#and i was like “he has such a sam energy”

[according2thelore]

i love the es/ls verse SO MUCCCHHHH!!! sam’s self-hatred towards his younger self in that last one is just - mwah! chef’s kiss! he’s so jealous of him and he also believes that that kid doesn’t deserve dean!! meanwhile younger sam hates older sam for what he’s become, but he’s jealous, too. ah!! amazing!

and dean not understanding and getting angry with sam’s self hatred is so wonderful. it’s like one if their key issues, but now it’s not a theoretical issue, it’s A Guy. and his name is 23y/o Sam Winchester.

you’re sooo amazing. love this so much. would love to see more if you’ve got it - the deans not understanding the sams’ negative feelings towards each other, and getting protective over it

hello, anon!

you get it: "it’s like one if their key issues, but now it’s not a theoretical issue, it’s A Guy. and his name is 23y/o Sam Winchester." HAHAHAHA you nailed it!

thank you so much!!! that means a lot--mwah mwah! <3

i always have more of it, lol!

~~~

"hey."

sam looks up sharply, startled. dean--his dean, young dean--is standing in the doorway of their shared bedroom in the bunker. his arms are crossed, and he looks peeved. he leans against the doorway, and he crosses his ankles in a practiced show of nonchalance.

"you don't need to talk to him like that." dean says, jaw ticking. sam snorts derisively, turning back around. he continues folding the shirt in his hand, and smacks it to his bed with enough force that it comes unfolded again.

sam doesn't reach for it again, just grabbing another.

"yeah. great. thanks dean." sam says. he's exhausted. anger--his old friend--rises up in him, but he can't even be bothered to put the energy in to stoke it.

after he confronted older sam in the kitchen, older dean's words pierced deep. i'm disappointed in you. sam feels like a chastened child. he is, in a way.

"what's that supposed to mean?" dean asks, stepping into the room. sam can feel him get closer. hates it. he folds his shirt faster, and doesn't look up at him.

"you took his side. i knew you would." sam spits the words like the poison they are. of course dean would pick the sam that doesn't fight with him, that doesn't want anything else.

dean stops, somewhere behind him, and sam hates that he can feel his brother without seeing him--a skill he had gotten on his knees and thanked god for when he was younger.

"okay what's with this--" dean fumbles for words. "this 'side' thing? it's just one side."

"no." sam finally whirls on him, dropping the shirt onto the bed. "it's not."

"sam." dean's brow is furrowed, and his voice is firm. "you need to back off. he's trying. he's been super cool with us staying here and--"

sam scoffs.

"spare me your hard-on." he spits. dean's eyebrows raise, and heat starts spotting his cheeks. sam wants to take him to the ground, until the reason dean's cheeks are pink are sam's hands, sam.

"that! what the fuck is that? back off!" dean shouts, and his hands ball at his sides. he doesn't deny it.

"back off? back off?" sam is incandescent with rage, his earlier apathy lighting aflame like dry tinder. "am i suddenly an asshole for not wanting to be here? for wanting to get home? i though that's what we wanted."

"it is--you know it is!"

"do i? do i fucking really?" sam gets in dean's face, shoves him back a step. "you're practically salivating whenever he walks into a room, you take his side in everything, you act like he's mother fucking teresa--"

dean's cheeks keep rising in colour, but his face is drawn into a furious scowl. he shoves sam back. sam's skin screams, buzzes, where dean touches it.

"he's you!"

"no, he's not!" sam shoves him back.

"sam." dean looks at him like he's crazy. sam feels like he is crazy, that this whole thing has driven him completely mad. "he is. he literally is. you're dogging on my little brother."

sam blinks hard, trying to fight off the sudden, blinding bite of tears.

"fuck you." sam spits. fuck dean for saying that like it's nothing. for claiming him like it's nothing. my little brother. dean only has one little brother.

"i'm--" sam starts, but cuts himself off because his voice is humiliatingly high. dean's face changes, irritation slipping into incredulity. sam wants him to stop thinking immediately. "stop that."

"are you--" dean's face splits into a grin.

"shut up, i swear to god--" sam begs, sitting down on his bed heavily and covering his eyes with his hands.

"you're jealous! or something! you're weird!" dean crows, and sam pitches to the side as dean's weight slams down onto the bed next to him.

sam moves his hands. dean is sitting on the side of his bed, tilted towards him and looking down at him. sam scowls.

he knows their MO is mockery and sarcasm, but for one fucking second, he just wants his brother to take him seriously. to take his side.

"i will take you down." sam threatens lowly, and throws an arm over his face. he waits for a beat, hoping dean will go away.

"sam." dean's voice is disappointingly close. "sammy, look at me."

sam is so shocked that dean has given him his name back that he moves his arm away. he sits up on his elbows. dean looks surprisingly somber, as he says:

"i'm not built to look at people be mean to 'sam.'" dean puts air quotes around his name. sam snorts, but dean just raises his eyebrows. "i'm not. i am hardwired to want to fuck up sammy's bullies. kinda my whole thing."

he's smiling a little at the end. sam softens. just a bit. he's not used to dean wanting to protect other people. he's not used to becoming a second priority in dean's life, in dean choosing a third party over sam's opinion, not since dad died.

"are you...are you calling me a bully?" sam asks, half-amused, half-irritated. dean rolls his eyes, but looks frustrated, like he can't even tell what he means.

"i'm saying. i...don't know. i'm kinda...protective over the guy. he's a sammy." dean shrugs. sam tilts his head, thinking.

"so you're saying if i get him to be a dick to me, you'll suplex him over a table?"

"oh yeah. i'll get a stepladder to reach him and everything." dean assures. sam snorts.

they sit in silence for a second, dean looking down at sam's face, and sam looking up at the ceiling, to give dean the chance to look. in a few minutes, it'll be sam's turn to look at dean while dean looks away.

a thought occurs to sam, though, and he looks over. dean obediently looks away, though there's a frown tugging at the edge of his lip, like he's annoyed his time was cut short.

"i'm not promising anything until you promise to be nice to big dean." sam says, and dean makes a disapproving, alarmed noise. he looks back at sam, eyes wide.

"that old fart? that's totally different. he's a dick. sammy's actually great and brilliant and nice and huge, so." dean tilts his chin up, like he's made a point. sam's chest seizes briefly around the impression of something--unused to and displeased with hearing dean praise someone else like this.

"hey!" sam says sharply, holding up an accusing finger. "dean's not that bad."

"hypocrite." "hypocrite." they say at once, dean's lower tone layering underneath sam's.

they blink at each other.

and--for the first time in too damn long--two brothers dissolve in, frankly, giggles. sam slumps forward into dean's arm, and dean scrubs a hand through his hair.

