SPN FIC - 1-800-MISSING (Part 4 of 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.
Part 3 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: 16,663 words overall; this part is 4058 words
1-800-MISSING
By Carol Davis
He went on falling for maybe half a minute, every second of it punctuated by collisions with trees, rocks, roots, and thick bunches of shrubbery. He came to rest, finally, jammed in among a cluster of rocks, lying in a long, narrow, dirty rut that must have been created by the runoff from a long series of storms.
Son of a…
The broken leg hurt ferociously, as did his chest, both arms, and his head. He lay still for a minute or two, both because the wind was entirely knocked out of him, and because it was what Dad had taught him to do.
Quiet down. Figure out what's damaged.
Damage, Dean thought. Yeah, there's friggin' DAMAGE.
The leg. Ribs that were at least badly bruised, maybe broken. Possible concussion, the latest in a long line.
"Sam?" he tried, but breathing deeply enough to put any kind of oomph behind his voice was a no-go.
Shit. Shit. SHIT.
All of this, because of a light in the woods. A stupid pool of pale silvery light in the middle of the woods that was probably nothing more than…
He had no idea what it was.
Friggin' TINKERBELL.
"Sam??"
But Sam was a good half a mile away, on the other side of a lot of trees and brush and rock, and the last time Dean had seen him, he was sound asleep.
Sam might come looking for him come morning, but that was a long ways off. It was full dark now, the middle of the night, and the three-quarter moon that had helped light his way along the path was hidden behind the slope he'd tumbled down.
The flashlight was nowhere to be found.
Grimacing, Dean ran his hands along as much of his body as he could reach without shifting his torso or the broken leg, looking for any of his clothing that might be the kind of wet-and-sticky that meant he was bleeding. He found no blood, just a big cluster of burrs stuck to the hem of his flannel button-down.
Small favors, he thought, without anything approaching gratitude.
His fingers had also found the tip of the broken bone, about a hand's width north of his right knee. It hadn't torn its way through his jeans, but it created enough of a lump underneath the thick denim that its identity was unmistakable.
He knew what Dad would say: find a couple of sticks. Tear the sleeves off the button-down and make a splint.
Then drag yourself back up the friggin' mountain.
Where he shouldn't have been in the first place.
About a million years ago, he'd been in a motel room in Bootback, Kansas with Sam, eating pre-packaged sandwiches and watching CNN while Sammy drank (and belched) bottle after bottle of Orange Crush.
Waiting for Cas to do something.
Waiting for something to happen.
The place had smelled kind of funny, but Dean could count on his fingers the number of places he'd overnighted in his life that didn't. It had decent cable reception, and plenty of towels, and the heat and AC had worked (if a little noisily). Its chief value was that it was within easy walking distance of the garage where a guy named Tim had assured Dean that he could get the Impala back into shape within a few days - at least, into good enough shape that Dean could get her back to Bobby's, where he could complete the repairs himself.
Where Bobby was no doubt asleep right now.
Bobby, who'd said he needed some time to think. Regroup. Talk to some people.
Got nobody to…
Someone sighed.
It's the wind.
But it wasn't; that was a voice, and instead of offering anything helpful, it sounded as if it was saying, Oh, Jesus, Dean, NOW what, all in the space of one breath.
Even if he'd tried, he wouldn't have been able to convince himself that if he ignored whoever it was, they'd go away. Things didn't work that way in his life: the people he desperately wanted to stay with him, didn't, and the ones who did nothing but trash his every waking moment…
"Dean."
Well, THAT figures.
"You do an amazingly shitty job," he murmured. "Okay? If I could, I'd get that embroidered on a friggin' baseball cap for you, but…wow. I'm laying halfway down a damn mountain with my leg snapped in half."
At least Myra of Blueberry Hill didn't sigh again.
"Go get Sam," he said.
"Sam is asleep."
"Then -"
He opened his eyes. He figured no matter what it cost him, even if the effort made him pass right the hell out, he was going to let her have it with both barrels. Venting his spleen at an angel had never accomplished much - only slamming a bloody hand onto Cas's Magical Angel-Banishing Sigil had ever produced any real results - but it was at least momentarily satisfying, and at this point in the proceedings, a flicker of satisfaction was worth cranking his pain level up a few notches.
But seeing her stunned him back into silence.
She was the light.
That pale, silvery light surrounded her, seemed to come from somewhere within her, and it bathed everything around her in a way sunlight couldn't dream of.
The word glory dropped into his mind.
"Who -" he stammered.
"They told me this assignment would be difficult," she said, ignoring his question. "They don't often give something like this to someone of my stature, but -"
Again, his lips formed the word "who," but the sound didn't follow.
"They told me all creatures seek the familiar. So I brought the food and drink you like, and a comfortable place to sleep. And your brother. That's what you seek most of all, isn't it? Your brother. But you -"
She looked like she wanted to cry.
"Why do you seek pain, Dean?"
