SPN FIC - "There's Just the One"
As I said: there's nothing the Muse likes better than a long weekend. So let's join the boys, out in the woods in the middle of a snowstorm, fresh from killing a nasty, hairy sumbitch that's a lot more trouble dead than it was alive.
There are small miracles, Sam thinks, and this is one of them: that they're stuck up here until the storm dies down, and he does not have to ride shotgun while his brother attempts to drive stoned.
CHARACTERS: Dean (18) and Sam (14)
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 4048 words
"THERE'S JUST THE ONE"
By Carol Davis
"You seein' this, man? This is freakin' awesome!"
It's not awesome. It's a hunting cabin. Sam looks around, frowning, the crash of door-meeting-wall (Dean's "Hey, honey, I'm HOME!" enthusiasm combined with the push of a howling wind) still echoing in his head, and takes note of all the amenities the place doesn't offer. Nothing that looks like it generates heat, other than the fireplace. The water's probably turned off. The lack of anything with a power cord means there's probably no electricity.
"Yeah, Dean," he sighs. "It's swell."
"Dude. We're out of the weather," something Dean proves by pressing the door shut against the wind.
"And?"
"We'll get a fire going. Ride this out."
He shouldn't be riding anything out, Sam figures; he should be in school. In American History, right about now. Mr. Hawes is one of the ten most boring teachers he's ever had, but the school's warm and brightly lit and… Crap. There was supposed to be a quiz today, worth ten percent of his grade for the quarter.
Dean's hauling breath in and out, winded in a way he shouldn't be. He's wearing a stupid grin, and he's looking around the cabin like it's the Presidential Suite at Disney World.
And he stinks.
With the door shut, there's no wind to wipe away that awful smell.
None of them - Dean, or Sam, or Dad - ever smells springtime fresh, exactly. They do shower, and they wash their clothes, but because of what they do, and where they live, and the fact that most of their clothes weren't new to begin with, there's a sort of faint, vague ripeness that clings to all three of them. Sam's noticed that. So have his classmates - in particular, every girl he's ever tried to sit close to, long enough to ask her out.
But this? The stench that's clinging to Dean is beyond hideous.
It figures that Dean hasn't even noticed.
"What is that?" Sam coughs, backing away from his brother. "God, man, you're making me sick."
"Right back atcha," Dean smirks.
"No, man, I mean it. What the hell is that smell?"
He can't back away anywhere near far enough; the cabin's no more than twenty feet across, and the Eau de Dean is spreading out rapidly, like a cancerous blue fog. Sam coughs again, clamps a hand over his face, and remembers a drive past a long stretch of chemical plants in New Jersey when he had to pull off a sneaker and use it as a respirator because the stink was so bad. This makes that seem like a stroll through a field of wildflowers.
He's not encouraged when Dean simply looks puzzled.
"Dunno, man," Dean shrugs, and drops their duffel of weapons onto the floor. "But check this out."
You'd think he'd never seen a table before. Or a bucket. The stack of firewood holds his interest for a good two minutes.
"Dean?" Sam says.
Dean beams at him.
"Are you high? When…when did you get high?"
They've been together all day, haven't been out of each other's sight for more than a few seconds. Dean's managed to raise stealth to a fine art, particularly if there's a teacher or a member of law enforcement involved, but there's no way he managed to get stoned without Sam noticing. The handful of times he's come back from somewhere high, he hasn't even bothered to deny it. Not to Sam, anyway. So this makes no sense.
Maybe he's High On Life, Sam thinks. Like in those dumbass TV commercials.
Frowning, Dean looks down at his clothes, his boots, his hands. All of him is pretty well splattered with gore from the thing they killed, the thing everybody who lives within fifty miles of here wanted to believe was a Bigfoot, even though it was no more than four feet tall and was about as terrifying as Mayor McCheese.
Sneaky, though.
And hairy. Not furry. Hairy.
"Messed up my jacket," Dean complains. "Never gonna be able to get this shit outta my jacket."
There are small miracles, Sam thinks, and this is one of them: that they're stuck up here until the storm dies down, and he does not have to ride shotgun while his brother attempts to drive stoned. He's gotten tapped to take the wheel a few times in the past year or so, when Dean or Dad couldn't manage it, but it's always been at night. He's got a fake driver's license in his pocket, but nobody with eyes would believe he's sixteen, and daylight makes him too easy to spot, so if they could make it to the car, it'd be Dean at the wheel.
Dean, who's now giggling at a 17-year-old Star Wars calendar thumbtacked to the wall.
"Lando Calrissian, man," he chortles. "Friggin' Lando Calrissian."
It's shelter, Sam concedes with a long, weary sigh. They're in out of the storm, and they're not likely to freeze to death. They've got water, and a handful of power bars, and the giant sack of M&Ms that Dean figures is essential equipment for a hike through the woods. The storm isn't supposed to amount to anything much, anyway, just some occasional high winds, near-zero visibility on the roads and maybe six or eight inches of accumulated snow. Dad knew all that when he sent them in here. He won't worry, and he won't get himself into trouble by coming to look for them. He's twenty miles away, trying to wrestle information out of an old guy who knows where some bones are buried.
Everything's cool. They killed the thing they came here to find. All they've got to do is hang out until the storm dies down a little.
