Supernatural: Six of One (1/8)
Title: Six of One
By: Vehemently
Fandom: Supernatural
Spoilers: 2.14, Born Under a Bad Sign
Rating: R for language, scariness, violence, and sexuality
Wordcount: 62,900
Beta by: vaznetti, luluminion, minim_calibre, and above and beyond the call by cofax7.
What is it: A transcontinental odyssey. A domestic melodrama. Something very confusing.
Tagline: "I'm looking for somebody," said Sam. "Somebody named Sam Winchester?"
Chapter 1: My Wayward Son
Sam Winchester came home, after two years and five months, to a place he didn't know. It was a coastal city in southern California, part of the megalopolis of Los Angeles, and he pulled off the freeway to find an old-fashioned phone booth and look himself up in the white pages. There was no listing for him, or for his brother.
So he drove around for a while, just getting the feel for the area, found the main drag and which diners the cops hung out in and counted the auto-body shops next to the offramps. He found a lunch counter and had himself a sandwich and looked out through the plate-glass windows at the midday sun and the ordinary people in it. He was very tired.
Finally he screwed up his courage and dug up out of the trunk the old broken muffler that had fallen off about four hundred miles ago, that he had managed to salvage but couldn't figure out how to reattach. It was just for show, something to hold in his hands and refer to, while he asked around. A prop, to help him play the role. Sam had spent his whole life blending in.
"Hey," he said, walking in to the Gulf station on the corner. "I'm, uh, I'm looking for a mechanic? I met him a couple years ago, he's got some expertise in classic hot-rods. I'm pretty sure he works in this town. Name's Sam Winchester?"
The attendant eyeballed him up and down and Sam wondered how bad he really looked. "Don't think so," said the man.
"His baby was this black four-door, a sixty-seven Impala. I bet he showed around pictures."
"Oh wait," said the attendant. He roped the air-pressure machine hose back towards its hanging loops while he thought. "Yeah, I met that guy, at the big show in Irvine. Forgot his name, but, the car -- that was choice. Him and his brother did it, he said. He works with Alvin, Classic Restorations, up by the freeway."
Sam chuckled. "Everybody remembers the car." He thanked the man and walked away, back the six blocks to where he had parked that selfsame Impala. It was quite a bit the worse for wear, after this long without maintenance, and not altogether black any longer, what with the mud. But that could all be fixed.
The freeway wasn't hard to find, and not far shy of it was a neat, graveled yard in front of a building emblazoned Classic Restorations in shiny red and white, like something escaped from 1956 in mint condition. There were ten or twelve cars parked in front, in a gleaming array: two early Mustangs, a GTO, a Chevelle, and last on the row one of those big land-boat Cadillacs from when they were intimidating, white and immaculate in the sun. The building was gray steel, with no windows, just the open bay doors and the cars inside and the faint tinkling of music somewhere. Sam drove past in a terror and circled back around again. He parked in front of a convenience store out of sight, got out, and girded himself with the broken muffler again before steeling himself for the walk.
He kicked up bits of gravel as he wandered into the yard, and they skittered away, nervous-like. He hadn't washed in a while, and hadn't slept in a while either, and in the bright sun he was starting to feel like a burger on a grill. He came up with cover stories one after another, and discarded each one as obvious nonsense. No whopper could outdo the truth.
Sam stuck his head in the door he had guessed was the office, and saw a big gray desk covered with invoices, modern computer, catalogs in slumping rows on the shelves and framed photos of muscle cars past on the walls. But no people. A radio sitting on the floor of the doorway faced out into the first bay, playing Pearl Jam. There was a big low clank out there, as if someone had put down a wrench. Somebody was there, of course, working like normal people do.
With the noise to hide him, Sam could snoop pretty far without being noticed. It was an orderly place, with chrome pieces hung on the walls of the garage and set carefully in rows on the shelves. There was a man in the back, washing grease off his hands with a green bar of soap in an industrial sink; he talked over his shoulder to someone else, words lost in the radio. Someone else talked back low, and Sam came fully into the bay to see. The man at the sink was fat, bearded; he reminded Sam of old Bobby in his wrecking yard. The second man was on his back on a roller, under a car, one knee bent and the other straight as if the knee were stiff. The feet were in boots, black work boots, scuffed up like they'd been to hell and back again, and they very nearly had. They looked like the shoes of a person who only owned one pair of shoes.
His sweaty hands took grit off the steel of the muffler he still held -- road dirt, grease, something. The two people hadn't seen him; until he made himself known he could observe them, hold off on making a scene. He wasn't particularly in the way or in anybody's line of vision; for all his size, he had learned how to lurk. He stayed where he was while two songs went by on the radio, just listening to the noise of the two men talking, unable to parse any of the words. Just watching and knowing and waiting, half-wondering whether to just disappear and never come back.
And then his decision was made for him, as the fat man -- had to be Alvin -- turned to put away some tool and looked up. Sam put on his brave face and walked in to meet the guy, leading with a handshake. "Hi, um, I'm trying to track down a mechanic," he said. The music was loud in his ears and he didn't know whether Alvin could hear him. He stood there awkward while the man looked him over, head cocked. Sam schooled himself and didn't glance at the roller under the car.
"Somebody told me he works here. His name is Sam?"
Alvin lifted up one side of his face in a grin, "Sammy!" he shouted, and that was something anybody could hear over the music. "Hey Sammy, got a visitor!"
Sam breathed in and out. "He worked on my car once, a long time ago," he explained, but Alvin was moving back, giving him room, and he wasn't paying attention any more. The roller came out from under the car and a man was on it, looking up distractedly, his brains still deep inside the car.
"Oh," said the man, sitting up. He was wearing a coverall, plain blue-gray, sleeves folded back to the elbow. The man filling the coverall was powerful, muscular, not much bigger than he used to be but with the look of someone capable in a fight. He stood up, hopping a little to find his balance, and put his hand on the car he'd been working on.
Sam didn't know what to do. He held his camouflage muffler in front of him, just looking and looking and trying to hold himself together, and then he dropped the damn thing and they fell into each other's arms with a great clap and grab and the muffler went clang on the concrete floor. Sam stuck his nose into the guy's shoulder and inhaled that sweat-smell that said family. They hung off each other for a long time. "Man," he said, not trusting himself, "Oh man, I --"
"Alvin, this is my brother Dean," said Dean, swinging around to face the fat man without giving up his grip on Sam's back. "You probably guessed that."
"Uh, hi," said Sam, not feigning his shyness. "Dean Winchester."
Alvin brought up both sides of his face this time, and it looked like a proper smile. "I seen you before. In the pictures." He hooked a thumb over his shoulder, pointing to a section of the wall that was nothing but pictures: beautiful cars, occasionally with people in front of them. "You still got the Impala?"
