fic: till the cows come down the river, SPN
title: till the cows come down the river
rating: PG-13, gen
summary: Sam’s never understood anything, not really, and Dean’s never wanted him to. But he always tries, even for the stuff Dean himself doesn’t understand. Dean’s never known what to do with that.
words: 9,962
notes: takes place in season 5 in between "Dark Side of the Moon" and "99 Problems." destro was big time moral support. <3
Fits with earlier stories: Or where you go, or where you've been and all the fear of the Lord I was given.
[warnings.]warnings: rather close POV depiction of a panic attack playing out over time is the best way I can put it. I dunno if it's triggering, so I wanted to give a heads up.
Sam takes the first shower. They bicker back and forth about it for a minute half-heartedly, but Dean needs to not see Sam with blood all over him right now and maybe Sam figures that out because after a couple of rounds of you first, no you, no you, will you please just take a fucking shower already Sam grabs his duffel and disappears into the shitty, mildew-stained bathroom.
Fucking Roy and Walt, the morons. There’s physical evidence everywhere -- shotgun shells left on the carpet, one of the ski masks in a limp heap by the bed where Dean had died and there’s bound to be a strand or two of hair caught up in the knit. Amateurs. Not that he and Sam were much better most days, but Jesus, they usually weren’t planning on trying to get away with shooting two guys point blank in the chest with shotguns in a freaking motel where everyone for a mile around would hear the blasts and come running.
He figures Zachariah probably had something to do with the shocking lack of any attention paid to those shotgun blasts. Lucky them. They’ll have to ditch the cards they used to pay for this room, though, and that fucking sucks.
There’s not much to be done about the blood. By now it’s soaked through to the mattresses, so taking the sheets with them would be pointless. Dean scoops up the shells and gets a faint whiff of gunpowder. He should leave them out on the floor to be found, let the fuckers face their own consequences, but those consequences might have blow-back Dean doesn’t want to particularly deal with if the moron assassins do happen to get caught and someone asks about the obvious lack of two dead bodies. So he pockets the shells to get rid of later and stuffs the ski mask into the weapons bag. Might come in handy.
Sam’s out of the shower in record time, followed from the bathroom by a swirl of damp air just as Dean finishes leaving a message for Cas.
“All yours,” Sam says, his eyes flickering over the bloody front of Dean’s shirt, and oh yeah, maybe he should have stripped that off.
Sam opens his mouth like he’s got something to say, but Dean pushes past him and closes himself into the little bathroom. It’s been awhile since motel bathrooms haven’t left him itchy and on the edge of claustrophobia but right now it’s almost a relief, being cut off from Sam’s scrutiny, from scrutinizing Sam.
Apparently being brought back to life by angels doesn’t cure you of the massive hangover you had coming to you before your chest was disintegrated by two guys you’d once trusted with your back, because Dean gets a little woozy under the hot water. Decides he’s clean enough, the blood washed away at least, and sits down hard on the toilet for a minute telling himself he’s not gonna puke because kneeling bare on this floor is a revolting proposition.
After the danger passes he pulls his jeans back on, since they were spared the worst and it will remind him to ditch the shells if they’re right there in his pocket. He catches the burnt gunpowder smell again and wrinkles his nose. His shirts are stained with blood but there’s a few black powder marks too. He balls them up with the blood on the inside and finds a spot in his duffel, another thing to ditch when they’re a safe distance away, like, two states maybe. Used to be that spent gunpowder wasn’t something he thought much about or even noticed or if he did, it was just a familiar part of his every day, like sweat and leather. Guess having a gun go off in your face puts things into a new perspective, but it’s not like it’s even the first time he’s been shot, though, so... whatever. It’ll fade.
Muffled voices through the door and he’s reaching for the gun he didn’t bring into the bathroom with him when he recognizes one of the cadences as belonging to Cas. The other is Sam, of course, which he knew without thinking. He sits back down on the toilet and realizes he should probably put on a shirt before he goes to let Cas down easy, if Sam hasn’t already. Part of him -- maybe most of him -- hopes that Sam has, and that’s a shitty thought but there it is. Dean’s tired and hungover and ready to be in another state and so not up to the look he knows will be on Cas’s face when they tell him what Joshua said about God.
He’s just tired. He thinks about turning the shower back on, standing under the water where he won’t be able to hear Cas and Sam talking, and maybe when he comes back out Cas will have fluttered off again to wherever Cas goes. And maybe another swipe with the crappy bar of motel soap will get rid of the linger of gunpowder.
Or maybe he should just suck it up.
He lets Sam drive. Well, really what he does is stow his bag then slide into the passenger seat of the Impala and make sure the keys are already in the ignition by the time Sam closes the motel room door behind him. Sam must notice, because he kind of swerves in his path on the way to the car in a way that might have at least brought a grin to Dean’s face a couple of years ago.
Sam doesn’t say anything. Just shoots him a look that Dean doesn’t want to read much into and starts the engine rumbling. Dean must doze off at some point because the next thing he knows the engine sound is gone along with the steady feel of forward motion. His face has tried to mould itself to the passenger door frame so he sits up and rubs at it, squinting at the overcast noon glare coming through the windshield. Wonders where his sunglasses are. Wonders where his brother is. Doesn’t think to wonder where they are, besides not moving, until there’s an impatient rap at his window that echoes through his hangover and Jesus, he didn’t even see the guy approach, which means he either needs a lot more sleep or a whole shitload of coffee.
Dean makes a face and the guy bent over his window bangs his knuckles against the glass again, like Dean wasn’t looking straight at him. Big guy with a buzz cut and some ill-considered tattoos, but just a kid. Couldn’t be more than twenty. Soft face screwed up in annoyance. Dean thinks about ignoring him but the kid looks the type that would take it out on the Impala’s hide, so he rolls down his window a couple inches. Not enough that the kid could get more than a hand through if he tried. But enough to stop the rapping.
“Can’t park here,” the kid says, leaning over the gap like Dean wouldn’t be able to hear him otherwise, his hands on his hips.
“Didn’t do the parking,” Dean says, which is the obvious if pointless truth given where he’s sitting.
“Does it look like I give a damn if you were the one to pick the spot?”
Dean rubs at his face again. There’s probably a mark there from where the door meets the window. “No sir, it does not,” Dean says, and the kid grimaces at him like he can’t figure out whether the sir really means fuck you, which it does, and the kid should know that much given that Dean’s betting he’s never been addressed as sir in his entire short life. “But since I don’t have the keys, I can’t do much about the parking situation.”
The kid peers past Dean at the steering wheel, at the ignition where the keychain would be dangling, and wrinkles his nose. “You can’t sleep here,” he says, like Dean’s foiling all his plans for the day, which as far as Dean can tell involve throwing his weight around the parking lot of a Stop n Go like a petty tyrant.
There’s a plastic name tag pinned to the breast of the kid’s flannel shirt, name scrawled out in big letters in black magic marker.
“Well, Dylan, does it look like I’m sleeping?”
The kid’s face has gone patchy red, about ten seconds from trying to shove his hand through the gap between the window and the door in a fruitless attempt to vent his annoyance on Dean’s face, and Dean’s of a mind to let him try, but just then Sam appears on the driver’s side and the kid takes a step back. All Dean can see of Sam is a swath of button-down shirt and the greasy bag he’s holding in one hand. The other hand is drifting behind Sam’s back to where there’s probably a piece stuffed into his waistband, but he doesn’t pull it.
“There a problem?” Sam’s voice sets the kid back another step from the Impala.
“No sir,” the kid says, then like an afterthought, all polite like, “You can’t park here is all, but it looks like you’re on your way, so...”
Sam’s gun hand comes back in view, slips into his pocket for the keys. “Alright,” he says, all easy charm. “Sorry about that.”
“Oh,” the kid shuffles and Dean rolls his eyes. “Uh, yeah, okay. No problem.”
Sam slides into the driver’s seat and tosses the paper bag onto the seat between them.
“Have a nice day!” Dean calls after the kid’s retreating back. He can’t rustle up easy or charming and doesn’t even try.
“Making friends?” Sam says, his tone is too careful to be light hearted so Dean ignores him. Whatever’s in the bag, it smells like it was scorched within an inch of edibility. Sam gestures toward the bag like it’s an offering. “It’s all they had fresh.”
Fresh? Dean reaches for the bag and opens it as Sam starts up the engine, pulls out of the parking lot and follows the signs back towards the interstate. There’s a couple of those ridiculously tiny sized bags of potato chips, the kind that once you let the air out hold about half a handful of chips, and underneath nestle two foil-wrapped oblong shapes.
“Hot dogs,” Sam says, as if it’s not obvious. Stuck between the foil and the bag are a bunch of packages of ketchup and mustard. A couple of green ones but those are for Sam because who puts relish on hot dogs? His brother, that’s who. When they’d been kids, Dean had liked to pulverize the chips and sprinkle them on the hot dog to make the whole thing crunchy, which never failed to gross Sam out. But gas station relish was just nasty.
Dean’s about as far from hungry as he can remember being. Ever. Overcooked hot dog fills the car while Dean stares down into the bag, weighing the value of forcing down the food against the chances that it might come right back up.
“You want yours now?” he asks, buying time.
Sam glances at him sidelong. “Sure. Can you...”
“Yeah.”
One of shotgun’s jobs is fixing up the food for the driver if they’re on the road. Dean pulls a hot dog out of the bag and peels the foil open. The bun is a little smooshed but not too shabby, though the meat isn’t so much scorched as mummified. Been rotating around the Stop n Go’s hot plate since opening, probably. Dean wipes away whatever look he can feel trying to take over his face and digs out a couple of the condiments. Makes sure to empty every package of relish he can find on Sam’s mummy dog before he hands it over.
“Thanks,” Sam says. Takes a big bite out of his hot dog, eyes on the road. It’ll be gone in four or five chomps.
Dean tears open one of the bags of chips and hands that over too before opening his own bag. Chews and swallows one of the ten whole chips inside, waits to see if it’s gonna stay down. Tries to keep the sight of Sam’s hot dog, oozing ketchup like blood and dotted with too-green chunks of relish, as far in the corner of his vision as he can get without turning his head away. Tries another chip. Tries to ignore the way Sam’s eyeing him.
“You gonna eat yours?” Sam says it like he wants to poach Dean’s share of the food, but that’s not what he means.
“Back off, glutton.” Dean forces a grin and grabs his hot dog out of the bag. The full force of the stench is right in his face when he unwraps it, and it smells familiar. It should, they’ve eaten a ballpark’s worth over the course of their lives, dad used to say hot dogs are good car food. But it’s not that kind of familiar. Dean’s not sure what kind of familiar it is exactly but it’s the kind that makes him want out of the car. Now.
“Hey, uh, I have to take a piss,” he announces.
Sam shoots an exasperated look at the rear view mirror. “You couldn’t have gone when we were stopped?”
“Didn’t have to then,” Dean says automatically. The hot dog is more shriveled than wrinkled, and if he doesn’t get away from the smell soon he’s going to wrench the wheel out of Sam’s hands.
Sam sighs and weaves his way through a caravan of semis and takes the next exit. Mission, Nebraska. Dean holds his hot dog in his lap and tries not to breathe too deeply. He wants to fling himself out of the car but its still moving and that might freak Sam out. He can wait until they stop. He can.
The first likely place they come across is a 7-11. As Sam pulls into the parking lot, Dean stuffs the hot dog back into the paper bag and is out of the car the moment Sam shifts to park. The salty smell follows him even after he tosses the bag into an open trash barrel and then smacks him in the face when he pushes through the door to the 7-11 because of course there’s another one of those roller grills on the counter next to the cash register. Dean makes a circuit around the store but can’t find a restroom sign, so he’s forced back to the counter. Where the hot dogs go to die.
“You got a bathroom?” he asks the woman behind the register. The faint humming from the roller grill settles in his teeth as she eyes him.
