Archive of Our Own

Dean isn’t exactly cleaning when he finds it, and he isn’t exactly exploring, though there are still plenty of cupboards and corners in the bunker they haven’t gotten around to turning over yet. He isn’t really doing much of anything, just wandering the corridors aimlessly because it’s better than sitting still with his thoughts, and because he doesn’t want to deal with the inevitable shit-fit if Sam comes home and finds him wasted in the middle of the afternoon.

Though, actually, it might not be so inevitable. More likely, Sam will just up the frequency of the worried looks and the loaded questions, make a couple more sneaky phone calls to Cas when he thinks Dean isn’t paying attention. They’re both too careful with him, trading worried looks that he catches out the corner of his eye, hesitating a beat too long before they ask how he’s doing. Now Charlie’s disappeared off to one of her boltholes, there’s nobody left who isn’t walking on eggshells around him.

It makes him want to punch something.

That’s the thing about time bombs. However carefully you tread around them, eventually that timer still ticks down to zero.

But that’s what Dean’s trying not to think about right now. That’s why he’s here, poking through a nightstand drawer in one of the empty bedrooms at the far end of the corridor from where he and Sam sleep.

That’s where he finds the mirror.

It’s one of those old-timey shaving mirrors with the holder on the front, though there’s no brush and no razor. The surface is a little scuffed, but there’s no dust on it. Must’ve belonged to some long-dead Man of Letters, keeping it stashed in his room to make sure nobody stole his stuff. It’s actually kind of cool. Maybe he should swipe it.

Dean pulls it out of the drawer to take a better look, holds it up in front of his face.

Maybe it’s a trick of the light—or the lack of it—but for maybe half a second, he thinks he sees something flicker in the mirror’s surface. He whips his head around, instinct kicking in before he has time to reason with himself that Sam and Cas are both avoiding him and there’s nobody else here.

Nothing. When he turns back to the mirror, all he sees reflected there is his own face, grim and tired around the eyes.

Before he can stop the thought, he’s remembering the men’s room at Donnie’s, that other thing he thought he saw in a mirror. That flash of black eyes. The surge of resentment he felt when Mama Crowley called him a hero—never mind that it sure as hell wasn’t a compliment coming from her. She still thought it was true, and that was what made him lash out at her, as much as anything else.

Dean grits his teeth. Not thinking about it.

He turns over the mirror in his hands, frowning when he realizes there’s something scratched into the back of it. Runs the pad of his thumb over the inscription.

Just one word. Imago.

Unfamiliar, and his lips shape the syllables unthinkingly—sounding it out, like he usually does when he runs across the name of some unfamiliar monster, or some Latin crap from one of the books in the library.

When he flips the mirror back over, its surface is definitely moving.

Dean freezes, staring down his own reflection. Doesn’t blink.

But his reflection does. Slow and lazy like a cat, and there’s a cold spark in its eyes that he takes a couple seconds to recognize as alien.

It’s instinct: you run into something wearing your face, and you don’t have any weapons, you get the fuck away from it. The mirror falls from his hands. He backs up toward the door, dropping into a defensive stance ready for whatever comes out of that mirror.

Nothing does. Dean holds very still for a couple seconds, waiting, but the mirror stays inert on the floor. There’s a single crack right down the middle of it.

Another moment of nothing happening, and he figures he should probably take a look. He inches toward the mirror.

Nothing happens, again, and he sighs and reaches down to pick it off the floor.

The air moves around him.

It’s weird, impossible to really explain what it looks like—not like wind disturbing the air, but like everything blurring around him, reality solidifying and losing definition at the same time. His fingers slip on the surface of the mirror, and it’s only when he sees a spot of blood on its surface that he realizes he’s cut himself.

There’s this sensation, then—like he’s being picked up by a cyclone, sucked out into the vacuum of space. If I have to say ‘not in Kansas anymore,’ he thinks, hysterically, I’m gonna stab somebody in the face.

Then, silence.

Sam’s still twitchy when he pulls up outside the bunker, checking his cell phone and his six just a little more often than he needs to. He’s got no reason to be this tightly-strung, to keep running over the excuses he gave in his head, looking for chinks in his story. Dean didn’t even bat an eyelid when he headed out.

At least, Sam doesn’t think he did—but that’s the thing. Dean’s never been much for admitting he has a problem, but he also pretty much sucks at concealing it for long. Lately, though, the act is dialed up to eleven. There’s so much surface you can hardly see the man underneath anymore.

Sam sighs, grabs the bag of takeout that’s cooling on the shotgun seat—a peace offering for a fight they haven’t had yet—and heads inside.

He finds Dean in the kitchen, wiping dishes. He has his sleeves rolled down to cover the Mark. Must be bothering him more than he admits.

Not that he gives any other sign of how he’s feeling. He looks over his shoulder when Sam walks in, gives a stiff, too-wide smile and says, “Back from your nerds’ day out just in time, Sammy. I was gonna make pumpkin soup.”

Sam figures there’s no point trying to talk it out right now, so he plays along, raises an eyebrow. “Isn’t that a little healthy for you?”

Dean makes a face. “The things I do for you, right?”

“Right, like how you fixed up my bedroom for me while I was at the cinema the other week?”

Dean actually doesn’t snigger at the memory, or say anything obnoxious, and Sam tries to ignore the twinge of worry in his guts. He lifts the takeout bag instead.

“Anyway,” he goes on, “nice idea, but I got Thai. So unless you’re dead set on being Martha Stewart…”

For a second, Dean just looks at him, blank. Then he grins. “No way. Thai sounds awesome.” And then he’s back in action, grabbing plates and beers, digging into his food with theatrical gusto and smirking when Sam shakes his head.

