A Cage Full of Heroes 2/4
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Chapter 2
Hazy Shade of Winter
Sgt. Hans Schultz’s opinions of bed checks varied depending on what he “didn’t know” was happening and on who ordered the check. He didn’t see any reason for this one other than the fact that Maj. Hochstetter had ordered it. He didn’t see any reason not to have it, though, other than inconvenience for himself and Col. Klink, so he didn’t object, but he did suggest checking Barracks 2 last because there might be some monkey business going on that he truly didn’t know about. The reason he gave, however, was not wanting to disturb Col. Hogan, and Klink agreed with that.
To Schultz’s relief, everyone in Barracks 2 was present and accounted for and sound asleep. Both of the new men seemed to be having bad dreams when he shone his flashlight on them to check their faces, but they didn’t react to the light any more than any of the other prisoners did. Klink was satisfied after he and Schultz checked on Hogan, and they got ready to leave.
And then Capt. Winchester started screaming.
Sgt. Winchester was wide awake and on his feet in seconds, trying valiantly to get his brother calmed down. “Dean! Dean! Wake up!”
“CAS! SAAAAAAAAAAM!”
“DEAN!!”
Klink and Schultz were frozen in shock at the door when Hogan came up to them. “Kommandant? Schultz? Can I talk to you for a minute?”
That snapped Klink out of it. “Hogan, what is the meaning of this?!”
Hogan jerked his head toward his quarters, and Klink followed. So did Schultz, though he found it difficult not to join Sgt. Winchester in trying to wake his brother from what sounded like a terrible nightmare.
Once they were in Hogan’s quarters, Klink hissed, “Hogan, what is going on here?”
Hogan sighed. “It was a hell of a crash, Kommandant. The Winchesters were the only ones who survived, and when the plane burned, Dean thought Sam was still inside. Lost two of their best friends, not to mention the rest of the crew. Seems like they get all the hard missions, too, get shot up more often than not. And their dad was killed at Pearl Harbor.”
Schultz gasped, fighting tears. “That’s terrible!”
Even Klink, who was not known for his sympathy for the prisoners, looked concerned. “What can we do? I can’t have this happening every night-they’ll wake the whole camp!”
Hogan sighed. “Wish I knew. We’ve assigned them to work details that should help during the day; maybe the benefits will carry over at night.”
“Perhaps they should go to a hospital.”
Hogan looked horrified. “You’re gonna lock them up in a mental ward for having nightmares?! That’s cruel!”
“But Hogan, if they’re shell-shocked....”
“Kommandant, it hasn’t even been a day since they were shot down. Give ’em some time. They’re away from the front lines. Maybe a few days here at the country club will be just what they need.”
Schultz looked back out into the main room. Capt. Winchester had stopped screaming and was sitting up, talking to Carter while Sgt. Winchester kept a hand on his back-not rubbing, but comforting nonetheless. And amazingly, Capt. Winchester had his hand on Carter’s shoulder and looked like he was comforting Carter instead of the other way around. Schultz had to maintain his composure because he was on duty, but he couldn’t stop a tear from slipping out.
“All right,” Klink was saying. “We’ll wait a few days. Schultz?”
Schultz took a deep breath. “Ja, Herr Kommandant?”
“Let’s get out of here.”
“Jawohl, Herr Kommandant.”
Schultz held himself together as he and Klink left the barracks and made their report to Hochstetter. But as soon as he got back to his own quarters, the toymaker’s heart that hid beneath the Luftwaffe uniform broke completely, and he wept as he prayed for the Winchester boys.
The Winchesters’ varying states of chronic sleep deprivation, grief, alcoholism, tentative grips on sanity, and other assorted post-Hell, post-Apocalypse, and Leviathan-crisis traumas made the first couple of days at Stalag 13 rougher than was probably usual for men who were actually Air Force officers. After those first couple of days, though, once they’d gotten used to the camp routine, Sam concluded that bizarrely, he kind of liked it there. Aside from the other men smoking like chimneys, the barracks were no worse than many of the other squats and no-tell motels where they’d stayed-cleaner than average, if he had to be honest, even if the straw mattress wasn’t comfortable and the bunk was almost too short for a man his height. The camp did have running water and functional facilities; the showers were cold, but that wasn’t anything the Winchesters hadn’t gotten used to on the run from the Leviathans. The routine was reassuring, and the exercise period usually involved some kind of fun game that the brothers hadn’t played in... decades, honestly, even centuries in Sam’s case, if one took Hell years into account. He genuinely couldn’t remember the last time he’d played volleyball, but he was fairly sure it was more recent than the last time he’d pitched horseshoes or played catch. The prisoners were friendly, too, even going so far as to distract the guard while Sam and Dean were showering so that their tattoos and scars wouldn’t attract undue attention. And thanks to LeBeau, the food was good-probably better than they knew, given that Sam happened to catch the Frenchman doctoring Dean’s coffee with vitamin oil one morning.
It probably said something about their lives that being trapped in a POW camp in the middle of World War II actually seemed like a vacation, but Sam decided not to think about that too hard.
Not only that, but it was also easier to ignore Lucifer here without having to resort to the pain of pressing on the scar on his left hand, a trick Dean had used to help him recognize what was real when the Hell hallucinations had started. Sam knew he was in a different reality for a host of reasons, and he knew Lucifer could not actually have followed them, not least because Lucifer tended to vanish into static during morning calisthenics. Keeping himself busy with yard cleanup helped, too. His grip on reality was still tenuous, true, but at least it didn’t feel quite so much like the thread by which he was hanging on would unravel at the least provocation.
That his telekinesis seemed to be returning to a very small degree, given the way bits of litter tended to freeze when he looked at them, was also easy enough to ignore. No one else commented on it, and Sam couldn’t be absolutely sure he wasn’t imagining it.
What got tricky was tuning out Lucifer’s commentary on the guards. Schultz went out of his way to be nice to the brothers, as did Cpl. Langenscheidt, and though Lucifer tried to convince Sam that they weren’t trustworthy, Sam had seen enough episodes of Hogan’s Heroes to know that Lucifer was wrong. They were both indifferent to most of the others, though Sgt. Hauschild and Lt. Bergmann seemed decent enough to Sam. Yet one guard, Pvt. Knorz, kept attracting Lucifer’s attention-in a positive way. And although Sam tried not to listen, he couldn’t help noticing that Knorz seemed to be watching both him and Dean. More than once Sam spotted Knorz hanging around either Barracks 2 or the motor pool.
Hogan had warned the Winchesters on the first morning that the Gestapo might be setting a trap for the Heroes. Lucifer wouldn’t shut up about Knorz, and Sam had shared both headspace and the Cage with the real Lucifer long enough to know how the Devil truly thought. So on the 19th, just to satisfy his own curiosity, Sam volunteered to help Carter clean Klink’s office and snuck a peek at the duty roster.
Yahtzee. Sgt. Schmidt was assigned to the motor pool, and Knorz was supposed to be patrolling on the opposite side of camp from Barracks 2.
That cinched it for Sam. And when Lucifer was chased off by Carter accidentally whacking Sam with his broom handle, Sam took advantage of the respite to come up with a quick way to find out for certain whether Knorz were Gestapo or something worse.
Hogan and Kinch had just finished a game of catch and were heading back to the barracks when Sam and Carter came out of the office, so after making sure the coast was clear, Sam set a quick pace across the compound to catch up to them while Carter took off to do something else. “Hey, Colonel?” he asked quietly as he walked up to Hogan just outside the barracks door. “Are there any important bombing missions coming up the Germans need to not know about?”
Hogan frowned. “Why?”
“Knorz. I can’t exactly say why, but I’ve got a feeling he’s a plant. So if Dean and I were to talk a little too freely about a mission that won’t be happening....”
“Winchester, you are aware that that’s exactly what they are planning to do to us?”
“Yeah, but we’re the new prisoners-traumatized, shot down on our 49th mission. Definitely not hunters with their own code who know there’s a perfect spot for eavesdropping not three feet from where Dean’s currently working.” Sam smiled innocently.
Hogan and Kinch looked at each other in amused surprise, picking up on Sam’s idea. American bomber crews were routinely sent home on rotation after flying fifty missions; it might make sense for an airman who was eager to get home to try to find out his last mission in advance.
