BB ch2
The first overnight stop we made was in what was left of a small town just about an hour or so over the Texas border of Louisiana, having crossed the Mississippi River and kept on going until we just couldn’t go anymore. We stopped a little over seventy miles after we crossed the state line, in a place that used to be called Tyler, a college town that had once boasted a population of somewhere around two hundred thousand. As far as I could tell, it was practically empty now. But we knew there was a place there where we could put some diesel in the stupid little car, which I was growing to hate more and more as the hours passed. Yeah, maybe I’d made fun of Dean a little bit for being so attached to the Impala, but at least I didn’t have to scrunch my legs up quite so much as I did in this ridiculous Audi that was clearly not designed for a man with a body the size of mine.
As a kid, I’d always wanted to be bigger than my brother. It pissed me off that he was always faster when we were running, because of his longer legs, and that he could beat me in sparring every time due to his superior muscle mass. He was four and a half years older, though, which I didn’t consider much at the time. I just wanted to be better than him at something, other than school shit, because he didn’t even care about that, and neither did our dad, really. But after I turned fifteen, all of a sudden I was all long limbs and hard angles and it took me a while to get used to it. When I tacked up a four-minute mile against his four and a half minute mile just a couple of months shy of my sixteenth birthday, I thought nothing better than that could ever happen to me in my entire fucking life. Dean was stunned, our dad was quietly proud, and I was exultant, unending in lording it over Dean that I was faster now. My growth spurt didn’t suddenly make me stronger or more agile, though, because it was another six months before I pinned him to the ground while training in the summer heat of Nebraska three months after I turned sixteen. I reveled in the victory, while at the same time feeling something else, something distinctly non-brotherly about having his body trapped under mine, not knowing at the time that he felt the same something else.
Right now, I was mainly pissed at being almost six and a half feet tall and trapped in this dumbass “good gas mileage” car just so that we could fucking live.
The abandoned house we found on the outskirts of town had no electricity, which we already knew would be the case, but it did have the luxury of a fireplace in the living room, and we took advantage of that immediately. It was clear that the former owners of the place had long since fled (almost surely thinking they could find someplace safer, most likely). After gorging ourselves on bags of chips and canned sodas we found in the kitchen, we laid down on the floor and enjoyed the warmth of the fire. It wasn’t long before we were searching out the comfort of each other’s touch, which we hadn’t allowed ourselves in quite some time, considering that most of our efforts had been concentrated on more pressing matters like not dying. It was quiet there, and warm, and we weren’t hungry or irritable. So it felt like the natural thing to do, turning to each other, my arms running around Dean’s back and pulling him close, capturing his mouth in a messy kiss, all spit and tongue. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I felt the tension start to melt away in his shoulders. Of course, that only spurred me on, taking the chance to strip him of his shirts and run my tongue over his chest, biting and sucking at his nipples as he whimpered and moaned. It was not a surprise when he took over control of the situation, moving to take off my shirts and push me over onto my back. It almost always ended up like that anyway. Not every time, but yeah, mostly. So I lifted my hips easily when he unbuttoned my jeans, making it easier for him to pull them off.
Neither of us bothered with underwear anymore, it’s not like we got a chance to wash our clothes all that often. When the electricity failed, we realized that Laundromats were now useless.
Once I was completely stripped, Dean stood up to take the rest of his clothes off, and I reveled in the sight of him standing above me like that, strong and naked and ready to make me feel the only thing that had given me any real satisfaction in years. Settling back down on his knees in the space between my eagerly spread legs, he took my aching cock into his hand, pulling tightly with no lubrication except for the pre-come that I was steadily leaking. We’d managed to hold on to one bottle of lube, halfway empty, but it hadn’t been used in a while. Dean snatched the bottle out of his bag and coated his fingers with it before releasing my hard dick and teasing around my hole then just diving right in with two fingers. My hands dug into the rug on the floor, searching for some kind of way to still myself against the onslaught of the pain, pleasure, stretch, burn, ecstasy. There was no way I was going to stop myself from fucking myself right into it, pushing against the intrusion, especially after he hit that spot, Jesus, that one fucking spot, it made me insane, turned me into a babbling idiot, incapable of forming any words more coherent than fuck, Dean, please, more, harder, more, pleeeeeassssse. His satisfaction was clear by the smirk he graced me with as he removed his fingers and slicked up his own rock-hard cock.
