Oz never did give nothing to the Tin Man, for tolakasa
Title: Oz never did give nothing to the Tin Man
Author: tesserae_
Recipient: tolakasa
Rating: Mature (language)
Wordcount: ~3,700
Warnings: none
A/N: Lyrics from Dewey Bunnell and America (1974).
Summary: Pre-series: John's heading out on a job and finds out a major tornado outbreak has hit the town where he left the boys.
Dad drops them off on a Tuesday, giving Dean a couple of tens and a look full of a bunch of shit Dean’s heard forty seven times already, and it takes the sound of the Impala’s engine a fucking long time to die away in the distance after he leaves. When it does, Sam pulls back the ratty curtain covering the room’s only window, and peers out.
“Dean! Can we go into town? I’m hungry.”
Dean joins him at the window, which looks out onto a gravel-strewn parking lot and beyond that, the narrow two-lane highway down which Dad had disappeared. Across the highway there’s a scruffy-looking field that stretches out toward the sky. Dean pulls himself up onto his toes to see if the view changes, if he can spot anything that looks like a town in the distance. Even a truck stop would do: all he needs is to get a sandwich or six into Sam, a plate of fries into himself, and enough grub to bring back to the motel that he won’t have to risk going out for the two or three days it takes Dad to get back from Oklahoma.
But there’s nothing. “Fuck,” he mutters, and letting the curtain drop, he marches over to the motel room’s front door and pulls it open. Shading his eyes against the sun, he peers around, but even hauling himself up onto the railing separating the room from the parking lot doesn’t help. He can’t see anything but grass. They’re as isolated here as they would be if Dad had dropped them into the middle of a lake. Drier, maybe, but -
At that moment Sam wanders up and shoves a phone book into Dean’s leg, forcing him to jump down off the railing. “You asshole,” he yells, reflexively, but Sam just gives him a mulish look and points at the page he’s holding the slim book open to.
“Says here there’s an arcade and all-you-can-eat happy hour. What’s a happy hour, Dean?” and Dean’s never sure, in those moments, if Sam isn’t pulling his leg, but from the little map helpfully printed in the front of the book, he can see that town such as it is, is behind them, not to the left or the right, and that makes him feel a little better. Not like they were at any risk of starving, but the last time he’d let Sammy gorge himself on peanut butter crackers from the vending machine for three days he’d horked them all back up the minute the Impala hit the interstate, and… yeah.
Town it was.
“Grab your jacket,” he tells Sam, shoving Dad’s money deep into his pocket. He lays a salt line along the pitted aluminum track of the window, hopes nothing human decides to try the flimsy lock, and grabs an extra handful for the doorsill. From the railing, Sam watches him quietly, launching himself down into the parking lot as Dean steps out of the room.
The Rest O’Day Motel looks like every other motel Dean’s ever stayed at. It’s unapologetically gray, not turquoise or yellow or pink, for fuck’s sake, which is kind of a change, but it’s got the same L-shaped layout he’s seen in every state since they left Kansas the first time a million years ago. He’s pretty sure the bedspread will be slimy - they always are - and that if he does end up feeding Sam out of the vending machine - which he always does - it’ll eat six quarters before spitting out something that might have tasted good sometime around Christmas of last year.
He pulls the door shut and rattles the knob to check the lock. Tiny chips of paint flake off the door frame and settle onto his boots like dandruff, and he stamps his feet to shake them off. Dad’s obsession with the Impala’s paint job suddenly makes more sense.
Pocketing the room key, he vaults over the railing to join Sam. As they pass the motel office, Dean can hear the faint tinny sound of a TV, and when he looks back, a woman with a pinched-looking face in what Dean figures are her early hundreds is watching them go. He waves at her cheerfully, checks the map he’d ripped out of the phone book, and steers Sam in the other direction to the one Dad had gone. Far as Dean could tell, there really isn’t anything between here and the Impala except the half-grown grass, and the Impala is getting farther away with every step they take.
Out on the highway, there’s a steady wind blowing, cooler than the sun in the wide blue sky seemed to promise. Dean shrugs his shoulders deeper into his jacket and tries not to think about how far it might be until they hit civilization. He needs lunch, that’s all, lunch and maybe a bum to talk into buying him a beer or two, and if he’s really lucky, a couple of rubes and a pool table. The twenty bucks Dad gave him wasn’t gonna --
Sam, trudging on ahead, lifts his head as if he’s hearing something, and Dean runs the few steps between them. “What?” he demands, but Sam just cocks his head, listening.
