Old Rebel Yeller -- Chapter 5
Fixed the wacky-assedness of the box size -- ALL of chapter 5 is now. Thank god you say. Whew, sez I.
Disklamshion: Ich grabben nieght to do mit das kunstentelevishion programmen “Supernatural”, met Ich vant to. Erik Kripkekunstenmaster ownst it ahl. Fuchking Schweinhund.
Schnell! Schnell!: Das historika ist “T” fur kursting - lots und lots der kursting. Und violenka. (Jesus, the things I write in this section just to keep myself awake)
--
The day started better this time, possibly because it didn’t involve being shelled by Confederate artillery.
Dean methodically demolished the “Trucker’s Special” which consisted mostly of animal proteins and carbohydrates swimming in various forms of fats: three eggs over easy, buttered grits, a small family of chubby pork sausages, and a slab of Virginia ham. And something called ‘scrapple’, the food group designation of which left Sam guessing. He didn’t even like looking at it.
Outside the diner’s window, a large billboard read, ‘If at First You Don’t Secede, Try, Try Again,’ and was decorated with Confederate battle flags and a cartoon Johnnie Reb. Sam watched his brother’s brow furrow as he stared at it as though he didn’t quite get the joke, or didn’t know if it was a joke, but it didn’t stop him from cleaning his plate with a piece of toast.
Sam, mildly disgusted, poked at his bowl of cornflakes, wondering what had possessed him to order it in the first place. The bowl had arrived with cream, not milk, and they were frosted flakes. The orange juice tasted suspiciously like Tang, and it stung his throat, still raw from smoke.
They had ignored the morning newspaper, although Sam was somewhat interested in how the Fredericksburg Gazette had explained yesterday’s carnage without sounding like the National Inquirer. The headline had screamed: Rocket’s Red Glare: Death Toll 5 at Civil War Reenactment. He’d gone so far as to pick up a newspaper abandoned on an uncleared table, but Dean had simply snatched it from his hand and thrown it back onto the bench seat as he followed the waitress to their table.
“The dig?” Dean asked, wiping his fingers on a grease-spotted paper napkin. “You know where it is?” He wasn’t looking at Sam; he was busy picking some wayward sausage casing from between his teeth with a fingernail. Sam added ‘tell him about toothpicks’ to the day’s to-do list.
He nodded, unfazed by a near-lifetime of Dean’s table manners. It was like living with a monkey some days. “Sure,” and pulled out a battlefield map that showed all the major National Park Service battlefields in the area: Wilderness, Chancellorsville, Spotsylvania Court House and Fredericksburg itself. They were all only a few miles apart. “Mira said to go to the Fredericksburg Battlefield Visitor Center and ask. Their dig is at the Sunken Road, just below Marye’s Heights.”
He ran a finger along the route they’d take, feeling a twinge of excitement. Maps, visitor centers, interpretive signage on the side of historical trails - all of it was feeding into his innate love of things making sense. Order: these things imposed order onto messy history. And Dean would probably rather put out an eye with Sam’s cereal spoon than step one foot in a park visitor center.
Dean chewed slowly, swallowed down the last of the ham with cold coffee. “You gonna eat that?” he thought to ask, but was already pulling the bowl of cornflakes across the worn tabletop. Sam thought about bananas.
There was no way Sam was going to be allowed to drive; he already knew that. He guided Dean into town, though there was no need, really, because Fredericksburg embraced its Civil War identity. Every inch was well marked.
As predicted, Dean hovered outside the Visitor Center while Sam went in to ask about the James Madison U dig. Ten minutes later he emerged laden with walking tour brochures, maps, and a free notepad. He’d sacrificed watching the 22-minute movie about the battle mostly because he wouldn’t put it past his brother to wander off if he left him alone for too long. He spotted Dean leaning over the hood of the Impala with his t-shirt’s sleeve pulled up, showing two young women his stitches from Beau’s bullet. They seemed impressed.
“Hey, Mr. Walking Wounded,” Sam called out, not coming too close, not wanting to hear whatever story Dean was feeding them. The truth was too much; Dean would have something that involved a drag-race shoot out, Sam was sure. “The dig’s this way.” And pointed to where clipped greenery and tall willow trees partially masked an asphalt road and several clapboard buildings. A sign pointed the way to the National Cemetery and the start of the Sunken Road Walking Tour.
“Doesn’t look too sunken,” Dean said as they took the gravel walkway and warily eyed a large reproduction of a horrendous battlefield painting posted by the path. “The cemetery’s up there?” He gestured with his chin up the hill to the west, asking for verification, since Sam was unfolding his site map.
“Yeah, I think that’s where a lot of the dead were buried.” The walking tour map was close to his nose, and he was wondering if the dig would be at the reconstructed stone wall, or nearer to the original stone wall. He didn’t realize what he’d said until he heard Dean make a little choking noise, like a cat when it was barfing.
“You think?” Dean repeated, trying to maintain a straight face. “In a cemetery?”
Sam scowled. “Cujo didn’t give the cemetery a second look and it’s full of Civil War dead. The dog went for the bones at the dig site.” At that moment he caught sight of Mira beside a long shallow trench, a tripod set up in the hole. She was aligning something that Sam couldn’t quite figure out from this distance.
In a purely theoretical way, a professor from a second year anthropology course had impressed upon Sam that field archaeology was largely science, dirt and sunburns, followed by winters in the lab, analyzing pot shards and horseshoe nails. Sam grinned, mostly because he saw that furrow start on Dean’s brow again.
“There’s Indiana Jones now,” Dean muttered, moving in front of Sam, determined to be first at the pit’s edge.
If Dean had been expecting golden idols and skulls, he would be disappointed. As Mira looked up with a tired hello in her eyes, Sam saw that the bottom of the trench - only about a foot and a half deep - was mostly covered in dirt with a scattering of stones set in a patterned array along one end. A black and white scale stick was laid beside one of the stones and Mira was taking a photograph of it.
“Hey,” Mira greeted them, then smiled, but it was forced. Forced gaiety wasn’t her style; true gaiety was, but she’d seen a lot yesterday that most people shouldn’t. “You came.” She glanced behind them. “Alone.”
Dean shrugged, almost apologetically if Sam didn’t know better. Sam plucked his t-shirt away from his chest, where it was sticking to the sweat. Man, it was hot and it wasn’t even ten in the morning. “Beau needed to set up the maneuvers they’re doing tonight.” Licked his lips, evidently wondering if this was coming as a surprise to her. “At Chancellorsville, an overnight with some of the guys.”
Hard to tell with Mira, but her mouth crooked in what looked like amusement. “Tell him that if they’re on the actual NPS battlefield, it’s illegal to bring a metal detector.”
Her tone was light, but Dean ducked his head anyway, and scratched behind his ear. “Metal detector’s pretty farby equipment, but I’ll tell him. We’re going over there after this.”
First Sam’d heard of these plans. He quirked an eyebrow at Dean, but didn’t pursue it. “What are we looking at?” he asked Mira instead, more to break the mood than anything. Mira turned.
“Original stone wall,” and she bent down to the rocks she’d been photographing. “After the war they tore most of it down, but we’re slowly finding the foundation.”
Dean whistled low. “Hmm, rocks,” he murmured. Since Mira was still bent away from them, Sam backhanded him on his sound shoulder, and Dean chuckled then said at his usual volume, which was to say, loud, “Lotta men died trying to cross this wall. Which way did Hooker’s assault come?” And he peered down at the remains of the stone wall.
Sam started to realize something just then. Huh, he thought.
Mira raised a hand to shade her eyes. “That way,” and pointed across the open lawn to where a flagpole gleamed white in the distance. It was too far to see the river.
“Was cold then,” Sam caught Dean say, but not quite to himself. “December 13, 1862. Early in the war. Lee was up there,” and he peered over to the hills behind them. “And Burnside across the river, tens of thousands of Federals in the town.”
“Dean?” Sam asked, the only word he could muster, but it came out more like a sound than a word, a single exhalation of wonder. Dean either didn’t hear him, or was lost to his thoughts. Both, maybe.
Behind him, Sam heard Mira putting the lens cap back on the Minolta. “Yeah, it’s mostly rocks and horseshoe nails and dug lead that we turn up around here. Nothing to get excited about.”
“Dug lead?” Sam repeated.
Mira stepped over to another tripod, this one suspending a large square frame covered in wire mesh. It was incredibly dirty, with rocks and other detritus caught in the screen. “We usually sift the dirt from the dig through one of these, catch any small stuff. Here’s one,” and she plucked out a chunk of lead as big as her thumb, all squashed and misshapen. “Soft lead minié balls grabbed onto the rifled grooves inside the gun’s barrel, gave it good spin, which is why it had such a long range. When the bullet hit though...” She passed the piece to Sam, who turned it over in his hand. It looked familiar, but before he had time to figure out why, Mira had taken it back and tossed it into the sieve. “Dug lead: spent bullets literally dug out of the side of buildings, or fence posts. Beau sometimes’ll make new bullets out of these old ones, but he’d prefer to have pure lead.”
Dean laughed. “Does he still get it from X-ray lab renos?”
Mira nodded. “What a freakin’ weirdo. Yeah.” She looked at Dean, who was staring out at the fields. Something in her face softened following Dean’s gaze, and Sam knew that Dean occasionally had that affect on people, something that was innate and had nothing to do with sex or picking up women, though Dean thought it did. “I’ll show you the original stone wall,” she suggested, packing away her camera. “Part of it’s still standing. You get a bit of a sense of the battle.”
“It’s too pretty,” Dean observed, his eyes on the gardens and lawns.
“It is,” Mira agreed.