Until Dean comes back down to earth.
Whoever owns the cabin left behind plenty of firewood and kindling, and a big box of kitchen matches. They could sit here without a fire and tough out the cold - that'd probably be Dad's choice - but Dad's not here, Dean might as well not be here, and that neat stack of firewood's all the invitation Sam needs. After a couple of minutes of effort he's got a nice crackling fire going and crouches in front of it to warm his hands.
Behind him, Dean is sitting cross-legged on the floor with the calendar in his lap, paging through it like he's somebody's grandmother looking at a family photo album.
"Uncle OWEN," he mourns. "God DAMN."
"Dean," Sam says.
Dean's rocking back and forth.
If Dean starts to cry, Sam thinks, he's going to bail out of here right now and head for the main road, and the hell with whether that storm's a big bunch of nothing or whether it's gonna defy all the predictions and turn into the Great Blizzard of '97. He is going to go, he is going to make his way to the road and hitch a ride, and he is going to leave Dean here to come drifting back down to Planet Earth all by himself.
He is.
He is definitely going to do that.
Screw Dean.
Screw Dean and Dad.
The fire's hypnotic. Relaxing. Dean's still rocking, but he's doing it quietly, so Sam watches the flames for a while, allowing his mind to slide towards blank. The cabin's not a bad place, he thinks; they'd lived in worse. He wouldn't half mind living up here in the summer, with a stack of books and a decent supply of provisions.
More from idle curiosity than anything else, he climbs to his feet and begins to investigate the cabin's few small cupboards. There's a half-empty jar of peanut butter in one of them, and a couple cans of tuna. In another, a handful of AA batteries, a deck of cards, and a sizeable stack of porn.
"We killed that lil' shit, didn't we, Sammy?" Dean announces out of the blue, loud enough to be heard halfway across the state.
"Yeah," Sam sighs. "We did."
"Didn't figure it'd" - Dean makes a wet, explosive fart with his mouth - "like that."
They didn't bring fresh clothes with them; didn't need to, since they were supposed to be out and back in a couple of hours. If they had, Sam would be insisting that his brother strip down and change. And shower, somehow.
Dean's got little stringy threads of Bigfoot McCheese's guts in his hair.
There's a dishtowel folded up in the cupboard with the peanut butter and the tuna that'll make a decent gas mask, so Sam returns to his seat in front of the fire and palms the towel over his mouth and nose.
"Blankie," Dean says behind him.
Sam doesn't answer. It wouldn't lead anywhere good.
"Saaaaaammy's got his blankie."
"Shut up, Dean."
"Din' bring your teddy bear?"
There are times when Sam is perfectly willing to kick his brother's ass - because Dean deserves it, or on general principle, or just for something to do. This is not any of those times, because kicking Dean's ass would involve actually touching Dean.
Sam's shoulders tense under the layers of clothing that are starting to feel like too much, too warm, and he thinks Do not touch me. Do not bring that stink anywhere near me. He'd say it out loud, but that would goad Dean into doing exactly that: jumping on Sam. Spreading that godawful slime all over him. Sam's not clean, exactly, is almost never the kind of squeaky clean most people are as a matter of course, but Dean's got slimy, stinking entrails in his damn hair, and that's way, way over the top.
If Dean comes near him, he thinks, if Dean touches him, he is going to hurl.
He holds his breath. Keeps it balled up way down in his gut.
Behind him, Dean makes a humming sound, like a kid imitating a small plane taxiing for takeoff.
The hell?? Sam thinks.
"Sammy," Dean murmurs. "Oh, Sammy, it's baaaaaaad."
No shit, Sam thinks. If he looks at his brother, he tells himself, Dean's going to take that as encouragement, so he doesn't turn, doesn't so much as glance in Dean's direction. When the storm dies down, he thinks, he's going to head for the car. If Dean wants to come along, he can ride in the trunk. Sam's driving. He is so driving.
"Saaaaaaam."
The hell with driving. Freezing to death out in the woods is starting to sound good.
"Saaaaammmmeeeeee…"
Sam grinds his eyes shut. Focuses on the sour, musty smell of the dishtowel, the cold floor under his butt, the small drifts of heat from the fire. Hunger, too: that's something to concentrate on. They've got food with them, but he hasn't eaten anything since breakfast.
"NnnnnnnNNNNNNNN," Dean keens.
This is the last time Sam is going hunting with his brother. So help him, the last time.
When he opens his eyes and turns to look, Dean is rocking forward and back, forward and back, a weird, gore-spattered, leather-jacketed pendulum.
"What's wrong with you?" Sam demands.
He doesn't want to know. He really doesn't want to know.
"You gotta make it stop," Dean says, shoving his hands at Sam like a penitent begging for absolution. "Sammy. You gotta."
"I gotta what?"
Tears begin to track down through the filth on Dean's face, and there's a thick line of snot working its way south from his left nostril. "Saaaaaaammy," he moans.
"WHAT?" Sam barks.
