peppermintfables

“Dave has shown recent attachment to the school the kids are currently at. It’s getting bothersome to hear him complain. Note for the future: draw clearer lines.”

- /home/Folder69/livelaughlove, Bro Strider’s computer files

Your name is Dave Strider and your life is rapidly falling apart. You seem to have lost your brother. You got your sister back, but only for a limited time and with the uncomfortable side effect of her having weird visions from an unknown source. Once you get your brother back you’re gonna have to deal with that and, if he tries to kill Rose, you don’t know what you’ll do.

And the traffic on the way to your motel in Chicago is really bad.

You sit in the car in silence. It’s not very in character for you, you know that. 

Even when you’re on a job on your own car rides are rarely quiet, you‘re to busy singing along to your tapes, testing yourself on any hunter knowledge that you shouldn‘t forget by mumbling to yourself or just straight up thinking out loud. 

With Rose especially you’re not used to it. Its never quiet with the two of you, you never had trouble finding pointless things to say.

You remember hours spend in the backseat of the car making up stories and arguing about music or singing along to whatever was playing while Bro drove. Nights spend in motel rooms, whispering to each other while trying not to wake Bro up.

And yet, after Rose finishes her retelling and you search for the address of the motel she names, neither of you says a word.

Once again you can see your family crumbling apart and you desperately want to find something to say that tapes it back together again, but that didn't work out last time either, did it.

There’s a part of you that wants to give up and let Rose go back to her new home, without you and there’s a part that hopes this awful, awkward car ride never ends. 

There’s a part of you that wants to find Bro as soon as possible, get all of you back together again and a part of you that thinks that if you don’t find him you at least will not have to deal with whatever happens after. 

It takes Rose too long to gather herself and start making fun of your music. The two of you used to  be better at ignoring your problems.

You don’t know what kind of car Bro rented (or stole), when he left the Silverado with you and Rose’ vision didn’t tell you his room number. So there’s no way to break into his room or to know if he’s even still here, without talking to the receptionist. Not that breaking into Bro’s room would ever be a good idea in the first place. Instead you give the receptionist everything you got.

“It’s just so horrible!”, Rose cries out dramatically. 

You know she’s not a fan of this and would rather just threaten the receptionist into giving her the information you want, but you don’t know how long you’re staying in the area yet and this way is less likely to end in someone calling security or the police. Less likely, but not unlikely, because Rose loves drama.

“How could he just not show up? My own father! On my most important day! He’s here, isn't he? Can you call him down? Or give me his room number? I just want to talk to him one last time!”

Rose starts some spiel about how Bro was her father, who had not shown up to her wedding day, despite promising to walk her down the aisle alongside her mother. But, because their parents had some sort of fight, he had fled and ruined his daughters big day. 

You do your best to look like an angry brother, but not to angry to be of concern, while holding back a grin at the panicked look on the overwhelmed receptionists face, as Rose tearfully unloads years of made up family drama on him.

“I know they have their problems. I know and I would never force them back together. But I thought just for this day I could have my whole family again. Is that so much to ask? Am I a bad daughter for asking them to do this?”, she sobs and looks at the receptionist like he surely has all the answers. 

The receptionist is looking at the door like he is considering just fleeing. You lay a supportive hand on her shoulder. When she starts up again you can practically see him give up.

“Ma'am, why don’t I give you the room number and you can see if you can clear this all up? I’m very sorry about your wedding.” He scribbles a number and a description of how to get there on a piece of paper and shoves it in your hands. Rose starts thanking him profusely, while you gently guide her away.

There’s no answer when they knock, which could mean anything really. So you might have to break  in after all.

“You do it”, Rose says, sweeping her hand in a magnanimous ‘Lady’s first’ gesture. “I think you might need the practice after what you did to my window.”

“Thanks, your concern for my breaking and entering skills is real touching. I feel so taken care of.”, you deadpan back and then you get to work.

It takes a bit, because Rose learned her security skills from Bro, but he was of course still better than her. This hotel room is more protected than her entire apartment.

But, after a lot of fumbling and cursing under your breath, the door swings open to reveal the carefully created chaos, that Bro manages to create in every room he stays in for more than a day.

You spend too much time learning the ins and outs of this special organization system, so you could put back anything you needed to borrow from Bro, without him noticing.

The reason nobody answered the door is, because nobody is in the room. 

“Should we just wait for him? His stuff’s still here, so he has to come back.”, you suggest.

Rose grimaces, before she answers: “ To be quiet honest I would prefer to finish with this sooner rather than later. And who knows when he’ll get back, he has never had sensible time management. Let’s just figure out what the job is, so we can look for him.”

