moats and boats and waterfalls
one two three four
Dean hops into the Impala and follows Earl's truck speedily back to the highway. Sam stays to keep an eye on Earl's leg and Burt's likely concussion, and Dean gets to watch his brother moving around in the back of the truck from his cautious following distance, absurd carrot-and-a-stick set-up but he's got to admit that it works; they're making excellent time.
The little county hospital they go to looks like a freakin' plantation house, but that's slightly better than the converted barn Dean was fearing. Earl is rushed into surgery as Sam and Mindy collaborate on a bullshit story about him getting attacked by a mountain lion, being the two least-ass-kicked of their number. The nurse seems to buy it, or maybe she's just bored, it's hard to tell.
Burt, glaze-eyed and woozy while still doing his best to grasp the reins of the situation, herds everyone into the appropriate restroom to wash the gun powder and graboid viscera off. In the men's, Sam wets a paper towel and carefully cleans the blood off Dean's forehead and around his eyes. Dean stands still, not leaning into the steadying hand Sam has on his shoulder, though he is aware that he wants to very much.
"I can't believe I missed the end of the fight," Burt grumbles, testing his fingers around the knot growing on the side of his head.
"You got the first one," Sam tries to reassure him. "Awesome shot with the Howitzer, by the way."
"Hmph. Probably never have a chance to hunt these fuckers again, just wish I'd had a shot at that last one."
Dean chuckles, eyelids shut firmly against the gentling swipes of Sam's fingertips through the damp paper. "Wasn't it, like, only yesterday that you were telling us how awful this hunt was the first time?"
Burt grins, kinda sheepishly, rinsing off his trembling hands. "We were trapped the first time. And we didn't know what they were or what could kill 'em, and most of the people were as civilian as it gets--remind me to tell you about Melvin sometime. And I--Heather was there."
Dean feels Sam's fingers stop momentarily, and then resume, hears him asking in a neutral voice, "She made it harder?"
"Having to worry about her getting killed made it harder," Burt says, eyes locked on his own reflection in the mirror. "Even knowing she was better-trained than anybody out there, and even thinking I was probably gonna die too, I still--it still gets to you."
Sam and Dean are quiet. Sam's fingers inch under the collar of Dean's jacket, brushing at the bare skin of his throat. Burt gets this look on his face like suddenly remembering his head injury, and he harrumphs, shaking water off his hands and pulling his battered Atlanta Hawks cap out of his back pocket and onto his head.
"All right, let's go," Burt says gruffly, and Sam and Dean follow him out of the restroom, wet hands dripping.
They sit in the hospital waiting room for the next four hours, waiting to hear word on Earl.
It's less than climactic.
The chairs are the molded greenish-gray plastic that hospital waiting rooms across the country have in common. No way to sit comfortably, everyone shifting and leaning forward over their knees, getting up to pace shallow circles around the room. Candy bars and stale coffee from the machines, a sun-dark farmer type sitting stoically with a blood-soaked rag wrung between his hands, praying for some mysteriously stricken relation.
Mindy flips through every out-of-date magazine in the place, and then says to Dean, "Lemme borrow your car."
Dean is slumped next to Sam, staring foggily at the place where their knees are touching. He starts. "What? No way."
"I wanna go tell Josué and Amaya what happened, c'mon be a sport."
"Take the truck."
"That thing's all messed up, did you not hear the engine? We're lucky it got us here without falling apart on the highway."
The presence of the truck had a pretty big hand in saving all their lives, point of fact, but Dean is achey and feels nailed to the chair. Sam is breathing evenly beside him, watching the discussion with mild interest.
"That doesn't mean my car is suddenly the community vehicle," Dean says, and Mindy huffs out a breath, that quick cutting grin of exasperation that girls do so well.
"Then come with, if you're gonna be so stubborn about it."
Dean weighs out his various options, exchanges a subdued look with his brother. Sam is slanted towards him, hips cocked, shoulders just turned. There is a scrape on the edge of Sam's jaw, raw red patch of skin no bigger than a quarter stretched oblong. Dean finds himself exceedingly disinclined to move.
Digging the keys out of his pocket, Dean says, "Take her. Be careful."
Mindy nods and fires off a mock salute on her way out. Dean glances at Burt, who's dozing a chair away, and reaches over to give him a prod.
"Wake up, sleepy pete," Dean says, and hears Sam's little hmm of amused recognition. Something their dad used to say, another one of those things.
Burt grunts, and opens startled eyes. "I'm up," he says, and shakes his head brusquely. "I'm all right."
"That's just the concussion talking," Dean says, mouth hinting at a generalized smile. "Keep your eyes open, man."
"Said I'm fine, you should try listening," Burt says, grumpy at being coddled by a pair of guys young enough to be his kids.
"Here," Sam says, and leans across Dean, their shoulders pressing firmly together as Sam passes Burt the handful of change they've accumulated from the vending machines. "Go give Heather a call while we're just sitting around."
