Little Monsters in the Tide - 2
Sam sidesteps to avoid getting his shoes wet. A long tongue of a wave swipes the sand at his feet and retreats, dragging foam. Sam watches it go, watches it get mixed up in the upcoming wave. He glances back, and there’s a trail of his footprints sunk into the beach, filling with water and slowly getting erased. He’s a heavy guy - it will take a minute before they’re completely gone.
Dean isn’t there.
Oh, Sam thinks, I’m dreaming.
The beach is one of the cold northern ones. The ocean and the sky are of a uniform gray color, and they stretch as far as the eye can see - just water, low clouds and wet sand all around. There are rocks sticking out here and there, some as much as fifteen feet tall, and driftwood licked smooth by the sea. Sam looks back, and his trail of footprints is gone. But there’s nothing else to do, so he walks.
Someone is up ahead, moving along the water’s edge. Sam takes the figure for a seagull at first, because of how it’s bent over something, rooting around purposefully, but he realizes that the figure is further away than he first thought. It’s a man, which becomes apparent when he straightens out. Maybe it’s Dean. Sam walks faster, keeping his eyes on him. The person is tall but his shoulders are stooped and he moves stiffly, like an old man or someone in pain. And he has a shovel. Sam knows, inexplicably, that it’s important to get to him, so he breaks into a run, covers the distance between them in half the time.
“Hey!” he yells. “Excuse me, sir!”
Me, seagulls cry overhead in their screechy, echoing manner, me, me, me!
Sam comes to a stop in front of the man who isn’t paying him any attention, too busy digging a hole. Seawater seeps into it and pools at the bottom. The man is only a foot in, but when Sam looks around, there are more mounds of disturbed sand along the beach, and they go on and on until they disappear into the thin fog. How long has he been digging? Sam turns his attention back to the old man, who keeps shoveling sand as if Sam isn’t there. He’s wearing a weathered jacket with its sleeves pushed up, and his forearms are all ropy muscles, but his wrists are bony, fingers twisted with age. A Coast Guard cap covers his head.
“Sir.” Sam touches the old man’s arm.
“Go away!” The man snaps at him, and Sam yanks his hand back instinctively.
The old man goes on digging, tossing shovelful after shovelful of waterlogged sand out of the hole. Small intertidal things scatter and wriggle away whenever his shovel cuts into a new layer. Tiny rocks and broken seashells make scraping noises against the metal. It’s hard work, and Sam knows a thing or two about digging. The old man must be hurting. And yet he keeps working, and Sam cringes in sympathy, imagining the screaming of his aged muscles.
“Can I help you dig?” he says. He’s careful this time to keep his hands by his sides. “Really, let me.”
The shovel cuts into the ground, pushes in halfway, stops. The old man stands still, leaning on it, his head hung low. Carefully, so as not to startle him, Sam touches the shovel’s handle just below where the old man is grasping it. The guy has a crooked pinkie on his left hand, probably from an old fracture. At least, that’s how Sam got his own finger bent.
Sam stares at their two left hands, one above the other, each with a crooked little finger. He looks up, and for the first time, he’s staring into the old man’s face. Into his own face, aged forty years.
“Yeah, Sam,” says the old man, “you can dig.”
~~~~
Dean wakes up before dawn to a touch of lips against his own. It’s not a typical morning but, he thinks, but okay, this works. Fingers run behind his ear, a thumb presses against the corner of his jaw, and there’s another kiss. Dean thinks about answering. He blinks, sleep-heavy. “Sam.”
“Yeah.” Another kiss to the underside of his jaw, lips sliding up to his chin - and that can’t be nice against the stubble, but Sam, Sam has this thing for…
“Sam.”
“Right here, Dean.”
How the hell long has it been since the last time?
He opens up to the next kiss, slides his tongue against Sam’s and ignores the stale taste. Through his half-closed lids, the room looks smudged and unclear, and the images are grainy in the predawn light. When they break the kiss for a moment, he sees the light reflecting off Sam’s eyes. It’s good, Dean decides, so good he’s starting to feel warm tingling in his toes and fingers, and why don’t they do this more often?