“Want it, Sammy? You’re all open and wet for me, whining like a whore, come on, tell me you want it.”
Every fucking time. He never shut up during sex. Ever.
It took everything I had to force my brain into coming up with a response, but I did it. “Yes, yes, Dean, please, want you inside me, fuck me, come on….”
“Say it again.”
Goddamnit. I knew exactly what it was that he wanted me to say again.
“Please. Please, Dean.”
And that was all it took, as he pushed my knees up and farther apart, sliding inside me until he was buried as far as he could go. It was less than thirty seconds before I gave him the signal, the brief nod of my head, telling him to move. And move he did, Christ, almost all the way out and then back in so fucking hard that it took my breath away for just a moment. Only until the next thrust, where I got back enough breath to yell, loudly. Dean was so very pleased with that. Not that he was going to ease up, clearly, the pace had been set and it was all I could do to hold on while he fucked me right into the floor, speeding up and slowing down, all unpredictable and making my brain even less functional.
“You love it, Sammy, love me to fuck you so hard, you know you do, I want you to say it.”
When no response was forthcoming, on account of that whole non-functional brain thing I had going on, he stopped, buried all the way inside of me and grabbed a handful of my hair. My head jerked up automatically, and my eyes opened again of their own accord, sense memory of what he expected now.
“Say it, baby boy. Come on. You can do it.”
“I love it…I…love it when you…fuck me so…Jesus…so hard, I love it when…you fuck…me…”, that was all I had and thankfully it was good enough for him to start moving again.
“Gets me so hot to hear it, Sammy, been my little whore for years and I never get tired of hearing you say how much you love it. How much you love being a whore for me. Do it. Do it now.”
How in the hell was he still able to form full coherent sentences? I had to find a way, get some temporary control over the brain-melt, give him what he wanted. My dick was so hard it hurt and Dean wasn’t even touching it.
“Love being your whore…yours…love it…I’m yours, a whore, your cockslut, Dean…all for you…”
That response seemed to satisfy him for the moment. Dean shut up and started pounding away again in earnest, pulling the weak moans and broken-off sobs from my throat until his rhythm faltered just a bit. He put his hand on me then, jerking me hard, rough, and I knew. He hated to come before I did, he would hold out as long as he possibly could to make sure it didn’t happen. He certainly wasn’t disappointed this time, because before I knew it my orgasm was ripped right out of me, and it’s possible that I all-out screamed when I felt my release falling all over his hand, over my belly, even onto my chest. Less than two minutes later, he stilled above me for just a moment, his mouth going slack and the whispered “Sammy” on his lips letting me know he had gotten there too. It had been far too long since we’d allowed ourselves this little time of peace.
I taste the sparks on your tongue
I see angels and devils and God
when you come
For just a few minutes, we stayed there like that, cum all over the front of me and steadily leaking out the back of me at the same time. When Dean finally pulled out I couldn’t hold back a ridiculous whine, but he stayed right there, laid his head on my chest, wrapped his arm around my waist. (Yes, this was the he post-sex cuddling that he’d deny to his dying day, and fuck that, because he did it every goddamn time. Almost. Not when it had been grudge-fucking or angry sex, because those times he always just got up and walked away to clean up. Sometimes he even had the decency to throw me a washcloth, but not usually.) Tonight wasn’t like that, though. Tonight it was us, just the two of us, real and vulnerable and in love and afraid and thankful that we’d gotten another night like this.
Neither of us knew how many more we had left.
After a while, though, we did move, we cleaned up, put on sweats to sleep in and found a bed where we could lie down and get some much-needed rest. We couldn’t stay here, obviously, because we couldn’t stay anywhere, not yet, not while everything was still crumbling down around us.
In the morning we indulged in maybe half an hour of kissing and touching before resigning ourselves to the fact that moving on was a necessity.
