On The Wings of Fury, part 3
Previous Part
- - -
Ash must have timed it, or something, because just as Dean came out for a tiny, tiny midday meal, he announced, “So, you crashed your plane in the middle of nowhere.”
Dean sort of paused, and glanced at Sam for some kind of context, but Sam just shrugged. Dean said, “Yeah. I know.”
“And you don’t have a plan or anything?” Ash kicked at the sand. “I mean, for getting out of here. It’s sort of important.”
A longer pause than before, and Dean passed an eye over everyone before wiping his hands clean on his shirt and stepping out into the sand, toward Ash. The tendons in his forearms stood out, clear defined line.
Sam stepped up behind him, strong support at his back.
Dean said, “I’m going to fix the radio, we’ll send out an SOS, determine our coordinates, and we wait. We’ve been over this.”
“It’s just,” Ash went on, like Dean hadn’t said anything, only he was louder, getting everyone to look. “It’s just that, you know, we could jury-rig something and get out of here ourselves, yeah.”
Dean shook his head. “What? Using what? Tail’s torn clean off - the Impala’s not,” and his breath hitched, and Sam had a half-second to panic about Dean ohjesus crying over his plane in front of everyone, “moving.”
“I dunno,” Ash said thoughtfully, rubbing his chin in a mock-thoughtful pose.
“There’s a plan already. We’re sticking to the plan.”
Now, Ash addressed all of the survivors drawing close to hear. “Plenty of it’s broken, guys, but,” he said, and there was no logical reason for him to sound so drunk and stupid and out of it, unless he had a concussion and bleeding in the brain or the beginnings of heat stroke, fingers crossed. Ash corrected himself, leering a little at Jo and Ava, “Guys and gals, sorry. Yeah. It’s mostly broken, and I can’t get that piece of shit up in the air again-”
Sam saw the muscles at the back of Dean’s neck tense up and his hands curl into fists and stepped up, a little, to press the front of his shoulder to the back of Dean’s, to maybe talk him down from the actual blood-spurting type of violence.
“-But if you guys tore out,” his hands came up and blocked the sun from his eyes and sort of waved in the general direction of different areas of the Impala, “like, most of it, and I learned real magic spells, I could put bits of it back together in some way that should, you know.”
Judging by a look around the camp, no one knew. The soldiers were wearing a glazed, patient expression, which Sam was starting to associate with Ash in general. Dean was pressing into Sam’s side, glaring at the sand covering the toes of Ash’s boots, which were unlaced and sloppy. Dean probably wasn’t listening. He was probably stuck back at the part where Ash called the Impala a piece of shit, which, Sam was about ready to punch him for that, and Sam didn’t have Dean’s unreasonable and inappropriate love for their plane.
Ash made a helpful flapping motion with his hands.
No one knew what he meant, still.
Until it clicked in Sam head and he said, “You’re crazy. You want us to build another plane?”
The Ash expressions were replaced by interest and calculations, and suddenly the half-circle they’d all formed around Ash opened up into two lines, around Ash and SamanDean, on each side, like a quickdraw match, toes buried in sand. Sam half expected a tumbleweed.
Jo said, “Would that work?”
She said it like a military commander, sharp and clear and an order, but Sam was very pointedly not military and she’d already deferred to Dean.
Ash said, “There’s a shot.”
Dean insisted, “I can get the radio up, broadcast an SOS. We just have to conserve our energy and wait.”
“Do you have a viable shot at fixing the radio?” Ash asked, not mean but legitimately curious. “Because a lot of shit tore off when you guys plowed us into this little oasis, and I don’t see a dish or antenna anywhere, so.”
Sam felt Dean flinch where they were touching, not anything obvious but definitely there, and oh, fuck no. He was suddenly more pissed at Dean than Ash, because there are things that you don’t tell the group because it’ll make them panic, but those are the things you still tell your fucking co-pilot. Especially when you’re brothers, because.
Just.
Fuck, that’s blood. You don’t do that to blood. Really, really, not to Winchester blood.
So, Sam wasn’t really listening as they fought it out - “With the work we’ll be doing, water rations would have to increase to, I dunno, like a gallon per person per day?” and “We have enough for a month right now on half that. How could we build a fucking plane in fifteen days?” - but they weren’t really fighting about whether it was going to happen or not, just logistics. It came down to Dean proving that he still had a say in this, that Ash wasn’t in control.
By the time that was done, everyone was on board. Dean argued Ash down to three fourths of a gallon, and working at night, and in four-hour shifts with an hour’s rest in between.
“We’ll start tonight,” Ash said, and there was really no way for Dean to get the last word after that without looking like a whiny kid and undermining himself, so he nodded and stalked off to the Impala and into the cockpit, which still felt like a sardine can but with more crumpled metal and the bed in the corner.
Sam crowded up behind him to get the door closed so he could yell at him properly in fucking private.
“Dean,” he started, and it was a little bit a question, but mostly a threat.
“Don’t even, Sammy,” Dean snarled, and gave Sam’s upended chair a vicious kick to where Sam’s kidneys would be. “Fucking fuck desert, gonna fucking kill that smartass little bitch.”
“Dean,” and Sam kept his voice low, so that even if all the others were crowded around with their ears to the door, they couldn’t hear. “We don’t have an antenna?” Sam hated himself for not even thinking to check himself, just assuming that Dean would take care of it.
“I can, shit, I can jury-rig something, it’s not like there’s no chance or anything, Sam.”
Except Dean wouldn’t look at Sam, had his shoulders set wide apart, and Sam watched a bead of sweat run from his hair to the collar of his soaked and drying and dirty shirt.
Sam sighed, and everything went out with it, and he leaned back against the door and couldn’t focus on anything at all. “Oh my God, we’re gonna. Dean, shit, Dean, tell me-”
Dean was there, hands steady and solid on Sam’s cheeks, making their eyes meet, Dean’s golden green. Very clearly, enunciating every word, he said, “We won’t. I’m telling you, we won’t, Sammy, and it’s true, okay? I need you with me on this.”
