[Fic] She Destroys You Line By Line (1/5)
Master Post | Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four | Part Five
*
They were in Alabama when they got the call. Four AM, trapped in a Holiday Inn hopeful with a banana-theme fetish and Dean’s woken up by the Oscar Meyer Weiner song-it was just one of those days.
Seriously, what the hell.
Dean groped for the night table blindly in search of his phone (if I were an Oscar Meyer Weiner!). No luck. Man, was he going to have to open his eyes to do this? He tried again, hand patting down the table’s surface because, seriously, there was only so much space on the fucking table. (Everyone would be in love with me!)
“Dean.”
“’m getting it.”
(If I were an Oscar Meyer Weiner!)
“Dean.” He was going to smash that thing.
“’m getting it.” He was.
There was a sigh. “Two centimeters to the right of your hand, son.”
Seriously? Dean cracked an eye open, a horribly blurry and oh-shit-that’s-freaky banana yellow night table came in view. Along with the vibrating phone that was shaking just two centimeters away from his hand.
“Oh.”
“Answer the phone, son.”
Right. He pushed himself up and grabbed the evil thing. Once glance told him he didn’t know who it was, but that really didn’t mean squat when it came down to it, so he pressed ‘send’ and held the phone to his ear. “Hello?”
This is Satan, how may I help you. His voice was rough with sleep. There was a short pause, then-
“…Is this Dean Winchester?” Oh, it was a chick. Immediately waking up at Oh-too-early in the morning wasn’t so bad.
A long yawn escaped him as he rubbed his eyes.
“What’s it to you?” He asked, blearily peering down at the blankets pooled in his lap-they were telling him to go back to sleep. He could talk in his sleep, Sam told him once he never shut up. He could make this work.
The blankets were also telling him to salt and burn them fast because the people who made them were smoking the serious shit-- there were bananas dancing across the things, for fuck’s sake. Why were there dancing bananas on his blankets? He fought back a sigh and took pity on the chick on the other line when she didn’t say anything for a long moment.
“Look, sorry, I’m not all here right now, who’s this?”
“I’m Jessica Moore.” Baby, give me Moore. Wow, that sounded cheesy even in his head.
“’Kay, it’s nice to meet you, Jessica, why’re you calling?”
“I need to get a hold of someone by the name of Dean Winchester. His brother, Sam, told me that he…” She trailed off, obviously uncomfortable giving out too much information when she didn’t know if the schmuck on the line was trustworthy or not. “Please, it’s important.”
“That’s me,” Dean replied, suddenly wide awake. Sam told her about him? “What did Sam tell you?”
Another long pause. “Look,” she sounded scared. “I’m desperate here, but that doesn’t mean I’m stupid. How do I know you’re really who you say you are?”
Smart chick. “What, you want me to give you the run down on Sam? Twenty-two years old, tall as a freaking giant, floppy ass hair that makes him look like an orangutan, went to Standford to be a lawyer…”
“He’s missing,” Jessica interrupted without preamble, seemingly convinced. Dean’s next words (puppy dog eyes) jammed in his throat like Los Angeles traffic at six AM.
“What?!” Dad glanced up from the newspapers scattered over the table in the middle of the room, Dean ignored him in favor of swinging his legs over the side of the bed. Fat chance at going back to sleep now. “When? How?”
“I don’t know how, that’s why I’m calling you!” she choked out. It was a toss up between whether she was upset at being upset or over not knowing what happened. Women.
“Because Sam told you about me.”
“Yes.”
Uh-huh. The fact that Sam still even acknowledged Dean’s existence was enough to make Dean want to start stocking up on ammunition and lighter fluid. Maybe start building Panic Rooms and shit to wait out the apocalypse, too.
“What exactly did he say?” Dean hedged cautiously. He couldn’t see college-boy Sammy Winchester telling anyone about ghosts and goblins (”I never wanted to be apart of this!”). So playing Twenty Supernatural Questions with this chick was either gonna piss her off royal, thinking he was trying to screw with her, or she was going to think he was nutso.
Considering Sam was fucking gone, neither idea was awesome enough to even think about right now.
“He…” A pause. Dean narrowed his eyes. It wasn’t an unsure pause either, like ‘fuck, I just woke Satan’s little helper’ or ‘I don’t know who I’m talking to’, like she had done earlier. This one was ‘how much should I say?’ The little pauses Sam used to make when staring down (or staring upat) the cops with startled eyes at the age of seven, hands full of rock salt and lighter fluid.
(”Science project…?”)