Burt takes the coins, still grumbling but getting to his feet and bee-lining for the single lonely pay phone with a metal folding chair set up underneath, because god knows how many hours people have spent in this room, waiting out injuries from tractor accidents and car crashes and long falls out of haylofts.
Sam settles back, leaves his arm pressed flush to the line of Dean's. Dean sighs, and he can't interpret it even for himself. He doesn't shift away from his brother.
A few long minutes pass. Dean reads all the public health posters lining the walls, and watches the admit nurse working methodically through a Sudoku book. His shoulder and ankle throb in time with each other, and he doesn't really mind.
"Nobody got eaten," Dean says eventually, low contented tone.
Sam nods in his peripheral vision. "Despite all efforts to the contrary. We can put alien-worm killers on our resumes now."
"Sure, if we had resumes. Which would be weird."
Sam's shoulder presses against Dean, spreading warmth through his body. Dean checks, vaguely dazed, and finds that his knee is still leaning against Sam's. Sam's shoe is right up against his own, and Dean is transfixed for some reason, their dirty mismatched boots side by side on the industrial green linoleum, getting bloody mud everywhere.
"Dean," Sam says, stirring depth in that single word.
Dean's gaze flies up and Sam is watching him intently through narrow eyes. Dean swallows, hears it click like a hammer being drawn back.
"Not here," Dean says, and wonders immediately and with building panic what he means by that. Quickening pulse, heat rushing his head as he stands and limps out the hospital's front doors, Sam close on his heels.
The parking lot isn't good enough; Earl's truck with its new dents and broken headlights feels like a witness. A sidewalk runs around the side of the main hospital building, and Dean follows it back to a small patio littered with cigarette butts, midday sun beating off the cement.
"Crazy," Dean says hoarsely, speaking for the world, and then Sam grabs his shoulder and turns him around, both hands hot on Dean's face as Sam's mouth fits against his, and it's a kiss, they're kissing right now.
Dean makes a falling sound in the back of his throat, his stomach curling and shivery heat running across his skin. Sam licks against his lips, presses in and open and kisses him deeply, slick tongue moving with Dean's own, hard fingers cupped around the back of his head.
And too much time goes by, lost to the moment. They break apart gasping, clutching at each other's collars.
Dean would like to just kind of gape and stare at his brother for a minute, try to process this is in some reasonable fashion, but Sam always ruins everything, and he derails Dean's train of thought with a sudden giddy grin.
"I told you," Sam says, gleeful. His hand rasps against the side of Dean's neck. "I totally knew this was gonna happen."
"You knew jack," Dean replies, automatic. He's staring directly at Sam's mouth. "Most ridiculous shit you've ever fuckin' pulled-"
and Sam kisses him again. And Dean lets him, tips his chin and parts his lips and lets Sam press them together and slide a leg between his, bend his neck back. Wild drunk feeling, and pain everywhere, his snake-bit shoulder like hot lead under his skin, his bad ankle wobbling beneath him. His head is fucking killing him. None of that is going to make him stop, nothing.
Dean has most of his weight resting on his brother. Sam pulls away from his mouth, panting, and drops his face into the hollow of Dean's throat. Scalding breath, teeth and tongue in rough reminder, and Dean sucks in air through his teeth, gripping a hand in Sam's hair.
"Jesus Christ," Dean says to the incredibly blue sky.
"I know," mumbled, and Sam kisses Dean hard just under the shelf of his jaw, lifts his head. "You can see how it's been distracting."
Sam doesn't make any sense, never even tries to make any goddamn sense, because no way did he know it was gonna be like this. Dean drags his fingers through Sam's hair to see momentary pain line his forehead, to see it smooth immediately away. He can feel Sam against him from shoulder to knee, long solid planes of his body shifting as Dean shifts, keeping up with him.
"So weird, Sammy," Dean says like a confession, eyes down.
"Yeah, you gotta. You just gotta live with it a little longer," Sam tells him, stroking his hand against Dean's cheek and somehow that's worse than everything else they've done so far. Splintery feeling in his mind, Dean gets his good leg under him and straightens up, puts a few desperately needed inches of space between them.
"I don't know if this is the kinda thing I want to feel normal, either," Dean says.
"No, never that." Sam's hands itch forward but he restrains himself, fingers curling back short of Dean's shoulder. "Obviously there's something very wrong here, but it's--doesn't it mean something that it's wrong with both of us?"
Dean shakes his head, meaning i don't know. He's fantastically aware of Sam's proximity, sweat and dirt and chemical hospital soap, the tiniest visible scars on his face, and Dean wants him persistently, dry-mouthed and kinda crazy when he thinks about it too long. A look to the ground shows the toe of Sam's boot overlapping Dean's own, and Dean thinks about taking that crucial step back, considers it and conceptualizes it and plays it out in his mind, and does not move.
"I. I keep trying to think," Dean says haltingly, still staring down at their shoes, because that's where his head is today. "Trying to, like, visualize."
"What?" Sam asks, leaning incrementally closer.
"Any possible way this ends well," Dean tells him, and risks a look at Sam's face, heart lodged in his throat.
