Deconstruction of a Hero
Title: Deconstruction of a Hero (1 of 1)
Author: Deanish
Rating: PG ... with a couple of lower-level swear words
Length: 9,500 words
Characters/Pairings: Dean, Sam, minor appearances by John
Summary: This is july_july_july's Sweet Charity story (and she was *very* charitable in, first, buying me to begin with, and, second, letting me get away with being almost three weeks late). She and I are both die hard Texans, so her prompt was Texas, tornados, Dean whump, protective Sam and preseries. This has at least a little of all of that.
Warnings: There's a LOT of Texas love going on in here. I don't know why anyone would have a problem with that, but thought I'd go ahead and warn you up front, just in case. I'm firmly convinced that Texas is the best of all states, and it maybe shows a little.
Also, I'm neither a doctor, nor a meteorologist.
Deconstruction of a Hero
Chapter 1
Texas.
For such a short word, Sam mused, it sure managed to sound big. He wondered if there might be something to that - like "a big things come in small packages" sort of maxim. Alaska was also a relatively short name - certainly shorter than, say, South Carolina, where they were now. Or Rhode Island, where they had lived four schools ago. That was definitely a lot of name for such a small state.
Sam thought through the state names, carefully dividing them into those he’d lived in and those he hadn’t. There were 16 left in the later category, and Alaska and Texas were two of them. Though he’d be scratching Texas off the list soon. There were only two on the short list with names shorter than Texas, but they were enough to disprove his theory: Ohio and Utah both had one less letter, but a lot less space.
So. Just a coincidence. Sam was beginning to realize that there were a lot of coincidences in the world. Lots and lots more than his dad seemed to believe in, judging by the way he said, ‘No such thing as coincidence, Sam,’ all the time.
For instance, there was the whole reason they were moving to Texas. They’d lived in a lot of places. Thirty-five states. Seeing as Sam was 13 years old, that was an average of 2.69 (which rounded up to three) states a year. Plus, they lived in more than one city in 12 of the states. That brought them up to an average of 3.6 moves a year, which rounded up to 4. A lot of places. But not Texas, even though Texas made up eight percent of the land in the 48 contiguous states and, judging by the old westerns Dean liked to watch on TV, was chocked full of ghost towns.
Dad said that was because Texas was also chocked full of the modern-day descendents of gunslingers, who were perfectly capable of taking care of their own ghosts. Or, at least, had been until recently. Last month, however, two of those gun-slinging progeny had up and died, and Dad said there was no such thing as a coincidence. So, two hunters dying within 30 miles of each other definitely meant something foul was afoot. ‘Course, Dad didn’t use those words, but Sam had read them recently in a Sherlock Holmes book and liked the way they sounded.
Anyway, the upshot, as Dean put it, was that everyone else could go to hell, they were going to Texas. (Which Sam thought Dean sounded really cool saying, but knew that he hadn’t come up with on his own. It was actually a paraphrase of something Davey Crockett said in 1835 during his campaign for a seat in Tennessee’s congress. Sam knew that because he liked to study up on a state before he moved there. Dean didn’t, normally, so Sam wasn’t sure if he knew that he was paraphrasing a Davey Crockett quote or not.)
In particular, the Winchesters were going to Canyon, which was about 500 miles away from the part of Texas that Davey Crockett lived in for a few months. That was a little disappointing; Sam had been hoping to see the Alamo. He had even looked into whether there might be some ghost of its defenders hanging about that could entice his Dad to take him there. But all the bodies had been burned, so that was unlikely.
But Canyon might be cool, too. It was named for the nearby Paloduro Canyon, which was the second largest canyon in the United States. Dean though that was pretty lame, but Sam figured since they’d never seen the Grand Canyon, it shouldn’t be too disappointing.
Even better, Canyon was home to West Texas A&M University, which, in turn, was home to Texas’ largest history museum. (He was beginning to notice that Texans seemed a lot more preoccupied with superlatives than the rest of the country.) And since Sam was well aware that seventh grade was the year appointed for all 13 year olds to learn their personal state’s history, he thought that might come in handy.
Sam was sure to be behind, since he’d started the year in Maine and then moved to South Carolina after Christmas. It was April now, so he had approximately two months to learn the history of Texas. This sounded like a particularly tall order, since the state had, according to the books Sam had been reading to get a head start, been part of six different countries in its lifetime, and originally included land that was now part of five other states.
Dean said he should suck it up. At least, he said, Sam wasn’t spending seventh grade in Nebraska. That’s where they’d been when dean was in seventh grade, and he swore up and down that Nebraskan history could be used in surgery as an anesthetic.
Sam mostly figured that Dean was right. So far, Texas was sounding like a pretty cool place to live for awhile. Well. Maybe cool wasn’t the best word. Dean would make fun of him if he knew Sam was making cool/uncool assessments based on the quality of a state’s history class. But you know. Anyway. He wondered if he might be able to talk Dad into a horse.
OOO
Dean rolled his eyes as he passed through what had been passing for their living room for the past few months. He’d distinctly heard the word "horse" leave Sam’s mouth in the kid’s best "innocent, yet still wheedling" tone. He almost wanted to stick around and hear this conversation for himself, because it should be good for a laugh. But Dad had said get packed, and if he had to explain why Sam could not have a horse and then come out to find the car still wasn’t at least halfway packed, it was going to be a long drive to Texas.
Well, really, it was going to be a long drive, regardless. And somehow, despite the 14 hours they were planning to spend on Texas highways, they weren’t going to be going through LaGrange. Dean suspected a conspiracy. How could they go to Texas and not go see the Chicken Ranch? It was, like, the state’s most famous landmark. "They got a lot of nice girls," ZZ Top had been crooning at him for as long as he could remember. A Dolly Parton movie had been made about it.
He’d pointed this out to Dad as subtly as he could, but Dad had just looked at him and said, "We’re not driving six hours out of our way so you can see an out-of-commission whorehouse, Dean."
‘Course, when he put it like that …
Anyway. Dean walked back through the living room, catching a snatch of Sam and John’s conversation - "I was just thinking it’d be a good thing to have around, you know? Animals are really sensitive to the supernatural." Dean cringed and wondered if his own attempts at subtlety had been as obvious as that. He hoped not.
Back in his and Sam’s room, he gave a last look at his side. Nothing left that he was planning to take. Scraps of paper filled with doodles in lieu of class notes, a few of phone numbers he’d no longer need, some socks too holey to bother packing, much less bending down to retrieve.
Sam’s half, on the other hand, somehow managed to look cleaner, despite the fact that almost all his stuff was still there. Dean wasn’t supposed to help him pack anymore. When Sam turned 10, Dad decreed that he was old enough to be relied upon to do it himself. But 13 or not, Dean was pretty sure that if Sam was allowed to do it unsupervised, he’d end up with two bags of books and one change of underwear. So, checking over his shoulder to make sure Dad was still preoccupied with the pony discussion, Dean moved to the bottom two drawers of their shared dresser and began pulling out Sam’s clothes. He’d just make sure they were at least in Sam’s line of sight when he started packing.
OOO
OK. So a horse was definitely a no-go. They cost too much to feed, wouldn’t fit in the trunk and probably would end up kicking Sam in the head, anyway, Dad said. (Personally, Sam suspected that he’d make a brilliant horseman.) But he had given Dean permission to take Sam to a rodeo while he was away, trying to hunt down whatever was hunting hunters. So horses were still in the offing, kind of. Maybe Sam could prove himself, yet. Maybe there would be a runaway bucking bronco barreling toward the audience and he’d jump on and stop it, calming it with his soothing voice and confident seat …
Sam replayed that scenario in his head a few times (by the third time, Penny Parker had some how shown up in the path of the bronco; though she hadn’t mentioned that she too would be leaving South Carolina for Texas, it didn’t seem out of the realm of possibility, really) as he loaded the last of his bags into the car, grunting a bit because it was the one he’d packed his books in. All but one, anyway. He was keeping "The Texas Republic: A Social and Economic History" out for the ride. He’d … well, he’d nicked it from the St. Stephen Public Library. Given that it’d only been checked out twice since it was published in 1946, he figured no one’d mind. Dad had eyed it a bit suspiciously, but Dad had no real idea what books Sam did or didn’t own, and evidently didn’t feel sure enough to call him on it. Dean would know, but Dean was in no position to comment.
Chapter 2
"Hey, did you know," Sam piped up from the backseat, and in the front, Dean groaned. Sam paused, looking up from his book uncertainly. He’d been starting sentences like that for the past six hours. And that was just today. There was also the 10 hours the day before, and the eight the day before that.
They had only today made it to the Texas border, and while the 18 hours in the car the first two days had gotten them through the first five states, it was going to take about 14 to get them from the southeastern border of this one to their target in the Panhandle. Dean didn’t know if he could take another eight hours of "Did you know."
He looked over at John, hoping he was also finding it irritating - ideally, enough so to put a stop to it. But as far as Dean could tell, Dad had heard neither Sam’s question, nor Dean’s groan. His ability to tune them out was unparalleled. Which was why Dean gave up and resigned himself to another lesson in Texas history. Sam’s working theory was, you never knew when he might find something in his studies of the places they were moving to that would prove useful to Dad in a job. It was his way of trying to help, since he wasn’t old enough to actually help yet. And it made Dean feel bad that Dad probably heard less than 10 percent of it. Even if he was pretty sure that the fact that cowboys slept with their eyes open was not going to help John find whatever had killed those two hunters.
It was kind of cool, though. He wondered if he could train himself to sleep with his eyes open. Sure’d be useful.
"What?" he finally relented.
Sam didn’t reply right away, so Dean turned to look back at him, wincing as the sudden influx of air over his back made him realize how wet his T-shirt was. Air conditioner was out again, which hadn’t been that big a deal in South Carolina’s April, but was proving ever more painful the farther west they traveled.
"What?" he said again, trying for genuinely interested. Sam held his gaze for a moment, looking for evidence that he really did want to know, and Dean felt another twinge of guilt. He knew it would never occur to Sam that there were facts that other people weren’t burning to find out.
Sam accepted the second "what" for the apology it was, and started back up.
"Did you know that the Battle of San Jacinto only lasted 18 minutes?"
"San Jacinto?" Dean repeated, before he’d thought it through. He should have just given the requisite "Wow, no, I didn’t know that" and turned around. Oh well. Too late now.
"Yeah. The last battle of the Texas Revolution," Sam said, checking his facts on the page in front of him, before gearing up for a lecture. "It was 900 Texans against 1,400 Mexicans, and the Texans won in 18 minutes. They killed 630 Mexicans, wounded 208 and captured 730. Only nine Texans were killed, and only 26 wounded."
OK, so that actually did kind of deserve a "Wow, no I didn’t know that." Dean let out an impressed whistle. "Geez," he said. "What were they fighting for?"
"Independence from Mexico. They were led by Sam Houston, who is the only American to have been governor of two different states, and the only governor of an American state who had also been president of another country. Their battle cry was ‘Remember the Alamo.’"
Sam said all of this matter-of-factly, reeling off trivia as if he’d been born in Texas, rather than having made it to the state just about four hours ago.
"Like, Davy Crockett and the Alamo?" Dean said, interested against his will. He’d watched some of those old Disney reruns, and the man had been played by John Wayne and Johnny Cash. This was history that interested Dean.