Dean searches blindly until his fingers bump into Sam’s side, slides his hand over and pulls Sam closer. They aren’t kissing anymore, and Sam’s nose is in Dean’s ear and Sam’s goddamn hair is in his face. Dean feels a leg slide between his, feels the uneven scratch of nails against his back as Sam gets a hand under his shirt. Sam’s dick is pressing into his thigh, hard and so hot through the fabric of the training pants he wears to bed.
“Hey,” Dean mumbles, trying to catch up, trying to slow Sam down a little. “Hey, crab-infested ghosts of floaters make you hot or something?”
Sam laughs in short snorts and drags him in for another kiss as he grinds against Dean’s thigh. He has no problem laughing at Dean’s jokes when he’s like this. It’s too hot inside their sleeping bags zipped together, Dean can feel sweat gathering at the small of his back and in the crease of Sam’s thigh when he puts his hand there. Sam mutters little obscenities in his ear, and Dean isn’t paying attention, doesn’t catch most of it but gets shivers down his spine from the tone alone. “Turn around,” Dean says.
Sam does. It’s dark and hot and sweaty, and Dean can hardly breathe with Sam hair getting into his face again. He pulls Sam’s pants down to his knees and finishes him off like that, with a hand and a little spit on his palm. And when Sam is almost over the edge, every muscle tense and his breath coming in short puffs, Dean stills his hand and presses his mouth to the column of Sam’s neck where the tendons are strained. He drags his teeth and his tongue along his brother’s skin, down to the shoulder and up again to his ear. “Is something wrong?”
Sam freezes for a moment. “Bad dream.”
Dean moves his hand again in a long stroke, and Sam moans, actually moans aloud like he rarely does.
Afterwards, Sam kisses his face and his mouth and asks him what he wants, and Dean tells him he wants to sleep, get the fuck out of bed. He smacks Sam’s ass, hard, before burrowing deeper into the bag, and Sam laughs, the little shit. Dean closes his eyes and traces his brother’s progress from the living room into the kitchen by the creaking of floorboards and the soft pat of footsteps. He has an aching erection that he’d like to have something done about, but sleep sounds nicer. Dean rolls over on his stomach and bends a knee to ease the strain on his spine, rolls his hips once and falls back asleep before he can decide on anything.
~~~~
It takes all morning for the stale aftertaste of a nightmare to dissipate, and Sam is waiting in the Kingston ferry line by the time his head finally starts to feel like it’s screwed on right. He buys an ice cream cone and eats it in the car, watching black cormorants dry their wings. It’s strange - being here alone, not being able to talk to Dean. He probably has the solitude to blame for getting stuck with the nightmare for so long. Once on the ferry, Sam gets out of the Impala among tightly-packed cars and stands by the railing all the way across the Puget Sound. The briny air feels good in his chest, helping clear away all thoughts of the lonely beach and the old man, until he can hardly recall the details.
The trip down to Fisherman’s Terminal in Seattle takes another forty minutes, and by the time Sam gets there, it’s almost noon. Dean would be awake, he guesses, exploring the beach. Sam walks along the pier, looking for a group of three that are supposed to be waiting for him. The men are a part of Bobby’s extensive contact network, some exotic crew that hunts at sea. Sam studies the boats moored at the Terminal, wondering if theirs will be a boat painted in some fierce colors.
“Sam!” He turns to look for the person calling his name. “Yo! Winchester!” A man with a bristling moustache waves at him from a table outside of a coffee shop. “There you are,” he says, jumping up to shake Sam’s hand when he gets near. “Bobby said to look for a really tall guy, and I thought, that’s a lousy description! Well, what do I know? I’m Willy.”
“Hi,” Sam says.
Willy’s companion is a big black man, who also shakes Sam’s hand and introduces himself as Dylan. It’s no wonder Sam missed them: the third crewman isn’t with them.
“I thought there were three of you,” he says.
“Here, I got you coffee.” Willy pushes a cup at him across the table, and Sam grins at the strong smell. Willy says, without any transition, “Ben died last month. On a case.”
