On The Wings of Fury, part 4
Previous Part
- - -
When the new, thin, spindly fuselage and wings coalesced out of the sand took shape and actually began resembling an airplane, Dean said something about it during dinner.
"We could name it Impala II," he said thoughtfully.
Andy hesitated. "Wouldn't that be, uh. Bad luck?"
Dean turned a glare on Andy to rival a bitchy teenage girl's. "I like that name."
"Yeah, but." Andy's shoulder's hunched, defensive. "Um. It crashed?"
He withered under Dean's gimlet eye, until Ava said, "Wasn't there a thing, a bird with flames, and rebirth?"
A phoenix, Sam's head supplied, and it clicked. The myth itself was shaky, but the bare-bones description was perfect. A bird that dove in flames to rise again rejuvenated and with new form to fly once more and live forever.
He pursed his lips to keep the explanation inside.
Bobby said, "You're thinkin' of a phoenix, Wilson."
She beamed. "Yes! Yeah. That. I am."
Dean shook his head, but didn't speak up. He let the point go.
Sam made a mental note to refer to it as the Impala II around his brother, no matter what.
- - -
Sam and Jo were lying on the sand during one of their breaks. Sam’s water was hotter than Sam’s tongue, and the two met in a gunky kind of paste that didn’t quench his thirst at all.
Sam dug his boots into the soft-swish sand and touched Jo’s arm, briefly. “Okay, I have to ask. How did you get stationed out in the middle of nowhere with your mother?”
Jo said, “She’s not my mother. She’s my dom. She just requires all her slaves to call her ‘mom’.”
Sam contemplates this. Then says, “Ew. Not really.”
“Not really,” Jo agrees. “She enlisted right out of high school, and had me on one of her breaks between tours. My dad died, my grandparents mostly raised me. I went to West Point and got a commission and got sent out here.”
Sam lay still in the soporific heat, and wondered if feeling hot and sleepy was a symptom of heat stroke just like hypothermia. That would be ironic. Also, he would be dying.
He asked, “They just let you take command over your mother? Don’t they have rules against that?”
“Oh, lots.” Jo’s hand waved in the air over her head, just at the edge of Sam’s vision. “Lots of rules. But they don’t know we’re related.”
“They thought the last name was a fluke?”
“Well, she uses her maiden name on official documents. I use Harvelle.”
“And you were shuffled together with her by accident.”
“I requested it.” She shrugged and worked hard to sit up. “Try giving your mother a dressing down. It’s a blast.”
“My mother’s dead.”
“Oh. Sorry.” Jo looked down at him and frowned. “I didn’t mean to make a thing of it.”
“It’s fine.” Sam was drifting, eyes almost closed against the sun, nearly ignoring the Phoenix’s wingtip above his head. “It was a plane crash, actually.”
“Must make this a little more horrific.”
“Not really. Hers blew up, she never hit the ground.”
Jo was awkwardly silent, head swiveling around to watch the others on their break.
Sam volunteered, “My Dad became a pilot after that, for closure, or something. I guess.”
She was still quiet, fingers moving in the sand, aimless, aimlessly searching for something. She finally met his eyes. “And then you did? Both of you brothers?”
Sam grinned, felt the lie like sand dust between his teeth. “I went to college.” Fell in love. Lost Jess to another plane crash. Got his license to fly, just like dear old Dad. “It didn’t work out. And here I am.”
“Lucky you,” Jo muttered.
A shadow fell over Sam’s eyes, and Dean was standing over him, upside-down. His hair was flat and depressed, and the dirt at his neck was mottled and messed from Dean’s habit of rubbing the back, there.
“Lucky me,” Sam agreed, and reached his hand up to his big brother.
Dean smirked. “Lazy-ass.” He circled around right-side-up and grabbed Sam’s hand and leaned back to get the right leverage. Sam helped, a little, and took his own weight to stand up.
He leaned into Dean a little more than usual, passed a hand from one of Dean’s hips across the small of his back to the other.
Dean gave him a long look, pursed his lips, considering. He put up an eyebrow. Everything okay?
Sam smiled as reassuringly as he could. “Hey. Isn’t it time for more slave labor?”
His older brother mimed cracking a whip. “Yeah, Sammy. Get to it.”