“Dog,” he says shortly, and takes off at a dead run.
“Sammy!”
Dean gives himself a minute to roll his eyes, gets a grip on the knife in his back holster and lopes after Sam. The road takes them up a slight rise, but when he gets to the top, his brother is nowhere to be found.
Fuck.
Dean comes to a stop and, shading his eyes against the sun, starts quartering the empty landscape like Dad taught him, looking for any sign of movement. There’s more on the hill than in the fields, a small building that might be a church built out of gray stone with most of a shed behind it, but no sign of cars or anything that might indicate people are living in the house. A narrow driveway leads up to the building, bare dirt patched with little yellow flowers. Dean doesn’t guess anyone’s driven up it lately.
Without moving, he cocks his head like Sam had done, listening. He’s reluctant to turn his back on the little house, but when he does, he sees three things at almost exactly the same time. One is a bullet-pocked sign saying Welcome to Cassoday, pop. 767. The sign points in a direction Dean thinks might be east, down a road not much wider than the driveway he’s standing in.
Town, finally, even if there are more people in your average Walmart than there are in Cassoday, but then he notices that the sky toward the east has lost its blue to a deep gray cloud. When did that happen? he’s wondering when the sudden shove of the wind against his back makes him look up and focus on the cloud.
Two seconds earlier it had been pushing its way into his face. From Dad, he knows that’s a bad sign. The fact that the cloud is starting to spin like Led Zeppelin IV on vinyl is even worse.
He’s looking around, wondering if there’s any place better than the house to take cover, when the dog starts to bark again. Far as he can tell over the wind that’s started to blast through his ears, the dog is over by the house. And wherever the dog is, he’s pretty sure to find Sam. Why the kid can’t just do what he’s told, stay out of the trouble he’s got an absolute fucking talent for, even at eight fucking years old--
Dean takes off running in what he hopes desperately is the right direction.
*
Halfway to Wichita, John Winchester pulls into a roadside gas station to top up the Impala’s gas tank. He’s handing one of the burner credit cards over to the clerk when the weather service cuts into a noisy rebroadcast of Family Feud.
“Take cover immediately,” an urgent female voice tells him. “Funnel clouds have been spotted northeast of Wichita near the town of -“
John lets the credit card fall to the ground and sprints back out to the car.
*
“Sammy!”
The wind grabs Dean’s voice and spits it back into his face as he pelts up the hill. Any luck, the front door will be open and Sam will already be inside, but that’s never the case in his world, and it isn’t now. Nearly falling up the porch stairs, he grabs the door handle and gives it a mighty twist, but it’s stuck tight and there’s no time to pick the lock, not with Sam still somewhere not right behind him. He turns, jumps the four steps back down into the yard and, ducking down against the wind, cuts around the side of the house to check out the shed.
Maybe the dog had been tied up, and they can just untie it, throw themselves into the root cellar like fucking Auntie Em and - “Sam!” he yells again, hearing the desperate edge of fear bleeding into his voice and not caring. “Sam!”
Swear to god, if he finds the kid he’s going to kill him…
The wind heels around again and Dean finds himself thrown into the side of the shed as if a wendigo had grabbed him. One of its rotten boards splinters beneath his shoulder and he grabs for it, trying to stay halfway upright. He pulls himself around to the shed’s ass end and, stepping over a pile of lumber, slides around the corner.
He’s out of the wind, which is great. A high-pitched whining greets him, and he whips his head around to peer into the furthest corner of the shed. Two pairs of eyes - one human, one canine - under identical tangles of hair peer back at him.
Even better. “Come on,” he says. “We gotta get out of this storm.”
Sam doesn’t move, except to tighten his arms around the dog. “Her leg is broken,” he says, and there’s a world of defiance in those four words.
Dean rolls his eyes. Didn’t they teach kids anything these days? “Sam. We can’t stay here. There’s a tornado coming, and this place ain’t much of a -“
As if to add its voice to Dean’s, the wind chooses that moment to start peeling the shed’s corrugated tin roof loose. Dean ducks reflexively and then, making up his mind, crosses the dirt floor to grab Sam’s shoulder.
“Dean! We can’t leave her! She’ll die!”
“Dude, if we don’t leave her we’ll die! And then Dad will kill us!”
Two seconds, three, four tick past, Sam’s eyes going huge in the small circle of his face. Dean’s about to give it up, throw himself down over Sam and the dog when the wind drops the roof back onto the shed with a slam that Dean feels more than he can hear. “Sam, go!” he begs, desperately. “Find a way into the house - I’ll bring the dog!”
