SPN FIC - Legend (Part Five: Sam and Dean)
I'd heard whispered bits of the story since I was a kid. Just after Halloween, back in '83, the demon Azazel had crept into the nursery of a baby boy, intending to drip blood into the child's mouth and turn him into demon spawn. But Mary Campbell was waiting for him. She had a gun a stranger had brought to her family ten years before: a gun that could kill anything. She used it to kill Azazel that night. Saved her child. Then she disappeared.
Legends are told in bits and pieces, spread by word of mouth over the years. This is the story of Mary Campbell's family: the husband to whom she told the truth of who she was. The son who grieved the loss of her so deeply that he spent half his life on the road alone, searching for her. And the son who found success, and love, and peace...until things went a little bit sideways.
Part One: Dean and Jo
Part Two: Dean, Sam, and Jessica
Part Three: John and Deacon
Part Four: Missouri and Pamela
CHARACTERS: Sam and Dean
GENRE: Gen (AU)
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 1973 words
LEGEND
By Carol Davis
Part Five: Sam and Dean
We'd been on the road for almost twenty-four hours when a giant billboard of Donny and Marie Osmond alerted me to the fact that Dean wasn't headed toward Phoenix, or anywhere else in Arizona, despite his claim that we were going to see Dad.
"Dude," I said.
He didn't hear me. He'd cranked the tape player way up, past the point where I could even try to identify what it was playing, on into the range where people were probably singing along with it in Argentina. When I waved a hand into Dean's field of vision he ignored me, so I turned the tape player off, interrupting Ozzie or Led Zep or whoever it was in mid-screech.
"Dude. Don't you want the I-15?"
"What for?"
"Arizona."
"No," he said.
"Then…we're not going to Arizona?"
It was still possible that we were. Dean knows every back road in the country and claims he prefers them to the interstate. He's got a point; a lot of interstate highway driving's made up of playing dodge-'em with semis. Back roads aren't the most efficient way to travel, but they're scenic, and they're littered with cheap motels, country diners and tourist attractions like the Idaho Potato Museum and the grave of Solid Muldoon.
"Down the - what is it, the 191? That what you're doing?"
"Just trying to drive."
East, then. He'd switched us from the 84 to the 80 just north of Salt Lake. That'd take us all the way across southern Wyoming.
I let him drive.
We'd stopped for the night last night at a motel in Twin Falls, after I'd told Dean (repeatedly) that my ass had gone numb from sitting on a forty-year-old car seat for eight hours. Every time I said something, he gave me the usual jabs about not owning a car of my own, having to use Jess's Saturn every time I wanted to drive somewhere, and having suffered a permanent and possibly fatal loss of testosterone from using public transportation.
"It's handy," I told him. "And very reliable."
"It's on a friggin' track, Sam."
But he relented. His head spun around a couple of times when I pointed him toward a Best Western (with Jess, I would have opted for the Hilton or the Holiday Inn, but with Dean you can only accomplish just so much), but he relented again when I pointed out that the place offered a "scrumptious continental breakfast" and free HBO.
When I told him the Shoshone Indian Ice Cave was only a few miles away, he told me where I could stick that.
Halfway into his second BBQ Bacon Supreme Burger at the Perkins across the street from the motel, he'd mellowed enough to tell me Dad wasn't in Arizona any more.
"And you know this how?"
"Got a feeling."
"A feeling."
"He was supposed to go to Deacon's for Thanksgiving. That whole Mama Chang's thing they do."
"So we're going to Little Rock?"
"Do I look like I want to eat my Thanksgiving dinner with chopsticks?"
Then he mellowed down another notch. It must have been the display of pies in the glass case near the door that was doing it, although the bacon cheeseburger had definitely earned a thumbs-up. Perkins is a chain, and a lot of people claim the food in chain restaurants sucks, but Dean likes them. Says he enjoys knowing what's on the menu, so he can plan ahead.
Even though he always orders the same thing.
