Fic: Like Luggage of Some Departed Traveller; Two
Master Post
Prologue | One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six
The sickness is moving east from the coast faster than they are. They roll cautiously up to a Supermax prison in Nevada and find the guards dead in their gun towers, skin dried out in the desert air and guns still cradled in their arms. Their bodies sit ever-vigilant but their eyes don't see. Dean snags some ammo, a set of plastic zip-ties, and a taser off the guards scattered around the perimeter, but they don't venture past the fence to see what happens when Croatoan sweeps through overcrowded cells of men who can't escape.
In Utah, the landscape turns white and alien. Dean barks a laugh, drums his hands on the wheel and pulls over. "We're making camp here."
They pitch the tent in the middle of the salt flat, and if Dean weren't a fervent believer in jinxes, he'd dare any kind of demonic sonofabitch to try to get at them here, where their defense is the earth beneath them.
They stay for two days, longer than they probably should, especially when they're so close to Colorado and Dad, but it feels like a vacation - salt surrounding them, plenty of water, closing in on their goal. Ever since the desert, Dean and Jess are at a cautious detente, and Sam casts them pleased glances whenever they voluntarily make conversation. They all crowd into the tent at night and Dean totally isn't smug that in this vast flat plane, there's nowhere for Sam and Jess to sneak off and knock boots.
On day three, Sam shakes Dean awake in the gray of early morning. "I have an idea," he says, with that infectious, irresistible, life-ruining grin. Dean, half-asleep, pokes a finger at Sam's dimple. Sam's smile doesn't lessen. He cuffs Dean gently upside the head. "Come on."
Sam has a battered map weighted to the trunk with rocks, its corners lazily waving in every breath of a breeze.
"I've been thinking about where we go after we find Dad," Sam says. Dean notices the word choice; Sam's learned not to say if we find Dad. Sam spreads his arms wide, gesture encompassing the bone-white barrenness around them. Dean's eyes flicker over the salt flats and come to rest on the curve of muscle in Sam's arm, on the breadth of him, the space Dean's little brother takes up in the world. "It's been good, being here," Sam says. "Right?"
Dean's fingers worry at the corner of the map. It's starting to disintegrate at the creases where it's been folded, black metal of the car peeking through. "Could be worse."
Sam smiles indulgently, and Dean wants him in this mood all the time. He flicks at Sam's ear just to make him dodge and swat at Dean's hand. Sam leans in close and taps a finger heavy on the map. It's a spot in Minnesota, just kissing one of the lakes. "Isle Bois Blanc," Sam says.
"Gesundheit," Dean says.
Sam hip-checks him. Dean lets the rebound sway him back closer. "It's an island," Sam says, tapping the map insistently. "Blessable water on all sides, and you know what this region is? All around the island? You know what it's famous for?"
Dean fixes Sam with a look.
"Yeah, well. It's the Iron Belt," Sam says. "Highest concentration of iron ore in the ground anywhere in the world. And look here." He taps the dot and tiny inscription on the island. "Only thing there is a university research outpost." Arms akimbo, Sam beams like he's waiting for Dean to congratulate him for the gold star on his report card. Its actual effect is to make Dean want to reel Sam in by his belt loops and kiss him.
He smiles instead and leans against the car. "A lake of holy water surrounded by cold, hard iron. Defensible. You did good, baby bro."
Sam rolls his eyes, looking ridiculously pleased in that way Dean doesn't think Sam even knows about, the completely transparent look Sam gets when he gets a pat on the back from his big brother.
They stand there inches apart, grinning at each other stupidly until Sam starts, "Dean--"
The tent zipper opening is like the whine of a mosquito.
"Whassgoin?" Jess says, eyes barely cracked open and pillow-crushed blonde curls rampaging unchecked.
Sam kneels next to the tent door and kisses her thoroughly. "I found something awesome. Everything's going to be all right."
If Sam wasn't kissing her again, Dean would go over and smack him upside the head. Everything's going to be all right. He scoffs as he wiggles a finger in the crease of the map, makes the hole over Des Moines bigger. You never say that, never ever.
On their last night of respite at the salt flats, Dean wakes up in fight or flight mode and can't immediately place why. He's still tucked safely beneath a pile of unzipped sleeping bags in the tent, Sam and Jess are still there, there are no sounds in the darkness outside. Dean stares blearily through the mesh panel until the stars come into focus. That's when he feels the minute trembling all along his left side and sees Jess's fingers combing through Sam's hair.
She whispers, shushes him. "You're here, you're in the tent, you're okay, I'm okay." It doesn't seem to be helping, because Sam makes a choked-off little noise that sounds like he's injured, and when Dean moves a hand to touch Sam's jaw, he finds it clenched tight enough to crack teeth.
"Jesus," Dean says. Jess is watching him, her hand still shaped to the curve of Sam's skull. Dean holds up a finger, wait. He pinches Sam's nose shut till Sam jolts awake with a gasp.
Sam's shaking hands immediately fly to either side of him in the tent. One finds Jess's ribs, the other lands on Dean's shoulder, like Sam's checking that they're still there. Eyes glittering in the darkness, his gaze flits over both of their faces, his mind's-eye still somewhere far away. There's a shine on his mouth - he's bitten through his lip. Sam licks the blood away. "Sorry."
"Go back to sleep, Sammy." Dean lays a hand over Sam's sternum, presses enough that Sam can really feel he's there, right over Sam's heart, holding him down, keeping him from floating away.
"K, Dean," Sam says, already half-asleep. He drifts off with a finger hooked in the sleeve of Dean's shirt.
Jess inclines her head silently toward the tent door, carefully extracts herself from the sleeping bags.
The salt earth bites at Dean's bare feet. He shivers in boxers and t-shirt. He watches his footing on the ground, can't afford a broken ankle, not out here. "What was that?"
"Nightmares," Jess says. Dean rolls his eyes. "A lot of nightmares," she clarifies. "He's been having them for a while. Little over a year, maybe." She crosses her arms and hunches her shoulders. Dean watches goosebumps rise on her skin. "They've been getting worse."
"What are they about?"
She looks at Dean with an amused expression. "He won't tell me."
"Yeah." Dean laughs. "Yeah, I guess he wouldn't." Secretive motherfucker, that kid.
Somewhere in the darkness a lone cricket makes its voice heard.
"Thanks for taking care of him." Dean says suddenly. He shuts his mouth abruptly with a click of teeth. He doesn't know where that came from. "After he left. You're good with him."
Jess nods. She kneels to gather a handful of salty earth, lets it sift through her fingers. "Thanks for taking care of him before that." Her fingertips shine with moonlit salt. "I know you pretty much raised him, so, um, good job. Thanks for - for Sam, I guess."
Dean's feet bring the gritty salt back into the sleeping bags and he never can shake it out after that. It remains, itching.
The night after that, Sam wakes up screaming and refuses to go back to sleep. He doesn't calm until they're packed up and a mile down the road from the barn they'd been crashing in.
Dean's fingers are clumsy in two layers of gloves and the tip of his nose hurts. He shovels furiously at the snow around the front fender, takes a wrong step, and slips and cracks his knees on the hard-packed snow, nearly ice. He can barely hear Sam's shouts over the wind, so he ignores them and keeps digging until Sam knocks him on his ass. Sam hauls him up by the front of his coat.
"If you don't stop," Sam says close in his ear, "you're going to die, and I'm not going to preserve your reputation. I'm going to tell everyone I meet that Dean Winchester got himself killed by hypothermia, and every girl you've ever slept with is going to retroactively take it back, and you're going to have died a virgin."
Dean can't help it. He laughs. That gets him studying Sam's face, though, seeing the wind-bitten red on Sam's ears, his pale lips. Sam's cold. Dean casts a glance back at the hopelessly stuck car. "If we don't get her out of here, what the fuck do we do?"
Sam helps Dean to his feet and shrugs, a slight movement hampered by his two sweatshirts and two coats. "I guess we walk."
Jess is already shivering in the dusty, dark Park Ranger's cabin a dozen paces off the road. Sam broke the lock clean off the door with a hard kick, all of their hands too numb to work a lock pick.
The fireplace initially sends thick black smoke billowing into the room, choking and acrid, until the old bird's nest lodged in the chimney drops neatly into the fire and burns. Even with the fire, wind is seeping in through the cracks, snow swirling in under the door.
There's one bed and a pile of scratchy wool blankets, and to fit they have to arrange their limbs like an intricate puzzle. Dean wakes up with an arm flung over Sam's abdomen, and for a sleepy ten seconds before the first cold breeze hits him, Dean thinks he's twenty-two and pathetically in love again, curled in a rented bed.
But they're not stupid lovestruck kids anymore. If Dean ever had a chance to make Sam a part of his life that wouldn't inevitably disappear, it is long past.
The fierce storm quiets the next day, but even when Dean's dug a trench around the half-buried car, the road ahead of them has vanished beneath the white. They're not going anywhere, not on wheels, anyway. "Dad's gonna fucking kill me," Dean mutters.
Dean rolls up the windows tight and breathes in short, staccato bursts. Sam keeps touching him, cautious little contacts with Dean's shoulder, forearm, like he's trying to soothe a scared and snarling dog. Dean shakes Sam's hand off.
They leave the car perched on a blocked pass in the Rockies, so goddamn close to flat ground. It takes them two days and mild cases of frostbite to get out of the mountains on foot. Dean leaves the car keys in the pocket of his jeans so they can dig against him uncomfortably.
The long days of walking tire them out, make tempers shorter. Sam's sleep-deprived from nightmares, Dean's shoulders ache from the weight of his pack, which he loaded heavier than either of the others, and even though they're in the right half of Colorado now, Dean has no fucking idea where Dad is or how to reach him.
Dean's skin feels stretched on his bones. He's ready to give up hope when they find brilliant, neon orange graffiti scrawled across every still-standing wall in Rooster Falls: "34. 42 56.21, Love Jim Rockford." It crops up on highway signs, even stretched across the road on route 58 at one point as they trudge down the empty blacktop. Hard to miss.
Time to find Dad.
Dad's hulking black truck dominates the driveway of a ramshackle two-story Victorian on a quiet cul-de-sac. Dean's stomach drops for a moment as he remembers that not only has he heartlessly abandoned his own best girl, he lost his father's car. Between that and the fact that his little brother is playing at family-man, Dean braces himself for a rocky reunion.
"Come in," filters out from the house. "Lock's broken off." Dean glances around and finds a mirror perched above the door frame, projecting their image in through the glass transom.
Dad's perched on a steamer trunk, making cowboy coffee over the fireplace in the former living room. From the graceful carved arabesques of the smoldering firewood, Dean deduces the reason for the lack of chairs. Birds flit in and out of a hole in the roof.