“The thing we were hunting dragged him overboard,” Dylan adds.
Sam sits there with the paper cup halfway up to his lips, feeling like a dumbass. Are there such things as sea monsters? And what do they look like? The question nags at him, an unanswered mystery. It’s a legitimate question; after all, he and Dean are hunting a sea ghost. Perhaps it would be alright to ask. “I’m really sorry about your friend,” he says instead.
“Yeah.” Willy sighs. “It’s too bad. He would’ve liked to meet you and that brother of yours.”
Sam smiles, unsure.
“Hellboys,” Dylan says. “That’s what they call the two of you.” He flashes Sam a great big smile full of teeth. “There’re rumors about you, that you’ve been to Hell and back. This one joker, he told me - and completely serious - that you guard the gates of Hell with rifles in your hands.”
“At least it wasn’t swords,” Willy adds, and Dylan laughs - a deep sound that comes rolling from his stomach.
They’re smiling, but there’s curiosity in their eyes. The knowledge that others have been talking about him and Dean makes Sam suddenly uncomfortable. He worries what else might have been said about the two of them, maybe something that people won’t repeat to his face. It feels like the spotlight has been on them, and they had no idea. He likes their small lives in which nobody recognizes them or gives them a second thought.
“Rifles,” Sam says. “Don’t need no stinking rifles. We take the Devil on with our bare hands.”
The men laugh, and Sam feels a little easier, now that the moment has passed and the rumor has been dismissed. But before he can change the topic, Willy beats him to it. “So, Bobby tells us you want a consult?”
Sam nods. He takes a sip of his coffee, too quickly, and it burns his tongue. “My brother and I are hunting a ghost over by the ocean. We think it’s haunting the beach, but it’s been going up to the house to knock on windows.” He remembers waking up the first time and finding the ghost in the bathtub. With it, immediately comes the memory of the nightmare, of the terror, of waking up in cold sweat and turning to Dean and the old comfort they haven’t shared in a while. These nightmares, doctor, they drive me to incest.
Noticing the slightly puzzled expressions on Willy and Dylan’s faces, Sam realizes that he spaced out. “Sorry. The owner said that the ghost just knocks, but it got inside last night. It looked like a drowned fisherman. Dean is trying to figure out what draws him to the house, but even if we do find it, we still don’t know how to put it to rest.”
There’s not going to be an easy answer, Sam guesses, watching the two men hunch their shoulders and frown. He thinks of all the fishermen lost at sea, all the vessels that have gone under with their entire crew onboard. How many families out there never found out what happened to these seamen? How many restless ghosts wander the coast, with no grave other than the seabed and the bellies of fish?
“It’s a paradox,” Dylan says.
“Paradox?”
“The ghosts in the ocean, I mean.” Dylan shrugs, and Willy nods in confirmation of his words. “All that salt. Nobody knows how they manage to stick around.”
Sam wonders about the phenomenon as he drinks his coffee. He doesn’t think it’s about the type of salt: he’s thrown sea salt at ghosts before and, in one notable case, bath salt. The latter didn’t work so well, but it did have an effect. “Okay. So how do you hunt them?”
“We don’t,” Willy says. “And I’ve never heard of anybody who does that kind of work.”
“How would you find their bones?” Dylan says.
Sam sighs. “Yeah. That’s about what I suspected.”
“Creatures are our specialty,” Willy says, and Sam looks up at him with a smile.
On the ferry back to the Peninsula, Sam doesn’t bother getting out of the car and stretches his legs out over the front seat. He mentally runs over the conversation and makes notes on a memo pad so that he won’t lose the details later. Sea monsters. Sam pauses, tapping the pen against the page, then quickly jots down a reminder to do a more thorough search later. Really, who would’ve thought. Sam sighs and returns to the case notes.