"Yeah," Sam said, sounding a little surprised by Dean’s sudden interest in what he was saying. "And Jim Bowie and William Travis."
"Jim Bowie, the Bowie Knife Jim Bowie?"
Sam nodded eagerly. "That’s the one."
"Huh."
"Though, actually, his brother made him that knife. He just made it famous, when he used it to gut a man who’d double crossed his friend in a duel and stabbed him with a sword cane after he’d already been shot."
"Christ," Dean said.
"Yeah," Sam grinned, then turned thoughtful. "Actually, he reminds me a little of you."
"Hell, yeah," Dean laughed.
"No, I mean it. He’s supposed to have been all tough and badass -" Here Sam snapped his mouth shut and shot a guilty look toward the back of John’s head. And though he’d yet to acknowledge a single other word of the conversation, John heard that and raised a censuring eyebrow in the rearview mirror.
"Sorry," Sam mumbled. "But it’s true! Says here: He is supposed to have ridden alligators, won sit-down knife fights on logs in the Mississippi River, fought Indians and sailed with pirates. People stared at him wherever he went, saying he had never lost a fight, nor had he ever started one."
Dean wasn’t sure what to say to that. John took his eyes off the road long enough to glance over at him.
"You been riding alligators?" he said, laughter hiding just behind his words.
Dean flushed and slid back around to face forward. "Shut up," he grumbled, not really aiming it at anyone in particular. John chuffed, but didn’t say anything else. In the passenger side mirror, Dean watched Sam frown in their general direction for a minute or two before shrugging and turning back to his book.
OOO
Duh. Sam knew Dean didn’t ride alligators. They’d totally missed the point. And they hadn’t let him finish and tell them the rest about Jim Bowie. And he hadn’t even got to tell them about William Travis at all. Besides being the colonel who’d inspired the men of the Alamo to stay and defend the mission against impossible odds - 182 against 2,000, which divided out to 11 to 1, and even though all the Texans were killed, more Mexicans were killed, about 600 hundred, which was, like, more than three times as many - Travis was a lawyer and kept a list of the books he’d read. Everything from novels by Sir Walter Scott to history by Herodotus and Napoleon. Sam hadn’t read those yet, but they were going on his list of things to get at the library.
And Travis was credited with writing a letter called the "sublimest document in American history." Sam wasn’t sure exactly what sublimest meant, but it sounded really good. And he liked the letter, which ended, "If this call is neglected, I am determined to sustain myself as long as possible and die like a soldier who never forgets what is due his own honor and that of his country. Victory or death."
But mostly he liked the idea that your words, what you thought, could be part of what made you a hero.
He killed a couple of hours of the drive imagining himself pacing in front of dozens of men, rallying them with his words to "sell their lives as dearly as possible" and drawing a line in the sand. And maybe Dean was watching, stoic and proud, from his cot where he’d later fight to the death, even though he was too sick to stand up.
Chapter 3
OK, when Dad said they were moving to Canyon, Texas, he’d clearly used the term "to" loosely. Dean didn’t think this shack could possibly be within any city’s limits. It was more than a mile down a dirt road, which turned off a ranch road several miles past any town or village that he’d noticed.
Dean sighed. They’d probably have to catch the school bus at the butt crack of dawn, and only after a predawn hike to the highway. And a town this size? No way those things would be air conditioned.
Shit. At least the house had electricity and indoor plumbing, though. Sometimes they didn’t. Still no air conditioning, however, which was fast becoming a theme of this trip.
They quickly set to work unpacking the car, then Dad left to make a supply run while he and Sam set up camp. Or it was supposed to be him and Sam. Sam, however, was continuously drawn to the window, which looked out over a rolling green pasture with something that could be horses grazing in the distance. Or it could be cows. Or, from this distance, zebras.
Regardless, when he opened his mouth, Dean figured he knew what was coming and gave him a preemptive no.
"What?" Sam asked, peevishly.
"No, you can’t go out there and see if those are horses."
Sam’s jaw thrust forward. "That’s not what I was going to ask," he lied. Dean wasn’t fooled.
"Oh no? What were you going to ask?"
Sam shot him a mutinous look, but his brother was nothing if not a quick thinker. "I was going to ask, did you know that it’s illegal to graffiti someone else’s cow in Texas?"
Dean snorted. "Well, good to know. I’ll have to scratch that off tonight’s agenda." He turned back to the box of battered pots he was unpacking, and counted down.
Three.
Two.
One.
"But why can’t I go see if those are horses?"
Bingo. Dean smiled and shook his head at his family’s predictability. "Because that’s not our land. You’d be trespassing."
"You and Dad trespass all the time."
"That’s different."
"How?"
"Because it is."
"Uh!"
"Besides, there’s probably snakes. And … what were those things again? Horny frogs?"
"Horny toads. And they’re not poisonous. They don’t even bite."
"Why would they choose a state mascot that can’t even bite?"
"It can shoot blood out of its eye," Sam answered, which, yeah, was pretty cool. "Besides, it’s not a state mascot. It’s the state reptile. Just like the state bird is the mocking bird and the state small mammal is the armadillo and the state large mammal is the longhorn and the state fish is the Guadalupe bass and the state insect is the Monarch butterfly."
"A butterfly? What a bunch of wusses."
"The official state dish is chili," Sam offered placatingly. He’d already forgotten that he was mad at Dean. It never took long.
"Mmm," Dean answered. "Chili."
Sam grinned at him. "Yeah. We should have that for dinner, huh? To be official and all."
Which was how Dean ended up chopping the official state vegetable a few hours later: 1015 sweet onions. Tomorrow was hamburgers, which Sam informed him had been invented in Texas.
OOO
By the time Sam got up the next morning, Dad was already gone, and Dean was looking unhappy. Sam figured the two were related. Since Dean had started hunting with Dad a little over a year ago, he hated seeing Dad go off on his own. Dean always said it was just that he wanted to go, too, but Sam didn’t believe him. His theory was that Dean was worried that something would happen and he wouldn’t be there to help. He was just too cool to admit that he was worrying.
Even so, that meant more worrying for Sam, because there was less certainty in Dean’s voice these days when he told Sam not to worry if Dad was going after something new or late getting home.
But Sam wasn’t worried right now, not about that, anyway. Dad had just left, and he didn’t even know what he was going after, yet. It’d probably take him several days of researching before he got to the dangerous part. So, for now, Sam could focus all his nerves on preparing for his first day of school.
He put on his best jeans and his blue shirt. The same outfit he’d worn for all his first days this year. ‘Course, he’d worn it a lot more times since the first days in Maine and South Carolina, but still. There was a nice symmetry to wearing it for all the first days.
Then he looked over his supplies. He should start all over in new notebooks, so that the new class notes wouldn’t get mixed up with the old ones. But Dad said there was no point buying new notebooks when school was going to be out in two months. Just like he’d said there was no point in buying new ones for South Carolina when the old ones only had four months’ worth of notes in them. Sam had talked him into some new pencils, but only because they were cheap and he’d chewed the erasers off all his old ones.
He’d left all his school books back in South Carolina, so his backpack was saggy and light for their first early-morning trek down the dirt road to meet the school bus. He bet it’d be heavy on the way home, though. Not for Dean, of course. Dean was only carrying one tattered notebook now and would probably carry that same notebook home at the end of the day. He’d stopped doing homework once he got to high school. He said it was because it got to be too much trouble to keep up, moving so often. But Sam thought it was really just that he lost interest.
That, and the fact that a backpack would cramp his style.
They reached the end of the dirt road, and settled in to wait next to a long row of aluminum mailboxes labeled with the same route and varying box numbers. Sam opened the one that matched their new address, just for the heck of it. There was no mail, but a big brown spider had built a nice web inside. Sam wondered if the mailman would deliver mail with a spider in their box. Not that they ever got mail, anyway.
That reminded Sam of William Travis’ letter, and he set to imagining the Alamo again for the 15 minutes before the bus came. Victory or death. He’d looked up sublimest when he’d unpacked his dictionary. It came from the root sublime, which meant inspiring awe. So William Travis had written the most awe-inspiring document in American history. That surprised Sam, but made him feel oddly proud of the man. He thought they had a lot in common.
The bus arrived and luckily the driver was nice enough to stop and let them on, even though Dad hadn’t remembered to sign them up to ride the bus. She said she just figured that if there were kids waiting by the side of the road on her route at this time of day, she should pick them up. They should probably be in school, anyway, she said.
Dean smiled and laughed and thanked her and charmingly assured her that, yes, school was exactly where they were trying to get to. Sam tried not to blush at having this woman know that Dad had forgotten again.
The bus wasn’t crowded, so Sam was faced with a choice. Sit by Dean or find a seat to himself. Used to, he’d always sit by Dean. But lately he’d become uncomfortably aware that it wasn’t cool for a high school junior to sit with a seventh grader. Dean hadn’t said anything, but then, he wouldn’t. Still. Sam knew how hard it was, starting over at a new school, and he didn’t want to embarrass his brother any more than he probably already was.
Dean stopped just past an empty seat and turned, waiting for Sam to slide in by the window.
"Uh," Sam stammered, ducking his head. "That’s OK. I’ll sit over there." He indicated a seat a few rows past.
"Oh," Dean said, surprised. "OK." He flattened himself against the seatback so that Sam and his backpack could slip by. He was sitting down by the time Sam got to his chosen seat, but there was a tense set to his shoulders that Sam wasn’t sure how to interpret. He saw Dean beginning to twist around to check on him, and quickly turned to rummage through his backpack so that he wouldn’t meet his eye.
He kept his nose buried in his book until the bus pulled to a stop at the high school. Dean slowly got up and turned to give him a final wave before heading toward the door. Sam bit the inside of his lip and gave a small wave back.
OOO
Dean was memorizing the Declaration of Independence for the third time this year. He’d pretty much decided that this was probably normal, that all government classes spent all year memorizing the thing, maybe interspersed with a few stabs at the Bill of Rights.
"We hold these truths to be self evident …"
Dean had come up with his own set of self evident truths. That all men were not created equal - Winchesters were clearly superior. That Impalas rock. That school is stupid. That history is boring.
Then again …
He thought back to what Sam had been saying in the car and flipped to the table of contents in his new history book. Sure enough, there were three whole chapters on Texas history, enough to constitute a full section of the tome. God this state was vain. He turned to the appropriate page number and began scanning. Spain, Mexico, France. Sheesh, was he glad he wasn’t in seventh grade this year. The flags alone would be enough to do him in. There. The Republic of Texas.
And of course, a convenient little subsection on the heroes of the Alamo.
Jim Bowie. Born in Kentucky, 1795. Blah blah blah. Six feet, one inch tall. Huh. Just like he was. That’s probably what caught Sam’s eye. He was obsessed with Dean’s height lately. Dean had made the mistake of telling him that he was the same height that Dean had been when he was 13, and Sam had gotten it into his head that that meant he would be the same height as Dean when he grew up. Dean hoped he was, because if not, Sam was going to be some kind of majorly disappointed.
It was all there, and then some. Alligators, knife fights, treasure hunting. All kinds of get-rich-quick schemes. More than willing to bend the truth a bit when the purpose suited him.