Dad stirs the coffee once more before standing up and acknowledging them. He wipes the coffee grounds on his hands off on his pants and observes the trio for a moment, and then he steps forward and Dean finds himself crushed against Dad's left shoulder, Sam hunched down to fit on Dad's right. "Boys," Dad says. His hand curves over the back of Sammy's head, rests on Sam's hair like he's still a five year-old small enough to pat on the head.
Dean hears a quiet, muffled, "Hi, Dad," spoken into Dad's coat and he smiles to himself, because goddamn right Sam missed Dad.
With a jarring thump to Dean's back, Dad lets them go. "You're late," he says.
"We walked," Jess says, forgotten behind them. "Sorry about the car. It was my fault," she says, which is a total lie, and Dean gets the weird sense that she's trying to cover for him. Dad's eyebrows raise at 'the car' and Dean's pretty sure he'll still catch hell for it later.
Dad holds out a hand. "You must be Jessica."
Dean's, "Sorry?" overlaps Jess's, "It's so nice to meet you."
The conversation skips a beat.
"You knew Sam was married," Dean says to Dad. It isn't a question. "I didn't merit a heads-up?"
In the encyclopedia of Dad's frowns, this is the one that indicates one of his sons having a private conversation in public; in this case, in front of Jess. Dean watches a crow perch at the edge of the hole in the roof and wonders when he stopped thinking of Jess as part of that public - a civilian, an outsider, the mass of people who all of Dean's life have been the other because they're not Winchesters. "'You know now," Dad says placidly.
The coffee boils over and hisses in the fireplace.
It begins to snow through the rafters while they eat canned beans and Spam for dinner, and they relocate to a formal parlor with a grandfather clock and an extensive array of weaponry. Sam devours his dinner like a ravening wolf, because firstly Sam has the tastes of a five year-old and will eat anything that's salty and comes out of a can, and secondly because Sam is the size of a major metropolitan area and probably needs a nuclear reactor to power his body, not the sparse diet of trail mix and wild game they've been carefully rationing.
Dad's successfully located the gun he came to Colorado for. Dean fondles it appreciatively, runs his fingers over the lettering. It's pretty bitchin', if impractical. "Why doesn't anyone ever make a demon-killing Kalashnikov?"
Sam snorts a laugh around a spoonful of beans. Dean's wishing they had booze, feeling heady and celebratory. He likes having everybody in the right place.
"We should get moving early tomorrow," Dad says.
"Did you tell him about the island?" Sam asks cautiously.
"No," Dean says over Dad's, "Island?"
Dean should be relieved that they're back with Dad and that Dad has a plan, even if that means hauling ass to some cowboy cemetery in Wyoming on the strength of a rumor that energies are converging there, and even if that means confronting the demon that ruined all of their lives, that killed Dean's mother in front of him, with an antiquated single-action revolver. It's what they've always wanted, isn't it? But Dean's been so focused on getting Sam out of harm's way, walled in with holy water and iron ore and maybe Dean patrolling the perimeter with a shotgun. Maybe two shotguns. To give that up now in favor of dragging Sam directly into harm's way, practically dangling him in front of a demon that absolutely, one hundred percent wants them all dead - well, it gives Dean stomach cramps, though that could also be the beans and Spam.
Sam's quiet, brow furrowed, and obviously thinking way too hard, which always makes Dean uneasy. He makes gimme hands at Dean and Dean passes him the gun. Sam swings open the chamber, looks at the five bullets - the only five bullets. "In your honest opinion," Sam says, "if we don't go after this demon, does it give a shit about us? Does it leave us alone?"
Dad's expression is unreadable, even by Dad standards. "No," he says. "No, we have something it wants." He doesn't meet Sam's eyes.
"The gun," Dean says.
"Are you serious?" Jess asks. She's staring at John incredulously. "You know for a fact that this thing, a demon, wants to kill you all, and your plan is to … what, follow it to its home territory and hope you're the quicker draw?" The longer Dean watches Jess and Dad in the same room, the more he wants to scribble her a little handwritten rulebook: Rule Number Fourteen: do not argue with John; Rule Number Fifteen: John is always serious; Rule Number Sixteen: do not imply that John is ever the slower gun hand.
Sam rubs the back of his hand over his mouth ruminatively. "If it wants to find us it will," he murmurs.
"Fortunately," John says, with a reasonably polite smile at Jess, "this isn't a democracy."
"Hold on," Dean says, hands outspread. "Hold on." His heart rate's up. He's been unconsciously edging to the left and he realizes he's put himself between Sam and the door. "We need to be together on this," he says, and he brings his hands back down when he notices their fine trembling. "If we split up, we're not all going to make it," he tells Dad. It's dirty pool, implying that Sam and Jess are going to take off and get eaten by rampaging bears or something, but sometimes that's the only way to get through to Dad. "So." He swallows. "This time, yeah. I, uh. I think we vote." His gaze shifts around the room in turn, but ends on Sam. Dean just got him back. "Island," he says. "I say the island. Minnesota."
John shakes his head, starts packing up the guns.
Jess is tight to Sam's side, watching his face closely, even as Sam seems a million miles away, eyes moving over a mental landscape that Dean can't see. "Sam?"
Sam jolts out of his reverie. He casts Dean a guilty look and Dean gets a sick feeling. His stomach cramps are like a stitch in his side now, enough to double him over if he were alone. "Wyoming," Sam says firmly. Dad turns slowly and meets Sam's eyes. "We end this," Sam says. Dad nods.
Jess shakes her head at Sam. "Okay, I'm going to blame your eagerness to go along with this on hereditary mental illness. If something's called a Devil's Gate, that should not be telling you, 'Hey, walk through me.' I vote island."
"So that's a draw," Dean says.
With sharp, efficient movements, John takes the Colt back from Sam and slips it under his own coat. "We have to go north either way. This isn't settled. We'll head out tomorrow at oh-six-hundred," he says. "Get some sleep. But Dean?" Dad's jaw is a dangerous line. "First let's talk about my car."
They bed down up the rickety stairs in real honest-to-god beds, and Dean finds himself sinking blissfully into a feather bed with a goose-down duvet. He burrows into it thoroughly, and only wakes up when there's a loud creak of floorboards just outside his room.
He silently catches up to Sam halfway down the stairs. Sweat glitters on Sam's brow in the freezing house. Sam stumbles on the bottom stair, and when Dean catches his elbow to steady him he realizes Sam's shaking from head to toe. "C'mere," Dean whispers, tugging his arm. "You need to medicate."
Dad's got a bottle of bourbon tucked safely between rolls of gauze in a duffel. Sam takes a long drink and grimaces. In the thick, unrelenting darkness of a world without streetlights, all Dean can see is the glint of the moon on glass, on liquor sloshing like a restless sea, on Sam's cold sweat. "Thanks," Sam says with the rasp of a non-drinker. He passes the bottle to Dean.
Dean drinks deeply, chases a drip down his chin with his tongue. "Of all the fuckin' times to agree with Dad, Sammy."
Sam sighs and wrests the bottle away, and Dean watches the shape of his mouth on the glass. "I'm guessing Jess ratted me out about the nightmares, right?" He smiles against the bottle, takes another drink.
When Dean takes the bottle back, the glass is warm from Sam's mouth. He makes a noise of assent.
"Jess burns," Sam says abruptly. "That's it. It's, what do you call it, recurring. Jess burns like Mom."
"It's just a dream, Sam. "
"It follows us," Sam says, an edge to his voice that raises the hair on the back of Dean's neck. He leans in so close Dean can smell the bourbon on his breath. "At first I thought I was just messed up, you know? 'Cause I was dreaming every night about Jess burning on the ceiling of our apartment. But that, you know, that's just a fucked up childhood, you go to therapy for that." He cocks his head and smiles grimly. "And then we left, and it followed us. Perfectly. My brain never - never brought me back to Palo Alto. I saw her burning in the car, and the tent, and that damn cabin. I saw her pinned against a tree. It followed everywhere we went. Like, I don't know. A warning?" He rips at the bottle's label with a thumbnail. "Like a taunt." He looks at Dean like the scared little boy he never was, so quiet and brave and so young. "I can't lose her, Dean."
Dean, feeling drunker than he is, leans close to Sam till the square edge of the bottle presses into his chest painfully. He wants to say, Sammy, you're all I've got, but while Sam is still Dean's family, his blood, Dean isn't Sam's family anymore. Sam went away and he made a new family of his choosing.
Sam's looking at him with concern. "You're still my fucking family," he says, and shoves Dean in the shoulder, and for fuck's sake, Dean refuses to consider that some version of all that might have spilled out audibly. "You're my brother," Sam says in the darkness. He says it like it's something sacred. Something permanent. "You're my brother," he says, and their faces are too close together, Sam huffing boozy breath against Dean's skin. "You know I," he says. "You know." He stops, as if that's a complete thought. You know.
When Dean piles back into the feather bed, he shifts restlessly and listens to wind whistling at the window. The pane is badly cracked, a spiderweb lit up in pale relief against the night. He lapses into sleep and dreams liquor-dreams, Sam pinned, crucified against a tree in the dark forest while a demon with Dad's face douses Sam's clothes with whiskey and drops a match.
It's slow going the first day, wheels sliding on the ice. Ceding the warmth of the passenger seat to Jess, Sam and Dean huddle under sleeping bags in the truck bed, each with only enough bare skin to see and breathe exposed between hats and scarves. Sam wordlessly plasters himself close to the warmth of Dean's side. Sam's hat has earflaps and strings to secure them with, and Dean can't help himself from tugging at the strings every time Sam starts to fall asleep, sending him jerking indignantly awake.
They stoke a fire at the side of the road and make watery, gritty cocoa, tainted by the dirt inevitably mixed in with all their belongings at this point. The boys clamber back into place with hands warmed by hot mugs while Jess informs them that she's spending the next hundred miles wringing embarrassing potty training stories out of John. It's a little hard to imagine Dad playing father-in-law - it's just not something Dean's ever had reason to consider. Dean retaliates by spending the drive pestering Sam for details about his sex life and delighting when Sam blushes and swears at him and finally, as always, relents with a mischievous smile and relishes in sharing the juicy details with his big brother. Dean makes sure to sound properly impressed to reward the over-sharing.
For miles, they pass through a cathedral of towering pines. Sam lays flat to stare up at them and Dean joins him. He wakes up rocking with the truck's motion, overly warm. He unwinds himself from around Sam, then sits up abruptly and looks around.
The weather's changed on them again. There isn't a hint of snow in the fields around them, and the truck's wheels are throwing up splatters of mud. Dean peels off layers and kicks off his boots for good measure. Sam's sleeping with his mouth open, sprawled unselfconsciously across every inch of the truck bed that isn't taken up with supplies. Dean carefully extracts Sam from his coat and scarf. He leaves the earflap hat on because it makes him want to pinch Sam's cheeks.