With that she starts rooting through Bro’s stuff and using the opportunity to clean up, folding his clothes and putting stuff where it should typically belong instead of where Bro thinks it should go. 

You know for a fact that Rose is not any tidier and constantly leaves her stuff just lying around, a habit she has not grown out of, judging from what you’ve seen of her apartment, but she always did this whenever she had the opportunity. A chance to piss of Bro by destroying his system, under the guise of just wanting to help him. You think Bro thinks it’s funny.

You go start going through stacks of paper, lying next to a chair. Your best bet of finding out what kind of job he’s on is probably his laptop, but there’s no way your getting in there.

The stacks are a mix of research, comic sketches, texts written in Latin and, noticeably, the latest chapter of Rose’s wizard fanfiction, printed out and annotated.

At some point you stop looking and start reading out the chapter and adding your own commentary, while Rose continues the search. Her face is carefully annoyed, but she doesn’t try to hit you over the head with a blunt object or rip the papers out of your hands, so you assume she’s having fun. 

“… okay, not that I don’t appreciate Zazzerpan and every scene he’s in, but it’s real convenient that he shows up right there. Also, what kind of word is ‘assiduous’ anyway.”

“A good one.”, she interrupts you. “Also shut up, I found some directions. It is possible that he went there today, so we might as well take a look.”

“Fair enough, but I’m taking this with us. I’ll need some entertainment on the way.” 

You continue your commentary.

Bro gives a lot of lectures. They’re not really lectures, since they don’t usually include a lot of words, unless he really gets going on a metaphor. 

They’re more singular sentences, that fall somewhere between advice and order and are often paired with a slight downward turn of the edge of his mouth or a thumbs down, to communicate disapproval of your actions. Equally often an ass-kicking follows. Sometimes the lecture includes no words at all and is instead an elaborate test of your abilities.

Part of you wonders if this is also a test. Maybe he’s testing how long you stay cool without losing your shit and looking for him. Or he’s testing if you know to come for back up, when he needs you.

You don’t know which one or what’s the right course of action and it makes you feel uneasy, but you don’t have a better idea, than to keep doing what your already doing.

And there’s a part of your mind that thinks that, if Bro is actually in danger, then coming to help him would surely be worth getting your ass kicked. You ignore that part, along with the uneasiness, because Bro’s to good to get in the sort of trouble he can’t get out of.

One of the lessons Bro keeps repeating is about blending in and staying unnoticed. Alibis, new identities, financial trails. Despite all that, Bro himself is not really subtle. It’s not his fault, he’s simply too cool to stay unnoticed. Also his shades don’t help.

Thanks to that it’s easy to follow his steps, once you picked up his trail, based on the information you and Rose found. Enough people saw him lounging around to give you a direction.

Somehow you still end up going in circles three times, until you decide to look under the bridge you’ve been crossing over each turn. 

You don’t really see the point in it, since you don’t exactly know what Bro would be doing under a bridge, but whatever. You slide down a muddy hill to get to a more hidden part and you start seeing the point.

Bro is lying in the mud under the bridge. His white polo shirt is stained brown everywhere and it would look like he just slipped and decided to not get up again if it wasn’t for Bro’s own sword impaling him through the sternum. If it wasn’t for the fact that the brown was not mud brown and instead the brown of dried blood.

You want to leave. You want to turn around and make this not be your problem. To just let him lie there and reject this from your mind. You’re not stupid enough to follow through on that instinct.

Even if he weren’t your Bro, you’re a hunter and not taking care of a body is asking for trouble. It’d probably be easier, if it wasn’t your Bro. For a very selfish second you think about booking it anyway and letting Rose deal with it on her own. You can’t do that either. You’re her older brother. Her only one now. (Her only one maybe ever)

You look at her and see her squaring her shoulders, before stalking over to Bro. She raises her eyebrows at you and says: “Well, do you want to do the honors?”

She waves her hand at the sword that’s still in Bro. In him. You come closer and raise your hand to pull it out and then let it flop down again. Nope. We are not making that happen. No way. Bro never let either of you touch his sword before and you can’t get yourself to now.

 

Its weird really. The three of you shared everything else, there’s not really another choice when you life in a truck with a family that doesn’t understand the concept of privacy. 

You especially shared weapons and didn’t really get attached to any of them, given that they often had to be discarded or broke because of their shitty quality. Your family went through blades like other people went through 5 dollar headphones. 

But that sword was always Bro’s sword. You just can’t. You won’t.