The original stone wall wasn’t a far walk. As they strolled between historic clapboard buildings, keeping to the Sunken Road, Dean gave his brother the bare bones of the situation on December 13, 1862: Four lines of Confederate infantry at the bottom of Marye’s Hill on the Sunken Road, protected by a four foot stone wall. Confederate cannons further up the hill able to shoot over the heads of their comrades clustered on the road below. All the Confederates had unlimited and sheltered sightlines onto the long stretch of barren winter pasture between the town and the wall. A huge number of Federals crossed that expanse, and more than eight thousand of them died that day, a fraction of the Confederate casualties, another egregious fuck-up in the long line of Yankee blunders that occurred at the war’s outset.
Sam looked at what remained this beautiful day, the smell of willow and grass, sunlight sweeping the lawns in waves, shadowed occasionally by strips of cloud. Cold, Dean said, voice in a strange place, and muddy, and full of the cries of the dying, who lay there all night, bleeding and freezing.
Dean had always been good at this, Sam remembered. Telling stories. As a kid, Dean had never relied on storybooks when it came to putting Sam to bed. Dean had stretched out beside his little brother, taking up most of the room on whatever motel mattress had found them that night, lights on, waiting for dad, fighting yawns. Sharing one room for everything meant that Dean almost always went to bed at the same time as Sam; he’d never leave Sam to drift off on his own. He made up stories as Sam tried to settle down, but the adventures were always too exciting, or too funny, or too sad. It took Sam forever to go to sleep, which was part of the pleasure for the both of them.
Sam missed it.
Rearranging the brochures in his hand gave him something to do as Dean spoke, because he worried that his brother wouldn’t like it if he thought Sam was listening too closely, if he was judging. That he might stop talking. What was it that Dean had said the other night? Something about people learning history in different ways, not always out of books. About remembering things differently.
Then Dean was looking straight at him, and Sam couldn’t tell what he was thinking. “Chamberlain brothers fought here. So did the Perlys. And the Warricks. Neville Warrick fought for the Confederacy. Charles Warrick for the Union. Their father said it broke his heart. Charles died here, on this field, and Neville five months later, when the Federals attacked this hill again.” His eyes returned to the manicured field. “Can’t even imagine that,” he stated firmly, without hesitation. But soft, and Sam knew that even though Dean had been falling asleep as Sam had jabbered on excitedly about things he didn’t know the first thing about, his brother had been processing it at a level Sam couldn’t even begin to understand.
The faraway look snapped suddenly, came back to Sam with a jolt, because Dean was now smiling sunnily. “So where’d you dig up the body?”
Mira showed them - it had happened almost a month ago. Wasn’t all that unusual, uncovering body parts more than a century old, but this one had been different in that it had been more or less complete. Mira had training in osteoarchaeology - the study of ancient bones - and she said that the body looked as though it had been left where it fell, the only signs of who it might have been small North Carolina ensignia pin and brass buttons of the type worn by Confederates early in the war. She couldn’t be sure until she spent some time with the remains in the lab, but she had noticed a round hole in the skull, just above where the soldier’s left ear would have been.
The discovery had been made late in the day, and so Mira and some of her teammates had covered up what they’d found, knowing that they’d be able to excavate fully in the morning. But the next day she’d returned to find the site dug up, the bones scattered throughout the trench and grassy verge, some snapped, showing wear marks typical of a larger canine. Mira and her team had gathered the remaining bones and sent them to the university lab for later study and identification.
Sam surveyed the unremarkable trench. It looked like someone was digging a new flowerbed, nothing more exciting than that. He’d noticed Dean glancing at him from time to time, perhaps worried that Sam’s weird nightmares might surface in a place so full of death, but there were no rules to that particular gift or curse. Or maybe horror had an expiry date. In any case, Sam felt nothing out of the ordinary.
They thanked Mira and returned to the parking lot, Dean more slowly than Sam for once, a rare look on his face - not just thoughtful, but immersed to the point of dreaminess. Consequently, it was Sam who spotted what Dean would have usually noticed first.
“Hey,” Sam turned to Dean, who was coming up behind him as the heat wafted off the parked cars in a breeze so lazy it was a doldrum, shimmered in the growing kiln of a day. On the power pole beside the Impala, facing away from the car so they wouldn’t have seen it until they returned from this particular angle, was a homemade sign that relied far too heavily on different fonts for excitement.
LOST DOG
Have you seen Buttercup?
Much loved. Reward.
A phone number and a picture. Dean was dialing before Sam was finished reading.
--
It fit.
Elliot Farmer had told them that his kid had stopped eating for five days after Buttercup had taken off. Luckily, four-year-olds were forgetful types generally, though little Tyler had a stubborn streak. They had found a lot of food dropped under the table before they’d realized that Tyler wasn’t refusing food, it was just that his usual food disposal unit had run away on the evening of May 20th.
Run away, Elliot had stressed, his trim light brown beard framing an amiable face, not unlike a golden Lab himself, proving to Dean that people looked like their dogs. She hadn’t been stolen, she wasn’t lost. Elliot was certain that she’d had someplace to go, something in mind. Dean had bitten the inside of his mouth to stop from rolling his eyes. The things people believed about their pets.
Still, Elliot had paid top dollar for purebred Buttercup and he’d like to see her back, even though she was forever digging up the flowerbeds. The flowers had looked okay now, given a month’s reprieve from Buttercup’s attentions.
The Farmer family had looked for her, of course. She was the sweetest dog imaginable, full of tail wagging and licks and that silly smile that Labs got when they were happy. Maybe a little overweight, but that was to be expected. She would never hurt a fly.
“I think Buttercup’s dropped a few pounds,” Dean said as he pulled out onto Route 3, more famously known as the Plank Road, heading towards Chancellorsville.
“Jeez,” Sam shook his head, pulling out his map again. “A family dog. I mean, a real family dog. D’you see the kid?”
“Little Tyler?” Dean asked, rolling down the window. The car’s interior was unbearable, and he was having a hard time keeping a grip on the steering wheel, which might as well have been burnished with a blowtorch. “He’s gonna be bummed when Buttercup comes back with someone’s arm in her mouth.”
He’d expected Sam to laugh at that - it was the reason he’d said it, for god’s sake, Sam was way too serious today, and Dean didn’t like it when Sam got serious - but his brother was studying the countryside out the window, the heat of mid-day bleaching the vibrant greens gray as sagebrush.
“Buttercup’s not coming back,” Sam replied, after a long moment. “You’re gonna kill that dog, aren’t you?”
Dean didn’t like it, not one bit, that accusatory tone in Sam’s voice. He pushed the cassette already perched in the tape player and Bad Company blared through the speakers. He swore Brian Howe’s voice sounded burbly, as though the tape was melting.
“Sure am,” he affirmed, trying not to think of the kid.
They didn’t say anything else on the drive to the next battlefield. Dean hadn’t told Sam that they were going mostly because he was sure Sam would have a fit. After yesterday, the idea of another outing with the hardcores was unappealing in the extreme, wouldn’t have been tolerated by most thinking people and Sammy was a thinking person if he was anything. Dean - well, he considered himself something different. Not a feeling person, never that. A doing person, maybe.
And right now, what he was intent on doing was finding Beau and dragging his ass back to his place where they would likely spend the hottest day of the fucking year melting lead into bullets. Beyond the making of highly specialized bullets, he wanted a word with Beau about his real reasons for summoning them here, and he’d have to ditch Sam to do that properly. Working in Dean’s favor was the fact that Sam was not going to want to sit around while good old boys cast Civil War ordnance in a stifling hot garage decorated with Rebel Battle flags and curling photos of Confederate soldiers. Maybe he could drop Sam off at a nice museum or something. He’d mentioned that movie at the visitor center. That might do.
Finding Beau and his severely depleted 22nd on the Chancellorsville battlefield wasn’t easy, considering the site was huge and densely wooded. Coupled with the fact that Beau and his boys were hiding, of course. The brothers came around the corner of the ubiquitous Visitor Center and almost immediately joined a group of sweating tourists fanning themselves with NPS flyers as they milled around in front of yet another hideously graphic battlefield painting.
Dean took one look at the park guide about to start the walking tour and turned in the other direction. Sam blocked his way, and could see clear over Dean’s head, and his face was rapt. Dear god, now he was going to have to drag Sammy away from yet another educational experience. Near broke his heart every time.
“Welcome to Chancellorsville National Battlefield Park, everyone,” and Sam wasn’t responding to Dean’s cleared throat at all. “Over three days in early May 1863, these fields and woods saw one of the North’s greatest defeats and one of the South’s greatest tragedies. Today, I’ll take you from where Union General Hooker entrenched his superior numbers at the Chancellorsville estate to where Generals Lee and Jackson split their lesser numbers and surprised Hooker by initiating the attack. Many thousands of men died here in the thick woods to our right, but no death was more important to the South’s ultimate defeat than that of General Thomas ‘Stonewall’ Jackson, killed by what we would now call ‘friendly’ fire.”
Right, Dean thought. That’s where Beau will be, where this whole thing started. He pinched Sam on the fleshy part on the upper arm, hard. Let’s go, Historic Site Boy. Sam dipped his head, a protest dying on his lips as he saw the expression on Dean’s face.
Lucky there was signage for it, otherwise he’d have to ask Sam, and that would have been unpleasant. Sam didn’t question Dean’s direction, but made those little sighs that told Dean he thought that Dean was being a big fat jerk. They walked into the woods, a wide cleared dirt road leading them up to the Jackson Memorial. Sure enough, Beau and about ten of his comrades were just a little ways off from the stone cenotaph, almost right at the place where Stonewall Jackson had been shot by his own soldiers. Dean heard them first, cursing in era-appropriate fashion. Someone was getting called a golderned whoremonger for stepping out of line. They were drilling, evidently.
