Chapter 66: Winchester's Three Idiots
The front of the building at one-thirty in the morning was not, traditionally, a venue for family reunions.
It was one now.
The first thirty seconds had been the hug — genuine, unselfconscious, the kind that happens when people who haven't seen each other in years suddenly close the distance and the years compress into something manageable. Dean had grabbed Rango's shoulder and shaken him like he was confirming he was real. Sam had gone still for a second in the way of someone processing something they'd been anticipating, and then put both arms around him and held on.
Then the insults started.
Then someone threw a punch at someone's shoulder, and someone else returned it lower, and within ninety seconds all three of them were in the street conducting what Megan, watching from McQueen with the careful attention of someone filing data, could only describe as a greeting that expressed genuine affection through the medium of controlled violence.
Rango had them both under his arms eventually — one on each side, six-four and six-one respectively against his own frame, which meant it was closer than it looked but he managed — and they were laughing and telling him to let go and he was asking if they missed him.
"Every day," Dean said, muffled. "Let go, man, I can't breathe."
He let them up.
Ted, from the building entrance, watched this with the expression of a man updating his models.
"This," he said to Megan, "is apparently how they say hello."
"It seems functional," Megan said.
"It seems efficient," Ted allowed. "I'll give it that."
Inside. Beer from the fridge — Rango had two cases, one for occasions and one for emergencies, and this qualified as both simultaneously. Megan produced a charcuterie board with the systematic thoroughness she brought to everything, and the three of them settled on the couch and the chairs with the instinctive geometry of people who had shared space before and remembered how the angles worked even after years apart.
Dean had grown into his face. The reckless kid who'd spent an entire visit teaching Rango card tricks he'd learned from a truck stop stranger was still visible in the way he moved — forward, committed, first and fastest — but organized now around something more purposeful. He carried himself like someone who had learned that charging ahead worked better when you knew what you were charging toward.
Sam was — tall. Genuinely startlingly tall, with the slightly apologetic quality of someone who had grown faster than they'd planned and hadn't quite finished negotiating with the outcome. He watched everything. Had been watching everything since he walked in — the museum exterior, the missing door, the police tape, the interior of the apartment, Rango's face, Ted, the charcuterie board. Not anxiously. Just completely.
Rango's father's voice, again: youngest one pays the most attention.
"The Shadow Hunters put out a notice," Sam said, when Rango asked why they hadn't called ahead. "Dark world bulletin, basically. Oldest Winchester son settled in New York. Hunting methods consistent with family tradition — their words. Address and vehicle description included."
"They listed McQueen specifically?" Rango said.
"'A red sports car of unclear make that moves without conventional operation,'" Dean said, doing a voice that suggested he'd read the bulletin several times. "Also 'extreme caution advised.' Which, by the way, we heard about the fortieth floor apartment. The hole."
"The entity had teleportation capabilities."
"We heard that too. We're not judging." Dean drank his beer. "We're impressed. There's a difference."
Rango looked at them both. "I should have had your numbers years ago."
"Dad moved around a lot," Sam said. "It was hard to—" he stopped. Restarted. "We didn't have a fixed address for most of high school."
The sentence landed with the weight of what it wasn't saying, and Rango let it sit for a moment without covering it over.
"Jocelyn told me you've been hunting," he said.
"Since we were teenagers," Dean said. "Dad's operation. You heard about the Texas church?"
"She mentioned it."
"Old-growth treant, entrenched in the foundation for about three hundred years. We had to burn it out." Dean's jaw set slightly. "The fire spread more than we planned."
"Did you try calling the diocese during daylight? Get an excavator to the root system? Treant that old, you pull the roots, you pull the anchor point, it can't maintain form."
Dean and Sam looked at each other.
The specific look of two people who have just been shown a door that was there the whole time.
"Drink," Dean said, and raised his glass.
Sam laughed — a real one, unguarded, the kind that arrived before he could apply any editing to it. It changed his whole face. Made him look twenty-three instead of whatever age sustained vigilance had been aging him toward.
Rango topped up the glasses.
By two in the morning the beer was three-quarters gone and the conversation had covered: the Yellow-Eyed Demon's current trajectory (eastern corridor, accelerating), John Winchester's location (unknown, which both of them said with the practiced neutrality of people who had been practicing it for a while), the Shadow Hunter coalition (Dean thought Jocelyn was all right, had strong opinions about Luke's parking habits, which was a thing that had apparently happened), and the museum.
"All of them," Dean said, when Rango confirmed that the tablet's effect covered every exhibit in the building. "Every night."
"Every night."
"Dinosaurs."
"Emma rides the T-Rex on a schedule."
Dean pointed at Sam. "I told you. I told you, when Jocelyn mentioned the museum, I said there were probably dinosaurs."
"You said, and I quote, 'bet there's cool stuff in there,'" Sam said. "That's not predicting dinosaurs specifically."
"The spirit of the prediction—"
"Has nothing to do with—"
"Gentlemen," Rango said.
They stopped.