Sam laughed, and Dean laughed beside him. "I parked it down the street. It could stand some work, though. It's been through a lot." Sam bent and picked up the muffler, held it stupidly in his hands again.
Dean kept up appearances smoothly, squeezing the back of Sam's neck (transferring grease thereto, Sam could feel it) and grinning at Alvin. "Hey, what do you say I knock off early today, man?" Alvin just chuckled and waved them off.
Sam let himself be manhandled, felt the relief of someone else in control. He followed Dean around, watched him wash his hands and take off his coverall and stuff it in a locker in the back. Dean moistened a cloth and scrubbed at the grease on Sam's neck, who squirmed while warm drops of water ran one by one down his back. It was warm, well into spring; Dean didn't have a jacket with him. He had a lunch box and a key ring and a brass pendant he wore on a thong around his neck. He pulled out a watch and something that looked suspiciously like a gold wedding ring and put them both on, and then he was ready.
"I'm driving," he said, and the delight in his face was worth everything, all of it, Sam was about to burst into tears in the back of a mechanic's shop just to see that face. "Assface," Dean added, and Sam got ahold of himself.
"Bitch," Sam muttered. He hunted in his pockets and surrendered the keys.
"See you tomorrow, Alvin," Dean called, and they kicked away at stray pebbles on their way out of the yard.
Sam did not bother to control himself when he brought Dean around the corner and the Impala lay there in a parking space. He grinned like a madman as Dean paced around her, clucking at the marks on her hood and her roof, noting the one broken headlight and the gigantic dent in the back fender and how the muffler currently attached to the car belonged to something twenty years too young. They slung themselves into the front seat as of old and Sam felt like a conquering hero, dazed, triumphant. Beside him, Dean sighed and relaxed into the leather, and cocked his head at the hitch in her starter, and groaned empathetically as she found first gear. Sam's face hurt from all the grinning.
"You eat?" asked Dean. Sam shrugged. He had no appointments but this one.
Chapter 2: World of Pain
Sam Winchester wakes up in a world of hurt. That's all he knows, really: his name and a world of hurt. His eyes do the little fireworks thing when he blinks at the ceiling, tears streaming, the corona of pain radiating down from the top of his head. He can hardly move, his skin weighs so much. There's a dull throb somewhere out far away, maybe in his toes, he's not sure.
It's a white drop-ceiling, with a couple of cobwebs, high but not so high as a school gym. It's a hospital, of course. He's in a hospital room. He's been in this kind of room too much. Dad died in a room like this one.
It's day, and there's a window someplace, sending long shadows his way. He's probably sharing a room: that means no coma. His teeth ache in his jaw -- they're all there. His breath feels skunky in his mouth. His lips are dry. This sucks a whole lot.
Long yellow hair looms over him -- oh. It's a person. It's a person who knows him and he should know. "Hey," she says, and he obviously doesn't have his poker face on because she follows up with, "It's me, Jo." She's got slender fingers and no nail polish. Long-faced, she is icy, but then she smiles and her cheeks plump up like apples and he likes her. She feeds him ice chips, one by one. "You got beat up. Yesterday. You're in the hospital."
He lies blinking and thinking, his head like a churchbell. "Oh. Dean okay?"
The look on Jo's face is terrifying: confusion, pity, fear. Every muscle he can actually feel is galvanized against the possibility. "Yeah," she says at last. "Not a scratch." He feels her skin against his forehead, like checking for a temperature is what you're supposed to do for a guy who's had the tar whaled out of him. "He'll be right back, he said."
Dean isn't here. Where would Dean go? Sam moves his hands vaguely around on the mattress, thinking he'll just sit up and stand up and head on out of here and find his brother. Two hands on his chest hold him down.
"Stop," says Jo. "You broke your leg. You're not going anywhere." He gazes up at her and recognizes that implacable stare. Oh, of course -- it starts coming back to him and Sam remembers that she's in the know about the whole monsters and beasties thing.
He lets her push him back into the pillow. "We were hunting?"
Jo snorts. "Not like you all tell me everything you do." She pauses, relents. "I expect so."
"Where'd he go?"
That look again: like she wants to ask him something but the answer is going to be bad. "Something with the cover story. You were already in the hospital when he called me. I drove up here last night, all damn night long." Sam just stares. He has no idea where he is. "This is Pensacola. I was down in Gainesville, so."
There isn't time to ask what they're doing in Pensacola before Dean sweeps into the room, in control and in a bad mood. "Why'nt you call me when he woke up?" he demands, while handing Jo a cup of coffee.
She shrugs, annoyed. "Just a second ago. I been trying to stop him climbing out of bed and chasing after you on a bloody stump."
Dean blinks at her like he's surprised, but not for long. She backs away from the bed, shy, leaving cold spots on Sam's chest where her hands had been. Dean looms over, bigger than he's ever seemed. He has furrowed brows and pursed lips like he's trying to fix something he shouldn't have broken. Sam has never noticed the lines next to his mouth before. "How are you feeling, Sam?"
"Like shit," says Sam. "Jo said I broke my leg."
"Yeah, you did," and the smile on Dean's face is weak, a little guarded, a lot relieved. "And got a concussion and a pair of broken ribs."
"And you didn't get a scratch."
That gets a little nervous laugh from Dean. "But for a good cause. What do you remember?"
Sam has to think that one over. "Not a fucking thing, man. What'd we do?"
Dean winds himself up, like he's got a speech prepared. But all he says is: "Long story. The short version is, you're free of the dude with the yellow eyes. He was trying to take you, and you threw yourself down a flight of stairs instead."
"That's good?" asks Sam dully. Dean is still, like he made a face and it got stuck that way. Sam has no idea what he is thinking.
"Very good." Dean's voice is soothing, thick, like cream in coffee. "You're safe now. We're safe now. You just have to get well."
He glances down Sam's body, at the broken leg or something else. "The doctor wants to operate on your knee in a couple of days. I did some research -- I think you're getting pins in there."
"Like Wolverine. Cool." Sam tries to laugh, but his ribs are sore so he stops. He looks over at the wall and there's Jo, listening to every word, pretending she's invisible, drawing that curtain of blonde over her face like she thinks she's ugly. She is definitely not ugly, and not all that invisible, either. Sam doesn't know why she's here. He doesn't remember why there's bad blood between them, but he thinks it's something he must have done. He opens his mouth to ask Dean, Why are you making her watch this?, but he finds himself biting that back. Instead he asks, "Can I have some of that coffee?"
Dean gives him a Very Sincere Face and says, "I'll ask the doctor if it's okay."
***
Sam swung the Impala out of the hospital parking lot, on his way over to see Shaniece. It was late afternoon, drawing on toward sunset this late in the fall. The sky looked like the inside of a gigantic pink grapefruit, far as the eye could see. That was Florida for you.