Once we had managed to pry ourselves out of bed, we realized that it had been a lucky house we’d found, though, for sure. Boxes of granola bars, a whole case of bottled water, a few more cans of soda, dry cereal, even a few big packs of commercially-made beef jerky. We packed up as much of it as we could, along with a few blankets, and hit the road again, across the dry expanse of Texas.
We’d both traveled back and forth across this particular state several times, but it wasn’t the same as before. We couldn’t stop to get a beer and hustle pool when we felt like it. There were no cases to work, no places we had to stop. So it seemed like a much longer trip this time around.
Finding a place to fill up again on diesel around Amarillo, Dean triumphantly emerged from the ransacked convenience store showing off a small bottle of Astroglide and a shit-eating grin. We considered stopping for the night but were both feeling just a bit restless, I guess, and stood outside the car, smoking pilfered cigarettes from the mostly-empty little store by the pumps. We’d never engaged in that particular pastime on a regular basis, especially not Dean. I’d smoked fairly often in college (Jess had tolerated it, didn’t nag but surely never approved either), and even after that, during the time when Dean was in…well, while Dean was not there with me, gone and leaving me as a burned out husk of what I’d been before. It’s not like Ruby was going to bitch about it. Though I knew he’d indulge occasionally (he’d admitted that he had briefly picked up the habit while he was living with Lisa. Lisa, like Jess, didn’t approve but just banished Dean to the outside of the house when he wanted a smoke), I also knew he’d frown on anything that he perceived as ‘not good for Sam’, especially after that one time he’d caught me behind the school when I was sixteen, sucking on a Camel Light, and smacked it out of my hand angrily, so I pretty much avoided smoking during the years we were together. But now…well now was now. I kept trying to come up with other words for “end of the fucking world” but I didn’t like “apocalypse”, due to its past connotations, and it seemed a bit soon (and also kind of pretentious) to use terms like “dystopia”, so screw it, it was the end of the fucking world, and it was likely that one or both (please please NotGodWhatever, please let it be both) of us would get taken out at any time, so lung cancer wasn’t on top of our list of Things To Worry About.
Demons, however, still were on that list, no matter how long it had been since we’d run into one. So when Crowley suddenly appeared, leaning casually against the post less than ten feet from where we were standing, I froze, cigarette in mid-air, while Dean dropped his smoke and clenched both his fists.
No wealth, no ruin, no silver, no gold
Nothing satisfies me but your soul
“Boys, boys, boys, you needn’t be frightened of little old me. Just dropping in to check on you.”
Dean was the first to speak. “Bullshit, Crowley, what the fuck do you care what happens to us? And how did you even find us anyway? Where did you come from? We haven’t had the trail of a fucking lowlife demon in months. Oh, and-”
Crowley raised a hand and silenced my brother in an instant. His power was still terrifying, after all we’d seen and experienced. Granted, he’d helped us more than once, more than twice, even. Still, he was who he was. King of Hell and all that.
As if he sensed my thoughts, he turned to me immediately after having shut Dean’s mouth with no more than a wave of his hand. “Don’t let me stop you, Sam. Go on and finish your smoke.”
Without another thought, I brought the cigarette to my mouth and took a long drag, never moving my eyes from the demon’s face. “What do you want?” I asked, the words coming out in a cloud of smoke, knowing there had to be something.
“King of Hell, huh? That’s what you just thought?” Crowley shook his head, looked down and then back up at me, an expression I’d never seen before on his face. “Hell’s a whole different place now, Jolly Green. Fucking flooded is what it is, a backlog of damned souls like you can’t even imagine. Don’t have to worry about crossroads demons anymore, voluntary collection of souls has been put on permanent hiatus. King of Hell gets to delegate, so I’m delegating. I needed a break, and figured I’d see what the two of you hardheaded blokes were up to.”
“Surprised not to see our names come up on your list, huh?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, lumberjack, the two of you aren’t going to Hell, not again. You’ve done your time, and you’re off-limits to me and my kind. When the life leaves you or your git of an overblown brother, your souls will be going in the other direction. Pearly gates and all that.”
The shock on my face as I blew out the last of my smoke must have registered, because he continued.
“Don’t give me the incredulous look, Sam. There’s still a Hell, I can tell you that for certain, which means there’s still a Heaven, too. And Dean, if you have something to say, go on ahead, I’ll give you another chance.”
