Fic: The Drift of Things
Title: The Drift of Things
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Sam, Dean. Genfic.
Word count: ~ 6000
Summary: Is the current mytharc leaving you cold? Are you missing the simpler days of Season Two? If so, this is the series for you. Story summary: Brotherly banter, a hunt gone slightly bad, and Sam’s psychic abilities going in a more than slightly unwelcome direction.
Author’s notes: This is chronologically the first story in my ‘ The Woods are Lonely’ ’verse. You need no familiarity with the other stories to understand this one. Further author’s notes under the cut.
Additional Notes: The ‘Woods are Lonely’ ’verse is set in what I’m calling an off-canon Season Two; off-canon rather than AU because it deviates from the real SPN world only in its different spin on Sam’s psychic abilities. While I’ve tried not to depart from what we’ve learned about the characters over time, the brotherly dynamics here are set firmly in what they were a few years ago, not in the past two seasons. Feedback is welcome.
The title is from the last stanza of Robert Frost’s “Reluctance:”
Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?
Whew! That’s enough notes. Let’s move on to the story, shall we?
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Fairborn, Ohio
August 5, 2006
“Ghoul!” Dean announced.
“You’re the morbid one, man. I’m just doing research.” Sam reached up to block Dean’s swat before he heard the swish of the newspaper, because originality? Not Dean’s strong suit.
Dean craned his neck to look at the page of death’s-head symbols Sam had been studying. “Little late for that now, isn’t it?”
“Let it go, Dean.” Sam snapped the book closed and hopped off the car’s hood. “What’ve you got?”
Dean pointedly rubbed away Sam’s handprints with his sleeve before spreading a map over the warm metal. “A pattern of graverobbing,” he said, tracing his finger over a yellow line marked with X’s that angled halfway down the state of Ohio. “It goes on in one place for a few weeks, then stops and picks up somewhere else. No big deal, until...”
He handed Sam the newspaper. Sam skimmed over the story about vandalism and a missing maintenance worker in a Springfield graveyard. No direct leads; police were blaming Satanists. Thank God for Satanists, because their jobs would be a hell of a lot harder if the police ever dug deeper for answers.
“I found a report of another missing cemetery worker north of Columbus, about six weeks ago,” Dean added. “Two different cities-the police didn’t put it together.”
Sam frowned at the paper, sifting through the clues. Ghouls had been known to hunt their prey, but they were mostly carrion-eaters and not too picky about the condition of the corpses. “I dunno, man. What made them branch out to fresh kills?”
Dean tapped the map. “The place before the last one, Wilmot? It’s a green cemetery.”
Green cemetery. Meaning natural burial, meaning…“No embalming,” Sam concluded.
“Circle of life, Sammy. You die, you get planted in a cardboard box, and you turn some ghoul on to organic food.” Dean folded up the map and stacked the papers on top of it. “So unless you saw another death’s head last night...”
“Let it go, Dean.” Sam opened the passenger door and clambered into the car. “Springfield it is.”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Springfield, Ohio
August 5, 2006
“This place doesn’t even have wireless,” Sam said incredulously as he tried to get to his e-mail. It was a few blocks from a tavern, which was the draw for Dean. The last job had been in a place too podunk for an easy pickup, and they’d been run out of the town before that too soon for Dean to follow up on the bartender’s flirting. Come hell or high water, Dean was determined to break his dry spell tonight.
Dean leaned closer to the mirror above the dresser and rubbed his chin. “Maybe I should shave.”
“For a ghoul? You frighten me.” Refreshing the browser for the third time didn’t work any better than it had the first two.
“Nah, chicks dig stubble,” Dean decided.
“I don’t even want to know how you can tell if a ghoul is a chick.” Sam gave up on the laptop, leaving himself nothing to stare at but the almost nauseatingly bright floral pattern on the wallpaper. “Did you hear what I just said?”
“No wireless,” Dean repeated as he checked the pay-per-view flyer. “No porn either. I can pick up a skin mag on the way back if you want to have some Sam time when I’m at the bar,” he offered.
Sam wrinkled his nose at the cloying smell as Dean shoved a basket of potpourri drenched in rose oil in his direction to clear room on the table for the weapons bag. Who’d’ve guessed that Springfield had once been the ‘Rose Capital of the World?’
“What did you do with the diagram illustrating ‘personal boundaries’ that I drew for you last week, and on the way back from where?” he asked, watching Dean transfer supplies from the large duffel into his backpack.
Dean shook a can of lighter fluid to check how much was left and tossed it into his pack. “Threw it away when you were in the john, and on the way back from the job. I’m taking this one solo,” he answered.
“What? No.” Tempting, because there’s only so much of your life you can spend within a ten-foot radius of someone else, but still a bad idea. “You shouldn’t go without backup.”
Dean snorted. “Dude, it’s a ghoul. A twelve-year-old could take one. You know that.”
“Yeah, and I know that other twelve-year-olds went to the amusement park for their birthdays,” Sam parried. “What I don’t know is that it isn’t a pack.”
“Two missing people in six weeks? The only kind of pack that could be is a Weight Watchers’ group.” Dean pulled out a shotgun and a semiautomatic, tilted his head in thought, and went with the pistol. “Unless you had a shining?”
Sam sighed and fished a few clips out of the larger duffel. “Remember the conversation we had last time you asked me that question?” he prompted as he handed over the ammo.
“The”-Dean raised his voice to an unnecessarily high falsetto-“‘I’ve been hunting since I was ten years old, Dean, Dad taught me everything he knew, same as you, Dean, and I’m not a goddamn EMF meter, Dean,’ conversation?”
“That’s the one.”
Dean finished loading the backpack and zipped it up. “What about it?”
Okay, Sam could live with Dean being somewhere else for a couple hours. Some days a little Dean went a long way, and this was one of those days. “Go,” he said. “Get out of my hair.”
Dean gave his hair a pained look. “Hustler, Playboy, or Playgirl?”
“I don’t need porn to have Sam time!”
“Chill, dude. I just thought you’d want to read the articles.” Dean shouldered his bag and reached for the doorknob. “Maybe you could catch some shuteye while I’m gone. Try to fine-tune your antenna,” he suggested, and made his escape before Sam could reply.
Since their encounter with the demon right before Dad’s death, Sam’s dreams had grown sharper, more vivid, and more frequent. Some had been nothing, one had been about another psychic, and three had led them to regular jobs. Four if you included the incident in California, but his nighttime vision of a grinning, ghostly white skull hovering over the place of a haunting was so misleading that he was writing it off as sheer coincidence.
“Why would a poltergeist move into a Jack-in-the-Box anyway?” Sam bitched. He slammed down the gas pedal, flying down the 101, eager to put Goleta behind them. “It’s just tacky.”
Dean shrugged philosophically and snagged another of Sam’s curly fries. “Maybe that freaky clown CEO attracts hostility.”
Sam tapped his fingers on the table and considered his options. He could head out in search of a Starbucks with neutral wallpaper and a wireless network. He could look for a grocery store selling food that hadn’t been processed three times over. ‘Sam time’ would be better with a skin mag because not wanting cheap sex wasn’t the same thing as losing appreciation for the beauty of the female form. Or he could just stop hiding and face the inevitable. With a groan, Sam stretched out on the bed and closed his eyes.
A lot of people can’t remember if their dreams are in color or black and white. Sam knew that his were tinged with red, and nightmare or not, they always tasted of ash. It was nightmares tonight. They began with the familiar: the sickening splatter of blood dripping on his face; the heat of flames taunting him as they devoured a blonde woman’s body; the flash of yellow eyes in the shadowed face of a figure standing over a crib. Then new images that were unfamiliar but no less disturbing. A perfect circle of dead trees in a pine forest, blasted and charred but still standing as sentries around a moss-covered cairn. An old-fashioned ceramic doll tossed carelessly in a dusty attic. A group of stone huts, houses of death, the iron door of one already open like a gaping maw. A rusty creak as the door of another swung wide and something moved within it.
