(no subject)
The Knuckles of Skinnybone Tree
Chapter 4
It’s not the sun that wakes Sam up. It’s not bad dreams, though he’s had his share of them since they’ve been camped out in the badlands, full of fire and blood and bruises.
What wakes him up is the tinny sounds of his cell phone, playing “We Built This City” at top volume.
Dean makes a noise of utter suffering and throws his hands over his ears, scrunching up his face. “Sam make it stop,” he groans, the words all blurring together: sammakeitstop.
Sam gropes for the phone, fumbles it open. “H’lo,” he mutters.
“Sam, hey! Heh, did I wake you up? Billy’s kicking me out of his house even though it’s like, the ass crack of dawn and I thought I’d share the joy. You guys got anything to eat out there? I think I have to ride a horse or something -”
“Michael,” Sam says. Michael stops dead, obediently. Sam rubs a hand over his face, takes a moment to appreciate the moment of quiet. “Slow down.”
“All that Billy’ll give me is coffee, the cheap fucker. Coffee and a horse. The fuck kind of people you guys know, Sam?”
“You get it?” Sam asks. Dean shifts enough to punch blindly in Sam’s direction and connects with Sam’s elbow.
“Shut the fuck up,” he growls.
“Yeah, of course,” Michael says in Sam’s ear. “Easy peasy. Anyway, Billy says it’ll take me an hour, hour and a half to get out to you guys, and I know how much you hate surprise wake up calls, so - I’m on my way. I’m starving. I’ve got water and food and illegal substances. I’ll see you in about an hour.”
“Kay,” Sam sighs. He flips his phone closed and stares up at the ceiling blindly. He doesn’t want to be awake. He doesn’t want to have to get up. He sighs again and pushes to his feet.
Dean grumbles a little when Sam pulls the sleeping bag off him, throwing Sam’s half of the bottom bag over Dean. Sam lays the other sleeping bag a few feet away, kicks his pillow over to it and nudges it with his foot until it looks slept in. Dean’s already asleep again, the bag slipping enough to show the broad line of his shoulders, the bruise just below his hairline, almost healed. When it was new there were two clear half-moons, where Sam had bitten down right over the ridges of Dean’s spine. Every time he’d seen Dean rub the mark, wincing, it had made him almost blindingly hard. Seeing it again, even half-healed, makes Sam want to mark Dean all over again, roll him onto his belly and lick the sweat off his skin.
But. Michael’s voice, even over the phone, is enough of a deterrent, even if John wasn’t out there somewhere, possibly awake even now. When Michael was staying with them, he was constantly underfoot, especially when he wasn’t wanted, and the prospect of his imminent arrival makes Sam’s stomach hurt.
The air is stuffed full of that breathless sort of silence that reminds Sam of California in the early summer, those few short weeks when El Nino’s gone for another year, before the summer heat rolls in, blanketing the coast with fog. It’s a bearable temperature, when the sky is pink and raw, but there’s a heaviness in the sky that sits uneasily, as if the desert is drawing breath to speak.
He stokes the fire up and sets a pot of water on to boil. They’ve been making cowboy coffee all week and there’s a couple of protein bars left in Sam’s pack, good enough for breakfast. There might be some dried rabbit for Michael to eat, if he’s that hungry. Sam’s feeling spiteful enough to hope that they drink all the coffee before Michael arrives.
It’s a while before anyone else is up; the pot boils and Sam makes himself a bitter cup of coffee, sets the pot on a flat rock in the coals to keep it warm. John materializes just when Sam’s finishing his first cup, and he fixes more for both of them. They watch the sun come up and Sam blinks sleep out of his eyes, inhales the smell. The last time he was alone with his dad, it was - he thinks it was the vampire deal. It’s hard to remember now. It was a long time before Sam could think about Dad without remembering Dad’s death, that sad smile he gave Sam when he said please. I don’t wanna fight.
“You sleep okay?” Sam asks, finally.
“Well enough,” John grunts.
He didn’t even want to be there with Dad, stuck in some crappy room waiting for Dean to come back, feeling like his skin was about to crawl off his body. He hated John then, maybe not as much as he did when he was at school or when they were spending months running after the slightest scrap of contact. He’d been waiting for years to say - fuck, he didn’t even know anymore, it was so long ago. How could John leave them like that. How could he say all those things, tell his own son to get lost and stay that way. And then, worse than any of the others, how fucking good it felt to see him again.
“Your friend on his way yet?” John asks.
“Yeah,” Sam says. “Woke me up. Not Robert, though, oh no.”
The corner of John’s mouth lifts a little over the rim of his cup, and he turns away, grinning quietly. “What?” Sam asks. “What’s so funny?”
John shakes his head, shrugs his shoulders. Sam’s seen Dean do the same more times than he can count and it hurts a little to see that familiar roll. “Ah, it’s nothing,” John says. “Just - Mary, my wife, she was awfully good at sleeping through the baby monitor.”
Sam bursts out laughing, surprising himself. “Uh, yeah,” he says. “That sounds familiar.”
They finish their coffee in silence that’s more or less comfortable, John humming softly as he shifts the logs around, letting the air get under the chimney Sam built. Sam watches him with a little bit of concern, waiting for John to knock the fire down, but after a while he sits back quietly.
He sort of wants to ask how old John is, but he doesn’t really want to know.
They hear Michael coming before they see him, the thud of hooves across the hard sand, coming up from behind the camp, the same direction John had taken that night he’d tried to sneak up on them. Michael comes openly, either knowing they’ll hear him or not even thinking about it; stealth had never been one of his strong points. John looks to Sam and they go out to meet Michael together.
Michael’s hanging on for dear life, perched on top of a grey horse, and his look of repressed panic drops away instantly when he spots Sam. There’s a long moment of panic where Sam just knows Michael’s gonna shout “Sam Winchester!” at the top of his lungs, but all that Michael does is give them an abbreviated wave, cut short when he has to grab at the pommel to keep upright.
They hold the horse still while Michael shimmies awkwardly off, grinning broadly. He lands on Sam’s side and Sam pulls Michael in close, speaks low and rapid into his ear: “While you’re out here, my name’s Jimmy and Dean’s Robert, you got that?”
