The Art of Re-Fixing Sour Lemonade Part Three
THEN:
Adam sucks on a cigarette and knocks his heels together as he sits on the makeshift bench Dean cobbled together out of scrap from the junkyard. Dean whistles, feet sticking out from under the dinged up frame of a Chevrolet Mercury. Sam is…elsewhere. The library, probably. He’s in that perpetual teenage angst phase where he tries to ignore the source of all his frustrations, i.e. all his familial relations. Again.
It’s 1954 this time. There is no hunting, no ghosts or demons or angels dropping in from above. They are still there, but John never saw Mary die on the ceiling. Mary disappeared, John turned to drink, that world’s Adam happened on a weekend bender. His Mom still died by ghoul, and Adam can’t untangle the logic behind that one.
“You’re thinking too loud again, cracker jack.” Dean slides out from under the car. He wiggles a wrench in Adam’s direction. “You know what that shit leads to. One grumpy sourpuss in this family is enough.”
He’s not talking about John. John hasn’t been in the picture since a year after Adam showed up on his doorstep with wild eyes and nothing but the clothes on his back. John’s car crash brought Dean low and made Sam unpredictable, but Dean pulled himself up and went to work as a resident mechanic. Sam, though…
“I’m not a sourpuss.” Adam tosses a grease rag at Dean. Dean catches it before it hits his face, the bastard.
“I sure don’t see a smile yet.” Dean tosses it back. It hits Adam’s cheek. “Now what’s got your whitey tighties in a twist?”
Adam takes another drag, feels the smoke settle in his lungs.
“Hypothetically-”
“Oh Jesus, you need to stop spending time with Sam-”
“Hypothetically, say you know something is going to happen by a certain sequence of events and you try to change the outcome, only every time you try you end up at the same place. Hypothetically, say you get multiple chances to change this sequence, but each time it only brings you to the same conclusion no matter how many times you try to stop it. What would you do?”
Dean rolls his eyes and rummages around in his toolbox.
“I am cutting you off from that science fiction crap you like to read,” he mutters, but Adam can tell he’s thinking because Dean screws up his face a certain way. He finds what he’s looking for and flips the wrench up the air, catching it by its handle. “Seems to me the entire problem is your perception of the problem, kiddo.”
Dean strides over, flicks Adam’s nose, and then steals his half-smoked cigarette. Dean takes a drag, something he’s never done in any other life Adam has yet seen.
“If the sequence is the problem then change your approach. Throw out the rules, stop trying the same old shit if it obviously isn’t working.”
Dean ruffles Adam’s hair. Adam lets out an indignant squawk and hops off the bench. He takes out his comb to re-direct his gelled up hair; some cliches just couldn’t be helped because of course the Winchesters were greasers.
No one gets his John Travolta jokes, of course. Dean and Sam are nice enough to just think he has a weird sense of humor that misses the mark.
“Also, if all this is just a roundabout way of asking me about girl problems I am very proud. Just be cool, be smooth, and do not knock this chick up, because that is not an inevitable ending right there, kiddo. That’s just poor planning.”
“You’re a jerk.” Adam rolls his eyes and walks for the garage door.
“You need some date money? The drive-in has a cool monster flick tonight,” Dean calls.
Adam flips him off over his shoulder, but he’s thinking about Dean’s advice.
Change the approach.
Well, nothing else has worked so far. And Dean, for all his outward appearance and opinions of himself, is a smart guy until Sam dies.
Adam does take the date money later, but he heads to the run down bookstore across town. Sam hasn’t found this haunt yet, being too caught up in the library and Jessica the librarian, but Adam’s had it on his radar since he got into town.
Singer’s Shop carries dusty old tomes from all corners of the world and is a pit stop for folk of all kinds of shady repute. The man himself, middle aged, pudgy, and hat clad, raises an eyebrow when Adam comes in.
“Boy, that ruckus last week better not have had anything to do with you.”
“That ruckus last week was not me,” Adam says dutifully.
Spirits are easy enough for him after all his practice, even without backup. Dean thought Adam had a girl, Sam was too into Jessica to care, and sometimes killing something supernatural was the only satisfaction he could get while his brothers lived ordinary lives.