He caught himself tapping his thumbs on the steering wheel ("Don't Stop Believing," of all things) and flipped the radio to something gratingly country. He sat in the car on the hot roadbed and nodded at the palm trees on the traffic islands that nodded back at him. The Impala was enormous with only one person in it.
Shaniece lived in a single-story block of apartments, concrete and painted some hideous pastel color. The five-pointed circle-design hanging from her door could have been a simple geometric oddity, if you didn't know anything about magic symbolism.
"You look okay," she told Sam, as she let him in. She was curvy, sturdily built, with warm brown skin and braids to her waist. She wore another ward around her neck, disguised in a riot of cowries and clinking painted chaff-beads. Sam couldn't have counted her necklaces if he tried. Even in gray sweats, she wore her jewelry, and a couple of cowries tied into her hair.
"I'm fine," he said absently, then, looking around, "You stash your mom someplace safe?"
"Safe enough," she said, and lowered her head, frowning. Sam felt hot bands around his chest as if he were shackled and fighting himself loose. He shrugged, awkward, and reached out a hand to her.
Through a sudden lump in his throat, he mumbled, "I didn't thank you. If you hadn't showed up, I don't know what --"
She turned to him, beads tapping her rhythm, as near to tears herself as he was afraid he was. They stood facing each other for a moment, man and woman, near-total strangers, and smiled at each other shyly, gulping. But she was a tidy person, and was quickly on to other things. She pushed her braids back off her shoulders and sat. "What are you going to tell your brother?"
"Nothing," he said, sitting to match her. His knees towered over the coffee table; it was an apartment geared towards two small women. Sam leapt in: "I mean, just enough to keep him out of it."
She tapped at a big, whorled glass bead that hung on her chest. "He didn't question you?"
"He's still pretty messed up. I can work on him again tomorrow."
"Okay," said Shaniece, and looked around the room. Sam looked with her, noted how the blood had been scrubbed off the wall and the carpet pulled up. The indentation in the wallboard would need to be patched, of course, but it looked like a home again, not like a battlefield. "I was thinking about moving away," came Shaniece's voice, breaking in on Sam's assessment. "Or, I don't know, he could be anywhere. I might never leave the house again."
"Doesn't matter," Sam contradicted, and watched that controlled fear creep out from under her mastery. "You stay here, and he finds your dreams. I travel everywhere, and he comes to me -- maybe, I guess every three or four months? Wherever you are, it's like we've all got radio collars."
"Marked," she said, and allowed her features to crumple. "Damnation."
Sam wasn't sure whether that was a swear word or a prediction. He said nothing.
She sat there looking at him, at his long bones all folded up on her little furniture, and how carefully he wasn't knocking over anything off the coffee table, and after a minute of that helpless silence, she waved one hand as if sweeping her fear and her horror away. Sam watched that hand, mesmerized: the dark back of it one way, and then the paler palm the other way, like a flag in the wind, a signal. "Well, anyway," she said, and gave him a wry smile. "So what's your magic?"
"Visions of the future. Well, usually, the futures of people like us. And one time I moved a sideboard without touching it," he added. "Just that once, though. It was an emergency."
"Two for the price of one," she mused. "Well, you've seen my superpower. That and the dreams. Should we get started?"
She stood, and he stood with her. Sam towered over her, but it was she who led the way and the conversation. "Not everybody gets the dreams," he warned her. "I don't think Andy ever did, or maybe he's just such a flake he can ignore them. I never got them at all, not like what you have."
"And that would be why we didn't find you till now." Shaniece came to the end of the hall and faced him. Her hair was a clinking waterfall behind her. "We've been looking for others for, oh, almost a year, and you just show up at my door."
"Kismet," Sam agreed. He followed her into the little nook off the kitchen where she kept her computer. The wall was all framed posters and photographs, smiling ordinary people in front of Sears portrait backgrounds and dramatic cut-outs from magazines, all of them watching over her as she typed. She called it her shield of ancestors, but Sam was pretty sure that Nina Simone and Samuel R. Delany and Nelson Mandela were not actual blood relatives. Sam added, "Divine intervention."
Shaniece smiled at him, impossibly young, his own age. How a handful of twentysomethings could stand against an evil so ancient -- "When we get up to a dozen on our team, we should throw a party." She gestured him into a folding chair and settled herself in front of the screen. Of all the stupid obvious things: the other five had found one another in a newsgroup about dream imagery. Sam had never thought to seek people out that way. Shaniece opened a chat window, showed him the icons of the other people waiting. "Okay, this is Kira and Lillian, and Nestor and Freddy. How should I introduce you?"
Chapter 3: On the Turning Away
Having paid extra for a rush job, Sam sat impatient in a bar down by the bayou just after noon. It was convenient, that the whole thing had gone down in a city with a Naval Air Station nearby, so the trade for false IDs for underage sailors was brisk; but sailors weren't usually in that much of a hurry, and the clock on the bar's Keno screens was like a grain of sand under his skin. Having eaten a greasy sandwich already, there wasn't anything to do to distract him from the crazy path he'd set himself on. It was making him a little nuts.
So it was kind of a relief to notice the pool table in the back. That soft green baize, the black fake-wood paneling around the frame. Pool always looked like a rich man's game, but Sam had never met anyone rich who played well. His fingers wanted the slim smooth cue to wrap themselves around. And really, he had to test it, right? Find out exactly what he'd gained.
Sam plugged in his quarters and racked the balls and sat the white ball on its button opposite. Till this week, he had only ever sunk one ball at a break. Pool was Dean's gig, and anyway, Sam didn't have the bravado for a con like that, and when you're thirteen and insecure there just isn't any incentive to let your brother challenge you at a game you both know he'll win again and again. Sam hit the ball and broke, and three balls fell into pockets. It all came clear in his head suddenly: the geometry of angles, calculations of force and speed, the sensitivity at the end of the cue like an extra finger. He watched himself, amazed, as he cleaned up the table in about three minutes.
He set down the cue in a corner, a little afraid that he'd shown his hand too much. His contact was watching him, leaning against the wall. Sam hunched his shoulders and led the man out into the back alley, where the cash and the fake driver's licenses changed hands.
"Hey, you want another game of pool?" the guy asked.
Sam shook his head. "I got somebody waiting for me." He walked away quickly, furtive -- he hadn't yet mastered that self-assured strut.
When he slipped into Dean's hospital room, an hour later, he found Dean watching television with a look of supreme boredom on his face. Dean lit up to see his brother, and in that instant Sam wanted to tell him what he'd done at the pool table. He felt in himself the fake-casual stance and knew the right way to capture and draw someone's interest, how to make a boast seem possible and yet a little dubious, and -- Sam controlled himself. This was not a game of pool.
"Hey," Sam said. "How's Oprah?"
"Hell should I know?" laughed Dean. "Not my fault you've got no taste in TV."