On the other hand, he spoke three languages. Actually did get rich quick. Charmed everyone he met, including his beautiful young wife …
Who’d died. Along with his two children. And mother- and father-in-law. All in the span of three days. He’d sent them out of town to avoid an epidemic, and they’d all died of it anyway while he was away. He began to gamble, drink, lose money and friends and sell the land he’d worked for years to amass. He lasted three years before finally finding a way out at the Alamo. There he’d fallen ill just in time for the siege, and died with a pistol in each hand, presumably taking out as many Mexican soldiers as he could from his sick bed before taking a few dozen bayonets to the chest.
Well. That was cheerful. He let the book fall closed.
He didn’t know what Sam had seen in the guy to remind him of Dean, but now he felt nervous. Dean didn’t know if it could be called superstitious, knowing what he knew, but what if Sam was right and he was like this guy, doomed somehow to follow in this poor schmuck’s footsteps. God. He didn’t even want to imagine what he’d do if his family was gone. Drink, gamble, find a losing battle to fight. Those all sounded like good starting points.
His mind returned, uneasily, to the hunt John had left for that morning. Two hunters dead already, and no clue even what he was heading into. Dean didn’t like it. But what could he do about it? Not like he could tell Dad not to hunt, even if he wanted to. Even if Dad was listening.
And for the record? Dad wasn’t listening.
One year and two months. That’s all he had left. Then he’d be done with school, quit wasting eight hours of his day and maybe be able to find the time to look after both Sam and John.
Chapter 4
A couple of weeks passed. Dean forged John’s signature on Sam’s progress reports, bought tickets to the big rodeo in Amarillo and made a trip to the history museum to accommodate Sam’s paper on the evolution of barbed wire. He even came across a few things at the museum that opened up new avenues of research on John’s hunt. And, yeah, with his spare time he got to know a couple of the local girls … and a few of the college girls. Turns out there were a lot of things museums were good for.
All in all, despite their official butterflies and the pride they took in things like being home to the largest parking lot in the world, Texans were turning out OK. Dean was even kind of enjoying the high percentage of female bottoms bearing the Wrangler brand. On the other hand, he could do without the disdain he’d noticed in the eyes of all the big mud-splattered-truck owners when they looked at the Impala.
And after hearing about the cow-tipping escapades of his classmates, Dean concluded that he and Sam weren’t likely to be arrested, or even noticed, during a brief bit of trespassing. So he relented and walked with Sam through the pasture in the back in search of the maybe possibly horses. They had to slip through a barbed wire fence - Sam helpfully identified it as being of the Scutt Split Arrow Plate Barb variety - and Dean warned Sam that if they got caught, they better make a run for it, because if they made laws against cow graffiti, then they probably shot suspected horse thieves on sight.
"What’s with you and horses lately, anyway?" he asked as they picked their way around the cow patties.
Sam shrugged. "They’re just cool."
"You never seemed to think so before."
Sam shrugged again, but didn’t reply. The brown specs in the distance grew a little more distinct and Dean could finally tell for certain that they did at least have four legs. He reached down to pluck a weed, preparing to stick it in his mouth because it seemed like the kind of thing you were supposed to do when walking through a pasture. Then he dodged another cow patty and decided maybe not, after all, and threw it down.
"The three Musketeers rode horses," Sam said, suddenly. That being one of the few books that he’d read (on Sam’s insistance that he’d love it), Dean was able to affirm that statement as true.
"William Wallace."
"Sometimes," Dean again allowed. Braveheart was their new favorite movie. They were still bellowing "They’ll never take OUR FREEDOM!" at each other at random intervals.
"William Travis."
Sounded familiar, but Dean couldn’t place the name. "Don’t think I know him," he said.
"He was the other colonel at the Alamo. Him and Jim Bowie."
"They had horses at the Alamo?"
"Yeah," Sam sighed, exasperated. "How else would they get around? William Travis was a member of the cavalry."
Dean couldn’t really add anything to that, so they passed the next few steps in a comfortable silence before Sam spoke up again.
"He was a lawyer, you know," he said, out of the blue.
"Who?"
"William Travis," Sam peeved at him, apparently irritated by Dean’s inability to keep up with the meandering conversation.
"Uh. OK," Dean said, not sure exactly what Sam was getting at.
"I just. Think that’s cool, is all. That he was a lawyer."
Dean shrugged. "I guess," he said, though, personally, he didn’t, especially.
It was beginning to look like the horses were actually horses. Unless they were maybe mules. Or donkeys. Did people keep herds of mules?
"Would you have been scared?"
Geez, what was with the kid tonight, Dean wondered. He was usually a little more articulate than this. "Sam," he sighed, "you’re gonna have to start including some context clues if you want me to know what the hell you’re talking about."
"At the Alamo," Sam said. And though Dean was looking at him, he could hear the eye roll in his voice. Would you have been scared at the Alamo?"
Dean snorted. "Well, yeah."
Sam stopped short and when Dean turned back to see what was up, he looked surprised. "You would?"
"Dude, what kind of idiot do you take me for?" Dean laughed again, but stopped when he realized that Sam was genuinely confused. "Man, you got the whole Mexican army bearing down on you and your 200 friends and you’re not scared? Something’s wrong with you."
"But …" Sam trailed off, mouth hanging open while he processed this. Dean gave him the time to think. "But they were heroes, fighting for their country, a cause they believed in."
Dean nodded slowly, carefully, trying to make up for laughing at Sam’s question earlier. "But," he said, "dying for a good cause is still dying. Doesn’t make a bullet hurt any less or leaving a family behind any easier."
If anything, Sam’s brow furrowed more at this. His mouth opened and closed a few times in aborted protests before he decided on one. "So, are you scared during hunts with Dad?"
Was that what this was about? Crap. "Nah," he said easily and mostly truthfully. "Dad doesn’t let me go on any of the certain death ones yet."
OK, possibly that didn’t come out in comforting in which it was intended, because Sam’s expression went from troubled straight to slack-jawed horror.
"Dad goes on certain death hunts?"
Yeah. Dean could see, now, how that would be less than comforting. Crap. Now Dean was the one fish mouthing, but Sam didn’t do him the courtesy of a minute to think.
"Is he on one now? Is that why you’ve been worried since we got to Texas?"
"Sam, calm down. Dad’s not on a certain death hunt. He’s just researching right now. You know that."
Sam looked unconvinced. And nauseous.
"Come on, man. I didn’t mean it like that. I was exaggerating. You know Dad’s not going to go after anything until he’s got a plan to kill it dead. If anything, it’s certain death for those monster sons of bitches."
"What about that Baihu? Back in San Francisco."
"He’s fine now," Dean pointed out.
"But he almost wasn’t," Sam insisted, pitch going higher with each syllable.
"Sam." Dean paused to take a steadying breath. "Sam. It’s a dangerous job. You already knew this. Dad’s careful, and he always comes back, one way or another. Why are you getting worked up about this now?"
"Does Dad get scared?"
Dean thought about lying, but decided Sam probably deserved the truth. And he wasn’t sure what the right answer was here, anyway. "Yeah," he said. "I mean, we don’t talk about it or anything, but, like I said, some situations, you’d have to be an idiot not to get scared."
Sam didn’t say anything. Just looked at Dean, crestfallen, and turned to walk back to the house.
"Hey!" Dean called after him. "What about the horses?"
OOO
Sam didn’t answer Dean, just kept walking, thought jumbled enough that he wouldn’t be surprised to trip over them.
He knew. He knew hunting was dangerous. But. He’d figured it was like Dean had told him back when he’d first found out about the monsters. Dad was a superhero. Or you know. Sam didn’t really think Dad was a superhero, but. Just.
If they weren’t scared of it, it couldn’t be that bad, right? Because if they were scared of it … then they knew it was dangerous enough to hurt you. And if they knew it was dangerous enough to hurt you … kill you, maybe … why would they do it?
Sure Dad came back bloody from time to time. And Dean even had a scar from that one hunt Dad took him on last year. But those were just mistakes. Accidents. Not because the hunt wasn’t something they could handle.
He made it back to the house, let the screen door slam behind him, stormed into the bedroom he shared with Dean and flopped on the bed on his side of the room to stare at the ceiling. A few minutes later, he heard the screen door slam again, Dean following far enough behind to give Sam his version of space, but close enough that he didn’t have to worry. Soft footfalls announced his presence in the room.
"Why do you do it, then, if you’re scared?" he asked without taking his eyes off the ceiling. He deliberately didn’t ask how do you do it if you’re scared. He’d just assumed that was something he was going to grow out of.
"Told ya, I’m not scared. Nothing to be scared of when I’m with Dad."
Sam frowned at the peeling drywall. "OK, then. Why does Dad do it, if he’s scared?"
He heard Dean take a deep breath before he moved farther into the room to sit down on his own bed. "It’s like you said," he said. "He’s a hero."
Sam let his head fall to the side so that he could give Dean a hard look. Dean just shrugged.
"He does it because it’s worth doing," he said. "A cause he believes in." He paused and pursed his lips, giving Sam a thoughtful look. "Kinda more badass to do it even though you’re scared, right?"
Sam went back to studying the ceiling.
Chapter 5
"Red sky at morning, sailor take warning," Sam murmured to himself a few days later. "Red sky at night, sailor’s delight."
So what did a yellow sky in the middle of the afternoon signal?
It had been stiflingly hot for the past couple of days, with an uncharacteristic humidity, cloying and thick. The tips of Sam’s hair were perpetually stuck to his face and neck. But now, he noticed, wind through the open door was picking up.
"Dean!"
OOO
Dean was lying in a puddle on the couch, trying to keep all parts of his body from touching any other part. He’d been lying in a puddle on the bed, but he’d run out of dry spots on the sweat-soaked sheets and so decided a change of venue was in order. He’d stripped down to jeans and a threadbare T-shirt, and hadn’t had shoes or socks on all day. But the hint of a cool edge on the breeze that had recently begun wafting through the open windows gave him hope that a break in the heat was on the way.
"Dean!" Sam lingered on the ee, pitch rising like an air raid siren. It was his "you’d better come take a look at this" voice. Dean cracked an eyelid and frowned, but resolved to heave himself up.
"What?" he grouched, lolling over to Sam at the screen door on the back of the house.
"Look," Sam instructed.
Rubbing a hand over his face - and then wincing at the way it just smeared the sweat around - Dean groggily moved to the door. It took him a second to figure out what he was looking at, but when he did, all grogginess fell away.
It was like looking through a tinted window. Everything had a sickly yellow tinge. Except the wall of thick black clouds moving their way. Dean looked back over his shoulder to the front windows, where he could see that the sky to the south was still blue with only occasional interruptions by harmless-looking white clouds. That probably wasn’t a good sign.
He took a slow look around him, and the house went from crappy-but-livable to sinister and threatening. He could almost here the sound that the cracks creeping up the walls would make as they splintered in half. And he doubted that the tin roof was held down by more than a nail here and there. The house didn’t even have a proper foundation. It was set up on cinderblocks and rattled if you moved at more than a shuffle over the floorboards.
But it was all they had. There was no cellar or basement. And since Dad had taken the car this morning, the next nearest option was a good three-mile-walk away. No way could they outrun the storm.
