“How are you doing, son?”
Dean stares at the FBI agent. What are the chances that Agent Briggs
isn’t thinking about how Dean is doing? What are the chances that he’s thinking about what Dean has done?
“Fine.” Fewer words are better. Dean learned that pretty quickly after his father’s arrest. Yes, ma’am and no, ma’am, yes, sir and no, sir, and not causing trouble.
Not that it helps.
“You’re fine,” Agent Briggs repeats, eyeing the bruise on Dean’s cheekbone.
“It doesn’t hurt.” Dean isn’t lying. The pain is there, but it can’t touch him. That’s part of being what he is, isn’t it? A lack of sensitivity to pain? To fear? To feeling?
Dean wonders, sometimes, if that’s how it started for his father. Every day, he remembers the feel of the knife in his hand. The smell of burning flesh.
“You did what you had to do, Dean. If you hadn’t played your father’s game, if you hadn’t convinced him you wanted to play, he would have killed Veronica.” Special Agent Tanner Briggs is awfully forgiving for someone whose wife’s flesh is now branded with Dean’s initials. “You hurt her so that he’d leave you alone with her.”
Don’t tell me I helped her escape. Don’t tell me I’m the reason she’s alive. Don’t tell me I’m the reason my father is behind bars. He’s a monster.
So am I.
“Is someone giving you a hard time?” Briggs tries again. “Because of your father?”
“I should go.” Dean is twelve. He’s not stupid. He knows that people want to say that they’ve done what they can for him.
He knows, even at twelve, that there’s nothing anyone can do.
“Wait.” Agent Briggs doesn’t touch him, but Dean has to push down the instinct to react like he has.
No one touches me. No one should touch me. If Dean doesn’t let people touch him, if he doesn’t touch back—he can’t hurt them.
He can’t become his father.
“There’s something else I wanted to talk to you about,” Agent Briggs says suddenly. “A case.”
Suddenly, Dean can hear himself think again. “Like my father’s?” “Not exactly.” Briggs pauses. “The UNSUB—unknown subject—that
we’re currently tracking has killed at least three prostitutes in the last eight weeks.”
How? The question echoes in Dean’s mind, again and again until he has to ask it out loud.
“The women were beaten to death.”
“Beaten bare-fisted?” For Dean, the question is automatic. He’s already imagining the way the women would have fought back, the way that might have made the person beating them feel. “Or with a blunt object?”
“Neither.” Briggs pauses for just a moment. “Our killer beats women to death wearing gloves.”
Dean pictures it. Something gives inside of him, something visceral and hopeful and dark. Maybe he can make a difference. Maybe he can atone.
Maybe thinking like a killer is enough.
