SPN Fic: Absolute Bearing
Title: Absolute Bearing
Genre: Gen
Characters: Sam, Dean
Word-count: 3065
Rating: PG-13 for language
Spoilers: AU post-7.23
Summary: Sometimes you only find what you're looking for when you've given up searching.
Notes: An immense thanks to nwspaprtaxis, who not only wrote the prompt ( here) that started this whole thing, but also gave me permission to tweak, play with, and otherwise deviate entirely from her original guidelines (and also endured occasional bitching). It's taken me months, but here it is - such as it is. ♥
The year he was fourteen, Sam lost the first book he ever owned.
It was, more or less, a piece of crap - a battered hardback with a disembodied yellow face in horn-rims grinning on the cover and a collection of pure acid-trip sci-fi inside that bizarre wrapper. Still - it was his, and at fourteen that counted for everything.
He found it one afternoon in a library book sale: a meager collection of spare shelves near the downstairs exit, color-coded dots stuck to the spines to mark the price (blue for 25 cents, green for 50 cents, red for 75 and yellow for a dollar). He'd sneaked away while Dad and Dean were slumped over the tables upstairs building a castle of empty coffee cups beside thick binders holding the last few decades of news clippings for Wherever It Was, Wyoming. Eighteen years later, Sam's forgotten the name of the town, but he can still remember the smell of that tiny corner: paper and mildew and tea and the attics of people who had houses to put them on.
He can still smell it, sometimes. If he really concentrates.
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
The room looks like someone's cleaned it in the past week with actual cleaning supplies; fresh towels on the rack in the bathroom and no smutty marks along the edges of the tub. When he sits down heavily on the navy blue bedspread, the mattress refrains from shrieking and jabbing him up the ass with a broken spring.
Looks like he's hit the jackpot in Motel Roulette this evening. He ought to throw a party.
Instead, he flicks on the TV, watches a woman explaining what her new conditioner did for her hair. Apparently, it gave her several beautiful children and a completely new wardrobe. Also plastic surgery. He presses the channel button; presses again. The button seems to be stuck, so he switches the TV off and sits gazing at the smooth black surface, a mirror showing him a warped obsidian version of the room.
One time, he recalls, Dean got cursed with muteness by a witch with a grudge and sense of humor. “You talk too much,” she said after Dean gave her the hero speech, and the next day he woke up choking on his own words like a stunned goldfish, red in the face until he finally gave up and took the pad of motel notepaper Sam held out to him. Sam laughed at first, dropped heavy hints all day about how peaceful the world was all of a sudden, smirked as Dean worked furiously to scrawl down page after page of misspelled bitching.
But by the time evening came and the spell wore off, he started to find himself straining to hear the other half of the world. As though one of his ears was plugged up with water, and he couldn't quite shake the silence out.
Now, lying back against the crisp, fat pillows, he feels like he's been drowning for months.
- - - - - - - - - -
The selection at the book sale was mostly garbage, of course - people had donated everything free, pulled out of closets and basements and stuffed haphazardly onto some unused steel shelving. Nobody'd bothered to organize them by author or genre or any system that Sam could make out, so he just started at one corner and began working his way around the room, trailing hesitant fingers along the spines of the books, head cocked awkwardly to one side to read the titles.
Tom Swift and the Happy Hollisters, Babysitter's Club, Crock-pot cookbooks, about five different copies of Hamlet, and a mess of thick books in shiny jackets by someone named Tom Clancy. Nothing Sam saw looked right, and he felt the excitement that had jumped up inside him as he stepped into the room curdling into disappointment as he inched along the shelves.
Then the words “Best Science Fiction” spilled down the spine his fingers had just touched, and he stopped. Pulled the book out and read the blurb on the inside flap of the dust jacket: “A man's discovery of the truth about his traveling companions. A shipboard romance involving a fickle female and three unresponsive crewmen. A young man's dissatisfaction with his new job.” He had no idea what any of that actually meant, but it didn't matter.
Uncertainly, feeling silly and self-conscious and knowing the cute red-headed girl in the Bible camp T-shirt was eyeing him skeptically from over the top of her copy of The Two Towers, he lifted the book to his nose and sniffed deeply.