It’s almost normal, and eventually, Sam decides to just take it at face value. Hell, maybe the cleaning and the pumpkin soup thing are good signs. Dean’s let the whole nesting thing fall by the wayside lately—or maybe he just never picked it back up after his stint as a demon. Sam suppresses a wince, remembering the state of the Impala when he found his brother, the balled-up wrappers on the dashboard and the smell of stale fast food and sulfur that clung to the interior for weeks afterward. But if Dean’s getting back into his house-proud routine, maybe that means he’s remembering the things that are important to him. Using them to keep fighting the Mark. Maybe he hasn’t given up, like Sam thought.

That’s probably too optimistic. But if Dean is busy trying to be normal, or just act normal—well, maybe he’s less likely to pick up on Sam sneaking out to meet Rowena.

Sam just has to keep him in the dark a little longer. Until they find out how to get rid of the Mark. Until things are normal—actually normal, or at least their version of it—again. That’s all.

Dean blinks awake on his back on the floor of the empty bedroom, and the first thing he notices is that the lights are screwed up.

Yeah, they’re switched on, but everything looks just a little wrong, kind of washed out. Like in Purgatory, where sickly gray twilight was the order of the day (and night), and whatever passed for natural light sure as hell didn’t come from any natural source.

Dean blinks again, frowns to himself. Things didn’t look this way before he got knocked out.

He winces as he sits up, his memories filtering sluggishly back. No, he didn’t get knocked out—he dropped that mirror. After he read out the word scratched onto the back of it—which yeah, okay, rookie mistake. Should’ve known better. As for whatever mojo it worked on him, he has no clue. He checks himself over; stretches his arms and legs, touches the back of his head where he hit the floor. No visible injuries. Then—instinctive, half-conscious—he tugs his shirtsleeve out the way, fingertips going instinctively to the raised edge of the Mark. Still there.

Yeah, right. He was never gonna get that kind of a lucky break.

And if he doesn’t feel quite as disappointed as he maybe should—well, he just knocked his head on the floor. He can be excused for feeling a little screwy.

Dean gets to his feet, taking the executive decision to give the cracked mirror a wide berth until he’s figured out what its deal is, and leaving it in the middle of the room. He closes the door behind him. Not that Sammy’s likely to go exploring and run across it—too busy triple-checking the lore and pretending not to watch Dean’s every move like a hawk.

Next stop: bathroom. Dean needs a not-cursed mirror.

Nothing unusual about his reflection, except for how sallow it looks in the grayish light. Same old shadows under his eyes; same two-day stubble; same livid red brand on his forearm. No sign of any curse or any ugly-ass supernatural illness.

His eyes are still green.

Not that it would necessarily show, if the mirror had done anything to him, but he doesn’t feel any different, either. A little tightly-wound, sure, clenched like a fist against the voice always whispering in the back of his skull, but that’s nothing new. There’s no curse burning through his veins but the Mark.

Maybe that figures. The first curse trumps all the others; they slide off of him, don’t even bother trying, because something worse has already gotten its claws into him. Makes a sick kind of sense when he thinks about it, so he tries not to think too hard about it and turns away from the mirror.

He’s almost out the door when he sees it, or thinks he does. Something flickers in the corner of his vision, a figure made of shadow.

Dean turns on the spot, but there’s nobody there. Peers back into the bathroom mirror, just in case. Nothing.

Probably he’s just on edge. He’s jittery most of the time lately, between the sleepless nights and the caffeine-fuelled days and the voice of the Mark that whispers to him and sometimes sounds a little too much like his own. He digs fingernails into his palms and heads for the generator room, not letting his eyes linger on the panels nailed over the busted door.

Maybe he’ll manage to get the lights fixed before Sam gets home. He isn’t sure he can stand another set of concerned looks and awkward questions.

Only he can’t find anything wrong in the generator room, however much he pokes around. By the time he gives up and decides he’ll have to start replacing lightbulbs, he’s lost track of time. Can’t be too late, he figures, because he hasn’t heard Sam come home—but when he digs his cell phone out of his pocket to check, the display reads 19:09.

Dean frowns, rubbing the dust off of his hands on the thighs of his jeans. Sam should be back by now. At least he should’ve texted to say he’s running late.

Maybe Dean just didn’t hear him come in, too caught up in trying to find whatever’s screwing with the lights. He pockets his cell and goes to check out the rest of the bunker.

Library’s empty, Sam’s laptop still sitting where he left it. Bedroom, too. Lights out in the kitchen.

Dean fires off a quick Where are you? text and tamps down on the worry that bubbles up in his chest, bitter and hot. The suspicion, too.

He’ll make a start on dinner, he decides. Give himself something to do, to take his mind off of Sam—and if he feels easier with a knife in his hands these days, well, it’s better than the alternatives. Better than a dirty bone blade and the echo of Cain’s voice in his ears, saying, I will never stop. Better than the sick twist of withdrawal deep in his guts, something hungry sharpening its teeth on his insides, nightmares in black and white and blood red from which he’s never a hundred percent sure he’s really woken.

He flips on the light, turns to grab an onion from the pantry. That’s when he sees it.

Something moves in the shiny metal surface of the hood above the hob. Dean peers into it, and for a moment all he can do is stand there blinking, trying to make sense out of what he sees.

Sam is in the kitchen. In the reflection. He’s at the table, eating dinner, and Dean is sitting opposite him. They’re talking—small talk, obviously, because nobody scowls or goes silent or stomps out of the room, though Dean can’t hear what they’re saying. Clinking beer bottles. They even laugh a couple times.

The reflection is bright, the colors of the room their normal, vivid selves, not washed-out like things are here. Like they have been since—

Since Dean touched that old shaving mirror in the empty bedroom. Since it did whatever it did to him.