Beau might have been expecting them, because he didn’t look at all surprised as they came through the woods, which really were ridiculously thick, no wonder Jackson had been mistaken by his own troops, thinking that he was part of a Union advance. Good that Beau was expecting them, too, because the ten men whirled around, rifles coming off their shoulders, ready before Beau shouted “Halt!” and the guys all relaxed. Relaxed as much as they could, considering what they’d been through yesterday.
“Hey, Beau,” Dean called, raising his hand, hoping that he hadn’t jumped when the boys in gray had wheeled around, bristling. “Mind not firing on my ass just for walking through the woods? We’re not at war.” Not really, he might have added, seeing the expression in Beau’s eyes. “I hope those aren’t loaded.”
“Damn dog’s still around,” Riddicker said, and his big face was stony. Fair enough, after what had happened to Tim.
“Regular bullets aren’t going to stop it.” Blunt as a butterknife. “That’s why I’ve been trying to find you, Beau. I’ll drive you to your place and use your stuff to make something that’ll work.” He looked at the men, worried about their loaded guns, knew how crazy they could get. “You guys should take a break until we get back.” He tried not to grin, because of the guns, and he was standing in front of them in jeans and a t-shirt. A civilian, telling them to take it easy. “You could grab a coffee at the Visitor Center.” And couldn’t quite keep the smile away. “You still have some extra stuff, Beau?”
Now it was Beau’s turn to grin ear to ear and he looked like a fucking pirate, not a Confederate infantryman. “Sure do, pard. You suiting up?”
Dean let the moment linger before delivering the goods. “Nope. Sam is.”
--
Sam argued all the way back to the car, or would have, Dean was sure, except that they ran into the walking tour again and Dean didn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. He suggested that Sam could spend the next couple of hours watching whatever movie he liked at the Visitor Center, following any walking tour that appealed to him, could read every damn historical plaque on the grounds, which would probably take him until next Easter.
Sam folded like a Japanese fan, suddenly hiding his pattern, silent and pissed. Dean would have happily left him with the tour, except that he wanted to make sure Sam had the salt gun, and Sam had also left his knapsack in the trunk, which contained his cell phone. Dean didn’t want Sam thrashing about the woods with a ghost, a rabid dog, and armed men who thought they were living a hundred and forty years in the past without a means of communication and a weapon that at least seemed to make a dent in the ghost. Quite frankly, though, Dean was more worried about Buttercup, because those teeth were real.
“...and here is the location where Jackson was fired upon by North Carolina troops on the evening of May 2, mistaken as part of a Yankee offensive.” The park guide seemed as earnest as when they’d started. Some of the tourists were starting to flag, though. They perked up at the appearance of Beau in full drill gear. The guide didn’t miss a beat. “He was hit on the palm of his hand and twice in the arm, necessitating its removal. He died a week later. This despite the lucky bullet I mentioned before, the one he’d been given the year prior at Fredericksburg.”
Sam suddenly stopped, and Dean took three steps before he realized it, only noticed that Sam wasn’t beside him because he heard his brother’s voice behind him.
“Sorry,” and that was just like Sam, to interrupt a fucking tour, to need some kind of clarification, to ask why. “I missed that part of the tour. A lucky bullet?” And Sam was way too fucking smart, always had been, and Dean didn’t need him to hear about this, because he would hit the fucking roof. But unless Dean was willing to drag Sam bodily away, which presented its own problems, Sam was about get exactly what he wanted. Why’s the dog going for us, Dean? Fuck.
The park guide smiled bemusedly, perhaps a little ticked off that they were traveling in the company of a war reenactor, who had admittedly taken the attention of his otherwise attentive audience of suburban white folk.
“I’d be pleased to. Not a very well-known story, and likely apocryphal, because there’s no real evidence to back it up other than oral histories collected years after the fact. But back in December of 1862, a young soldier named Jubal Garrett from the North Carolina 11th Infantry was considered the luckiest man in the corps: he was practically bulletproof, they said. He traveled with a big dog that terrified the Yankees, and was cool as a cucumber under fire. The day before the Union assault on Marye’s Heights, Jackson reviewed the troops and is said to have had a conversation with Garrett, asked him what his secret was. Some claim he took Garrett’s lucky bullet when the young man offered it to him. You have to understand, Jackson was a very godly man. Some religious folks say that while it brought him victory in battle, it was the devil’s work. North Carolina bullets ended Jackson’s life, so maybe that much is true.”
The crowd laughed, and Dean knew that look on Sam’s face, the one that anyone else would think was merely amused, but that actually meant he was going to pitch a fit as soon as he got Dean alone. Dean started to back away from the tour group. Actually, he’d never heard the Jubal Garrett part of the story before, especially hadn’t heard about the fucking dog, but he knew about Jackson’s lucky bullet all right. Knew all about it.
“And, excuse me,” now Sam was getting insistent, and Dean had a pretty good idea that a) Sam would have been completely insufferable in a class full of freshman, and b) that Sam was going to give him an earful, maybe more.
The park guide, a middle aged man with little round glasses and a gentle smirk, raised his sandy eyebrows. “Yes?” Okay, more than a little annoyed.
“Did they find the lucky bullet on Jackson when he was hit?”
Sam, Sam, Sammy, leave it.
The guide’s face screwed up a little. “Well, he certainly wasn’t buried with it. There’s no mention about what happened to that bullet.”
“And what happened to Jubal Garrett?” There was nothing of curiosity in the voice now, and anyone bothering to listen would hear the anger. It was probably confusing the shit out of the park guide. A different kind of pilgrim baiting, Dean thought.
“His fellow soldiers say that he died the very next day, right after giving away his good luck token,” the park guide said. “But they never found his body, what with all the carnage at Marye’s Heights. The dog went wild and the Confederate troops had to shoot the poor beast.”
Dean had heard enough. Sam had definitely heard enough. Dean walked away, pulled out his phone and asked Beau what Mira’s number was. If he was on the phone, then Sam would have a chance to cool down. Except there was no way Sam was cooling down anytime soon and god alone knew Sam was capable of holding a fucking grudge for decades.
“Hey Mira, it’s Dean,” and he could hear Sam coming up behind him, felt sweat run down the middle of his back, it was at least four o’clock now, the hottest part of the goddamn day and Sam was going to crucify him when he put it all together, which wouldn’t take him... “Yeah, gotta favor to ask.” She was a reasonable girl. He smiled grimly at Sam, who was not smiling at all. “Can you bring those bones back to the dig?”
Turned out she wasn’t so reasonable. Finally, Sam extended his hand and raised his eyebrows. He didn’t look happy. Dean licked his lips, gave his brother the phone.
“Mira?” Sam said. “Sam here. It’s important. Beau’s told you about the ghost and you saw what the dog did to Tim. Just bring the bones. We have to end this.”
And how was that any different from what he’d just said? But apparently it was, because Sam arranged to meet Mira tomorrow, late afternoon - the university lab being locked up for the weekend - and she’d bring the box of bones. Sam clicked off the phone, handed it back to Dean wordlessly.
The Impala was on the far side of the lot, because there had been some shade there two hours ago. Now it stood exposed to the blazing sun, and Dean could commiserate, facing Sam like he was standing at the mouth of a blast furnace.
“Give me your keys, Dean,” Sam said quietly, proving beyond a doubt that not only was he mad, but he was smart.
Dean wiped his forehead, and his hand slid around some in the sweat. He glanced quickly to Beau, who looked so freakishly innocent he might have been a choirboy in a kepi. Slowly, Dean reached into his front pocket and pulled out the keys, weighed them in his hand. A chunk of lead hung there, a piece that to the inexperienced eye looked like a fishing weight, a lump of dark gray, heavy. Not much larger than a big marble. He kept them close, so Sam wouldn’t grab them.
“Lucky bullet, Dean?” Sam asked, but it wasn’t really a question. He went on to demonstrate that it wasn’t a question by filling in the silence. “I ought to...”
“To what, Sam?” Dean’s rule: never admit to being wrong, especially when you were really, really wrong.
“Where’d it come from?”
Dean wasn’t a squealer, never had been. He couldn’t look at Beau then without giving it away. So he just crossed his arms, kept hold of his keys, tucked them under his left elbow. He started walking towards the car, determined to ride it out. How the fuck was he supposed to explain it to Sam? When would have been the appropriate time? Until right this second, he wasn’t even completely sure himself. A hunk of dug lead, retrieved from the ground. With a metal detector. By Beau, on this battleground, who had done enough research, had the sense of where to look for things like this. He was a specialist, after all.
Dean ran his hand alongside the Impala, and it burned. Popping the trunk so Sam could get the salt gun and his pack, he then unlocked the driver’s door as Sam crowded him - loomed, maybe a better word would be, because Sam was fucking masterful at looming - and didn’t move at all. Dean tried ignoring him. He opened the door, but not all the way, because that would have involved shoving Sam to the side. Instead, he waited for Sam to shift, which he was pretty practiced at, really, the only kind of waiting he was good at.
Sam had that stupid clenching of the jaw thing going on that always made Dean think of gunslingers from old Westerns. If he didn’t watch it, Sam was going to clench himself into a knot, but apology wasn’t an option. He glanced at Beau, standing beside the nearby bushes, and he shrugged as if to say, ‘wasn’t me keeping a secret.’
Sam was struggling; Dean could see it plainly. “How long have you had it?” Hard to articulate with your jaw locked like that.
A shrug would have pushed Sam over the edge, but Dean considered it anyway. “Three years,” and swallowed. “You weren’t around then, Sam. Weren’t exactly in the sharing caring frame of mind.”
Sam unclenched enough to smile that awful smile he had when he was this furious. “Let me see it.” He held out his hand and Dean backed away from the open door, gestured to the trunk, the keys in his hand, catching the angled sun.
