SPN FIC - 1-800-MISSING (Part 3 of 4)
My apologies -- I know it's been a ridiculously long time since the last chapter, but I believe the Muse and I are on track to finish this little enterprise within the next few days. So here's Part 3, with Part 4 coming SOON.
There's someone we haven't seen in a while -- and we've made assumptions about where he's gone. But that's because Show has let us see a little bit more than it's allowed the boys to see. A year and a half (ish) has gone by since the last time either of the Winchesters saw the eminent Chuck Shurley, and to their dismay, it's been just as long since someone else saw him: someone who believes something terrible might have happened, and insists that Sam and Dean help her in her quest for the truth.
Part 1 is here.
Part 2 is here.
It wasn't the maid.
"Oh," he sighed.
SHIT, was what he was thinking.
The smiting they'd been worried about? That would have been better than this. That would have been truckloads better than this.
CHARACTERS: Dean, Sam, Becky, OFC
GENRE: Gen
SPOILERS: Heavily spoilery for S6 finale (takes place two days post-6.22 and will undoubtedly be mightily Kripke'd)
RATING: PG
LENGTH: Remains to be seen; this part is 4256 words
1-800-MISSING
By Carol Davis
Guardian??? Dean thought.
His freaking GUARDIAN ANGEL?
"Get out," he snapped. "Get as far away from me as you can get. Because, lady, you are the last thing I need right now."
"You're hyperventilating," she told him.
"Trust me - that's not all I'm doing."
Sam was doing the Pensive Pondering thing, which did nothing at all to ameliorate Dean's still-bubbling anger. Gonna hit the red zone any second now, he thought. There's gonna be pieces of me all over the woods. In a perfect world - in a decent world - Sam would have realized that and would have stepped up to kick some angel ass.
But all Sam did was ponder.
Until he said, "Dean. Maybe she can help."
"Are you kidding me?"
"She said she's on your side. Our side?" Sam directed that at the angel, and she shrugged a very unimpressive amount of agreement.
"Cas was on our side," Dean barked.
"You're feeling the pain of betrayal," the angel said. "I understand. We've been going through a great deal of that lately."
"Lady -"
"Myra."
"What?"
"You can call me Myra. My real name is…much longer than that. It's difficult for humans to pronounce, and I suspect you would shorten it to 'Myra' anyway, given your fondness for nicknames. I'm also aware of your fondness of being stubborn for its own sake, but it's my understanding that by continuing to breathe in that rapid, shallow fashion for any prolonged period of time, you are reasonably likely to lose consciousness, so I would suggest that you step away from that cluster of rocks."
"You a doctor, now?"
"Merely making a suggestion."
Stubborn for its own sake, huh?
But she was right: the hyperventilating had begun to make him a little lightheaded.
"Just - GO," he insisted. "Get out of here. My dad taught me how to find my way out of the woods when I was seven years old. I can figure out where I am, and how to get out of here. I don't need any more of your 'help'."
"You have no idea what's back there, Dean."
Little flashes of light had begun to form around the edges of his vision. He could feel himself wavering, feel his balance begin to give way, but this was definitely not the time to go all girly and sit down, not when he was still a long, long way from gaining anything that looked like an upper hand. "Look - Myra," he said as fiercely as he could manage, adding an extra fillip of sarcasm to her name. "I'm not some little kid, okay? I've seen things. I've done things. Believe me - whatever's 'back there' can't possibly be any worse than the massive mountains of crap I've had to dig my way through, my entire freaking life. And aside from that - let me tell you, if you're my guardian angel, then you've been doing a seriously piss-poor job of it."
"I was only assigned this morning," she said. "My predecessor is dead."
"Was it Cas?" Sam asked. "Is he - cleaning house up there?"
Cas, Dean thought.
Friggin' CAS.
That was the last thought he had before everything went black.
~~~~~~~~
He awoke to a view of the forest canopy and glimpses of a sky that wasn't as bright as it had been before. Late afternoon, he guessed, moving on towards evening, which meant he'd been out for quite a while.
Swell.
"Hey," Sam said from somewhere nearby, his voice a little tentative, a little weary, as if starting a conversation was pretty close to the last thing he wanted to do. "You okay?"
It took Dean a moment to take stock. Someone inside his head, using his skull as a kettle drum. Stomach uneasy, though thankfully not yet threatening a round of dry heaves. It got a little worse when he moved his head, sliding his gaze around just enough to locate his brother. "Been better," he muttered. "What happened?"
"You passed out."
"I - what did she do to me?"
"She didn't do anything. You started swaying back and forth like you were on the deck of a ship, and you went down like a box of rocks. You've been out for like five hours." Before Dean could protest, Sam went on, "You didn't seem to be - you know. In any kind of serious medical situation. So I just let you sleep."
"When in doubt, do nothing? That's your game plan?"
Sam made a point of staring off into the woods. "Could we not start, right now? Please? This is not my fault."
"It's -"
"It's screwed up. Fine. All right? Just go with that." Scowling, Sam got up from the seat he'd made for himself on the ground, using a big, flat rock as a backrest, and crouched down beside Dean, offering him an already-opened bottle of water. "You should drink this. You slept okay, but you're still kind of pale. Drink it, then you should eat something."
"Eat? Eat what? You been out collecting nuts and berries?"
"I didn't need to."
Sam nodded, using his head as a pointer.