~~~

"he's trying his best." dean mutters into sammy's bare shoulder. sammy closes his eyes, enjoying the feeling of dean's chapped lip on his skin.

their younger selves were probably hashing it out, too, a wing away.

sammy turns around in dean's arms, and sam nudges his way under dean's chin. dean lifts his head obediently, and sam exhales against dean's bare chest. he wishes he were still small enough to fit here completely.

even his younger self couldn't do this, anymore.

"i know." sam says, finally. he doesn't have to ask "i think...i think i hate him."

dean's arms seize around sam's shoulders.

"no, you don't. he's a kid. a baby."

my kid. my baby. dean's words don't say. sam hears them. he hates them. that's why he hates this kid. among many reasons. he's so blindly arrogant, so violent, so harsh. so fucking prideful. head full of his own words and heart full of fire. and dean looks at him like he looks at sammy.

"no, i don't." sammy acquiesces. and he doesn't. "resent" is probably a better word.

dean reads his silences so well that he starts petting through sam's hair. it should feel infantilizing, but it doesn't. sam sighs. he's an adult. and in a second, he'll pull away and deal with this like a regular person.

"do you miss him?" sam asks, after a long pause. him. sam. the sam i used to be. the sam that sits a dozen rooms over, talking to his own brother.

"i'll always miss you." dean says. "all versions of my pain in the ass are my pains in the ass."

sam snorts, but it's half-hearted, quiet.

there are worse things, sam supposes, than being loved to the point of absurdity. to the point of forgiveness. to the point of dean loving all versions of him, all the time.

"as long as i'm your favourite." sam murmurs. dean noses along his hairline, breathes deep in sam's hair. sammy knows dean isn't good at saying it out loud. but the soft lips at his temple are answer enough for him. dean's horrifyingly sappy when he's quiet.