Their ghost seems to be a drowned fisherman whose bones were probably carried by the current to somewhere in the vicinity of the beach. That includes underwater caves and rock formations as well as the beach itself. Okay, Sam thinks, okay, this one is going to be a pain. There is always that possibility that it’s not the bones but rather a haunted object, a precious possession that the man couldn’t part with. The identity is a lost cause entirely. Even if it wasn’t, Dylan and Willy had no advice to offer in dispensing a sea ghost.
Sam sighs, putting the notes away. Someone on the upper deck has been throwing bread to the seagulls since they left the pier, and a whole flock is chasing the ferry, snatching food out of the air. Sam leans back against the door. Birds are greedy, always ravenous, always chasing food. Maybe that’s what happened to their fisherman. Maybe he was eaten by fish, squid and starfish, and then crabs and birds finished him once the body washed up ashore. It’s a hell of a way to go.
Up ahead, dark silhouettes of birds are circling. Sam tracks their flight patterns with his eyes. One seagull lands on a large mound of sand, one of the many that are visible along the beach where Sam is standing. It’s the work of an obsessed man. Looking at it gives Sam an uneasy feeling of déjà vu, though he can’t think of where he might have seen this beach before. From somewhere ahead of him, concealed by another sand mound, comes the sound of digging. Sam would recognize it anywhere.
The old man is bent over a new hole, too wrapped up in his work to notice his surroundings. This time, Sam knows him immediately because of the familiar air he carries around, something in the set of his shoulders, in his hips and the back of his neck. He straightens out to massage his sore back, and that simple gesture, too, might as well have been a reflection in a mirror. His left hand has a crooked little finger, from an old fracture.
“I could-” The old man jumps and drops his shovel. “Sorry,” Sam says. He bites down on ‘I didn’t mean to scare you’, because everyone’s first impulse is to deny having been scared, despite obvious reactions, and the last thing Sam wants to do is make his future self feel ridiculous. He tries for a disarming smile. “Perhaps I could help you dig. If I dig from the past while you dig from the future, we’ll find it sooner. Whatever it is.”
The old man scowls at him from under the bill of his cap. Sam has seen this particular grimace in the mirror a million times, only this time it deepens the lines in his face.
Dig, the seagulls cry, dig, dig, dig! There are so many birds around this time, circling overhead, sitting on driftwood or rooting around the rocks, keeping their beady little eyes on the two men. Besides seagulls, Sam sees the ever present crows, black cormorants, ducks and sandpipers, and even a blue heron. So many little eyes are fixed on the two of them. Sam turns around in a slow circle, and the birds are everywhere. The old man is watching him with an irritated expression, but Sam has almost forgotten about him. So many animals are creeping up on them from all directions, from air, sea and land, wriggling out of the sand beneath their feet. Big purple starfish cling to the underside of the nearest rock, and another rock is covered with mussels in wetly gleaming black shells. Crabs crowd one another under a cover of boulders, an endless commotion of hundreds of legs. Somewhere far away, Sam hears coyotes barking.
“You stupid asshole,” says the old man, and Sam turns to him. The old man’s voice is hoarse from disuse, past colds and chronic smoking, and yet, it’s the unmistakable voice Sam hears in his own head whenever he speaks, the private one that not even Dean knows.
Sam swallows. “I just want to help.”
A crab skitters over his foot and nearly causes him to jump. The seagulls seem to have descended a little, and the sandpipers are closer now. More coyotes are making a ruckus in the woods, approaching.
“You’ll never find him,” says the old man. “I haven’t. You and I will both die and never know where his bones are. Don’t you get it?” He snarls at Sam and kicks sand at him. “Don’t you get it? Dean’s body is all over the fucking Pacific, there’s nothing to find!”
Cold iron claws grip Sam’s insides, a shiver runs through his body, and he’s suddenly lightheaded. “What do you mean, Dean’s body?”
“What do you think I mean? Look at them.” The old man spreads his arms, incorporating with that gesture all the animals crowding around them, creeping closer when Sam isn’t looking. Never bypass a chance to eat or sleep - that’s the law of road trips, and it holds true for wilderness.
“No,” he says, taking a step back, away from the old man’s sneer. “Not Dean. No.”
