The Knuckles of Skinnybone Tree (SPN, Sam/Dean)
The Knuckles of Skinnybone Tree
Chapter 1
John Winchester walks the badlands, his head hung low, his boot heels scuffing across shale. The sun’s finally out of his eyes, hanging low against the horizon, lingering. Nightfall, finally. The desert will come alive around him, small animals that skitter invisibly away from his footsteps, the silent beat of wings above his head.
The bullets in his gun will vaporize most everything edible out here, but he thinks he’s heard rabbits. He heard one scream as it was picked up by a hawk, the sound of it echoing like a gunshot across the hills. He thinks he could pick a rabbit off, if he could see one of the damn things. When it rises, the moon will be heavy in the sky, barely half-full. It hasn’t changed since he’s been walking, through all the nights and weeks and years or however the fuck long he’s been out here, and that’s what makes him think he’s already dead and just doesn’t know it.
He was only fifty miles outside of what passes for civilization in these parts, skeletal farmhouses populated by people who look like they were carved out of the desert they live in. He knows a man can get turned around in a place like this, get doubled back on his own tracks; he knows this but he wasn’t so stupid to come out here without a compass and it hasn’t told him wrong yet. He should’ve gotten back, should’ve seen something by now. He headed south the morning after the old man left him, picked a spot on the horizon and started walking.
He doesn’t let himself think about the boys, but they’re always on the edge of his mind, tugging at his sleeve. Whether they’re okay, if Dean’s keeping a good eye on Sammy, if Bill is keeping an eye on both of them, making sure they’re not running ragged and dusty in the yard like all those dogs he keeps. What’ll happen to them if he never comes back.
John tamps his last cigarette against his thumbnail, his stride faltering only long enough to get the thing lit. Shale clatters under his boots and slides off into the darkness. He’s almost to the crest of the hill. There’ve been whiteouts, dust storms where all he can do is crouch down and try not to breathe. The taste of the sand is in his mouth, on his skin. He’d give anything for water.
Threw away the water skins two days ago. Two years ago. Should’ve died by now anyway, all that sun. He got to know heat in ‘Nam but nothing could’ve prepared him for this. ‘Nam had been like drowning in your own sweat and uncertainty, but this - the desert sun sucks the sweat off your skin and leaves you with no hope of rescue. No helicopter coming, no radio to call for backup.
He’s thought he was dying before. Come close to it. When he was gut shot by a sniper, thought all of his insides were gonna come steaming out of his body. After Mary was murdered, no time to even breathe between the baby’s needs and Dean’s needs and his own grief, so deep and dark that it was all he could think about. Still doesn’t know how he made it through those months. When he was shot the medics had been on him in a heartbeat. It wouldn’t have been a bad way to go, bleeding his life out on a jungle trail, better than grieving to death, better than this. Not knowing if his boys were gonna be okay.
John hefts the pack a little higher on his shoulder. It’s lighter without the food or water he came out here with, light enough that the .45 is a solid weight against his back. He’s just dehydrated now but it’s only a matter of time before he’s raving. Better to blow his brains out on a desert trail. He’ll give it another day or two, see if he can feel himself start to go.
The cigarette helps. Clears the taste of dust out of his mouth even as it sears his throat. Cheap fuckin’ hand rolled tobacco. He should’ve known he’d already hit bottom when he was buying Top. He drops the butt and grinds it under his heel, and when he looks back up, he sees the fire.
He doesn’t want to believe it, at first. The fire’s still a good ways off but the moon’s heading towards full and he has the higher ground; he should’ve seen it miles ago. And then: it doesn’t have to be human to set a campfire. He can see two shapes, one seated and the other moving around, but the old man had looked human too, right up until he drew an arm out of his cloak.
But John doesn’t have much to lose, anyway.
He approaches slow, low to the ground, the .45 in one hand. The camp's in the last remnants of a ghost town, a squat cluster of buildings in the middle of the plain, and he circles carefully around. He can smell their dinner, roasted meat of some kind. Human, then, unless the local spirits like hickory sauces. Should’ve smelled that miles away too.
He can hear them talking as he reaches the first building. A man’s voice, rough and lazy, loud enough to carry on the still air.
