FIC: Orpheus At The Gates
Castiel is made of so much awesome. The second episode was just as impressive as the first. BOBBY IS LOVE.
And I wrote an SPN story. It's whole, it doesn't suck, it's pure SPN and not a convoluted crossover that makes me disgusted with my ability to write. It's not exactly a feel-good hit of the summer, but hey. Apparently my strong stories are angsty death-filled depressionfests and I write people in moments of crisis and shock really well. Go figure what that says about me.
Title: Orpheus At The Gates
Author: ravenclaw42
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: PG
Summary: Twenty-four hours following the end of No Rest for the Wicked.
Author's Notes: Spoilers for season 4 premiere, in a way. So lots of details people noticed about Dean’s return in Lazarus Rising led me to start itching to know why. Little things like Sam taking the amulet, Dean’s clothes being changed, the shift in location from Dean’s death in New Harmony, Indiana to his burial near Pontiac, Illinois (over four hours away), where they got the coffin, what they did with Ruby’s old body, the fact that Sam and Bobby must have been together and interacting for the whole time. So this story contains retroactive continuity for Lazarus Rising despite being set immediately after No Rest for the Wicked.
Orpheus is Sam, seen through Bobby's eyes. He's looking down into hell and deciding whether or not to follow Eurydice. (Interpret the lovers vs. brothers thing as you will. I think the intensity of codependency & love is the same with or without any added sex/marriage/romance concepts.) I might do an Orpheus Descending and/or an Orpheus Ascending -- I have ideas. We'll see.
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Orpheus At The Gates
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With Sam at the wheel, Bobby riding shotgun and an occupied quilt shroud in the back, they drove out of New Harmony. Bobby didn’t question it. They just went.
After the brothers had broken in to deal with Lilith, Bobby had heard little of what was going on inside the house he was guarding. He’d heard raised voices at midnight and squeezed his eyes shut, praying to anything and everything he didn’t even believe in. A bright flash of white light had lit up the house behind him like the pop of a dying lightbulb. A couple minutes later, every demon snarling at him through the wash from the sprinklers had turned their faces up and scampered like bats... well, bats back to hell. He’d sagged, then, with relief or dread.
No one had came out of the house.
Eventually he’d gone inside, after making a thorough sweep of the neighborhood and turning off the sprinklers. Not a demon left in the vicinity. He’d walked up the steps, tensing at every squeak in the eerie quiet, and he’d pushed open the door -- unlocked, still -- and stepped over the undisturbed body on the welcome mat.
He’d seen the blood first. Only the briefest glance at the body -- what was only barely recognizable as a body -- on the floor, and he’d had to turn his face away. Not because of the gore, but because...
It didn’t matter. He’d looked at Sam, who hadn’t looked up when he’d come in. There might have been redness around Sam’s eyes, but it was hard to see in the dim light and anyway, he wasn’t making a sound anymore. Sam sat crosslegged on the floor by his brother; his eyes were flicking back and forth, intensely focused, picking over every last detail laid out in front of him. Burning it in, for whatever purpose -- memorial or revenge.
Bobby had walked back out and checked around the house. Signs of struggle, signs of a frenzied rush towards no answers and no help at all. When he’d reached the door to the basement, he’d heard voices in choked whispers on the other side. He’d knocked quietly but firmly and said, “You can come out now, the danger’s passed.”
After some harsh whispered debate, the door had cracked open. The woman’s face behind the door shied away when she saw Bobby, and she’d tried to close the door again. “You’re not the man who told me to --”
“He can’t come to the phone right now,” Bobby snapped. “Everything’s taken care of, ma’am. I’d recommend taking your family to a hotel for the night and we’ll take care of the mess.”
“What about Nana and Grandpa?” asked a girl’s knee-high voice.
The woman made a choked sound.
“Come on out and it’ll be better in the morning, ma’am,” Bobby had said, too tired then to be snappish.
They’d crept out like mice, the husband so dazed that he’d had to lean on his wife to walk. The mother’s hand had never left her mouth and when she’d seen the tableau in the dining room she’d swallowed a sob and tucked her daughter’s face closer into her belly. Bobby had herded them out the door.
When Bobby had returned to the dining room, Sam was gone. A moment later he’d reappeared from the master bedroom with a quilt. Bobby had said nothing about the theft, but had helped Sam spread the quilt out on the floor in the doorway. When they’d picked up the body, Sam had taken the head and shoulders, Bobby the feet.
Burden laid out next to the curb by the car, they’d taken the three other bodies -- an old man, an old woman, and the poor girl who had once been Ruby, whether or not that had been her human name -- outside into the garden and salted and burned them. The ground was too wet from the sprinklers for there to be any danger of the house catching, so they’d left while the fires were still flickering. Bobby had called the police and the coroner and a local hunter he knew to come tow his own truck back to their place, because there was no way in hell he was leaving Sam alone. It had been half past two in the morning when they’d driven away.
By now it was nearly five. Sam still hadn’t said a word. Not that Bobby was particularly chatty himself, of course, but he worried more for Sam than for himself.
They were headed west, had crossed the state line from Indiana to Illinois a while back. The quilt in the backseat was soaked through with blood. It was probably in the upholstery. Bobby didn’t want to think about the cleanup.