- - -
Three days later, it was finished. The Phoenix stood proud and apart from the sad, desiccated remains of the Impala - no matter how often Dean called it the ‘Impala II’ in private to Sam - and they had to set off one of their five flares to start and test the engine but it worked, and the propeller turned freely, and they could all harness up to it and taxi it around and out of their valley and into the next, the chosen runway.
And Sam and Dean pulled Ash aside and Dean said, “Now, explain from the ground up how we’re flying this thing.”
Ash shrugged. “Well, Dean-o can drive, and I’ll be on the rudder in the back. It’s separate. Kinda like a puppet show, only all our lives,” he made a frantic motion with his hands, “hang in balance, y’know, and stuff.”
Dean said, “Yeah, I call bullshit. That’ll be Sammy. Show him how to do it.”
Ash squinted up at the sun, then down at Sam’s shoulder. “Alright, but I’ll have to refigure the weight for the wings, place us all properly.”
“We can make up the difference, I don’t care how. But I’m not pilot if Sammy’s not my second.”
Ash tossed his shoulders around and mustered up the impression that Dean hadn’t totally cowed him a couple days before. “Have it your way.”
“I will.”
Sam would have called him a sentimental girl, only that was a little hypocritical.
- - -
They were going to fly the Phoenix tomorrow.
Which inherently involved the massive probability that Ash was a fucking liar and they were all going to die horrifically. In flames.
Very, very ironic flames.
Dean gazed thoughtfully at the console, gutted and ruined, wires still trailing over the mesh metal floor.
“Immm-paaah-laaah,” he said, singsong slow, stretching the name out thoughtfully and solemnly.
Sam sat nearly on top of him, mostly wrapped up in him, nose tucked into the gap in Dean’s clavicle. He didn’t mind the gamey smell anymore, the sweat and the dirty and the Dean.
Sam said, “Impala II.”
Dean set his hand on Sam’s shoulder. “When we get out of here.”
Deep breath. In, Dean, out. Sam said, “We’ll get another plane.”
Dean’s fingertips carefully pressed into Sam’s skin in a random pattern. “No, Sammy, when we get out of here,” and he moved his hand, rubbed solid and sure and familiar.
“I love you, Dean,” Sam said, and the words weren’t a revelation but they should have been.
“Love you, too,” Dean shot back fiercely, arms around Sam’s shoulders, possessive.
Sam touched his older brother’s knee, and finished, “So. When we get back, I’ll still.”
Dean rumbled, like purring, and hitched Sam in closer, somehow. “Yeah. Yeah, okay.”
- - -
They were going to fly today.
Ava stood near Sam, a little behind him, watching the sun rise. It was already too hot. Stupid fucking desert.
The Phoenix stood proud and young and awkwardly proportioned just outside their camp. The sand dropped off into sandstone, solid enough to use as a runway, and “probably long enough, too,” according to Ash.
Sam really, really hated Ash.
Ava said, “We’re really getting out, huh?”
“Yeah,” Sam said, and didn’t feel guilty for feigned certainty. She needed it.
She turned back to watch the people emerging from the tent that covered the cannibalized remains of the Impala. Sam caught Dean’s back out of the corner of his eye and didn’t stare. He also didn’t notice Jo approach Dean, or Jo scuff her boot in the sand like a seven-year-old with a crush.
“I wonder,” Ava started, and swallowed. “My fiancé, right? I wonder if they’ve told him, yet. That I’m MIA. Or, jesus, KIA.”
Sam completely ignored Jo hitting on Dean and jostled his shoulder against Ava’s. He smiled, and joked, “You think he’s gone a whole tour without you only to forget you and take another woman in the last three weeks? After they figured out we didn’t make checkpoint. And then decided to inform him. So, more like one week.”
“Yeah. That’d be a little suspicious,” Ava giggled. “Oh, she’s missing? Let me finish up with the neighbor’s wife, hang on a second.”
She laughed weakly for a few seconds more. And then stopped.
- - -
They had to use a flare gun for a spark, to ignite the Phoenix and get the engine running.
Sam sat in his backwards-facing seat, holding the two steering joysticks that pulled the rudder to the left or right.
Ava, Jo, Andy, and Ellen were strapped in on the right wing, Ash and Bobby on the left, Dean and Sam back-to-back on the fuselage. Sam fiddled with the rudder, making the flap at the end of the tail twist this way or that, for a few minutes.
Without warning or buildup, Dean set off the first flare.