"Oh right," Sam replied. "You watch scrambled porn and CNN. How could I forget?" He came up close to Dean, looked him over carefully. They'd shaved him, or let him shave himself, and his hair always stood up like that. He looked like himself, just a little pale under the freckles. The bruises were greening around the edges, ugly but not as ugly as they had been. He'd lost a little weight, but that always happens in hospitals. "You mind if I look?"
Dean shrugged, as if it didn't matter to him, but he eyed carefully as Sam pushed back the bedsheets from his leg. The operation had gone fine, as far as Sam knew; anyway the doctors had clapped him on the back and told him things had gone fine. The leg didn't look fine. The whole thing was swollen from mid-thigh on down, with yellow smears everywhere that might have been iodine or might have been pus or something, but were probably dried blood. There were more stitches than Sam cared to count.
"Dude," Sam said, after a little while. "That's gross. When you broke your wrist it wasn't that gross."
Dean tried elaborately to hide a smile. "Squeamish?"
Sam whapped him on the arm and he laughed out loud. "Who's the one held you down when that clinic doc set your wrist in the first place, while you screamed like a girl?"
"I did not scream like a girl," Dean said, pointing a finger. "That is a hateful rumor."
"Whatever you say, little brother," said Sam. He pulled up a chair. They could go on like this all day.
***
Sam wakes when the ceiling is shadowed gray, night or day he doesn't know. He is still in the same hospital room, or it could be another for all he knows. He has been dreaming, the kind of cracked-out shit that happens when you're on good drugs. He has dreamed that his brother is screaming for him. His fingers wander over the sheets, vaguely searching.
They find another hand that is just resting there. That hand grabs onto his, hot, bony and long-fingered. "You're safe, Sammy," says Dean. He sounds tired. He is sitting at such an angle that Sam can't see his face, can't see anything but that tanned hand. He says again: "You can go back to your life at Stanford. You can go back to normal. I made you safe."
Heavy sleep is resting on his chest, weighting him back down. Sam blinks against it, clears his throat. There is something he wants to say to Dean, and he can't remember it. He lets out a breath and it doesn't have any words in it. He closes his eyes again.
"You rest, Sammy," comes Dean's voice, hypnotic and low. "You're safe now."
***
Sam arrived back at the motel room after getting his hair cut and stared at himself in the bathroom mirror. He'd forgotten that sensation of having an eighth-inch buzz at the back of his neck, and had his fingers in it like a girl for twenty minutes; but it was the visual that was so normal it was weird. Having no hair made his face look bigger; made him look older; made him look tougher. He had a tan line at his eyebrows, and his forehead was disturbingly pale.
Jo eyeballed him from the other side of the motel room, uneasy. Between them, Dean lay asleep. "You look weird," was all she said. She had Dad's journal in her lap, and a notebook open on the table. She was copying out of it neatly, near the end. She'd gotten a lot out of it, in the few days she'd been here.
He finished sorting clothes into two piles, and repacked his bag, and set it on the edge of the empty bed. "Are you going to be okay with this?" he asked, after a moment. "I didn't think you'd come. I know I'm not your favorite person --"
"You knew I'd come," she said. And it was true, he hadn't wondered. He'd called her up at two in the morning and expected her to be there at dawn, and she had arrived, stomping mad and silent. They'd been at close quarters and she hadn't smiled once, but that wasn't too far from normal. She wasn't smiling now -- just fixing him with that wide, pitiless stare.
"Right. I'll just -- right."
Jo sat stiff-necked and straight-backed, the pen still in her hand. She blinked away after a moment, as if he were frightening. She would know. "What do you want me to tell Ellen?" she asked loudly, examining the thumbed pages Dad had assembled. It felt weird, to allow any eyes but Winchester eyes to look at it, but a bargain was a bargain. "He'll call her up one day and ask after Dean, and she'll figure it all out."
He hushed her with his hands. "I'll think of something." Dean stirred, and subsided again.
Dean was drugged to the gills, of course, and even unmedicated he could sleep through a thunderstorm. Sam had found a long-sleeved shirt and tied Dean's left wrist to the handle of the nightstand, so he wouldn't roll over in the night and cause himself damage. He was going to be the crankiest man alive when he woke up in the morning.
"He's going to be mad." Jo laughed, a hard sour sound.
"Yeah, well, he'll get used to it," Sam answered, and that came out meaner than he'd intended. He'd been doing that a lot, this last couple of days, result of the shock or a symptom of the change or some damn thing. He put it out of his mind by brute force -- another new skill he'd acquired. He had too much to do to sit around dithering about clothes.
He finished cleaning up, put on the leather jacket. Nothing fit quite right. The chunk of silver on his finger was heavy on his right hand, made him feel a little out of balance. He pulled out the two leather bracelets, the watch -- actually, that was a lot of jewelry, for a guy. He did not know how to think of himself as vain. Last was the pendant, the brass bull on a black thong. He put it on, felt its weight on his chest. This is mine, he told himself. But he took it off after all.
The beds were side by side, knock-knees close as always. Sam sat on the other bed and looked over his brother. He wasn't tangled in the sheets too badly, but they covered his legs, hiding the brace that kept the knee still. His free hand was up behind his head, under the pillow, a position that would have his fingertips numb after a little while. His eye sockets were a little shadowed; it had been a hard day, getting him checked out of the hospital and settled in here. Sam noted the crow's feet encroaching on his temples, the way he slept with his tongue hard against the backs of his front teeth, as if in constant vigilance against snoring. He'd never snored that Sam had heard, but he'd bitten his tongue getting startled awake a hundred times.
"Hey little brother," Sam said, low. He nudged Dean's hip till one heavy lid lifted and showed the green eye underneath. Dean made a dull querying noise in the back of his throat. Jo glanced their way, and then pretended Sam didn't exist. "I have to go now. It's just some minor details, stuff I have to take care of, and then I'll be back. You're safe now, so you don't have to worry about me."
Dean's eye drifted shut. Sam couldn't think of what else to say. He reached up and freed that hand from under the pillow. A knife came with it, of course, not the usual hunting knife but a littler one. Sam's old mumblety-peg knife. Sam confiscated the blade and settled Dean's hand on his chest. Under his hand, under Sam's hand, a thumping heart, steady and fine. Safe.
"Okay," Sam said, mostly to himself, to make himself stand up. He closed the mumblety-peg knife and pocketed it. He really should leave it behind, as he'd done all the mementoes of being Sam -- things of Dad's, pictures of his college friends -- but he was going to need knives where he was going, and Dean would not. Jo craned her neck, like he was Godzilla standing over her or something. "I guess I should -- go. Are you sure you've got --"
"Dean," she chided him. "You're acting like him already."
Sam nodded to himself. "Okay. I guess it's time."
***
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8
So hey, welcome to the story. Go tell all your friends.
