SPN Fic (illustrated): Landunter (1/2)
Title: Landunter
Beta: nightrider101
Fandom: Supernatural
Characters: Dean, Sam (some Cas and OCs)
Rating: PG
Warnings: inaccurate presentation of historical facts
Spoilers: Set in the second half of season 6
Words: 10.869
Summary: One moment, Dean and Sam are fighting angels in Florida, the next they are trying not to drown on some freezing cold island somewhere very far away. Very, very far away. And possibly very long ago as well.
Note: Written for worldwide_spn, country: Germany. Special thanks go to my beta nightrider101, who was a great help when it came to getting right what Americans think about certain things - sometimes be being a convenient example.
It had been raining when the light came. That was the first thing that struck Dean as odd, even before he opened his eyes. It had been raining and now it wasn’t. And it hadn’t been the kind of rain that stopped from one moment to the next as if someone hadn’t paid their electricity bill. No, this rain should have slowly subsided, leaving moist air behind that crept into everything. The air that surrounded him right now was mostly dry, and blowing in a strong wind that hadn’t been there before. It was also frigging cold - Dean could basically feel it freeze the water on his skin and in his soaked clothes, coating him with a nice, protective shield of ice.
Carefully, very carefully and slowly, he opened his eyes, well aware that in the face of the light that had been rushing towards him a second before, the weather was an absurd thing to wonder about. Especially since he was pretty sure that the light that had been coming for him was that of a nuclear explosion.
Or the angelic equivalent of one, anyway.
He blinked his eyes open and closed them again in a heartbeat, because it had been dark one second before (except for the light, but that had been lethal and Dean’s eyes had refused to react to it, because seriously, why bother?) and now it wasn’t, and his eyes didn’t like that.
He was obviously dead, but if this was Heaven, it had become an even shittier place than before, and he certainly didn’t have any awesome memories in his collection that involved being wet and freezing.
Must be Sam’s, then. The little freak was into the weirdest things, and since they shared the same Heaven, Dean could simply have landed in the wrong place.
Which meant that Sam had to be dead as well. It wasn’t surprising, since he had been standing right beside Dean, clutching his shirt like he had done the day Lucifer escaped. Like they both had done, instinctively holding on to each other in the face of something too big for them to handle, and fuck, why had they ever let go?
Dean’s eyes got used to the light quickly and he looked around. It wasn’t even that bright - the sky was overcast and grey, only a last, small spot of washed-out blue still visible in the rapidly closing cover. It was the wind that stung his eyes and made them water.
Maybe he wasn’t dead after all. This wasn’t Hell, definitely not, but it sucked a little too much to deserve being called Paradise.
Or maybe this was the angels’ idea of giving them the finger: Congratulations, you’re dead. But you’re not getting anything out of it but frozen toes. That’s what you get for sticking with the wrong side, suckers!
But that, too, wasn’t likely in the end, if only because Raphael and his minions would have known how to best annoy Dean and Sam Winchester short of sending them to Hell - and that would have been by separating them. And there Sam was, lying on the ground beside a rock and not moving.
Sam not moving did not go along with Dean’s idea of Heaven either.
So Dean started to run over to him, except after a few steps a wave of dizziness washed over him and knocked him off his feet. He still managed to stumble far enough that he crashed to the ground right beside his brother.
“Sammy,” he said, reaching for Sam’s shoulder and shaking him. “Hey, Sam. You with me?”
His stomach sank when Sam didn’t immediately respond. Before the icy cold dread and fear that always carried him back to Cold Oak could fully settle in his stomach, though, Sam jerked, coughed, and tried to punch him.
Dean caught his blindly thrown fist easily and held it still. Sam struggled for a second and for the quarter of a second there was wild, mindless panic in his eyes that caused another kind of dread in Dean - because death was no longer the worst that could happen to Sam and how could he know that the light hadn’t vaporized the wall in Sam’s mind like glass in an atomic blast?
But the light had never reached them (or had it?) and as Sam blinked in the unexpected daylight, the fear disappeared so completely Dean wasn’t sure it had ever been there in the first place. His brother groaned and squeezed shut his eyes, clutching his head with one hand, the nails of the other digging into the dirt beneath him.
It worried Dean, but this display of pretty awful pain, too, disappeared after a moment and Sam relaxed some, lying shivering on the ground and blinking up at the sky in mild confusion.
“Hey Sam,” Dean said. “Do you feel dead?”
Sam screwed his face into a grimace. “I wish I was.” He sat up and Dean helped him. “Where are we?”
“No clue. Cas must have transported us away - to Nowhereland somewhere near Shit Town, North Dakota, by the look of it.”
Sam frowned. “Smells like the sea, doesn’t it?”
Now he mentioned it, Dean could smell it, too - the distinct tang of salt in the air. “I guess. So?”
“North Dakota doesn’t have a coast.”
Dean rolled his eyes. “Maybe it’s Shit Town, Philadelphia. How should I know? I only know it’s ass cold and we’re in the middle of nowhere. No sign of Cas, before you ask.” He quickly looked around to make sure he wasn’t talking bullshit, but Cas really was nowhere to be seen, and while Dean hadn’t looked for him before now, he was pretty sure that the angel would have announced his presence at some point if he had indeed been with them.
“You think he’s alright?” Sam asked worriedly.
“’Course he is. It’s Cas.” Pushing away the thought that Cas could not be with them because he used his last strength to save Dean and Sam and didn’t make it himself, Dean slowly got back to his feet. The dizziness left him alone this time. “I’m sure he’s back on that baseball field, kicking Raphael’s ass. He’ll pick us up when he’s done. Which I hope is soon.” His teeth were already chattering.
“It’s January,” Sam reminded him. “There are some states in which it’s actually winter in January.”
“No shit.” Dean pulled his jacket closer around his shoulders and wished they were back on that field in Florida - just without the light and the impending death it brought.
His jacket was wet and didn’t do much to protect him from the cold. Sam wasn’t any better off, and after lying on the ground he was even more smeared with mud than his brother. Dean helped him up and noted at once that Sam favoured his left leg. There was a tight line around his mouth.
Dean distantly remembered one of Raphael’s minions throwing him into a cabinet, but that had been basically ages ago.
“You’re leg?” he asked.
“Twisted it, I guess.” Sam’s voice was a little tight, but it was his head he touched gingerly.
“Concussion?” Dean guessed, worried. He didn’t doubt that Cas wouldn’t have sent them here if they were in any immediate danger, but as long as they didn’t know where they were and how to get back to civilization, Dean would much prefer it if his brother didn’t suffer from any limiting injuries like twisted ankles or concussions.
