Three Bullets, for astarloa
Title: Three Bullets
Author: chiiyo86
Recipient: astarloa
Rating: PG13
Wordcount: ~6,300
Warnings: aborted sexual situation with someone underage, character deaths.
Author’s Notes: Thank you to chemm80 for the fast and efficient beta. I kept the second person POV used in the prompt - hope my recipient will enjoy it!
Summary: Prompt: Dean-centric. The world ended on Thursday morning and all you’ve got left is a gun, three bullets and the voice in your head that says, “Find your brother.” AU.
The world ends on a Thursday.
It is that sudden. You wake up in a field somewhere, lying down with your face against the ground and your mouth full of dirt. You spit it out, push yourself up on knees and elbows, and don’t need more than a cursory glance around to know that you’re not in Ilchester, Maryland anymore. The land is flat as the back of your hand and there isn’t one building in sight.
“Sam!” you call. It’s hardwired instinct; you can’t help yourself. “Sammy!”
Your voice gets lost, not even an echo as there’s no surface for it to bounce against. Alright. So there was some big white light tearing the floor of the convent apart, and Sam was gripping at your jacket, you remember that, and you were clutching at him too - the two of you were holding each other and now you’re alone God knows where, probably not in Maryland anymore - maybe not in the US. Obviously, there’s only one thing you can do. You need to find Sam.
You get on your feet and pat yourself down: you seem to have lost your demon-killing knife at one point - maybe Sam has it - and you only find your cell phone and your gun. One gun and - you check - only three bullets. That’s some amazing odds of survival you’re facing there. You try to call Sam but there’s no reception. You’re not that much surprised.
You can’t see your car anywhere and it makes you feel twitchy. You walk across the field until you find a road, and then you walk down the road because all roads have to lead somewhere, right? And somewhere is better than nowhere, which is where you currently are.
Something’s wrong with the sky, that’s what you notice quickly. Scratch that, something’s wrong, period. The sky is uniformly gray and low, heavy with opaque clouds, and flashes of lightning crisscross intermittently, shedding dirty light on them. Thunder roars afar, like a giant pair of dice rolling up there, and the air is still and stifling. Ominous stillness. It’s not hot, but it’s not cold either. It’s like the oxygen is in low supply now, and you find yourself taking measured breaths, pacing yourself.
You end up reaching a handful of habitations, tidy rows of houses with artificial-looking green lawns and scrawny trees and big cars parked in front of garage doors. The landscape has stopped being so flat and there are rocky hills framing the square of houses, cut out against the wonky sky. New question - after where the fuck is Sam - where the fuck are all the people? Your feet hurt from the long walk and your throat is parched, so you know you’re gonna have to break into a house. Except that you don’t have to, actually, because the first house you try is open. A car is parked outside, but it doesn’t feel like there’s anyone home.
You call to make sure. “Anyone in there? Anyone alive?” And then, because it is, after all, an option: “Anyone dead? Ghosts, zombies? Demons?”
You chuckle at your own joke. It’s the desperate kind of chuckle that comes with that feeling that you need to get your fun where you can, because there isn’t a lick of fun to be found in the situation.
Inside, you drink at the tap, too thirsty to mind the metallic tang of the water, and you rummage through the fridge for something to eat. You find a bottle of milk - it’s curdled - some ham and bread eaten away by green mold, and a few apples. You bite into one and it tastes like dirt, and you have to spit your mouthful in the sink. How long have the people been gone that all the food turned bad? Looking through the cupboards you find some chocolate bars that taste okay, and that’s your dinner for today.
You sleep on the couch, in the living room, with your hand on your gun. Feels wrong to get into those people’s beds.
---
Having gone through the house and found a newspaper, you now know that you’re in California. It fills you with relief; at least you’re still in America. Still on planet Earth. It’s impossible to stay put, that urgent feeling tugging at you like you’re on a leash, pulsating at the back of your mind. So you pick a direction, not a wholly conscious decision, just your instinct guiding you.
You take a backpack that you fill with water, chocolate bars and crackers and you set out on your journey. You whistle most of the time to fill the silence. That’s something you’ve come to be gradually aware of, the silence. No cars or other people sounds, that much you’d figured out, but no animal sounds either. No birds or insects. That gives you the creeps, no joke, and if you couldn’t hear yourself you’d think you’d turned deaf. You pass a few farms on your way and you hope that those aren’t empty, that there are people hiding out and just as freaked as you are.
You sleep in a ditch with yellowish grass tickling your nose. You can’t tell if it’s actually night because there’s no change in the sky or in the lighting, but it says that it’s midnight on your watch and keeping up the routine makes you feel like you still have a handle on your sanity. You think about the Impala, waiting around for you somewhere, her black hood dull with no sun to make it shine. Wait for me, baby. I’ll find you too. Once you’ve found Sam, of course.
You dream you’re standing at the top of a mountain, looking down at a valley where a small town is nestled. The wind is sweet on your face and the air tastes like rain. Castiel is standing next to you, and he’s saying something, but you know he’s not really talking to you in your mind this time because you can’t hear him, even if you two are just a couple of feet apart.
You wake up with a sour guilty feeling at the pit of your stomach. You forgot about Cas. Something rustles behind you and your heart leaps in your chest.
“Cas? Castiel, is that you?”
“Raise your hands where I can see them, son.”
Another human voice. At first you’re so thrilled about it that the threat doesn’t register.
“Hey, you-” you start, sitting up and starting to turn around.
Something pokes you between your shoulder blades, and you still. You only got three bullets and your hand isn’t even on your gun.
“Keep cool, pal,” you say in what you hope is a soothing voice. Sometimes you get soothing and sarcastic a little mixed up.
“Stand up and turn around, real slow.”
You do as you’re told, and after a moment at least as long as one of Earth’s rotations, you find yourself facing a man about as tall as you are. He’s wearing dungarees and a plaid shirt open on curly blond chest hair, and he doesn’t look quite old enough to call you son, barely ten years on you. He squints at you beneath the visor of his dirty cap and you remember the shotgun in his hands. Play nice, will you.
“Look, I’m not armed,” you say, presenting the man with your empty palms.
“You ain’t one of the crazies,” he says.
“Well…” You ponder that statement. “I guess that’s debatable, but I don’t mean you no harm, that’s for sure.”
“No.” The man jerks his shotgun in an impatient gesture, and you think you should ask him - is he one of the crazies? “I mean one of the rabid ones - they’re strong and totally off their rockers, when they see you they try to jump you and cut you up, Lord knows why. So you’re not one of them.”
You should maybe congratulate the man for that outstanding show of deductive reasoning, but first, don’t antagonize the man with the gun, and second… His words ring a bell; you feel dread like ice running in your veins. Crazy people, cutting others up. Don’t tell me it’s the Croatoan virus again, once was enough. Well at least, you can find comfort in the fact that your brother, wherever he is, is immune to that shit.
The man has said something, you can tell at the expectant twist of his eyebrows, but you were too lost into yourself to hear it.
“I’m sorry, what did you just say?”
“I said - want to come to my farm and enjoy a meal with us?”
Us sounds good, means that the country hasn’t been depopulated just yet. You follow the man to his house, pleasantly painted in green and red, stone stairs leading to the porch. The man climbs them and calls, “I’m back, it’s alright!” He turns to you and holds out his hand. “I’m Tom, by the way.”
“Dean.” You clasp his strong, dry hand in yours.