“Look, you need my help and I need yours if we’re going to get anywhere, alright? So I need you to be completely honest with me.”
“He said you and your father were private investigators,” was her only response. She was still leaving something out. He fought back a sigh and let it slide, she wasn’t going anywhere and right now they had bigger fish to fry.
“When’s the last time you saw him?”
“The day before he went missing. Or night. God, everything’s just a complete mess, I don’t even know the date anymore! I’ve been trying everything to get someone to help but even Sam’s friends won’t listen to me. It’s like nothing’s happened, but I went to his place-Sam doesn’t just do that!”
Dean wasn’t sure he was even reading the same book with this woman anymore, she was leaping all over the place. A hectic bundle of nerves. There went Dean’s desperate theory that Sam just went to the supermarket and got lost in a nearby bookstore on the way back.
“Okay, hey.” She went quiet. “You’re losing me, start from the beginning. And go slow.” It was fucking four in the morning and he had no caffeine, he couldn’t catch a freakin’ turtle if he tried. “What makes you think he’s missing?”
She took a breath. “The day-night-before he went missing, Sam came to my place. Nothing big, he does it all the time. So I let him up, ‘cause I live in these apartments and he has to buzz to get past the lobby, but this time he had a freaking huge bag of salt with him.” She coughed, clearing her throat. “I was like, ‘Sam, what’s up?’ and it was like I zapped him with a cattle prod. He wouldn’t tell me what was going on, he just-he told me not to leave the house before dawn.”
An involuntary shudder ran through him. That didn’t sound good. At all. “What then?”
He could practically see the shrug, the rolling eyes to fight back the tears-Dean had seen it so many times before it was something he could identify by sound now. Lost family members dragged to the bottom of lakes, lost friends, and the people left behind to deal with it.
Dean refused to feel hollow.
“He asked me to line my house with salt. I thought he was drunk,” her voice turned pleading. “I just laughed, I laughed. I saw he was scared and I’ve seen Sam drunk and…”
“Keep it together,” he interrupted sharply. They didn’t have the time to cry right now, they could do it after Dean beat his baby brother’s head in with a baseball bat.
“Right. You’re right” She coughed again. “When he saw I wasn’t going do it he started doing it instead. I tried to stop him but all he had to do was look at me and I was spooked so I let him finish. After that he left and I was too scared to try and follow.”
That bad feeling? Yeah, it had just gotten ten times worse. It wasn’t the first time he wished Sam just hadn’t left for college. That he would have just been happy to have Dean tail him everywhere-or that he’d have at least called Dean whenever this shit had gone down. He would have fucking high tailed it from wherever he was and been there in a day with shotguns and rock salt, no questions asked.
“The next day, I went to his place.” Her voice shook. Images of blood splattered walls, of rooms turned to disaster zones with broken furniture and shattered glass flashed through Dean’s head. Fuck, for the longest time before Sam went to college he’d look at those places, sober as a judge, and it was like he was saying ‘another home wrecked’. He fucking loved those places because they were so normal, watching them be destroyed as like watching The Life of the Winchesters version two-point-oh.
And now it was like the same thing had happened to Sam.
Dean couldn’t for the life of him get his jaw to unclench when the traitorous thoughts of Sam’s body lying in some morgue kept invading his head-that maybe this chick’s definition of ‘missing’ was ‘lying under tons of debris and can’t be dug out, sorry’.
“…like a bomb went off.” Jessica’s voice jerked him out of his thoughts. “The whole place was just destroyed. There was glass everywhere and the scary part is… it’s like nothing was touched. I mean, the place is a fucking wreck, but the only things out of place are a broken chair and the glass. It feels like I’m losing my mind, I don’t know what to think.” Dean imagined her shaking her head--no, no, this can’t be true.
Another thing he’d pay never to see again.
“I kept expecting to find Sam somewhere, hidden in the closet, chopped to pieces.” She laughed. “I don’t know what’s worse, not finding him or hoping to.”
Closure. Fuck closure. He didn’t want a body, he wanted the bitching and the name calling and Sam rolling the windows down because the car was too hot. Dean honestly could have cried right then if Dad hadn’t been in the room. He ran a hand over his face and took a slow, deep breath.
“He wasn’t anywhere in the place?”
“No.”
“Did he try to contact you at all after that?”
“No.” A beat, then- “I don’t know. I called everyone I knew who knew Sam to see if he stopped by or if they’d seen him and they all said they hadn’t heard a thing, so I don’t think so.”