“You sanctimonious motherfucker, what the fuck do you think you’re doing showing up here like-”
“All right, I changed my mind. You can shut up again”, Crowley responded, silencing Dean once more.
“I have the same question. What are you doing here? What do you want with us?”
“You won’t believe me, and that’s fine, but I’m just trying to help. Think back, I know we don’t have the most romantic history, but you must recognize that I’ve had a soft spot for the two of you kids as long as I’ve known you. Against my nature as well as my better judgment, but it couldn’t be avoided. And you won’t believe this either, I know, but I’m sorry about Bobby. You know I liked him too. And no, he’s also not ‘on my list’, obviously.”
He wasn’t lying, at least about some of it. He had done more than he had to for us, and for Bobby, even if he had selfish motives to begin with. All I could come up with was, “We’re not kids.”
Crowley just laughed, that sarcastic and cutting chuckle lacing his smooth Scottish accent, threaded with barely shrouded ill-intent that I’d heard so many times before. “All right, Sam, you’re not kids, you’re grownups, you’re men, you’re fucking each other, have been for years, and cut the wide-eyed look, everyone knows. Least the ones in my circle know. Hell, Bobby knew, too. Didn’t see that one coming, did you? It doesn’t matter. Not anymore. He didn’t give a shit about it. Anyway, in case you hadn’t noticed, the world you live in has changed significantly in recent months, hasn’t it?”
Another Bobby comment, and I was more shocked by this one, but I tried to keep myself under control as I continued the conversation. “Yeah, fine, and how much did you have to do with that?”
He laughed again. “You actually think I could pull off something like this? I’m flattered, honestly, but no fucking way. Lucifer, maybe, but even that’s fairly unlikely. The Horsemen stepped in to take advantage but they didn’t start it, either. This was all you. I mean, not you, but you. What I’m telling you is, it was just your run of the mill regular people with a taste for destruction. Demons didn’t start this, and neither did angels. Awwww, Dean, I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to bring up a sore subject there. Your Castiel is fine, I swear to you, back in his home and surely missing the two of you badly. Possibly one of you more than the other”, he had the decency not to look right at Dean as he said it, “but not suffering or turned to burnt wings or anything. Do you have something to say?”
Dean finally got the power to speak again, but his words were not nearly as heated this time. “He’s okay? Cas? He’s not…you know, like, dead or anything? Not hurt?”
“No, Dean, not dead, not hurt aside from wishing he could be back with the two of you non-caped crusaders. Take my word or don’t, that’s not my decision, I’m just telling you what I know. Little Castiel is safe, he can’t return here but he’s in good hands and keeping company with some other folks you know.”
“Like who? Who’s with Cas?” Dean asked, this time without much angry force behind his words. I’d already lit another cigarette, content just to listen to their exchange.
I’d been jealous of Castiel, that much was absolutely true. As much as I loved him, I knew he felt something for Dean that didn’t belong to him, and there were times I was afraid Dean had returned those feelings. Nothing was ever acted on, but some days while Cas was with us, no matter how much I had loved him, I felt a kind of emotional betrayal, like Dean was maybe giving Cas a piece of himself that belonged to me. Maybe it was true, maybe not, I’d resigned myself to the fact that I’d never know, and that now it didn’t matter anymore.
“I can give you names. Some are names that I know - Bobby, John, Mary. Some I don’t - Pamela, Ash, Jessica-”
A gasp must have escaped my lips, and Dean was at my side immediately, holding me up before I realized I’d even started falling. My heart felt like it had a fist around it.
“Ah, Jessica. She must have been one of yours, Sam.”
Dean lashed out again. “You shut your fucking mouth about Jessica. Don’t you goddamn dare say anything to him about Jessica.” I could almost feel the heat radiating from my brother in his possessive mode, ready to stand up to the King of Hell to protect my feelings. Fuck, I loved him so much, so much, and he loved me, he did, he loved me too.
But I'll never do it better than I do it with you,
So long - So long - I would do anything for love,
I would do anything for love
“Stand down, big brother, I never meant to upset anyone. I told you, I only came to see whether or not the two of you were still holding your own up here.”