"That was decent of her," he said around a big mouthful of meat and cheese. "Jessica. Letting you go when it's Thanksgiving."
"Not that big a deal," I told him. "She's gonna do this huge girl thing with a friend of hers. Chick flicks all day long, after the Macy's Parade."
"Still."
"It'd help if I could tell her where we're going."
That, apparently, was one push too many. He started staring out the window, watching snow come down out in the parking lot.
"Tell her when we get there," was all he would say.
It didn't surprise me to wake up a little after two o'clock in the morning to find Dean sitting up in the other bed, propped up against a heap of pillows, channel surfing with the TV on mute. From the look of him, he hadn't slept at all, and didn't consider a few hours of sleep to be something even worth pondering.
"Sorry," he said when he saw me looking at him.
"No. It's - it's okay."
He turned the TV off, but he didn't put the remote down, and he didn't do anything to indicate he was going to try to sleep.
"What is it?" I asked him.
He shook his head. Started picking at one of the buttons on the remote with his thumbnail. We hadn't closed the drapes all the way, and there was more than enough light coming in from the parking lot to show me what he was doing, and the look on his face.
He was scared, but there was no point in asking him why.
"Turn the TV back on if you want," I said. "Jess does it all the time when she can't sleep. It doesn't bother me."
He didn't, of course. He crawled down into the bed and lay on his side, with his back to me. I didn't need to see his face to know that his eyes were open, and that they'd probably stay open for the rest of the night. That he'd get out of bed in the morning looking like somebody who'd been dragged a hundred miles behind a bus.
He did eat breakfast, before we hit the road again. The eggs and bacon and hash browns probably weren't as "scrumptious" as the motel's website claimed, but he ate enough of them that they must have been passable. We bought a couple bottles of Coke and some snacks for the road, then got back into the car that wasn't new even when Dad first bought it, and set off into the snow.
Idaho, Utah, then Wyoming.
Dean was scared, the whole way.
He said nothing to indicate why, or of what. He played his old cassettes, the ones Dad had played in this same car when we were kids, and now and then drummed a hand (sometimes both of them) against the steering wheel. The snow let up after a while and the sun came out brilliantly enough that we both had to go fishing for sunglasses.
We made a couple of stops. For gas. To use a bathroom.
When we hit Cheyenne, Dean took us onto the 25, heading due south, toward Denver. It had long since gotten dark, and the roads weren't in the best of condition due to the snow, but Dean - as he always has - kept the car going straight and true. All the times I've ridden with him, I've never had a moment of feeling like that car was going to get away from him.
His life is a whole other story.
"We gonna stop?" I asked him when we were able to see the lights of Denver up ahead.
He looked over at me, just for a second. He looked more miserable in that second than he had the whole time he'd had the flu, back in '07, when he'd spent two weeks huddled in a sleeping bag on the floor of my apartment, sweating and coughing, listening to old sitcom reruns while Jess and I were out because (he claimed) the voices calmed him down.
One night, when his fever spiked up close to 103, he began talking in his sleep to somebody named Lisa.
"It's not my life," he kept saying. "I'm sorry, it's not my life."
I'd make him sleep tonight, I thought, if I had to hit him over the head with a brick.
We found another Perkins in Golden. Another BBQ Bacon Supreme for him, a hot turkey sandwich for me. Apple pie a la mode with coffee. When we got back to the motel we sat through a couple of hours of Law & Order: SVU.
If I'd thought ahead a little bit, I would have swiped a couple of the Ambien that Jess keeps in the medicine cabinet, even though they make her spacey and she's afraid of sleepwalking herself right out of the apartment.
"You need to sleep, man," I told Dean. "If you're gonna keep driving, you need to sleep."
I waited. Thought maybe he'd say "You can drive, then," but he didn't.
"It's a good lead," he said after a minute. Then he turned his head away, but I could see his face in the mirror over the dresser.