“Has anyone else been in his apartment besides you?”
“No. They’re all convinced something came up and Sam had to go without telling us. But- They haven’t seen his apartment, they didn’t see Sam the night before. It was like he was being chased by a ghost, he was honest to god acting like the sky was going to fall.”
Dean grinned wryly. Ghost, right. That was really funny, in that ‘oh man, that’s so fucking ironic-shut up, I know what ironic means’ kind of way.
“Oh.” She gasped suddenly, startled. Dean sat up straight.
“What is it?”
“I- My- I was touching things when I went through his place, I was so scared I wasn’t thinking straight. I- My fingerprints are probably everywhere. Oh god, did I screw things up big time? First Sam, now this-I’ve practically killed him myself.”
“Hey, it’s fine, you told me yourself you were there, we can work around it,” he lied. Not like they were going to be taking fingerprints anyway-not like there were going to be any fingerprints besides hers and Sam’s, anyway. “Sam’s not dead, trust me. We’re going to find him and then we’re going to beat the shit out of him for making us freak out like a bunch of girls-”
“Hey!”
Oh, right.
She laughed when he stopped talking, a quiet, wrung out sound that had seen better days. Dean could sympathize.
“Out of curiosity,” Dean started. “How’d you get this number? Did Sam give this to you?” He was fishing. Sam couldn’t have given her this number, they’d just gotten it a month ago and with the unspoken Line In The Sand, Sam might as well have been on the other side of the globe.
“No, Robert Singer did.”
Eyebrows shot up. He wasn’t sure whether to be impressed or… well, impressed. “How’d you get that number?” It wasn’t like Bobby was in the phone book under ‘Knows Where the Winchesters Sleep’.
“Sam left his number for me.”
For some reason that made him shudder again. A long, spine-tingling shake that made him think of something running a finger down his back. If Sam knew something was going to happen and didn’t try to call, then…
“In his apartment?”
He could imagine her shaking her head. “No, in the empty bag of salt he left behind.”
---
Dean was moving the second the call ended. His duffel on the bed and opened, his clothes stuffed into any available inch. All that military training Dad had drilled into him and Sam on how to pack on the go? Yeah, Dean was really appreciating that now. ‘Cause sitting still had never been one of his fine points before, but now it was freakin’ near impossible. He was an insanely wrapped bundle of energy with a little pink bow of ‘goddamnit why am I still here’ on top.
Dad hadn’t moved a muscle. Dean had forgotten he was even there.
“You wanna fill me in on what’s going on, Dean?” he said when Dean finally remembered him. Dean wanted to… Well, maybe him wanting to act right now was a bad idea.
It was one of those rare times where he just wanted to strangle Dad-for not stopping Sam, for not letting him check on Sam, for putting that wall there and filling in the moat. For not knowing.
Dean forced himself to breathe.
“Sam’s missing, sir.” But Dad must’ve known that, he heard Dean talking-it wasn’t hard to guess what was going on by his tone, by his side of the conversation.
He could remember when Sam was seven. They had lived in some shitty place in Washington. Sam had wanted to know about their mother, for the fortieth kazillion time, and Dean couldn’t handle it. Sam had every right to know, Dean knew that now-she was his mom too, but he couldn’t talk about it. Not without remembering someone screaming. So like always he got mad and he ran away. Sam, being Sam, tried to follow and Dean didn’t know it then.
He’d been so blinded by smoke to try to look behind him to see if his kid brother had stayed where he should’ve.
Sam was missing by the time Dean got back an hour later. He was still missing by the time Dad got back a few hours after that. They searched the apartment high and low, when they didn’t find him they split up and searched the city. They found him a few blocks away, just sitting on some bench waiting for them, but before they did Dad hadn’t so much as sat down once.
Right now, Dad hadn’t moved. Hadn’t reacted. Not once.
Dean was tempted to repeat when he had said, ‘cause Dad must have not heard. He wasn’t doing anything!
“Sir?” Please move, Dad.
Then finally, Dean got a reaction. Dad frowned over his research, face thoughtful and partially hidden in shadows. “You know this for a fact?”
Dean nodded once. “That was just Jessica Moore, she’s a--” Friend? Girlfriend? Two years ago Dean would have known this. He hadn’t thought to ask. “She knows Sam. She called because Sam told her we were private investigators.”
“She say how she got your number?”
The urge to shout was back and even uglier than before. Now he wanted to strangle and just start hitting. Why were they still here? Why were they still talking about this? Why weren’t they on the I-65 and on their way out of Alabama already?!