Michael’s eyes flick up to him, his grin faltering only slightly. He doesn’t say anything, just nods, and when John sticks his hand out, Michael shakes it easily enough. They introduce themselves, first names only, thank god, and they get the gray unloaded and settled with the other horses before leading Michael back to the campfire.
Mike, to his credit, doesn’t ask John how he wound up in the desert; he bitches about having to get up so early and tells them about the job he was working down in San Antonio, a fucking chupacabra, can you believe it, a gleeful light in his eyes. It’s only been a few months since he’s been allowed to go hunting on his own, and everything’s got that shiny new patina on it. Sam takes his revenge by offering Michael the very bottom of the pot. Michael picks the sunken grounds out of his teeth with hardly a pause. Sam’s just beginning to relax when a voice from behind them bawls out, “Mikey!”
Dean’s lounging, one shoulder up against the building they’ve got John sleeping in, one hand stuffed into the pocket of his jeans. Michael looks like Christmas has just come early, but he surprises Sam by greeting Dean with an enthusiastic, “Rob!”
When Michael first caught up with them in Beaverton, Oregon, Dean had said it was the worst idea Sam had ever had, to let him stay. That this kid, who Sam had barely even remembered, was going to get himself killed, get one of them killed, or just blow the whole job and bring the Feds down on their heads again. It had taken him approximately a day and a half to warm back up to the kid, who was small and almost helpless and more stubborn than John on his worst days. He hadn’t ever noticed, growing up, but Dean had one hell of a soft spot for kids, especially kids who looked at Dean as though he were a god.
Michael gets to his feet so that Dean can get a better look at him, one thumb on Mikey’s chin, admiring his black eye. “It’s no big deal,” Michael says dismissively, fighting down a smile.
“Chupacabra, huh?” Dean asks. “Yeah, they’re a bitch. Good job, kiddo.”
“Not good enough,” Michael says sourly, sitting back down. “Bobby was on my ass about it, said I was sloppy. I was on my way back to his place when you guys called, thought he was gonna literally rip me a new one when I told him I was gonna be a few days late.”
“Tell him we’ll make it up to him,” Dean says. Sam snorts. “Well, how about it, candyman? You gonna show us the goods or what?”
“Heh,” Michael says. “Hang on.” The bag’s in his duffel and he has to run to get it, but he hands it over to Dean with a solemnity that makes Sam want to laugh.
Dean studies the bag’s contents carefully, passes it all over to Sam with the judgment, “They’re like little fugly shrooms, aren’t they?”
Inside the freezer bag are maybe fifty ugly brown knobs, the quickest road to a spirit journey that they know of. “What the hell is that?” John asks.
“Peyote,” Michael says, with some satisfaction. “The best quality a white kid from Wisconsin can buy. Shit, if I had known I was gonna be crashing at the house of a genuine medicine man, I would’ve just waited.”
Dean claps him on the back. “Nice work, kid.”
**
“The original plan,” Sam explains, “was a vision quest. We got word of something really bad out here from Billy Ayawamat, a few weeks ago, and said we’d come, try to make contact with it, placate it if we could, kill it if we couldn’t.”
“Vision quests are rites of passages,” Dean says, picking up the narrative. “Traditionally, the seeker goes out into the wilderness alone, bringing nothing of society with them, and then ... waits. He sketches out a circle and fasts, prays - waits for the visions to come. Or heatstroke, whatever gets him first. It moves the soul into a place beyond all its normal concerns.”
“It lasted for four nights,” Sam says, his voice dropping. “Four’s the limit we set before we came out here.” He laughs, under his breath. It’s close enough to the truth, close enough that they don’t have to explain John’s presence, walking off the Path of the Dead as though he was Dean’s spirit guide. “After that, it was going to be too risky.”
“Insta-quest,” Mikey muses. “Just add hallucinogens.”
“Pretty much,” Dean says.
John’s eyes stray back to the bag of peyote, over and over. There was weed in Vietnam, lots of things if he’d wanted them. Peyote makes him think of the dog-eared paperbacks Mary’s little brother always carried around with him, too dense and weird for John to ever get through. He’d kept his hair as long as Michael’s is now, thick and messy over his face.
They talk fast, the three of them, easy in the language of hunters and transients. It makes John’s head hurt. He heard once that it was impossible to learn another language past a certain age; that all the little paths in your brain just up and died if you didn’t use them. He’ll never learn how to do this.
He looks up to see Robert watching him, his wide eyes narrowed. John offers a narrow smile, and Robert returns it with the twitch of an eyebrow. Jimmy's and Michael’s heads are close together, both grinning openly over the details of some case, some mutual friend, John doesn’t even know. There’s the sweat on his face and in the hollow of his throat and Robert’s eyes, far too bright in the dim light.
Robert blinks and then shakes his head hard, like a dog. “How about it, John?” he says, his mouth sliding up into a mocking grin. “You wanna get high?”
John has to laugh at that, like it’s some sort of line from an after-school special. Robert laughs too, nodding, like he appreciates the joke. “Get in on your hunt?” John asks. “Well - fuck yeah, actually. Been a long time, though. For that part of it, I mean.”
“The wilderness is the best place for it,” Robert says wisely. “Reconnecting with nature and all that shit. I mean, everything’s gonna feel all meaningful and special anyway, why not spend a half hour communing with a tree?”
“The heat was what got to me, in Nam,” John says, grinning. “I kept thinking I was going to melt, bones, muscle, all of it, and become part of the jungle. It wasn’t too bad, actually. A lot better than thinking about what was actually going on there.”
And Robert howls, shaking with laughter, reaching across to knock Jimmy’s arm. “I told you!” he crows. “You owe me five bucks, you son of a bitch!”
Jimmy’s looking at John with a mixture of surprise and awe. “Shut the hell up,” he says, and punches Robert back.
“Jimmy’s such a bitch about it,” Robert says confidingly, leaning in close to John. “He’s only ever had one hit off of one bong. And he lived in Northern California.”