Sam registers fear for a moment, and then he picks that up and puts it aside, because he's a Winchester and that was the first thing they ever learned.
"That's assuming it ends," Sam says, and Dean wants to laugh at him, his bright eyes and earnest tone, the surety in his expression, so fucking absurd Dean can't even handle it.
So he does, head back and eyes closed, laughs right out loud, but it sounds different than he intended, amazed instead of jeering, high-toned with awe, and when Sam closes his fist in Dean's shirt and pulls him forward, Dean just goes, no thought, no question.
It always works out better for them when Sam is the one with a plan, after all.
*
They come back into the waiting room, disheveled but not worse than what the graboids managed, so Dean figures it's a wash. Nothing too interesting could happen out on the smoking patio, leaving Dean with the jittery skin-tight feeling of being ramped up and left hanging. His palms are crawling.
Mindy has made it back, the Impala returned unharmed. She's brought Josué and Amaya and the kids with her, and the room is about three times as loud as it was when they left.
Relating the story of what happened with the graboids is an all-around effort, Sam throwing in random Spanish vocabulary words and Josué squinting seriously behind his glasses, piecing the narrative together with help from his wife, who seems to understand much more English than she speaks out loud. In an attempt to stay conscious, Burt takes it upon himself to act out the destruction of the first graboid, crouching with his hands on the bank of chairs standing in for the Howitzer. The kids get in on the fun, crowding near Burt and firing invisible guns of their own, pow pow ¡matar al monstruo!
Sam and Dean sit side by side by the coffee machine, watching the show. Haze across Dean's vision, double images shuddering in and out of focus--it's been the longest kind of day. Sam isn't much better, rubbing his eyes like he's been out in a sandstorm.
At some point everyone joins hands and says a prayer for Earl and his ability to walk. Odd dissociative layer to it for Dean, because how many times has he seen a loose circle of people praying for mercy, hospitals and scenes of atrocities and every other black circumstance to which this life has taken him, how many times? Always with a kind of sneer, lookit 'em talking to their imaginary friend in the sky, but now Dean's got Amaya's rough-palmed hand in his own, rosary beads pressed like small smooth stones between them, and it makes a certain amount of sense to him. It's nice to have something tangible to hold on to. Nice to hear Josué and Amaya murmuring in unison, and then Burt rumbling, "Through Christ our Lord, amen," and everyone acting like the words have the power to protect, everyone believing it even if just for the moment.
At this point, Dean's like ninety-five percent he has a bit of a concussion himself, but he's not terribly distressed by the thought.
Earl gets out of surgery near sunset.
The doctor, a barrel-chested good ole boy with a reflective bald head under his scrub cap, pushes through the swinging doors, chart in hand, and gives their motley assortment the fish eye.
"Who's here for Earl Basset?" the doctor asks, and an amusing look of surprise opens his face when first Dean, Sam, Burt, and Mindy raise their hands, then Josué and Amaya, then the kids.
"Well. All right." The doctor coughs, scanning across the lot of them and choosing to speak directly to Burt as the oldest white dude present, which was pretty funny considering Burt had been dipping in and out of consciousness for the past four hours.
But the news is good. Earl's leg has been saved. He'll walk with a limp for the rest of his life, but he'll walk.
They pack into the room Earl is sharing with an old fellow who seems to be in a coma, the television bolted to the wall and showing a rerun of The McLaughlin Group that features a lot of shoulder-padded pants suits for the women and terrible eighties hair for everyone.
Earl looks as gray as someone who's been dead for three days, but his eyes crack open when they come in, and a small almost-smile tweaks his expression.
"Burt, you look like hell," Earl says raspily.
"Oh that's rich," Burt says, eye-rolling and coming to stand at Earl's bedside with a critical eye. "Got yourself pretty good and laid up, didn't ya."
Earl gestures weakly at the white plaster encasing his lower leg, foot up in a sling. "Three steel pins," he says, practically bragging. "You can just call me the Six Million Dollar Man."
"You're gonna be okay, though," Sam tells him. He reaches out and gives Earl's good leg a shake. "Gonna walk right outta here."
"Well, on crutches," Dean amends, not wanting to get anybody's hopes up unrealistically.
"You got that graboid tried to eat my leg, right?" Earl asks.
"Sure did," Mindy says, pouring Earl a cup of water from the pitcher and pressing it on him until he smirks and takes it. "Blew him up into gross little graboid pieces."
"That's what I wanna hear." Earl drinks his water and sighs with weary contentment, then catches Josué's eye and grins, stretching out a hand for him to grasp. "Hey, amigo, bueno verte. ¿Amaya, como está?"
There's an interlude in Spanish. One of the little boys attempts to climb the side of the bed like it's a vertical cliff, and Dean picks him up, puts him over the guardrail on Earl's good side, where he promptly curls up with his head on Earl's stomach and falls asleep. Dean watches Sam smiling in a soft way, bruised under his clothes, happy.