The propeller jumped, swung clockwise and slow, ground to a stop.
Everyone was absolutely silent with the effort not to look at Ash.
Dean shifted around in his seat and set the second flare off. The full gun had six. Four left.
The propeller didn’t even try this time.
The absence of noise in a desert was oppressive, trying to burst Sam’s eardrums, especially since he expected to hear the engine he was straddling.
Dean’s seat squealed and stuttered against the metal of the Phoenix. Sam turned around, back stretched and strained from hauling the entire pseudo-plane into position, and met Dean’s eyes.
Dean was not panicking. He wasn’t even close. Almost casually, he said, “Engine might be flooded, standing still so long. Gunk, you know?”
Sam volunteered, “I’ll go check.”
He tipped over the edge of the fuselage and landed scatter-sprawled and tense. His fingers were shaking.
They were going to get out. Dean said. Dean said, and Sam believed him, and Sam trusted him. This wasn’t some clever stall tactic just because Dean wasn’t sure.
Sam worked a panel off the underside of the engine’s casing and put probing fingers up inside, hoping he wouldn’t catch something and cut himself.
Idly, he commented, “Hey, Dean, I’m inside the Impala II.”
“Fuck you, Sammy,” Dean yelled down, but his smile must have been licking the back of his teeth, Sam could hear it.
“Aw, you’re sweet,” Sam sent back.
Gunk, black tarry goo on his fingers when he pulled them out.
Sam called, “Yeah, it’s flooded. Anyone got the lighter?”
“Here, Sam,” Bobby grumbled, investigating his pockets and folds in his clothes. The lighter flew in a high arc a few seconds later.
Sam struck a light and held it and eased his thumb off, let it go out. He hesitated, and said, “Dean, if this thing lights up and I burn off your face, I’ll feel really bad about it.”
Ava said, “What?”
Dean said, “You better be. Do it.”
Andy said, “‘Lights up’?”
Sam struck a light again and set the black grease buildup of jet engine fuel on fire.
It all blew out in one flume, hotter against Sam’s cheeks than the white-hot sun, and then nothing.
Heart pounding, Sam called, “Dean.”
“I’m okay. Nothing’s wrong,” Dean was quiet, and soft, and comforting Sam, and Sam was going to take every comfort he could get. “Get your ass up here.”
Sam scrambled up into his rudder position. “Does she start?”
Dean’s back was tense, awkward, unfamiliar in the Impala’s chair and a different plane. A line of damp ran from his hair to his collar, and Sam wanted to…
It wasn’t like it had been before. Sam had impulses, now, to touch, to comfort, reassure, Dean wasn’t panicking but maybe Sam sort of was and Sam wanted contact with him.
Dean turned his head and winked at Sam and, just for a second, his tongue touched his chapped, chafing lip.
Sam felt better. It was illogical. It was sociopolitics. Dean was the leader, Sam followed him, Sam took comfort from him.
Dean yanked the trigger and the flare went off and the propeller kicked, coughed, jumped, skipped, and finally settled into a loping sort of sprint.
For a second, Sam was deaf, the engine turning under him and the wind in his eyes.
He could breathe, he was so relieved.
Then sound snapped back and everyone was yelling, hollering, screaming in celebration, and Dean reached, reached, strained to touch a finger to Sam shoulder and make sure he was paying attention.
Dean grabbed the throttle, took control, and they began the too-fast flight out of the middle of Hell.
- - -
They didn’t have a radio, so it was mostly luck that the base let them land.
By time and air speed, they had been two hundred miles out from the base the whole time. Sam had the feeling that if he looked on a map, the wreck of the Impala would be devastatingly close to some goat-watering hole for nomads or something.
That was all superseded by the hey-you’re-alive! greetings and doctors’ visits and the IV drip for Ellen, who had been severely, morbidly dehydrated for at least three days and not told anyone.
Also, they drank water. Water that was cold.
Cold water.
And there were showers involved.
And new clothes, and nice clean hospital sheets, and socks that contained no sand.
It was heaven. Sam was half convinced that they’d died, after all.
Except, well. Hospital food still sucked, even after three weeks of nothing but sand grit and MREs.
Four days after the ‘rescue’ that they’d performed themselves, they were all released from hospital care and standing in a tent near the runway.