They run sputtering out of gas and are stuck for a week while Dad sets off on foot for more. They set up camp behind the barbed wire-topped fence of a railway depot, and find a surprising number of squatters in the boxcars and warehouses. They go to work prowling through the cargo trains, pawing through the slim pickings that haven't already been scooped up by others. Dean zips up his coat and stuff reels of fishing wire and canisters of kosher salt down it. Jess has been, pardon Dean's French, a raging bitch the last couple days, and when Dean unearths a box of tampons and a box of Midol that's only slightly mouse-nibbled, he tosses them to her with a wink. She stares at them like he's just handed her a snake, and he makes a mental note that she can take a joke about as well as Sam can.
The weather heats up steadily. Something in the fields of shifting grasses that surround them for acres is making Dean miserable and snotty. He tries to stealthily skirt around the other refugees to avoid conversation, but his sneezes give him away every time.
Initially, Dean thinks it's just the allergies and Dad being gone that have him on edge, but swiftly revises his opinion. Something's up with Sam. He's been acting weird, spacey and easygoing, ever since they stopped. Dean grows concerned that Sam thinks he's enjoying his last days before Wyoming turns into a suicide mission.
But on the evening of day three, he catches Sam humming quietly to himself as he cleans guns a safe distance away from the campfire, sitting on a log with the golden glow flickering over his face. His legs are tangled with Jess's, his big booted foot between her ankles. Jess knocks her knee against Sam's and he looks up, catches her gaze and smiles. Dean can't hear what they're saying, but he can hear when Sam starts up cleaning again and he's humming something soft and out-of-tune, the melody unrecognizable.
Dean corners him by the buckets of rainwater later. "What's going on, man? You're makin' me nervous."
Sam just smiles a little and shakes his head. "Nothing bad, man." And then he hugs Dean.
Dean can't help taking just a moment to lean his face into Sam's shoulder, because he doesn't know when he'll get the chance again. But he still has the presence of mind to step back and shoot Sam a cocked eyebrow. "Yeah, I'm really reassured now."
Maybe it's not that Sam's suicidally intent on Wyoming; maybe he's just anticipating all this being over. That's not so far from where Dean is right now. One way or another, this is going to end soon. Dean isn't going to spend every day watching what he can't have, in surround-sound technicolor. If they go to Minnesota, and if the research facility's still alive and kicking, there'll be enough other people around that Dean can hide himself. Find a hot scientist with glasses. Catch up with Sam periodically, keep it casual, and salvage what he can of his ruined heart.
If they go to Wyoming, Dean knows for a fact that Sam will make it out of the cowboy cemetery in one piece. If Dean has to ensure that with his own blood, then he'll still have taken the demon out, and that's no different an end than Dean's been expecting his whole life. Dying young and violently for a good reason is the best outcome Dean can reasonably hope for, and then Sam and Jess can go on playing footsie for the rest of their long, demon-free lives, but Dean won't have to see it.
A mutinous corner of Dean's brain insists that he wants to see it. That he'd rather pine pathetically until he's got a walker and a colostomy bag if it means he can peer in the window at Sam's happiness.
Dean sleeps alone in the bed of Dad's truck. Sam and Jess pitch their tent just far enough away that every ambiguous noise from that direction becomes skin on skin in Dean's mind, becomes the sound of a zipper, a kiss.
They go to work rigging up shards of mirror along the fence line, so the more permanent residents here have a good view of what's approaching from the outside. Sam and Dean are the least likely of everyone in the encampment to bleed themselves dry on the coils of razor wire, so they're stuck perched atop the fencing most of the day. At least it gets them out of shoveling the fetid pit toilets far on the east side of camp.
"Pliers," Dean says around a mouth full of fishing line.
"When Dad gets back, I'm telling him I vote island," Sam says, retrieving the pliers from a pocket.
Dean chews on the fishing line for a thoughtful moment. "Yeah?" He spits the clear nylon wire out and begins winding it methodically around the stub of a large piece of convex mirror. "Did the crazy train make an unexpected stop on its way to Suicide Mission?"
Sam huffs a laugh, embarrassed. He joins in securing the shard of mirror, hands darting in around Dean's, tightening his knots, clipping off stray ends. "You know why I went to Stanford?" Sam asks.
"Oh, Jesus," Dean says. "You think it'll knock me out if I jump from this high? Or at least scramble my brain enough I can't hear this?"
Sam punches his arm, makes him sway atop the fence. "Dick." He snips the last end of fishing wire. "Since I was eight, the only things I had to look forward to - the only options any of us had - were either getting killed in some stupid, pointless way by a creature with the brain capacity of a grasshopper and ending up an unclaimed body in the morgue, or else going out in a blaze of glory, and still ending up dead, and still no one would know or care." Sam's wrestling to bend a loop of razor wire into place, acquiring tiny scratches all over his forearms where his gloves end. "And you know what I wanted? I wanted a fucking happy ending." He yanks the wire into place with a grunt and a hard pull that shakes the fence beneath them. "I wanted it to be okay to want that."
"Happy ending, huh?" Dean coughs, brushes Sam's hands aside because he's shredding himself on the wire. "Let me tell you, there's this massage parlor in a strip-mall in Nashville - "
Sam flicks Dean's cheekbone, hard tap of his index finger. Dean swears and swats. Sam catches his hand and Dean immediately feels sweat bead at the base of his neck. Sam taps at the center of Dean's hand. "Why couldn't the story end differently? Door number three. That's all I wanted. I just wanted a choice."
Dean curls Sam's fingers around a large piece of glass so he'll let go of Dean. "Yeah, well." He clears his throat. "Sorry I fucked that up for you, coming and getting you."
Sam's quiet for a little too long. Dean looks up. Sam is watching him. "It's not a happy ending if you're not in it, too," he says.
When they're climbing down, boots pressed against the fence and fingers tight between the boards, Sam dislodges the last piece of mirror. It falls at their feet and shatters into glittering dust. "Nine lives," Dean says.
"That's cats," Sam says. "It's seven years' bad luck." They crunch over the broken pieces, protected by their heavy boots. Back at the truck, Dean spreads the thinnest film of carefully-rationed antiseptic over the cuts on Sam's arms.
When Dad gets back, back bowed with a cattle-weight of gas cans, smelling like the fumes, Sam tells him they're taking door number three. Dad responds with silence, and trudges off to funnel gas into the truck. They eat instant rice and pinto beans for dinner, and Dad agrees to accompany them as far north as he can before splitting off to go after the demon. "This isn't how I raised you," he tells Sam.
Sam chews and swallows his beans and rice before he responds calmly, "You raised me to protect my family, full stop. That includes protecting them from you."
Dean gets the uncomfortable sense that he's included in that them, but it's not really the time or place to rip Sam a new one for presuming to protect him.
Their course angles northeast when they set out from the rail depot. Along the roadside, crocus shoots poke their heads nervously above the thick mud.
One day out from the rail depot, they make camp in an apple orchard. The trees are lush and green, bursting with leaves and tight green buds. The grass is so soft it's almost a problem, because Dean finds himself wrestling to find a flat spot amid the hummocks to set up sleeping arrangements. Sam and Jess are still rocking the battered old tent, and they're just going to have to live with uneven ground.
Their supplies are getting low, so they're down to trying to cook half a dozen packets of ramen (in three different flavors) in a big pot over the fire now. Dad's already volunteered to be the one who spends a maddening amount of time blowing on sparks and adding wisps of straw and cotton wool in the way that neither Sam nor Dean has ever had patience for. Dad seems to get some kind of perverse pleasure out of it. Sam's trekked off with empty buckets in hand to get all the water they're going to need, and Jess is alternating between hilarious grimaces and expressions of unholy glee as she tries to gut a rabbit with Dad's knife. Hell, any of them would've been happy to do it for her, but the lady knows what she wants, and she wants to learn.
Dean curses as he wrestles with the tent poles. They'll stand up just fine and then collapse just to fuck with him the moment he puts the weight of fabric on them. This isn't usually his job when they're setting up camp. Dean abandons the monstrosity of a tent for the moment and starts tying bowlines for his and Dad's simpler, albeit less water- and insect- and wind-proof, tarp and sleeping mat setups. A breeze billows the translucent plastic sheeting in his hands, and he just lets it for a moment, enjoys the riffle of it on the back of his neck. The wind smells like apples and wild grasses and old wooden crates.
Struck by a bolt of inspiration, Dean stops what he's doing, sits down in the grass, and takes his boots off. When he pulls his socks off, they're alarmingly stiff, and Dean gets full in the face with the smell of his feet. "Jesus," he blurts out, reeling back from his own feet.
"Now you know how we feel," Jess says dryly. Her knife hand has been tentatively hovering, but she lowers it decisively now, carefully splitting the rabbit open from its neck to its groin, her other hand holding the animal in place by the scruff of its neck.
"Oh, I'm so happy that my brother married a comedian," he says cheerfully, and Jess raises a bloody hand to flip him off with a smile. Dean tosses his socks away into the grass where he can't smell them and makes a mental note to get Sam to show him the way to the creek, so he can take a miserable, frigid bath later. It'll be worth it, after a solid month of nothing but quick scrubs with their limited water supply, sometimes with one of Sam's dorky plastic dromedaries hung from a tree branch as an improvised shower.
The wind has chased the plastic sheeting further down the orchard, so Dean follows and pounces on it before the next gust can take it away again. He squidges the grass between his toes and doesn't even care if he's picking up ticks in the long grass. It's worth it.
"Oh god," Jess is saying when he gets back. She's got a handful of small, delicate rabbit intestines and an appalled look. Dean laughs and she gestures at him with the knife as she speaks. "You know, I was a vegetarian. A vegetarian."
"And now you're not! How nice for you. Glad the end of the motherfucking world made a positive difference in someone's life," Dean says. There's a clatter and a low curse from the dirt patch where Dad's trying to start the fire. Dean watches Dad's lightweight kindling tumbling merrily across the grass, caught in the same wind. Dad starts hauling their bulky packs to one side of the stack of twigs as a wind-block.
Dean ties the bowline taut as he can between two squat apple trees with thick moss on their trunks, heaves with a foot against the roots for leverage. He stretches the plastic over the rope, then gathers rocks and dirt into each of the four corners. Tie a bit of cord around each plastic-covered bundle of dirt, tie the other end to a stick thrust into the ground, and he's got himself a pretty decent tent. Won't keep a curious possum from coming to chew on the foot of his sleeping bag, as he's discovered, but that's not the end of the world.
End of the world. Ha.
The sky's dropping to dusky gray, and Dean will have to stop messing around in bare feet soon, help actually get camp set up before the light's completely gone, but he can't help lingering in his good mood for a bit longer, toes in the grass. He finishes constructing the real tent and when he's pretty sure it's not going to collapse down on Sam and Jess, he steps back with a proud smile and brushes the dirt from his knees.
"Hey Dean," Dad says, not taking his eyes off the valiant little spark that's trying to grow into a fire behind the wind-block. He gestures urgently. "Get the ramen." Leave it to Dad to be that serious about the fire for their ten-cent noodle soup.