"They got me, Sammy. Not gonna be nothin' left. You gotta -"
Dean's up and moving then, scrabbling first to his knees, then to his feet, flailing his hands in the air as if he's trying to shake something off - something that's got a pretty firm grip on him. For half a minute Sam lets him do it, because, come on, neither one of them's in any real danger; the thing they came out here to kill is dead, and all they've got to do is ride out the storm. But when Dean careens off the edge of the battered table, bounces from there to the wall, his eyes widening to the point where it seems like his eyeballs are going to pop right out of his head and ricochet around the room, well, there's no way to let that just ride. Leery of being crashed into, or stepped on, Sam climbs to his feet and grabs twin handfuls of his brother's gore-slicked jacket.
That calms Dean back down, at least a little. "Sammy," he moans.
"What? What's the matter with you?"
Dean's hands are in between them, curled into fists. Dean looks down at them, lower lip trembling. "They got me, Sammy."
"Who? What got you?"
"Them."
"Them?"
"The flesh-eaters."
"Flesh-eaters? What flesh-eaters?"
There's water sluicing out of Dean's eyes now, running down his face in little floods. "They're gonna eat me, Sammy."
"There's not - there's no flesh-eaters here, Dean."
"They GOT me," Dean insists.
And Sam thinks, Yeah, Dad. "You boys can take care of it. There's only the one. I'll meet you back at the motel."
No problem.
"Flesh-eatin' bacteria," Dean mumbles, the words slurring together, like he's reluctant to let them squirm past his lips. "Like onna news."
"What -" is all Sam can get out.
"Hands are gonna be gone, Sammy. Then m' arms."
Dean takes a step back and again lays his hands out for inspection. The cabin's single window is so caked with grime that the light in the cabin is thin and gray, but even so, if there's anything at work on Dean's palms, yes, it's at the microscopic level. The skin's not broken, not by so much as a scratch. That'll fix you, Captain Badass, Sam thinks. You had to be the one to use the silver knife. Had to do it all by yourself.
"There's nothing on your hands," he says. "Just…guts. You smell like Technicolor shit, is all."
That seems to perplex his brother. Then Dean's nose twitches. Wiggles. He reaches up, swipes the back of his hand against his nose to eliminate the trail of snot.
Then he shrieks.
Sam's had less fun than this, but for the life of him he can't remember when.
It's tough to string thoughts together with Dean's screaming echoing around the cabin.
"Dean!" he pleads. "Come on, man, don't do that. Dean!"
Part of the job, he thinks frantically. Grace under fire, be the eye of the storm, keep your shit together. It's all part of the job. Dad told him that, Uncle Bobby told him that. Save your own ass. Keep it together. But his brother's freaking out, and all Sam can think is that this is going to hop an express train headed south any second now and Dean is going to try to tear out his eyes, or shred the skin off his arms, because he's hallucinating and all he knows is…
Is that there's blood and gore all over him.
From that thing.
It's that, Sam thinks, that's what it is, it's poison from that thing. That's what's got Dean high. He should have figured it out sooner, but hindsight's a pain in the ass; Uncle Bobby says so. He's got here and now, that's it, that's all, there's now, there's poison all over his brother, and he needs to wash it off.
In a cabin with no running water.
He tries anyway: cranks the faucets at the small, rusty sink and is rewarded with nothing but the gasp and sputter of air in the pipes. From there he scrambles to the weapons duffel, fumbles the zipper open and pulls out his canteen. It was full when they left the motel, but he took a couple of long drinks out there in the woods. There's a cup or so of water left, better than nothing, so Sam hauls his brother over to the sink and dumps the water over Dean's hands, thinking, Please, please, come on, PLEASE.
Dean trembles and shudders in Sam's grasp, tears dripping off his jaw.
There's not enough water.
There was another canteen. Dean's canteen. Lower lip clamped between his teeth, Sam stumbles back to the duffel and gropes through it without success. They've got weapons of all kinds, plenty of ammo, a prayer book, Dean's M&Ms.
But no more water. No second canteen.
Dean must dropped it out in the snow somewhere. Maybe when he ran after McCheese.
He…
Snow.
There's snow outside. Three or four inches on the ground, and more coming down.
It takes some doing to propel the frantic Dean out the door, back out into the biting wind, across the narrow porch and down the two steps to the ground. Getting Dean's hands down to snow level is easier - all Sam has to do is trip him, and Dean goes face-first into a drift. The snow muffles Dean's shrieking for a moment, which is a blessing, but he flips himself over like a bug and goes back to flailing the air. As Sam struggles with him, trying to plunge his hands down into the snow, Dean begins to claw at his face, and damn, he's got more limbs than a centipede.
"Dean!" Sam wails. "Dean, man, cut it out! Stop it, Dean!"
The snow's wet, thank God. Sam catches an elbow to the cheek and a knee to the gut but finally, finally, manages to catch hold of Dean's right hand long enough to smear some half-melted snow across the palm. Maybe it's the cold, maybe it's something else, but the action seems to distract Dean a little, makes him stare first at his hand, then at Sam. "Yeah," Sam sputters, nodding crazily, thinking, I was supposed to be in History right now, I was supposed to be taking a test - but maybe this is a test.
Maybe…
Dean would have been out here by himself.
Dean tries to yank his hand away, but Sam's got a good, solid grip. He cleans that hand as best he can, then the other, then scoops up a big palmful of soggy snow and uses it to bathe Dean's face and hair.