Sam’s head was stuck back in college, in the sociopolitics lectures, and he knew that he had to follow Dean because otherwise no one else would, and it would be disorganized and even more emotionally charged then it was now, and everyone would die for sure, and that’s why Dean needed him.
At the same time, they were in the Impala and they were Winchesters and loyalty was just something Sam owed Dean, no questions asked.
“Okay. Yeah.” Sam swallowed back the bile in his throat, didn’t want to waste the water and half-can of peaches that made up lunch. “I’m with you, Dean.”
“C’mon, we should get back out there.”
Sam came out into the sun a minute or so after Dean did, and nothing had been settled but it was maybe a little bit better than before.
No radio.
Fucking Jesus.
But Dean said they weren’t going to die, so they weren’t.
- - -
At night, before they woke up properly to work, Sam curled closer to Dean and said, “Can I ask you something?”
“Get me some coffee and I’ll even do you a favor,” Dean grumbled, nose turned into the sand-stained sleeping bag.
Sam set his hand on Dean’s lower back, his knee on Dean’s calf, his forehead on Dean’s shoulder. “Do they mean more to you, now?”
Dean reached out blindly and found Sam. “I’m responsible for getting them to the base, I’m still responsible for that. Nothing new. No sweat.”
Sam wanted to say a lot of things. But he settled on, “Before, you’d been through the classes, gotten your license. Someone else telling you what to do in any situation.”
“Yeah.”
And there wasn’t anything else to say about it, so Sam pushed closer to Dean and went with, “I love you.”
“Love you, too, Sammy,” Dean rumbled back automatically, even though they hadn’t traded family affection since Sam entered junior high.
And Sam dragged himself up for another hard day’s night, bolstered and better.
- - -
The work - at night, with no light but the single bright-burn drum of jet fuel soaking into a long-lasting canvas tent cover - was repetitive. The first night, Ash gave the only two hammers to Andy and Sam and they beat the rivets on the plane from the inside out until two different sections of panels could be removed.
Sam made sure Ash had to go through Dean before giving any order to work or to take a break. It was one thing to follow Ash’s scribbled-in-the-sand-with-a-stick blueprints, and another to let him stand up in front of everyone and nitpick about a mistake Dean made.
The third day was slept away. The night was spent working.
That’s how the fourth passed, too.
And on the fifth, Max Miller climbed out of his cot and disappeared.
- - -
Ava saw it first. She was awake in the afternoon, getting the supplies together for everyone’s breakfast. Her shouts echoed inside the tin-can body of the plane, and everyone came running.
Max’s bed was very decidedly empty.
Andy said, shocked and absent and vague, “I don’t even. He couldn’t stand, let alone. How did he, Max, Max, jesus fucking God Miller how did you do it.”
Ava stared down at Max’s bed, on her knees, dark, stringy fall of hair hiding her face from everyone else, shoulders hitched up.
They were all worried, talking about needing to find him and having no idea where to look, and the sun sank slowly, slowly, toward the top of the closest dune. They drifted apart and kept talking about it, in circles, with nothing and no way to fix it.
Sam sat down next to Ava and said, “You knew.”
She flinched. “I, um. He might’ve. He woke up yesterday, you know, and I explained about how we’re trying to get out of here, and I just don’t. He said, he said, but I didn’t think he would.”
Sam set his hand on her thigh, squeezed reassuringly like Dean always did to him. “Which way, Ava? Do you know?”
“He said he was gonna go back.” She was crying, sniffling, but not sobbing. “I thought he woulda gone - like, draw a straight line behind the tail and follow it going away, right? Back the way we came. That’s how it sounded.”
“Right. Okay.” Sam stood up and made a conscious effort not to sigh. “No one’s mad at you or anything. I’ll be right back, okay?”
He went out into the sun and pulled a face at Dean, and it only took a minute for him to turn up at Sam’s shoulder.
“Back the way we came, and I don’t think he would have made it very far.”
Dean sucked in his breath, jerked a nod, went inside, came out with two full canteens, and marched away, toward the foot of one of the dunes.
Sam watched him until he dropped out of sight, and then went back inside.
“Ava?” he asked softly. She was still crying, bent over Max’s bed.
“I don’t want him to die,” she huffed, wiping over her face and rearranging the patterns of grime over her cheeks and nose.
“Ava.” Sam sat next to her and didn’t think about Dean walking out into the desert with no sure way to find his way back, with or without Max fucking Miller. “Hey, sweetie. I have to ask you something else.”
She looked up at him, huge doe-eyes and kicked-puppy quiver in her lips, and Sam rubbed a hand over his eyes and hated himself for this.
“Why did Max leave?” he asked, as gently as he could.
Ava shook her head. “He said, he said that we were, are, we’re wasting water on him, that he’s - he was - gonna die anyway and he just had to hurry - he - oh god.”
Sam stared at his knees. “Is he going to die? If Dean goes and gets him. Will he die anyway?”
She hung her head down around her shoulders. “It’s, his wound, the surgery wound, it’s infected, maybe. Swollen up and red. I don’t know how he could walk.”
“Maybe he was just very determined,” Sam mused out loud, and that made her cry again, so he climb up and went out into the sun.
Dean wasn’t back by the time they started working that night, so Sam made Ash check with him before doing anything major, which was shaky, but the guy ignored Sam’s authority as breezily as he did Dean’s.
Two hours past sunset, just when the sky turned from deep purple to complete black with the silver-scatter stars, Dean came back. He was staggering, uneven steps in the sand, one canteen still full and jaw clenched hard.
Sam only saw him when he reached the edge of the fuel-torch firelight. Alone.
But Sam and Bobby and Ellen were working together to move the Impala’s engine from perpendicular to parallel on the wing, a slow heavy precarious project that took the rest of the night, because Ash was a fucking idiot and no, this was not ‘just like Legos, guys’.
Anyway, Ava broke down crying for twenty minutes and then got right back to work. Sam couldn’t really do anything else without being anticlimactic.
And Ash behaved himself that night, asked Dean for the go-ahead on everything.
Dean sat, rigid and silent and forbidding, for one hour, and then walked over to Andy and asked for a rundown of what he was doing and how Dean could help.