Sam carried a water bottle with him everywhere, still, taking sips and gulps every couple of minutes. Dean had gotten back into the habit of dragging on his canteen like it was a flask of whiskey.
Andy looked clean-polished and combed, shaved and healthy. He wasn’t planning to become a paramedic anymore. He wasn’t planning to stay in the military, either.
Ava’s hair was alive and voluminous, and she was dressed in civilian jeans and button-up blouse.
(She smiled and waved at Sam, but didn’t come closer. He stayed back, too, and let her twist the ring on her right hand around and around.)
Bobby had transformed into the kind uncle, who dressed up as Santa Claus for Christmas and gave kids their first bikes with training wheels. Sam couldn’t believe that he’d watched this guy tug a giant tent spike out of his thigh.
Ellen and Jo were staying safe and tight together, talking in low voices. Ellen kept straightening Jo’s uniform, a fussing mother and impatient daughter.
(Jo gravitated toward Dean and said, “Hey, Mr. Hero,” and Dean grinned a little ruefully and she turned bright red and sighed and said, “Shit, it was worth a shot,” and turned back to her mother.)
Ash didn’t show up. Sam was pretty sure he was busy building things that didn’t have propellers. He spared a few spiteful moments to wish a laboratory accident on the bastard before backing off and accepting that, yes, the plane flew.
And Dean was just. He looked changed entirely, no stubble, no painted canvas swirls of dirt across his cheeks or neck, shirt that fit properly and wasn’t bleached by the sun or ruined by work. He was Dean, Sam’s big brother, the one he’d known for twenty-five years. He was familiar.
But after three weeks with the Dean that meted out duties and rations and orders, held ten lives in his hands going in and eight coming out, walked through a circle of people that stood aside for him…
Sam hadn’t talked to Dean about it. Four days, and it was all just bitching about hospital food or teasing Sam for meticulously retracing their steps to plot on a map or pitching ideas back and forth for the perfect contact sport - a cross between shot put and rugby, judging by the rules they had spun together.
The plane to take them over the Mediterranean and Atlantic was scheduled to arrive in fifteen minutes.
Sam was… lonely. In plain terms, he was lonely.
He must have made a face at that, because Dean’s hand found his hip and Dean leaned into him to say, “Come here a second.”
Sam was two steps behind him, following him back to the tiny, permanent-structure hospital, before he realized that it was an order to jump and Sam hadn’t even bothered to ask how high.
Dean ducked into the first empty room they passed, and spun abruptly so that Sam stopped a second too late and they were nose to nose. “Hey, Sammy,” Dean said, and tied his fingers into the hair at Sam’s neck and pulled him down into a kiss that very, very quickly turned into making out against the wall.
Sam’s weight held Dean, and Sam could feel Dean’s heartbeat in his own chest, and Dean stopped for some air and to shrug. “You said you’d still.” He untangled one arm enough to wave between them.
“I do, yeah, I do, Dean,” Sam promised.
Dean chuckled, easy and pleased, relaxed like the entire Phoenix thing and losing the Impala hadn’t put a dent in him. He confessed, “Around all the rest of those guys, it kinda feels like I’m performing, like they still expect me to give them some job to do.” His thigh moved, and brushed Sam’s leg, and up, and higher. Then it sank down guiltily. “I can hear the plane coming in.”
Sam could, too. Damn it.
“Damn it.”
“Move, Sammy,” Dean said, and he led the way out to the tent again.
Watching the clunky, recycled, military supply plane taxi up to them felt like - nothing. Sam didn’t think it could crash. Statistically speaking.
He said, “We should start our own business. Fuck contracting.”
Dean gave him a slow, amused glance, and licked his swollen lips. “Oh, really.”
Sam flashed him a shit-eating grin. He suggested, “Phoenix Airlines?”
“If it doesn’t have the word Impala in there somewhere, I’m gonna get Bobby to keep you off that little airship and I’ll disown you.”
“The logo would be flames. Or fiery somehow.”
“My brother is dead to me.”
“We could only fly to desert locales.”
“I feel no grief, though. I’m pretty sure he was adopted.”
“Someone would have to paint a giant orange bird pissing on a broken plane. It would hang in the CEO’s study.”
“Oh, fuck you, Sammy.”
Their shoulders jostled as they walked out in step with one another, and then all of them - Sam, Andy, Ava, Bobby, Ellen, and Jo - stepped aside to let Dean board first.