“What a loser,” Mikey snorts. “Sometimes I can’t believe you guys are related, for real.”
There’s a long, echoing silence where they all turn to stare at Michael, who blinks at them. His eyes are red, from sand or sleeplessness. “Someone say something?” he asks, vaguely.
“What?” John says. He slides his palms down the length of his thighs, slowly, wiping the sweat off his hands. “What did you say?”
Michael looks back and forth between John and Robert, frowning. His mouth twitches, like he’s waiting for someone to cue him in to the joke. Robert’s face is white.
“Related?” John says. His fingers are numb. The smile on his face feels ghastly, frozen. “They didn’t tell me they were related.”
Michael’s staring at him as though John’s gone off his nut. “Yeah,” he says, slowly.
“Michael,” Jimmy says tightly, but Michael doesn’t hear.
“They’re brothers,” he says, and the words drop into John’s stomach like jagged chunks of ice.
Robert gets to his feet slowly, not looking at anybody, his hands clenching and unclenching at his sides, and walks out.
“What’s wrong?” Michael asks, his eyes wide. John looks, but can’t find any words.
**
Dean stares at the ground between his hunched body and the wall, his palms braced on the dry surface, the stringy puddle of bile that was all his stomach could bring up. Hadn’t even had coffee before Mikey showed up. His jaw tightens and his stomach heaves and he spits a bit more onto the ground. Wipes his chin with the back of his hand. He could walk out into the desert. Sammy’s a good tracker, but not as good as Dean. He could walk out there, maybe find the Path of the Dead and walk forever.
The thought is only in his head for a second before he shakes it loose, digging the heels of his hands into his eyes until there are bright colors blooming against his eyelids and the taste of puke isn’t so bad. He can’t get up. He can feel his legs cramping and he feels like he’s going to heave again but he can’t move.
He gets to his feet slowly, kneeling first on his knees and then just one and then he’s falling, his knees loose and shaky. He catches himself with his forearms, clumsily, his body sagging until his face hits the cool wall, balanced between his hands.
He can hear voices; Sam, maybe, excusing them, hustling Mikey off before he can put the pieces together. He’s a smart kid, make a great hunter some day. He’d figure it out. If he could bring himself to believe it. Then the wicker of Mikey’s horse, fading. Then silence.
He remembered Mikey well enough, when he’d tracked them down. Mikey hadn’t changed much, had gotten taller, thinner, but for all intents and purposes was still the same kid that Dean had dangled on a hook three years earlier. He would’ve remembered anyway.
He can still remember thinking that he would be forgiven for the shtriga, that after Dad cooled off, he’d give Dean a hug and tell him it was okay, even if it wasn’t. It had taken him weeks to figure out that wasn’t gonna happen, and by that time he was a whipped dog, running to please Sammy, Pastor Jim, anyone, but especially Dad. Never really shook that, especially when Dad loomed mythically large in Dean’s brain, any order coming down from on high. It still shames him, to think about it, even after they exorcised that particular demon. Hot, ugly humiliation sitting heavy on his shoulders. This is worse.
The wind kicks up as he turns his boots back towards the center of camp, throwing dust and dirt clods into his nose and mouth. It lifts his short hair away from his skull and blinds him. He stumbles forward, choking, and doesn’t see John until both of John’s hands are wrapped around Dean’s elbows, steadying him.
Dean jerks back instinctively, his eyes streaming. “What are you doing?” he yells. John doesn’t say anything, his face grim and the pressure on Dean’s elbows insistent, forcing him to his knees. It takes Dean a moment to get it and he pulls away from John long enough to yank his shirt off, pull it over both of their heads. The buildings are gone; camp is gone; Sam’s nowhere to be seen, and then, finally, he can breathe again.
He can barely hear John even though he’s panting, open-mouthed, in Dean’s ear, the hand that’s not holding his edge of the shirt down scrubbing furiously at the mud caked in his nose and mouth. They’re close enough that Dean can feel the heat baking off John’s skin.
He hopes Sam is okay. He hopes Michael’s got enough sense to find somewhere to hunker down, wait it out. The sand whips across his back, stinging his skin.
“Brothers,” John shouts. His mouth brushes against Dean’s ear. “I don’t even know what to fucking say.”
“None of your fucking business,” Dean shouts back. They tussle a little for space, moving back and then forward again as Dean’s shirt stretches out of shape. The wind howls. Little tendrils of dust work their way under the shirt and they grab the edges frantically, trying to keep it all out. Can’t fucking breathe through all of the dirt and wind and panic.
“All the secrets - the fake names - makes a lot more sense now,” John says. He’s not shouting anymore, not really, but the disgust, the anger in his voice is thick enough to cut. Dean used to talk to his dad, to the air, really, after John was gone - the same way he’d been leaving voice mails into the void, not really expecting a response. He quit doing it after the first time with Sam, too afraid to face a voice in his head. It’s exactly the way he pictured it, the little curl on John’s lip, the lift of his chin. And it’s just too much. Dean drops the edges of the shirt and grabs John’s collar with both hands, twisting it until their noses are touching.
“Shut the fuck up,” he growls into the face of his father. “You don’t understand, he’s all I have. You weren’t there.”
“That’s disgusting,” John snarls, and Dean leans back and punches him in the face.
It’s a solid hit and they go down, still tangled together in Dean’s shirt. John gets it off first and Dean flails out blindly, connects with something soft. Then John’s knee is in his belly and all the air rushes out of Dean’s lungs. He sucks in a breath instinctively, and instantly his mouth, his nose, his face are covered in sand and he can’t breathe. He can hear John choking and Dean’s choking, on his hands and knees in the dirt.
**
There’s not a lot of talking, after that. The whiteout dies down in a matter of minutes and they find Sam crouched in the big house, covered by John’s sleeping bag. The skin on Dean’s back is scraped raw, from the wind and rolling on the sand, and John’s nose is bleeding. It’s black with dust and clotted blood but he won’t let either of them touch it. He washes it out with the boiled cactus water and they can hear him hissing, outside.