"I don't -"
I need to get closer, he thought. He wasn't sure where the impulse was coming from, but the sudden need to crawl into that light, to be a part of it, was suddenly far more powerful than the throbbing pain in his leg. But Myra, still in her hoodie and t-shirt, was a couple of yards away, sitting on the flat top of a big, otherwise jagged rock. For all the effort it would have taken to reach her, she might as well have been on the other side of the world.
If this was the world.
Just because everything here looked real - real enough that both he and Sam had easily identified it as being part of sequoia country - didn't mean it was. That game show world; the Green Room; that bizarre place where his life and Sam's were fictional, part of a TV series called Supernatural; his glimpse of a Croatoan-ruined future - they'd all seemed real enough, but they'd all been constructs.
For all he knew, the place everyone had told him was Heaven was a construct, too.
"Are we in California?" he asked Myra.
Are we anywhere real?
Instead of answering that, she looked somewhere past him, into a cluster of shrubs. "I didn't know it would be this difficult," she said absently, as if she were talking to herself rather than to him - or anyone human, for that matter.
He tried to shift a little, to reach out to the silvery light, but a flash of agony running from his thigh up into his hip forced him to lie back down. She had something to learn, he thought, if having her expectations squashed was her idea of a big-time problem. And for that matter, who'd said she was allowed to have expectations? About him? Who'd decided he needed a guardian in the first place?
Been taking care of myself since I was a little kid. I don't need you, lady. Unless you can make a damn call and get me Medivac'ed out of here. Do something. If you're supposed to take care of me, then get me out of here! Zap me back up the mountain to the freakin' yuppie campground. Or back to Chuck's. Or back to the motel. Somewhere. Anywhere. 'Cause this ain't taking care of me, letting me lay here all busted up like this.
You hearing me?
"I thought you were -" she began.
"What? A cake job? Did you not pay attention to the job specs?"
She frowned at that, as puzzled as Cas had once been over the peculiarities of slang.
"You could've said no," Dean told her.
"I was assigned. One does not say 'no'."
"Kinda sucks to be you, then, doesn't it."
"I can't give you what you think you need, Dean," she said softly.
"I need not to have a broken leg! If you could zap six tons of stuff in here from…wherever you got it from, and me and Sam along with it, then you can fix my damn leg."
She sighed again.
"You supposed to be teaching me some kind of lesson? Is that it?"
"Would you listen, if I were?"
It was like that stupid TV show, he thought: the one he'd watched all that one winter, healing from an earlier broken leg, waiting for Dad, waiting for Sam to get home from school. Three episodes a day, Monday through Friday.
A show about angels.
Their light had been golden, not silver.
But that was TV.
"You're not like the rest of 'em," he said, his voice growing raspy with pain. "Who are you? Really?"
"I told you."
"And I told you -"
"It isn't my place to restore you. I understand that Castiel has done it several times, but that was an abuse of power. He has a long history of abusing his power."
"Don't," Dean told her sharply. "Don't start -"
She cocked her head a little to one side. Listening, obviously, but whatever she was listening to was beyond Dean's range of hearing.
"Get me out of here," he gasped. "Please."
Don't take the light away. Don't…
She began to fade.
"No!" Dean yelped.
But she was gone before he'd finished forming the word.
~~~~~~~~
He wasn't bleeding, and the night was mild, so he wouldn't bleed to death, wouldn't freeze to death.
Might go into shock, though.
All this for a stupid…
DEAN.
Nobody's gonna get you out of here. Do what I taught you. Make a splint. Got what you need right there. Fix yourself up, and climb back up that damn hill.
"Not a hill," he muttered. "'S a mountain."
So you're just gonna lie there?
"Tired."
You whiny princess. Bite on a stick if you have to. You think I haven't had to do worse? You think every one of us hasn't had to do worse? Fine, then - if this is too tough for you, then lie there like a kicked dog. If you die there in the dirt, then good riddance.
DEAN. Get off your ass.
You figure we're supposed to take care of you? Fine, we'll carry you out of there on a damn stretcher.
Why do you seek pain, Dean?
"Don't," he muttered. "I don't do that."
Dean.
The night was mild enough that Sam had gone to sleep lying on top of one of those thick, soft sleeping bags, one arm tucked under his head for a pillow. Dean had only crawled inside his own sleeping bag because the additional warmth was a comfort. As he began to shiver, he tried to retrieve the memory of being wrapped up in that down-filled cocoon; tried to tell himself that he was warm enough, and safe enough, and that Sam would come looking for him as soon as he woke and discovered that Dean wasn't anywhere nearby.
Gonna be fine.
Gonna…
So beautiful. That light. Been dead a million times, and never saw anything like that.
"Come back," he whispered.
Then thought: I sound like Kate friggin' Winslet after the damn Titanic goes down. "Come back! Come baaaaaack!"
He would have had no more luck blowing an emergency whistle than she had, though. His chest felt as if it were wrapped in bands of white-hot metal; taking a full, deep breath was impossible.
He'd never make it back to the campsite. Not on his own.
You hearin' me, Angel Radio? Come the fuck BACK.
But no one came.
~~~~~~~~
"Dean."
"Go 'way."