He could have followed up this particular lead on his own, just like he'd followed so many others over the past sixteen years. He could have gone to see whoever it was that we were aiming to see, without any kind of backup, hunter-trained or otherwise. Things generally don't scare my brother; call it foolhardiness or stupidity or whatever you like, but he's tackled things that would send other hunters running screaming in the other direction. He was scared now, though, and it was written all over his face.
He was afraid this was all going to end, when we got to wherever it was we were going.
He was afraid that this person we were going to see, whoever he - or she - was, was going to tell him Mom was dead.
When we were kids, when thunder would crash around the house, or after I'd watched some crazy-ass horror movie on TV and laid in bed sure that the boogeyman was lurking a few steps away, Dean would get out of his own bed and crawl into mine. He'd lie there in the dark telling me stories he'd read in a comic book, or some wild thing he'd heard from another kid at school: that sea monkeys were actually tiny little people, or that there were silver dollars in certain boxes of cereal, instead of cheap plastic toys.
He'd talk to me about nonsense until I fell asleep.
He was lying far enough to one side of his bed that there was plenty of room for me to climb into the other side.
"The hell you doing?" he sputtered, and I told him to shut up.
He was silent for a minute while I squirmed around, trying to get comfortable. The pinched look on his face didn't loosen the whole time.
"You wanna get out of my bed?" he groused. "What are you, lonely? What the hell, Sam."
"I'm not lonely," I said.
"What, then?"
When we were very small, he'd spoon himself around me and would talk close to my ear. All these years later, I remember the warmth of him and how comforting it was; even sound asleep, I would know he was there, taking care of me. As time went on, he retreated from that, and would lie on his back, hands tucked up under his head, gazing up at the ceiling as he talked, his voice kept low so no one else in the house would hear him.
I did that now: lay on my back, hands tucked up between my head and the pillow.
"Did you know that a single snowstorm can drop forty million tons of snow?" I asked him, keeping my voice low, in a sort of golf-commentator drone.
Dean didn't say anything for a minute.
Then he said, "You try to snuggle with me and I'm gonna kick your ass."
"Most snow produced in a single snowstorm? Mount Shasta, California, February 1959. Fifteen feet, nine inches."
"How do you even know that shit?"
"No two snowflakes being alike? Is a myth."
"Jesus," Dean said.
But he was asleep less than five minutes later.
* * * * *
Legends are told in bits and pieces, spread by word of mouth over the years. This is the story of Mary Campbell's family: the husband to whom she told the truth of who she was. The son who grieved the loss of her so deeply that he spent half his life on the road alone, searching for her. And the son who found success, and love, and peace...until things went a little bit sideways.
Part One: Dean and Jo
Part Two: Dean, Sam, and Jessica
Part Three: John and Deacon
Part Four: Missouri and Pamela
CHARACTERS: Sam and Dean
GENRE: Gen (AU)
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 1973 words
LEGEND
By Carol Davis
Part Five: Sam and Dean
We'd been on the road for almost twenty-four hours when a giant billboard of Donny and Marie Osmond alerted me to the fact that Dean wasn't headed toward Phoenix, or anywhere else in Arizona, despite his claim that we were going to see Dad.
"Dude," I said.
He didn't hear me. He'd cranked the tape player way up, past the point where I could even try to identify what it was playing, on into the range where people were probably singing along with it in Argentina. When I waved a hand into Dean's field of vision he ignored me, so I turned the tape player off, interrupting Ozzie or Led Zep or whoever it was in mid-screech.
"Dude. Don't you want the I-15?"
"What for?"
"Arizona."
"No," he said.
"Then…we're not going to Arizona?"
It was still possible that we were. Dean knows every back road in the country and claims he prefers them to the interstate. He's got a point; a lot of interstate highway driving's made up of playing dodge-'em with semis. Back roads aren't the most efficient way to travel, but they're scenic, and they're littered with cheap motels, country diners and tourist attractions like the Idaho Potato Museum and the grave of Solid Muldoon.
"Down the - what is it, the 191? That what you're doing?"
"Just trying to drive."