At five thirty, as the graying sun rose over the still dawn and asphalt continued to pass uninterrupted beneath their wheels, Bobby spoke.
“Sam,” he murmured.
Sam said nothing.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
And a while after that, “We can’t drive forever.”
Sam didn’t respond, but he looked away and Bobby respectfully neglected to see the fresh streaks of tears mixed with the blood -- not his own -- on Sam’s face.
For maybe another hour they passed road signs for various Illinois burgs, some bigger, some smaller, and Bobby knew that Sam was looking. No place felt right. Nothing was right, now. After a while, they passed a billboard for a Historic Route 66 Museum and a green mile sign pointing the way to Pontiac.
“Here, Sam,” Bobby said firmly. The sun had risen and it was after seven.
Sam made a strangled noise of protest.
“Pull over,” Bobby ordered.
Sam did so. They were in the middle of nowhere, sun slanting in through the windows onto their backseat cargo. Bobby thought about cars passing and people looking in and seeing so much blood and probably calling the police. Except people didn’t look at each other on the road, not anymore. They were safe.
That was funny. Safe.
“You know what has to be done,” Bobby murmured, not quite looking at Sam.
Sam opened his mouth but no sound came out. After a couple of tries, he said, “I won’t burn him,” he said.
“Sam,” said Bobby.
“I won’t... it’s... he’s desecrated enough.”
“Anything could use him against you unless you do the rites,” said Bobby.
Sam’s jaw went tight and he looked out the driver-side window again. “No,” he said at last. “His soul’s gonna need a home to come back to.”
Bobby’s insides sank, icy. “Don’t think it, boy.”
“Don’t call me boy,” Sam said, all quiet and calm and brittle untempered steel. “I’ll do what I need to and no more.”
“Your old man thought that way -- Dean thought that way -- see where they are, Sam, this cycle is insane.”
Sam shook his head hard, refusing to hear a word Bobby said. His knuckles were bone-colored where they gripped the wheel. “No, this isn’t the end. It isn’t.”
“Listen to me --”
“No,” Sam thundered, and Bobby leaned back, feeling a thrill run down his spine along with the first inklings of the magnitude of certain potentials within Sam, tamped down by Dean’s influence and Sam’s own sense of restraint, both of which were now stripped away.
Minutes passed in silence.
When Sam spoke at last, it was the first time Bobby had heard unsteadiness in his voice. “We’ll bury the body,” he conceded. “If there’s no way to... he deserves that honor, at least. Not salted and burned.” Like a monster hung unspoken at the end.
Bobby closed his eyes and nodded once. He ought to be tougher about this, but he couldn’t. He wasn’t their father, though they might have wished he was. Sam, whatever was crawling within Sam, was beyond him. He knew it was a mistake and a weakness but the hurt was too new and accountability seemed to crumble in the face of grief.
Sam fired the engine again and made a sharp left off the road, into the fallow field next to it. Not too far in the distance there was a line of slim-trunked pine trees. The car bumped and jerked over the uneven ground and Bobby kept his eyes shut against the grim temptation to look at the matching movements of the body in the backseat.
They stopped at the treeline. Sam threw open his door and got out; Bobby followed more slowly. Sam stood with his eyes mostly closed, face pointed towards the sky, away from the rising sun. The red light muted the stark color of dried blood against his skin.
Bobby broke the stillness of the moment by opening the back door. The quilt had slipped and he found himself looking at one closed eye and half a face. He tugged the cover back up before he could get a good look at the mutilation in the light of day. Luckily it was still chilly in the mornings this far north and he couldn’t smell much.
Between them they maneuvered the body out of the car and laid it out. Sam started into the woods without a word. Bobby took a step after him, but the gravity of the dead drew him back. He couldn’t leave the body alone. So he sat sideways on the driver’s seat, the door open, elbows on his knees and chin in his hands, studying the patterns of interlocking geometric shapes on the stained, stolen shroud.
Ten minutes later, Sam reemerged from the woods. If his eyes were redder than before, Bobby didn’t comment on it.
“There’s a clearing not far in,” Sam mumbled, trying to cover the hoarseness in his voice. He didn’t look at Bobby and went straight for the covered body. Bobby helped him lift it, again on the foot end, and they navigated the woods for a couple of minutes, arms straining, breath strangely loud in the still air. No birds sang, and only the occassional rustle betrayed life in the undergrowth.
Sam straightened and wiped sweat from his forehead. “There’s shovels in the trunk,” he said, almost offhandedly. He started back the way they had come.
“You want I should stay with him?” Bobby asked, not moving.
Sam stopped and glanced briefly over his shoulder. There was a beat before he said, “He’s not going anywhere.”
“Sam...” Bobby murmured.
Sam’s shoulders jerked in a stilted half-shrug and he kept walking. Bobby followed reluctantly, looking back often until the lonely red-splashed quilt in the pine needles was out of sight.
At the car, Sam had already opened the trunk and pulled out a shovel and a duffel bag. “I want a coffin,” he said to the air. Perfectly nonchalant.
Bobby sighed. He knew he was going to lose this argument, too. “Takes time, Sam. Need materials. Sun’s going to rise, day’s going to get warmer, with all that open meat --”
Sam all but dented the trunk went he slammed the cover down. “Don’t,” he said.
“It’s only truth,” Bobby warned him.