you're always my favourite.

~~~

thank you for your patience, anon! i hope you enjoyed!!!! life kinda came at me w a baseball bat, so i'm sorry it took so long to respond! i hope you see this :)

-lizzy

[timdrakesbussy]

sam to me is like will ramos where whenever they talk, they're so positive and so energetic but then you hear them in their songs and they sound so unrecognizable due to their screams and growls.

[ach-sss-no]

I feel weird giving out unprompted permission statements because I'm making a big assumption that anyone's going to want to use my work. That said I also know people do like to build on other people's art and can't always work up the nerve to ask, so: Anyone is free to use this design if they want to for any reason- I don't own this character anyway. (Although I am hopeful that you do not, you know, monetize it, because i cant do that and if you do that its not fair ;_; ) Feel free to remix, improve, use as basic inspiration, etc. I would appreciate a tag/mention if you use it so I can see what you did!

This design has evolved a little since I first started drawing it, and I will see people reblogging the original design notes and think 'oh no! those are out of date and I don't have new/accurate ones!'

Reblogging the old one is still an honor- and the first take on a design just sometimes has a different appeal because it's less refined and more chaotic (especially with a character that should be chaotic), so I suspect some people will just prefer the older drawings & they'll still get shared, which is great! But I felt as if the project was a little bit incomplete without an update, since I think I've reached the point where if you see that old post & then come to my blog and look at my current content, there's a noticeable difference.

Also I kind of like making design notes.

If anyone's wondering why things changed, the answer's really simple- 90% of it is just the result of him settling into having more consistent anatomy and facial structure so that I can keep him looking accurate across different angles and poses. If you look at the old drawings you may notice that Gollum has an inconsistently shaped squishy head. That's fine for a concept post but doesn't work as well for maintaining him across different comic panels or in an animatic, at least not the way I work.

In the same vein, while my art is still & will always be heavily stylized, I started giving him more structured semi-sorta-realistic anatomy so that he wouldn't look entirely out of place next to less bizarre-looking characters such as Aragorn. (I feel that's also helpful in nudging Gollum into the uncanny valley where he ought to be, rather than leaving him so abstractified that there's a risk you won't see anything wrong with him having noodle arms.) He also acquired the new-style 'garbage bag' outfit because I found a reference in LOTR to his arms and legs being bare/exposed (it's in one of my favorite passages, the 'an eagle would think Gollum was dead if it came by right now' passage in The Two Towers):

Not even an eagle poised against the sun would have marked the hobbits sitting there, under the weight of doom, silent, not moving, shrouded in their thin grey cloaks. For a moment he might have paused to consider Gollum, a tiny figure sprawling on the ground: there perhaps lay the famished skeleton of some child of Men, its ragged garment still clinging to it, its long arms and legs almost bone-white and bone-thin: no flesh worth a peck.

[scarebats]

merlin’s height does not match the rest of him.

[oneluckygoose]

Ok, guys. A lot of people have their fan casts for a Rat Grinders spinoff series, but hear me out.

What if season whatever of Dimension 20 was with the intrepid heroes, but Brennan didn’t tell them what their characters were. They get into the dome, The background is the normal Fantasy High background. The DM screen is the normal Fantasy High DM screen. They all sit as if they would for their Fantasy High characters. Brennan does the introduction, everybody’s smiling everybody’s happy, then he starts with the first scene.

But Nobody has a character sheet nobody knows who they are. “Strange, how do you play if you don’t know who you are playing?” A sentiment throughout the six heroes. The scene moves on, and he does it through one of the players perspectives, and it becomes clearer and clearer, slowly, that that person is playing their Fancy High characters antithesis from the Rat Grinders. Brennan hands them a character sheet.

The scenes go on, each hero getting their own. The character sheets are handed out. Horror: screams are heard throughout the dome, yells and shouts for Brendan to do unspeakable things. All the players are befuddled. All the players are filled with wishes for revenge.

The Intrepid Heroes, beloved of the characters they play called The Bad Kids, now play what they hate the most.

They are the rat grinders.

[mlp-natural]

Jack about to get white girl drunk off his ass istg

White Claw, Red Bull, and Blue Raspberry Smirnoff is his drink of choice (The American Dream RAAAHHH)

[wanderingcas]

the thing i can't reconcile with early seasons interpretation of destiel is the thought behind dean "teaching cas free will". that bitch was canonically reprogrammed for thousands of years, over and over, before meeting dean. AND he rebelled against heaven without a single blink of an eye, dean just basically gave him a reason to. so it's less like he was the lesson, more like the catalyst? idk. just always felt that way to me??

[autumnrory]

this season of ted lasso saying sam should forgive racists who vandalized the restaurant and  then you know, dropping anything to do with that storyline immediately afterwards

and the saying jamie should forgive his abusive father bc hating him apparently isn’t good for him or whatever

doesn’t feel great tbh

[botanicallyinclinednerd]

About to start the episode of SG-1 where I meet Rodney McKay and I've heard a lot about him from two different sources, one that hates him and one that loves him, and now I finally get to see for myself what the fuck this guy does in SG-1

[thegremlinprince]

Starting a conversation on discord about Star Trek Muppets, and getting my friends in on it isn't how I expected the day to go, but it's certainly a good thing.

Ufhdhd thinking about a tribbles episode-

[rutadales]

gem au but whoops all c!droolish

[cas-poisoning]

Jared Padalecki is a millennial. Let that sink in.

[setaripendragon]

I Want To Be Free - Chapter 0