By: Vehemently
Fandom: Supernatural
Spoilers: 2.14, Born Under a Bad Sign
Rating: R for language, scariness, violence, and sexuality
Wordcount: 62,900
Beta by: vaznetti, luluminion, minim_calibre, and above and beyond the call by cofax7.
What is it: A transcontinental odyssey. A domestic melodrama. Something very confusing.
Tagline: "I'm looking for somebody," said Sam. "Somebody named Sam Winchester?"
Chapter 1: My Wayward Son
Sam Winchester came home, after two years and five months, to a place he didn't know. It was a coastal city in southern California, part of the megalopolis of Los Angeles, and he pulled off the freeway to find an old-fashioned phone booth and look himself up in the white pages. There was no listing for him, or for his brother.
So he drove around for a while, just getting the feel for the area, found the main drag and which diners the cops hung out in and counted the auto-body shops next to the offramps. He found a lunch counter and had himself a sandwich and looked out through the plate-glass windows at the midday sun and the ordinary people in it. He was very tired.
Finally he screwed up his courage and dug up out of the trunk the old broken muffler that had fallen off about four hundred miles ago, that he had managed to salvage but couldn't figure out how to reattach. It was just for show, something to hold in his hands and refer to, while he asked around. A prop, to help him play the role. Sam had spent his whole life blending in.
"Hey," he said, walking in to the Gulf station on the corner. "I'm, uh, I'm looking for a mechanic? I met him a couple years ago, he's got some expertise in classic hot-rods. I'm pretty sure he works in this town. Name's Sam Winchester?"
The attendant eyeballed him up and down and Sam wondered how bad he really looked. "Don't think so," said the man.
"His baby was this black four-door, a sixty-seven Impala. I bet he showed around pictures."
"Oh wait," said the attendant. He roped the air-pressure machine hose back towards its hanging loops while he thought. "Yeah, I met that guy, at the big show in Irvine. Forgot his name, but, the car -- that was choice. Him and his brother did it, he said. He works with Alvin, Classic Restorations, up by the freeway."
Sam chuckled. "Everybody remembers the car." He thanked the man and walked away, back the six blocks to where he had parked that selfsame Impala. It was quite a bit the worse for wear, after this long without maintenance, and not altogether black any longer, what with the mud. But that could all be fixed.
The freeway wasn't hard to find, and not far shy of it was a neat, graveled yard in front of a building emblazoned Classic Restorations in shiny red and white, like something escaped from 1956 in mint condition. There were ten or twelve cars parked in front, in a gleaming array: two early Mustangs, a GTO, a Chevelle, and last on the row one of those big land-boat Cadillacs from when they were intimidating, white and immaculate in the sun. The building was gray steel, with no windows, just the open bay doors and the cars inside and the faint tinkling of music somewhere. Sam drove past in a terror and circled back around again. He parked in front of a convenience store out of sight, got out, and girded himself with the broken muffler again before steeling himself for the walk.
He kicked up bits of gravel as he wandered into the yard, and they skittered away, nervous-like. He hadn't washed in a while, and hadn't slept in a while either, and in the bright sun he was starting to feel like a burger on a grill. He came up with cover stories one after another, and discarded each one as obvious nonsense. No whopper could outdo the truth.
Sam stuck his head in the door he had guessed was the office, and saw a big gray desk covered with invoices, modern computer, catalogs in slumping rows on the shelves and framed photos of muscle cars past on the walls. But no people. A radio sitting on the floor of the doorway faced out into the first bay, playing Pearl Jam. There was a big low clank out there, as if someone had put down a wrench. Somebody was there, of course, working like normal people do.
With the noise to hide him, Sam could snoop pretty far without being noticed. It was an orderly place, with chrome pieces hung on the walls of the garage and set carefully in rows on the shelves. There was a man in the back, washing grease off his hands with a green bar of soap in an industrial sink; he talked over his shoulder to someone else, words lost in the radio. Someone else talked back low, and Sam came fully into the bay to see. The man at the sink was fat, bearded; he reminded Sam of old Bobby in his wrecking yard. The second man was on his back on a roller, under a car, one knee bent and the other straight as if the knee were stiff. The feet were in boots, black work boots, scuffed up like they'd been to hell and back again, and they very nearly had. They looked like the shoes of a person who only owned one pair of shoes.
His sweaty hands took grit off the steel of the muffler he still held -- road dirt, grease, something. The two people hadn't seen him; until he made himself known he could observe them, hold off on making a scene. He wasn't particularly in the way or in anybody's line of vision; for all his size, he had learned how to lurk. He stayed where he was while two songs went by on the radio, just listening to the noise of the two men talking, unable to parse any of the words. Just watching and knowing and waiting, half-wondering whether to just disappear and never come back.
And then his decision was made for him, as the fat man -- had to be Alvin -- turned to put away some tool and looked up. Sam put on his brave face and walked in to meet the guy, leading with a handshake. "Hi, um, I'm trying to track down a mechanic," he said. The music was loud in his ears and he didn't know whether Alvin could hear him. He stood there awkward while the man looked him over, head cocked. Sam schooled himself and didn't glance at the roller under the car.
"Somebody told me he works here. His name is Sam?"
Alvin lifted up one side of his face in a grin, "Sammy!" he shouted, and that was something anybody could hear over the music. "Hey Sammy, got a visitor!"
Sam breathed in and out. "He worked on my car once, a long time ago," he explained, but Alvin was moving back, giving him room, and he wasn't paying attention any more. The roller came out from under the car and a man was on it, looking up distractedly, his brains still deep inside the car.
"Oh," said the man, sitting up. He was wearing a coverall, plain blue-gray, sleeves folded back to the elbow. The man filling the coverall was powerful, muscular, not much bigger than he used to be but with the look of someone capable in a fight. He stood up, hopping a little to find his balance, and put his hand on the car he'd been working on.
Sam didn't know what to do. He held his camouflage muffler in front of him, just looking and looking and trying to hold himself together, and then he dropped the damn thing and they fell into each other's arms with a great clap and grab and the muffler went clang on the concrete floor. Sam stuck his nose into the guy's shoulder and inhaled that sweat-smell that said family. They hung off each other for a long time. "Man," he said, not trusting himself, "Oh man, I --"
"Alvin, this is my brother Dean," said Dean, swinging around to face the fat man without giving up his grip on Sam's back. "You probably guessed that."
"Uh, hi," said Sam, not feigning his shyness. "Dean Winchester."
Alvin brought up both sides of his face this time, and it looked like a proper smile. "I seen you before. In the pictures." He hooked a thumb over his shoulder, pointing to a section of the wall that was nothing but pictures: beautiful cars, occasionally with people in front of them. "You still got the Impala?"