“I’ll stay,” said Sam. “I’ll dig. I want a coffin and a marker, doesn’t have to be fancy. Dad didn’t get that much and that’s changing now.”
Bobby put a hand to his face and rubbed his beard for a moment before sighing. “I’ll drive into town. Get me a piece of paper.”
Sam dug some old receipts out of the glove compartment and found a pen on the dash. Bobby wrote a list and checked that he had his wallet.
“You don’t do anything stupid,” Bobby muttered to Sam as he slid into the driver’s seat.
With nothing else needing to be said, they parted ways.
-------
In the Lowes parking lot, Bobby realized that there was blood smeared on the back door windows where he and Sam had leaned on them or touched them getting the body inside. The backseat upholstery was a gory mess. Fleeting panic settled in and he circled the parking lot, took a California left to get back into the heavy morning rush hour traffic and found a couple of back alleys that put him close to the Lowes without being in open sight. His hands were flaking dried blood, and there was only so much that a handful of napkins from the glove box could do about it. He took off his jacket, which was beyond disguise; the dark shirt beneath didn’t show dark stains.
Hands in his pockets, he nodded to a passing cart-collector outside the store and once inside made a beeline to the bathroom. Watching Dean’s blood swirl down the drain in a podunk Illinois home improvement store’s bathroom sink, some last jagged leg of dissociation that was holding his screaming sanity separate from his motor functions seemed to crack and sag. He leaned against the sink and breathed through his nose, steadying.
Not yet. Don’t collapse yet.
He went back into the store and bought some black plastic sheeting, a stack of one by eleven pine boards, a couple of hammers and a box of nails. As an afterthought he picked up a pint tin of white paint and a chip brush.
“What are you building?” asked the checkout woman, far too cheerful for so early in the morning.
“Just doing some repair work,” he replied.
“Well, good luck,” she said, smiling, as he hefted the boards and headed out.
He lined the backseat with opaque plastic sheeting to hide the blood, rolled down the back windows, and maneuvered the boards between the front seats to slant diagonally through the open space. Back in the driver’s seat, he shut the door and put his hands on the wheel.
The first sob ripped up from nowhere like vomit and he tasted bile as the breakdown hit. An alley behind Lowes in Pontiac, Illinois, at eight in the morning, and he couldn’t hold it together; and it just reminded him of losing it over mundane things after his wife had gone -- breaking up over laundry or opening the refridgerator door for a beer or opening his eyes in the morning and shedding the last shreds of sleep’s oblivion. Remembering that the world was fucked to hell and nothing was ever right in it, and good things never happened to the wrong kind of people. He almost felt the motion and the resistance of the knife passing into his wife’s flesh. He hadn’t known then. God, he hadn’t known anything.
But all the knowledge in the world didn’t make new losses any easier. He’d thought, with enough books, with enough facts on his side to illuminate the dark... But now he was older and not so naive and he knew that brighter lights cast darker shadows.
He scrubbed his face roughly with one hand and got his breath back. This wasn’t helping. He was afraid to leave Sam alone for too long, considering what had happened when the brothers’ roles had been reversed a year ago.
He stopped at a fast food place on the way out of town and picked up some breakfast he that he didn’t have high hopes would actually get eaten, but the token gesture felt necessary. They hadn’t eaten since the previous evening.
The traffic had thinned when he got back on the road. He had reached a halfway comfortable state of not thinking, not feeling, with the only side effect being slightly shaky hands. He kept his eyes on the road and drove.
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The tableau of the clearing in the woods was more than a little surreal when Bobby walked back into it. Sam sat crosslegged near the head of a perfectly dug grave, product of much practice, though it was not nearly six feet deep. A neat pile of earth dammed up one side and the body, no longer shrouded, lay opposite. Sam sat by his brother’s head, absently fiddling with something small in his hands.
Without the quilt to hide it, Bobby’s mind stuttered over the word ‘body.’ He wanted to call it Dean. He wanted to believe it was Dean, asleep or maybe laying in the sun, eyes closed. That was almost more gruesome than the image of mutilated flesh under a damp shroud, and Bobby found Sam’s calm nearness to the corpse to be eerie in itself.
Dean’s clothes had been changed and one of Sam’s shirts, soaked with blood and tossed to the side, stood testament to how Sam had cleaned up the body. Bobby tried not to see the odd concaves that shouldn’t be there in Dean’s chest. The shirt Sam had put him in was dark, and if it had stained yet, it wasn’t showing.
“Bobby,” said Sam without looking up, “why did you want me to give this to Dad?”
Bobby drew a blank. He approached Sam, carefully skirting the body, and looked down at the object in Sam’s hands.
Memory came slowly, but he did remember. Sam had always been more shy around Bobby than Dean, and at the time Bobby had not really known what to make of John’s kids -- but he had felt sorry for them. He knew John was a good hunter and a good man and wasn’t cavalier about the safety of his children in any way, but that didn’t mean John wasn’t also an obsessive bastard. Bobby had seen John’s kids stung by that neglect, suffering in silence in their own very different ways, and he had thought that maybe a nudge in John’s side would bring the man’s eyes down from his maps and plans and gunsights for at least a moment, to look at his boys instead. Just a nudge, a gesture from youngest son to distant father. No powers, no magic, no deux ex machina of protection, just a small gift. Its meaning was in the giving, not the thing itself.