It smelled like the sixties and like the future, and Sam just stood for a moment, rubbing his thumb over the tiny green sticker just under “Science Fiction” and gazing down into the eyes of the grinning face in glasses.
It leered up at him like the two of them were in on the best, most terrifying secret in the world.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
The shelf in front of him boasts twelve separate brands of peanut butter, and he supposes that represents a real accomplishment to somebody. All he can think is that anyone who thinks a shiny label with a picture of a green fairy on it can make their mashed-up peanuts taste better deserves to pay a dollar sixty-nine extra for their magic scrap of paper.
He doesn't even like peanut butter anyway.
Turning away, he swims down the rows of lurid bags of corn chips and a spectrum of Pringle cans towards the frozen foods instead, slipping between the towering, Saran-wrapped stacks of cardboard boxes that guard the entrance to the aisle. When staring at frozen peas gets too depressing, he heads to the front of the store and walks out through the sighing automatic doors.
The night leaks its summer warmth under his collar, cozying up to his body comfortably after the chill of the supermarket, and he leans his head back to look at the stars, swallowed up in murky clouds but poking through here and there as though someone's forgotten to erase them.
All the same, he thinks stupidly, that would be enough to wish on. Who's to say a magic green insect won't pop up to save the day, after all? Nothing else has worked, of course, but that's no reason to assume this won't. What was it Cas was always talking about, anyway? Faith, that's what.
“Wish I may,” he mumbles at the sky, feeling like an idiot and not even caring.
And can't find the rest of the words. Break my brother out of Purgatory, Jiminy? Tear reality a new one and spit the last piece of my family back out to me? I want to be a real little boy again, please.
“Fuck you,” he informs the Milky Way evenly.
It blinks back at him, complacent.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
The first night, he dug into the special pocket in his old gray backpack, pulled out the pen Bobby had given him for his birthday last month, and printed in neat, painstaking letters on the inside cover, This book is the property of Sam Winchester.
He read the seven stories slowly as they worked their way across the Midwest back to New Hampshire, savoring them state by state. Dean rolled his eyes and turned the music up, but Sam simply balanced the book along his knees, a barrier between him and the car, and stared into the world of white and ink and madness, inhaling it one word at a time and tasting every syllable on his lips, imagining the Impala as a spaceship and himself as a lonely robot hurtling through nothingness at the speed of light.
When they checked out of their motel in Binghamton, he forgot the book under the covers of the bed. They were halfway to Lake Champlain before he realized, and Sam knew even before he begged that there was no turning around now.
It was the first time he'd asked his father for anything in months, and Dad said, “No.”
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
Week after week, the list he scrawled in the yellow notebook over the course of a hundred different phone conversations dwindles slowly, checking itself off author by author: Van den Aardweg, Wright, Bromhall, Henry Jones, Samuel Johnson. One scratchy voice suggested an archive near Berlin, and Sam wired a request across the ocean and waited impatiently for the scans to arrive, chewing his fingernails off until he had to tape them up and dab disinfectant on the reddened bite marks.
Five minutes after tearing open the envelope laden with foreign stamps, he crumpled the papers into a ball and tossed them into the trash can under the motel sink.
That was four weeks ago, and now he's in Pittsburgh and the list's crossed out.
Six hours this morning, he sat in the university library staring into a computer screen until his eyes watered, ignoring the discomfort and straining every rod and cone at each individual letter, comma, and ink blotch of Hartcliffe's Discourse on Purgatory. Finally, after three times through and nothing to show for it, he slips down from the tall chair and hands the microfilm back to the librarian without a word.
“Get what you wanted?” he chirps helpfully, and Sam can only shake his head, struggling against the dual urges to scream and crush the man's smiling skull. Neither, he decides, is probably a good choice, and instead he simply turns away and hurries towards the exit, ignoring the puzzled look he can feel targeted at his back.
On the way through the metal detectors at the door, he slides the yellow notebook into a yawning book drop.