Sam jerked himself out of sleep, grabbed a pen and paper, and scribbled notes on the fragmentary images and words that vanished as quickly as he jotted them down. He stared at the last phrase-‘death house’-as the stone huts flashed through his mind again. They weren’t huts, he realized: they were mausoleums.
Ghouls were subhuman but cunning, and a pack that mostly fed on bodies in mausoleums could hide its numbers for a long time. He lunged for his phone and hit the speed-dial for Dean’s cell. No answer. Silent running-the hunt was on.
Sam grabbed the shotgun and a handful of shells, and bolted for the door.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
A distant gunshot told him which way to run as he jumped from his stolen Toyota. He charged over little knolls and past small memorial ponds towards the back of the graveyard, until the first of several gray structures loomed into view. Sam skidded up to it. Plastering himself against the wall, he crept forward and spun around the corner to the front, shotgun trained into the open door. The splintered wood of decayed and broken coffins lay in the dust along with piles of bones-ones too desiccated to be worth gnawing on thrown in corners, and fresh ones scattered throughout the small room.
Too many fresh ones. God knew where the bodies came from, but the taxpayers of Springfield weren’t getting a good return on their investment in law enforcement, because more than one person had gone missing in the couple weeks. A lot more. And somewhere in the cemetery was a pack of ghouls who liked their meat the natural way.
He barreled toward the sound of another shot and picked up the trail immediately. Dead ghoul sprawled out across two graves, dead ghoul crumpled against a weeping willow, dead ghoul at the base of a stone angel. Sam rounded another mausoleum, hugging the wall for cover. Opposite it was a living ghoul-well, animate ghoul-on the ground, claws lashing up toward his brother. Dean pinned the flailing arm under his foot, his bloodied face set in stone, and shot it point-blank.
Whatever his flaws may have been, Dean was one hell of a monster hunter.
Dean didn’t see him at the other side of the stone structure. Something else had caught his eye-yet another ghoul coming out of a cluster of trees about fifteen yards down. The reaction was as automatic as breathing now: Sam ducked back, sighted his target, and fired at the same instant Dean did. The report ringing off the wall nearly deafened him, but the thing dropped.
His brother ejected the ammo clip from his weapon and reached into his jacket for another, scanning around the direction the ghoul had come from. His movements were efficient but unhurried; it looked like he’d gotten the last of them. An auditory burst of memory came back from Sam’s dream, though: the screech of a rusty hinge and the scrape of iron on stone. He looked around frantically, eyes lighting on a mausoleum to his other side. The door was already open.
“Dean!” he hollered, rounding the corner of his shelter. Just as his brother’s head jerked around, something strong and unspeakably foul-smelling struck Sam from behind. The force of the blow added to his own momentum hurled him off his feet. He crashed hard on his right side, gun flying out of his hand, the wind knocked out of him, and half his body screaming in pain.
A concussion of terror followed on the heels of the crash: blind, stark, paralyzing fear. The weight of it crushing his chest stifled all efforts to breathe. Dean’s shock-widened eyes were on him, not his pistol, and his hands faltered. As Sam finally gasped in a heaving breath Dean shook himself and swung back into action, slamming the clip home as the ghoul tensed to pounce. Sam tamped down that overwhelming fear enough to lunge for his own weapon, but his leg gave way beneath him. Gritting his teeth, he tried to stretch out his hand for it. His arm didn’t move.
The seconds Dean had lost reloading were seconds too many. As he lifted the pistol there was the slash of another claw, a violent blow, and Dean was crashing against a headstone with a ‘crack.’
“Dean!” Sam bellowed.
That pulled the creature’s attention back to him, at least, and a layer of Sam’s fear peeled away when Dean looked toward him-but no, his face was slack, and his head had only rolled as he lost consciousness.
Instinct and adrenaline kicked in. Sam threw himself into a roll, grabbing the gun as he went, letting the momentum carry him as he pointed the weapon at the creature and fired. Thank God for the wide scatter pattern on a shotgun-his left-handed aim was lousy, but the shot was enough to finish the ghoul off. He dropped the gun, retched at the redoubled agony in his shoulder, and collapsed on his back, panting, until it subsided enough to move.
Then he crawled to his brother’s side. “Dean!”
Dean groaned. “Indoor voices, Sammy.”
“Hey, hey,” Sam urged, glancing nervously over his shoulder. “Can you move?”
Dean blinked at him. “No.” And he was out again.
“Fuck.” Sam felt at the misshapen lump of his shoulder, tried to move the arm again, and got a fresh burst of pain for his trouble. Hissing, he rotated the joint until it popped back into its socket and tested his leg. He was mobile, but no way could he get Dean out of here except under his own steam.
He slumped forward with his chin on his knees, eyes scanning the cemetery, and rummaged around in his mind for anything to distract him from his shoulder while he waited. ‘The difference between a “Woman in White” apparition and a “hitchhiker ghost” is that the latter is usually benign and the former malevolent,’ he recited inwardly. ‘The 1943 Supreme Court ruling in “West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette” outlawed mandatory recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools.’ ‘“Excruciating”’ is an adjectival participle deriving from the Latin verb excrucio, meaning “to torture” or “to break on the rack.”’ Sam tried to conjugate the verb, got stuck on the imperfect subjunctive, and gave up.
A faint prickle came across the back of his neck, like when you sense someone behind you, and he heard a whispered “Sammy?”
His head jerked up. “Yeah. You okay?”
Dean shifted. “Are you crying, Sammy?”
“What? No.” He sniffed experimentally, swiped the back of his hand across his eyes, and found them damp. “Oh. Maybe a little.”
A sparring buddy of Sam’s in college once remarked that one benefit of being a black belt was that you could say you liked the color pink without anyone thinking you were a sissy. The Winchester equivalent was that after you’d walked a mile on a hand-splinted compound fracture, it was okay to admit that crushing pain made your eyes sting.
Not that he’d walked it alone.
That had been a good day for their father-they found him sober and absorbed in his journal when they made it back. He knelt before Sam to look at the injury while Dean recounted how the branch Sam had shimmied onto while reaching for a strix nest had broken under his weight. Sam scrubbed furiously at his eyes: he was thirteen, way too old for crying, but even when Dean was all but carrying him the agony had grown with every step.
“It’s all right, Sammy,” his father had said gently, pulling his hands away from his face. “All that matters is that you didn’t quit.” Though still quiet, his voice grew sterner as he directed his next comment to his elder son. “You shouldn’t have let him go up there.”
Dean stood there in his black leather jacket, his long hair half-pulled out of the tieback he wore while hunting, hands shoved so deep into his pockets that the spiked bracelet on his wrist was barely visible, and looked down. “Yes, sir,” he replied stoically, taking the blame that wasn’t his. Dean could face down anything in this world or the next, except for their father.
Before Sam could demand his share of responsibility, though, Dad grinned. “Couldn’t stop him, could you?” Without waiting for an answer, he squeezed Sam’s hands. “Sam, when I’m not there you have to listen to your brother.”
He stood and lifted Sam as easily as he had when he’d been six years old. “You’re going to be fine. That was a good work on the splint, Dean.”
Pain exploded in Sam’s shoulder. He choked back bile, his head swimming too much to stay steady, before he realized that dizziness hadn’t thrown him off-balance. Dean had wrapped an arm around him and was drawing him into a hug.
“Dean!” he yelped.