“No,” Sam said. “Feels more like a migraine. It’s no big deal.”
Sam wasn’t exactly prone to migraines unless he had recently suffered from a vision, demon-blood withdrawal or a literal flashback from Hell. Dean wasn’t going to mention that, though, if Sam wasn’t. “Think you can walk?”
“I’d rather walk than stay here and freeze.” Already, Sam was trembling all over and Dean wasn’t much better off. They were both wet and coated in mud, and a motel room, even a shitty one, would be an awesome thing to find.
So they looked around and saw nothing but more mud. Very muddy mud, covering very wet grass. Even if it wasn’t raining right now, it probably had lately, and a lot.
Dean listened to the sounds that surrounded them and only heard the crashing of waves on a shore. “The ocean’s that way,” he said and pointed in a direction he decided, for lack of anything proving him wrong, to call north.
“Ocean’s every way,” Sam grumbled, and yeah, he was kind of right, too. There seemed to be an awful lot of ocean.
It wasn’t hard to find. Once Dean was taking in more than the immediate surrounding, he noted that beyond the muddy meadow they were standing on, it stretched to the horizon, the same grey color as the sky and almost invisible. He could make out the foam on the waves, though, and the spray of those that crashed against the land not so far away.
There was an awful lot of sea, and it became painfully obvious that it wasn’t framed by hotels.
“An island?” Dean thought out loud. For all the water he had found without looking for it this had to be either an island or a peninsula at least. This was just getting better. If Cas had dropped them on some stupid and uninhabited island without food or a way to get off it, Dean would hand his ass to him the next time he showed up.
“I think there’s houses over there.” Sam pointed to the hypothetical south, and Dean saw it, too. The air wasn’t particularly clear, but he could make out something like a small, flat hill a few hundred yards away and on them two buildings, their roofs so steep and long they almost touched the ground. The windows, once he could make them out at all, were dark.
Beside him, Sam made a small, worried noise, but Dean didn’t care if the place didn’t look all that inviting. It would be better than freezing out here even if it was deserted, and if the houses were haunted, well, that would be bad luck for the ghost.
But even before he could get his brother to move, it was Sam who said, “Come on, let’s hurry.”
Dean shrugged his surprise away and moved to help support Sammy’s weight as his brother was already hobbling on.
They found a street after a while - or what would have passed for a street a couple of centuries ago. It was narrow and pretty rough even for cobblestone, but at least it was better than walking on the muddy ground.
Behind them the roar of the ocean never lessened, never seemed to move further away, no matter how far they moved from the coast. Not that they were moving particularly fast - Sam was stumbling every few steps and the uneven ground had to be hell for his leg.
The houses were further away than Dean had thought. Even as they got closer they remained dark and looked empty, but at least they would offer shelter from the wind and a place for Sam to rest his leg. Maybe there would be food there. The thought made Dean’s stomach growl in the first acknowledgement of hunger.
Sam seemed to think the same. Despite his difficulties he moved like someone in a hurry. “Dude,” Dean growled when he had to keep his brother from falling flat on his face for the fifth time. “Slow down before you break your neck.” After a second he admitted, “I can’t wait to reach that fucking hill either. Sounds like the damn ocean is following us.”
“It is,” Sam said grimly. “And that is not a hill.”
“It’s not?” Dean asked as he turned around to find that even though they had walked a good bit the water seemed to be even closer than it had been before. Well, that was just awesome. “What is it?”
He was feeling somewhat nervous, because the ocean was hunting his ass and because Sam knew scary shit sometimes and he looked grim and tense, like this was one of those times.
“It’s a dwelling mound.”
Dean had no idea what that was. “What’s that?”
“Something we should reach before the water reaches us.”
Exceptionally unhelpful, but Dean wasn’t going to complain right now. He tightened his hold around his brother’s waist and together they limped onwards.
They reached the foot of the mound not much later. Crude steps made of the same stone as the road led to the top and Dean helped Sam up as quickly as he could, the roaring of the waves unnaturally loud in his ears. Only when they were all the way up did they stop to turn around and look.
The water was indeed a lot closer than it had been before, but it wasn’t yet lapping at the stairs as Dean had halfway expected.
The wind was blowing right in their faces, making their eyes tear. The last bit of blue had long since disappeared from the sky and it had gotten so dark Dean would never have guessed it was midday if he hadn’t seen that small stretch of sky right after their arrival.
Sam was already dragging himself onwards, around the corner of the house closest to them.
On the other side they were protected from the wind and Dean’s brother sat down on the simple bench beneath a small, dark window. He was panting, his face pale and tight. Dean didn’t know if it was just his leg, or if his head was still bothering him. Either way, a place to lie down was needed. A warm place, preferably.
Sam’s head would be visible through the window right now, though, and Dean half feared that any moment it would be blasted away by some pissed farmer who had grown paranoid from living in the middle of nowhere where even the sea was out to get him.
Well, the sea wasn’t impressed by bullets, as Dean knew from experience. Maybe the farmer would throw buckets at them.
But by the look of it, there was nobody home. Dean tried the door beside the bench and found it locked. He banged on it, calling for anyone in there to open the door, but nothing happened. The whole place looked abandoned.
There was movement to his right, though. Dean’s head whipped around, but he couldn’t see anything.
“Wait here,” he ordered before he went to investigate. What he had seen - something small and white-ish - had disappeared in the direction of the other building that eventually turned out to be some sort of stable. Dean rounded it and found a lonely sheep on the other side. It looked at him and said, “Meeh.”
They were equally unimpressed with each other’s presence. Keeping a suspicious eye on the animal in case it was to attack him after all, Dean opened the unlocked door to the stable and found more sheep inside, all of them looking up in unison to stare at him.
Yeah, that wasn’t creepy at all. But it was a lot warmer inside, and even while the smell of sheep was overwhelming, it would be better than being out in the wind.
But he shouldn’t have let the other sheep, the one outside, out of his sight. Because it sneaked up on him and said, “Dean.”
Dean yelped. He turned around, ready to fight it to the death and roast its corpse for dinner, but it was just Sam, his hair ruffled by the wind.
“Dude,” Dean growled. “I thought you were the sheep!”
Sam looked at him in irritation, as if Dean had said something stupid. He hadn’t. Sheep couldn’t be trusted.
“We should move on.”
“What?”
“I don’t think it’s safe here.”
“The house is empty, Sam. And the sheep will share their home with us until the storm is over and the water isn’t after our asses anymore.”
“That’s what worries me. This place looks recently abandoned. They didn’t even take the sheep along. This might be a big one.”