Then Hogan shrugged. “Guess it can’t hurt. Your fiftieth mission would have been tomorrow, target....” He thought for a moment. “Osnabrück.”
Sam blinked. “What’s in Osnabrück?”
“Nothing that important. We’ve been hitting it pretty hard throughout the war; it’s an industrial center.”
Sam pondered this for a moment. “But it’s further from the front lines than something that is important.”
Hogan shrugged with his eyebrows.
Sam laughed. “Okay. One fake raid on Osnabrück, coming up.”
“Be careful, Sam. If Knorz is Gestapo, he’ll be suspicious if you let too much slip or say it too loud.”
“Oh, trust me, sir. We don’t know anything about acoustics, and we’ve definitely never had to bluff our way out of anything more than a parking ticket.” Sam smiled innocently again.
Kinch’s eyes narrowed. “What’s the toughest jam you have had to bluff your way out of? For real, I mean.”
Sam lowered his voice. “Honestly? We got thrown into this other reality where our lives are a TV show... and we had to pretend to be the actors who were pretending to be us. On camera. It didn’t go too well!”
Kinch’s laughter followed Sam as he made a long detour around the barracks to be suitably depressed by the time he got to the motor pool. Said detour also allowed him to see whether Knorz were near the barracks or where he was supposed to be patrolling; he wasn’t, but Sam did see him disappear into the motor pool. Perfect. Dean was elbow-deep in a truck engine when Sam arrived, and Knorz was nowhere to be seen, so Sam assumed Knorz would find his way within earshot as soon as Sam approached Dean. Thus, he made sure he was wearing his most emo face as he walked up to the truck.
Big brother radar being what it was, Dean looked around at Sam in concern before Sam could even speak. “Sammy? What’s up?”
Sam sighed. “Nothin’. I was just... thinking about that parade they were gonna have for us when we got back to Lawrence next week. Ticker tape, ninety-nine red balloons, everything.”
Dean nodded slowly, processing the code phrase. “You do remember what happened last time we left Lawrence, right?”
Sam huffed-as if either of them would ever forget the showdown in Stull Cemetery that had stopped the Apocalypse, ending with Sam wresting back control of his body from Lucifer long enough to dive into a hellmouth as a prelude to 180 Hell years in the Cage while his mis-rescued body wandered about soulless until Dean got him out. “Yeah,” he said. “But it can’t happen again, so... I dunno. I was just really looking forward to being done, going home, y’know? All the missions we’ve survived, and we get shot down on number forty-nine.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I know what you mean. I’m sick of bein’ shot at. And I am not gonna miss that English cuisine back at base. Fish and chips is all right, but the rest of it?”
“Seriously.”
“Give me a bacon cheeseburger with extra onion and some Key lime pie....”
“Key lime pie? In January?”
“Shut up, Sam.”
“And you know they’re rationing sugar still.”
“All right, cobbler made with canned peaches. The point stands.”
“Yeah. And it would’ve all been over tomorrow. Goodbye, Gatwick; goodbye, Osnabrück; hello, Jay Bird’s blue plate special.”
Dean frowned. “What’d you say?”
Sam rolled his eyes. “Dean, nobody can hear me.”
“We are behind enemy lines, Sam. We still need to be careful.”
“Look, Schmidt’s clear over there.” Sam pointed to Schmidt with his hand and to the point where he suspected Knorz was hiding with his head.
Dean caught both motions and deliberately turned away from Knorz to look and wave at Schmidt. “Yeah, well. Ixnay, capisce?”
Sam sighed. “Yeah, sure.”
“Hey, as long as you’re here, you wanna help?”
“Sure. What do you need?”
Dean put Sam right to work-and they both pretended they hadn’t heard the rustle of fabric as Knorz moved away.
The next evening, Knorz-actually Sturmscharführer Knorz of the SS Sicherheitsdienst-left Stalag 13 at the end of his shift and returned to his apartment in Hammelburg. When he switched on the light, however, Maj. Wolfgang Hochstetter was sitting on his couch, flanked by two junior officers.
“So, Knorz,” Hochstetter said slowly. “They’re going to hit Osnabrück again, ja?”
Knorz swallowed hard. “That’s what the prisoner said, Herr Major.”
“That’s what the prisoner said. Which prisoner?”
“One of the new men, Sgt. Winchester.”
“Not Col. Hogan?”
“Nein, Herr Major.”
Hochstetter chuckled unpleasantly. “And how did you happen to gain this information, Knorz?”
“I... overheard him talking to his brother in the motor pool.”
“And there is no way they could have known you were nearby, eh?”
“I... did not believe so, Herr Major.”
“So it is just a coincidence that we sent you to Stalag 13 to find a ring of spies and saboteurs and you came back with information on a bombing raid that could have helped the all-victorious Luftwaffe make some gains against the barbarian American Air Force... if it had actually happened.”
Knorz paled. “There was not a raid today?”
“Oh, ja, there was a raid all right. But it never got to Osnabrück. It never got to Germany at all. We moved the mobile anti-aircraft battery from the Dutch plant that made the liquid oxygen for the V2 rockets, and today that plant was demolished by British Spitfires!!”
Knorz’s stomach turned. “Herr Major, I swear to you, I suspected nothing. The new prisoners are crazy-they are weak-they could not have known I was there!”
Hochstetter shot to his feet and began pacing. “Crazy?! Weak?! You are crazy, Knorz! They have spent five days with the most dangerous man in all Germany, and you suspected nothing?!”
“The sergeant, he sees things which are not there. The captain, he has night terrors, his hands shake.”
“And how do you know this?”
“The guards gossip. And I have been observing them.”
“Oh, you have been observing them. Too obviously you have been observing them! You watch a man who sees things that are not there and expect him to think that you are not there?!”
Knorz had no answer to that accusation, but he pleaded, “I thought they might prove to be the weak link in Papa Bear’s organization.”
“And instead they have found the weak link in ours.” Hochstetter’s lip curled. “Perhaps you will not prove to be such a liability in Pomerania.”
It was all Knorz could do to keep from fainting.
Dean tried. He really did. Even if the prisoners had a stash of hooch somewhere, he knew he couldn’t risk getting caught with alcohol in his system, not here. Not now. It would only make trouble for Hogan. And he’d gone sober for four days or so at a time before without too many consequences, so he thought he’d be okay and be able to hide any shakes and jitters that resulted this time. But after about six days, he couldn’t keep the DTs under wraps anymore. He made it through roll call but shook like a leaf all through breakfast, and when he started to get up afterward, Hogan’s hand came down firmly on his shoulder. “Forget it, Winchester. You’re confined to quarters until you’re well. I’ll tell Klink you’ve got the flu.”
“Sir-”
“That’s a direct order, Captain.”
It wasn’t until he was back in bed, trying not to shake the bunk apart, that Dean wondered why he’d accepted that order from someone barely ten years his senior as readily as he would have if it had come from Dad. Hogan wasn’t actually Dean’s superior officer... but somehow, it helped not to be in charge anymore. Having to save the world with only Sam for backup had gotten old seven years ago.
Of course, so had losing everyone and everything they cared about, knowing how much of it was his own fault for having sold his soul to save Sam’s life and then having broken in Hell, turning torturer and thereby breaking the first seal on Lucifer’s Cage. Sam had broken the last seal and started the Apocalypse, but he wouldn’t have been able to do so if Dean hadn’t broken the first, and Dean still couldn’t forgive himself for that. And he really didn’t want to dwell on how Castiel, the angel who’d rescued him from Hell, had betrayed them with a bad plan to stop Raphael from restarting the Apocalypse. When Dean had called Cas on it, Cas had tried to sideline both brothers by breaking Sam’s head, unleashing the Hell trauma that now left Sam seeing Lucifer everywhere he went. Dean might eventually be able to forgive Cas for opening Purgatory and releasing the Leviathans, but he didn’t know if he’d ever be able to forgive Cas for hurting Sammy.
And people wondered why he drank so much. He knew it wasn’t healthy, but how the hell else was he supposed to deal?