“Sorry about the… you know.” Tom gestures with his shotgun. “Can’t be too careful.”
“Of course. No harm done, man.”
Tom introduces you to his wife, Maggie, who beams at you under a mass of red hair, to his daughter Maisy, surly girl of twenty, and to Henry, a drifter they picked up on the side of the road, just like they did you. Dinner is a rabbit, a puny thing with not much meat on its bones - your throat tightens painfully at the generosity of these people, inviting you to their table when they don’t have a lot to eat themselves. Tom hunted the small animal himself, he tells you proudly; that it was no small feat is strongly implied.
“Can’t say I have seen any animals for the last few days,” you say. “I thought they were all gone.”
“They’re hiding, far as I can tell,” Tom explains. “Some of them turn up dead and start rotting almost instantly. I had a dog.”
No need to ask where this dog is now. There’s a silence as the plates pass around and come back with a little meat and a few potatoes.
“Where are all the people?” you ask, because finally, you might be able to get some answers.
Everyone at the table looks at each other and you feel like you’ve missed something, skipped an episode.
“Where’ve you been?” Maisy murmurs.
“Some people just disappeared,” Maggie says softly. “In a big flash of light.” She and her husband exchange a look. “Gone to Heaven, you see.”
Heaven? The fucking Rapture, no kidding? Somehow you can’t get yourself to believe that so many people are righteous enough to deserve the ultimate reward, and you’ve also seen firsthand what kind of nice people Heaven’s inhabitants are - selling out the world to destruction, and now hand-picking the ones they want to save. How charming. But call you a cynic, you’re still not enough of a bastard to tell these people the truth and dash their hopes.
“Some people have gone nuts, that’s the crazies,” Tom says, “and then there’s only a handful of us left, trying to survive.” This declaration is followed by heavy silence, and you feel kind of bad for ruining the companionable mood.
During the rest of the meal they try to avoid depressing subjects, but you manage to pick up a few things: there’re no more TV channels, and the only reason the family still has electricity is because they have their own generator. Animals are dying, food is rotting. Something is in the air, something evil. You realize that the world has ended, and this is the epilogue. The people eating with you know it but none of them can say it out loud.
Tom offers you a shot of whisky as Henry goes to help Maggie and Maisy with the dishes. The two of you drink on the porch and watch the fields, whose colors are dulled by the non-light filtering through the clouds. A bolt of lightning zigzags across the sky and slices it in two, but there’s still no rain, still no wind. The clouds look like they should burst with water, but they are the same as they’ve been for the past few days, like a lid covering the world.
“If you’re looking for a place to stay,” Tom says after a while, sneaking a glance at you.
You’re touched; you can’t deny it. “Thanks. But I’m looking for my brother.”
“Your brother’s missing?” Tom casts you a knowing look. “He was with you, wasn’t he? And now he’s gone.”
Is Tom suggesting that Sam got raptured? You hold back a snort. With the blood drinking, the demon fucking, you somehow doubt that your brother was a candidate for the godly ascension. He was merely their little pawn, their scapegoat. Played like a violin. You haven’t let yourself think about all this, about how fucked up things have been between you and Sam for a while now. You figure you and your brother will have the time to talk about it when you find him.
“I still gotta try.”
Tom nods like he gets it and you’re grateful that he doesn’t insist. You think you might’ve been just a little too tempted to agree to stay.
---
On your way to nowhere - wherever Sam is - and after you leave Tom and his little family, you find a car, right in the middle of the road. Door is closed but unlocked, and the key is in the ignition. Looks like someone got raptured here. You find it more disturbing than if you’d found broken windows and blood on the seats, signs that the driver was dragged out of his car screaming by the crazies. One minute at the wheel, the next washed away in a big white light. Are the angels storing their vessels, lining them up in rows, like pieces of meat in the slaughterhouse of Heaven?
You still take the car, glad to feel a motor rumbling again, even if it isn’t your baby’s, and glad to be off your feet. You drive through identical central California towns, sometimes seeing a glimpse of human figures. You drive faster then, because even if they’re not infected you doubt that every survivor is as nice as Tom and his people.
The car breaks down on you at the edge of Lucerne Valley. You try to fiddle with it, you curse it for good measure, but it’s useless - maybe the evil-in-the-air is messing with car engines too. You keep walking, rounded-top mountains blocking your perspective on your right and on your left, a few sparse trees here and there, a lot of knee-high bushes, a rocky ground. Feels like the desert is near.
You arrive at a gas station and you find something written on the pale yellow wall of the store: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” You blink at it for a whole minute. You think you’d have preferred an apocalyptic message of the “The end is nigh” type.
You hear a noise, resounding in the silence, and you whip around, your gun out before you can think. On the other side of the road is a restaurant; the building is vaguely Mexican-styled, with an arched entry and red tiles on the roof. A few motorbikes are parked on the front, and one of them fell down - that was the noise. There’s a little girl of four or five standing beside it, all skinny arms and legs, black hair falling into her eyes. You don’t drop your gun, because you know that little girls don’t always equal harmlessness - fucking Lilith, would things have been different if she’d worn a little girl at the end?
“Hey, kid,” you call, not too harshly in case this is really an innocent child. “You on your own?”
The little girl doesn’t answer, and with her head down, you can’t even tell if she heard you. You cross the road with slow steps, feeling foolishly like you’re walking into a trap but unable to help yourself.
The little girl raises her head, and her eyes are beetle-black. Aw, come on.
“Dean Winchester,” she says, and as if it was a signal of some sort, screaming people suddenly rush out of the restaurant.
You shoot at one of them - a man with a bushy beard and a black leather jacket, probably the former proud owner of one of the bikes - and you don’t miss, but then you remember: three bullets, make each of them count. You opt for running away.
Lucerne Valley isn’t the best place for hiding - all flat, low buildings, wide spaces between them. You’re getting tired, your lungs are burning, and they can probably be sustained by their insanity for a long time. You zigzag between abandoned cars and make a sharp turn left, leaving the road you’ve been following so far. You pass a shopping center, a thrift shop, a pizzeria, each time tempted to take refuge in them but afraid you’d get trapped instead. Another few twists and turns and you realize you can’t see them immediately behind you anymore, even though you can still hear their screams. You frantically look around for something you could use, and there you see another abandoned motorbike. You haven’t ridden a bike since you were about eighteen, but what the hell. If that thing has enough gas to take you away from here, you gotta take that chance. You jump on the bike and take off like a shot - so fast you’re not exactly ready for it and feel like you’ve left half of your skin behind. You pass the horde of crazies and they screech at you. You can’t see the demon girl anywhere.
It so happens that riding a bike is… just like riding a bike. You don’t crash and the speed’s getting you high like nothing else
“Woohoo!” you yell at the desert as you cut through the still air and it almost feels like the wind. You leave Lucerne Valley behind.
You stop for the night - even though there’s no night to speak of - and at the way your motorbike’s engine is coughing you know the thing is done for. You feel a pang of regret, as this was the most fun you’ve had in years.
Feeling paranoid, you look for somewhere to sleep away from the road. Unfortunately, meager bushes are the only sort of vegetation you can find around here. Even more unfortunate is that moment when you’re too tired to watch where you step and your foot gets caught in a hole. You fall down like a tree, twisting your knee on the way.
“Ow, fuck!”
It hurts but you can’t see how bad it is without taking your jeans off, and when you try it’s too painful so you give up. You sleep fitfully behind a bush, your backpack as a makeshift pillow, you knee throbbing unrelentingly.