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
Two years passed, and Sam forgot. Not entirely, because ever since he'd turned twelve everything had started counting for too fucking much, and these days even a stupid book was enough to make him angry for weeks - at himself for losing it, at Dean for laughing at it, at Dad for being Dad.
Still, after a while that anger faded out, making room for new rage, because Dad was an ass and Dean was an ass-kisser and between the two of them Sam had more than enough material to keep him seething through his first two pieced-together years of high school.
Then came 1996, and a tiny coffee-scented used book place tucked into the corner of a shopping center. He was sixteen years old, tired of not living, and that afternoon the sight of battered leather spines and crinkly paperbacks suddenly made researching the best way to take down a pukwudgie seem beyond irrelevant.
Taking his time, he trawled his fingertips along the backs of the books, scanning each title carefully, casting about for strange, tantalizing words and phrases. A few names and titles were familiar; most weren't, and he hardly knew where to start, the whole wealth of fiction stretching before him, uncharted, and only three dollars in his pocket. He pulled out a book, found ~6 marked in pencil on the inside cover, and put it back, dejected.
Then, springing from the ordered ranks of the unknown, a book in a chapped white paper jacket caught his eye, the black lettering down the spine spelling out a name so familiar it took a moment for surprise to catch up with him.
Pausing, he touched a tentative finger to the binding. Closed his eyes, breathed in - and there it was, rich and dusty and sour.
Two years past, and he could almost imagine he'd never been away.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Sam's decided he prefers the park to the bar. It's not just because they kicked him out or anything, either. He's got reasons. Good ones. The park's quieter, for one thing. Also, way more cold benches to sit on. Sam's always liked freezing his ass on stony, dew-gathering wood.
Besides, if he's finally gonna drown in the endless, roaring silence, he thinks he'd rather do it alone than in the middle of a crowd.
The book's a hard, stiff annoyance in the crook of his elbow; he unzips the pocket of his jacket and pries the half-bent paperback out, barely able to make out the cover in the murky darkness (his body's blocking the light from the streetlamps several yards behind, and he doesn't care enough to shift). It doesn't matter - he's been carrying the book around with him long enough to know the image even through the shadows - but he squints at it anyway, as though maybe, just maybe, there's some clue there that he missed the first hundred or so times. The two watery sepia faces stare up at him blandly, stacked like a dismal unfinished snowman, and he wonders wildly, stupidly, what anyone thought two brown faces had to do with Purgatorio.
Because that's definitely the biggest omission here.
He crams his head down onto his hands for a second, breathing hard, and they could stick a goddamn clown on the cover for all he cares if it just said something, anything inside about how to crack the place open, how to steal souls back when they vanish inside and leave the earth lopsided, half blind and half deaf and totally without light or air.
Somewhere in the night behind him, a dog whimpers. Snapped back to reality, he straightens up, pushing the hair back from his face and wiping away the damp that's leaked out onto his cheeks. Staggering to his feet, he lurches across the slippery grass towards the dark blot of what seems to be a duck pond, ringed with long, trashy-looking cattails. He weighs the book in his hand a moment, then stretches his arm back and flings it into the darkness with every fragment, every ounce of his strength.
It splats unsatisfactorily into a patch of submerged weeds at the near edge of the pond, and bobs blithely on the invisible ripples. The dog whines again.
He doesn't bother wading in to bury the thing properly at the bottom of the pond. Hell, for all he knows, it's just a glorified puddle, and there's no bottom for anything to sink to - and he's exhausted and cold and suddenly just doesn't care any more. Leaving the already-sodden book rocking among the reeds, he turns back toward the street, eyes searching idly for the dog, who's keening now, a low, mournful noise.
There's no dog, he realizes as he draws nearer to the lamplight - just a homeless guy with a filthy raincoat and no shoes. He's wandering up and down the sidewalk, tossing his head back and forth aimlessly and staring up into the amber sodium-vapor glow. For a brief moment, Sam's reminded of Castiel - those curious, bird-like motions - and he almost laughs at the thought that Cas might decide to show up now, after months of praying and pleading and shouting to empty rooms.
Then the guy turns around.