Sam stares at him for another beat and Dean can see the moment he makes the decision. In a flash, Sam unwinds himself from the dog and flees. Not giving himself time to wonder if Sam’s gonna make it to the safety of the house and its stone walls and not-tin roof, Dean wraps his arms around the dog and picks her up. Fortunately, she’s smaller than Sam, and given the single yip she squeezes out, more used to doing what she’s told, too. He shoves a hand under her ass as carefully as he can and runs for it.
The idea that Sam had to think about trusting him makes something hurt sharply, deep inside, but the thought is lost as the back door swings open and Sam, blood to his elbows, hauls the dog out of Dean’s arms. Thrown off-balance by her weight, he scrambles backwards, pulling her and Dean into the house just as a lightning strike splits the sky, slamming into the field beyond the battered shed and bringing with it an explosion of hailstones.
*
John stays off the turnpike, gunning the Impala’s powerful engines over the rough asphalt of the county highway and hoping the cops are all finishing their donuts someplace else. The sun’s to his left, fierce and hard in the darkening sky as if gearing up for an epic battle. He’s got the car’s old radio tuned to an AM station that keeps snapping out, and as he gets closer to Cassoday and the motel where he dropped the boys a half hour earlier the DJ’s voice gets increasingly high-pitched. He glances to his right, wondering if the guy’s head will explode before the thing spits out a twister, but all he can see is the cloud’s curving edge and the flashes of light of light as electricity moves through it.
The air coming through the car’s ventilation system is heavy with the smell of ozone and rain, and John’s not surprised when something hits the roof with a sound like ball bearings. Hail, damn it, and he hopes Dean’s been smart enough to keep Sam inside the motel room he’d rented for them. Not that he couldn’t have taken them along, stowed them in some equally-crappy place closer to the thing he expected to be hunting in Broken Arrow, but he’d needed… well, a beer or six and a couple nights without arguments, mostly.
Now, though, all he wants is the Rest O’Whatever Motel to still be standing and both boys to be eating junk food and bitching about no cable in the room. Short of that - John flicks on his high beams and floors the accelerator. The heavy car leaps ahead and John leans over the wheel as the sky opens up above him.
Short of that is both boys in the grip of something John’s got no weapons for killing, and he’s not going there, he’s just not.
Never. Not ever. And certainly not here, a scant hundred miles from the place their mother died.
*
“Sam, holy shit! Your arms!”
Dean untangles himself from the dog and Sam. Sam’s got his arms wrapped around her again, and while Dean doesn’t think dog fur is going to beat out band-aids anytime soon, nothing seems to be dripping onto the floor. So, first things first: he kicks the door shut, latching it against the wind, and looks around for a light switch. Sam may not be actively bleeding, but he’s gonna have to put the dog down sooner or later.
The light switch doesn’t work - no surprise there. It’s still light enough outside for Dean to see, though, so he makes his way toward the sink he can see on the far side of the room. There’s no soap by the side of the sink, but he finds a towel underneath it that doesn’t look any dirtier than the dog, tears it in half and makes his way back over to Sam. “Seriously, what happened to you?”
Sam nods his head toward the window next to the back door. “Seemed to be the easiest way to get in.”
They’d seen it in movies a million times. “Dude, you’re supposed to wrap your hand in your jacket and knock all the glass out first.” Now that Dean’s looking, he can see dark smears on the window frame and the door knob. He shudders. “Lemme take a look,” he adds, gentler this time, and after another long searching look, Sam lets him take the dog and set her down and examine the cuts on his arms.
Dean pulls back the remains of Sam’s shirt sleeves. The cuts aren’t too bad, once he gets the mess cleaned up, although both arms are gonna hurt once the adrenaline wears off. “Hold these in place.” He He pulls at Sam’s hands until they’re resting on the makeshift bandages over his forearms. He’s goona need to wash the cuts out, make sure there isn’t any glass left in them. “Hey, how’d you manage to get both arms?”
Sam ducks his chin and and gives Dean a half-embarrassed look from under his lashes. “Broke the wrong window the first time.”
Sure enough, the narrow window on the far side of the door is broken too. Dean whistles, impressed in spite of himself.
The dog yips sharply and seeing Sam’s sudden movement toward her, Dean shakes his head, grimacing. Now that he’s got her inside and away from Sam, he can’t really tell if her leg is broken, but something’s clearly wrong with it from the way she keeps licking her paw. And from the way she isn’t a million miles away by now, he thinks, but Sam’s always kinda had that effect on animals.