He was pacing, Dean realized suddenly.
“Dean, sit down.”
Dean sat. Good boy.
“Did this Moore girl say how Sam went missing?” Dad amended without missing a beat.
Dean shook his head. “No sir, she didn’t. She claimed that Sam stopped by her place two days ago carrying a bag of rock salt, he asked her to line the windows and doors with it, she thought he was drunk.” Because that’s what people did when they were drunk.
“And he went missing afterwards?”
“Right. He left, she went to check on him the next day, his apartment was completely destroyed and he was nowhere to be found.”
Dad didn’t reply for a long moment. “What are you thinking, sir?”
“Did she say how she found us?” he asked again. This time Dean made himself reply, it was the least he could do. Dad was just trying to get the facts straight so they wouldn’t be flying blind.
“Yeah, Sam left a list of phone numbers in the bag of salt he brought over.” Again, no response. Dean recognized the mood he was in, no action, just all thought-the mood he got whenever he started suspecting the numbers. “You’re thinking she’s lying?
“I’m not sure what to think.”
Dean stood and took a deep breath. Fuck, he was gonna get it for this. But at this rate whoever took Sam might as well carve him up and slow cook him because they weren’t gonna find him anytime this year.
“If she was lying then it means there’s still the chance that something has Sam, Dad-”
“Dean.” It was Dad’s no nonsense, you-will-listen-to-me-now-boy voice. Every nerve in Dean’s body was practically vibrating with energy, sending conflicting messages to sit down and to move. “We’re going to find him, but we’re gonna do it right. Right now the some things aren’t adding up, so we have to be prepared for anything. Rushing in half cocked isn’t going to do anything to help anyone, do I make myself clear?”
Dean nodded and sat back down. Atta boy.
-*-
”Do you realize what will take place soon? Or the part you’ll play?”
It takes Sam a whole week to slow down and breathe. By that time he’s in Arkansas, he’s covered in dirt and grime and he can’t figure out for the life of him how he got there.
Hitchhiking? The roads are empty. Didn’t steal a car, wasn’t that desperate after all it seemed-so what did that leave? It’s hard to think clearly right now. Like his brain is wrapped in gauze and padded with cotton balls. It’s not a pleasant feeling at all.
He has at least seven missed calls on his phone, maybe ten. He doesn’t even have to check to see who they’re from to know who called-right now there’s about three people out there who know enough about what’s going on to freak out.
Sam should have tossed the phone somewhere in Nevada. Shoulda, woulda, coulda, he thinks. His hands shake as he scrolls through his inbox, a wry smile splits his face as he does it. His inbox is empty, but his voicemail is full.
It feels like that should be some profound saying that gets written on holiday Hallmark cards with a cute little drawing of Snoopy next to it or something. Fuck, how much sleep did he get? He can’t remember. He laughs, a short, barking sound that’s filled with just a little bit of hysteria and bounces off the trees around him. Reminds him how alone he is.
He wants to call Dean, or even Dad-even though that’d end spectacularly-he just can’t bring himself to. The kick in him that’s driving him to runrunRUN is also bouncing around his chest screaming at the thought of letting anyone know where he is and dialing that number so he can talk to someone just makes it scream more. Like just the simple press of a button will drag him through the line and there he’ll be, sitting in the back of the Impala stewing bitterly at something Dad said, did, would do while Dean cracked jokes at the air like a miner worked at stones.
Or maybe he’ll be in some crummy motel room where Dad isn’t and Dean is. They’ll be watching something on television and if Sam’s lucky, it won’t be porn.
His fingers are cold. When did he get so goddamn cold (he needs to calm down, he’s getting nowhere like this).
“There is no time, you must run.”
So he does.
He tries.
He doesn’t know where the fuck he’s going.
He should, but the cards all fell around him so suddenly. There was no time to look at a map and draw lines down the highways or make reservations at the motels. He barely had time to run to Jessica’s to try and warn her and still make it back before… Well, this.
The phone rings. There’s no sound, but he can feel it vibrate in his hand, shaking like an eager bird desperate to take flight.
Sam closes his eyes, only for a moment, before he makes his decision and pockets the tiny thing. With it gone the silence just presses in even more. There really is no one there, something Sam used to like when he had been at Stanford-especially at night. He used to jog after hours, when everyone was supposed to be sleeping. It was peaceful and incredibly ironic considering he had left everything to be there so he could be normal and once there, he just wanted quiet.
Now the quiet just reminds him of the calm before a storm with everything holding its breath in quiet anticipation.