"So listen," Earl says eventually. "I'm gonna have to be here overnight but I can probably talk them into releasing me tomorrow. Amaya's just offered to put y'all up for the night at their house, nice lady that she is."
"Back at the farm?" Dean asks. "You figure it's safe to go back there?"
"I'm pretty sure there were only two," Burt cuts in. "I think that was their homebase we found, and the healthy one was trying to protect the injured. If there were any others, they woulda been there too."
"I love this reasoning," Mindy says, sounding pretty sincere even if the smile on her face edges towards a smirk.
Burt shoots her a suspicious look, then continues, "We should be there anyway, of course, just in case. But I think we'll probably be okay."
"Right, so that's settled then. Piensan que es una buena idea," Earl relays to Josué and Amaya, and everyone grins and nods at each other for awhile, and the other little kid claws at Dean's jeans until Dean picks him up and puts him on top of Earl's good leg, one hand spread out on the his fragile back to keep him from crawling onto anything sensitive, and the whole scene is idyllic like a marketing brochure for something, but Dean can't quite pinpoint what.
He checks with Sam, stabilizing glance that Dean is beginning to recognize as his default response to every single goddamn thing, and Sam looks half-asleep on his feet, one hand curled around the silver bar of the bed's guardrail. Sam looks up like he can feel it when Dean's eyes land on him, and there's color on his face as he smiles at his brother, color on Dean's own as he helplessly smiles back.
*
That night.
After they spend a few hours cramming debris into the giant hole in the living room floor, and Sam chops apart the orange-gore-soaked coach to fill in the gaps, and they nail down a big square of blue tarp to keep the kids out of it until a more permanent repair can be effected. After a dinner of huevos rancheros because eggs are what there are the most of, and peanut butter sandwiches because there's still not enough eggs to sufficiently fill anyone up, and beers on the back porch watching the sun go down behind the mountains. After an evening of amusingly cobbled-together conversation on all sides and the little boys having an epic dogfight with their plastic fighter jets and the shadows crawling up the walls, after all of that.
Sometimes past midnight, Sam shakes Dean awake on the floor of the spare room, warm hand over his mouth before he can speak out loud. Burt and Mindy are both sound asleep in their twisted sleeping bags, little-kid sweatshirts balled up under their heads. Sam and Dean slip out of there silently, Sam's fingers careful around Dean's wrist.
Dean is foggy, the western half of his mind clinging to sleep. It never occurs to him to do anything but follow Sam, out of the house and onto the crunching dirt of the yard. Enormous moon tonight, like a cue mark on the film of the sky, approaching the change-over.
Sam unlocks the Impala, which is parked a little ways away from the darkened farmhouse, and puts his hand on the backseat door handle, looks at Dean.
"Okay?" Sam asks, muted and searching and hopeful, seeming especially dark-eyed though it is dark everywhere.
Dean nods, sticky-mouthed. Heat lurches in his stomach as Sam grins wickedly, pulls open the door and pulls Dean into him.
Both of them in the T-shirts and jeans that they fell asleep in, and Dean is overwhelmingly aware of it as Sam's fingers slide up his bare forearm, scrape roughly against the tender hollow of his elbow. Sam has him off-balance, pushing him down into the backseat of the Impala and crawling after him, and Dean gets up on his elbows, breath coming unevenly as he watches Sam press his bent legs apart and take up the space between them.
Sam turns to check for dangling feet, and then slams the Impala's door shut behind him. Implacable darkness for a moment, Sam palming his big hand on Dean's knee and Dean's whole body jerking, and then his eyes begin to adjust and the moonlight pours in through the windows, and it gets better.
"Dean," Sam whispers, and shifts forward, hand fumbling across Dean's chest. "You gotta--gotta tell me what I should do."
A disbelieving laugh from Dean, broken exhale kind of a thing. Sam's thumb brushes his nipple through his shirt and his spine stiffens with a jolt of pleasure. The fingers of Sam's other hand are lined up on the inseam of Dean's jeans, some six inches north of his knee.
"You can't expect me to. Talk," Dean says, his face alight with mortification at the very idea.
Sam groans, amazing collapsing groan as he leans down over his brother, missing Dean's mouth and kissing hotly across his cheek and jaw, down his throat. Dean jerks, head cracking into the car door, and his arm hooks automatically around Sam's shoulders.
Time compresses again. Making out in the backseat of the car, dreamlike, locked away like this with even the moon dimming as the windows fog. Dean's higher thought processes never really came online before Sam pushed him down on the seat and crawled in after, and he's long gone now, reduced to the physical, the wash of sensation.
Sam has one of Dean's legs bent and pressed against the seat, the other held sprawled open in the foot-well. At some point, he got Dean's fly undone and now Sam's fingers rub curiously and carefully at Dean's cock through his boxers as it twitches and comes hard under his brother's hand.
"It's okay, this is okay," Sam says in a breathy rush against Dean's cheek, and it seems like he means it to be a question.