Funny how things turned out when the world went topsy-turvy.
“You’re gonna get yourself killed one of these days.”
Bobby had thrown Adam out of the shop the first few times he tried to buy something. It took hunting down a raw-head and depositing it on the back step for Bobby to let him in and start sharing his knowledge. Adam may have also threatened to keep on even without Bobby’s help, but low tactic or not it had worked.
“I need to start looking at books on spells,” Adam says.
Bobby regards him. “You wanna be more specific, because I’ve got a shit ton that fit that criteria.”
“I’ll know it when I see it,” Adam says with a shrug.
Bobby rolls his eyes. “Back room, west side. Anything sealed needs to stay that way, understand?”
“Aye-aye.” Adam throws him a salute.
“Damn fool idgit.”
Adam spends half the night in the back room flipping through books on witchcraft, spells, and magical objects. He finds what he needs near midnight and almost brains himself on a shelf in his excitement.
Tucked away in a small journal nearly two hundred years old, Adam reads a passage about re-weaving fate by way of using one’s own soul threads.
He buys the book and goes home feeling twenty feet tall with hope hanging near and sweet over his head.
Dean smirks when he walks in.
“Hope you used a condom,” he calls.
Sam rolls his eyes. “Geez, could you be any more crude?”
Adam can’t speak at all. The words are gummed up in his throat and chasing each other in circles because he can fix this, he can fix everything.
“I love you guys,” Adam croaks. He hugs a disgruntled Sam and a smug Dean and heads off to his room.
“Maybe you should take a leaf from the kid’s book and finally get past first base with your honey,” Dean says. “Seems to work magic.”
Adam closes his door on Sam’s heated reply. Adam hides the book with the other few he’s been able to afford beneath the floorboards in his closet. Tomorrow he’ll start gathering supplies.
NOW:
Adam calms down. Eventually. After a round of holy water, silver knife cuts, and a weird test where Sam has him inhale the smoke from a burning sage bundle. The only thing that accomplishes is clearing his nasal passages and quenching his thirst.
“He’s not quite real,” Sam says. His head is cocked to the side, eyes distant. He stares at Adam like he sees right through him, down to the fraying threads of his soul. “He’s alive, but he’s not…right.”
“You’re one to talk,” Adam says. He remembers Sam in the cage, in Germany, after Little Bighorn. No one is real or right after that.
“So what are you if you’re not a real boy?” Dean stands close enough to be considered hovering, with his arms crossed over his chest, a veritable wall of pissy disapproval.
Adam’s accidental teleportation has tripped the Big Brother wire. He can’t decide if he wants to laugh again or get angry.
“I’m not anything,” Adam says. “I’m trying to fix things and you two are still getting in the way.”
“Yeah, you said that before,” says Sam.
“Because it’s true. You two are idiots on the highest levels on every level. I swear, it’s like you shouldn’t have even survived this long but you’ve got cockroach genes and you keep scuttling around even when people cut your heads off, complete with the spinning in circles and bumping into walls.”
“Well, he’s got you two pegged,” Bobby drawls. Dean rolls his eyes.
“I can’t get a read on him at all,” Sam continues, still doing the staring thing. “He feels slippery, like he’s coated in oil. There’s a few images but they don’t make any sense.”
“So he’s got some mojo on him. We strip it away,” Dean says.
Sam opens his mouth to say something back, but he jolts and both he and Dean turn in sync towards the door like puppets. It’s the creepiest thing Adam has seen since that world where John ended up in a sexual relationship with Crowley.
“The kid is right, it’s a miracle you’ve both survived this long.” A blond-haired woman in jeans and a Queen t-shirt is standing there. Adam shrinks away, because she overwhelmingly radiates the energy of the Shadowlands. Adam can almost taste the sand and air. His heart lurches.
“Fred,” Sam says, smiling.
Dean raises an eyebrow and considers her.
Adam tries to breathe through the surging panic attack closing his airways.
“Sam, Dean, Mr. Singer,” the woman nods at everyone and then focuses on Adam. “And Adam. You’ve been kicking up some dust.”
Adam raises a shaky hand and flips her off.