He passes Jess, hearing the sound of her hands squishing in rabbit guts. She's genuinely looking pretty ill now, and he bends to touch at her shoulder. He speaks softly enough that Dad won't hear. "Want me to spell you out?" She looks ready to protest that she's perfectly capable of finishing the job, so Dean interjects, "I've been on my feet since we got here, let a fella have a turn at the cushy job. You trying to run me into the ground, Princess?"
Jess nods, and Dean's more attuned to the minutiae of her expressions now, knows she's appreciating not only the break from rabbit guts, but also Dean's keeping John out of the loop. Thanks, she mouths silently, and stands on slightly wavering feet. Must've gotten to her more than she let on. Dean takes the rabbit by its ears and grabs the knife, and Jess shakes her hands off with a look of revulsion. "Ugh. Get this off of me. Where's the water?"
"Don't know," Dean says. "Ask Sam."
"Hey Sam, where's the water?" she calls, hands held far from her body so they don't drip viscera on her clothes.
Dean counts his heartbeats and listens to the whispering leaves. He looks around. "Sam?" The light gray sky is darkening rapidly now as night comes on, making the shadows jump and shimmy between the trees. "Sam?" Something flickers overhead, bat or bird. "Where'd he go after he got back with the water?"
Jess's mouth opens and closes once silently. "I was concentrating on the rabbit, I don't know."
"Jess, I was off dealing with the tents, you were here, I need you to try to remember where he went after he came back." The grass is cold now where it whispers along Dean's feet, brushes his bare ankles.
"I didn't." Jess's voice is barely there, and it sends Dean's pulse rabbiting within seconds. "I didn't see when he got back. I must've been - I must've been looking down at what I was doing."
Dean turns in the direction of the creek. He cups his hands and shouts. "Sam!"
"Dean?" Dad's coming toward them now, face set in a look of military readiness. He steps with a heavy foot right in the middle of the sputtering fire he's been working on for the last hour, and he doesn't even seem to notice.
Jess joins Dean, voice a higher register but just as loud. "Sam!"
Dad grabs Dean's shoulder, but Dean beats him to the punch in speaking. "Did you see Sam come back?" he asks Dad. Dean's hands are grasping at his sides, trying to grab onto the air instinctively, hold everything around him in place. "Did you see him come back from getting water?"
The look on John's face scares Dean. He takes a long moment before he speaks. "I wasn't paying attention. I was trying to get the damn fire going."
Dean sets off in the vague direction where he thinks the creek is on bare feet. "Hey asshole, if you're hearing us then you better sing out!"
Jess's voice is thick with incipient tears. "We haven't been here that long, it's just a long walk to the water, you can't really tell on the map. And it'll be heavy once he's carrying the buckets back full."
"Yeah," Dean says grimly. "You don't know Winchester luck." Dean wonders if broken mirror is still ground into the soles of his boots. He can hear Dad's heavy footsteps behind them, coming down hard on fallen apple branches.
The creek is five minutes away. Two buckets full of cold, fresh water sit lonely on the bank.
They stay by the water and call until they start getting dive-bombed by curious bats. Dad rebuilds the fire, fumbling in the dark, so it'll be easy for Sam to find his way back to camp.
The tents sit empty all night, rustling in the wind.
It's an outrageously beautiful day. The sun is out, and the early warm weather has the apple trees confused, a few fragrant white blossoms beginning to peek from their buds. Dean wakes up from an unrestful, dream-plagued sleep and sees a pair of amorous squirrels chasing each other around and up the trunk of a tree in dizzying spirals.
Sam has been missing for five days.
Before it was even truly light the first morning, they fanned out across the farmlands and vacant lots in a calculated grid, moving out from where they found the buckets at the creek. Dean's eyes grew sore from scanning for footprints in the mud, but he found none. He looked in the bushy underbrush that would be perfect for hiding a passed-out body, even a tall one. Irrational, scared, he scanned the trees in case Sam was chased up one by a predator and then … fell asleep? Halfway through that first day, with no shouts from John or Jess, no giddy celebratory spark in the sky from the emergency flares they'd use if one of them found Sam, Dean sat heavily, suddenly, on an overturned rototiller in a field of dead corn. He heaved drily but nothing came up; they never did have dinner.
When they got back that evening, all with tentative hope on their faces that was doused when they saw no one else had brought Sam back, the rabbit carcass had begun putrefying where Dean dropped it. It was attracting flies.
Jess walked to the other side of the tents and was violently sick in the grass. Dean listened to her wheeze and shared a glance with Dad, then walked over. She was shuddering, holding her sides. Dean rubbed a hand along her back and said, "We've gotten through worse than this," telling it to himself just as much. How many times before Stanford had he felt his heart in his throat like this, never getting any easier no matter how much practice he got seeing Sam in danger. "Sam knows how to take care of himself. He'll hold it together till we find him."
Still bent double and gulping hard to hold back the bile, Jess turned her head up to look at him steadily. "What about Winchester luck?"
On the third day they quietly began searching the river. Dad walked downstream, eyes sharp on the muddy banks, the thick obscuring reeds. Jess, the strongest swimmer, dove in repeatedly, looking underwater. Twice she came up waving frantically for Dean, only to find that the murky shape on the riverbed was a log.
It's the morning of the fifth day.
They gather around the charred circle of the campfire and Dad says, "I think we need to consider the possibilities here."
Dean's stomach is heavy with dread, because there's absolutely nowhere this can go that he will like.
"I'm just going to outline what we could be looking at here, and then we need to talk about how to move forward."
Dean starts when Jess slips her hand around his elbow. She squeezes, quick then release, as she watches John nervously.
"One: Sam is injured somewhere nearby, and isn't able to answer us or get himself back to camp. If this is the case, he's been out there for five days and we're going to start running into -" John catches himself, visibly searches for the right words. "Time limitations." He clears his throat. "Two: Sam is already dead."
Dean feels Jess sway against his side.
John barrels forward, like if he stops talking he won't get through this speech. "If that's true, then nothing we do now makes a difference to him either way." The tree directly behind John is celebrating the spring particularly prematurely. Its blossoms are white tinged with pink, and they bob gently in the breeze, casting dancing shadows on John's face. "Three: Sam was taken away from here by someone or something. If that's what happened, we still don't know where he is, who's responsible, or whether he's still alive." John runs a hand over his mouth and chin, and if Dean didn't know better he'd say John looked nervous. "Four: Sam left of his own free will."
Dean and Jess speak over each other.
"What?" No way. Sam's seemed so happy lately, and besides, he's Sam. He wouldn't leave his girl.
"No, John."
John holds his hands up, face calm. "I'm just saying we have to consider all the possibilities."
Jess is shaking her head, and Dean is surprised to feel the quiet strength in her stance, not even a tremble of indignation. She unhooks her hand from his arm. "Sam wouldn't have left under his own power. "
Something about the way she says it, the way she's looking off sideways at the wind in the leaves, sends alarm bells clamoring up and down Dean's nerves. He lets his voice drop to lethal quiet, because this is Sam at stake. "What do you know that you're not telling us?"
She looks terribly tired, all of a sudden. "I'm sorry, I should have told you the moment we realized he was gone," she says. "I just keep waiting for him to walk back across this field, all sheepish because he got lost and scared us."
"Jessica," Dad says. "If you have information about Sam, you need to share it with us now. If we're not all on the same page, we're endangering Sam."
Dean looks hard at Jess as she glances up at John, and somehow he knows, even before she opens her mouth. "I'm pregnant," she says. "Sam knew."
Dad shuts his mouth and doesn't open it again.
For a split second Dean's about to suggest that it wouldn't be the first time a young guy got cold feet about fatherhood and left his girl in the lurch, but then he remembers who they're talking about. "Okay, so Sam didn't leave on purpose. Which we already knew," he says with a glare at Dad. Dean needs to just … derail this conversation a little, because he can only deal with one thing at a time, and right now that thing is that the most important person in the world is has vanished without explanation. He can't even wrap his mind around the notion that there's a baby, a Sam-baby, baby-of-Sam's, in creepy little fetus form, arm's length away from Dean.
Sam was gonna be a dad.
Dean catches himself using the past tense and for the first time in five days of hell, his eyes are wet. "So we keep searching," he says. "What else can we do?"
They keep searching.
The apple blossoms are heavy on the branches. Their petals have rained down on the tent and the two rigged-up tarps. The rabbit, where Dean flung it in the bushes, has been skeletonized by insects.
Sam's been gone for three weeks.
He could have been lying within a shout's distance this whole time, dehydrating and dying and decomposing. He could have been taken, in which case they're not helping him. He could have wandered off and gotten lost, could still be wandering and surviving and trying to find his way back to them, but that's-
That's the worst, for Dean, worse than if he's dead. Because they have to choose, now. Either they stay here forever, out of denial rather than true hope. Or they leave. They leave Sam behind. His bones or his damaged body, dying by inches, or the hope of ever finding out what happened to him. They leave him.
"Get rid of it," John tells Jess in week three. She points a loaded .45 at him. It's not much of a threat, given that she's forgotten to take the safety off, or more likely, doesn't know how. But it gets the message across. Dean would applaud, but his arms are full of firewood. "There are ways. It's a vulnerability," Dad says.
"If I have a physical condition that constitutes a vulnerability, I will inform you," she says evenly. "In the meantime, man up, Grandpa."
Dad somehow manages to get drunk that night, on what Dean doesn't know, but industrial strength solvents are easier to come by these days than scotch, so it's probably taking a few years off Dad's life.
On the first day of the fourth week without Sam, Dean wakes to the sight of a raccoon running away with the rabbit bones, chewing at the gristle. They fight while they search, that day.
Dad thinks Wyoming is the answer, thinks going straight into the belly of the beast and tracking down the demon is the only way. So sure that Sam's been taken, that it's all a part of Dad's narrative of persecution.
Dean can't get the image of Sam's happy smile from that last week out of his head. Sam would never forgive Dean for walking Sam's wife and child into the hands of the enemy.
Dean and Jess sit silently in the tent at night while John stalks the meadow outside, muttering under his breath and flipping through his journal.
"He was so excited," Jess says. Dean's been staring at her, trying to see if she has a, uh, a baby bump, creepy as that term is to him. He can't tell yet. "So excited."
Dean swallows hard. "I think we're on the same page, aren't we?"
Jess looks at him over the light of the flashlight with an expression of the purest misery Dean has ever seen. "Yeah. I think we are."
Sam's been gone for over three weeks. On the twenty-third day, Dean tells John their decision. The only thing left that they can do for Sam is to protect what he loved the most.
John hugs Dean, and, after the barest hesitation, Jess. They break down camp and reassemble their packs. Dean watches Jess pressing apple blossoms between the pages of a thick book of incantations.
John strikes out for Wyoming. Dean watches him go till he's out of sight.
It's a long road to Minnesota. The first step away from the orchard is the hardest, and after that it's done.