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
The face was as smug as ever, grinning sallowly up at him through the horn rims as though it had expected this all along. As though it had been waiting for him all this time.
He opened the cover, and stared.
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
The face staring at Sam is covered in cuts and scrapes, blood and dirt etching out a grubby, clumsy patchwork across the cheeks and jaw, clotting at the hairline in dark, sticky spikes.
It blinks at Sam, and it's hard to know if the huge green eyes are actually seeing anything at all.
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
The ink had bled in one spot where someone must have spilled water on it, and the letters were blurred slightly at the edges, but he could still read it, clear and distinct and the most beautiful, crazy words he'd ever seen.
This book, it read, is the property of Sam Winchester.
He ran his finger over the sentence, mouthed the words as though they were an incantation that needed saying before it would work. Closed the book, opened it again just to be sure.
The writing didn't disappear.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -
“Dean?”
It takes him a long time to work up the courage to say it, because suddenly he's terrified that the least wrong step will send it all in reverse, leave him gaping at empty space again. But he needs to be sure, needs to hear that voice and knock the water out of the ear that's been muted for so long.
The eyes swivel, as though searching for the source of the noise; Sam thinks he hears the low, hoarse sound again, breaking from between torn, swollen lips. Without thinking, he puts out a hand to steady the swaying shoulders, recoiling a little as his fingers touch caked blood, still warm and slightly tacky.
“Talk to me, man.”
But he doesn't. Instead, he kneels suddenly to the pavement, eyes kicking back into his skull and neck snapping to the side as though it's made out of cheap plastic. Sam dives to catch his brother as he falls, breaking the force of the impact with his own body, ignoring the bite of pain as the concrete tears into his knees.
Holding his breath until he expects to see the world crack open with the strain, he feels for the pulse at the corner of the rough, stubbly jaw, waits until the faint, reassuring throb stirs distinctly underneath his fingers.
“I'm here,” he whispers into Dean's unresponsive ear, and buries his face in the stiff fabric of his shoulder. Together they kneel in the pool of light underneath the street lamp, listening to the neighborhood breathing softly in its sleep.
Next: For Fierce Confusion, Peace
Genre: Gen
Characters: Sam, Dean
Word-count: 3065
Rating: PG-13 for language
Spoilers: AU post-7.23
Summary: Sometimes you only find what you're looking for when you've given up searching.
Notes: An immense thanks to nwspaprtaxis, who not only wrote the prompt ( here) that started this whole thing, but also gave me permission to tweak, play with, and otherwise deviate entirely from her original guidelines (and also endured occasional bitching). It's taken me months, but here it is - such as it is. ♥
The year he was fourteen, Sam lost the first book he ever owned.
It was, more or less, a piece of crap - a battered hardback with a disembodied yellow face in horn-rims grinning on the cover and a collection of pure acid-trip sci-fi inside that bizarre wrapper. Still - it was his, and at fourteen that counted for everything.
He found it one afternoon in a library book sale: a meager collection of spare shelves near the downstairs exit, color-coded dots stuck to the spines to mark the price (blue for 25 cents, green for 50 cents, red for 75 and yellow for a dollar). He'd sneaked away while Dad and Dean were slumped over the tables upstairs building a castle of empty coffee cups beside thick binders holding the last few decades of news clippings for Wherever It Was, Wyoming. Eighteen years later, Sam's forgotten the name of the town, but he can still remember the smell of that tiny corner: paper and mildew and tea and the attics of people who had houses to put them on.
He can still smell it, sometimes. If he really concentrates.
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
The room looks like someone's cleaned it in the past week with actual cleaning supplies; fresh towels on the rack in the bathroom and no smutty marks along the edges of the tub. When he sits down heavily on the navy blue bedspread, the mattress refrains from shrieking and jabbing him up the ass with a broken spring.
Looks like he's hit the jackpot in Motel Roulette this evening. He ought to throw a party.
Instead, he flicks on the TV, watches a woman explaining what her new conditioner did for her hair. Apparently, it gave her several beautiful children and a completely new wardrobe. Also plastic surgery. He presses the channel button; presses again. The button seems to be stuck, so he switches the TV off and sits gazing at the smooth black surface, a mirror showing him a warped obsidian version of the room.