He wasn’t making sense there. “Sammy, could you please for one moment remember that you never told me what’s actually going on?”
Instead of explaining anything, Sam pulled Dean backwards, out of the stable and into the wind again.
Dean saw what he meant. The water, pushed by the wind, had come several yards closer in the few minutes they had been up here. But as long as they were on the hill, it shouldn’t touch them, right?
“Look over there,” Sam said and pointed to the other direction. The view was even worse than before, but in the gloom, Dean could just make out something that looked like a much bigger flat hill, with a lot more buildings on it, among them something that looked like the outline of a church tower. “That one’s higher. And larger. I think we would be better off there.”
Dean looked over to the approaching water, then to the town on the hill. He didn’t argue.
-
They were in even more of a hurry this time, because the town was far away and the water wasn’t. Sam was in a lot of pain, only pushed onwards by adrenaline, and Dean didn’t question his decision to move on.
“What’s a what’s-it-called, anyway?” he asked about halfway through what he had dubbed the Valley of Watery Death in his mind. Sam needed the distraction and Dean really wanted to know.
“A dwelling mound,” Sam said. “It’s an artificial hill on holms or flat islands. People build their houses on it so when a storm flood covers the rest of the island, they’re safe.”
Dean didn’t even know what a holm was, but that didn’t seem to matter right now. “Who the fuck lives on an island that regularly floods? You’d think the rest of the States offer enough land to find something better.”
“If water is the only criteria, who the fuck lives in New Orleans?” Sam countered. “Besides, don’t you think that those houses look awfully European?”
Dean blanched as the meaning of those words sank in. “You mean we might be in Europe?”
“The architecture and the change in daytime seem to indicate so.”
“…Hell. Does that mean we have to take a plane to get home?” Dean asked, not quite willing to accept the fact that he was going to have to spend twelve hours flying over the Atlantic and trying not to hyperventilate the entire time.
“’Fraid so. Unless you want to swim.” Sam’s lips twitched. The little bitch was enjoying Dean’s upcoming misery!
For now they had different worries, though. The threat of air-travel looming in his future kept Dean’s nerves occupied, but not half as much as the much more immediate threat of really having to swim.
Just a few yards from the slope of the higher hill ahead, Dean opened his mouth to announce that they made it after all when a particularly strong wave crashed behind them and for a moment their feet were submerged in icy water
.
“Fucking fuck!” Dean cursed, jumping forward. They basically ran the last bit, Sam’s hurting ankle forgotten in the face of a planet trying to kill them.
There were no stairs where they reached the hill so Dean had to let go of his brother so they could scramble up on all fours over the wet grass that covered the muddy ground.
Halfway up, Sam had to rest. Dean stayed near him because he was an awesome big brother and the thought of Sam out of reach in this situation was even more scary than the situation was anyway, but he didn’t like it one bit. It was hard not to grab Sam’s arm and just drag him onward, further up, when the first wave crashed fully against the hill, and the wind carried the spray up into their faces.
“Nature can be damn scary, huh?”
Dean looked at Sam in suspicion, not sure if his brother was making fun of him. But Sam looked pretty shaken himself and, sooner than he was ready, he began to crawl further up.
They were both out of breath when they reached the top of the slope. Dean was first and he pulled Sam up, and then they stumbled on. They were too high up for the water to reach them now - they had to be, since this was where all these people built their houses and they actually seemed to have put some thought into that - but the brothers still felt better the more distance they put between themselves and the waves.
The first houses stood not far away and Dean and Sam sought shelter between them. Narrow streets made of cobblestone led further into the small town. They were deserted. And Dean couldn’t blame anyone for not being out in this weather, since he rather would not have been out in this weather either, but it felt wrong. It felt like the smaller mound they’d climbed before. Empty.
The houses were all the same kind. They looked historical: rough stones, roofs made of straw or crude shingles, most of the straw ones reaching nearly all the way to the ground. The doors were wooden with no doorbells or numbers. Dean didn’t see a single postbox, and no cars. Not one.
All the windows were dark.
“The power is out?” he asked doubtfully. Sam made a non-committal sound, apparently as little convinced of this idea as his brother was.
They tried knocking on doors again, but no one would answer them. Eventually they found a house that was unlocked and inside they found rooms that were small and a ceiling so low they both had to duck. There was one large room that was full of tools and an ancient looking wagons and a smaller room that contained a table, a cooking place, one cabinet and two partitions in the wall Dean thought were closets at first, before he found them to be beds. Really, really short beds. Dean would barely have fit in there if he curled into a ball.
It was so dark outside that there was hardly any light falling in through the small window and they couldn’t find a light switch. There were no lamps either, but for an empty oil lamp hanging from the ceiling. Dean could just make out the cutlery on the table. The plates were empty, but if not for the fact that there was nothing edible in this room, he would have said some family had just gotten ready for dinner.
The utter lack of electricity and anything more modern than the fifteen-hundreds was somewhat disconcerting.
No, scratch that. It was incredibly disconcerting. Because they were dealing with angels here, and angles had this thing for time travel and this? This didn’t only make Dean nervous because of the incoming flood.
It felt all wrong. Perhaps it was just that Dean was so used to seeing electric lights and cars that everything felt wrong if he didn’t see them, but the fact that he had travelled through time before did nothing to calm his nerves.
Sam had the same idea. “Maybe you’re lucky,” he muttered. “The next flight home might not be leaving for another five hundred years.”
Dean didn’t consider himself lucky at all. “Maybe this is some kind of historical village?” he said hopefully. “You know, the ones where people live like medieval farmers and eat twigs for a month.”
“Yeah, maybe.” But Sam didn’t sound like he was considering that possibility at all.
-
The house was robust and obviously had made it through a few storms, but they still felt like the wind might tear it apart any moment. It also wasn’t comfortable at all, but the fact that the wind seemed to have picked up even more made them hesitate to step outside again.
“We need to find someone,” Dean decided none the less. “See what’s going on here. Find the fucking camera teams that come with places like this, whatever. Maybe there’s a shelter somewhere where everyone is waiting this out.”
“That’s pretty likely, actually.” Sam’s face brightened as he warmed to the idea. Then it fell again. “Unless everyone was evacuated off the island.”
There was that. But maybe that wouldn’t have been too bad, because that would have meant this was really just some medieval village and not, in fact, the middle ages. In that case, Dean and Sam would only have to wait this out by themselves and hitch a ride on the first boat when everyone was brought back to repair the damage left by the storm.