Slowly, Dean levered himself up onto his elbows and took a look in the direction Sam was indicating. The fact that Myra was nowhere to be seen came as no surprise. What was a surprise was the collection of stuff that was there in her place: two gigantic red-and-white coolers, a trio of shrink-wrapped cases of bottled water, a small propane stove, a meticulously assembled tent big enough to sleep a family of six, a stack of folded blankets, several cases of canned food of various kinds, two wood-and-canvas folding chairs, a small table, several battery-powered lanterns, and a portable toilet.
"What the hell is all that stuff?" Dean demanded.
"Camping equipment. Your friend the angel blinked it in here, right before she left. So we'd be 'comfortable,' she said."
"Dude. The hell. It's like friggin' Joe and Judy McYuppie Go Camping."
"With all the little McYuppies," Sam said dryly. "There's a Slip 'n Slide and a badminton set, and a deck of Old Maid cards."
With a groan, Dean lowered himself back down, realizing only then that he wasn't lying on the ground; a nice, thick sleeping bag was laid out underneath him.
"She left?" he groused.
"Maybe ten minutes after you hit the deck."
"There a sat phone in with that mess?"
"No. No radio, or sat phone, anything like that. There's plenty of food and water, though. Even if we eat like Henry the Eighth, we're good for at least a week."
"Not staying up here for a week, Sam."
Sam was silent for a moment, prompting Dean to shift position again to look at him. "I don't know that we have a lot of choice," Sam said with some reluctance. "I mean - we could start walking. At least, we could if you could get more than a hundred feet without faceplanting again. But what's to say we'd get anywhere? We've got no clue how far it is to a town, or a phone, or even a road. And even if we could get that far, for all we know she'd just zap us right back here again."
"So you're gonna give up."
"I didn't say that."
"It's what you sound like."
Right on cue, Sam's features began to morph into his all-too-familiar bitchface, but he only got partway there. He let out a half-sigh, half-groan, shook his head a little, then got up and went back to his seat in front of the big flat rock. The fact that he looked pretty much everywhere but at Dean told Dean that his brother had indeed made his peace with sticking around up here, in the nice, idyllic spot the angel had picked out for them.
Apparently, Sam was okay with doing absolutely nothing.
Okay with letting Cas do whatever he had lined up on his Heavenly agenda, and with letting whatever was happening to Chuck go on happening.
It figured, Dean thought. Nine years ago, Sam had been okay with abandoning the hunt so he could sit in a classroom and learn how to be a frigging lawyer. And how many times since then had Sam walked away?
You go right ahead and do that. Just freaking quit.
Why the hell did you leave Bobby's? Why'd you leave Bobby's and follow us? You could've gone somewhere else - anywhere else - if this was all too much for you. Go back to California. Go move in with Becky and let her tell you how damn fantastic you are all day long.
Son of a BITCH.
Muttering to himself, Dean shifted himself carefully up into a sit. He considered the bottle for a long while before he picked it up; he would rather have pitched it off into the woods, but he'd left "thirsty" in his rearview hours ago and his mouth had started to taste like the lining of a cat's litter box. Studying the collection of camping equipment was a better option than basking in the warmth of Sam's annoyance - as if Sam had anything to be annoyed about - so as he slugged down the water he went on cataloguing what he could see of Myra's largesse.
Food. Water. Fun and games.
A friggin' Slip 'N Slide???
Empty, the water bottle made a lousy projectile. It flew through the trees less than a dozen yards and hit the ground with a hollow twock.
"You've been telling me for years now how tired you are," Sam said after a minute. "Back in River Grove - remember River Grove? - you said you were so tired you didn't care if you died. In fact, you pretty much acted like you wanted to die, and I don't know that anything much has changed since then. Can't we" - he hesitated, and sighed - "can't we just hang out here for a while? No TV, no newspapers, no phones? Whatever's going on, just trust that somebody else can handle it? Isn't that what you want, Dean?"
"We don't walk away from a job, Sam."
"So says the Gospel of John Winchester."
"You're gonna bring Dad into this? That's the route you're gonna go? He's been dead for five years, Sam. Leave him out of this."
"Even Dad didn't tackle everything, man," Sam persisted. "He wasn't the only one capable of doing what he did. You're not the only one capable of doing what we do. And even if you were - you're human. You're fried, Dean. So am I. Look what we've been through these last few months. Can't we let the world manage itself without us for a while?"
"Is there somebody else who's gonna talk Cas down off that ledge?"
"I hope so."
"You hope so."
"We don't know that we can do that. We've got no reason to believe Cas will listen to you, or me, or anybody."
"I'm not walking away from this, Sam. I don't see people lining up to volunteer - so it's us or it's nobody. And don't start telling me Cas is gonna smite me if I go anywhere near him. He could smite me before, and he never did."
"He beat the living crap out of you once."
"Exactly. He held back. He won't kill me. He'll listen to me."
Sam shook his head, then squeezed his eyes shut.
His dismay was written all over his face.
Dean silently cursed any number of things: the angel, this quiet, bucolic location, the loss of his car, the spinning muzziness in his head and the continuing slow roll of his stomach.
His whole life, particularly the part of it that had unspooled during the past couple of years.
He refused to let himself think about Lisa and Ben. There was enough to be angry about without including them in the mix.
"Seriously, man," Sam said quietly. "You don't look good. Maybe you ought to…try to sleep some more."
"Yeah, Sam," Dean shot back. "Maybe I should do that. I'll just let the world turn to crap because I'm pale."