Prison life being what it was, however, there wasn’t an awful lot for Dean to do while he was on bed rest and the others were all outside, aside from giving in to LeBeau’s insistence that he eat all the chicken soup he could hold. He was too shaky to read or to beef up any of the wards he and Sam had set after breakfast their second day there, and though Kinch had gotten him a small transistor radio that he could listen to with the volume turned way down, his only options appeared to be German radio-oompah music and torch songs with incomprehensible lyrics-or whatever happened to be on the BBC, which was usually Big Band music or classical. The latter put him to sleep, and the former only made him think about both how awesome and how disappointing it had been to hang out with Eliot Ness when Chronos had dragged him back to 1944. He couldn’t help wondering whether they’d ever be able to locate Ness’s journal, if he even kept one. And that made him wonder what Ness had written about him, whether he’d been a total disappointment to his hero or whether Ness had even bothered to record his involvement in the Chronos hunt at all. He kind of hoped he’d made a positive enough impression-Ness had called him “Untouchable” there at the last-but he couldn’t be sure.
He’d disappointed every other hero of his that he’d met. Why should Ness be any different?
He was still in one such funk a couple of days later, though he’d dragged himself to the table to eat and hadn’t yet dragged himself back to Sam’s bunk, when the other men started filtering back into the barracks after the work details. Hogan went into his quarters, and most of the other prisoners drifted to their bunks, but Carter sat down at the table across from Dean.
“Capt. Winchester?” Carter prompted. “What’s wrong, sir?”
Dean shook his head. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“I dunno; I could try. It’s not like I don’t know anything about war.”
“Yeah, but you’ve got the whole Army. You’ve got a big team; you’ve got the Underground. Me and Sam, we’ve got to save the world on our own. Again. From a threat we can’t just kill. And this time all our friends are dead.”
“Why don’t you ask God for help?” Carter frowned.
Dean snorted. “He’s missing. Even the angels haven’t seen him.”
Carter’s frown deepened. “How do you lose an infinite, omnipresent God?”
Dean blinked. “I... don’t know.”
Carter sighed. “Wish Dr. McKay was here. He’s a physicist; he might know.”
Dean blinked again and stared at Carter. “McKay. Rodney McKay?”
“Yeah, do you know him? He and Col. Sheppard helped us blow up an atomic research lab back in October.”
Dean was still laughing a full minute later when Sam came back. Sam looked around at the others, bewildered.
“Crackers, that’s wot ’e is,” Newkirk grumbled into his coffee, which only made Dean laugh harder.
“Dude. Breathe,” said Sam.
Dean finally gasped for air. “Can we stay here, Sammy?” he asked, wiping the tears off his face. “I wanna go to Atlantis.”
Sam cleared his throat and looked at Newkirk. “What’s the saying-concur your analysis?”
“Hey, at least you can shoot Wraith with regular ammo,” Dean giggled.
“And how, exactly, are we supposed to get to Atlantis when it won’t even be discovered for another sixty years?”
“Solar flare. Or hell, maybe we could find Chronos-you remember the summoning spell, right?”
“Dean.”
“Oh, lighten up, Francis.”
Sam snorted and rolled his eyes.
Hogan came out of his office at that point and looked from one brother to the other. “Did I miss something?”
“Inside joke,” they chorused automatically.
Before Hogan could inquire further, Sam held up a finger. “Oh, Colonel, I don’t know if this means anything or if it’s even reliable, but I overheard Schultz and a couple of the other guards talking a little while ago. They were saying something about Knorz getting transferred to East Prussia, wondering if it was just the standard story of someone getting sent to the Eastern Front or if there were a new troop build-up underway, maybe some kind of attempt to relieve Memel and retake Riga.”
Hogan frowned. “Who was wondering?”
“I don’t remember his name, sorry. One of the younger guards brought it up. Schultz said he hadn’t heard anything, but the others were laughing at him because he never knows anything.”
“And it was just speculation?”
“Yes, sir. A couple of ‘Oh, yeah, So-and-so’s being transferred, too’ remarks, but nothing more than... anecdata, some people call it in our day.”
Dean snorted. “‘Some people’? Some nerds, you mean. Who even talks like that?”
Sam shot him a Look. “I learned it from Ash.”
Dean shut up. Ash’s death was one of many that still weighed heavily on Dean’s conscience, even though the brothers had seen him happy and well in Heaven the last time they were both dead at the same time.
“What do you think, Colonel?” Carter asked.
Hogan shook his head. “I dunno. Wouldn’t be much to go on even without the Gestapo around. As it is... all it means definitely is that Knorz won’t be here for a while. We can’t take the risk of sending anything to London, not now.”
There were nods and “yes, sir”s all around, and everyone drifted back to what they’d been doing before.
Sam grabbed himself a cup of coffee and sat down across from Dean. “You okay?”
Dean shrugged. “Listen, Sam....”
Sam smiled a little. “Forget it, dude. I know you didn’t mean anything.”
Dean sighed and played with his empty soup mug for a moment before confessing quietly, “I wish you’d been with me, man. In ’44.” At Sam’s confused blink, he continued, “Maybe... maybe this time we could have....”
And Sam’s face fell as he caught on. “Dean....”
“Dude, it’s my fault. I’m the reason Mom knew about Liddy Walsh. I’m the reason she insisted on going with Samuel to try to stop Azazel. I’m the one who missed the shot, twice.” Dean didn’t know why he was letting this spill now, here, with so many other people in the room, even if they were giving the brothers as much space as they could; he hadn’t even been thinking about the time he’d walked into a predestination paradox. Maybe the detox was doing more of a number on him than he’d thought.
Sam reached across the table and grabbed Dean’s trembling hand. “Dean. The angels set you up in ’73. And even if I had been there in ’44, it might not have gone any better than in ’78. I mean, Michael scrubbed our warning from Mom’s memory then; he could have stopped us from changing anything in ’44.” His grip tightened. “You can’t let the what-ifs eat you alive like this, man. Next time we face something like Osiris....” He trailed off, shaking his head and clearly fighting tears as he recalled how the god had condemned Dean to death, despite Sam’s argument that Dean’s sense of guilt was irrational. The ghost of their friend Jo would have been forced to carry out the sentence had Sam not been able to gank Osiris first. Next time there might not be a way out.
And that brought to mind a more recent conversation, after the run-in with the Amazons. I don’t care how you deal. Just don’t... don’t get yourself killed.
Dean found himself fighting tears of his own. “Sammy....”
“Dean.” The I need you was unspoken, yet Dean heard it loud and clear.
The tears fell, damn them, and Dean couldn’t meet Sam’s eyes anymore. I can’t, he wanted to say. I can’t let it go. I can’t shake it off. I don’t know how. But his mouth remained stubbornly shut as the stupid tears kept running down his cheeks, and he couldn’t even muster the strength to wipe them away.
Sam rubbed Dean’s wrist. “Hey,” he whispered, barely audible over the sounds of the other prisoners trying to keep themselves occupied and not eavesdrop or intrude on the brothers’ moment. Dean made himself look up to find that Sam couldn’t keep the tears at bay, either.
“I’m sorry, Sam. I’m a failure. I’m a monster.” Damn withdrawal-where was this stuff coming from? At least his voice was as quiet as Sam’s, and only Sam would know he meant it more literally than not. He had, after all, been a vampire for a day before they found a cure, and that was after everything Dean had done in Hell.
Sam wasn’t buying it, though. “And I’m not?”
“Sam....”
“Dean.”
“You don’t know what I did down there.”
“You don’t know what I did without my soul.”
“That wasn’t you. And with Ruby-hell, you were high.”
“You were Stockholmed. Non compos mentis.”
“Sam.”
“Dean.”
LeBeau cleared his throat at that point before walking close enough to potentially overhear. “Pardon, Messieurs, but I’m about to need this space to prepare dinner.”
Sam let go of Dean’s wrist then, but only long enough to come around the table and all but carry Dean back to the bunks. And if Dean thought the moment was over, he was mistaken. “Do you know what... what I regret most?” Sam asked as he settled Dean on his own bunk, the better to help him up for supper. “From when I was soulless?”
Dean sighed. “Sam....”