Part Two
*
They were in Alabama when they got the call. Four AM, trapped in a Holiday Inn hopeful with a banana-theme fetish and Dean’s woken up by the Oscar Meyer Weiner song-it was just one of those days.
Seriously, what the hell.
Dean groped for the night table blindly in search of his phone (if I were an Oscar Meyer Weiner!). No luck. Man, was he going to have to open his eyes to do this? He tried again, hand patting down the table’s surface because, seriously, there was only so much space on the fucking table. (Everyone would be in love with me!)
“Dean.”
“’m getting it.”
(If I were an Oscar Meyer Weiner!)
“Dean.” He was going to smash that thing.
“’m getting it.” He was.
There was a sigh. “Two centimeters to the right of your hand, son.”
Seriously? Dean cracked an eye open, a horribly blurry and oh-shit-that’s-freaky banana yellow night table came in view. Along with the vibrating phone that was shaking just two centimeters away from his hand.
“Oh.”
“Answer the phone, son.”
Right. He pushed himself up and grabbed the evil thing. Once glance told him he didn’t know who it was, but that really didn’t mean squat when it came down to it, so he pressed ‘send’ and held the phone to his ear. “Hello?”
This is Satan, how may I help you. His voice was rough with sleep. There was a short pause, then-
“…Is this Dean Winchester?” Oh, it was a chick. Immediately waking up at Oh-too-early in the morning wasn’t so bad.
A long yawn escaped him as he rubbed his eyes.
“What’s it to you?” He asked, blearily peering down at the blankets pooled in his lap-they were telling him to go back to sleep. He could talk in his sleep, Sam told him once he never shut up. He could make this work.
The blankets were also telling him to salt and burn them fast because the people who made them were smoking the serious shit-- there were bananas dancing across the things, for fuck’s sake. Why were there dancing bananas on his blankets? He fought back a sigh and took pity on the chick on the other line when she didn’t say anything for a long moment.
“Look, sorry, I’m not all here right now, who’s this?”
“I’m Jessica Moore.” Baby, give me Moore. Wow, that sounded cheesy even in his head.
“’Kay, it’s nice to meet you, Jessica, why’re you calling?”
“I need to get a hold of someone by the name of Dean Winchester. His brother, Sam, told me that he…” She trailed off, obviously uncomfortable giving out too much information when she didn’t know if the schmuck on the line was trustworthy or not. “Please, it’s important.”
“That’s me,” Dean replied, suddenly wide awake. Sam told her about him? “What did Sam tell you?”
Another long pause. “Look,” she sounded scared. “I’m desperate here, but that doesn’t mean I’m stupid. How do I know you’re really who you say you are?”
Smart chick. “What, you want me to give you the run down on Sam? Twenty-two years old, tall as a freaking giant, floppy ass hair that makes him look like an orangutan, went to Standford to be a lawyer…”
“He’s missing,” Jessica interrupted without preamble, seemingly convinced. Dean’s next words (puppy dog eyes) jammed in his throat like Los Angeles traffic at six AM.
“What?!” Dad glanced up from the newspapers scattered over the table in the middle of the room, Dean ignored him in favor of swinging his legs over the side of the bed. Fat chance at going back to sleep now. “When? How?”
“I don’t know how, that’s why I’m calling you!” she choked out. It was a toss up between whether she was upset at being upset or over not knowing what happened. Women.
“Because Sam told you about me.”
“Yes.”
Uh-huh. The fact that Sam still even acknowledged Dean’s existence was enough to make Dean want to start stocking up on ammunition and lighter fluid. Maybe start building Panic Rooms and shit to wait out the apocalypse, too.
“What exactly did he say?” Dean hedged cautiously. He couldn’t see college-boy Sammy Winchester telling anyone about ghosts and goblins (”I never wanted to be apart of this!”). So playing Twenty Supernatural Questions with this chick was either gonna piss her off royal, thinking he was trying to screw with her, or she was going to think he was nutso.
Considering Sam was fucking gone, neither idea was awesome enough to even think about right now.
“He…” A pause. Dean narrowed his eyes. It wasn’t an unsure pause either, like ‘fuck, I just woke Satan’s little helper’ or ‘I don’t know who I’m talking to’, like she had done earlier. This one was ‘how much should I say?’ The little pauses Sam used to make when staring down (or staring upat) the cops with startled eyes at the age of seven, hands full of rock salt and lighter fluid.
(”Science project…?”)