Bobby wondered if anything would have turned out differently if Sam had given John that amulet.
“I just thought it wouldn’t hurt to remind John that it was Christmas every once in a while,” said Bobby. “Thought it might make him take a break. Give you boys a break.”
Sam fiddled with it for a moment longer, then raised the cord and slipped it over his head. He tucked the little golden tribal head beneath his shirt and levered himself to his feet.
“Got the stuff?” he asked, not looking Bobby in the eye.
Bobby jerked his head back in the direction of the car. Sam started walking, and Bobby followed.
He had a feeling there was going to be a lot of that in the future.
-------
They had no saw, but an axe sufficed. The boards were rough, left splinters in their hands, and the finished product was a little uneven. Sam folded the stolen quilt and lined the bottom of the box with it. His movements had slowed and there was a gentleness to him now that could have been a healthy acceptance, or as Bobby rather suspected, a drifting loss of self. The same thing Bobby was feeling.
A slow-spreading pain like the ache of deep cold crept through Bobby’s insides and he thought that, if he let Sam out of his sight, he would never see the boy again. And Sam would be young and in agony and on fire with vengeance and righteousness, like Bobby had been when he was younger, and Bobby could understand that and didn’t want to get in Sam’s way. But Bobby himself wasn’t young now. He understood the power of simple grief and the safety of it. Thinking about Sam going out there, throwing himself at every pike he could find, knowing that he couldn’t do the same himself, wishing Sam could just stay, just grieve, just leave the dead in their graves... with his wife, with Sam’s girlfriend, with John.
Sam was going to run and Bobby was going to be alone with this. He’d let himself get too tied up in the Winchesters and now Ellen had vanished into the woodwork and everyone else he knew were hunters, all occupied... because hell was rising. And Bobby was too tired to fight it anymore.
They lowered the coffin into the grave first, then moved to pick up the body. Bobby leaned down to take the feet, but Sam remained still, staring down at what had once been his brother. The face was pale and grayish, eyes already sunken -- but Sam wasn’t seeing the death. His eyes, which had been so focused and intense just after midnight, were now hazy and still. He looked at Dean, but saw... Bobby didn’t know. Visions of hell, maybe.
“Sam,” Bobby murmured.
Sam gave no sign of recognition, but after a few moments he knelt down and began searching his pockets. Bobby watched as he took out various paraphernalia of the trade, some obviously taken out of the pockets of Dean’s earlier outfit. He poured some salt from a small pouch onto each of Dean’s eyelids, the palms of his hands, and with a little leverage work because of the rigor mortis, into his mouth. He tucked Dean’s chalk stubs and flask and lighter and a crumpled lottery ticket back in his jacket pockets. He adjusted the collar and brushed up the hair.
He touched the bump of the amulet under his shirt and, finally, stood.
“Okay,” he murmured.
Together they lowered their burden into the ground, ending up kneeling by the open grave. Sam settled his brother’s head gently on the quilt padding.
They lifted the lid over and set it down. Dean’s ashen face vanished beneath knotted yellow pine. Bobby again felt the aging supports of his soul cracking, and they left splinters like the ones in his hands. The bile rose again.
Sam’s face abruptly screwed up and he turned away, clasping his hand over his eyes. His shoulders moved with rough spasms, but no sound emerged. Bobby looked off into the trees, swallowing down the bile-flavored scream that wanted out; it was so close his tongue ached with it and he felt it in his sinuses, reverberating silently into his brain and back down to the lungs. For a moment he couldn’t breathe.
Somehow they managed to put nails in the coffin lid. Somehow they each tossed a cursory handful of dirt onto the box. Somehow they picked up their shovels and their arms worked in the familiar motions. Bobby’s whole body buzzed with every hollow impact of dirt on wood; the thumps became increasingly less hollow until they were soft patterings, just dirt on dirt, and Dean was gone.
Sam took the last board and didn’t bother with the axe. He put his foot against it, offcenter, and pulled with a strength that could only have been dictated by rage. The board snapped and Sam threw down the pieces.
Bobby nailed them into a cross while Sam stood to the side, arms crossed over his stomach, staring into the trees. It was Bobby who ended up with the only chip brush, laving white paint in loose strokes over the wood.
Sam came back over to dig up a place for the marker and they each took a side to bear down on, shove it in deep. Their hands were stained white with fresh paint, covering the last remnants of blood.
Sam spoke, looking into the middle nothing. “Thank you, Bobby,” he said.
“Don’t go, boy,” Bobby said plaintively. “I know you want to. Just stay. Build something new.”
Sam shook his head. “I’ll drive you into town.”
Bobby closed his eyes and held in the scream.
“And then I think I’ll be seeing you, Bobby,” said Sam. “Thanks for everything.”
“You son of a bitch,” Bobby murmured, not quite harsh.
Sam didn’t respond.
That night Bobby had a motel room in Pontiac and the image of the Impala’s taillights burned into his mind, and a small collection of complimentary alcohol to keep him company. Two phone calls put him easily on the way back to his home and business tomorrow, by borrowed transportation.
A third call went unanswered. Sam’s number blinked on the LCD screen for ten seconds before the automated light went off.