“Dean, I need to say this. I mean, yeah, I did my time and all, but... I let you get turned because I knew there was a cure. And it didn’t even occur to me that you’d freak out and go....”
Dean shot Sam a warning glare. The vampire incident had cost him the only long-term relationship he’d ever had because he’d nearly killed his girlfriend; that topic was off limits forever.
Sam caught it and didn’t finish the sentence. “I just... the fact that I’m even capable of that....”
The flash of anger faded into pain over the whole rotten mess, not least because Dean hated to see Sam blame himself for something that had happened while he wasn’t himself. “Sam.”
Sam shook his head and kept going. “Maybe you were right. Maybe I am a monster, a... a blood-sucking freak.”
Dean blinked. “Wait, whoa, what? I’ve said some stupid stuff, Sam, but I don’t remember saying that.”
“It was in that voice mail.”
“What voice mail?”
“The one you left... before....”
“Aw, hell.” Dean understood now-after a major fight with Sam in the last days before the Apocalypse, he’d called to try to mend fences, but the message he had left clearly wasn’t the message Sam had heard. “I knew Zach had done something, but....”
Sam frowned. “Zachariah?”
“He changed it, Sam. Him or Ruby, I’m not sure.” They’d both been played like a Stradivarius-Dean by the angels, Sam by the demons.
“Then... you didn’t....”
“No. I didn’t.”
Sam’s only response was to pull Dean into a crushing hug. And Dean was still too weak to stop the tears.
Finally, though, Dean managed to say, “Hey. You want me to give you the flu for real?”
Sam gave a damp chuckle and let go.
“Honestly, Sam, a man in my condition-”
“In your condition?! Dean, you are not terminal!”
“Maybe I am. Maybe I’ve got consumption. Or double pneumonia. One of those things where you have to move to Arizona before you croak.”
Sam burst out laughing. “Any excuse to see the Grand Canyon before it’s over, right?”
“Damn straight, little brother.” Dean felt his own spirits lifting somewhat and managed a genuine smile. “Hot sand and hot chicks. A winning combination.”
That seemed to be everyone’s cue to start another round of Winchester Trivial Pursuit, which kept both brothers happily occupied until lights out. Talking so much was exhausting to Dean, but the endorphins did help somewhat. And the chick flick moment did seem to have cleared the air between him and Sam, at least a little, which was always a relief.
It still didn’t stop the nightmares. And even being allowed outside the next day for some (cold) fresh air and sunshine didn’t do much to pull him out of the funk he’d slid back into. So he really wasn’t in the mood for conversation when Sgt. Wilson wandered over and saw the look on his face.
“Problem, Captain?” Wilson asked amiably, sitting down beside Dean.
Dean snorted. “Yeah. Wishing I could go home and get blind drunk and forget about war for a while.”
Wilson didn’t take the hint. “Shouldn’t self-medicate like that, son. Oh, trust me, I know the feeling, but it doesn’t help. You’ll drink yourself into an early grave.”
Dean let out a short, harsh laugh. “If you only knew....”
“-Don’t tell me you already have.”
“Not drunk myself to death, no, but it’s about the only way I haven’t died yet. Well, that or cancer.” Dean snorted again and shook his head. “Not too many old men in our line of work. The good die young and the ornery barely make it past 50. And that goes double for the ones who get mixed up with us. Don’t know why we keep coming back; the rest of the family just keeps dyin’.”
“First rule of warfare,” Wilson said sympathetically. “Good men die.”
“And rule number two is that doctors can’t change rule number one,” Dean quoted bitterly. “Thank you, Henry Blake.”
“Look, Captain, whatever’s eating you, even if it is your fault, I can tell you for a fact that keeping it bottled up will kill you. You need to talk to someone.”
“Who? Nobody here would understand except maybe Col. Hogan, and he said he doesn’t want to know.”
“Talk to God if you have to.”
“You think I haven’t tried?!” Dean was really on a tear now. “How can I talk to God when He won’t answer the phone?!”
“Maybe He has,” Wilson returned mildly.
That brought Dean up short. “What do you mean?”
“You’re here, right?” At Dean’s frown, Wilson continued, “Usually when we have ‘visitors,’ they’re here because we need them for something, but we’re on complete lockdown. So maybe this time there’s something you need from us.”
“Like what?”
Wilson shrugged. “Learning how to be POWs?”
“How so?”
“Look, even here, there’s a limit to how much control we have over what we do and what’s done to us. Col. Hogan has to do a lot of fancy footwork to get guys out of the cooler, stop transfers, keep guys out of the Gestapo’s hands. Sometimes it’s still not enough. Some men go stir crazy. Some men just get on Hochstetter’s bad side, or Klink’s or Burkhalter’s. And if you fight back too hard... pow. Shot while escaping.”
“At least they’re humans. Humans you can kill.”
“Only if they let down their guard. And they don’t, not that often. Even if they did, you kill too many, the rest start asking questions.”
“But you’ve got backup.”
“Backup with limits. Backup that fails now and then. Backup that dies just like the monsters that are holding us. I trust the men in this camp with my life, Captain, but not even Col. Hogan can pull off some miracles. Sometimes he’s fast, but not fast enough to beat truth serum or torture. Sometimes the goons get us boxed in. Sometimes the Krauts get lucky. Sometimes London drops us a man and he gets shot up on the way down, dies before our guys bring him in. Sometimes a plane or a bomb just fails; sometimes the weather louses things up, and it’s nobody’s fault.”
Dean wondered wildly just who was playing father confessor here.
“My point, Captain, is that you can’t win them all. You can’t control everything. You can’t even always prevent terrible things from being done to you. And that isn’t a personal failure on your part.” Wilson paused. “That doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt like hell every time. But that’s not a personal failure, either. It means you’re human.”
“So what am I supposed to do, huh? How am I supposed to deal?”
“I don’t know.” Wilson stood. “I just know that somehow we all get up every morning and keep going, one day at a time. And if you can’t do that... you die.” And on that cheerful note, Wilson left.
Dean supposed that advice might have helped someone else. But death didn’t scare him or Sam anymore. They kept going because they couldn’t leave each other behind again, because someone had to stop the world from offing itself, because everyone they’d lost would want them to. Yet even now, even here, if they both went together... Dean wasn’t so sure he would mind. At least here, there’d be a chance it would really be over, even though they’d never see Mom or Dad again.
He sighed and forced himself to go inside to eat some lunch.
Hochstetter was not a patient man. He knew that intelligence work took time, but if a plan took more than a day or two to yield results, his temper grew considerably shorter. So it took considerable effort for him to remain calm as he waited for Pvt. Hausmann, Knorz’s replacement, to return to Gestapo headquarters from Stalag 13 at the end of the fourth day with no unusual enemy action in East Prussia and no messages intercepted by the radio detector truck parked halfway between Hammelburg and the camp.
Finally, Hausmann showed and reported to Hochstetter. “Capt. Winchester is recovering, Herr Major, and there has been no change in Sgt. Winchester.”
“You are sure Sgt. Winchester has overheard your speculations, hm?”
“Jawohl, Herr Major. And so has Sgt. Schultz, whom I have observed talking with Col. Hogan many times. He has had every opportunity to draw his own conclusions if word has gotten to him-and I saw Sgt. Winchester near us the first day.” Hausmann paused. “Might it be, Herr Major....”
“No,” Hochstetter snapped. “Papa Bear is at Stalag 13, I smell it. He is simply too smart to take the bait so soon after fooling Knorz.” He got up and paced for a moment as he thought out loud. “The Geneva Convention is a nuisance, though we have our ways around it. These prisoners are too new; the Red Cross will be watching too closely. We cannot push the boundaries very far.” Then he looked at Hausmann. “How well is Capt. Winchester? Could we interrogate him safely?”
Hausmann considered. “He is on light duty, I believe. He could handle questioning, perhaps, but nothing more. At least, in my opinion... I’m not a medical officer.”
Hochstetter drummed the fingers of his right hand on his belt buckle as he thought. Then he nodded once. “Very well. Tomorrow I shall make the acquaintance of the Winchester brothers. And mark my words, Hausmann: they will talk.”
Next
Note: Sturmscharführer was roughly the equivalent of a technical sergeant; the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) was the intelligence wing of the SS.