They still hesitated, because the wind tore the door from their hands when they opened it and they had no idea where to go. It was almost completely dark outside and it had started to rain. The roaring of the sea mixed with the roaring of the storm to an orchestra of doom.
But another sound was mixed in that. It was Sam who said, “Shh,” and lifted his hand to signal silence since Dean couldn’t hear him when he made quiet noises like that and really, what was the point anyway? But Dean listened, and eventually he heard it himself: the distant but frantic ringing of bells.
The moment the noise registered, it seemed to pick up strength and within seconds was easily heard over all the sounds of nature. It seemed to Dean like there was a message in that but at the moment he couldn’t care less.
“The church,” he realized. And yeah, if there was a message in that, it was definitely sent by an angel, because evidently, God didn’t give a shit.
He shared a look with his brother, then they were out the door and back in the storm, turning in the direction of the noise.
But Sam held Dean back just as he was about to march on. “Look,” he yelled, and pointed back the way they came.
Between the houses, Dean could make out the distant horizon, lit by the rays of a setting sun visible through a gap in the clouds incredibly far away. It reflected off the water and just about let them see the roofs of the buildings on the lower dwelling mound that were still sticking out of the water while the base had disappeared in the waves up to the windows.
Dean swallowed and wrapped his arm around Sam’s waist to help him along, away from the angry water’s edge.
There was thunder above, joining the cacophony around them. Lightning illuminated the dark clouds for a split-second, leaving the world even darker in its wake.
They couldn’t make out the church tower from where they were standing, but the bell rang clearly over everything else and led their way. The crashing of the waves followed them as before, making Dean think that the flood was still rising, that the bells were tolling for this entire town.
The ground was uneven and soaked by the rain. Sam with his bad leg slipped and stumbled again and again and once Dean slipped at the same time and they both fell into what Dean hoped was just a puddle of icy rainwater.
Then more lightning split the sky, and in its light they saw the church, right before them, a looming shadow standing like a fortress in the storm. Dean found himself hoping the doors weren’t closed and locked like those of most the houses. But they weren’t. They opened a second before Sam’s fingers could close around the handle and someone came out, yelled something neither of them understood and pulled the doors closed behind him.
“Hey! We wanted to get in there,” Dean protested, but he doubted anyone but the wind heard him. The man kept yelling and gesticulating. He was pointing behind them but dragged them onwards by the sleeves of their jackets before they could look.
Dean didn’t need to look. He could hear the waves quite clearly. The streets they had walked were ever so slightly leading upwards and that was the only reason they weren’t yet running through water.
The church wasn’t any safer than the first mound or the house they broke into, now probably already standing in water.
The bells had gone silent.
They needed to get to higher ground. The man leading them seemed to share their opinion. He dragged them on and on, but the slope was minimal and when a particularly strong wave broke against the walls of the houses and cold wetness bit Dean’s ankles like a hungry hellhound, he yelled in shock and panic.
Beside him, the water brought his brother off balance and Sam fell, got dragged back by the receding wave a few feet before he managed to get a grip on something and Dean could drag him back to his feet.
It hit him, for the first time, that they might die here.
The stranger took both their arms again and dragged. Dean wished he would stop that because it made it harder to keep his own hold on Sammy, but the man seemed to know where to go.
Another crack of lighting and Dean saw that he was dressed in strange, formal robes. Like a priest.
The lightning also revealed that the slope got steeper in the distance. It led to a small hill with trees that were fighting against the wind just as they were, but Dean also saw that it was too far away. Every other wave hit them now. They wouldn’t make it that far.
But their guide seemed to know where he was going. All of a sudden, there were steps and then they were a little further away from the water. Dean was about to breathe a sigh of relief when he noticed that the steps led them nowhere. They were on a small platform a few feet above the ground and the platform was connected to nothing but another platform, another four or five feet higher. Dean realized that this was the roof of a flat building but the knowledge didn’t help any. It was an island that wouldn’t protect them for long.
The priest yelled something in his weird (possibly ancient) language and made a gesture that was pretty universal (and timeless) for “Wait here!” Then he ran down the stairs again and back where they came from, his long robe dragging behind him in the water that went up to his knees by the time Dean lost sight of him in the dark. He was a good bit smaller than him and Sam but moved through the waves with a certainty that didn’t seem natural anymore.
Beside Dean, Sam yelled his name to be heard over the storm. He was already leaning against the wall of the building, his hands on the roof. From the platform it hardly went up to his chest and the fact that he hadn’t climbed up there yet told Dean that his brother was worse off than he let on.
Without a word he placed his hands on Sam’s ass and pushed him up before following with the easiness Sam should have possessed himself. On the roof they huddled together, for warmth and to be protected from the wind that seemed increasingly determined to push them off their little island.
There was nothing but darkness around them. They heard the thunder, the wind, the waves and could imagine the water getting higher and higher. Dean imagined that it was already too late to leave this roof and get anywhere else, not that there was anywhere to go. All he could do was wrap an arm around Sam and pull him close. He was supposed to keep him safe, and right here, now, it didn’t matter that Sam was twenty-eight and a survivor of Hell, the apocalypse and the shittiest destiny anyone could be cursed with. He was Dean’s little brother and could just as well have been four.
Sam let it happen and clung right back.
For a long time they sat in silence, trying to make out what they could in the sporadic flash of lighting. Still, the first wave that washed over the roof took them by surprise and made them jump up in shock, still clinging to each other.
It had to have been a particularly strong one because it wasn’t followed by another for a while, but it sufficed to effectively destroy any flase sense of security.
Then there was a voice in the darkness, and suddenly the priest was back, climbing onto the roof beside them and pulling something behind him by a rope. It took Dean a moment to recognize the small, wooden boat, and he knew with absolute certainty that if this man had been a living person he would never have gotten it to them through this storm.
But he brought them a boat, and that fact outweighed everything else.
Dean was the first in the boat, stretching to help his brother join him. Together, they managed to nearly tip the small thing over, but the priest stepped forward at the last moment and held on, keeping them from crashing into the water. Then he started to push them away.
Sam held out his hand. “Come with us,” he called.
“Sam.” Dean’s voice was probably inaudible over the storm to anyone but him, but Sam seemed to have heard him anyway. He shook his head and his lips moved, forming the words “I know.” But he held out his hand anyway.
The priest shook his head. He held out his own hand in greeting and then he was gone, swallowed once again by the darkness and the storm. And Sam and Dean were soon enough busy trying to stay in the boat, struggling to keep it balanced and in line with the waves, and then just holding on for dear life with hands that had turned numb from cold as the boat was washed out to sea, further and further away from the town they could no longer see.