He was a long way from here, dreaming of Lisa in a filmy babydoll nightie, her hair hanging loose and wavy around her shoulders, smiling as she moved across the bed toward him on her hands and knees. He'd told her his leg was hurting, and his chest, and she'd promised to make it all better, that she knew how to kiss all those bad places in a way that'd make him forget they'd ever hurt in the first place.
"Dean."
Not Sam.
Not Bobby.
Definitely not Lisa.
Hell with you. Go 'way and leave me alone.
But there was light creeping in through the narrow gap between his eyelids. Morning, he thought fleetingly.
No, not morning.
That.
Myra, then. But it hadn't sounded like her. Sounded more like…
Dean forced his eyes open, wincing at the full-on return of the pain that seemed to run the whole length of his body, and found himself looking at a figure in jeans and a grubby, half-buttoned flannel shirt, the frayed neck of a grimy t-shirt visible beneath it.
The weary, lopsided, wry-rather-than-humorless grin on that face was all too familiar.
Chuck.
CHUCK???
Dean startled, and wished immediately that he hadn't; the pain streaking through his body brought tears to his eyes, and he had to lie still for a minute before he could summon enough strength to speak. "What…what the hell are you doing here?" he gasped.
"If I said I didn't have anything better to do, would you come anywhere close to - no, never mind. You look kind of messed up, Dean."
He'd been sent out to find Chuck Shurley, he seemed to remember. Presumably, to bring Chuck safely back to Kripke's Hollow. And if that second thing was true, it was a good thing for Chuck's sake - and for Becky Rosen's - that he'd left his gun back in the campsite with Sam, tucked underneath his currently empty sleeping bag.
"Get Sam," he ground out.
Chuck pondered that for a second, then shrugged apologetically. "Maybe it'd be better if we let him sleep for a while longer."
"Get. SAM."
Chuck made a small, squeaky noise with his lower lip, then leaned back and took a long look around. The route Dean had taken in falling down the mountainside occupied most of his attention, though it didn't seem to impress him very much. "You can probably make it," he offered after a minute. "Go up backwards. Trail the leg along behind you."
"You think?"
"It'll take you a while."
"Chuck," Dean said. "You got any kind of a clue what I'd like to do with this leg right now? Not gonna climb a mountain backwards on my butt."
"It's the only way to avoid putting pressure on the leg."
"Chuck."
He was only acting that way - reasonably self-assured - because Dean wasn't close enough to beat the shit out of him. Dean figured he could get in at least one good swing before he passed out from the pain, but the Prophet was a good ten or twelve feet away, sitting cross-legged in a big pool of moonlight, completely out of reach.
Exhausted, Dean lay his head down again and stared up into the trees, grateful beyond words when Chuck didn't say anything.
Then Chuck started to hum.
There was a knife tucked into Dean's left boot. He'd be able to reach it if he bent that knee and brought it slowly and steadily up toward his shoulder. The movement would hurt like a bastard, no doubt, but it'd be worth the suffering. The knife was honed sharp as a razor, and one good slice would be enough.
Wherever he ended up after he cut his own throat, maybe they'd leave him there.
Chuck just went on humming.
Dean bent the leg, slowly and gingerly. Brought his knee up toward his shoulder and probed inside his boot until he located the knife. It was warm to the touch and glimmered in the moonlight as he shifted it in his grasp. He'd spent a good long while back at the Wagon Wheel Inn stroking the whetstone against it, making sure the blade wouldn't let him down when he needed it.
His vision swam as he thrust it in.
You will not die choking on your own puke. Forget that shit. You WILL NOT.
Chuck was most of the way through "Me and Bobby McGee" when Dean tugged loose the left sleeve of his button-down. From there the Prophet segued into some spirited air guitar, then moved on to something that Dean absently identified as "Crazy."
GUN, man, you are so damn lucky I don't have a gun, that I don't have a frigging MACHINE GUN, because you would be splattered all over the side of this mountain. You got an archangel tied to you? Well, let's give that a test, because I figure they're all dead now, or they've got better shit to do with their time than protect your sorry ass.
There were tears streaming down Dean's face as he pulled free the right sleeve of his shirt, partly from pain and partly because Chuck's Midnight Celebration of Greatest Dead People Hits had taken a left turn into "Take Me Home, Country Roads." "Close to You" was up next, prodding Dean into a faster and faster search for a couple of long, relatively straight sticks. His stomach was churning like a blender set on Liquefy. His nose had started to run, and he could barely see through the tears that refused to stop welling in his eyes.
When he finished tying the splint in place, Chuck finally, blessedly, stopped humming.
"I am going to fucking kill you," Dean wheezed. "I am. And if somebody blows me into bloody chunks for it, I won't complain."
He hauled himself into a sit, head spinning, every inch of him trembling with pain.
Then it stopped.
It just…stopped.
"Tell Becky that Chuck is fine," the Prophet said with an odd, crooked smile on his face. "Okay? Tell her Chuck is sorry that it didn't work out, and that there's some paperwork she should have, in a manila envelope in the bottom right-hand drawer of the desk." He paused, looking something past Dean's shoulder, something that made him chuckle softly. "Tell her…that she's a good soul, and she should have faith in herself. But that she might give some thought to making better use of her time."