Dean arches, pushing his hips up into Sam's hand and muttering, "Yeah, 's great, keep going," because once you're in it, you might as well be in it all the way.
And it's amazing, anyway. The size and weight and heat of Sam's body over his, the bizarre creeping thrill of having someone between his legs like this, Sam's long-fingered hand stroking just right through damp cotton. Arousal soaking through him, Dean kisses his brother's chin and then his mouth, and Sam groans, kisses him back messily.
That lovely blur again. Something about not caring about air when he's kissing Sam, something like that. Dean returns to himself to find that they've jumped forward and his cock is bare now, bare and slick and pressed up against Sam's, Sam's huge hand clasping them both together and Dean can only stare for a long moment, breathing out raggedly against Sam's shoulder.
His hips surge up before he's ready, and Dean whispers, "Christ," as Sam strokes and squeezes them both together, mouth moving restlessly on Dean's throat.
"Dean, it's working," Sam manages through panting stifled moans. "Isn't it, it's good isn't it," with his thumb rubbing hard and beautiful over the heads and he can't actually expect an answer.
Dean's body rocks up into Sam's, his chest shuddering, heaving. Sam braces above him, eyes fierce and rapt in the dim.
"It's gonna work, Dean, see," Sam says, and then a moan catches him off-guard and Dean takes advantage, wraps a hand around the back of his head and pulls him down into a kiss.
Sam swears into it, almost sobs, moving his hips jerkily against Dean's with his hand caught in between. Dean licks at Sam's lip, sucks on his tongue, overwhelmed.
"Almost," Sam mutters against Dean's mouth, and shifts to give himself some room, their jeans rasping together.
Dean groans as Sam lets go of his cock, protests breathlessly, "Sam, c'mon," and Sam's moving before Dean stops speaking, sliding and curling awkwardly over Dean's body. Sam sucks the head of Dean's dick into his mouth and Dean shouts, hot wet and tight amazing fucking amazing and then he's being shoved up and over and off, coming hard down Sam's throat.
The first clear thought Dean has upon resurfacing is, that didn't take long, and then the awareness that Sam is knelt over him jerking off becomes rather paramount.
Sam pants audibly as Dean's flickering dazed eyes meet his. He's got a hand pushing up Dean's shirt, drawing urgent designs on his chest and stomach, his other hand fisted around his cock, stroking hard and fast and slippery-slick. Dean feels wrung-out and shaky from pleasure, watching his fingers tremble as he reaches out to help Sam. Sam gasps his name as Dean's fingertips twist around the head of his cock, and he grabs his brother's hand, presses them both down together. Dean stares at his face as Sam uses Dean's hand to grind off on, wet-open mouth and shadow-weighted eyes and the flex of his thighs against Dean's. Crazy feeling, impossible, but yeah, Dean wants to tell his brother, yeah it works.
Sam finishes sharply, crying out and falling down over Dean, seeking a necessary kiss. Dean pushes a hand into Sam's hair, kisses him like he's air.
They lie like that for a few minutes, blur time again. Sam is crushing Dean and it's kinda hard to breathe. Doesn't seem important. Dean is in that faraway place, distant and joyful and okay with suffocation if it means he doesn't have to move.
Eventually Sam shifts, and his lips brush Dean's throat. "Told you," he mumbles.
Dean twitches his fingers in Sam's hair. "You keep saying that like you think I'm gonna believe you or something."
"'s okay, Dean," Sam says muffled. His thumb traces the edge of Dean's lowest rib, curving around his side. "You're a little slow sometimes, but that's why you got me."
"Dude." Brief yank of Sam's hair should put paid to that, but Sam's hissing pained inhale against his neck only confuses Dean's poor overstimulated body. "I thought. Thought this was gonna stop you being such a bitch."
Strangest feel, Sam grinning with his mouth flush to Dean's skin. Dean is shivering and he can't say why, can't really hide it.
"I don't know where the hell you got that idea," Sam says. His hand slides further up Dean's body, touches the place where everyone's told their heart is.
"Honestly, Sam," Dean says on a long exhale, and closes his eyes.
And they get about fifteen minutes like that, just like that. At long last: they stop talking, stop moving around, and just stay.
*
Dean sleeps fitfully in the farmhouse, sick of spending the night on floors and in his clothes, pining for the stale overly laundered sheets of budget motels. He dreams about the graboids and about Sam in the back of the Impala, and he comes jolting awake half a dozen times, as if déjà vu works better than terror.
Sam is dead to the world when Dean wakes up for the last time at sometime approaching dawn, and the rest of the farmhouse is quiet but for the give of the rafters, slow mournful whine.
He's done trying to sleep, and so Dean writes a note and raids the cache of tools in the storage closet. He drives the Impala back over to the hospital, figuring he might as well kill some time working on Earl's truck.
First he has a pen-light bit between his front teeth and beaming across the cavern of the engine, but then the sun comes up. Dean tinkers happily under the hood until his back starts to ache from the extreme angle, and then goes inside for some terrible vending machine coffee.
