|| They Have All Been Blown Out ||
In some town without a name a half day's travel outside of Antrim - as far and as close as Dad ever let them get, not until they were ready, not until they were stronger, and now it's as close as Dean will ever go period - a vagrant poet tells Dean what his problem is, what it has been all his life. It wasn't his idea to be here at all, but he'd learned a long time ago that it was useless to fight the overflowing, desperate good will of a group of people huddled together around a bonfire on Lunasa; so he sits dutifully inside the circle of flickering light, trying too hard to ignore the empty space at his back where someone he trusted should have been, and listens to some poor bastard that'd had a modicum of education before being hoisted out of Ivona try to tell a story about loyalty to a group of people who care only for the sound of his voice.
"All of his life, the dagger of love had worked itself between his ribs, seating itself fully into the flesh and bone and blood and heart of him safely through the seam of his armor; he had felt it but he had not minded, trusting inherently the hand on the hilt to never hurt him, to never twist and draw it out and gut him with its sharpened edge."
It's the combination of the fear-stink rolling off the handful of family groups around him, the distantly familiar Vohemaro flatbread in his belly, the weight of the dark pressing in over the firelight that does it; the dull ache in his side where a cougeret's claws had found purchase when he'd forgotten he needed to cover his own blind spot doesn't really help, and moreover it feels now more like a dagger that had been twisted and drawn out Dean smiles blandly at the girl who has settled in next to him, hugging her knees with her elbow and shoulder brushing his, and looks down at the rock in his paint-smudged hands. He remembers that he had never really understood the point in decorating them, and does not care to remember why he had always done so anyway; when the rest of the people decorating stones lean forward and add them to the fire ring, he does the same and then turns to the girl and asks if she knows a place they can be alone. She is gentle and likes his wound, telling him it makes her feel safe with him; he is attentive and likes her warmth, and does not tell her that she is safe or he wouldn't be here at all.
The coals are still smoking when he makes his way out of the settlement on foot the next morning. If anyone sees him stop to kick the stone he'd placed in line with everyone else's into the firepit itself, he doesn't stick around long enough to find out.
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"Stop gaping at me like a damn babe without a teat and get your gear, Dean. We leave in ten." Dad's voice had that snapping, raw edge to it, the one that said Don't You Fuck With Me Right Now, Dean Winchester. He couldn't help that his feet wouldn't respond to what his brain told them strengthlessly to do; he did close his jaw without a sound. Mostly.
"But..." But nothing. It doesn't matter.
Dad wasn't there to watch Dean fumble gracelessly with the extra, unexpected space in his satchel; wasn't there to see the way he nearly overbalanced when the load he hefted to his shoulder was a fraction of the weight it should have been without Sam's books crowding for room with Dean's extra shirt and socks. Dad was already half a mile outside of town, and Dean kicked his mare up to a long-legged lope for twenty minutes just to fall into stride behind.
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The young girls of Tolsdale's Pisspot, Badlands, have been steadily disappearing from their beds, staying gone for days, and turning up again without memory of where they've been. They seem unharmed, but their parents are panicked about what's causing it, and one of their fathers happens to have been in the same unit as his own father, and that's why Dean is traipsing around in the sand dunes in the middle of the night looking for eight-year-old Solly Bride. It's not that he minds searching for children, or even the dark, or the fact that it's fucking boring out here - no, what he minds is that he had to sell his horse four days ago to pay for the repairs to his favorite pair of workboots, and isn't that ironic because he's been walking everywhere since and now there's fucking sand in them.
He is, in fact, almost to the point where he's going to have to stop to dump the sand out of them for the fifth time since starting his search at sunset when he hears the noise he hadn't known he's been expecting since he heard about what was going on. Dad and Sam are the research buffs, they're the ones who would have wanted to stake out the dry wash and check their books and, who knows, meditate on it or something; but Dean has an excellent, if unorganized, memory and he knows what amnesia in young girls and that particular sound of air against feathery leathered wings far above him means now that he's heard it. Relti are fast and vicious and utterly peaceful as long as they aren't interrupted; but the girls they steal the memories from will, someday soon, remember nothing at all, not even their own names, and Dean definitely intends to interrupt this one when he breaks into a measured run to follow the dark shape that momentarily blotted out the stars.
In the end, it's textbook - or it would be if there were a textbook for these kinds of things - and he kind of wishes there were someone else there to see it except for how he tells himself he doesn't care. His eyes are adjusted enough to the dark that it's easy, when the relti glides down over the white sand quarry, to see where the longest of the three tentacles steadies it against the rock outcropping, to watch its head bend down to the small dark form huddled against the ground. He's not even breathing hard when he draws his revolver in one smooth, natural motion, swinging the lines of his feet and hips, shoulders and arms and hands, into the familiar, comfortable frame that will always do exactly what it does now: explode the base of the relti's tentacle arm with the first shot, then splatter the bone-colored sand with blood-colored gore when it lifts its head to scream.
Solly Bride won't remember her own name someday soon, but Dean doesn't mention that when he hands her sleeping form over from the cradle of his hip to her father's crushing embrace. He smiles stiffly when the man tries to pay him, shakes his head; asks for what he wants instead, but of course, of course Solly's father hasn't heard anything from Dean's father, but it's a long way to any form of civilization from here, and will he take a horse instead? He agrees, and when he kicks the gelding out of town at a ground-eating trot, he doesn't bother to aim it in any particular direction.