The grip didn’t let up. “It’s okay, Sammy,” Dean shushed him. His voice was lighter than it had been in years, and Jesus, he was trying to tuck Sam against his side. It would have been comical if it weren’t so excruciating. Sam leaned in out of sheer self-defense, and the pressure stopped.
“We should go,” he said without any expectation of a satisfactory response. He got none except for a reassuring murmur and the press of Dean’s cheek, tacky with drying blood, against his own. Confusion was normal with a head blow: Sam checked his watch to time it and settled in to wait some more. His brother was addled, but his body was as solid and his presence as reassuring as ever.
“How did we get here, Dean?” Sam asked, less because he cared about the existential dilemma and more because it seemed that a jaded and world-weary comment was at least a token effort to counterbalance the fact that a grown man wanted to snuggle against his older brother like a five-year-old. All evidence to the contrary, some little part of Sam’s subconscious still clung to the belief that nothing could harm him within the circle of his brother’s arm, and it was surprisingly hard not to relax into his embrace. Instead, though, he maneuvered the shotgun into a better position. If a ghoul wandered by, he would sneer something Clint Eastwood-like before dispatching it to where it would tell no tales.
Since infancy, if family photos and Dad’s reminiscences were true, it was all but hard-wired into him to feel safe with Dean. The tactile memory he felt now didn’t evoke what passed for safety these days: the confidence that a salt circle and the vigilance of his battle-hardened partner meant that he could rest a few hours in peace. Rather, it was the nearly forgotten safety of the time before he knew about monsters, of the time when he had a child’s absolute faith that his brother could protect him from any danger.
Dean murmured something to soft to hear, and Sam swallowed hard. Nostalgia is worthless, but Sam would have given everything he owned to feel that way again, just for a few minutes. And he’d give everything he had and more for Dean to. Both had lost something when they outgrew that innocent belief that Dean could keep Sam safe, but Dean’s loss was the greater: Sam had shed his desire to be taken care of along with his milk teeth and baby fat, but Dean had never escaped the need to be somebody’s protector. Even now, it was almost tangible.
Not almost-it was. Sam couldn’t explain or define it, but the emotion was palpable...just as palpable as that shock of fear that had hit him when Dean saw him thrown to the ground. Fear that had been snuffed out when Dean lost consciousness.
Oh, God.
He did not need this. He did not want this. He had no clue what this was, but he was totally against it. Sam groaned and got another yelp-inducing squeeze for his trouble.
First things first-they were getting out of here.
The obvious solution-“Dean, we need to go”-got no reaction. Neither did “Dean, we really need to go,” so he tried a different tack.
“Dean?” he asked, pitching his voice to a higher, child-like level.
Dean hugged him again and he choked. “Yeah, Sammy?”
“Can we go back to Dad now?” he asked, slipping out of his brother’s embrace. His voice didn’t go that high anymore. “I don’t like it here. I want to go back to Dad.”
“Sure, Sammy,” Dean told him. He moved as if to stand, wobbled, and sat back down hard. He didn’t try to get up again.
“Please?” Sam slid his hand into Dean’s and pulled out the big guns: “I’m scared, Dean.”
Dean’s hand tightened around his hard enough for his ring to bite. “It’s okay, Sammy. I’ll take care of you.” This time he managed to stand, and reached back down to grasp Sam’s arm and pull him up. Sam bit back another cry of pain.
“I can walk,” he whined, though he used Dean’s arm for leverage as he rose. If he had to keep up that voice thing much longer, he’d be looking for chamomile tea instead of coffee in the morning. Or straining a vocal cord and ending up with a high pitch that might be soothing coming from a middle-aged female psychic, but was likely to make people give him odd looks before sidling a step backward. “Let’s just go back to Dad.”
Dean heaved the put-upon sigh of big brothers everywhere. “Okay.”
He cajoled, nagged, and manipulated Dean back toward the car. By the time they reached the cemetery gates Sam had walked off the worst of the pain in his leg, and Dean was having flashes of lucidity.
“What happened?” he asked during one of them.
“There was a pack,” Sam informed him.
“Oh.” They reached the Impala. “Did I finish it off?”
“No, dumbass, I finished it off.” Sam figured they could quibble about minutiae like body counts and credit due when Dean had recovered enough to count without needing his fingers.
“Good job, Sammy,” Dean said vaguely as he staggered toward the driver’s side, fumbling in his pocket.
“Uh-uh. I’m driving.”
Bundling Dean into the passenger seat was relatively easy; starting the car and shifting hurt like a sonovabitch. Worse, Dean lost the momentum they’d gained once he slumped into the seat and closed his eyes. When they pulled into the parking lot a few minutes later, something in his concussed brain had decided that they’d made it to safety, and no amount of wheedling produced anything more than a drowsy, grunted, “Go ’way, Sam.”
Well, wheedling wasn’t the only way to get Dean mobile. Dean had two bone-deep instincts: to protect Sam, and...
“Move it, Dean!” he barked in a credible imitation of their father’s voice.
Dean jumped awake. “Yes, Dad.”
They staggered up the stairs like a couple of drunks-at least, Sam hoped that’s how they looked-and he jimmied the lock to their room because he’d left the key behind. That was a bitch left-handed too-Dean had trained himself to be passably ambidextrous, but Sam was not. What the motel lost in crappy security, though, it made up for in a decent-sized bathroom, and Sam maneuvered Dean in. He could sit up on his own, but his eyes were closed again and his head nodded down onto Sam’s shoulder. Sam let it rest there, and if he was holding him tighter than was needed to steady him, well, Dean was too out of it to notice.
“Dad?” his brother mumbled. “Where’s Sammy?”
Sam released his clasp on Dean’s shoulder. “Sammy’s right here,” he said. Dean pulled back a little, blinking, and Sam could see the pieces falling back into place. “Sammy’s all grown up,” he continued. “He’s six inches taller than you, a better bow hunter, and he goes by ‘Sam’ now.”
“Six inches?” Dean’s voice was weak, but back to normal. “In your dreams, man.”
Sam grinned. “Better than asking who the president is.” Dean wasn’t above entertaining himself by giving bizarre answers to diagnostic questions, and besides, Sam wasn’t sure his brother knew who the president was when ‘Saturday Night Live’ was in reruns. You can’t withstand the mind-numbing tedium of life on the road without learning to screen out things that bore you to tears. For Sam, that was Sally Jessy Raphael and the state of Idaho; for Dean, it was politics.
“And even if you were a better bow hunter,” Dean grumbled, “it’d be because I taught you everything you know.”
“Keep telling yourself that, Dean.” He backed away and held up the index finger of his left hand. “Track my finger,” he ordered.
“Which one?”
Sam glared. “Track my finger or I’ll start a round of painful prodding and asking, ‘Does this hurt?’”
Dean rolled his eyes, probably just to show that he could. “I’m fine, dude,” he said.
“No, you’re concussed,” Sam corrected, “and I need to figure out how bad it is.” He moved his hand in a steady motion when Dean focused. “Are you dizzy? Nauseous? How old am I?”
“A little, no, twenty-three, and screw you.”
“Painful prodding, Dean,” Sam warned. Dean’s pupils were fine, his tracking was fine...“You’re fine,” Sam pronounced.
“Told you.” Dean felt the back of his head and narrowed his eyes. “What’s wrong with your arm?”
“Dislocated my shoulder. I popped it back in,” Sam answered, rubbing gingerly at the sorest spot. The people of Clark County must be pretty damned high in protein if a ghoul could throw him. “You’ll have to do your own bandages.”
“Bandages?” Dean asked. When Sam gestured at his face he touched his cheek and looked at the blood that came away on his fingertips. “Tell me the truth, Sam. What about my rakish good looks?”
“You can always grow a beard,” Sam told him.