It all clicks together in his brain. How quiet and dim everything is here—like a reflection in mottled glass. That feeling when he touched the mirror, the air solidifying, pulling at him.

Dean’s heart skitters. He bangs on the reflective surface with the heel of his hand, the noise oddly dull in the empty kitchen. Sam doesn’t look up from his food.

“Sammy!” he yells. “Sam! Look at me! That’s not—”

He breaks off as the Dean in the mirror—the thing that looks like Dean—turns its head and stares right at him. There’s a cold light in the thing’s eyes as it inclines its head, tilts its beer bottle toward him in a mock-toast that Sam is apparently too busy stuffing noodles in his face to notice.

The worst part is how the creature’s expression sits on his face. How it still looks a little like him.

He raps on the surface again, hard enough he’ll probably have bruises on his knuckles in the morning. The creature gives a tiny shrug and turns back to its food.

“Fuck,” Dean mutters to himself, pinching the bridge of his nose, breathing out as slow as he can. Panic won’t do him any favors right now. Panic leads to violence, and violence leads him places that—well, places where he won’t be any good to himself or Sam. He turns away from the reflection and makes for the empty bedroom.

The mirror still sits in the middle of the floor where he dropped it. He lifts it carefully, thumbs just brushing the edges of the glass, but it doesn’t do anything else, just sits inert in his hands.

Dean turns it over, touches the word scratched into the back. Imago.

Vaguely familiar, now he thinks it over again. Sam had been in middle school, doing some project on bugs, holing himself up in the corner of a small town library and painstakingly copying crap out of books from the science section. Dean didn’t pay much attention—busy staring out the window at mini-skirted Kari Klein, who stood popping gum and watching her kid sister in the playground over the road—but Sam had been so damn proud of the thing, all the new words he’d learned.

Imago. A larva or a chrysalis or something, Dean thinks. Not that that tells him anything. Damn Kari Klein and her bubblegum, he should’ve paid attention.

So, library. He flips open Sam’s laptop—or the copy of it that’s on the copy of their table, anyway—and discovers that, thank fuck, creepy-ass mirror-world at least has mirror-internet.

He means to dig into the lore, but the dictionary definition that pops up at the top of the search page arrests his eyes.

Imago (n): An idealized image of a person.

That creature with his face, smiling coldly back at him. Sam, laughing obliviously at its jokes.

The Mark on his arm itches.

Sam wakes before his alarm, to the faint noise of Dean banging about in the kitchen and a fainter sense of unease he can’t place. If he even needs to place it; if it’s anything more than the dread he’s been carrying around since Illinois, the certainty that their lives are spiraling down the drain, maybe not right now, maybe not tomorrow, but sometime very soon. It isn’t even anything new, really, just the background noise of his existence. He’s learned to live with it, mostly—learned that it’s easier to live with if he’s at least trying to fix it.

He reaches for his cell phone. No word from Rowena. He’s still watching the screen, as though he might will some good news into being if he just stares hard enough, when his alarm begins to trill.

In the kitchen, Dean is still wearing yesterday’s clothes, which Sam takes as a sign to tread carefully. He knows his brother’s been running on empty for months—either avoiding nightmares or wired with unnatural energy, the Mark burning a path to the wakey-wakey centers of his brain (a thought that makes Sam stiffen at the remembered pop of a firecracker)—but most of the time, Dean at least makes the effort to pretend he’s been sleeping. Not today, though. If only Sam had a clue what that meant.

Sam stifles his yawn, scrubbing a hand over his eyes. “Morning.”

Dean spins around to look at him just a little too fast—yeah, definitely wired, then—but at least he’s smiling. “So, Sleeping Beauty finally shows up,” he says. “Hey, was Prince Charming disappointed when you turned into a moose instead of a princess?”

Sam refrains from saying, What, you’re borrowing insults from Crowley now? He does frown a little when Dean just nods in the direction of the coffeemaker, whatever Mom instinct normally makes him pour coffees and open beers apparently dormant this morning.

His shirtsleeve is still rolled down over the Mark. Sam wonders if that’s a good sign or a bad one.

“Think I’ll make a breakfast run,” Dean offers, as Sam helps himself to coffee. “You want anything?”

Sam shrugs. “Sure,” he says. “Whatever looks good.” He pauses. “My good, not your good.”

Dean makes a face. “Spinach smoothie coming right up,” he says, and drains the last of his coffee. He grabs the keys to the Impala off the table and heads out, just a little too much of a spring in his step.

That faint unease again, roiling in the pit of Sam’s stomach.

Dean’s just trying to be normal, he reminds himself. Just putting a brave face on it, like he always does when there’s crap hanging over his head that he doesn’t want to acknowledge. There’s no use Sam driving himself crazy over it—not when he finally has a chance of fixing it instead.

He swallows his coffee black and heads for the bathroom.

Sam’s shaving when he thinks he sees something flicker in the mirror.

It’s almost nothing, not even there long enough for him to tell what it is—but it makes him start, and he ends up with a nick at his jaw that won’t stop bleeding. He presses his fingertip over it and frowns into the mirror, then checks over both his shoulders.

Nothing. He’s jittery—the sleeplessness or the caffeine, or maybe the brittle caricature of his brother he’s been living with for the past few months, conspiring to make him think he has to watch his back the whole time. He sighs and absently sucks blood off the pad of his finger.

There’s just enough that he tastes it, iron on the back of his tongue, and he tastes blood often enough that it stopped making him wince years ago, but he still can’t help how his eyes flick to his reflection in the mirror. Just for half a second; just to be sure it’s still him. Not a habit Sam will ever break.

These days, Dean does it, too.