“Not for the general public, we don’t.” She’s probably Dean’s age, the start of lines framing her mouth that’ll deepen in the next five years. Face bare of makeup, her hair back in a tight ponytail. A couple of charms on a thin gold chain might stand for the kids she’s got at home. The way she stands at the counter, the set of her shoulders, he thinks a shotgun wouldn’t look out of place in her hands.
If she had one, it’d be aimed at his chest right about now. Might even be a pistol under that counter.
“How about for paying customers?” he asks, thumb pointing to the coffee maker.
“Pay up first,” she says, “you can grab your Joe on the way out.”
The thing is, he doesn’t actually need to piss. He’s not even sure why he’s playing out this charade. But he forks over the four dollars for two large coffees and drops the change into the take-a-penny tray and the cashier slides him a key tied to a splintery wood block and nods to a door marked Employees Only to the right of the counter, next to the refrigerator cases full of energy drinks. They key’s not for that door, though, ‘cause it doesn’t have a lock. Dean pushes through and follows the short hallway to a door marked with a pictogram of figures with and without a skirt, in case there was any confusion as to who was allowed to use the facilities.
Dean’s never been so glad for the heady mix of stale piss and lemon-lime industrial cleaner.
As far as convenience store bathrooms go this one’s pretty clean. Dean risks taking a seat on the closed toilet and stares at the white ceramic of the urinal for a couple of minutes, lets his mind blank out. The whole place, floor and walls, are tiled with grey and green squares, the grout gone mostly black on the floor, but there isn’t much in the way of grime. Somebody gives it a mop on a fairly frequent basis. There’s one of those paper charts on the door with dates and initials marking the last time it was cleaned, and the last date listed is yesterday. He thinks it was yesterday. He’s not sure how long they were dead, though, so he can’t be sure. Might have been a couple of days.
Fucking angels.
That gives him the push to get back on his feet. He turns the water on at the sink, lets it run for a minute before splashing his face. Washes his hands with the bubble-gum pink soap from the dispenser while water drips from his nose and chin and doesn’t look in the mirror. Dries himself off with scratchy brown paper towel and almost forgets the woodblock with the key, which he’d left on the toilet tank.
Back out in the store he tosses the cashier her key with a nod of thanks that she returns and then huddles over the coffee stand, focusing on the burnt caramel aroma while he pours out two styrofoam cups. He stuffs a bunch of sugar packets in his pockets for Sam and makes a beeline for the door.
Sam’s leaning against the driver’s side of the Impala, sipping from a cup identical to the two Dean’s carrying.
“Oh,” Sam says, with a sheepish shrug. “I--”
Dean turns and chucks one of the cups into the trash barrel and gets back in the car.
Sam tosses him the keys after they stop for dinner at a sub shop just outside of Lincoln. Dean manages half of his footlong -- tuna salad, and he’d ignored Sam’s raised eyebrow -- and Sam doesn’t veer from his steady patter of small talk but he eyes Dean’s leftovers like they might tell him something important. Judging by the local paper, this part of Nebraska is ridiculously free of the supernatural. They don’t have to discuss moving on. When Dean slides into the driver’s seat with a new cup of shitty sub shop coffee, he heads back to the highway.
All he’s done is ride in the car all day but he feels drained, tapped like a sugar maple. Energy drip-drip-dripping away. The coffee keeps him awake but once it gets dark oncoming headlights smear in his peripheral vision. He shoves in some Metallica and Sam doesn’t even blink even though he knows Sam hates Metallica. Two songs in he hears the distant whine of sirens under the drums. Turns down the volume, head cocked, and he can still hear it aways off. No flash of blue and red lights in the rearview mirror and they’re hundreds of miles away from their own double homicide but maybe the clerk at the motel had taken down their plates. Should have switched them out last time they stopped, but he’d thought they were far enough away.
Sam must notice him checking the mirrors, because he sits up straighter. “What’s wrong?”
The siren is faint but still there, like a ringing in Dean’s ears, but it never seems to come closer. Stopped for an accident maybe, miles behind them. He shakes his head. “Nothing.” Pops the tape out and finds a public radio station playing the blues and the sirens fade.
His plan was to drive through the night but sometime around two he catches himself jerking out of white line fever, no memory of the past twenty miles. Sam squints at him when Dean jostles his shoulder but Sam had put in a good twelve hours and he’s in no condition to take over.
“Gonna stop,” Dean says, but turns out that’s easier said than done. They’re in the middle of nowhere. He white knuckles the wheel to keep himself focused and pulls off at the next exit, follows the signs for the Kelso Motor Inn (Free Cable! A/C!) and when he finds it, the lot is packed full.
Since there’s nowhere to park, Sam hops out and jogs to the office while Dean lets the Impala grumble to herself. The blues station has faded to static so Dean switches the radio off, beats out a rhythm on the steering wheel. Tries not to listen for sirens. Sam reappears a couple minutes later, empty handed.
“There’s some kind of local agricultural thing,” he says as he gets back in the car, gesturing vaguely, like maybe he’d only been half listening, “so they’re full. And the owner said this is the only place in town.”
“Shit.” Dean rubs at his eyes. They could pull off somewhere out of the way, grab a few hours, but Dean’s bones have been grinding together for the past hundred miles.
“He says they’ll have a room in the morning, says this crew is a bunch of early risers. We can check back around six or seven, should be something for us.”
They half heartedly argue about it for a few minutes, but neither of them wants to sleep in the car and neither of them is up to driving much farther. Finding a place to kill time it is. Dean guides the Impala down the dark main street of Nowhere, Missouri, looking for an all night coffee joint, a Steak n Shake, anything that doesn’t mind too much loitering in the middle of the night. Everything is deserted, even the McDonald's. Dean can’t remember what day it is offhand but it’s so late it wouldn’t matter: the three bars they pass are shuttered anyway. The first lighted window he comes across is the Ty-Dee Wash 24 Hr Coin Laundry.
Done.
Sam eyes the bright bank of windows on the front of the laundromat that stretch nearly floor to ceiling and shrugs, so Dean finds a place to park by the front door.
“Why d’you suppose they always build these places so’s the whole world can watch you fold your underwear?” Dean grumbles as the Impala shudders to a stop.
“Free advertising,” Sam says, and slides out.
They don’t have much in the way of cash. Dean grabs the battered Folger’s canister where they keep change for tolls and rattles it, but there’s only a couple bucks in there by the sound. There’s sixty-odd cents in his pocket, left over from the sub shop, and Sam’s got a couple of wrinkled bills.
“They might have an ATM,” Sam says, but he doesn’t sound hopeful.
“S’enough for a couple loads.” Dean pops the trunk and they grab their duffels. There’s an emergency stash of bills he just remembered, coiled up in an old orange plastic prescription bottle made out to one of Elroy McGillicudy’s sons, thrown in with the flasks of holy water. Maybe twenty bucks in ones, but it’ll do the job, so he grabs that and stuffs it in his pocket. It’s a good thing, too, because they’re out of detergent and it costs an arm and a leg when you buy it from the laundromat.
There’s a handwritten sign on the door: ASK US ABOUT OUR OVERNIGHT SPECIALS. It comes off more like a demand than a friendly offer. A leather strap studded with tarnished sleigh bells tied to the handle of the door gives off a death rattle when Dean pushes into the Ty-Dee Wash’s arid warmth. After drifting through the dark all night the place is searingly bright, everything overexposed until he blinks a couple of times. He must come up short while he does it because Sam bumps into his back and then steps to the side, his eyes slitted against the light same as Dean’s.
When his vision clears he finds the attendant behind the counter staring at them, a kind of half-curious hostility stirring from somewhere deep in her near-comatose boredom. He almost opens his mouth to reassure the lady they won’t be any trouble but Sam is already headed towards the machines. The Ty-Dee Wash isn’t as empty as you’d think at three a.m. -- places like this never were. There’s always swing shifters and insomniacs anywhere you go, even in tiny nowheresville with its lone no-vacancy motel. Sam picks a scantily populated corner and drops his bag onto one of the familiar wide-lipped plastic tables. Here in the Ty-Dee Wash, they’re a brash pumpkin orange. Probably relics of the 70’s, judging by the orange and avocado approximately daisy-shaped decals starting to peel from the walls.
The table’s big enough that they can stand side by side to empty out the contents of their duffels. Sam elbows him sharp in the ribs and grabs the blood caked shirts Dean had forgot about before Dean even notices that they’ve landed on top of his heap of wrinkled clothes.
“Dude,” Sam hisses, and shoves the evidence of Dean’s demise into his own bag.
Dean darts a glance up but the closest of their fellow night owl launderers, a stocky guy in his sixties dressed pretty much exactly like them down to the work boots, hasn’t even turned in their direction. “Chill,” Dean says.
“I will if you pay attention and stop trying to get us arrested.” Sam cinches his duffel shut with a jerk and tosses it aside, already separating out his lights and darks.
“Like anybody here gives a damn,” Dean mutters. Except for the attendant, who’s shooting occasional peeks in their direction. The Ty-Dee Wash is probably nothing but regulars, so he and Sam have got to be the highlight of the working year. She looks like she came with the place, Farrah hair and baby blue eyeshadow and pink-dyed feather earrings. Maybe they hired her in 1973 and never let her leave. The dog-eared magazines scattered around are probably thirty years out of date too.
Sam starts sorting Dean’s clothes like he thinks Dean’s too slow, so Dean moves aside to let him. Pulls Donald McGillicudy’s old pill bottle out of his pocket and twists off the child-proof cap, then shakes out the carefully rolled up cash. Counts out twenty-three dollars and shoves it back in his pocket, then pries open the Folger’s can and dumps the change out onto the table. Future Them frowns at the clatter but goes back to his crossword. Dean lines up the coins, makes little dollar piles: three dollars and fifty-eight cents.
“How many loads we got?” he asks Sam.
Sam shrugs. “Two. Maybe three.” That’s because Sam insists on washing the lights and darks separate. Dean figures no one cares much about his lights since they’re under his darks, so what does it matter? It’s cheaper if you wash ‘em together. But he doesn’t bother saying anything, because Sam will just make a face at him.
Dean jerks his thumb toward the line of vending machines. “Gonna get some soap.”
“Don’t forget the dryer sheets,” Sam says.
It’s not that he ever forgets them. It’s that sometimes they don’t have the cash, and dryer sheets aren’t exactly essential to the laundry process. But he just gives Sam a nod. Brings back a couple of single-use boxes of powdered Tide, a box of the dryer sheets with the annoying bear on the front, a bag of red licorice for Sam, and a bag of black for himself.
“You remember that time you left a red crayon in a load?” Sam says as he tosses their lights into one of the machines.
Dean doesn’t answer, too busy prying his pack of licorice open. There’s nothing to say about it anyway. Sam tells this story approximately every tenth time they do laundry. Something about the memory seems to delight him, which Dean’s never gotten, but he never says anything either.
“Dad was so pissed,” Sam says, grinning, and it’s only stories from when Sam was little that he thinks of Dad being pissed as funny. “All our underwear and socks were pink. His tee shirts. Man, the look on his face?”
Dad used to tell the story too. Pretty much word for word the way Sam tells it, only it had sounded different.
“Yeah,” Dean says eventually, because Sam seems to expect a response.
Once their clothes are in the washers there’s nothing to do but wait. Sam retrieves his laptop from the car and folds himself down into one of the molded orange plastic chairs next to their table, his knees practically in his ears, the computer balanced on his thighs. Dean can’t imagine there’s wireless in this place, but doesn’t bother to ask. He sits next to Sam for a few minutes but the hard plastic chair sets off an ache that stretches from his tailbone up to the base of his skull, the puzzle pieces of his spine jammed together all wrong from too many hours in the car.
So he changes a couple of bills for quarters and heads for the cluster of old arcade games near the windows. That’s the thing about nowhere little towns -- these things would go for good money anyplace else, snapped up by retro-loving hipsters. Centipede has a hand-lettered OUT OF ORDER! sign taped to its console, but Ms. Pac-Man still works, and there’s even a pinball machine. Dean blows a dollar on Ms. Pac-Man before muscle memory starts to kick in, the red ball of the controller slipping snug into his palm. The jazzy little MIDI tunes hover somewhere between grating on his nerves and homey nostalgia while he guides the lipsticked monster around the screen, gobbling white dots and the occasional bunch of cherries. It takes him another couple of games to remember the names of the little floating ghosties: Inkie and Pinky, Blinky and Sue, but his memory doesn’t extend to which ghost is which.