By the time he finishes, his brother's skin is mottled crimson and white but is undamaged except for a number of small scrapes and scratches from leaves and twigs Sam grabbed up along with the snow. Dean's dragging in air in big gulps and his eyes are still stupidly wide, but he's stopped shrieking, and he seems to know where he is, which wasn't true a couple of minutes ago.
"You okay?" Sam asks tentatively.
Dean blinks at him.
"Dean?" Sam prods.
"Yeah," Dean mutters. He takes a long look around, and nobody needs to explain it's because he's reluctant to meet Sam's gaze.
Sam goes back to work in silence, shivering in the wind as he scoops up snow and uses it to clean Dean's jacket and jeans, the gullies between his fingers, the back of his neck. Dean does nothing to help him, but doesn't resist, just sits there pale and shaking from the cold.
Finally, when Sam has finished and has settled back onto his haunches, Dean lifts his hands and frowns at them. Flexes his fingers a couple of times.
"Flesh-eating bacteria?" Sam asks.
"That was -" Dean is silent for a moment. "That was seriously messed up."
"You're all right? Really? Are you okay?"
"Yeah. I'm -"
Then Sam is looking at his brother through a faceful of snow. It's in his hair, up his nose, dripping off his jaw down onto his jacket. "Asshole," Sam says incredulously, his body tensing with fury. "What -"
"You tell Dad about this, I'm gonna kick your ass."
"I saved you, man."
"You didn't save me from jack shit," Dean says as he shifts his weight, moving to his feet as easily as a dancer. He's got just enough advantage to be able to flip Sam over onto his belly, one hand planted firmly on Sam's back, the other whacking the back of Sam's head to drive it down into the melting snow, but the advantage doesn't last long. By the time they both surrender they're soaking wet and shivering, arms wrapped around themselves to hold in what little body heat they've got left.
"Coulda done it myself," Dean says. "Washed that shit off. Probably woulda worn off after a while, anyway."
"Maybe. After you knocked yourself unconscious from slamming into the wall."
"Bitch," Dean replies.
"Asshole," Sam says pointedly.
He settles his weight, thinking Dean's going to flip him into the snow again. Instead, Dean's expression shifts a little, and he spends a moment just looking at Sam. When that's over he shakes himself like a dog, ridding himself of some of the snow that's caked to his clothing and his hair, then turns to walk the few steps back to the cabin.
They've been inside for a few minutes before Dean says offhandedly, "Woulda been. You know."
"Screwed?" Sam offers.
"Bruised, anyway."
"You're welcome."
Dean blinks at that, and Sam thinks he's going to say something else, but he doesn't.
"High on life," Sam sighs.
"What?"
"Dude. You got high off that thing's guts."
"Huh," Dean says, and squints down at his hands. "Maybe we oughta go back out. Scrape up what's left."
"And do what with it?"
Dean's only response is a smirk.
"Freak," Sam says.
They sit side by side on the floor, warming themselves in front of the fire, listening to the shriek of the wind.
After a while Sam's eyes drift half-shut, and he tries to think himself away from being cold, and hungry, and tired. He could eat - could dig a couple of power bars out of the duffel - but he's too tired to do that, so he settles for simply zoning out. He's almost there, has almost transported himself back to the cozy if somewhat lumpy security of his bed at the motel, when a sound coming from close by makes his cheek twitch.
It's Dean, keening a single note.
Sam's eyes fly open.
Dean's grinning at him.
"Son of a -" he blurts. After what he did? After he frigging saved his brother? He shifts, cocks a fist, hauls back to let it fly.
But…
His hand.
It's crawling.
"Dean?" he whimpers. "Oh, shit."
It's itching. Twitching, like there's something underneath his skin. Something alive. "Dean," he stammers. "Oh God. It's -"
He got it on him. From cleaning Dean off.
It's ON HIM.
"Deeeeeeeeean!" he shrieks.
Dean sits looking at him for a moment, silent and almost unblinking, and Sam thinks OhmyGOD he's possessed, we're both gonna be possessed, Dad's gonna come find us and we'll be zombies and it's gonna eat me ohhhhh shiiiiiiit
Then Dean hoists him to his feet. "Got you, man," he says. "You're good."
They go face-first into the snow together.
SHIT but it's cold.
"Dean?" Sam mutters after they've scrubbed him clean, when he's managed to still his chattering teeth enough to talk. "There was just one of those things, right? That's it, right? Dad said there's just the one."
It's getting dark now. It could be a trick of the fading light, and the limited visibility through the still-falling snow, but he could swear he saw something out there in the woods.
Something kind of small. And hairy. And Dean saw it too.
"Awesome," Dean sighs.
"We gonna -"
"You got my back?"
"We're not -"
"Yeah," Dean says. "We are."
They return to the cabin long enough to retrieve the duffel of weapons. His brother's crazy, Sam thinks as they trudge back out into the storm, still damp down to their underwear; he's downright certifiable. They could freeze to death out there. Lose fingers and toes to frostbite. They're all wet, for crying out loud. "What if there's a whole nest of them?"
Dean stops in mid-step.
He stands motionless for a moment, then leans toward Sam, and, just loud enough to be heard over the wind, says with a crooked smile, "Use the Force, Luke."
"Jerk," Sam groans. "God. Jerk."
"Got my back, blankey-boy?"
"I -" Sam sputters.
It's the job, he thinks. It's what they do. "Yeah," he tells his brother. "All right. Yeah."