He’d earned the right.
- - -
When the new, thin, spindly fuselage and wings coalesced out of the sand took shape and actually began resembling an airplane, Dean said something about it during dinner.
"We could name it Impala II," he said thoughtfully.
Andy hesitated. "Wouldn't that be, uh. Bad luck?"
Dean turned a glare on Andy to rival a bitchy teenage girl's. "I like that name."
"Yeah, but." Andy's shoulder's hunched, defensive. "Um. It crashed?"
He withered under Dean's gimlet eye, until Ava said, "Wasn't there a thing, a bird with flames, and rebirth?"
A phoenix, Sam's head supplied, and it clicked. The myth itself was shaky, but the bare-bones description was perfect. A bird that dove in flames to rise again rejuvenated and with new form to fly once more and live forever.
He pursed his lips to keep the explanation inside.
Bobby said, "You're thinkin' of a phoenix, Wilson."
She beamed. "Yes! Yeah. That. I am."
Dean shook his head, but didn't speak up. He let the point go.
Sam made a mental note to refer to it as the Impala II around his brother, no matter what.
- - -
Sam and Jo were lying on the sand during one of their breaks. Sam’s water was hotter than Sam’s tongue, and the two met in a gunky kind of paste that didn’t quench his thirst at all.
Sam dug his boots into the soft-swish sand and touched Jo’s arm, briefly. “Okay, I have to ask. How did you get stationed out in the middle of nowhere with your mother?”
Jo said, “She’s not my mother. She’s my dom. She just requires all her slaves to call her ‘mom’.”
Sam contemplates this. Then says, “Ew. Not really.”
“Not really,” Jo agrees. “She enlisted right out of high school, and had me on one of her breaks between tours. My dad died, my grandparents mostly raised me. I went to West Point and got a commission and got sent out here.”
Sam lay still in the soporific heat, and wondered if feeling hot and sleepy was a symptom of heat stroke just like hypothermia. That would be ironic. Also, he would be dying.
He asked, “They just let you take command over your mother? Don’t they have rules against that?”
“Oh, lots.” Jo’s hand waved in the air over her head, just at the edge of Sam’s vision. “Lots of rules. But they don’t know we’re related.”
“They thought the last name was a fluke?”
“Well, she uses her maiden name on official documents. I use Harvelle.”
“And you were shuffled together with her by accident.”
“I requested it.” She shrugged and worked hard to sit up. “Try giving your mother a dressing down. It’s a blast.”
“My mother’s dead.”
“Oh. Sorry.” Jo looked down at him and frowned. “I didn’t mean to make a thing of it.”
“It’s fine.” Sam was drifting, eyes almost closed against the sun, nearly ignoring the Phoenix’s wingtip above his head. “It was a plane crash, actually.”
“Must make this a little more horrific.”
“Not really. Hers blew up, she never hit the ground.”
Jo was awkwardly silent, head swiveling around to watch the others on their break.
Sam volunteered, “My Dad became a pilot after that, for closure, or something. I guess.”
She was still quiet, fingers moving in the sand, aimless, aimlessly searching for something. She finally met his eyes. “And then you did? Both of you brothers?”
Sam grinned, felt the lie like sand dust between his teeth. “I went to college.” Fell in love. Lost Jess to another plane crash. Got his license to fly, just like dear old Dad. “It didn’t work out. And here I am.”
“Lucky you,” Jo muttered.
A shadow fell over Sam’s eyes, and Dean was standing over him, upside-down. His hair was flat and depressed, and the dirt at his neck was mottled and messed from Dean’s habit of rubbing the back, there.
“Lucky me,” Sam agreed, and reached his hand up to his big brother.
Dean smirked. “Lazy-ass.” He circled around right-side-up and grabbed Sam’s hand and leaned back to get the right leverage. Sam helped, a little, and took his own weight to stand up.
He leaned into Dean a little more than usual, passed a hand from one of Dean’s hips across the small of his back to the other.
Dean gave him a long look, pursed his lips, considering. He put up an eyebrow. Everything okay?
Sam smiled as reassuringly as he could. “Hey. Isn’t it time for more slave labor?”
His older brother mimed cracking a whip. “Yeah, Sammy. Get to it.”