This AU came to me nearly ten years ago. It didn't have a plot, just a vague idea of 'horror-esque One Piece' smashing into my other favourite fandom; Supernatural. So I put it away. Then OPLA came along and drop-kicked me back into the One Piece fandom a decade later, and suddenly, the ideas for how this AU would actually go started pouring in. Idk how far I'm going to get with this, I'm still pretty stuck on a lot of 'but what would the other Straw Hats actually be' (which, if you have any ideas, drop a comment/some tags/an ask/whatever!), but I've got rough notes for another couple of chapters, I think? Also, yes, I did play around a lot with the names to make them more real-world-y -waves creative liscence- I did it because it's fun, and gives me cool opportunities to play with worldbuilding, and I felt like it.

Prologue - Seven Years Ago

It’s early, but Didi is used to rising with the sun. Early to bed, early to rise, as they say! Besides, getting up early means no one, not even her husband, sees her without her face on, and she can make herself presentable in peace.

Face on, hair done, but still in her dressing gown, she leaves the en suite and heads downstairs to get breakfast started. Always good to remind the help that you’re watching, after all, else they might run off with the silver. As she passes the nursery, noises catch her attention, and she pauses, listening intently.

Voices. That’s voices. Plural. And while she wouldn’t put it past that useless boy to start talking to himself, since he’s never missed a moment to shame their family, Stacy is still a bit too young to be talking back!

Didi flings the door open, panic and outrage fighting a war in her breast. Outrage wins when she spots that little demon hanging half in the window on the opposite side of the room. He’s already tainted her first son with his filthy common ways, so to see him so close to the ornate crib holding her second precious child is infuriating.

Thankfully, he still seems focused on Sabino, standing like an idiot in the middle of the room, entirely undignified in an appalling mismatch of pyjamas and street clothes and formal attire, his mouth gaping open at her entrance. Hopeless boy! Useless! After all they’ve done for him, all the effort they’ve put into straightening out his life, and he doesn’t even have the decency to send this demon-child running before he put his grubby little hands all over Didi’s windowsill?!

“You-!” she shrieks furiously, waking poor Stacy and setting him to wailing in alarm. How dare that awful boy distress her poor sweet baby so?! Sabino snaps his mouth shut at last, but only to replace it with the most ugly glower.

This! This is all that little demon’s influence. And he’s just hanging there, watching her without so much as a hint of deference for his betters. It puts a tremble in Didi’s hands that she tells herself is entirely rage. “Get out! Get out of my house! I’m calling the police!”

“No.”

The sun is rising over the neighbour’s roof behind the boy. It sets his face in shadow, save for an odd cat-like gleam of white for the briefest of seconds where his eyes should be. Didi jerks backwards, hits the wall, and realises what just happened. “HOW DARE YOU?!”

“I’m not leaving without Sabo. You can’t keep him,” the filthy little creature insists.

Didi laughs, sharp and mocking and furious. What a stupid little boy, trying to insist the world be the way he wants it to be, throwing this ridiculous little tantrum because someone took his favourite toy away. “Of course we can,” she sneers, lifting her chin. She can’t believe she let a little trick of the light unnerve her! “Didn’t you learn your lesson last time? He’s ours. Our son, our blood. He belongs to us, whether the ungrateful little brat likes it or not!”

“No, I don’t!”

Sabino glares up at her, hands balled into fists. Didi’s hand is in the air before the intent fully crosses her mind, fury driving her past rational thought, but before the slap can connect, the boy in the window shifts.

Sunlight spears her eyes, bright white and blinding. She redirects with a cry, flinging her arm across her face as she recoils, eyes screwed shut against the sudden assault.

An acrid scent hits her nose. She blinks rapidly, trying to see past the gleaming spots of white-yellow-orange that are drifting across her vision. What is that? It reminds her a little of that time she left her hair curler plugged in and it melted a divot into her hairdryer.

She sucks in a horrified gasp, and promptly chokes on the smoke as she recoils. The doorknob jams painfully into her hip, but that’s fine! That means she knows where it is!

She spins and grabs for it, but the stupid thing won’t turn, her hands too sweaty to get proper traction on the shiny metal. She told Sabinus they ought to have gotten handles instead of knobs!

Something thuds across the room, and Didi whirls back around to see the window is shut, the demon boy gone, and Sabino along with him. Stacy is still crying, but there’s a wall of flame licking across the carpet between them, and she can’t reach him. The spots are fading, finally, but that’s no use when the room is quickly filling with black, acrid smoke.

Pain sears up the side of her leg, and she jerks away from the fire, only to realise it’s coming with her; the hem of her dressing-gown already alight. Flames lick eagerly up the velvet and silk, eating through to her skin in seconds.

Didi screams.

-

“Hey, boys. Think I got something for you.”

Sam sits up a little straighter in the passenger seat of the Impala, which gets Dean’s attention. He pauses his off-beat drumming on the steering wheel as he glances over, thank god. He even turns the music down, which is surprisingly considerate of him. “Yeah? What you got, Ash?”

“A fire in a nursery,” Ash deadpans.

“What? Where?!”

“East coast. Up near Boston. I’ll text you the address.”

“Alright,” Sam agrees, then lowers the phone to mouth ‘Boston’ at Dean, who nods, and takes the next turning eastward. “When did it happen?”

“Last night. Saw it in the news this morning,” Ash explains. “Checked my scanner, and sure enough, weather’s going haywire out there. There was supposed to be a storm rolling in, but instead they’re getting a nice little localised heatwave.”

Sam frowns thoughtfully. After all this time, he has everything his dad recorded about Yellow-Eyes’ patterns memorised, and that… “Doesn’t Yellow-Eyes cause storms, rather than stopping them?”

That gets Dean’s attention, but Sam is too busy thinking and listening to Ash to respond to his increasingly intense, irritated looks and gestures. “Yeah. Well, and wild fluctuations in temperature, so this could just be the opening salvo. Who knows, man?”