Earl is awake when Dean strolls past waiting for his coffee to get cool enough to drink, and Dean goes in there, checking on the coma guy and he hasn't moved an inch.
"Morning, Earl," Dean says, tipping his little cardboard cup.
Earl grins, waves Dean forward. "Dean, hey Dean. I was, was tryin' to remember your name. You an' Sam 'cause you both have the same name, right, but I couldn't remember it."
"Uh, Winchester, you mean?"
"Winchester!" and Earl's being pretty loud even if his roommate is in a coma. "I knew it was something to do with the guns, Val didn't believe me when I said it was about the guns."
"Wait, you talked to Val? And also, are you drunk right now, or what?"
Earl's hand flaps through the air again, pale blue hospital bracelet loose on his wrist. He has a beatific smile on his face, clearly flying high. "Came by and gave me my shot just a little while ago, the pretty one with the dark hair, didja see her, Dean?"
"No man, I missed her." Dean pulls up a chair, because crazy old roughneck on a morphine high sounds like pretty solid entertainment to him. "When'd you talk to Val, I thought he lived in California?"
"Oh he does, sure 'nough he does. Rancho, Rancho Park Los An-geh-les California 90025," Earl recites, emphasizing the hard G that old-timers like to throw in the middle of the city's name.
"It's six in the morning there too, did you wake him up?"
Bobbing nod of Earl's head, heavy doped-up eyes skittering and slipping off Dean's face. "Yeah, he hollered a bit, but what do you expect, what can you? Time's the same over there as it is here, works the same, I hope you know."
"Yeah, I, I know, Earl," Dean says, biting back his grin. "You're loopy as fuck right now, it's pretty hilarious."
"Yep yep. Good of you to come, Dean. Winchester. Hey, lemme get some of that coffee."
Dean passes it over, asks, "Did you tell Val about the graboids?"
"Oh surely. And you want him to holler, you wanna make him really holler, you kill a couple graboids without telling him about it, hoo boy."
"Yeah, he wished he coulda been here, huh?"
"Talks and talks and talks, you ever heard that guy talk? Thinks we musta done everything wrong and I screwed up bad letting my leg get hurt, but he's just talkin'. I know what it's like when he's just talkin'."
"Yeah," Dean says. "Can't listen to that negative stuff, not after we survived and everything."
"And he wanted to come out here too," Earl says, almost spills Dean's coffee with his violent hand gesture. "Just hop in his car and drive on up like it's not seven hundred miles, can you believe it?"
"Um, I guess not." Dean rescues the cup, licking a hot brown drop off the side of his hand. "You don't want him to come out?"
A flicker then, Earl's stoned smile wavering briefly like there's a wind blowing through him. "What's he gonna do? Graboids are already dead, leg's already broken. He ain't magic, I don't care what Mindy's been telling you."
"No, she just--I thought you guys were really tight. Like, like brothers kinda."
"Yeah well," and Earl is trying to get it back, tacking on a phony see-through smile. "Long time ago, you know."
"Yeah," Dean says, swallowing hard. He doesn't want to say anything more, feeling like he's pressing his luck in some weird way.
"Told him, I was always telling him, you gotta have a plan," Earl says, his eyes drifting out of focus, searching across the ceiling. "Never get anywhere without a plan, just be running in place. Didn't think he was listening, but lookit this, after all that which one of us got out?"
Dean nods along, though Earl is not looking at him. Earl rubs a hand across his face as if every part of him has gone numb, like the drugs are the best ever. Look on Earl's face that's half stymied affection and half heartbroken cynicism, the kind of thing you have to live six decades before being able to pull off.
Earl's gaze wanders down from the ceiling to catch up with Dean's again, and he says, "You're lucky. What's your name again?"
"Winchester," Dean says, freshly baffled. "How exactly am I lucky?"
"Even twenty years from now and seven hundred miles away, even if you never talk to Sam 'cept on the phone and only see him in Christmas cards, even so you'll still have blood in common."
It knocks the wind out of Dean, blows him away. He slumps back in the chair, staring at Earl's face all carved up by the years separating the life he'd wanted from the life he'd made for himself in its absence. Earl looks back, gray and pale against the still paler hospital gown, and it's not entirely regret, not overwhelming like that, just a reflective sort of pain, a long-healed scar throbbing before the rain.
"Yeah," Dean manages. "I guess that's something."
"It's a lot," Earl mumbles, marble-mouthed. "Lot more than other people have."
"Yeah," Dean says again, hoarse kinda tone that doesn't sound much like him.
"And the graboids are dead again," Earl goes on, obscuring fog continuing its advance across his face. "Everything's easier once the graboids are dead."
Hitching smile, Dean's chin tilts up, little agreeable nod. "True enough."
"You can do anything once the graboids are dead," Earl says like a litany, a gauzy fanatical look in his eye even as exhaustion and morphine drag him down. Dean watches his descent with fond interest, pretty tired himself but that's like the default at this point.
Just then, Dean's phone vibrates in his pocket, and he fishes it out.