“Get your pack, Sam. Jackson’s bullet is all we need to get the dog to us. But we can’t kill it till I make the right bullet. So stop talking -“
“You knew!” Sam suddenly shouted, taking a step forward, away from the car. Dean circled round him, hoping to gently herd him toward the trunk through sheer tenacity and willpower.
He didn’t realize that he was getting angry too, didn’t recognize the signs. Because just then, despite his best intentions, he shrugged, turned it into an insult. Sam made a grab for the keys and Dean jumped back, crashing into the Impala, jamming his left shoulder onto the roof. Right where the stitches were and that hurt. The keys flew from his hand, landed on the car seat.
“Course I knew, Sam,” he said between gritted teeth, holding his shoulder and wondering how four small stitches could hurt so fucking much. Right then he really didn’t care how pissed his brother was. “What was I going to say? ‘Hi Sam, haven’t seen you in awhile, here’s my Stonewall Jackson lucky fucking bullet, let’s be friends again?’”
He never did find out what Sam thought he ought to have said, because at that moment Buttercup came crashing out of the bushes right beside Beau, who barely had time to blink, let alone warn them, and hurled herself at Dean. Except, no, not really at Dean, he was just in the way. She knocked him down - he was off-balance anyway, holding his shoulder and slightly bent at the waist - and blasted into the car like a line drive from a heavy hitter.
--
Stay down, wiggly fucking fucker. Outta my way. Stay still, waving it around like a fucking frisbee. You have no idea how fucked up you guys are...just stop fucking moving.
Sit. Stay. Shit, never worked for me, either.
Owww! Hands off! Drop it! Stop grabbing my ---
--
Dean, on the ground, yanked hard on the dog’s tail, trying to prevent it from getting into the car, though it was most of the way there by the time he got good purchase. Get the fuck outta my -
And yelped as the dog’s scrabbling paws - and what the hell that was doing to the leather interior he wasn’t going to consider just yet - dislodged something that came flying out like a rocket to glance off his cheekbone.
“Let go! Dean, let go!” he heard Sam yell on the hard edge of panic, loud enough it might as well be in his ear, and he stopped trying to drag the dog out of his car, hoped like hell that Sam or Beau or somebody had gotten a gun or an ax or something lethal from the open trunk, because as soon as he let go of that tail, the dog’s going to... “Roll, roll, ROLL!” Sam screamed at him, so he did, getting out of the way as Sam slammed the Impala’s door shut so hard the window rattled in its casing.
Dean, breathing hard, sat up, looked over his shoulder to see Buttercup going apeshit inside the Impala. He stared at Sam, who had a determined, calm set to his face now, watched as he bent his long ridiculous length and picked up the keys from the ground. Reaching up, Dean felt where the flung keys had hit him on the cheek. Sam stared at the keys in his hand, looking at the chunk of lead there, glanced over at the hysterics of the dog in the car, the Impala rocking with the ferocity of the barking and the jumping.
“What the fuck have you done?” Dean cried, unable to decide which was worse: the keys in Sam’s hands, or the rabid dog in the car.
“Given us time to think,” Sam replied, pushing his stupid long hair out of his narrowing eyes. Okay, still pissed. “To weigh options. Come up with a plan. Act with a strategy.” And Dean groaned, got to his feet, almost unable to think for the barking going on inside. In this heat, maybe the dog would bake. Nah. Possessed dogs didn’t die from ordinary bullets and they weren’t going to expire from heat exhaustion either.
“Dog like that could make a terrible mess of a car’s upholstery,” Beau observed, leaning down to peer through the window.
“Shut up,” both Winchesters said at the same time.
Coming up beside Beau, Sam gestured for him to move away, which he did. Slowly, Sam brought the keys to the window. Buttercup threw herself against them, a long glob of saliva messing the window as the clack of her teeth against the glass made Dean wince.
“So, the dog’s not after us in particular?” Sam asked him softly, almost maliciously.
“Not really,” Beau said, even though he’d been told to conduct himself otherwise. “After the bullet, I reckon.”
“Maybe we should let her have it,” Sam suggested, and met Dean’s stare. The voice of reason. “Maybe she’ll take the bullet to the ghost of Jubal Garrett, he’ll be at rest and this’ll all be over.”
Dean found that he couldn’t look at Sam anymore, couldn’t look at his smug sensibility. Buttercup was now attacking the steering wheel, chewing it. He didn’t know how much more he could take.
“Yep, only one problem with that plan, pard,” Beau said, undeterred by the combined Winchester death stares. “What happens to the dog? Still on the loose. And we still need to burn the bones, I’d say. I mean you could try it,” and he shrugged. “Just don’t see how it helps us catch the dog.”
“We’ve caught the dog!” Sam yelled, openly frustrated. Dean watched as he collected himself, but couldn’t really concentrate because Buttercup was repeatedly throwing herself against the driver’s side window and, holy shit...
Craaaaaack. A long thin line silvered across the window like forked lightning. Dean stepped forward, swearing at the dog with every curse he knew, which was not an inconsiderable set of words and phrases. He barely noticed when Sam came back from a trip to the trunk, pushed a salt gun into Dean’s hands, pulled him away from the window.
Dean heard Sam jingle the keys in his hand, his face still and focused. “Dean, get ready. On my count, Beau, open the door.”
“Are you fucking nuts?” Dean asked, but Beau was already there, and Buttercup was thrashing about and she was coming out, one way or another.
On Sam’s shouted ‘three’, Beau yanked open the door. Dean had the gun to his shoulder, the salt loaded and the hammer cocked, and Sam wound up like Roger Clemens on a good day twenty years ago and pitched the keys as far as he could.
--
Good boy, tall one, there’s a good boy. All over, just give me what I want, and this’ll be all over. Good boy, good boy. Don’t fucking tease.
So much movement, so many arms and legs and fingers, and the smell of blood on the wiggly one, wouldn’t mind taking a bite outta him. Stronger still, the smell of need and want and hunger. Hunger - just throw it, just throw it. Could almost see it, see it flying away making her heart want to follow. Just like that. Fast as a fucking squirrel.
And there.
--
She was gone. Into the underbrush, where they could hear her for a few seconds, then that too disappeared, replaced by the occasional outburst of heat bugs. A few minutes later, they heard a howl, far in the distance.
Dean leaned onto the car like it was a life raft in the North Atlantic, didn’t care how hot it was, how it hurt, even through his sweat-dampened t-shirt. After a long moment and with a heavy heart, he peered inside, bracing himself for the worst. The steering wheel was okay, though sticky with dog spit. The driver’s side seat, however, had several large rips in the leather, the cotton ticking and layers of 60s era padding seeping out like intestines from a cavity wound. He leaned in, not wanting to talk with anyone, the heat and his abused bullet wound and the Impala’s interior and the smell of dog combining to make him feel a little sick.
“Let’s go,” he heard Sam say behind him. He didn’t sound angry anymore. He sounded something else, and Dean couldn’t put his finger on what that was.
Straightening, wiping his face of more sweat, wishing he had some water, anything to drink, he looked at Sam, who had put the salt gun back in the trunk and slammed it shut.
“How?” Dean asked, his eyes following the trajectory of the thrown keys, which had landed god alone knew where in the dense underbrush. He turned to Sam, trying to find anger, but failing. “How?”
And Sam smiled lopsidedly, pulled his hand out of his pocket, placed Dean’s set of keys, lucky bullet and all, onto the palm of his brother’s hand. “Here’s Jackson’s lucky bullet. Let’s be friends.”
--
They stuffed the reenactor in the backseat where he belonged. Both brothers were a little tired of Beau, but Dean was right: they needed to make the bullet, fast. Sam imagined for a moment having a Get Smart Cone of Silence that he could put down over the front seats so Beau would just stay out of it, because Sam knew what was coming.
They weren’t even out the parking lot before it arrived. Dean at least cleared his throat, a warning. “Where’d the keys come from?”
Sam, window unrolled, trying not to breathe too deeply because a feral dog soaked in day old human blood trapped in a hot car stank in a truly indescribable way, sighed. “What? I can’t have keys?”
Dean’s sunburned nose wrinkled, whether from the stench or from Sam’s refusal, Sam didn’t know. “Just didn’t think...”
“I had a life, Dean,” he said quietly. “It involved an apartment, a bike lock, Jess’s car, her parents’ cabin up north, the padlock to the boathouse - “
Something in his voice must have made Dean uncomfortable; Sam could see his brother’s larynx cartilage jump up and down as he swallowed. Sam turned to the window again.
“Sorry,” Dean said, finally. Roughly. “I’m sorry.”
Sam waved his fingers in the breeze. “S’okay. Doesn’t matter.” He glanced over at Dean and their eyes met for moment before both of them looked away.
“I don’t get it,” Dean said in that long-suffering tone he sometimes got, but it was after a moment of consideration, his voice returning from whatever place he’d gone, sitting silently in the ripped seat. “Those keys weren’t important to you? Really?”
But he did get it, didn’t he, and he wasn’t really asking a question so much as giving an answer.
Sam thought about that. Thought about the place of things in your life that had no practical purpose anymore, that were all memory, the true purpose of which was only mined by stripping off layer from layer: metal keys, function, memory, feeling, meaning. Lawn, topsoil, packed earth, human remains. Bedrock. Knew what the meaning was for him, whether the keys were there or not.
He smiled lightly, but didn’t need to look at Dean. “Seemed more important to keep the keys we actually need.”
TBC
a/n: I’ve totally taken the biggest liberties with this part of my fic. Although Jackson was killed by friendly fire at Chancellorsville, and lots of Confederates but especially Union troops died at the Sunken Road, the story of the ‘lucky bullet’ is just that - a story, completely fabricated by me. Jackson was so religious, I doubt he had anything ‘luckier’ than a cross. Also, the names of the various brotherly soldiers I mentioned are also fictitious, though brothers fighting brothers on the same battlefield certainly wasn’t.
