BB ch3
And then he was gone just like he had appeared, back into thin air, leaving us both stunned and speechless for a minute. Dean was shaking. I offered him another cigarette, but he turned me down. I started in on another one anyway.
“You think he’s lying?”
“About what? The Heaven thing? The electricity thing? The population thing? The mosquito thing? He kind of sprung a whole bunch of shit on us all at once, Dean.”
“Any of it, I guess, all of it. It’s not like he’s never gotten his jollies by fucking around with us before. We can’t just assume…”
“No, I don’t think he was lying. There’s nothing in it for him. He sure doesn’t need us for our entertainment value anymore, considering the state of the world. Man, I didn’t think there were so many gone. So fucking many. I don’t even know how to get my brain around it.”
“Hell, to tell you the truth, Sammy, I didn’t think there were so many left. Guess since we’ve gone out of our way to avoid contact, I kind of figured almost everyone was gone.”
After a few minutes of just standing in silence, we got back in the car and started moving again. I fired up the music player on my laptop and I chose all kinds of different songs that seemed fitting at the time. While Dean may have hated some of them on principle, he still listened to the lyrics.
Come on baby...don't fear the reaper
Baby take my hand...don't fear the reaper
We'll be able to fly...don't fear the reaper
Baby I'm your man...
That one got a chuckle out of Dean, since he really did like Blue Oyster Cult. Then his expression turned serious, like he was really thinking about Reapers, and how likely it was that one of them would be coming to collect one or both of us soon, if there were any left, the pretty ones like Tessa or the Crypt-Keeper ones we’d seen in other places.
After a couple more hours of driving, we stopped again, near a town that advertised itself as Logan, New Mexico. Pre-end of the world population about a thousand, post-end of the world population looked like approximately zero, unless you counted the coyotes. I swear to Chuck I saw them alongside the highway, and so what if Dean thought I imagined that shit, I know I saw them. We found one place with diesel and filled the gas tank again. Then we spotted the dark sign for the Budget Inn Motel, and pulled into the empty lot. It wasn’t hard for me to pick the lock on one of the doors (one of those things I’d prided myself on when we were younger was that I was a thousand times better at lock-picking than Dean was), and there we were, just like old times. A single room, a non-working television, two beds, just like most of the places we’d spent the night for the past seven years, and plenty of nights before that too. We lit a few candles so we could see, and took a shower together in the hopes that maybe there would be a little water left that would be at least lukewarm. And it was, for about four minutes. As the water started running cold, we quickly finished rinsing off and hopped out to get dried into bed.
Our earlier encounter with Crowley left us in no mood for fooling around, but we did fall asleep in the same bed, wrapped around each other like blankets. It took a while, though, for both of us. Talking to the demon had raised more questions than it had given us answers. Some of the answers were great. Castiel in Heaven, Jessica in Heaven, surrounded by people I loved, people who loved me.
Would you hold my hand
If I saw you in heaven?
Would you help me stand
If I saw you in heaven?
No matter what had developed between Dean and me, he never showed even one single sign of jealousy or resentment that my grief over losing her had lingered after all these years. Maybe it was because this part of our relationship hadn’t started while Jess and I were together, or maybe it was because he still held on to that little spark that had hoped I could find some kind of ‘normal’ one of these days, some life that didn’t involve as much hunting as it did having kids and a house and a picket fence and backyard barbecues.
We both knew now that neither of us would ever have kids. The two of us, sorry-assed Hell-scarred incestuous sinners, we’d be the very last of the Winchester line. I wondered for a moment whether or not Chuck would have inserted that little gem into his so-called “gospels”. We never had found out what had happened to him. Probably dead, unless that whole prophet thing worked in his favor. Maybe we should have checked, but there were higher priorities. I felt bad, though, honestly, thinking of him, and of Becky, and of those folks we’d met once who’d thought we had this really fantastic life. They were good people, and they were gone now, I was sure of it, just like almost everyone else was gone now.
