In His Image: Guess
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In which Dean wins at the Internet, and Sam is not transparent.
Dean, Sam.
guess [v]: to attempt to estimate conjecturally, on little or no evidence; to keep [a person] guessing: to keep in a state of uncertainty; [adj] dial. of a cow or ewe, barren.
They had a plan now, a clear mission. Gabriel had left them that, at least. It gave Dean something to keep his eyes on, to fight toward. A good clear road, none of the useless bush-bashing without any clue where they were going or whether they were headed in the right direction. Eyes to the front, like a good soldier. No distractions.
All the hurting, doubting, screaming, praying, cursing, desperately wanting, all the tender spots, they’d all died away one by one, burnt themselves out. Cauterised. So long as he didn’t poke them, he was focussed. He was good.
Famine had had a point. Dean just hadn’t noticed it until after Van Nuys.
---
Two days and two outbreaks of swine flu later, and they were no closer to Pestilence. All Bobby could suggest was that they just keep heading east, as if there was anywhere else for Pestilence to go from western Nevada.
The whole fake-Sam thing had bothered the real one enough that he’d nagged Bobby into looking into it. Once he had known where to look, Bobby had found more than forty small towns that had worked out how to start fighting back. A couple of them seemed to have locked themselves down like Repton - there were reports of roadblocks nearby, or other hunters had dropped by and found them still fighting. Three towns, hundreds of miles apart, had banded together on the internet and put together an open message board and a Twitter feed to keep each other updated. They’d even started a website detailing how to fight demons and hellhounds and sharing survival tips, with a headline on their front page about getting the message out and uniting against the Apocalypse. By the look of their message board, people from other states, and even from other countries, had started to respond. People were resisting, and teaching each other how. Dean felt weirdly proud about that. Humanity might have been late to join the game, but at least it wasn’t going down without a fight.
Of course, for every town that was still fighting, there were others that had been turned into a bloody smear. Worse, some seemed to have gone down Blue Earth’s road, even without the benefit of the Whore’s influence. Bobby had muttered something about the Crucible on fast forward.
Apparently you could give people the tools to fight, but you couldn’t force them not to be assholes when they were scared.
Given the information had been up on the internet for a couple of months now, Bobby said he couldn’t be sure how many of the towns had had outside help in figuring it out. Eleven cases over the past five months fit pattern for sure: the town had been harassed by demons or similar, someone had turned up and told them how to defend themselves then left them to it. The thing was, none of the descriptions matched. Male, female, old, young, black or white or Asian or Hispanic. Could have just been different hunters, except for the names. Two Sam Winchesters (one of them a Samantha, to Dean’s delight). One Dean Smith. One Novak and two d’Angelos, without first names. One Robert Harvelle (and that one really pissed Sam off). Enough of a pattern not to be coincidence.
The list of things that could change their body or weave an illusion of it was too long to be helpful. The list of things that could know Enochian wards had been pretty damn short a year back, but demons like Crowley had caught on quickly once angels came on the scene, and who knew how far the knowledge had spread by now. The list of things unhealthily obsessed with Winchesters, of course, looked something like the telephone directory of a small city.
The weird thing, to Dean, was that whoever it was seemed to be trying to protect humans from Hell and from Heaven. And honestly, he couldn’t think of anything but a human who’d want to do that.
When Sam had starting asking Bobby to look more closely at the Twitter feed or something, Bobby had growled that he’d already wasted four hours on this and that they had more important things to do like, oh yeah, chasing down horsemen of the damned Apocalypse, and told Sam to do his own poking about. And to weigh in with advice and corrections on that message board while he was at it, because Bobby was too busy to deal with idjits on the internet.
When they had stopped, Sam had changed his wireless card, done a system restore, switched to a browser that allowed some kind of extra-secure surfing, and done a few other things Dean hadn’t bothered to follow. Ten minutes after he’d started looking for his impersonator, a yellow note had popped up to say that googling himself would make him go blind. Sam had made a squeaky noise of frustration and stomped off for coffee. Dean was kind of starting to like Mystery Computer Worm.