When you wake up, your knee has doubled in size; you can feel it hot and swollen under the denim. There’s not much you can do - you should put ice on it but you don’t have ice, it’s the desert, and you should get some rest for it but you still need to find Sam. Sam didn’t just disappear in a flash of light like all those raptured people; you won’t believe it. He’s out there somewhere and you’ll find him.
You tear off a band of fabric from your shirt and you bandage your knee as best as you can. You try the bike, but as you’d figured, it won’t take you anywhere now. A wave of weariness washes over you at the thought of walking on a hurt knee. Any euphoria from yesterday’s bike ride is well gone by now.
The sun might still be up there behind the clouds because you think it’s getting hotter the deeper you get into the desert. You have to take off your jacket and tie it up around your waist. At least you won’t get sunburn - small favors.
---
You pick up a hitchhiker, figuratively speaking, somewhere along the way. It happens when you’re taking a piss on the side of the road, thinking as you watch urine darken the dust that you don’t have much water left to drink, and that dehydration is probably the way you’ll go.
“Er, sorry?”
This almost gives you a heart attack. You take a deep controlled breath, urging your heart to calm down, and take your time tucking your dick in and zipping up. You turn around.
The girl looks at you, frightened, even though she’s the one who talked to you. She has dirty blond hair - not the color, it’s dirty and blond - and her jeans and tank top are about as clean as your own clothes.
“Where the hell d’you come from?” you ask, because it looks to you like she’s just sprouted out of the ground like a fresh flower.
“I was sleeping behind the rocks over there.” She points at a group of flat rocks, piled up together like a stack of pancakes. “I saw you coming from a distance.”
“Right.” She seems to be expecting something. “What’s your name, kid?”
“Kate.” She hesitates. “And you?”
“Name’s Dean. How long have you been walking?”
“I don’t know. I can’t tell day from night. A long time. I haven’t seen anyone in a while. Well, except for…”
“The crazies?”
She smiles like it’s a joke. “Yeah. You’ve seen them too? They tried to, to bleed on me, I think. Why’d they do that?”
“They want to pass the virus,” you say before you can think of keeping the information to yourself.
Her eyes widen in astonishment at your knowledge. How do you explain to the poor kid that this has been in the making for a long time, their doom gleefully crafted by demons and angels both?
“Where you going?” you ask her to cut her incoming questions short.
“Palm Springs,” she says. “Home. I’m trying to find my mom, and my brother and sister.”
“Well, we have something in common then. I’m trying to find my brother, except that I don’t know where he is.”
“Can I… Can I come with you? I’ve been on my own for so long…”
You’ve been on your own for too long too. And it’s not like she’ll be in any more danger with you than without.
“Alright. I have to warn you though - I fucked up my knee a while ago so I can’t walk very fast.”
“Not a problem,” she says eagerly. “I can help you out. Let me just get my stuff!”
It’s nice, travelling with someone else again. Kate offers you her arm and you won’t admit it, but it’s heaven on your knee to be able the take the weight off of it a little. It’s not as swollen as it used to be, but it’s stiff and sore and you know you’re not doing it any favors by walking on it.
You learn a lot about Kate, because she talks your ears off. You love it. It makes that awful silence recede.
“I was at summer camp,” she explains. “Some of the people disappeared in the white light, and I couldn’t call Mom when I tried. They tried to keep me from going, but I ran away. I had to find my family and see if they’re alright. What about you? You said you were looking for your brother?”
“Yeah, Sam. Are your siblings younger or older than you?” And that’s how you deflect attention from yourself and turn it back onto the other person. You don’t want to talk about Sam.
You learn that Kate’s siblings are actually the same age as she is. Her dad took off as soon as he learned that he’d been gifted with three for the price of one, and her mom has been raising her triplets on her own since then.
“Your dad is an asshole,” you say fervently.
“Yeah.” She looks down and doesn’t say anything for a moment. You feel bad about it, so you offer an anecdote from your childhood until she laughs and talks again.
You reach another town and you look for water and food. The water at the tap is undrinkable, tinged with red with a decidedly bloody taste. Bottled water is a little bit better.
“What’s going on with the food and water?” Kate asks you, as she’s decided you know everything.
“I’m not sure. Something in the air, maybe.”
“Are we gonna get sick?”
“Nah, I don’t think so.” Like you even know what you’re talking about.
You see people lurking in dark corners. Since they don’t attack you, you assume they’re not contaminated by the virus, but you still feel uneasy about it. It makes sense that there would be more crazies where more people used to live, so even though your knee could badly use a real bed, you lead Kate out of town before you find somewhere to sleep.
“Safer that way,” you say, and she accepts it without questions. More obedient than Sam at the same age.
It’s not particularly cold, so you don’t need to cuddle for warmth, but when you start dozing off you feel Kate press against your back. So she needs comfort, whatever, it’s fine. Except that you feel her hand pass your hip and find its way to your crotch, pressing down.
“Hey!” You catch that wandering little hand and roll over to face Kate. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
“I - you know.” She snatches back her hand and rises to her knees. “I just want to make you feel good.”
“Yeah, I got that.”
You swallow and look at her, her perky breasts pressing against the fabric of her top - and her baby cheeks, the healing acne on her chin and forehead. Jesus, how old is this kid? Sixteen, seventeen? You don’t ask her, because you remember being this age and being tremendously offended at the question.
“You and me.” You gesture between the two of you. “It can’t work out.”
“I don’t mind that you’re old,” she says, lovely girl.
“Thanks,” you say dryly.
“And it’s not like it’ll get you put in jail. Look at the world! Who’s gonna stop us?”
“Good point, but it’s not about being afraid of prison, it’s… It’s not right, okay? C’mon Kate, let’s go back to sleep. I’m exhausted, you’re probably tired too. Okay?”
“Yeah,” she says sullenly. “Alright.”
When you wake up next, she’s gone. You’re not exactly surprised - she probably felt pretty humiliated - but it takes your mood to subterranean levels. It’s a hassle to get on your feet and get going again; your knee is a dull ache that never subsides and you feel so terribly lonely. You find yourself humming Iron Maiden’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner just for the sound of your own voice.
And the curse goes on and on and on at sea, and the thirst goes on and on for them and me.
You remember Sam at fourteen lecturing you about the song being based on a poem by Samuel Coleridge. The memory stabs you in the heart unexpectedly, and for the first time, you feel like you won’t find Sam. That you’ll just keep walking around in circles forever and ever. You sit down by the side of the road and cry silently with your hand in front of your mouth.
You calm down after a while, and drink from your water bottle, wincing at how much it tastes like blood - almost like having a mouthful of blood, and you don’t like the memories it stirs up. At the corner of your eye you catch a movement and you freeze. It’s a bird, hoping about in the middle of the road. It’s a small bird, white and grey, with black stripes at the eyes.
You haven’t seen a single bird since you woke up in a field with no brother and a whole new world. You’ve wondered about the animals, and gathered that most of them, the ones that could, probably moved underground. The birds, though, you assumed they were all dead.