One time, he recalls, Dean got cursed with muteness by a witch with a grudge and sense of humor. “You talk too much,” she said after Dean gave her the hero speech, and the next day he woke up choking on his own words like a stunned goldfish, red in the face until he finally gave up and took the pad of motel notepaper Sam held out to him. Sam laughed at first, dropped heavy hints all day about how peaceful the world was all of a sudden, smirked as Dean worked furiously to scrawl down page after page of misspelled bitching.
But by the time evening came and the spell wore off, he started to find himself straining to hear the other half of the world. As though one of his ears was plugged up with water, and he couldn't quite shake the silence out.
Now, lying back against the crisp, fat pillows, he feels like he's been drowning for months.
- - - - - - - - - -
The selection at the book sale was mostly garbage, of course - people had donated everything free, pulled out of closets and basements and stuffed haphazardly onto some unused steel shelving. Nobody'd bothered to organize them by author or genre or any system that Sam could make out, so he just started at one corner and began working his way around the room, trailing hesitant fingers along the spines of the books, head cocked awkwardly to one side to read the titles.
Tom Swift and the Happy Hollisters, Babysitter's Club, Crock-pot cookbooks, about five different copies of Hamlet, and a mess of thick books in shiny jackets by someone named Tom Clancy. Nothing Sam saw looked right, and he felt the excitement that had jumped up inside him as he stepped into the room curdling into disappointment as he inched along the shelves.
Then the words “Best Science Fiction” spilled down the spine his fingers had just touched, and he stopped. Pulled the book out and read the blurb on the inside flap of the dust jacket: “A man's discovery of the truth about his traveling companions. A shipboard romance involving a fickle female and three unresponsive crewmen. A young man's dissatisfaction with his new job.” He had no idea what any of that actually meant, but it didn't matter.
Uncertainly, feeling silly and self-conscious and knowing the cute red-headed girl in the Bible camp T-shirt was eyeing him skeptically from over the top of her copy of The Two Towers, he lifted the book to his nose and sniffed deeply.
It smelled like the sixties and like the future, and Sam just stood for a moment, rubbing his thumb over the tiny green sticker just under “Science Fiction” and gazing down into the eyes of the grinning face in glasses.
It leered up at him like the two of them were in on the best, most terrifying secret in the world.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
The shelf in front of him boasts twelve separate brands of peanut butter, and he supposes that represents a real accomplishment to somebody. All he can think is that anyone who thinks a shiny label with a picture of a green fairy on it can make their mashed-up peanuts taste better deserves to pay a dollar sixty-nine extra for their magic scrap of paper.
He doesn't even like peanut butter anyway.
Turning away, he swims down the rows of lurid bags of corn chips and a spectrum of Pringle cans towards the frozen foods instead, slipping between the towering, Saran-wrapped stacks of cardboard boxes that guard the entrance to the aisle. When staring at frozen peas gets too depressing, he heads to the front of the store and walks out through the sighing automatic doors.
The night leaks its summer warmth under his collar, cozying up to his body comfortably after the chill of the supermarket, and he leans his head back to look at the stars, swallowed up in murky clouds but poking through here and there as though someone's forgotten to erase them.
All the same, he thinks stupidly, that would be enough to wish on. Who's to say a magic green insect won't pop up to save the day, after all? Nothing else has worked, of course, but that's no reason to assume this won't. What was it Cas was always talking about, anyway? Faith, that's what.
“Wish I may,” he mumbles at the sky, feeling like an idiot and not even caring.
And can't find the rest of the words. Break my brother out of Purgatory, Jiminy? Tear reality a new one and spit the last piece of my family back out to me? I want to be a real little boy again, please.
“Fuck you,” he informs the Milky Way evenly.
It blinks back at him, complacent.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
The first night, he dug into the special pocket in his old gray backpack, pulled out the pen Bobby had given him for his birthday last month, and printed in neat, painstaking letters on the inside cover, This book is the property of Sam Winchester.