Frowning, Dean ran a wobbling hand along his thigh.
That lump of protruding bone was no longer there.
"Tell her yourself," he said absently.
When he looked back at Chuck, Chuck was no longer sitting in a big pool of moonlight.
Chuck was the big pool of moonlight.
"Wha -" was all Dean could put together.
The Prophet smiled at him from somewhere deep inside that well of light. It was Chuck Shurley's face, and yet it wasn't; it possessed something - a lot of somethings - that Chuck on his best day wouldn't have been able to consider laying claim to.
"Who are you?" Dean demanded.
"Find your brother," the Prophet said. "I'll send you back when it's time."
"Time for what?"
Once more, Chuck - the person…thing…whatever…that looked like Chuck - began to hum. Just a few bars, this time.
"Carry on, Dean," he said. "There'll be peace when it's over. I promise."
Then he was gone.
And Sam's voice bellowed from somewhere up above: "Dean! DEAN! Where the hell are you, man?"
~~~~~~~~
"What do you mean, you found Chuck?"
Dean glanced back over his shoulder. The place in the woods where he'd lost his footing, where he'd tumbled down the mountainside; the place where he'd tossed aside the makeshift splint; the place where he'd seen Myra sitting, then Chuck - none of it was visible any longer. He and Sam were almost back to the campsite, the bright colors of the tent and the enormous heap of food and supplies only thirty or forty yards away.
"He said he's fine," Dean said.
"Then - where is he now?"
"No idea."
"Somebody zapped him here, then? Was it Myra?"
"I don't know, Sam."
Sam huffed at that - the early warning sign of an impending bitchface - but his disgust vanished almost immediately, replaced by an odd look that was clearly visible in the faint, but rising, morning sunlight. "You scared the hell out of me, man," he said. "Again."
"I went to take a leak."
"And you fell down the mountain."
"Yeah."
"I looked all over for you. For like - I don't even know how long. Hours."
"Hours? Dude, I wasn't down there for hours."
The odd expression got progressively odder. Involved a lot of nostril flaring and lip twitching. Dean was a breath away from demanding that Sam knock it off when Sam took an abrupt step forward, flung his arms out, and swept Dean into a bone-crushing hug.
"Dude," Dean wheezed. "Seriously."
"You scared the hell out of me, man. I mean it."
"Yeah, well, I'm - I'm good."
It took some prodding to get Sam to let go. For a moment, Dean wasn't entirely sure he wanted Sam to let go.
"I'm good," he said again.
They'd almost broken through into the clearing when Dean took another look back. Hours? he thought.
Broken leg.
The humming.
The light.
"There was -" he said, then cut himself off.
Sam raised a brow.
"This light," Dean said. "This really weird light. Like nothing I ever saw before. That's what drew me out there."
Sam took a look. "I don't see anything. Just daylight."
Light.
Like…
"It was -"
Fading.
"Something to do with Myra?" Sam asked.
"Yeah. I guess. I think."
"Well," Sam said mildly, apparently happy enough with having located Dean that nothing else concerned him, "next time you see her, you can ask her."
Or maybe it was just that Sam was freakin' weird.
"She won't answer the question," Dean told him. "They never answer a question. It'd mess with that whole mystical, mysterious thing. Anyway - it's not like we're not used to it. You remember a time when Dad ever answered a question, straight out?"
The campsite was just as they'd left it: sleeping bags laid out near the fire, the heaps of supplies largely untouched.
"There's one thing I'd ask her," Sam said. "How come you merit a guardian angel and I don't."
He didn't stand still long enough to see much of the guilty shrug Dean gave him in reply. Instead, he began rooting around in the boxes of food, flipping open the lid of one of the big coolers when he didn't find what he wanted. "But it's kind of - I know what she'd say."
"You do."
Sam nodded. Smiled a little. "They didn't give me one, because it would have been kind of redundant."
Yeah: weird.
Seriously weird.
"You hungry?" Sam asked. "There's pancake mix. And waffles."
"I could eat," Dean told him.
~~~~~~~~
The smell of blood.
The smell of fear.
Bobby, there beside him. Bits of the woman Raphael had been wearing, splashed all over the wall and the floor.
Words shaped themselves in Dean's throat, on his lips and tongue, along with the sensation - puzzling, but easily ignored - that he had spoken them before.
Sam there, then, visible behind Cas.
Thrusting Raphael's blade into Castiel's back.
Nothing happening.
"I'm not an angel any more," Cas said, and at that moment he was someone Dean recognized all too well: the angel who'd strode into an abandoned barn some three years back, fierce and unblinking, as unimpressed by gunfire as he would have been by circling insects. Fear me - that was the impression he'd given then.
He gave it again now, in spades.
I'm your new god," he said. "A better one. So you will bow down and profess your love unto me, your lord - or I shall destroy you."
God, Dean thought, but whether it was simply an echo of what Cas had said, or a prayer, he would not decide for a long, long time.