He took Sam’s place at the rickety formica table and eyed the laptop. It eyed him back.
One of the tabs was open to the message board Bobby had been talking about, so Dean cracked a beer and started poking about there. Most of the advice people had put up was fairly simple stuff - salt and iron, blessing the town water supply, holy ground and holy water and easily defendable spaces, stockpiling essentials, boiling water and organising sewage systems, logistics of survival. A few people had added info on other things like werewolves and fangs and ghosts, but there was as much urban myth and vampire fangirling and hysteria there as good stuff. Plus some people had already started arguing and bitching and calling each other trolls. Because it was the internet, and apparently being right was more important than people dying.
Dean made an account, took another beer, and started responding. To the people swapping tips on establishing regular simple security checks on members of your own family, he suggested greeting each other with “Christo” - simpler than outfitting everyone with iron bracelets that they had to keep touching, or whatever. Though kudos to the guy who suggested carving anti-possession symbols into the bracelets, if they had the tools to swing it. He posted the complete exorcism ritual, and recommended memorisation and tag-teaming with megaphones. Then he began the slow task of correcting every single freaking idiot on there. He even managed to do it politely for the first ten minutes or so.
Mostly.
Definitely not to the chick who kept calling vampires “lonely waifs of the nite,” though.
After telling the third Buffy fan that no, vampires did not turn to dust when they died and they didn’t give a shit if you shoved a piece of wood through their chest and did they think the breastbone was made of Jell-O anyway, another yellow note popped up.
australian gold rush v. boring.
… Well, that was a change of pace. And also completely random.
Then he got an inform. Someone he’d corrected was arguing back. The hell? He hadn’t even finished going through the werewolf posts yet. Didn’t these people have anything better to do than argue on the internet?
Didn’t they know none of them had the upper-body strength to take a vamp’s head off in one go and they were all going to die nasty if they came up against any of these things anyway? And that throwing a hissy fit wouldn’t help?
Ten minutes later,
what do you know? so was canada’s. colder though.
Dean took a slow pull of his beer. Then he pulled up a new tab, gave the computer an I-just-dare-you look, and entered a search query into Google:
u just viisted 2 gold rushes?
The clock over Sam’s bed ticked, rasping loud over the murmur of traffic, ten, twelve times. Then:
slow day. nothing better to do.
Huh. Take that, Sammy. Dean was a computer genius.
He’d just about had his fill of correcting civilians on death row anyway.
for a mystery worm posessing my brothers computer u sure get about a lot
This time, the reply came almost at once.
hey deano! long time no killing each other.
do i know u?
nope
you: puny human brain. me: ineffable
Well, that just narrowed it down to every single cocky thing they’d ever run into. Sounded like angel-speak, especially with the time travel, but maybe that’s what it wanted him to think.
Not that he and Sam were more likely to trust an angel than anything else these days.
mouthy for a wrom too
you inspire me, tiger
Dean snorted. Seriously?
so, trime travel?
just that awesome
gonna tell mewho you r & y we shuld trust u?
nope :)
Of course not. Keep the humans guessing. Probably liked to play with its food.
A url popped up, followed by,
this one’s not bad
Dean took a look at it. Some quiet little blog or something, analysing and cataloguing references to Pestilence over about eight hundred years. Most of it was about the development of the personification and representation of pestilentia/Pestilentia as a concrete entity in a sociopsychological attempt to define and control the fundamental alterity of disease and epidemic (which Dean interpreted as “people feel better when they’ve got something to shoot”), but there was one entry just on alleged sightings of a haggard man on a pale green horse. The author obviously thought these reports were some kind of sociopsychological allegorical phenomenon, or whatever, but she was fascinated by their similarity across a span of three hundred years and most of Eurasia. So was Dean. Though probably not for the same reasons.
Dean poked about at it for about ten minutes, decided it would make more sense to Sam, and bookmarked it.
not bad.