- - -
Three days later, it was finished. The Phoenix stood proud and apart from the sad, desiccated remains of the Impala - no matter how often Dean called it the ‘Impala II’ in private to Sam - and they had to set off one of their five flares to start and test the engine but it worked, and the propeller turned freely, and they could all harness up to it and taxi it around and out of their valley and into the next, the chosen runway.
And Sam and Dean pulled Ash aside and Dean said, “Now, explain from the ground up how we’re flying this thing.”
Ash shrugged. “Well, Dean-o can drive, and I’ll be on the rudder in the back. It’s separate. Kinda like a puppet show, only all our lives,” he made a frantic motion with his hands, “hang in balance, y’know, and stuff.”
Dean said, “Yeah, I call bullshit. That’ll be Sammy. Show him how to do it.”
Ash squinted up at the sun, then down at Sam’s shoulder. “Alright, but I’ll have to refigure the weight for the wings, place us all properly.”
“We can make up the difference, I don’t care how. But I’m not pilot if Sammy’s not my second.”
Ash tossed his shoulders around and mustered up the impression that Dean hadn’t totally cowed him a couple days before. “Have it your way.”
“I will.”
Sam would have called him a sentimental girl, only that was a little hypocritical.
- - -
They were going to fly the Phoenix tomorrow.
Which inherently involved the massive probability that Ash was a fucking liar and they were all going to die horrifically. In flames.
Very, very ironic flames.
Dean gazed thoughtfully at the console, gutted and ruined, wires still trailing over the mesh metal floor.
“Immm-paaah-laaah,” he said, singsong slow, stretching the name out thoughtfully and solemnly.
Sam sat nearly on top of him, mostly wrapped up in him, nose tucked into the gap in Dean’s clavicle. He didn’t mind the gamey smell anymore, the sweat and the dirty and the Dean.
Sam said, “Impala II.”
Dean set his hand on Sam’s shoulder. “When we get out of here.”
Deep breath. In, Dean, out. Sam said, “We’ll get another plane.”
Dean’s fingertips carefully pressed into Sam’s skin in a random pattern. “No, Sammy, when we get out of here,” and he moved his hand, rubbed solid and sure and familiar.
“I love you, Dean,” Sam said, and the words weren’t a revelation but they should have been.
“Love you, too,” Dean shot back fiercely, arms around Sam’s shoulders, possessive.
Sam touched his older brother’s knee, and finished, “So. When we get back, I’ll still.”
Dean rumbled, like purring, and hitched Sam in closer, somehow. “Yeah. Yeah, okay.”
- - -
They were going to fly today.
Ava stood near Sam, a little behind him, watching the sun rise. It was already too hot. Stupid fucking desert.
The Phoenix stood proud and young and awkwardly proportioned just outside their camp. The sand dropped off into sandstone, solid enough to use as a runway, and “probably long enough, too,” according to Ash.
Sam really, really hated Ash.
Ava said, “We’re really getting out, huh?”
“Yeah,” Sam said, and didn’t feel guilty for feigned certainty. She needed it.
She turned back to watch the people emerging from the tent that covered the cannibalized remains of the Impala. Sam caught Dean’s back out of the corner of his eye and didn’t stare. He also didn’t notice Jo approach Dean, or Jo scuff her boot in the sand like a seven-year-old with a crush.
“I wonder,” Ava started, and swallowed. “My fiancé, right? I wonder if they’ve told him, yet. That I’m MIA. Or, jesus, KIA.”
Sam completely ignored Jo hitting on Dean and jostled his shoulder against Ava’s. He smiled, and joked, “You think he’s gone a whole tour without you only to forget you and take another woman in the last three weeks? After they figured out we didn’t make checkpoint. And then decided to inform him. So, more like one week.”
“Yeah. That’d be a little suspicious,” Ava giggled. “Oh, she’s missing? Let me finish up with the neighbor’s wife, hang on a second.”
She laughed weakly for a few seconds more. And then stopped.
- - -
They had to use a flare gun for a spark, to ignite the Phoenix and get the engine running.
Sam sat in his backwards-facing seat, holding the two steering joysticks that pulled the rudder to the left or right.
Ava, Jo, Andy, and Ellen were strapped in on the right wing, Ash and Bobby on the left, Dean and Sam back-to-back on the fuselage. Sam fiddled with the rudder, making the flap at the end of the tail twist this way or that, for a few minutes.
Without warning or buildup, Dean set off the first flare.