She almost looks amused.
“You know anything about this?” Dean thumbs over his shoulder at Adam.
“A little, but mostly that being as he’s ya’ll’s younger brother he falls into the category of your problem. So, happy reunion and all that. I suggest you take this show on the road, though, because there’s some pretty high powers out looking for him besides me.”
“Brother?” Dean whips around.
Sam gives him a nod. Part of Dean’s expression closes.
“What higher powers?” asks Sam.
“Angels. Demons. Other gods. Anything with a supernatural bent, because he’s leaving a tantalizing trail.”
Fred tosses Sam something. He catches it. It’s a cell phone.
“Taz demands you use that to keep in touch. She got it from some witch-hacker she banged out in Rio. Untraceable, secure channel. I’ll ward Mr. Singer’s residence so he’s not caught in the crossfire.”
“What’s Adam caught up in?” Sam asks.
Fred catches Adam’s eyes. He feels something transpire between them. A twist, a pull, some kind of release.
“The same thing we were made for,” she says. “Get going.”
Sam is on his feet and moving to Adam, while Dean just raises an eyebrow.
“We’re seriously packing shit and leaving on her say so?”
“You’ll need to go to your tree, Dean,” Fred says. That gets Dean’s full attention.. “Your connection is so strong there that nothin’ will be able to touch you, not even angels. It’s the safest place while you get all the facts from littlest brother, there.” Fred turns to Bobby. “Mr. Singer, I hear you have a wonderful panic room. I’ve got a couple new wards I can put in place for you.”
Bobby looks to the Winchesters. Sam nods. Dean considers Sam, then nods as well.
“Right this way,” says Bobby.
Then Sam and Dean turn to Adam.
It’s only fractionally less scary than staring down his chupacabra-self had been.
Sam manhandles Adam into the Impala. Adam closes his eyes as the scent of leather and oil cloud his senses. He’s aware of Sam buckling him in and his brothers getting in the car.
Adam is busy with the flashes in his head.
John giving him a half-quirked smile on the way home from the ball game.
John yelling as an Adam bleeds out onto the front seat, ghoul bites too deep and many to stitch up.
Sam and Ruby in the backseat.
Dean and Anna in the backseat.
Adam splayed out on the trunk, gun loose in his hands, Lucifer-wearing-Sam standing over him, fist raised.
Adam brushing past the twisted shell of a once awesome car, metal cutting his shoulder, as he pushed his way toward a rip in the fabric of the universe.
“Hey, look alive back there, asshole. You still need to start talking,” Dean says from the front seat as the Impala roars to life.
“You’re never going to believe me,” Adam says.
“Try us.”
SHADOWLANDS:
The fire sputters out as Adam makes a final turn and comes to the center of the spiral. The world is dark for a moment, and then his eyes adjust to a soft glow of a million blue hanging lights.
No, not lights.
Adam stares up in awe. He would almost call them fireflies, except they aren’t bugs. They are the tiniest of blue spheres just hanging in the air like frozen rain. They sway and drift on a breeze Adam can’t feel, and they go up and up, far into the ceiling of the cave and disappear from his sight.
Adam steps forward into the fray. The spheres grow in size as he gets closer. He reaches one on the outskirts and peers in close. The sphere becomes a contained galaxy of stars and planets and soft, sparkly cloud dust.
Adam wades into them, at first dodging around them, until he gets too close and simply passes through.
The light grows stronger as he goes on, until all the little spheres, the millions of universes, appear to be connected by strings of lights, turning the cave into a large spiderweb of lighted worlds.
“Hello, Adam.”
Adam startles. The darkness parts and an old woman steps out into the light. She’s got wrinkles on top of wrinkles and long hair hanging in a braid that would make Rapunzel green with envy. The lights and worlds cover her like a gown and drift with her movements, more like they are an extension of her skin.
“Hi,” he says.
“You’ve made quite a journey to get here. Several times,” she says. “This is the first time you got all the way.”
The woman waves her hand to the side. For a moment the shadows dance across the sand and part the veil. He sees the shapes of several bodies dressed like him littering an expanse of desert while vultures and other carrion kind move in.
Creepy doesn't begin to cover it.