Dean almost cracks this goddamn mirror as well. He ignores the bruises he can feel forming under the skin on his knuckles and raps as hard as he can.

There’s a moment when Sam looks like he might’ve noticed, starts a little and peers at the glass in puzzlement. But he looks right though Dean, doesn’t bat an eye when Dean yells his name. Just wipes a spot of blood from the shaving cut at his jaw, licks it off of his finger—which, ew—and goes back to shaving.

Ew. Dean tries to make sure that’s all he thinks about it. Tries not to look at the glint of the razorblade, just a couple inches from Sam’s throat; grits his teeth against whispers in the back of his skull and visions of arterial spray. Settles for calling Sam every kind of asshole under the sun, instead, because seriously, how oblivious do you have to be not to recognize you’re living with some freaky-ass mirror-clone instead of your own brother?

Well. Maybe that isn’t a question Dean really wants answered.

He spent the night in the library, which is pretty much exactly like the library in the real bunker, except for having no Sam to rag on when his eyes start to ache and his head starts to swim from reading too long in the unhealthy gray light. Nothing about the imago—which is what Dean’s calling the freaky mirror-clone, anyway—or the mirror it came from. Which is weird, because you’d think the damn Men of Letters would’ve had records of the supernatural crap they had lying around the place.

Dean hasn’t even gotten halfway down his list of insults for whatever long-dead librarian thought it wasn’t worth keeping notes on when he hears the noise.

It’s behind him, and he turns on the spot.

Then he freezes.

There’s something in the corner of the bathroom, just behind the door. Or somebody, maybe. A humanoid figure, gray and shadowy.

Dean clears his throat. It doesn’t move.

“Hey,” he tries. “Hey, you. Whatever the hell you are.”

The figure stays still in its corner, doesn’t acknowledge him.

He frowns, takes a couple steps toward it and snaps his fingers, right up in its face—or where its face would be, if he could see it more clearly. It’s kind of indistinct, edges wavering like it’s starting to dissolve, bits of it breaking off to dissipate in midair.

Dean’s still staring, weighing the dangers of giving the thing a poke to see if it’s solid, when he catches sight of his own hand, still held before the thing’s face.

He looks like that, too.

He pivots, back toward the mirror, the impulse to show Sammy kicking in before his brain catches up and reminds him that Sam can’t see him, and anyway, letting Sam know that there’s anything wrong with him is a bad idea these days. Not that it makes a difference, because when he looks in the glass, Sam is gone.

It’s late when Sam gets home from the next town, a few groceries hastily picked up on the way home to bolster the latest of his increasingly-flimsy excuses for meeting Rowena. He’s half-expecting the whole thing to come tumbling down around his ears when he walks through the door—an interrogation, or at the very least a suspicious look and a couple pointed comments about how It took you two hours to choose zucchini, seriously? Were you making sure they matched your purse?

Dean barely raises an eyebrow, though, absorbed in a stack of papers in the library. Sam sneaks a glance at what he’s reading. Some old report typed on Men of Letters headed paper. Sam’s already combed through that stuff until his eyeballs hurt, so he knows there’s nothing in there about the Mark.

“Found us a job?” he asks.

Dean looks up from his papers and stares blankly at Sam for half a second before the too-wide grin he wears too often these days splits his face. “Nah,” he says. “Just being thorough. Thought you were all about that, dork.”

Sam rolls his eyes and heads for the kitchen. He returns to the library with two bottles of beer in hand, in the interest of prolonging Dean’s good mood, because sometimes you have to pick your battles. He’ll beat himself up for encouraging Dean’s drinking when he’s done saving his brother from the more literal demons. The table has been cleared, and Dean’s sprawled on the couch with his laptop balanced on his knees, the papers he was reading stacked neatly back in their box. He chuckles, and Sam passes the beer over Dean’s shoulder, taking the opportunity to glance at the laptop screen.

Nothing about the Mark, or a case, or anything supernatural at all. Just some video of a puppy running headfirst into a wall, falling on its ass and then bouncing back up again. It’s like Dean’s taken Sam’s presence back in the bunker as his cue to clock off.

Not a very Dean thing to do, and Sam can’t help the twinge of apprehension he feels at the thought. He casts a glance over at the box on the table, looking away again before Dean can catch him staring.

They eat dinner, and they have another beer, and then Dean yawns theatrically and announces that he’s beat and heading to bed, as though to make up for all the sleeping he hasn’t been doing lately, or at least for Sam’s having noticed it. And Sam finally gets a chance to look over the papers.

They don’t make a whole lot of sense, honestly. A couple of what look like spell components, margin notes in handwriting that could belong to any one of a hundred dead Men of Letters. Nothing coherent, but if Sam had to guess, he’d say that somebody was trying to put together a summoning.

Again, the twist of worry in his guts.

Dean isn’t dumb. He might be tempted to do something dumb, if it means getting rid of the Mark, but not something that involves trusting unknown supernatural entities.

Gadreel, Sam’s brain supplies, helpfully. Cain. Crowley.

He shakes his head. That’s how Dean ended up with the Mark in the first place; not a lesson he’ll forget anytime soon. He won’t do something that dumb. He won’t.

Still, Sam replaces the lid on the box, shifts it over into a mostly-unused corner of the library, as though that might somehow discourage Dean from looking in there again. He sighs, sets an early alarm on his cell phone, and puts out the light.

When he turns into the bathroom to brush his teeth, the mirror over the sink is gone.

Sam frowns. Thinks again about how Dean watches himself these days, in the rear view mirror when he’s driving, in storefront windows—quick, sharp looks, like he might just get a glimpse of something else if he catches himself unawares. He thinks about how tightly Dean holds onto his anger lately, how close it simmers to the surface. About how when Dean lashes out, it’s always at himself as much as the monster he’s fighting or the person he’s yelling at.