And at the end, just before dawn, Dean went into the tent and grabbed Max’s bedding and threw it on the last of the fire in the barrel, and they all stood around it and tried not to gag at the rotten-sweet smell of disease caught in the creases.
When they went to sleep, separate on the floor of the cockpit because the day’s heat made it impossible to touch, Sam said, “You found him.”
“Yeah, Sammy.”
“And? Was he already gone?”
“No.”
It was absolutely, eerily still like it only could be this far from civilization. And then Sam said, “What did he say to you?”
Dean growled with a bloody, pure hatred, “No one is allowed to give up like that, Sammy. No one. I’d rather leave him out there than drag him back and let him make anyone else think like that.”
And, well.
Sam fell asleep with Dean’s hand searing too hot on his arm, sweaty skin-to-skin contact unpleasant when they woke up later but exactly what he needed now.
- - -
The sun slipped clear of the horizon, blooming, desert rose pink and orange and bright. Time for sleep.
Dean sat next to Sam, cup cradled in both hands, elbows propped on spread knees. He sipped his water, savored it like aged whiskey.
Sam pulled one hand through his hair, lifting it up so the air could get in. He laughed, tired, crazy tired. “Guess I’m regretting my haircut now, huh?”
Dean didn’t laugh, or tell him to shut up, or do anything.
Sam shut up anyway.
The slow sounds of everyone else crawling into the nest that had become their bed tapered off. They had all settled down.
Just when Sam was ready to suggest they do the same, Dean said, “Is this my fault?”
Which pretty much turned off Sam’s brain for a few seconds.
“What?” he demanded, but it sounded less outraged and more four years old.
“This. All this.” Dean kept his back to the Impala, to the new airplane taking shape beyond that. “Is it my fault, because I wouldn’t listen to you about the storm? We could’ve. Anything. We could’ve put down somewhere.”
Sam sucked air in, fought the tightness around his chest. “No, Dean. No no no, of course not.”
“Max and Carey. They’re dead.” Dean turned away from the dune he’d been focused on, looked at Sam like there was nothing his brother could do to make it better. “You look me in the eye, Sammy, and tell me there’s nothing I coulda done to stop that.”
Sam felt - despair. All his strength, everything he’d been leaning on to get himself through this, drained out onto the sand, and suddenly he was trapped in the middle of the desert with a plane that couldn’t fly and six people who might kill him to get his ration of water.
He rasped, “Dean, you’re. You’re the best man I’ve ever known. You’re going to get us through this.” He wasn’t fighting back tears, because he was too dehydrated. His voice was even, and soft and hard at once, and deadly deadly serious.
Dean’s eyes were sharp, and searching, and trying to pick out what was lie or truth. And then he sighed, drained the last of his water, and knocked his shoulder against Sam’s where they were almost touching, anyway. “C’mon. Gotta get your beauty rest, Sam.”
Sam beamed, and felt his lips crack and split open, but he didn’t care about that. He had the strength to stand again.
- - -
They nearly had the hardware and frame finished - propeller hooked up and tested, engine reattached firmly, neither of the jury-rigged and incongruent wings wobbled anymore - when, in idle conversation over the sunset, right before work, Bobby told Sam, “Hell, when they dragged Ash off every couple weeks, who’da thought he was making planes.”
It caught Sam’s attention. “You didn’t know what he was doing?”
Ava was on his other side, chewing her gooey, lukewarm breakfast. “Top secret. And you know how he’s kind of off?” She made the finger-twirling-at-the-temple gesture that meant crazy.
Bobby picked the story up. “They told us not to ask him about it, because like as not he’d just tell us, confidentiality waiver or no.”
“Made us sign we-won’t-get-curious contracts,” Ava said. “I asked what was so bad if Ash told us himself, but they said they might have to kill me and didn’t look like they were joking.”
“So you don’t know exactly what Ash does.”
Bobby shrugged. “Builds planes.”
Sam stared at him. “How well do you know Ash?”
“As well as a body can know a crazy person.”
“I don’t know his last name,” Sam said as an example. “That counts as not knowing someone.”
Bobby tilted his head to his shoulder and cracked his neck. “Then I guess I don’t either.”
“Then.” Sam waved his hands and fought back the suspicion, because he never trusted Ash, never, so just because no one actually knew him didn’t mean that he was a lying son of a bitch.
So he left and found Dean.
“I don’t know that Ash actually knows how to build an airplane,” Sam hissed, bent down a little to reach Dean’s ear, smelling the salt-and-game-and-engine-grease of his brother’s shoulder. The desert dust was caked heavily in Dean’s crow’s feet, sunburst around his eyes edged in dark brown and sand.
Dean’s spine stiffened as he came out of his slouch. He stared at Sam’s eyes, considering, turning to over, making a plan, and then he turned and called across the dead air of their little arroyo, “Hey, Ash.”
Ash looked up from where he was drawing lewd things in his little pocket notebook and blinked blearily. “Uh. Yeah, dude?”
“You have a doctorate, right?” Dean was playing chummy, but Sam was right behind him, could feel how tense and wired Dean was.
“Yeah, man.” Ash grinned and glazed over like he was in a reverie.
“What in?”
“Propulsion and weapons development.”
Everyone was watching the back-and-forth, because, true to form, Dean and Ash were on completely opposite ends of any group, keeping a cushion between them.
Dean grinned, feral and vicious and cruel. “Fun shit, sounds like.”
“Yeah. Fun shit.” Ash chuckled.
His voice was carefully blank. “D’you design missiles, Ash?”
“Yup. My latest makes the biggest crater, you have no idea.”
“Top secret missiles.”
“Very confidential. It was explained to me - by, like, y’know, The Man.” Oh lord, he did the airquotes.
Dean nodded, cracked his knuckles like he was about to punch someone in the mouth. “Like missiles that don’t have wings or engines or propellers? That kind of missile?”
Ash’s smile dropped. “What?”
“Do you know how to build a fucking plane?” Dean took a step, fists curled and rising to beat Ash into the next desert over, but Sam wrapped one arm across his chest and set the other hand on Dean’s hip, trying to keep him back. Dean pushed into Sam instead of trying to go forward, muscles working against themselves.