The propeller jumped, swung clockwise and slow, ground to a stop.
Everyone was absolutely silent with the effort not to look at Ash.
Dean shifted around in his seat and set the second flare off. The full gun had six. Four left.
The propeller didn’t even try this time.
The absence of noise in a desert was oppressive, trying to burst Sam’s eardrums, especially since he expected to hear the engine he was straddling.
Dean’s seat squealed and stuttered against the metal of the Phoenix. Sam turned around, back stretched and strained from hauling the entire pseudo-plane into position, and met Dean’s eyes.
Dean was not panicking. He wasn’t even close. Almost casually, he said, “Engine might be flooded, standing still so long. Gunk, you know?”
Sam volunteered, “I’ll go check.”
He tipped over the edge of the fuselage and landed scatter-sprawled and tense. His fingers were shaking.
They were going to get out. Dean said. Dean said, and Sam believed him, and Sam trusted him. This wasn’t some clever stall tactic just because Dean wasn’t sure.
Sam worked a panel off the underside of the engine’s casing and put probing fingers up inside, hoping he wouldn’t catch something and cut himself.
Idly, he commented, “Hey, Dean, I’m inside the Impala II.”
“Fuck you, Sammy,” Dean yelled down, but his smile must have been licking the back of his teeth, Sam could hear it.
“Aw, you’re sweet,” Sam sent back.
Gunk, black tarry goo on his fingers when he pulled them out.
Sam called, “Yeah, it’s flooded. Anyone got the lighter?”
“Here, Sam,” Bobby grumbled, investigating his pockets and folds in his clothes. The lighter flew in a high arc a few seconds later.
Sam struck a light and held it and eased his thumb off, let it go out. He hesitated, and said, “Dean, if this thing lights up and I burn off your face, I’ll feel really bad about it.”
Ava said, “What?”
Dean said, “You better be. Do it.”
Andy said, “‘Lights up’?”
Sam struck a light again and set the black grease buildup of jet engine fuel on fire.
It all blew out in one flume, hotter against Sam’s cheeks than the white-hot sun, and then nothing.
Heart pounding, Sam called, “Dean.”
“I’m okay. Nothing’s wrong,” Dean was quiet, and soft, and comforting Sam, and Sam was going to take every comfort he could get. “Get your ass up here.”
Sam scrambled up into his rudder position. “Does she start?”
Dean’s back was tense, awkward, unfamiliar in the Impala’s chair and a different plane. A line of damp ran from his hair to his collar, and Sam wanted to…
It wasn’t like it had been before. Sam had impulses, now, to touch, to comfort, reassure, Dean wasn’t panicking but maybe Sam sort of was and Sam wanted contact with him.
Dean turned his head and winked at Sam and, just for a second, his tongue touched his chapped, chafing lip.
Sam felt better. It was illogical. It was sociopolitics. Dean was the leader, Sam followed him, Sam took comfort from him.
Dean yanked the trigger and the flare went off and the propeller kicked, coughed, jumped, skipped, and finally settled into a loping sort of sprint.
For a second, Sam was deaf, the engine turning under him and the wind in his eyes.
He could breathe, he was so relieved.
Then sound snapped back and everyone was yelling, hollering, screaming in celebration, and Dean reached, reached, strained to touch a finger to Sam shoulder and make sure he was paying attention.
Dean grabbed the throttle, took control, and they began the too-fast flight out of the middle of Hell.
- - -
They didn’t have a radio, so it was mostly luck that the base let them land.
By time and air speed, they had been two hundred miles out from the base the whole time. Sam had the feeling that if he looked on a map, the wreck of the Impala would be devastatingly close to some goat-watering hole for nomads or something.
That was all superseded by the hey-you’re-alive! greetings and doctors’ visits and the IV drip for Ellen, who had been severely, morbidly dehydrated for at least three days and not told anyone.
Also, they drank water. Water that was cold.
Cold water.
And there were showers involved.
And new clothes, and nice clean hospital sheets, and socks that contained no sand.
It was heaven. Sam was half convinced that they’d died, after all.
Except, well. Hospital food still sucked, even after three weeks of nothing but sand grit and MREs.
Four days after the ‘rescue’ that they’d performed themselves, they were all released from hospital care and standing in a tent near the runway.
Sam carried a water bottle with him everywhere, still, taking sips and gulps every couple of minutes. Dean had gotten back into the habit of dragging on his canteen like it was a flask of whiskey.