* * * * *
Part 1 is here.
Part 2 is here.
Part 3 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: 16,663 words overall; this part is 4058 words
1-800-MISSING
By Carol Davis
He went on falling for maybe half a minute, every second of it punctuated by collisions with trees, rocks, roots, and thick bunches of shrubbery. He came to rest, finally, jammed in among a cluster of rocks, lying in a long, narrow, dirty rut that must have been created by the runoff from a long series of storms.
Son of a…
The broken leg hurt ferociously, as did his chest, both arms, and his head. He lay still for a minute or two, both because the wind was entirely knocked out of him, and because it was what Dad had taught him to do.
Quiet down. Figure out what's damaged.
Damage, Dean thought. Yeah, there's friggin' DAMAGE.
The leg. Ribs that were at least badly bruised, maybe broken. Possible concussion, the latest in a long line.
"Sam?" he tried, but breathing deeply enough to put any kind of oomph behind his voice was a no-go.
Shit. Shit. SHIT.
All of this, because of a light in the woods. A stupid pool of pale silvery light in the middle of the woods that was probably nothing more than…
He had no idea what it was.
Friggin' TINKERBELL.
"Sam??"
But Sam was a good half a mile away, on the other side of a lot of trees and brush and rock, and the last time Dean had seen him, he was sound asleep.
Sam might come looking for him come morning, but that was a long ways off. It was full dark now, the middle of the night, and the three-quarter moon that had helped light his way along the path was hidden behind the slope he'd tumbled down.
The flashlight was nowhere to be found.
Grimacing, Dean ran his hands along as much of his body as he could reach without shifting his torso or the broken leg, looking for any of his clothing that might be the kind of wet-and-sticky that meant he was bleeding. He found no blood, just a big cluster of burrs stuck to the hem of his flannel button-down.
Small favors, he thought, without anything approaching gratitude.
His fingers had also found the tip of the broken bone, about a hand's width north of his right knee. It hadn't torn its way through his jeans, but it created enough of a lump underneath the thick denim that its identity was unmistakable.
He knew what Dad would say: find a couple of sticks. Tear the sleeves off the button-down and make a splint.
Then drag yourself back up the friggin' mountain.
Where he shouldn't have been in the first place.
About a million years ago, he'd been in a motel room in Bootback, Kansas with Sam, eating pre-packaged sandwiches and watching CNN while Sammy drank (and belched) bottle after bottle of Orange Crush.
Waiting for Cas to do something.
Waiting for something to happen.
The place had smelled kind of funny, but Dean could count on his fingers the number of places he'd overnighted in his life that didn't. It had decent cable reception, and plenty of towels, and the heat and AC had worked (if a little noisily). Its chief value was that it was within easy walking distance of the garage where a guy named Tim had assured Dean that he could get the Impala back into shape within a few days - at least, into good enough shape that Dean could get her back to Bobby's, where he could complete the repairs himself.
Where Bobby was no doubt asleep right now.
Bobby, who'd said he needed some time to think. Regroup. Talk to some people.
Got nobody to…
Someone sighed.
It's the wind.
But it wasn't; that was a voice, and instead of offering anything helpful, it sounded as if it was saying, Oh, Jesus, Dean, NOW what, all in the space of one breath.
Even if he'd tried, he wouldn't have been able to convince himself that if he ignored whoever it was, they'd go away. Things didn't work that way in his life: the people he desperately wanted to stay with him, didn't, and the ones who did nothing but trash his every waking moment…
"Dean."
Well, THAT figures.
"You do an amazingly shitty job," he murmured. "Okay? If I could, I'd get that embroidered on a friggin' baseball cap for you, but…wow. I'm laying halfway down a damn mountain with my leg snapped in half."
At least Myra of Blueberry Hill didn't sigh again.
"Go get Sam," he said.
"Sam is asleep."
"Then -"
He opened his eyes. He figured no matter what it cost him, even if the effort made him pass right the hell out, he was going to let her have it with both barrels. Venting his spleen at an angel had never accomplished much - only slamming a bloody hand onto Cas's Magical Angel-Banishing Sigil had ever produced any real results - but it was at least momentarily satisfying, and at this point in the proceedings, a flicker of satisfaction was worth cranking his pain level up a few notches.
But seeing her stunned him back into silence.
She was the light.
That pale, silvery light surrounded her, seemed to come from somewhere within her, and it bathed everything around her in a way sunlight couldn't dream of.
The word glory dropped into his mind.
"Who -" he stammered.
"They told me this assignment would be difficult," she said, ignoring his question. "They don't often give something like this to someone of my stature, but -"
Again, his lips formed the word "who," but the sound didn't follow.
"They told me all creatures seek the familiar. So I brought the food and drink you like, and a comfortable place to sleep. And your brother. That's what you seek most of all, isn't it? Your brother. But you -"
She looked like she wanted to cry.
"Why do you seek pain, Dean?"
