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“I’m not dead!”
His voice is shrill and cracked when he speaks, breaking it pitch as he stares at the TV in a shady motel room in the dead of night. He sits on a bed who sheets haven’t been washed, rigid in posture and flaring with shock and anger, wounds burning as he moves. He gestures to the screen, muted and dull and stares at his newly discovered elder brother, who gives him a tilted look.
Across the buzzed screen, pixilated and fuzzy, is an image of his face. It’s an old school photo of his, smiling brightly with wide eyes and looking on the verge of a laugh. His mother stands next to him, arm wrapped around his shoulders and smiles softer, but no less kind, warm with hair framing her tired eyes. Underneath the photo is his name in bold letters, followed by a nauseating headline.
Adam Milligan, 14, found bludgeoned to death alongside his mother, Kate Milligan, who’s cause of death has yet to be determined
It’s a shocking statement, because Adam is here. He can feel his hands and his face and the sting of fresh wounds with makeshift wraps, and he can remember just yesterday he was in school half asleep and whining about pages of homework. Adam Milligan is most definitely alive, head intact though injuries litter him underneath his clothes, breathing and blinking and distraught over the news flashed in front of him. The same cannot be said for his mother. He cannot think about that now.
Dean, his brother, his brother that he had no idea he had, no idea even existed gives a look to the screen and back to Adam. His face is worn and hard and tired as he sits at a table, phones and books and a ragged journal in front of him. His hands are still bloody from breaking in the face of the monster that held his visage. Neither of them have had time to rest or shower.
“I know you’re not,” Dean drawls, flipping a page of the journal. He squints and fiddles with a pen, eyebrows furrowed. He doesn’t not seem very focused on the news in front of him, and a flash of anger slices through Adam. “But we can’t do anything about that.”
“Why not?” Adam snaps, standing up before stumbling, his ankle aching. He saunters towards Dean with a half limp and smacks his hands down on the table. His eyes widen slightly. “Why can’t we?! I’m clearly not dead!”
“And what’s that going to do, Adam?” His brother says, crossing his arms and leaning back. His voice has a hard edge to it and he stares at him. “Please enlighten me.”
He scowls. Dean's a dick. He’s such a dick! Why is he acting like this? Why isn’t he loading him up in that old car and driving him back home and taking him back to his life? Why is he in a motel room that stinks of smoke and bugs ten hours away? “What do you think? I can’t just go back home with a death certificate attached to my name!”
Dean looks weird then. He doesn’t get angry like Adam expects, but he doesn’t flush with understanding like he wants. Instead, he seems one part awkward and two parts confused, looking at Adam with narrowed eyes. It makes him squirm and his ankle flares at the weight that’s being placed on it.
“Adam. You’re not going home.”
It’s like a slap to the face. Adam hasn’t even been slapped, but he imagines the shock and the sting that blossom across his chest and shoot down his spine feel similar. He gapes like a fish and the world spins in a blur, and he leans against his wrist on the table. What the hell is Dean talking about? Why is he saying that?
Of course he can go back home! He’s not dead! All he needs to do is walk into a police station and show his face and claim there’s been a mistake and life can go back to almost normal. He wants his bed and his clothes and his moms meals and even schooled and he can’t get if they let the police believe he’s that dead monster they left in his house.
“What?” He gets out, tone thin, and Dean stares. “What do you mean?”
Dean ignores the question. “Sit down.” He orders, tone rough with authority and thinly veiled concern. “You look like you’re going to pass out.”
Adam ignores him as well. “What do you mean, Dean?” He hisses, and the air feels tight and stale and voices sound distant. Perhaps he should sit down. His legs are shaking.
His brother stands and looms and Adam instinctually cowers, a memory of him bloody with skin and fat on his fist and a gun to his hip and quite scary, flashes to the forefront of his mind. He forgets how scary Dean can be and look and he realizes that he still doesn’t quite know him. He doesn’t know how he acts or works or speaks, and maybe screeching at him isn’t the best way to go about it. Fear snakes through his stomach amidst all the emotion. He beat in a monster that looked just like him without a second thought. Would he do the same to Adam?
He doesn’t seem the type, but how is he supposed to know?
Dean places a hand on his shoulder and glares, shoving Adam down into the seat. Adam waits for a reprimand or a scolding or a smack.
“I mean,” he starts, grated and quiet, “it doesn’t matter that they think you’re dead kid. You can’t go back anyway.”
It doesn’t matter that they think you’re dead. It doesn’t matter that they think you’re dead. It’s like a whirlwind in his brain and blotted with confusion and Adam can’t think straight. It can’t be true. It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make any sense.
“You’re lying.” He breathes out without thinking, and Deans had whips away from his shoulder. It’s a weird feeling. Adam wants it back. He almost regrets saying what he did.
“I’m not lying ,” Dean says, turning on his heel to head back to his journal. “I don’t know what you want me to say. Do ya seriously want me to waltz into a police station with a dead kid in tow and go “sorry folks! The kid ain’t actually dead! It was just a ghoul that took his face and that’s what you found! Whoopies us, right? Monsters are real!’”
He ends the act with a flourish of his hands and sits back down, and Adam glowers at that and embarrassment colors his cheeks. That’s not what he meant. That’s not what he meant and Dean knows it.
But, he raises a good point that Adam hadn’t thought about in his borderline deranged state after reading the news. What would they tell people? How would that even go down? Did he try to explain that monsters did exist and that’s what they found? That monsters were out for revenge on a father he barely knew? That ghouls took his face and tried to eat him alive and killed his mother and there is no senile murderer in the lose they need to look for?