Sam checks the sink for broken glass. He doesn’t find any, but that doesn’t really tell him anything. Dean’s obsessive enough about cleaning up after himself when he doesn’t have anything to hide.

He hesitates a second before letting himself out into the corridor, tapping on the door to Dean’s bedroom.

No answer. Cautiously, Sam pushes it open.

The room is empty. Sam casts a glance around, like he might find Dean lurking in the shadows behind the door. It’s unnaturally tidy in here. As in, more so than usual. Everything lined up neat and parallel, bedsheets made up with hospital corners like nobody’s slept on them lately.

Footsteps in the corridor, then. They approach from the far end of the bunker—where the disused bedrooms are. They rarely go looking down there—actually, the last time Sam went into any of them might have been when they cleared Kevin’s things out and sent them home with his mom.

He pushes the unwelcome thought aside, turns to the door with an apology ready on his tongue. Dean gets pissy about Sam looking in his room without permission at the best of times.

Dean doesn’t bitch at him, though. He blinks once, a little stiffly, and says, “What’s up?”

“Uh.” Sam gestures toward the corridor. “The mirror. From the bathroom. You know what happened to it?”

Dean nods. “It broke.”

That’s all he offers. He stands to one side, making way for Sam to leave. His smile is very cold.

Sam never sees him. Sam never fucking sees him.

Dean stalks the corridors of the mirror-bunker with clenched fists, pushing down memories of another Dean who stalked through the real one not so long ago with murder in his eyes. Would’ve had blood on his hands if Cas hadn’t shown up when he did.

He stares numbly into reflective surfaces. He’s given up knocking on them.

He’s in the kitchen, watching creepy-ass clone-Dean get himself a beer from the fridge and not bother tossing one to Sam, when he sees it again. That shadowy flicker behind him, that figure disintegrating around its edges.

Dean turns on the spot—and this time, he’s fast enough. He surges forward, grabs the gray figure by its throat—or what would be its throat, if it was human—and slams it back against the kitchen cabinets.

It looks at him in vague surprise.

He stares back at it. And it kind of—comes into focus.

Not completely. It’s still a little fuzzy, like something from a faded photograph. But Dean’s pretty sure it’s a person. A dude in an old-timey suit, clean-shaven, neatly-combed hair with a side parting. Like somebody from the fifties.

When it speaks, its voice has that same indistinct quality. Muffled as if by static, like the worn old vinyl albums Mom used to listen to.

“Can I help you?” it says.

Dean blinks, taken aback by how mild it sounds. No fight, no snapping and snarling—more like it’s just some ordinary guy on the street, and Dean’s asking it for directions.

Could all be a trap, of course. Just because something looks harmless doesn’t mean it is. Dean tightens his jaw, and his hold on the thing’s throat. “You can start by telling me what you are.”

It blinks at him, and he loosens his grip, just enough to let it speak.

“My name’s James Goodman,” it says. “I’m a Man of Letters.”

Dean raises his eyebrows. “That so? Then you mind telling me what you’re doing trapping one of your own in here while that creepy-ass—whatever-it-is—runs around with my face?”

Goodman opens his mouth as though to answer—and then he stops, eyes narrowed on Dean’s face. “John,” he says.

That’s enough to make Dean take a step back, letting Goodman go and grabbing for the gun he picked up in one of the storage rooms. At least the mirror-bunker still has supplies. “What?” he gets out.

Apparently, Goodman doesn’t hear the danger in his voice, because he exhales, rubbing at his neck. “John Winchester,” he says. “You’re Henry’s boy. I’ve seen photographs. But—you’re all grown up.” He frowns. Looks around, like a guy just waking up. “How long have I been in here?”

Well, crap.

Dean holds steady, though, raises the gun and doesn’t shift his eyes from Goodman’s face. “Answer the question.”

Goodman shakes his head. “I didn’t trap anybody in here,” he says. “The imago did. Just like it trapped me.”

Imago. The word scratched into the back of the mirror. “That’s what that thing is out there?”

“Yes.” Goodman gives himself a little shake, like he’s trying to get himself together. “How much do you know about it? Did Sinclair keep any of my notes?”

“Sinclair? As in, Cuthbert Sinclair?”

An expression of distaste crosses Goodman’s face. “He was so intent on studying it that he left me here.”

“Yeah, that sounds like him.” Dean sighs. Steps back toward the kitchen table and pulls out a chair, nodding toward the other one. “Take a seat, James. Sounds like this is gonna be a long story.”

It is—long enough that Goodman gets through two beers from the mirror-bunker’s fridge before he’s done. Dean hesitates before helping himself, because there’s Hades and Persephone, and a ton of fairylore, and who the hell knows what else, all in agreement that eating when you’re stuck in another realm is a bad idea. In the end, though, he figures it never did him any harm in Purgatory, and watching Goodman chug down half a bottle in one go like a guy who’s just crawled out the desert, he feels thirsty for the first time since he woke up here.

The Mark on his arm starts to itch again, same time. Faint, like an insect crawling on the skin—a gentle reminder that nothing’s going to do Dean much physical harm while it has its claws into him. That probably shouldn’t reassure him like it does.

But it does, so he drinks and he listens.

Turns out, James Goodman found the mirror in ‘56, on a case. Or, well, in the aftermath of a case, because that was what the Men of Letters did—swooping in to pick up scraps for their research papers after the hunters on the ground had ganked the monster. He got the gist of what had happened from the hunter who took it out, though.