Sam takes another step back, but his foot finds no purchase, and he’s falling backward, down into a three foot deep hole in the sand. He lands on his back, and feels something hard strike him in the ribs and across the spine. It’s just barely under the surface, where the old man would’ve found it, had he gone three inches deeper. Sam’s hand finds small irregular shapes, and he pushes his fingers into the ground. There’s a scattering of phalanges and metacarpals in the sand, like another hand gripping his. A cold metal band - a ring? - presses into his palm.
Crabs come scurrying down the slopes of the hole, and birds rush up to the edges, and the barking of coyotes is right there, now more like roaring.
Another engine right in front of the Impala comes to life, and Sam jumps so hard he hits the ceiling and slams his hand down on the horn. The driver of the car ahead of him turns around to give him a dirty look. Sam only stares at him. They’re back, the visions are back. But the cars are starting to move up ahead, and a man from the ferry’s crew gestures wildly at Sam from where he’s standing. He starts the engine and follows the line of cars, but pulls to the side of the road as soon as he’s able to.
There’s no answer on Dean’s phone. Sam waits and listens to the beeping, his heart beating like crazy. Behind him, cormorants dry their wings and seagulls walk on the pier.
~~~~
Dean’s head is pounding. Without opening his eyes, he lifts one hand and touches his forehead, half-afraid that the bone will give under pressure. It doesn’t. Dean runs his fingers over his scalp and temples, feeling for bumps or gashes, but finds none. His jaw is numb, right where the ghost grabbed him under the chin.
Oh yeah. The ghost.
“Ugh,” Dean tries to say. His voice echoes a little, in what sounds like a small enclosed space. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of light, so he risks opening his eyes.
The place he’s in appears to be a dark chamber of irregular shape, with an uneven hole in the roof, which is scarcely a foot over Dean’s head. He’s lying on sand. A piece of gray sky is visible through the roof hole, letting in some light. Dean reaches up to feel the edges of the hole and finds it to be corroded metal that stains his fingertips orange. The ceiling is low near the wall where Dean is lying, but it curves up to perhaps two feet over the opposite end of the chamber. The far wall has a slim metal rib, rusted like the rest of whatever it is that Dean is under. A shipwreck, he realizes, this is a piece of shipwreck.
“Not going to freak out,” he says. The echo bounces his voice back at him. “Okay.”
Dean runs his fingers along the wall nearest to him, trying to find the bottom edge, which isn’t there. It’s buried too deep. There’s no reason to panic just yet. Sure, it’s a small enclosed space, but that doesn’t mean there’s no way out. He taps on the wall, hoping that it might be rusted badly enough to break. The metal holds. Dean rolls over onto his stomach - slowly, after the first movement makes his head pound even harder - and crawls along the wall, feeling for edges.
His hand lands on something dry and brittle and half-buried in the sand. He’s touched enough bones in his life to recognize the object by feel immediately.
“Hi there, ghostie.” He leans closer, peering at his findings in the semi-darkness. A couple of ribs and a pelvis are poking out of the sand, next to a piece of thick polyester fabric. Dean pulls on it a little, just to confirm that it’s a yellow raincoat, the kind that the fisherman was wearing. “I gotta tell you, buddy, I’d piss on your bones if I didn’t ha-”
If I didn’t have to preserve water. Dean bites his tongue, but the thought finishes itself in his head anyway. He sees his fingers beginning to shake, and his spine is starting to feel like an icy column piercing his body. Waves of trembling pass through his muscles. Dean thumps his head against the sandy floor and squeezes his eyes shut.
“Ninety nine bottles of beer on the wall, ninety nine bottles of beer!” He inhales sharply through his nose, lets the breath trickle out. “Take one down, pass it around, ninety eight bottles of beer.”
He woke up that morning after Sam has already left to meet the hunters in Seattle. So far so good. He ate breakfast and went down to the beach to see if he could find where the ghost comes from, and instead, he found the ghost. It reached out from the water and put its hand on Dean’s jaw. That’s where the memories stop. Okay, but the ghost had to get him here somehow, and it clearly wasn’t through that hole in the roof. There has to be a way out, then.