What the fuck, though, Dean had tried to make that whole normal thing happen for me. He did, he let me go, he didn’t come for me at Stanford until he had to, he could never have known what would happen as a result. Dean would have been happy to have those couple of days with me and then gone on with his life, as long as he knew I was safe. And he’d even tried it himself, after Stull, only after I forced him to promise me. He put his best effort into making a life with Lisa and Ben, a regular job, beers with the neighbors, family game night on Fridays. If only I could have stayed away from him then, maybe he could have had it for real, with more time to adjust. But circumstances being what they were, it didn’t turn out that way, and there was no changing any of it now. Ben and Lisa, even before they had both died of tuberculosis months ago, didn’t even remember Dean, as a result of Castiel’s little trick. Finding out about that, I’d been about as useless at comforting him as I had after Castiel disappeared. Dean went silent for a week, at least, and I just let him have it. I hadn’t known them, either of them, we’d only met a handful of times, and when I had come to take my brother away from them, I wasn’t exactly me. So I kept my distance, let him grieve in his own way. Nothing I could have done or said would have helped. It would have been like a minister who’d never met the decedent giving a eulogy at a funeral. Worthless.
So yeah, both of us had a lot on our minds and it was a good long time before we finally fell into a restless sleep, made possible only by each other’s presence.
Sleep, sugar, let your dreams flood in,
Like waves of sweet fire, you're safe within
Sleep, sweetie, let your floods come rushing in,
And carry you over to a new morning
In the morning, we both woke with the sun and figured we’d just start all over again, another day like all the rest. But I felt like I was physically stuck where I was, lying in bed with Dean’s head resting on my chest. I moved my head so I could kiss his temple. I knew he was already awake, and I suspected he might not be quite ready to move just like I was. So we stayed there, silent, holding on to each other. Eventually he tipped his face up toward mine and kissed me, really kissed me, like he hadn’t in a while, slow and soft and gentle.
As usual, there was a natural progression from kissing to touching and licking and (always always) fighting for control. Dean seemed to be happy to hand it over to me, though, this time, without more than a token amount of resistance. We’d slept without clothes on, so at least the chore of undressing was already out of the way. I stayed where I was, lying on my left side, facing my brother, and held out my palm in front of his face. He knew instinctively to lick it, get it nice and wet before I moved that hand down to grip his cock and stroke slowly, the friction eased by his saliva and his pre-come. After only a few minutes of that and my other hand carding gently through his hair, I was already eliciting soft moans from him, almost whimpers, though I’d never call it that and he’d never admit to it. I pushed him over so he was on his back, and lowered myself between his legs, replacing my hand with my mouth. Licking and sucking for all I was worth, I could feel him getting closer to the edge, I could hear him panting, whispering my name with other nonsense “Sammy, so good baby, your mouth, fucking perfect, so good to me baby boy”. I didn’t want it to be over too quickly, and this wasn’t exactly what I had in mind anyway, so I pulled off his cock and leaned over to his bag to retrieve that bottle of lube. Slicking up my fingers, I teased him and opened him up, prepped him so very slowly, despite his pushing back against me and clearly wanting more. This one was mine, so I took my time. Once I was achingly hard and Dean was nearly incoherent, I handed him the lube and told him to slick me up, which he of course did immediately and with enthusiasm.
I switched it up on him, though, and from the look on his face I knew he was surprised when I told him to move. I settled myself down on the bed and positioned him across my lap, his thighs resting on either side of mine.
“Ride me, Dean. Let me watch you.”
He hesitated for just a moment before reaching for my dick and guiding it toward his entrance. The fact of the matter was that he didn’t bottom all that often, and him physically being on top even though he was the one getting fucked seemed to make the situation more comfortable for him somehow. A sharp exhale escaped his mouth as he slid down gently, taking all of me slowly, inch by inch. I let him go at this own pace, it wasn’t as easy for him since he wasn’t used to being the one with a cock up his ass. He adjusted, though, and I could feel his muscles relax around me as the moments passed.
