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By the end of the night, Kathleen has some answers: her brother is dead, and he died terrified, hunted down and shot and stabbed until his heart stopped beating. Riley’s last moments were nothing but terror, and the realisation that he was going to die.
She watches Sam and Dean walk down the driveway, past the trees and shrubs, stepping on sand and dirt and rocks that anyone running for their life could trip over in the darkness.
She never wants to see either of them again, she thinks, as their backs finally disappear from view. She has no idea who they are, or what they do, or why Dean knows how to pick a handcuff and make fake IDs and lie about himself like it’s the easiest thing in the world. She doesn’t know why Sam can fight like he’s trained, holds a gun so easily and breathes in the violence like he was bathed in it.
She does know they’re dangerous, from the way they walk, and the way they are entirely unfazed by the shambles of unprecedented violence around them.
Sam smiles at Dean, shrugs off being locked in a cage for days, and talks with more coherence than Kathleen can muster, and she's the one who's the cop. Dean is the same person he was before this happened, there’s relief at the sight of Sam back beside him, and she can see that in his stance, looser and not as tense. Shoulders not as tight, eyes not as bright. But he is still the same. She doesn't think he'll lose sleep over this.
She called Dean a civilian back before entering the farm, but she’s not sure what he is, not sure if she wants to know.
Kathleen lets her thoughts about them die out as they vanish into the trees and shrubs, and she hopes to every fucking god she’s ever heard of that she never sees them again. She’s not scared of them, not really. At least, she's not scared of them hurting her, but she does know they aren’t people she wants to get involved with.
They’re too comfortable with blood on their hands (if that gun hadn’t jammed when Sam was fighting the other Benders, she knows he would have killed him. Even worse, Sam is skilled enough to not need to kill them).
When she is sure she is alone, with no one other than the corpse of the patriarch of this shit show, the unconscious bodies of the men locked in the cages in the shed, and Missy locked in the closet, does she even step near the house again.
It takes a year and then some for her to step over the threshold, moving from the porch to the inside of the house - and all she’s left with is the silence, and the roaring of her own thoughts. There’s a wind chime made of jawbones. A jar full of teeth, and Polaroid pictures pinned to a lattice piece in the house that she will be forever forced to remember. She doesn’t enter the house again after that, she lingers at the doorway. She tells herself it’s because she doesn’t want to further contaminate the scene, and not the other option, where if she steps across the threshold she might find something belonging to Riley, and that might make this entire nightmare real.
His car sits on the property, there to rot right alongside the memory of him and everything that made him special. She can’t bring herself to go near it. Some old part of her wants to walk over, like Riley will be in the front seat, already opening the door and making some bad joke about worrying her, and she'll scold him for being an idiot.
There are bruises forming along every surface of her body, hurting in places she didn’t think even got hit, bubbling with red-hot pain. Her hands shudder at her side.
She closes the door to the house, and stands on the porch, and remembers when things made a bit more sense.
Before she knew that her brother met his end with these people, hunted for sport and his body ripped to pieces, used for decoration; when she didn’t think Dean was anyone other than a man looking for a lost family member; when she didn’t know about the Benders on their doorstep, all the answers she’s been searching for was right here, a stone's throw away from town.
The silence roars in her ears, the Bender’s patriarch's taunts echo in her brain, bounce around like she’ll never rid of it, but still worse is the silence. It’s a different silence than when her and Sam sat in those cages, waiting for Dean to find a key, neither of them speaking as if that would in turn alert the benders to his presence on the farm.
This silence sits heavy. She’ll never shake it off, long after she steps off this farm, she knows. It will follow her to her grave.
This farm that holds so much blood soaked into its dirt, that has heard the dying screams of dozens of people, that has witnessed brutality like nothing she has seen before.
The wind is cold, biting at her skin, cold like she’s never felt before.
Her brother was murdered, brutally, and he would have felt it all. He would have run for his life and he would have been caught, and he would have been terrified. He died out here, on this farm. His blood is soaked into the soil.
There’s no body to take home, because there are jawbones for wind chimes and teeth in jars and pictures of lifeless bodies, and the Benders standing beside them, grinning with foul teeth like they just caught a deer.
It doesn’t matter how many officers traipse this land, how many people analyse and take apart every part of this place looking for evidence, how loud the sirens are, or how much the Benders will scream as they’re dragged away, the silence of this place will be palpable.
There are too many ghosts here, she thinks, even if the thought is an odd one. Kathleen’s never been one to give much thought to the other side, or the goings-on of things she can’t see or doesn’t understand, but the dirt coats her boots, and blood drips down her face, and there are a dozen cars at least littered around the property, all belonging to people who lived and loved and didn’t deserve what happened to them. It’s inevitable, that the ghosts hang around, long after they are meant to move on.
They are a part of the land, this property. Taken apart bit by bit, bones now decorations, blood now a part of the soil. She doesn’t know what they do with the heads, and that’s worse. So, so much worse.
All the Bender’s victims will be tied to this fucking place, no matter how hard they try to match bones to which victim, no matter how hard they try, Kathleen will never be able to bury her brother.
Kathleen has answers, but none of the ones she wanted.