He thought about trying for an easy, lithe spring to his feet, the kind of up-and-at-'em he'd accomplished almost without thought any number of times; of taking the first step toward thumbing his nose at Sam and this angel-generated, Norman Rockwell weekend in the woods and finding his way out of here - wherever the hell here was.
But his stomach did a backflip that would have done an Olympic swimmer proud.
He wasn't going anywhere. Not right now, anyway.
He tried thinking SHE did this as he lay back down.
But even he didn't quite buy that.
~~~~~~~~
He woke again to find the Deep In Thought version of Sam in the midst of devouring his dinner: what looked like a roast beef sandwich (complete with Russian dressing, a dollop of which was smeared on Sam's upper lip), a bottle of beer, and a banana.
Dean made a show of ignoring his brother for a while, for what little good it did.
"There's all kinds of stuff in there," Sam said, nodding toward the giant coolers. "Sandwiches. Fruit. Pudding. A couple of packages of hamburger for the grill. Cereal and milk. You name it, it's in there."
"Don't really feel like eating."
"There's Jell-O."
"And why the hell would I want Jell-O?"
"Settle your stomach. There's bread. I can make toast on the grill. Or there's -" Sam grinned. "Fruit cocktail and graham crackers. You always liked that when you were sick. And applesauce. There's a bunch of those little individual serving cups."
"Jesus, Sam."
"Fruit cocktail, man. With cherries."
Dean glowered at him.
Sam let him lie there undisturbed this time - if you could call being serenaded by the sounds of chewing and swallowing and drinking being undisturbed - and signaled the end of his meal with a huge, satisfied belch. Rather than watch him do any of that, Dean studied what he could see of the trees and the sky, and thrust aside a memory of himself and Ben out in the back yard of the house they'd shared, tossing a ball around and talking about the Space Shuttle.
"I think I was nine," Sam said out of the blue.
Dean glanced over at him but said nothing.
"Right? Eight or nine. That time we were out in the woods with Dad and Bobby and that guy - what was his name? Stan. That guy was a hoot. Told all those weird stories about rocks. And his wife - I think that was the craziest woman I ever met. Back then, anyway. But she made the best scrambled eggs I ever ate."
"Shirl," Dean said reluctantly.
"Right. Shirl."
The campfire was the first image that came to mind: a big one, burning hot and bright, the knots in the wood snapping and popping like small fireworks. There'd been maybe ten people in their group, out in the middle of nowhere, though it was an area Stan and his wife knew as well as most urban dwellers knew their neighborhood streets. They'd both been tickled by the idea of showing off their woods to two young boys, and had spent several days acquainting Dean and Sam with everything the wilderness had to offer.
Dad had taught Dean how to find his way out of the woods, true enough, but Dad's knowledge had had its limits; he'd never lived in the woods, let the wilderness become a part of him. These people, Shirl and Stan, had.
"Wonder where they are now," Sam mused.
"Probably still roaming around Montana."
"You don't think something got 'em?"
"No. I - no, man. Something did not get them. They're still out there, communing with rocks and trees."
Dean took a long look around in what little was left of the daylight, the way Stan and Shirl had taught him to, taking in the delicate curl of a fern, the striations in the rock Sam was leaning against, the scratches in the bark of a nearby tree that indicated something had climbed it not long ago. He remembered Stan, whose long gray hair hung in a braid down his back, pointing up into the highest branches of a tree - nowhere near as tall as the sequoias that surrounded Dean now, but toweringly tall to a boy - and talking quietly, the man's voice fitting into the sounds of the forest as smoothly as the chirrup of a bird or the soft croaking of a frog.
He remembered the flavor of Shirl's scrambled eggs, and the warmth of the sleeping bag he'd burrowed down into when everyone agreed it was time for lights out.
He'd slept quietly then. Peacefully.
And, man, those meals had been good, cooked over that roaring fire, all of it a little crisp around the edges.
He heaved a long sigh, then ventured, "Is there cupcakes?"
"Vanilla and chocolate."
"SpaghettiOs?"
"Dude," Sam said. "Nobody older than eight actually likes SpaghettiOs. There's a couple of containers of real spaghetti and meatballs."
"Seriously?"
"And a couple of really nice-looking steaks."
"I could eat," Dean said.
~~~~~~~~
"This is big, huh? This place."
Sam, in the midst of polishing off the last of a plateful of steak and eggs, shrugged and nodded. "National park's like half a million acres. That's a lot of territory. And there's more that's not within the boundaries of the park. We could be pretty much anywhere. We'll be able to tell more in a little while, when the stars come out."
"That one of your finely-honed senses, too?"
"Dean," Sam said.
Dean poked at the remains of his meal with the tip of his fork. "Yeah, well, pardon me if I feel like this is just another chapter of Heaven's big hit, 'Let's Dick With Dean'," he said, though there wasn't much heat in it. "I drove to Chuck's house. I kind of figured at this point in the proceedings, I'd still be somewhere in the vicinity of Chuck's house. Instead, I'm stuck in the middle of a billion square miles of freaking redwood trees, with no way to get out of here but walking."
"People do choose to come here."
"Yeah? Well, I ain't one of 'em."
Sam polished off the last few bites of his meal, then took a couple of sips of the second beer he'd pulled from the cooler to wash it all down. "Then let's make the best of it," he said mildly. "If there's nothing we can do about it - I'm serious, man. People come all the way out here just to hang out and enjoy being a part of nature."