"Awesome," Dean says once more.
Sam has to run to keep up with him as he lopes off into the woods.
* * * * *
There are small miracles, Sam thinks, and this is one of them: that they're stuck up here until the storm dies down, and he does not have to ride shotgun while his brother attempts to drive stoned.
CHARACTERS: Dean (18) and Sam (14)
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 4048 words
"THERE'S JUST THE ONE"
By Carol Davis
"You seein' this, man? This is freakin' awesome!"
It's not awesome. It's a hunting cabin. Sam looks around, frowning, the crash of door-meeting-wall (Dean's "Hey, honey, I'm HOME!" enthusiasm combined with the push of a howling wind) still echoing in his head, and takes note of all the amenities the place doesn't offer. Nothing that looks like it generates heat, other than the fireplace. The water's probably turned off. The lack of anything with a power cord means there's probably no electricity.
"Yeah, Dean," he sighs. "It's swell."
"Dude. We're out of the weather," something Dean proves by pressing the door shut against the wind.
"And?"
"We'll get a fire going. Ride this out."
He shouldn't be riding anything out, Sam figures; he should be in school. In American History, right about now. Mr. Hawes is one of the ten most boring teachers he's ever had, but the school's warm and brightly lit and… Crap. There was supposed to be a quiz today, worth ten percent of his grade for the quarter.
Dean's hauling breath in and out, winded in a way he shouldn't be. He's wearing a stupid grin, and he's looking around the cabin like it's the Presidential Suite at Disney World.
And he stinks.
With the door shut, there's no wind to wipe away that awful smell.
None of them - Dean, or Sam, or Dad - ever smells springtime fresh, exactly. They do shower, and they wash their clothes, but because of what they do, and where they live, and the fact that most of their clothes weren't new to begin with, there's a sort of faint, vague ripeness that clings to all three of them. Sam's noticed that. So have his classmates - in particular, every girl he's ever tried to sit close to, long enough to ask her out.
But this? The stench that's clinging to Dean is beyond hideous.
It figures that Dean hasn't even noticed.
"What is that?" Sam coughs, backing away from his brother. "God, man, you're making me sick."
"Right back atcha," Dean smirks.
"No, man, I mean it. What the hell is that smell?"
He can't back away anywhere near far enough; the cabin's no more than twenty feet across, and the Eau de Dean is spreading out rapidly, like a cancerous blue fog. Sam coughs again, clamps a hand over his face, and remembers a drive past a long stretch of chemical plants in New Jersey when he had to pull off a sneaker and use it as a respirator because the stink was so bad. This makes that seem like a stroll through a field of wildflowers.
He's not encouraged when Dean simply looks puzzled.
"Dunno, man," Dean shrugs, and drops their duffel of weapons onto the floor. "But check this out."
You'd think he'd never seen a table before. Or a bucket. The stack of firewood holds his interest for a good two minutes.
"Dean?" Sam says.
Dean beams at him.
"Are you high? When…when did you get high?"
They've been together all day, haven't been out of each other's sight for more than a few seconds. Dean's managed to raise stealth to a fine art, particularly if there's a teacher or a member of law enforcement involved, but there's no way he managed to get stoned without Sam noticing. The handful of times he's come back from somewhere high, he hasn't even bothered to deny it. Not to Sam, anyway. So this makes no sense.
Maybe he's High On Life, Sam thinks. Like in those dumbass TV commercials.
Frowning, Dean looks down at his clothes, his boots, his hands. All of him is pretty well splattered with gore from the thing they killed, the thing everybody who lives within fifty miles of here wanted to believe was a Bigfoot, even though it was no more than four feet tall and was about as terrifying as Mayor McCheese.
Sneaky, though.
And hairy. Not furry. Hairy.
"Messed up my jacket," Dean complains. "Never gonna be able to get this shit outta my jacket."
There are small miracles, Sam thinks, and this is one of them: that they're stuck up here until the storm dies down, and he does not have to ride shotgun while his brother attempts to drive stoned. He's gotten tapped to take the wheel a few times in the past year or so, when Dean or Dad couldn't manage it, but it's always been at night. He's got a fake driver's license in his pocket, but nobody with eyes would believe he's sixteen, and daylight makes him too easy to spot, so if they could make it to the car, it'd be Dean at the wheel.
Dean, who's now giggling at a 17-year-old Star Wars calendar thumbtacked to the wall.
"Lando Calrissian, man," he chortles. "Friggin' Lando Calrissian."
It's shelter, Sam concedes with a long, weary sigh. They're in out of the storm, and they're not likely to freeze to death. They've got water, and a handful of power bars, and the giant sack of M&Ms that Dean figures is essential equipment for a hike through the woods. The storm isn't supposed to amount to anything much, anyway, just some occasional high winds, near-zero visibility on the roads and maybe six or eight inches of accumulated snow. Dad knew all that when he sent them in here. He won't worry, and he won't get himself into trouble by coming to look for them. He's twenty miles away, trying to wrestle information out of an old guy who knows where some bones are buried.
Everything's cool. They killed the thing they came here to find. All they've got to do is hang out until the storm dies down a little.
Until Dean comes back down to earth.