East, then. He'd switched us from the 84 to the 80 just north of Salt Lake. That'd take us all the way across southern Wyoming.
I let him drive.
We'd stopped for the night last night at a motel in Twin Falls, after I'd told Dean (repeatedly) that my ass had gone numb from sitting on a forty-year-old car seat for eight hours. Every time I said something, he gave me the usual jabs about not owning a car of my own, having to use Jess's Saturn every time I wanted to drive somewhere, and having suffered a permanent and possibly fatal loss of testosterone from using public transportation.
"It's handy," I told him. "And very reliable."
"It's on a friggin' track, Sam."
But he relented. His head spun around a couple of times when I pointed him toward a Best Western (with Jess, I would have opted for the Hilton or the Holiday Inn, but with Dean you can only accomplish just so much), but he relented again when I pointed out that the place offered a "scrumptious continental breakfast" and free HBO.
When I told him the Shoshone Indian Ice Cave was only a few miles away, he told me where I could stick that.
Halfway into his second BBQ Bacon Supreme Burger at the Perkins across the street from the motel, he'd mellowed enough to tell me Dad wasn't in Arizona any more.
"And you know this how?"
"Got a feeling."
"A feeling."
"He was supposed to go to Deacon's for Thanksgiving. That whole Mama Chang's thing they do."
"So we're going to Little Rock?"
"Do I look like I want to eat my Thanksgiving dinner with chopsticks?"
Then he mellowed down another notch. It must have been the display of pies in the glass case near the door that was doing it, although the bacon cheeseburger had definitely earned a thumbs-up. Perkins is a chain, and a lot of people claim the food in chain restaurants sucks, but Dean likes them. Says he enjoys knowing what's on the menu, so he can plan ahead.
Even though he always orders the same thing.
"That was decent of her," he said around a big mouthful of meat and cheese. "Jessica. Letting you go when it's Thanksgiving."
"Not that big a deal," I told him. "She's gonna do this huge girl thing with a friend of hers. Chick flicks all day long, after the Macy's Parade."
"Still."
"It'd help if I could tell her where we're going."
That, apparently, was one push too many. He started staring out the window, watching snow come down out in the parking lot.
"Tell her when we get there," was all he would say.
It didn't surprise me to wake up a little after two o'clock in the morning to find Dean sitting up in the other bed, propped up against a heap of pillows, channel surfing with the TV on mute. From the look of him, he hadn't slept at all, and didn't consider a few hours of sleep to be something even worth pondering.
"Sorry," he said when he saw me looking at him.
"No. It's - it's okay."
He turned the TV off, but he didn't put the remote down, and he didn't do anything to indicate he was going to try to sleep.
"What is it?" I asked him.
He shook his head. Started picking at one of the buttons on the remote with his thumbnail. We hadn't closed the drapes all the way, and there was more than enough light coming in from the parking lot to show me what he was doing, and the look on his face.
He was scared, but there was no point in asking him why.
"Turn the TV back on if you want," I said. "Jess does it all the time when she can't sleep. It doesn't bother me."
He didn't, of course. He crawled down into the bed and lay on his side, with his back to me. I didn't need to see his face to know that his eyes were open, and that they'd probably stay open for the rest of the night. That he'd get out of bed in the morning looking like somebody who'd been dragged a hundred miles behind a bus.
He did eat breakfast, before we hit the road again. The eggs and bacon and hash browns probably weren't as "scrumptious" as the motel's website claimed, but he ate enough of them that they must have been passable. We bought a couple bottles of Coke and some snacks for the road, then got back into the car that wasn't new even when Dad first bought it, and set off into the snow.
Idaho, Utah, then Wyoming.
Dean was scared, the whole way.
He said nothing to indicate why, or of what. He played his old cassettes, the ones Dad had played in this same car when we were kids, and now and then drummed a hand (sometimes both of them) against the steering wheel. The snow let up after a while and the sun came out brilliantly enough that we both had to go fishing for sunglasses.
We made a couple of stops. For gas. To use a bathroom.