"I don't -"
I need to get closer, he thought. He wasn't sure where the impulse was coming from, but the sudden need to crawl into that light, to be a part of it, was suddenly far more powerful than the throbbing pain in his leg. But Myra, still in her hoodie and t-shirt, was a couple of yards away, sitting on the flat top of a big, otherwise jagged rock. For all the effort it would have taken to reach her, she might as well have been on the other side of the world.
If this was the world.
Just because everything here looked real - real enough that both he and Sam had easily identified it as being part of sequoia country - didn't mean it was. That game show world; the Green Room; that bizarre place where his life and Sam's were fictional, part of a TV series called Supernatural; his glimpse of a Croatoan-ruined future - they'd all seemed real enough, but they'd all been constructs.
For all he knew, the place everyone had told him was Heaven was a construct, too.
"Are we in California?" he asked Myra.
Are we anywhere real?
Instead of answering that, she looked somewhere past him, into a cluster of shrubs. "I didn't know it would be this difficult," she said absently, as if she were talking to herself rather than to him - or anyone human, for that matter.
He tried to shift a little, to reach out to the silvery light, but a flash of agony running from his thigh up into his hip forced him to lie back down. She had something to learn, he thought, if having her expectations squashed was her idea of a big-time problem. And for that matter, who'd said she was allowed to have expectations? About him? Who'd decided he needed a guardian in the first place?
Been taking care of myself since I was a little kid. I don't need you, lady. Unless you can make a damn call and get me Medivac'ed out of here. Do something. If you're supposed to take care of me, then get me out of here! Zap me back up the mountain to the freakin' yuppie campground. Or back to Chuck's. Or back to the motel. Somewhere. Anywhere. 'Cause this ain't taking care of me, letting me lay here all busted up like this.
You hearing me?
"I thought you were -" she began.
"What? A cake job? Did you not pay attention to the job specs?"
She frowned at that, as puzzled as Cas had once been over the peculiarities of slang.
"You could've said no," Dean told her.
"I was assigned. One does not say 'no'."
"Kinda sucks to be you, then, doesn't it."
"I can't give you what you think you need, Dean," she said softly.
"I need not to have a broken leg! If you could zap six tons of stuff in here from…wherever you got it from, and me and Sam along with it, then you can fix my damn leg."
She sighed again.
"You supposed to be teaching me some kind of lesson? Is that it?"
"Would you listen, if I were?"
It was like that stupid TV show, he thought: the one he'd watched all that one winter, healing from an earlier broken leg, waiting for Dad, waiting for Sam to get home from school. Three episodes a day, Monday through Friday.
A show about angels.
Their light had been golden, not silver.
But that was TV.
"You're not like the rest of 'em," he said, his voice growing raspy with pain. "Who are you? Really?"
"I told you."
"And I told you -"
"It isn't my place to restore you. I understand that Castiel has done it several times, but that was an abuse of power. He has a long history of abusing his power."
"Don't," Dean told her sharply. "Don't start -"
She cocked her head a little to one side. Listening, obviously, but whatever she was listening to was beyond Dean's range of hearing.
"Get me out of here," he gasped. "Please."
Don't take the light away. Don't…
She began to fade.
"No!" Dean yelped.
But she was gone before he'd finished forming the word.
~~~~~~~~
He wasn't bleeding, and the night was mild, so he wouldn't bleed to death, wouldn't freeze to death.
Might go into shock, though.
All this for a stupid…
DEAN.
Nobody's gonna get you out of here. Do what I taught you. Make a splint. Got what you need right there. Fix yourself up, and climb back up that damn hill.
"Not a hill," he muttered. "'S a mountain."
So you're just gonna lie there?
"Tired."
You whiny princess. Bite on a stick if you have to. You think I haven't had to do worse? You think every one of us hasn't had to do worse? Fine, then - if this is too tough for you, then lie there like a kicked dog. If you die there in the dirt, then good riddance.
DEAN. Get off your ass.
You figure we're supposed to take care of you? Fine, we'll carry you out of there on a damn stretcher.
Why do you seek pain, Dean?
"Don't," he muttered. "I don't do that."
Dean.
The night was mild enough that Sam had gone to sleep lying on top of one of those thick, soft sleeping bags, one arm tucked under his head for a pillow. Dean had only crawled inside his own sleeping bag because the additional warmth was a comfort. As he began to shiver, he tried to retrieve the memory of being wrapped up in that down-filled cocoon; tried to tell himself that he was warm enough, and safe enough, and that Sam would come looking for him as soon as he woke and discovered that Dean wasn't anywhere nearby.
Gonna be fine.
Gonna…
So beautiful. That light. Been dead a million times, and never saw anything like that.
"Come back," he whispered.
Then thought: I sound like Kate friggin' Winslet after the damn Titanic goes down. "Come back! Come baaaaaack!"
He would have had no more luck blowing an emergency whistle than she had, though. His chest felt as if it were wrapped in bands of white-hot metal; taking a full, deep breath was impossible.
He'd never make it back to the campsite. Not on his own.
You hearin' me, Angel Radio? Come the fuck BACK.
But no one came.
~~~~~~~~
"Dean."
"Go 'way."
