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It was Dean's turn to get dinner — as Sam had reminded him three times in the last hour. So he'd kept the flirting with the cute, must-be-legal-if-she's-selling-booze-right? clerk to a minimum. Still, when he returned to the hotel room with a bag of fire-ass Doritos, a couple of warmed-up burritos, and a six-pack, his little brother seemed to have forgotten his usual need to eat every damn thing in sight. (And wasn't he supposed to have grown out of that by now? Freak.)
No, Sam was sitting on one of the beds, back against the wall, that damned computer he loved so much on his lap, looking like someone had just kicked his puppy.
"HotGeekGirls.com kick you off their server again?" he asked, kicking a chair away from the scuffed-up table and dropping into it. He had ripped open the bag of chips and was reaching for a beer when he realized Sam hadn't even scowled, much less flipped him off.
That was enough to set off alarm bells. He felt himself shifting into alert mode without even thinking about it. "Sam? What's wrong?"
"I'm being audited."
Dean blinked. "What?" he asked, as his brain re-shelved its encyclopedia of monsters and otherworldly vermin and tried to process what he was hearing.
"I haven't filed a return in two years now and the IRS is auditing me." Sam's tone was downright depressed. Dean had only one response to that.
"You pay taxes?"
Sam finally looked up at that with a grimace. "Well, not recently." He gestured to the screen before him. "And now the IRS has a warrant out on me for suspected tax evasion."
That was it. The point at which Dean completely lost it.
After a few minutes of watching Dean laugh his ass off — and almost ending up on the floor more than once — at least Sammy didn't look morose anymore. Pissed off was a whole lot better in Dean's opinion.
"It's not funny, Dean," Sam insisted. "That's how they got Al Capone."
That set off another round of hysterical laughter. "So you're Capone now?" Dean spread his hands out as if framing the poster: "Sam Winchester, FBI's Most Wanted."
"Dean, I'm serious—"
"No, no you're not," he answered, deliberately popping the top of the beer off against the edge of the table in the way that always made Sam wince. "We spend our days breaking every other law we run across and fighting hellbeasts with our bare hands and you're worried about a tax audit?"
His answer was a scowl. "Well some of us don't have the advantage of being legally dead in most states. They're never going to go after you."
"And if they do, I've got a silver bullet, a few stakes, and a metric assload of rock salt to defend myself with. They can't be any worse than those rabid werewolves in Tampa. We'll be fine."
"Very funny."
"No, Sam. You know the reason why they're not going to come after me? It's because I've never filed taxes in my life. They don't even know I exist. It's called keeping a low profile." Dean called up his smuggest big-brother grin and tossed a still-warm burrito toward the bed. Sam caught it without even looking up, but his attention was back on the computer screen and his mood wasn't showing any signs of improving.
Dean rolled his eyes. "Next you're going to tell me you've been filling out those little change of address cards at the post office every time we leave a town."
That earned him a glare at least. "I had a life, Dean." Sam reluctantly slid the laptop to one side and started picking at the burrito wrapper. Dean tossed him a bottle. "For a couple of years there, I actually had a normal life. I went to school and I had a job — a normal job — and a girlfriend—"
Dean winced, but said nothing as Sam took a deep breath and continued. "I had a normal life and a future and yeah, I paid my taxes and voted and everything."
And hell, what was he supposed to say to that? He was the one who'd shown up and ripped Sam out of his happy little fairy-tale world after all.
"Look, you know they're not actually going to come after you, right?" He took a deliberately casual pull at his beer. "Hell, you could probably get in there and at least cancel the warrant alert, if it's got you this worried."
"I know."
Great. He'd been afraid of this. It wasn't the warrant or the audit that was the real problem. It was more of that deep emotional crap Dean was never any good at.
Thank God Sammy decided to explain. "It's just over, Dean."
Well, 'explain' might be stretching it. Dean looked concerned and waited for something a little less cryptic.
As usual, it worked. "The IRS auditing me? It would have been a big thing in that life — huge. But it doesn't mean anything anymore. Because I'm never going back to that life. They're looking for someone who doesn't even exist any more."
Oh God, here they went into the "Why couldn't we just have had normal lives?" routine. Because that damned yellow-eyed bastard of a demon decided to lurk over your cradle one night, Sammy, and then fry mom to the ceiling when she tried to save you, that's why.
Not that he would ever say it, of course. It's not as if Sam didn't know the answer all too well as it was.
Which left Dean again without any damned thing to say.
"We could mess with them, you know. If you wanted to."
"Dean—"
"No, I mean it: We could file under any name we wanted to. Make up a name entirely. They'll still be missing yours, so we give them an extra from, say 'Humberto Skeeter'."
Sam was just sitting there with one eyebrow raised, giving him that "Are you on crack?" look of his, but Dean was warming to his subject. "They'd have to take it seriously, right? I mean, how often do people file returns for entirely fictional people? Drive 'em nuts trying to figure out who it belongs to.
"Humberto Skeeter. Profession: Demon Hunter. Of course he'd be an independent contractor, so he'd have to file business tax stuff, right? So he could deduct his holy water and rock salt. And, of course, a good solid crossbow costs a nice chunk of change, so there'd be the accrual on the weapons—"
"I think you mean depreciation."
Dean just waved him off, refusing to show his relief at getting Sammy off his emo trip, if just for the moment. "Whatever. Hey, the mileage on his car alone ought to get him some exemptions. And then there's his dog."
"His dog?"
"Yeah. Fred. He's got a dog named Fred who'll need some sort of trust fund set up in case poor Humberto gets torn up by a wendigo someday, right? I mean, you can't just leave the poor little guy with nothing, especially after he lost a leg to that demon jackalope that one time."
Sam was looking at him as if he'd lost his mind, but that was at least normal. And Dean could see the beginnings of a smile hidden under there. "Demon jackalope?"
"Oh, yeah. Those suckers can be vicious," he assured his brother straight faced. "Better yet," he announced with a dramatic snap of his fingers, "We haul out our IRS badges and present the case to the next piss-ant local office we come upon. Tell them that tracking this guy down is absolutely critical. National security and all. Hush-hush, of course. But word from the top is whoever nails this one gets a free pass to the Washington office. And a nice promotion."
That did it, Sam couldn't hide the snickering any more. "You are demented, Dean. You know that, right?"
"You've just got no sense of adventure." He made a good show of being offended, but he could feel a certain amount of smirk bleeding through. He made a point of hiding it behind the bottle.
Final Score: Sammy's withdrawal into a blue funk over shit none of them could control - 0, Dean - 1.
Maybe he was getting better at this emotional crap after all.