Dean stared at him and said nothing.
"We're safe here, Dean."
"We are not safe here, Sam. There's bears up here. Mountain lions. Poisonous snakes."
"Wendigos?" Sam said, and smiled.
"You could take this seriously."
"There's also deer up here, man. Rabbits. Birds. Squirrels. Chipmunks. It's a regular Disney movie."
"You are such a freak."
"People come up here to relax. Lay out under the stars. Look - she raided a Land's End for us. Everything's in there that we need. Chuck's been gone for a year and a half now, Dean. If something's happened to him, it probably happened a long time ago. Our being up here for a couple of days isn't going to make any difference. And if we had to get stuck somewhere, I'd kind of rather have it be here than" - Sam snorted softly - "locked up someplace, like that dungeon where Crowley was keeping the alphas."
"Bobby's gonna wonder where we are," Dean said stubbornly.
"If Bobby's got any sense, he's regrouping, and trying to get some sleep. Come on - we had the TV on for two days. If Cas intended to run out and smite the world, something would have happened already, and it didn't. Right?"
"Sitting on our asses ain't helping, Sam."
"We were sitting on our asses at the motel. This smells better."
It did; Dean had to admit that much. The air was mild and dry, and there was enough of a breeze blowing to carry the fresh scent of pine and wildflowers. The real deal, not the fake aroma of laundry detergent and air fresheners.
"We oughta be doing something," he insisted.
"We are."
"Sam -"
Sam didn't offer a word of objection when Dean unrolled one of the sleeping bags and lay down.
Just for a minute, Dean figured.
So he could think.
He was asleep before he could put a thought together.
~~~~~~~~
He awoke to full dark and a painfully full bladder, and to Sam's loud, almost musical snore. The fire Sam had assembled - overkill, in a way, because the night was very mild, for the mountains - had burned down low but was still crackling softly.
The woods around them seemed still and silent.
It would have been one thing, Dean thought, if somebody had given him the option of coming here. If someone had said "Choose A or B," and then had given him a reasonable amount of time to weigh the possibilities.
But being BENCHED?
In a way, it was same old, same old. The damn angels had spent a whole year telling him he was the key to their freaking Apocalypse, that it was him or nothing, that Michael had had his eye on Dean since back before the Big Bang, practically - and then they'd shoved him aside in favor of Adam.
Adam, for crying out loud.
Adam, who was…
No. Not going there. Not right now.
I'm sorry, Adam.
He wormed his way out of his sleeping bag and climbed carefully, slowly, to his feet, wary both of waking Sam and of disturbing the equilibrium his head and his stomach had settled into over the past couple of hours. The water, the good meal, the beers that had chased it down, and those reasonably long stretches of sleep had gone a long way towards making him feel halfway decent. A little less battered. A little less like…well, like he'd been in a car that had been blown upside down onto its roof just a few days ago.
Sam made a noise like there was a blender running inside his head.
Gotta go. NOW.
Myra had thoughtfully provided a portable toilet, but there was no way Dean was going to make use of it. The thing looked like a potty chair, and even if he set it inside the tent for a little added privacy, it was just too…
He was in the woods.
He delayed his mission just long enough to locate a flashlight in amongst the piles of equipment, then chose what looked like a path and followed it into the woods far enough to prevent any unpleasant fragrances from reaching the campsite - though it would have served Sam right if his lamblike slumber was interrupted by a little bit of nature at work.
On the other hand, Dean was well acquainted to Sam's usual response to toxic dumps.
Not that Sam wasn't capable of generating some eyebrow-singeing toxins of his own.
They'd had a battle once, involving large quantities Mama Rosita's Internationally Famous Chili Con Carne, the carne portion of which had been of very questionable origin and refrigeration, and remembering it made Dean grin foolishly as he took care of business. There wasn't any chili (fresh-cooked or canned) included in Myra's enormous collection of groceries, but the combination of a few other items might do the trick.
Might as well make the best of this.
He chuckled softly as he lifted his jeans back up and fastened them.
When he turned to look for the path back to the campsite, he noticed something he could swear hadn't been there before: a pale, silvery light, coming from deep within the woods. It wasn't the campfire; that was in the other direction. And it wasn't the moon; this light was being generated from a spot at ground level, not overhead.
"The hell -?" he muttered.
Other campers, maybe. Or some kind of safety light set up by the park rangers?
Either one of those would indicate that he and Sam weren't as far from civilization as they'd assumed - and wouldn't that take the cake, if they'd spent the past twelve hours fussing about being stuck in the middle of nowhere, only to find out they were a stone's throw from a lodge, or a big campground, or a ranger station?
The angels'd laugh their asses off over that one.
Scowling, he set off further into the woods, toward the light, leaving the campsite and Sam and the faintly crackling fire behind him. The path he followed wasn't much of one; it was a snaking, natural division between the trees rather than something wide and manmade and convenient, so he had to make his way along with branches and brush swiping at his arms and legs, scratching his face, threatening the stability of his footing.
The closer he got, the less that light looked natural.
He glanced back over his shoulder, contemplating the worth of going back to fetch Sam - no more than a couple of seconds' worth of not watching where he was going, but that was long enough. The next step he took didn't land on solid ground, and that threw him off balance, tumbling him forward into the brush and down a steep, rocky slope, startled and disoriented enough that all he could think was Son of a BITCH!!! in the instant before he collided with something huge and solid and felt his right leg give way with a loud and sickening crack.