Dean reared back in horror. Sam kept his poker face for as long as he could, but Dean had always been the better player. “Cute, Sammy,” he said, and his balance was good enough to push himself up and shove Sam away from the mirror so he could get a good look at the bloody but shallow claw marks.
“I didn’t say you needed to,” Sam pointed out.
Dean extended his index finger and jabbed Sam in his injured shoulder.
“Ow!”
“Does that hurt?” Dean asked innocently. “Just trying to figure out how bad it is.”
Sam tossed a wet washcloth squarely at his brother’s chest and started cleaning the scrapes and smudges of Dean’s blood that had gotten on his own cheek. Next to him, Dean did the same. They had the routine down pat: iodine and the box of bandages where they could both reach thm, taking turns at the mirror, talking over any loose ends in the job. Like, what to do with the bodies and whether or not they’d gotten all the ghouls.
“If we’re lucky, we missed one,” Sam said. Ghouls didn’t get on the move unless they had the cover of a full night ahead of them; if they were lucky, a lone survivor would have dragged the corpses back into a mausoleum to cannibalize as it waited for the next sunset. It’s rare to find a prey that cleans up after itself.
“We’ll sweep the whole place for more dens in the morning,” Dean decided. “How’d you know it was a pack anyway?”
Sam avoided meeting his brother’s eyes in the mirror. “I dreamed it.”
“Huh,” Dean answered, which was pretty much all there was to say. Except, it wasn’t.
Sam eased into it. “You panicked when you saw me go down,” he said.
Dean snorted and tilted his head to study a cut on his cheek. “You dreamed that one wrong. I don’t panic.”
“I didn’t dream it.” Sam watched Dean wash the grave dirt from the cut. “I felt it,” he said, mumbling the words like they wouldn’t be as real if said aloud. “I, uh, sensed what you were feeling.”
Dean froze in place for a second. Then he threw the washcloth into the sink with a splat. “Goddammit, Sam,” he barked, “I can take a lot from you, but you’d better not be reading my mind.”
“Dean!” Sam protested, stung and okay, a little scared. “It was just a couple flashes, and it’s gone, okay? I don’t want to be in your grubby little brain any more than you do.”
Dean clenched his fingers around the porcelain basin, head turned away from Sam, and yeah, Sam would be freaked too, but…
“C’mon, man,” Sam said, hearing a trace of that little boy’s plea in his tone. It’s not my fault, I’m not a freak, don’t look at me like that, I can’t handle this without you….“I can’t help it.”
Dean rolled the tension out of his shoulders and reached for the antibiotic ointment-the producers of Neosporin, Sam thought randomly, would never go out of business with the Winchesters around. “You should ice your shoulder,” Dean told him, dabbing the cream on his claw marks.
Sam waited for his brother to speak, to look at him, hell, for any token sign of reassurance that Dean wasn’t going to deal by shoving him away. After a moment of silence, he turned to leave the bathroom in defeat.
“Sam?” Dean said from behind him.
Sam looked over his shoulder. “Yeah?”
Dean turned his head from side to side to study his handiwork. “My brain is not little.”
Twenty minutes later Sam had his arm in a sling and was pacing restlessly, holding a cold pack to his shoulder. Dean was sprawled out on what had been Sam’s bed, boots still on, and squinting at the dream diary.
“Doll, attic, forest, yeah, that’s useful,” he said, flipping through the pages. “Couldn’t you at least get a state?”
Sam stopped pacing and started glaring. “If you don’t like the way I have visions, you can have the next one,” he said.
Dean ignored him. “Cairn, and death house,” he finished.
“You can cross the last one off.”
Dean made a show of studying the words. “I dunno, man. It might be ‘Demon Mouse,’” he said with that glint in his eyes. “Are we going back to Cali?”
“Let it go, Dean,” Sam said. “And demons know better than to fuck with Disney.”
Dean tossed the notebook back down next to a vase of artificial sweetheart roses. Never one to put things off, he shoved himself up from the bed and started mixing a couple Molotov cocktails in case they found another den. The smell of ethanol overpowered the sickly sweet scent of the potpourri; Sam almost wished it didn’t.
“I’m not going to be able to stop, you know,” he said. “Not as long as the visions keep coming.”
Dean’s hands paused. “I thought you said you didn’t want to stop.”
“Yeah, but you’re right, I’ll never be able to square things with Dad, and I didn’t stop wanting…other things.” Sam trailed off. As near as he could tell Dean hadn’t figured out that things weren’t what he cared about, and he didn’t want to open the door to that conversation.
Dean corked the bottles; they’d stuff the rags in tomorrow. “You don’t need visions to know what’s out there, Sammy.”
“Yeah, I know.” Sam put down the icepack and pressed his cold fingers against his aching temple. For two years he’d told himself that there were plenty of ways to do good in the world that don’t involve isolation, danger, and ending the day with three different blood types on your face. It was past time to accept for once and for all that the world didn’t need him to do that good.
“Why don’t you get some sleep?” he suggested, cracking open the window. Muggy heat flooded in but the smell drifted out; it was too late at night for them to worry about a passerby noticing. “I’ll keep watch.”
“For ghouls? They’re not coming after us,” Dean scoffed. When Sam didn’t move, he shrugged and started undressing. “Suit yourself, but we’re going to be up at first light torching those things.”
“I’ll be awake enough to tell you where to drag the bodies,” Sam promised.
Dean considered the two beds and took the one his boots hadn’t been on. “You’ve got one good arm.”
“Which I will use to point to where you should drag the bodies.” Sam ran his hand through his hair. “Go to sleep, Dean. I’m okay.”
He waited for Dean’s breathing to even into the rhythm of sleep before he picked up the shotgun and drifted over to a spot facing the door. They had to find a new job, and soon. Sam couldn’t live off the rush of the kill alone; it was different when there was a face to the task, a real person being saved when he and Dean were doing what only they could do.
So they’d look for a new job, and just on principle, he’d pick it. He’d learn to take pleasure in the hunt itself, he’d savor the fleeting human connections made on jobs, and if the need for a more physical connection grew too strong, he’d learn to chase the ghost of love in bars and run-down clubs among the equally lonely...No, someone equally discontented. Whatever else a future of hunting with Dean would be-annoying, sometimes exhilarating, quite possibly maddening-it wouldn’t be lonely.
Dean groaned in his sleep and rolled over. Sam winced but figured it was better to let him sleep. Nightmares never killed anyone.
He bonked his head against the wall because Dean wasn’t awake to do it. God, what a stupid thought.
Fingering his weapon’s stock, he sidled a few feet over to another random spot. He was making his peace with this life right here, right now. Tomorrow, it’d be out of his system for good. Tomorrow they’d finish the job and move on to the next one. No problem, no mistakes.
Not tomorrow, at least. Someday, there would be. It could be next week, next month, or years down the road, but someday he wouldn’t be quick enough or Dean wouldn’t be strong enough; his shot would miss its mark or Dean’s cunning would fail, and that would be the end of them. Or, worse, the end of one of them. Sam slid down to sit with his back propped against the wall, the shotgun resting across his knees, and settled in for a long, dark night of the soul. What had become of his life, that his greatest hope was that he and his brother would go out together?
Yeah, Dean, I’m crying.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Additional author’s notes:
Readers might notice that the structure of this story nearly duplicates that of The Bridge from Lawrence to Rockford. That is because it was initially one story that got broken into two. Also, I’ve never put an inaccurate detail in a fic in my life, but I couldn’t find out whether a concussion can really knock fifteen years out of someone’s head. Apologies for any inaccuracies; it was necessary for plot reasons.
Comments are welcome; hell, I'd be happy just to know that someone read it. All my fic can be found here.
I'll be damned if I can figure out why the font changes mid-paragraph above, so apologies for that too. All I know is that I can't fix it.