Dean sits quietly while Sam cleans the scratches with water. Only a few bleed when Sam swipes the edge of a clean shirt over them, and Dean hardly moves at all. They avoid each other’s eyes.
There’s dust all over everything and Sam makes tentative motions towards shaking things off, packing things up. One way or another, they’ll be out of here soon. There’s sand in the peyote bag and Sam stares at it for a long time, watching the sun glint across the smooth surface, the way the gnarled surfaces swallow up the light.
Jesus, he can’t believe it. Six years and he feels as bad as if it really was their dad, their dad, not this inexperienced punk, who was sitting out there, cleaning his own wounds. Knowing what his sons did.
If he looks out the window, he can see John’s bowed head. He’s probably sitting with his legs stretched out in front of him, twisting his wedding band around his finger. Sam could walk out right now and just tell him, finish the nightmare so that when they sent John back to wherever he came from, he’d look at his boys and know what they were going to grow up to be.
He doesn’t hear Dean stand up; he’s so lost in thought that he startles a little when Dean pulls the bag out of his hands. Dean looks up at him, his eyes flat, and a little chill works its way up Sam’s spine. His mouth twitches but he doesn’t speak, and after a moment he looks down at the ground.
It doesn’t matter; they’ve been living shoulder to shoulder for so long that it’s never really been necessary to talk. “Come on,” Sam says, “let’s go get good and hydrated. It’s gonna be a long night.”
John stands when they step out of the building, facing them with empty hands, palms out. He opens his mouth but Sam just as quickly cuts him off. “We’ve got until dusk to get ready, so start getting ready.” John sets his head down, looking mulish, but Sam fought him for six years and, he realizes giddily, he’s older than John is now. He doesn’t have to listen.
“Look,” Sam says. “You can freak out or you can come with us and help us kill this thing, okay? We’re the best hope you have for getting back to your boys and whatever else we do isn’t any of your business. Got it?” He can feel Dean staring at him but he keeps his gaze steady until John drops his eyes.
There’s not a lot to do. They reconstruct the protective circle. Dean hunkers down to scratch protective symbols around the rim. They fill up their water bags. They double-check the pack, make sure the heat hasn’t gotten to any of the weapons. They don’t know what they’re facing and there’s a little bit of everything going into the bag. The sun’s on its way towards the hills by the time everything’s ready, and they take an early dinner sitting as far away from each other as they can get. Dean’s not talking much - he says a handful of words to Sam over the course of the day and none at all to John, and when he gets up and fishes the bag of peyote out of the duffel, Sam and John both tense.
They draw close and Dean hands out the caps as though he’s dealing cards: one to Sam, one to John, one for himself and then back around. The whiskey is gone, so they make do the best they can with water, chewing the caps just long enough to be able to wash them down, grimacing. They taste about as awful as they look but eventually, they all eat their share.
“I think I’m gonna puke,” Sam says, after a time. He can’t tell if it’s nerves, the peyote or the natural consequence of a stupidly fucked up day, but his stomach’s doing its best to get rid of everything he just put into it. He lifts his hands and stares at them; they’re trembling. A few feet away, Dean snorts laughter.
“Just ride it,” he says, his vowels loose and long. “You’ll feel good, I promise.”
For a moment, Sam can’t figure out who Dean’s talking to. He turns his head and finds John watching Dean, his eyes slitted and thoughtful. He thinks that Dean doesn’t notice, but after a moment Dean’s eyes find John’s and they consider each other over the fire, which licks across the bones of their faces as if it’s looking to devour them.
“Um,” Sam says, mentally reviewing his thought process. “I think I’m kinda high.”
“Me too,” John says thoughtfully, a weighty pause between the first word and the second. Dean’s grinning at them both, more cheerful than he’s been since they arrived in the badlands. Dean laughs again, harder this time. He and John still staring each other down.
And he’s lost in it. In them, in what could’ve been. In true, cliched fashion, he’d only realized what he had when it was gone. He’d treasured Jess, every day with her, even when he was full of ideas about what the rest of their lives would be like. He hadn’t had a life of his own for long enough to take it for granted and then the job became his life again, the endless road and his brother beside him. He chased Dad’s ghost for years, metaphorically and literally, and never caught up to it.
“I think I’ve figured it out,” Sam begins, and loses his train of thought when he notices the color of his hands. He brings them to his face, squints.
“You seein’ tracks?” Dean asks, grinning.
“Yeah,” Sam says, and he rides it, headlong down into a roller coaster that starts with watching the fire burn through his fingernails and palm and straight into his brain. He’s melting, the way that John said, not into the jungle but down into the sand, dissolving into time itself. A trite image, he thinks, right on the heel of the first thought, but it sticks. He can feel his entire life unraveling, all context and memory vanishing until he isn’t sure whether he’s done anything else in his life but sit too close to a fire in the badlands with his brother and his father.
Slowly, through the noise and the crackle of every nerve along his body, he hears singing, soft at first, hardly more then humming. He knows that it’s his father before he turns his head and sees John singing to the fire, his eyes soft and unfocused. He carries the melody softly, thoughtfully, better than Sam would think and it feels so fucking familiar that it hurts. He remembers this. Remembers the song, big hands on his face, his whole body heavy with sleep.
“If I get home before midnight, I just might get some sleep ... tonight,” John croons. His voice dies away, and with it goes all sound: the crackle of the fire, Dean’s voice; it all drops away to the shifting of the sand in the wind, pebbles skittering nervously across the surface of shale. And then nothing. Even the buzz of Sam’s senses, the instincts had been trained into him, always searching for the eyes on his back, have fallen still. He sucks in air, drowns in it - his chin touches his chest and then bobs up again. Across the fire, he sees Dean slump to one side, his shoulders lax and his eyelashes trailing shadows over his cheeks. John’s gone, his eyes closed, flat on his back in the sand.
There’s a smell in the air, a thick, gamy smell. Like rot, or an animal laid out to mummify in the sun. “Old bones,” Sam says out loud, pleased with the thought and terrified, somehow both at once, and he feels the press of a muzzle against his ear. The snort of hot breath against his skin and then - blackness.