As a cautious afterthought, he added,
thakns.
There was a pause, almost a minute. Then,
hey look, winchesters with manners. bring on the confetti.
screwu
more like it :P
you’re welcome.
Hey look, monsters with manners.
He stretched out in his chair and linked his hands over his belt. A minute ticked by, and nothing else. Dean’s stomach was starting to make demands, and that was about as much computer as he could care about for one day, so he went for his keys and jacket. Weirdly, the freaky little exchange had kind of soothed him. Felt like he’d got something done, which they weren’t getting much of right now.
As he went to leave, he glanced over at the screen. Two more notes.
btw, y r u2 summoning an angel? & who?
won’t workon L unless he lets it no matter how cute u try 2 look
… what?
were not summoning an angel?
Except that Sam… had already been gone longer than he needed to get a coffee.
Dean’s stomach decided maybe it didn’t want to be fed after all.
rosemarywood+cassis+cypress+almond essence etc? stalking ur computer, remember :P
Dammit, Sammy.
And there, in the bottom of Sam’s bag: a suspicious-looking bronze bowl, almond essence, and something labelled “poudre de feuille de cassis.”
---
He found him coming out of some swanky-ass kitchen store, carrying a bag that Dean would have laid good money held one rosemary-wood stirring spoon with extra angel magnetism. He had his phone pressed between his ear and shoulder as he held the door for a teenager with a stroller, like an earnest distracted giraffe of good intentions.
“So there’s nothing solid on any other archangels at all? Not even Chamael?”
He tucked the little bag into his jacket and juggled his phone back into his hand as he came down the steps.
“I don’t know, Bobby. The name just feels really familiar. And ‘lost in humanity’ is better than ‘dead’, right?”
Then his eyes caught and snagged on Dean leaning against a pole by the kerb. His face flashed from getting-things-done-all-efficiently-behind-my-awesome-brother’s-back to gangly-Sam-deer-caught-in-the-headlights.
“Uh, Bobby, I have to go. Yeah, thanks.”
He hung up. Stood there awkwardly with the stupid shiny phone dangling far too small in his stupidly enormous hand.
Dean’s voice felt like it scraped his throat harsh on the way out. “Archangels, huh Sammy? That what you’re trying to summon?”
Sam made a little wounded noise. “Look. Dean. I can explain.”
Not again. Not another half-assed explanation way after the fact. Dean tried to keep his voice low and even, tried not to accuse or scream, because he was trying to understand, he really was. “You sure? Because you’re looking really incredibly caught out there, man.”
“Dean.” Sam stepped closer, eyes widening, repeating Dean’s name like a lifeline. Like he was the one losing a brother here, slipping away in front of his eyes for years and fucking years. “Dean, stop looking at me like that. It’s okay. It’s really not that bad.”
“You’re going away in the nights again, aren’t you. Like last year.” It wasn’t a question.
Dean flinched back without thinking when Sam reached out to him, and Sam stopped like he’d taken a punch to the gut. “No! Well, just that once, but - there was a reason for that, Dean.” He obviously heard how lame that sounded, because he added, uselessly, “This isn’t like with Ruby.”
Dean was so tired, bone deep, and he had no idea how to go forward. They’d done all these steps before and never got out of it. “A reason. Sam, there’s always a reason. There’s a reason every freaking step of the way down, and you never tell me.”
“It isn’t like that.” Sam’s voice was strangely gentle, always so earnest.
“Then what, Sam? What is it like? Because I’m having a really hard time seeing how this is any different.” He heard the pleading edge in his own voice, feel his perilous sharp calm falling apart around him, teetering on the edge of everything he’d pushed away to get the job done.
“Look, Dean. I.” Sam’s eyes skittered down for a moment, then back up, set and determined. “Cas said something, alright?” He ploughed on ruthlessly over Dean’s flinch at the name. “Weeks ago. He mentioned other archangels, who were gone. Making seven in all, including the four we know. And I thought, well, what if they were only gone like Anna was? Or like Gabriel? What if we could find them? I mean, they obviously aren’t all gung-ho with the Apocalypse plan if they haven’t pitched in yet, right?” His eyes were wide and emphatic, urging Dean to share his enthusiasm. “Could be they might lend a hand.”