“Yeah, just like that”, I said, grabbing onto his hips tightly. “Move when you’re ready. I want you to fuck yourself on my dick, Dean.”
And I guess since he was used to being the dirty-talker, my words caught him off-guard. I could easily see the flush that spread from his face to his chest before he lifted himself up, just a little way, then back down again. I shifted my hips to get a better angle and knew when I’d hit his prostate dead-on from the way he wailed and his eyes rolled back in his head. Dean’s thighs were starting to shake with the effort, so I took pity on him and held him in place, fucking up into him and there was no sound to be heard in the room save for our flesh colliding and the loud, unabashed moans of pleasure falling from both of us.
As much as I would have loved for it to last forever, that was clearly not happening as I felt his balls tighten against his body the same way mine were. I reached up a hand between us and started stroking him again, faster and more insistent this time. Though neither of us were very much aware of anything else, I realized that we’d come at almost exactly the same moment, and that wasn’t something that happened very often. Sure, it was usually pretty close, but this close together, almost simultaneously, it was like a gift, a rare and amazing gift, especially since we’d both managed to keep our eyes open and trained directly on each other even as we were taken over by orgasm. Dean almost immediately slumped over and face-planted next to my head, his arms and legs shaking. I was fairly certain that I had blacked out for two or three seconds.
“Jesus, Sammy, you fuck me so good. I love you. Love you.”
“Love you too. We gotta get up, Dean, we have to keep moving.”
“I don’t want to. Can’t we just stay here forever?” He’d deny to his grave that he was whining, but seriously, he was whining.
“Here, with no lights or hot water or…”
“Other people.” He finished my sentence for me, completed my thought before it worked its way from my brain to my mouth. Dean was like that. He could do that sometimes, actually a lot of times, but for some reason it still surprised me when it happened.
Then, of course, I felt guilty and like I was being insensitive. “Aw, Dean, come on. You sound like your feelings are hurt.”
“I don’t need other people. But you do. No, no, don’t give me those eyes, you know what I mean. You need contact, connections, company. Not just mine. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s not like I think you want to go get married to some random chick and leave me behind. I know we’re the most important people in the world to each other, but that doesn’t mean we’re exactly the same. We’ll find the place that’s right for us, and if that means we end up part of a community, I don’t think it would be bad. Sometimes I worry, though…”
“If people will accept us? If we’ll have to lie about being brothers or hide the fact that we’re sleeping together? Yeah, I know, I worry about it too, but you heard what Crowley said. For whatever that’s worth. What’s left of the world is a different place now, and whatever societal norms everyone used to hold onto so tightly may not be that important anymore. And I’ll tell you right now Dean, if we can’t find a place like that, a place where we can just be who we are, then it’s just going to be you and me, Grizzly Adams-style, living on a mountain somewhere, and fuck whoever else is left. Their loss for missing out on how kick-ass we are.”
And he believed me. I could tell from the look on his face, he knew I was telling the truth. If we ran into a town where folks were trying to start over, and they couldn’t accept Dean and me exactly as we were, we’d just move on. I wasn’t going to spend the whole entire end of the fucking world pretending and hiding.
“Beards and everything?” he joked.
“Hell no, no beards, Dean, Jesus. Gross. Like you could ever grow a beard anyway.”
Dean’s displeasure at my remark was expressed as usual, with him smacking the back of my head and telling me to shut up.
Either way, it was time to start moving again, no matter how comfy and sated we were there in that dusty motel bed. We threw our bags back into our tiny car (which I’d secretly started referring to in my brain as the NotImpala) and headed west on I-40, stopping again on the other side of the state in Gallup to fill the gas tank. After referring to the map again, I figured we should get off the interstate and head northwest. It was the best way to test out my theory and Crowley’s statement about the electricity still being generated by the Hoover Dam. Randomly, I pointed at a little town near the border of Arizona and Utah. “Maybe we can make it that far by tonight.”