They've left Sam behind.
next
Prologue | One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six
The sickness is moving east from the coast faster than they are. They roll cautiously up to a Supermax prison in Nevada and find the guards dead in their gun towers, skin dried out in the desert air and guns still cradled in their arms. Their bodies sit ever-vigilant but their eyes don't see. Dean snags some ammo, a set of plastic zip-ties, and a taser off the guards scattered around the perimeter, but they don't venture past the fence to see what happens when Croatoan sweeps through overcrowded cells of men who can't escape.
In Utah, the landscape turns white and alien. Dean barks a laugh, drums his hands on the wheel and pulls over. "We're making camp here."
They pitch the tent in the middle of the salt flat, and if Dean weren't a fervent believer in jinxes, he'd dare any kind of demonic sonofabitch to try to get at them here, where their defense is the earth beneath them.
They stay for two days, longer than they probably should, especially when they're so close to Colorado and Dad, but it feels like a vacation - salt surrounding them, plenty of water, closing in on their goal. Ever since the desert, Dean and Jess are at a cautious detente, and Sam casts them pleased glances whenever they voluntarily make conversation. They all crowd into the tent at night and Dean totally isn't smug that in this vast flat plane, there's nowhere for Sam and Jess to sneak off and knock boots.
On day three, Sam shakes Dean awake in the gray of early morning. "I have an idea," he says, with that infectious, irresistible, life-ruining grin. Dean, half-asleep, pokes a finger at Sam's dimple. Sam's smile doesn't lessen. He cuffs Dean gently upside the head. "Come on."
Sam has a battered map weighted to the trunk with rocks, its corners lazily waving in every breath of a breeze.
"I've been thinking about where we go after we find Dad," Sam says. Dean notices the word choice; Sam's learned not to say if we find Dad. Sam spreads his arms wide, gesture encompassing the bone-white barrenness around them. Dean's eyes flicker over the salt flats and come to rest on the curve of muscle in Sam's arm, on the breadth of him, the space Dean's little brother takes up in the world. "It's been good, being here," Sam says. "Right?"
Dean's fingers worry at the corner of the map. It's starting to disintegrate at the creases where it's been folded, black metal of the car peeking through. "Could be worse."
Sam smiles indulgently, and Dean wants him in this mood all the time. He flicks at Sam's ear just to make him dodge and swat at Dean's hand. Sam leans in close and taps a finger heavy on the map. It's a spot in Minnesota, just kissing one of the lakes. "Isle Bois Blanc," Sam says.
"Gesundheit," Dean says.
Sam hip-checks him. Dean lets the rebound sway him back closer. "It's an island," Sam says, tapping the map insistently. "Blessable water on all sides, and you know what this region is? All around the island? You know what it's famous for?"
Dean fixes Sam with a look.
"Yeah, well. It's the Iron Belt," Sam says. "Highest concentration of iron ore in the ground anywhere in the world. And look here." He taps the dot and tiny inscription on the island. "Only thing there is a university research outpost." Arms akimbo, Sam beams like he's waiting for Dean to congratulate him for the gold star on his report card. Its actual effect is to make Dean want to reel Sam in by his belt loops and kiss him.
He smiles instead and leans against the car. "A lake of holy water surrounded by cold, hard iron. Defensible. You did good, baby bro."
Sam rolls his eyes, looking ridiculously pleased in that way Dean doesn't think Sam even knows about, the completely transparent look Sam gets when he gets a pat on the back from his big brother.
They stand there inches apart, grinning at each other stupidly until Sam starts, "Dean--"
The tent zipper opening is like the whine of a mosquito.
"Whassgoin?" Jess says, eyes barely cracked open and pillow-crushed blonde curls rampaging unchecked.
Sam kneels next to the tent door and kisses her thoroughly. "I found something awesome. Everything's going to be all right."
If Sam wasn't kissing her again, Dean would go over and smack him upside the head. Everything's going to be all right. He scoffs as he wiggles a finger in the crease of the map, makes the hole over Des Moines bigger. You never say that, never ever.
On their last night of respite at the salt flats, Dean wakes up in fight or flight mode and can't immediately place why. He's still tucked safely beneath a pile of unzipped sleeping bags in the tent, Sam and Jess are still there, there are no sounds in the darkness outside. Dean stares blearily through the mesh panel until the stars come into focus. That's when he feels the minute trembling all along his left side and sees Jess's fingers combing through Sam's hair.
She whispers, shushes him. "You're here, you're in the tent, you're okay, I'm okay." It doesn't seem to be helping, because Sam makes a choked-off little noise that sounds like he's injured, and when Dean moves a hand to touch Sam's jaw, he finds it clenched tight enough to crack teeth.
"Jesus," Dean says. Jess is watching him, her hand still shaped to the curve of Sam's skull. Dean holds up a finger, wait. He pinches Sam's nose shut till Sam jolts awake with a gasp.
Sam's shaking hands immediately fly to either side of him in the tent. One finds Jess's ribs, the other lands on Dean's shoulder, like Sam's checking that they're still there. Eyes glittering in the darkness, his gaze flits over both of their faces, his mind's-eye still somewhere far away. There's a shine on his mouth - he's bitten through his lip. Sam licks the blood away. "Sorry."
"Go back to sleep, Sammy." Dean lays a hand over Sam's sternum, presses enough that Sam can really feel he's there, right over Sam's heart, holding him down, keeping him from floating away.
"K, Dean," Sam says, already half-asleep. He drifts off with a finger hooked in the sleeve of Dean's shirt.
Jess inclines her head silently toward the tent door, carefully extracts herself from the sleeping bags.
The salt earth bites at Dean's bare feet. He shivers in boxers and t-shirt. He watches his footing on the ground, can't afford a broken ankle, not out here. "What was that?"
"Nightmares," Jess says. Dean rolls his eyes. "A lot of nightmares," she clarifies. "He's been having them for a while. Little over a year, maybe." She crosses her arms and hunches her shoulders. Dean watches goosebumps rise on her skin. "They've been getting worse."
"What are they about?"
She looks at Dean with an amused expression. "He won't tell me."
"Yeah." Dean laughs. "Yeah, I guess he wouldn't." Secretive motherfucker, that kid.
Somewhere in the darkness a lone cricket makes its voice heard.
"Thanks for taking care of him." Dean says suddenly. He shuts his mouth abruptly with a click of teeth. He doesn't know where that came from. "After he left. You're good with him."
Jess nods. She kneels to gather a handful of salty earth, lets it sift through her fingers. "Thanks for taking care of him before that." Her fingertips shine with moonlit salt. "I know you pretty much raised him, so, um, good job. Thanks for - for Sam, I guess."
Dean's feet bring the gritty salt back into the sleeping bags and he never can shake it out after that. It remains, itching.
The night after that, Sam wakes up screaming and refuses to go back to sleep. He doesn't calm until they're packed up and a mile down the road from the barn they'd been crashing in.
Dean's fingers are clumsy in two layers of gloves and the tip of his nose hurts. He shovels furiously at the snow around the front fender, takes a wrong step, and slips and cracks his knees on the hard-packed snow, nearly ice. He can barely hear Sam's shouts over the wind, so he ignores them and keeps digging until Sam knocks him on his ass. Sam hauls him up by the front of his coat.
"If you don't stop," Sam says close in his ear, "you're going to die, and I'm not going to preserve your reputation. I'm going to tell everyone I meet that Dean Winchester got himself killed by hypothermia, and every girl you've ever slept with is going to retroactively take it back, and you're going to have died a virgin."
Dean can't help it. He laughs. That gets him studying Sam's face, though, seeing the wind-bitten red on Sam's ears, his pale lips. Sam's cold. Dean casts a glance back at the hopelessly stuck car. "If we don't get her out of here, what the fuck do we do?"
Sam helps Dean to his feet and shrugs, a slight movement hampered by his two sweatshirts and two coats. "I guess we walk."
Jess is already shivering in the dusty, dark Park Ranger's cabin a dozen paces off the road. Sam broke the lock clean off the door with a hard kick, all of their hands too numb to work a lock pick.
The fireplace initially sends thick black smoke billowing into the room, choking and acrid, until the old bird's nest lodged in the chimney drops neatly into the fire and burns. Even with the fire, wind is seeping in through the cracks, snow swirling in under the door.
There's one bed and a pile of scratchy wool blankets, and to fit they have to arrange their limbs like an intricate puzzle. Dean wakes up with an arm flung over Sam's abdomen, and for a sleepy ten seconds before the first cold breeze hits him, Dean thinks he's twenty-two and pathetically in love again, curled in a rented bed.
But they're not stupid lovestruck kids anymore. If Dean ever had a chance to make Sam a part of his life that wouldn't inevitably disappear, it is long past.
The fierce storm quiets the next day, but even when Dean's dug a trench around the half-buried car, the road ahead of them has vanished beneath the white. They're not going anywhere, not on wheels, anyway. "Dad's gonna fucking kill me," Dean mutters.
Dean rolls up the windows tight and breathes in short, staccato bursts. Sam keeps touching him, cautious little contacts with Dean's shoulder, forearm, like he's trying to soothe a scared and snarling dog. Dean shakes Sam's hand off.
They leave the car perched on a blocked pass in the Rockies, so goddamn close to flat ground. It takes them two days and mild cases of frostbite to get out of the mountains on foot. Dean leaves the car keys in the pocket of his jeans so they can dig against him uncomfortably.
The long days of walking tire them out, make tempers shorter. Sam's sleep-deprived from nightmares, Dean's shoulders ache from the weight of his pack, which he loaded heavier than either of the others, and even though they're in the right half of Colorado now, Dean has no fucking idea where Dad is or how to reach him.
Dean's skin feels stretched on his bones. He's ready to give up hope when they find brilliant, neon orange graffiti scrawled across every still-standing wall in Rooster Falls: "34. 42 56.21, Love Jim Rockford." It crops up on highway signs, even stretched across the road on route 58 at one point as they trudge down the empty blacktop. Hard to miss.
Time to find Dad.
Dad's hulking black truck dominates the driveway of a ramshackle two-story Victorian on a quiet cul-de-sac. Dean's stomach drops for a moment as he remembers that not only has he heartlessly abandoned his own best girl, he lost his father's car. Between that and the fact that his little brother is playing at family-man, Dean braces himself for a rocky reunion.
"Come in," filters out from the house. "Lock's broken off." Dean glances around and finds a mirror perched above the door frame, projecting their image in through the glass transom.
Dad's perched on a steamer trunk, making cowboy coffee over the fireplace in the former living room. From the graceful carved arabesques of the smoldering firewood, Dean deduces the reason for the lack of chairs. Birds flit in and out of a hole in the roof.
Dad stirs the coffee once more before standing up and acknowledging them. He wipes the coffee grounds on his hands off on his pants and observes the trio for a moment, and then he steps forward and Dean finds himself crushed against Dad's left shoulder, Sam hunched down to fit on Dad's right. "Boys," Dad says. His hand curves over the back of Sammy's head, rests on Sam's hair like he's still a five year-old small enough to pat on the head.