Bobby stood up, and his low voice rumbled, “What the hell is going on here?”
Dean spat, “He doesn’t, look at him, he doesn’t know how.”
Ash waved his arms, loose and lanky and disorganized. “I took aeronautics, it’s not like I don’t know how. It’ll fly and stuff, and everything. Calm down.”
“Calm!” Andy screeched, in one of his less dignified moments. His breathing was quick and shallow and panicked, but he forced his voice steady. “Ash, I took a fucking class in drafting, but that doesn’t I can design a house.”
“Oh. I can, though.” Ash tapped his temple. “I got it goin’ on.”
Dean was holding onto Sam’s arm, helping to keep himself back before he went and killed anyone, chest heaving with the blind rage. In a steady, rolling rumble, he said, “’M gonna kill him. Sammy, ‘m gonna - fucking goddamn fuck fuck shit we could have lasted and we only have one week and I’m gonna kill him.”
Sam talked back, because Dean was freaking out. “Hey, hey, Dean. We can, we’ll get out, it’ll work, hey, Dean, listen to me, okay?”
Everyone else was drawing in close to Ash, yelling and demanding and blocking him in and ignoring Ash insisting that the Phoenix would fly.
“Dean,” Sam warned, and let go.
Without anything to lean against, Dean stumbled through soft sand, then marched forward with awkward, stiff steps, without looking back.
All of them - Ellen, Jo, Bobby, Andy, Ava - cleared a path for him when he came near, fell silent and watched for his decision.
And this was it. This was why Sam insisted that Dean needed to be in control of them, needed to get them used to his orders. So that he could have a chance like this, to save a life.
Dean reached for Ash and dragged him in by the collar.
…Or not save a life.
Sam’s stomach lurched, because no matter what Dean did right now, Sam was going to back him up on it, Sam would follow him anywhere.
“Ash,” Dean began, in a falsely friendly way, too sweet like Max’s bed. “Explain yourself. Right the fuck now.”
“It’ll fly,” Ash insisted softly, terrified and repeating himself. “It’ll fly, the balance is right, we have enough fuel, it’ll fly, it’ll fly, there’s nothing wrong with my plane!”
Dean’s arms extended and snapped back, shaking Ash sharply. “My plane,” he snarled, and Sam had to move closer because he could barely hear Dean’s voice, soft and quiet and Sam still couldn’t tell what Dean was planning.
“Your plane! It’s - it’s fine! It’s nearly finished! I did the math, the thrust is enough but not too much, and the balance looks off right now but it’ll work when each person is buckled in how I - I told you, every step of the way, did it ever seem like I didn’t know what I was doing, I know how, I, I know-“
“Shut up.”
Ash’s eyes were wide but his mouth clicked shut.
Dean glanced around the circle, careful not to meet Sam’s eyes, and held the moment.
And then let go and push Ash to his knees and took his hands away, less threatening but still there.
“It’ll fly.”
Ash nodded, too fast, too quick. “It will.”
“Okay.” Dean nodded and took another step back. “And we got the heavy lifting done, all that’s left is the outside, sealing cracks, making sure sand hasn’t clogged up anything, right?”
“Details.” He was downshifting from outright panic to an attempt to recover whatever face he might have started with. “Just the details, man. Not much.”
Dean took another step back, even with the others in the circle, and his shoulder just barely brushed Sam’s before he put his weight on his other leg. His face was white under the sunburned red and leather tan and two weeks of beard.
“We’re gonna work during the day from now on - I don’t want to burn any more fuel for light. We have water for a week more, but this won’t take a week.” He raised his eyebrows at Ash, daring him to contradict.
Ash did not. He was standing up again, brushing sand off his knees and trying to slouch nonchalantly.
“Right,” Dean said, and turned away. “Gonna be in the cockpit if you need me, but try to get some sleep - we’ll have to switch our schedule again.”
He walked away, back still stiff but gait easy and rolling, and Ash was still alive and no one was going to hurt him because this was the judgment Dean passed.
Sam waited five minutes and followed him, and Dean was on the floor across from their somewhat separated bed, head to knees and not moving at all.
Sam sat across from him, back against the console, and tangled their legs together. “I don’t want to say I told you so, but.”
Dean grimaced, but right now, it counted as a smile. “Yeah, alright, Sammy, your magical powers of college learning have saved the day.”
“I thought we agreed I’m a criminal mastermind?” Sam tried to joke, but Dean glared down at his shoes and wouldn’t go along with it.
Instead, he said, “I could’ve just. I could’ve killed him just now, Sam.”
Sam’s eyes traced over the lines on Dean’s face, picked out and deepened by the dust in them, and the lines of sunburn where his neck creased. He said, “You didn’t.”
Dean shook his head. “I could taste it. Like copper. I could’ve killed him, or turned him out to walk into the desert and that’s no better or worse than killing him, or let the others tear him apart because that’s what they were going to do.”
Sam reached for him and squeezed Dean’s knee, the furthest part he could grab comfortably. Dean met his eyes, green and gold that nearly glowed in the red of the setting sun outside and through the windshield.
A knot formed in Sam throat, and he wasn’t going to cry, and he croaked, “You’re the best man I’ve ever known,” just like before, because it was even more true now.
Dean kept staring at him, and covered Sam’s hand with his own, and said, “Hey, Sam, did you ever think.”
Sam let his eyes drop to their hands and swallowed but his throat was too dry. Everything was too, too dry. “Not before,” he admitted.
“But now.” Dean’s voice was odd, weirdly flat, not a question at all.
“Yeah.”
His thumb passed over the back of Sam’s hand, and then two fingers pressed into the pulsepoint of Sam’s wrist, and then Dean drew his arm back to his side. “Alright. Yes. Yeah, okay, we can. Can’t we?”
Sam smirked at his brother. “Aren’t you supposed to be good at talking to girls?”
“Oh, so you’re admitting your girlness?”
“No such word, dumbass.”
“Bitch.”
“Just for that, I’m not putting out until the third date. And no going dutch or anything.”
Dean laughed, and Sam realized how long it had been since he’d heard that.
But. Well.