It’s coming in your direction and you’re looking for some crackers to give it when you notice something strange - it’s leaving traces behind it on the road, red traces. Its small beak is smeared with red; red is staining its feathers. You scramble to your feet, cursing and hissing in pain, and when you’re up you can see some kind of rodent on the other side of the road, with all its insides outside. The bird is coming at you. It opens its beak and it’s no charming bird chirping that comes out - it’s a shrill sound, and it’s aimed at you. It keeps coming, shrieking. You get your gun out and shoot it down.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” you mumble, rubbing a hand over your mouth. Did you just go crazy and killed the last bird on the planet? Or was there really something wrong with that bird? Can the Croatoan virus be transmitted to animals?
“One bullet left,” you say to no one.
---
You find Chuck. Or maybe it’s him who finds you, you’re not completely clear on that. He’s sitting on the side of the road with his back against the door of a small car, and he’s drinking. It’s vodka, and you wonder if it tastes better than water.
“Hey, Dean,” he says. His voice is rusty like he hasn’t talked to anyone in a long time. You can sympathize.
“Chuck. You’re alive.”
“Yep.” He takes another gulp from his bottle. “Seems like it, but who can actually tell?”
“Right. So… Do you know what happened to Cas? You were together and now you’re… not.”
“Oh, Castiel. Poof!” Chuck mimes an explosion with his hands. “That’s what the archangel did to him. I got bits of him in my hair.” He buries his fingers in his tangled mass of curly hair and shivers. “I think I got all of it out, though.”
“So he’s… dead. Yeah. That’s what I thought.”
You’re a bit apathetic about it, maybe because you already had the feeling that Castiel was dead, maybe because at this point you feel like anything that can go wrong has gone wrong. Maybe because nothing matters much except finding Sam.
“Did you hear from Sam?”
“Sam, yes, oh yes. That’s why I’m here. I was waiting for you.”
“Waiting for me?”
“Yeah. I had one last vision. I know where Sam is. Or at least I know where he will be, where you’ll find him, which amounts to the same thing, I guess.” He pauses, seemingly for dramatic effect, and you kind of want to use your last bullet on the guy. “Joshua Tree National Park. Look for the skull rock. Sam will be there.”
“That’s it?” you ask urgently. “No other indications?”
“You’ll find maps at the visitor center, it’s easy,” Chuck says, flapping a hand above his head like he can’t be bothered. “That’s all I can tell you anyway. Oh, and take my car.”
You look doubtfully at the car. “Is it still working?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Then why don’t you take it to get the hell outta here?”
Chuck looks at you for the first time. “I had to wait for you, man,” he says, like it’s the most evident thing in the world.
---
The car takes you to the Joshua Tree Visitor Center, then a bit down Park Boulevard before it breaks down. You can’t stop thinking about Chuck. You tried to convince him to come with you but he was immovable. Refused to tell you what else he saw in that vision of his, too - and it rattled you more than you care to admit to see how much despair oozed from him. When the guy who can see the future directs his eyes down to the bottom of a bottle, things are pretty much fucked to hell and back.
You walk down Park Boulevard, an eye out for any rock that looks like a skull. Problem is, there are a lot of rocks, and maybe this one is away from the road. You forgot to get a map from the visitor center, and when you realize it you don’t have the energy to go back. Your knee is a source of infinite agony and you kind of have to drag it behind you as you walk. Your backpack is filled with empty water bottles and torn up wrappers. You know this is the end of your journey, one way or another.
In the end, the skull rock is pretty easy to find. For one, there’s a sign indicating its presence. But even then it’s visible from the road, at least twenty feet tall, with three cavities that could pass for eye sockets and nostrils. You immediately see Sam huddled in on himself in the nostril cavity.
“Sammy!”
You have to climb up other rocks before you can get to him, and it’s a struggle with your knee, but the adrenaline is like fire in your veins and you manage it more quickly than you should be able to.
“Hey, Sam.”
Sam looks up at you. His skin is pasty, patched with red spots, his eyes are injected with blood. But the worst are his arms and the twisted up symbols cut into them - some are healing, others are still seeping blood. Sam did have the demon-killing knife, after all, and it’s in his hand, stained with blood.
“What happened to you, Sam?” you ask softly, not wanting to spook him, and sit down on your ass on the flat rock surface in front of the skull. You feel empty and too exhausted to be horrified.
“Lucifer,” Sam mumbles, and looks down at his arms, examining the wounds. “I’m so tired.”
“What did he do to you? Hey, look at me.”
You take his chin and force him to look up. You see your own hand and you realize that every visible patch of skin on your body is caked with a mixture of sweat and dust. It smears on Sam’s pale skin.
“He wants a vessel,” Sam says, and lets out a hoarse chuckle. “He wants me.”
Oooh, of course, of course. That’s why he took Sam and discarded you like a broken toy. You weren’t of any use to him. Fucking big white light. Fucking Lucifer.
“He won’t have you,” you promise.
“He’ll be back. He’s always back. I can’t do it anymore, Dean.”
“You won’t have to. I’m here now.”
What can you do though? You travelled all the way to here, and all you can do is watch your brother be driven to insanity. You shift positions and you feel the weight of your gun at your back.
“I have one bullet left,” you offer Sam.
He looks at you. You look at each other for a long time.
“Alright,” Sam says and nods. Just like that.
Is there anything you should say or do before you do this? You’ve come to the end of your journey and you know it. The thought is liberating. You look around you, because it seems important now to take it all in. The rocks are all round, soft lines, polished as if by human hands, and the Joshua trees look like twisted human figures raising their arms to the sky. The odd light that erases all contrasts makes the scenery look faded, like an old photograph in sepia tones. What you would give to see the sun one more time.
You turn to Sam and crouch in front of him, or try to, because your knee won’t bend so you have to keep your leg stretched out. How should you do this? You press your forehead against his, feel his clammy skin and sweaty hair stick to your face.
“Hey,” you say, struck by a sudden thought, and pull apart. “Could he just, well, bring you back to life?”
Sam scrunches up his nose thoughtfully, like this is all just an academic discussion.
“I have it covered,” he says. He looks at his arms but there is no intact skin left, so he lifts his t-shirt up and starts cutting over his stomach. So nonchalant about it, it makes you feel cold to think that this is how your brother has spent all his time while you were traipsing around the state of California.
“Want one?” he asks you, dabbing at his new wound with his dirty t-shirt.
“Uh, no, thanks.” He shrugs, like you’ve just turned down a spliff. Don’t know what you’re missing, man.
“Okay,” you say. “Let’s do this.”
The two of you press foreheads once more, and you put the gun at the back of Sam’s head. He doesn’t even flinch. You think about angles - what if the bullet goes through Sam but reaches you at the wrong angle, and then you’re not dead but just disfigured? You’re a bit squeamish about getting your face messed up.
When you’re more or less satisfied with the way you’re holding your gun, you have a moment of pause. This really is the end. You’ve died once already but this is totally different. You poke at your feelings - you’re hungry and thirsty, your left ass cheek itches, and your knee is acutely protesting the position. You don’t think you feel like a man who’s about to die; there should be something in you protesting against this. Is it about saving the world? Are you and Sam going to save anything by dying here? Maybe it’ll finally get the world out of its protracted epilogue. Maybe it’ll give it a new chapter for people like Tom and his own, for Kate, for Chuck. Or maybe not.
“You ready?” you ask Sam.
You should probably say something else to him, discuss your issues before this is really over. You don’t think you can find the words, get your meaning across. This is a world entirely deprived of meaning.
“Yeah,” Sam says. “Thank you.”
He closes his eyes. His breathing’s deep and peaceful. You make your own breathing pattern match his, almost instinctively.