Oh well, he’s stuck with both of them until the storm either blows over or transports them all to the land of midgets and flying monkeys, and meanwhile, getting them out of the kitchen with its glass shards seems like a smart idea. He hauls himself to his feet, trying not to favor his shoulder, and heads into the hallway to scope out the duck and cover possibilities.
Which is when he sees, through the big window at the front, a familiar pair of headlights barreling toward the house.
*
The Rest O’Day looms up through his windshield wipers and John hauls on the steering wheel hard enough to put a lesser vehicle into a fishtailing spin. The Impala just corrects herself and crunches over the mix of gravel and hail in the parking lot until they get to the room he’d left the boys in. Leaving the car running, he takes all four steps at once and bangs his fist on the door. “Dean! Sam!”
There’s no answer, so he opens the door with one well-paced kick.
The lights are off but more importantly, the room is empty except for the boys’ bags, thrown into the corner of the room. He grabs them both and slings them over one shoulder. He doesn’t bother looking for a note; Dean doesn’t expect him back for minimum four days, he guesses. He does bother checking one thing, though, and makes a mental note to tell Dean he’d done a good job with the salt line. And another one to ask what he’s telling Sam about the family ritual.
He tosses both bags into the back seat and reverses across the lot to the motel’s office. It’s deserted too, but a rug tossed into one corner of the room to reveal what looks like a trapdoor gives him some clue as to where the owner is. A fierce hope blooms in his chest - maybe the boys are down there with her? He reaches for the ring that lifts the trap and yanks on it, letting go and staggering back when it refuses to budge. Again, he bangs his fist into solid wood.
“Dean? Sam? You down there?”
There’s no answer for a moment, and he’s about to head back out to the car for a shotgun when there’s a sharp rap on the far side of the trapdoor.
“Go away!” a voice says, thin and distorted through the battered wood. “No one down here but me!” she adds, louder this time.
John grits his teeth, swallowing the bile he’s pretty sure would eat its way through to her if he unleashed it - who leaves two boys alone to survive a tornado? and heads back out into the storm.
Back in the Impala, with the door and the windows closed, it’s almost quiet. John puts his head back, staring unseeing at the roof for a bare second, but the rocking of the car in tune with the wind reminds him that he’s got two kids to find and no good idea where they could be. He’d been checking both sides of the highway as he drove north, but hadn’t seen as much as a tree to break the endless tallgrass prairie. There’s got to be a town nearby, though, and if he knows his oldest son, that’s where Dean’s headed, toward food and maybe something fun for Sam to do before they head back to the Rest O’Day’s undoubtedly-crappy TV reception.
Yeah, that’s it: Dean’s taken them in the other direction. John shakes his head to clear it and backs away from the motel office. He’ll have to believe it until he’s proven wrong, he decides, and turns back out onto the highway.
This time, he keeps his speed down, looking for anywhere Sam and Dean might have found shelter. The land rises and drops almost imperceptibly, but even with the storm-fueled wind making patterns in the grass there’s nothing on either side of the road until he tops a low rise and there, in the distance, there’s a small gray house. That’s gotta be it, and John steps on the gas as hard as he can without throwing the Impala into a skid.
The wind picks up as he reaches the turnoff that leads to the house. Now, he can really feel it, the heavy car shaking under him as he cranks the wheel. He’s halfway up the hill when he wind shifts and doubles down, sending something that looks like a sheet of metal rocketing over the Impala’s roof. He slams on the brakes in a desperate reflex, and that’s when the front door to the house bursts open and his oldest son comes flying down the steps.
“Dad, get in the house!” Dean yells, and for once, John’s only too happy to listen.
*
Dean drags his father into the house and slams the door. He’s not sure why he feels safe but he does: Sam’s got his dog, he’s got Sam and somehow, some way, Dad and the Impala, too. And the sound of hail on the roof is finally going away, along with the wind that’s been like a freight train idling in his head for the last hour. He glances around, seeing Dad on his knees checking out the dog’s paw and smiles, happier than he can really put words to.
It lasts, too, until Dad lays the dog’s paw down on the ground and glances over at Dean with a question in his eyes. That’s when he feels a gentle lurch, and the house whirls around two or three times and rises slowly through the air.
End
Final notes: last line from L. Frank Baum. This was an Oz prompt? Right? Right? Many thanks to you-know-who-you-are for encouraging me in this madness!
