#in which case @wincestwednesdays please ignore this <3

[egipci]

Vertigo, 1999

(for @wincestwednesdays)

What they have in common is they're loud, and they talk too much. That's what Dad used to say. Nine out of ten hunters have no fucking idea what they’re doing. You put four of them in a room together and you get twelve tall tales and intel that’ll set you back three days. Not that he spent much time with any one of them. There was a time, back in the beginning, he'd take on a job with a guy, say, someone Bobby knew, or he'd just run into a random dude on the scene, and they'd try to crack it together, talk theories, or they'd do interviews, bad-cop-good-cop, that sort of thing, and right in the middle of it, no matter how it was going, he'd turn to that other guy and suddenly remember he hated all of them. He'd tell me about that stuff. That's why he roped me in soon as he could. He didn't like anybody else. I don’t know how he stayed friends with Pastor Jim as long as he did. There was a fight once after Jim offered to take his confession, but they got over it eventually. Sometimes I wonder what the two of them would say about your praying. I still can’t do it. I couldn’t do it the first time you died, and I can’t do it now. I try to meditate, for Lisa. She says you can think of anything or nothing at all. So I close my eyes and I think about Wyoming that one winter.

There were hunters there too, and they warned us. You were in the car, and I was with Dad in a convenience store on the edge of Indian country. We were questioning the cashier. Mostly Dad was doing the talking. It was a two-stall restroom kind of joint and he'd backed me up against the sink and put his hands under my shirt so I was still in that warm stupid daze I could never tell you about. He was asking about the missing girls, if any of them had stopped by before they'd disappeared, and these two guys who knew him from somewhere came up. Right away he couldn’t stand them. They asked what we were there for. You could tell they were really freaked. They said there was something out there. A god, maybe. They could feel its strength and nothing else. Of course Dad didn't believe them, and that was all that mattered. 

Anyway, here is the part I keep replaying: he's walking ahead of us and it’s getting dark fast. It hasn't snowed yet but it's cold enough he let me wear his jacket. You and I are about the same height, so I got my arm around your shoulder, your neck in the crook of my elbow, and I'm dragging you along, and you're squirming and being a bitch, so we're lagging way behind, and I'm saying stupid shit to make you laugh, trying to make you feel better, and you’re trying hard not to crack up. Then you elbow me in the gut and you stop walking, so I stop, and I turn to look at you. The trees are humming around us, all the way down to their roots. At least that’s the sense I had. We never found anything out there, so I never brought it up again. I never asked you. But the way you looked at me. You said my name, and you looked into my eyes then at the bottom half of my face, and when we finally set up camp you slept outside the tent. I slept with my head sticking out so you wouldn’t be alone. Something bit you first and then bit me. That night we stayed up staring at the sky. What I wouldn’t give to feel us so small again, to hear you naming the constellations.