Hey are you coming home any time soon, Sam wants to know, and Dean stares at the screen for too long a moment, thinking what a strange thing to ask, what a strange name to give this place in the middle of nowhere.
He passes his thumb over the buttons on the phone, something immense buckling like an earthquake in his chest, and types, yeah pretty soon, looks up to say, "I gotta get back, man," but Earl has already fallen asleep and Dean's not talking to anybody.
*
*
*
Four months later, word reaches Sam and Dean that Heather Gummer has died.
They've made it as far as Iowa, running down a busted lead on the demon, and now they're holed up in a motel room with liquor and oranges and cable television, the boneless sprawl of Sam on the bed.
Normal now, almost normal. Dean sits down next to his brother with a towel around his waist, and Sam lifts his hand at an awkward angle, traces a drop of water as it snakes down Dean's side, casual and without intent. Dean watches the spaceship movie on the TV, sore and feeling bent, over-used, but he still likes Sam's hand on him, the vague following itch of Sam's fingers over his ribs. It's been two days since they've traveled farther than the vending machines.
This is what life looks like for them now. The weirdest part is that Dean doesn't really feel any differently about Sam than he did before they went to Elko County.
Sam likes to argue with him about that. Sam says, "Of course it's different, of course you don't love me the same, unless you've always wanted to bend me over things and just weren't saying."
But that's just the physical, that's not what Dean means. He looks back and can't help but notice that it took less than a day to go from Sam jerking him halfway off in the gas station bathroom to kissing his brother on the hospital's smoking patio. A lot of action-adventure stuff happened in there too, but still: it didn't even take him a day.
Dean has come to realize that his heart and mind have been in it for years, maybe forever. Disquieting thing to think at first, but Dean isn't too bothered by it anymore. He's starting to feel like it all came together in the end.
Sam's fingers spider over an old scar on Dean's stomach, softened and pink from the heat of the shower. Sam murmurs like a little song, "When I was a boy I cut my arm."
Dean glances at him, upside-down Sam with his lovely slanted eyes, his clever mouth. "Cool story, bro. You got any more?"
Sam grins, his hand slipping to the place where Dean's towel is tucked into itself, answering, "Come down here and I'll tell you all about it."
There's a message waiting for him when he finally gets around to putting on jeans and finds his phone in the pocket, a terse FYI kind of thing-- Heather has passed. Burt.
It gets them moving.
The drive to Nevada takes all night and half the next day. Sam and Dean trade stories about Heather and Burt, and they talk about the graboids and they wonder how Josué and Amaya and the kids are doing. Sam takes a refueling nap against the car door, hair mashed out of shape on the window, and he says Dean's name in his sleep.
Perfection is exactly the same, and Dean figures it'll probably be that way three years and three decades from now, dirt roads and the faded schoolhouse red of Chang's general store and the rounded apple-dented trucks up on blocks.
Burt comes out of the bunker to unlock the chainlink and let them in, and they exchange quick thumping hugs in the yard, stumbling over their condolences. Burt is sallow, noticeably thinner with his eyes sunk back, his shoulders curved as if under invisible weight. He still puts on that big camp counselor's voice of his, still claps his hand on their shoulders and herds them inside, "Good timing, boys, got a familiar face downstairs."
It's Earl, stationed in a chair with his cane propped up beside him. Their reunion is exuberant but subdued, marking the occasion. Earl spins the cane into his hands to show Sam and Dean, running stubby fingertips over the intricate engravings that depict tiny graboids rearing out of the earth to menace tiny humans on tiny roofs, a tiny truck with an even-tinier Howitzer strapped to its bed speeding towards the scene.
"Awesome," Dean says, and Sam comes in right behind him, "Best cane ever, it's perfect," and Earl grins, turns the cane to show them where he's carved PERFECTION, NV in tall bold letters.
They spend the afternoon in the rec room of the bunker, drinking beer and telling stories. Burt's voice is a raspy fraction of how Dean remembers it. There are tears in his eyes as he describes meeting Heather for the first time, but no one mentions it and he is able to blink them back.
Mindy joins them after getting off work at the store, and hugs Dean so tightly he can feel his ribs creak, before whapping him on the head for not keeping in touch. Dean hunches and gives her an abashed smile, thawing her out almost as much as the beer Sam brings her. The oft-mentioned Miguel arrives a little later, rotund and bald with a drooping dark mustache and an appealing manner reminiscent of Cheech or Chong, not stoned just friendly.
Dean can't remember the last time he and Sam went to a memorial service for someone who wasn't due to become an unsettled spirit. It's an odd feeling, mournful and companionable at the same time, everyone wearing a similarly downtrodden expression, trading the same sad smile back and forth.
Halfway through his third beer, Sam speaks up into a lull.
"My dad met Heather in the wintertime. They were hunting the same thing. A--bear. This was in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, probably about thirty years ago. They were following the same trail and stumbled across each other by accident, and you know how hunters can get territorial when they're hunting bears. A, a really big bear."