Where would he go? Into foster care? To an aunt or uncle his mother never spoke of? Grandparents that were long dead? Certainly not to John. His mom had no idea where he was and hardly got ahold of him, and Adam had only know him for two years when he insisted his mother contact him because he wanted to meet him, and he was less than impressed.
Adam shuffles his hands and feels angry tears prick the corner of his eyes. He would sound traumatized at best, or crazy at worst. He can’t even think of a reasonable way to explain the dead ghoul that looked like him either. He really would be dead if Dean hadn’t been looking for their father and killed them, and trying to go back would probably get the man in trouble, and Adam doesn’t want that. He saved his life even if he is kind of weird and peppy and freaks him out a little bit.
Plus, he can’t forget the way Dean pulled him from the hellfire and undid the restraints and patched him up with first aid from the car. He can’t forget the way he looked when he said John was his father, or the way he hugged him when he panicked and fed him a sandwich and told him it would be okay, and that he would figure it all out. There is kindness in his gruffness, and a protective streak in his sarcasm, he Adam feels he owns him. He didn’t need to do all this.
He curls his fingers into fists on his legs and screws his eyes shut, looking at the floor. He can’t cry, not again, and not again in front of Dean, but the only think that fills his mind is rampant thoughts of confusions and despair, and it sucks. This sucks so much. He want his mom and he wants to go home.
His misses her. He can’t believe that she’s dead.
He didn’t want to believe it at first. He had been strapped down to a table with a shallow slit in his wrist and his shirt pulled up with marks across his stomach and blood on his face. His head throbbed and he cried and tried to move before the ghoul, the ghoul who’s face was morphing into his stuffed fabric in his mouth and peeled skin from his arm.
His listened to his mom cry. He listened to her beg and scream and heard blood spill from her body and splat onto the ground. He heard teeth grate against bone and saw flesh and muscles ripped from her body when a ghoul bent his head and forced him to watch. He heard her cries turn to moans and eventually nothing but shaky breathes and then silence and felt them turn to him.
Dean's right. He’s not a liar. There really is nothing to go back to.
Adam Milligan is dead.
“Hey.” His brother breaks through his thoughts, clearing his throat and sounding slightly unsure but also gentle, and Adam wipes his nose on his sleeve. “It’s gonna be okay, kid.”
Adam sniffs and fights back tears. His throat is cinched and hot and he doesn’t want to speak. His wounds hurt and revelations burn and his head aches with thought, stomach flipping and nauseous as it settles in his bones and carves in his skin that he cannot go home. He leans forward on his thighs and gags, emotion coming up his throat in a bitter stream and spittle from his lips as reality sets in. He feels his world is crashing down and he cannot breathe.
For perhaps the very first time since it all, since the monsters and death and pain, time has slowed down enough for fact to burst through the walls in his head and flood his mind.
When he first saw the news, just minutes ago and fueled with rage, he believed it to be a mistake. It was not him with a bashed in head on the floor of his home, bleeding into the carpet and surrounded by bullet shells, but a creature with his visage. It did not hold his name and he was not dead. It was not him.
But Adam is dead. He’s dead in all the ways but the flesh, and in all the ways that matter. The ghoul took his life and his purpose and his family away from him in little time and with practiced cruelty and that cannot be changed. It’s like Dean said. It doesn’t matter if Adam isn’t the corpse they found. His life is gone and rotting with his mothers body shoved in a morgue.
Something heavy touches his back, drumming on his spine. A set of blurred knees falls into view and Adam digs his nails into his thighs, gurgling and gagging and hiding tears.
“Hey now, cmon kid.” Dean tries again, patting his back. Adam shakes “Panic ain’t gonna do nothing but make ya sick. Just breathe a little bit.”
He tries. He sucks in a breath and chokes, trying to banish images and thoughts from his head. Deans hand runs along his back and he tries to focus on it, on a soft touch at reminds him of his mother even though Deans hands are calloused and bruised. It’s still kind and very practiced. Familial.
“If you’re gonna hurl, do it away from my shoes. They’re the only pair I have.”
It’s not funny, but Adam gives a watery chuckle and sucks air into his lungs, a wry grin on his face. He wipes fallen tears with his hands and looks up at Dean knelt in front of him. He has a raised eyebrow and a stern look but softens when he hears Adam laugh and look up at him. He moves his hand to rest on the back of Adam’s neck, continuing to drum his fingers in a methodically pattern against his skin.
Dean grins. “You back with me?”
“Yeah,” Adam warbles, wiping his nose.
“I mean what I said kid,” his brother insists, pulling Adam a bit closer and looking rather serious. “It’s gonna be okay. It’s gonna suck balls for a while, but it’s gonna be okay. We look after family.”
Family. Adam hadn’t thought about that. Dean is his brother, his half brother, and that technically makes them family, but Dean doesn’t know him. He didn’t even know about his existence until ten hours ago when he spat it out in a fit of hysteria in a hell house, and he hadn’t expected much from it. His family died with his mother, he thought. He thought he was alone.
But Dean has called him family, and it burns in his chest. Fresh tears well in his eyes but don’t fall, and befuddlement washes over the older man’s face as Adam looks him in the eyes.
“What did I say -“
Adam hugs him. He throws himself into his chest and Dean staggers back slightly as Adam’s weight presses against him, and he wraps his arms tightly around his neck. He can feel the scruff of his beard tickle his forehead and the beat of his heart and he hugs him.
Dean chuckles and tucks his arm around Adams back, letting one cup his head. “Don’t you get all sappy on me.” He scolds, but his tone is warm and soft.
Adam laughs and holds tight. It’s quite the big brother thing to say.