Fulfillment is Rain - Chapter 1
Title: Fulfillment is Rain
Summary: Trying to distract Sam from Jessica's death, Dean lets his brother talk him into a backpacking trip to hunt for the cause of some deadly Bigfoot sightings. The backcountry trip takes a turn for the worse when Sam becomes the next victim.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: None
Spoilers: Early Season 1
Word Count: 2,114 for this part
Author's Note: An extension of ‘ Promises’. Story takes place early Season 1. Many thanks to Leahelisabeth for her fantastic beta work! Master post can be found here.
~~~
Southside Diner - Grand Junction, Colorado
Sam had woken him up screaming again. But nothing was wrong. No, everything was just super. His brother was killing himself and his Dad was probably out doing the same. Dean was going to kick both their asses.
It was hard to say what Dad had been thinking taking off without a word, but there was really nothing new there. Dean just had to trust him and roll with the punches. If Dad sent them a case, they’d deal with it. If they came across their own case, they’d deal with that too.
Either way it was the same thing. Just find the monsters and kill them. It was no different than what he and Sam had always done and like always, Dad would call when he was ready. All they had to do was wait and keep busy until then. Easy to say, but it got harder to do every day.
He finished the last of his coffee and glanced across the table towards his exhausted brother. Sam hadn’t even eaten half of his breakfast and had to be close to overdosing on caffeine. But everything was just fine.
Dean flipped though the morning paper. He was supposed to be looking for a case, but what he really needed was something to get Sam’s mind off the damn nightmares that wouldn’t stop haunting his brother. Sam could hardly close his eyes without being bombarded. If his brother thought he was hiding it he needed a serious reality check.
The woman Sam had loved had been torched on a ceiling. It was too much to deal with alone. Dean knew. Sam still wouldn’t talk to him about any of it because he thought he wouldn’t understand. His little brother didn’t get that he was one of the only people in the world that could understand. Dean had already been there.
“Maybe we should head east,” Sam suggested. “There’s some reports here...sounds like there could be an active vengeful spirit in this bar in Cleveland.”
Dean’s fork stabbed one of the uneaten sausage links that had been taunting him from Sam’s plate. There wasn’t anything wrong with going east, but he had a better idea. He barely finished chewing the chunk of sausage in his mouth before replying.
“Or it could be that they’re serving alcohol in the bar. I say we head out west.”
His brother glared at him over his coffee. “Just to argue or is there actually a reason?”
“A little of both,” Dean admitted with a shrug. “Dude, we just salted and burned three corpses. We need a little variety. I’m tired of getting knocked around by spooks. I want to kick some...what’s that word of yours...’corporeal’ ass for a change.”
An amused smirk came to Dean’s lips. His pen circled a minor article in the paper before he traded the folded newspaper for Sam’s plate. He didn’t have to ask to know that his brother had no intention of finishing his breakfast and he couldn’t stand by and let perfectly good food go to waste.
“A chupacabra in Reno?” Sam asked disbelievingly as he glanced over the article. “What paper are you reading?”
Dean snatched the under appreciated newspaper back and Sam returned to his computer without further comment. The paper was legit, but the article wasn’t. Why couldn’t he have a dumber brother? It didn't matter that the chupacabra was a hoax, there was something that needed killing everywhere. Reno had the advantage of also being full of all types of other pleasant distractions.
He honestly didn’t know what Sam considered to be fun. As far as he could tell, locking his brother in a library would probably be Sam’s idea of a fantasy vacation, but no brother of his was going to get off on textbooks while avoiding the finer things in life.
“A beast terrifying the masses. This is our kind of gig.”
“You hate Reno.”
“No I don’t,” Dean replied indignantly.
Sam looked up from his laptop with a raised brow. “I believe last time we left your exact words were ‘if we ever head back towards Reno shoot me’.”
“Yeah, well, I also convinced you the legal drinking age in Reno was sixteen,” Dean replied with a chuckle. “Man, you have to admit that was awesome.”
“Yeah...Dad thought that was hilarious,” Sam replied with an eye roll.
Dean shrugged. “Okay, maybe it wasn’t one of my better ideas. I was a little drunk.”
“A little? Dean, you introduced me to the bartender as your girlfriend Samantha.”