“Why am I here?”
“That’s something you need to ask yourself, you’re the one that insists on seeing it through to the end.”
“Where are we?”
The woman smiles.
“This is the beginning and ending and rebirth of everything.”
A sudden sense of smallness sweeps over Adam. He feels like a speck of dust surrounded by the glory of a mountain, helpless to overcome it.
The old woman reaches out and takes him by the hand. She leads him deeper into the web where the dark becomes a tangible thing between the strings of light and glowing worlds. It tugs at Adam’s clothing, brushes his skin, in a way that doesn’t happen when he passes through worlds. He is a ghost to everything but the dark.
They come to stop at the base of a tree. The trunk is old and gnarled, twisting up and out of sight, while some of the lower branches hang down heavy from supporting the worlds.
The enormity of what this place is, what it means, is too big for Adam to comprehend. He turns his eyes downward and away.
The woman reaches out and touches the trunk with her hand.
“You have come here seeking answers, Adam. Should you still want them, now is the time to ask.”
The woman is not talking about herself. Adam wants to run away, to find his way to Rabbit and tell her to take him home. He wants to curl up in a corner and shut the world away.
Adam bites his lip hard enough to bleed. He reaches out with tentative fingers toward the tree and presses his palm flat against it.
At first there is nothing.
And then there is everything.
NOW:
The Impala twists out of Singer Salvage and arrives at closed gates on a dirt road. There is a Native American man in jeans and a button down shirt leaning against the fence post. He lifts his hand in greeting and opens the gate. The Impala rolls forward.
“Missouri said to expect you today,” the man says. “The tree is a couple miles in, just keep to the road and then make a left when you see the ruins.”
“Missouri?” Dean says.
“A friend of John,” the man says. “No one will disturb you here, Mochni. It’s good to have you back, and we welcome your brothers Chankoowashtay and Ata’halne.”
“Chan what?” Dean asks intelligently.
“Those are the names we know them by. Chankoowashtay, the good road,” the man gestures to Sam. “And Ata’halne, he who interrupts. Your stories have been passed down for generations, starting with my great-great grandfather the medicine man, Hania.”
Dean startles. His throat works like words are stumbling around inside trying to get out. In the end he extends his hand. The man takes it.
“It’s an honor to meet you,” Dean says, more serious than Adam has ever heard.
“The honor is mine. Go ahead, there’s a place prepared for you.”
The man waves them on. Dean hesitates a moment and then the Impala rolls forward. Adam chances a glance back at the gate. The man is there for a moment, and then he isn’t.
The road is winding and takes them deeper into the scrub brush and hills. None of them talk, but the tension is tangible. Adam makes fists of his hands and wraps his arms around his middle. He ignores the way he shakes.
A couple miles farther and the ruins of a pueblo village appear. Dean takes the road branching out on the left. The ruins then rise around them, rows of broken and crumbling homes fanning out around the newer road winding between them all.
The tree appears around another bend in the middle of the road. The tree isn’t overly magnificent in size or shape, but it has a distinct presence that Adam finds amazing. The trunk twists up from the earth and branches sprout off in every direction, giving the tree a wide canopy of green leaves and small berries. The roots twist over one another and plunge into the cracked earth like they are cradling something beneath.
Dean shuts off the engine and gets out of the car. Sam follows. Adam hesitates, but he feels a tug of impatient energy from both of them. Adam joins his brothers a couple steps behind.
Dean stops in front of the tree. Adam can’t see his face, but his shoulders are stiff and Adam doesn’t dare breathe too much. Sam is off to the side, face blank, waiting.
Dean reaches toward the tree, much like Adam once did, and presses his palm to the trunk, head bowed.
When he steps back there’s a strange look on his face before Dean buries it. Then Dean is looking at Adam
“Come on,” Dean says.
A walk around the tree reveals a small cabin. Three beds are made up inside. There is a mini fridge and a small shower hooked up to some outside solar panels. The fridge is filled with food and beer.
They get comfortable. At least, Sam and Dean get comfortable. Adam sits down as far away as they will permit and feels like he’s facing down a firing squad.
“All right,” Dean says. “Talk.”
PART FOUR>