Dean looked away, down the length of the street, bustling and peaceful. He could feel Sam hovering, a tall anxious shape in front of him, like he wanted to reach out. There was something Dean was missing, and he didn’t know what it was, or who was actually there speaking to him in the big gangly body of his brother.
“I’m trying to trust you, Sam. I am.”
Something to hit would be great.
“I’m sorry, Dean. Really. I just… didn’t want to tell you until I was sure it would work.” Something small and real and fierce under there.
“So, what, you were going to summon a freaking archangel and not let me know?”
“It wouldn’t be dangerous, Dean.” Dean huffed a little breath of harsh, unamused air. “No, really, this ritual lets me summon them into my dreams. They’d never even know where I was, and they couldn’t actually touch me.”
Because of course talking to angels in your sleep never hurt anybody.
Except he couldn’t tell Sam “no.” He wasn’t allowed to decide whether or not Sam risked his own life if he wanted to. Because he was a goddamn adult. Sam got to make his own decisions about the important stuff now. Even if being an adult sucked.
He blinked hard, too conscious of all the eyes around him. Dean Winchester, having a goddamn breakdown in the middle of main street. Nothing to see here.
His voice felt like one of those shopping trolleys with a wobbly wheel that you couldn’t trust to go in a straight line. “Then what’s the harm in telling me?”
“Honestly?” Sam reached out to touch his sleeve, so frank and so goddamned gentle, then pulled a face that said “to hell with it” and wrapped his hand strong and warm around the bones of Dean’s wrist. “You’re looking so beaten-down lately, like the only reason you’re still walking is you can’t actually feel your feet anymore. I just… I didn’t want to get your hopes up for such a long shot.” He shrugged, with a sheepish little attempt at a grin, the one that got Dean every time. “Was kind of hoping I could just walk in one day and say, hey, look, I found you an angel.”
Maybe the problem had always been Dean, not Sam.
Dean couldn’t help but feel there was something ironic just now about Sam trying to take care of him rather than the other way around, but he wasn’t really sure where that came from. Or how to get them out of this moment.
He scrubbed one hand over his face. “Always with the secrets, Sammy.”
“I know, Dean. Just trust me, please. I know what I’m doing.”
I need you to be my rock here, Sammy. “I’m trying,” he said again, not knowing how to try. “I promise.”
---
Sam insisted on taking them to a halfway-decent restaurant to eat, like he did sometimes when he was feeling guilty about something or throwing up his hands about Dean’s diet. They didn’t say much.
As they left, Dean looked at him and asked, “Just… leave it until we’re back at Bobby’s, okay? Just in case something goes wrong.”
“No calling archangels until we get to Bobby’s. Check.”
Sam’s grin was broad and relieved, and all honesty.
---
That night, he dreamed that all of his body was scraped raw and jagged, and that he couldn’t quite cover it up.
He dreamed of a man who was his brother, forehead all crumpled and concerned under ridiculous hair, but when Dean reached out a hand it went right through him, because Dean wasn’t really there, not as real as Sam. Sam changed, and kept changing, and Dean trailed around after him, all immaterial, unable to change himself or anything else in the world around him.
He dreamed, achingly, of pale blue eyes taking him apart, holding him together, looking at him like he existed and mattered, like he was so earth-shakingly important. Eyes that were absolutely fucking terrifying, and the one constant thing in a broken world. He dreamed of those eyes hurt and clouded and still.
He dreamed of deep, twisting loneliness, of being left behind.
Honestly, his subconscious wasn’t even making an effort.
---
you there mystry worm?
sam says hi, also that its still creepy having somonen watching his computer evne if you talk back
---
just dont go get stuck in the dionsaurs or something okay
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