Dean’s chuckle turned to throat clearing. He didn’t remember that part, but it wasn’t the sort of thing that Sam would make up and the night had been a blur. All right, he had been totally wasted, but it had been a hell of a good time right up until Dad had gotten back from his hunt two days early.
The ending might have been painful, but bringing it up was pulling in Sam’s attention just like he had hoped. His brother stopped pointlessly clicking the keys on his computer and really looked at him. Dean could finally see the hints of the smirk Sam was hiding.
“I thought Dad was going to kill you,” Sam mused. “Like literally kill you.”
“That makes two of us. I think he would have if he hadn’t needed me for bait to finish the hunt. I told you hunting saves lives.”
Dad had come back early because it turned out that the thing he was hunting had actually been a lot closer than they’d thought. That was one of many reasons Dad had been so pissed. Dad had every reason in the world to tear him a new one.
He’d screwed up, ditched his responsibilities and he could have easily gotten Sam killed. It was the first and last time he’d let himself get sloppy drunk. He couldn’t afford to drop his guard like that. Not ever.
When he really thought about it, he couldn’t actually remember why it struck him as a good memory. But after a moment, it finally came. It had been one of the only times that he and Sam had just been stupid kids doing pointlessly stupid things.
“You never told me what happened.”
Dean made a face. Suddenly he remembered why Reno had really sucked. The hunt hadn’t exactly gone as planned and not in a way that he ever planned to admit to his brother.
“Nothing happened. Dad wasted it. Forget Reno.”
He could tell that, even through his funk, Sam wanted to push for an explanation, but Dean’s glare promised instant death if Sam didn’t drop it. Instead of pushing, the worry returned to his brother’s eyes, but Dean didn’t want that either. Sam’s brow furrowed and he again seemed to get lost in thought. Dean opened his mouth to pull his brother back from wherever his mind had gone, but Sam spoke first.
“You really think he’s okay?”
There was no question who Sam was talking about. Dean was tired of having this conversation. They had been having it practically since Sam could talk and the answer was always the same.
“He’s Dad.”
Sam thought he didn’t care, that he wasn’t going nuts trying to figure out what Dad was up to, but he was. After all, it was him that Dad had ditched. Whatever Dad was on the trail of, he hadn’t trusted that Dean could deal with it and considering everyway he had tried to prove himself, that stung like a mother.
He wanted Dad to trust him and he wanted to know that Dad was safe. Hell, he wanted them all to be together as a family again, but he didn’t expect that he was going to start getting what he wanted now and he sure wasn’t going to sit around and cry about it.
Dad knew what was best and if he didn’t want to communicate with them directly there had to be a damn good reason for it. There wasn’t a thing to do but suck it up and move on. They had their own work to do now. That was if they could agree on a job.
“Right...” Sam’s eyes returned to the computer and Dean returned to his newspaper until Sam spoke again, “Here I got one...how about a series of unexplained deaths in the Hoh Rainforest?”
A wide grin again crossed Dean’s lips. He folded the newspaper and tossed it aside. Finally Sam was on the right track.
“The ‘Ho Rainforest’? Now you’re talking. I knew you’d find me some strippers in need.”
His mind was filled with visions of gorgeous, scantily clad women around a bar waving palm fronds and dangling bunches of grapes. Here he’d been thinking Sam was a lost cause, but there was hope for his dopey brother yet.
“It’s a national park.”
Dean’s face fell. “In southern California?” he asked hopefully.
“No strippers, no bikinis,” Sam replied with only a mild hint of annoyance.
Dean was obviously going to have to try harder at being a pain in the ass. Sam was being more dense than usual.
“Then what does it have?”
“Bigfoot.”
That simple statement was proof positive that his brother needed a vacation. “Yeah, okay. Do you want to stop by the unicorn farm on the way?”
“At least I’m looking for a case instead of a hookup.”
“Oh come on. You wanna hunt for Bigfoot and you were giving me crap about a chupacabra? Okay, so there’s no chupacabra in Reno, but at least they exist. Every hunter knows Bigfoot is nothing but a hoax.”
“I’m not saying it’s actually Bigfoot, but it’s something. Take a look at these,” Sam said as he turned the computer so that Dean could see the screen too.