Whoever owns the cabin left behind plenty of firewood and kindling, and a big box of kitchen matches. They could sit here without a fire and tough out the cold - that'd probably be Dad's choice - but Dad's not here, Dean might as well not be here, and that neat stack of firewood's all the invitation Sam needs. After a couple of minutes of effort he's got a nice crackling fire going and crouches in front of it to warm his hands.
Behind him, Dean is sitting cross-legged on the floor with the calendar in his lap, paging through it like he's somebody's grandmother looking at a family photo album.
"Uncle OWEN," he mourns. "God DAMN."
"Dean," Sam says.
Dean's rocking back and forth.
If Dean starts to cry, Sam thinks, he's going to bail out of here right now and head for the main road, and the hell with whether that storm's a big bunch of nothing or whether it's gonna defy all the predictions and turn into the Great Blizzard of '97. He is going to go, he is going to make his way to the road and hitch a ride, and he is going to leave Dean here to come drifting back down to Planet Earth all by himself.
He is.
He is definitely going to do that.
Screw Dean.
Screw Dean and Dad.
The fire's hypnotic. Relaxing. Dean's still rocking, but he's doing it quietly, so Sam watches the flames for a while, allowing his mind to slide towards blank. The cabin's not a bad place, he thinks; they'd lived in worse. He wouldn't half mind living up here in the summer, with a stack of books and a decent supply of provisions.
More from idle curiosity than anything else, he climbs to his feet and begins to investigate the cabin's few small cupboards. There's a half-empty jar of peanut butter in one of them, and a couple cans of tuna. In another, a handful of AA batteries, a deck of cards, and a sizeable stack of porn.
"We killed that lil' shit, didn't we, Sammy?" Dean announces out of the blue, loud enough to be heard halfway across the state.
"Yeah," Sam sighs. "We did."
"Didn't figure it'd" - Dean makes a wet, explosive fart with his mouth - "like that."
They didn't bring fresh clothes with them; didn't need to, since they were supposed to be out and back in a couple of hours. If they had, Sam would be insisting that his brother strip down and change. And shower, somehow.
Dean's got little stringy threads of Bigfoot McCheese's guts in his hair.
There's a dishtowel folded up in the cupboard with the peanut butter and the tuna that'll make a decent gas mask, so Sam returns to his seat in front of the fire and palms the towel over his mouth and nose.
"Blankie," Dean says behind him.
Sam doesn't answer. It wouldn't lead anywhere good.
"Saaaaaammy's got his blankie."
"Shut up, Dean."
"Din' bring your teddy bear?"
There are times when Sam is perfectly willing to kick his brother's ass - because Dean deserves it, or on general principle, or just for something to do. This is not any of those times, because kicking Dean's ass would involve actually touching Dean.
Sam's shoulders tense under the layers of clothing that are starting to feel like too much, too warm, and he thinks Do not touch me. Do not bring that stink anywhere near me. He'd say it out loud, but that would goad Dean into doing exactly that: jumping on Sam. Spreading that godawful slime all over him. Sam's not clean, exactly, is almost never the kind of squeaky clean most people are as a matter of course, but Dean's got slimy, stinking entrails in his damn hair, and that's way, way over the top.
If Dean comes near him, he thinks, if Dean touches him, he is going to hurl.
He holds his breath. Keeps it balled up way down in his gut.
Behind him, Dean makes a humming sound, like a kid imitating a small plane taxiing for takeoff.
The hell?? Sam thinks.
"Sammy," Dean murmurs. "Oh, Sammy, it's baaaaaaad."
No shit, Sam thinks. If he looks at his brother, he tells himself, Dean's going to take that as encouragement, so he doesn't turn, doesn't so much as glance in Dean's direction. When the storm dies down, he thinks, he's going to head for the car. If Dean wants to come along, he can ride in the trunk. Sam's driving. He is so driving.
"Saaaaaaam."
The hell with driving. Freezing to death out in the woods is starting to sound good.
"Saaaaammmmeeeeee…"
Sam grinds his eyes shut. Focuses on the sour, musty smell of the dishtowel, the cold floor under his butt, the small drifts of heat from the fire. Hunger, too: that's something to concentrate on. They've got food with them, but he hasn't eaten anything since breakfast.
"NnnnnnnNNNNNNNN," Dean keens.
This is the last time Sam is going hunting with his brother. So help him, the last time.
When he opens his eyes and turns to look, Dean is rocking forward and back, forward and back, a weird, gore-spattered, leather-jacketed pendulum.
"What's wrong with you?" Sam demands.
He doesn't want to know. He really doesn't want to know.
"You gotta make it stop," Dean says, shoving his hands at Sam like a penitent begging for absolution. "Sammy. You gotta."
"I gotta what?"
Tears begin to track down through the filth on Dean's face, and there's a thick line of snot working its way south from his left nostril. "Saaaaaaammy," he moans.
"WHAT?" Sam barks.
"They got me, Sammy. Not gonna be nothin' left. You gotta -"
Dean's up and moving then, scrabbling first to his knees, then to his feet, flailing his hands in the air as if he's trying to shake something off - something that's got a pretty firm grip on him. For half a minute Sam lets him do it, because, come on, neither one of them's in any real danger; the thing they came out here to kill is dead, and all they've got to do is ride out the storm. But when Dean careens off the edge of the battered table, bounces from there to the wall, his eyes widening to the point where it seems like his eyeballs are going to pop right out of his head and ricochet around the room, well, there's no way to let that just ride. Leery of being crashed into, or stepped on, Sam climbs to his feet and grabs twin handfuls of his brother's gore-slicked jacket.