"Sam, go drag the mattress off dad’s bed," he said, tersely.
"Drag it where?"
"The bathroom." There were no inside rooms on this house. It was divided into living room and kitchen on one side and two bedrooms and a bathroom on the other. But the bathroom at least had the smallest window in the house.
"Will it fit?" Sam asked, eyeing the closet of a room doubtfully.
"Make it fit," Dean snapped, and Sam’s expression immediately turned mulish.
"What are you going to do?" It was more of an accusation than a question. Dean tried not to grind his teeth.
"See that old rake? And that spare tire? And that rusty ax? This storm hits and all that turns into missiles. You’ve heard the stories about tornados driving straws into trees. I don’t know about you, but I don’t really want to play the tree to that ax’s straw."
"You’re going out there?" The petulance was gone, fear left in its place. Unfortunately, Dean didn’t have time to comfort him.
"If I don’t go out there, it’s coming in here. Now. Mattress. Go."
Sam hesitated only a moment more before fleeing to John’s room. Dean could hear the loud thumps and the screeching of the bed’s metal frame against the wood floors, so he turned back toward the yard. Stepping out onto the porch, it immediately became clear how much the wind had actually picked up. It whipped around the corner of the house and tore the screen door from his hand, slamming it into the wall with a loud crack.
Dean scrambled down the steps of the house’s rickety porch and turned in a circle, trying to decide where to start. Was the ax more dangerous? Or the rusted-out hood left from some long-forgotten car? Then again, not much that he could do about the hood, anyway. He might be able to lift it on his own, but where would he put it? He decided to focus on the small things that could be brought inside, first.
Five minutes later he was wrangling an armload of old farm tools and what seemed like a decade’s worth of random liter when the rain started. Fat drops of frigid water that quickly turned into a deluge. The wind shifted, driving the rain into horizontal sheets. Dean might just as well have been underwater as he attempted to shield his face with his elbow, without taking a hand off the debris he’d gathered. He’d just lost a half-rotted two-by-four to the wind when he heard the door slam again.
"Dean!"
It was faint, almost drowned out by the pounding of rain on the tin roof, but Dean was programmed to hear that call no matter the circumstances. He spun around to find Sam watching anxiously from the porch.
"Go back inside!" he yelled, trying to make himself heard. "Get under the mattress!"
Dean couldn’t hear Sam’s reply, but he could interpret the stubborn shake of his head easily enough. "Dammit, Sam, go!"
Whether he could hear Dean or not, Sam evidently was also getting Dean’s gist, because there was a split second where Dean could see the scowl forming. Before it was able to fully coalesce, however, Sam’s gaze fixed on a point behind Dean and his expression mutated into something more like panic. There was a moment of frozen horror before he launched himself off the porch.
You’d have to be pretty dense to misread that message. Dean spun around just in time to avoid the worst of a collision with the now-airborne car hood. It clipped his shoulder, scattering the debris he’d gathered and knocking him down, but did no major damage. Sam didn’t know that, however; by the time Dean began pushing himself up, he was halfway across the yard.
He was about 15 feet away when the first sheet of corrugated tin was ripped off the roof.
Their roles were suddenly reversed, but Sam wasn’t watching Dean’s face as closely and probably wouldn’t have been able to halt his forward momentum quickly enough even if he had been. Dean was on his feet before Sam hit the ground, but still too late to do anything.
"Sam!" he screamed, sliding to his knees by his brother’s side.
The relief was almost painful when Sam rolled over, dazed and bleeding from the chin and the back of his head, but awake and mobile. Dean wrenched him up by the arm, but immediately had to drop back down to avoid another tin missile, then another.
About that time, the heavens decided to start raining down hail. They didn’t even bother with a marble- or golf ball-sized opening volley. Dean was holding onto one of Sam’s shoulders, ready to push him down if he spotted another sheet of roofing heading in their direction, when Sam yelped and yanked his hand out of Dean’s grasp. Dean turned back to find him gripping his other shoulder and staring, stunned, at a softball-sized chunk of ice.
Before Dean could really make the connection that this thing had just fallen onto his brother from the sky, a thump a foot away diverted his attention. Then another behind him. One hit the meat of his calf and bounced off; another rebounded from the ground in front of him to catch him square in the stomach. He heard another yelp from Sam and a groan from the direction of the house right before another roofing section peeled off. A mailbox went tumbling by to crash through the window of the living room.
There was no time to make a run for the house. And even if there was and they miraculously managed not to be impaled along the way, it didn’t seem in any way certain that the house wouldn’t come down around them.
So. If Dean couldn’t bring Sam to the shelter, he’d just have to bring the shelter to Sam.
OOO
One minute Sam was blinking up at the sky, trying to figure out what needed shielding the most, and the next, he was lying face down in the mud, just a glimpse of Dean’s eyes, wide and wild, to mark the transition.
"Dean," he grunted, wriggling in an effort to get out from underneath his brother. "Dean, get off."
"Be still, Sammy." Dean’s voice was loud and sure, right in his ear. It sounded like the calm in the middle of the storm. But it was followed by a gut deep "umph" that Sam knew was Dean trying not to cry out.
"Dean," Sam said, more urgently this time, "let me up. Let me up, we’ve got to get back to the house."
"Can’t," Dean breathed out around two hisses of pain. "We-"
He was cut off by a solid-sounding thunk and promptly went limp, chin suddenly jutting into Sam’s neck.
"Dean? Dean!" Sam’s wriggling increased tenfold, but between the thickening mud and Dean’s bulk, he couldn’t move. "Dean!"
Desperate, Sam went completely still and focused on Dean’s weight on his back. It was difficult to pick out with everything else going on around them, but … There, he thought, grasping at a mere hint of movement and waiting to see if a pattern emerged. Yes. Dean was breathing. Sam let his own face fall limply into the mud. But a hailstone thumping down four inches from the tip of his nose spurred him back into action. Dean was breathing now didn’t mean that he would continue to do so.
One arm was trapped under his chest, and it took some doing to get it free. Then there was the contortion of trying to bend them into the angles he needed to reach up and behind his own head to link his fingers over Dean’s. He went through a brief internal debate about whether it was more important to protect Dean’s head or his neck; decided to go with the head since it’d already proved a vulnerability.
That done, there was nothing to do but wait and try to keep his mouth above the mud. Hope things didn’t get any worse.
The hail began to fall faster, and Sam winced, squeezed his eyes shut and began praying "please don’t die, please don’t die, please don’t die," and readjusted his grip over Dean’s head.
In the moment before Dean had tackled him, he was sure he’d seen fear in his eyes. And he was pretty sure now that Dean had been lying the other day when he said he didn’t get scared on hunts. Between the way he knew how to keep going despite being afraid, when Sam had been stupidly cowering in the middle of the yard, and the sound of his voice in Sam’s ear afterward, it was clear he had already learned somewhere how to ignore his fear.
Thinking back to how he’d been comparing Dean to Jim Bowie, imaging himself and Dean fighting side by side at the Alamo, he suddenly felt ridiculous and childish. Being a hero is not fun, not exciting, not romantic. It’s horrible.
A hailstone hit him square on the fourth and middle fingers of his right hand and he saw white for what seemed like an eternity. He grit his teeth and pressed his forehead into the mud, trying to ride through the pain. He was pretty sure something had broken. Biting his lips and trying not to breath, he gingerly readjusted his grip, telling himself to buck up - better his finger than Dean’s skull.
When he had the capacity again for thinking of something else, he noticed that he could feel the ground vibrating a bit. He frowned and peered out into the rain, wondering if they were going to have an earthquake on top of everything else. He remembered from his book that Texas occasionally had an earthquake, but couldn’t call up the frequency, locations or severity.
But no. If he squinted, Sam could make out through the rain, a smudge in the pasture next to their house. And it was moving closer. Within seconds, he could tell that it was the horses from next door, but moving more like a flock of birds.
Stampeding.
Sam again began frantically trying to squirm out from under Dean. He almost had to stop when another hailstone glanced off the tip of his elbow, sending a jolt through his entire body that made him nauseous and teary. He worked through it, but might as well have stopped, as he had no better luck this time. He held his breath as the horses came closer to the barbed wire that separated the pasture from the property the Winchesters were renting.
The lead horses suddenly turned away, leading the herd around the edge of the fence, and Sam might have collapsed in relief if he hadn’t seen in that moment what was chasing them.
A ragged black funnel cloud suddenly dropped from the sky behind the horses. It raced a few feet and was sucked back up, only to drop down again and teeter a bit farther.
It did this three more times as Sam watched, frozen. On what little bare skin he still had exposed to the open air, he could feel the wind around him shift and shimmy as the tornado wobbled in this direction or that. Bits of the porch and more roofing sheets flew in its direction as if the funnel was some sort of magnet. Sam was too dumbfounded to do more than stare by this point.
And then, it disappeared and stayed gone.
That seemed to have been the storm’s finale, because a few minutes later, the hail tapered to a stop, followed by the rain. And then watery sunlight was breaking through the clouds, and everything was cool, shiny and freshly scrubbed. Sam would have wondered if he’d imagined it all, except Dean was still heavy on his back.
Trembling, Sam lowered his cheek to the mud and let his eyes slip closed. When he opened them again, it was to the sound of a car horn blaring frantically, getting louder and louder as it got closer to the house. Moments later, the Impala roared up the long driveway. Then John was bursting out at a run, footsteps heavy through the mud and puddles. He called Dean’s name, then Sam’s, but before Sam could answer, Dean was being rolled gently off of him.
The sudden absence of his brother’s weight was almost as stunning as its introduction had been, and Dad had to roll him over too, repeating his name anxiously. Sam blinked up at him, but couldn’t find it in him to do much more. After that, things began to blur. There was the car, somehow … and then the hospital, a madhouse of sobs and pleas and shouting. There was a period - he didn’t really know if it was long or short - of waiting, and then tests (lots of tests) and stitches (the gashes on the back of his head and chin) and a cast (two broken fingers - he also had a chipped ulna, which would hurt, but a cast wouldn’t help much).
Dad flitted in and out of the scene, and at the end showed up again to take him to Dean, who would be fine, but very, very sore. Serious concussion, but no skull fracture, at least. Three broken ribs, a black and blue back of everything and a hairline fracture in his heel that would heal fine but hurt a whole lot in the meantime.
Dad was again there sometimes and not, others, and Sam was sitting alone by Dean’s bed a good half the time while they waited for Dean to wake up. So he had plenty of time to think about the day’s events.
He kept coming back to that look in Dean’s eyes and how it matched up with the sound of his voice a moment later. Fear and calm cool. How it was more badass if you did it even though you were scared. How it still hurt, even if it was for a good cause.
Wrestling with alligators, sailing with pirates.
Drawing lines in the sand.
He wouldn’t mind if he never saw another horse again.
Notes:
For the record, I've experienced a tornado here and there, including one with softball-sized hail. However, I stayed inside for all of them. So most of the tornado stuff I got watching videos of tornados on youtube.
The Texas stuff, however, is all 100 percent accurate and verifiable, though I've exaggerated toward the stereotype a bit. Oh. Except maybe the stampeding horses. I imagine that there are large herds of them somewhere, but I don't know of any, personally.