Disklamshion: Ich grabben nieght to do mit das kunstentelevishion programmen “Supernatural”, met Ich vant to. Erik Kripkekunstenmaster ownst it ahl. Fuchking Schweinhund.
Schnell! Schnell!: Das historika ist “T” fur kursting - lots und lots der kursting. Und violenka. (Jesus, the things I write in this section just to keep myself awake)
--
The day started better this time, possibly because it didn’t involve being shelled by Confederate artillery.
Dean methodically demolished the “Trucker’s Special” which consisted mostly of animal proteins and carbohydrates swimming in various forms of fats: three eggs over easy, buttered grits, a small family of chubby pork sausages, and a slab of Virginia ham. And something called ‘scrapple’, the food group designation of which left Sam guessing. He didn’t even like looking at it.
Outside the diner’s window, a large billboard read, ‘If at First You Don’t Secede, Try, Try Again,’ and was decorated with Confederate battle flags and a cartoon Johnnie Reb. Sam watched his brother’s brow furrow as he stared at it as though he didn’t quite get the joke, or didn’t know if it was a joke, but it didn’t stop him from cleaning his plate with a piece of toast.
Sam, mildly disgusted, poked at his bowl of cornflakes, wondering what had possessed him to order it in the first place. The bowl had arrived with cream, not milk, and they were frosted flakes. The orange juice tasted suspiciously like Tang, and it stung his throat, still raw from smoke.
They had ignored the morning newspaper, although Sam was somewhat interested in how the Fredericksburg Gazette had explained yesterday’s carnage without sounding like the National Inquirer. The headline had screamed: Rocket’s Red Glare: Death Toll 5 at Civil War Reenactment. He’d gone so far as to pick up a newspaper abandoned on an uncleared table, but Dean had simply snatched it from his hand and thrown it back onto the bench seat as he followed the waitress to their table.
“The dig?” Dean asked, wiping his fingers on a grease-spotted paper napkin. “You know where it is?” He wasn’t looking at Sam; he was busy picking some wayward sausage casing from between his teeth with a fingernail. Sam added ‘tell him about toothpicks’ to the day’s to-do list.
He nodded, unfazed by a near-lifetime of Dean’s table manners. It was like living with a monkey some days. “Sure,” and pulled out a battlefield map that showed all the major National Park Service battlefields in the area: Wilderness, Chancellorsville, Spotsylvania Court House and Fredericksburg itself. They were all only a few miles apart. “Mira said to go to the Fredericksburg Battlefield Visitor Center and ask. Their dig is at the Sunken Road, just below Marye’s Heights.”
He ran a finger along the route they’d take, feeling a twinge of excitement. Maps, visitor centers, interpretive signage on the side of historical trails - all of it was feeding into his innate love of things making sense. Order: these things imposed order onto messy history. And Dean would probably rather put out an eye with Sam’s cereal spoon than step one foot in a park visitor center.
Dean chewed slowly, swallowed down the last of the ham with cold coffee. “You gonna eat that?” he thought to ask, but was already pulling the bowl of cornflakes across the worn tabletop. Sam thought about bananas.
There was no way Sam was going to be allowed to drive; he already knew that. He guided Dean into town, though there was no need, really, because Fredericksburg embraced its Civil War identity. Every inch was well marked.
As predicted, Dean hovered outside the Visitor Center while Sam went in to ask about the James Madison U dig. Ten minutes later he emerged laden with walking tour brochures, maps, and a free notepad. He’d sacrificed watching the 22-minute movie about the battle mostly because he wouldn’t put it past his brother to wander off if he left him alone for too long. He spotted Dean leaning over the hood of the Impala with his t-shirt’s sleeve pulled up, showing two young women his stitches from Beau’s bullet. They seemed impressed.
“Hey, Mr. Walking Wounded,” Sam called out, not coming too close, not wanting to hear whatever story Dean was feeding them. The truth was too much; Dean would have something that involved a drag-race shoot out, Sam was sure. “The dig’s this way.” And pointed to where clipped greenery and tall willow trees partially masked an asphalt road and several clapboard buildings. A sign pointed the way to the National Cemetery and the start of the Sunken Road Walking Tour.
“Doesn’t look too sunken,” Dean said as they took the gravel walkway and warily eyed a large reproduction of a horrendous battlefield painting posted by the path. “The cemetery’s up there?” He gestured with his chin up the hill to the west, asking for verification, since Sam was unfolding his site map.
“Yeah, I think that’s where a lot of the dead were buried.” The walking tour map was close to his nose, and he was wondering if the dig would be at the reconstructed stone wall, or nearer to the original stone wall. He didn’t realize what he’d said until he heard Dean make a little choking noise, like a cat when it was barfing.
“You think?” Dean repeated, trying to maintain a straight face. “In a cemetery?”
Sam scowled. “Cujo didn’t give the cemetery a second look and it’s full of Civil War dead. The dog went for the bones at the dig site.” At that moment he caught sight of Mira beside a long shallow trench, a tripod set up in the hole. She was aligning something that Sam couldn’t quite figure out from this distance.
In a purely theoretical way, a professor from a second year anthropology course had impressed upon Sam that field archaeology was largely science, dirt and sunburns, followed by winters in the lab, analyzing pot shards and horseshoe nails. Sam grinned, mostly because he saw that furrow start on Dean’s brow again.
“There’s Indiana Jones now,” Dean muttered, moving in front of Sam, determined to be first at the pit’s edge.
If Dean had been expecting golden idols and skulls, he would be disappointed. As Mira looked up with a tired hello in her eyes, Sam saw that the bottom of the trench - only about a foot and a half deep - was mostly covered in dirt with a scattering of stones set in a patterned array along one end. A black and white scale stick was laid beside one of the stones and Mira was taking a photograph of it.
“Hey,” Mira greeted them, then smiled, but it was forced. Forced gaiety wasn’t her style; true gaiety was, but she’d seen a lot yesterday that most people shouldn’t. “You came.” She glanced behind them. “Alone.”
Dean shrugged, almost apologetically if Sam didn’t know better. Sam plucked his t-shirt away from his chest, where it was sticking to the sweat. Man, it was hot and it wasn’t even ten in the morning. “Beau needed to set up the maneuvers they’re doing tonight.” Licked his lips, evidently wondering if this was coming as a surprise to her. “At Chancellorsville, an overnight with some of the guys.”
Hard to tell with Mira, but her mouth crooked in what looked like amusement. “Tell him that if they’re on the actual NPS battlefield, it’s illegal to bring a metal detector.”
Her tone was light, but Dean ducked his head anyway, and scratched behind his ear. “Metal detector’s pretty farby equipment, but I’ll tell him. We’re going over there after this.”
First Sam’d heard of these plans. He quirked an eyebrow at Dean, but didn’t pursue it. “What are we looking at?” he asked Mira instead, more to break the mood than anything. Mira turned.
“Original stone wall,” and she bent down to the rocks she’d been photographing. “After the war they tore most of it down, but we’re slowly finding the foundation.”
Dean whistled low. “Hmm, rocks,” he murmured. Since Mira was still bent away from them, Sam backhanded him on his sound shoulder, and Dean chuckled then said at his usual volume, which was to say, loud, “Lotta men died trying to cross this wall. Which way did Hooker’s assault come?” And he peered down at the remains of the stone wall.
Sam started to realize something just then. Huh, he thought.
Mira raised a hand to shade her eyes. “That way,” and pointed across the open lawn to where a flagpole gleamed white in the distance. It was too far to see the river.
“Was cold then,” Sam caught Dean say, but not quite to himself. “December 13, 1862. Early in the war. Lee was up there,” and he peered over to the hills behind them. “And Burnside across the river, tens of thousands of Federals in the town.”
“Dean?” Sam asked, the only word he could muster, but it came out more like a sound than a word, a single exhalation of wonder. Dean either didn’t hear him, or was lost to his thoughts. Both, maybe.
Behind him, Sam heard Mira putting the lens cap back on the Minolta. “Yeah, it’s mostly rocks and horseshoe nails and dug lead that we turn up around here. Nothing to get excited about.”
“Dug lead?” Sam repeated.
Mira stepped over to another tripod, this one suspending a large square frame covered in wire mesh. It was incredibly dirty, with rocks and other detritus caught in the screen. “We usually sift the dirt from the dig through one of these, catch any small stuff. Here’s one,” and she plucked out a chunk of lead as big as her thumb, all squashed and misshapen. “Soft lead minié balls grabbed onto the rifled grooves inside the gun’s barrel, gave it good spin, which is why it had such a long range. When the bullet hit though...” She passed the piece to Sam, who turned it over in his hand. It looked familiar, but before he had time to figure out why, Mira had taken it back and tossed it into the sieve. “Dug lead: spent bullets literally dug out of the side of buildings, or fence posts. Beau sometimes’ll make new bullets out of these old ones, but he’d prefer to have pure lead.”
Dean laughed. “Does he still get it from X-ray lab renos?”
Mira nodded. “What a freakin’ weirdo. Yeah.” She looked at Dean, who was staring out at the fields. Something in her face softened following Dean’s gaze, and Sam knew that Dean occasionally had that affect on people, something that was innate and had nothing to do with sex or picking up women, though Dean thought it did. “I’ll show you the original stone wall,” she suggested, packing away her camera. “Part of it’s still standing. You get a bit of a sense of the battle.”
“It’s too pretty,” Dean observed, his eyes on the gardens and lawns.
“It is,” Mira agreed.
