A Place to Rest These Weary Bones
It’s mid-morning in late summer, the air warm and comfortable when Dean steps out onto the porch. From the placement of the sun he can guess it’s probably around ten o’clock. There’s nothing but rolling hills and fields filled with long grass and wild vegetation for miles and miles around, a single dirt road a few hundred yards from the house that leads to a run down half-empty town in one direction and a large pond in the other. The sun’s lighting everything up vividly gold and green.
There’s some kind of vine starting to creep its way onto the porch. Yesterday Dean thought about tearing it out, didn’t want any damn poison ivy deciding to invade the place, but when he knelt down to look closer he noticed the little green buds all along it and figured he’d let them bloom before deciding whether or not he wanted to destroy it. If it’s pretty enough, maybe he’ll let it live. Maybe.
Sam would probably know what it is just by looking at the vine, Dean thinks. His brother’s settling into country life surprisingly well, though Dean has some suspicions that he might miss being around people. Dean likes it just fine out here, alone with nature and Sam and whatever animals have decided they wanted to stick around. The place was a farm, before. There’s a barn in the back, and a well protected hen house, and two huge sparsely wooded fields on either side of the property that have fences around them. The first night they were there Dean didn’t bother looking closely, figured they were empty and didn’t really care much about some grassy fields, but in the morning he knew something was up when he walked outside and found four very large cows watching him from the other side of the fence. A few days later they discovered that the other side was a horse pasture. So far they’ve found seven cows and three horses, but Sam suspects that there are more cows somewhere, or there was more before and they’ve either escaped or died. Or found a really good hiding spot.
Dean does not like the cows. They smell.
Dean doesn’t like the roosters either, who are mean and incredibly loud, but the hens are handy for providing eggs, so he guesses they’re worth keeping around. Unlike the cows, who just moo, eat grass and crap. Dean really doesn’t like them.
They’ve even got a little garden now, with peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers and some kind of small yellow squash that grows like crazy and tastes good roasted over a fire. There are a few areas that still have electricity, running on generators usually, but they had no such luck. Dean doesn’t really mind, though. There’s a fire pit in the back yard and they managed to find a cast iron grill to put over it, and they can cook things wrapped in tin foil or lay a skillet on the grill and fry eggs and the little meat they can get. Dean’s been hunting, and there’s plenty of wildlife roaming the rural Ohio woods, but Sam constantly tells him not to over-do it, to only take what they absolutely need. They can’t really store food for more than a few days anyway, a week at the most. In winter that’ll get easier, and Dean plans on stocking up in fall, but for now a few birds here and there will be enough. Dean’s been learning how to rig up traps, so he won’t have to waste their limited supply of bullets on small game. He caught a rabbit in a snare last week and showed Sam who, despite his disgust at the thought of eating a cute little bunny, nodded in approval and seemed pretty impressed.
The first couple of weeks with Sam were hard. The first six days were the worst, with Sam trying to come down from his demon blood induced high, always yo-yoing in and out of consciousness, sometimes lucid and sometimes…
Dean would rather not think about the other times. Sometimes he still has dreams about Sam, strung out and black-eyed and screaming about all the things he’d do to Dean if he wasn’t tied to a bed, all the ways he could make Dean scream.
Dean doesn’t think about those times.
After Dean finally dubbed Sam detoxified (and yeah, they were right, it changed Sam forever, Dean knows that every time he looks in Sam’s mismatched eyes, sees the one that’s the same familiar hazel, such a stark contrast to the other, the one that’s got no trace of color left, permanently stained dark as ink, but Sam’s still Sam), they still had a few mountains to climb. Sam was catatonic for a while, and Dean swore his brother was just going to waste away and die right under his damn nose, but a few days later Dean woke up and Sam was awake too, and the day after that he was talking, and then brooding and rolling his eyes and smiling and calling Dean an idiot like the good old days. It took a while for him to come back to himself, but Sam’s still Sam. There are some nights that are harder than others, when Sam remembers all those things he did when he was chugging down blood like fucking supernatural protein shakes, filling his reserves, and what happened after he said yes, but it’s usually easy for Dean to snap him out of it with a slightly harsh, “Sam, it wasn’t you. So quit brooding about it.”
And Dean’s right, it wasn’t Sam. It was Lucifer, and Michael, and their armies of demons and angels who tore up half the planet. Sam was the one who saved them, all of them. Every damn human on the planet owes their life to Dean’s pain in the ass little brother, because he did the impossible, and who the hell else would be strong enough to overpower Satan? Nobody, that’s who.
Well, Chuck Norris, maybe. Dean absently wonders if Chuck Norris is even alive.
But in the end, it was Sam. It took two long, hard months full of constant battle that wiped out nearly half the planet, but Sam did it. Ended it all. Sam was strong enough to overpower Lucifer, to kill both of those archangel sons of bitches with nothing but that giant freaky brain of his. He’s got the burns to prove it: a perfect set of wings branded into his back and shoulders, a few stray feathers on his arms, and Dean can only imagine how large they must have been because not even half of the scorch marks had fit on Sam’s skin. It was almost as if a giant had tried to use a stamp and Sam got in the way, leaving a big blank spot in the center of the image where the ink had hit his back instead of the paper.
Dean pushes all of that out of his head. They’re alive and okay now, the war is over, and this is their happy ending. And it’s a damn decent one, too.
Dean closes his eyes and exhales. Later he’ll take Sammy down to the pond and they’ll see what they can find, and maybe tonight Dean will grab some tomatoes and peppers and roast them with one of the chickens. Maybe he’ll even try to coax one of the cows into the barn and see if he can get them some fresh milk. But for now, he just surveys the land once more, looking out over the fields and hills like a king in his castle, before heading back inside.
This is their home. This is their peace.