After a while, the church bells started to ring again.
Continues HERE
Beta: nightrider101
Fandom: Supernatural
Characters: Dean, Sam (some Cas and OCs)
Rating: PG
Warnings: inaccurate presentation of historical facts
Spoilers: Set in the second half of season 6
Words: 10.869
Summary: One moment, Dean and Sam are fighting angels in Florida, the next they are trying not to drown on some freezing cold island somewhere very far away. Very, very far away. And possibly very long ago as well.
Note: Written for worldwide_spn, country: Germany. Special thanks go to my beta nightrider101, who was a great help when it came to getting right what Americans think about certain things - sometimes be being a convenient example.
It had been raining when the light came. That was the first thing that struck Dean as odd, even before he opened his eyes. It had been raining and now it wasn’t. And it hadn’t been the kind of rain that stopped from one moment to the next as if someone hadn’t paid their electricity bill. No, this rain should have slowly subsided, leaving moist air behind that crept into everything. The air that surrounded him right now was mostly dry, and blowing in a strong wind that hadn’t been there before. It was also frigging cold - Dean could basically feel it freeze the water on his skin and in his soaked clothes, coating him with a nice, protective shield of ice.
Carefully, very carefully and slowly, he opened his eyes, well aware that in the face of the light that had been rushing towards him a second before, the weather was an absurd thing to wonder about. Especially since he was pretty sure that the light that had been coming for him was that of a nuclear explosion.
Or the angelic equivalent of one, anyway.
He blinked his eyes open and closed them again in a heartbeat, because it had been dark one second before (except for the light, but that had been lethal and Dean’s eyes had refused to react to it, because seriously, why bother?) and now it wasn’t, and his eyes didn’t like that.
He was obviously dead, but if this was Heaven, it had become an even shittier place than before, and he certainly didn’t have any awesome memories in his collection that involved being wet and freezing.
Must be Sam’s, then. The little freak was into the weirdest things, and since they shared the same Heaven, Dean could simply have landed in the wrong place.
Which meant that Sam had to be dead as well. It wasn’t surprising, since he had been standing right beside Dean, clutching his shirt like he had done the day Lucifer escaped. Like they both had done, instinctively holding on to each other in the face of something too big for them to handle, and fuck, why had they ever let go?
Dean’s eyes got used to the light quickly and he looked around. It wasn’t even that bright - the sky was overcast and grey, only a last, small spot of washed-out blue still visible in the rapidly closing cover. It was the wind that stung his eyes and made them water.
Maybe he wasn’t dead after all. This wasn’t Hell, definitely not, but it sucked a little too much to deserve being called Paradise.
Or maybe this was the angels’ idea of giving them the finger: Congratulations, you’re dead. But you’re not getting anything out of it but frozen toes. That’s what you get for sticking with the wrong side, suckers!
But that, too, wasn’t likely in the end, if only because Raphael and his minions would have known how to best annoy Dean and Sam Winchester short of sending them to Hell - and that would have been by separating them. And there Sam was, lying on the ground beside a rock and not moving.
Sam not moving did not go along with Dean’s idea of Heaven either.
So Dean started to run over to him, except after a few steps a wave of dizziness washed over him and knocked him off his feet. He still managed to stumble far enough that he crashed to the ground right beside his brother.
“Sammy,” he said, reaching for Sam’s shoulder and shaking him. “Hey, Sam. You with me?”
His stomach sank when Sam didn’t immediately respond. Before the icy cold dread and fear that always carried him back to Cold Oak could fully settle in his stomach, though, Sam jerked, coughed, and tried to punch him.
Dean caught his blindly thrown fist easily and held it still. Sam struggled for a second and for the quarter of a second there was wild, mindless panic in his eyes that caused another kind of dread in Dean - because death was no longer the worst that could happen to Sam and how could he know that the light hadn’t vaporized the wall in Sam’s mind like glass in an atomic blast?
But the light had never reached them (or had it?) and as Sam blinked in the unexpected daylight, the fear disappeared so completely Dean wasn’t sure it had ever been there in the first place. His brother groaned and squeezed shut his eyes, clutching his head with one hand, the nails of the other digging into the dirt beneath him.
It worried Dean, but this display of pretty awful pain, too, disappeared after a moment and Sam relaxed some, lying shivering on the ground and blinking up at the sky in mild confusion.
“Hey Sam,” Dean said. “Do you feel dead?”
Sam screwed his face into a grimace. “I wish I was.” He sat up and Dean helped him. “Where are we?”
“No clue. Cas must have transported us away - to Nowhereland somewhere near Shit Town, North Dakota, by the look of it.”
Sam frowned. “Smells like the sea, doesn’t it?”
Now he mentioned it, Dean could smell it, too - the distinct tang of salt in the air. “I guess. So?”
“North Dakota doesn’t have a coast.”
Dean rolled his eyes. “Maybe it’s Shit Town, Philadelphia. How should I know? I only know it’s ass cold and we’re in the middle of nowhere. No sign of Cas, before you ask.” He quickly looked around to make sure he wasn’t talking bullshit, but Cas really was nowhere to be seen, and while Dean hadn’t looked for him before now, he was pretty sure that the angel would have announced his presence at some point if he had indeed been with them.
“You think he’s alright?” Sam asked worriedly.
“’Course he is. It’s Cas.” Pushing away the thought that Cas could not be with them because he used his last strength to save Dean and Sam and didn’t make it himself, Dean slowly got back to his feet. The dizziness left him alone this time. “I’m sure he’s back on that baseball field, kicking Raphael’s ass. He’ll pick us up when he’s done. Which I hope is soon.” His teeth were already chattering.
“It’s January,” Sam reminded him. “There are some states in which it’s actually winter in January.”
“No shit.” Dean pulled his jacket closer around his shoulders and wished they were back on that field in Florida - just without the light and the impending death it brought.
His jacket was wet and didn’t do much to protect him from the cold. Sam wasn’t any better off, and after lying on the ground he was even more smeared with mud than his brother. Dean helped him up and noted at once that Sam favoured his left leg. There was a tight line around his mouth.
Dean distantly remembered one of Raphael’s minions throwing him into a cabinet, but that had been basically ages ago.
“You’re leg?” he asked.
“Twisted it, I guess.” Sam’s voice was a little tight, but it was his head he touched gingerly.
“Concussion?” Dean guessed, worried. He didn’t doubt that Cas wouldn’t have sent them here if they were in any immediate danger, but as long as they didn’t know where they were and how to get back to civilization, Dean would much prefer it if his brother didn’t suffer from any limiting injuries like twisted ankles or concussions.