Bobby downed the last mouthful-bottle of vodka, and slept for the first time in thirty hours.
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And I wrote an SPN story. It's whole, it doesn't suck, it's pure SPN and not a convoluted crossover that makes me disgusted with my ability to write. It's not exactly a feel-good hit of the summer, but hey. Apparently my strong stories are angsty death-filled depressionfests and I write people in moments of crisis and shock really well. Go figure what that says about me.
Title: Orpheus At The Gates
Author: ravenclaw42
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: PG
Summary: Twenty-four hours following the end of No Rest for the Wicked.
Author's Notes: Spoilers for season 4 premiere, in a way. So lots of details people noticed about Dean’s return in Lazarus Rising led me to start itching to know why. Little things like Sam taking the amulet, Dean’s clothes being changed, the shift in location from Dean’s death in New Harmony, Indiana to his burial near Pontiac, Illinois (over four hours away), where they got the coffin, what they did with Ruby’s old body, the fact that Sam and Bobby must have been together and interacting for the whole time. So this story contains retroactive continuity for Lazarus Rising despite being set immediately after No Rest for the Wicked.
Orpheus is Sam, seen through Bobby's eyes. He's looking down into hell and deciding whether or not to follow Eurydice. (Interpret the lovers vs. brothers thing as you will. I think the intensity of codependency & love is the same with or without any added sex/marriage/romance concepts.) I might do an Orpheus Descending and/or an Orpheus Ascending -- I have ideas. We'll see.
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Orpheus At The Gates
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With Sam at the wheel, Bobby riding shotgun and an occupied quilt shroud in the back, they drove out of New Harmony. Bobby didn’t question it. They just went.
After the brothers had broken in to deal with Lilith, Bobby had heard little of what was going on inside the house he was guarding. He’d heard raised voices at midnight and squeezed his eyes shut, praying to anything and everything he didn’t even believe in. A bright flash of white light had lit up the house behind him like the pop of a dying lightbulb. A couple minutes later, every demon snarling at him through the wash from the sprinklers had turned their faces up and scampered like bats... well, bats back to hell. He’d sagged, then, with relief or dread.
No one had came out of the house.
Eventually he’d gone inside, after making a thorough sweep of the neighborhood and turning off the sprinklers. Not a demon left in the vicinity. He’d walked up the steps, tensing at every squeak in the eerie quiet, and he’d pushed open the door -- unlocked, still -- and stepped over the undisturbed body on the welcome mat.
He’d seen the blood first. Only the briefest glance at the body -- what was only barely recognizable as a body -- on the floor, and he’d had to turn his face away. Not because of the gore, but because...
It didn’t matter. He’d looked at Sam, who hadn’t looked up when he’d come in. There might have been redness around Sam’s eyes, but it was hard to see in the dim light and anyway, he wasn’t making a sound anymore. Sam sat crosslegged on the floor by his brother; his eyes were flicking back and forth, intensely focused, picking over every last detail laid out in front of him. Burning it in, for whatever purpose -- memorial or revenge.
Bobby had walked back out and checked around the house. Signs of struggle, signs of a frenzied rush towards no answers and no help at all. When he’d reached the door to the basement, he’d heard voices in choked whispers on the other side. He’d knocked quietly but firmly and said, “You can come out now, the danger’s passed.”
After some harsh whispered debate, the door had cracked open. The woman’s face behind the door shied away when she saw Bobby, and she’d tried to close the door again. “You’re not the man who told me to --”
“He can’t come to the phone right now,” Bobby snapped. “Everything’s taken care of, ma’am. I’d recommend taking your family to a hotel for the night and we’ll take care of the mess.”
“What about Nana and Grandpa?” asked a girl’s knee-high voice.
The woman made a choked sound.
“Come on out and it’ll be better in the morning, ma’am,” Bobby had said, too tired then to be snappish.
They’d crept out like mice, the husband so dazed that he’d had to lean on his wife to walk. The mother’s hand had never left her mouth and when she’d seen the tableau in the dining room she’d swallowed a sob and tucked her daughter’s face closer into her belly. Bobby had herded them out the door.
When Bobby had returned to the dining room, Sam was gone. A moment later he’d reappeared from the master bedroom with a quilt. Bobby had said nothing about the theft, but had helped Sam spread the quilt out on the floor in the doorway. When they’d picked up the body, Sam had taken the head and shoulders, Bobby the feet.
Burden laid out next to the curb by the car, they’d taken the three other bodies -- an old man, an old woman, and the poor girl who had once been Ruby, whether or not that had been her human name -- outside into the garden and salted and burned them. The ground was too wet from the sprinklers for there to be any danger of the house catching, so they’d left while the fires were still flickering. Bobby had called the police and the coroner and a local hunter he knew to come tow his own truck back to their place, because there was no way in hell he was leaving Sam alone. It had been half past two in the morning when they’d driven away.
By now it was nearly five. Sam still hadn’t said a word. Not that Bobby was particularly chatty himself, of course, but he worried more for Sam than for himself.
They were headed west, had crossed the state line from Indiana to Illinois a while back. The quilt in the backseat was soaked through with blood. It was probably in the upholstery. Bobby didn’t want to think about the cleanup.
At five thirty, as the graying sun rose over the still dawn and asphalt continued to pass uninterrupted beneath their wheels, Bobby spoke.