“ - year we should just hit the Grand Canyon again, man. I’m really starting to hate all of this roughing-it shit. And since when did you get into camping? Always a goddamn princess when you were a kid. ‘Daddy, there’s a bug in here!’ ‘I refuse to shit in a field!’ Whatever mid-life crisis you’ve got going on, leave me out of it, okay?”
The speaker’s back is to him. Cropped hair, broad shoulders, no shirt. Hell of a collection of scars on his back. He’s sitting Indian style a few dozen yards away, close enough that John can see his empty hands.
There are a lot of excuses for what happens next, but no reasons. John’s dehydrated, exhausted, bruised to hell. He’s listening to the guy in front of the fire chatter, and it isn’t until he feels the butt of a shotgun come down against the back of his skull that he realizes nobody's talking back.
He hits the ground on his hands and knees and tries to roll, bring the gun up, do anything. The gun is kicked out of his hand before he can move and something - the shotgun butt or a boot, he can’t see - gets him right on the jaw. He goes down. Flat on his back into the dust, trying to see what hit him.
From the darkness, the man’s voice comes again. “You get him?”
“Yeah,” says another voice, right above him, and John flinches when the flashlight clicks on. He can see the glint of the shotgun trained on him, held underneath the flashlight, a shaggy crown of hair. And then, low, choked, “Holy fuck -”
He sees the flashlight shake, sees the barrel of the shotgun dip. He knows what’s going to happen.
The crack of the gun is deafening, and for a moment, John knows that this is it. This is how he goes, he’s dying, he’s dead.
Then his nerves kick back in and the howl of pain in his skull and jaw are deafened by the shrieking of his chest. Hands are all over him in an instant, prying him out of the fetal position he's curled into, framing his face and holding it still. He hears someone calling, “Sammy? Sammy!” over and over, a voice sobbing “Christo” above him, and then nothing at all.
**
Everything hurts. It’s the first thing he’s aware of again, that everything hurts.
“Who are you?”
There’s water on his forehead, chill across his chest. John opens his eyes slowly. There’s a man staring down at him, swiping a wet cloth over John’s forehead. “Who are you?” he asks again.
“You shot me,” John manages. His own voice hurts to hear.
“Yeah,” the man says. “Sorry about that. What’s your name?”
“What’s yours?”
“Jimmy,” the man says. “Don’t be an asshole. I’m gonna lift your head up, okay? Sip it slowly.”
The water’s flat and tastes like it came out of a drain. It’s the best thing John’s ever tasted. Jimmy pulls the cup away when a little bit slops over the side, his eyes watchful. “My name’s John,” John replies, finally.
“Say Saint Michael’s prayer,” Jimmy says. Two years ago, that might’ve made John pause, but he’s met some strange folk since then and it rolls off his tongue easily enough. Jimmy’s face tightens as John recites the prayer, calls on the prince of heavenly armies, and when he gets to the part about binding the old serpent, Jimmy lifts the cup back to John’s mouth again.
“Okay,” he says while John’s drinking. It sounds a little bit like he’s saying it to himself, and he says it again, a little louder. “Okay. So. John. Where were you born?”
“Indiana,” John says. He lets his head flop back down and only then notices that he’s got a pillow under there and a sleeping bag under his back.
“What year?”
“We playing Twenty Questions?” John says. He opens his eyes, meets Jimmy’s square on.
“What the hell were you doing all the way out here, John?” Jimmy replies.
“Hunting,” John says, and Jimmy grins at that, dips his chin into his chest and shakes his head a little.
“Of course.”
John lets that one go, closes his eyes again and takes stock. He feels better, tighter. His chest stings like fuck, but the inside of his mouth is wet and that's all he cares about. He laughs shakily and surprises himself by saying, “Thought I was a goner out there.”
Jimmy just nods, not looking at John. “Yeah,” he says. “I’m uh, I’m gonna let you get some rest. There’s water right here when you need it, just come out whenever you want. We’ll be around.” He’s out of the room before John can say anything, and for a long moment, everything is quiet. He can hear Jimmy’s boots thumping across the hard packed earth and, quietly, voices.
Jimmy didn’t seem too surprised to hear that John was hunting in the badlands. They’ll tell him if they’re hunting the same thing when they’re ready to, he guesses. John’s met a lot of people in the last few years, hollow-eyed and empty or filled with the same sort of things that he is, and he knows better than to pry.