Dean hears a quiet, muffled, "Hi, Dad," spoken into Dad's coat and he smiles to himself, because goddamn right Sam missed Dad.
With a jarring thump to Dean's back, Dad lets them go. "You're late," he says.
"We walked," Jess says, forgotten behind them. "Sorry about the car. It was my fault," she says, which is a total lie, and Dean gets the weird sense that she's trying to cover for him. Dad's eyebrows raise at 'the car' and Dean's pretty sure he'll still catch hell for it later.
Dad holds out a hand. "You must be Jessica."
Dean's, "Sorry?" overlaps Jess's, "It's so nice to meet you."
The conversation skips a beat.
"You knew Sam was married," Dean says to Dad. It isn't a question. "I didn't merit a heads-up?"
In the encyclopedia of Dad's frowns, this is the one that indicates one of his sons having a private conversation in public; in this case, in front of Jess. Dean watches a crow perch at the edge of the hole in the roof and wonders when he stopped thinking of Jess as part of that public - a civilian, an outsider, the mass of people who all of Dean's life have been the other because they're not Winchesters. "'You know now," Dad says placidly.
The coffee boils over and hisses in the fireplace.
It begins to snow through the rafters while they eat canned beans and Spam for dinner, and they relocate to a formal parlor with a grandfather clock and an extensive array of weaponry. Sam devours his dinner like a ravening wolf, because firstly Sam has the tastes of a five year-old and will eat anything that's salty and comes out of a can, and secondly because Sam is the size of a major metropolitan area and probably needs a nuclear reactor to power his body, not the sparse diet of trail mix and wild game they've been carefully rationing.
Dad's successfully located the gun he came to Colorado for. Dean fondles it appreciatively, runs his fingers over the lettering. It's pretty bitchin', if impractical. "Why doesn't anyone ever make a demon-killing Kalashnikov?"
Sam snorts a laugh around a spoonful of beans. Dean's wishing they had booze, feeling heady and celebratory. He likes having everybody in the right place.
"We should get moving early tomorrow," Dad says.
"Did you tell him about the island?" Sam asks cautiously.
"No," Dean says over Dad's, "Island?"
Dean should be relieved that they're back with Dad and that Dad has a plan, even if that means hauling ass to some cowboy cemetery in Wyoming on the strength of a rumor that energies are converging there, and even if that means confronting the demon that ruined all of their lives, that killed Dean's mother in front of him, with an antiquated single-action revolver. It's what they've always wanted, isn't it? But Dean's been so focused on getting Sam out of harm's way, walled in with holy water and iron ore and maybe Dean patrolling the perimeter with a shotgun. Maybe two shotguns. To give that up now in favor of dragging Sam directly into harm's way, practically dangling him in front of a demon that absolutely, one hundred percent wants them all dead - well, it gives Dean stomach cramps, though that could also be the beans and Spam.
Sam's quiet, brow furrowed, and obviously thinking way too hard, which always makes Dean uneasy. He makes gimme hands at Dean and Dean passes him the gun. Sam swings open the chamber, looks at the five bullets - the only five bullets. "In your honest opinion," Sam says, "if we don't go after this demon, does it give a shit about us? Does it leave us alone?"
Dad's expression is unreadable, even by Dad standards. "No," he says. "No, we have something it wants." He doesn't meet Sam's eyes.
"The gun," Dean says.
"Are you serious?" Jess asks. She's staring at John incredulously. "You know for a fact that this thing, a demon, wants to kill you all, and your plan is to … what, follow it to its home territory and hope you're the quicker draw?" The longer Dean watches Jess and Dad in the same room, the more he wants to scribble her a little handwritten rulebook: Rule Number Fourteen: do not argue with John; Rule Number Fifteen: John is always serious; Rule Number Sixteen: do not imply that John is ever the slower gun hand.
Sam rubs the back of his hand over his mouth ruminatively. "If it wants to find us it will," he murmurs.
"Fortunately," John says, with a reasonably polite smile at Jess, "this isn't a democracy."
"Hold on," Dean says, hands outspread. "Hold on." His heart rate's up. He's been unconsciously edging to the left and he realizes he's put himself between Sam and the door. "We need to be together on this," he says, and he brings his hands back down when he notices their fine trembling. "If we split up, we're not all going to make it," he tells Dad. It's dirty pool, implying that Sam and Jess are going to take off and get eaten by rampaging bears or something, but sometimes that's the only way to get through to Dad. "So." He swallows. "This time, yeah. I, uh. I think we vote." His gaze shifts around the room in turn, but ends on Sam. Dean just got him back. "Island," he says. "I say the island. Minnesota."
John shakes his head, starts packing up the guns.
Jess is tight to Sam's side, watching his face closely, even as Sam seems a million miles away, eyes moving over a mental landscape that Dean can't see. "Sam?"
Sam jolts out of his reverie. He casts Dean a guilty look and Dean gets a sick feeling. His stomach cramps are like a stitch in his side now, enough to double him over if he were alone. "Wyoming," Sam says firmly. Dad turns slowly and meets Sam's eyes. "We end this," Sam says. Dad nods.
Jess shakes her head at Sam. "Okay, I'm going to blame your eagerness to go along with this on hereditary mental illness. If something's called a Devil's Gate, that should not be telling you, 'Hey, walk through me.' I vote island."
"So that's a draw," Dean says.
With sharp, efficient movements, John takes the Colt back from Sam and slips it under his own coat. "We have to go north either way. This isn't settled. We'll head out tomorrow at oh-six-hundred," he says. "Get some sleep. But Dean?" Dad's jaw is a dangerous line. "First let's talk about my car."
They bed down up the rickety stairs in real honest-to-god beds, and Dean finds himself sinking blissfully into a feather bed with a goose-down duvet. He burrows into it thoroughly, and only wakes up when there's a loud creak of floorboards just outside his room.
He silently catches up to Sam halfway down the stairs. Sweat glitters on Sam's brow in the freezing house. Sam stumbles on the bottom stair, and when Dean catches his elbow to steady him he realizes Sam's shaking from head to toe. "C'mere," Dean whispers, tugging his arm. "You need to medicate."
Dad's got a bottle of bourbon tucked safely between rolls of gauze in a duffel. Sam takes a long drink and grimaces. In the thick, unrelenting darkness of a world without streetlights, all Dean can see is the glint of the moon on glass, on liquor sloshing like a restless sea, on Sam's cold sweat. "Thanks," Sam says with the rasp of a non-drinker. He passes the bottle to Dean.
Dean drinks deeply, chases a drip down his chin with his tongue. "Of all the fuckin' times to agree with Dad, Sammy."
Sam sighs and wrests the bottle away, and Dean watches the shape of his mouth on the glass. "I'm guessing Jess ratted me out about the nightmares, right?" He smiles against the bottle, takes another drink.
When Dean takes the bottle back, the glass is warm from Sam's mouth. He makes a noise of assent.
"Jess burns," Sam says abruptly. "That's it. It's, what do you call it, recurring. Jess burns like Mom."
"It's just a dream, Sam. "
"It follows us," Sam says, an edge to his voice that raises the hair on the back of Dean's neck. He leans in so close Dean can smell the bourbon on his breath. "At first I thought I was just messed up, you know? 'Cause I was dreaming every night about Jess burning on the ceiling of our apartment. But that, you know, that's just a fucked up childhood, you go to therapy for that." He cocks his head and smiles grimly. "And then we left, and it followed us. Perfectly. My brain never - never brought me back to Palo Alto. I saw her burning in the car, and the tent, and that damn cabin. I saw her pinned against a tree. It followed everywhere we went. Like, I don't know. A warning?" He rips at the bottle's label with a thumbnail. "Like a taunt." He looks at Dean like the scared little boy he never was, so quiet and brave and so young. "I can't lose her, Dean."
Dean, feeling drunker than he is, leans close to Sam till the square edge of the bottle presses into his chest painfully. He wants to say, Sammy, you're all I've got, but while Sam is still Dean's family, his blood, Dean isn't Sam's family anymore. Sam went away and he made a new family of his choosing.
Sam's looking at him with concern. "You're still my fucking family," he says, and shoves Dean in the shoulder, and for fuck's sake, Dean refuses to consider that some version of all that might have spilled out audibly. "You're my brother," Sam says in the darkness. He says it like it's something sacred. Something permanent. "You're my brother," he says, and their faces are too close together, Sam huffing boozy breath against Dean's skin. "You know I," he says. "You know." He stops, as if that's a complete thought. You know.
When Dean piles back into the feather bed, he shifts restlessly and listens to wind whistling at the window. The pane is badly cracked, a spiderweb lit up in pale relief against the night. He lapses into sleep and dreams liquor-dreams, Sam pinned, crucified against a tree in the dark forest while a demon with Dad's face douses Sam's clothes with whiskey and drops a match.
It's slow going the first day, wheels sliding on the ice. Ceding the warmth of the passenger seat to Jess, Sam and Dean huddle under sleeping bags in the truck bed, each with only enough bare skin to see and breathe exposed between hats and scarves. Sam wordlessly plasters himself close to the warmth of Dean's side. Sam's hat has earflaps and strings to secure them with, and Dean can't help himself from tugging at the strings every time Sam starts to fall asleep, sending him jerking indignantly awake.
They stoke a fire at the side of the road and make watery, gritty cocoa, tainted by the dirt inevitably mixed in with all their belongings at this point. The boys clamber back into place with hands warmed by hot mugs while Jess informs them that she's spending the next hundred miles wringing embarrassing potty training stories out of John. It's a little hard to imagine Dad playing father-in-law - it's just not something Dean's ever had reason to consider. Dean retaliates by spending the drive pestering Sam for details about his sex life and delighting when Sam blushes and swears at him and finally, as always, relents with a mischievous smile and relishes in sharing the juicy details with his big brother. Dean makes sure to sound properly impressed to reward the over-sharing.
For miles, they pass through a cathedral of towering pines. Sam lays flat to stare up at them and Dean joins him. He wakes up rocking with the truck's motion, overly warm. He unwinds himself from around Sam, then sits up abruptly and looks around.
The weather's changed on them again. There isn't a hint of snow in the fields around them, and the truck's wheels are throwing up splatters of mud. Dean peels off layers and kicks off his boots for good measure. Sam's sleeping with his mouth open, sprawled unselfconsciously across every inch of the truck bed that isn't taken up with supplies. Dean carefully extracts Sam from his coat and scarf. He leaves the earflap hat on because it makes him want to pinch Sam's cheeks.