“Sam,” he murmured.
Sam said nothing.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
And a while after that, “We can’t drive forever.”
Sam didn’t respond, but he looked away and Bobby respectfully neglected to see the fresh streaks of tears mixed with the blood -- not his own -- on Sam’s face.
For maybe another hour they passed road signs for various Illinois burgs, some bigger, some smaller, and Bobby knew that Sam was looking. No place felt right. Nothing was right, now. After a while, they passed a billboard for a Historic Route 66 Museum and a green mile sign pointing the way to Pontiac.
“Here, Sam,” Bobby said firmly. The sun had risen and it was after seven.
Sam made a strangled noise of protest.
“Pull over,” Bobby ordered.
Sam did so. They were in the middle of nowhere, sun slanting in through the windows onto their backseat cargo. Bobby thought about cars passing and people looking in and seeing so much blood and probably calling the police. Except people didn’t look at each other on the road, not anymore. They were safe.
That was funny. Safe.
“You know what has to be done,” Bobby murmured, not quite looking at Sam.
Sam opened his mouth but no sound came out. After a couple of tries, he said, “I won’t burn him,” he said.
“Sam,” said Bobby.
“I won’t... it’s... he’s desecrated enough.”
“Anything could use him against you unless you do the rites,” said Bobby.
Sam’s jaw went tight and he looked out the driver-side window again. “No,” he said at last. “His soul’s gonna need a home to come back to.”
Bobby’s insides sank, icy. “Don’t think it, boy.”
“Don’t call me boy,” Sam said, all quiet and calm and brittle untempered steel. “I’ll do what I need to and no more.”
“Your old man thought that way -- Dean thought that way -- see where they are, Sam, this cycle is insane.”
Sam shook his head hard, refusing to hear a word Bobby said. His knuckles were bone-colored where they gripped the wheel. “No, this isn’t the end. It isn’t.”
“Listen to me --”
“No,” Sam thundered, and Bobby leaned back, feeling a thrill run down his spine along with the first inklings of the magnitude of certain potentials within Sam, tamped down by Dean’s influence and Sam’s own sense of restraint, both of which were now stripped away.
Minutes passed in silence.
When Sam spoke at last, it was the first time Bobby had heard unsteadiness in his voice. “We’ll bury the body,” he conceded. “If there’s no way to... he deserves that honor, at least. Not salted and burned.” Like a monster hung unspoken at the end.
Bobby closed his eyes and nodded once. He ought to be tougher about this, but he couldn’t. He wasn’t their father, though they might have wished he was. Sam, whatever was crawling within Sam, was beyond him. He knew it was a mistake and a weakness but the hurt was too new and accountability seemed to crumble in the face of grief.
Sam fired the engine again and made a sharp left off the road, into the fallow field next to it. Not too far in the distance there was a line of slim-trunked pine trees. The car bumped and jerked over the uneven ground and Bobby kept his eyes shut against the grim temptation to look at the matching movements of the body in the backseat.
They stopped at the treeline. Sam threw open his door and got out; Bobby followed more slowly. Sam stood with his eyes mostly closed, face pointed towards the sky, away from the rising sun. The red light muted the stark color of dried blood against his skin.
Bobby broke the stillness of the moment by opening the back door. The quilt had slipped and he found himself looking at one closed eye and half a face. He tugged the cover back up before he could get a good look at the mutilation in the light of day. Luckily it was still chilly in the mornings this far north and he couldn’t smell much.
Between them they maneuvered the body out of the car and laid it out. Sam started into the woods without a word. Bobby took a step after him, but the gravity of the dead drew him back. He couldn’t leave the body alone. So he sat sideways on the driver’s seat, the door open, elbows on his knees and chin in his hands, studying the patterns of interlocking geometric shapes on the stained, stolen shroud.
Ten minutes later, Sam reemerged from the woods. If his eyes were redder than before, Bobby didn’t comment on it.
“There’s a clearing not far in,” Sam mumbled, trying to cover the hoarseness in his voice. He didn’t look at Bobby and went straight for the covered body. Bobby helped him lift it, again on the foot end, and they navigated the woods for a couple of minutes, arms straining, breath strangely loud in the still air. No birds sang, and only the occassional rustle betrayed life in the undergrowth.
Sam straightened and wiped sweat from his forehead. “There’s shovels in the trunk,” he said, almost offhandedly. He started back the way they had come.
“You want I should stay with him?” Bobby asked, not moving.
Sam stopped and glanced briefly over his shoulder. There was a beat before he said, “He’s not going anywhere.”
“Sam...” Bobby murmured.
Sam’s shoulders jerked in a stilted half-shrug and he kept walking. Bobby followed reluctantly, looking back often until the lonely red-splashed quilt in the pine needles was out of sight.
At the car, Sam had already opened the trunk and pulled out a shovel and a duffel bag. “I want a coffin,” he said to the air. Perfectly nonchalant.
Bobby sighed. He knew he was going to lose this argument, too. “Takes time, Sam. Need materials. Sun’s going to rise, day’s going to get warmer, with all that open meat --”
Sam all but dented the trunk went he slammed the cover down. “Don’t,” he said.
“It’s only truth,” Bobby warned him.