Dean gives the nearest wall a probative kick. It seems solid enough, and the sound comes shallow, like that part of the shipwreck is buried underground. Maybe not too far down, considering that there is an opening to the outside, but-
“Not visible from the surface,” he finishes, and sees his hands starting to shake again.
He feels for the wall’s edge all the way around the perimeter, until he finds a second skeleton. That one is smaller and completely intact, curled up by the wall. A girl went missing, Sam said, could’ve wandered off on her own, could’ve been a victim. As Dean looks down at the skull, a fiddler crab scurries out of the eye socket and disappears through a small hole in the wall.
~~~~
Some old book that Sam read a million years ago talked about burials on the beach. He can’t remember what the book was or what subject he was researching, except that it wasn’t burials. But the book talked about it. Beach burials were a disgrace, the post-mortem punishment for the most vile of criminals. The bodies were laid in loosely bound sand close to where high tides reached, so that the water would eventually destroy the grave, after the animals have already made a start on the body. Birds, and crabs, and starfish, and mussels, and squid, and fish… It was some culture’s way of ensuring that the spirit would never know rest.
“Hey!” Sam yells across the empty beach so much like the one in his dream, only not yet dug up. “Hey, you fucker, he’s not a criminal! He doesn’t deserve this!” Sam’s voice breaks. He’s been yelling for a while.
Nobody deserves this - not the fisherman, not the girl from the fifties, but Sam can’t bring himself to care about either of them. The fisherman might not have deserved what happened to him, but that was a long time ago, back when he was human. Sam would stomp all over his bones, given half a chance.
“Move on,” he tells the waves and the empty beach. “Why don’t you people ever move on?” He thinks of the dream, and the old man who’s been digging up the shoreline for forty years. Speaking of moving on.
The EMF is giving him a uniformly low reading, indicating traces of recent activity all over the beach, but no active presence. Sam expected that much. He adjusts the bag slung over his shoulder, and it makes a metallic clang.
There are underwater caves here, and rock clusters far out in the sea, and small islands covered with woods, not to mention miles and miles of sand. The fisherman’s bones could’ve ended up anywhere. They could just be sitting underwater a few feet offshore, but Sam figures, the ghost needs some way of trapping its victims. The thought makes bile rise up in his throat.
“Hey! Hey, ghost! Come and get me!”
Seagulls cry overhead. Sam can see them diving every now and again, snatching up crabs as the tide pulls out. Standing there with his stupid bag - the best idea he could come up with on the spot - Sam feels more alone in the world that he ever had before.
“Dean!”
~~~~
“I’m right here!” Dean yells, putting his mouth against the hole in the roof. “Sammy! Right here! Fuck.” He kicks the wall of the shipwreck, which makes a dull sound underneath the layers of sand piled over it on the outside, too weak for Sam to hear. Dean should know, he’s been screaming himself hoarse and banging on the walls for what feels like forever, since he first heard Sam calling his name outside. He wishes he never heard this much despair in his brother’s voice.
The smell of decomposition appears so suddenly and is so strong that it makes Dean’s eyes water. He clamps his nose shut and breathes through his mouth, looking around the little chamber. Something glows and flickers in the corner in a long familiar way, and then the ghost is there. It’s the same nasty apparition that he and Sam saw in the bathtub the night before, with its beard dripping and its swollen flesh bursting out of the yellow raincoat. Dean backs up to the wall as far as he can, but the ghost doesn’t seem to pay any attention to him. It hovers over the pile of its own bones, staring emptily at something that isn’t in the underground chamber. Dean waits. The ghost flickers a few times but remains in place.
“Hello, asshole,” Dean says. No reaction. “What do you want?”
The ghost rocks in place. It picks transparent crabs out of its beard absent-mindedly. The task must be difficult with fingers so swollen. Dean throws some sand at the ghost but gets no response.
“Fine. Then just sit there.”
Out on the beach, Sam starts yelling again, and Dean winces. He picks up his improvised tool - the fisherman’s pelvic bone - and goes back to digging by the wall. The ghost doesn’t seem to notice the mistreatment of his remains.