Chapter 5
Chapter 4
It’s not the sun that wakes Sam up. It’s not bad dreams, though he’s had his share of them since they’ve been camped out in the badlands, full of fire and blood and bruises.
What wakes him up is the tinny sounds of his cell phone, playing “We Built This City” at top volume.
Dean makes a noise of utter suffering and throws his hands over his ears, scrunching up his face. “Sam make it stop,” he groans, the words all blurring together: sammakeitstop.
Sam gropes for the phone, fumbles it open. “H’lo,” he mutters.
“Sam, hey! Heh, did I wake you up? Billy’s kicking me out of his house even though it’s like, the ass crack of dawn and I thought I’d share the joy. You guys got anything to eat out there? I think I have to ride a horse or something -”
“Michael,” Sam says. Michael stops dead, obediently. Sam rubs a hand over his face, takes a moment to appreciate the moment of quiet. “Slow down.”
“All that Billy’ll give me is coffee, the cheap fucker. Coffee and a horse. The fuck kind of people you guys know, Sam?”
“You get it?” Sam asks. Dean shifts enough to punch blindly in Sam’s direction and connects with Sam’s elbow.
“Shut the fuck up,” he growls.
“Yeah, of course,” Michael says in Sam’s ear. “Easy peasy. Anyway, Billy says it’ll take me an hour, hour and a half to get out to you guys, and I know how much you hate surprise wake up calls, so - I’m on my way. I’m starving. I’ve got water and food and illegal substances. I’ll see you in about an hour.”
“Kay,” Sam sighs. He flips his phone closed and stares up at the ceiling blindly. He doesn’t want to be awake. He doesn’t want to have to get up. He sighs again and pushes to his feet.
Dean grumbles a little when Sam pulls the sleeping bag off him, throwing Sam’s half of the bottom bag over Dean. Sam lays the other sleeping bag a few feet away, kicks his pillow over to it and nudges it with his foot until it looks slept in. Dean’s already asleep again, the bag slipping enough to show the broad line of his shoulders, the bruise just below his hairline, almost healed. When it was new there were two clear half-moons, where Sam had bitten down right over the ridges of Dean’s spine. Every time he’d seen Dean rub the mark, wincing, it had made him almost blindingly hard. Seeing it again, even half-healed, makes Sam want to mark Dean all over again, roll him onto his belly and lick the sweat off his skin.
But. Michael’s voice, even over the phone, is enough of a deterrent, even if John wasn’t out there somewhere, possibly awake even now. When Michael was staying with them, he was constantly underfoot, especially when he wasn’t wanted, and the prospect of his imminent arrival makes Sam’s stomach hurt.
The air is stuffed full of that breathless sort of silence that reminds Sam of California in the early summer, those few short weeks when El Nino’s gone for another year, before the summer heat rolls in, blanketing the coast with fog. It’s a bearable temperature, when the sky is pink and raw, but there’s a heaviness in the sky that sits uneasily, as if the desert is drawing breath to speak.
He stokes the fire up and sets a pot of water on to boil. They’ve been making cowboy coffee all week and there’s a couple of protein bars left in Sam’s pack, good enough for breakfast. There might be some dried rabbit for Michael to eat, if he’s that hungry. Sam’s feeling spiteful enough to hope that they drink all the coffee before Michael arrives.
It’s a while before anyone else is up; the pot boils and Sam makes himself a bitter cup of coffee, sets the pot on a flat rock in the coals to keep it warm. John materializes just when Sam’s finishing his first cup, and he fixes more for both of them. They watch the sun come up and Sam blinks sleep out of his eyes, inhales the smell. The last time he was alone with his dad, it was - he thinks it was the vampire deal. It’s hard to remember now. It was a long time before Sam could think about Dad without remembering Dad’s death, that sad smile he gave Sam when he said please. I don’t wanna fight.
“You sleep okay?” Sam asks, finally.
“Well enough,” John grunts.
He didn’t even want to be there with Dad, stuck in some crappy room waiting for Dean to come back, feeling like his skin was about to crawl off his body. He hated John then, maybe not as much as he did when he was at school or when they were spending months running after the slightest scrap of contact. He’d been waiting for years to say - fuck, he didn’t even know anymore, it was so long ago. How could John leave them like that. How could he say all those things, tell his own son to get lost and stay that way. And then, worse than any of the others, how fucking good it felt to see him again.
“Your friend on his way yet?” John asks.
“Yeah,” Sam says. “Woke me up. Not Robert, though, oh no.”
The corner of John’s mouth lifts a little over the rim of his cup, and he turns away, grinning quietly. “What?” Sam asks. “What’s so funny?”
John shakes his head, shrugs his shoulders. Sam’s seen Dean do the same more times than he can count and it hurts a little to see that familiar roll. “Ah, it’s nothing,” John says. “Just - Mary, my wife, she was awfully good at sleeping through the baby monitor.”
Sam bursts out laughing, surprising himself. “Uh, yeah,” he says. “That sounds familiar.”
They finish their coffee in silence that’s more or less comfortable, John humming softly as he shifts the logs around, letting the air get under the chimney Sam built. Sam watches him with a little bit of concern, waiting for John to knock the fire down, but after a while he sits back quietly.
He sort of wants to ask how old John is, but he doesn’t really want to know.
They hear Michael coming before they see him, the thud of hooves across the hard sand, coming up from behind the camp, the same direction John had taken that night he’d tried to sneak up on them. Michael comes openly, either knowing they’ll hear him or not even thinking about it; stealth had never been one of his strong points. John looks to Sam and they go out to meet Michael together.
Michael’s hanging on for dear life, perched on top of a grey horse, and his look of repressed panic drops away instantly when he spots Sam. There’s a long moment of panic where Sam just knows Michael’s gonna shout “Sam Winchester!” at the top of his lungs, but all that Michael does is give them an abbreviated wave, cut short when he has to grab at the pommel to keep upright.
They hold the horse still while Michael shimmies awkwardly off, grinning broadly. He lands on Sam’s side and Sam pulls Michael in close, speaks low and rapid into his ear: “While you’re out here, my name’s Jimmy and Dean’s Robert, you got that?”