Rose doesn’t want to touch it either, so she just starts jostling Bro’s body until it falls out by itself.

That should be worse but you can respect it. 

More blood spills out once it’s free and you can’t really understand how there can be any more blood. What kind of bottomless mozzarella sticks bullshit is this. Nope, that’s a bad metaphor, retreat, retreat. 

You cant really bury him here and now. Digging an unauthorized grave in the middle of the day would be noticed and so would dragging a bloody corpse through town. In the end, you end up hiding him more out of sight, with the plan to come back once its dark. 

You find a jewish cemetery a reasonable distance away. At some point it feels almost normal breaking into a cemetery, something that only makes it more uncomfortable, not less.

You work together to dig the grave without having to discuss it much and both of you are aware that you usually do this to dig someone up, not to bury them. Somehow doing it the right way around feels worse. Nothing about this fits right.

It’s not quiet, because words are flowing out of your mouth, but to be honest you don’t even hear what your saying and by the looks of it Rose isn’t listening either. Her face is a mix of blank and furious, if you ignore the rapid blinking of her eyes, as if she's trying not to let the fury slip away.

Bro’s burial is good enough to stop any supernatural bullshit, but otherwise wholly practical, impersonal and unsentimental.

You go back to his room after, gather all his things and then get a motel room at a different place under a different name. Rose dumps anything of Bro’s she doesn’t deem important in a corner of your room and curls up with the rest.

“We still have to figure out what killed him. If it was that dangerous it might take out more people.”, she says.

“Sure. If we’re lucky Bro has already done most of the research for us and it won’t even be that much of the boring part. Best kind of job.”, you say. 

You don’t say that, if this thing was strong enough to kill Bro, the two of you have very little chance against it. Fighting things that are naturally stronger, faster and better than you is what a hunter does. It’s what Bro does. You have no excuse. You get that urge to leave again.

You snatch the jacket you just threw over a chair back up and turn to Rose.

“I’ll go ask around what even brought Bro here, while you go through his notes. Do your boring nerd shit or whatever.”

You slam the door and maybe leave a little faster than would normally be appropriate of a dude as cool as you.

Asking around gets a lot of information and none of it especially useful.

“Oh, are you the partner of that FBI guy? Agent Mathers, the one that asked after Mr. Powell? Did you ask his wife yet? I’m sure you did, you must be very good at your job. And it’s not like I think that she stabbed him! It’s just that I know they had some problems, I could always hear them yelling when I was tending the garden. Not that I was listening, of course. I was still taught manners, unlike whatever Mrs. Fisher two houses down is teaching her young one. He’s constantly prank buzzing here! Can you believe it? But no, I wasn’t listening, they were just always that loud. A disturbance really.”, an older women tells you, followed by every sin anyone in this street has ever committed, including someone leaving up Christmas decorations for too long, which seems to be equal to potentially stabbing your husband.

You convince a group of teens, that you find near the bridge where you found Bro, to tell you what they know and they tell you about more stabbings, which seem mostly unrelated to Mr. Powell. Nobody has any reliable details, but at first glance the victims don’t seem to have much in common.

And there’s no sign of anything supernatural going on either. 

No weird circumstances of death, no impossible break ins or missing body parts or blood. Nobody seeing anything weird or the victims having a feeling of being followed before their deaths.

Just good, old stabbings, some standard human murder. Why was Bro even following this trail?

When you get back Rose doesn’t look any happier either.

“You find anything at all?”, you ask her.

“No.”, she frowns. “Nothing useful in the papers. Didn’t see anything about stabbings either. Anything relevant is probably on the Laptop, but I tried to crack it and didn’t manage.”

“So what now?”

Rose looks contemplative for a moment. 

“I don’t think there's anything useful we can do here, for now. There’s really no point in doing all the work Bro did from the ground up again, when everything we need is most likely on the laptop already. I propose that, if we are not able to access the information ourselves, the next logical step would be to find someone who can help with that.”

There were very few people that Bro respected, but Jake Harley was probably one of them. You knew this because 1. Bro never said anything downright insulting about him and 2. most hunters respected Jake Harley. He was the shining paragon of what every hunter should be.

Cared about hunting more than anything else in his life and the dude knew how to pretty much handle any type of gun, with an absurd amount of knowledge about the supernatural on top of that.

Maybe that’s just the kind of knowledge you get when your in the business that long, but most hunters didn’t get to be that old.

Bro even worked on a few jobs with him and Bro hated working with other people. Even with you, most of the time you were sure that he only let you tag along, because he wasn’t sure you wouldn’t get yourself killed on your own and you’re family. But he worked with Harley voluntarily.