Part 4…
There's someone we haven't seen in a while -- and we've made assumptions about where he's gone. But that's because Show has let us see a little bit more than it's allowed the boys to see. A year and a half (ish) has gone by since the last time either of the Winchesters saw the eminent Chuck Shurley, and to their dismay, it's been just as long since someone else saw him: someone who believes something terrible might have happened, and insists that Sam and Dean help her in her quest for the truth.
Part 1 is here.
Part 2 is here.
It wasn't the maid.
"Oh," he sighed.
SHIT, was what he was thinking.
The smiting they'd been worried about? That would have been better than this. That would have been truckloads better than this.
CHARACTERS: Dean, Sam, Becky, OFC
GENRE: Gen
SPOILERS: Heavily spoilery for S6 finale (takes place two days post-6.22 and will undoubtedly be mightily Kripke'd)
RATING: PG
LENGTH: Remains to be seen; this part is 4256 words
1-800-MISSING
By Carol Davis
Guardian??? Dean thought.
His freaking GUARDIAN ANGEL?
"Get out," he snapped. "Get as far away from me as you can get. Because, lady, you are the last thing I need right now."
"You're hyperventilating," she told him.
"Trust me - that's not all I'm doing."
Sam was doing the Pensive Pondering thing, which did nothing at all to ameliorate Dean's still-bubbling anger. Gonna hit the red zone any second now, he thought. There's gonna be pieces of me all over the woods. In a perfect world - in a decent world - Sam would have realized that and would have stepped up to kick some angel ass.
But all Sam did was ponder.
Until he said, "Dean. Maybe she can help."
"Are you kidding me?"
"She said she's on your side. Our side?" Sam directed that at the angel, and she shrugged a very unimpressive amount of agreement.
"Cas was on our side," Dean barked.
"You're feeling the pain of betrayal," the angel said. "I understand. We've been going through a great deal of that lately."
"Lady -"
"Myra."
"What?"
"You can call me Myra. My real name is…much longer than that. It's difficult for humans to pronounce, and I suspect you would shorten it to 'Myra' anyway, given your fondness for nicknames. I'm also aware of your fondness of being stubborn for its own sake, but it's my understanding that by continuing to breathe in that rapid, shallow fashion for any prolonged period of time, you are reasonably likely to lose consciousness, so I would suggest that you step away from that cluster of rocks."
"You a doctor, now?"
"Merely making a suggestion."
Stubborn for its own sake, huh?
But she was right: the hyperventilating had begun to make him a little lightheaded.
"Just - GO," he insisted. "Get out of here. My dad taught me how to find my way out of the woods when I was seven years old. I can figure out where I am, and how to get out of here. I don't need any more of your 'help'."
"You have no idea what's back there, Dean."
Little flashes of light had begun to form around the edges of his vision. He could feel himself wavering, feel his balance begin to give way, but this was definitely not the time to go all girly and sit down, not when he was still a long, long way from gaining anything that looked like an upper hand. "Look - Myra," he said as fiercely as he could manage, adding an extra fillip of sarcasm to her name. "I'm not some little kid, okay? I've seen things. I've done things. Believe me - whatever's 'back there' can't possibly be any worse than the massive mountains of crap I've had to dig my way through, my entire freaking life. And aside from that - let me tell you, if you're my guardian angel, then you've been doing a seriously piss-poor job of it."
"I was only assigned this morning," she said. "My predecessor is dead."
"Was it Cas?" Sam asked. "Is he - cleaning house up there?"
Cas, Dean thought.
Friggin' CAS.
That was the last thought he had before everything went black.
~~~~~~~~
He awoke to a view of the forest canopy and glimpses of a sky that wasn't as bright as it had been before. Late afternoon, he guessed, moving on towards evening, which meant he'd been out for quite a while.
Swell.
"Hey," Sam said from somewhere nearby, his voice a little tentative, a little weary, as if starting a conversation was pretty close to the last thing he wanted to do. "You okay?"
It took Dean a moment to take stock. Someone inside his head, using his skull as a kettle drum. Stomach uneasy, though thankfully not yet threatening a round of dry heaves. It got a little worse when he moved his head, sliding his gaze around just enough to locate his brother. "Been better," he muttered. "What happened?"
"You passed out."
"I - what did she do to me?"
"She didn't do anything. You started swaying back and forth like you were on the deck of a ship, and you went down like a box of rocks. You've been out for like five hours." Before Dean could protest, Sam went on, "You didn't seem to be - you know. In any kind of serious medical situation. So I just let you sleep."
"When in doubt, do nothing? That's your game plan?"
Sam made a point of staring off into the woods. "Could we not start, right now? Please? This is not my fault."
"It's -"
"It's screwed up. Fine. All right? Just go with that." Scowling, Sam got up from the seat he'd made for himself on the ground, using a big, flat rock as a backrest, and crouched down beside Dean, offering him an already-opened bottle of water. "You should drink this. You slept okay, but you're still kind of pale. Drink it, then you should eat something."
"Eat? Eat what? You been out collecting nuts and berries?"
"I didn't need to."
Sam nodded, using his head as a pointer.