He tilted his head as his brother clicked through some pictures. Some were the typical blurry photos that could just as easily be a picture of the family dog as anything else, but others were weirdly in focus. Dean couldn’t deny that they all looked like pictures of Bigfoot.
On the other hand, while he hadn’t seen any of these specific photos before, he’d seen plenty of others like them and they’d all been fakes. Sure, some of these were way better than he’d ever previously seen, but this was Bigfoot they were talking about. Even though the photos looked like they had all been taken with different cameras, the same guy was obviously behind all of them. Any idiot could see that.
“Those all look like the Bigfoot from the Patterson-Gimlin footage.”
“I know,” Sam replied. “But these were all taken in the last couple of weeks and all by different people.”
“So someone found the old suit and is running around the backcountry scaring the tourists. It’s funny, but it’s not a case.”
“It’s not just the sightings and it’s not just some joke. They have footprints that look legit enough that Fish and Wildlife is investigating and bodies are starting to turn up. These people were ripped apart.”
“Hoax and bear attacks,” Dean replied dismissively. Still he watched the photos click by until one caught his eye. “Hey, wait, go back to that last one.” The photo wasn’t of Bigfoot, but of a several young women posing for a group shot outside of a ranger station. “Who are they?”
“Some of the witnesses. There are some students from the local university doing research projects in the area.”
“I’m in,” Dean announced. He shoveled the last of Sam’s hash browns into his mouth before popping up out of his chair. “Let’s hit the road.”
Sam just shook his head, but was convinced enough to pack up his laptop. Dean knew his brother wanted to complain about his motivation. Honestly he was hoping that Sam would. He’d been trying his best lately to goad his brother into distraction, but he must be losing his touch. He was okay with that, just as long as it wasn’t the alternative - that he was losing his brother.
Dean wouldn’t let that happen. He had already basically lost Dad to the thing that had killed Mom. He wasn’t losing Sam too. One way or another he was going to pull his brother out of this rut. This Bigfoot thing was a heaping waste of time, but that didn’t matter.
If his brother wanted to take a pseudo case chasing some dude in a monkey suit, Dean would be right there with him, laughing all the way. As a bonus, once this was over, he was going to have the world’s biggest ‘I told you so’ to hold over Sam’s head.
Continue to Chapter 2
Summary: Trying to distract Sam from Jessica's death, Dean lets his brother talk him into a backpacking trip to hunt for the cause of some deadly Bigfoot sightings. The backcountry trip takes a turn for the worse when Sam becomes the next victim.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: None
Spoilers: Early Season 1
Word Count: 2,114 for this part
Author's Note: An extension of ‘ Promises’. Story takes place early Season 1. Many thanks to Leahelisabeth for her fantastic beta work! Master post can be found here.
~~~
Southside Diner - Grand Junction, Colorado
Sam had woken him up screaming again. But nothing was wrong. No, everything was just super. His brother was killing himself and his Dad was probably out doing the same. Dean was going to kick both their asses.
It was hard to say what Dad had been thinking taking off without a word, but there was really nothing new there. Dean just had to trust him and roll with the punches. If Dad sent them a case, they’d deal with it. If they came across their own case, they’d deal with that too.
Either way it was the same thing. Just find the monsters and kill them. It was no different than what he and Sam had always done and like always, Dad would call when he was ready. All they had to do was wait and keep busy until then. Easy to say, but it got harder to do every day.
He finished the last of his coffee and glanced across the table towards his exhausted brother. Sam hadn’t even eaten half of his breakfast and had to be close to overdosing on caffeine. But everything was just fine.
Dean flipped though the morning paper. He was supposed to be looking for a case, but what he really needed was something to get Sam’s mind off the damn nightmares that wouldn’t stop haunting his brother. Sam could hardly close his eyes without being bombarded. If his brother thought he was hiding it he needed a serious reality check.
The woman Sam had loved had been torched on a ceiling. It was too much to deal with alone. Dean knew. Sam still wouldn’t talk to him about any of it because he thought he wouldn’t understand. His little brother didn’t get that he was one of the only people in the world that could understand. Dean had already been there.
“Maybe we should head east,” Sam suggested. “There’s some reports here...sounds like there could be an active vengeful spirit in this bar in Cleveland.”
Dean’s fork stabbed one of the uneaten sausage links that had been taunting him from Sam’s plate. There wasn’t anything wrong with going east, but he had a better idea. He barely finished chewing the chunk of sausage in his mouth before replying.