It was on one of these hunts that you and Rose met Jade for the first time. The three of you must have been like 12 years old and Bro and Jake Harley had left you in a relatively safe spot on standby, in case they needed back up, while they went deal with the Mandragora.

The rifle Jade was holding seemed almost taller than her, but she didn’t seem to have any trouble handling it or like she was scared.

You think that’s a perfectly valid reason to develop a bit of a crush on someone.

At some point she had let out a sincere laugh at something you said and nudged you in the side like you had known each other forever and you think that’s an even better reason.

Jake Harley was dead now. It gets even the best ones eventually. But as far as you know Jade’s still active and still as competent as ever, both with her rifle and, more importantly right now, computers. She’s your best shot to crack that laptop.

Bro mostly keeps to himself, since he doesn’t need help often, but there are spots where hunters meet up and Jade visits them quite frequently.

When she sees you and Rose walking through the door a big grin spreads across her face and she sprints towards you, trying to pull both of you into a hug at the same time. It’s awkward but warm, just like her.

“Dave! Rose!! Your both here! Together.”, she says.

“Yes, my retirement was interrupted by a family emergency.”, Rose explains, trying her best to look dignified while still being hugged and failing miserably.

“Oh no! What happened? Is everything alright?”

“Bro’s dead.”, Rose states. You close your eyes behind your shades just for a moment.

“Oh, I’m so sorry, guys.”, Jade says and looks at you specifically. You just about manage not to turn away. How did you get stuck between two girls who seem to think you’re gonna break any minute. You’re fine. 

“There’s nothing to be done about it.”, Rose states brusquely. “But we would like to find out what happened and we could use your help with gaining access to Bro’s laptop.”

Jade immediately smiles at Rose.

“Yeah, of course! To be honest I’ve been kind of curious about Bro’s security anyway! Grandpa always says that he’s a real ‘crackerjack’ at computers and I could use a challenge!”

At least someone is getting something out of this.

You try to make yourself train while Jade is busy. At first you try to keep her company, but it’s not really your kind of thing and Jade gets a bit frustrated when people can’t keep up. 

There’s a few other hunters at this meeting point, but since it’s a bit out of the way, there aren’t that many and they mostly keep to themselves. 

Rose took the opportunity to claim a couch in the corner and go through her uni notes. Makes sense, you guess, it would suck if she went back only to fail all her classes. 

And she probably misses it. 

The smart thing for you to do with this bit of free time would be to train. It’s what Bro would want you to do. It’s what Bro would make you do. 

You can’t bring yourself to, for some reason. So now your sitting on a small wall outside the back of the house, thinking about knife-forms and moves you haven’t quite internalized yet and your body just won’t move.

You’re still stuck like that when Jade comes out and sits down next to you.

“All done! This one was tough. But fun! I didn’t look at anything yet, I thought you and Rose probably want to do that.”

As always your mouth is the first part of your body that reconnects to your brain.

“What you didn’t take the opportunity to look at Bro’s porn folder?”

The rest of you catches up and you wince. Jade, bless her, just smiles at you indulgently. She definitely has to deal with too much of your shit. 

“The obvious one with the ironic kinks or the hidden one with the more sincere ones?.” Rose follows Jade through the door. Gross. You decide in this moment to get a new sister. Sure, you brought up the porn thing first, but everyone knows that you have don’t think before you speak!

Rose is very much thinking and she’s doing it on purpose. Maybe you can trade her in for Jade.

“How the fuck would you even know about Bro’s porn folders? Wasn’t the whole thing here that we don’t know how to get to his files?”

Rose smirks knowingly. It doesn’t explain anything. Ugh.

At some point you do accidentally click on porn. Curse Bro for not properly labeling any of his files. How does he find anything? It’s just tons of weirdly labeled files in unlabeled folders. You have to admire your Bro’s dedication to purposeful chaos. 

Going through the most recent files you find screenshots from newspapers all over the country. Weird weather, people vanishing, the usual things a hunter looks out for. Eventually you find some police reports about stabbings in the town you found him in. 

There’s still nothing unusual about them as far as you can see. All of them got stabbed through the sternum but that doesn’t mean its anything supernatural. Could just be a dude. 

You click through several more files, some of them not even hunting related. One of them is just an anime of the season list. Then you find what your looking for.

At first you think Bro took a screenshot of some poor dudes tinder profile, but then you look at his age.

Jack, Demon, 346(?) years old. Hobbies: Stabbing.

 

You think you found it. Next to you Rose falls over. 

Again.