John drowses. Bobs up against the surface of consciousness and sinks again. It’s too hot to do much else. Once, there’s food laid out for him. Twice the water bottle next to his sleeping bag is refilled. The second time the jerky, untouched, is gone again.
He dreams. His boys are tucked into the curve of his arms. Dean’s short hair, damp with sweat, prickly against the sensitive skin of his inner arm. Sammy is a solid weight on top of his chest, smaller than he’s been for half a year. The smell of the desert seeps into the dream, a sort of no-color scent that reminds him of abandoned houses. It blends with the sweet-sour baby smell of his children. Somewhere, he’s aware of voices, flowing over what’s left of his family like the faintest breath of dry air.
He drifts. Water in his veins, sloshing in his stomach. His boys, with him, where they should be. He used to sleep this way sometimes on his days off, after hours in the yard teaching Dean to catch a football or swinging Sam into the air, sprawled out on their Goodwill couch or in the sweet grass in the yard, Sammy sleeping or just staring at John like his daddy was magic. Months where Dean was happier sandwiched between John and Mary than in his brand-new big boy bed that had cost most of a paycheck, his little hands clenched tight around John’s thumbs.
“After this, we’ll go some place on the coast,” he murmurs, stroking a hand over Dean’s hair. “Somewhere that rains all the time. Beaches. I’ve never seen the Pacific before. Not from this side of it. Yeah. Somewhere wet.”
Dean’s wet enough to have been swimming, sweat pooling on the back of his neck where his skin bunches together, underneath where his fingers curl against John’s chest. Sammy’s heavy, as heavy as the toddler he really is, his head sliding across John’s skin. Slicker than it should be, and the heavy tang of iron is in his nose.
And his mouth moves even though his whole body has turned to stone, his lungs frozen, his fingers numb where they cup the backs of his sons’ skulls. “Deano?” he croaks. And he looks, even though he knows what he’s going to see.
It’s already soaked through the sleeping bag underneath him, trickling down his collarbone and to either side of his throat in sullen streams. He can feel it dripping off his skin, Dean’s face buried behind a mask of bruises and gore, his mouth open, the lower lip split in two. His hands are burned where they rest against John’s skin, dead, blackened skin flaking off to reveal oozing sores. And it’s the hardest thing he’s ever done, to drag his eyes up to see his younger son, his baby. To see that Sammy’s head hangs wide from the rest of his body, his soft throat hacked all the way through until John can see bone.
He’s on the ground before he realizes he’s awake, gagging on blood, his hands and shirtfront and face soaked in it, great clots of blood streaming from his nose and mouth. He’s reaching for his sons, his hands scrabbling over the splintered wood. It’s a long, long time before he can uncurl himself, stand up, pinch his nose shut to try and stop the flow of blood. Not real. Not real, not real, not real. Safe with Bill, not getting any vegetables, running ragged and dusty with all those dogs. Safe.
“Safe,” he rumbles, and wipes blood from his face.
It’s dusk when he stumbles out into the open, as cleaned up as he could get with a bottle of water and a clean shirt. The fire’s already going and his - rescuers, he doesn’t know what to call them yet, tough to name a friendship that started off with you getting shot - are sitting on the other side of it. They tense and move apart as if they’ve been stung as soon as they lay eyes on him, which is ... interesting, but not as interesting as the smell of meat they’ve got laid across the coals.
“John,” Jimmy says, after a moment. He stands, brushing dust from the knees of his jeans. “You uh, you hungry? There's rabbit.”
“Yeah,” John says. The other guy stays seated, his eyes flat and unreadable. Something dangerous about them, John thinks. Once, he caught a VC after two steady weeks under fire, two weeks of the bastards following John's unit around from village to village until his unit caught a nest of them, hiding out under some family’s house. One of them, skinny fucker, younger than John was, turned around and shot the three VC who raised their hands in surrender before they could take him down. John had been in the Corps for a while by then but he was new to the jungle. He’d crept forward, the muzzle of his gun still hot, and watched the light go out of the VC’s dark eyes.
He holds the man’s eyes - wide, and green in a way that catches at the edge of his memory - and steps over the clear circle that they’ve carved into the dirt, over the symbols that line its edge. Jimmy introduces his, uh, friend as Robert, or Rob. Robert lifts his chin in greeting, says nothing.