That calms Dean back down, at least a little. "Sammy," he moans.
"What? What's the matter with you?"
Dean's hands are in between them, curled into fists. Dean looks down at them, lower lip trembling. "They got me, Sammy."
"Who? What got you?"
"Them."
"Them?"
"The flesh-eaters."
"Flesh-eaters? What flesh-eaters?"
There's water sluicing out of Dean's eyes now, running down his face in little floods. "They're gonna eat me, Sammy."
"There's not - there's no flesh-eaters here, Dean."
"They GOT me," Dean insists.
And Sam thinks, Yeah, Dad. "You boys can take care of it. There's only the one. I'll meet you back at the motel."
No problem.
"Flesh-eatin' bacteria," Dean mumbles, the words slurring together, like he's reluctant to let them squirm past his lips. "Like onna news."
"What -" is all Sam can get out.
"Hands are gonna be gone, Sammy. Then m' arms."
Dean takes a step back and again lays his hands out for inspection. The cabin's single window is so caked with grime that the light in the cabin is thin and gray, but even so, if there's anything at work on Dean's palms, yes, it's at the microscopic level. The skin's not broken, not by so much as a scratch. That'll fix you, Captain Badass, Sam thinks. You had to be the one to use the silver knife. Had to do it all by yourself.
"There's nothing on your hands," he says. "Just…guts. You smell like Technicolor shit, is all."
That seems to perplex his brother. Then Dean's nose twitches. Wiggles. He reaches up, swipes the back of his hand against his nose to eliminate the trail of snot.
Then he shrieks.
Sam's had less fun than this, but for the life of him he can't remember when.
It's tough to string thoughts together with Dean's screaming echoing around the cabin.
"Dean!" he pleads. "Come on, man, don't do that. Dean!"
Part of the job, he thinks frantically. Grace under fire, be the eye of the storm, keep your shit together. It's all part of the job. Dad told him that, Uncle Bobby told him that. Save your own ass. Keep it together. But his brother's freaking out, and all Sam can think is that this is going to hop an express train headed south any second now and Dean is going to try to tear out his eyes, or shred the skin off his arms, because he's hallucinating and all he knows is…
Is that there's blood and gore all over him.
From that thing.
It's that, Sam thinks, that's what it is, it's poison from that thing. That's what's got Dean high. He should have figured it out sooner, but hindsight's a pain in the ass; Uncle Bobby says so. He's got here and now, that's it, that's all, there's now, there's poison all over his brother, and he needs to wash it off.
In a cabin with no running water.
He tries anyway: cranks the faucets at the small, rusty sink and is rewarded with nothing but the gasp and sputter of air in the pipes. From there he scrambles to the weapons duffel, fumbles the zipper open and pulls out his canteen. It was full when they left the motel, but he took a couple of long drinks out there in the woods. There's a cup or so of water left, better than nothing, so Sam hauls his brother over to the sink and dumps the water over Dean's hands, thinking, Please, please, come on, PLEASE.
Dean trembles and shudders in Sam's grasp, tears dripping off his jaw.
There's not enough water.
There was another canteen. Dean's canteen. Lower lip clamped between his teeth, Sam stumbles back to the duffel and gropes through it without success. They've got weapons of all kinds, plenty of ammo, a prayer book, Dean's M&Ms.
But no more water. No second canteen.
Dean must dropped it out in the snow somewhere. Maybe when he ran after McCheese.
He…
Snow.
There's snow outside. Three or four inches on the ground, and more coming down.
It takes some doing to propel the frantic Dean out the door, back out into the biting wind, across the narrow porch and down the two steps to the ground. Getting Dean's hands down to snow level is easier - all Sam has to do is trip him, and Dean goes face-first into a drift. The snow muffles Dean's shrieking for a moment, which is a blessing, but he flips himself over like a bug and goes back to flailing the air. As Sam struggles with him, trying to plunge his hands down into the snow, Dean begins to claw at his face, and damn, he's got more limbs than a centipede.
"Dean!" Sam wails. "Dean, man, cut it out! Stop it, Dean!"
The snow's wet, thank God. Sam catches an elbow to the cheek and a knee to the gut but finally, finally, manages to catch hold of Dean's right hand long enough to smear some half-melted snow across the palm. Maybe it's the cold, maybe it's something else, but the action seems to distract Dean a little, makes him stare first at his hand, then at Sam. "Yeah," Sam sputters, nodding crazily, thinking, I was supposed to be in History right now, I was supposed to be taking a test - but maybe this is a test.
Maybe…
Dean would have been out here by himself.
Dean tries to yank his hand away, but Sam's got a good, solid grip. He cleans that hand as best he can, then the other, then scoops up a big palmful of soggy snow and uses it to bathe Dean's face and hair.
By the time he finishes, his brother's skin is mottled crimson and white but is undamaged except for a number of small scrapes and scratches from leaves and twigs Sam grabbed up along with the snow. Dean's dragging in air in big gulps and his eyes are still stupidly wide, but he's stopped shrieking, and he seems to know where he is, which wasn't true a couple of minutes ago.