All started with this housewife who started acting weird. Nothing anybody could put a finger on, at first, except that her husband said she was like an actress playing herself. Kind of cold, smiley but not really there, the whole Stepford deal. Then she started forgetting to feed the kids, forgetting to eat herself. Ignoring her friends in the street. Took all the mirrors out the house and put them in the basement. It was luck, really, that the husband got talking to some guy in a bar who just happened to be a hunter coming off of a salt-and-burn a couple towns over.

So, hunter figured out something freaky was going on, paid a visit to check out the wife. Later, he couldn’t pinpoint what it was that told him she wasn’t human—just said that he felt like he was looking back at himself when he talked to her. He managed to take out the creepy doppelganger, and when he went down to the basement, the floor was covered in shards of glass.

Just this one mirror that wasn’t broken, the word imago scratched into the back. For a second, the hunter could’ve sworn he saw her face staring back at him—the real woman, not the imago. Then she was gone.

Goodman had picked it up, was just getting started on his research when he made the same dumb rookie mistake as Dean and got himself sucked in. At first, he spent his time watching his colleagues in the bunker through the mirrors, waiting for them to figure out it wasn’t really him in there with them.

“But I’d always kept to myself,” he says. “I was better with books than people. I guess they didn’t know me well enough to see the difference.”

Sinclair gave him hope, at first. It looked like he was starting to figure things out, work on a binding spell to trap the thing. Only, he didn’t gank the imago once he had it under control, just led it off somewhere. Dean grits his teeth at that part; wonders if Goodman’s double was still in the zoo when he and Sam paid their visit to Sinclair. It might have been one of his neighbors, if Sinclair had gotten his way.

Goodman deflates a little once he’s done relating that part, sagging forward with his elbows on the table. “I guess I lost hope a little, after that. I stopped trying to see what was going on out there. It got so quiet.”

Dean looks down, worries at the label of his beer bottle for a moment before meeting Goodman’s eyes. “About that,” he says. “Man, I hate to be the bearer of bad news here, but there haven’t been any Men of Letters in a long time.”

“What do you mean?”

“Happened in ‘58. This demon, Abaddon, possessed one of your members and went all Anakin Skywalker on the rest.”

Goodman gives him a bewildered look. “I’m sorry?”

“She killed them all.” The Mark throbs gently. Dean covers it with his palm, tries to shove it out of his mind. “The whole organization just kinda fell by the wayside after that. Me and my brother found this place a couple years back.” He figures leaving out the whole time-travel thing is probably for the best: Goodman looks poleaxed enough without it. “And, uh, I’m not John Winchester. He was my dad.”

Goodman’s quiet for a long moment. Glances over at the reflective surface. “I’ve been in here longer than I thought,” he says at last, voice very quiet. “This place…”

“Well, we’re gonna figure out how to get out of it,” Dean tells him. “We’re gonna fix this.”

“I wish that were possible,” Goodman tells him. “But there’s no stopping them.”

It’s Dean’s turn to frown. “Stopping them from what?” he asks. “Do we even know what they want?”

Goodman nods. His eyes go unfocused, and he sounds like he’s reciting something from memory. His long-lost research notes on the imago, maybe. “Their element is chaos,” he tells Dean. “They live in the in-between—the space between reality and reflection, where all our competing images of the world reside. All the different sides of ourselves that we present to other people. Sometimes I think they’re more a subject for Freudians than occultists.” He purses his lips, thoughtful, and for a second Dean thinks he’s losing the guy again. He raises his hand, and he’s about to wave it in front of Goodman’s face, but then Goodman blinks and focuses. “That chaos is their goal, I think. They want to release it into the world, shake the foundations of human reality so they can live in it.”

Dean shifts uneasily in his chair. “Okay, that doesn’t sound good,” he admits. “But you’re back with the program now, and you got an extra pair of hands. We’ll think of something.”

“There’s nothing we can do. Not from in here. You can only kill them by destroying the imago itself, or breaking the mirror.”

“Well, we got the mirror. And there has to be a hammer around here somewhere.” Furthest storeroom, bottom left cupboard. Sam doesn’t know he knows.

But Goodman shakes his head. “That was the first thing I tried. It only works from the other side. There’s some kind of magic protecting it—if only I’d gotten further in my research, maybe I’d know how to undo it.”

“Great.” Dean slumps forward, elbows on the table. “So unless I can get through to my damn brother—”

“You won’t,” Goodman tells him. “Whatever we do, we’re invisible to human eyes. He can’t see you in here.”

Worse, Sam can’t see what’s in front of him. Can’t see that the stiff, play-acting creature he’s living with isn’t Dean.

He pushes the thought away and glowers at Goodman. “What, so you’ve just given up? You’re just gonna stay stuck here for the rest of—ever?”

Goodman shrugs. “I don’t think there’s any getting out for me. Whatever happened to the imago that Sinclair took, I doubt it’s still alive. There has to be a double to switch with. That seems to be one of the rules.” He says it so blandly, like he’s explaining a card game, not giving up on the rest of his life.

Dean grits his teeth and gets to his feet. Stalks out of the kitchen, and Goodman doesn’t follow, doesn’t call after him. When Dean glances back in his direction, he’s still sitting at the table, eyes unfocused, lapsed back into silence. He’s starting to look fuzzy around the edges again. Dean tears himself away, makes for the bedroom where he found that fucking mirror in the first place.

It’s still on the floor where he left it. But when Dean looks into it, he doesn’t see the room he’s standing in. Just a piece of ceiling, bisected by the crack down the middle; a fragment of a devil’s trap. It takes him a second to recognize it as the one from the basement. Which means the mirror must be laying on the floor down there.

What the hell?

He’s frowning to himself, trying to puzzle it out, when the top of a head comes into view in the mirror. Not his own head. Sam.