“I’ll stay,” said Sam. “I’ll dig. I want a coffin and a marker, doesn’t have to be fancy. Dad didn’t get that much and that’s changing now.”
Bobby put a hand to his face and rubbed his beard for a moment before sighing. “I’ll drive into town. Get me a piece of paper.”
Sam dug some old receipts out of the glove compartment and found a pen on the dash. Bobby wrote a list and checked that he had his wallet.
“You don’t do anything stupid,” Bobby muttered to Sam as he slid into the driver’s seat.
With nothing else needing to be said, they parted ways.
-------
In the Lowes parking lot, Bobby realized that there was blood smeared on the back door windows where he and Sam had leaned on them or touched them getting the body inside. The backseat upholstery was a gory mess. Fleeting panic settled in and he circled the parking lot, took a California left to get back into the heavy morning rush hour traffic and found a couple of back alleys that put him close to the Lowes without being in open sight. His hands were flaking dried blood, and there was only so much that a handful of napkins from the glove box could do about it. He took off his jacket, which was beyond disguise; the dark shirt beneath didn’t show dark stains.
Hands in his pockets, he nodded to a passing cart-collector outside the store and once inside made a beeline to the bathroom. Watching Dean’s blood swirl down the drain in a podunk Illinois home improvement store’s bathroom sink, some last jagged leg of dissociation that was holding his screaming sanity separate from his motor functions seemed to crack and sag. He leaned against the sink and breathed through his nose, steadying.
Not yet. Don’t collapse yet.
He went back into the store and bought some black plastic sheeting, a stack of one by eleven pine boards, a couple of hammers and a box of nails. As an afterthought he picked up a pint tin of white paint and a chip brush.
“What are you building?” asked the checkout woman, far too cheerful for so early in the morning.
“Just doing some repair work,” he replied.
“Well, good luck,” she said, smiling, as he hefted the boards and headed out.
He lined the backseat with opaque plastic sheeting to hide the blood, rolled down the back windows, and maneuvered the boards between the front seats to slant diagonally through the open space. Back in the driver’s seat, he shut the door and put his hands on the wheel.
The first sob ripped up from nowhere like vomit and he tasted bile as the breakdown hit. An alley behind Lowes in Pontiac, Illinois, at eight in the morning, and he couldn’t hold it together; and it just reminded him of losing it over mundane things after his wife had gone -- breaking up over laundry or opening the refridgerator door for a beer or opening his eyes in the morning and shedding the last shreds of sleep’s oblivion. Remembering that the world was fucked to hell and nothing was ever right in it, and good things never happened to the wrong kind of people. He almost felt the motion and the resistance of the knife passing into his wife’s flesh. He hadn’t known then. God, he hadn’t known anything.
But all the knowledge in the world didn’t make new losses any easier. He’d thought, with enough books, with enough facts on his side to illuminate the dark... But now he was older and not so naive and he knew that brighter lights cast darker shadows.
He scrubbed his face roughly with one hand and got his breath back. This wasn’t helping. He was afraid to leave Sam alone for too long, considering what had happened when the brothers’ roles had been reversed a year ago.
He stopped at a fast food place on the way out of town and picked up some breakfast he that he didn’t have high hopes would actually get eaten, but the token gesture felt necessary. They hadn’t eaten since the previous evening.
The traffic had thinned when he got back on the road. He had reached a halfway comfortable state of not thinking, not feeling, with the only side effect being slightly shaky hands. He kept his eyes on the road and drove.
---------
The tableau of the clearing in the woods was more than a little surreal when Bobby walked back into it. Sam sat crosslegged near the head of a perfectly dug grave, product of much practice, though it was not nearly six feet deep. A neat pile of earth dammed up one side and the body, no longer shrouded, lay opposite. Sam sat by his brother’s head, absently fiddling with something small in his hands.
Without the quilt to hide it, Bobby’s mind stuttered over the word ‘body.’ He wanted to call it Dean. He wanted to believe it was Dean, asleep or maybe laying in the sun, eyes closed. That was almost more gruesome than the image of mutilated flesh under a damp shroud, and Bobby found Sam’s calm nearness to the corpse to be eerie in itself.
Dean’s clothes had been changed and one of Sam’s shirts, soaked with blood and tossed to the side, stood testament to how Sam had cleaned up the body. Bobby tried not to see the odd concaves that shouldn’t be there in Dean’s chest. The shirt Sam had put him in was dark, and if it had stained yet, it wasn’t showing.
“Bobby,” said Sam without looking up, “why did you want me to give this to Dad?”
Bobby drew a blank. He approached Sam, carefully skirting the body, and looked down at the object in Sam’s hands.
Memory came slowly, but he did remember. Sam had always been more shy around Bobby than Dean, and at the time Bobby had not really known what to make of John’s kids -- but he had felt sorry for them. He knew John was a good hunter and a good man and wasn’t cavalier about the safety of his children in any way, but that didn’t mean John wasn’t also an obsessive bastard. Bobby had seen John’s kids stung by that neglect, suffering in silence in their own very different ways, and he had thought that maybe a nudge in John’s side would bring the man’s eyes down from his maps and plans and gunsights for at least a moment, to look at his boys instead. Just a nudge, a gesture from youngest son to distant father. No powers, no magic, no deux ex machina of protection, just a small gift. Its meaning was in the giving, not the thing itself.