The original stone wall wasn’t a far walk. As they strolled between historic clapboard buildings, keeping to the Sunken Road, Dean gave his brother the bare bones of the situation on December 13, 1862: Four lines of Confederate infantry at the bottom of Marye’s Hill on the Sunken Road, protected by a four foot stone wall. Confederate cannons further up the hill able to shoot over the heads of their comrades clustered on the road below. All the Confederates had unlimited and sheltered sightlines onto the long stretch of barren winter pasture between the town and the wall. A huge number of Federals crossed that expanse, and more than eight thousand of them died that day, a fraction of the Confederate casualties, another egregious fuck-up in the long line of Yankee blunders that occurred at the war’s outset.
Sam looked at what remained this beautiful day, the smell of willow and grass, sunlight sweeping the lawns in waves, shadowed occasionally by strips of cloud. Cold, Dean said, voice in a strange place, and muddy, and full of the cries of the dying, who lay there all night, bleeding and freezing.
Dean had always been good at this, Sam remembered. Telling stories. As a kid, Dean had never relied on storybooks when it came to putting Sam to bed. Dean had stretched out beside his little brother, taking up most of the room on whatever motel mattress had found them that night, lights on, waiting for dad, fighting yawns. Sharing one room for everything meant that Dean almost always went to bed at the same time as Sam; he’d never leave Sam to drift off on his own. He made up stories as Sam tried to settle down, but the adventures were always too exciting, or too funny, or too sad. It took Sam forever to go to sleep, which was part of the pleasure for the both of them.
Sam missed it.
Rearranging the brochures in his hand gave him something to do as Dean spoke, because he worried that his brother wouldn’t like it if he thought Sam was listening too closely, if he was judging. That he might stop talking. What was it that Dean had said the other night? Something about people learning history in different ways, not always out of books. About remembering things differently.
Then Dean was looking straight at him, and Sam couldn’t tell what he was thinking. “Chamberlain brothers fought here. So did the Perlys. And the Warricks. Neville Warrick fought for the Confederacy. Charles Warrick for the Union. Their father said it broke his heart. Charles died here, on this field, and Neville five months later, when the Federals attacked this hill again.” His eyes returned to the manicured field. “Can’t even imagine that,” he stated firmly, without hesitation. But soft, and Sam knew that even though Dean had been falling asleep as Sam had jabbered on excitedly about things he didn’t know the first thing about, his brother had been processing it at a level Sam couldn’t even begin to understand.
The faraway look snapped suddenly, came back to Sam with a jolt, because Dean was now smiling sunnily. “So where’d you dig up the body?”
Mira showed them - it had happened almost a month ago. Wasn’t all that unusual, uncovering body parts more than a century old, but this one had been different in that it had been more or less complete. Mira had training in osteoarchaeology - the study of ancient bones - and she said that the body looked as though it had been left where it fell, the only signs of who it might have been small North Carolina ensignia pin and brass buttons of the type worn by Confederates early in the war. She couldn’t be sure until she spent some time with the remains in the lab, but she had noticed a round hole in the skull, just above where the soldier’s left ear would have been.
The discovery had been made late in the day, and so Mira and some of her teammates had covered up what they’d found, knowing that they’d be able to excavate fully in the morning. But the next day she’d returned to find the site dug up, the bones scattered throughout the trench and grassy verge, some snapped, showing wear marks typical of a larger canine. Mira and her team had gathered the remaining bones and sent them to the university lab for later study and identification.
Sam surveyed the unremarkable trench. It looked like someone was digging a new flowerbed, nothing more exciting than that. He’d noticed Dean glancing at him from time to time, perhaps worried that Sam’s weird nightmares might surface in a place so full of death, but there were no rules to that particular gift or curse. Or maybe horror had an expiry date. In any case, Sam felt nothing out of the ordinary.
They thanked Mira and returned to the parking lot, Dean more slowly than Sam for once, a rare look on his face - not just thoughtful, but immersed to the point of dreaminess. Consequently, it was Sam who spotted what Dean would have usually noticed first.
“Hey,” Sam turned to Dean, who was coming up behind him as the heat wafted off the parked cars in a breeze so lazy it was a doldrum, shimmered in the growing kiln of a day. On the power pole beside the Impala, facing away from the car so they wouldn’t have seen it until they returned from this particular angle, was a homemade sign that relied far too heavily on different fonts for excitement.
LOST DOG
Have you seen Buttercup?
Much loved. Reward.
A phone number and a picture. Dean was dialing before Sam was finished reading.
--
It fit.
Elliot Farmer had told them that his kid had stopped eating for five days after Buttercup had taken off. Luckily, four-year-olds were forgetful types generally, though little Tyler had a stubborn streak. They had found a lot of food dropped under the table before they’d realized that Tyler wasn’t refusing food, it was just that his usual food disposal unit had run away on the evening of May 20th.
Run away, Elliot had stressed, his trim light brown beard framing an amiable face, not unlike a golden Lab himself, proving to Dean that people looked like their dogs. She hadn’t been stolen, she wasn’t lost. Elliot was certain that she’d had someplace to go, something in mind. Dean had bitten the inside of his mouth to stop from rolling his eyes. The things people believed about their pets.
Still, Elliot had paid top dollar for purebred Buttercup and he’d like to see her back, even though she was forever digging up the flowerbeds. The flowers had looked okay now, given a month’s reprieve from Buttercup’s attentions.
The Farmer family had looked for her, of course. She was the sweetest dog imaginable, full of tail wagging and licks and that silly smile that Labs got when they were happy. Maybe a little overweight, but that was to be expected. She would never hurt a fly.
“I think Buttercup’s dropped a few pounds,” Dean said as he pulled out onto Route 3, more famously known as the Plank Road, heading towards Chancellorsville.
“Jeez,” Sam shook his head, pulling out his map again. “A family dog. I mean, a real family dog. D’you see the kid?”
“Little Tyler?” Dean asked, rolling down the window. The car’s interior was unbearable, and he was having a hard time keeping a grip on the steering wheel, which might as well have been burnished with a blowtorch. “He’s gonna be bummed when Buttercup comes back with someone’s arm in her mouth.”
He’d expected Sam to laugh at that - it was the reason he’d said it, for god’s sake, Sam was way too serious today, and Dean didn’t like it when Sam got serious - but his brother was studying the countryside out the window, the heat of mid-day bleaching the vibrant greens gray as sagebrush.
“Buttercup’s not coming back,” Sam replied, after a long moment. “You’re gonna kill that dog, aren’t you?”
Dean didn’t like it, not one bit, that accusatory tone in Sam’s voice. He pushed the cassette already perched in the tape player and Bad Company blared through the speakers. He swore Brian Howe’s voice sounded burbly, as though the tape was melting.
“Sure am,” he affirmed, trying not to think of the kid.
They didn’t say anything else on the drive to the next battlefield. Dean hadn’t told Sam that they were going mostly because he was sure Sam would have a fit. After yesterday, the idea of another outing with the hardcores was unappealing in the extreme, wouldn’t have been tolerated by most thinking people and Sammy was a thinking person if he was anything. Dean - well, he considered himself something different. Not a feeling person, never that. A doing person, maybe.
And right now, what he was intent on doing was finding Beau and dragging his ass back to his place where they would likely spend the hottest day of the fucking year melting lead into bullets. Beyond the making of highly specialized bullets, he wanted a word with Beau about his real reasons for summoning them here, and he’d have to ditch Sam to do that properly. Working in Dean’s favor was the fact that Sam was not going to want to sit around while good old boys cast Civil War ordnance in a stifling hot garage decorated with Rebel Battle flags and curling photos of Confederate soldiers. Maybe he could drop Sam off at a nice museum or something. He’d mentioned that movie at the visitor center. That might do.
Finding Beau and his severely depleted 22nd on the Chancellorsville battlefield wasn’t easy, considering the site was huge and densely wooded. Coupled with the fact that Beau and his boys were hiding, of course. The brothers came around the corner of the ubiquitous Visitor Center and almost immediately joined a group of sweating tourists fanning themselves with NPS flyers as they milled around in front of yet another hideously graphic battlefield painting.
Dean took one look at the park guide about to start the walking tour and turned in the other direction. Sam blocked his way, and could see clear over Dean’s head, and his face was rapt. Dear god, now he was going to have to drag Sammy away from yet another educational experience. Near broke his heart every time.
“Welcome to Chancellorsville National Battlefield Park, everyone,” and Sam wasn’t responding to Dean’s cleared throat at all. “Over three days in early May 1863, these fields and woods saw one of the North’s greatest defeats and one of the South’s greatest tragedies. Today, I’ll take you from where Union General Hooker entrenched his superior numbers at the Chancellorsville estate to where Generals Lee and Jackson split their lesser numbers and surprised Hooker by initiating the attack. Many thousands of men died here in the thick woods to our right, but no death was more important to the South’s ultimate defeat than that of General Thomas ‘Stonewall’ Jackson, killed by what we would now call ‘friendly’ fire.”
Right, Dean thought. That’s where Beau will be, where this whole thing started. He pinched Sam on the fleshy part on the upper arm, hard. Let’s go, Historic Site Boy. Sam dipped his head, a protest dying on his lips as he saw the expression on Dean’s face.
Lucky there was signage for it, otherwise he’d have to ask Sam, and that would have been unpleasant. Sam didn’t question Dean’s direction, but made those little sighs that told Dean he thought that Dean was being a big fat jerk. They walked into the woods, a wide cleared dirt road leading them up to the Jackson Memorial. Sure enough, Beau and about ten of his comrades were just a little ways off from the stone cenotaph, almost right at the place where Stonewall Jackson had been shot by his own soldiers. Dean heard them first, cursing in era-appropriate fashion. Someone was getting called a golderned whoremonger for stepping out of line. They were drilling, evidently.