“No,” Sam said. “Feels more like a migraine. It’s no big deal.”
Sam wasn’t exactly prone to migraines unless he had recently suffered from a vision, demon-blood withdrawal or a literal flashback from Hell. Dean wasn’t going to mention that, though, if Sam wasn’t. “Think you can walk?”
“I’d rather walk than stay here and freeze.” Already, Sam was trembling all over and Dean wasn’t much better off. They were both wet and coated in mud, and a motel room, even a shitty one, would be an awesome thing to find.
So they looked around and saw nothing but more mud. Very muddy mud, covering very wet grass. Even if it wasn’t raining right now, it probably had lately, and a lot.
Dean listened to the sounds that surrounded them and only heard the crashing of waves on a shore. “The ocean’s that way,” he said and pointed in a direction he decided, for lack of anything proving him wrong, to call north.
“Ocean’s every way,” Sam grumbled, and yeah, he was kind of right, too. There seemed to be an awful lot of ocean.
It wasn’t hard to find. Once Dean was taking in more than the immediate surrounding, he noted that beyond the muddy meadow they were standing on, it stretched to the horizon, the same grey color as the sky and almost invisible. He could make out the foam on the waves, though, and the spray of those that crashed against the land not so far away.
There was an awful lot of sea, and it became painfully obvious that it wasn’t framed by hotels.
“An island?” Dean thought out loud. For all the water he had found without looking for it this had to be either an island or a peninsula at least. This was just getting better. If Cas had dropped them on some stupid and uninhabited island without food or a way to get off it, Dean would hand his ass to him the next time he showed up.
“I think there’s houses over there.” Sam pointed to the hypothetical south, and Dean saw it, too. The air wasn’t particularly clear, but he could make out something like a small, flat hill a few hundred yards away and on them two buildings, their roofs so steep and long they almost touched the ground. The windows, once he could make them out at all, were dark.
Beside him, Sam made a small, worried noise, but Dean didn’t care if the place didn’t look all that inviting. It would be better than freezing out here even if it was deserted, and if the houses were haunted, well, that would be bad luck for the ghost.
But even before he could get his brother to move, it was Sam who said, “Come on, let’s hurry.”
Dean shrugged his surprise away and moved to help support Sammy’s weight as his brother was already hobbling on.
They found a street after a while - or what would have passed for a street a couple of centuries ago. It was narrow and pretty rough even for cobblestone, but at least it was better than walking on the muddy ground.
Behind them the roar of the ocean never lessened, never seemed to move further away, no matter how far they moved from the coast. Not that they were moving particularly fast - Sam was stumbling every few steps and the uneven ground had to be hell for his leg.
The houses were further away than Dean had thought. Even as they got closer they remained dark and looked empty, but at least they would offer shelter from the wind and a place for Sam to rest his leg. Maybe there would be food there. The thought made Dean’s stomach growl in the first acknowledgement of hunger.
Sam seemed to think the same. Despite his difficulties he moved like someone in a hurry. “Dude,” Dean growled when he had to keep his brother from falling flat on his face for the fifth time. “Slow down before you break your neck.” After a second he admitted, “I can’t wait to reach that fucking hill either. Sounds like the damn ocean is following us.”
“It is,” Sam said grimly. “And that is not a hill.”
“It’s not?” Dean asked as he turned around to find that even though they had walked a good bit the water seemed to be even closer than it had been before. Well, that was just awesome. “What is it?”
He was feeling somewhat nervous, because the ocean was hunting his ass and because Sam knew scary shit sometimes and he looked grim and tense, like this was one of those times.
“It’s a dwelling mound.”
Dean had no idea what that was. “What’s that?”
“Something we should reach before the water reaches us.”
Exceptionally unhelpful, but Dean wasn’t going to complain right now. He tightened his hold around his brother’s waist and together they limped onwards.
They reached the foot of the mound not much later. Crude steps made of the same stone as the road led to the top and Dean helped Sam up as quickly as he could, the roaring of the waves unnaturally loud in his ears. Only when they were all the way up did they stop to turn around and look.
The water was indeed a lot closer than it had been before, but it wasn’t yet lapping at the stairs as Dean had halfway expected.
The wind was blowing right in their faces, making their eyes tear. The last bit of blue had long since disappeared from the sky and it had gotten so dark Dean would never have guessed it was midday if he hadn’t seen that small stretch of sky right after their arrival.
Sam was already dragging himself onwards, around the corner of the house closest to them.
On the other side they were protected from the wind and Dean’s brother sat down on the simple bench beneath a small, dark window. He was panting, his face pale and tight. Dean didn’t know if it was just his leg, or if his head was still bothering him. Either way, a place to lie down was needed. A warm place, preferably.
Sam’s head would be visible through the window right now, though, and Dean half feared that any moment it would be blasted away by some pissed farmer who had grown paranoid from living in the middle of nowhere where even the sea was out to get him.
Well, the sea wasn’t impressed by bullets, as Dean knew from experience. Maybe the farmer would throw buckets at them.
But by the look of it, there was nobody home. Dean tried the door beside the bench and found it locked. He banged on it, calling for anyone in there to open the door, but nothing happened. The whole place looked abandoned.
There was movement to his right, though. Dean’s head whipped around, but he couldn’t see anything.
“Wait here,” he ordered before he went to investigate. What he had seen - something small and white-ish - had disappeared in the direction of the other building that eventually turned out to be some sort of stable. Dean rounded it and found a lonely sheep on the other side. It looked at him and said, “Meeh.”
They were equally unimpressed with each other’s presence. Keeping a suspicious eye on the animal in case it was to attack him after all, Dean opened the unlocked door to the stable and found more sheep inside, all of them looking up in unison to stare at him.
Yeah, that wasn’t creepy at all. But it was a lot warmer inside, and even while the smell of sheep was overwhelming, it would be better than being out in the wind.
But he shouldn’t have let the other sheep, the one outside, out of his sight. Because it sneaked up on him and said, “Dean.”
Dean yelped. He turned around, ready to fight it to the death and roast its corpse for dinner, but it was just Sam, his hair ruffled by the wind.
“Dude,” Dean growled. “I thought you were the sheep!”
Sam looked at him in irritation, as if Dean had said something stupid. He hadn’t. Sheep couldn’t be trusted.
“We should move on.”
“What?”
“I don’t think it’s safe here.”
“The house is empty, Sam. And the sheep will share their home with us until the storm is over and the water isn’t after our asses anymore.”
“That’s what worries me. This place looks recently abandoned. They didn’t even take the sheep along. This might be a big one.”