Bobby wondered if anything would have turned out differently if Sam had given John that amulet.
“I just thought it wouldn’t hurt to remind John that it was Christmas every once in a while,” said Bobby. “Thought it might make him take a break. Give you boys a break.”
Sam fiddled with it for a moment longer, then raised the cord and slipped it over his head. He tucked the little golden tribal head beneath his shirt and levered himself to his feet.
“Got the stuff?” he asked, not looking Bobby in the eye.
Bobby jerked his head back in the direction of the car. Sam started walking, and Bobby followed.
He had a feeling there was going to be a lot of that in the future.
-------
They had no saw, but an axe sufficed. The boards were rough, left splinters in their hands, and the finished product was a little uneven. Sam folded the stolen quilt and lined the bottom of the box with it. His movements had slowed and there was a gentleness to him now that could have been a healthy acceptance, or as Bobby rather suspected, a drifting loss of self. The same thing Bobby was feeling.
A slow-spreading pain like the ache of deep cold crept through Bobby’s insides and he thought that, if he let Sam out of his sight, he would never see the boy again. And Sam would be young and in agony and on fire with vengeance and righteousness, like Bobby had been when he was younger, and Bobby could understand that and didn’t want to get in Sam’s way. But Bobby himself wasn’t young now. He understood the power of simple grief and the safety of it. Thinking about Sam going out there, throwing himself at every pike he could find, knowing that he couldn’t do the same himself, wishing Sam could just stay, just grieve, just leave the dead in their graves... with his wife, with Sam’s girlfriend, with John.
Sam was going to run and Bobby was going to be alone with this. He’d let himself get too tied up in the Winchesters and now Ellen had vanished into the woodwork and everyone else he knew were hunters, all occupied... because hell was rising. And Bobby was too tired to fight it anymore.
They lowered the coffin into the grave first, then moved to pick up the body. Bobby leaned down to take the feet, but Sam remained still, staring down at what had once been his brother. The face was pale and grayish, eyes already sunken -- but Sam wasn’t seeing the death. His eyes, which had been so focused and intense just after midnight, were now hazy and still. He looked at Dean, but saw... Bobby didn’t know. Visions of hell, maybe.
“Sam,” Bobby murmured.
Sam gave no sign of recognition, but after a few moments he knelt down and began searching his pockets. Bobby watched as he took out various paraphernalia of the trade, some obviously taken out of the pockets of Dean’s earlier outfit. He poured some salt from a small pouch onto each of Dean’s eyelids, the palms of his hands, and with a little leverage work because of the rigor mortis, into his mouth. He tucked Dean’s chalk stubs and flask and lighter and a crumpled lottery ticket back in his jacket pockets. He adjusted the collar and brushed up the hair.
He touched the bump of the amulet under his shirt and, finally, stood.
“Okay,” he murmured.
Together they lowered their burden into the ground, ending up kneeling by the open grave. Sam settled his brother’s head gently on the quilt padding.
They lifted the lid over and set it down. Dean’s ashen face vanished beneath knotted yellow pine. Bobby again felt the aging supports of his soul cracking, and they left splinters like the ones in his hands. The bile rose again.
Sam’s face abruptly screwed up and he turned away, clasping his hand over his eyes. His shoulders moved with rough spasms, but no sound emerged. Bobby looked off into the trees, swallowing down the bile-flavored scream that wanted out; it was so close his tongue ached with it and he felt it in his sinuses, reverberating silently into his brain and back down to the lungs. For a moment he couldn’t breathe.
Somehow they managed to put nails in the coffin lid. Somehow they each tossed a cursory handful of dirt onto the box. Somehow they picked up their shovels and their arms worked in the familiar motions. Bobby’s whole body buzzed with every hollow impact of dirt on wood; the thumps became increasingly less hollow until they were soft patterings, just dirt on dirt, and Dean was gone.
Sam took the last board and didn’t bother with the axe. He put his foot against it, offcenter, and pulled with a strength that could only have been dictated by rage. The board snapped and Sam threw down the pieces.
Bobby nailed them into a cross while Sam stood to the side, arms crossed over his stomach, staring into the trees. It was Bobby who ended up with the only chip brush, laving white paint in loose strokes over the wood.
Sam came back over to dig up a place for the marker and they each took a side to bear down on, shove it in deep. Their hands were stained white with fresh paint, covering the last remnants of blood.
Sam spoke, looking into the middle nothing. “Thank you, Bobby,” he said.
“Don’t go, boy,” Bobby said plaintively. “I know you want to. Just stay. Build something new.”
Sam shook his head. “I’ll drive you into town.”
Bobby closed his eyes and held in the scream.
“And then I think I’ll be seeing you, Bobby,” said Sam. “Thanks for everything.”
“You son of a bitch,” Bobby murmured, not quite harsh.
Sam didn’t respond.
That night Bobby had a motel room in Pontiac and the image of the Impala’s taillights burned into his mind, and a small collection of complimentary alcohol to keep him company. Two phone calls put him easily on the way back to his home and business tomorrow, by borrowed transportation.
A third call went unanswered. Sam’s number blinked on the LCD screen for ten seconds before the automated light went off.
Bobby downed the last mouthful-bottle of vodka, and slept for the first time in thirty hours.
--------