Real ghosts aren’t this easy to avoid. The ghosts in regular Pac-Man had followed set patterns, though, if he remembers right. Once you knew the pattern, the game wasn’t as fun. Ms. Pac-Man, though, you had to be tricky. It took more skill to stay alive. He makes it two levels and suddenly the screen comes to life with crude animation. Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man falling in love. Like if she dodges enough ghosts and eats enough little dots, everything falls in place for her. He wonders if she ever resents being hooked up for eternity with her male twin, if maybe she’d have preferred one of the ghosts. Or maybe the centipede over in the other console. But it’s not like she can escape her programming, and the centipede is dead, at least for now.
After awhile the pervasive high pitched whew whew whew whew of the soundtrack works its way under his skin until he’s straining to listen for real sirens, his attention flicking from the pixelated maze to the dark nothing outside the bank of windows at the front of the laundromat. The controller goes slick in his grip and a flock of ghosts rushes Ms. Pac-Man, who turns belly up to die with a mournful tune before she and her destined beau reach the stage of their burgeoning relationship where they take turns chasing each other across the screen. Dean wipes his hands off on his jeans and takes the rest of his quarters to the pinball machine.
He hasn’t seen a working pinball in years, so he’s even rustier at it than he was Ms. Pac-Man. His vision blurs and he can’t quite follow the silver ball bearing as it bounces around the back of the platform, keeps losing track of it until it slips by his guard and back into the bowels of the machine. After he wastes a dollar in the span of fifteen minutes, Dean throws in the towel.
Sam looks up when Dean flops back into the chair next to him. There’s about fifty windows open on the laptop screen, the top few full of densely packed Latin text.
“Somebody’s got an unsecured mobile hotspot going,” Sam says, like he’s reading Dean’s mind.
“Find anything?” Dean asks, not because he cares all that much, but because he’s bored and restless and tired and there’s nothing else to do.
Sam shrugs. “There’s been a lot of what looks like demonic activity in Minnesota. Might be worth checking out.”
“Yeah, okay.” Dean snags one of the wrinkled old magazines from the low table between their chairs. People, June 2008. Huh. Wonder what he missed.
“Where d’you think Cas went?” Sam asks after a few minutes of key-rattling, page-flipping silence.
Dean’s been trying not to think about the look on Cas’s face. “Dunno.”
“You think we should try to call him?”
“Go ahead,” Dean says. Sam just looks at him, like dialing up angels is his territory. “What?”
“Aren’t you worried about him?”
Wouldn’t matter if he was. “Cas can take care of himself.”
Usually the familiar thunk-thunk rhythm of industrial clothes driers and the constant hiss of washers lulls Dean into the closest he gets to relaxing these days, but tonight everything seems aggressively loud, like a ticking clock when you’re lying in the grip of insomnia. The older guy closest to them has pulled his dry clothes out into one of the big wire carts and is folding a pile of white tee-shirts with the kind of precision Dean’s father would have appreciated. A few rows away from them a woman at least a couple years younger than Sam is squinting down at a thick accounting textbook and chewing on the cap of her pen, a toddler limp and open-mouthed with sleep in a stroller by her chair. There can’t be a college around here for a hundred miles, so she’s probably in some kind of online program. Working second shift, nobody to take care of her kid. She looks up and notices his attention and her eyes shift away to the stroller. Dean’s too tired to fake anything like a reassuring smile but he can’t help but feel bad she caught him looking. From the pinched expression she’s used to being judged.
“Hey, you know. About Flagstaff,” Sam says, in that halting tone he uses when he’s sure saying something is a bad idea but he feels like he has to anyway, “I didn’t know. I mean, I didn’t think about what Dad would’ve--”
Dean stands up. He doesn’t know where he’s going or what he’s going to do, but he’s not staying here for a heart to heart about fucking Flagstaff.
“Whatever. You were a kid, Sam.” It feels wrong in his mouth, bitter.
Sam’s gaze shifts and focuses. “So were you,” he says, and Dean walks away.
Their wash is on the spin cycle, not ready for the dryers yet. Dean leans against their table and watches it for a couple minutes until he feels Sam next to him, just standing there. “I ran away on your watch,” Sam says, tossing Dean’s own words back at him. “So what happened when Dad got home?”
“Nothing.” He doesn’t look at Sam. Says it to the wall of washers.
“Dad chewed me out all the way back to the motel,” Sam says, almost like he’s reminiscing. “But you weren’t with us.”
“Sam--”
“You didn’t recognize the trailer. I forgot, it was just Dad who found me. Made me take Bones to the animal shelter. Said it was the humane thing to do.”
Dean’s hands are in fists. He stuffs them in his pockets before Sam notices.
“I don’t remember you being there when I got back,” Sam says, slow and thoughtful and Dean has to take a breath so he doesn’t do something stupid. There’s a smell at the back of his throat. Been there awhile maybe, but now it’s strong enough to register. Sharp, like ozone.
Dean turns away from his brother, scanning the room, but nothing stands out. “You smell that?”
Sam’s face screws up in confusion. “Smell what?”
He’s smelled it before. Can’t place it though. Corrosive, like it’s eating away at his nose.
“Sulfur?” Sam says, lowering his voice. Dean shakes his head.
“Electrical.” It tickles his throat and he has to suppress a cough. He swivels, but the guy with his tee shirts and the girl with her kid don’t seem bothered.
Sam’s staring at him.
“Nevermind,” he says, right as their washers wind to a halt.
Sam takes the whites and Dean takes the darks and he buries his hands in damp laundry and tries to ignore the smell but it lingers, stronger than the powder fresh Tide. Fucking Flagstaff. When he closes his eyes he can see his dad’s face, the way Dean hadn’t had to say anything, Dad had just known the minute he walked in the door. He opens them again to Sam watching him, realizes he’s been standing there too long. Grabs armfuls of wet laundry and dumps it in the nearby dryer, tosses in a dryer sheet. Sam’s already done, his machine thunk-thunking away.
Dean swipes a pile of coins off the table and tries to feed them into the slots on the dryer, but they don’t fit. He mutters obscenities to himself and tries again, fumbling the coins, then like an idiot dropping them to the tile floor where they bounce noisily around his boots.
“It only takes quarters,” tee-shirt guy says, and what the fuck? Of course it only takes quarters. But when Dean scoops the coins back up off the floor, he’s got a handful of nickels.
Sam’s still watching him from over by their table and tee-shirt guy is frowning and even the girl with the toddler is looking edgy and Dean realizes he’s still fuck fuck fuck-ing under his breath, so he shuts his mouth. Stalks over to the change machine and feeds in a dollar from the wad in his pocket but of course it’s too wrinkled and the machines spits it out with an annoyed grinding sound. Dean tries again with the only other one left in his pocket but the machine whirs away at him, the dollar bunching up when he forces it.
The Farrah look-alike at the front desk eyes him like she’s getting ready for a hold up. He tosses down a five and before he can say anything she’s shaking her head.
“You gotta get change from the machine,” she says, not even touching the bill.
“It won’t take my money. Look, can you just--”
“I’m sorry, but you have to get change from the machine. It’s policy.” Her jaw is set but her eyes have gone round and Jesus, Dean, dial it back a notch. He tries, he does, he takes a breath and pulls out a smile. Holds out the wrinkled ones.
“Maybe you could just exchange these for newer bills for me, then?”
The clerk’s attention skitters away from him and her face smooths out with relief. A moment later he can feel Sam a little behind him, hovering.
“I just want to dry my clothes and the fucking machine won’t take my money. Please. All I’m asking is--”
“I don’t want trouble,” the clerk says to him, her voice quavering. Then she turns to Sam, like Dean’s completely ceased to exist, like Sam’s her savior. “If he’s gonna be disruptive I’ll have to ask you to leave.”
And that is just the fucking last straw. Dean’s face is burning and he doesn’t know what he looks like but the clerk stumbles back a step away from the counter and her eyes dart to the wall-mounted phone a few feet away. Sam’s fingers dig into his shoulder and pull him back, and Dean hasn’t wanted to punch him so bad for months. Sam, the calm one, the voice of reason, the face everybody trusts, Sam puts himself between Dean and the lady scared out of her fucking mind because Dean wanted a couple of one dollar bills for his fucking laundry.
Sam’s talking to the clerk in a low voice, his hands up, placating, and it’s not like Dean even fucking did anything but ask for some change. Mr. Tee-Shirts and a couple of other guys are watching, looking like they’ll jump to Farrah’s defense if Dean even flinches, and there’s a switchblade in Dean’s pocket but all the guns are in the car. He catches himself thinking about it, catches his hand in his pocket closing around the knife, and what the fuck is wrong with him. Across the room, Ms. Pac-Man starts up again with the whew whew whew on her own like somebody’s called the video game cops, and a laugh tears out of him, high and not at all funny.
Sam turns around with a handful of quarters and grabs Dean by the bicep and jerks him away, back toward their table. “You need to calm down,” he says.
Dean tries to shake him off but Sam’s got ginormous hands. “Lemme go.”
Sam’s grip tightens. “Calm the fuck down before the nice lady reports us to the local PD.”
“Sam--” It comes out strangled, his throat closing in on him.
Sam abruptly changes directions, heading for the front door. Dean tries to pull away again but Sam manhandles him through the door and outside, drags him around the side of the building and slams him against the brick wall, pinning him in place with both hands. Dean loses track of things for a minute, bucking against his brother. Tries to headbutt him but Sam just dodges and presses him to the wall. GIves his shoulders a rough shake.
“Stop it,” Sam says. “Just-- what is going on with you?”
Dean doesn’t know where the next thing he says comes from but it blurts out of him anyway, airless and crazy. “Something’s burning in there.”
That brings Sam up short. He blinks at Dean, and in the orangey light of the parking lot he looks pale. “What?”
Dean shakes his head, because he doesn’t know why he said that.
“Nothing’s burning, Dean.” Sam says, slow and even.
It’s so strong he can still taste it. Like being caught in a grave with a salt-n-burn. “Okay.” His voice doesn’t sound like it belongs to him anymore. “She, uh. Sammy, she--”
“Maybe we should go,” Sam says. “I can get our--”
“She looked at me.” His hands are fisted in the fabric of Sam’s flannel shirt and he’s not sure when that happened. “She looked right at me.”
“Dean.” Sam lets go of his shoulders and for a long second Dean’s not sure his knees will hold. “I don’t know what you’re--”
The words trip and stutter out of him, getting caught on each other, unsteady, and it doesn’t sound like him at all. “That wasn’t real. With Zachariah, right? It wasn’t real. But if it wasn’t, how did, how did she, how did that thing know what it smelled like?”
“Like what smelled like?” Sam’s face is blank, and something inside Dean snaps shut with a click.
“Nothing,” he says. “We need to get our clothes before somebody snatches ‘em.”
Sam puts a hand out, stops him without touching before he can push off the wall. “No, Dean, what were you talking about?”
Dean shakes his head. Nothing. He hadn’t been talking about anything. Sam’s about to press it when a voice calls out from the front of the building.
“You boys alright out here?”
Sam straightens and Dean straightens and it’s the guy who’d been folding tee shirts closest to them, the guy about Bobby’s age.
“Yessir,” Sam says, responding to the tone like it’s muscle memory.
“I got your last load started,” the guy says, looking at each of them evenly in the eye in turn. “You’d best finish up and get out of here, before Lindsay calls the cops.” There’s a little humor in his voice. Sam smiles at the guy and Dean knows he doesn’t mean it, but it’s a smile the civilians usually buy. This one just shakes his head. “Look, I know you weren’t meaning to start anything in there.” He looks to Dean, this time.
All Dean can do is nod.
“Lindsay’s been through a lot,” is all the guy says before he gives them both a nod and disappears back into the laundromat.