Chapter 2
Hazy Shade of Winter
Sgt. Hans Schultz’s opinions of bed checks varied depending on what he “didn’t know” was happening and on who ordered the check. He didn’t see any reason for this one other than the fact that Maj. Hochstetter had ordered it. He didn’t see any reason not to have it, though, other than inconvenience for himself and Col. Klink, so he didn’t object, but he did suggest checking Barracks 2 last because there might be some monkey business going on that he truly didn’t know about. The reason he gave, however, was not wanting to disturb Col. Hogan, and Klink agreed with that.
To Schultz’s relief, everyone in Barracks 2 was present and accounted for and sound asleep. Both of the new men seemed to be having bad dreams when he shone his flashlight on them to check their faces, but they didn’t react to the light any more than any of the other prisoners did. Klink was satisfied after he and Schultz checked on Hogan, and they got ready to leave.
And then Capt. Winchester started screaming.
Sgt. Winchester was wide awake and on his feet in seconds, trying valiantly to get his brother calmed down. “Dean! Dean! Wake up!”
“CAS! SAAAAAAAAAAM!”
“DEAN!!”
Klink and Schultz were frozen in shock at the door when Hogan came up to them. “Kommandant? Schultz? Can I talk to you for a minute?”
That snapped Klink out of it. “Hogan, what is the meaning of this?!”
Hogan jerked his head toward his quarters, and Klink followed. So did Schultz, though he found it difficult not to join Sgt. Winchester in trying to wake his brother from what sounded like a terrible nightmare.
Once they were in Hogan’s quarters, Klink hissed, “Hogan, what is going on here?”
Hogan sighed. “It was a hell of a crash, Kommandant. The Winchesters were the only ones who survived, and when the plane burned, Dean thought Sam was still inside. Lost two of their best friends, not to mention the rest of the crew. Seems like they get all the hard missions, too, get shot up more often than not. And their dad was killed at Pearl Harbor.”
Schultz gasped, fighting tears. “That’s terrible!”
Even Klink, who was not known for his sympathy for the prisoners, looked concerned. “What can we do? I can’t have this happening every night-they’ll wake the whole camp!”
Hogan sighed. “Wish I knew. We’ve assigned them to work details that should help during the day; maybe the benefits will carry over at night.”
“Perhaps they should go to a hospital.”
Hogan looked horrified. “You’re gonna lock them up in a mental ward for having nightmares?! That’s cruel!”
“But Hogan, if they’re shell-shocked....”
“Kommandant, it hasn’t even been a day since they were shot down. Give ’em some time. They’re away from the front lines. Maybe a few days here at the country club will be just what they need.”
Schultz looked back out into the main room. Capt. Winchester had stopped screaming and was sitting up, talking to Carter while Sgt. Winchester kept a hand on his back-not rubbing, but comforting nonetheless. And amazingly, Capt. Winchester had his hand on Carter’s shoulder and looked like he was comforting Carter instead of the other way around. Schultz had to maintain his composure because he was on duty, but he couldn’t stop a tear from slipping out.
“All right,” Klink was saying. “We’ll wait a few days. Schultz?”
Schultz took a deep breath. “Ja, Herr Kommandant?”
“Let’s get out of here.”
“Jawohl, Herr Kommandant.”
Schultz held himself together as he and Klink left the barracks and made their report to Hochstetter. But as soon as he got back to his own quarters, the toymaker’s heart that hid beneath the Luftwaffe uniform broke completely, and he wept as he prayed for the Winchester boys.
The Winchesters’ varying states of chronic sleep deprivation, grief, alcoholism, tentative grips on sanity, and other assorted post-Hell, post-Apocalypse, and Leviathan-crisis traumas made the first couple of days at Stalag 13 rougher than was probably usual for men who were actually Air Force officers. After those first couple of days, though, once they’d gotten used to the camp routine, Sam concluded that bizarrely, he kind of liked it there. Aside from the other men smoking like chimneys, the barracks were no worse than many of the other squats and no-tell motels where they’d stayed-cleaner than average, if he had to be honest, even if the straw mattress wasn’t comfortable and the bunk was almost too short for a man his height. The camp did have running water and functional facilities; the showers were cold, but that wasn’t anything the Winchesters hadn’t gotten used to on the run from the Leviathans. The routine was reassuring, and the exercise period usually involved some kind of fun game that the brothers hadn’t played in... decades, honestly, even centuries in Sam’s case, if one took Hell years into account. He genuinely couldn’t remember the last time he’d played volleyball, but he was fairly sure it was more recent than the last time he’d pitched horseshoes or played catch. The prisoners were friendly, too, even going so far as to distract the guard while Sam and Dean were showering so that their tattoos and scars wouldn’t attract undue attention. And thanks to LeBeau, the food was good-probably better than they knew, given that Sam happened to catch the Frenchman doctoring Dean’s coffee with vitamin oil one morning.
It probably said something about their lives that being trapped in a POW camp in the middle of World War II actually seemed like a vacation, but Sam decided not to think about that too hard.
Not only that, but it was also easier to ignore Lucifer here without having to resort to the pain of pressing on the scar on his left hand, a trick Dean had used to help him recognize what was real when the Hell hallucinations had started. Sam knew he was in a different reality for a host of reasons, and he knew Lucifer could not actually have followed them, not least because Lucifer tended to vanish into static during morning calisthenics. Keeping himself busy with yard cleanup helped, too. His grip on reality was still tenuous, true, but at least it didn’t feel quite so much like the thread by which he was hanging on would unravel at the least provocation.
That his telekinesis seemed to be returning to a very small degree, given the way bits of litter tended to freeze when he looked at them, was also easy enough to ignore. No one else commented on it, and Sam couldn’t be absolutely sure he wasn’t imagining it.
What got tricky was tuning out Lucifer’s commentary on the guards. Schultz went out of his way to be nice to the brothers, as did Cpl. Langenscheidt, and though Lucifer tried to convince Sam that they weren’t trustworthy, Sam had seen enough episodes of Hogan’s Heroes to know that Lucifer was wrong. They were both indifferent to most of the others, though Sgt. Hauschild and Lt. Bergmann seemed decent enough to Sam. Yet one guard, Pvt. Knorz, kept attracting Lucifer’s attention-in a positive way. And although Sam tried not to listen, he couldn’t help noticing that Knorz seemed to be watching both him and Dean. More than once Sam spotted Knorz hanging around either Barracks 2 or the motor pool.
Hogan had warned the Winchesters on the first morning that the Gestapo might be setting a trap for the Heroes. Lucifer wouldn’t shut up about Knorz, and Sam had shared both headspace and the Cage with the real Lucifer long enough to know how the Devil truly thought. So on the 19th, just to satisfy his own curiosity, Sam volunteered to help Carter clean Klink’s office and snuck a peek at the duty roster.
Yahtzee. Sgt. Schmidt was assigned to the motor pool, and Knorz was supposed to be patrolling on the opposite side of camp from Barracks 2.
That cinched it for Sam. And when Lucifer was chased off by Carter accidentally whacking Sam with his broom handle, Sam took advantage of the respite to come up with a quick way to find out for certain whether Knorz were Gestapo or something worse.
Hogan and Kinch had just finished a game of catch and were heading back to the barracks when Sam and Carter came out of the office, so after making sure the coast was clear, Sam set a quick pace across the compound to catch up to them while Carter took off to do something else. “Hey, Colonel?” he asked quietly as he walked up to Hogan just outside the barracks door. “Are there any important bombing missions coming up the Germans need to not know about?”
Hogan frowned. “Why?”
“Knorz. I can’t exactly say why, but I’ve got a feeling he’s a plant. So if Dean and I were to talk a little too freely about a mission that won’t be happening....”
“Winchester, you are aware that that’s exactly what they are planning to do to us?”
“Yeah, but we’re the new prisoners-traumatized, shot down on our 49th mission. Definitely not hunters with their own code who know there’s a perfect spot for eavesdropping not three feet from where Dean’s currently working.” Sam smiled innocently.
Hogan and Kinch looked at each other in amused surprise, picking up on Sam’s idea. American bomber crews were routinely sent home on rotation after flying fifty missions; it might make sense for an airman who was eager to get home to try to find out his last mission in advance.