Dinner’s quiet. Jimmy and Robert are staring at him. Every time he puts his head down to eat, John can feel their eyes on him like a physical weight. Jimmy passes a bottle around, bathwater warm, Jameson. Robert hasn’t moved except to turn the rabbit skewers he’s got neatly lined up, pinching a thin strip of meat every few minutes, handing them over to Jimmy when he judges them cooked. He doesn’t take any himself, only drinks from a water bottle and stares.
Maybe they still think John’s some sort of creature, some kind of spirit. He eats carefully even though he wants nothing more than to put away three or four rabbits. He’s never had rabbit before. It tastes better than he would’ve thought. Hell, it’s fucking delicious. “This is great,” he says.
They blink at him. “Thanks,” Jimmy says, after a moment.
Robert grunts and then asks abruptly, “So, what were you doing out there, John?”
John swallows the bite in his mouth, chases it with a swig of water. “Tourists going missing,” he says. “Six of them over the last two years.”
“Maybe they got lost,” Robert says.
John bristles at his tone. “I was in the neighborhood, told a friend I’d do him a favor, check this one out.”
Robert and Jimmy exchange a look. “Funny,” Robert says. “That’s how we wound up out here. You find what you were looking for, Johnny?”
“Yeah,” John says shortly. “I did.”
The sun sets, unwillingly. The air gets cooler. Jimmy gets more water from wherever they’ve got it stored. He’s tall enough that John starts a little every time he gets near. John’s not a small man but Jimmy looms, his shoulders hunched as though he’s too aware of his height. His boots clumping across the shale are slow enough that John could almost forget how blindingly fast they’d moved when they needed to, disarming John as easily as a child.
Robert grudgingly shares his cigarettes with John. He tosses John the pack with a neat flick of the wrist and his mouth twitches a little when John catches it one-handed, uses the lighter stuffed inside. John talks about nothing with Jimmy, hunting and the sort of jobs they’ve worked. He's not a talkative guy, doesn’t like chit chat, but he’s just spent a week in the badlands with nobody around to talk to but bones.
He doesn’t ask, how did you get started in this; he wouldn’t answer the question himself, but he does ask, “How long have you guys been hunting?”
They look at each other again. They do that a lot. Every other sentence is punctuated with some sort of glance, returned or not, that makes John feel like there’s some sort of joke being told behind his back. Through the light of the fire he can see that Jimmy’s hand is wrapped around Robert’s bare foot, the sort of gesture that he thinks he’s not supposed to see, Jimmy’s thumb stroking slowly over the other man’s skin, over and over.
John’s not a religious man, not anymore. He guesses that there’s enough Jesus and Satan and sin leftover in him to feel vaguely queasy, watching two men touch like that, but most of the small things quit looking so damn big two years ago and he never cared too much to know what people did behind closed doors, anyway.
“It’s kinda the family business,” Jimmy says, uncomfortably. Robert rubs the back of his own neck, not looking at either of them. “For both of us. We were raised in it, never really knew much else.”
Robert snorts. “The fuck’re you talking about, college boy?” He jerks his head towards Jimmy. “He graduated from Stanford. Sumna cum awesome.”
“Shut up,” Jimmy mutters. He grins over at Robert anyway, and lets Robert reach over and pinch his cheek. John glances away, out towards the night. Family business. He’d been thinking of teaching Dean to shoot, take him out on Bill’s property and set up a couple of cans on a fence, letting him shoot dry until he was comfortable with it, the weight of it in his hands. He wouldn’t even be thinking about it but Dean’s taken to following him out lately, never asking for it but just watching, his eyes big and dark the way they used to be, when he wasn’t talking or looking anybody in the face but his Daddy.
It could be a birthday present, he thinks, pleased with the idea for just a moment before he thinks of Mary, of what she’d think of Dean’s little hands wrapped around a gun.
“Are you okay?” Jimmy asks, his voice soft.
It startles him, a little. He glances up and then away again, clears his throat. “Yeah, I was just ...” He almost doesn’t say anything, but a laugh, quiet and uncomfortable, comes bubbling out of his chest. “I was just thinking about my boys.”
He doesn’t see his rescuers stiffen, glancing down at his lap as he digs into the pocket of his jeans. “Got two of ‘em ... six and two.”