They stand there in the silence of the little sliver of lot between the laundromat and a stand of scrapland, scraggly trees and vine-wrapped weedy bushes and a couple of bare, rusty fence posts. Blue light bleeds around their feet from the neon Ty-Dee Wash sign on the front of the building.
Sam shakes his head and gives Dean a once-over, a frown creeping across his face. “Maybe you should--”
“Yeah, fine,” Dean says. “Just, you know. Hurry it up.”
Sam sighs and runs a hand through his hair. “Soon as it’s dry, we’re out of here.” He looks back once, at the door to the Ty-Dee Wash. By then Dean’s standing by the Impala’s front bumper, one hand trapped in his pocket, the other on the solid metal of her hood. Just pressing down.
He can’t sleep. Sam’s crashed fully dressed on top of the covers on the other bed, but at least he’d kicked off his boots. The blackout blinds do pretty well at blocking the morning sun, but Dean’s awake anyway. The kind of awake that’s gone brittle and friable at the edges.
He lies on his back for awhile with his eyes closed, listening to Sam breathe, listening to people coming and going outside, the last stragglers from whatever agricultural event had filled the motel to the brim last night. His thoughts won’t settle in one place long enough for him to really focus on anything, even if there was something to focus on. They skitter around in his skull and he tries not to count his pulse because he knows paying too much attention to it will just make things worse. His breathing is slow and even but his heart’s been a runaway horse headed for the cliff’s edge since the Ty-Dee Wash.
It’s not the first time.
He remembers at that hospital in Ketchum with Martin and the wraith, they’d given him something that had stopped this but he doesn’t know what it was. Maybe they’d told him at the time, maybe not. That part isn’t very clear. They’d given him Xanax in Cheyenne. After Alastair. So maybe it’d been that.
Before Ketchum had been Carthage. He’d hung on to Bobby’s voice scratchy over the radio and he’d been able to get it together a little. Enough to keep moving. But there was nothing to do right now, he’s supposed to be getting some shut eye. He thinks about calling Bobby. Doesn’t know what he’d say. Doesn’t want to wake Sam up. Doesn’t know if he’d be able to work the phone.
It’d been a bad idea, thinking of Carthage. For an hour all he can feel is Jo’s blood slippery under his hands. He stares at the glowing red numerals of the digital clock on the nightstand by the bed until his eyes sting while the growls of Meg’s hellhounds rumble in his chest. He sits up and darts a look at Sam but Sam’s rolled away from him, the curved line of his back rising and falling in the pattern that means Sam will be out for hours if you leave him alone. Swiping his phone off of the nightstand, Dean shrugs into his coat and slips out the motel room door as quiet as he can.
Outside everything is too bright. Dean squints and instinctively heads for the darkest patch in his field of vision, which turns out to be an alley between the main building of the motel and the main office. He’s already hit Bobby’s number when he remembers Bobby might not want to talk to him right now. Threatening to shoot a guy’s resurrected wife tends to have consequences. Leaning back against the painted cinderblock wall of the motel, he listens to Bobby’s personal line ring a few times and then cancels the call.
He tries Cas but the call keeps dropping, which could mean anything. Cas hasn’t said much about whether he’s had other angels on his ass, if Zach’s goons are after him.
They just saw Cas yesterday morning and he’d been fine. Well, not fine, but still in one piece. Dean doesn’t let himself think anything beyond that. Cas will turn up. When he’s ready.
Somewhere down the road, further in town, an old-fashioned church bell starts to toll and Dean realizes it must be Sunday. Something swells to fill his chest, a black empty thing, so he squeezes his eyes shut against the bright strip of sunlight on the wall across the alley and he’d block his ears too if he could move.
for a second I thought I’d left a pot roast burning in the oven
His hands are scrabbling against the cinderblock behind him and something clatters to the pavement. The phone. He slides down the rough wall until he’s closer to the ground. Feels for the hard plastic case of the phone and curls his fingers around it. This’ll pass if he just lets it. He knows that.
He knows that but it just keeps going.
“Agent Willis, FBI.” There’s a voice in his ear. Dean blinks. “Look, whoever this is, I don’t--”
“Bobby?”
There’s a silence that lasts long enough for Dean to realize he’s the one who must have called. His phone is pressed to his ear, anyway.
“Yeah,” Bobby says. Kinda flat and wary, and Dean shouldn’t have called him but he did and all he can really do is sit there and breathe. “Is there something I can do for you? ‘Cause now’s not the best time.”
“Right,” Dean says. “No, uh, no, I--”
Dean catches the edge of a muffled sigh and he knows he’s the last person Bobby wants to talk to. But when Bobby’s voice comes back, the impatience is gone. “Where are you?”
Dean can’t remember. He opens his eyes again. There’s a cracked sidewalk under his boots and he’s sitting on his haunches and the church bells have stopped.
“Dean.” Bobby sounds solid this time. “Hey, kid, where are you? Is Sam there?”
“No,” Dean says. “I mean. He’s asleep. He’s sleeping.”
“Okay. Alright. Are you in the room? In a motel?”
Dean shuts his eyes with a cold wash of shame because he knows what Bobby’s doing and he knows Bobby of all people shouldn’t have to be doing this right now but all he can do is cling to the voice anyway. “Yeah. No, I-I’m outside,” he says. “Uh, I’m just outside the room a ways.”
“It’s going on ten o’clock here,” Bobby says, even and calm and Dean hangs on every word. “Fixing to be a nice sunny day.”
“Yeah?” Dean lets himself sink the rest of the way to the pavement until he can feel it cold and gritty under his ass.
“What time is it where you are?” Bobby prompts.
Dean has to lower the phone so he can look at his watch. Then he checks the time against the display on his phone, in case they switched time zones and he didn’t adjust.
“Dean?” Bobby’s voice is tinny so Dean brings the phone back up to his ear.
“S’ten here, too. And it’s, uh. It’s bright. Sunny.” And then just like that, the memory of where they are pops back into his head. There’s a motel room key in his jacket pocket so he takes it out and squints at the tag just to be sure. Kelso Motor Inn, it says. “We’re in Kelso. Kelso, Missouri.”
“Alright, good,” Bobby says. Sweat trickles down the side of Dean’s neck. He swipes at it with his free hand, drags his hand over his forehead, his face. “What’re you boys doing in Kelso?”
“Laundry,” Dean laughs. It’s a threadbare sound but Bobby doesn’t comment. “We’re just, uh, we’re between jobs.” He wants to tell Bobby about heaven but the words don’t come.
“Yeah?” Bobby starts talking at him, something about a hunter he calls Garth who got himself into a pickle with a goblin in Utah of all places. Dean just rests the back of his head against the wall behind him and listens until Bobby’s voice turns into a white noise drone and his body goes heavy.
He doesn’t realize he’s half asleep until Bobby’s voice changes cadence in his ear. “Dean, you still there?”
He clears his throat and rubs at his eyes. “I’m here.”
“You good?”
An apology bubbles up but he knows Bobby won’t want to hear it, won’t want to get into Karen and everything that happened with the zombies, so all he says is “Yeah.”
“Might have something for you up in Minnesota. Got a few more leads to follow, I’ll call later on today, okay?”
“Okay,” Dean echoes, and then Bobby cuts the call.
There’s not a rifle in his face when he wakes up this time, so he figures that counts for something. Everything’s blurry the way it always is when you’ve slept hard but not long enough. Sam’s bed is empty, the covers rumpled, but Dean can hear the burble and pop of a coffee maker on its last legs and underneath that a clatter of keys. The mattress isn’t very comfortable and he must have slept funny on his shoulder because it’s sending pulses of pain down his arm to where his fingers are tingling with pins and needles.
“Dean, you up?” Sam pitches his voice low, in case Dean’s not, but they know each other’s breathing patterns too well for it to be anything but a rhetorical question.
Dean shifts so his shoulder stops bugging him and doesn’t answer. Sam leaves him alone. After awhile the coffeemaker sputters and hisses to completion and Dean listens to Sam get up and pour himself a cup. The tink of the spoon hitting the side of the mug as Sam stirs in his sugar. The way Sam slurps a little when he sips if the coffee’s too hot. The pad of Sam’s bare feet back to the table by the window where he’s got the laptop set up.
He probably would have stayed where he was for another hour but something is digging into his hip like he’s got rocks in bed with him. So he sits up slow, all his joints creaking and his head muffled, vaguely seasick. There’s a lump in the front pocket of his jeans that turns out to be the room key on its ring. And in with the key are the oblong cylinders of the shells he’d picked up in their last motel room.
Fucking Roy and Walt.
He must have said it aloud, because Sam lets out a bemused snort.
“Any news?” He rattles the shells in his palm and turns toward his brother. Sam’s still in the clothes he’d put on after their resurrections and a crease from his pillow runs up one cheek.
Sam glances up from the laptop, chipped coffee mug cradled in one hand. “Nothing so far. Guess the lack of any dead bodies kept it under the radar.”
“Motel probably didn’t even report it. Something like that’d be bad for business.”
“There was a lot of blood,” Sam says, but doesn’t argue further. No news is good news and it’s not like there’s much they can do about it.
Dean tosses the shells onto the bedspread and rubs his shoulder, which is still twinging at him. The muscles of his back have tightened up into a snarl and his neck is so stiff it hurts a little to turn his head. So all he’s thinking of is hot water when Sam clicks the laptop shut and it takes him a moment to realize Sam’s waiting for his attention.
“Last night. I mean, this morning--”
He rubs his palms against his thighs. “Yeah?”
Sam’s got that narrow-eyed expression like he thinks he’ll be able to peer through Dean’s skin if he tries hard enough. Dean pulls himself to his feet and heads for the coffeemaker.
“C’mon, Sam.” His brother left a clean mug out for him and the pot is full but he hovers there for a minute because he’s not so sure caffeine’s a good idea after this morning. He’s got a bottle of Jack in his bag, but it’s only two thirty and Sam’s already watching him. If he’d been together enough to think of it earlier maybe he would have gotten more sleep.
The silence gets awkward. Sam lets out a breath like he’s been holding it. “Dean--”
Dean turns back around, the empty mug still gripped in one hand like a weapon. Sam shifts in his chair and sets his own mug down on the table.
“I think we need to talk about it.” Sam frowns like he knows exactly how officious he’s coming off.
“Bobby’s gonna call later. Says he’s got a job for us in Minnesota. Weren’t you tracking demonic omens up there?” Dean pours himself some coffee for something to do, so he doesn’t have to worry about his hands betraying him.
“When’d you talk to Bobby?”
Dean shrugs, stirring a couple of packets of sugar into his coffee even though he usually drinks it black. “This morning. You were asleep.”
“I’m just surprised, is all. When we left I thought he might need a little space.”
“Yeah, well, since when does the apocalypse care about what anyone needs?” The minute he says it he knows it’s a mistake. He sips his coffee and tries not to make a face at the sweetness as Sam gets that look, the one that says he thinks he knows what’s going on in Dean’s noggin.
“Look,” Sam says, trying on his patient psychologist voice. “I know what happened in heaven was a setback. It rattled me too. But--”
“Did you miss the part where our best bet told us to fuck off?” Dean summons up a mask of anger he doesn’t really feel. “Maybe you didn’t get the memo, but Elvis has left the building.”
“I got the memo.” Sam sighs, and maybe he got a couple more hours of sleep than Dean, but it wasn’t enough. “But Dean, last night at the laundromat, you can’t tell me that was about God.”
For a minute they lock eyes and Dean can’t look away. Sam’s never understood anything, not really, and Dean’s never wanted him to. But he always tries, even for the stuff Dean himself doesn’t understand. Dean’s never known what to do with that.
He sets his mug down. “Sam--” He sounds desperate to his own ears and hates it. “I don’t know what last night was about, okay? Can we just--”
Sam deflates, breaks the gaze first. Flips the laptop back open. “Yeah. Okay.”
Dean lets out a breath and swipes at his mouth. Grabs his duffle from the foot of his bed.
“I’m just gonna--”
Sam doesn’t look up. “Yeah.”