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Sam, Dean. Genfic.
Word count: ~ 6000
Summary: Is the current mytharc leaving you cold? Are you missing the simpler days of Season Two? If so, this is the series for you. Story summary: Brotherly banter, a hunt gone slightly bad, and Sam’s psychic abilities going in a more than slightly unwelcome direction.
Author’s notes: This is chronologically the first story in my ‘ The Woods are Lonely’ ’verse. You need no familiarity with the other stories to understand this one. Further author’s notes under the cut.
Additional Notes: The ‘Woods are Lonely’ ’verse is set in what I’m calling an off-canon Season Two; off-canon rather than AU because it deviates from the real SPN world only in its different spin on Sam’s psychic abilities. While I’ve tried not to depart from what we’ve learned about the characters over time, the brotherly dynamics here are set firmly in what they were a few years ago, not in the past two seasons. Feedback is welcome.
The title is from the last stanza of Robert Frost’s “Reluctance:”
Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?
Whew! That’s enough notes. Let’s move on to the story, shall we?
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Fairborn, Ohio
August 5, 2006
“Ghoul!” Dean announced.
“You’re the morbid one, man. I’m just doing research.” Sam reached up to block Dean’s swat before he heard the swish of the newspaper, because originality? Not Dean’s strong suit.
Dean craned his neck to look at the page of death’s-head symbols Sam had been studying. “Little late for that now, isn’t it?”
“Let it go, Dean.” Sam snapped the book closed and hopped off the car’s hood. “What’ve you got?”
Dean pointedly rubbed away Sam’s handprints with his sleeve before spreading a map over the warm metal. “A pattern of graverobbing,” he said, tracing his finger over a yellow line marked with X’s that angled halfway down the state of Ohio. “It goes on in one place for a few weeks, then stops and picks up somewhere else. No big deal, until...”
He handed Sam the newspaper. Sam skimmed over the story about vandalism and a missing maintenance worker in a Springfield graveyard. No direct leads; police were blaming Satanists. Thank God for Satanists, because their jobs would be a hell of a lot harder if the police ever dug deeper for answers.
“I found a report of another missing cemetery worker north of Columbus, about six weeks ago,” Dean added. “Two different cities-the police didn’t put it together.”
Sam frowned at the paper, sifting through the clues. Ghouls had been known to hunt their prey, but they were mostly carrion-eaters and not too picky about the condition of the corpses. “I dunno, man. What made them branch out to fresh kills?”
Dean tapped the map. “The place before the last one, Wilmot? It’s a green cemetery.”
Green cemetery. Meaning natural burial, meaning…“No embalming,” Sam concluded.
“Circle of life, Sammy. You die, you get planted in a cardboard box, and you turn some ghoul on to organic food.” Dean folded up the map and stacked the papers on top of it. “So unless you saw another death’s head last night...”
“Let it go, Dean.” Sam opened the passenger door and clambered into the car. “Springfield it is.”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Springfield, Ohio
August 5, 2006
“This place doesn’t even have wireless,” Sam said incredulously as he tried to get to his e-mail. It was a few blocks from a tavern, which was the draw for Dean. The last job had been in a place too podunk for an easy pickup, and they’d been run out of the town before that too soon for Dean to follow up on the bartender’s flirting. Come hell or high water, Dean was determined to break his dry spell tonight.
Dean leaned closer to the mirror above the dresser and rubbed his chin. “Maybe I should shave.”
“For a ghoul? You frighten me.” Refreshing the browser for the third time didn’t work any better than it had the first two.
“Nah, chicks dig stubble,” Dean decided.
“I don’t even want to know how you can tell if a ghoul is a chick.” Sam gave up on the laptop, leaving himself nothing to stare at but the almost nauseatingly bright floral pattern on the wallpaper. “Did you hear what I just said?”
“No wireless,” Dean repeated as he checked the pay-per-view flyer. “No porn either. I can pick up a skin mag on the way back if you want to have some Sam time when I’m at the bar,” he offered.
Sam wrinkled his nose at the cloying smell as Dean shoved a basket of potpourri drenched in rose oil in his direction to clear room on the table for the weapons bag. Who’d’ve guessed that Springfield had once been the ‘Rose Capital of the World?’
“What did you do with the diagram illustrating ‘personal boundaries’ that I drew for you last week, and on the way back from where?” he asked, watching Dean transfer supplies from the large duffel into his backpack.
Dean shook a can of lighter fluid to check how much was left and tossed it into his pack. “Threw it away when you were in the john, and on the way back from the job. I’m taking this one solo,” he answered.
“What? No.” Tempting, because there’s only so much of your life you can spend within a ten-foot radius of someone else, but still a bad idea. “You shouldn’t go without backup.”
Dean snorted. “Dude, it’s a ghoul. A twelve-year-old could take one. You know that.”
“Yeah, and I know that other twelve-year-olds went to the amusement park for their birthdays,” Sam parried. “What I don’t know is that it isn’t a pack.”
“Two missing people in six weeks? The only kind of pack that could be is a Weight Watchers’ group.” Dean pulled out a shotgun and a semiautomatic, tilted his head in thought, and went with the pistol. “Unless you had a shining?”
Sam sighed and fished a few clips out of the larger duffel. “Remember the conversation we had last time you asked me that question?” he prompted as he handed over the ammo.
“The”-Dean raised his voice to an unnecessarily high falsetto-“‘I’ve been hunting since I was ten years old, Dean, Dad taught me everything he knew, same as you, Dean, and I’m not a goddamn EMF meter, Dean,’ conversation?”
“That’s the one.”
Dean finished loading the backpack and zipped it up. “What about it?”
Okay, Sam could live with Dean being somewhere else for a couple hours. Some days a little Dean went a long way, and this was one of those days. “Go,” he said. “Get out of my hair.”
Dean gave his hair a pained look. “Hustler, Playboy, or Playgirl?”
“I don’t need porn to have Sam time!”
“Chill, dude. I just thought you’d want to read the articles.” Dean shouldered his bag and reached for the doorknob. “Maybe you could catch some shuteye while I’m gone. Try to fine-tune your antenna,” he suggested, and made his escape before Sam could reply.
Since their encounter with the demon right before Dad’s death, Sam’s dreams had grown sharper, more vivid, and more frequent. Some had been nothing, one had been about another psychic, and three had led them to regular jobs. Four if you included the incident in California, but his nighttime vision of a grinning, ghostly white skull hovering over the place of a haunting was so misleading that he was writing it off as sheer coincidence.
“Why would a poltergeist move into a Jack-in-the-Box anyway?” Sam bitched. He slammed down the gas pedal, flying down the 101, eager to put Goleta behind them. “It’s just tacky.”
Dean shrugged philosophically and snagged another of Sam’s curly fries. “Maybe that freaky clown CEO attracts hostility.”
Sam tapped his fingers on the table and considered his options. He could head out in search of a Starbucks with neutral wallpaper and a wireless network. He could look for a grocery store selling food that hadn’t been processed three times over. ‘Sam time’ would be better with a skin mag because not wanting cheap sex wasn’t the same thing as losing appreciation for the beauty of the female form. Or he could just stop hiding and face the inevitable. With a groan, Sam stretched out on the bed and closed his eyes.
A lot of people can’t remember if their dreams are in color or black and white. Sam knew that his were tinged with red, and nightmare or not, they always tasted of ash. It was nightmares tonight. They began with the familiar: the sickening splatter of blood dripping on his face; the heat of flames taunting him as they devoured a blonde woman’s body; the flash of yellow eyes in the shadowed face of a figure standing over a crib. Then new images that were unfamiliar but no less disturbing. A perfect circle of dead trees in a pine forest, blasted and charred but still standing as sentries around a moss-covered cairn. An old-fashioned ceramic doll tossed carelessly in a dusty attic. A group of stone huts, houses of death, the iron door of one already open like a gaping maw. A rusty creak as the door of another swung wide and something moved within it.