Michael’s eyes flick up to him, his grin faltering only slightly. He doesn’t say anything, just nods, and when John sticks his hand out, Michael shakes it easily enough. They introduce themselves, first names only, thank god, and they get the gray unloaded and settled with the other horses before leading Michael back to the campfire.
Mike, to his credit, doesn’t ask John how he wound up in the desert; he bitches about having to get up so early and tells them about the job he was working down in San Antonio, a fucking chupacabra, can you believe it, a gleeful light in his eyes. It’s only been a few months since he’s been allowed to go hunting on his own, and everything’s got that shiny new patina on it. Sam takes his revenge by offering Michael the very bottom of the pot. Michael picks the sunken grounds out of his teeth with hardly a pause. Sam’s just beginning to relax when a voice from behind them bawls out, “Mikey!”
Dean’s lounging, one shoulder up against the building they’ve got John sleeping in, one hand stuffed into the pocket of his jeans. Michael looks like Christmas has just come early, but he surprises Sam by greeting Dean with an enthusiastic, “Rob!”
When Michael first caught up with them in Beaverton, Oregon, Dean had said it was the worst idea Sam had ever had, to let him stay. That this kid, who Sam had barely even remembered, was going to get himself killed, get one of them killed, or just blow the whole job and bring the Feds down on their heads again. It had taken him approximately a day and a half to warm back up to the kid, who was small and almost helpless and more stubborn than John on his worst days. He hadn’t ever noticed, growing up, but Dean had one hell of a soft spot for kids, especially kids who looked at Dean as though he were a god.
Michael gets to his feet so that Dean can get a better look at him, one thumb on Mikey’s chin, admiring his black eye. “It’s no big deal,” Michael says dismissively, fighting down a smile.
“Chupacabra, huh?” Dean asks. “Yeah, they’re a bitch. Good job, kiddo.”
“Not good enough,” Michael says sourly, sitting back down. “Bobby was on my ass about it, said I was sloppy. I was on my way back to his place when you guys called, thought he was gonna literally rip me a new one when I told him I was gonna be a few days late.”
“Tell him we’ll make it up to him,” Dean says. Sam snorts. “Well, how about it, candyman? You gonna show us the goods or what?”
“Heh,” Michael says. “Hang on.” The bag’s in his duffel and he has to run to get it, but he hands it over to Dean with a solemnity that makes Sam want to laugh.
Dean studies the bag’s contents carefully, passes it all over to Sam with the judgment, “They’re like little fugly shrooms, aren’t they?”
Inside the freezer bag are maybe fifty ugly brown knobs, the quickest road to a spirit journey that they know of. “What the hell is that?” John asks.
“Peyote,” Michael says, with some satisfaction. “The best quality a white kid from Wisconsin can buy. Shit, if I had known I was gonna be crashing at the house of a genuine medicine man, I would’ve just waited.”
Dean claps him on the back. “Nice work, kid.”
**
“The original plan,” Sam explains, “was a vision quest. We got word of something really bad out here from Billy Ayawamat, a few weeks ago, and said we’d come, try to make contact with it, placate it if we could, kill it if we couldn’t.”
“Vision quests are rites of passages,” Dean says, picking up the narrative. “Traditionally, the seeker goes out into the wilderness alone, bringing nothing of society with them, and then ... waits. He sketches out a circle and fasts, prays - waits for the visions to come. Or heatstroke, whatever gets him first. It moves the soul into a place beyond all its normal concerns.”
“It lasted for four nights,” Sam says, his voice dropping. “Four’s the limit we set before we came out here.” He laughs, under his breath. It’s close enough to the truth, close enough that they don’t have to explain John’s presence, walking off the Path of the Dead as though he was Dean’s spirit guide. “After that, it was going to be too risky.”
“Insta-quest,” Mikey muses. “Just add hallucinogens.”
“Pretty much,” Dean says.
John’s eyes stray back to the bag of peyote, over and over. There was weed in Vietnam, lots of things if he’d wanted them. Peyote makes him think of the dog-eared paperbacks Mary’s little brother always carried around with him, too dense and weird for John to ever get through. He’d kept his hair as long as Michael’s is now, thick and messy over his face.
They talk fast, the three of them, easy in the language of hunters and transients. It makes John’s head hurt. He heard once that it was impossible to learn another language past a certain age; that all the little paths in your brain just up and died if you didn’t use them. He’ll never learn how to do this.
He looks up to see Robert watching him, his wide eyes narrowed. John offers a narrow smile, and Robert returns it with the twitch of an eyebrow. Jimmy's and Michael’s heads are close together, both grinning openly over the details of some case, some mutual friend, John doesn’t even know. There’s the sweat on his face and in the hollow of his throat and Robert’s eyes, far too bright in the dim light.
Robert blinks and then shakes his head hard, like a dog. “How about it, John?” he says, his mouth sliding up into a mocking grin. “You wanna get high?”
John has to laugh at that, like it’s some sort of line from an after-school special. Robert laughs too, nodding, like he appreciates the joke. “Get in on your hunt?” John asks. “Well - fuck yeah, actually. Been a long time, though. For that part of it, I mean.”
“The wilderness is the best place for it,” Robert says wisely. “Reconnecting with nature and all that shit. I mean, everything’s gonna feel all meaningful and special anyway, why not spend a half hour communing with a tree?”
“The heat was what got to me, in Nam,” John says, grinning. “I kept thinking I was going to melt, bones, muscle, all of it, and become part of the jungle. It wasn’t too bad, actually. A lot better than thinking about what was actually going on there.”
And Robert howls, shaking with laughter, reaching across to knock Jimmy’s arm. “I told you!” he crows. “You owe me five bucks, you son of a bitch!”
Jimmy’s looking at John with a mixture of surprise and awe. “Shut the hell up,” he says, and punches Robert back.
“Jimmy’s such a bitch about it,” Robert says confidingly, leaning in close to John. “He’s only ever had one hit off of one bong. And he lived in Northern California.”