Dean gives up trying to get his attention, and simply floors the gas pedal. Sam shoots him a grateful look, to which Dean responds by flipping him off. Jerk. “Any survivors?”

“The dad and the kid. Mother and older brother both died in the fire.”

“Yikes.” Sam grimaces. “Well, thanks, Ash. We’ll get right on it,” he says, subdued, and Ash hangs up without so much as a goodbye. A moment later, Sam’s phone chimes with an incoming text. He rattles it off to Dean, along with the rest of the information Ash had relayed. By the end, Dean looked grim.

“Shit, this is the first time we’ve had a kid get caught in the crossfire of one of these.”

“Yeah…”

“Well, we’ll be there in a couple of hours.”

-

“This place is giving me hives,” Dean mutters under his breath as they’re shown through a gilded foyer into a lavish receiving room, where a portly man in a stuffy suit with the saddest little moustache Dean has ever seen in his life is standing stiff-backed in front of a huge bay window, bandage-wrapped hands clasped behind his back like he thinks he’s the tragic hero in a period drama.

Sam hisses at him and steps on his foot, to which Dean only rolls his eyes. He lets Sam spin the spiel about being FBI, wanting his side of the story, take his time, in his own words, blah blah blah, while Dean lets his eyes wander the room.

This house is fucking pristine. You wouldn’t know from looking at it that there’d been a fire here last night. Hell, you wouldn’t know there were supposed to be two kids under the age of sixteen here, either. There are delicate porcelain and glass figurines out on display, there’s no sign of anything that might possibly be mistaken for a toy, not a single thing out of place or wrinkled or messy at all. Hell, the carpet’s white.

“As I told your colleagues earlier today,” the man sniffs disdainfully at them, only half turned towards them in a display that makes Dean’s hackles rise instinctively. “I don’t know what happened.”

“Anything you can tell us,” Sam says patiently.

“I’ve already been over this! Can’t you people do your jobs without needing your hands held through the entire process? Get the report from the last lot of you incompetent louts, rather than harassing a grieving widower!”

“We’re from a different department,” Sam says, patiently. “We have to conduct our own investigation from the ground up, I’m afraid. If you could please answer the question, we’ll do our best to get out of your hair as soon as possible.”

The man huffs, blustery and impatient. “I woke up to my wife screaming, and our son crying. The nanny was already at the nursery when I got there, but the door was stuck. The doorknob was hot enough to burn me when I tried it.” He lifts one hand in demonstration. “Someone pulled me away – I’m not certain who – when smoke began to fill the hallway. Then the fire brigade arrived.”

“You couldn’t get into the room at all?” Dean asks, frowning a little.

“No,” the man snaps impatiently. “Like I said, the door was jammed. The fire department had to break it down to get inside. It’s going to cost a fortune to replace. It was solid mahogany.”

It takes everything Dean has not to say ‘your wife and son are dead and you’re worried about the cost of the damn door?’

“And when they did, your wife, was she still alive at the time, or…?”

“How am I supposed to know? I wasn’t standing around gawking like some common pleb. They informed me that my son was alive and being taken to hospital, so I assume not, or they would have mentioned it.”

Dean makes a mental note to get the reports from the fire brigade, since apparently Mr Saddest Moustache over there was too busy having a bracing cup of tea to give a shit about his wife or sons. “Your son. Was that-” Sam glances down at his dorky little notebook like he actually needs to check. Maybe he does; the names in this family are whack. “Stacy or, uh, Sabino?”

Who the hell calls their son Stacy?

“Stacy, of course,” the man huffs.

Of course?

“Do you know if Sabino was-”

“I already said I don’t!” the man snaps.

Sam plasters an entirely fake smile across his face. “Of course. Alright, well, I’m sorry for taking up your time, Mr Outlook, we’ll just-”

“The third,” the man interrupts, bristling.

“…Excuse me?”

“I am Sabinus Stacy Godefroy Outlook the Third, and I’ll thank you to remember it!”

Dean barely manages to choke back a laugh and turn it into a small coughing fit. He has to turn away, so he doesn’t see whatever expression Sam is making, but he can hear the straining of his composure in his voice when he says, “Alright, Mr Outlook the Third, we just need to have a quick look at the scene, and then we’ll be out of your hair.”

Mr Sabinus Stacy Godefroy Outlook the Third sniffs at them. “Have the housekeeper show you up, I can’t bear to look at that room anymore,” he declares in tragic tones. Dean wonders if it’s the charred remains of his family that bother him, or the cost of replacing his fancy carpet.

-

The nursery is… Well, there definitely was a fire, but beyond the charring, it looks nothing like Sam’s expecting it to. For a start, the room’s still in tact. The ceiling is soot-stained and spotted with patches where the paint has obviously been singed, but it’s very clearly not the origin point. No, that’s on floor. There’s a small, lopsided hole in the wood under the melted remnants of the carpet, with edges that look like they’ve been seared, right in the middle of the burnt area.

If it weren’t for the pattern of said area, Sam might have wondered if there was anything supernatural about this fire at all. Except the fire very conspicuously did not spread into the area around the crib. Everything else is scorched black, melted or charred or some ugly combination of both, but there’s a wobbly semi-circle around the baby’s crib, and everything within it is untouched, if lightly speckled with soot.

Perhaps the fire was natural, but something wanted that baby to survive.

That something equally clearly didn’t care about the other occupant of the room. The child’s bed tucked into the corner next to the door is… well, it’s honestly hard to tell it was a bed. It’s a mangled lump of charred wood and melted plastic. Dean crouches down next to it and pokes at it with a pen he must have stolen from somewhere else in the house, because no way does he have anything that fancy just hanging about in his pocket.

He uses the pen to shift a stubborn little scrap of fabric that breaks apart into tinier pieces at the prodding, and frowns deeply. “Was the other kid in bed when the fire started?” he asks as he rises from his crouch.

“I would assume so,” the housekeeper says indifferently.

“I have it here that the eldest son – Sabino – he was thirteen?” Sam checks.