Beau might have been expecting them, because he didn’t look at all surprised as they came through the woods, which really were ridiculously thick, no wonder Jackson had been mistaken by his own troops, thinking that he was part of a Union advance. Good that Beau was expecting them, too, because the ten men whirled around, rifles coming off their shoulders, ready before Beau shouted “Halt!” and the guys all relaxed. Relaxed as much as they could, considering what they’d been through yesterday.
“Hey, Beau,” Dean called, raising his hand, hoping that he hadn’t jumped when the boys in gray had wheeled around, bristling. “Mind not firing on my ass just for walking through the woods? We’re not at war.” Not really, he might have added, seeing the expression in Beau’s eyes. “I hope those aren’t loaded.”
“Damn dog’s still around,” Riddicker said, and his big face was stony. Fair enough, after what had happened to Tim.
“Regular bullets aren’t going to stop it.” Blunt as a butterknife. “That’s why I’ve been trying to find you, Beau. I’ll drive you to your place and use your stuff to make something that’ll work.” He looked at the men, worried about their loaded guns, knew how crazy they could get. “You guys should take a break until we get back.” He tried not to grin, because of the guns, and he was standing in front of them in jeans and a t-shirt. A civilian, telling them to take it easy. “You could grab a coffee at the Visitor Center.” And couldn’t quite keep the smile away. “You still have some extra stuff, Beau?”
Now it was Beau’s turn to grin ear to ear and he looked like a fucking pirate, not a Confederate infantryman. “Sure do, pard. You suiting up?”
Dean let the moment linger before delivering the goods. “Nope. Sam is.”
--
Sam argued all the way back to the car, or would have, Dean was sure, except that they ran into the walking tour again and Dean didn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. He suggested that Sam could spend the next couple of hours watching whatever movie he liked at the Visitor Center, following any walking tour that appealed to him, could read every damn historical plaque on the grounds, which would probably take him until next Easter.
Sam folded like a Japanese fan, suddenly hiding his pattern, silent and pissed. Dean would have happily left him with the tour, except that he wanted to make sure Sam had the salt gun, and Sam had also left his knapsack in the trunk, which contained his cell phone. Dean didn’t want Sam thrashing about the woods with a ghost, a rabid dog, and armed men who thought they were living a hundred and forty years in the past without a means of communication and a weapon that at least seemed to make a dent in the ghost. Quite frankly, though, Dean was more worried about Buttercup, because those teeth were real.
“...and here is the location where Jackson was fired upon by North Carolina troops on the evening of May 2, mistaken as part of a Yankee offensive.” The park guide seemed as earnest as when they’d started. Some of the tourists were starting to flag, though. They perked up at the appearance of Beau in full drill gear. The guide didn’t miss a beat. “He was hit on the palm of his hand and twice in the arm, necessitating its removal. He died a week later. This despite the lucky bullet I mentioned before, the one he’d been given the year prior at Fredericksburg.”
Sam suddenly stopped, and Dean took three steps before he realized it, only noticed that Sam wasn’t beside him because he heard his brother’s voice behind him.
“Sorry,” and that was just like Sam, to interrupt a fucking tour, to need some kind of clarification, to ask why. “I missed that part of the tour. A lucky bullet?” And Sam was way too fucking smart, always had been, and Dean didn’t need him to hear about this, because he would hit the fucking roof. But unless Dean was willing to drag Sam bodily away, which presented its own problems, Sam was about get exactly what he wanted. Why’s the dog going for us, Dean? Fuck.
The park guide smiled bemusedly, perhaps a little ticked off that they were traveling in the company of a war reenactor, who had admittedly taken the attention of his otherwise attentive audience of suburban white folk.
“I’d be pleased to. Not a very well-known story, and likely apocryphal, because there’s no real evidence to back it up other than oral histories collected years after the fact. But back in December of 1862, a young soldier named Jubal Garrett from the North Carolina 11th Infantry was considered the luckiest man in the corps: he was practically bulletproof, they said. He traveled with a big dog that terrified the Yankees, and was cool as a cucumber under fire. The day before the Union assault on Marye’s Heights, Jackson reviewed the troops and is said to have had a conversation with Garrett, asked him what his secret was. Some claim he took Garrett’s lucky bullet when the young man offered it to him. You have to understand, Jackson was a very godly man. Some religious folks say that while it brought him victory in battle, it was the devil’s work. North Carolina bullets ended Jackson’s life, so maybe that much is true.”
The crowd laughed, and Dean knew that look on Sam’s face, the one that anyone else would think was merely amused, but that actually meant he was going to pitch a fit as soon as he got Dean alone. Dean started to back away from the tour group. Actually, he’d never heard the Jubal Garrett part of the story before, especially hadn’t heard about the fucking dog, but he knew about Jackson’s lucky bullet all right. Knew all about it.
“And, excuse me,” now Sam was getting insistent, and Dean had a pretty good idea that a) Sam would have been completely insufferable in a class full of freshman, and b) that Sam was going to give him an earful, maybe more.
The park guide, a middle aged man with little round glasses and a gentle smirk, raised his sandy eyebrows. “Yes?” Okay, more than a little annoyed.
“Did they find the lucky bullet on Jackson when he was hit?”
Sam, Sam, Sammy, leave it.
The guide’s face screwed up a little. “Well, he certainly wasn’t buried with it. There’s no mention about what happened to that bullet.”
“And what happened to Jubal Garrett?” There was nothing of curiosity in the voice now, and anyone bothering to listen would hear the anger. It was probably confusing the shit out of the park guide. A different kind of pilgrim baiting, Dean thought.
“His fellow soldiers say that he died the very next day, right after giving away his good luck token,” the park guide said. “But they never found his body, what with all the carnage at Marye’s Heights. The dog went wild and the Confederate troops had to shoot the poor beast.”
Dean had heard enough. Sam had definitely heard enough. Dean walked away, pulled out his phone and asked Beau what Mira’s number was. If he was on the phone, then Sam would have a chance to cool down. Except there was no way Sam was cooling down anytime soon and god alone knew Sam was capable of holding a fucking grudge for decades.
“Hey Mira, it’s Dean,” and he could hear Sam coming up behind him, felt sweat run down the middle of his back, it was at least four o’clock now, the hottest part of the goddamn day and Sam was going to crucify him when he put it all together, which wouldn’t take him... “Yeah, gotta favor to ask.” She was a reasonable girl. He smiled grimly at Sam, who was not smiling at all. “Can you bring those bones back to the dig?”
Turned out she wasn’t so reasonable. Finally, Sam extended his hand and raised his eyebrows. He didn’t look happy. Dean licked his lips, gave his brother the phone.
“Mira?” Sam said. “Sam here. It’s important. Beau’s told you about the ghost and you saw what the dog did to Tim. Just bring the bones. We have to end this.”
And how was that any different from what he’d just said? But apparently it was, because Sam arranged to meet Mira tomorrow, late afternoon - the university lab being locked up for the weekend - and she’d bring the box of bones. Sam clicked off the phone, handed it back to Dean wordlessly.
The Impala was on the far side of the lot, because there had been some shade there two hours ago. Now it stood exposed to the blazing sun, and Dean could commiserate, facing Sam like he was standing at the mouth of a blast furnace.
“Give me your keys, Dean,” Sam said quietly, proving beyond a doubt that not only was he mad, but he was smart.
Dean wiped his forehead, and his hand slid around some in the sweat. He glanced quickly to Beau, who looked so freakishly innocent he might have been a choirboy in a kepi. Slowly, Dean reached into his front pocket and pulled out the keys, weighed them in his hand. A chunk of lead hung there, a piece that to the inexperienced eye looked like a fishing weight, a lump of dark gray, heavy. Not much larger than a big marble. He kept them close, so Sam wouldn’t grab them.
“Lucky bullet, Dean?” Sam asked, but it wasn’t really a question. He went on to demonstrate that it wasn’t a question by filling in the silence. “I ought to...”
“To what, Sam?” Dean’s rule: never admit to being wrong, especially when you were really, really wrong.
“Where’d it come from?”
Dean wasn’t a squealer, never had been. He couldn’t look at Beau then without giving it away. So he just crossed his arms, kept hold of his keys, tucked them under his left elbow. He started walking towards the car, determined to ride it out. How the fuck was he supposed to explain it to Sam? When would have been the appropriate time? Until right this second, he wasn’t even completely sure himself. A hunk of dug lead, retrieved from the ground. With a metal detector. By Beau, on this battleground, who had done enough research, had the sense of where to look for things like this. He was a specialist, after all.
Dean ran his hand alongside the Impala, and it burned. Popping the trunk so Sam could get the salt gun and his pack, he then unlocked the driver’s door as Sam crowded him - loomed, maybe a better word would be, because Sam was fucking masterful at looming - and didn’t move at all. Dean tried ignoring him. He opened the door, but not all the way, because that would have involved shoving Sam to the side. Instead, he waited for Sam to shift, which he was pretty practiced at, really, the only kind of waiting he was good at.
Sam had that stupid clenching of the jaw thing going on that always made Dean think of gunslingers from old Westerns. If he didn’t watch it, Sam was going to clench himself into a knot, but apology wasn’t an option. He glanced at Beau, standing beside the nearby bushes, and he shrugged as if to say, ‘wasn’t me keeping a secret.’
Sam was struggling; Dean could see it plainly. “How long have you had it?” Hard to articulate with your jaw locked like that.
A shrug would have pushed Sam over the edge, but Dean considered it anyway. “Three years,” and swallowed. “You weren’t around then, Sam. Weren’t exactly in the sharing caring frame of mind.”
Sam unclenched enough to smile that awful smile he had when he was this furious. “Let me see it.” He held out his hand and Dean backed away from the open door, gestured to the trunk, the keys in his hand, catching the angled sun.
