Breathing In - Chapter Fifteen
The day before the Mountain View mission, Dean and John discuss logistics.
The situation to the west has changed since the last time Dean drove out, when he first fetched Sam from Stanford. The Bay area is still largely intact, geography and density working their usual charm. But the space in between here and there? Not so much.
John wants to take highway 130 through the Diablo mountain range.
“It's direct,” he says.
“It's isolated,” Dean counters.
In many respects, becoming one of the leaders of the USHC was the most inconvenient thing that could have ever happened to John. Dean wasn't under any illusions about whether his father would be happier going it alone. He preferred efficiency at all costs, no matter how reckless it could sometimes be. He treated strategic concerns like supply lines and reinforcement maneuverability like bothersome afterthoughts.
His father is stern. “If you'd read the reports, you'd know why we can't go up through Livermore.”
Dean grits his teeth and stands straighter. “I read the reports, sir.” Easy, easy. “But we can plan for Livermore. And I'd rather take on a known difficulty where backup can easily reach us than go through a restrictive terrain of unknown hostility - ”
“Dean, it's decided,” John says with finality. He looks away, visually dismissing him even before adding, “Now go sort out your team. I want everything ready to roll by 0600.”
Dean obeys instantly, but he seethes the whole walk across the base.
There's a feeling in his gut he doesn't like, misgivings about this whole mission. But as with everything else in his life, he has no other option but to go forward.
-
It's the middle of the day, so the barracks are empty. Even Connolly's off somewhere, probably trying to bribe a medic into signing off on him going on the mission. He's wasting his time; there's no way Dean will allow it.
Dean's eyes take a few seconds to adjust to the dim lighting of the barracks and then he sees that the mail's been dropped off. Letters and care packages from those few lucky enough to have family and friends alight various bunks. Since Dean's main source of mail is now sleeping three feet away, he isn't expecting anything. So he's mildly surprised to find the postcard on his cot.
Dean stares bemused down at the photo of the Great American Ball Park lit up and packed at night. He flips it over and sees all that's written in the message space is a terse: 39.1600, -84.4146. It's in his father's handwriting.
“What the hell,” he mutters.
He turns on his heel and goes to track John down again, but the man's holed up in a meeting with section command. So Dean does what he's always done when his father isn't available, which is go find Sam instead.
-
When they'd finally grabbed a moment alone earlier in the week, Sam told Dean what he saw during the spook swarm.
To be honest, it had sounded like a whole lot of nothing - a man Sam didn't recognize standing in a bland and unfamiliar room and talking vague crap about contingency plans. Hardly as exciting as a girl getting electrocuted by the touch of her girlfriend.
Whatever it sounded like to Dean, though, Sam had clearly been troubled. He spent the next several days walking through camp with his head ducked, started hanging around on the northern rampart, staring out at the falling city of Modesto.
And that's where Dean finds him now.
“Whatever's going through your mind right now, you need to drop it,” he says to him as he walks up.
Sam turns his head slightly, but doesn't look over. He's been doing that a lot lately too. It makes Dean feel itchy and unsettled, not having his brother's eyes on him.
“How can you tell me to drop something when you don't even know what it is?” He asks, distracted and disobedient.
“Because I know you,” Dean says. “And I know that look, Broody McBrooderson. Nothing good comes from that face.”
Sam's mouth quirks up. “Thanks.” He sighs then. “I've got a bad feeling about this mission, Dean.”
Dean pauses. “Normal-worry-bad-feeling or psychic-vision-bad-feeling?”
Sam cuts his eyes over. “The former.”
“Yeah, well, you're not alone there.” He steps up and leans his forearms on the railing, shoulder brushing Sam's. “We're taking 130 through the Diablo range.”
Sam's brow knits as he works out the route in his head. “Not a lot of options for maneuverability there.”
“I know.” But he didn't come to Sam to bitch about their dad's decisions. He's about to bring up the postcard when Sam starts talking. Everything from his tone to the cadence of his speech sounds rehearsed, heavy with importance, and Dean's thoughts about the postcard subside in the face of it.
“I don't know how long we can keep doing this, Dean.”
He tenses. “What do you mean?”
“It's just - it hasn't been like I thought it would. The fighting feels like we're just spinning wheels and after what happened with Ernst - I don't feel like I'm making a difference here.” He sighs and ducks his head so hair hair falls forward over his eyes. Voice drops lower for the next part: “Or that I'm any closer to finding the thing that killed Jess.”
Anger is a slow unfurling thing inside of Dean. Suddenly his heart's racing like they're in the middle of a firefight. “Sorry it hasn't been as glorious as you imagined, Sam - ”
“That's not what I meant.”
“ - but you gotta look at the big picture with this kind of thing.”
Sam turns fully to face him, jaw set. “I am looking at the big picture, and we're losing, Dean. We're losing the zone.”