This time Dean takes the first shower.
rating: PG-13, gen
summary: Sam’s never understood anything, not really, and Dean’s never wanted him to. But he always tries, even for the stuff Dean himself doesn’t understand. Dean’s never known what to do with that.
words: 9,962
notes: takes place in season 5 in between "Dark Side of the Moon" and "99 Problems." destro was big time moral support. <3
Fits with earlier stories: Or where you go, or where you've been and all the fear of the Lord I was given.
[warnings.]warnings: rather close POV depiction of a panic attack playing out over time is the best way I can put it. I dunno if it's triggering, so I wanted to give a heads up.
Sam takes the first shower. They bicker back and forth about it for a minute half-heartedly, but Dean needs to not see Sam with blood all over him right now and maybe Sam figures that out because after a couple of rounds of you first, no you, no you, will you please just take a fucking shower already Sam grabs his duffel and disappears into the shitty, mildew-stained bathroom.
Fucking Roy and Walt, the morons. There’s physical evidence everywhere -- shotgun shells left on the carpet, one of the ski masks in a limp heap by the bed where Dean had died and there’s bound to be a strand or two of hair caught up in the knit. Amateurs. Not that he and Sam were much better most days, but Jesus, they usually weren’t planning on trying to get away with shooting two guys point blank in the chest with shotguns in a freaking motel where everyone for a mile around would hear the blasts and come running.
He figures Zachariah probably had something to do with the shocking lack of any attention paid to those shotgun blasts. Lucky them. They’ll have to ditch the cards they used to pay for this room, though, and that fucking sucks.
There’s not much to be done about the blood. By now it’s soaked through to the mattresses, so taking the sheets with them would be pointless. Dean scoops up the shells and gets a faint whiff of gunpowder. He should leave them out on the floor to be found, let the fuckers face their own consequences, but those consequences might have blow-back Dean doesn’t want to particularly deal with if the moron assassins do happen to get caught and someone asks about the obvious lack of two dead bodies. So he pockets the shells to get rid of later and stuffs the ski mask into the weapons bag. Might come in handy.
Sam’s out of the shower in record time, followed from the bathroom by a swirl of damp air just as Dean finishes leaving a message for Cas.
“All yours,” Sam says, his eyes flickering over the bloody front of Dean’s shirt, and oh yeah, maybe he should have stripped that off.
Sam opens his mouth like he’s got something to say, but Dean pushes past him and closes himself into the little bathroom. It’s been awhile since motel bathrooms haven’t left him itchy and on the edge of claustrophobia but right now it’s almost a relief, being cut off from Sam’s scrutiny, from scrutinizing Sam.
Apparently being brought back to life by angels doesn’t cure you of the massive hangover you had coming to you before your chest was disintegrated by two guys you’d once trusted with your back, because Dean gets a little woozy under the hot water. Decides he’s clean enough, the blood washed away at least, and sits down hard on the toilet for a minute telling himself he’s not gonna puke because kneeling bare on this floor is a revolting proposition.
After the danger passes he pulls his jeans back on, since they were spared the worst and it will remind him to ditch the shells if they’re right there in his pocket. He catches the burnt gunpowder smell again and wrinkles his nose. His shirts are stained with blood but there’s a few black powder marks too. He balls them up with the blood on the inside and finds a spot in his duffel, another thing to ditch when they’re a safe distance away, like, two states maybe. Used to be that spent gunpowder wasn’t something he thought much about or even noticed or if he did, it was just a familiar part of his every day, like sweat and leather. Guess having a gun go off in your face puts things into a new perspective, but it’s not like it’s even the first time he’s been shot, though, so... whatever. It’ll fade.
Muffled voices through the door and he’s reaching for the gun he didn’t bring into the bathroom with him when he recognizes one of the cadences as belonging to Cas. The other is Sam, of course, which he knew without thinking. He sits back down on the toilet and realizes he should probably put on a shirt before he goes to let Cas down easy, if Sam hasn’t already. Part of him -- maybe most of him -- hopes that Sam has, and that’s a shitty thought but there it is. Dean’s tired and hungover and ready to be in another state and so not up to the look he knows will be on Cas’s face when they tell him what Joshua said about God.
He’s just tired. He thinks about turning the shower back on, standing under the water where he won’t be able to hear Cas and Sam talking, and maybe when he comes back out Cas will have fluttered off again to wherever Cas goes. And maybe another swipe with the crappy bar of motel soap will get rid of the linger of gunpowder.
Or maybe he should just suck it up.
He lets Sam drive. Well, really what he does is stow his bag then slide into the passenger seat of the Impala and make sure the keys are already in the ignition by the time Sam closes the motel room door behind him. Sam must notice, because he kind of swerves in his path on the way to the car in a way that might have at least brought a grin to Dean’s face a couple of years ago.
Sam doesn’t say anything. Just shoots him a look that Dean doesn’t want to read much into and starts the engine rumbling. Dean must doze off at some point because the next thing he knows the engine sound is gone along with the steady feel of forward motion. His face has tried to mould itself to the passenger door frame so he sits up and rubs at it, squinting at the overcast noon glare coming through the windshield. Wonders where his sunglasses are. Wonders where his brother is. Doesn’t think to wonder where they are, besides not moving, until there’s an impatient rap at his window that echoes through his hangover and Jesus, he didn’t even see the guy approach, which means he either needs a lot more sleep or a whole shitload of coffee.
Dean makes a face and the guy bent over his window bangs his knuckles against the glass again, like Dean wasn’t looking straight at him. Big guy with a buzz cut and some ill-considered tattoos, but just a kid. Couldn’t be more than twenty. Soft face screwed up in annoyance. Dean thinks about ignoring him but the kid looks the type that would take it out on the Impala’s hide, so he rolls down his window a couple inches. Not enough that the kid could get more than a hand through if he tried. But enough to stop the rapping.
“Can’t park here,” the kid says, leaning over the gap like Dean wouldn’t be able to hear him otherwise, his hands on his hips.
“Didn’t do the parking,” Dean says, which is the obvious if pointless truth given where he’s sitting.
“Does it look like I give a damn if you were the one to pick the spot?”
Dean rubs at his face again. There’s probably a mark there from where the door meets the window. “No sir, it does not,” Dean says, and the kid grimaces at him like he can’t figure out whether the sir really means fuck you, which it does, and the kid should know that much given that Dean’s betting he’s never been addressed as sir in his entire short life. “But since I don’t have the keys, I can’t do much about the parking situation.”
The kid peers past Dean at the steering wheel, at the ignition where the keychain would be dangling, and wrinkles his nose. “You can’t sleep here,” he says, like Dean’s foiling all his plans for the day, which as far as Dean can tell involve throwing his weight around the parking lot of a Stop n Go like a petty tyrant.
There’s a plastic name tag pinned to the breast of the kid’s flannel shirt, name scrawled out in big letters in black magic marker.
“Well, Dylan, does it look like I’m sleeping?”
The kid’s face has gone patchy red, about ten seconds from trying to shove his hand through the gap between the window and the door in a fruitless attempt to vent his annoyance on Dean’s face, and Dean’s of a mind to let him try, but just then Sam appears on the driver’s side and the kid takes a step back. All Dean can see of Sam is a swath of button-down shirt and the greasy bag he’s holding in one hand. The other hand is drifting behind Sam’s back to where there’s probably a piece stuffed into his waistband, but he doesn’t pull it.
“There a problem?” Sam’s voice sets the kid back another step from the Impala.
“No sir,” the kid says, then like an afterthought, all polite like, “You can’t park here is all, but it looks like you’re on your way, so...”
Sam’s gun hand comes back in view, slips into his pocket for the keys. “Alright,” he says, all easy charm. “Sorry about that.”
“Oh,” the kid shuffles and Dean rolls his eyes. “Uh, yeah, okay. No problem.”
Sam slides into the driver’s seat and tosses the paper bag onto the seat between them.
“Have a nice day!” Dean calls after the kid’s retreating back. He can’t rustle up easy or charming and doesn’t even try.
“Making friends?” Sam says, his tone is too careful to be light hearted so Dean ignores him. Whatever’s in the bag, it smells like it was scorched within an inch of edibility. Sam gestures toward the bag like it’s an offering. “It’s all they had fresh.”
Fresh? Dean reaches for the bag and opens it as Sam starts up the engine, pulls out of the parking lot and follows the signs back towards the interstate. There’s a couple of those ridiculously tiny sized bags of potato chips, the kind that once you let the air out hold about half a handful of chips, and underneath nestle two foil-wrapped oblong shapes.
“Hot dogs,” Sam says, as if it’s not obvious. Stuck between the foil and the bag are a bunch of packages of ketchup and mustard. A couple of green ones but those are for Sam because who puts relish on hot dogs? His brother, that’s who. When they’d been kids, Dean had liked to pulverize the chips and sprinkle them on the hot dog to make the whole thing crunchy, which never failed to gross Sam out. But gas station relish was just nasty.
Dean’s about as far from hungry as he can remember being. Ever. Overcooked hot dog fills the car while Dean stares down into the bag, weighing the value of forcing down the food against the chances that it might come right back up.
“You want yours now?” he asks, buying time.
Sam glances at him sidelong. “Sure. Can you...”
“Yeah.”
One of shotgun’s jobs is fixing up the food for the driver if they’re on the road. Dean pulls a hot dog out of the bag and peels the foil open. The bun is a little smooshed but not too shabby, though the meat isn’t so much scorched as mummified. Been rotating around the Stop n Go’s hot plate since opening, probably. Dean wipes away whatever look he can feel trying to take over his face and digs out a couple of the condiments. Makes sure to empty every package of relish he can find on Sam’s mummy dog before he hands it over.
“Thanks,” Sam says. Takes a big bite out of his hot dog, eyes on the road. It’ll be gone in four or five chomps.
Dean tears open one of the bags of chips and hands that over too before opening his own bag. Chews and swallows one of the ten whole chips inside, waits to see if it’s gonna stay down. Tries to keep the sight of Sam’s hot dog, oozing ketchup like blood and dotted with too-green chunks of relish, as far in the corner of his vision as he can get without turning his head away. Tries another chip. Tries to ignore the way Sam’s eyeing him.
“You gonna eat yours?” Sam says it like he wants to poach Dean’s share of the food, but that’s not what he means.
“Back off, glutton.” Dean forces a grin and grabs his hot dog out of the bag. The full force of the stench is right in his face when he unwraps it, and it smells familiar. It should, they’ve eaten a ballpark’s worth over the course of their lives, dad used to say hot dogs are good car food. But it’s not that kind of familiar. Dean’s not sure what kind of familiar it is exactly but it’s the kind that makes him want out of the car. Now.
“Hey, uh, I have to take a piss,” he announces.
Sam shoots an exasperated look at the rear view mirror. “You couldn’t have gone when we were stopped?”
“Didn’t have to then,” Dean says automatically. The hot dog is more shriveled than wrinkled, and if he doesn’t get away from the smell soon he’s going to wrench the wheel out of Sam’s hands.
Sam sighs and weaves his way through a caravan of semis and takes the next exit. Mission, Nebraska. Dean holds his hot dog in his lap and tries not to breathe too deeply. He wants to fling himself out of the car but its still moving and that might freak Sam out. He can wait until they stop. He can.
The first likely place they come across is a 7-11. As Sam pulls into the parking lot, Dean stuffs the hot dog back into the paper bag and is out of the car the moment Sam shifts to park. The salty smell follows him even after he tosses the bag into an open trash barrel and then smacks him in the face when he pushes through the door to the 7-11 because of course there’s another one of those roller grills on the counter next to the cash register. Dean makes a circuit around the store but can’t find a restroom sign, so he’s forced back to the counter. Where the hot dogs go to die.
“You got a bathroom?” he asks the woman behind the register. The faint humming from the roller grill settles in his teeth as she eyes him.
“Not for the general public, we don’t.” She’s probably Dean’s age, the start of lines framing her mouth that’ll deepen in the next five years. Face bare of makeup, her hair back in a tight ponytail. A couple of charms on a thin gold chain might stand for the kids she’s got at home. The way she stands at the counter, the set of her shoulders, he thinks a shotgun wouldn’t look out of place in her hands.