Then Hogan shrugged. “Guess it can’t hurt. Your fiftieth mission would have been tomorrow, target....” He thought for a moment. “Osnabrück.”
Sam blinked. “What’s in Osnabrück?”
“Nothing that important. We’ve been hitting it pretty hard throughout the war; it’s an industrial center.”
Sam pondered this for a moment. “But it’s further from the front lines than something that is important.”
Hogan shrugged with his eyebrows.
Sam laughed. “Okay. One fake raid on Osnabrück, coming up.”
“Be careful, Sam. If Knorz is Gestapo, he’ll be suspicious if you let too much slip or say it too loud.”
“Oh, trust me, sir. We don’t know anything about acoustics, and we’ve definitely never had to bluff our way out of anything more than a parking ticket.” Sam smiled innocently again.
Kinch’s eyes narrowed. “What’s the toughest jam you have had to bluff your way out of? For real, I mean.”
Sam lowered his voice. “Honestly? We got thrown into this other reality where our lives are a TV show... and we had to pretend to be the actors who were pretending to be us. On camera. It didn’t go too well!”
Kinch’s laughter followed Sam as he made a long detour around the barracks to be suitably depressed by the time he got to the motor pool. Said detour also allowed him to see whether Knorz were near the barracks or where he was supposed to be patrolling; he wasn’t, but Sam did see him disappear into the motor pool. Perfect. Dean was elbow-deep in a truck engine when Sam arrived, and Knorz was nowhere to be seen, so Sam assumed Knorz would find his way within earshot as soon as Sam approached Dean. Thus, he made sure he was wearing his most emo face as he walked up to the truck.
Big brother radar being what it was, Dean looked around at Sam in concern before Sam could even speak. “Sammy? What’s up?”
Sam sighed. “Nothin’. I was just... thinking about that parade they were gonna have for us when we got back to Lawrence next week. Ticker tape, ninety-nine red balloons, everything.”
Dean nodded slowly, processing the code phrase. “You do remember what happened last time we left Lawrence, right?”
Sam huffed-as if either of them would ever forget the showdown in Stull Cemetery that had stopped the Apocalypse, ending with Sam wresting back control of his body from Lucifer long enough to dive into a hellmouth as a prelude to 180 Hell years in the Cage while his mis-rescued body wandered about soulless until Dean got him out. “Yeah,” he said. “But it can’t happen again, so... I dunno. I was just really looking forward to being done, going home, y’know? All the missions we’ve survived, and we get shot down on number forty-nine.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I know what you mean. I’m sick of bein’ shot at. And I am not gonna miss that English cuisine back at base. Fish and chips is all right, but the rest of it?”
“Seriously.”
“Give me a bacon cheeseburger with extra onion and some Key lime pie....”
“Key lime pie? In January?”
“Shut up, Sam.”
“And you know they’re rationing sugar still.”
“All right, cobbler made with canned peaches. The point stands.”
“Yeah. And it would’ve all been over tomorrow. Goodbye, Gatwick; goodbye, Osnabrück; hello, Jay Bird’s blue plate special.”
Dean frowned. “What’d you say?”
Sam rolled his eyes. “Dean, nobody can hear me.”
“We are behind enemy lines, Sam. We still need to be careful.”
“Look, Schmidt’s clear over there.” Sam pointed to Schmidt with his hand and to the point where he suspected Knorz was hiding with his head.
Dean caught both motions and deliberately turned away from Knorz to look and wave at Schmidt. “Yeah, well. Ixnay, capisce?”
Sam sighed. “Yeah, sure.”
“Hey, as long as you’re here, you wanna help?”
“Sure. What do you need?”
Dean put Sam right to work-and they both pretended they hadn’t heard the rustle of fabric as Knorz moved away.
The next evening, Knorz-actually Sturmscharführer Knorz of the SS Sicherheitsdienst-left Stalag 13 at the end of his shift and returned to his apartment in Hammelburg. When he switched on the light, however, Maj. Wolfgang Hochstetter was sitting on his couch, flanked by two junior officers.
“So, Knorz,” Hochstetter said slowly. “They’re going to hit Osnabrück again, ja?”
Knorz swallowed hard. “That’s what the prisoner said, Herr Major.”
“That’s what the prisoner said. Which prisoner?”
“One of the new men, Sgt. Winchester.”
“Not Col. Hogan?”
“Nein, Herr Major.”
Hochstetter chuckled unpleasantly. “And how did you happen to gain this information, Knorz?”
“I... overheard him talking to his brother in the motor pool.”
“And there is no way they could have known you were nearby, eh?”
“I... did not believe so, Herr Major.”
“So it is just a coincidence that we sent you to Stalag 13 to find a ring of spies and saboteurs and you came back with information on a bombing raid that could have helped the all-victorious Luftwaffe make some gains against the barbarian American Air Force... if it had actually happened.”
Knorz paled. “There was not a raid today?”
“Oh, ja, there was a raid all right. But it never got to Osnabrück. It never got to Germany at all. We moved the mobile anti-aircraft battery from the Dutch plant that made the liquid oxygen for the V2 rockets, and today that plant was demolished by British Spitfires!!”
Knorz’s stomach turned. “Herr Major, I swear to you, I suspected nothing. The new prisoners are crazy-they are weak-they could not have known I was there!”
Hochstetter shot to his feet and began pacing. “Crazy?! Weak?! You are crazy, Knorz! They have spent five days with the most dangerous man in all Germany, and you suspected nothing?!”
“The sergeant, he sees things which are not there. The captain, he has night terrors, his hands shake.”
“And how do you know this?”
“The guards gossip. And I have been observing them.”
“Oh, you have been observing them. Too obviously you have been observing them! You watch a man who sees things that are not there and expect him to think that you are not there?!”
Knorz had no answer to that accusation, but he pleaded, “I thought they might prove to be the weak link in Papa Bear’s organization.”
“And instead they have found the weak link in ours.” Hochstetter’s lip curled. “Perhaps you will not prove to be such a liability in Pomerania.”
It was all Knorz could do to keep from fainting.
Dean tried. He really did. Even if the prisoners had a stash of hooch somewhere, he knew he couldn’t risk getting caught with alcohol in his system, not here. Not now. It would only make trouble for Hogan. And he’d gone sober for four days or so at a time before without too many consequences, so he thought he’d be okay and be able to hide any shakes and jitters that resulted this time. But after about six days, he couldn’t keep the DTs under wraps anymore. He made it through roll call but shook like a leaf all through breakfast, and when he started to get up afterward, Hogan’s hand came down firmly on his shoulder. “Forget it, Winchester. You’re confined to quarters until you’re well. I’ll tell Klink you’ve got the flu.”
“Sir-”
“That’s a direct order, Captain.”
It wasn’t until he was back in bed, trying not to shake the bunk apart, that Dean wondered why he’d accepted that order from someone barely ten years his senior as readily as he would have if it had come from Dad. Hogan wasn’t actually Dean’s superior officer... but somehow, it helped not to be in charge anymore. Having to save the world with only Sam for backup had gotten old seven years ago.
Of course, so had losing everyone and everything they cared about, knowing how much of it was his own fault for having sold his soul to save Sam’s life and then having broken in Hell, turning torturer and thereby breaking the first seal on Lucifer’s Cage. Sam had broken the last seal and started the Apocalypse, but he wouldn’t have been able to do so if Dean hadn’t broken the first, and Dean still couldn’t forgive himself for that. And he really didn’t want to dwell on how Castiel, the angel who’d rescued him from Hell, had betrayed them with a bad plan to stop Raphael from restarting the Apocalypse. When Dean had called Cas on it, Cas had tried to sideline both brothers by breaking Sam’s head, unleashing the Hell trauma that now left Sam seeing Lucifer everywhere he went. Dean might eventually be able to forgive Cas for opening Purgatory and releasing the Leviathans, but he didn’t know if he’d ever be able to forgive Cas for hurting Sammy.
And people wondered why he drank so much. He knew it wasn’t healthy, but how the hell else was he supposed to deal?