Sam jerked himself out of sleep, grabbed a pen and paper, and scribbled notes on the fragmentary images and words that vanished as quickly as he jotted them down. He stared at the last phrase-‘death house’-as the stone huts flashed through his mind again. They weren’t huts, he realized: they were mausoleums.
Ghouls were subhuman but cunning, and a pack that mostly fed on bodies in mausoleums could hide its numbers for a long time. He lunged for his phone and hit the speed-dial for Dean’s cell. No answer. Silent running-the hunt was on.
Sam grabbed the shotgun and a handful of shells, and bolted for the door.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
A distant gunshot told him which way to run as he jumped from his stolen Toyota. He charged over little knolls and past small memorial ponds towards the back of the graveyard, until the first of several gray structures loomed into view. Sam skidded up to it. Plastering himself against the wall, he crept forward and spun around the corner to the front, shotgun trained into the open door. The splintered wood of decayed and broken coffins lay in the dust along with piles of bones-ones too desiccated to be worth gnawing on thrown in corners, and fresh ones scattered throughout the small room.
Too many fresh ones. God knew where the bodies came from, but the taxpayers of Springfield weren’t getting a good return on their investment in law enforcement, because more than one person had gone missing in the couple weeks. A lot more. And somewhere in the cemetery was a pack of ghouls who liked their meat the natural way.
He barreled toward the sound of another shot and picked up the trail immediately. Dead ghoul sprawled out across two graves, dead ghoul crumpled against a weeping willow, dead ghoul at the base of a stone angel. Sam rounded another mausoleum, hugging the wall for cover. Opposite it was a living ghoul-well, animate ghoul-on the ground, claws lashing up toward his brother. Dean pinned the flailing arm under his foot, his bloodied face set in stone, and shot it point-blank.
Whatever his flaws may have been, Dean was one hell of a monster hunter.
Dean didn’t see him at the other side of the stone structure. Something else had caught his eye-yet another ghoul coming out of a cluster of trees about fifteen yards down. The reaction was as automatic as breathing now: Sam ducked back, sighted his target, and fired at the same instant Dean did. The report ringing off the wall nearly deafened him, but the thing dropped.
His brother ejected the ammo clip from his weapon and reached into his jacket for another, scanning around the direction the ghoul had come from. His movements were efficient but unhurried; it looked like he’d gotten the last of them. An auditory burst of memory came back from Sam’s dream, though: the screech of a rusty hinge and the scrape of iron on stone. He looked around frantically, eyes lighting on a mausoleum to his other side. The door was already open.
“Dean!” he hollered, rounding the corner of his shelter. Just as his brother’s head jerked around, something strong and unspeakably foul-smelling struck Sam from behind. The force of the blow added to his own momentum hurled him off his feet. He crashed hard on his right side, gun flying out of his hand, the wind knocked out of him, and half his body screaming in pain.
A concussion of terror followed on the heels of the crash: blind, stark, paralyzing fear. The weight of it crushing his chest stifled all efforts to breathe. Dean’s shock-widened eyes were on him, not his pistol, and his hands faltered. As Sam finally gasped in a heaving breath Dean shook himself and swung back into action, slamming the clip home as the ghoul tensed to pounce. Sam tamped down that overwhelming fear enough to lunge for his own weapon, but his leg gave way beneath him. Gritting his teeth, he tried to stretch out his hand for it. His arm didn’t move.
The seconds Dean had lost reloading were seconds too many. As he lifted the pistol there was the slash of another claw, a violent blow, and Dean was crashing against a headstone with a ‘crack.’
“Dean!” Sam bellowed.
That pulled the creature’s attention back to him, at least, and a layer of Sam’s fear peeled away when Dean looked toward him-but no, his face was slack, and his head had only rolled as he lost consciousness.
Instinct and adrenaline kicked in. Sam threw himself into a roll, grabbing the gun as he went, letting the momentum carry him as he pointed the weapon at the creature and fired. Thank God for the wide scatter pattern on a shotgun-his left-handed aim was lousy, but the shot was enough to finish the ghoul off. He dropped the gun, retched at the redoubled agony in his shoulder, and collapsed on his back, panting, until it subsided enough to move.
Then he crawled to his brother’s side. “Dean!”
Dean groaned. “Indoor voices, Sammy.”
“Hey, hey,” Sam urged, glancing nervously over his shoulder. “Can you move?”
Dean blinked at him. “No.” And he was out again.
“Fuck.” Sam felt at the misshapen lump of his shoulder, tried to move the arm again, and got a fresh burst of pain for his trouble. Hissing, he rotated the joint until it popped back into its socket and tested his leg. He was mobile, but no way could he get Dean out of here except under his own steam.
He slumped forward with his chin on his knees, eyes scanning the cemetery, and rummaged around in his mind for anything to distract him from his shoulder while he waited. ‘The difference between a “Woman in White” apparition and a “hitchhiker ghost” is that the latter is usually benign and the former malevolent,’ he recited inwardly. ‘The 1943 Supreme Court ruling in “West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette” outlawed mandatory recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools.’ ‘“Excruciating”’ is an adjectival participle deriving from the Latin verb excrucio, meaning “to torture” or “to break on the rack.”’ Sam tried to conjugate the verb, got stuck on the imperfect subjunctive, and gave up.
A faint prickle came across the back of his neck, like when you sense someone behind you, and he heard a whispered “Sammy?”
His head jerked up. “Yeah. You okay?”
Dean shifted. “Are you crying, Sammy?”
“What? No.” He sniffed experimentally, swiped the back of his hand across his eyes, and found them damp. “Oh. Maybe a little.”
A sparring buddy of Sam’s in college once remarked that one benefit of being a black belt was that you could say you liked the color pink without anyone thinking you were a sissy. The Winchester equivalent was that after you’d walked a mile on a hand-splinted compound fracture, it was okay to admit that crushing pain made your eyes sting.
Not that he’d walked it alone.
That had been a good day for their father-they found him sober and absorbed in his journal when they made it back. He knelt before Sam to look at the injury while Dean recounted how the branch Sam had shimmied onto while reaching for a strix nest had broken under his weight. Sam scrubbed furiously at his eyes: he was thirteen, way too old for crying, but even when Dean was all but carrying him the agony had grown with every step.
“It’s all right, Sammy,” his father had said gently, pulling his hands away from his face. “All that matters is that you didn’t quit.” Though still quiet, his voice grew sterner as he directed his next comment to his elder son. “You shouldn’t have let him go up there.”
Dean stood there in his black leather jacket, his long hair half-pulled out of the tieback he wore while hunting, hands shoved so deep into his pockets that the spiked bracelet on his wrist was barely visible, and looked down. “Yes, sir,” he replied stoically, taking the blame that wasn’t his. Dean could face down anything in this world or the next, except for their father.
Before Sam could demand his share of responsibility, though, Dad grinned. “Couldn’t stop him, could you?” Without waiting for an answer, he squeezed Sam’s hands. “Sam, when I’m not there you have to listen to your brother.”
He stood and lifted Sam as easily as he had when he’d been six years old. “You’re going to be fine. That was a good work on the splint, Dean.”
Pain exploded in Sam’s shoulder. He choked back bile, his head swimming too much to stay steady, before he realized that dizziness hadn’t thrown him off-balance. Dean had wrapped an arm around him and was drawing him into a hug.
“Dean!” he yelped.