- - -
Next Part
- - -
Ash must have timed it, or something, because just as Dean came out for a tiny, tiny midday meal, he announced, “So, you crashed your plane in the middle of nowhere.”
Dean sort of paused, and glanced at Sam for some kind of context, but Sam just shrugged. Dean said, “Yeah. I know.”
“And you don’t have a plan or anything?” Ash kicked at the sand. “I mean, for getting out of here. It’s sort of important.”
A longer pause than before, and Dean passed an eye over everyone before wiping his hands clean on his shirt and stepping out into the sand, toward Ash. The tendons in his forearms stood out, clear defined line.
Sam stepped up behind him, strong support at his back.
Dean said, “I’m going to fix the radio, we’ll send out an SOS, determine our coordinates, and we wait. We’ve been over this.”
“It’s just,” Ash went on, like Dean hadn’t said anything, only he was louder, getting everyone to look. “It’s just that, you know, we could jury-rig something and get out of here ourselves, yeah.”
Dean shook his head. “What? Using what? Tail’s torn clean off - the Impala’s not,” and his breath hitched, and Sam had a half-second to panic about Dean ohjesus crying over his plane in front of everyone, “moving.”
“I dunno,” Ash said thoughtfully, rubbing his chin in a mock-thoughtful pose.
“There’s a plan already. We’re sticking to the plan.”
Now, Ash addressed all of the survivors drawing close to hear. “Plenty of it’s broken, guys, but,” he said, and there was no logical reason for him to sound so drunk and stupid and out of it, unless he had a concussion and bleeding in the brain or the beginnings of heat stroke, fingers crossed. Ash corrected himself, leering a little at Jo and Ava, “Guys and gals, sorry. Yeah. It’s mostly broken, and I can’t get that piece of shit up in the air again-”
Sam saw the muscles at the back of Dean’s neck tense up and his hands curl into fists and stepped up, a little, to press the front of his shoulder to the back of Dean’s, to maybe talk him down from the actual blood-spurting type of violence.
“-But if you guys tore out,” his hands came up and blocked the sun from his eyes and sort of waved in the general direction of different areas of the Impala, “like, most of it, and I learned real magic spells, I could put bits of it back together in some way that should, you know.”
Judging by a look around the camp, no one knew. The soldiers were wearing a glazed, patient expression, which Sam was starting to associate with Ash in general. Dean was pressing into Sam’s side, glaring at the sand covering the toes of Ash’s boots, which were unlaced and sloppy. Dean probably wasn’t listening. He was probably stuck back at the part where Ash called the Impala a piece of shit, which, Sam was about ready to punch him for that, and Sam didn’t have Dean’s unreasonable and inappropriate love for their plane.
Ash made a helpful flapping motion with his hands.
No one knew what he meant, still.
Until it clicked in Sam head and he said, “You’re crazy. You want us to build another plane?”
The Ash expressions were replaced by interest and calculations, and suddenly the half-circle they’d all formed around Ash opened up into two lines, around Ash and SamanDean, on each side, like a quickdraw match, toes buried in sand. Sam half expected a tumbleweed.
Jo said, “Would that work?”
She said it like a military commander, sharp and clear and an order, but Sam was very pointedly not military and she’d already deferred to Dean.
Ash said, “There’s a shot.”
Dean insisted, “I can get the radio up, broadcast an SOS. We just have to conserve our energy and wait.”
“Do you have a viable shot at fixing the radio?” Ash asked, not mean but legitimately curious. “Because a lot of shit tore off when you guys plowed us into this little oasis, and I don’t see a dish or antenna anywhere, so.”
Sam felt Dean flinch where they were touching, not anything obvious but definitely there, and oh, fuck no. He was suddenly more pissed at Dean than Ash, because there are things that you don’t tell the group because it’ll make them panic, but those are the things you still tell your fucking co-pilot. Especially when you’re brothers, because.
Just.
Fuck, that’s blood. You don’t do that to blood. Really, really, not to Winchester blood.
So, Sam wasn’t really listening as they fought it out - “With the work we’ll be doing, water rations would have to increase to, I dunno, like a gallon per person per day?” and “We have enough for a month right now on half that. How could we build a fucking plane in fifteen days?” - but they weren’t really fighting about whether it was going to happen or not, just logistics. It came down to Dean proving that he still had a say in this, that Ash wasn’t in control.
By the time that was done, everyone was on board. Dean argued Ash down to three fourths of a gallon, and working at night, and in four-hour shifts with an hour’s rest in between.
“We’ll start tonight,” Ash said, and there was really no way for Dean to get the last word after that without looking like a whiny kid and undermining himself, so he nodded and stalked off to the Impala and into the cockpit, which still felt like a sardine can but with more crumpled metal and the bed in the corner.
Sam crowded up behind him to get the door closed so he could yell at him properly in fucking private.
“Dean,” he started, and it was a little bit a question, but mostly a threat.
“Don’t even, Sammy,” Dean snarled, and gave Sam’s upended chair a vicious kick to where Sam’s kidneys would be. “Fucking fuck desert, gonna fucking kill that smartass little bitch.”
“Dean,” and Sam kept his voice low, so that even if all the others were crowded around with their ears to the door, they couldn’t hear. “We don’t have an antenna?” Sam hated himself for not even thinking to check himself, just assuming that Dean would take care of it.
“I can, shit, I can jury-rig something, it’s not like there’s no chance or anything, Sam.”
Except Dean wouldn’t look at Sam, had his shoulders set wide apart, and Sam watched a bead of sweat run from his hair to the collar of his soaked and drying and dirty shirt.
Sam sighed, and everything went out with it, and he leaned back against the door and couldn’t focus on anything at all. “Oh my God, we’re gonna. Dean, shit, Dean, tell me-”
Dean was there, hands steady and solid on Sam’s cheeks, making their eyes meet, Dean’s golden green. Very clearly, enunciating every word, he said, “We won’t. I’m telling you, we won’t, Sammy, and it’s true, okay? I need you with me on this.”