“That’s correct.”

Sam looks at the housekeeper, then down at the bed that could at most be four feet in length, and then back up at the housekeeper again with an expectant expression. “And this was his bed?” he presses.

“Yes,” the housekeeper says stiffly, chin kicking up, her level stare turning into something a little closer to a glare. Like she’s daring Sam to keep pressing the point.

“Exactly how tall was he, again?” Sam asks, meeting the woman stare for stare.

“I don’t see how that is at all relevant to catching the monster that killed Master Sabino,” the housekeeper retorts.

“You sure they did?” Dean interjects, making the both of them jump and turn to stare at him. Dean raises an eyebrow at the housekeeper.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I don’t see any variation in the burn pattern, no smearing, no evidence of a struggle… And believe me, lady, when someone’s on fire, they don’t sit still about it.” Dean states grimly. Sam takes another, closer look, and sure enough, there aren’t even marks that would indicate where they body had been, and there should be.

“Perhaps he was already unconscious from the smoke,” the housekeeper says coldly.

“Uh-huh.” Dean says, heavy with scepticism. “Sure.”

-

Silence swells to fill the Impala once Sam and Dean slam their respective doors shut. Dean doesn’t know about Sam, but he needs a moment to process all the gold-plated shit they’d uncovered in that ugly fucking house. “That,” he says after a moment, “is one fucked up family.”

Sam blows out a harsh breath. “Yeah.”

“Was I the only one getting the vibes that Mr Sabinus Stacy Godefroy Outlook the Third,” Dean recites in the most pompous voice he can manage and Sam snorts a laugh without much feeling behind it, “wanted his kid to be dead?”

“I can’t tell if I think they’re covering up the fact that he isn’t, or if they’re covering up the fact that he is, it just wasn’t the fire that killed him,” Sam replies, darkly amused.

“What do you mean, covering up the fact that he isn’t? Why would they cover that up?” Dean asks, startled. He’s already pretty solidly convinced that Mr Saddest Moustache, or perhaps the late Mrs Saddest Moustache, offed the kid themself and is using the fire as a way to explain his death.

“Come on, Dean,” Sam says impatiently. When Dean doesn’t react with miraculous new understanding, he rolls his eyes. “You can’t argue that this-” He waves his hand towards the house. “-doesn’t quite fit Yellow-Eyes’ MO.”

“Fire in the nursery, dead mom, six-month old baby…”

“Except the fire didn’t start on the ceiling. There was someone else apparently in the room the whole time and it was only as the mum came in that the fire started? And the crib was untouched. If I remember your stories right, Dad had to grab me out of my crib because it was on fire just like everything else!”

“Okay, so what’s your point?”

“So what if Yellow-Eyes wasn’t the one to start the fire?” Sam asks.

Dean blinks. Stares out of the windshield as that idea slots into place. “You think this Sabo kid started the fire?” he checks, a little dubious.

“You saw how everyone in that house was acting, same as I did. You saw that bed, too. Who makes a thirteen year old sleep in a nursery with a literal baby, in a bed meant for a four year old?” Sam demands.

Turning that over in his mind, Dean starts the car and sets off for a less skin-crawling part of town. “You think the kid set his own mom on fire and then, what, ran away?”

“Well, yeah. Maybe… maybe not on purpose,” Sam hedges quietly. “If he’s… got some ability to control fire, then it would explain why it didn’t touch the baby, wouldn’t it? If it went out of control because he was scared or- or angry, but he managed to keep it away from his brother? And it would explain why no one wants to admit to it. That’s one image-conscious household, and ‘tragically dead’ is a much better look than ‘child arsonist reacting to abuse’.”

Dean has to give him that one.

-

“So get this,” Sam say, and ignores Dean’s groan as he peels his eyes open from where he fell asleep still mostly dressed with several stolen copies of police reports splayed across his chest. “This isn’t the first time around here that there’s been a weird fire followed by a heatwave in which a kid went missing,” he declares, and slaps his compiled research down on Dean’s chest.

Grumbling, Dean squints down and opens the file. On top there is a print-out of a newspaper article that reads ‘Freak Heatwave Starts Fire in Junkyard’ and is dated around three years ago. “Anyone die?” Dean asks as he leafs through the rest of it.

“Yes, as a matter of fact,” Sam says smugly. Then he falters as the reality of the answer dawns on him. “Quite a lot of people, actually. At least one of them was a suspected child trafficker, and several of the others were noted in the investigation as having ‘close ties’ to this James Blue person.”

“So more dead shitheads. Any conspicuous survivals?”

“Well, as far as I can tell, which isn’t certain because whoever did the investigation clearly didn’t care, the Junkyard was a safe haven for the homeless, but there’s no mention of any of them getting caught in the fire,” Sam explains, pulling a face. “There’s no John Does, and all the bodies have residences listed.”

“Not ironclad,” Dean mutters, but he’s clearly not expecting more. Sam pulls a face at him anyway. “What about this guy?” he asks, flicking a finger at the hospital report Sam had stuffed in at the back.

“That’s the weird thing,” Sam says.

Dean’s waking up properly now, and Sam can see the minute he actually reads the hospital report. “What the fuck? Dude loses an arm and just… fucks off outta the hospital the next day?”

“And then he drops off the radar. I can’t find any records of this guy, before or after. He just… poof.” Sam snaps his fingers. “He gave a statement saying he was in the Junkyard to look for the kid of a friend of his – that’s how he lost the arm, apparently, something fell on him and he took it rather than let it hit the kid – but that kid is marked down as having died in the fire. I checked the morgue reports.”

“No kid-sized bodies?”

“No kid-sized bodies.”

Dean stares at the file Sam put together, face screwing up in consternation. “And no sign of Armless here anywhere near the Outlook Estate,” he mutters, putting on a voice as he names the house. Sam doesn’t want to admit he finds Dean’s stubborn insistence in mocking the airs that family’s giving itself at every opportunity funny, but he really does.

“No sign of him anywhere. Check the end of his statement,” Sam adds, jerking his chin towards the file.

Dean glances up, then goes back to reading. He frowns. “What about it?”