Prison life being what it was, however, there wasn’t an awful lot for Dean to do while he was on bed rest and the others were all outside, aside from giving in to LeBeau’s insistence that he eat all the chicken soup he could hold. He was too shaky to read or to beef up any of the wards he and Sam had set after breakfast their second day there, and though Kinch had gotten him a small transistor radio that he could listen to with the volume turned way down, his only options appeared to be German radio-oompah music and torch songs with incomprehensible lyrics-or whatever happened to be on the BBC, which was usually Big Band music or classical. The latter put him to sleep, and the former only made him think about both how awesome and how disappointing it had been to hang out with Eliot Ness when Chronos had dragged him back to 1944. He couldn’t help wondering whether they’d ever be able to locate Ness’s journal, if he even kept one. And that made him wonder what Ness had written about him, whether he’d been a total disappointment to his hero or whether Ness had even bothered to record his involvement in the Chronos hunt at all. He kind of hoped he’d made a positive enough impression-Ness had called him “Untouchable” there at the last-but he couldn’t be sure.
He’d disappointed every other hero of his that he’d met. Why should Ness be any different?
He was still in one such funk a couple of days later, though he’d dragged himself to the table to eat and hadn’t yet dragged himself back to Sam’s bunk, when the other men started filtering back into the barracks after the work details. Hogan went into his quarters, and most of the other prisoners drifted to their bunks, but Carter sat down at the table across from Dean.
“Capt. Winchester?” Carter prompted. “What’s wrong, sir?”
Dean shook his head. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“I dunno; I could try. It’s not like I don’t know anything about war.”
“Yeah, but you’ve got the whole Army. You’ve got a big team; you’ve got the Underground. Me and Sam, we’ve got to save the world on our own. Again. From a threat we can’t just kill. And this time all our friends are dead.”
“Why don’t you ask God for help?” Carter frowned.
Dean snorted. “He’s missing. Even the angels haven’t seen him.”
Carter’s frown deepened. “How do you lose an infinite, omnipresent God?”
Dean blinked. “I... don’t know.”
Carter sighed. “Wish Dr. McKay was here. He’s a physicist; he might know.”
Dean blinked again and stared at Carter. “McKay. Rodney McKay?”
“Yeah, do you know him? He and Col. Sheppard helped us blow up an atomic research lab back in October.”
Dean was still laughing a full minute later when Sam came back. Sam looked around at the others, bewildered.
“Crackers, that’s wot ’e is,” Newkirk grumbled into his coffee, which only made Dean laugh harder.
“Dude. Breathe,” said Sam.
Dean finally gasped for air. “Can we stay here, Sammy?” he asked, wiping the tears off his face. “I wanna go to Atlantis.”
Sam cleared his throat and looked at Newkirk. “What’s the saying-concur your analysis?”
“Hey, at least you can shoot Wraith with regular ammo,” Dean giggled.
“And how, exactly, are we supposed to get to Atlantis when it won’t even be discovered for another sixty years?”
“Solar flare. Or hell, maybe we could find Chronos-you remember the summoning spell, right?”
“Dean.”
“Oh, lighten up, Francis.”
Sam snorted and rolled his eyes.
Hogan came out of his office at that point and looked from one brother to the other. “Did I miss something?”
“Inside joke,” they chorused automatically.
Before Hogan could inquire further, Sam held up a finger. “Oh, Colonel, I don’t know if this means anything or if it’s even reliable, but I overheard Schultz and a couple of the other guards talking a little while ago. They were saying something about Knorz getting transferred to East Prussia, wondering if it was just the standard story of someone getting sent to the Eastern Front or if there were a new troop build-up underway, maybe some kind of attempt to relieve Memel and retake Riga.”
Hogan frowned. “Who was wondering?”
“I don’t remember his name, sorry. One of the younger guards brought it up. Schultz said he hadn’t heard anything, but the others were laughing at him because he never knows anything.”
“And it was just speculation?”
“Yes, sir. A couple of ‘Oh, yeah, So-and-so’s being transferred, too’ remarks, but nothing more than... anecdata, some people call it in our day.”
Dean snorted. “‘Some people’? Some nerds, you mean. Who even talks like that?”
Sam shot him a Look. “I learned it from Ash.”
Dean shut up. Ash’s death was one of many that still weighed heavily on Dean’s conscience, even though the brothers had seen him happy and well in Heaven the last time they were both dead at the same time.
“What do you think, Colonel?” Carter asked.
Hogan shook his head. “I dunno. Wouldn’t be much to go on even without the Gestapo around. As it is... all it means definitely is that Knorz won’t be here for a while. We can’t take the risk of sending anything to London, not now.”
There were nods and “yes, sir”s all around, and everyone drifted back to what they’d been doing before.
Sam grabbed himself a cup of coffee and sat down across from Dean. “You okay?”
Dean shrugged. “Listen, Sam....”
Sam smiled a little. “Forget it, dude. I know you didn’t mean anything.”
Dean sighed and played with his empty soup mug for a moment before confessing quietly, “I wish you’d been with me, man. In ’44.” At Sam’s confused blink, he continued, “Maybe... maybe this time we could have....”
And Sam’s face fell as he caught on. “Dean....”
“Dude, it’s my fault. I’m the reason Mom knew about Liddy Walsh. I’m the reason she insisted on going with Samuel to try to stop Azazel. I’m the one who missed the shot, twice.” Dean didn’t know why he was letting this spill now, here, with so many other people in the room, even if they were giving the brothers as much space as they could; he hadn’t even been thinking about the time he’d walked into a predestination paradox. Maybe the detox was doing more of a number on him than he’d thought.
Sam reached across the table and grabbed Dean’s trembling hand. “Dean. The angels set you up in ’73. And even if I had been there in ’44, it might not have gone any better than in ’78. I mean, Michael scrubbed our warning from Mom’s memory then; he could have stopped us from changing anything in ’44.” His grip tightened. “You can’t let the what-ifs eat you alive like this, man. Next time we face something like Osiris....” He trailed off, shaking his head and clearly fighting tears as he recalled how the god had condemned Dean to death, despite Sam’s argument that Dean’s sense of guilt was irrational. The ghost of their friend Jo would have been forced to carry out the sentence had Sam not been able to gank Osiris first. Next time there might not be a way out.
And that brought to mind a more recent conversation, after the run-in with the Amazons. I don’t care how you deal. Just don’t... don’t get yourself killed.
Dean found himself fighting tears of his own. “Sammy....”
“Dean.” The I need you was unspoken, yet Dean heard it loud and clear.
The tears fell, damn them, and Dean couldn’t meet Sam’s eyes anymore. I can’t, he wanted to say. I can’t let it go. I can’t shake it off. I don’t know how. But his mouth remained stubbornly shut as the stupid tears kept running down his cheeks, and he couldn’t even muster the strength to wipe them away.
Sam rubbed Dean’s wrist. “Hey,” he whispered, barely audible over the sounds of the other prisoners trying to keep themselves occupied and not eavesdrop or intrude on the brothers’ moment. Dean made himself look up to find that Sam couldn’t keep the tears at bay, either.
“I’m sorry, Sam. I’m a failure. I’m a monster.” Damn withdrawal-where was this stuff coming from? At least his voice was as quiet as Sam’s, and only Sam would know he meant it more literally than not. He had, after all, been a vampire for a day before they found a cure, and that was after everything Dean had done in Hell.
Sam wasn’t buying it, though. “And I’m not?”
“Sam....”
“Dean.”
“You don’t know what I did down there.”
“You don’t know what I did without my soul.”
“That wasn’t you. And with Ruby-hell, you were high.”
“You were Stockholmed. Non compos mentis.”
“Sam.”
“Dean.”
LeBeau cleared his throat at that point before walking close enough to potentially overhear. “Pardon, Messieurs, but I’m about to need this space to prepare dinner.”
Sam let go of Dean’s wrist then, but only long enough to come around the table and all but carry Dean back to the bunks. And if Dean thought the moment was over, he was mistaken. “Do you know what... what I regret most?” Sam asked as he settled Dean on his own bunk, the better to help him up for supper. “From when I was soulless?”
Dean sighed. “Sam....”