Author: tesserae_
Recipient: tolakasa
Rating: Mature (language)
Wordcount: ~3,700
Warnings: none
A/N: Lyrics from Dewey Bunnell and America (1974).
Summary: Pre-series: John's heading out on a job and finds out a major tornado outbreak has hit the town where he left the boys.
Dad drops them off on a Tuesday, giving Dean a couple of tens and a look full of a bunch of shit Dean’s heard forty seven times already, and it takes the sound of the Impala’s engine a fucking long time to die away in the distance after he leaves. When it does, Sam pulls back the ratty curtain covering the room’s only window, and peers out.
“Dean! Can we go into town? I’m hungry.”
Dean joins him at the window, which looks out onto a gravel-strewn parking lot and beyond that, the narrow two-lane highway down which Dad had disappeared. Across the highway there’s a scruffy-looking field that stretches out toward the sky. Dean pulls himself up onto his toes to see if the view changes, if he can spot anything that looks like a town in the distance. Even a truck stop would do: all he needs is to get a sandwich or six into Sam, a plate of fries into himself, and enough grub to bring back to the motel that he won’t have to risk going out for the two or three days it takes Dad to get back from Oklahoma.
But there’s nothing. “Fuck,” he mutters, and letting the curtain drop, he marches over to the motel room’s front door and pulls it open. Shading his eyes against the sun, he peers around, but even hauling himself up onto the railing separating the room from the parking lot doesn’t help. He can’t see anything but grass. They’re as isolated here as they would be if Dad had dropped them into the middle of a lake. Drier, maybe, but -
At that moment Sam wanders up and shoves a phone book into Dean’s leg, forcing him to jump down off the railing. “You asshole,” he yells, reflexively, but Sam just gives him a mulish look and points at the page he’s holding the slim book open to.
“Says here there’s an arcade and all-you-can-eat happy hour. What’s a happy hour, Dean?” and Dean’s never sure, in those moments, if Sam isn’t pulling his leg, but from the little map helpfully printed in the front of the book, he can see that town such as it is, is behind them, not to the left or the right, and that makes him feel a little better. Not like they were at any risk of starving, but the last time he’d let Sammy gorge himself on peanut butter crackers from the vending machine for three days he’d horked them all back up the minute the Impala hit the interstate, and… yeah.
Town it was.
“Grab your jacket,” he tells Sam, shoving Dad’s money deep into his pocket. He lays a salt line along the pitted aluminum track of the window, hopes nothing human decides to try the flimsy lock, and grabs an extra handful for the doorsill. From the railing, Sam watches him quietly, launching himself down into the parking lot as Dean steps out of the room.
The Rest O’Day Motel looks like every other motel Dean’s ever stayed at. It’s unapologetically gray, not turquoise or yellow or pink, for fuck’s sake, which is kind of a change, but it’s got the same L-shaped layout he’s seen in every state since they left Kansas the first time a million years ago. He’s pretty sure the bedspread will be slimy - they always are - and that if he does end up feeding Sam out of the vending machine - which he always does - it’ll eat six quarters before spitting out something that might have tasted good sometime around Christmas of last year.
He pulls the door shut and rattles the knob to check the lock. Tiny chips of paint flake off the door frame and settle onto his boots like dandruff, and he stamps his feet to shake them off. Dad’s obsession with the Impala’s paint job suddenly makes more sense.
Pocketing the room key, he vaults over the railing to join Sam. As they pass the motel office, Dean can hear the faint tinny sound of a TV, and when he looks back, a woman with a pinched-looking face in what Dean figures are her early hundreds is watching them go. He waves at her cheerfully, checks the map he’d ripped out of the phone book, and steers Sam in the other direction to the one Dad had gone. Far as Dean could tell, there really isn’t anything between here and the Impala except the half-grown grass, and the Impala is getting farther away with every step they take.
Out on the highway, there’s a steady wind blowing, cooler than the sun in the wide blue sky seemed to promise. Dean shrugs his shoulders deeper into his jacket and tries not to think about how far it might be until they hit civilization. He needs lunch, that’s all, lunch and maybe a bum to talk into buying him a beer or two, and if he’s really lucky, a couple of rubes and a pool table. The twenty bucks Dad gave him wasn’t gonna --
Sam, trudging on ahead, lifts his head as if he’s hearing something, and Dean runs the few steps between them. “What?” he demands, but Sam just cocks his head, listening.