Sam glances at Dean and Dean's lips twitch, makes no other sign. There was never any bear, of course. Dean remembers this story: it was werewolves they were after, one specific daughter-killing werewolf in Heather's case. Sam looks back at the assembled group, leans forward a bit over his knees, and Dean watches the side of his face, the neat line of his throat moving as he speaks.
"So my dad tells Heather to get lost and Heather tells my dad to get lost and they stand there arguing, and meanwhile it's starting to snow. That real thick mountain snow, like where even the sky turns white, and they got caught up in it."
"Never could read the weather worth a damn," Burt adds from his armchair. "She'll show up for summer in ski boots."
"Yeah." Sam directs a subtle smile at him. "Our dad wasn't much better. So they're out there, in the snow. And Heather was the one to stop them arguing eventually, saying they gotta get under some cover. Her truck was closer than Dad's, but he just bundles up, you know, prepares for the hike.
"And Heather says, 'Where do you think you're going?' Dad gives her this look, you know," and Sam does the look, wonky confused eyebrows with an overlay of suspicion, "tells her his truck is still a little ways off and she says, 'Don't be a jackass, get in mine before you freeze to death.'
"And maybe Dad was still feeling sore about losing the--the bear's trail, but he said something like, 'What, you ain't worried about me taking advantage,' just to be a jerk, really, but then Heather wasn't even fazed, and Dad swore this is what she said, like, verbatim: 'Well, I'd be worried for you. But that wouldn't stop me from kicking your teeth in, so don't let it stop you.'"
A breaking moment of laughter fills the room, the skimming surface laughter that befits a wake. Sam sits back against the couch, smiling and checking with his brother to make sure that was a good story to tell. Dean tucks his elbow into Sam's side, because it was, it was perfect. Dean watches Burt blinking swiftly down at the floor, his hand twitching towards the empty space at his right hand.
At twilight, they tromp out to the canyons. Burt leads the way with an urn clasped to his chest, a backpack full of homemade explosives on his back. Everybody else is carrying rifles.
On a sheer cliff, where there is a tree with initials carved into it, Burt steps away from the group, and says, "This is the place Heather loved best." He pauses, breathing carefully. "And she's the one I loved best."
With nothing further to say, Burt kneels and scatters Heather's ashes. A powder gray wind whips around him and away, dissipating within seconds and she's gone, just like that, gone.
Burt stands on the edge of the cliff for a long few moments. Nobody says anything, and Dean concentrates on Sam's arm just touching his, Sam solid and whole beside him, under no threat from the wind.
"All right," Burt says, turning back to them with an indescribable look on his face. "Take arms, men. And Mindy."
Their small ragged company spreads out a bit, rifles swinging around. Burt takes up a spot just to the side and behind them, digging into his backpack for the homemade explosives.
"This one is for my wife," Burt says, lifting his voice, and he hurls an explosive into the darkening purple sky.
Earl is the first to get a bead on it, rifle crack and simultaneous burst of vivid green light pulsing against the low-lying clouds. Mindy shouts, delighted. Fireworks, Burt had said, because Heather loved fireworks.
"This one is for our daughter," Burt says, kinda strangled but fighting through it. Another explosive thrown out over the cliff, and Mindy says fast, "Got it, got it," before blowing it into an overflow of brilliant violet sparks.
Again and again, flung bombs arching and picked off, flower bursts of gold and pink and orange, household chemicals in every shade. For our life, for our home. For the good we've done. For our unanswered prayers. Burt's voice falters, nearly gone, and maybe he's crying now, but no one turns around to see.
Dean looks to his brother. Sam's face is unlined and intent, tilted up towards the sky with his cheek against the rifle stock. Behind them, Burt calls like a warning over the echoing canyons, "For our love," and Dean watches, entirely riveted, as Sam shoots that new star right out of the sky.
THE END
Endnotes: Goddamn right, Tremors crossover! I feel like that was pretty freakin' inevitable. Graboids=best MoTW ever.
Another favorite since youth (and perennial Christmastime movie, for some reason), the screenplay was written by Brent Maddock and S.S. Wilson. Earl is Fred Ward, Val is Kevin Bacon, Burt is Michael Gross, Heather is Reba motherfuckin' McEntire, respect!
It's like a cheesy B-movie, but it gets EVERYTHING RIGHT, and is hilarious and absurd and the whole cast plays it totally straight and badass and it's so wonderful. Also, Mister Miyagi!
(That's wee!Mindy there with her pogo stick and Walkman--she's also the kid from Jurassic Park, Ariana Richards, as I learned.)
I also realized in the writing of this that Tremors actually informs a lot of my Supernatural aesthetic, if such a thing can be said to exist. The desert setting, the rundown speck of a town, crazyass survivalists and roughnecks and annoying kids like Melvin, the unabashed wall of freakin' guns. Val and Earl being such bros! It's all there in larval form.
In closing:
Broke into the wrong goddamn REC ROOM, didn't ya you BASTARD!
(if i owned this, i would never want for anything else in my life. c'mon, licensors! approve!)