He was a long way from here, dreaming of Lisa in a filmy babydoll nightie, her hair hanging loose and wavy around her shoulders, smiling as she moved across the bed toward him on her hands and knees. He'd told her his leg was hurting, and his chest, and she'd promised to make it all better, that she knew how to kiss all those bad places in a way that'd make him forget they'd ever hurt in the first place.
"Dean."
Not Sam.
Not Bobby.
Definitely not Lisa.
Hell with you. Go 'way and leave me alone.
But there was light creeping in through the narrow gap between his eyelids. Morning, he thought fleetingly.
No, not morning.
That.
Myra, then. But it hadn't sounded like her. Sounded more like…
Dean forced his eyes open, wincing at the full-on return of the pain that seemed to run the whole length of his body, and found himself looking at a figure in jeans and a grubby, half-buttoned flannel shirt, the frayed neck of a grimy t-shirt visible beneath it.
The weary, lopsided, wry-rather-than-humorless grin on that face was all too familiar.
Chuck.
CHUCK???
Dean startled, and wished immediately that he hadn't; the pain streaking through his body brought tears to his eyes, and he had to lie still for a minute before he could summon enough strength to speak. "What…what the hell are you doing here?" he gasped.
"If I said I didn't have anything better to do, would you come anywhere close to - no, never mind. You look kind of messed up, Dean."
He'd been sent out to find Chuck Shurley, he seemed to remember. Presumably, to bring Chuck safely back to Kripke's Hollow. And if that second thing was true, it was a good thing for Chuck's sake - and for Becky Rosen's - that he'd left his gun back in the campsite with Sam, tucked underneath his currently empty sleeping bag.
"Get Sam," he ground out.
Chuck pondered that for a second, then shrugged apologetically. "Maybe it'd be better if we let him sleep for a while longer."
"Get. SAM."
Chuck made a small, squeaky noise with his lower lip, then leaned back and took a long look around. The route Dean had taken in falling down the mountainside occupied most of his attention, though it didn't seem to impress him very much. "You can probably make it," he offered after a minute. "Go up backwards. Trail the leg along behind you."
"You think?"
"It'll take you a while."
"Chuck," Dean said. "You got any kind of a clue what I'd like to do with this leg right now? Not gonna climb a mountain backwards on my butt."
"It's the only way to avoid putting pressure on the leg."
"Chuck."
He was only acting that way - reasonably self-assured - because Dean wasn't close enough to beat the shit out of him. Dean figured he could get in at least one good swing before he passed out from the pain, but the Prophet was a good ten or twelve feet away, sitting cross-legged in a big pool of moonlight, completely out of reach.
Exhausted, Dean lay his head down again and stared up into the trees, grateful beyond words when Chuck didn't say anything.
Then Chuck started to hum.
There was a knife tucked into Dean's left boot. He'd be able to reach it if he bent that knee and brought it slowly and steadily up toward his shoulder. The movement would hurt like a bastard, no doubt, but it'd be worth the suffering. The knife was honed sharp as a razor, and one good slice would be enough.
Wherever he ended up after he cut his own throat, maybe they'd leave him there.
Chuck just went on humming.
Dean bent the leg, slowly and gingerly. Brought his knee up toward his shoulder and probed inside his boot until he located the knife. It was warm to the touch and glimmered in the moonlight as he shifted it in his grasp. He'd spent a good long while back at the Wagon Wheel Inn stroking the whetstone against it, making sure the blade wouldn't let him down when he needed it.
His vision swam as he thrust it in.
You will not die choking on your own puke. Forget that shit. You WILL NOT.
Chuck was most of the way through "Me and Bobby McGee" when Dean tugged loose the left sleeve of his button-down. From there the Prophet segued into some spirited air guitar, then moved on to something that Dean absently identified as "Crazy."
GUN, man, you are so damn lucky I don't have a gun, that I don't have a frigging MACHINE GUN, because you would be splattered all over the side of this mountain. You got an archangel tied to you? Well, let's give that a test, because I figure they're all dead now, or they've got better shit to do with their time than protect your sorry ass.
There were tears streaming down Dean's face as he pulled free the right sleeve of his shirt, partly from pain and partly because Chuck's Midnight Celebration of Greatest Dead People Hits had taken a left turn into "Take Me Home, Country Roads." "Close to You" was up next, prodding Dean into a faster and faster search for a couple of long, relatively straight sticks. His stomach was churning like a blender set on Liquefy. His nose had started to run, and he could barely see through the tears that refused to stop welling in his eyes.
When he finished tying the splint in place, Chuck finally, blessedly, stopped humming.
"I am going to fucking kill you," Dean wheezed. "I am. And if somebody blows me into bloody chunks for it, I won't complain."
He hauled himself into a sit, head spinning, every inch of him trembling with pain.
Then it stopped.
It just…stopped.
"Tell Becky that Chuck is fine," the Prophet said with an odd, crooked smile on his face. "Okay? Tell her Chuck is sorry that it didn't work out, and that there's some paperwork she should have, in a manila envelope in the bottom right-hand drawer of the desk." He paused, looking something past Dean's shoulder, something that made him chuckle softly. "Tell her…that she's a good soul, and she should have faith in herself. But that she might give some thought to making better use of her time."