“I don’t deserve this, you know,” he tells the still silent ghost. “And neither did that girl. And you know what? Sam deserves your shit least of all.” He thinks of Sam then - the smiling kid, the sulky teenager, the man that Dean held in his arms just this morning. He can still feel Sam’s skin against his palms, Sam’s hair against his mouth, and the sense memory is so strong it nearly breaks him. Dean grinds his teeth and keeps digging.
“Hey!” Sam screams from outside somewhere, far away. “Hey, you piece of shit, come here! We need to talk.”
“No you don’t!” Dean kicks the wall again, and throws a femur against it for good measure. “Stop calling him, Sam!”
The ghost sighs, and Dean feels it on his skin as a rush of frigid water that isn’t actually there. “Bad person.”
“What?”
The ghost turns its disfigured face to him. “No one will miss a bad person.”
“I’m an awesome person, just so you know.”
“I see,” the ghost says, pointing at his one milky eye and the sand-filled socket where the other one used to be. “Stealing, incest and murder.”
Dean stares at the apparition, forgetting to dig for a minute. And it sits there, the giant hypocrite, and talks about murder. “You forgot grave desecrations. And credit card fraud, and law enforcement impersonation, and fake documents, and escape. How about pizza for breakfast, too? Dick.” He gets a better grip on the pelvic bone and turns away from the ghost and back to his work. He’s already gone a foot down, though the edge of the metal shell is nowhere in sight yet. “Anyway, what did you see in that poor Down’s syndrome kid? What, she didn’t do her math problems?”
There’s a deafening roar, and Dean feels a wave of coldness pass through his body back to front as the ghost rushes through him. It pushes all the sand back into the hole and disappears.
~~~~
The EMF meter gives out a sharp squeal, and Sam drops it. Dean will probably kick his ass for leaving his favorite toy exposed to the elements like that, but if they both make it out of the ghost’s trap, Sam figures, Dean can do whatever he wants to him. He’d give a lot right now to get his ass kicked for mistreatment of the EMF meter.
A transparent figure flickers into view a dozen feet ahead, flickers again and reappears much closer. It stands in the surf, where the waves roll through its feet without breaking. Sam makes sure the bag is secure around his shoulder, wraps his wrist in the strap and waits. He makes himself breathe deeper and slower. The smell of decomposition hits him like a sledgehammer, and then the ghost is right in front of him.
“You’re lonely,” Sam says to it. “I’m pretty good company.”
It’s an odd sensation when the ghost grabs him by the collar and yanks him off his feet. Sam can’t feel hands on him, only a massive pull where the fisherman got a hold of him. The force of that pull drops Sam to his knees and drags him forwards, twisting the collar around his neck. He grabs onto it with one hand, tries to pull it away from his throat so that he won’t choke, but he keeps the other hand wrapped tightly around the bag’s strap. The ghost drags him through the wet sand and shallow water, too fast for Sam to regain footing, and he makes it a few feet on his stomach before he can flip himself over. A high wave covers Sam’s lower body for a moment, soaking his jeans through with freezing water. Sam doesn’t notice, too busy trying to draw a breath. Friction burns like fire on his thighs and back. Far up above, the sky is full of seagulls.
He manages to hold onto the bag all the way to an unremarkable pile of rocks, where the ghost stops. Now that he’s close, Sam can see an edge of some rusty piece of metal poking through the sand in the shade of the rocks, almost entirely covered. At least it’s not an underwater cave, Sam thinks. A swollen, transparent hand reaches for his head. Sam tries to pull back out of instinct, but the ghost is still holding him down with the other hand, and there isn’t much room to go. The birds’ cries sound like laughter.
~~~~
Somebody kicks Sam in the thigh, bringing him back to consciousness. “Ouch.”
He gets another kick, and it’s so careful and helplessly frustrated at the same time that Sam knows his attacker instantly. He grins and grabs the foot before he even opens his eyes, and pulls Dean closer.