Sam laughed, and Dean laughed beside him. "I parked it down the street. It could stand some work, though. It's been through a lot." Sam bent and picked up the muffler, held it stupidly in his hands again.
Dean kept up appearances smoothly, squeezing the back of Sam's neck (transferring grease thereto, Sam could feel it) and grinning at Alvin. "Hey, what do you say I knock off early today, man?" Alvin just chuckled and waved them off.
Sam let himself be manhandled, felt the relief of someone else in control. He followed Dean around, watched him wash his hands and take off his coverall and stuff it in a locker in the back. Dean moistened a cloth and scrubbed at the grease on Sam's neck, who squirmed while warm drops of water ran one by one down his back. It was warm, well into spring; Dean didn't have a jacket with him. He had a lunch box and a key ring and a brass pendant he wore on a thong around his neck. He pulled out a watch and something that looked suspiciously like a gold wedding ring and put them both on, and then he was ready.
"I'm driving," he said, and the delight in his face was worth everything, all of it, Sam was about to burst into tears in the back of a mechanic's shop just to see that face. "Assface," Dean added, and Sam got ahold of himself.
"Bitch," Sam muttered. He hunted in his pockets and surrendered the keys.
"See you tomorrow, Alvin," Dean called, and they kicked away at stray pebbles on their way out of the yard.
Sam did not bother to control himself when he brought Dean around the corner and the Impala lay there in a parking space. He grinned like a madman as Dean paced around her, clucking at the marks on her hood and her roof, noting the one broken headlight and the gigantic dent in the back fender and how the muffler currently attached to the car belonged to something twenty years too young. They slung themselves into the front seat as of old and Sam felt like a conquering hero, dazed, triumphant. Beside him, Dean sighed and relaxed into the leather, and cocked his head at the hitch in her starter, and groaned empathetically as she found first gear. Sam's face hurt from all the grinning.
"You eat?" asked Dean. Sam shrugged. He had no appointments but this one.
Chapter 2: World of Pain
Sam Winchester wakes up in a world of hurt. That's all he knows, really: his name and a world of hurt. His eyes do the little fireworks thing when he blinks at the ceiling, tears streaming, the corona of pain radiating down from the top of his head. He can hardly move, his skin weighs so much. There's a dull throb somewhere out far away, maybe in his toes, he's not sure.
It's a white drop-ceiling, with a couple of cobwebs, high but not so high as a school gym. It's a hospital, of course. He's in a hospital room. He's been in this kind of room too much. Dad died in a room like this one.
It's day, and there's a window someplace, sending long shadows his way. He's probably sharing a room: that means no coma. His teeth ache in his jaw -- they're all there. His breath feels skunky in his mouth. His lips are dry. This sucks a whole lot.
Long yellow hair looms over him -- oh. It's a person. It's a person who knows him and he should know. "Hey," she says, and he obviously doesn't have his poker face on because she follows up with, "It's me, Jo." She's got slender fingers and no nail polish. Long-faced, she is icy, but then she smiles and her cheeks plump up like apples and he likes her. She feeds him ice chips, one by one. "You got beat up. Yesterday. You're in the hospital."
He lies blinking and thinking, his head like a churchbell. "Oh. Dean okay?"
The look on Jo's face is terrifying: confusion, pity, fear. Every muscle he can actually feel is galvanized against the possibility. "Yeah," she says at last. "Not a scratch." He feels her skin against his forehead, like checking for a temperature is what you're supposed to do for a guy who's had the tar whaled out of him. "He'll be right back, he said."
Dean isn't here. Where would Dean go? Sam moves his hands vaguely around on the mattress, thinking he'll just sit up and stand up and head on out of here and find his brother. Two hands on his chest hold him down.
"Stop," says Jo. "You broke your leg. You're not going anywhere." He gazes up at her and recognizes that implacable stare. Oh, of course -- it starts coming back to him and Sam remembers that she's in the know about the whole monsters and beasties thing.
He lets her push him back into the pillow. "We were hunting?"
Jo snorts. "Not like you all tell me everything you do." She pauses, relents. "I expect so."
"Where'd he go?"
That look again: like she wants to ask him something but the answer is going to be bad. "Something with the cover story. You were already in the hospital when he called me. I drove up here last night, all damn night long." Sam just stares. He has no idea where he is. "This is Pensacola. I was down in Gainesville, so."
There isn't time to ask what they're doing in Pensacola before Dean sweeps into the room, in control and in a bad mood. "Why'nt you call me when he woke up?" he demands, while handing Jo a cup of coffee.
She shrugs, annoyed. "Just a second ago. I been trying to stop him climbing out of bed and chasing after you on a bloody stump."
Dean blinks at her like he's surprised, but not for long. She backs away from the bed, shy, leaving cold spots on Sam's chest where her hands had been. Dean looms over, bigger than he's ever seemed. He has furrowed brows and pursed lips like he's trying to fix something he shouldn't have broken. Sam has never noticed the lines next to his mouth before. "How are you feeling, Sam?"
"Like shit," says Sam. "Jo said I broke my leg."
"Yeah, you did," and the smile on Dean's face is weak, a little guarded, a lot relieved. "And got a concussion and a pair of broken ribs."
"And you didn't get a scratch."
That gets a little nervous laugh from Dean. "But for a good cause. What do you remember?"
Sam has to think that one over. "Not a fucking thing, man. What'd we do?"
Dean winds himself up, like he's got a speech prepared. But all he says is: "Long story. The short version is, you're free of the dude with the yellow eyes. He was trying to take you, and you threw yourself down a flight of stairs instead."
"That's good?" asks Sam dully. Dean is still, like he made a face and it got stuck that way. Sam has no idea what he is thinking.
"Very good." Dean's voice is soothing, thick, like cream in coffee. "You're safe now. We're safe now. You just have to get well."
He glances down Sam's body, at the broken leg or something else. "The doctor wants to operate on your knee in a couple of days. I did some research -- I think you're getting pins in there."
"Like Wolverine. Cool." Sam tries to laugh, but his ribs are sore so he stops. He looks over at the wall and there's Jo, listening to every word, pretending she's invisible, drawing that curtain of blonde over her face like she thinks she's ugly. She is definitely not ugly, and not all that invisible, either. Sam doesn't know why she's here. He doesn't remember why there's bad blood between them, but he thinks it's something he must have done. He opens his mouth to ask Dean, Why are you making her watch this?, but he finds himself biting that back. Instead he asks, "Can I have some of that coffee?"
Dean gives him a Very Sincere Face and says, "I'll ask the doctor if it's okay."
***
Sam swung the Impala out of the hospital parking lot, on his way over to see Shaniece. It was late afternoon, drawing on toward sunset this late in the fall. The sky looked like the inside of a gigantic pink grapefruit, far as the eye could see. That was Florida for you.