Frowning, Dean ran a wobbling hand along his thigh.
That lump of protruding bone was no longer there.
"Tell her yourself," he said absently.
When he looked back at Chuck, Chuck was no longer sitting in a big pool of moonlight.
Chuck was the big pool of moonlight.
"Wha -" was all Dean could put together.
The Prophet smiled at him from somewhere deep inside that well of light. It was Chuck Shurley's face, and yet it wasn't; it possessed something - a lot of somethings - that Chuck on his best day wouldn't have been able to consider laying claim to.
"Who are you?" Dean demanded.
"Find your brother," the Prophet said. "I'll send you back when it's time."
"Time for what?"
Once more, Chuck - the person…thing…whatever…that looked like Chuck - began to hum. Just a few bars, this time.
"Carry on, Dean," he said. "There'll be peace when it's over. I promise."
Then he was gone.
And Sam's voice bellowed from somewhere up above: "Dean! DEAN! Where the hell are you, man?"
~~~~~~~~
"What do you mean, you found Chuck?"
Dean glanced back over his shoulder. The place in the woods where he'd lost his footing, where he'd tumbled down the mountainside; the place where he'd tossed aside the makeshift splint; the place where he'd seen Myra sitting, then Chuck - none of it was visible any longer. He and Sam were almost back to the campsite, the bright colors of the tent and the enormous heap of food and supplies only thirty or forty yards away.
"He said he's fine," Dean said.
"Then - where is he now?"
"No idea."
"Somebody zapped him here, then? Was it Myra?"
"I don't know, Sam."
Sam huffed at that - the early warning sign of an impending bitchface - but his disgust vanished almost immediately, replaced by an odd look that was clearly visible in the faint, but rising, morning sunlight. "You scared the hell out of me, man," he said. "Again."
"I went to take a leak."
"And you fell down the mountain."
"Yeah."
"I looked all over for you. For like - I don't even know how long. Hours."
"Hours? Dude, I wasn't down there for hours."
The odd expression got progressively odder. Involved a lot of nostril flaring and lip twitching. Dean was a breath away from demanding that Sam knock it off when Sam took an abrupt step forward, flung his arms out, and swept Dean into a bone-crushing hug.
"Dude," Dean wheezed. "Seriously."
"You scared the hell out of me, man. I mean it."
"Yeah, well, I'm - I'm good."
It took some prodding to get Sam to let go. For a moment, Dean wasn't entirely sure he wanted Sam to let go.
"I'm good," he said again.
They'd almost broken through into the clearing when Dean took another look back. Hours? he thought.
Broken leg.
The humming.
The light.
"There was -" he said, then cut himself off.
Sam raised a brow.
"This light," Dean said. "This really weird light. Like nothing I ever saw before. That's what drew me out there."
Sam took a look. "I don't see anything. Just daylight."
Light.
Like…
"It was -"
Fading.
"Something to do with Myra?" Sam asked.
"Yeah. I guess. I think."
"Well," Sam said mildly, apparently happy enough with having located Dean that nothing else concerned him, "next time you see her, you can ask her."
Or maybe it was just that Sam was freakin' weird.
"She won't answer the question," Dean told him. "They never answer a question. It'd mess with that whole mystical, mysterious thing. Anyway - it's not like we're not used to it. You remember a time when Dad ever answered a question, straight out?"
The campsite was just as they'd left it: sleeping bags laid out near the fire, the heaps of supplies largely untouched.
"There's one thing I'd ask her," Sam said. "How come you merit a guardian angel and I don't."
He didn't stand still long enough to see much of the guilty shrug Dean gave him in reply. Instead, he began rooting around in the boxes of food, flipping open the lid of one of the big coolers when he didn't find what he wanted. "But it's kind of - I know what she'd say."
"You do."
Sam nodded. Smiled a little. "They didn't give me one, because it would have been kind of redundant."
Yeah: weird.
Seriously weird.
"You hungry?" Sam asked. "There's pancake mix. And waffles."
"I could eat," Dean told him.
~~~~~~~~
The smell of blood.
The smell of fear.
Bobby, there beside him. Bits of the woman Raphael had been wearing, splashed all over the wall and the floor.
Words shaped themselves in Dean's throat, on his lips and tongue, along with the sensation - puzzling, but easily ignored - that he had spoken them before.
Sam there, then, visible behind Cas.
Thrusting Raphael's blade into Castiel's back.
Nothing happening.
"I'm not an angel any more," Cas said, and at that moment he was someone Dean recognized all too well: the angel who'd strode into an abandoned barn some three years back, fierce and unblinking, as unimpressed by gunfire as he would have been by circling insects. Fear me - that was the impression he'd given then.
He gave it again now, in spades.
I'm your new god," he said. "A better one. So you will bow down and profess your love unto me, your lord - or I shall destroy you."
God, Dean thought, but whether it was simply an echo of what Cas had said, or a prayer, he would not decide for a long, long time.
* * * * *