Sam’s head was stuck back in college, in the sociopolitics lectures, and he knew that he had to follow Dean because otherwise no one else would, and it would be disorganized and even more emotionally charged then it was now, and everyone would die for sure, and that’s why Dean needed him.
At the same time, they were in the Impala and they were Winchesters and loyalty was just something Sam owed Dean, no questions asked.
“Okay. Yeah.” Sam swallowed back the bile in his throat, didn’t want to waste the water and half-can of peaches that made up lunch. “I’m with you, Dean.”
“C’mon, we should get back out there.”
Sam came out into the sun a minute or so after Dean did, and nothing had been settled but it was maybe a little bit better than before.
No radio.
Fucking Jesus.
But Dean said they weren’t going to die, so they weren’t.
- - -
At night, before they woke up properly to work, Sam curled closer to Dean and said, “Can I ask you something?”
“Get me some coffee and I’ll even do you a favor,” Dean grumbled, nose turned into the sand-stained sleeping bag.
Sam set his hand on Dean’s lower back, his knee on Dean’s calf, his forehead on Dean’s shoulder. “Do they mean more to you, now?”
Dean reached out blindly and found Sam. “I’m responsible for getting them to the base, I’m still responsible for that. Nothing new. No sweat.”
Sam wanted to say a lot of things. But he settled on, “Before, you’d been through the classes, gotten your license. Someone else telling you what to do in any situation.”
“Yeah.”
And there wasn’t anything else to say about it, so Sam pushed closer to Dean and went with, “I love you.”
“Love you, too, Sammy,” Dean rumbled back automatically, even though they hadn’t traded family affection since Sam entered junior high.
And Sam dragged himself up for another hard day’s night, bolstered and better.
- - -
The work - at night, with no light but the single bright-burn drum of jet fuel soaking into a long-lasting canvas tent cover - was repetitive. The first night, Ash gave the only two hammers to Andy and Sam and they beat the rivets on the plane from the inside out until two different sections of panels could be removed.
Sam made sure Ash had to go through Dean before giving any order to work or to take a break. It was one thing to follow Ash’s scribbled-in-the-sand-with-a-stick blueprints, and another to let him stand up in front of everyone and nitpick about a mistake Dean made.
The third day was slept away. The night was spent working.
That’s how the fourth passed, too.
And on the fifth, Max Miller climbed out of his cot and disappeared.
- - -
Ava saw it first. She was awake in the afternoon, getting the supplies together for everyone’s breakfast. Her shouts echoed inside the tin-can body of the plane, and everyone came running.
Max’s bed was very decidedly empty.
Andy said, shocked and absent and vague, “I don’t even. He couldn’t stand, let alone. How did he, Max, Max, jesus fucking God Miller how did you do it.”
Ava stared down at Max’s bed, on her knees, dark, stringy fall of hair hiding her face from everyone else, shoulders hitched up.
They were all worried, talking about needing to find him and having no idea where to look, and the sun sank slowly, slowly, toward the top of the closest dune. They drifted apart and kept talking about it, in circles, with nothing and no way to fix it.
Sam sat down next to Ava and said, “You knew.”
She flinched. “I, um. He might’ve. He woke up yesterday, you know, and I explained about how we’re trying to get out of here, and I just don’t. He said, he said, but I didn’t think he would.”
Sam set his hand on her thigh, squeezed reassuringly like Dean always did to him. “Which way, Ava? Do you know?”
“He said he was gonna go back.” She was crying, sniffling, but not sobbing. “I thought he woulda gone - like, draw a straight line behind the tail and follow it going away, right? Back the way we came. That’s how it sounded.”
“Right. Okay.” Sam stood up and made a conscious effort not to sigh. “No one’s mad at you or anything. I’ll be right back, okay?”
He went out into the sun and pulled a face at Dean, and it only took a minute for him to turn up at Sam’s shoulder.
“Back the way we came, and I don’t think he would have made it very far.”
Dean sucked in his breath, jerked a nod, went inside, came out with two full canteens, and marched away, toward the foot of one of the dunes.
Sam watched him until he dropped out of sight, and then went back inside.
“Ava?” he asked softly. She was still crying, bent over Max’s bed.
“I don’t want him to die,” she huffed, wiping over her face and rearranging the patterns of grime over her cheeks and nose.
“Ava.” Sam sat next to her and didn’t think about Dean walking out into the desert with no sure way to find his way back, with or without Max fucking Miller. “Hey, sweetie. I have to ask you something else.”
She looked up at him, huge doe-eyes and kicked-puppy quiver in her lips, and Sam rubbed a hand over his eyes and hated himself for this.
“Why did Max leave?” he asked, as gently as he could.
Ava shook her head. “He said, he said that we were, are, we’re wasting water on him, that he’s - he was - gonna die anyway and he just had to hurry - he - oh god.”
Sam stared at his knees. “Is he going to die? If Dean goes and gets him. Will he die anyway?”
She hung her head down around her shoulders. “It’s, his wound, the surgery wound, it’s infected, maybe. Swollen up and red. I don’t know how he could walk.”
“Maybe he was just very determined,” Sam mused out loud, and that made her cry again, so he climb up and went out into the sun.
Dean wasn’t back by the time they started working that night, so Sam made Ash check with him before doing anything major, which was shaky, but the guy ignored Sam’s authority as breezily as he did Dean’s.
Two hours past sunset, just when the sky turned from deep purple to complete black with the silver-scatter stars, Dean came back. He was staggering, uneven steps in the sand, one canteen still full and jaw clenched hard.
Sam only saw him when he reached the edge of the fuel-torch firelight. Alone.
But Sam and Bobby and Ellen were working together to move the Impala’s engine from perpendicular to parallel on the wing, a slow heavy precarious project that took the rest of the night, because Ash was a fucking idiot and no, this was not ‘just like Legos, guys’.
Anyway, Ava broke down crying for twenty minutes and then got right back to work. Sam couldn’t really do anything else without being anticlimactic.
And Ash behaved himself that night, asked Dean for the go-ahead on everything.
Dean sat, rigid and silent and forbidding, for one hour, and then walked over to Andy and asked for a rundown of what he was doing and how Dean could help.