“Fuck you, Sam.”
Wherever they are smells like rust, seaweed and dead fish. There isn’t much light, but Sam can see night sky through the hole in the roof only about a foot above him. Dean is mostly a dark shadow hovering over him, but he’s there, alive and in one piece. Sam lets go of his leg, catches him around the waist and pulls until Dean lands on top of him. He grabs the back of Dean’s head, loving the feel of his hair and warm skin, and presses Dean’s face into his shoulder.
“And still fuck you, octopus.” But Dean doesn’t try to pull away.
They lie together in the narrow space underneath some metal shell, and Sam is perfectly happy to just breathe for the moment and feel his brother’s chest moving against his, up and down, such a perfect reassurance of life. Just a dream, oh god, just a stupid dream. Sam finds Dean’s mouth in the dark and presses a hard kiss to it.
“What did you have to go and do that for?” Dean mumbles against his lips.
“Kiss you?”
“No, you stupid asshole.” Dean pinches his side, hard, and Sam bats his hand away. “Why did you have to get dragged down here with me?”
So that you wouldn’t have to die alone, Sam thinks, but says no such thing. He pushes Dean off and checks if the bag is still there. It is, and he breathes a small relieved sigh.
He can’t quite see Dean, just his dark outline, but he can feel the heat of another person, can smell that familiar scent of brother. It makes Sam’s head spin. He rolls on his side and throws his arm around Dean’s waist again, for reassurance. Not going to die alone.
“Okay,” Dean says. “Okay, okay, you got me, Sammy.”
“Damn right.” Sam can hear the tide breaking on the beach outside. The sand they’re lying on is dry, so the waves probably don’t reach this far, except when the water is particularly high. “Hey, did you see how the ghost got me under here?”
Dean sighs, and Sam can feel it tickling against the side of his face. It’s the most wonderful sensation. “It lifted the piece of hull out of the ground, held me down and put you under.” He’s quiet for a moment while he’s thinking something through. “The thing must go down three or four feet. I was digging with the dude’s bone, but he fucked up all my work.”
“It’s alright. Here, I brought water.” Sam reaches behind him into the bag and finds a bottle of water among the other stuff shoved in there, most of it useless.
While Dean is drinking, Sam looks up at the sky through the hole. The stars seem close, like they always do outside cities, and there’s not a single bird up there. Sam wonders if he should be scared. But it was a dream, only a stupid dream, and now that the future is once again obscure and unpredictable, he can only feel relief. Maybe he cracked the case without realizing it, understood from the readings what the ghost did to its victims and dreamed up the whole scenario. Maybe it was some recurring prophetic dream. But, Sam thinks, but fuck it all - the future, the ghosts, the birds and the crabs. Whatever happens now, whether or not they get out, Dean won’t be the scattering of bones in a shallow grave, and Sam won’t be the obsessed old man digging up the beach. Beyond that, he can’t bring himself to care.
“What’s in the bag?” Dean says.
“I didn’t know where you were, so I brought all kinds of stuff. There’s a crowbar and a hammer, oxygen and a sapper shovel. And salt.”
Dean hums his approval. “Yeah, alright. We’ll figure it out.”
Sam nods. He should probably start looking for a flashlight, get the tools, get the salt to lay the ghost to rest, but he doesn’t move, wanting another minute to soak in relief. Dean must feel something similar or is having a rare diplomatic moment, because he doesn’t rush him. Outside, waves splash against the stones, driftwood moans, and Sam can imagine the crabs, and the starfish, and the sandpipers, always hunting for food, never stopping. He thinks of disappearing into the Pacific, piece by tiny piece. It sounds like a good way to drop off the face of the Earth and to be finally left alone, once they’re done trying.
They aren’t done trying, though.
“I had a dream like you wouldn’t believe,” Sam says.
Dean is still for a moment, and then he reaches out a hand and wiggles his fingers in front of Sam’s eyes. Without saying a word, he waves his hand in an exaggerated gesture and opens and closes it impatiently. Sam smiles, wider and wider, until his face feels like it might split in half.
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