The grip didn’t let up. “It’s okay, Sammy,” Dean shushed him. His voice was lighter than it had been in years, and Jesus, he was trying to tuck Sam against his side. It would have been comical if it weren’t so excruciating. Sam leaned in out of sheer self-defense, and the pressure stopped.
“We should go,” he said without any expectation of a satisfactory response. He got none except for a reassuring murmur and the press of Dean’s cheek, tacky with drying blood, against his own. Confusion was normal with a head blow: Sam checked his watch to time it and settled in to wait some more. His brother was addled, but his body was as solid and his presence as reassuring as ever.
“How did we get here, Dean?” Sam asked, less because he cared about the existential dilemma and more because it seemed that a jaded and world-weary comment was at least a token effort to counterbalance the fact that a grown man wanted to snuggle against his older brother like a five-year-old. All evidence to the contrary, some little part of Sam’s subconscious still clung to the belief that nothing could harm him within the circle of his brother’s arm, and it was surprisingly hard not to relax into his embrace. Instead, though, he maneuvered the shotgun into a better position. If a ghoul wandered by, he would sneer something Clint Eastwood-like before dispatching it to where it would tell no tales.
Since infancy, if family photos and Dad’s reminiscences were true, it was all but hard-wired into him to feel safe with Dean. The tactile memory he felt now didn’t evoke what passed for safety these days: the confidence that a salt circle and the vigilance of his battle-hardened partner meant that he could rest a few hours in peace. Rather, it was the nearly forgotten safety of the time before he knew about monsters, of the time when he had a child’s absolute faith that his brother could protect him from any danger.
Dean murmured something to soft to hear, and Sam swallowed hard. Nostalgia is worthless, but Sam would have given everything he owned to feel that way again, just for a few minutes. And he’d give everything he had and more for Dean to. Both had lost something when they outgrew that innocent belief that Dean could keep Sam safe, but Dean’s loss was the greater: Sam had shed his desire to be taken care of along with his milk teeth and baby fat, but Dean had never escaped the need to be somebody’s protector. Even now, it was almost tangible.
Not almost-it was. Sam couldn’t explain or define it, but the emotion was palpable...just as palpable as that shock of fear that had hit him when Dean saw him thrown to the ground. Fear that had been snuffed out when Dean lost consciousness.
Oh, God.
He did not need this. He did not want this. He had no clue what this was, but he was totally against it. Sam groaned and got another yelp-inducing squeeze for his trouble.
First things first-they were getting out of here.
The obvious solution-“Dean, we need to go”-got no reaction. Neither did “Dean, we really need to go,” so he tried a different tack.
“Dean?” he asked, pitching his voice to a higher, child-like level.
Dean hugged him again and he choked. “Yeah, Sammy?”
“Can we go back to Dad now?” he asked, slipping out of his brother’s embrace. His voice didn’t go that high anymore. “I don’t like it here. I want to go back to Dad.”
“Sure, Sammy,” Dean told him. He moved as if to stand, wobbled, and sat back down hard. He didn’t try to get up again.
“Please?” Sam slid his hand into Dean’s and pulled out the big guns: “I’m scared, Dean.”
Dean’s hand tightened around his hard enough for his ring to bite. “It’s okay, Sammy. I’ll take care of you.” This time he managed to stand, and reached back down to grasp Sam’s arm and pull him up. Sam bit back another cry of pain.
“I can walk,” he whined, though he used Dean’s arm for leverage as he rose. If he had to keep up that voice thing much longer, he’d be looking for chamomile tea instead of coffee in the morning. Or straining a vocal cord and ending up with a high pitch that might be soothing coming from a middle-aged female psychic, but was likely to make people give him odd looks before sidling a step backward. “Let’s just go back to Dad.”
Dean heaved the put-upon sigh of big brothers everywhere. “Okay.”
He cajoled, nagged, and manipulated Dean back toward the car. By the time they reached the cemetery gates Sam had walked off the worst of the pain in his leg, and Dean was having flashes of lucidity.
“What happened?” he asked during one of them.
“There was a pack,” Sam informed him.
“Oh.” They reached the Impala. “Did I finish it off?”
“No, dumbass, I finished it off.” Sam figured they could quibble about minutiae like body counts and credit due when Dean had recovered enough to count without needing his fingers.
“Good job, Sammy,” Dean said vaguely as he staggered toward the driver’s side, fumbling in his pocket.
“Uh-uh. I’m driving.”
Bundling Dean into the passenger seat was relatively easy; starting the car and shifting hurt like a sonovabitch. Worse, Dean lost the momentum they’d gained once he slumped into the seat and closed his eyes. When they pulled into the parking lot a few minutes later, something in his concussed brain had decided that they’d made it to safety, and no amount of wheedling produced anything more than a drowsy, grunted, “Go ’way, Sam.”
Well, wheedling wasn’t the only way to get Dean mobile. Dean had two bone-deep instincts: to protect Sam, and...
“Move it, Dean!” he barked in a credible imitation of their father’s voice.
Dean jumped awake. “Yes, Dad.”
They staggered up the stairs like a couple of drunks-at least, Sam hoped that’s how they looked-and he jimmied the lock to their room because he’d left the key behind. That was a bitch left-handed too-Dean had trained himself to be passably ambidextrous, but Sam was not. What the motel lost in crappy security, though, it made up for in a decent-sized bathroom, and Sam maneuvered Dean in. He could sit up on his own, but his eyes were closed again and his head nodded down onto Sam’s shoulder. Sam let it rest there, and if he was holding him tighter than was needed to steady him, well, Dean was too out of it to notice.
“Dad?” his brother mumbled. “Where’s Sammy?”
Sam released his clasp on Dean’s shoulder. “Sammy’s right here,” he said. Dean pulled back a little, blinking, and Sam could see the pieces falling back into place. “Sammy’s all grown up,” he continued. “He’s six inches taller than you, a better bow hunter, and he goes by ‘Sam’ now.”
“Six inches?” Dean’s voice was weak, but back to normal. “In your dreams, man.”
Sam grinned. “Better than asking who the president is.” Dean wasn’t above entertaining himself by giving bizarre answers to diagnostic questions, and besides, Sam wasn’t sure his brother knew who the president was when ‘Saturday Night Live’ was in reruns. You can’t withstand the mind-numbing tedium of life on the road without learning to screen out things that bore you to tears. For Sam, that was Sally Jessy Raphael and the state of Idaho; for Dean, it was politics.
“And even if you were a better bow hunter,” Dean grumbled, “it’d be because I taught you everything you know.”
“Keep telling yourself that, Dean.” He backed away and held up the index finger of his left hand. “Track my finger,” he ordered.
“Which one?”
Sam glared. “Track my finger or I’ll start a round of painful prodding and asking, ‘Does this hurt?’”
Dean rolled his eyes, probably just to show that he could. “I’m fine, dude,” he said.
“No, you’re concussed,” Sam corrected, “and I need to figure out how bad it is.” He moved his hand in a steady motion when Dean focused. “Are you dizzy? Nauseous? How old am I?”
“A little, no, twenty-three, and screw you.”
“Painful prodding, Dean,” Sam warned. Dean’s pupils were fine, his tracking was fine...“You’re fine,” Sam pronounced.
“Told you.” Dean felt the back of his head and narrowed his eyes. “What’s wrong with your arm?”
“Dislocated my shoulder. I popped it back in,” Sam answered, rubbing gingerly at the sorest spot. The people of Clark County must be pretty damned high in protein if a ghoul could throw him. “You’ll have to do your own bandages.”
“Bandages?” Dean asked. When Sam gestured at his face he touched his cheek and looked at the blood that came away on his fingertips. “Tell me the truth, Sam. What about my rakish good looks?”
“You can always grow a beard,” Sam told him.