“Or it could be that they’re serving alcohol in the bar. I say we head out west.”
His brother glared at him over his coffee. “Just to argue or is there actually a reason?”
“A little of both,” Dean admitted with a shrug. “Dude, we just salted and burned three corpses. We need a little variety. I’m tired of getting knocked around by spooks. I want to kick some...what’s that word of yours...’corporeal’ ass for a change.”
An amused smirk came to Dean’s lips. His pen circled a minor article in the paper before he traded the folded newspaper for Sam’s plate. He didn’t have to ask to know that his brother had no intention of finishing his breakfast and he couldn’t stand by and let perfectly good food go to waste.
“A chupacabra in Reno?” Sam asked disbelievingly as he glanced over the article. “What paper are you reading?”
Dean snatched the under appreciated newspaper back and Sam returned to his computer without further comment. The paper was legit, but the article wasn’t. Why couldn’t he have a dumber brother? It didn't matter that the chupacabra was a hoax, there was something that needed killing everywhere. Reno had the advantage of also being full of all types of other pleasant distractions.
He honestly didn’t know what Sam considered to be fun. As far as he could tell, locking his brother in a library would probably be Sam’s idea of a fantasy vacation, but no brother of his was going to get off on textbooks while avoiding the finer things in life.
“A beast terrifying the masses. This is our kind of gig.”
“You hate Reno.”
“No I don’t,” Dean replied indignantly.
Sam looked up from his laptop with a raised brow. “I believe last time we left your exact words were ‘if we ever head back towards Reno shoot me’.”
“Yeah, well, I also convinced you the legal drinking age in Reno was sixteen,” Dean replied with a chuckle. “Man, you have to admit that was awesome.”
“Yeah...Dad thought that was hilarious,” Sam replied with an eye roll.
Dean shrugged. “Okay, maybe it wasn’t one of my better ideas. I was a little drunk.”
“A little? Dean, you introduced me to the bartender as your girlfriend Samantha.”
Dean’s chuckle turned to throat clearing. He didn’t remember that part, but it wasn’t the sort of thing that Sam would make up and the night had been a blur. All right, he had been totally wasted, but it had been a hell of a good time right up until Dad had gotten back from his hunt two days early.
The ending might have been painful, but bringing it up was pulling in Sam’s attention just like he had hoped. His brother stopped pointlessly clicking the keys on his computer and really looked at him. Dean could finally see the hints of the smirk Sam was hiding.
“I thought Dad was going to kill you,” Sam mused. “Like literally kill you.”
“That makes two of us. I think he would have if he hadn’t needed me for bait to finish the hunt. I told you hunting saves lives.”
Dad had come back early because it turned out that the thing he was hunting had actually been a lot closer than they’d thought. That was one of many reasons Dad had been so pissed. Dad had every reason in the world to tear him a new one.
He’d screwed up, ditched his responsibilities and he could have easily gotten Sam killed. It was the first and last time he’d let himself get sloppy drunk. He couldn’t afford to drop his guard like that. Not ever.
When he really thought about it, he couldn’t actually remember why it struck him as a good memory. But after a moment, it finally came. It had been one of the only times that he and Sam had just been stupid kids doing pointlessly stupid things.
“You never told me what happened.”
Dean made a face. Suddenly he remembered why Reno had really sucked. The hunt hadn’t exactly gone as planned and not in a way that he ever planned to admit to his brother.
“Nothing happened. Dad wasted it. Forget Reno.”
He could tell that, even through his funk, Sam wanted to push for an explanation, but Dean’s glare promised instant death if Sam didn’t drop it. Instead of pushing, the worry returned to his brother’s eyes, but Dean didn’t want that either. Sam’s brow furrowed and he again seemed to get lost in thought. Dean opened his mouth to pull his brother back from wherever his mind had gone, but Sam spoke first.
“You really think he’s okay?”
There was no question who Sam was talking about. Dean was tired of having this conversation. They had been having it practically since Sam could talk and the answer was always the same.
“He’s Dad.”
Sam thought he didn’t care, that he wasn’t going nuts trying to figure out what Dad was up to, but he was. After all, it was him that Dad had ditched. Whatever Dad was on the trail of, he hadn’t trusted that Dean could deal with it and considering everyway he had tried to prove himself, that stung like a mother.