“Dog,” he says shortly, and takes off at a dead run.
“Sammy!”
Dean gives himself a minute to roll his eyes, gets a grip on the knife in his back holster and lopes after Sam. The road takes them up a slight rise, but when he gets to the top, his brother is nowhere to be found.
Fuck.
Dean comes to a stop and, shading his eyes against the sun, starts quartering the empty landscape like Dad taught him, looking for any sign of movement. There’s more on the hill than in the fields, a small building that might be a church built out of gray stone with most of a shed behind it, but no sign of cars or anything that might indicate people are living in the house. A narrow driveway leads up to the building, bare dirt patched with little yellow flowers. Dean doesn’t guess anyone’s driven up it lately.
Without moving, he cocks his head like Sam had done, listening. He’s reluctant to turn his back on the little house, but when he does, he sees three things at almost exactly the same time. One is a bullet-pocked sign saying Welcome to Cassoday, pop. 767. The sign points in a direction Dean thinks might be east, down a road not much wider than the driveway he’s standing in.
Town, finally, even if there are more people in your average Walmart than there are in Cassoday, but then he notices that the sky toward the east has lost its blue to a deep gray cloud. When did that happen? he’s wondering when the sudden shove of the wind against his back makes him look up and focus on the cloud.
Two seconds earlier it had been pushing its way into his face. From Dad, he knows that’s a bad sign. The fact that the cloud is starting to spin like Led Zeppelin IV on vinyl is even worse.
He’s looking around, wondering if there’s any place better than the house to take cover, when the dog starts to bark again. Far as he can tell over the wind that’s started to blast through his ears, the dog is over by the house. And wherever the dog is, he’s pretty sure to find Sam. Why the kid can’t just do what he’s told, stay out of the trouble he’s got an absolute fucking talent for, even at eight fucking years old--
Dean takes off running in what he hopes desperately is the right direction.
*
Halfway to Wichita, John Winchester pulls into a roadside gas station to top up the Impala’s gas tank. He’s handing one of the burner credit cards over to the clerk when the weather service cuts into a noisy rebroadcast of Family Feud.
“Take cover immediately,” an urgent female voice tells him. “Funnel clouds have been spotted northeast of Wichita near the town of -“
John lets the credit card fall to the ground and sprints back out to the car.
*
“Sammy!”
The wind grabs Dean’s voice and spits it back into his face as he pelts up the hill. Any luck, the front door will be open and Sam will already be inside, but that’s never the case in his world, and it isn’t now. Nearly falling up the porch stairs, he grabs the door handle and gives it a mighty twist, but it’s stuck tight and there’s no time to pick the lock, not with Sam still somewhere not right behind him. He turns, jumps the four steps back down into the yard and, ducking down against the wind, cuts around the side of the house to check out the shed.
Maybe the dog had been tied up, and they can just untie it, throw themselves into the root cellar like fucking Auntie Em and - “Sam!” he yells again, hearing the desperate edge of fear bleeding into his voice and not caring. “Sam!”
Swear to god, if he finds the kid he’s going to kill him…
The wind heels around again and Dean finds himself thrown into the side of the shed as if a wendigo had grabbed him. One of its rotten boards splinters beneath his shoulder and he grabs for it, trying to stay halfway upright. He pulls himself around to the shed’s ass end and, stepping over a pile of lumber, slides around the corner.
He’s out of the wind, which is great. A high-pitched whining greets him, and he whips his head around to peer into the furthest corner of the shed. Two pairs of eyes - one human, one canine - under identical tangles of hair peer back at him.
Even better. “Come on,” he says. “We gotta get out of this storm.”
Sam doesn’t move, except to tighten his arms around the dog. “Her leg is broken,” he says, and there’s a world of defiance in those four words.
Dean rolls his eyes. Didn’t they teach kids anything these days? “Sam. We can’t stay here. There’s a tornado coming, and this place ain’t much of a -“
As if to add its voice to Dean’s, the wind chooses that moment to start peeling the shed’s corrugated tin roof loose. Dean ducks reflexively and then, making up his mind, crosses the dirt floor to grab Sam’s shoulder.
“Dean! We can’t leave her! She’ll die!”
“Dude, if we don’t leave her we’ll die! And then Dad will kill us!”
Two seconds, three, four tick past, Sam’s eyes going huge in the small circle of his face. Dean’s about to give it up, throw himself down over Sam and the dog when the wind drops the roof back onto the shed with a slam that Dean feels more than he can hear. “Sam, go!” he begs, desperately. “Find a way into the house - I’ll bring the dog!”