Slowly, Dean levered himself up onto his elbows and took a look in the direction Sam was indicating. The fact that Myra was nowhere to be seen came as no surprise. What was a surprise was the collection of stuff that was there in her place: two gigantic red-and-white coolers, a trio of shrink-wrapped cases of bottled water, a small propane stove, a meticulously assembled tent big enough to sleep a family of six, a stack of folded blankets, several cases of canned food of various kinds, two wood-and-canvas folding chairs, a small table, several battery-powered lanterns, and a portable toilet.
"What the hell is all that stuff?" Dean demanded.
"Camping equipment. Your friend the angel blinked it in here, right before she left. So we'd be 'comfortable,' she said."
"Dude. The hell. It's like friggin' Joe and Judy McYuppie Go Camping."
"With all the little McYuppies," Sam said dryly. "There's a Slip 'n Slide and a badminton set, and a deck of Old Maid cards."
With a groan, Dean lowered himself back down, realizing only then that he wasn't lying on the ground; a nice, thick sleeping bag was laid out underneath him.
"She left?" he groused.
"Maybe ten minutes after you hit the deck."
"There a sat phone in with that mess?"
"No. No radio, or sat phone, anything like that. There's plenty of food and water, though. Even if we eat like Henry the Eighth, we're good for at least a week."
"Not staying up here for a week, Sam."
Sam was silent for a moment, prompting Dean to shift position again to look at him. "I don't know that we have a lot of choice," Sam said with some reluctance. "I mean - we could start walking. At least, we could if you could get more than a hundred feet without faceplanting again. But what's to say we'd get anywhere? We've got no clue how far it is to a town, or a phone, or even a road. And even if we could get that far, for all we know she'd just zap us right back here again."
"So you're gonna give up."
"I didn't say that."
"It's what you sound like."
Right on cue, Sam's features began to morph into his all-too-familiar bitchface, but he only got partway there. He let out a half-sigh, half-groan, shook his head a little, then got up and went back to his seat in front of the big flat rock. The fact that he looked pretty much everywhere but at Dean told Dean that his brother had indeed made his peace with sticking around up here, in the nice, idyllic spot the angel had picked out for them.
Apparently, Sam was okay with doing absolutely nothing.
Okay with letting Cas do whatever he had lined up on his Heavenly agenda, and with letting whatever was happening to Chuck go on happening.
It figured, Dean thought. Nine years ago, Sam had been okay with abandoning the hunt so he could sit in a classroom and learn how to be a frigging lawyer. And how many times since then had Sam walked away?
You go right ahead and do that. Just freaking quit.
Why the hell did you leave Bobby's? Why'd you leave Bobby's and follow us? You could've gone somewhere else - anywhere else - if this was all too much for you. Go back to California. Go move in with Becky and let her tell you how damn fantastic you are all day long.
Son of a BITCH.
Muttering to himself, Dean shifted himself carefully up into a sit. He considered the bottle for a long while before he picked it up; he would rather have pitched it off into the woods, but he'd left "thirsty" in his rearview hours ago and his mouth had started to taste like the lining of a cat's litter box. Studying the collection of camping equipment was a better option than basking in the warmth of Sam's annoyance - as if Sam had anything to be annoyed about - so as he slugged down the water he went on cataloguing what he could see of Myra's largesse.
Food. Water. Fun and games.
A friggin' Slip 'N Slide???
Empty, the water bottle made a lousy projectile. It flew through the trees less than a dozen yards and hit the ground with a hollow twock.
"You've been telling me for years now how tired you are," Sam said after a minute. "Back in River Grove - remember River Grove? - you said you were so tired you didn't care if you died. In fact, you pretty much acted like you wanted to die, and I don't know that anything much has changed since then. Can't we" - he hesitated, and sighed - "can't we just hang out here for a while? No TV, no newspapers, no phones? Whatever's going on, just trust that somebody else can handle it? Isn't that what you want, Dean?"
"We don't walk away from a job, Sam."
"So says the Gospel of John Winchester."
"You're gonna bring Dad into this? That's the route you're gonna go? He's been dead for five years, Sam. Leave him out of this."
"Even Dad didn't tackle everything, man," Sam persisted. "He wasn't the only one capable of doing what he did. You're not the only one capable of doing what we do. And even if you were - you're human. You're fried, Dean. So am I. Look what we've been through these last few months. Can't we let the world manage itself without us for a while?"
"Is there somebody else who's gonna talk Cas down off that ledge?"
"I hope so."
"You hope so."
"We don't know that we can do that. We've got no reason to believe Cas will listen to you, or me, or anybody."
"I'm not walking away from this, Sam. I don't see people lining up to volunteer - so it's us or it's nobody. And don't start telling me Cas is gonna smite me if I go anywhere near him. He could smite me before, and he never did."
"He beat the living crap out of you once."
"Exactly. He held back. He won't kill me. He'll listen to me."
Sam shook his head, then squeezed his eyes shut.
His dismay was written all over his face.
Dean silently cursed any number of things: the angel, this quiet, bucolic location, the loss of his car, the spinning muzziness in his head and the continuing slow roll of his stomach.
His whole life, particularly the part of it that had unspooled during the past couple of years.
He refused to let himself think about Lisa and Ben. There was enough to be angry about without including them in the mix.
"Seriously, man," Sam said quietly. "You don't look good. Maybe you ought to…try to sleep some more."
"Yeah, Sam," Dean shot back. "Maybe I should do that. I'll just let the world turn to crap because I'm pale."