If she had one, it’d be aimed at his chest right about now. Might even be a pistol under that counter.
“How about for paying customers?” he asks, thumb pointing to the coffee maker.
“Pay up first,” she says, “you can grab your Joe on the way out.”
The thing is, he doesn’t actually need to piss. He’s not even sure why he’s playing out this charade. But he forks over the four dollars for two large coffees and drops the change into the take-a-penny tray and the cashier slides him a key tied to a splintery wood block and nods to a door marked Employees Only to the right of the counter, next to the refrigerator cases full of energy drinks. They key’s not for that door, though, ‘cause it doesn’t have a lock. Dean pushes through and follows the short hallway to a door marked with a pictogram of figures with and without a skirt, in case there was any confusion as to who was allowed to use the facilities.
Dean’s never been so glad for the heady mix of stale piss and lemon-lime industrial cleaner.
As far as convenience store bathrooms go this one’s pretty clean. Dean risks taking a seat on the closed toilet and stares at the white ceramic of the urinal for a couple of minutes, lets his mind blank out. The whole place, floor and walls, are tiled with grey and green squares, the grout gone mostly black on the floor, but there isn’t much in the way of grime. Somebody gives it a mop on a fairly frequent basis. There’s one of those paper charts on the door with dates and initials marking the last time it was cleaned, and the last date listed is yesterday. He thinks it was yesterday. He’s not sure how long they were dead, though, so he can’t be sure. Might have been a couple of days.
Fucking angels.
That gives him the push to get back on his feet. He turns the water on at the sink, lets it run for a minute before splashing his face. Washes his hands with the bubble-gum pink soap from the dispenser while water drips from his nose and chin and doesn’t look in the mirror. Dries himself off with scratchy brown paper towel and almost forgets the woodblock with the key, which he’d left on the toilet tank.
Back out in the store he tosses the cashier her key with a nod of thanks that she returns and then huddles over the coffee stand, focusing on the burnt caramel aroma while he pours out two styrofoam cups. He stuffs a bunch of sugar packets in his pockets for Sam and makes a beeline for the door.
Sam’s leaning against the driver’s side of the Impala, sipping from a cup identical to the two Dean’s carrying.
“Oh,” Sam says, with a sheepish shrug. “I--”
Dean turns and chucks one of the cups into the trash barrel and gets back in the car.
Sam tosses him the keys after they stop for dinner at a sub shop just outside of Lincoln. Dean manages half of his footlong -- tuna salad, and he’d ignored Sam’s raised eyebrow -- and Sam doesn’t veer from his steady patter of small talk but he eyes Dean’s leftovers like they might tell him something important. Judging by the local paper, this part of Nebraska is ridiculously free of the supernatural. They don’t have to discuss moving on. When Dean slides into the driver’s seat with a new cup of shitty sub shop coffee, he heads back to the highway.
All he’s done is ride in the car all day but he feels drained, tapped like a sugar maple. Energy drip-drip-dripping away. The coffee keeps him awake but once it gets dark oncoming headlights smear in his peripheral vision. He shoves in some Metallica and Sam doesn’t even blink even though he knows Sam hates Metallica. Two songs in he hears the distant whine of sirens under the drums. Turns down the volume, head cocked, and he can still hear it aways off. No flash of blue and red lights in the rearview mirror and they’re hundreds of miles away from their own double homicide but maybe the clerk at the motel had taken down their plates. Should have switched them out last time they stopped, but he’d thought they were far enough away.
Sam must notice him checking the mirrors, because he sits up straighter. “What’s wrong?”
The siren is faint but still there, like a ringing in Dean’s ears, but it never seems to come closer. Stopped for an accident maybe, miles behind them. He shakes his head. “Nothing.” Pops the tape out and finds a public radio station playing the blues and the sirens fade.
His plan was to drive through the night but sometime around two he catches himself jerking out of white line fever, no memory of the past twenty miles. Sam squints at him when Dean jostles his shoulder but Sam had put in a good twelve hours and he’s in no condition to take over.
“Gonna stop,” Dean says, but turns out that’s easier said than done. They’re in the middle of nowhere. He white knuckles the wheel to keep himself focused and pulls off at the next exit, follows the signs for the Kelso Motor Inn (Free Cable! A/C!) and when he finds it, the lot is packed full.
Since there’s nowhere to park, Sam hops out and jogs to the office while Dean lets the Impala grumble to herself. The blues station has faded to static so Dean switches the radio off, beats out a rhythm on the steering wheel. Tries not to listen for sirens. Sam reappears a couple minutes later, empty handed.
“There’s some kind of local agricultural thing,” he says as he gets back in the car, gesturing vaguely, like maybe he’d only been half listening, “so they’re full. And the owner said this is the only place in town.”
“Shit.” Dean rubs at his eyes. They could pull off somewhere out of the way, grab a few hours, but Dean’s bones have been grinding together for the past hundred miles.
“He says they’ll have a room in the morning, says this crew is a bunch of early risers. We can check back around six or seven, should be something for us.”
They half heartedly argue about it for a few minutes, but neither of them wants to sleep in the car and neither of them is up to driving much farther. Finding a place to kill time it is. Dean guides the Impala down the dark main street of Nowhere, Missouri, looking for an all night coffee joint, a Steak n Shake, anything that doesn’t mind too much loitering in the middle of the night. Everything is deserted, even the McDonald's. Dean can’t remember what day it is offhand but it’s so late it wouldn’t matter: the three bars they pass are shuttered anyway. The first lighted window he comes across is the Ty-Dee Wash 24 Hr Coin Laundry.
Done.
Sam eyes the bright bank of windows on the front of the laundromat that stretch nearly floor to ceiling and shrugs, so Dean finds a place to park by the front door.
“Why d’you suppose they always build these places so’s the whole world can watch you fold your underwear?” Dean grumbles as the Impala shudders to a stop.
“Free advertising,” Sam says, and slides out.
They don’t have much in the way of cash. Dean grabs the battered Folger’s canister where they keep change for tolls and rattles it, but there’s only a couple bucks in there by the sound. There’s sixty-odd cents in his pocket, left over from the sub shop, and Sam’s got a couple of wrinkled bills.
“They might have an ATM,” Sam says, but he doesn’t sound hopeful.
“S’enough for a couple loads.” Dean pops the trunk and they grab their duffels. There’s an emergency stash of bills he just remembered, coiled up in an old orange plastic prescription bottle made out to one of Elroy McGillicudy’s sons, thrown in with the flasks of holy water. Maybe twenty bucks in ones, but it’ll do the job, so he grabs that and stuffs it in his pocket. It’s a good thing, too, because they’re out of detergent and it costs an arm and a leg when you buy it from the laundromat.
There’s a handwritten sign on the door: ASK US ABOUT OUR OVERNIGHT SPECIALS. It comes off more like a demand than a friendly offer. A leather strap studded with tarnished sleigh bells tied to the handle of the door gives off a death rattle when Dean pushes into the Ty-Dee Wash’s arid warmth. After drifting through the dark all night the place is searingly bright, everything overexposed until he blinks a couple of times. He must come up short while he does it because Sam bumps into his back and then steps to the side, his eyes slitted against the light same as Dean’s.
When his vision clears he finds the attendant behind the counter staring at them, a kind of half-curious hostility stirring from somewhere deep in her near-comatose boredom. He almost opens his mouth to reassure the lady they won’t be any trouble but Sam is already headed towards the machines. The Ty-Dee Wash isn’t as empty as you’d think at three a.m. -- places like this never were. There’s always swing shifters and insomniacs anywhere you go, even in tiny nowheresville with its lone no-vacancy motel. Sam picks a scantily populated corner and drops his bag onto one of the familiar wide-lipped plastic tables. Here in the Ty-Dee Wash, they’re a brash pumpkin orange. Probably relics of the 70’s, judging by the orange and avocado approximately daisy-shaped decals starting to peel from the walls.
The table’s big enough that they can stand side by side to empty out the contents of their duffels. Sam elbows him sharp in the ribs and grabs the blood caked shirts Dean had forgot about before Dean even notices that they’ve landed on top of his heap of wrinkled clothes.
“Dude,” Sam hisses, and shoves the evidence of Dean’s demise into his own bag.
Dean darts a glance up but the closest of their fellow night owl launderers, a stocky guy in his sixties dressed pretty much exactly like them down to the work boots, hasn’t even turned in their direction. “Chill,” Dean says.
“I will if you pay attention and stop trying to get us arrested.” Sam cinches his duffel shut with a jerk and tosses it aside, already separating out his lights and darks.
“Like anybody here gives a damn,” Dean mutters. Except for the attendant, who’s shooting occasional peeks in their direction. The Ty-Dee Wash is probably nothing but regulars, so he and Sam have got to be the highlight of the working year. She looks like she came with the place, Farrah hair and baby blue eyeshadow and pink-dyed feather earrings. Maybe they hired her in 1973 and never let her leave. The dog-eared magazines scattered around are probably thirty years out of date too.
Sam starts sorting Dean’s clothes like he thinks Dean’s too slow, so Dean moves aside to let him. Pulls Donald McGillicudy’s old pill bottle out of his pocket and twists off the child-proof cap, then shakes out the carefully rolled up cash. Counts out twenty-three dollars and shoves it back in his pocket, then pries open the Folger’s can and dumps the change out onto the table. Future Them frowns at the clatter but goes back to his crossword. Dean lines up the coins, makes little dollar piles: three dollars and fifty-eight cents.
“How many loads we got?” he asks Sam.
Sam shrugs. “Two. Maybe three.” That’s because Sam insists on washing the lights and darks separate. Dean figures no one cares much about his lights since they’re under his darks, so what does it matter? It’s cheaper if you wash ‘em together. But he doesn’t bother saying anything, because Sam will just make a face at him.
Dean jerks his thumb toward the line of vending machines. “Gonna get some soap.”
“Don’t forget the dryer sheets,” Sam says.
It’s not that he ever forgets them. It’s that sometimes they don’t have the cash, and dryer sheets aren’t exactly essential to the laundry process. But he just gives Sam a nod. Brings back a couple of single-use boxes of powdered Tide, a box of the dryer sheets with the annoying bear on the front, a bag of red licorice for Sam, and a bag of black for himself.
“You remember that time you left a red crayon in a load?” Sam says as he tosses their lights into one of the machines.
Dean doesn’t answer, too busy prying his pack of licorice open. There’s nothing to say about it anyway. Sam tells this story approximately every tenth time they do laundry. Something about the memory seems to delight him, which Dean’s never gotten, but he never says anything either.
“Dad was so pissed,” Sam says, grinning, and it’s only stories from when Sam was little that he thinks of Dad being pissed as funny. “All our underwear and socks were pink. His tee shirts. Man, the look on his face?”
Dad used to tell the story too. Pretty much word for word the way Sam tells it, only it had sounded different.
“Yeah,” Dean says eventually, because Sam seems to expect a response.
Once their clothes are in the washers there’s nothing to do but wait. Sam retrieves his laptop from the car and folds himself down into one of the molded orange plastic chairs next to their table, his knees practically in his ears, the computer balanced on his thighs. Dean can’t imagine there’s wireless in this place, but doesn’t bother to ask. He sits next to Sam for a few minutes but the hard plastic chair sets off an ache that stretches from his tailbone up to the base of his skull, the puzzle pieces of his spine jammed together all wrong from too many hours in the car.
So he changes a couple of bills for quarters and heads for the cluster of old arcade games near the windows. That’s the thing about nowhere little towns -- these things would go for good money anyplace else, snapped up by retro-loving hipsters. Centipede has a hand-lettered OUT OF ORDER! sign taped to its console, but Ms. Pac-Man still works, and there’s even a pinball machine. Dean blows a dollar on Ms. Pac-Man before muscle memory starts to kick in, the red ball of the controller slipping snug into his palm. The jazzy little MIDI tunes hover somewhere between grating on his nerves and homey nostalgia while he guides the lipsticked monster around the screen, gobbling white dots and the occasional bunch of cherries. It takes him another couple of games to remember the names of the little floating ghosties: Inkie and Pinky, Blinky and Sue, but his memory doesn’t extend to which ghost is which.