“Get your pack, Sam. Jackson’s bullet is all we need to get the dog to us. But we can’t kill it till I make the right bullet. So stop talking -“
“You knew!” Sam suddenly shouted, taking a step forward, away from the car. Dean circled round him, hoping to gently herd him toward the trunk through sheer tenacity and willpower.
He didn’t realize that he was getting angry too, didn’t recognize the signs. Because just then, despite his best intentions, he shrugged, turned it into an insult. Sam made a grab for the keys and Dean jumped back, crashing into the Impala, jamming his left shoulder onto the roof. Right where the stitches were and that hurt. The keys flew from his hand, landed on the car seat.
“Course I knew, Sam,” he said between gritted teeth, holding his shoulder and wondering how four small stitches could hurt so fucking much. Right then he really didn’t care how pissed his brother was. “What was I going to say? ‘Hi Sam, haven’t seen you in awhile, here’s my Stonewall Jackson lucky fucking bullet, let’s be friends again?’”
He never did find out what Sam thought he ought to have said, because at that moment Buttercup came crashing out of the bushes right beside Beau, who barely had time to blink, let alone warn them, and hurled herself at Dean. Except, no, not really at Dean, he was just in the way. She knocked him down - he was off-balance anyway, holding his shoulder and slightly bent at the waist - and blasted into the car like a line drive from a heavy hitter.
--
Stay down, wiggly fucking fucker. Outta my way. Stay still, waving it around like a fucking frisbee. You have no idea how fucked up you guys are...just stop fucking moving.
Sit. Stay. Shit, never worked for me, either.
Owww! Hands off! Drop it! Stop grabbing my ---
--
Dean, on the ground, yanked hard on the dog’s tail, trying to prevent it from getting into the car, though it was most of the way there by the time he got good purchase. Get the fuck outta my -
And yelped as the dog’s scrabbling paws - and what the hell that was doing to the leather interior he wasn’t going to consider just yet - dislodged something that came flying out like a rocket to glance off his cheekbone.
“Let go! Dean, let go!” he heard Sam yell on the hard edge of panic, loud enough it might as well be in his ear, and he stopped trying to drag the dog out of his car, hoped like hell that Sam or Beau or somebody had gotten a gun or an ax or something lethal from the open trunk, because as soon as he let go of that tail, the dog’s going to... “Roll, roll, ROLL!” Sam screamed at him, so he did, getting out of the way as Sam slammed the Impala’s door shut so hard the window rattled in its casing.
Dean, breathing hard, sat up, looked over his shoulder to see Buttercup going apeshit inside the Impala. He stared at Sam, who had a determined, calm set to his face now, watched as he bent his long ridiculous length and picked up the keys from the ground. Reaching up, Dean felt where the flung keys had hit him on the cheek. Sam stared at the keys in his hand, looking at the chunk of lead there, glanced over at the hysterics of the dog in the car, the Impala rocking with the ferocity of the barking and the jumping.
“What the fuck have you done?” Dean cried, unable to decide which was worse: the keys in Sam’s hands, or the rabid dog in the car.
“Given us time to think,” Sam replied, pushing his stupid long hair out of his narrowing eyes. Okay, still pissed. “To weigh options. Come up with a plan. Act with a strategy.” And Dean groaned, got to his feet, almost unable to think for the barking going on inside. In this heat, maybe the dog would bake. Nah. Possessed dogs didn’t die from ordinary bullets and they weren’t going to expire from heat exhaustion either.
“Dog like that could make a terrible mess of a car’s upholstery,” Beau observed, leaning down to peer through the window.
“Shut up,” both Winchesters said at the same time.
Coming up beside Beau, Sam gestured for him to move away, which he did. Slowly, Sam brought the keys to the window. Buttercup threw herself against them, a long glob of saliva messing the window as the clack of her teeth against the glass made Dean wince.
“So, the dog’s not after us in particular?” Sam asked him softly, almost maliciously.
“Not really,” Beau said, even though he’d been told to conduct himself otherwise. “After the bullet, I reckon.”
“Maybe we should let her have it,” Sam suggested, and met Dean’s stare. The voice of reason. “Maybe she’ll take the bullet to the ghost of Jubal Garrett, he’ll be at rest and this’ll all be over.”
Dean found that he couldn’t look at Sam anymore, couldn’t look at his smug sensibility. Buttercup was now attacking the steering wheel, chewing it. He didn’t know how much more he could take.
“Yep, only one problem with that plan, pard,” Beau said, undeterred by the combined Winchester death stares. “What happens to the dog? Still on the loose. And we still need to burn the bones, I’d say. I mean you could try it,” and he shrugged. “Just don’t see how it helps us catch the dog.”
“We’ve caught the dog!” Sam yelled, openly frustrated. Dean watched as he collected himself, but couldn’t really concentrate because Buttercup was repeatedly throwing herself against the driver’s side window and, holy shit...
Craaaaaack. A long thin line silvered across the window like forked lightning. Dean stepped forward, swearing at the dog with every curse he knew, which was not an inconsiderable set of words and phrases. He barely noticed when Sam came back from a trip to the trunk, pushed a salt gun into Dean’s hands, pulled him away from the window.
Dean heard Sam jingle the keys in his hand, his face still and focused. “Dean, get ready. On my count, Beau, open the door.”
“Are you fucking nuts?” Dean asked, but Beau was already there, and Buttercup was thrashing about and she was coming out, one way or another.
On Sam’s shouted ‘three’, Beau yanked open the door. Dean had the gun to his shoulder, the salt loaded and the hammer cocked, and Sam wound up like Roger Clemens on a good day twenty years ago and pitched the keys as far as he could.
--
Good boy, tall one, there’s a good boy. All over, just give me what I want, and this’ll be all over. Good boy, good boy. Don’t fucking tease.
So much movement, so many arms and legs and fingers, and the smell of blood on the wiggly one, wouldn’t mind taking a bite outta him. Stronger still, the smell of need and want and hunger. Hunger - just throw it, just throw it. Could almost see it, see it flying away making her heart want to follow. Just like that. Fast as a fucking squirrel.
And there.
--
She was gone. Into the underbrush, where they could hear her for a few seconds, then that too disappeared, replaced by the occasional outburst of heat bugs. A few minutes later, they heard a howl, far in the distance.
Dean leaned onto the car like it was a life raft in the North Atlantic, didn’t care how hot it was, how it hurt, even through his sweat-dampened t-shirt. After a long moment and with a heavy heart, he peered inside, bracing himself for the worst. The steering wheel was okay, though sticky with dog spit. The driver’s side seat, however, had several large rips in the leather, the cotton ticking and layers of 60s era padding seeping out like intestines from a cavity wound. He leaned in, not wanting to talk with anyone, the heat and his abused bullet wound and the Impala’s interior and the smell of dog combining to make him feel a little sick.
“Let’s go,” he heard Sam say behind him. He didn’t sound angry anymore. He sounded something else, and Dean couldn’t put his finger on what that was.
Straightening, wiping his face of more sweat, wishing he had some water, anything to drink, he looked at Sam, who had put the salt gun back in the trunk and slammed it shut.
“How?” Dean asked, his eyes following the trajectory of the thrown keys, which had landed god alone knew where in the dense underbrush. He turned to Sam, trying to find anger, but failing. “How?”
And Sam smiled lopsidedly, pulled his hand out of his pocket, placed Dean’s set of keys, lucky bullet and all, onto the palm of his brother’s hand. “Here’s Jackson’s lucky bullet. Let’s be friends.”
--
They stuffed the reenactor in the backseat where he belonged. Both brothers were a little tired of Beau, but Dean was right: they needed to make the bullet, fast. Sam imagined for a moment having a Get Smart Cone of Silence that he could put down over the front seats so Beau would just stay out of it, because Sam knew what was coming.
They weren’t even out the parking lot before it arrived. Dean at least cleared his throat, a warning. “Where’d the keys come from?”
Sam, window unrolled, trying not to breathe too deeply because a feral dog soaked in day old human blood trapped in a hot car stank in a truly indescribable way, sighed. “What? I can’t have keys?”
Dean’s sunburned nose wrinkled, whether from the stench or from Sam’s refusal, Sam didn’t know. “Just didn’t think...”
“I had a life, Dean,” he said quietly. “It involved an apartment, a bike lock, Jess’s car, her parents’ cabin up north, the padlock to the boathouse - “
Something in his voice must have made Dean uncomfortable; Sam could see his brother’s larynx cartilage jump up and down as he swallowed. Sam turned to the window again.
“Sorry,” Dean said, finally. Roughly. “I’m sorry.”
Sam waved his fingers in the breeze. “S’okay. Doesn’t matter.” He glanced over at Dean and their eyes met for moment before both of them looked away.
“I don’t get it,” Dean said in that long-suffering tone he sometimes got, but it was after a moment of consideration, his voice returning from whatever place he’d gone, sitting silently in the ripped seat. “Those keys weren’t important to you? Really?”
But he did get it, didn’t he, and he wasn’t really asking a question so much as giving an answer.
Sam thought about that. Thought about the place of things in your life that had no practical purpose anymore, that were all memory, the true purpose of which was only mined by stripping off layer from layer: metal keys, function, memory, feeling, meaning. Lawn, topsoil, packed earth, human remains. Bedrock. Knew what the meaning was for him, whether the keys were there or not.
He smiled lightly, but didn’t need to look at Dean. “Seemed more important to keep the keys we actually need.”
TBC
a/n: I’ve totally taken the biggest liberties with this part of my fic. Although Jackson was killed by friendly fire at Chancellorsville, and lots of Confederates but especially Union troops died at the Sunken Road, the story of the ‘lucky bullet’ is just that - a story, completely fabricated by me. Jackson was so religious, I doubt he had anything ‘luckier’ than a cross. Also, the names of the various brotherly soldiers I mentioned are also fictitious, though brothers fighting brothers on the same battlefield certainly wasn’t.