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He doesn't think about where he's going, in the end. He just goes.
Outside the club he pulls out his phone, practically running toward where his bike is parked. The call takes less than a minute. He doesn't have more than that to spare. Get the gun. Get the girls. Lock the door and don't answer it. Especially don't answer if it's Dean. I'll explain later.
Though how he'll do that is pretty low on his list of things to figure out.
Later he'll wonder why he didn't go to Castiel. He'll wonder and he'll sense the answer without actually wanting to get too into it. More than one answer. More than one kind of difficulty.
He needs someone like him. He needs a hunter.
He could stop in, see Neil, try to tell him just enough. But he's already heading toward Sam's. Too late to turn back now.
It always has been.
It's beyond late, and it occurs to him as he stops outside the door that he doesn't even know for sure if Sam is here, but what the fuck. He raises a fist, pounds on the door. Hard.
Outside the club he pulls out his phone, practically running toward where his bike is parked. The call takes less than a minute. He doesn't have more than that to spare. Get the gun. Get the girls. Lock the door and don't answer it. Especially don't answer if it's Dean. I'll explain later.
Though how he'll do that is pretty low on his list of things to figure out.
Later he'll wonder why he didn't go to Castiel. He'll wonder and he'll sense the answer without actually wanting to get too into it. More than one answer. More than one kind of difficulty.
He needs someone like him. He needs a hunter.
He could stop in, see Neil, try to tell him just enough. But he's already heading toward Sam's. Too late to turn back now.
It always has been.
It's beyond late, and it occurs to him as he stops outside the door that he doesn't even know for sure if Sam is here, but what the fuck. He raises a fist, pounds on the door. Hard.
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"Getting real fucking tired of assholes doing that to me tonight," he hisses. "I didn't do anything."
Well, that's probably not entirely true. And he's not even sure that he has no part in what Dean's become. But leave it, just leave it for now.
"His eyes turned black, he slammed me into a fucking wall, and he had a lot to say on the subject of demons. Let me go or this gets ugly."
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And when he does, when Mike continues, eyes flashing darkly as dread pools and spreads in Sam's gut, he finally pulls back. Not because Mike's told him too, but because he's gone cold all over. He thinks of the gallons of demon blood he has in the trunk of the Impala, the fact that he's been stocking up for days, not yet drinking a drop, but... but thinking about it. Thinking about it in a way he hasn't in nearly a year.
He hasn't spent any time questioning it, but now. Now he knows why.
"Fuck," Sam breathes and he finally pulls away entirely, pushing past the guilt and the terror clawing at his insides to get to the important parts. "Where is he?"
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And he knows it's exactly what the demon would want.
"I don't fucking know. He ran off after we had a little chat, he didn't exactly do the whole supervillain filling-me-in-on-his-plans business." He pauses, eyes slightly narrowed as he searches Sam's face. "What the fuck is your deal, anyway? What was that just now?"
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"Fuck," Sam growls, completely ignoring Mike's question. Whatever he'd let slip through, he isn't going to acknowledge right now. Not when they have bigger things to worry about. "I knew it... I knew something was going on. But he has-- we both have a tattoo. No demon should be able to possess him."
Unless those rules don't apply here. Or the demon just... found a way.
Looking hard at Mike again, his tone brooks no argument as fishes the key from his pocket and swiftly unlocks and opens his front door. "You need to tell me everything you remember. Right now."
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Except his own instincts. Which he should have been trusting this whole time.
"You sure you wanna know all the details? He was chained to the wall at the time." But he doesn't wait for an answer before pushing ahead. "Look, we've been... doing shit. At Obsidian. He said it helped him. Except the last couple weeks it's been different. Been saying lately that nothing I did to him hurt him the way it used to. But tonight he was..." His mouth twists. This is embarrassing. He should have kept better control. If nothing else, it was a violation of trust. "He was pushing me. Talking shit. He never does that. I got the sense he wanted me to seriously hurt him."
He steps over toward the window, facing away from Sam. It's not like he doesn't want to meet his eyes. It's that it's easier to think when he doesn't have to. "So I stopped everything. Except he was telling me I couldn't let him loose, he was fucking frantic. Then... Eyes, wall, a bunch of shit about Hell."