He caught himself tapping his thumbs on the steering wheel ("Don't Stop Believing," of all things) and flipped the radio to something gratingly country. He sat in the car on the hot roadbed and nodded at the palm trees on the traffic islands that nodded back at him. The Impala was enormous with only one person in it.
Shaniece lived in a single-story block of apartments, concrete and painted some hideous pastel color. The five-pointed circle-design hanging from her door could have been a simple geometric oddity, if you didn't know anything about magic symbolism.
"You look okay," she told Sam, as she let him in. She was curvy, sturdily built, with warm brown skin and braids to her waist. She wore another ward around her neck, disguised in a riot of cowries and clinking painted chaff-beads. Sam couldn't have counted her necklaces if he tried. Even in gray sweats, she wore her jewelry, and a couple of cowries tied into her hair.
"I'm fine," he said absently, then, looking around, "You stash your mom someplace safe?"
"Safe enough," she said, and lowered her head, frowning. Sam felt hot bands around his chest as if he were shackled and fighting himself loose. He shrugged, awkward, and reached out a hand to her.
Through a sudden lump in his throat, he mumbled, "I didn't thank you. If you hadn't showed up, I don't know what --"
She turned to him, beads tapping her rhythm, as near to tears herself as he was afraid he was. They stood facing each other for a moment, man and woman, near-total strangers, and smiled at each other shyly, gulping. But she was a tidy person, and was quickly on to other things. She pushed her braids back off her shoulders and sat. "What are you going to tell your brother?"
"Nothing," he said, sitting to match her. His knees towered over the coffee table; it was an apartment geared towards two small women. Sam leapt in: "I mean, just enough to keep him out of it."
She tapped at a big, whorled glass bead that hung on her chest. "He didn't question you?"
"He's still pretty messed up. I can work on him again tomorrow."
"Okay," said Shaniece, and looked around the room. Sam looked with her, noted how the blood had been scrubbed off the wall and the carpet pulled up. The indentation in the wallboard would need to be patched, of course, but it looked like a home again, not like a battlefield. "I was thinking about moving away," came Shaniece's voice, breaking in on Sam's assessment. "Or, I don't know, he could be anywhere. I might never leave the house again."
"Doesn't matter," Sam contradicted, and watched that controlled fear creep out from under her mastery. "You stay here, and he finds your dreams. I travel everywhere, and he comes to me -- maybe, I guess every three or four months? Wherever you are, it's like we've all got radio collars."
"Marked," she said, and allowed her features to crumple. "Damnation."
Sam wasn't sure whether that was a swear word or a prediction. He said nothing.
She sat there looking at him, at his long bones all folded up on her little furniture, and how carefully he wasn't knocking over anything off the coffee table, and after a minute of that helpless silence, she waved one hand as if sweeping her fear and her horror away. Sam watched that hand, mesmerized: the dark back of it one way, and then the paler palm the other way, like a flag in the wind, a signal. "Well, anyway," she said, and gave him a wry smile. "So what's your magic?"
"Visions of the future. Well, usually, the futures of people like us. And one time I moved a sideboard without touching it," he added. "Just that once, though. It was an emergency."
"Two for the price of one," she mused. "Well, you've seen my superpower. That and the dreams. Should we get started?"
She stood, and he stood with her. Sam towered over her, but it was she who led the way and the conversation. "Not everybody gets the dreams," he warned her. "I don't think Andy ever did, or maybe he's just such a flake he can ignore them. I never got them at all, not like what you have."
"And that would be why we didn't find you till now." Shaniece came to the end of the hall and faced him. Her hair was a clinking waterfall behind her. "We've been looking for others for, oh, almost a year, and you just show up at my door."
"Kismet," Sam agreed. He followed her into the little nook off the kitchen where she kept her computer. The wall was all framed posters and photographs, smiling ordinary people in front of Sears portrait backgrounds and dramatic cut-outs from magazines, all of them watching over her as she typed. She called it her shield of ancestors, but Sam was pretty sure that Nina Simone and Samuel R. Delany and Nelson Mandela were not actual blood relatives. Sam added, "Divine intervention."
Shaniece smiled at him, impossibly young, his own age. How a handful of twentysomethings could stand against an evil so ancient -- "When we get up to a dozen on our team, we should throw a party." She gestured him into a folding chair and settled herself in front of the screen. Of all the stupid obvious things: the other five had found one another in a newsgroup about dream imagery. Sam had never thought to seek people out that way. Shaniece opened a chat window, showed him the icons of the other people waiting. "Okay, this is Kira and Lillian, and Nestor and Freddy. How should I introduce you?"
Chapter 3: On the Turning Away
Having paid extra for a rush job, Sam sat impatient in a bar down by the bayou just after noon. It was convenient, that the whole thing had gone down in a city with a Naval Air Station nearby, so the trade for false IDs for underage sailors was brisk; but sailors weren't usually in that much of a hurry, and the clock on the bar's Keno screens was like a grain of sand under his skin. Having eaten a greasy sandwich already, there wasn't anything to do to distract him from the crazy path he'd set himself on. It was making him a little nuts.
So it was kind of a relief to notice the pool table in the back. That soft green baize, the black fake-wood paneling around the frame. Pool always looked like a rich man's game, but Sam had never met anyone rich who played well. His fingers wanted the slim smooth cue to wrap themselves around. And really, he had to test it, right? Find out exactly what he'd gained.
Sam plugged in his quarters and racked the balls and sat the white ball on its button opposite. Till this week, he had only ever sunk one ball at a break. Pool was Dean's gig, and anyway, Sam didn't have the bravado for a con like that, and when you're thirteen and insecure there just isn't any incentive to let your brother challenge you at a game you both know he'll win again and again. Sam hit the ball and broke, and three balls fell into pockets. It all came clear in his head suddenly: the geometry of angles, calculations of force and speed, the sensitivity at the end of the cue like an extra finger. He watched himself, amazed, as he cleaned up the table in about three minutes.
He set down the cue in a corner, a little afraid that he'd shown his hand too much. His contact was watching him, leaning against the wall. Sam hunched his shoulders and led the man out into the back alley, where the cash and the fake driver's licenses changed hands.
"Hey, you want another game of pool?" the guy asked.
Sam shook his head. "I got somebody waiting for me." He walked away quickly, furtive -- he hadn't yet mastered that self-assured strut.
When he slipped into Dean's hospital room, an hour later, he found Dean watching television with a look of supreme boredom on his face. Dean lit up to see his brother, and in that instant Sam wanted to tell him what he'd done at the pool table. He felt in himself the fake-casual stance and knew the right way to capture and draw someone's interest, how to make a boast seem possible and yet a little dubious, and -- Sam controlled himself. This was not a game of pool.
"Hey," Sam said. "How's Oprah?"
"Hell should I know?" laughed Dean. "Not my fault you've got no taste in TV."