He thought about trying for an easy, lithe spring to his feet, the kind of up-and-at-'em he'd accomplished almost without thought any number of times; of taking the first step toward thumbing his nose at Sam and this angel-generated, Norman Rockwell weekend in the woods and finding his way out of here - wherever the hell here was.
But his stomach did a backflip that would have done an Olympic swimmer proud.
He wasn't going anywhere. Not right now, anyway.
He tried thinking SHE did this as he lay back down.
But even he didn't quite buy that.
~~~~~~~~
He woke again to find the Deep In Thought version of Sam in the midst of devouring his dinner: what looked like a roast beef sandwich (complete with Russian dressing, a dollop of which was smeared on Sam's upper lip), a bottle of beer, and a banana.
Dean made a show of ignoring his brother for a while, for what little good it did.
"There's all kinds of stuff in there," Sam said, nodding toward the giant coolers. "Sandwiches. Fruit. Pudding. A couple of packages of hamburger for the grill. Cereal and milk. You name it, it's in there."
"Don't really feel like eating."
"There's Jell-O."
"And why the hell would I want Jell-O?"
"Settle your stomach. There's bread. I can make toast on the grill. Or there's -" Sam grinned. "Fruit cocktail and graham crackers. You always liked that when you were sick. And applesauce. There's a bunch of those little individual serving cups."
"Jesus, Sam."
"Fruit cocktail, man. With cherries."
Dean glowered at him.
Sam let him lie there undisturbed this time - if you could call being serenaded by the sounds of chewing and swallowing and drinking being undisturbed - and signaled the end of his meal with a huge, satisfied belch. Rather than watch him do any of that, Dean studied what he could see of the trees and the sky, and thrust aside a memory of himself and Ben out in the back yard of the house they'd shared, tossing a ball around and talking about the Space Shuttle.
"I think I was nine," Sam said out of the blue.
Dean glanced over at him but said nothing.
"Right? Eight or nine. That time we were out in the woods with Dad and Bobby and that guy - what was his name? Stan. That guy was a hoot. Told all those weird stories about rocks. And his wife - I think that was the craziest woman I ever met. Back then, anyway. But she made the best scrambled eggs I ever ate."
"Shirl," Dean said reluctantly.
"Right. Shirl."
The campfire was the first image that came to mind: a big one, burning hot and bright, the knots in the wood snapping and popping like small fireworks. There'd been maybe ten people in their group, out in the middle of nowhere, though it was an area Stan and his wife knew as well as most urban dwellers knew their neighborhood streets. They'd both been tickled by the idea of showing off their woods to two young boys, and had spent several days acquainting Dean and Sam with everything the wilderness had to offer.
Dad had taught Dean how to find his way out of the woods, true enough, but Dad's knowledge had had its limits; he'd never lived in the woods, let the wilderness become a part of him. These people, Shirl and Stan, had.
"Wonder where they are now," Sam mused.
"Probably still roaming around Montana."
"You don't think something got 'em?"
"No. I - no, man. Something did not get them. They're still out there, communing with rocks and trees."
Dean took a long look around in what little was left of the daylight, the way Stan and Shirl had taught him to, taking in the delicate curl of a fern, the striations in the rock Sam was leaning against, the scratches in the bark of a nearby tree that indicated something had climbed it not long ago. He remembered Stan, whose long gray hair hung in a braid down his back, pointing up into the highest branches of a tree - nowhere near as tall as the sequoias that surrounded Dean now, but toweringly tall to a boy - and talking quietly, the man's voice fitting into the sounds of the forest as smoothly as the chirrup of a bird or the soft croaking of a frog.
He remembered the flavor of Shirl's scrambled eggs, and the warmth of the sleeping bag he'd burrowed down into when everyone agreed it was time for lights out.
He'd slept quietly then. Peacefully.
And, man, those meals had been good, cooked over that roaring fire, all of it a little crisp around the edges.
He heaved a long sigh, then ventured, "Is there cupcakes?"
"Vanilla and chocolate."
"SpaghettiOs?"
"Dude," Sam said. "Nobody older than eight actually likes SpaghettiOs. There's a couple of containers of real spaghetti and meatballs."
"Seriously?"
"And a couple of really nice-looking steaks."
"I could eat," Dean said.
~~~~~~~~
"This is big, huh? This place."
Sam, in the midst of polishing off the last of a plateful of steak and eggs, shrugged and nodded. "National park's like half a million acres. That's a lot of territory. And there's more that's not within the boundaries of the park. We could be pretty much anywhere. We'll be able to tell more in a little while, when the stars come out."
"That one of your finely-honed senses, too?"
"Dean," Sam said.
Dean poked at the remains of his meal with the tip of his fork. "Yeah, well, pardon me if I feel like this is just another chapter of Heaven's big hit, 'Let's Dick With Dean'," he said, though there wasn't much heat in it. "I drove to Chuck's house. I kind of figured at this point in the proceedings, I'd still be somewhere in the vicinity of Chuck's house. Instead, I'm stuck in the middle of a billion square miles of freaking redwood trees, with no way to get out of here but walking."
"People do choose to come here."
"Yeah? Well, I ain't one of 'em."
Sam polished off the last few bites of his meal, then took a couple of sips of the second beer he'd pulled from the cooler to wash it all down. "Then let's make the best of it," he said mildly. "If there's nothing we can do about it - I'm serious, man. People come all the way out here just to hang out and enjoy being a part of nature."
Dean stared at him and said nothing.