He wasn’t making sense there. “Sammy, could you please for one moment remember that you never told me what’s actually going on?”
Instead of explaining anything, Sam pulled Dean backwards, out of the stable and into the wind again.
Dean saw what he meant. The water, pushed by the wind, had come several yards closer in the few minutes they had been up here. But as long as they were on the hill, it shouldn’t touch them, right?
“Look over there,” Sam said and pointed to the other direction. The view was even worse than before, but in the gloom, Dean could just make out something that looked like a much bigger flat hill, with a lot more buildings on it, among them something that looked like the outline of a church tower. “That one’s higher. And larger. I think we would be better off there.”
Dean looked over to the approaching water, then to the town on the hill. He didn’t argue.
-
They were in even more of a hurry this time, because the town was far away and the water wasn’t. Sam was in a lot of pain, only pushed onwards by adrenaline, and Dean didn’t question his decision to move on.
“What’s a what’s-it-called, anyway?” he asked about halfway through what he had dubbed the Valley of Watery Death in his mind. Sam needed the distraction and Dean really wanted to know.
“A dwelling mound,” Sam said. “It’s an artificial hill on holms or flat islands. People build their houses on it so when a storm flood covers the rest of the island, they’re safe.”
Dean didn’t even know what a holm was, but that didn’t seem to matter right now. “Who the fuck lives on an island that regularly floods? You’d think the rest of the States offer enough land to find something better.”
“If water is the only criteria, who the fuck lives in New Orleans?” Sam countered. “Besides, don’t you think that those houses look awfully European?”
Dean blanched as the meaning of those words sank in. “You mean we might be in Europe?”
“The architecture and the change in daytime seem to indicate so.”
“…Hell. Does that mean we have to take a plane to get home?” Dean asked, not quite willing to accept the fact that he was going to have to spend twelve hours flying over the Atlantic and trying not to hyperventilate the entire time.
“’Fraid so. Unless you want to swim.” Sam’s lips twitched. The little bitch was enjoying Dean’s upcoming misery!
For now they had different worries, though. The threat of air-travel looming in his future kept Dean’s nerves occupied, but not half as much as the much more immediate threat of really having to swim.
Just a few yards from the slope of the higher hill ahead, Dean opened his mouth to announce that they made it after all when a particularly strong wave crashed behind them and for a moment their feet were submerged in icy water
.
“Fucking fuck!” Dean cursed, jumping forward. They basically ran the last bit, Sam’s hurting ankle forgotten in the face of a planet trying to kill them.
There were no stairs where they reached the hill so Dean had to let go of his brother so they could scramble up on all fours over the wet grass that covered the muddy ground.
Halfway up, Sam had to rest. Dean stayed near him because he was an awesome big brother and the thought of Sam out of reach in this situation was even more scary than the situation was anyway, but he didn’t like it one bit. It was hard not to grab Sam’s arm and just drag him onward, further up, when the first wave crashed fully against the hill, and the wind carried the spray up into their faces.
“Nature can be damn scary, huh?”
Dean looked at Sam in suspicion, not sure if his brother was making fun of him. But Sam looked pretty shaken himself and, sooner than he was ready, he began to crawl further up.
They were both out of breath when they reached the top of the slope. Dean was first and he pulled Sam up, and then they stumbled on. They were too high up for the water to reach them now - they had to be, since this was where all these people built their houses and they actually seemed to have put some thought into that - but the brothers still felt better the more distance they put between themselves and the waves.
The first houses stood not far away and Dean and Sam sought shelter between them. Narrow streets made of cobblestone led further into the small town. They were deserted. And Dean couldn’t blame anyone for not being out in this weather, since he rather would not have been out in this weather either, but it felt wrong. It felt like the smaller mound they’d climbed before. Empty.
The houses were all the same kind. They looked historical: rough stones, roofs made of straw or crude shingles, most of the straw ones reaching nearly all the way to the ground. The doors were wooden with no doorbells or numbers. Dean didn’t see a single postbox, and no cars. Not one.
All the windows were dark.
“The power is out?” he asked doubtfully. Sam made a non-committal sound, apparently as little convinced of this idea as his brother was.
They tried knocking on doors again, but no one would answer them. Eventually they found a house that was unlocked and inside they found rooms that were small and a ceiling so low they both had to duck. There was one large room that was full of tools and an ancient looking wagons and a smaller room that contained a table, a cooking place, one cabinet and two partitions in the wall Dean thought were closets at first, before he found them to be beds. Really, really short beds. Dean would barely have fit in there if he curled into a ball.
It was so dark outside that there was hardly any light falling in through the small window and they couldn’t find a light switch. There were no lamps either, but for an empty oil lamp hanging from the ceiling. Dean could just make out the cutlery on the table. The plates were empty, but if not for the fact that there was nothing edible in this room, he would have said some family had just gotten ready for dinner.
The utter lack of electricity and anything more modern than the fifteen-hundreds was somewhat disconcerting.
No, scratch that. It was incredibly disconcerting. Because they were dealing with angels here, and angles had this thing for time travel and this? This didn’t only make Dean nervous because of the incoming flood.
It felt all wrong. Perhaps it was just that Dean was so used to seeing electric lights and cars that everything felt wrong if he didn’t see them, but the fact that he had travelled through time before did nothing to calm his nerves.
Sam had the same idea. “Maybe you’re lucky,” he muttered. “The next flight home might not be leaving for another five hundred years.”
Dean didn’t consider himself lucky at all. “Maybe this is some kind of historical village?” he said hopefully. “You know, the ones where people live like medieval farmers and eat twigs for a month.”
“Yeah, maybe.” But Sam didn’t sound like he was considering that possibility at all.
-
The house was robust and obviously had made it through a few storms, but they still felt like the wind might tear it apart any moment. It also wasn’t comfortable at all, but the fact that the wind seemed to have picked up even more made them hesitate to step outside again.
“We need to find someone,” Dean decided none the less. “See what’s going on here. Find the fucking camera teams that come with places like this, whatever. Maybe there’s a shelter somewhere where everyone is waiting this out.”
“That’s pretty likely, actually.” Sam’s face brightened as he warmed to the idea. Then it fell again. “Unless everyone was evacuated off the island.”
There was that. But maybe that wouldn’t have been too bad, because that would have meant this was really just some medieval village and not, in fact, the middle ages. In that case, Dean and Sam would only have to wait this out by themselves and hitch a ride on the first boat when everyone was brought back to repair the damage left by the storm.
They still hesitated, because the wind tore the door from their hands when they opened it and they had no idea where to go. It was almost completely dark outside and it had started to rain. The roaring of the sea mixed with the roaring of the storm to an orchestra of doom.