He wanted Dad to trust him and he wanted to know that Dad was safe. Hell, he wanted them all to be together as a family again, but he didn’t expect that he was going to start getting what he wanted now and he sure wasn’t going to sit around and cry about it.
Dad knew what was best and if he didn’t want to communicate with them directly there had to be a damn good reason for it. There wasn’t a thing to do but suck it up and move on. They had their own work to do now. That was if they could agree on a job.
“Right...” Sam’s eyes returned to the computer and Dean returned to his newspaper until Sam spoke again, “Here I got one...how about a series of unexplained deaths in the Hoh Rainforest?”
A wide grin again crossed Dean’s lips. He folded the newspaper and tossed it aside. Finally Sam was on the right track.
“The ‘Ho Rainforest’? Now you’re talking. I knew you’d find me some strippers in need.”
His mind was filled with visions of gorgeous, scantily clad women around a bar waving palm fronds and dangling bunches of grapes. Here he’d been thinking Sam was a lost cause, but there was hope for his dopey brother yet.
“It’s a national park.”
Dean’s face fell. “In southern California?” he asked hopefully.
“No strippers, no bikinis,” Sam replied with only a mild hint of annoyance.
Dean was obviously going to have to try harder at being a pain in the ass. Sam was being more dense than usual.
“Then what does it have?”
“Bigfoot.”
That simple statement was proof positive that his brother needed a vacation. “Yeah, okay. Do you want to stop by the unicorn farm on the way?”
“At least I’m looking for a case instead of a hookup.”
“Oh come on. You wanna hunt for Bigfoot and you were giving me crap about a chupacabra? Okay, so there’s no chupacabra in Reno, but at least they exist. Every hunter knows Bigfoot is nothing but a hoax.”
“I’m not saying it’s actually Bigfoot, but it’s something. Take a look at these,” Sam said as he turned the computer so that Dean could see the screen too.
He tilted his head as his brother clicked through some pictures. Some were the typical blurry photos that could just as easily be a picture of the family dog as anything else, but others were weirdly in focus. Dean couldn’t deny that they all looked like pictures of Bigfoot.
On the other hand, while he hadn’t seen any of these specific photos before, he’d seen plenty of others like them and they’d all been fakes. Sure, some of these were way better than he’d ever previously seen, but this was Bigfoot they were talking about. Even though the photos looked like they had all been taken with different cameras, the same guy was obviously behind all of them. Any idiot could see that.
“Those all look like the Bigfoot from the Patterson-Gimlin footage.”
“I know,” Sam replied. “But these were all taken in the last couple of weeks and all by different people.”
“So someone found the old suit and is running around the backcountry scaring the tourists. It’s funny, but it’s not a case.”
“It’s not just the sightings and it’s not just some joke. They have footprints that look legit enough that Fish and Wildlife is investigating and bodies are starting to turn up. These people were ripped apart.”
“Hoax and bear attacks,” Dean replied dismissively. Still he watched the photos click by until one caught his eye. “Hey, wait, go back to that last one.” The photo wasn’t of Bigfoot, but of a several young women posing for a group shot outside of a ranger station. “Who are they?”
“Some of the witnesses. There are some students from the local university doing research projects in the area.”
“I’m in,” Dean announced. He shoveled the last of Sam’s hash browns into his mouth before popping up out of his chair. “Let’s hit the road.”
Sam just shook his head, but was convinced enough to pack up his laptop. Dean knew his brother wanted to complain about his motivation. Honestly he was hoping that Sam would. He’d been trying his best lately to goad his brother into distraction, but he must be losing his touch. He was okay with that, just as long as it wasn’t the alternative - that he was losing his brother.
Dean wouldn’t let that happen. He had already basically lost Dad to the thing that had killed Mom. He wasn’t losing Sam too. One way or another he was going to pull his brother out of this rut. This Bigfoot thing was a heaping waste of time, but that didn’t matter.
If his brother wanted to take a pseudo case chasing some dude in a monkey suit, Dean would be right there with him, laughing all the way. As a bonus, once this was over, he was going to have the world’s biggest ‘I told you so’ to hold over Sam’s head.
Continue to Chapter 2