And can I say one more time how great and charitable July is? It bears repeating.
Author: Deanish
Rating: PG ... with a couple of lower-level swear words
Length: 9,500 words
Characters/Pairings: Dean, Sam, minor appearances by John
Summary: This is july_july_july's Sweet Charity story (and she was *very* charitable in, first, buying me to begin with, and, second, letting me get away with being almost three weeks late). She and I are both die hard Texans, so her prompt was Texas, tornados, Dean whump, protective Sam and preseries. This has at least a little of all of that.
Warnings: There's a LOT of Texas love going on in here. I don't know why anyone would have a problem with that, but thought I'd go ahead and warn you up front, just in case. I'm firmly convinced that Texas is the best of all states, and it maybe shows a little.
Also, I'm neither a doctor, nor a meteorologist.
Deconstruction of a Hero
Chapter 1
Texas.
For such a short word, Sam mused, it sure managed to sound big. He wondered if there might be something to that - like "a big things come in small packages" sort of maxim. Alaska was also a relatively short name - certainly shorter than, say, South Carolina, where they were now. Or Rhode Island, where they had lived four schools ago. That was definitely a lot of name for such a small state.
Sam thought through the state names, carefully dividing them into those he’d lived in and those he hadn’t. There were 16 left in the later category, and Alaska and Texas were two of them. Though he’d be scratching Texas off the list soon. There were only two on the short list with names shorter than Texas, but they were enough to disprove his theory: Ohio and Utah both had one less letter, but a lot less space.
So. Just a coincidence. Sam was beginning to realize that there were a lot of coincidences in the world. Lots and lots more than his dad seemed to believe in, judging by the way he said, ‘No such thing as coincidence, Sam,’ all the time.
For instance, there was the whole reason they were moving to Texas. They’d lived in a lot of places. Thirty-five states. Seeing as Sam was 13 years old, that was an average of 2.69 (which rounded up to three) states a year. Plus, they lived in more than one city in 12 of the states. That brought them up to an average of 3.6 moves a year, which rounded up to 4. A lot of places. But not Texas, even though Texas made up eight percent of the land in the 48 contiguous states and, judging by the old westerns Dean liked to watch on TV, was chocked full of ghost towns.
Dad said that was because Texas was also chocked full of the modern-day descendents of gunslingers, who were perfectly capable of taking care of their own ghosts. Or, at least, had been until recently. Last month, however, two of those gun-slinging progeny had up and died, and Dad said there was no such thing as a coincidence. So, two hunters dying within 30 miles of each other definitely meant something foul was afoot. ‘Course, Dad didn’t use those words, but Sam had read them recently in a Sherlock Holmes book and liked the way they sounded.
Anyway, the upshot, as Dean put it, was that everyone else could go to hell, they were going to Texas. (Which Sam thought Dean sounded really cool saying, but knew that he hadn’t come up with on his own. It was actually a paraphrase of something Davey Crockett said in 1835 during his campaign for a seat in Tennessee’s congress. Sam knew that because he liked to study up on a state before he moved there. Dean didn’t, normally, so Sam wasn’t sure if he knew that he was paraphrasing a Davey Crockett quote or not.)
In particular, the Winchesters were going to Canyon, which was about 500 miles away from the part of Texas that Davey Crockett lived in for a few months. That was a little disappointing; Sam had been hoping to see the Alamo. He had even looked into whether there might be some ghost of its defenders hanging about that could entice his Dad to take him there. But all the bodies had been burned, so that was unlikely.
But Canyon might be cool, too. It was named for the nearby Paloduro Canyon, which was the second largest canyon in the United States. Dean though that was pretty lame, but Sam figured since they’d never seen the Grand Canyon, it shouldn’t be too disappointing.
Even better, Canyon was home to West Texas A&M University, which, in turn, was home to Texas’ largest history museum. (He was beginning to notice that Texans seemed a lot more preoccupied with superlatives than the rest of the country.) And since Sam was well aware that seventh grade was the year appointed for all 13 year olds to learn their personal state’s history, he thought that might come in handy.
Sam was sure to be behind, since he’d started the year in Maine and then moved to South Carolina after Christmas. It was April now, so he had approximately two months to learn the history of Texas. This sounded like a particularly tall order, since the state had, according to the books Sam had been reading to get a head start, been part of six different countries in its lifetime, and originally included land that was now part of five other states.
Dean said he should suck it up. At least, he said, Sam wasn’t spending seventh grade in Nebraska. That’s where they’d been when dean was in seventh grade, and he swore up and down that Nebraskan history could be used in surgery as an anesthetic.
Sam mostly figured that Dean was right. So far, Texas was sounding like a pretty cool place to live for awhile. Well. Maybe cool wasn’t the best word. Dean would make fun of him if he knew Sam was making cool/uncool assessments based on the quality of a state’s history class. But you know. Anyway. He wondered if he might be able to talk Dad into a horse.
OOO
Dean rolled his eyes as he passed through what had been passing for their living room for the past few months. He’d distinctly heard the word "horse" leave Sam’s mouth in the kid’s best "innocent, yet still wheedling" tone. He almost wanted to stick around and hear this conversation for himself, because it should be good for a laugh. But Dad had said get packed, and if he had to explain why Sam could not have a horse and then come out to find the car still wasn’t at least halfway packed, it was going to be a long drive to Texas.
Well, really, it was going to be a long drive, regardless. And somehow, despite the 14 hours they were planning to spend on Texas highways, they weren’t going to be going through LaGrange. Dean suspected a conspiracy. How could they go to Texas and not go see the Chicken Ranch? It was, like, the state’s most famous landmark. "They got a lot of nice girls," ZZ Top had been crooning at him for as long as he could remember. A Dolly Parton movie had been made about it.
He’d pointed this out to Dad as subtly as he could, but Dad had just looked at him and said, "We’re not driving six hours out of our way so you can see an out-of-commission whorehouse, Dean."
‘Course, when he put it like that …
Anyway. Dean walked back through the living room, catching a snatch of Sam and John’s conversation - "I was just thinking it’d be a good thing to have around, you know? Animals are really sensitive to the supernatural." Dean cringed and wondered if his own attempts at subtlety had been as obvious as that. He hoped not.
Back in his and Sam’s room, he gave a last look at his side. Nothing left that he was planning to take. Scraps of paper filled with doodles in lieu of class notes, a few of phone numbers he’d no longer need, some socks too holey to bother packing, much less bending down to retrieve.
Sam’s half, on the other hand, somehow managed to look cleaner, despite the fact that almost all his stuff was still there. Dean wasn’t supposed to help him pack anymore. When Sam turned 10, Dad decreed that he was old enough to be relied upon to do it himself. But 13 or not, Dean was pretty sure that if Sam was allowed to do it unsupervised, he’d end up with two bags of books and one change of underwear. So, checking over his shoulder to make sure Dad was still preoccupied with the pony discussion, Dean moved to the bottom two drawers of their shared dresser and began pulling out Sam’s clothes. He’d just make sure they were at least in Sam’s line of sight when he started packing.
OOO
OK. So a horse was definitely a no-go. They cost too much to feed, wouldn’t fit in the trunk and probably would end up kicking Sam in the head, anyway, Dad said. (Personally, Sam suspected that he’d make a brilliant horseman.) But he had given Dean permission to take Sam to a rodeo while he was away, trying to hunt down whatever was hunting hunters. So horses were still in the offing, kind of. Maybe Sam could prove himself, yet. Maybe there would be a runaway bucking bronco barreling toward the audience and he’d jump on and stop it, calming it with his soothing voice and confident seat …
Sam replayed that scenario in his head a few times (by the third time, Penny Parker had some how shown up in the path of the bronco; though she hadn’t mentioned that she too would be leaving South Carolina for Texas, it didn’t seem out of the realm of possibility, really) as he loaded the last of his bags into the car, grunting a bit because it was the one he’d packed his books in. All but one, anyway. He was keeping "The Texas Republic: A Social and Economic History" out for the ride. He’d … well, he’d nicked it from the St. Stephen Public Library. Given that it’d only been checked out twice since it was published in 1946, he figured no one’d mind. Dad had eyed it a bit suspiciously, but Dad had no real idea what books Sam did or didn’t own, and evidently didn’t feel sure enough to call him on it. Dean would know, but Dean was in no position to comment.
Chapter 2
"Hey, did you know," Sam piped up from the backseat, and in the front, Dean groaned. Sam paused, looking up from his book uncertainly. He’d been starting sentences like that for the past six hours. And that was just today. There was also the 10 hours the day before, and the eight the day before that.
They had only today made it to the Texas border, and while the 18 hours in the car the first two days had gotten them through the first five states, it was going to take about 14 to get them from the southeastern border of this one to their target in the Panhandle. Dean didn’t know if he could take another eight hours of "Did you know."
He looked over at John, hoping he was also finding it irritating - ideally, enough so to put a stop to it. But as far as Dean could tell, Dad had heard neither Sam’s question, nor Dean’s groan. His ability to tune them out was unparalleled. Which was why Dean gave up and resigned himself to another lesson in Texas history. Sam’s working theory was, you never knew when he might find something in his studies of the places they were moving to that would prove useful to Dad in a job. It was his way of trying to help, since he wasn’t old enough to actually help yet. And it made Dean feel bad that Dad probably heard less than 10 percent of it. Even if he was pretty sure that the fact that cowboys slept with their eyes open was not going to help John find whatever had killed those two hunters.
It was kind of cool, though. He wondered if he could train himself to sleep with his eyes open. Sure’d be useful.
"What?" he finally relented.
Sam didn’t reply right away, so Dean turned to look back at him, wincing as the sudden influx of air over his back made him realize how wet his T-shirt was. Air conditioner was out again, which hadn’t been that big a deal in South Carolina’s April, but was proving ever more painful the farther west they traveled.
"What?" he said again, trying for genuinely interested. Sam held his gaze for a moment, looking for evidence that he really did want to know, and Dean felt another twinge of guilt. He knew it would never occur to Sam that there were facts that other people weren’t burning to find out.
Sam accepted the second "what" for the apology it was, and started back up.
"Did you know that the Battle of San Jacinto only lasted 18 minutes?"
"San Jacinto?" Dean repeated, before he’d thought it through. He should have just given the requisite "Wow, no, I didn’t know that" and turned around. Oh well. Too late now.
"Yeah. The last battle of the Texas Revolution," Sam said, checking his facts on the page in front of him, before gearing up for a lecture. "It was 900 Texans against 1,400 Mexicans, and the Texans won in 18 minutes. They killed 630 Mexicans, wounded 208 and captured 730. Only nine Texans were killed, and only 26 wounded."
OK, so that actually did kind of deserve a "Wow, no I didn’t know that." Dean let out an impressed whistle. "Geez," he said. "What were they fighting for?"
"Independence from Mexico. They were led by Sam Houston, who is the only American to have been governor of two different states, and the only governor of an American state who had also been president of another country. Their battle cry was ‘Remember the Alamo.’"
Sam said all of this matter-of-factly, reeling off trivia as if he’d been born in Texas, rather than having made it to the state just about four hours ago.
"Like, Davy Crockett and the Alamo?" Dean said, interested against his will. He’d watched some of those old Disney reruns, and the man had been played by John Wayne and Johnny Cash. This was history that interested Dean.