But another sound was mixed in that. It was Sam who said, “Shh,” and lifted his hand to signal silence since Dean couldn’t hear him when he made quiet noises like that and really, what was the point anyway? But Dean listened, and eventually he heard it himself: the distant but frantic ringing of bells.
The moment the noise registered, it seemed to pick up strength and within seconds was easily heard over all the sounds of nature. It seemed to Dean like there was a message in that but at the moment he couldn’t care less.
“The church,” he realized. And yeah, if there was a message in that, it was definitely sent by an angel, because evidently, God didn’t give a shit.
He shared a look with his brother, then they were out the door and back in the storm, turning in the direction of the noise.
But Sam held Dean back just as he was about to march on. “Look,” he yelled, and pointed back the way they came.
Between the houses, Dean could make out the distant horizon, lit by the rays of a setting sun visible through a gap in the clouds incredibly far away. It reflected off the water and just about let them see the roofs of the buildings on the lower dwelling mound that were still sticking out of the water while the base had disappeared in the waves up to the windows.
Dean swallowed and wrapped his arm around Sam’s waist to help him along, away from the angry water’s edge.
There was thunder above, joining the cacophony around them. Lightning illuminated the dark clouds for a split-second, leaving the world even darker in its wake.
They couldn’t make out the church tower from where they were standing, but the bell rang clearly over everything else and led their way. The crashing of the waves followed them as before, making Dean think that the flood was still rising, that the bells were tolling for this entire town.
The ground was uneven and soaked by the rain. Sam with his bad leg slipped and stumbled again and again and once Dean slipped at the same time and they both fell into what Dean hoped was just a puddle of icy rainwater.
Then more lightning split the sky, and in its light they saw the church, right before them, a looming shadow standing like a fortress in the storm. Dean found himself hoping the doors weren’t closed and locked like those of most the houses. But they weren’t. They opened a second before Sam’s fingers could close around the handle and someone came out, yelled something neither of them understood and pulled the doors closed behind him.
“Hey! We wanted to get in there,” Dean protested, but he doubted anyone but the wind heard him. The man kept yelling and gesticulating. He was pointing behind them but dragged them onwards by the sleeves of their jackets before they could look.
Dean didn’t need to look. He could hear the waves quite clearly. The streets they had walked were ever so slightly leading upwards and that was the only reason they weren’t yet running through water.
The church wasn’t any safer than the first mound or the house they broke into, now probably already standing in water.
The bells had gone silent.
They needed to get to higher ground. The man leading them seemed to share their opinion. He dragged them on and on, but the slope was minimal and when a particularly strong wave broke against the walls of the houses and cold wetness bit Dean’s ankles like a hungry hellhound, he yelled in shock and panic.
Beside him, the water brought his brother off balance and Sam fell, got dragged back by the receding wave a few feet before he managed to get a grip on something and Dean could drag him back to his feet.
It hit him, for the first time, that they might die here.
The stranger took both their arms again and dragged. Dean wished he would stop that because it made it harder to keep his own hold on Sammy, but the man seemed to know where to go.
Another crack of lighting and Dean saw that he was dressed in strange, formal robes. Like a priest.
The lightning also revealed that the slope got steeper in the distance. It led to a small hill with trees that were fighting against the wind just as they were, but Dean also saw that it was too far away. Every other wave hit them now. They wouldn’t make it that far.
But their guide seemed to know where he was going. All of a sudden, there were steps and then they were a little further away from the water. Dean was about to breathe a sigh of relief when he noticed that the steps led them nowhere. They were on a small platform a few feet above the ground and the platform was connected to nothing but another platform, another four or five feet higher. Dean realized that this was the roof of a flat building but the knowledge didn’t help any. It was an island that wouldn’t protect them for long.
The priest yelled something in his weird (possibly ancient) language and made a gesture that was pretty universal (and timeless) for “Wait here!” Then he ran down the stairs again and back where they came from, his long robe dragging behind him in the water that went up to his knees by the time Dean lost sight of him in the dark. He was a good bit smaller than him and Sam but moved through the waves with a certainty that didn’t seem natural anymore.
Beside Dean, Sam yelled his name to be heard over the storm. He was already leaning against the wall of the building, his hands on the roof. From the platform it hardly went up to his chest and the fact that he hadn’t climbed up there yet told Dean that his brother was worse off than he let on.
Without a word he placed his hands on Sam’s ass and pushed him up before following with the easiness Sam should have possessed himself. On the roof they huddled together, for warmth and to be protected from the wind that seemed increasingly determined to push them off their little island.
There was nothing but darkness around them. They heard the thunder, the wind, the waves and could imagine the water getting higher and higher. Dean imagined that it was already too late to leave this roof and get anywhere else, not that there was anywhere to go. All he could do was wrap an arm around Sam and pull him close. He was supposed to keep him safe, and right here, now, it didn’t matter that Sam was twenty-eight and a survivor of Hell, the apocalypse and the shittiest destiny anyone could be cursed with. He was Dean’s little brother and could just as well have been four.
Sam let it happen and clung right back.
For a long time they sat in silence, trying to make out what they could in the sporadic flash of lighting. Still, the first wave that washed over the roof took them by surprise and made them jump up in shock, still clinging to each other.
It had to have been a particularly strong one because it wasn’t followed by another for a while, but it sufficed to effectively destroy any flase sense of security.
Then there was a voice in the darkness, and suddenly the priest was back, climbing onto the roof beside them and pulling something behind him by a rope. It took Dean a moment to recognize the small, wooden boat, and he knew with absolute certainty that if this man had been a living person he would never have gotten it to them through this storm.
But he brought them a boat, and that fact outweighed everything else.
Dean was the first in the boat, stretching to help his brother join him. Together, they managed to nearly tip the small thing over, but the priest stepped forward at the last moment and held on, keeping them from crashing into the water. Then he started to push them away.
Sam held out his hand. “Come with us,” he called.
“Sam.” Dean’s voice was probably inaudible over the storm to anyone but him, but Sam seemed to have heard him anyway. He shook his head and his lips moved, forming the words “I know.” But he held out his hand anyway.
The priest shook his head. He held out his own hand in greeting and then he was gone, swallowed once again by the darkness and the storm. And Sam and Dean were soon enough busy trying to stay in the boat, struggling to keep it balanced and in line with the waves, and then just holding on for dear life with hands that had turned numb from cold as the boat was washed out to sea, further and further away from the town they could no longer see.
After a while, the church bells started to ring again.
Continues HERE