“Look, you need my help and I need yours if we’re going to get anywhere, alright? So I need you to be completely honest with me.”
“He said you and your father were private investigators,” was her only response. She was still leaving something out. He fought back a sigh and let it slide, she wasn’t going anywhere and right now they had bigger fish to fry.
“When’s the last time you saw him?”
“The day before he went missing. Or night. God, everything’s just a complete mess, I don’t even know the date anymore! I’ve been trying everything to get someone to help but even Sam’s friends won’t listen to me. It’s like nothing’s happened, but I went to his place-Sam doesn’t just do that!”
Dean wasn’t sure he was even reading the same book with this woman anymore, she was leaping all over the place. A hectic bundle of nerves. There went Dean’s desperate theory that Sam just went to the supermarket and got lost in a nearby bookstore on the way back.
“Okay, hey.” She went quiet. “You’re losing me, start from the beginning. And go slow.” It was fucking four in the morning and he had no caffeine, he couldn’t catch a freakin’ turtle if he tried. “What makes you think he’s missing?”
She took a breath. “The day-night-before he went missing, Sam came to my place. Nothing big, he does it all the time. So I let him up, ‘cause I live in these apartments and he has to buzz to get past the lobby, but this time he had a freaking huge bag of salt with him.” She coughed, clearing her throat. “I was like, ‘Sam, what’s up?’ and it was like I zapped him with a cattle prod. He wouldn’t tell me what was going on, he just-he told me not to leave the house before dawn.”
An involuntary shudder ran through him. That didn’t sound good. At all. “What then?”
He could practically see the shrug, the rolling eyes to fight back the tears-Dean had seen it so many times before it was something he could identify by sound now. Lost family members dragged to the bottom of lakes, lost friends, and the people left behind to deal with it.
Dean refused to feel hollow.
“He asked me to line my house with salt. I thought he was drunk,” her voice turned pleading. “I just laughed, I laughed. I saw he was scared and I’ve seen Sam drunk and…”
“Keep it together,” he interrupted sharply. They didn’t have the time to cry right now, they could do it after Dean beat his baby brother’s head in with a baseball bat.
“Right. You’re right” She coughed again. “When he saw I wasn’t going do it he started doing it instead. I tried to stop him but all he had to do was look at me and I was spooked so I let him finish. After that he left and I was too scared to try and follow.”
That bad feeling? Yeah, it had just gotten ten times worse. It wasn’t the first time he wished Sam just hadn’t left for college. That he would have just been happy to have Dean tail him everywhere-or that he’d have at least called Dean whenever this shit had gone down. He would have fucking high tailed it from wherever he was and been there in a day with shotguns and rock salt, no questions asked.
“The next day, I went to his place.” Her voice shook. Images of blood splattered walls, of rooms turned to disaster zones with broken furniture and shattered glass flashed through Dean’s head. Fuck, for the longest time before Sam went to college he’d look at those places, sober as a judge, and it was like he was saying ‘another home wrecked’. He fucking loved those places because they were so normal, watching them be destroyed as like watching The Life of the Winchesters version two-point-oh.
And now it was like the same thing had happened to Sam.
Dean couldn’t for the life of him get his jaw to unclench when the traitorous thoughts of Sam’s body lying in some morgue kept invading his head-that maybe this chick’s definition of ‘missing’ was ‘lying under tons of debris and can’t be dug out, sorry’.
“…like a bomb went off.” Jessica’s voice jerked him out of his thoughts. “The whole place was just destroyed. There was glass everywhere and the scary part is… it’s like nothing was touched. I mean, the place is a fucking wreck, but the only things out of place are a broken chair and the glass. It feels like I’m losing my mind, I don’t know what to think.” Dean imagined her shaking her head--no, no, this can’t be true.
Another thing he’d pay never to see again.
“I kept expecting to find Sam somewhere, hidden in the closet, chopped to pieces.” She laughed. “I don’t know what’s worse, not finding him or hoping to.”
Closure. Fuck closure. He didn’t want a body, he wanted the bitching and the name calling and Sam rolling the windows down because the car was too hot. Dean honestly could have cried right then if Dad hadn’t been in the room. He ran a hand over his face and took a slow, deep breath.
“He wasn’t anywhere in the place?”
“No.”
“Did he try to contact you at all after that?”
“No.” A beat, then- “I don’t know. I called everyone I knew who knew Sam to see if he stopped by or if they’d seen him and they all said they hadn’t heard a thing, so I don’t think so.”
“Has anyone else been in his apartment besides you?”