"Yeah," Sam said, sounding a little surprised by Dean’s sudden interest in what he was saying. "And Jim Bowie and William Travis."
"Jim Bowie, the Bowie Knife Jim Bowie?"
Sam nodded eagerly. "That’s the one."
"Huh."
"Though, actually, his brother made him that knife. He just made it famous, when he used it to gut a man who’d double crossed his friend in a duel and stabbed him with a sword cane after he’d already been shot."
"Christ," Dean said.
"Yeah," Sam grinned, then turned thoughtful. "Actually, he reminds me a little of you."
"Hell, yeah," Dean laughed.
"No, I mean it. He’s supposed to have been all tough and badass -" Here Sam snapped his mouth shut and shot a guilty look toward the back of John’s head. And though he’d yet to acknowledge a single other word of the conversation, John heard that and raised a censuring eyebrow in the rearview mirror.
"Sorry," Sam mumbled. "But it’s true! Says here: He is supposed to have ridden alligators, won sit-down knife fights on logs in the Mississippi River, fought Indians and sailed with pirates. People stared at him wherever he went, saying he had never lost a fight, nor had he ever started one."
Dean wasn’t sure what to say to that. John took his eyes off the road long enough to glance over at him.
"You been riding alligators?" he said, laughter hiding just behind his words.
Dean flushed and slid back around to face forward. "Shut up," he grumbled, not really aiming it at anyone in particular. John chuffed, but didn’t say anything else. In the passenger side mirror, Dean watched Sam frown in their general direction for a minute or two before shrugging and turning back to his book.
OOO
Duh. Sam knew Dean didn’t ride alligators. They’d totally missed the point. And they hadn’t let him finish and tell them the rest about Jim Bowie. And he hadn’t even got to tell them about William Travis at all. Besides being the colonel who’d inspired the men of the Alamo to stay and defend the mission against impossible odds - 182 against 2,000, which divided out to 11 to 1, and even though all the Texans were killed, more Mexicans were killed, about 600 hundred, which was, like, more than three times as many - Travis was a lawyer and kept a list of the books he’d read. Everything from novels by Sir Walter Scott to history by Herodotus and Napoleon. Sam hadn’t read those yet, but they were going on his list of things to get at the library.
And Travis was credited with writing a letter called the "sublimest document in American history." Sam wasn’t sure exactly what sublimest meant, but it sounded really good. And he liked the letter, which ended, "If this call is neglected, I am determined to sustain myself as long as possible and die like a soldier who never forgets what is due his own honor and that of his country. Victory or death."
But mostly he liked the idea that your words, what you thought, could be part of what made you a hero.
He killed a couple of hours of the drive imagining himself pacing in front of dozens of men, rallying them with his words to "sell their lives as dearly as possible" and drawing a line in the sand. And maybe Dean was watching, stoic and proud, from his cot where he’d later fight to the death, even though he was too sick to stand up.
Chapter 3
OK, when Dad said they were moving to Canyon, Texas, he’d clearly used the term "to" loosely. Dean didn’t think this shack could possibly be within any city’s limits. It was more than a mile down a dirt road, which turned off a ranch road several miles past any town or village that he’d noticed.
Dean sighed. They’d probably have to catch the school bus at the butt crack of dawn, and only after a predawn hike to the highway. And a town this size? No way those things would be air conditioned.
Shit. At least the house had electricity and indoor plumbing, though. Sometimes they didn’t. Still no air conditioning, however, which was fast becoming a theme of this trip.
They quickly set to work unpacking the car, then Dad left to make a supply run while he and Sam set up camp. Or it was supposed to be him and Sam. Sam, however, was continuously drawn to the window, which looked out over a rolling green pasture with something that could be horses grazing in the distance. Or it could be cows. Or, from this distance, zebras.
Regardless, when he opened his mouth, Dean figured he knew what was coming and gave him a preemptive no.
"What?" Sam asked, peevishly.
"No, you can’t go out there and see if those are horses."
Sam’s jaw thrust forward. "That’s not what I was going to ask," he lied. Dean wasn’t fooled.
"Oh no? What were you going to ask?"
Sam shot him a mutinous look, but his brother was nothing if not a quick thinker. "I was going to ask, did you know that it’s illegal to graffiti someone else’s cow in Texas?"
Dean snorted. "Well, good to know. I’ll have to scratch that off tonight’s agenda." He turned back to the box of battered pots he was unpacking, and counted down.
Three.
Two.
One.
"But why can’t I go see if those are horses?"
Bingo. Dean smiled and shook his head at his family’s predictability. "Because that’s not our land. You’d be trespassing."
"You and Dad trespass all the time."
"That’s different."
"How?"
"Because it is."
"Uh!"
"Besides, there’s probably snakes. And … what were those things again? Horny frogs?"
"Horny toads. And they’re not poisonous. They don’t even bite."
"Why would they choose a state mascot that can’t even bite?"
"It can shoot blood out of its eye," Sam answered, which, yeah, was pretty cool. "Besides, it’s not a state mascot. It’s the state reptile. Just like the state bird is the mocking bird and the state small mammal is the armadillo and the state large mammal is the longhorn and the state fish is the Guadalupe bass and the state insect is the Monarch butterfly."
"A butterfly? What a bunch of wusses."
"The official state dish is chili," Sam offered placatingly. He’d already forgotten that he was mad at Dean. It never took long.
"Mmm," Dean answered. "Chili."
Sam grinned at him. "Yeah. We should have that for dinner, huh? To be official and all."
Which was how Dean ended up chopping the official state vegetable a few hours later: 1015 sweet onions. Tomorrow was hamburgers, which Sam informed him had been invented in Texas.
OOO
By the time Sam got up the next morning, Dad was already gone, and Dean was looking unhappy. Sam figured the two were related. Since Dean had started hunting with Dad a little over a year ago, he hated seeing Dad go off on his own. Dean always said it was just that he wanted to go, too, but Sam didn’t believe him. His theory was that Dean was worried that something would happen and he wouldn’t be there to help. He was just too cool to admit that he was worrying.
Even so, that meant more worrying for Sam, because there was less certainty in Dean’s voice these days when he told Sam not to worry if Dad was going after something new or late getting home.
But Sam wasn’t worried right now, not about that, anyway. Dad had just left, and he didn’t even know what he was going after, yet. It’d probably take him several days of researching before he got to the dangerous part. So, for now, Sam could focus all his nerves on preparing for his first day of school.
He put on his best jeans and his blue shirt. The same outfit he’d worn for all his first days this year. ‘Course, he’d worn it a lot more times since the first days in Maine and South Carolina, but still. There was a nice symmetry to wearing it for all the first days.
Then he looked over his supplies. He should start all over in new notebooks, so that the new class notes wouldn’t get mixed up with the old ones. But Dad said there was no point buying new notebooks when school was going to be out in two months. Just like he’d said there was no point in buying new ones for South Carolina when the old ones only had four months’ worth of notes in them. Sam had talked him into some new pencils, but only because they were cheap and he’d chewed the erasers off all his old ones.
He’d left all his school books back in South Carolina, so his backpack was saggy and light for their first early-morning trek down the dirt road to meet the school bus. He bet it’d be heavy on the way home, though. Not for Dean, of course. Dean was only carrying one tattered notebook now and would probably carry that same notebook home at the end of the day. He’d stopped doing homework once he got to high school. He said it was because it got to be too much trouble to keep up, moving so often. But Sam thought it was really just that he lost interest.
That, and the fact that a backpack would cramp his style.
They reached the end of the dirt road, and settled in to wait next to a long row of aluminum mailboxes labeled with the same route and varying box numbers. Sam opened the one that matched their new address, just for the heck of it. There was no mail, but a big brown spider had built a nice web inside. Sam wondered if the mailman would deliver mail with a spider in their box. Not that they ever got mail, anyway.
That reminded Sam of William Travis’ letter, and he set to imagining the Alamo again for the 15 minutes before the bus came. Victory or death. He’d looked up sublimest when he’d unpacked his dictionary. It came from the root sublime, which meant inspiring awe. So William Travis had written the most awe-inspiring document in American history. That surprised Sam, but made him feel oddly proud of the man. He thought they had a lot in common.
The bus arrived and luckily the driver was nice enough to stop and let them on, even though Dad hadn’t remembered to sign them up to ride the bus. She said she just figured that if there were kids waiting by the side of the road on her route at this time of day, she should pick them up. They should probably be in school, anyway, she said.
Dean smiled and laughed and thanked her and charmingly assured her that, yes, school was exactly where they were trying to get to. Sam tried not to blush at having this woman know that Dad had forgotten again.
The bus wasn’t crowded, so Sam was faced with a choice. Sit by Dean or find a seat to himself. Used to, he’d always sit by Dean. But lately he’d become uncomfortably aware that it wasn’t cool for a high school junior to sit with a seventh grader. Dean hadn’t said anything, but then, he wouldn’t. Still. Sam knew how hard it was, starting over at a new school, and he didn’t want to embarrass his brother any more than he probably already was.
Dean stopped just past an empty seat and turned, waiting for Sam to slide in by the window.
"Uh," Sam stammered, ducking his head. "That’s OK. I’ll sit over there." He indicated a seat a few rows past.
"Oh," Dean said, surprised. "OK." He flattened himself against the seatback so that Sam and his backpack could slip by. He was sitting down by the time Sam got to his chosen seat, but there was a tense set to his shoulders that Sam wasn’t sure how to interpret. He saw Dean beginning to twist around to check on him, and quickly turned to rummage through his backpack so that he wouldn’t meet his eye.
He kept his nose buried in his book until the bus pulled to a stop at the high school. Dean slowly got up and turned to give him a final wave before heading toward the door. Sam bit the inside of his lip and gave a small wave back.
OOO
Dean was memorizing the Declaration of Independence for the third time this year. He’d pretty much decided that this was probably normal, that all government classes spent all year memorizing the thing, maybe interspersed with a few stabs at the Bill of Rights.
"We hold these truths to be self evident …"
Dean had come up with his own set of self evident truths. That all men were not created equal - Winchesters were clearly superior. That Impalas rock. That school is stupid. That history is boring.
Then again …
He thought back to what Sam had been saying in the car and flipped to the table of contents in his new history book. Sure enough, there were three whole chapters on Texas history, enough to constitute a full section of the tome. God this state was vain. He turned to the appropriate page number and began scanning. Spain, Mexico, France. Sheesh, was he glad he wasn’t in seventh grade this year. The flags alone would be enough to do him in. There. The Republic of Texas.
And of course, a convenient little subsection on the heroes of the Alamo.
Jim Bowie. Born in Kentucky, 1795. Blah blah blah. Six feet, one inch tall. Huh. Just like he was. That’s probably what caught Sam’s eye. He was obsessed with Dean’s height lately. Dean had made the mistake of telling him that he was the same height that Dean had been when he was 13, and Sam had gotten it into his head that that meant he would be the same height as Dean when he grew up. Dean hoped he was, because if not, Sam was going to be some kind of majorly disappointed.
It was all there, and then some. Alligators, knife fights, treasure hunting. All kinds of get-rich-quick schemes. More than willing to bend the truth a bit when the purpose suited him.