Dean took the map and studied it carefully. While we were stopped to fill up the tank, as usual. He got carsick if he read or even just glanced at a map while the car was moving. Neither of us had ever said it but we both knew it to be true. That was why I’d always been the navigator. And the one to take the blame if we got lost. Of course.
“Are you in a hurry to get there?”
“No, I just figured it might be a safe enough place to stop for a night. You have another idea?” But then, looking over his shoulder at the map, I knew exactly what he was thinking.
“Dean, we don’t have any hurry for anything anymore. You wanna take a detour? I know you always wanted to see the Grand Canyon. We can go, we won’t even have to pay for some stupid guided tour or donkey ride or whatever the fuck else they used to have there. We can just go. See. Is that what you want?”
And fuck all if he didn’t look embarrassed, like there was some kind of shame attached to wanting something. Jesus F. At least he got far enough past it to answer me honestly. “Yeah. I do. Would you mind? I know we have to conserve fuel for the car, it’s okay if it’s not practical or…”
I cut him off there with a hand gripped tight into his hair, kissing him with what I hoped was all it would take to convince him I was being sincere. “That’s where you want to go. That’s where we’re going. It’s four, maybe five hours from here. We’d be there by sundown, we could watch the whole world move from light to dark, sitting on the hood of this shitty car. Then we could sleep a while, and get a good look at it in the daylight, stay as long as you want. Whatever you want, Dean.”
So that’s exactly what we did. By the time we got there, the sun was just starting to get a little low in the sky. We had plenty of more time to see everything in the natural light. On the south rim of the canyon, there was a little building with a sign calling it “Hermit’s Rest”. We went inside and raided the place for a few bottles of water, then took a little walk. The view was amazing. I couldn’t believe this was something I thought would just be some lame tourist trap, something Dean had built up in his head as an unfathomable wonder. Because it was, it was fucking amazing, there was no other descriptor I could come up with. The spot we’d picked gave us a spectacular view of the Colorado River running through the depths of the canyon, though from so far above it looked like a trickle of water rather than the mighty force it really was. There wasn’t much conversation. After half an hour or so of looking, walking, quiet exclamations of how beautiful and perfect it looked, we sat down.
When I realized that Dean was crying, I put my arm around his shoulder and, finally, fucking finally, he gave in, leaning into me, resting his head on my chest and letting the tears fall. I knew what those tears were for. So many reasons, so much to grieve. He’d lost what we’d all lost, the world we used to know. But he’d also lost Castiel, he’d lost Ben and Lisa, he’d lost the car that had been our home, maybe he’d even lost what he thought he knew about himself. But here we were, in a place that he’d always wanted to visit, and we were together, we still had each other, which meant there was hope.
It was dangerous. Hoping. Wanting. Expecting. So much on the line. Having hope makes you vulnerable in ways that almost nothing else does. No one knew that better than the two of us. We’d put so much effort into not wanting anything, since whatever we wanted had always been taken away, by our own actions, or by the directions of things out of our own control. Dean once hoped, before he knew about Castiel’s betrayal, that he’d find a way to make me whole again after I lost my soul and got it back. I once hoped, when I was still an ignorant teenager, I could get away from hunting and forge a new path for myself. We’d both hoped that we would find a way to hold off the apocalypse.
As the sun disappeared, I kissed the tears from his face, and we went back to the little building we’d found before. On the floor, on top of and under a mountain of blankets, we held on to each other and fell asleep. The last thought I had before I was pulled under was that I’d made sure Dean had gotten to do something he’d always wanted to do. It was a nice way to let go of the day.