“What a loser,” Mikey snorts. “Sometimes I can’t believe you guys are related, for real.”
There’s a long, echoing silence where they all turn to stare at Michael, who blinks at them. His eyes are red, from sand or sleeplessness. “Someone say something?” he asks, vaguely.
“What?” John says. He slides his palms down the length of his thighs, slowly, wiping the sweat off his hands. “What did you say?”
Michael looks back and forth between John and Robert, frowning. His mouth twitches, like he’s waiting for someone to cue him in to the joke. Robert’s face is white.
“Related?” John says. His fingers are numb. The smile on his face feels ghastly, frozen. “They didn’t tell me they were related.”
Michael’s staring at him as though John’s gone off his nut. “Yeah,” he says, slowly.
“Michael,” Jimmy says tightly, but Michael doesn’t hear.
“They’re brothers,” he says, and the words drop into John’s stomach like jagged chunks of ice.
Robert gets to his feet slowly, not looking at anybody, his hands clenching and unclenching at his sides, and walks out.
“What’s wrong?” Michael asks, his eyes wide. John looks, but can’t find any words.
**
Dean stares at the ground between his hunched body and the wall, his palms braced on the dry surface, the stringy puddle of bile that was all his stomach could bring up. Hadn’t even had coffee before Mikey showed up. His jaw tightens and his stomach heaves and he spits a bit more onto the ground. Wipes his chin with the back of his hand. He could walk out into the desert. Sammy’s a good tracker, but not as good as Dean. He could walk out there, maybe find the Path of the Dead and walk forever.
The thought is only in his head for a second before he shakes it loose, digging the heels of his hands into his eyes until there are bright colors blooming against his eyelids and the taste of puke isn’t so bad. He can’t get up. He can feel his legs cramping and he feels like he’s going to heave again but he can’t move.
He gets to his feet slowly, kneeling first on his knees and then just one and then he’s falling, his knees loose and shaky. He catches himself with his forearms, clumsily, his body sagging until his face hits the cool wall, balanced between his hands.
He can hear voices; Sam, maybe, excusing them, hustling Mikey off before he can put the pieces together. He’s a smart kid, make a great hunter some day. He’d figure it out. If he could bring himself to believe it. Then the wicker of Mikey’s horse, fading. Then silence.
He remembered Mikey well enough, when he’d tracked them down. Mikey hadn’t changed much, had gotten taller, thinner, but for all intents and purposes was still the same kid that Dean had dangled on a hook three years earlier. He would’ve remembered anyway.
He can still remember thinking that he would be forgiven for the shtriga, that after Dad cooled off, he’d give Dean a hug and tell him it was okay, even if it wasn’t. It had taken him weeks to figure out that wasn’t gonna happen, and by that time he was a whipped dog, running to please Sammy, Pastor Jim, anyone, but especially Dad. Never really shook that, especially when Dad loomed mythically large in Dean’s brain, any order coming down from on high. It still shames him, to think about it, even after they exorcised that particular demon. Hot, ugly humiliation sitting heavy on his shoulders. This is worse.
The wind kicks up as he turns his boots back towards the center of camp, throwing dust and dirt clods into his nose and mouth. It lifts his short hair away from his skull and blinds him. He stumbles forward, choking, and doesn’t see John until both of John’s hands are wrapped around Dean’s elbows, steadying him.
Dean jerks back instinctively, his eyes streaming. “What are you doing?” he yells. John doesn’t say anything, his face grim and the pressure on Dean’s elbows insistent, forcing him to his knees. It takes Dean a moment to get it and he pulls away from John long enough to yank his shirt off, pull it over both of their heads. The buildings are gone; camp is gone; Sam’s nowhere to be seen, and then, finally, he can breathe again.
He can barely hear John even though he’s panting, open-mouthed, in Dean’s ear, the hand that’s not holding his edge of the shirt down scrubbing furiously at the mud caked in his nose and mouth. They’re close enough that Dean can feel the heat baking off John’s skin.
He hopes Sam is okay. He hopes Michael’s got enough sense to find somewhere to hunker down, wait it out. The sand whips across his back, stinging his skin.
“Brothers,” John shouts. His mouth brushes against Dean’s ear. “I don’t even know what to fucking say.”
“None of your fucking business,” Dean shouts back. They tussle a little for space, moving back and then forward again as Dean’s shirt stretches out of shape. The wind howls. Little tendrils of dust work their way under the shirt and they grab the edges frantically, trying to keep it all out. Can’t fucking breathe through all of the dirt and wind and panic.
“All the secrets - the fake names - makes a lot more sense now,” John says. He’s not shouting anymore, not really, but the disgust, the anger in his voice is thick enough to cut. Dean used to talk to his dad, to the air, really, after John was gone - the same way he’d been leaving voice mails into the void, not really expecting a response. He quit doing it after the first time with Sam, too afraid to face a voice in his head. It’s exactly the way he pictured it, the little curl on John’s lip, the lift of his chin. And it’s just too much. Dean drops the edges of the shirt and grabs John’s collar with both hands, twisting it until their noses are touching.
“Shut the fuck up,” he growls into the face of his father. “You don’t understand, he’s all I have. You weren’t there.”
“That’s disgusting,” John snarls, and Dean leans back and punches him in the face.
It’s a solid hit and they go down, still tangled together in Dean’s shirt. John gets it off first and Dean flails out blindly, connects with something soft. Then John’s knee is in his belly and all the air rushes out of Dean’s lungs. He sucks in a breath instinctively, and instantly his mouth, his nose, his face are covered in sand and he can’t breathe. He can hear John choking and Dean’s choking, on his hands and knees in the dirt.
**
There’s not a lot of talking, after that. The whiteout dies down in a matter of minutes and they find Sam crouched in the big house, covered by John’s sleeping bag. The skin on Dean’s back is scraped raw, from the wind and rolling on the sand, and John’s nose is bleeding. It’s black with dust and clotted blood but he won’t let either of them touch it. He washes it out with the boiled cactus water and they can hear him hissing, outside.