Sam stares at him for another beat and Dean can see the moment he makes the decision. In a flash, Sam unwinds himself from the dog and flees. Not giving himself time to wonder if Sam’s gonna make it to the safety of the house and its stone walls and not-tin roof, Dean wraps his arms around the dog and picks her up. Fortunately, she’s smaller than Sam, and given the single yip she squeezes out, more used to doing what she’s told, too. He shoves a hand under her ass as carefully as he can and runs for it.
The idea that Sam had to think about trusting him makes something hurt sharply, deep inside, but the thought is lost as the back door swings open and Sam, blood to his elbows, hauls the dog out of Dean’s arms. Thrown off-balance by her weight, he scrambles backwards, pulling her and Dean into the house just as a lightning strike splits the sky, slamming into the field beyond the battered shed and bringing with it an explosion of hailstones.
*
John stays off the turnpike, gunning the Impala’s powerful engines over the rough asphalt of the county highway and hoping the cops are all finishing their donuts someplace else. The sun’s to his left, fierce and hard in the darkening sky as if gearing up for an epic battle. He’s got the car’s old radio tuned to an AM station that keeps snapping out, and as he gets closer to Cassoday and the motel where he dropped the boys a half hour earlier the DJ’s voice gets increasingly high-pitched. He glances to his right, wondering if the guy’s head will explode before the thing spits out a twister, but all he can see is the cloud’s curving edge and the flashes of light of light as electricity moves through it.
The air coming through the car’s ventilation system is heavy with the smell of ozone and rain, and John’s not surprised when something hits the roof with a sound like ball bearings. Hail, damn it, and he hopes Dean’s been smart enough to keep Sam inside the motel room he’d rented for them. Not that he couldn’t have taken them along, stowed them in some equally-crappy place closer to the thing he expected to be hunting in Broken Arrow, but he’d needed… well, a beer or six and a couple nights without arguments, mostly.
Now, though, all he wants is the Rest O’Whatever Motel to still be standing and both boys to be eating junk food and bitching about no cable in the room. Short of that - John flicks on his high beams and floors the accelerator. The heavy car leaps ahead and John leans over the wheel as the sky opens up above him.
Short of that is both boys in the grip of something John’s got no weapons for killing, and he’s not going there, he’s just not.
Never. Not ever. And certainly not here, a scant hundred miles from the place their mother died.
*
“Sam, holy shit! Your arms!”
Dean untangles himself from the dog and Sam. Sam’s got his arms wrapped around her again, and while Dean doesn’t think dog fur is going to beat out band-aids anytime soon, nothing seems to be dripping onto the floor. So, first things first: he kicks the door shut, latching it against the wind, and looks around for a light switch. Sam may not be actively bleeding, but he’s gonna have to put the dog down sooner or later.
The light switch doesn’t work - no surprise there. It’s still light enough outside for Dean to see, though, so he makes his way toward the sink he can see on the far side of the room. There’s no soap by the side of the sink, but he finds a towel underneath it that doesn’t look any dirtier than the dog, tears it in half and makes his way back over to Sam. “Seriously, what happened to you?”
Sam nods his head toward the window next to the back door. “Seemed to be the easiest way to get in.”
They’d seen it in movies a million times. “Dude, you’re supposed to wrap your hand in your jacket and knock all the glass out first.” Now that Dean’s looking, he can see dark smears on the window frame and the door knob. He shudders. “Lemme take a look,” he adds, gentler this time, and after another long searching look, Sam lets him take the dog and set her down and examine the cuts on his arms.
Dean pulls back the remains of Sam’s shirt sleeves. The cuts aren’t too bad, once he gets the mess cleaned up, although both arms are gonna hurt once the adrenaline wears off. “Hold these in place.” He He pulls at Sam’s hands until they’re resting on the makeshift bandages over his forearms. He’s goona need to wash the cuts out, make sure there isn’t any glass left in them. “Hey, how’d you manage to get both arms?”
Sam ducks his chin and and gives Dean a half-embarrassed look from under his lashes. “Broke the wrong window the first time.”
Sure enough, the narrow window on the far side of the door is broken too. Dean whistles, impressed in spite of himself.
The dog yips sharply and seeing Sam’s sudden movement toward her, Dean shakes his head, grimacing. Now that he’s got her inside and away from Sam, he can’t really tell if her leg is broken, but something’s clearly wrong with it from the way she keeps licking her paw. And from the way she isn’t a million miles away by now, he thinks, but Sam’s always kinda had that effect on animals.