Real ghosts aren’t this easy to avoid. The ghosts in regular Pac-Man had followed set patterns, though, if he remembers right. Once you knew the pattern, the game wasn’t as fun. Ms. Pac-Man, though, you had to be tricky. It took more skill to stay alive. He makes it two levels and suddenly the screen comes to life with crude animation. Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man falling in love. Like if she dodges enough ghosts and eats enough little dots, everything falls in place for her. He wonders if she ever resents being hooked up for eternity with her male twin, if maybe she’d have preferred one of the ghosts. Or maybe the centipede over in the other console. But it’s not like she can escape her programming, and the centipede is dead, at least for now.
After awhile the pervasive high pitched whew whew whew whew of the soundtrack works its way under his skin until he’s straining to listen for real sirens, his attention flicking from the pixelated maze to the dark nothing outside the bank of windows at the front of the laundromat. The controller goes slick in his grip and a flock of ghosts rushes Ms. Pac-Man, who turns belly up to die with a mournful tune before she and her destined beau reach the stage of their burgeoning relationship where they take turns chasing each other across the screen. Dean wipes his hands off on his jeans and takes the rest of his quarters to the pinball machine.
He hasn’t seen a working pinball in years, so he’s even rustier at it than he was Ms. Pac-Man. His vision blurs and he can’t quite follow the silver ball bearing as it bounces around the back of the platform, keeps losing track of it until it slips by his guard and back into the bowels of the machine. After he wastes a dollar in the span of fifteen minutes, Dean throws in the towel.
Sam looks up when Dean flops back into the chair next to him. There’s about fifty windows open on the laptop screen, the top few full of densely packed Latin text.
“Somebody’s got an unsecured mobile hotspot going,” Sam says, like he’s reading Dean’s mind.
“Find anything?” Dean asks, not because he cares all that much, but because he’s bored and restless and tired and there’s nothing else to do.
Sam shrugs. “There’s been a lot of what looks like demonic activity in Minnesota. Might be worth checking out.”
“Yeah, okay.” Dean snags one of the wrinkled old magazines from the low table between their chairs. People, June 2008. Huh. Wonder what he missed.
“Where d’you think Cas went?” Sam asks after a few minutes of key-rattling, page-flipping silence.
Dean’s been trying not to think about the look on Cas’s face. “Dunno.”
“You think we should try to call him?”
“Go ahead,” Dean says. Sam just looks at him, like dialing up angels is his territory. “What?”
“Aren’t you worried about him?”
Wouldn’t matter if he was. “Cas can take care of himself.”
Usually the familiar thunk-thunk rhythm of industrial clothes driers and the constant hiss of washers lulls Dean into the closest he gets to relaxing these days, but tonight everything seems aggressively loud, like a ticking clock when you’re lying in the grip of insomnia. The older guy closest to them has pulled his dry clothes out into one of the big wire carts and is folding a pile of white tee-shirts with the kind of precision Dean’s father would have appreciated. A few rows away from them a woman at least a couple years younger than Sam is squinting down at a thick accounting textbook and chewing on the cap of her pen, a toddler limp and open-mouthed with sleep in a stroller by her chair. There can’t be a college around here for a hundred miles, so she’s probably in some kind of online program. Working second shift, nobody to take care of her kid. She looks up and notices his attention and her eyes shift away to the stroller. Dean’s too tired to fake anything like a reassuring smile but he can’t help but feel bad she caught him looking. From the pinched expression she’s used to being judged.
“Hey, you know. About Flagstaff,” Sam says, in that halting tone he uses when he’s sure saying something is a bad idea but he feels like he has to anyway, “I didn’t know. I mean, I didn’t think about what Dad would’ve--”
Dean stands up. He doesn’t know where he’s going or what he’s going to do, but he’s not staying here for a heart to heart about fucking Flagstaff.
“Whatever. You were a kid, Sam.” It feels wrong in his mouth, bitter.
Sam’s gaze shifts and focuses. “So were you,” he says, and Dean walks away.
Their wash is on the spin cycle, not ready for the dryers yet. Dean leans against their table and watches it for a couple minutes until he feels Sam next to him, just standing there. “I ran away on your watch,” Sam says, tossing Dean’s own words back at him. “So what happened when Dad got home?”
“Nothing.” He doesn’t look at Sam. Says it to the wall of washers.
“Dad chewed me out all the way back to the motel,” Sam says, almost like he’s reminiscing. “But you weren’t with us.”
“Sam--”
“You didn’t recognize the trailer. I forgot, it was just Dad who found me. Made me take Bones to the animal shelter. Said it was the humane thing to do.”
Dean’s hands are in fists. He stuffs them in his pockets before Sam notices.
“I don’t remember you being there when I got back,” Sam says, slow and thoughtful and Dean has to take a breath so he doesn’t do something stupid. There’s a smell at the back of his throat. Been there awhile maybe, but now it’s strong enough to register. Sharp, like ozone.
Dean turns away from his brother, scanning the room, but nothing stands out. “You smell that?”
Sam’s face screws up in confusion. “Smell what?”
He’s smelled it before. Can’t place it though. Corrosive, like it’s eating away at his nose.
“Sulfur?” Sam says, lowering his voice. Dean shakes his head.
“Electrical.” It tickles his throat and he has to suppress a cough. He swivels, but the guy with his tee shirts and the girl with her kid don’t seem bothered.
Sam’s staring at him.
“Nevermind,” he says, right as their washers wind to a halt.
Sam takes the whites and Dean takes the darks and he buries his hands in damp laundry and tries to ignore the smell but it lingers, stronger than the powder fresh Tide. Fucking Flagstaff. When he closes his eyes he can see his dad’s face, the way Dean hadn’t had to say anything, Dad had just known the minute he walked in the door. He opens them again to Sam watching him, realizes he’s been standing there too long. Grabs armfuls of wet laundry and dumps it in the nearby dryer, tosses in a dryer sheet. Sam’s already done, his machine thunk-thunking away.
Dean swipes a pile of coins off the table and tries to feed them into the slots on the dryer, but they don’t fit. He mutters obscenities to himself and tries again, fumbling the coins, then like an idiot dropping them to the tile floor where they bounce noisily around his boots.
“It only takes quarters,” tee-shirt guy says, and what the fuck? Of course it only takes quarters. But when Dean scoops the coins back up off the floor, he’s got a handful of nickels.
Sam’s still watching him from over by their table and tee-shirt guy is frowning and even the girl with the toddler is looking edgy and Dean realizes he’s still fuck fuck fuck-ing under his breath, so he shuts his mouth. Stalks over to the change machine and feeds in a dollar from the wad in his pocket but of course it’s too wrinkled and the machines spits it out with an annoyed grinding sound. Dean tries again with the only other one left in his pocket but the machine whirs away at him, the dollar bunching up when he forces it.
The Farrah look-alike at the front desk eyes him like she’s getting ready for a hold up. He tosses down a five and before he can say anything she’s shaking her head.
“You gotta get change from the machine,” she says, not even touching the bill.
“It won’t take my money. Look, can you just--”
“I’m sorry, but you have to get change from the machine. It’s policy.” Her jaw is set but her eyes have gone round and Jesus, Dean, dial it back a notch. He tries, he does, he takes a breath and pulls out a smile. Holds out the wrinkled ones.
“Maybe you could just exchange these for newer bills for me, then?”
The clerk’s attention skitters away from him and her face smooths out with relief. A moment later he can feel Sam a little behind him, hovering.
“I just want to dry my clothes and the fucking machine won’t take my money. Please. All I’m asking is--”
“I don’t want trouble,” the clerk says to him, her voice quavering. Then she turns to Sam, like Dean’s completely ceased to exist, like Sam’s her savior. “If he’s gonna be disruptive I’ll have to ask you to leave.”
And that is just the fucking last straw. Dean’s face is burning and he doesn’t know what he looks like but the clerk stumbles back a step away from the counter and her eyes dart to the wall-mounted phone a few feet away. Sam’s fingers dig into his shoulder and pull him back, and Dean hasn’t wanted to punch him so bad for months. Sam, the calm one, the voice of reason, the face everybody trusts, Sam puts himself between Dean and the lady scared out of her fucking mind because Dean wanted a couple of one dollar bills for his fucking laundry.
Sam’s talking to the clerk in a low voice, his hands up, placating, and it’s not like Dean even fucking did anything but ask for some change. Mr. Tee-Shirts and a couple of other guys are watching, looking like they’ll jump to Farrah’s defense if Dean even flinches, and there’s a switchblade in Dean’s pocket but all the guns are in the car. He catches himself thinking about it, catches his hand in his pocket closing around the knife, and what the fuck is wrong with him. Across the room, Ms. Pac-Man starts up again with the whew whew whew on her own like somebody’s called the video game cops, and a laugh tears out of him, high and not at all funny.
Sam turns around with a handful of quarters and grabs Dean by the bicep and jerks him away, back toward their table. “You need to calm down,” he says.
Dean tries to shake him off but Sam’s got ginormous hands. “Lemme go.”
Sam’s grip tightens. “Calm the fuck down before the nice lady reports us to the local PD.”
“Sam--” It comes out strangled, his throat closing in on him.
Sam abruptly changes directions, heading for the front door. Dean tries to pull away again but Sam manhandles him through the door and outside, drags him around the side of the building and slams him against the brick wall, pinning him in place with both hands. Dean loses track of things for a minute, bucking against his brother. Tries to headbutt him but Sam just dodges and presses him to the wall. GIves his shoulders a rough shake.
“Stop it,” Sam says. “Just-- what is going on with you?”
Dean doesn’t know where the next thing he says comes from but it blurts out of him anyway, airless and crazy. “Something’s burning in there.”
That brings Sam up short. He blinks at Dean, and in the orangey light of the parking lot he looks pale. “What?”
Dean shakes his head, because he doesn’t know why he said that.
“Nothing’s burning, Dean.” Sam says, slow and even.
It’s so strong he can still taste it. Like being caught in a grave with a salt-n-burn. “Okay.” His voice doesn’t sound like it belongs to him anymore. “She, uh. Sammy, she--”
“Maybe we should go,” Sam says. “I can get our--”
“She looked at me.” His hands are fisted in the fabric of Sam’s flannel shirt and he’s not sure when that happened. “She looked right at me.”
“Dean.” Sam lets go of his shoulders and for a long second Dean’s not sure his knees will hold. “I don’t know what you’re--”
The words trip and stutter out of him, getting caught on each other, unsteady, and it doesn’t sound like him at all. “That wasn’t real. With Zachariah, right? It wasn’t real. But if it wasn’t, how did, how did she, how did that thing know what it smelled like?”
“Like what smelled like?” Sam’s face is blank, and something inside Dean snaps shut with a click.
“Nothing,” he says. “We need to get our clothes before somebody snatches ‘em.”
Sam puts a hand out, stops him without touching before he can push off the wall. “No, Dean, what were you talking about?”
Dean shakes his head. Nothing. He hadn’t been talking about anything. Sam’s about to press it when a voice calls out from the front of the building.
“You boys alright out here?”
Sam straightens and Dean straightens and it’s the guy who’d been folding tee shirts closest to them, the guy about Bobby’s age.
“Yessir,” Sam says, responding to the tone like it’s muscle memory.
“I got your last load started,” the guy says, looking at each of them evenly in the eye in turn. “You’d best finish up and get out of here, before Lindsay calls the cops.” There’s a little humor in his voice. Sam smiles at the guy and Dean knows he doesn’t mean it, but it’s a smile the civilians usually buy. This one just shakes his head. “Look, I know you weren’t meaning to start anything in there.” He looks to Dean, this time.
All Dean can do is nod.
“Lindsay’s been through a lot,” is all the guy says before he gives them both a nod and disappears back into the laundromat.