Dean’s heart leaps, the Mark sparking to life on his arm with a fire-ant itch. He doesn’t realize he’s spoken his brother’s name out loud until his voice dies away and leaves the silence in the empty room feeling twice as oppressive.

Sam doesn’t meet his eyes. He ducks back out of view.

Dean’s fingernails dig into his palms, hands white-knuckled, rage roiling in his gut. He has to fight not to smash the mirror with his bare hands.

It occurs to him that maybe it doesn’t make a whole lot of difference, whether it’s him out in the world, or the imago. A monster that wants to unleash some weirdo mirror-chaos on the world, or a monster that will inevitably snap and murder his way across the continent sometime soon. Not much to choose between them.

Maybe it would be better if Sam never knew he was trapped in here. He has to figure out sometime that the imago isn’t really Dean. He’ll take it out before it does too much damage—and at least that way, Sam will have the comfort of knowing the monster wasn’t his brother. At least the blood won’t really be on Dean’s hands.

Dean takes deep, trembling breaths and tries to keep telling himself that.

Sam finds Dean in the basement.

That’s the first weird thing. Not exactly the most cheerful room in the bunker at the best of times, and he doesn’t think he’s seen Dean choose to go in there since they got done with the demon cure, except when it’s absolutely necessary. Seeing Dean in the center of the room—in that same red shirt that Sam wishes to God he’d stop wearing—startles him enough that he freezes in the doorway for a second, blinking against the threat of a flashback.

It takes him a moment to notice the second weird thing. Which is that Dean’s kneeling on the floor with every single mirror in the bunker spread out around him, all laid out so their reflective surfaces point at the ceiling.

Sam frowns and steps closer, leaning over to look at the bizarre arrangement. Yeah: there’s the one from the bathroom, the one that Dean said had broken, plus a few more taken down from various walls. A couple scrying mirrors from the storerooms downstairs. Even a compact mirror from the contact lens kit that Charlie left here last time she stayed. Plus an antique shaving mirror that Sam thinks he’d recognize if he’d seen it before. Must be from one of the rooms they haven’t gotten around to clearing out yet. There’s a single crack down the middle of it. As he watches, Dean runs his index finger lightly along the break.

“Dude,” Sam says. “What are you doing?”

Dean’s head snaps around, his smile a little too ready, a little too wide. In the basement gloom, his eyes are bright and sharp as pins. Sam swallows.

“Spring cleaning, Sammy,” Dean says.

“Okay,” Sam says, and he’s about to add, Are you sure that’s what you wanna go with? when Dean gets to his feet.

“Anyway,” Dean goes on. “Been meaning to talk to you.”

Sam blinks at him in surprise. He’s pretty sure Dean’s been avoiding him even more determinedly than usual the past couple days. “You have?”

“Yeah.” The grin widens, and Dean takes a step toward him. It’s an effort to stand his ground. “I got good news.”

And then Sam forgets about the mirrors, forgets to be pissed at Dean’s obvious bullshitting, because Dean rolls up his right shirtsleeve and—it’s gone.

The Mark is gone. Just vanished, like it was never there. There isn’t even a scar.

Sam lets out an astonished breath. “How?”

“Does it matter?” Dean’s smile doesn’t waver.

And that isn’t right, is it? Because if this is real, then Dean shouldn’t have waited until now to tell him. He should be laughing and chugging beers, insisting that they go out and celebrate, c’mon, Sammy, let’s make some new friends, and trying out all his most cringe-making pickup lines on some poor waitress. Or if Dean’s gone and done some dumb, self-destructive thing to pull this off, and he’s been holding off because he doesn’t want Sam to figure it out, then he should be pissed and defensive, lashing out to shut Sam down before he gets a chance to question it.

But all this crap—the closed-off weirdness, the cartoonish front—it was the Mark. It had to be the Mark. Dean’s just been acting a part so he doesn’t have to face it. And now the Mark is gone, and this stuff—isn’t.

God, if this is really Dean now—

Sam swallows down nausea. Tries to keep his face from falling, because Dean is still watching him closely with those, sharp, bright eyes.

“That’s great, Dean,” he gets out. “That’s—really great.”

Dean’s stare holds him pinned in place. For a second, he feels like a rabbit staring down a snake. Even chasing him through the corridors with a hammer, Dean wasn’t this cold, and there’s something beating at the back of Sam’s brain saying wrongwrongwrong, and he doesn’t think he can hide it, and Dean is still watching him with narrowed eyes—

The sound of footsteps, somewhere out in the corridor. Cas’s voice follows a moment later. “Sam? Dean? Is anybody home?”

Sam casts a relieved glance in its direction. “Awesome,” he says. “C’mon, let’s go tell Cas the good news.”

Dean frowns at him for a split second longer. Then his expression clears, and that same stiff smile replaces it. “Awesome,” Dean parrots. “You go on up, Sammy. I’ll be right out.”

But it turns out they don’t need to go. The footsteps come closer, and then Cas pokes his head around the door.

“Hello—” he begins, and then breaks off, looking startled.

A second passes before he schools his face into calm. Maybe he can see that the Mark is gone without being told?

“Dean,” he says, voice carefully neutral, and gives a nod in Dean’s direction. Dean returns it, doesn’t even say hi. “Sam. Can I speak with you?”

Sam frowns, casting another glance in Dean’s direction. Dean’s expression gives nothing away. “Uh, sure, Cas,” Sam says, and follows him out into the corridor.

Cas grips his arm like a vise, and for a moment Sam thinks he’s about to be dragged bodily out of the bunker. But Cas stops dead once they round the corner into the next corridor, leaning into Sam’s space, face set and fierce.

“Sam,” he hisses, voice low. “That is not your brother.”

Tell me about it, Sam thinks, for the space of a heartbeat.