"You can come see it," Rango said. "Both of you. The exhibits are—" he considered how to describe it — "they've been at this for a while. They have personalities. Some of them are a lot."
"Octavian?" Sam said. He'd apparently done his research.
"Octavius. He prefers Octavius. And yes, he's exactly what you'd expect." Rango paused. "He and Ted have an ongoing disagreement about Gladiator that I've stopped trying to mediate."
Dean looked at Ted, who was on the end table and had been following the conversation with the quiet attention of someone who was deciding whether these two had earned his full engagement yet.
"The bear," Dean said. Not rudely. Checking.
"My colleague," Rango said. "He's been here longer than I have. Knows more about the collection than anyone."
Ted looked at Dean. "Ghana," he said. "Before this."
"Stanford," Sam said, which was clearly a reflex and which produced a slight wince immediately after, the wince of someone who was used to a particular response to that information.
"What did you study?" Ted asked.
Sam blinked. "Pre-law. Before I left."
"Why'd you leave?"
A pause. "Family situation came up."
Ted looked at him for a moment. "You should go back," he said. "When the current situation resolves." He said it the way he said most things — matter-of-fact, without particular pressure, the statement of someone who had assessed the relevant data and arrived at a conclusion. "It would suit you."
Sam looked at Ted for a moment.
"Yeah," he said, quietly. "Maybe."
Dean was looking at his beer. The slight shift in his jaw that happened when a topic arrived that he had feelings about and had decided not to deploy.
Rango watched this and filed it.
The conversation drifted — to the Foot Clan, to the Acquisitions Office card that Rango produced and put on the table and which Dean identified immediately ("Shredder's supply network uses them as intermediaries, we've seen that letterhead before"), to the component now in the turtles' possession, to Splinter's offer.
"The old rat," Dean said. "Yeah. He's the real thing. Dad ran into him in '09, said he moved like nothing he'd ever seen."
"He offered to teach me."
"Take it," both of them said, simultaneously, which produced a brief moment of mutual surprise and then the small, specific satisfaction of people discovering they agree about something.
Then Sam said, into his beer glass, without looking up: "You know what we should actually do."
"What," Dean said.
"The tablet." Sam turned it in his hands. "The effect works on any exhibit in the museum. Any model, any portrait, any reconstruction."
"Yeah," Rango said.
"So theoretically," Sam said, still looking at his glass, still in the tone of someone thinking out loud rather than proposing something, "if someone brought in accurate portraits or reconstructions of people — not just historical figures, but—"
He stopped.
He looked up.
Looked at Rango. Then at Dean. The thing on his face was very careful.
"We could bring in portraits of Mom and Dad," he said. "And ask them what happened."
The room went completely quiet.
Dean's hand stopped moving on his beer bottle.
Rango sat very still.
The clock on the wall did what clocks do, indifferent.
The idea was — Rango's mind had already gone around the edges of it twice before Sam finished the sentence, the way it went around things that mattered, checking the structure, looking for the place where it broke. And he couldn't find the place where it broke. The tablet worked on any exhibit. Any sufficiently accurate representation. There were photographs. There were — his mother had sat for a portrait, which was in a box in storage that he hadn't opened yet because he hadn't been ready yet.
He looked at Sam.
Sam was watching him with those careful, complete eyes, the ones that missed nothing, and waiting.
"Come on," Dean said, very quietly. "Drink."
He picked up his bottle.
They drank.
The idea stayed on the table, where none of them had put it and all of them were looking at it.
Outside, on the street, McQueen's lights were off and his engine was cool and he sat next to the Impala in the specific companionship of two vehicles that had covered serious distance in service of the same family and recognized something in each other that didn't require explanation.
The night deepened.
Inside, the three Winchester cousins sat in the particular silence of people who have arrived at something too large for the current hour and have tacitly agreed to leave it where it is until morning.
Dean refilled everyone's glass.
"So," he said, in the tone of a man changing the subject with full acknowledgment that he was changing the subject. "The Foot Clan warehouse on Lafayette. You said you wanted to hit it."
"I said I wanted information on it," Rango said.
"Right." Dean grinned. "Same thing."
Sam covered his face with his hand.
Rango looked at the two of them — Dean already forward in his chair, already planning, already committed; Sam shaking his head with the fondness of someone who has been shaking his head at the same person for twenty-three years and has made peace with the fact that this is permanent.
The family resemblance wasn't in the faces, he realized.
It was in this. The specific gravity that pulled them toward the problem, toward the work, toward whatever came next.
He'd been in New York for months, doing it alone.
He looked at his cousins and felt the specific shift of something that had been held by one person being distributed across three, and how that changed the weight of it.
"Okay," he said. "Lafayette. But we plan it properly. No burning anything down."
"The church was a special case," Dean said.
"No burning anything down," Rango said again, with finality.
Ted, from the end table, raised one small paw.
"Also," he said, "someone needs to fix the door before morning."
"We know a guy," Dean said.
"His name is April," Sam said.
"She's a reporter," Dean said. "But she has contacts."
Rango looked at the ceiling.
"Get me her number," he said.
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