On the other hand, he spoke three languages. Actually did get rich quick. Charmed everyone he met, including his beautiful young wife …
Who’d died. Along with his two children. And mother- and father-in-law. All in the span of three days. He’d sent them out of town to avoid an epidemic, and they’d all died of it anyway while he was away. He began to gamble, drink, lose money and friends and sell the land he’d worked for years to amass. He lasted three years before finally finding a way out at the Alamo. There he’d fallen ill just in time for the siege, and died with a pistol in each hand, presumably taking out as many Mexican soldiers as he could from his sick bed before taking a few dozen bayonets to the chest.
Well. That was cheerful. He let the book fall closed.
He didn’t know what Sam had seen in the guy to remind him of Dean, but now he felt nervous. Dean didn’t know if it could be called superstitious, knowing what he knew, but what if Sam was right and he was like this guy, doomed somehow to follow in this poor schmuck’s footsteps. God. He didn’t even want to imagine what he’d do if his family was gone. Drink, gamble, find a losing battle to fight. Those all sounded like good starting points.
His mind returned, uneasily, to the hunt John had left for that morning. Two hunters dead already, and no clue even what he was heading into. Dean didn’t like it. But what could he do about it? Not like he could tell Dad not to hunt, even if he wanted to. Even if Dad was listening.
And for the record? Dad wasn’t listening.
One year and two months. That’s all he had left. Then he’d be done with school, quit wasting eight hours of his day and maybe be able to find the time to look after both Sam and John.
Chapter 4
A couple of weeks passed. Dean forged John’s signature on Sam’s progress reports, bought tickets to the big rodeo in Amarillo and made a trip to the history museum to accommodate Sam’s paper on the evolution of barbed wire. He even came across a few things at the museum that opened up new avenues of research on John’s hunt. And, yeah, with his spare time he got to know a couple of the local girls … and a few of the college girls. Turns out there were a lot of things museums were good for.
All in all, despite their official butterflies and the pride they took in things like being home to the largest parking lot in the world, Texans were turning out OK. Dean was even kind of enjoying the high percentage of female bottoms bearing the Wrangler brand. On the other hand, he could do without the disdain he’d noticed in the eyes of all the big mud-splattered-truck owners when they looked at the Impala.
And after hearing about the cow-tipping escapades of his classmates, Dean concluded that he and Sam weren’t likely to be arrested, or even noticed, during a brief bit of trespassing. So he relented and walked with Sam through the pasture in the back in search of the maybe possibly horses. They had to slip through a barbed wire fence - Sam helpfully identified it as being of the Scutt Split Arrow Plate Barb variety - and Dean warned Sam that if they got caught, they better make a run for it, because if they made laws against cow graffiti, then they probably shot suspected horse thieves on sight.
"What’s with you and horses lately, anyway?" he asked as they picked their way around the cow patties.
Sam shrugged. "They’re just cool."
"You never seemed to think so before."
Sam shrugged again, but didn’t reply. The brown specs in the distance grew a little more distinct and Dean could finally tell for certain that they did at least have four legs. He reached down to pluck a weed, preparing to stick it in his mouth because it seemed like the kind of thing you were supposed to do when walking through a pasture. Then he dodged another cow patty and decided maybe not, after all, and threw it down.
"The three Musketeers rode horses," Sam said, suddenly. That being one of the few books that he’d read (on Sam’s insistance that he’d love it), Dean was able to affirm that statement as true.
"William Wallace."
"Sometimes," Dean again allowed. Braveheart was their new favorite movie. They were still bellowing "They’ll never take OUR FREEDOM!" at each other at random intervals.
"William Travis."
Sounded familiar, but Dean couldn’t place the name. "Don’t think I know him," he said.
"He was the other colonel at the Alamo. Him and Jim Bowie."
"They had horses at the Alamo?"
"Yeah," Sam sighed, exasperated. "How else would they get around? William Travis was a member of the cavalry."
Dean couldn’t really add anything to that, so they passed the next few steps in a comfortable silence before Sam spoke up again.
"He was a lawyer, you know," he said, out of the blue.
"Who?"
"William Travis," Sam peeved at him, apparently irritated by Dean’s inability to keep up with the meandering conversation.
"Uh. OK," Dean said, not sure exactly what Sam was getting at.
"I just. Think that’s cool, is all. That he was a lawyer."
Dean shrugged. "I guess," he said, though, personally, he didn’t, especially.
It was beginning to look like the horses were actually horses. Unless they were maybe mules. Or donkeys. Did people keep herds of mules?
"Would you have been scared?"
Geez, what was with the kid tonight, Dean wondered. He was usually a little more articulate than this. "Sam," he sighed, "you’re gonna have to start including some context clues if you want me to know what the hell you’re talking about."
"At the Alamo," Sam said. And though Dean was looking at him, he could hear the eye roll in his voice. Would you have been scared at the Alamo?"
Dean snorted. "Well, yeah."
Sam stopped short and when Dean turned back to see what was up, he looked surprised. "You would?"
"Dude, what kind of idiot do you take me for?" Dean laughed again, but stopped when he realized that Sam was genuinely confused. "Man, you got the whole Mexican army bearing down on you and your 200 friends and you’re not scared? Something’s wrong with you."
"But …" Sam trailed off, mouth hanging open while he processed this. Dean gave him the time to think. "But they were heroes, fighting for their country, a cause they believed in."
Dean nodded slowly, carefully, trying to make up for laughing at Sam’s question earlier. "But," he said, "dying for a good cause is still dying. Doesn’t make a bullet hurt any less or leaving a family behind any easier."
If anything, Sam’s brow furrowed more at this. His mouth opened and closed a few times in aborted protests before he decided on one. "So, are you scared during hunts with Dad?"
Was that what this was about? Crap. "Nah," he said easily and mostly truthfully. "Dad doesn’t let me go on any of the certain death ones yet."
OK, possibly that didn’t come out in comforting in which it was intended, because Sam’s expression went from troubled straight to slack-jawed horror.
"Dad goes on certain death hunts?"
Yeah. Dean could see, now, how that would be less than comforting. Crap. Now Dean was the one fish mouthing, but Sam didn’t do him the courtesy of a minute to think.
"Is he on one now? Is that why you’ve been worried since we got to Texas?"
"Sam, calm down. Dad’s not on a certain death hunt. He’s just researching right now. You know that."
Sam looked unconvinced. And nauseous.
"Come on, man. I didn’t mean it like that. I was exaggerating. You know Dad’s not going to go after anything until he’s got a plan to kill it dead. If anything, it’s certain death for those monster sons of bitches."
"What about that Baihu? Back in San Francisco."
"He’s fine now," Dean pointed out.
"But he almost wasn’t," Sam insisted, pitch going higher with each syllable.
"Sam." Dean paused to take a steadying breath. "Sam. It’s a dangerous job. You already knew this. Dad’s careful, and he always comes back, one way or another. Why are you getting worked up about this now?"
"Does Dad get scared?"
Dean thought about lying, but decided Sam probably deserved the truth. And he wasn’t sure what the right answer was here, anyway. "Yeah," he said. "I mean, we don’t talk about it or anything, but, like I said, some situations, you’d have to be an idiot not to get scared."
Sam didn’t say anything. Just looked at Dean, crestfallen, and turned to walk back to the house.
"Hey!" Dean called after him. "What about the horses?"
OOO
Sam didn’t answer Dean, just kept walking, thought jumbled enough that he wouldn’t be surprised to trip over them.
He knew. He knew hunting was dangerous. But. He’d figured it was like Dean had told him back when he’d first found out about the monsters. Dad was a superhero. Or you know. Sam didn’t really think Dad was a superhero, but. Just.
If they weren’t scared of it, it couldn’t be that bad, right? Because if they were scared of it … then they knew it was dangerous enough to hurt you. And if they knew it was dangerous enough to hurt you … kill you, maybe … why would they do it?
Sure Dad came back bloody from time to time. And Dean even had a scar from that one hunt Dad took him on last year. But those were just mistakes. Accidents. Not because the hunt wasn’t something they could handle.
He made it back to the house, let the screen door slam behind him, stormed into the bedroom he shared with Dean and flopped on the bed on his side of the room to stare at the ceiling. A few minutes later, he heard the screen door slam again, Dean following far enough behind to give Sam his version of space, but close enough that he didn’t have to worry. Soft footfalls announced his presence in the room.
"Why do you do it, then, if you’re scared?" he asked without taking his eyes off the ceiling. He deliberately didn’t ask how do you do it if you’re scared. He’d just assumed that was something he was going to grow out of.
"Told ya, I’m not scared. Nothing to be scared of when I’m with Dad."
Sam frowned at the peeling drywall. "OK, then. Why does Dad do it, if he’s scared?"
He heard Dean take a deep breath before he moved farther into the room to sit down on his own bed. "It’s like you said," he said. "He’s a hero."
Sam let his head fall to the side so that he could give Dean a hard look. Dean just shrugged.
"He does it because it’s worth doing," he said. "A cause he believes in." He paused and pursed his lips, giving Sam a thoughtful look. "Kinda more badass to do it even though you’re scared, right?"
Sam went back to studying the ceiling.
Chapter 5
"Red sky at morning, sailor take warning," Sam murmured to himself a few days later. "Red sky at night, sailor’s delight."
So what did a yellow sky in the middle of the afternoon signal?
It had been stiflingly hot for the past couple of days, with an uncharacteristic humidity, cloying and thick. The tips of Sam’s hair were perpetually stuck to his face and neck. But now, he noticed, wind through the open door was picking up.
"Dean!"
OOO
Dean was lying in a puddle on the couch, trying to keep all parts of his body from touching any other part. He’d been lying in a puddle on the bed, but he’d run out of dry spots on the sweat-soaked sheets and so decided a change of venue was in order. He’d stripped down to jeans and a threadbare T-shirt, and hadn’t had shoes or socks on all day. But the hint of a cool edge on the breeze that had recently begun wafting through the open windows gave him hope that a break in the heat was on the way.
"Dean!" Sam lingered on the ee, pitch rising like an air raid siren. It was his "you’d better come take a look at this" voice. Dean cracked an eyelid and frowned, but resolved to heave himself up.
"What?" he grouched, lolling over to Sam at the screen door on the back of the house.
"Look," Sam instructed.
Rubbing a hand over his face - and then wincing at the way it just smeared the sweat around - Dean groggily moved to the door. It took him a second to figure out what he was looking at, but when he did, all grogginess fell away.
It was like looking through a tinted window. Everything had a sickly yellow tinge. Except the wall of thick black clouds moving their way. Dean looked back over his shoulder to the front windows, where he could see that the sky to the south was still blue with only occasional interruptions by harmless-looking white clouds. That probably wasn’t a good sign.
He took a slow look around him, and the house went from crappy-but-livable to sinister and threatening. He could almost here the sound that the cracks creeping up the walls would make as they splintered in half. And he doubted that the tin roof was held down by more than a nail here and there. The house didn’t even have a proper foundation. It was set up on cinderblocks and rattled if you moved at more than a shuffle over the floorboards.
But it was all they had. There was no cellar or basement. And since Dad had taken the car this morning, the next nearest option was a good three-mile-walk away. No way could they outrun the storm.