“What?” Jimmy says, low and flat, nearly overlapped by Robert’s “What’d you just say?”
John pauses, his wallet in his hand, but any reply he’d care to make is cut off as Robert stands abruptly. He’s a little shorter than Jimmy, probably a little shorter than John himself, and he glares down at both of them. “No,” he says. “You know what? Fuck this. Fuck you,” he says to Jimmy, “and fuck you,” he adds, to John. “I’ve had it up to here with all of this crap - no, fuck off, seriously,” he says as Jimmy grabs at him, stepping neatly away before he spins on his heels and stalks into the darkness, pausing only to kick open the circle that had been carefully drawn into the sand.
They’re quiet for a long time. John almost wants to ask Jimmy if he’s gonna go after his boyfriend or what, but Jimmy just looks at him with these sad, unreadable eyes, and after a few moments shuffles over on his knees to John’s side of the fire and says, hesitantly, “If you’ve got pictures in there, can I see?”
**
“He thinks it’s 1985.”
He can’t see Dean but Sam knows that he’s out there. The horses wicker at him, the gray stretching its neck out in hopes of a nose rub or a carrot or something. Sam pats it absently, staring into its placid face.
“Yeah,” Dean says. “I got that, what with the whole six and two thing. Thanks.”
It takes him a moment to find Dean, who’s sitting up against the outlying building, his knees drawn up, his head tilted back. Sam sits next to him, gingerly, leaving a couple feet between them. Dean doesn’t look at him. From this angle, the horses’ thick bodies block out nearly all the stars.
“What do you think this is?” Sam asks. “Some sort of apparition?”
“He’d been bleeding when he came out earlier. I know you saw it.”
Sam settles carefully against the wall, a few feet away from Dean, mindful of the space between them. “If he’s physical,” Sam says softly, and then Dean cuts him off.
“It’s not him.”
“What if it is?”
“It’s not him.”
Sam edges a bit closer. “He says he came out here on a hunting trip and lost some sort of contest with a spirit, and he’s been wandering the desert ever since. It’s been at least a few days, maybe a week - long enough that he should’ve died, or at least been close to it, but apart from some dehydration and the rock salt in his chest, he’s pretty much okay. I was thinking - we’re sitting on a ley line, right? All we’ve been doing is trying to open a connection to whatever it that Bill sent us after - what if he’s been walking some sort of Path of the Dead and it led him straight to us?”
Dean grunts. Sam scoots closer. “I’m not saying that it’s - that it’s us. That we did this. I don’t think - he’s not Dad, not really. I mean, he is, or he might be, but we didn’t call up his spirit. We made sure that that wasn’t possible.”
“So what is he?” Dean says, unwillingly. He’s still not looking at Sam but he lets his shoulder slip down against Sam’s.
“He’s young,” Sam says, and can’t find anything else to say. He’s thought it out, added up the numbers and whoever Sam left sitting by the fire with the last rabbit ka-bob is younger than they are now. He’s missing two scars on his face and the beard that covers up the one high on his throat but what’s bothering Sam the most is his eyes. They’re different in a way he can’t put his finger on, not yet.
Dean’s shoulder is warm against Sam’s. “I’m starving,” he says. “It’s been three days. This isn’t working. All the visions I’m having are of steak and beer. I’m done with this.”
Sammy lets his head hang down, his hands dangling between his knees. “Yeah,” he says. “You already left the circle, whatever contact we made has probably been broken anyway.”
“Yeah,” Dean says. Everything that they can’t bring themselves to say fills up the air between them, thick, the weight of years behind it. Sam doesn’t look over when he lays his hand over the back of Dean’s neck but eventually, Dean’s whole side is pressed against him, shoulder and elbow and hip.
“What if,” Dean says, and clears his throat. “What if it is him?” Sam can feel him breathing, feel the thud-thud of Dean’s heartbeat. “What if he figures it out?”
Sam turns his brother’s face towards him, close enough that the hand that was around Dean’s neck slips easily around and cups his cheek. Two years ago, Dean wouldn’t have let him but he allows it, closes his eyes and lets Sam tug him forward. The stars are bright enough that Dean’s eyelashes leave smudgy shadows on his cheekbones.