"We're safe here, Dean."
"We are not safe here, Sam. There's bears up here. Mountain lions. Poisonous snakes."
"Wendigos?" Sam said, and smiled.
"You could take this seriously."
"There's also deer up here, man. Rabbits. Birds. Squirrels. Chipmunks. It's a regular Disney movie."
"You are such a freak."
"People come up here to relax. Lay out under the stars. Look - she raided a Land's End for us. Everything's in there that we need. Chuck's been gone for a year and a half now, Dean. If something's happened to him, it probably happened a long time ago. Our being up here for a couple of days isn't going to make any difference. And if we had to get stuck somewhere, I'd kind of rather have it be here than" - Sam snorted softly - "locked up someplace, like that dungeon where Crowley was keeping the alphas."
"Bobby's gonna wonder where we are," Dean said stubbornly.
"If Bobby's got any sense, he's regrouping, and trying to get some sleep. Come on - we had the TV on for two days. If Cas intended to run out and smite the world, something would have happened already, and it didn't. Right?"
"Sitting on our asses ain't helping, Sam."
"We were sitting on our asses at the motel. This smells better."
It did; Dean had to admit that much. The air was mild and dry, and there was enough of a breeze blowing to carry the fresh scent of pine and wildflowers. The real deal, not the fake aroma of laundry detergent and air fresheners.
"We oughta be doing something," he insisted.
"We are."
"Sam -"
Sam didn't offer a word of objection when Dean unrolled one of the sleeping bags and lay down.
Just for a minute, Dean figured.
So he could think.
He was asleep before he could put a thought together.
~~~~~~~~
He awoke to full dark and a painfully full bladder, and to Sam's loud, almost musical snore. The fire Sam had assembled - overkill, in a way, because the night was very mild, for the mountains - had burned down low but was still crackling softly.
The woods around them seemed still and silent.
It would have been one thing, Dean thought, if somebody had given him the option of coming here. If someone had said "Choose A or B," and then had given him a reasonable amount of time to weigh the possibilities.
But being BENCHED?
In a way, it was same old, same old. The damn angels had spent a whole year telling him he was the key to their freaking Apocalypse, that it was him or nothing, that Michael had had his eye on Dean since back before the Big Bang, practically - and then they'd shoved him aside in favor of Adam.
Adam, for crying out loud.
Adam, who was…
No. Not going there. Not right now.
I'm sorry, Adam.
He wormed his way out of his sleeping bag and climbed carefully, slowly, to his feet, wary both of waking Sam and of disturbing the equilibrium his head and his stomach had settled into over the past couple of hours. The water, the good meal, the beers that had chased it down, and those reasonably long stretches of sleep had gone a long way towards making him feel halfway decent. A little less battered. A little less like…well, like he'd been in a car that had been blown upside down onto its roof just a few days ago.
Sam made a noise like there was a blender running inside his head.
Gotta go. NOW.
Myra had thoughtfully provided a portable toilet, but there was no way Dean was going to make use of it. The thing looked like a potty chair, and even if he set it inside the tent for a little added privacy, it was just too…
He was in the woods.
He delayed his mission just long enough to locate a flashlight in amongst the piles of equipment, then chose what looked like a path and followed it into the woods far enough to prevent any unpleasant fragrances from reaching the campsite - though it would have served Sam right if his lamblike slumber was interrupted by a little bit of nature at work.
On the other hand, Dean was well acquainted to Sam's usual response to toxic dumps.
Not that Sam wasn't capable of generating some eyebrow-singeing toxins of his own.
They'd had a battle once, involving large quantities Mama Rosita's Internationally Famous Chili Con Carne, the carne portion of which had been of very questionable origin and refrigeration, and remembering it made Dean grin foolishly as he took care of business. There wasn't any chili (fresh-cooked or canned) included in Myra's enormous collection of groceries, but the combination of a few other items might do the trick.
Might as well make the best of this.
He chuckled softly as he lifted his jeans back up and fastened them.
When he turned to look for the path back to the campsite, he noticed something he could swear hadn't been there before: a pale, silvery light, coming from deep within the woods. It wasn't the campfire; that was in the other direction. And it wasn't the moon; this light was being generated from a spot at ground level, not overhead.
"The hell -?" he muttered.
Other campers, maybe. Or some kind of safety light set up by the park rangers?
Either one of those would indicate that he and Sam weren't as far from civilization as they'd assumed - and wouldn't that take the cake, if they'd spent the past twelve hours fussing about being stuck in the middle of nowhere, only to find out they were a stone's throw from a lodge, or a big campground, or a ranger station?
The angels'd laugh their asses off over that one.
Scowling, he set off further into the woods, toward the light, leaving the campsite and Sam and the faintly crackling fire behind him. The path he followed wasn't much of one; it was a snaking, natural division between the trees rather than something wide and manmade and convenient, so he had to make his way along with branches and brush swiping at his arms and legs, scratching his face, threatening the stability of his footing.
The closer he got, the less that light looked natural.
He glanced back over his shoulder, contemplating the worth of going back to fetch Sam - no more than a couple of seconds' worth of not watching where he was going, but that was long enough. The next step he took didn't land on solid ground, and that threw him off balance, tumbling him forward into the brush and down a steep, rocky slope, startled and disoriented enough that all he could think was Son of a BITCH!!! in the instant before he collided with something huge and solid and felt his right leg give way with a loud and sickening crack.
Part 4…