“At three - one, two…”
Author: chiiyo86
Recipient: astarloa
Rating: PG13
Wordcount: ~6,300
Warnings: aborted sexual situation with someone underage, character deaths.
Author’s Notes: Thank you to chemm80 for the fast and efficient beta. I kept the second person POV used in the prompt - hope my recipient will enjoy it!
Summary: Prompt: Dean-centric. The world ended on Thursday morning and all you’ve got left is a gun, three bullets and the voice in your head that says, “Find your brother.” AU.
The world ends on a Thursday.
It is that sudden. You wake up in a field somewhere, lying down with your face against the ground and your mouth full of dirt. You spit it out, push yourself up on knees and elbows, and don’t need more than a cursory glance around to know that you’re not in Ilchester, Maryland anymore. The land is flat as the back of your hand and there isn’t one building in sight.
“Sam!” you call. It’s hardwired instinct; you can’t help yourself. “Sammy!”
Your voice gets lost, not even an echo as there’s no surface for it to bounce against. Alright. So there was some big white light tearing the floor of the convent apart, and Sam was gripping at your jacket, you remember that, and you were clutching at him too - the two of you were holding each other and now you’re alone God knows where, probably not in Maryland anymore - maybe not in the US. Obviously, there’s only one thing you can do. You need to find Sam.
You get on your feet and pat yourself down: you seem to have lost your demon-killing knife at one point - maybe Sam has it - and you only find your cell phone and your gun. One gun and - you check - only three bullets. That’s some amazing odds of survival you’re facing there. You try to call Sam but there’s no reception. You’re not that much surprised.
You can’t see your car anywhere and it makes you feel twitchy. You walk across the field until you find a road, and then you walk down the road because all roads have to lead somewhere, right? And somewhere is better than nowhere, which is where you currently are.
Something’s wrong with the sky, that’s what you notice quickly. Scratch that, something’s wrong, period. The sky is uniformly gray and low, heavy with opaque clouds, and flashes of lightning crisscross intermittently, shedding dirty light on them. Thunder roars afar, like a giant pair of dice rolling up there, and the air is still and stifling. Ominous stillness. It’s not hot, but it’s not cold either. It’s like the oxygen is in low supply now, and you find yourself taking measured breaths, pacing yourself.
You end up reaching a handful of habitations, tidy rows of houses with artificial-looking green lawns and scrawny trees and big cars parked in front of garage doors. The landscape has stopped being so flat and there are rocky hills framing the square of houses, cut out against the wonky sky. New question - after where the fuck is Sam - where the fuck are all the people? Your feet hurt from the long walk and your throat is parched, so you know you’re gonna have to break into a house. Except that you don’t have to, actually, because the first house you try is open. A car is parked outside, but it doesn’t feel like there’s anyone home.
You call to make sure. “Anyone in there? Anyone alive?” And then, because it is, after all, an option: “Anyone dead? Ghosts, zombies? Demons?”
You chuckle at your own joke. It’s the desperate kind of chuckle that comes with that feeling that you need to get your fun where you can, because there isn’t a lick of fun to be found in the situation.
Inside, you drink at the tap, too thirsty to mind the metallic tang of the water, and you rummage through the fridge for something to eat. You find a bottle of milk - it’s curdled - some ham and bread eaten away by green mold, and a few apples. You bite into one and it tastes like dirt, and you have to spit your mouthful in the sink. How long have the people been gone that all the food turned bad? Looking through the cupboards you find some chocolate bars that taste okay, and that’s your dinner for today.
You sleep on the couch, in the living room, with your hand on your gun. Feels wrong to get into those people’s beds.
---
Having gone through the house and found a newspaper, you now know that you’re in California. It fills you with relief; at least you’re still in America. Still on planet Earth. It’s impossible to stay put, that urgent feeling tugging at you like you’re on a leash, pulsating at the back of your mind. So you pick a direction, not a wholly conscious decision, just your instinct guiding you.
You take a backpack that you fill with water, chocolate bars and crackers and you set out on your journey. You whistle most of the time to fill the silence. That’s something you’ve come to be gradually aware of, the silence. No cars or other people sounds, that much you’d figured out, but no animal sounds either. No birds or insects. That gives you the creeps, no joke, and if you couldn’t hear yourself you’d think you’d turned deaf. You pass a few farms on your way and you hope that those aren’t empty, that there are people hiding out and just as freaked as you are.
You sleep in a ditch with yellowish grass tickling your nose. You can’t tell if it’s actually night because there’s no change in the sky or in the lighting, but it says that it’s midnight on your watch and keeping up the routine makes you feel like you still have a handle on your sanity. You think about the Impala, waiting around for you somewhere, her black hood dull with no sun to make it shine. Wait for me, baby. I’ll find you too. Once you’ve found Sam, of course.
You dream you’re standing at the top of a mountain, looking down at a valley where a small town is nestled. The wind is sweet on your face and the air tastes like rain. Castiel is standing next to you, and he’s saying something, but you know he’s not really talking to you in your mind this time because you can’t hear him, even if you two are just a couple of feet apart.
You wake up with a sour guilty feeling at the pit of your stomach. You forgot about Cas. Something rustles behind you and your heart leaps in your chest.
“Cas? Castiel, is that you?”
“Raise your hands where I can see them, son.”
Another human voice. At first you’re so thrilled about it that the threat doesn’t register.
“Hey, you-” you start, sitting up and starting to turn around.
Something pokes you between your shoulder blades, and you still. You only got three bullets and your hand isn’t even on your gun.
“Keep cool, pal,” you say in what you hope is a soothing voice. Sometimes you get soothing and sarcastic a little mixed up.
“Stand up and turn around, real slow.”
You do as you’re told, and after a moment at least as long as one of Earth’s rotations, you find yourself facing a man about as tall as you are. He’s wearing dungarees and a plaid shirt open on curly blond chest hair, and he doesn’t look quite old enough to call you son, barely ten years on you. He squints at you beneath the visor of his dirty cap and you remember the shotgun in his hands. Play nice, will you.
“Look, I’m not armed,” you say, presenting the man with your empty palms.
“You ain’t one of the crazies,” he says.
“Well…” You ponder that statement. “I guess that’s debatable, but I don’t mean you no harm, that’s for sure.”
“No.” The man jerks his shotgun in an impatient gesture, and you think you should ask him - is he one of the crazies? “I mean one of the rabid ones - they’re strong and totally off their rockers, when they see you they try to jump you and cut you up, Lord knows why. So you’re not one of them.”
You should maybe congratulate the man for that outstanding show of deductive reasoning, but first, don’t antagonize the man with the gun, and second… His words ring a bell; you feel dread like ice running in your veins. Crazy people, cutting others up. Don’t tell me it’s the Croatoan virus again, once was enough. Well at least, you can find comfort in the fact that your brother, wherever he is, is immune to that shit.
The man has said something, you can tell at the expectant twist of his eyebrows, but you were too lost into yourself to hear it.
“I’m sorry, what did you just say?”
“I said - want to come to my farm and enjoy a meal with us?”
Us sounds good, means that the country hasn’t been depopulated just yet. You follow the man to his house, pleasantly painted in green and red, stone stairs leading to the porch. The man climbs them and calls, “I’m back, it’s alright!” He turns to you and holds out his hand. “I’m Tom, by the way.”
“Dean.” You clasp his strong, dry hand in yours.