They stand there in the silence of the little sliver of lot between the laundromat and a stand of scrapland, scraggly trees and vine-wrapped weedy bushes and a couple of bare, rusty fence posts. Blue light bleeds around their feet from the neon Ty-Dee Wash sign on the front of the building.
Sam shakes his head and gives Dean a once-over, a frown creeping across his face. “Maybe you should--”
“Yeah, fine,” Dean says. “Just, you know. Hurry it up.”
Sam sighs and runs a hand through his hair. “Soon as it’s dry, we’re out of here.” He looks back once, at the door to the Ty-Dee Wash. By then Dean’s standing by the Impala’s front bumper, one hand trapped in his pocket, the other on the solid metal of her hood. Just pressing down.
He can’t sleep. Sam’s crashed fully dressed on top of the covers on the other bed, but at least he’d kicked off his boots. The blackout blinds do pretty well at blocking the morning sun, but Dean’s awake anyway. The kind of awake that’s gone brittle and friable at the edges.
He lies on his back for awhile with his eyes closed, listening to Sam breathe, listening to people coming and going outside, the last stragglers from whatever agricultural event had filled the motel to the brim last night. His thoughts won’t settle in one place long enough for him to really focus on anything, even if there was something to focus on. They skitter around in his skull and he tries not to count his pulse because he knows paying too much attention to it will just make things worse. His breathing is slow and even but his heart’s been a runaway horse headed for the cliff’s edge since the Ty-Dee Wash.
It’s not the first time.
He remembers at that hospital in Ketchum with Martin and the wraith, they’d given him something that had stopped this but he doesn’t know what it was. Maybe they’d told him at the time, maybe not. That part isn’t very clear. They’d given him Xanax in Cheyenne. After Alastair. So maybe it’d been that.
Before Ketchum had been Carthage. He’d hung on to Bobby’s voice scratchy over the radio and he’d been able to get it together a little. Enough to keep moving. But there was nothing to do right now, he’s supposed to be getting some shut eye. He thinks about calling Bobby. Doesn’t know what he’d say. Doesn’t want to wake Sam up. Doesn’t know if he’d be able to work the phone.
It’d been a bad idea, thinking of Carthage. For an hour all he can feel is Jo’s blood slippery under his hands. He stares at the glowing red numerals of the digital clock on the nightstand by the bed until his eyes sting while the growls of Meg’s hellhounds rumble in his chest. He sits up and darts a look at Sam but Sam’s rolled away from him, the curved line of his back rising and falling in the pattern that means Sam will be out for hours if you leave him alone. Swiping his phone off of the nightstand, Dean shrugs into his coat and slips out the motel room door as quiet as he can.
Outside everything is too bright. Dean squints and instinctively heads for the darkest patch in his field of vision, which turns out to be an alley between the main building of the motel and the main office. He’s already hit Bobby’s number when he remembers Bobby might not want to talk to him right now. Threatening to shoot a guy’s resurrected wife tends to have consequences. Leaning back against the painted cinderblock wall of the motel, he listens to Bobby’s personal line ring a few times and then cancels the call.
He tries Cas but the call keeps dropping, which could mean anything. Cas hasn’t said much about whether he’s had other angels on his ass, if Zach’s goons are after him.
They just saw Cas yesterday morning and he’d been fine. Well, not fine, but still in one piece. Dean doesn’t let himself think anything beyond that. Cas will turn up. When he’s ready.
Somewhere down the road, further in town, an old-fashioned church bell starts to toll and Dean realizes it must be Sunday. Something swells to fill his chest, a black empty thing, so he squeezes his eyes shut against the bright strip of sunlight on the wall across the alley and he’d block his ears too if he could move.
for a second I thought I’d left a pot roast burning in the oven
His hands are scrabbling against the cinderblock behind him and something clatters to the pavement. The phone. He slides down the rough wall until he’s closer to the ground. Feels for the hard plastic case of the phone and curls his fingers around it. This’ll pass if he just lets it. He knows that.
He knows that but it just keeps going.
“Agent Willis, FBI.” There’s a voice in his ear. Dean blinks. “Look, whoever this is, I don’t--”
“Bobby?”
There’s a silence that lasts long enough for Dean to realize he’s the one who must have called. His phone is pressed to his ear, anyway.
“Yeah,” Bobby says. Kinda flat and wary, and Dean shouldn’t have called him but he did and all he can really do is sit there and breathe. “Is there something I can do for you? ‘Cause now’s not the best time.”
“Right,” Dean says. “No, uh, no, I--”
Dean catches the edge of a muffled sigh and he knows he’s the last person Bobby wants to talk to. But when Bobby’s voice comes back, the impatience is gone. “Where are you?”
Dean can’t remember. He opens his eyes again. There’s a cracked sidewalk under his boots and he’s sitting on his haunches and the church bells have stopped.
“Dean.” Bobby sounds solid this time. “Hey, kid, where are you? Is Sam there?”
“No,” Dean says. “I mean. He’s asleep. He’s sleeping.”
“Okay. Alright. Are you in the room? In a motel?”
Dean shuts his eyes with a cold wash of shame because he knows what Bobby’s doing and he knows Bobby of all people shouldn’t have to be doing this right now but all he can do is cling to the voice anyway. “Yeah. No, I-I’m outside,” he says. “Uh, I’m just outside the room a ways.”
“It’s going on ten o’clock here,” Bobby says, even and calm and Dean hangs on every word. “Fixing to be a nice sunny day.”
“Yeah?” Dean lets himself sink the rest of the way to the pavement until he can feel it cold and gritty under his ass.
“What time is it where you are?” Bobby prompts.
Dean has to lower the phone so he can look at his watch. Then he checks the time against the display on his phone, in case they switched time zones and he didn’t adjust.
“Dean?” Bobby’s voice is tinny so Dean brings the phone back up to his ear.
“S’ten here, too. And it’s, uh. It’s bright. Sunny.” And then just like that, the memory of where they are pops back into his head. There’s a motel room key in his jacket pocket so he takes it out and squints at the tag just to be sure. Kelso Motor Inn, it says. “We’re in Kelso. Kelso, Missouri.”
“Alright, good,” Bobby says. Sweat trickles down the side of Dean’s neck. He swipes at it with his free hand, drags his hand over his forehead, his face. “What’re you boys doing in Kelso?”
“Laundry,” Dean laughs. It’s a threadbare sound but Bobby doesn’t comment. “We’re just, uh, we’re between jobs.” He wants to tell Bobby about heaven but the words don’t come.
“Yeah?” Bobby starts talking at him, something about a hunter he calls Garth who got himself into a pickle with a goblin in Utah of all places. Dean just rests the back of his head against the wall behind him and listens until Bobby’s voice turns into a white noise drone and his body goes heavy.
He doesn’t realize he’s half asleep until Bobby’s voice changes cadence in his ear. “Dean, you still there?”
He clears his throat and rubs at his eyes. “I’m here.”
“You good?”
An apology bubbles up but he knows Bobby won’t want to hear it, won’t want to get into Karen and everything that happened with the zombies, so all he says is “Yeah.”
“Might have something for you up in Minnesota. Got a few more leads to follow, I’ll call later on today, okay?”
“Okay,” Dean echoes, and then Bobby cuts the call.
There’s not a rifle in his face when he wakes up this time, so he figures that counts for something. Everything’s blurry the way it always is when you’ve slept hard but not long enough. Sam’s bed is empty, the covers rumpled, but Dean can hear the burble and pop of a coffee maker on its last legs and underneath that a clatter of keys. The mattress isn’t very comfortable and he must have slept funny on his shoulder because it’s sending pulses of pain down his arm to where his fingers are tingling with pins and needles.
“Dean, you up?” Sam pitches his voice low, in case Dean’s not, but they know each other’s breathing patterns too well for it to be anything but a rhetorical question.
Dean shifts so his shoulder stops bugging him and doesn’t answer. Sam leaves him alone. After awhile the coffeemaker sputters and hisses to completion and Dean listens to Sam get up and pour himself a cup. The tink of the spoon hitting the side of the mug as Sam stirs in his sugar. The way Sam slurps a little when he sips if the coffee’s too hot. The pad of Sam’s bare feet back to the table by the window where he’s got the laptop set up.
He probably would have stayed where he was for another hour but something is digging into his hip like he’s got rocks in bed with him. So he sits up slow, all his joints creaking and his head muffled, vaguely seasick. There’s a lump in the front pocket of his jeans that turns out to be the room key on its ring. And in with the key are the oblong cylinders of the shells he’d picked up in their last motel room.
Fucking Roy and Walt.
He must have said it aloud, because Sam lets out a bemused snort.
“Any news?” He rattles the shells in his palm and turns toward his brother. Sam’s still in the clothes he’d put on after their resurrections and a crease from his pillow runs up one cheek.
Sam glances up from the laptop, chipped coffee mug cradled in one hand. “Nothing so far. Guess the lack of any dead bodies kept it under the radar.”
“Motel probably didn’t even report it. Something like that’d be bad for business.”
“There was a lot of blood,” Sam says, but doesn’t argue further. No news is good news and it’s not like there’s much they can do about it.
Dean tosses the shells onto the bedspread and rubs his shoulder, which is still twinging at him. The muscles of his back have tightened up into a snarl and his neck is so stiff it hurts a little to turn his head. So all he’s thinking of is hot water when Sam clicks the laptop shut and it takes him a moment to realize Sam’s waiting for his attention.
“Last night. I mean, this morning--”
He rubs his palms against his thighs. “Yeah?”
Sam’s got that narrow-eyed expression like he thinks he’ll be able to peer through Dean’s skin if he tries hard enough. Dean pulls himself to his feet and heads for the coffeemaker.
“C’mon, Sam.” His brother left a clean mug out for him and the pot is full but he hovers there for a minute because he’s not so sure caffeine’s a good idea after this morning. He’s got a bottle of Jack in his bag, but it’s only two thirty and Sam’s already watching him. If he’d been together enough to think of it earlier maybe he would have gotten more sleep.
The silence gets awkward. Sam lets out a breath like he’s been holding it. “Dean--”
Dean turns back around, the empty mug still gripped in one hand like a weapon. Sam shifts in his chair and sets his own mug down on the table.
“I think we need to talk about it.” Sam frowns like he knows exactly how officious he’s coming off.
“Bobby’s gonna call later. Says he’s got a job for us in Minnesota. Weren’t you tracking demonic omens up there?” Dean pours himself some coffee for something to do, so he doesn’t have to worry about his hands betraying him.
“When’d you talk to Bobby?”
Dean shrugs, stirring a couple of packets of sugar into his coffee even though he usually drinks it black. “This morning. You were asleep.”
“I’m just surprised, is all. When we left I thought he might need a little space.”
“Yeah, well, since when does the apocalypse care about what anyone needs?” The minute he says it he knows it’s a mistake. He sips his coffee and tries not to make a face at the sweetness as Sam gets that look, the one that says he thinks he knows what’s going on in Dean’s noggin.
“Look,” Sam says, trying on his patient psychologist voice. “I know what happened in heaven was a setback. It rattled me too. But--”
“Did you miss the part where our best bet told us to fuck off?” Dean summons up a mask of anger he doesn’t really feel. “Maybe you didn’t get the memo, but Elvis has left the building.”
“I got the memo.” Sam sighs, and maybe he got a couple more hours of sleep than Dean, but it wasn’t enough. “But Dean, last night at the laundromat, you can’t tell me that was about God.”
For a minute they lock eyes and Dean can’t look away. Sam’s never understood anything, not really, and Dean’s never wanted him to. But he always tries, even for the stuff Dean himself doesn’t understand. Dean’s never known what to do with that.
He sets his mug down. “Sam--” He sounds desperate to his own ears and hates it. “I don’t know what last night was about, okay? Can we just--”
Sam deflates, breaks the gaze first. Flips the laptop back open. “Yeah. Okay.”
Dean lets out a breath and swipes at his mouth. Grabs his duffle from the foot of his bed.
“I’m just gonna--”
Sam doesn’t look up. “Yeah.”
This time Dean takes the first shower.