When we woke, we raided the small structure where we’d spent the night for whatever we could find. It had a snack bar, so we took cans of soda, bottles of water, protein bars, bags of peanuts and some souvenir t-shirts and sweatshirts advertising Grand Canyon, along with a few more blankets. Remembering what Crowley said, we snatched a few bottles of bug-spray, too. We were still headed to that small Arizona town, but it was only about three hours away, so we stole a few more precious minutes to appreciate the wonder that was before us. I couldn’t call anyone on my cell phone anymore, but I could still use it to take photos, so I did. Pictures of the canyon, pictures of Dean. One close-up of both of us as I held the phone in front of us. That one was a bit off center but it was my favorite. I hoped our car would last long enough for the built-in battery charger to let us keep it a while.
Then we drove north for an hour, got onto US-89, and headed toward the town of Page, Arizona.
About fifteen miles outside of our destination, we saw it, and both of us were shocked, even though we had hoped for it. Dean was rattled enough that he stopped the car right there on the highway.
Lights.
It was still daytime, but it had been long enough since either of us had seen electric lights that we recognized them even in the bright sun of the early afternoon. It was just a little filling station, the gas tanks knocked over, the store obviously looted, but the sign advertising “SHELL” was lit up.
And oh my fucking NotGodWhatever, my hunch had been right. Crowley had told us the truth. There was power out here. Electricity. My brain couldn’t move fast enough to process all the possibilities.
Dean whispered a low and almost breathless, “Sam…”
“I know. Shit. I know, Dean. You wanna go in there?”
“Let’s just keep going until we get to this town. See what’s there. I know you said there’s a place that might still have diesel. So let’s check that out, okay?”
“Yeah”, I replied, still completely stunned. “Sure, yeah, let’s go.”
He got the car moving again and twenty minutes later we passed the sign for Page, population about seven thousand. A mile or so past the city limit, we pulled into a Texaco that was like a truck stop, a store attached, lights blazing from the sign above the door. At the diesel tank, we stopped the car and got out, mentally crossing our fingers. And hell yeah, there was still some left. Enough to fill up the NotImpala. Not sure what else we’d find, we filled up the five-gallon plastic tank in the trunk as well. This little piece of shit could go pretty fucking far on five gallons, which was the only advantage it had over the (R.I.P.) ActualImpala.
I’d kept the stolen pack of cigarettes we’d gotten the night Crowley showed up, and decided this would be a good time to have one, rolling my window halfway down and feeling the breeze on my face. The slightly dizzy but exhilarating sensation from the nicotine wound its way all around my brain and body. When I offered one to Dean, he declined. “You know that can get to be a habit, Sam. I don’t want to develop an addiction for something I might never get again. I’m not bitching, I’m not giving you a lecture, I’m just saying maybe you should think about it.” If we’d still been in the Impala and I’d lit up a smoke, I would surely have gotten much more than a lecture on the subject. Probably something closer to a punch in the jaw and possibly a shove out of the moving vehicle.
But I did, I thought about it, though I still finished the cigarette, some generic brand that I never bothered to really pay any attention to. What Dean had said had made sense, it really did. It was dangerous to risk an addiction when there was a real possibility that picking up a pack of smokes might not be a possibility anymore. We both knew I was prone to addiction in general, from past experience, and Dean was too. He’d barely touched a drop of alcohol for as long as I could remember, turning it down even on the rare occasions that we’d found some.
We’d headed to that particular town for a few reasons - it was close enough to the Hoover Dam for me to test out my theory, and it was a small enough place that we figured it would be deserted by now, like the other small towns we’d stopped in while we made our way west across the country. Instinct had us heading to a residential area, where we were more likely to find empty houses with food and water we could appropriate.
The first stop we made was in a tiny neighborhood with modest homes that were similar but made original by the many Native American designs and decorations on the windows and doors. Wind-chimes, dream-catchers, paintings of traditional art adorned almost every house on the street. All was quiet, though, so we made our way up to the last house at the end of the road, and opened the unlocked door.
Completely unprepared, we found ourselves staring down two children in the front room, holding rifles that were pointed directly at our chests.
Chapter Four