“Sorry about the… you know.” Tom gestures with his shotgun. “Can’t be too careful.”
“Of course. No harm done, man.”
Tom introduces you to his wife, Maggie, who beams at you under a mass of red hair, to his daughter Maisy, surly girl of twenty, and to Henry, a drifter they picked up on the side of the road, just like they did you. Dinner is a rabbit, a puny thing with not much meat on its bones - your throat tightens painfully at the generosity of these people, inviting you to their table when they don’t have a lot to eat themselves. Tom hunted the small animal himself, he tells you proudly; that it was no small feat is strongly implied.
“Can’t say I have seen any animals for the last few days,” you say. “I thought they were all gone.”
“They’re hiding, far as I can tell,” Tom explains. “Some of them turn up dead and start rotting almost instantly. I had a dog.”
No need to ask where this dog is now. There’s a silence as the plates pass around and come back with a little meat and a few potatoes.
“Where are all the people?” you ask, because finally, you might be able to get some answers.
Everyone at the table looks at each other and you feel like you’ve missed something, skipped an episode.
“Where’ve you been?” Maisy murmurs.
“Some people just disappeared,” Maggie says softly. “In a big flash of light.” She and her husband exchange a look. “Gone to Heaven, you see.”
Heaven? The fucking Rapture, no kidding? Somehow you can’t get yourself to believe that so many people are righteous enough to deserve the ultimate reward, and you’ve also seen firsthand what kind of nice people Heaven’s inhabitants are - selling out the world to destruction, and now hand-picking the ones they want to save. How charming. But call you a cynic, you’re still not enough of a bastard to tell these people the truth and dash their hopes.
“Some people have gone nuts, that’s the crazies,” Tom says, “and then there’s only a handful of us left, trying to survive.” This declaration is followed by heavy silence, and you feel kind of bad for ruining the companionable mood.
During the rest of the meal they try to avoid depressing subjects, but you manage to pick up a few things: there’re no more TV channels, and the only reason the family still has electricity is because they have their own generator. Animals are dying, food is rotting. Something is in the air, something evil. You realize that the world has ended, and this is the epilogue. The people eating with you know it but none of them can say it out loud.
Tom offers you a shot of whisky as Henry goes to help Maggie and Maisy with the dishes. The two of you drink on the porch and watch the fields, whose colors are dulled by the non-light filtering through the clouds. A bolt of lightning zigzags across the sky and slices it in two, but there’s still no rain, still no wind. The clouds look like they should burst with water, but they are the same as they’ve been for the past few days, like a lid covering the world.
“If you’re looking for a place to stay,” Tom says after a while, sneaking a glance at you.
You’re touched; you can’t deny it. “Thanks. But I’m looking for my brother.”
“Your brother’s missing?” Tom casts you a knowing look. “He was with you, wasn’t he? And now he’s gone.”
Is Tom suggesting that Sam got raptured? You hold back a snort. With the blood drinking, the demon fucking, you somehow doubt that your brother was a candidate for the godly ascension. He was merely their little pawn, their scapegoat. Played like a violin. You haven’t let yourself think about all this, about how fucked up things have been between you and Sam for a while now. You figure you and your brother will have the time to talk about it when you find him.
“I still gotta try.”
Tom nods like he gets it and you’re grateful that he doesn’t insist. You think you might’ve been just a little too tempted to agree to stay.
---
On your way to nowhere - wherever Sam is - and after you leave Tom and his little family, you find a car, right in the middle of the road. Door is closed but unlocked, and the key is in the ignition. Looks like someone got raptured here. You find it more disturbing than if you’d found broken windows and blood on the seats, signs that the driver was dragged out of his car screaming by the crazies. One minute at the wheel, the next washed away in a big white light. Are the angels storing their vessels, lining them up in rows, like pieces of meat in the slaughterhouse of Heaven?
You still take the car, glad to feel a motor rumbling again, even if it isn’t your baby’s, and glad to be off your feet. You drive through identical central California towns, sometimes seeing a glimpse of human figures. You drive faster then, because even if they’re not infected you doubt that every survivor is as nice as Tom and his people.
The car breaks down on you at the edge of Lucerne Valley. You try to fiddle with it, you curse it for good measure, but it’s useless - maybe the evil-in-the-air is messing with car engines too. You keep walking, rounded-top mountains blocking your perspective on your right and on your left, a few sparse trees here and there, a lot of knee-high bushes, a rocky ground. Feels like the desert is near.
You arrive at a gas station and you find something written on the pale yellow wall of the store: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” You blink at it for a whole minute. You think you’d have preferred an apocalyptic message of the “The end is nigh” type.
You hear a noise, resounding in the silence, and you whip around, your gun out before you can think. On the other side of the road is a restaurant; the building is vaguely Mexican-styled, with an arched entry and red tiles on the roof. A few motorbikes are parked on the front, and one of them fell down - that was the noise. There’s a little girl of four or five standing beside it, all skinny arms and legs, black hair falling into her eyes. You don’t drop your gun, because you know that little girls don’t always equal harmlessness - fucking Lilith, would things have been different if she’d worn a little girl at the end?
“Hey, kid,” you call, not too harshly in case this is really an innocent child. “You on your own?”
The little girl doesn’t answer, and with her head down, you can’t even tell if she heard you. You cross the road with slow steps, feeling foolishly like you’re walking into a trap but unable to help yourself.
The little girl raises her head, and her eyes are beetle-black. Aw, come on.
“Dean Winchester,” she says, and as if it was a signal of some sort, screaming people suddenly rush out of the restaurant.
You shoot at one of them - a man with a bushy beard and a black leather jacket, probably the former proud owner of one of the bikes - and you don’t miss, but then you remember: three bullets, make each of them count. You opt for running away.
Lucerne Valley isn’t the best place for hiding - all flat, low buildings, wide spaces between them. You’re getting tired, your lungs are burning, and they can probably be sustained by their insanity for a long time. You zigzag between abandoned cars and make a sharp turn left, leaving the road you’ve been following so far. You pass a shopping center, a thrift shop, a pizzeria, each time tempted to take refuge in them but afraid you’d get trapped instead. Another few twists and turns and you realize you can’t see them immediately behind you anymore, even though you can still hear their screams. You frantically look around for something you could use, and there you see another abandoned motorbike. You haven’t ridden a bike since you were about eighteen, but what the hell. If that thing has enough gas to take you away from here, you gotta take that chance. You jump on the bike and take off like a shot - so fast you’re not exactly ready for it and feel like you’ve left half of your skin behind. You pass the horde of crazies and they screech at you. You can’t see the demon girl anywhere.
It so happens that riding a bike is… just like riding a bike. You don’t crash and the speed’s getting you high like nothing else
“Woohoo!” you yell at the desert as you cut through the still air and it almost feels like the wind. You leave Lucerne Valley behind.
You stop for the night - even though there’s no night to speak of - and at the way your motorbike’s engine is coughing you know the thing is done for. You feel a pang of regret, as this was the most fun you’ve had in years.
Feeling paranoid, you look for somewhere to sleep away from the road. Unfortunately, meager bushes are the only sort of vegetation you can find around here. Even more unfortunate is that moment when you’re too tired to watch where you step and your foot gets caught in a hole. You fall down like a tree, twisting your knee on the way.
“Ow, fuck!”
It hurts but you can’t see how bad it is without taking your jeans off, and when you try it’s too painful so you give up. You sleep fitfully behind a bush, your backpack as a makeshift pillow, you knee throbbing unrelentingly.