“Well now you know. We’re still alive, and I think that counts as holding our own considering the circumstances”, I responded, trying to shake off how horribly it wrong it felt to hear Jess’ name come from Crowley’s mouth. The thought of her being in Heaven with other people I loved was comforting enough to tamp down at least some of my anger. “Where have you been? What have you seen?”
“Everywhere, Sam. I’ve been all over the world. Some places are worse than others but basically it’s a knee deep pile of shit no matter where you look. No lights, no fresh food, no clean water, no place where people aren’t murdering each other in cold blood for things.” He must have recognized my eager expression, because he continued, “Ah, there’s the smart one, brain as big as that mop of hair, figured it out, have you? A useful source of information right here, belly-crawling demon that I am”, he responded with a smirk.
And he was right, of course. No one knew anything about what was happening outside of their direct line of vision, because there was no communication, no way to see, no CNN screens with brave reporters checking in from the front lines with rolling tickers across the bottom giving you one-sentence snippets of other news.
Dean asked him, incredulously, “And you’re going to share information with us? In exchange for what? You already said you couldn’t get our souls back.”
“For nothing, Dean. For nothing. Because I can. Because I want to. Because I’m a bit on the soft-hearted side for a monster and I’ve gotten a little attached to you over the years. Doesn’t really matter. But if you’ve got questions, ask me, and I’ll answer them if I can.”
I jumped on that immediately, of course. First things first. “How many are left?”
“Oh, plenty. Almost a billion, I’d guess.”
Dean and I looked at each other with wild, confused expressions, then back to Crowley. “Plenty? That’s plenty? It’s less than twenty percent of the world’s population four months ago! Jesus fuck, I knew it was bad, but…”
“Yes, I know, it sounds awful, and before everything levels out, there will be less. After a while, though, there will be more again. The world will be a different place. But it will still be here, for whoever’s left to do what they will to it. Don’t forget, I’m much older than you think. The earth’s population, animal and human, has been decimated before. Sometimes through natural circumstances, sometimes, in the case of humans, through their own stupidity. Maybe they won’t make the same mistakes again.”
“Levels out?” Dean asked, clearly intrigued. “You mean eventually things will just get to some kind of baseline, like a this is the new normal kind of thing?”
“I reckon so. It’ll be a while, though, can’t say how long, but not overnight.”
I thought this might be a good time to find out if my theory had been correct. “Do you know if the lights are still on west of here? Electricity?”
“Yeah, good guess, Moose. Hoover Dam. For now, at least. Vegas strip’s still lit up like Christmas. Though I don’t guess the rats and corpses are playing much blackjack these days. But yeah, all over there, a few spots in Arizona, parts of Nevada and California, more people alive and even healthy on account of the electricity. Water’s still bad, but if you’ve got the means to boil it it’s safer for you lot. I’m not saying it’s pretty, but at least they’ve still got that. No way of telling how long it will last, of course.”
For just a minute I breathed a sigh of relief. If the trip out west wasn’t going to get us anything, then we would have sacrificed a lot for nothing.
“So maybe we’ll be safe there for a while if we can make it, Sam. Right, Crowley?”
Crowley responded to Dean’s question with the hint of a chuckle behind his voice. “There’s no ‘safe’ anymore. I can tell you that without any uncertainty. People are still killing each other, dying off from illness and starvation every day, even out there. But you’d rather be in the western United States than in Haiti or Russia right now, at least you’ve got a fighting chance. Especially the two of you. You’ve got weapons, I’d guess you would probably make decent hunters, you know, like, hunting for food. Times like these maybe you want to thank your Daddy for the survival skills he taught you.”
Dean tensed up again, and Crowley held up his hands in a peace-making gesture. “Sorry, sorry, no more mentioning anyone either of you ever knew, all right? I’ve got to go anyway. Maybe I’ll see you again. One thing before I go, though. If that’s the way you’re headed, see if you can stock up on insect repellant.”
Both of us fixed him with a confused look before he explained. “West Nile virus. Nasty outbreak in California, spreading to Nevada and Arizona, New Mexico too. Mosquitoes aren’t just little pests anymore.”
Chapter Three