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"Everyone just STOP." If he had known at the time, he would never have said that. He would have let them argue until they both passed out or knocked each other out, then tied them up and slung them into the boiler room of the low end Trewe hotel until they just stopped hating each other. But he didn't know, and he'd said it, and they listened to him about as much as they ever did; he wanted to punch them both, but settled for keeping them from punching each other instead.
The walls of the room will echo for days with the memory of Winchester temper. Dean half-expected trouble from the innkeep when they try to leave, but it won't be for the door Sam knocked off its hinges on his way out, and it won't be for the lamp oil Dad spilled on the floorboards when he upended the nightstand. Dean'd already fixed the door, as long as they don't treat it roughly anymore anyway, and had just finished finding out that the threadbare rug on the floor won't cover the stain completely when it occurred to him that it is too quiet. The adjacent room, his and Sam's room, was empty - he could feel it like he could feel the sudden triphammer of his pulse against his chest and he was surprised to realize that he wasn't surprised.
Dad tore the door off its hinges again when he came back in, features dark and movements precise with an aborted urgency.
"What're you doing? Let's go. We're not waiting around for him to pull his head out of his ass."
Dean's hand tightened on the bedpost, a moment away from sliding it over to mask the rest of the oil stain on the floor. He opened his mouth to say something but his throat wouldn't give up the words as he stared at Dad, uncomprehending, wondering that he could still hear his heart beating when Dad snapped at him with thunder in his voice.
"Stop gaping at me like a damn babe without a teat and get your gear, Dean. We leave in ten."
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"Another round, sweetheart; and there's a tip in it for you if it's good and cold."
It's good and cold, and he nearly doubles the price of it when he hands over his cash to thank her for hearing him when he talks. Her smooth professional smile turns sincerely warm when she sees how much he's given her, and he thinks she wouldn't be a bad way to spend some time if Dad takes long enough to get here. Dean sips his beer and tries not to check the door, keeping an eye instead on the two men across the room who've been eyeing him back since he hit his third drink.
He doesn't want trouble, but he gets the feeling that very soon it won't matter what he wants, because it never really ever does. So he slops a bit onto the bar when he puts the bottle down, belches loudly, and juts his hip out to one side of the stool to put a crick in his spine and a heaviness in his lean on the bar. If they're going to give him a try, he wants them overly confident and cocky. Dad won't want him fighting, not where they're supposed to be meeting, but Dad hasn't bothered to so much as write in over a month so he can suck it. All the same, Dean promises himself he won't start it, and starts instead to flirt with the girl bringing him drinks - starts to really flirt, not just smile and let her fill in the blanks, because Dad is taking too long and he needs some way to waste the time and it might as well be her.
An hour later the girl - Hope, she told him, and he wishes she hadn't - has flushed cheeks and lively, sparking eyes and has told him that she gets a break in fifteen minutes; he smiles lopsidedly, lets his voice drawl a bit too loudly when he replies as naively and suggestively as he knows how. The men in the corner are hunched and whispering quickly now, stealing looks that are so obvious that Dean knows they think he's going to be an easy mark. If he gets up and moves now, even to go with Hope, there's going to be a fight, and he's okay with that, he's even okay with how mad Dad is going to be when he gets here; he orders another beer so he'll have something to wrap his hand around, something to break off on the bar and slide away from concealed weapons charges if none of them move fast enough to get away in the aftermath. That's when it happens.
"Are you Dean?" He'd seen the man come in, of course he had, noted the dusty clothes and the drawn face and the tired bonelessness of his movements and paired it with his navy blue satchel to come to the conclusion of messenger. But the inquiry is all business, no fear or desperation or anger or suspicion, so Dean nods and turns more towards him, ignoring Hope's insulted pout and the men who freeze at their table to wait. "Package for you. That'll be thirty bits."
Dean pauses in his automatic reach for his money pouch, raising both eyebrows at the man, who looks steadily back with his own hand in his delivery satchel.
"It's come a long way."
Dean hands over what he's convinced is way too much money and hopes Dad doesn't walk in at this very moment to see him getting fleeced; the messenger hands over a difference engine and a bulky, wrapped package and disappears quickly enough to cement Dean's suspicions over the price. Not that he remembers them in the next moment, because he sees the name on the portable journal, and recognizes the weight in his hand.
He doesn't unwrap the Impala until the next day, however; he spends the time until then thoroughly searching the entire town for any sign of the messenger, but he's already gone and Dean can't get to his horse fast enough to turn the one lead he has into answers. Not that it matters - he's fucking had it, he's fucking done, they're both stubborn bastards and they're going to know exactly what he thinks about that when he finds them even if he has to knock some fucking sense into them with his own two hands; he sells the gelding and pockets the money, but only long enough to find an airship that will take him where he wants to go.
He'll figure out where that is when he gets to it.
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"I'm not going to follow your orders forever!"
"You will as long as you want to be a part of this family!"
"Everyone just STOP." If he had known at the time, he would never have said that.