Then it dawns on him that Cas is being literal.

Just for a moment, before the panic sets in, relief breaks over him like a wave.

“Sam,” Cas says, and his worried frown drags Sam out from under it.

“Then what is it?” Sam gets out. “Where’s Dean? We have to—”

That’s all he has time for, because then Cas is looking at something behind him, eyes wide with shock. There’s a sound of breaking glass, and Sam blacks out as something hits him over the back of the head.

Dean’s still hunched over the shaving mirror, teeth gritted against his anger, when he sees it. His double, leaning over and picking something up off of the floor.

Yeah—he’s pretty sure that’s the bathroom mirror. He frowns. What the hell is that doing on the floor in the basement?

Then it occurs to him that he could just go look, so he does. On this side, the mirror’s still on the wall, where it’s always been. Maybe he’ll be able to see what’s going on through it. He sprints to the bathroom.

His heart catches in his throat at what he sees in the mirror. Sam, standing at the end of a corridor as Dean’s double stalks toward him, his back to the mirror. And Cas, facing him.

Cas, meeting his eyes in the mirror. Cas, seeing him.

What was it Goodman said? We’re invisible to human eyes. Nothing about angelic ones.

Hope flares up inside him. “The mirror,” he calls, just hoping Cas will be able to hear him too. “You gotta break the mirror!”

The glass in front of him shatters.

Sam hits the floor like a ton of bricks, glass shards falling around him like rain. He looks up and finds the thing with Dean’s face standing over him, teeth bared in something that definitely isn’t a smile anymore. Cas stands frozen on the spot, blinking at it, then at Sam.

The creature takes another step forward, and Sam scoots away from it as best he can. “Uh, Cas?” he gets out. “Little help here?”

“The mirror,” Cas says, frowning. “Dean told me to break the mirror. But the mirror’s broken, and—” He gestures at the creature; the absence of Dean.

Sam stares in confusion for a moment, because he definitely didn’t hear Dean say any of that.

Then it dawns on him. All the mirrors from the bunker, hidden away in the dungeon. And Cas was looking right into the mirror before it hit Sam over the head.

That’s where Dean is. Trapped behind one of those mirrors.

The one that Sam didn’t recognize. That has to be it.

“In the dungeon,” he says. “In the middle of the floor. This little antique mirror, it’s cracked—that’s the one, you have to—”

He breaks off as the creature turns on its heel and darts away from them, heading back the way it came. No way will Cas get there first. Sam does the only thing he can thing of and lunges at it, grabbing its ankle and pulling hard.

It’s like trying to drop a marble statue. But Sam holds on with all his strength, and he manages to unbalance the thing long enough for Cas to shoulder past it and run for the dungeon, coat flapping ungracefully behind him.

The thing topples, hits the floor with a cracking sound that puzzles Sam for a whole half a second, before he has to dodge a punch and the thought flees from his head.

He twists out of the way, but then the creature is on him, Dean’s face stretched into a rictus of rage as it pins him to the floor. Sam ducks another blow and the creature’s fist leaves a dent in the floor tiles. It’s all hard surface, inhuman, and Sam feels like a traitor for the images that flash over his mind’s eye.

Dean coming after him through these same corridors, hammer swinging from his hand like a kid with a favorite toy. Dean on his knees in Randy’s front room, the floor around him strewn with bodies.

This very same thing that’s playing out right now—but with the anger in Dean’s eyes hot and bright and real, not stiff and cold like this creature, the Mark still burning on Dean’s arm.

That one isn’t a memory. It’s something that might still happen.

Sam grits his teeth and grabs for the creature’s arm—to push it off of him, or to remind himself that it isn’t flesh and blood, isn’t his brother. He doesn’t have time to think about which.

It’s too strong for him. It shakes off his hand like an insect, grabs his shoulder to pin him down and raises its fist. There won’t be any getting away from it this time. Sam closes his eyes.

There’s a distant sound of breaking glass.

The creature goes still. Sam opens his eyes again and finds it looking at him without expression. Nothing in its eyes; completely hollowed out. For the space of a heartbeat it stays frozen, staring down at him. Then it splinters, and he’s left lying on the floor amid a mess of broken glass.

Dean comes around on his knees in the middle of the dungeon, Cas’s hand on his arm, Cas’s concerned expression right up in his face.

“Dean. Are you okay?”

He winces and lets himself be hauled to his feet. “Yeah. Yeah, I think so.”

Cas doesn’t seem convinced, but Dean can hear someone running down the corridor, so he looks past Cas’s frown. Sam’s wincing as he walks in. He went down hard when the imago hit him over the head; must’ve hurt like a bitch. There’s a cut on his cheek.

Dean tries to feel bad about that. Maybe even does, somewhere on the surface. But Sam’s relieved grin tightens something up in him. A hot clench of anger that sings in his veins, in harmony with the throb of the Mark.

It must show in his expression, because Sam’s face falls a little.

“Hey, Dean,” he says, softly. “Listen, I—” He breaks off, lowers his eyes for a moment, then looks back up at Dean. “How long?”

Dean holds in a snort of derision. “Long enough.”

“Dean—”

He holds up a hand. “Don’t, Sammy,” he says. “Just—don’t worry about it, okay? All’s well that ends well, and—you know. All that stuff.”

That’s a laugh and a half. Poor Goodman’s still stuck in the mirror-bunker; no getting out for him now. Sam and Cas might’ve taken out the imago, but who says what they brought back in its place is any better?

“Yeah. All that stuff.” Sam nods, flashes him a brief, unhappy smile.

Dean turns away from it. From the dungeon floor, his own shattered reflection looks back at him.

Weeks later, he watches his face in another broken mirror, and feels nothing.