And at the end, just before dawn, Dean went into the tent and grabbed Max’s bedding and threw it on the last of the fire in the barrel, and they all stood around it and tried not to gag at the rotten-sweet smell of disease caught in the creases.
When they went to sleep, separate on the floor of the cockpit because the day’s heat made it impossible to touch, Sam said, “You found him.”
“Yeah, Sammy.”
“And? Was he already gone?”
“No.”
It was absolutely, eerily still like it only could be this far from civilization. And then Sam said, “What did he say to you?”
Dean growled with a bloody, pure hatred, “No one is allowed to give up like that, Sammy. No one. I’d rather leave him out there than drag him back and let him make anyone else think like that.”
And, well.
Sam fell asleep with Dean’s hand searing too hot on his arm, sweaty skin-to-skin contact unpleasant when they woke up later but exactly what he needed now.
- - -
The sun slipped clear of the horizon, blooming, desert rose pink and orange and bright. Time for sleep.
Dean sat next to Sam, cup cradled in both hands, elbows propped on spread knees. He sipped his water, savored it like aged whiskey.
Sam pulled one hand through his hair, lifting it up so the air could get in. He laughed, tired, crazy tired. “Guess I’m regretting my haircut now, huh?”
Dean didn’t laugh, or tell him to shut up, or do anything.
Sam shut up anyway.
The slow sounds of everyone else crawling into the nest that had become their bed tapered off. They had all settled down.
Just when Sam was ready to suggest they do the same, Dean said, “Is this my fault?”
Which pretty much turned off Sam’s brain for a few seconds.
“What?” he demanded, but it sounded less outraged and more four years old.
“This. All this.” Dean kept his back to the Impala, to the new airplane taking shape beyond that. “Is it my fault, because I wouldn’t listen to you about the storm? We could’ve. Anything. We could’ve put down somewhere.”
Sam sucked air in, fought the tightness around his chest. “No, Dean. No no no, of course not.”
“Max and Carey. They’re dead.” Dean turned away from the dune he’d been focused on, looked at Sam like there was nothing his brother could do to make it better. “You look me in the eye, Sammy, and tell me there’s nothing I coulda done to stop that.”
Sam felt - despair. All his strength, everything he’d been leaning on to get himself through this, drained out onto the sand, and suddenly he was trapped in the middle of the desert with a plane that couldn’t fly and six people who might kill him to get his ration of water.
He rasped, “Dean, you’re. You’re the best man I’ve ever known. You’re going to get us through this.” He wasn’t fighting back tears, because he was too dehydrated. His voice was even, and soft and hard at once, and deadly deadly serious.
Dean’s eyes were sharp, and searching, and trying to pick out what was lie or truth. And then he sighed, drained the last of his water, and knocked his shoulder against Sam’s where they were almost touching, anyway. “C’mon. Gotta get your beauty rest, Sam.”
Sam beamed, and felt his lips crack and split open, but he didn’t care about that. He had the strength to stand again.
- - -
They nearly had the hardware and frame finished - propeller hooked up and tested, engine reattached firmly, neither of the jury-rigged and incongruent wings wobbled anymore - when, in idle conversation over the sunset, right before work, Bobby told Sam, “Hell, when they dragged Ash off every couple weeks, who’da thought he was making planes.”
It caught Sam’s attention. “You didn’t know what he was doing?”
Ava was on his other side, chewing her gooey, lukewarm breakfast. “Top secret. And you know how he’s kind of off?” She made the finger-twirling-at-the-temple gesture that meant crazy.
Bobby picked the story up. “They told us not to ask him about it, because like as not he’d just tell us, confidentiality waiver or no.”
“Made us sign we-won’t-get-curious contracts,” Ava said. “I asked what was so bad if Ash told us himself, but they said they might have to kill me and didn’t look like they were joking.”
“So you don’t know exactly what Ash does.”
Bobby shrugged. “Builds planes.”
Sam stared at him. “How well do you know Ash?”
“As well as a body can know a crazy person.”
“I don’t know his last name,” Sam said as an example. “That counts as not knowing someone.”
Bobby tilted his head to his shoulder and cracked his neck. “Then I guess I don’t either.”
“Then.” Sam waved his hands and fought back the suspicion, because he never trusted Ash, never, so just because no one actually knew him didn’t mean that he was a lying son of a bitch.
So he left and found Dean.
“I don’t know that Ash actually knows how to build an airplane,” Sam hissed, bent down a little to reach Dean’s ear, smelling the salt-and-game-and-engine-grease of his brother’s shoulder. The desert dust was caked heavily in Dean’s crow’s feet, sunburst around his eyes edged in dark brown and sand.
Dean’s spine stiffened as he came out of his slouch. He stared at Sam’s eyes, considering, turning to over, making a plan, and then he turned and called across the dead air of their little arroyo, “Hey, Ash.”
Ash looked up from where he was drawing lewd things in his little pocket notebook and blinked blearily. “Uh. Yeah, dude?”
“You have a doctorate, right?” Dean was playing chummy, but Sam was right behind him, could feel how tense and wired Dean was.
“Yeah, man.” Ash grinned and glazed over like he was in a reverie.
“What in?”
“Propulsion and weapons development.”
Everyone was watching the back-and-forth, because, true to form, Dean and Ash were on completely opposite ends of any group, keeping a cushion between them.
Dean grinned, feral and vicious and cruel. “Fun shit, sounds like.”
“Yeah. Fun shit.” Ash chuckled.
His voice was carefully blank. “D’you design missiles, Ash?”
“Yup. My latest makes the biggest crater, you have no idea.”
“Top secret missiles.”
“Very confidential. It was explained to me - by, like, y’know, The Man.” Oh lord, he did the airquotes.
Dean nodded, cracked his knuckles like he was about to punch someone in the mouth. “Like missiles that don’t have wings or engines or propellers? That kind of missile?”
Ash’s smile dropped. “What?”
“Do you know how to build a fucking plane?” Dean took a step, fists curled and rising to beat Ash into the next desert over, but Sam wrapped one arm across his chest and set the other hand on Dean’s hip, trying to keep him back. Dean pushed into Sam instead of trying to go forward, muscles working against themselves.