Dean sits quietly while Sam cleans the scratches with water. Only a few bleed when Sam swipes the edge of a clean shirt over them, and Dean hardly moves at all. They avoid each other’s eyes.
There’s dust all over everything and Sam makes tentative motions towards shaking things off, packing things up. One way or another, they’ll be out of here soon. There’s sand in the peyote bag and Sam stares at it for a long time, watching the sun glint across the smooth surface, the way the gnarled surfaces swallow up the light.
Jesus, he can’t believe it. Six years and he feels as bad as if it really was their dad, their dad, not this inexperienced punk, who was sitting out there, cleaning his own wounds. Knowing what his sons did.
If he looks out the window, he can see John’s bowed head. He’s probably sitting with his legs stretched out in front of him, twisting his wedding band around his finger. Sam could walk out right now and just tell him, finish the nightmare so that when they sent John back to wherever he came from, he’d look at his boys and know what they were going to grow up to be.
He doesn’t hear Dean stand up; he’s so lost in thought that he startles a little when Dean pulls the bag out of his hands. Dean looks up at him, his eyes flat, and a little chill works its way up Sam’s spine. His mouth twitches but he doesn’t speak, and after a moment he looks down at the ground.
It doesn’t matter; they’ve been living shoulder to shoulder for so long that it’s never really been necessary to talk. “Come on,” Sam says, “let’s go get good and hydrated. It’s gonna be a long night.”
John stands when they step out of the building, facing them with empty hands, palms out. He opens his mouth but Sam just as quickly cuts him off. “We’ve got until dusk to get ready, so start getting ready.” John sets his head down, looking mulish, but Sam fought him for six years and, he realizes giddily, he’s older than John is now. He doesn’t have to listen.
“Look,” Sam says. “You can freak out or you can come with us and help us kill this thing, okay? We’re the best hope you have for getting back to your boys and whatever else we do isn’t any of your business. Got it?” He can feel Dean staring at him but he keeps his gaze steady until John drops his eyes.
There’s not a lot to do. They reconstruct the protective circle. Dean hunkers down to scratch protective symbols around the rim. They fill up their water bags. They double-check the pack, make sure the heat hasn’t gotten to any of the weapons. They don’t know what they’re facing and there’s a little bit of everything going into the bag. The sun’s on its way towards the hills by the time everything’s ready, and they take an early dinner sitting as far away from each other as they can get. Dean’s not talking much - he says a handful of words to Sam over the course of the day and none at all to John, and when he gets up and fishes the bag of peyote out of the duffel, Sam and John both tense.
They draw close and Dean hands out the caps as though he’s dealing cards: one to Sam, one to John, one for himself and then back around. The whiskey is gone, so they make do the best they can with water, chewing the caps just long enough to be able to wash them down, grimacing. They taste about as awful as they look but eventually, they all eat their share.
“I think I’m gonna puke,” Sam says, after a time. He can’t tell if it’s nerves, the peyote or the natural consequence of a stupidly fucked up day, but his stomach’s doing its best to get rid of everything he just put into it. He lifts his hands and stares at them; they’re trembling. A few feet away, Dean snorts laughter.
“Just ride it,” he says, his vowels loose and long. “You’ll feel good, I promise.”
For a moment, Sam can’t figure out who Dean’s talking to. He turns his head and finds John watching Dean, his eyes slitted and thoughtful. He thinks that Dean doesn’t notice, but after a moment Dean’s eyes find John’s and they consider each other over the fire, which licks across the bones of their faces as if it’s looking to devour them.
“Um,” Sam says, mentally reviewing his thought process. “I think I’m kinda high.”
“Me too,” John says thoughtfully, a weighty pause between the first word and the second. Dean’s grinning at them both, more cheerful than he’s been since they arrived in the badlands. Dean laughs again, harder this time. He and John still staring each other down.
And he’s lost in it. In them, in what could’ve been. In true, cliched fashion, he’d only realized what he had when it was gone. He’d treasured Jess, every day with her, even when he was full of ideas about what the rest of their lives would be like. He hadn’t had a life of his own for long enough to take it for granted and then the job became his life again, the endless road and his brother beside him. He chased Dad’s ghost for years, metaphorically and literally, and never caught up to it.
“I think I’ve figured it out,” Sam begins, and loses his train of thought when he notices the color of his hands. He brings them to his face, squints.
“You seein’ tracks?” Dean asks, grinning.
“Yeah,” Sam says, and he rides it, headlong down into a roller coaster that starts with watching the fire burn through his fingernails and palm and straight into his brain. He’s melting, the way that John said, not into the jungle but down into the sand, dissolving into time itself. A trite image, he thinks, right on the heel of the first thought, but it sticks. He can feel his entire life unraveling, all context and memory vanishing until he isn’t sure whether he’s done anything else in his life but sit too close to a fire in the badlands with his brother and his father.
Slowly, through the noise and the crackle of every nerve along his body, he hears singing, soft at first, hardly more then humming. He knows that it’s his father before he turns his head and sees John singing to the fire, his eyes soft and unfocused. He carries the melody softly, thoughtfully, better than Sam would think and it feels so fucking familiar that it hurts. He remembers this. Remembers the song, big hands on his face, his whole body heavy with sleep.
“If I get home before midnight, I just might get some sleep ... tonight,” John croons. His voice dies away, and with it goes all sound: the crackle of the fire, Dean’s voice; it all drops away to the shifting of the sand in the wind, pebbles skittering nervously across the surface of shale. And then nothing. Even the buzz of Sam’s senses, the instincts had been trained into him, always searching for the eyes on his back, have fallen still. He sucks in air, drowns in it - his chin touches his chest and then bobs up again. Across the fire, he sees Dean slump to one side, his shoulders lax and his eyelashes trailing shadows over his cheeks. John’s gone, his eyes closed, flat on his back in the sand.
There’s a smell in the air, a thick, gamy smell. Like rot, or an animal laid out to mummify in the sun. “Old bones,” Sam says out loud, pleased with the thought and terrified, somehow both at once, and he feels the press of a muzzle against his ear. The snort of hot breath against his skin and then - blackness.
Chapter 5