“No. They’re all convinced something came up and Sam had to go without telling us. But- They haven’t seen his apartment, they didn’t see Sam the night before. It was like he was being chased by a ghost, he was honest to god acting like the sky was going to fall.”
Dean grinned wryly. Ghost, right. That was really funny, in that ‘oh man, that’s so fucking ironic-shut up, I know what ironic means’ kind of way.
“Oh.” She gasped suddenly, startled. Dean sat up straight.
“What is it?”
“I- My- I was touching things when I went through his place, I was so scared I wasn’t thinking straight. I- My fingerprints are probably everywhere. Oh god, did I screw things up big time? First Sam, now this-I’ve practically killed him myself.”
“Hey, it’s fine, you told me yourself you were there, we can work around it,” he lied. Not like they were going to be taking fingerprints anyway-not like there were going to be any fingerprints besides hers and Sam’s, anyway. “Sam’s not dead, trust me. We’re going to find him and then we’re going to beat the shit out of him for making us freak out like a bunch of girls-”
“Hey!”
Oh, right.
She laughed when he stopped talking, a quiet, wrung out sound that had seen better days. Dean could sympathize.
“Out of curiosity,” Dean started. “How’d you get this number? Did Sam give this to you?” He was fishing. Sam couldn’t have given her this number, they’d just gotten it a month ago and with the unspoken Line In The Sand, Sam might as well have been on the other side of the globe.
“No, Robert Singer did.”
Eyebrows shot up. He wasn’t sure whether to be impressed or… well, impressed. “How’d you get that number?” It wasn’t like Bobby was in the phone book under ‘Knows Where the Winchesters Sleep’.
“Sam left his number for me.”
For some reason that made him shudder again. A long, spine-tingling shake that made him think of something running a finger down his back. If Sam knew something was going to happen and didn’t try to call, then…
“In his apartment?”
He could imagine her shaking her head. “No, in the empty bag of salt he left behind.”
---
Dean was moving the second the call ended. His duffel on the bed and opened, his clothes stuffed into any available inch. All that military training Dad had drilled into him and Sam on how to pack on the go? Yeah, Dean was really appreciating that now. ‘Cause sitting still had never been one of his fine points before, but now it was freakin’ near impossible. He was an insanely wrapped bundle of energy with a little pink bow of ‘goddamnit why am I still here’ on top.
Dad hadn’t moved a muscle. Dean had forgotten he was even there.
“You wanna fill me in on what’s going on, Dean?” he said when Dean finally remembered him. Dean wanted to… Well, maybe him wanting to act right now was a bad idea.
It was one of those rare times where he just wanted to strangle Dad-for not stopping Sam, for not letting him check on Sam, for putting that wall there and filling in the moat. For not knowing.
Dean forced himself to breathe.
“Sam’s missing, sir.” But Dad must’ve known that, he heard Dean talking-it wasn’t hard to guess what was going on by his tone, by his side of the conversation.
He could remember when Sam was seven. They had lived in some shitty place in Washington. Sam had wanted to know about their mother, for the fortieth kazillion time, and Dean couldn’t handle it. Sam had every right to know, Dean knew that now-she was his mom too, but he couldn’t talk about it. Not without remembering someone screaming. So like always he got mad and he ran away. Sam, being Sam, tried to follow and Dean didn’t know it then.
He’d been so blinded by smoke to try to look behind him to see if his kid brother had stayed where he should’ve.
Sam was missing by the time Dean got back an hour later. He was still missing by the time Dad got back a few hours after that. They searched the apartment high and low, when they didn’t find him they split up and searched the city. They found him a few blocks away, just sitting on some bench waiting for them, but before they did Dad hadn’t so much as sat down once.
Right now, Dad hadn’t moved. Hadn’t reacted. Not once.
Dean was tempted to repeat when he had said, ‘cause Dad must have not heard. He wasn’t doing anything!
“Sir?” Please move, Dad.
Then finally, Dean got a reaction. Dad frowned over his research, face thoughtful and partially hidden in shadows. “You know this for a fact?”
Dean nodded once. “That was just Jessica Moore, she’s a--” Friend? Girlfriend? Two years ago Dean would have known this. He hadn’t thought to ask. “She knows Sam. She called because Sam told her we were private investigators.”
“She say how she got your number?”
The urge to shout was back and even uglier than before. Now he wanted to strangle and just start hitting. Why were they still here? Why were they still talking about this? Why weren’t they on the I-65 and on their way out of Alabama already?!
He was pacing, Dean realized suddenly.