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And what Mike reveals... Sam isn't surprised. He doesn't like it, the images that come to mind making his skin crawl and his stomach queasy, but some part of him also understands. Sam hasn't the faintest idea what those things did to his brother in Hell, but he knows what demons are capable above ground and that's bad enough. So whatever happened, whatever Dean had to endure down there, Sam knows it fucked him up. Maybe even fucked him up more than watching his brother get taken in by Lucifer.
Maybe.
"I need specifics," Sam says, his voice low and almost eerily calm as he heads immediately for his bedroom, for the hidden latch behind a piece of art he'd found at an import store (and that had given him a weird laugh at the time -- where exactly are they importing from here?), revealing the arsenal of weaponry carefully arranged behind it. "Tell me exactly what he said to you. Every word you can remember. Did he mention anyone else?"
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And Sam isn't trying to kill him again. It's probably a little perverse that if he's going to let the Obsidian cat out of its bag, it should be at a time when there's something this big to distract from it.
"He asked me if I knew where demons came from. He said they were made. In Hell. He pretty much implied that's what's happening to Dean. What I was seeing." He said I was right there with him. But no, he's not going to say that. That's for him. And it's not that he's bothered by it.
Because he actually isn't. He is what he is. He knows at least half of what he is is pretty fucking awful.
He lifts a hand to his mouth, chews absently on a jagged fingernail as his gaze moves over blades.
"He told me I had one chance to kill him and end everything. Tried to get me to pick up the knife. What... Y'know, what I think he'd been trying to get me to do all along." His gaze slides over to Sam's again. "I didn't. So he laughed at me and bolted." He pauses, briefly turned inward. "I don't know why he didn't kill me."
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Sam grabs it first, along with a pistol and a container of rock salt buck shots.
"He wanted you to find me," Sam says, lips drawn in a thin line as he gives Mike another quick glance. "Or Castiel. He's counting on you to spill the beans."
After tucking one more gun under his arm, Sam shuts the door back in place, locks it with a quick flick of his wrist. "Demons have a flair for the dramatic," he explains. There's absolute no humor in his tone, nothing but maybe a bite of sarcasm. "It's one of their more appealing attributes."
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He's not sure that he does, though. Not entirely.
"Is he? Is he possessed? Or was that actually him talking?"
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"I'd say you know Dean as well as I do by now," he says, though he know it isn't true. Dean may not be exactly the same as Sam remembers, he may be broken in a way Sam never could've imagined, but he's still Dean. He's still Sam's brother. And there are still some things Sam knows no one else could ever touch, not even angels and mysterious, tropical islands. "Did it feel like him?"
Honestly, Sam doesn't want to entertain the possibility that it could just be Dean, that he's finally shattered into something unrecognizable. If it's demon possession, Sam knows what to do.
If it isn't...
Well.
He knows what to do there, too. But it's even more complicated.
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And it's not just the eyes, the way the face had twisted. The cadence of the voice, the rhythm of the words. It's so much more than that, and now he understands that whatever the demon had been trying to make him believe, it was lying, and he had known it the instant it opened Dean's mouth to speak.
"It wasn't him." He pauses, teeth briefly closing on the inside of his cheek. "He's in there. He's fighting. But he's getting tired."
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He grabs one bag and shoves it into Mike's arms before closing the door, mind whirling.
"There's no telling how long it's been in him," Sam says, his frown deepening for a moment as he meets Mike's eyes. "The tattoo on his chest. It's still there, right? You didn't... tear his skin there?"
The thought of Mike tying his brother down and torturing him, whether it be by Dean's choice or not, still doesn't sit well with him. Not at all. But he has to ask right now, he has to know. Mike's seen more Dean that Sam has, he knows more. As much as it pains Sam to admit, Mike is valuable.
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Bizarrely, he's a little offended.
"I don't touch ink. Common courtesy."
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"Did you see anything else on him?" Sam asks. "Any fresh tattoos. Or brandings. Anything at all out of the ordinary."
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But was there? Should he have noticed something?
His eyes narrow slightly. "Why?"
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Sam gives Mike another look-over then, scrutinizing. Some demons work alone, others together. It's impossible right now to know if the one in Dean is solitary or if there's a wider a web here. And there's still a significant part of Sam that isn't sure whether or not to trust Mike.
Without another thought, Sam flicks a slit in the bag of salt in Mike's arms, freeing just enough granules to start a small river of white over Mike's hands.
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"The hell was that about?"