He read the seven stories slowly as they worked their way across the Midwest back to New Hampshire, savoring them state by state. Dean rolled his eyes and turned the music up, but Sam simply balanced the book along his knees, a barrier between him and the car, and stared into the world of white and ink and madness, inhaling it one word at a time and tasting every syllable on his lips, imagining the Impala as a spaceship and himself as a lonely robot hurtling through nothingness at the speed of light.
When they checked out of their motel in Binghamton, he forgot the book under the covers of the bed. They were halfway to Lake Champlain before he realized, and Sam knew even before he begged that there was no turning around now.
It was the first time he'd asked his father for anything in months, and Dad said, “No.”
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
Week after week, the list he scrawled in the yellow notebook over the course of a hundred different phone conversations dwindles slowly, checking itself off author by author: Van den Aardweg, Wright, Bromhall, Henry Jones, Samuel Johnson. One scratchy voice suggested an archive near Berlin, and Sam wired a request across the ocean and waited impatiently for the scans to arrive, chewing his fingernails off until he had to tape them up and dab disinfectant on the reddened bite marks.
Five minutes after tearing open the envelope laden with foreign stamps, he crumpled the papers into a ball and tossed them into the trash can under the motel sink.
That was four weeks ago, and now he's in Pittsburgh and the list's crossed out.
Six hours this morning, he sat in the university library staring into a computer screen until his eyes watered, ignoring the discomfort and straining every rod and cone at each individual letter, comma, and ink blotch of Hartcliffe's Discourse on Purgatory. Finally, after three times through and nothing to show for it, he slips down from the tall chair and hands the microfilm back to the librarian without a word.
“Get what you wanted?” he chirps helpfully, and Sam can only shake his head, struggling against the dual urges to scream and crush the man's smiling skull. Neither, he decides, is probably a good choice, and instead he simply turns away and hurries towards the exit, ignoring the puzzled look he can feel targeted at his back.
On the way through the metal detectors at the door, he slides the yellow notebook into a yawning book drop.
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
Two years passed, and Sam forgot. Not entirely, because ever since he'd turned twelve everything had started counting for too fucking much, and these days even a stupid book was enough to make him angry for weeks - at himself for losing it, at Dean for laughing at it, at Dad for being Dad.
Still, after a while that anger faded out, making room for new rage, because Dad was an ass and Dean was an ass-kisser and between the two of them Sam had more than enough material to keep him seething through his first two pieced-together years of high school.
Then came 1996, and a tiny coffee-scented used book place tucked into the corner of a shopping center. He was sixteen years old, tired of not living, and that afternoon the sight of battered leather spines and crinkly paperbacks suddenly made researching the best way to take down a pukwudgie seem beyond irrelevant.
Taking his time, he trawled his fingertips along the backs of the books, scanning each title carefully, casting about for strange, tantalizing words and phrases. A few names and titles were familiar; most weren't, and he hardly knew where to start, the whole wealth of fiction stretching before him, uncharted, and only three dollars in his pocket. He pulled out a book, found ~6 marked in pencil on the inside cover, and put it back, dejected.
Then, springing from the ordered ranks of the unknown, a book in a chapped white paper jacket caught his eye, the black lettering down the spine spelling out a name so familiar it took a moment for surprise to catch up with him.
Pausing, he touched a tentative finger to the binding. Closed his eyes, breathed in - and there it was, rich and dusty and sour.
Two years past, and he could almost imagine he'd never been away.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Sam's decided he prefers the park to the bar. It's not just because they kicked him out or anything, either. He's got reasons. Good ones. The park's quieter, for one thing. Also, way more cold benches to sit on. Sam's always liked freezing his ass on stony, dew-gathering wood.
Besides, if he's finally gonna drown in the endless, roaring silence, he thinks he'd rather do it alone than in the middle of a crowd.
The book's a hard, stiff annoyance in the crook of his elbow; he unzips the pocket of his jacket and pries the half-bent paperback out, barely able to make out the cover in the murky darkness (his body's blocking the light from the streetlamps several yards behind, and he doesn't care enough to shift). It doesn't matter - he's been carrying the book around with him long enough to know the image even through the shadows - but he squints at it anyway, as though maybe, just maybe, there's some clue there that he missed the first hundred or so times. The two watery sepia faces stare up at him blandly, stacked like a dismal unfinished snowman, and he wonders wildly, stupidly, what anyone thought two brown faces had to do with Purgatorio.