Bobby stood up, and his low voice rumbled, “What the hell is going on here?”
Dean spat, “He doesn’t, look at him, he doesn’t know how.”
Ash waved his arms, loose and lanky and disorganized. “I took aeronautics, it’s not like I don’t know how. It’ll fly and stuff, and everything. Calm down.”
“Calm!” Andy screeched, in one of his less dignified moments. His breathing was quick and shallow and panicked, but he forced his voice steady. “Ash, I took a fucking class in drafting, but that doesn’t I can design a house.”
“Oh. I can, though.” Ash tapped his temple. “I got it goin’ on.”
Dean was holding onto Sam’s arm, helping to keep himself back before he went and killed anyone, chest heaving with the blind rage. In a steady, rolling rumble, he said, “’M gonna kill him. Sammy, ‘m gonna - fucking goddamn fuck fuck shit we could have lasted and we only have one week and I’m gonna kill him.”
Sam talked back, because Dean was freaking out. “Hey, hey, Dean. We can, we’ll get out, it’ll work, hey, Dean, listen to me, okay?”
Everyone else was drawing in close to Ash, yelling and demanding and blocking him in and ignoring Ash insisting that the Phoenix would fly.
“Dean,” Sam warned, and let go.
Without anything to lean against, Dean stumbled through soft sand, then marched forward with awkward, stiff steps, without looking back.
All of them - Ellen, Jo, Bobby, Andy, Ava - cleared a path for him when he came near, fell silent and watched for his decision.
And this was it. This was why Sam insisted that Dean needed to be in control of them, needed to get them used to his orders. So that he could have a chance like this, to save a life.
Dean reached for Ash and dragged him in by the collar.
…Or not save a life.
Sam’s stomach lurched, because no matter what Dean did right now, Sam was going to back him up on it, Sam would follow him anywhere.
“Ash,” Dean began, in a falsely friendly way, too sweet like Max’s bed. “Explain yourself. Right the fuck now.”
“It’ll fly,” Ash insisted softly, terrified and repeating himself. “It’ll fly, the balance is right, we have enough fuel, it’ll fly, it’ll fly, there’s nothing wrong with my plane!”
Dean’s arms extended and snapped back, shaking Ash sharply. “My plane,” he snarled, and Sam had to move closer because he could barely hear Dean’s voice, soft and quiet and Sam still couldn’t tell what Dean was planning.
“Your plane! It’s - it’s fine! It’s nearly finished! I did the math, the thrust is enough but not too much, and the balance looks off right now but it’ll work when each person is buckled in how I - I told you, every step of the way, did it ever seem like I didn’t know what I was doing, I know how, I, I know-“
“Shut up.”
Ash’s eyes were wide but his mouth clicked shut.
Dean glanced around the circle, careful not to meet Sam’s eyes, and held the moment.
And then let go and push Ash to his knees and took his hands away, less threatening but still there.
“It’ll fly.”
Ash nodded, too fast, too quick. “It will.”
“Okay.” Dean nodded and took another step back. “And we got the heavy lifting done, all that’s left is the outside, sealing cracks, making sure sand hasn’t clogged up anything, right?”
“Details.” He was downshifting from outright panic to an attempt to recover whatever face he might have started with. “Just the details, man. Not much.”
Dean took another step back, even with the others in the circle, and his shoulder just barely brushed Sam’s before he put his weight on his other leg. His face was white under the sunburned red and leather tan and two weeks of beard.
“We’re gonna work during the day from now on - I don’t want to burn any more fuel for light. We have water for a week more, but this won’t take a week.” He raised his eyebrows at Ash, daring him to contradict.
Ash did not. He was standing up again, brushing sand off his knees and trying to slouch nonchalantly.
“Right,” Dean said, and turned away. “Gonna be in the cockpit if you need me, but try to get some sleep - we’ll have to switch our schedule again.”
He walked away, back still stiff but gait easy and rolling, and Ash was still alive and no one was going to hurt him because this was the judgment Dean passed.
Sam waited five minutes and followed him, and Dean was on the floor across from their somewhat separated bed, head to knees and not moving at all.
Sam sat across from him, back against the console, and tangled their legs together. “I don’t want to say I told you so, but.”
Dean grimaced, but right now, it counted as a smile. “Yeah, alright, Sammy, your magical powers of college learning have saved the day.”
“I thought we agreed I’m a criminal mastermind?” Sam tried to joke, but Dean glared down at his shoes and wouldn’t go along with it.
Instead, he said, “I could’ve just. I could’ve killed him just now, Sam.”
Sam’s eyes traced over the lines on Dean’s face, picked out and deepened by the dust in them, and the lines of sunburn where his neck creased. He said, “You didn’t.”
Dean shook his head. “I could taste it. Like copper. I could’ve killed him, or turned him out to walk into the desert and that’s no better or worse than killing him, or let the others tear him apart because that’s what they were going to do.”
Sam reached for him and squeezed Dean’s knee, the furthest part he could grab comfortably. Dean met his eyes, green and gold that nearly glowed in the red of the setting sun outside and through the windshield.
A knot formed in Sam throat, and he wasn’t going to cry, and he croaked, “You’re the best man I’ve ever known,” just like before, because it was even more true now.
Dean kept staring at him, and covered Sam’s hand with his own, and said, “Hey, Sam, did you ever think.”
Sam let his eyes drop to their hands and swallowed but his throat was too dry. Everything was too, too dry. “Not before,” he admitted.
“But now.” Dean’s voice was odd, weirdly flat, not a question at all.
“Yeah.”
His thumb passed over the back of Sam’s hand, and then two fingers pressed into the pulsepoint of Sam’s wrist, and then Dean drew his arm back to his side. “Alright. Yes. Yeah, okay, we can. Can’t we?”
Sam smirked at his brother. “Aren’t you supposed to be good at talking to girls?”
“Oh, so you’re admitting your girlness?”
“No such word, dumbass.”
“Bitch.”
“Just for that, I’m not putting out until the third date. And no going dutch or anything.”
Dean laughed, and Sam realized how long it had been since he’d heard that.
But. Well.
- - -
Next Part