When we hit Cheyenne, Dean took us onto the 25, heading due south, toward Denver. It had long since gotten dark, and the roads weren't in the best of condition due to the snow, but Dean - as he always has - kept the car going straight and true. All the times I've ridden with him, I've never had a moment of feeling like that car was going to get away from him.
His life is a whole other story.
"We gonna stop?" I asked him when we were able to see the lights of Denver up ahead.
He looked over at me, just for a second. He looked more miserable in that second than he had the whole time he'd had the flu, back in '07, when he'd spent two weeks huddled in a sleeping bag on the floor of my apartment, sweating and coughing, listening to old sitcom reruns while Jess and I were out because (he claimed) the voices calmed him down.
One night, when his fever spiked up close to 103, he began talking in his sleep to somebody named Lisa.
"It's not my life," he kept saying. "I'm sorry, it's not my life."
I'd make him sleep tonight, I thought, if I had to hit him over the head with a brick.
We found another Perkins in Golden. Another BBQ Bacon Supreme for him, a hot turkey sandwich for me. Apple pie a la mode with coffee. When we got back to the motel we sat through a couple of hours of Law & Order: SVU.
If I'd thought ahead a little bit, I would have swiped a couple of the Ambien that Jess keeps in the medicine cabinet, even though they make her spacey and she's afraid of sleepwalking herself right out of the apartment.
"You need to sleep, man," I told Dean. "If you're gonna keep driving, you need to sleep."
I waited. Thought maybe he'd say "You can drive, then," but he didn't.
"It's a good lead," he said after a minute. Then he turned his head away, but I could see his face in the mirror over the dresser.
He could have followed up this particular lead on his own, just like he'd followed so many others over the past sixteen years. He could have gone to see whoever it was that we were aiming to see, without any kind of backup, hunter-trained or otherwise. Things generally don't scare my brother; call it foolhardiness or stupidity or whatever you like, but he's tackled things that would send other hunters running screaming in the other direction. He was scared now, though, and it was written all over his face.
He was afraid this was all going to end, when we got to wherever it was we were going.
He was afraid that this person we were going to see, whoever he - or she - was, was going to tell him Mom was dead.
When we were kids, when thunder would crash around the house, or after I'd watched some crazy-ass horror movie on TV and laid in bed sure that the boogeyman was lurking a few steps away, Dean would get out of his own bed and crawl into mine. He'd lie there in the dark telling me stories he'd read in a comic book, or some wild thing he'd heard from another kid at school: that sea monkeys were actually tiny little people, or that there were silver dollars in certain boxes of cereal, instead of cheap plastic toys.
He'd talk to me about nonsense until I fell asleep.
He was lying far enough to one side of his bed that there was plenty of room for me to climb into the other side.
"The hell you doing?" he sputtered, and I told him to shut up.
He was silent for a minute while I squirmed around, trying to get comfortable. The pinched look on his face didn't loosen the whole time.
"You wanna get out of my bed?" he groused. "What are you, lonely? What the hell, Sam."
"I'm not lonely," I said.
"What, then?"
When we were very small, he'd spoon himself around me and would talk close to my ear. All these years later, I remember the warmth of him and how comforting it was; even sound asleep, I would know he was there, taking care of me. As time went on, he retreated from that, and would lie on his back, hands tucked up under his head, gazing up at the ceiling as he talked, his voice kept low so no one else in the house would hear him.
I did that now: lay on my back, hands tucked up between my head and the pillow.
"Did you know that a single snowstorm can drop forty million tons of snow?" I asked him, keeping my voice low, in a sort of golf-commentator drone.
Dean didn't say anything for a minute.
Then he said, "You try to snuggle with me and I'm gonna kick your ass."
"Most snow produced in a single snowstorm? Mount Shasta, California, February 1959. Fifteen feet, nine inches."
"How do you even know that shit?"
"No two snowflakes being alike? Is a myth."
"Jesus," Dean said.
But he was asleep less than five minutes later.
* * * * *