Because that's definitely the biggest omission here.
He crams his head down onto his hands for a second, breathing hard, and they could stick a goddamn clown on the cover for all he cares if it just said something, anything inside about how to crack the place open, how to steal souls back when they vanish inside and leave the earth lopsided, half blind and half deaf and totally without light or air.
Somewhere in the night behind him, a dog whimpers. Snapped back to reality, he straightens up, pushing the hair back from his face and wiping away the damp that's leaked out onto his cheeks. Staggering to his feet, he lurches across the slippery grass towards the dark blot of what seems to be a duck pond, ringed with long, trashy-looking cattails. He weighs the book in his hand a moment, then stretches his arm back and flings it into the darkness with every fragment, every ounce of his strength.
It splats unsatisfactorily into a patch of submerged weeds at the near edge of the pond, and bobs blithely on the invisible ripples. The dog whines again.
He doesn't bother wading in to bury the thing properly at the bottom of the pond. Hell, for all he knows, it's just a glorified puddle, and there's no bottom for anything to sink to - and he's exhausted and cold and suddenly just doesn't care any more. Leaving the already-sodden book rocking among the reeds, he turns back toward the street, eyes searching idly for the dog, who's keening now, a low, mournful noise.
There's no dog, he realizes as he draws nearer to the lamplight - just a homeless guy with a filthy raincoat and no shoes. He's wandering up and down the sidewalk, tossing his head back and forth aimlessly and staring up into the amber sodium-vapor glow. For a brief moment, Sam's reminded of Castiel - those curious, bird-like motions - and he almost laughs at the thought that Cas might decide to show up now, after months of praying and pleading and shouting to empty rooms.
Then the guy turns around.
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
The face was as smug as ever, grinning sallowly up at him through the horn rims as though it had expected this all along. As though it had been waiting for him all this time.
He opened the cover, and stared.
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
The face staring at Sam is covered in cuts and scrapes, blood and dirt etching out a grubby, clumsy patchwork across the cheeks and jaw, clotting at the hairline in dark, sticky spikes.
It blinks at Sam, and it's hard to know if the huge green eyes are actually seeing anything at all.
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
The ink had bled in one spot where someone must have spilled water on it, and the letters were blurred slightly at the edges, but he could still read it, clear and distinct and the most beautiful, crazy words he'd ever seen.
This book, it read, is the property of Sam Winchester.
He ran his finger over the sentence, mouthed the words as though they were an incantation that needed saying before it would work. Closed the book, opened it again just to be sure.
The writing didn't disappear.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -
“Dean?”
It takes him a long time to work up the courage to say it, because suddenly he's terrified that the least wrong step will send it all in reverse, leave him gaping at empty space again. But he needs to be sure, needs to hear that voice and knock the water out of the ear that's been muted for so long.
The eyes swivel, as though searching for the source of the noise; Sam thinks he hears the low, hoarse sound again, breaking from between torn, swollen lips. Without thinking, he puts out a hand to steady the swaying shoulders, recoiling a little as his fingers touch caked blood, still warm and slightly tacky.
“Talk to me, man.”
But he doesn't. Instead, he kneels suddenly to the pavement, eyes kicking back into his skull and neck snapping to the side as though it's made out of cheap plastic. Sam dives to catch his brother as he falls, breaking the force of the impact with his own body, ignoring the bite of pain as the concrete tears into his knees.
Holding his breath until he expects to see the world crack open with the strain, he feels for the pulse at the corner of the rough, stubbly jaw, waits until the faint, reassuring throb stirs distinctly underneath his fingers.
“I'm here,” he whispers into Dean's unresponsive ear, and buries his face in the stiff fabric of his shoulder. Together they kneel in the pool of light underneath the street lamp, listening to the neighborhood breathing softly in its sleep.
Next: For Fierce Confusion, Peace