When you wake up, your knee has doubled in size; you can feel it hot and swollen under the denim. There’s not much you can do - you should put ice on it but you don’t have ice, it’s the desert, and you should get some rest for it but you still need to find Sam. Sam didn’t just disappear in a flash of light like all those raptured people; you won’t believe it. He’s out there somewhere and you’ll find him.
You tear off a band of fabric from your shirt and you bandage your knee as best as you can. You try the bike, but as you’d figured, it won’t take you anywhere now. A wave of weariness washes over you at the thought of walking on a hurt knee. Any euphoria from yesterday’s bike ride is well gone by now.
The sun might still be up there behind the clouds because you think it’s getting hotter the deeper you get into the desert. You have to take off your jacket and tie it up around your waist. At least you won’t get sunburn - small favors.
---
You pick up a hitchhiker, figuratively speaking, somewhere along the way. It happens when you’re taking a piss on the side of the road, thinking as you watch urine darken the dust that you don’t have much water left to drink, and that dehydration is probably the way you’ll go.
“Er, sorry?”
This almost gives you a heart attack. You take a deep controlled breath, urging your heart to calm down, and take your time tucking your dick in and zipping up. You turn around.
The girl looks at you, frightened, even though she’s the one who talked to you. She has dirty blond hair - not the color, it’s dirty and blond - and her jeans and tank top are about as clean as your own clothes.
“Where the hell d’you come from?” you ask, because it looks to you like she’s just sprouted out of the ground like a fresh flower.
“I was sleeping behind the rocks over there.” She points at a group of flat rocks, piled up together like a stack of pancakes. “I saw you coming from a distance.”
“Right.” She seems to be expecting something. “What’s your name, kid?”
“Kate.” She hesitates. “And you?”
“Name’s Dean. How long have you been walking?”
“I don’t know. I can’t tell day from night. A long time. I haven’t seen anyone in a while. Well, except for…”
“The crazies?”
She smiles like it’s a joke. “Yeah. You’ve seen them too? They tried to, to bleed on me, I think. Why’d they do that?”
“They want to pass the virus,” you say before you can think of keeping the information to yourself.
Her eyes widen in astonishment at your knowledge. How do you explain to the poor kid that this has been in the making for a long time, their doom gleefully crafted by demons and angels both?
“Where you going?” you ask her to cut her incoming questions short.
“Palm Springs,” she says. “Home. I’m trying to find my mom, and my brother and sister.”
“Well, we have something in common then. I’m trying to find my brother, except that I don’t know where he is.”
“Can I… Can I come with you? I’ve been on my own for so long…”
You’ve been on your own for too long too. And it’s not like she’ll be in any more danger with you than without.
“Alright. I have to warn you though - I fucked up my knee a while ago so I can’t walk very fast.”
“Not a problem,” she says eagerly. “I can help you out. Let me just get my stuff!”
It’s nice, travelling with someone else again. Kate offers you her arm and you won’t admit it, but it’s heaven on your knee to be able the take the weight off of it a little. It’s not as swollen as it used to be, but it’s stiff and sore and you know you’re not doing it any favors by walking on it.
You learn a lot about Kate, because she talks your ears off. You love it. It makes that awful silence recede.
“I was at summer camp,” she explains. “Some of the people disappeared in the white light, and I couldn’t call Mom when I tried. They tried to keep me from going, but I ran away. I had to find my family and see if they’re alright. What about you? You said you were looking for your brother?”
“Yeah, Sam. Are your siblings younger or older than you?” And that’s how you deflect attention from yourself and turn it back onto the other person. You don’t want to talk about Sam.
You learn that Kate’s siblings are actually the same age as she is. Her dad took off as soon as he learned that he’d been gifted with three for the price of one, and her mom has been raising her triplets on her own since then.
“Your dad is an asshole,” you say fervently.
“Yeah.” She looks down and doesn’t say anything for a moment. You feel bad about it, so you offer an anecdote from your childhood until she laughs and talks again.
You reach another town and you look for water and food. The water at the tap is undrinkable, tinged with red with a decidedly bloody taste. Bottled water is a little bit better.
“What’s going on with the food and water?” Kate asks you, as she’s decided you know everything.
“I’m not sure. Something in the air, maybe.”
“Are we gonna get sick?”
“Nah, I don’t think so.” Like you even know what you’re talking about.
You see people lurking in dark corners. Since they don’t attack you, you assume they’re not contaminated by the virus, but you still feel uneasy about it. It makes sense that there would be more crazies where more people used to live, so even though your knee could badly use a real bed, you lead Kate out of town before you find somewhere to sleep.
“Safer that way,” you say, and she accepts it without questions. More obedient than Sam at the same age.
It’s not particularly cold, so you don’t need to cuddle for warmth, but when you start dozing off you feel Kate press against your back. So she needs comfort, whatever, it’s fine. Except that you feel her hand pass your hip and find its way to your crotch, pressing down.
“Hey!” You catch that wandering little hand and roll over to face Kate. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
“I - you know.” She snatches back her hand and rises to her knees. “I just want to make you feel good.”
“Yeah, I got that.”
You swallow and look at her, her perky breasts pressing against the fabric of her top - and her baby cheeks, the healing acne on her chin and forehead. Jesus, how old is this kid? Sixteen, seventeen? You don’t ask her, because you remember being this age and being tremendously offended at the question.
“You and me.” You gesture between the two of you. “It can’t work out.”
“I don’t mind that you’re old,” she says, lovely girl.
“Thanks,” you say dryly.
“And it’s not like it’ll get you put in jail. Look at the world! Who’s gonna stop us?”
“Good point, but it’s not about being afraid of prison, it’s… It’s not right, okay? C’mon Kate, let’s go back to sleep. I’m exhausted, you’re probably tired too. Okay?”
“Yeah,” she says sullenly. “Alright.”
When you wake up next, she’s gone. You’re not exactly surprised - she probably felt pretty humiliated - but it takes your mood to subterranean levels. It’s a hassle to get on your feet and get going again; your knee is a dull ache that never subsides and you feel so terribly lonely. You find yourself humming Iron Maiden’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner just for the sound of your own voice.
And the curse goes on and on and on at sea, and the thirst goes on and on for them and me.
You remember Sam at fourteen lecturing you about the song being based on a poem by Samuel Coleridge. The memory stabs you in the heart unexpectedly, and for the first time, you feel like you won’t find Sam. That you’ll just keep walking around in circles forever and ever. You sit down by the side of the road and cry silently with your hand in front of your mouth.
You calm down after a while, and drink from your water bottle, wincing at how much it tastes like blood - almost like having a mouthful of blood, and you don’t like the memories it stirs up. At the corner of your eye you catch a movement and you freeze. It’s a bird, hoping about in the middle of the road. It’s a small bird, white and grey, with black stripes at the eyes.
You haven’t seen a single bird since you woke up in a field with no brother and a whole new world. You’ve wondered about the animals, and gathered that most of them, the ones that could, probably moved underground. The birds, though, you assumed they were all dead.