"You okay?" Sam asks tentatively.
Dean blinks at him.
"Dean?" Sam prods.
"Yeah," Dean mutters. He takes a long look around, and nobody needs to explain it's because he's reluctant to meet Sam's gaze.
Sam goes back to work in silence, shivering in the wind as he scoops up snow and uses it to clean Dean's jacket and jeans, the gullies between his fingers, the back of his neck. Dean does nothing to help him, but doesn't resist, just sits there pale and shaking from the cold.
Finally, when Sam has finished and has settled back onto his haunches, Dean lifts his hands and frowns at them. Flexes his fingers a couple of times.
"Flesh-eating bacteria?" Sam asks.
"That was -" Dean is silent for a moment. "That was seriously messed up."
"You're all right? Really? Are you okay?"
"Yeah. I'm -"
Then Sam is looking at his brother through a faceful of snow. It's in his hair, up his nose, dripping off his jaw down onto his jacket. "Asshole," Sam says incredulously, his body tensing with fury. "What -"
"You tell Dad about this, I'm gonna kick your ass."
"I saved you, man."
"You didn't save me from jack shit," Dean says as he shifts his weight, moving to his feet as easily as a dancer. He's got just enough advantage to be able to flip Sam over onto his belly, one hand planted firmly on Sam's back, the other whacking the back of Sam's head to drive it down into the melting snow, but the advantage doesn't last long. By the time they both surrender they're soaking wet and shivering, arms wrapped around themselves to hold in what little body heat they've got left.
"Coulda done it myself," Dean says. "Washed that shit off. Probably woulda worn off after a while, anyway."
"Maybe. After you knocked yourself unconscious from slamming into the wall."
"Bitch," Dean replies.
"Asshole," Sam says pointedly.
He settles his weight, thinking Dean's going to flip him into the snow again. Instead, Dean's expression shifts a little, and he spends a moment just looking at Sam. When that's over he shakes himself like a dog, ridding himself of some of the snow that's caked to his clothing and his hair, then turns to walk the few steps back to the cabin.
They've been inside for a few minutes before Dean says offhandedly, "Woulda been. You know."
"Screwed?" Sam offers.
"Bruised, anyway."
"You're welcome."
Dean blinks at that, and Sam thinks he's going to say something else, but he doesn't.
"High on life," Sam sighs.
"What?"
"Dude. You got high off that thing's guts."
"Huh," Dean says, and squints down at his hands. "Maybe we oughta go back out. Scrape up what's left."
"And do what with it?"
Dean's only response is a smirk.
"Freak," Sam says.
They sit side by side on the floor, warming themselves in front of the fire, listening to the shriek of the wind.
After a while Sam's eyes drift half-shut, and he tries to think himself away from being cold, and hungry, and tired. He could eat - could dig a couple of power bars out of the duffel - but he's too tired to do that, so he settles for simply zoning out. He's almost there, has almost transported himself back to the cozy if somewhat lumpy security of his bed at the motel, when a sound coming from close by makes his cheek twitch.
It's Dean, keening a single note.
Sam's eyes fly open.
Dean's grinning at him.
"Son of a -" he blurts. After what he did? After he frigging saved his brother? He shifts, cocks a fist, hauls back to let it fly.
But…
His hand.
It's crawling.
"Dean?" he whimpers. "Oh, shit."
It's itching. Twitching, like there's something underneath his skin. Something alive. "Dean," he stammers. "Oh God. It's -"
He got it on him. From cleaning Dean off.
It's ON HIM.
"Deeeeeeeeean!" he shrieks.
Dean sits looking at him for a moment, silent and almost unblinking, and Sam thinks OhmyGOD he's possessed, we're both gonna be possessed, Dad's gonna come find us and we'll be zombies and it's gonna eat me ohhhhh shiiiiiiit
Then Dean hoists him to his feet. "Got you, man," he says. "You're good."
They go face-first into the snow together.
SHIT but it's cold.
"Dean?" Sam mutters after they've scrubbed him clean, when he's managed to still his chattering teeth enough to talk. "There was just one of those things, right? That's it, right? Dad said there's just the one."
It's getting dark now. It could be a trick of the fading light, and the limited visibility through the still-falling snow, but he could swear he saw something out there in the woods.
Something kind of small. And hairy. And Dean saw it too.
"Awesome," Dean sighs.
"We gonna -"
"You got my back?"
"We're not -"
"Yeah," Dean says. "We are."
They return to the cabin long enough to retrieve the duffel of weapons. His brother's crazy, Sam thinks as they trudge back out into the storm, still damp down to their underwear; he's downright certifiable. They could freeze to death out there. Lose fingers and toes to frostbite. They're all wet, for crying out loud. "What if there's a whole nest of them?"
Dean stops in mid-step.
He stands motionless for a moment, then leans toward Sam, and, just loud enough to be heard over the wind, says with a crooked smile, "Use the Force, Luke."
"Jerk," Sam groans. "God. Jerk."
"Got my back, blankey-boy?"
"I -" Sam sputters.
It's the job, he thinks. It's what they do. "Yeah," he tells his brother. "All right. Yeah."
"Awesome," Dean says once more.
Sam has to run to keep up with him as he lopes off into the woods.
* * * * *