"Sam, go drag the mattress off dad’s bed," he said, tersely.
"Drag it where?"
"The bathroom." There were no inside rooms on this house. It was divided into living room and kitchen on one side and two bedrooms and a bathroom on the other. But the bathroom at least had the smallest window in the house.
"Will it fit?" Sam asked, eyeing the closet of a room doubtfully.
"Make it fit," Dean snapped, and Sam’s expression immediately turned mulish.
"What are you going to do?" It was more of an accusation than a question. Dean tried not to grind his teeth.
"See that old rake? And that spare tire? And that rusty ax? This storm hits and all that turns into missiles. You’ve heard the stories about tornados driving straws into trees. I don’t know about you, but I don’t really want to play the tree to that ax’s straw."
"You’re going out there?" The petulance was gone, fear left in its place. Unfortunately, Dean didn’t have time to comfort him.
"If I don’t go out there, it’s coming in here. Now. Mattress. Go."
Sam hesitated only a moment more before fleeing to John’s room. Dean could hear the loud thumps and the screeching of the bed’s metal frame against the wood floors, so he turned back toward the yard. Stepping out onto the porch, it immediately became clear how much the wind had actually picked up. It whipped around the corner of the house and tore the screen door from his hand, slamming it into the wall with a loud crack.
Dean scrambled down the steps of the house’s rickety porch and turned in a circle, trying to decide where to start. Was the ax more dangerous? Or the rusted-out hood left from some long-forgotten car? Then again, not much that he could do about the hood, anyway. He might be able to lift it on his own, but where would he put it? He decided to focus on the small things that could be brought inside, first.
Five minutes later he was wrangling an armload of old farm tools and what seemed like a decade’s worth of random liter when the rain started. Fat drops of frigid water that quickly turned into a deluge. The wind shifted, driving the rain into horizontal sheets. Dean might just as well have been underwater as he attempted to shield his face with his elbow, without taking a hand off the debris he’d gathered. He’d just lost a half-rotted two-by-four to the wind when he heard the door slam again.
"Dean!"
It was faint, almost drowned out by the pounding of rain on the tin roof, but Dean was programmed to hear that call no matter the circumstances. He spun around to find Sam watching anxiously from the porch.
"Go back inside!" he yelled, trying to make himself heard. "Get under the mattress!"
Dean couldn’t hear Sam’s reply, but he could interpret the stubborn shake of his head easily enough. "Dammit, Sam, go!"
Whether he could hear Dean or not, Sam evidently was also getting Dean’s gist, because there was a split second where Dean could see the scowl forming. Before it was able to fully coalesce, however, Sam’s gaze fixed on a point behind Dean and his expression mutated into something more like panic. There was a moment of frozen horror before he launched himself off the porch.
You’d have to be pretty dense to misread that message. Dean spun around just in time to avoid the worst of a collision with the now-airborne car hood. It clipped his shoulder, scattering the debris he’d gathered and knocking him down, but did no major damage. Sam didn’t know that, however; by the time Dean began pushing himself up, he was halfway across the yard.
He was about 15 feet away when the first sheet of corrugated tin was ripped off the roof.
Their roles were suddenly reversed, but Sam wasn’t watching Dean’s face as closely and probably wouldn’t have been able to halt his forward momentum quickly enough even if he had been. Dean was on his feet before Sam hit the ground, but still too late to do anything.
"Sam!" he screamed, sliding to his knees by his brother’s side.
The relief was almost painful when Sam rolled over, dazed and bleeding from the chin and the back of his head, but awake and mobile. Dean wrenched him up by the arm, but immediately had to drop back down to avoid another tin missile, then another.
About that time, the heavens decided to start raining down hail. They didn’t even bother with a marble- or golf ball-sized opening volley. Dean was holding onto one of Sam’s shoulders, ready to push him down if he spotted another sheet of roofing heading in their direction, when Sam yelped and yanked his hand out of Dean’s grasp. Dean turned back to find him gripping his other shoulder and staring, stunned, at a softball-sized chunk of ice.
Before Dean could really make the connection that this thing had just fallen onto his brother from the sky, a thump a foot away diverted his attention. Then another behind him. One hit the meat of his calf and bounced off; another rebounded from the ground in front of him to catch him square in the stomach. He heard another yelp from Sam and a groan from the direction of the house right before another roofing section peeled off. A mailbox went tumbling by to crash through the window of the living room.
There was no time to make a run for the house. And even if there was and they miraculously managed not to be impaled along the way, it didn’t seem in any way certain that the house wouldn’t come down around them.
So. If Dean couldn’t bring Sam to the shelter, he’d just have to bring the shelter to Sam.
OOO
One minute Sam was blinking up at the sky, trying to figure out what needed shielding the most, and the next, he was lying face down in the mud, just a glimpse of Dean’s eyes, wide and wild, to mark the transition.
"Dean," he grunted, wriggling in an effort to get out from underneath his brother. "Dean, get off."
"Be still, Sammy." Dean’s voice was loud and sure, right in his ear. It sounded like the calm in the middle of the storm. But it was followed by a gut deep "umph" that Sam knew was Dean trying not to cry out.
"Dean," Sam said, more urgently this time, "let me up. Let me up, we’ve got to get back to the house."
"Can’t," Dean breathed out around two hisses of pain. "We-"
He was cut off by a solid-sounding thunk and promptly went limp, chin suddenly jutting into Sam’s neck.
"Dean? Dean!" Sam’s wriggling increased tenfold, but between the thickening mud and Dean’s bulk, he couldn’t move. "Dean!"
Desperate, Sam went completely still and focused on Dean’s weight on his back. It was difficult to pick out with everything else going on around them, but … There, he thought, grasping at a mere hint of movement and waiting to see if a pattern emerged. Yes. Dean was breathing. Sam let his own face fall limply into the mud. But a hailstone thumping down four inches from the tip of his nose spurred him back into action. Dean was breathing now didn’t mean that he would continue to do so.
One arm was trapped under his chest, and it took some doing to get it free. Then there was the contortion of trying to bend them into the angles he needed to reach up and behind his own head to link his fingers over Dean’s. He went through a brief internal debate about whether it was more important to protect Dean’s head or his neck; decided to go with the head since it’d already proved a vulnerability.
That done, there was nothing to do but wait and try to keep his mouth above the mud. Hope things didn’t get any worse.
The hail began to fall faster, and Sam winced, squeezed his eyes shut and began praying "please don’t die, please don’t die, please don’t die," and readjusted his grip over Dean’s head.
In the moment before Dean had tackled him, he was sure he’d seen fear in his eyes. And he was pretty sure now that Dean had been lying the other day when he said he didn’t get scared on hunts. Between the way he knew how to keep going despite being afraid, when Sam had been stupidly cowering in the middle of the yard, and the sound of his voice in Sam’s ear afterward, it was clear he had already learned somewhere how to ignore his fear.
Thinking back to how he’d been comparing Dean to Jim Bowie, imaging himself and Dean fighting side by side at the Alamo, he suddenly felt ridiculous and childish. Being a hero is not fun, not exciting, not romantic. It’s horrible.
A hailstone hit him square on the fourth and middle fingers of his right hand and he saw white for what seemed like an eternity. He grit his teeth and pressed his forehead into the mud, trying to ride through the pain. He was pretty sure something had broken. Biting his lips and trying not to breath, he gingerly readjusted his grip, telling himself to buck up - better his finger than Dean’s skull.
When he had the capacity again for thinking of something else, he noticed that he could feel the ground vibrating a bit. He frowned and peered out into the rain, wondering if they were going to have an earthquake on top of everything else. He remembered from his book that Texas occasionally had an earthquake, but couldn’t call up the frequency, locations or severity.
But no. If he squinted, Sam could make out through the rain, a smudge in the pasture next to their house. And it was moving closer. Within seconds, he could tell that it was the horses from next door, but moving more like a flock of birds.
Stampeding.
Sam again began frantically trying to squirm out from under Dean. He almost had to stop when another hailstone glanced off the tip of his elbow, sending a jolt through his entire body that made him nauseous and teary. He worked through it, but might as well have stopped, as he had no better luck this time. He held his breath as the horses came closer to the barbed wire that separated the pasture from the property the Winchesters were renting.
The lead horses suddenly turned away, leading the herd around the edge of the fence, and Sam might have collapsed in relief if he hadn’t seen in that moment what was chasing them.
A ragged black funnel cloud suddenly dropped from the sky behind the horses. It raced a few feet and was sucked back up, only to drop down again and teeter a bit farther.
It did this three more times as Sam watched, frozen. On what little bare skin he still had exposed to the open air, he could feel the wind around him shift and shimmy as the tornado wobbled in this direction or that. Bits of the porch and more roofing sheets flew in its direction as if the funnel was some sort of magnet. Sam was too dumbfounded to do more than stare by this point.
And then, it disappeared and stayed gone.
That seemed to have been the storm’s finale, because a few minutes later, the hail tapered to a stop, followed by the rain. And then watery sunlight was breaking through the clouds, and everything was cool, shiny and freshly scrubbed. Sam would have wondered if he’d imagined it all, except Dean was still heavy on his back.
Trembling, Sam lowered his cheek to the mud and let his eyes slip closed. When he opened them again, it was to the sound of a car horn blaring frantically, getting louder and louder as it got closer to the house. Moments later, the Impala roared up the long driveway. Then John was bursting out at a run, footsteps heavy through the mud and puddles. He called Dean’s name, then Sam’s, but before Sam could answer, Dean was being rolled gently off of him.
The sudden absence of his brother’s weight was almost as stunning as its introduction had been, and Dad had to roll him over too, repeating his name anxiously. Sam blinked up at him, but couldn’t find it in him to do much more. After that, things began to blur. There was the car, somehow … and then the hospital, a madhouse of sobs and pleas and shouting. There was a period - he didn’t really know if it was long or short - of waiting, and then tests (lots of tests) and stitches (the gashes on the back of his head and chin) and a cast (two broken fingers - he also had a chipped ulna, which would hurt, but a cast wouldn’t help much).
Dad flitted in and out of the scene, and at the end showed up again to take him to Dean, who would be fine, but very, very sore. Serious concussion, but no skull fracture, at least. Three broken ribs, a black and blue back of everything and a hairline fracture in his heel that would heal fine but hurt a whole lot in the meantime.
Dad was again there sometimes and not, others, and Sam was sitting alone by Dean’s bed a good half the time while they waited for Dean to wake up. So he had plenty of time to think about the day’s events.
He kept coming back to that look in Dean’s eyes and how it matched up with the sound of his voice a moment later. Fear and calm cool. How it was more badass if you did it even though you were scared. How it still hurt, even if it was for a good cause.
Wrestling with alligators, sailing with pirates.
Drawing lines in the sand.
He wouldn’t mind if he never saw another horse again.
Notes:
For the record, I've experienced a tornado here and there, including one with softball-sized hail. However, I stayed inside for all of them. So most of the tornado stuff I got watching videos of tornados on youtube.
The Texas stuff, however, is all 100 percent accurate and verifiable, though I've exaggerated toward the stereotype a bit. Oh. Except maybe the stampeding horses. I imagine that there are large herds of them somewhere, but I don't know of any, personally.
And can I say one more time how great and charitable July is? It bears repeating.