“The bit about the kid,” Sam sighs.

Slowly, Dean’s frown turns from baffled to more serious. “He was really damn sure the kid was alive and okay when the paramedics turned up, wasn’t he?” he says slowly, looking up at Sam. Sam nods. “But everything else says he was among the dead,” Dean adds.

“And the one dissenting voice disappears the very next day,” Sam concludes.

Dean groans and drops the file into his lap to scrub his hands over his face. “So we’ve got a firestarter who hates child abusers but spares the homeless and kidnaps children but leaves the baby, and a mysterious badass who disappears after drawing attention to all this… Is this all starting to feel a bit… Neverland to you?”

“What, like some sort of fae spirit collecting lost and abused children and murdering people on the way out with its prize?” Sam asks.

“Well, yeah,” Dean agrees ruefully. “I can’t think of anything else that fits this mess,” he complains, whapping the file with the back of his hand. “Stealing children could be a Lamia, even killing men on the way out, but that doesn’t explain the mom.”

“And Lamias don’t like fire,” Sam adds.

Dean nods distractedly. “What do we know besides demons that can start fires like this?” he asks, baffled.

“Uh… witches?” Sam guesses. “Or… maybe psychics.”

“What, you mean like you?” Dean asks sharply.

Sam nods. “You said it yourself, Dean. The one thing we know can start fires is Yellow-Eyes, and… look at what Max did. It’s not too farfetched to think that if someone got fire powers, they might go all vigilante about it.”

“Except this is three years ago,” Dean reminds him, gesturing to the file. “Your whole Shining shtick didn’t start until last year, remember?”

“Oh, I remember,” Sam snaps, a little bitter at the reminder.

Dean gives him the hairy eyeball, but doesn’t press the point, to Sam’s relief. “Alright, I suppose we better go see if we can find anything left at the Junkyard, and then maybe try and shake some more information out of this first kid’s family. I thought I saw something about a grandfather in there…” Dean muses as he shoves the mess of paperwork aside and gets up with a spine-cracking stretch before heading for the bathroom.

“Yeah, but he’s actual FBI. I’m thinking we don’t want to go poking that dragon,” Sam calls ruefully through the door Dean left open. Dean grunts through his toothpaste. “We’d have more luck with the foster sister, I think.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah. Patricia Makino. She owns a bar down by the docks.”

-

“Welcome to Party’s Bar! Can I get you two anything?”

The woman behind the bar looks like she could have stepped right out of Dean’s favourite magazine, if with considerably more clothes on. Pretty, dark haired, Asian, and somehow managing to look like she just stepped out of an idyllic ranch in the middle of nowhere. She even has a cute patterned kerchief tied over her hair. “Two beers and the name of the pretty lady serving them to us?” Dean asks with his most charming grin.

“Don’t you know it’s not polite to ask for someone’s name without offering your own first?” the woman fires back, unimpressed and gently chiding, even as she goes to pour them a couple of beers.

“I’m Sam, the idiot’s my brother Dean,” Sam offers.

“Makino,” she replies. So this is the woman they’re looking for. Probably. When Dean saw the name of the bar, he’d assumed she preferred to go by Patty, but apparently not.

“Nice to meet you,” Sam says politely. Dean toasts the woman with his beer to echo the sentiment, and Sam rolls his eyes and gives Makino a commiserating look. “Brothers, am I right?” he asks, long-suffering.

Makino huffs a laugh. “They are a handful.”

“Spoken like an older sibling,” Dean says knowingly. “Don’t let this one fool you, he’s got pretty manners, but he’s really a troublemaker.”

“Oh, I know one like that, too,” she agrees, smiling more warmly. “He’s always forgetting that I’m the one who taught him those manners, so I can see right through them.”

Sam snorts, grinning with easy amusement. “Well, that wouldn’t work for Dean. He’d have to have manners before he could teach them to anyone else.”

“Hey,” Dean protests, pointing accusingly at Sam. “I raised you best as I knew how, gave you the clothes off my back and the food from my plate, and this is how you thank me? By dissing me in front of a pretty lady?”

Makino laughs when Sam splutters indignantly. Excellent. She’s relaxing into their easy banter, which should make it easier to get some answers out of her. “Little brothers are naturally skilled at cock-blocking, I’ve found,” she tells him.

“And here I thought that was just Sam,” Dean grouses, to another indignant yelp. “Your little brother is just as good at picking exactly the wrong moment, then?”

“Oh, yes. Entirely by accident, of course, but still…” She sighs dramatically, but there’s a fond, wistful smile on her face that suggests she’s not as mad about it as she’s pretending to be. “It didn’t help that he thought my date was just the coolest person ever and always wanted all of his attention for himself.”

Dean snorts. “Sounds like he’s quite a bit younger than you, huh? I don’t think Sam ever thought any of my dates were cool.”

“Yeah, but that’s because you have bad taste, not because of my age,” Sam mutters.

“More than ten years,” Makino confirms as though she couldn’t hear him, though her smirk tells a different story. That matches up to what Dean knows about her and the first missing kid from the files. It’s also not the reaction of a woman who’s beloved younger brother died three years ago.

They can’t seem to get her to talk about that, though. She’s quite happy to tell story after story about her little brother in between serving the other customers that wander through at irregular intervals, but it’s as though he’s just in the back room and could be scampering out to cause more trouble at any moment. She makes absolutely no mention of the junkyard fire, the armless man, or the kid’s disappearance.

Dean eventually gets frustrated enough to bring up – in the sparsest detail he can manage – saving his own little brother from a fire when they were younger. Makino barely reacts, but she does react. There’s the tiniest little flinch at the mention of the fire.

“Sorry,” Dean says, feigning a grimace. “Bit grim, isn’t it? I guess that fire that’s been in the news lately stirred up old memories.”

“Ah, yes. The Outlook place,” Makino agrees. “Tragic, that.”

She doesn’t actually sound very sincere. “You knew them?” Sam asks curiously.