It’s coming in your direction and you’re looking for some crackers to give it when you notice something strange - it’s leaving traces behind it on the road, red traces. Its small beak is smeared with red; red is staining its feathers. You scramble to your feet, cursing and hissing in pain, and when you’re up you can see some kind of rodent on the other side of the road, with all its insides outside. The bird is coming at you. It opens its beak and it’s no charming bird chirping that comes out - it’s a shrill sound, and it’s aimed at you. It keeps coming, shrieking. You get your gun out and shoot it down.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” you mumble, rubbing a hand over your mouth. Did you just go crazy and killed the last bird on the planet? Or was there really something wrong with that bird? Can the Croatoan virus be transmitted to animals?
“One bullet left,” you say to no one.
---
You find Chuck. Or maybe it’s him who finds you, you’re not completely clear on that. He’s sitting on the side of the road with his back against the door of a small car, and he’s drinking. It’s vodka, and you wonder if it tastes better than water.
“Hey, Dean,” he says. His voice is rusty like he hasn’t talked to anyone in a long time. You can sympathize.
“Chuck. You’re alive.”
“Yep.” He takes another gulp from his bottle. “Seems like it, but who can actually tell?”
“Right. So… Do you know what happened to Cas? You were together and now you’re… not.”
“Oh, Castiel. Poof!” Chuck mimes an explosion with his hands. “That’s what the archangel did to him. I got bits of him in my hair.” He buries his fingers in his tangled mass of curly hair and shivers. “I think I got all of it out, though.”
“So he’s… dead. Yeah. That’s what I thought.”
You’re a bit apathetic about it, maybe because you already had the feeling that Castiel was dead, maybe because at this point you feel like anything that can go wrong has gone wrong. Maybe because nothing matters much except finding Sam.
“Did you hear from Sam?”
“Sam, yes, oh yes. That’s why I’m here. I was waiting for you.”
“Waiting for me?”
“Yeah. I had one last vision. I know where Sam is. Or at least I know where he will be, where you’ll find him, which amounts to the same thing, I guess.” He pauses, seemingly for dramatic effect, and you kind of want to use your last bullet on the guy. “Joshua Tree National Park. Look for the skull rock. Sam will be there.”
“That’s it?” you ask urgently. “No other indications?”
“You’ll find maps at the visitor center, it’s easy,” Chuck says, flapping a hand above his head like he can’t be bothered. “That’s all I can tell you anyway. Oh, and take my car.”
You look doubtfully at the car. “Is it still working?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Then why don’t you take it to get the hell outta here?”
Chuck looks at you for the first time. “I had to wait for you, man,” he says, like it’s the most evident thing in the world.
---
The car takes you to the Joshua Tree Visitor Center, then a bit down Park Boulevard before it breaks down. You can’t stop thinking about Chuck. You tried to convince him to come with you but he was immovable. Refused to tell you what else he saw in that vision of his, too - and it rattled you more than you care to admit to see how much despair oozed from him. When the guy who can see the future directs his eyes down to the bottom of a bottle, things are pretty much fucked to hell and back.
You walk down Park Boulevard, an eye out for any rock that looks like a skull. Problem is, there are a lot of rocks, and maybe this one is away from the road. You forgot to get a map from the visitor center, and when you realize it you don’t have the energy to go back. Your knee is a source of infinite agony and you kind of have to drag it behind you as you walk. Your backpack is filled with empty water bottles and torn up wrappers. You know this is the end of your journey, one way or another.
In the end, the skull rock is pretty easy to find. For one, there’s a sign indicating its presence. But even then it’s visible from the road, at least twenty feet tall, with three cavities that could pass for eye sockets and nostrils. You immediately see Sam huddled in on himself in the nostril cavity.
“Sammy!”
You have to climb up other rocks before you can get to him, and it’s a struggle with your knee, but the adrenaline is like fire in your veins and you manage it more quickly than you should be able to.
“Hey, Sam.”
Sam looks up at you. His skin is pasty, patched with red spots, his eyes are injected with blood. But the worst are his arms and the twisted up symbols cut into them - some are healing, others are still seeping blood. Sam did have the demon-killing knife, after all, and it’s in his hand, stained with blood.
“What happened to you, Sam?” you ask softly, not wanting to spook him, and sit down on your ass on the flat rock surface in front of the skull. You feel empty and too exhausted to be horrified.
“Lucifer,” Sam mumbles, and looks down at his arms, examining the wounds. “I’m so tired.”
“What did he do to you? Hey, look at me.”
You take his chin and force him to look up. You see your own hand and you realize that every visible patch of skin on your body is caked with a mixture of sweat and dust. It smears on Sam’s pale skin.
“He wants a vessel,” Sam says, and lets out a hoarse chuckle. “He wants me.”
Oooh, of course, of course. That’s why he took Sam and discarded you like a broken toy. You weren’t of any use to him. Fucking big white light. Fucking Lucifer.
“He won’t have you,” you promise.
“He’ll be back. He’s always back. I can’t do it anymore, Dean.”
“You won’t have to. I’m here now.”
What can you do though? You travelled all the way to here, and all you can do is watch your brother be driven to insanity. You shift positions and you feel the weight of your gun at your back.
“I have one bullet left,” you offer Sam.
He looks at you. You look at each other for a long time.
“Alright,” Sam says and nods. Just like that.
Is there anything you should say or do before you do this? You’ve come to the end of your journey and you know it. The thought is liberating. You look around you, because it seems important now to take it all in. The rocks are all round, soft lines, polished as if by human hands, and the Joshua trees look like twisted human figures raising their arms to the sky. The odd light that erases all contrasts makes the scenery look faded, like an old photograph in sepia tones. What you would give to see the sun one more time.
You turn to Sam and crouch in front of him, or try to, because your knee won’t bend so you have to keep your leg stretched out. How should you do this? You press your forehead against his, feel his clammy skin and sweaty hair stick to your face.
“Hey,” you say, struck by a sudden thought, and pull apart. “Could he just, well, bring you back to life?”
Sam scrunches up his nose thoughtfully, like this is all just an academic discussion.
“I have it covered,” he says. He looks at his arms but there is no intact skin left, so he lifts his t-shirt up and starts cutting over his stomach. So nonchalant about it, it makes you feel cold to think that this is how your brother has spent all his time while you were traipsing around the state of California.
“Want one?” he asks you, dabbing at his new wound with his dirty t-shirt.
“Uh, no, thanks.” He shrugs, like you’ve just turned down a spliff. Don’t know what you’re missing, man.
“Okay,” you say. “Let’s do this.”
The two of you press foreheads once more, and you put the gun at the back of Sam’s head. He doesn’t even flinch. You think about angles - what if the bullet goes through Sam but reaches you at the wrong angle, and then you’re not dead but just disfigured? You’re a bit squeamish about getting your face messed up.
When you’re more or less satisfied with the way you’re holding your gun, you have a moment of pause. This really is the end. You’ve died once already but this is totally different. You poke at your feelings - you’re hungry and thirsty, your left ass cheek itches, and your knee is acutely protesting the position. You don’t think you feel like a man who’s about to die; there should be something in you protesting against this. Is it about saving the world? Are you and Sam going to save anything by dying here? Maybe it’ll finally get the world out of its protracted epilogue. Maybe it’ll give it a new chapter for people like Tom and his own, for Kate, for Chuck. Or maybe not.
“You ready?” you ask Sam.
You should probably say something else to him, discuss your issues before this is really over. You don’t think you can find the words, get your meaning across. This is a world entirely deprived of meaning.
“Yeah,” Sam says. “Thank you.”
He closes his eyes. His breathing’s deep and peaceful. You make your own breathing pattern match his, almost instinctively.
“At three - one, two…”