Andy looked clean-polished and combed, shaved and healthy. He wasn’t planning to become a paramedic anymore. He wasn’t planning to stay in the military, either.
Ava’s hair was alive and voluminous, and she was dressed in civilian jeans and button-up blouse.
(She smiled and waved at Sam, but didn’t come closer. He stayed back, too, and let her twist the ring on her right hand around and around.)
Bobby had transformed into the kind uncle, who dressed up as Santa Claus for Christmas and gave kids their first bikes with training wheels. Sam couldn’t believe that he’d watched this guy tug a giant tent spike out of his thigh.
Ellen and Jo were staying safe and tight together, talking in low voices. Ellen kept straightening Jo’s uniform, a fussing mother and impatient daughter.
(Jo gravitated toward Dean and said, “Hey, Mr. Hero,” and Dean grinned a little ruefully and she turned bright red and sighed and said, “Shit, it was worth a shot,” and turned back to her mother.)
Ash didn’t show up. Sam was pretty sure he was busy building things that didn’t have propellers. He spared a few spiteful moments to wish a laboratory accident on the bastard before backing off and accepting that, yes, the plane flew.
And Dean was just. He looked changed entirely, no stubble, no painted canvas swirls of dirt across his cheeks or neck, shirt that fit properly and wasn’t bleached by the sun or ruined by work. He was Dean, Sam’s big brother, the one he’d known for twenty-five years. He was familiar.
But after three weeks with the Dean that meted out duties and rations and orders, held ten lives in his hands going in and eight coming out, walked through a circle of people that stood aside for him…
Sam hadn’t talked to Dean about it. Four days, and it was all just bitching about hospital food or teasing Sam for meticulously retracing their steps to plot on a map or pitching ideas back and forth for the perfect contact sport - a cross between shot put and rugby, judging by the rules they had spun together.
The plane to take them over the Mediterranean and Atlantic was scheduled to arrive in fifteen minutes.
Sam was… lonely. In plain terms, he was lonely.
He must have made a face at that, because Dean’s hand found his hip and Dean leaned into him to say, “Come here a second.”
Sam was two steps behind him, following him back to the tiny, permanent-structure hospital, before he realized that it was an order to jump and Sam hadn’t even bothered to ask how high.
Dean ducked into the first empty room they passed, and spun abruptly so that Sam stopped a second too late and they were nose to nose. “Hey, Sammy,” Dean said, and tied his fingers into the hair at Sam’s neck and pulled him down into a kiss that very, very quickly turned into making out against the wall.
Sam’s weight held Dean, and Sam could feel Dean’s heartbeat in his own chest, and Dean stopped for some air and to shrug. “You said you’d still.” He untangled one arm enough to wave between them.
“I do, yeah, I do, Dean,” Sam promised.
Dean chuckled, easy and pleased, relaxed like the entire Phoenix thing and losing the Impala hadn’t put a dent in him. He confessed, “Around all the rest of those guys, it kinda feels like I’m performing, like they still expect me to give them some job to do.” His thigh moved, and brushed Sam’s leg, and up, and higher. Then it sank down guiltily. “I can hear the plane coming in.”
Sam could, too. Damn it.
“Damn it.”
“Move, Sammy,” Dean said, and he led the way out to the tent again.
Watching the clunky, recycled, military supply plane taxi up to them felt like - nothing. Sam didn’t think it could crash. Statistically speaking.
He said, “We should start our own business. Fuck contracting.”
Dean gave him a slow, amused glance, and licked his swollen lips. “Oh, really.”
Sam flashed him a shit-eating grin. He suggested, “Phoenix Airlines?”
“If it doesn’t have the word Impala in there somewhere, I’m gonna get Bobby to keep you off that little airship and I’ll disown you.”
“The logo would be flames. Or fiery somehow.”
“My brother is dead to me.”
“We could only fly to desert locales.”
“I feel no grief, though. I’m pretty sure he was adopted.”
“Someone would have to paint a giant orange bird pissing on a broken plane. It would hang in the CEO’s study.”
“Oh, fuck you, Sammy.”
Their shoulders jostled as they walked out in step with one another, and then all of them - Sam, Andy, Ava, Bobby, Ellen, and Jo - stepped aside to let Dean board first.
He’d earned the right.