“Dean, sit down.”
Dean sat. Good boy.
“Did this Moore girl say how Sam went missing?” Dad amended without missing a beat.
Dean shook his head. “No sir, she didn’t. She claimed that Sam stopped by her place two days ago carrying a bag of rock salt, he asked her to line the windows and doors with it, she thought he was drunk.” Because that’s what people did when they were drunk.
“And he went missing afterwards?”
“Right. He left, she went to check on him the next day, his apartment was completely destroyed and he was nowhere to be found.”
Dad didn’t reply for a long moment. “What are you thinking, sir?”
“Did she say how she found us?” he asked again. This time Dean made himself reply, it was the least he could do. Dad was just trying to get the facts straight so they wouldn’t be flying blind.
“Yeah, Sam left a list of phone numbers in the bag of salt he brought over.” Again, no response. Dean recognized the mood he was in, no action, just all thought-the mood he got whenever he started suspecting the numbers. “You’re thinking she’s lying?
“I’m not sure what to think.”
Dean stood and took a deep breath. Fuck, he was gonna get it for this. But at this rate whoever took Sam might as well carve him up and slow cook him because they weren’t gonna find him anytime this year.
“If she was lying then it means there’s still the chance that something has Sam, Dad-”
“Dean.” It was Dad’s no nonsense, you-will-listen-to-me-now-boy voice. Every nerve in Dean’s body was practically vibrating with energy, sending conflicting messages to sit down and to move. “We’re going to find him, but we’re gonna do it right. Right now the some things aren’t adding up, so we have to be prepared for anything. Rushing in half cocked isn’t going to do anything to help anyone, do I make myself clear?”
Dean nodded and sat back down. Atta boy.
-*-
”Do you realize what will take place soon? Or the part you’ll play?”
It takes Sam a whole week to slow down and breathe. By that time he’s in Arkansas, he’s covered in dirt and grime and he can’t figure out for the life of him how he got there.
Hitchhiking? The roads are empty. Didn’t steal a car, wasn’t that desperate after all it seemed-so what did that leave? It’s hard to think clearly right now. Like his brain is wrapped in gauze and padded with cotton balls. It’s not a pleasant feeling at all.
He has at least seven missed calls on his phone, maybe ten. He doesn’t even have to check to see who they’re from to know who called-right now there’s about three people out there who know enough about what’s going on to freak out.
Sam should have tossed the phone somewhere in Nevada. Shoulda, woulda, coulda, he thinks. His hands shake as he scrolls through his inbox, a wry smile splits his face as he does it. His inbox is empty, but his voicemail is full.
It feels like that should be some profound saying that gets written on holiday Hallmark cards with a cute little drawing of Snoopy next to it or something. Fuck, how much sleep did he get? He can’t remember. He laughs, a short, barking sound that’s filled with just a little bit of hysteria and bounces off the trees around him. Reminds him how alone he is.
He wants to call Dean, or even Dad-even though that’d end spectacularly-he just can’t bring himself to. The kick in him that’s driving him to runrunRUN is also bouncing around his chest screaming at the thought of letting anyone know where he is and dialing that number so he can talk to someone just makes it scream more. Like just the simple press of a button will drag him through the line and there he’ll be, sitting in the back of the Impala stewing bitterly at something Dad said, did, would do while Dean cracked jokes at the air like a miner worked at stones.
Or maybe he’ll be in some crummy motel room where Dad isn’t and Dean is. They’ll be watching something on television and if Sam’s lucky, it won’t be porn.
His fingers are cold. When did he get so goddamn cold (he needs to calm down, he’s getting nowhere like this).
“There is no time, you must run.”
So he does.
He tries.
He doesn’t know where the fuck he’s going.
He should, but the cards all fell around him so suddenly. There was no time to look at a map and draw lines down the highways or make reservations at the motels. He barely had time to run to Jessica’s to try and warn her and still make it back before… Well, this.
The phone rings. There’s no sound, but he can feel it vibrate in his hand, shaking like an eager bird desperate to take flight.
Sam closes his eyes, only for a moment, before he makes his decision and pockets the tiny thing. With it gone the silence just presses in even more. There really is no one there, something Sam used to like when he had been at Stanford-especially at night. He used to jog after hours, when everyone was supposed to be sleeping. It was peaceful and incredibly ironic considering he had left everything to be there so he could be normal and once there, he just wanted quiet.
Now the quiet just reminds him of the calm before a storm with everything holding its breath in quiet anticipation.
Part Two