They run sputtering out of gas and are stuck for a week while Dad sets off on foot for more. They set up camp behind the barbed wire-topped fence of a railway depot, and find a surprising number of squatters in the boxcars and warehouses. They go to work prowling through the cargo trains, pawing through the slim pickings that haven't already been scooped up by others. Dean zips up his coat and stuff reels of fishing wire and canisters of kosher salt down it. Jess has been, pardon Dean's French, a raging bitch the last couple days, and when Dean unearths a box of tampons and a box of Midol that's only slightly mouse-nibbled, he tosses them to her with a wink. She stares at them like he's just handed her a snake, and he makes a mental note that she can take a joke about as well as Sam can.
The weather heats up steadily. Something in the fields of shifting grasses that surround them for acres is making Dean miserable and snotty. He tries to stealthily skirt around the other refugees to avoid conversation, but his sneezes give him away every time.
Initially, Dean thinks it's just the allergies and Dad being gone that have him on edge, but swiftly revises his opinion. Something's up with Sam. He's been acting weird, spacey and easygoing, ever since they stopped. Dean grows concerned that Sam thinks he's enjoying his last days before Wyoming turns into a suicide mission.
But on the evening of day three, he catches Sam humming quietly to himself as he cleans guns a safe distance away from the campfire, sitting on a log with the golden glow flickering over his face. His legs are tangled with Jess's, his big booted foot between her ankles. Jess knocks her knee against Sam's and he looks up, catches her gaze and smiles. Dean can't hear what they're saying, but he can hear when Sam starts up cleaning again and he's humming something soft and out-of-tune, the melody unrecognizable.
Dean corners him by the buckets of rainwater later. "What's going on, man? You're makin' me nervous."
Sam just smiles a little and shakes his head. "Nothing bad, man." And then he hugs Dean.
Dean can't help taking just a moment to lean his face into Sam's shoulder, because he doesn't know when he'll get the chance again. But he still has the presence of mind to step back and shoot Sam a cocked eyebrow. "Yeah, I'm really reassured now."
Maybe it's not that Sam's suicidally intent on Wyoming; maybe he's just anticipating all this being over. That's not so far from where Dean is right now. One way or another, this is going to end soon. Dean isn't going to spend every day watching what he can't have, in surround-sound technicolor. If they go to Minnesota, and if the research facility's still alive and kicking, there'll be enough other people around that Dean can hide himself. Find a hot scientist with glasses. Catch up with Sam periodically, keep it casual, and salvage what he can of his ruined heart.
If they go to Wyoming, Dean knows for a fact that Sam will make it out of the cowboy cemetery in one piece. If Dean has to ensure that with his own blood, then he'll still have taken the demon out, and that's no different an end than Dean's been expecting his whole life. Dying young and violently for a good reason is the best outcome Dean can reasonably hope for, and then Sam and Jess can go on playing footsie for the rest of their long, demon-free lives, but Dean won't have to see it.
A mutinous corner of Dean's brain insists that he wants to see it. That he'd rather pine pathetically until he's got a walker and a colostomy bag if it means he can peer in the window at Sam's happiness.
Dean sleeps alone in the bed of Dad's truck. Sam and Jess pitch their tent just far enough away that every ambiguous noise from that direction becomes skin on skin in Dean's mind, becomes the sound of a zipper, a kiss.
They go to work rigging up shards of mirror along the fence line, so the more permanent residents here have a good view of what's approaching from the outside. Sam and Dean are the least likely of everyone in the encampment to bleed themselves dry on the coils of razor wire, so they're stuck perched atop the fencing most of the day. At least it gets them out of shoveling the fetid pit toilets far on the east side of camp.
"Pliers," Dean says around a mouth full of fishing line.
"When Dad gets back, I'm telling him I vote island," Sam says, retrieving the pliers from a pocket.
Dean chews on the fishing line for a thoughtful moment. "Yeah?" He spits the clear nylon wire out and begins winding it methodically around the stub of a large piece of convex mirror. "Did the crazy train make an unexpected stop on its way to Suicide Mission?"
Sam huffs a laugh, embarrassed. He joins in securing the shard of mirror, hands darting in around Dean's, tightening his knots, clipping off stray ends. "You know why I went to Stanford?" Sam asks.
"Oh, Jesus," Dean says. "You think it'll knock me out if I jump from this high? Or at least scramble my brain enough I can't hear this?"
Sam punches his arm, makes him sway atop the fence. "Dick." He snips the last end of fishing wire. "Since I was eight, the only things I had to look forward to - the only options any of us had - were either getting killed in some stupid, pointless way by a creature with the brain capacity of a grasshopper and ending up an unclaimed body in the morgue, or else going out in a blaze of glory, and still ending up dead, and still no one would know or care." Sam's wrestling to bend a loop of razor wire into place, acquiring tiny scratches all over his forearms where his gloves end. "And you know what I wanted? I wanted a fucking happy ending." He yanks the wire into place with a grunt and a hard pull that shakes the fence beneath them. "I wanted it to be okay to want that."
"Happy ending, huh?" Dean coughs, brushes Sam's hands aside because he's shredding himself on the wire. "Let me tell you, there's this massage parlor in a strip-mall in Nashville - "
Sam flicks Dean's cheekbone, hard tap of his index finger. Dean swears and swats. Sam catches his hand and Dean immediately feels sweat bead at the base of his neck. Sam taps at the center of Dean's hand. "Why couldn't the story end differently? Door number three. That's all I wanted. I just wanted a choice."
Dean curls Sam's fingers around a large piece of glass so he'll let go of Dean. "Yeah, well." He clears his throat. "Sorry I fucked that up for you, coming and getting you."
Sam's quiet for a little too long. Dean looks up. Sam is watching him. "It's not a happy ending if you're not in it, too," he says.
When they're climbing down, boots pressed against the fence and fingers tight between the boards, Sam dislodges the last piece of mirror. It falls at their feet and shatters into glittering dust. "Nine lives," Dean says.
"That's cats," Sam says. "It's seven years' bad luck." They crunch over the broken pieces, protected by their heavy boots. Back at the truck, Dean spreads the thinnest film of carefully-rationed antiseptic over the cuts on Sam's arms.
When Dad gets back, back bowed with a cattle-weight of gas cans, smelling like the fumes, Sam tells him they're taking door number three. Dad responds with silence, and trudges off to funnel gas into the truck. They eat instant rice and pinto beans for dinner, and Dad agrees to accompany them as far north as he can before splitting off to go after the demon. "This isn't how I raised you," he tells Sam.
Sam chews and swallows his beans and rice before he responds calmly, "You raised me to protect my family, full stop. That includes protecting them from you."
Dean gets the uncomfortable sense that he's included in that them, but it's not really the time or place to rip Sam a new one for presuming to protect him.
Their course angles northeast when they set out from the rail depot. Along the roadside, crocus shoots poke their heads nervously above the thick mud.
One day out from the rail depot, they make camp in an apple orchard. The trees are lush and green, bursting with leaves and tight green buds. The grass is so soft it's almost a problem, because Dean finds himself wrestling to find a flat spot amid the hummocks to set up sleeping arrangements. Sam and Jess are still rocking the battered old tent, and they're just going to have to live with uneven ground.
Their supplies are getting low, so they're down to trying to cook half a dozen packets of ramen (in three different flavors) in a big pot over the fire now. Dad's already volunteered to be the one who spends a maddening amount of time blowing on sparks and adding wisps of straw and cotton wool in the way that neither Sam nor Dean has ever had patience for. Dad seems to get some kind of perverse pleasure out of it. Sam's trekked off with empty buckets in hand to get all the water they're going to need, and Jess is alternating between hilarious grimaces and expressions of unholy glee as she tries to gut a rabbit with Dad's knife. Hell, any of them would've been happy to do it for her, but the lady knows what she wants, and she wants to learn.
Dean curses as he wrestles with the tent poles. They'll stand up just fine and then collapse just to fuck with him the moment he puts the weight of fabric on them. This isn't usually his job when they're setting up camp. Dean abandons the monstrosity of a tent for the moment and starts tying bowlines for his and Dad's simpler, albeit less water- and insect- and wind-proof, tarp and sleeping mat setups. A breeze billows the translucent plastic sheeting in his hands, and he just lets it for a moment, enjoys the riffle of it on the back of his neck. The wind smells like apples and wild grasses and old wooden crates.
Struck by a bolt of inspiration, Dean stops what he's doing, sits down in the grass, and takes his boots off. When he pulls his socks off, they're alarmingly stiff, and Dean gets full in the face with the smell of his feet. "Jesus," he blurts out, reeling back from his own feet.
"Now you know how we feel," Jess says dryly. Her knife hand has been tentatively hovering, but she lowers it decisively now, carefully splitting the rabbit open from its neck to its groin, her other hand holding the animal in place by the scruff of its neck.
"Oh, I'm so happy that my brother married a comedian," he says cheerfully, and Jess raises a bloody hand to flip him off with a smile. Dean tosses his socks away into the grass where he can't smell them and makes a mental note to get Sam to show him the way to the creek, so he can take a miserable, frigid bath later. It'll be worth it, after a solid month of nothing but quick scrubs with their limited water supply, sometimes with one of Sam's dorky plastic dromedaries hung from a tree branch as an improvised shower.
The wind has chased the plastic sheeting further down the orchard, so Dean follows and pounces on it before the next gust can take it away again. He squidges the grass between his toes and doesn't even care if he's picking up ticks in the long grass. It's worth it.
"Oh god," Jess is saying when he gets back. She's got a handful of small, delicate rabbit intestines and an appalled look. Dean laughs and she gestures at him with the knife as she speaks. "You know, I was a vegetarian. A vegetarian."
"And now you're not! How nice for you. Glad the end of the motherfucking world made a positive difference in someone's life," Dean says. There's a clatter and a low curse from the dirt patch where Dad's trying to start the fire. Dean watches Dad's lightweight kindling tumbling merrily across the grass, caught in the same wind. Dad starts hauling their bulky packs to one side of the stack of twigs as a wind-block.
Dean ties the bowline taut as he can between two squat apple trees with thick moss on their trunks, heaves with a foot against the roots for leverage. He stretches the plastic over the rope, then gathers rocks and dirt into each of the four corners. Tie a bit of cord around each plastic-covered bundle of dirt, tie the other end to a stick thrust into the ground, and he's got himself a pretty decent tent. Won't keep a curious possum from coming to chew on the foot of his sleeping bag, as he's discovered, but that's not the end of the world.
End of the world. Ha.
The sky's dropping to dusky gray, and Dean will have to stop messing around in bare feet soon, help actually get camp set up before the light's completely gone, but he can't help lingering in his good mood for a bit longer, toes in the grass. He finishes constructing the real tent and when he's pretty sure it's not going to collapse down on Sam and Jess, he steps back with a proud smile and brushes the dirt from his knees.
"Hey Dean," Dad says, not taking his eyes off the valiant little spark that's trying to grow into a fire behind the wind-block. He gestures urgently. "Get the ramen." Leave it to Dad to be that serious about the fire for their ten-cent noodle soup.