“Dean, I need to say this. I mean, yeah, I did my time and all, but... I let you get turned because I knew there was a cure. And it didn’t even occur to me that you’d freak out and go....”
Dean shot Sam a warning glare. The vampire incident had cost him the only long-term relationship he’d ever had because he’d nearly killed his girlfriend; that topic was off limits forever.
Sam caught it and didn’t finish the sentence. “I just... the fact that I’m even capable of that....”
The flash of anger faded into pain over the whole rotten mess, not least because Dean hated to see Sam blame himself for something that had happened while he wasn’t himself. “Sam.”
Sam shook his head and kept going. “Maybe you were right. Maybe I am a monster, a... a blood-sucking freak.”
Dean blinked. “Wait, whoa, what? I’ve said some stupid stuff, Sam, but I don’t remember saying that.”
“It was in that voice mail.”
“What voice mail?”
“The one you left... before....”
“Aw, hell.” Dean understood now-after a major fight with Sam in the last days before the Apocalypse, he’d called to try to mend fences, but the message he had left clearly wasn’t the message Sam had heard. “I knew Zach had done something, but....”
Sam frowned. “Zachariah?”
“He changed it, Sam. Him or Ruby, I’m not sure.” They’d both been played like a Stradivarius-Dean by the angels, Sam by the demons.
“Then... you didn’t....”
“No. I didn’t.”
Sam’s only response was to pull Dean into a crushing hug. And Dean was still too weak to stop the tears.
Finally, though, Dean managed to say, “Hey. You want me to give you the flu for real?”
Sam gave a damp chuckle and let go.
“Honestly, Sam, a man in my condition-”
“In your condition?! Dean, you are not terminal!”
“Maybe I am. Maybe I’ve got consumption. Or double pneumonia. One of those things where you have to move to Arizona before you croak.”
Sam burst out laughing. “Any excuse to see the Grand Canyon before it’s over, right?”
“Damn straight, little brother.” Dean felt his own spirits lifting somewhat and managed a genuine smile. “Hot sand and hot chicks. A winning combination.”
That seemed to be everyone’s cue to start another round of Winchester Trivial Pursuit, which kept both brothers happily occupied until lights out. Talking so much was exhausting to Dean, but the endorphins did help somewhat. And the chick flick moment did seem to have cleared the air between him and Sam, at least a little, which was always a relief.
It still didn’t stop the nightmares. And even being allowed outside the next day for some (cold) fresh air and sunshine didn’t do much to pull him out of the funk he’d slid back into. So he really wasn’t in the mood for conversation when Sgt. Wilson wandered over and saw the look on his face.
“Problem, Captain?” Wilson asked amiably, sitting down beside Dean.
Dean snorted. “Yeah. Wishing I could go home and get blind drunk and forget about war for a while.”
Wilson didn’t take the hint. “Shouldn’t self-medicate like that, son. Oh, trust me, I know the feeling, but it doesn’t help. You’ll drink yourself into an early grave.”
Dean let out a short, harsh laugh. “If you only knew....”
“-Don’t tell me you already have.”
“Not drunk myself to death, no, but it’s about the only way I haven’t died yet. Well, that or cancer.” Dean snorted again and shook his head. “Not too many old men in our line of work. The good die young and the ornery barely make it past 50. And that goes double for the ones who get mixed up with us. Don’t know why we keep coming back; the rest of the family just keeps dyin’.”
“First rule of warfare,” Wilson said sympathetically. “Good men die.”
“And rule number two is that doctors can’t change rule number one,” Dean quoted bitterly. “Thank you, Henry Blake.”
“Look, Captain, whatever’s eating you, even if it is your fault, I can tell you for a fact that keeping it bottled up will kill you. You need to talk to someone.”
“Who? Nobody here would understand except maybe Col. Hogan, and he said he doesn’t want to know.”
“Talk to God if you have to.”
“You think I haven’t tried?!” Dean was really on a tear now. “How can I talk to God when He won’t answer the phone?!”
“Maybe He has,” Wilson returned mildly.
That brought Dean up short. “What do you mean?”
“You’re here, right?” At Dean’s frown, Wilson continued, “Usually when we have ‘visitors,’ they’re here because we need them for something, but we’re on complete lockdown. So maybe this time there’s something you need from us.”
“Like what?”
Wilson shrugged. “Learning how to be POWs?”
“How so?”
“Look, even here, there’s a limit to how much control we have over what we do and what’s done to us. Col. Hogan has to do a lot of fancy footwork to get guys out of the cooler, stop transfers, keep guys out of the Gestapo’s hands. Sometimes it’s still not enough. Some men go stir crazy. Some men just get on Hochstetter’s bad side, or Klink’s or Burkhalter’s. And if you fight back too hard... pow. Shot while escaping.”
“At least they’re humans. Humans you can kill.”
“Only if they let down their guard. And they don’t, not that often. Even if they did, you kill too many, the rest start asking questions.”
“But you’ve got backup.”
“Backup with limits. Backup that fails now and then. Backup that dies just like the monsters that are holding us. I trust the men in this camp with my life, Captain, but not even Col. Hogan can pull off some miracles. Sometimes he’s fast, but not fast enough to beat truth serum or torture. Sometimes the goons get us boxed in. Sometimes the Krauts get lucky. Sometimes London drops us a man and he gets shot up on the way down, dies before our guys bring him in. Sometimes a plane or a bomb just fails; sometimes the weather louses things up, and it’s nobody’s fault.”
Dean wondered wildly just who was playing father confessor here.
“My point, Captain, is that you can’t win them all. You can’t control everything. You can’t even always prevent terrible things from being done to you. And that isn’t a personal failure on your part.” Wilson paused. “That doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt like hell every time. But that’s not a personal failure, either. It means you’re human.”
“So what am I supposed to do, huh? How am I supposed to deal?”
“I don’t know.” Wilson stood. “I just know that somehow we all get up every morning and keep going, one day at a time. And if you can’t do that... you die.” And on that cheerful note, Wilson left.
Dean supposed that advice might have helped someone else. But death didn’t scare him or Sam anymore. They kept going because they couldn’t leave each other behind again, because someone had to stop the world from offing itself, because everyone they’d lost would want them to. Yet even now, even here, if they both went together... Dean wasn’t so sure he would mind. At least here, there’d be a chance it would really be over, even though they’d never see Mom or Dad again.
He sighed and forced himself to go inside to eat some lunch.
Hochstetter was not a patient man. He knew that intelligence work took time, but if a plan took more than a day or two to yield results, his temper grew considerably shorter. So it took considerable effort for him to remain calm as he waited for Pvt. Hausmann, Knorz’s replacement, to return to Gestapo headquarters from Stalag 13 at the end of the fourth day with no unusual enemy action in East Prussia and no messages intercepted by the radio detector truck parked halfway between Hammelburg and the camp.
Finally, Hausmann showed and reported to Hochstetter. “Capt. Winchester is recovering, Herr Major, and there has been no change in Sgt. Winchester.”
“You are sure Sgt. Winchester has overheard your speculations, hm?”
“Jawohl, Herr Major. And so has Sgt. Schultz, whom I have observed talking with Col. Hogan many times. He has had every opportunity to draw his own conclusions if word has gotten to him-and I saw Sgt. Winchester near us the first day.” Hausmann paused. “Might it be, Herr Major....”
“No,” Hochstetter snapped. “Papa Bear is at Stalag 13, I smell it. He is simply too smart to take the bait so soon after fooling Knorz.” He got up and paced for a moment as he thought out loud. “The Geneva Convention is a nuisance, though we have our ways around it. These prisoners are too new; the Red Cross will be watching too closely. We cannot push the boundaries very far.” Then he looked at Hausmann. “How well is Capt. Winchester? Could we interrogate him safely?”
Hausmann considered. “He is on light duty, I believe. He could handle questioning, perhaps, but nothing more. At least, in my opinion... I’m not a medical officer.”
Hochstetter drummed the fingers of his right hand on his belt buckle as he thought. Then he nodded once. “Very well. Tomorrow I shall make the acquaintance of the Winchester brothers. And mark my words, Hausmann: they will talk.”
Next
Note: Sturmscharführer was roughly the equivalent of a technical sergeant; the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) was the intelligence wing of the SS.