He's looking at Dean evenly. Earnest, even regretful, like he's trying to let him down gently or some shit.
Dean stares back him, jaw clenched. “So what do you even mean, Sam? Spit it out. What do you think you're going to do.”
“I don't know,” he says. “But I think I'm done after Mountain View.” He hesitates and then adds, eyes beseeching, “And I think you should be too. Come with me, Dean.”
Dean barks out a laugh at that, surprising them both. He looks away, out over the wall, and wipes a hand over his mouth. His whole body's off-kilter now, like a Jenga piece has been unceremoniously yanked out of somewhere critical.
He'd forgotten this feeling. Fucking Sam.
“You think you can just quit the service?” He asks. “That's not how it works.” He feels like he's spent his whole damn life telling Sam how things work, only for his brother to -
“Who's going to stop us? Dad? Section command? What, they going to arrest us, clap on the irons, with all the shit going on out there?” He lays it out all these real questions like they're mere rhetoricals. Thing is, if anyone could make them so, it would be Sam. Dean's stomach twists.
“You're a selfish son of a bitch, you know that?” He says finally.
A muscle in Sam's jaw jumps and he leans back as if hit, nodding and smiling bitterly.
“You really think that?”
“Yeah, I do. You just go through life doing whatever the hell you want - ”
“You can't even begin to imagine what I want, Dean.” There's a different edge to his tone suddenly, something furious and dark glittering in his eyes that Dean instinctively backs away from without being able to explain to himself why.
“I know enough,” he says instead. “Same old story it's always been with you. You want out, want to leave your family. Run away.”
Sam punches him.
Dean recovers and straightens up again, tongues his stinging lip. He looks over at his brother, who's glaring back, chest heaving.
“All right,” Dean says, grinning bloody-mouthed and cheerless, “Let's do this.”
It gets vicious and dirty fast. It isn't sparring, what they are doing; it's a red-tinged, blind intent to hurt .
Sam gets in another shot to his ribs before Dean blocks his next blow. He grabs Sam under the arms, pinning them to his side, and drags him down to bounce his head off the railing of the rampart.
Sam goes down but kicks out as he does, plowing Dean's shin with a buckling force. Then they're rolling over the ground, kicking dust up, scraping their skin bloody over dirt and concrete.
People are yelling above them but Dean pays it all no mind, his whole will aimed at the twist of Sam's face, the vulnerable opening on his right side.
Strong hands get him by the back of his collar and haul him up, off the ground and his brother. He resists until words filter in and he realizes his father has arrived.
“The day before a critical mission and you do this?” John is white-lipped with fury, staring from Sam, still on the ground, to Dean.
Dean jerks out of the grip of the corporals holding him and looks down and away. He feels sick with humiliation and lingering anger. He's burning with it.
Blood drips slowly down his chin. He catches Connolly's eye from the crowd that has gathered. The man is staring at him, grim and knowing, and suddenly Dean just can't take it. Any of it.
He turns and walks away. His steps don't so much as falter when John calls after him.
-
He takes a long shower, flagrantly blowing past the five-minute time limit. With one hand up on the tiles, Dean leans forward into the hot spray and uses his other hand to gingerly prod his blooming bruises. Runs fingers over his ribs and along his nose to make sure nothing is cracked.
It feels good to press the bruises, almost like he can catch a secondhand buzz from the adrenaline and anger of earlier. It's a good distraction from thoughts of his brother staring up at him from the ground, wide-eyed with furious hurt.
Afterwards, standing in nothing but a towel, he studies his face in the burnished metal mirror of the locker room. Under the buzzing fluorescents his skin looks grey and sickly, his eyes dull and tired.
It's here that Dean finally admits to himself the truth.
They are losing. Not just the zone - though, yeah, that too - but the whole damn war. Even someone who barely snatched up a GED has to be able to read the numbers of their win-loss ratio.
Dean's been to five different postings since he officially joined up and only two of them could be called a win with a straight face. He knows how that looks, but what the fuck is he supposed to do about it? It's not like he can just retire, hide out on some farm in Kansas until a monster comes calling and ends it all for him.
When he and Sam were younger, their dad had told them that vampires were extinct. Had been wiped out by hunters, at least in North America.
It had meant something to Dean. Back then, he believed in an end, an afterlife of settling down, maybe even having a family. The monsters, all those evil sons of bitches - they weren't unstoppable. His dad said so.
Well, then there was the awakening, the formation of the USHC and a formalized communications network and, hey, turns out the vamps hadn't been wiped out after all. Not even close.
John took the news with little more than a curse and a shrug. But Dean? He felt like he'd been sucker-punched, like someone had come up on his blind spot and just laid him out.
So he's known for a long time that the world is going to end bloody. He knows he's going to go down swinging.
But he'd gotten complacent, spoiled; he'd gotten used to the idea that his brother would be at his side when it happened.