He passes Jess, hearing the sound of her hands squishing in rabbit guts. She's genuinely looking pretty ill now, and he bends to touch at her shoulder. He speaks softly enough that Dad won't hear. "Want me to spell you out?" She looks ready to protest that she's perfectly capable of finishing the job, so Dean interjects, "I've been on my feet since we got here, let a fella have a turn at the cushy job. You trying to run me into the ground, Princess?"
Jess nods, and Dean's more attuned to the minutiae of her expressions now, knows she's appreciating not only the break from rabbit guts, but also Dean's keeping John out of the loop. Thanks, she mouths silently, and stands on slightly wavering feet. Must've gotten to her more than she let on. Dean takes the rabbit by its ears and grabs the knife, and Jess shakes her hands off with a look of revulsion. "Ugh. Get this off of me. Where's the water?"
"Don't know," Dean says. "Ask Sam."
"Hey Sam, where's the water?" she calls, hands held far from her body so they don't drip viscera on her clothes.
Dean counts his heartbeats and listens to the whispering leaves. He looks around. "Sam?" The light gray sky is darkening rapidly now as night comes on, making the shadows jump and shimmy between the trees. "Sam?" Something flickers overhead, bat or bird. "Where'd he go after he got back with the water?"
Jess's mouth opens and closes once silently. "I was concentrating on the rabbit, I don't know."
"Jess, I was off dealing with the tents, you were here, I need you to try to remember where he went after he came back." The grass is cold now where it whispers along Dean's feet, brushes his bare ankles.
"I didn't." Jess's voice is barely there, and it sends Dean's pulse rabbiting within seconds. "I didn't see when he got back. I must've been - I must've been looking down at what I was doing."
Dean turns in the direction of the creek. He cups his hands and shouts. "Sam!"
"Dean?" Dad's coming toward them now, face set in a look of military readiness. He steps with a heavy foot right in the middle of the sputtering fire he's been working on for the last hour, and he doesn't even seem to notice.
Jess joins Dean, voice a higher register but just as loud. "Sam!"
Dad grabs Dean's shoulder, but Dean beats him to the punch in speaking. "Did you see Sam come back?" he asks Dad. Dean's hands are grasping at his sides, trying to grab onto the air instinctively, hold everything around him in place. "Did you see him come back from getting water?"
The look on John's face scares Dean. He takes a long moment before he speaks. "I wasn't paying attention. I was trying to get the damn fire going."
Dean sets off in the vague direction where he thinks the creek is on bare feet. "Hey asshole, if you're hearing us then you better sing out!"
Jess's voice is thick with incipient tears. "We haven't been here that long, it's just a long walk to the water, you can't really tell on the map. And it'll be heavy once he's carrying the buckets back full."
"Yeah," Dean says grimly. "You don't know Winchester luck." Dean wonders if broken mirror is still ground into the soles of his boots. He can hear Dad's heavy footsteps behind them, coming down hard on fallen apple branches.
The creek is five minutes away. Two buckets full of cold, fresh water sit lonely on the bank.
They stay by the water and call until they start getting dive-bombed by curious bats. Dad rebuilds the fire, fumbling in the dark, so it'll be easy for Sam to find his way back to camp.
The tents sit empty all night, rustling in the wind.
It's an outrageously beautiful day. The sun is out, and the early warm weather has the apple trees confused, a few fragrant white blossoms beginning to peek from their buds. Dean wakes up from an unrestful, dream-plagued sleep and sees a pair of amorous squirrels chasing each other around and up the trunk of a tree in dizzying spirals.
Sam has been missing for five days.
Before it was even truly light the first morning, they fanned out across the farmlands and vacant lots in a calculated grid, moving out from where they found the buckets at the creek. Dean's eyes grew sore from scanning for footprints in the mud, but he found none. He looked in the bushy underbrush that would be perfect for hiding a passed-out body, even a tall one. Irrational, scared, he scanned the trees in case Sam was chased up one by a predator and then … fell asleep? Halfway through that first day, with no shouts from John or Jess, no giddy celebratory spark in the sky from the emergency flares they'd use if one of them found Sam, Dean sat heavily, suddenly, on an overturned rototiller in a field of dead corn. He heaved drily but nothing came up; they never did have dinner.
When they got back that evening, all with tentative hope on their faces that was doused when they saw no one else had brought Sam back, the rabbit carcass had begun putrefying where Dean dropped it. It was attracting flies.
Jess walked to the other side of the tents and was violently sick in the grass. Dean listened to her wheeze and shared a glance with Dad, then walked over. She was shuddering, holding her sides. Dean rubbed a hand along her back and said, "We've gotten through worse than this," telling it to himself just as much. How many times before Stanford had he felt his heart in his throat like this, never getting any easier no matter how much practice he got seeing Sam in danger. "Sam knows how to take care of himself. He'll hold it together till we find him."
Still bent double and gulping hard to hold back the bile, Jess turned her head up to look at him steadily. "What about Winchester luck?"
On the third day they quietly began searching the river. Dad walked downstream, eyes sharp on the muddy banks, the thick obscuring reeds. Jess, the strongest swimmer, dove in repeatedly, looking underwater. Twice she came up waving frantically for Dean, only to find that the murky shape on the riverbed was a log.
It's the morning of the fifth day.
They gather around the charred circle of the campfire and Dad says, "I think we need to consider the possibilities here."
Dean's stomach is heavy with dread, because there's absolutely nowhere this can go that he will like.
"I'm just going to outline what we could be looking at here, and then we need to talk about how to move forward."
Dean starts when Jess slips her hand around his elbow. She squeezes, quick then release, as she watches John nervously.
"One: Sam is injured somewhere nearby, and isn't able to answer us or get himself back to camp. If this is the case, he's been out there for five days and we're going to start running into -" John catches himself, visibly searches for the right words. "Time limitations." He clears his throat. "Two: Sam is already dead."
Dean feels Jess sway against his side.
John barrels forward, like if he stops talking he won't get through this speech. "If that's true, then nothing we do now makes a difference to him either way." The tree directly behind John is celebrating the spring particularly prematurely. Its blossoms are white tinged with pink, and they bob gently in the breeze, casting dancing shadows on John's face. "Three: Sam was taken away from here by someone or something. If that's what happened, we still don't know where he is, who's responsible, or whether he's still alive." John runs a hand over his mouth and chin, and if Dean didn't know better he'd say John looked nervous. "Four: Sam left of his own free will."
Dean and Jess speak over each other.
"What?" No way. Sam's seemed so happy lately, and besides, he's Sam. He wouldn't leave his girl.
"No, John."
John holds his hands up, face calm. "I'm just saying we have to consider all the possibilities."
Jess is shaking her head, and Dean is surprised to feel the quiet strength in her stance, not even a tremble of indignation. She unhooks her hand from his arm. "Sam wouldn't have left under his own power. "
Something about the way she says it, the way she's looking off sideways at the wind in the leaves, sends alarm bells clamoring up and down Dean's nerves. He lets his voice drop to lethal quiet, because this is Sam at stake. "What do you know that you're not telling us?"
She looks terribly tired, all of a sudden. "I'm sorry, I should have told you the moment we realized he was gone," she says. "I just keep waiting for him to walk back across this field, all sheepish because he got lost and scared us."
"Jessica," Dad says. "If you have information about Sam, you need to share it with us now. If we're not all on the same page, we're endangering Sam."
Dean looks hard at Jess as she glances up at John, and somehow he knows, even before she opens her mouth. "I'm pregnant," she says. "Sam knew."
Dad shuts his mouth and doesn't open it again.
For a split second Dean's about to suggest that it wouldn't be the first time a young guy got cold feet about fatherhood and left his girl in the lurch, but then he remembers who they're talking about. "Okay, so Sam didn't leave on purpose. Which we already knew," he says with a glare at Dad. Dean needs to just … derail this conversation a little, because he can only deal with one thing at a time, and right now that thing is that the most important person in the world is has vanished without explanation. He can't even wrap his mind around the notion that there's a baby, a Sam-baby, baby-of-Sam's, in creepy little fetus form, arm's length away from Dean.
Sam was gonna be a dad.
Dean catches himself using the past tense and for the first time in five days of hell, his eyes are wet. "So we keep searching," he says. "What else can we do?"
They keep searching.
The apple blossoms are heavy on the branches. Their petals have rained down on the tent and the two rigged-up tarps. The rabbit, where Dean flung it in the bushes, has been skeletonized by insects.
Sam's been gone for three weeks.
He could have been lying within a shout's distance this whole time, dehydrating and dying and decomposing. He could have been taken, in which case they're not helping him. He could have wandered off and gotten lost, could still be wandering and surviving and trying to find his way back to them, but that's-
That's the worst, for Dean, worse than if he's dead. Because they have to choose, now. Either they stay here forever, out of denial rather than true hope. Or they leave. They leave Sam behind. His bones or his damaged body, dying by inches, or the hope of ever finding out what happened to him. They leave him.
"Get rid of it," John tells Jess in week three. She points a loaded .45 at him. It's not much of a threat, given that she's forgotten to take the safety off, or more likely, doesn't know how. But it gets the message across. Dean would applaud, but his arms are full of firewood. "There are ways. It's a vulnerability," Dad says.
"If I have a physical condition that constitutes a vulnerability, I will inform you," she says evenly. "In the meantime, man up, Grandpa."
Dad somehow manages to get drunk that night, on what Dean doesn't know, but industrial strength solvents are easier to come by these days than scotch, so it's probably taking a few years off Dad's life.
On the first day of the fourth week without Sam, Dean wakes to the sight of a raccoon running away with the rabbit bones, chewing at the gristle. They fight while they search, that day.
Dad thinks Wyoming is the answer, thinks going straight into the belly of the beast and tracking down the demon is the only way. So sure that Sam's been taken, that it's all a part of Dad's narrative of persecution.
Dean can't get the image of Sam's happy smile from that last week out of his head. Sam would never forgive Dean for walking Sam's wife and child into the hands of the enemy.
Dean and Jess sit silently in the tent at night while John stalks the meadow outside, muttering under his breath and flipping through his journal.
"He was so excited," Jess says. Dean's been staring at her, trying to see if she has a, uh, a baby bump, creepy as that term is to him. He can't tell yet. "So excited."
Dean swallows hard. "I think we're on the same page, aren't we?"
Jess looks at him over the light of the flashlight with an expression of the purest misery Dean has ever seen. "Yeah. I think we are."
Sam's been gone for over three weeks. On the twenty-third day, Dean tells John their decision. The only thing left that they can do for Sam is to protect what he loved the most.
John hugs Dean, and, after the barest hesitation, Jess. They break down camp and reassemble their packs. Dean watches Jess pressing apple blossoms between the pages of a thick book of incantations.
John strikes out for Wyoming. Dean watches him go till he's out of sight.
It's a long road to Minnesota. The first step away from the orchard is the hardest, and after that it's done.
They've left Sam behind.
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