"Oh right," Sam replied. "You watch scrambled porn and CNN. How could I forget?" He came up close to Dean, looked him over carefully. They'd shaved him, or let him shave himself, and his hair always stood up like that. He looked like himself, just a little pale under the freckles. The bruises were greening around the edges, ugly but not as ugly as they had been. He'd lost a little weight, but that always happens in hospitals. "You mind if I look?"
Dean shrugged, as if it didn't matter to him, but he eyed carefully as Sam pushed back the bedsheets from his leg. The operation had gone fine, as far as Sam knew; anyway the doctors had clapped him on the back and told him things had gone fine. The leg didn't look fine. The whole thing was swollen from mid-thigh on down, with yellow smears everywhere that might have been iodine or might have been pus or something, but were probably dried blood. There were more stitches than Sam cared to count.
"Dude," Sam said, after a little while. "That's gross. When you broke your wrist it wasn't that gross."
Dean tried elaborately to hide a smile. "Squeamish?"
Sam whapped him on the arm and he laughed out loud. "Who's the one held you down when that clinic doc set your wrist in the first place, while you screamed like a girl?"
"I did not scream like a girl," Dean said, pointing a finger. "That is a hateful rumor."
"Whatever you say, little brother," said Sam. He pulled up a chair. They could go on like this all day.
***
Sam wakes when the ceiling is shadowed gray, night or day he doesn't know. He is still in the same hospital room, or it could be another for all he knows. He has been dreaming, the kind of cracked-out shit that happens when you're on good drugs. He has dreamed that his brother is screaming for him. His fingers wander over the sheets, vaguely searching.
They find another hand that is just resting there. That hand grabs onto his, hot, bony and long-fingered. "You're safe, Sammy," says Dean. He sounds tired. He is sitting at such an angle that Sam can't see his face, can't see anything but that tanned hand. He says again: "You can go back to your life at Stanford. You can go back to normal. I made you safe."
Heavy sleep is resting on his chest, weighting him back down. Sam blinks against it, clears his throat. There is something he wants to say to Dean, and he can't remember it. He lets out a breath and it doesn't have any words in it. He closes his eyes again.
"You rest, Sammy," comes Dean's voice, hypnotic and low. "You're safe now."
***
Sam arrived back at the motel room after getting his hair cut and stared at himself in the bathroom mirror. He'd forgotten that sensation of having an eighth-inch buzz at the back of his neck, and had his fingers in it like a girl for twenty minutes; but it was the visual that was so normal it was weird. Having no hair made his face look bigger; made him look older; made him look tougher. He had a tan line at his eyebrows, and his forehead was disturbingly pale.
Jo eyeballed him from the other side of the motel room, uneasy. Between them, Dean lay asleep. "You look weird," was all she said. She had Dad's journal in her lap, and a notebook open on the table. She was copying out of it neatly, near the end. She'd gotten a lot out of it, in the few days she'd been here.
He finished sorting clothes into two piles, and repacked his bag, and set it on the edge of the empty bed. "Are you going to be okay with this?" he asked, after a moment. "I didn't think you'd come. I know I'm not your favorite person --"
"You knew I'd come," she said. And it was true, he hadn't wondered. He'd called her up at two in the morning and expected her to be there at dawn, and she had arrived, stomping mad and silent. They'd been at close quarters and she hadn't smiled once, but that wasn't too far from normal. She wasn't smiling now -- just fixing him with that wide, pitiless stare.
"Right. I'll just -- right."
Jo sat stiff-necked and straight-backed, the pen still in her hand. She blinked away after a moment, as if he were frightening. She would know. "What do you want me to tell Ellen?" she asked loudly, examining the thumbed pages Dad had assembled. It felt weird, to allow any eyes but Winchester eyes to look at it, but a bargain was a bargain. "He'll call her up one day and ask after Dean, and she'll figure it all out."
He hushed her with his hands. "I'll think of something." Dean stirred, and subsided again.
Dean was drugged to the gills, of course, and even unmedicated he could sleep through a thunderstorm. Sam had found a long-sleeved shirt and tied Dean's left wrist to the handle of the nightstand, so he wouldn't roll over in the night and cause himself damage. He was going to be the crankiest man alive when he woke up in the morning.
"He's going to be mad." Jo laughed, a hard sour sound.
"Yeah, well, he'll get used to it," Sam answered, and that came out meaner than he'd intended. He'd been doing that a lot, this last couple of days, result of the shock or a symptom of the change or some damn thing. He put it out of his mind by brute force -- another new skill he'd acquired. He had too much to do to sit around dithering about clothes.
He finished cleaning up, put on the leather jacket. Nothing fit quite right. The chunk of silver on his finger was heavy on his right hand, made him feel a little out of balance. He pulled out the two leather bracelets, the watch -- actually, that was a lot of jewelry, for a guy. He did not know how to think of himself as vain. Last was the pendant, the brass bull on a black thong. He put it on, felt its weight on his chest. This is mine, he told himself. But he took it off after all.
The beds were side by side, knock-knees close as always. Sam sat on the other bed and looked over his brother. He wasn't tangled in the sheets too badly, but they covered his legs, hiding the brace that kept the knee still. His free hand was up behind his head, under the pillow, a position that would have his fingertips numb after a little while. His eye sockets were a little shadowed; it had been a hard day, getting him checked out of the hospital and settled in here. Sam noted the crow's feet encroaching on his temples, the way he slept with his tongue hard against the backs of his front teeth, as if in constant vigilance against snoring. He'd never snored that Sam had heard, but he'd bitten his tongue getting startled awake a hundred times.
"Hey little brother," Sam said, low. He nudged Dean's hip till one heavy lid lifted and showed the green eye underneath. Dean made a dull querying noise in the back of his throat. Jo glanced their way, and then pretended Sam didn't exist. "I have to go now. It's just some minor details, stuff I have to take care of, and then I'll be back. You're safe now, so you don't have to worry about me."
Dean's eye drifted shut. Sam couldn't think of what else to say. He reached up and freed that hand from under the pillow. A knife came with it, of course, not the usual hunting knife but a littler one. Sam's old mumblety-peg knife. Sam confiscated the blade and settled Dean's hand on his chest. Under his hand, under Sam's hand, a thumping heart, steady and fine. Safe.
"Okay," Sam said, mostly to himself, to make himself stand up. He closed the mumblety-peg knife and pocketed it. He really should leave it behind, as he'd done all the mementoes of being Sam -- things of Dad's, pictures of his college friends -- but he was going to need knives where he was going, and Dean would not. Jo craned her neck, like he was Godzilla standing over her or something. "I guess I should -- go. Are you sure you've got --"
"Dean," she chided him. "You're acting like him already."
Sam nodded to himself. "Okay. I guess it's time."
***
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8
So hey, welcome to the story. Go tell all your friends.