Dean reared back in horror. Sam kept his poker face for as long as he could, but Dean had always been the better player. “Cute, Sammy,” he said, and his balance was good enough to push himself up and shove Sam away from the mirror so he could get a good look at the bloody but shallow claw marks.
“I didn’t say you needed to,” Sam pointed out.
Dean extended his index finger and jabbed Sam in his injured shoulder.
“Ow!”
“Does that hurt?” Dean asked innocently. “Just trying to figure out how bad it is.”
Sam tossed a wet washcloth squarely at his brother’s chest and started cleaning the scrapes and smudges of Dean’s blood that had gotten on his own cheek. Next to him, Dean did the same. They had the routine down pat: iodine and the box of bandages where they could both reach thm, taking turns at the mirror, talking over any loose ends in the job. Like, what to do with the bodies and whether or not they’d gotten all the ghouls.
“If we’re lucky, we missed one,” Sam said. Ghouls didn’t get on the move unless they had the cover of a full night ahead of them; if they were lucky, a lone survivor would have dragged the corpses back into a mausoleum to cannibalize as it waited for the next sunset. It’s rare to find a prey that cleans up after itself.
“We’ll sweep the whole place for more dens in the morning,” Dean decided. “How’d you know it was a pack anyway?”
Sam avoided meeting his brother’s eyes in the mirror. “I dreamed it.”
“Huh,” Dean answered, which was pretty much all there was to say. Except, it wasn’t.
Sam eased into it. “You panicked when you saw me go down,” he said.
Dean snorted and tilted his head to study a cut on his cheek. “You dreamed that one wrong. I don’t panic.”
“I didn’t dream it.” Sam watched Dean wash the grave dirt from the cut. “I felt it,” he said, mumbling the words like they wouldn’t be as real if said aloud. “I, uh, sensed what you were feeling.”
Dean froze in place for a second. Then he threw the washcloth into the sink with a splat. “Goddammit, Sam,” he barked, “I can take a lot from you, but you’d better not be reading my mind.”
“Dean!” Sam protested, stung and okay, a little scared. “It was just a couple flashes, and it’s gone, okay? I don’t want to be in your grubby little brain any more than you do.”
Dean clenched his fingers around the porcelain basin, head turned away from Sam, and yeah, Sam would be freaked too, but…
“C’mon, man,” Sam said, hearing a trace of that little boy’s plea in his tone. It’s not my fault, I’m not a freak, don’t look at me like that, I can’t handle this without you….“I can’t help it.”
Dean rolled the tension out of his shoulders and reached for the antibiotic ointment-the producers of Neosporin, Sam thought randomly, would never go out of business with the Winchesters around. “You should ice your shoulder,” Dean told him, dabbing the cream on his claw marks.
Sam waited for his brother to speak, to look at him, hell, for any token sign of reassurance that Dean wasn’t going to deal by shoving him away. After a moment of silence, he turned to leave the bathroom in defeat.
“Sam?” Dean said from behind him.
Sam looked over his shoulder. “Yeah?”
Dean turned his head from side to side to study his handiwork. “My brain is not little.”
Twenty minutes later Sam had his arm in a sling and was pacing restlessly, holding a cold pack to his shoulder. Dean was sprawled out on what had been Sam’s bed, boots still on, and squinting at the dream diary.
“Doll, attic, forest, yeah, that’s useful,” he said, flipping through the pages. “Couldn’t you at least get a state?”
Sam stopped pacing and started glaring. “If you don’t like the way I have visions, you can have the next one,” he said.
Dean ignored him. “Cairn, and death house,” he finished.
“You can cross the last one off.”
Dean made a show of studying the words. “I dunno, man. It might be ‘Demon Mouse,’” he said with that glint in his eyes. “Are we going back to Cali?”
“Let it go, Dean,” Sam said. “And demons know better than to fuck with Disney.”
Dean tossed the notebook back down next to a vase of artificial sweetheart roses. Never one to put things off, he shoved himself up from the bed and started mixing a couple Molotov cocktails in case they found another den. The smell of ethanol overpowered the sickly sweet scent of the potpourri; Sam almost wished it didn’t.
“I’m not going to be able to stop, you know,” he said. “Not as long as the visions keep coming.”
Dean’s hands paused. “I thought you said you didn’t want to stop.”
“Yeah, but you’re right, I’ll never be able to square things with Dad, and I didn’t stop wanting…other things.” Sam trailed off. As near as he could tell Dean hadn’t figured out that things weren’t what he cared about, and he didn’t want to open the door to that conversation.
Dean corked the bottles; they’d stuff the rags in tomorrow. “You don’t need visions to know what’s out there, Sammy.”
“Yeah, I know.” Sam put down the icepack and pressed his cold fingers against his aching temple. For two years he’d told himself that there were plenty of ways to do good in the world that don’t involve isolation, danger, and ending the day with three different blood types on your face. It was past time to accept for once and for all that the world didn’t need him to do that good.
“Why don’t you get some sleep?” he suggested, cracking open the window. Muggy heat flooded in but the smell drifted out; it was too late at night for them to worry about a passerby noticing. “I’ll keep watch.”
“For ghouls? They’re not coming after us,” Dean scoffed. When Sam didn’t move, he shrugged and started undressing. “Suit yourself, but we’re going to be up at first light torching those things.”
“I’ll be awake enough to tell you where to drag the bodies,” Sam promised.
Dean considered the two beds and took the one his boots hadn’t been on. “You’ve got one good arm.”
“Which I will use to point to where you should drag the bodies.” Sam ran his hand through his hair. “Go to sleep, Dean. I’m okay.”
He waited for Dean’s breathing to even into the rhythm of sleep before he picked up the shotgun and drifted over to a spot facing the door. They had to find a new job, and soon. Sam couldn’t live off the rush of the kill alone; it was different when there was a face to the task, a real person being saved when he and Dean were doing what only they could do.
So they’d look for a new job, and just on principle, he’d pick it. He’d learn to take pleasure in the hunt itself, he’d savor the fleeting human connections made on jobs, and if the need for a more physical connection grew too strong, he’d learn to chase the ghost of love in bars and run-down clubs among the equally lonely...No, someone equally discontented. Whatever else a future of hunting with Dean would be-annoying, sometimes exhilarating, quite possibly maddening-it wouldn’t be lonely.
Dean groaned in his sleep and rolled over. Sam winced but figured it was better to let him sleep. Nightmares never killed anyone.
He bonked his head against the wall because Dean wasn’t awake to do it. God, what a stupid thought.
Fingering his weapon’s stock, he sidled a few feet over to another random spot. He was making his peace with this life right here, right now. Tomorrow, it’d be out of his system for good. Tomorrow they’d finish the job and move on to the next one. No problem, no mistakes.
Not tomorrow, at least. Someday, there would be. It could be next week, next month, or years down the road, but someday he wouldn’t be quick enough or Dean wouldn’t be strong enough; his shot would miss its mark or Dean’s cunning would fail, and that would be the end of them. Or, worse, the end of one of them. Sam slid down to sit with his back propped against the wall, the shotgun resting across his knees, and settled in for a long, dark night of the soul. What had become of his life, that his greatest hope was that he and his brother would go out together?
Yeah, Dean, I’m crying.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Additional author’s notes:
Readers might notice that the structure of this story nearly duplicates that of The Bridge from Lawrence to Rockford. That is because it was initially one story that got broken into two. Also, I’ve never put an inaccurate detail in a fic in my life, but I couldn’t find out whether a concussion can really knock fifteen years out of someone’s head. Apologies for any inaccuracies; it was necessary for plot reasons.
Comments are welcome; hell, I'd be happy just to know that someone read it. All my fic can be found here.
I'll be damned if I can figure out why the font changes mid-paragraph above, so apologies for that too. All I know is that I can't fix it.