“Oh, not personally,” Makino says, a little too quickly. “People like them are a dime a dozen around here- Well, not around here,” she laughs, waving a hand around at the bar, and Dean has to admit, this is definitely the sort of place that Sabinus Stacy Godefroy Outlook the Third would turn his pointy little nose up at. “But there’s a lot of old blood over in High Town that like to give themselves airs.”

“Rich people,” Dean mutters in disgust, and Makino grimaces in agreement.

“Whether or not the lady deserved it, I can’t believe the kid was all that bad,” Sam interjects, giving Dean a faintly chiding look.

At that, Makino sobers. “No,” she says softly, and then shakes herself. “Although, you’d be surprised how absolutely awful some of those kids can be. When your parents can just buy your way out of any sort of trouble you make so that the consequences never touch you,I suppose it’s easy to start thinking the harm you do doesn’t matter.”

“That sounds personal,” Dean says.

Makino gives him a dry look. “When you’ve seen your little brother put in life-threatening danger multiple times because of those stuck-up pricks, you tend to hold a grudge.”

“Life-threatening danger?” Sam asks, all alarmed concern and puppy-eyes. “What happened?”

“Which time?” Makino asks pointedly.

“That Sabino kid wasn’t one of them, though, was he?” Dean asks instead of trying to get her to elaborate. They might be able to talk her around to the junkyard fire, but he can’t think of a reason to bring it up without seeming suspiciously well informed or suspiciously invested in someone else’s misfortune.

“No,” Makino relents with a sigh. “No, Sabo was a good kid. Always so generous despite what his parents tried to teach him. He deserves- sorry, deserved better than the Outlooks.”

Dean does his very best not to react to that, but there’s a whole world of implications in the fact that victim number two knew victim number one’s older sister. “You knew him?” Sam prompts curiously, and then tacks on a hasty, “I’m sorry for your loss.”

“I did. He was friends with my brother.”

Dean catches Sam’s eye at that. “It doesn’t worry you?” Dean asks, throwing subtlety out the window. She’s obviously hiding something, given her complete non-reactions to the very striking parallels, and they’re not going to get it out of her by dancing around the issue. Makino cocks her head at him inquiringly. “That both Luffy and Sabino disappeared the exact same way?”

It’s a mistake. Dean can see that the moment the words leave his mouth. Makino’s body language closes off entirely. “I don’t recall mentioning my little brother’s name,” she tells him coldly.

“We’re looking into the disappearances,” Sam hastens to explain. “Like Dean said, something similar happened to me when I was a kid, so we thought it might be the same- same person that-”

“That’s very noble of you,” Makino says, entirely insincere. “But I don’t like talking about those events. I think it’d be best if you left now.”

Dean raises an eyebrow. “You don’t want the monster that stole your brother to be stopped? Even after it stole another child just two days ago?” he asks judgementally.

“Hey! My daughter asked you to leave!”

Dean jumps back with a curse as a walking stick smacks down against the edge of the bar mere inches away from where his hand was resting. The guy wielding it raises it in the air again and waves it at him aggressively, apparently undaunted by the fact that Dean has a good foot on him and is at least sixty years younger.

“Mr Wu, you’ll dent the bar…” Makino complains fondly.

“Out! Get out!” Mr Wu gripes, wagging his stick at them, and then devolving into what Dean can only assume is a vitriolic blue streak. He can’t be sure because it’s entirely in Chinese. He backs up, as does Sam, and they end up being driven right out of the door by the old man and having the door slammed in their faces.

“So, the foster family definitely knows what’s going on,” Sam concludes.

“Definitely.”

“…Stake-out?”

“Stake-out.”

“Ugh.”

-

An entire week of surveillance and everything they can dig up about the family reveals absolutely nothing. Wu Paiji is, by all accounts, a pillar of the community. A grouchy old stickler, according to basically everyone that knows him, who runs the local community centre and has been fostering children for the last fifty years.

Patricia Makino was fostered at age seven, and five years later, gained a little brother when a baby was abandoned on the community centre’s front steps. She started working at what was then The Old Dog straight out of high school, and was left it when the previous owner passed only a couple of years later. Absolutely no one they speak to in the area has a single bad word to say about her.

In fact, several of them immediately turn hostile the moment they realise Sam and Dean are the ones that got kicked out of Party’s Bar. It ends in a couple of fights that only make their reputation around there worse. One woman, with a cloud of aggressively frizzy red hair and a build like she bench-presses trucks for a living, very nearly breaks Dean’s skull when she takes a swipe at him with an honest-to-god metal pipe.

When they get arrested for stalking and informed that Ms. Makino has agreed not to file for a restraining order if they get the hell out of town, they reluctantly go. Every other trail they tried to chase has gone cold. Neither the Outlooks nor Luffy’s foster family will speak to them. None of the official records have anything helpful to say. They don’t even have a clue what kind of creature could have done this.

It sticks in Sam’s craw, leaving the job unfinished, but there’s a hunt out in Ohio, and he knows that’s where they’re needed more. He does make a note to keep an eye on any fires that happen in that area, though. Just in case.

[downtherabbitholewithlucy]

🔥THE BEAST BEHIND THE BASS OF BIZKIT🔥

[cadykeus-clay]

there is truly nothing funnier to me than the all work no play ghost hunting episode

[furshrimps]

I'm soooo 🤏 close to messaging my trainer if she knows somebody who would be a good fit for Sammy and his issues.

The more time goes by the more I think about this idea. I don't think I can give him the quality of life that he deserves and needs anymore.

The most noticeable thing for me is that he's regressed with grooming a lot and I don't have the (physical and mental) energy to put the constant effort in that would be required to improve that. Same goes for muzzle training, and he needs that done. I just don't have that anymore. Training fun things here and there is a whole other matter, but this is something that needs to be done continuously and with a lot of patience. I think he might be better off with someone else at this point.