Oh well, he’s stuck with both of them until the storm either blows over or transports them all to the land of midgets and flying monkeys, and meanwhile, getting them out of the kitchen with its glass shards seems like a smart idea. He hauls himself to his feet, trying not to favor his shoulder, and heads into the hallway to scope out the duck and cover possibilities.
Which is when he sees, through the big window at the front, a familiar pair of headlights barreling toward the house.
*
The Rest O’Day looms up through his windshield wipers and John hauls on the steering wheel hard enough to put a lesser vehicle into a fishtailing spin. The Impala just corrects herself and crunches over the mix of gravel and hail in the parking lot until they get to the room he’d left the boys in. Leaving the car running, he takes all four steps at once and bangs his fist on the door. “Dean! Sam!”
There’s no answer, so he opens the door with one well-paced kick.
The lights are off but more importantly, the room is empty except for the boys’ bags, thrown into the corner of the room. He grabs them both and slings them over one shoulder. He doesn’t bother looking for a note; Dean doesn’t expect him back for minimum four days, he guesses. He does bother checking one thing, though, and makes a mental note to tell Dean he’d done a good job with the salt line. And another one to ask what he’s telling Sam about the family ritual.
He tosses both bags into the back seat and reverses across the lot to the motel’s office. It’s deserted too, but a rug tossed into one corner of the room to reveal what looks like a trapdoor gives him some clue as to where the owner is. A fierce hope blooms in his chest - maybe the boys are down there with her? He reaches for the ring that lifts the trap and yanks on it, letting go and staggering back when it refuses to budge. Again, he bangs his fist into solid wood.
“Dean? Sam? You down there?”
There’s no answer for a moment, and he’s about to head back out to the car for a shotgun when there’s a sharp rap on the far side of the trapdoor.
“Go away!” a voice says, thin and distorted through the battered wood. “No one down here but me!” she adds, louder this time.
John grits his teeth, swallowing the bile he’s pretty sure would eat its way through to her if he unleashed it - who leaves two boys alone to survive a tornado? and heads back out into the storm.
Back in the Impala, with the door and the windows closed, it’s almost quiet. John puts his head back, staring unseeing at the roof for a bare second, but the rocking of the car in tune with the wind reminds him that he’s got two kids to find and no good idea where they could be. He’d been checking both sides of the highway as he drove north, but hadn’t seen as much as a tree to break the endless tallgrass prairie. There’s got to be a town nearby, though, and if he knows his oldest son, that’s where Dean’s headed, toward food and maybe something fun for Sam to do before they head back to the Rest O’Day’s undoubtedly-crappy TV reception.
Yeah, that’s it: Dean’s taken them in the other direction. John shakes his head to clear it and backs away from the motel office. He’ll have to believe it until he’s proven wrong, he decides, and turns back out onto the highway.
This time, he keeps his speed down, looking for anywhere Sam and Dean might have found shelter. The land rises and drops almost imperceptibly, but even with the storm-fueled wind making patterns in the grass there’s nothing on either side of the road until he tops a low rise and there, in the distance, there’s a small gray house. That’s gotta be it, and John steps on the gas as hard as he can without throwing the Impala into a skid.
The wind picks up as he reaches the turnoff that leads to the house. Now, he can really feel it, the heavy car shaking under him as he cranks the wheel. He’s halfway up the hill when he wind shifts and doubles down, sending something that looks like a sheet of metal rocketing over the Impala’s roof. He slams on the brakes in a desperate reflex, and that’s when the front door to the house bursts open and his oldest son comes flying down the steps.
“Dad, get in the house!” Dean yells, and for once, John’s only too happy to listen.
*
Dean drags his father into the house and slams the door. He’s not sure why he feels safe but he does: Sam’s got his dog, he’s got Sam and somehow, some way, Dad and the Impala, too. And the sound of hail on the roof is finally going away, along with the wind that’s been like a freight train idling in his head for the last hour. He glances around, seeing Dad on his knees checking out the dog’s paw and smiles, happier than he can really put words to.
It lasts, too, until Dad lays the dog’s paw down on the ground and glances over at Dean with a question in his eyes. That’s when he feels a gentle lurch, and the house whirls around two or three times and rises slowly through the air.
End
Final notes: last line from L. Frank Baum. This was an Oz prompt? Right? Right? Many thanks to you-know-who-you-are for encouraging me in this madness!