Dean hesitates for just a second, long enough for Sam to think he’s going to say something, he’ll see or but what if or just no, the way he used to. Sam steels himself for it but Dean only makes this sound low in his throat, and when he kisses Sam it’s desperate in the way it used to be, back when they barely had the space to breathe. And when Sam kisses back it’s just as hard, biting Dean’s lips, and he doesn’t have to admit that he has no answers for Dean, that he’s scared too.
Chapter Two
Chapter 1
John Winchester walks the badlands, his head hung low, his boot heels scuffing across shale. The sun’s finally out of his eyes, hanging low against the horizon, lingering. Nightfall, finally. The desert will come alive around him, small animals that skitter invisibly away from his footsteps, the silent beat of wings above his head.
The bullets in his gun will vaporize most everything edible out here, but he thinks he’s heard rabbits. He heard one scream as it was picked up by a hawk, the sound of it echoing like a gunshot across the hills. He thinks he could pick a rabbit off, if he could see one of the damn things. When it rises, the moon will be heavy in the sky, barely half-full. It hasn’t changed since he’s been walking, through all the nights and weeks and years or however the fuck long he’s been out here, and that’s what makes him think he’s already dead and just doesn’t know it.
He was only fifty miles outside of what passes for civilization in these parts, skeletal farmhouses populated by people who look like they were carved out of the desert they live in. He knows a man can get turned around in a place like this, get doubled back on his own tracks; he knows this but he wasn’t so stupid to come out here without a compass and it hasn’t told him wrong yet. He should’ve gotten back, should’ve seen something by now. He headed south the morning after the old man left him, picked a spot on the horizon and started walking.
He doesn’t let himself think about the boys, but they’re always on the edge of his mind, tugging at his sleeve. Whether they’re okay, if Dean’s keeping a good eye on Sammy, if Bill is keeping an eye on both of them, making sure they’re not running ragged and dusty in the yard like all those dogs he keeps. What’ll happen to them if he never comes back.
John tamps his last cigarette against his thumbnail, his stride faltering only long enough to get the thing lit. Shale clatters under his boots and slides off into the darkness. He’s almost to the crest of the hill. There’ve been whiteouts, dust storms where all he can do is crouch down and try not to breathe. The taste of the sand is in his mouth, on his skin. He’d give anything for water.
Threw away the water skins two days ago. Two years ago. Should’ve died by now anyway, all that sun. He got to know heat in ‘Nam but nothing could’ve prepared him for this. ‘Nam had been like drowning in your own sweat and uncertainty, but this - the desert sun sucks the sweat off your skin and leaves you with no hope of rescue. No helicopter coming, no radio to call for backup.
He’s thought he was dying before. Come close to it. When he was gut shot by a sniper, thought all of his insides were gonna come steaming out of his body. After Mary was murdered, no time to even breathe between the baby’s needs and Dean’s needs and his own grief, so deep and dark that it was all he could think about. Still doesn’t know how he made it through those months. When he was shot the medics had been on him in a heartbeat. It wouldn’t have been a bad way to go, bleeding his life out on a jungle trail, better than grieving to death, better than this. Not knowing if his boys were gonna be okay.
John hefts the pack a little higher on his shoulder. It’s lighter without the food or water he came out here with, light enough that the .45 is a solid weight against his back. He’s just dehydrated now but it’s only a matter of time before he’s raving. Better to blow his brains out on a desert trail. He’ll give it another day or two, see if he can feel himself start to go.
The cigarette helps. Clears the taste of dust out of his mouth even as it sears his throat. Cheap fuckin’ hand rolled tobacco. He should’ve known he’d already hit bottom when he was buying Top. He drops the butt and grinds it under his heel, and when he looks back up, he sees the fire.
He doesn’t want to believe it, at first. The fire’s still a good ways off but the moon’s heading towards full and he has the higher ground; he should’ve seen it miles ago. And then: it doesn’t have to be human to set a campfire. He can see two shapes, one seated and the other moving around, but the old man had looked human too, right up until he drew an arm out of his cloak.
But John doesn’t have much to lose, anyway.
He approaches slow, low to the ground, the .45 in one hand. The camp's in the last remnants of a ghost town, a squat cluster of buildings in the middle of the plain, and he circles carefully around. He can smell their dinner, roasted meat of some kind. Human, then, unless the local spirits like hickory sauces. Should’ve smelled that miles away too.
He can hear them talking as he reaches the first building. A man’s voice, rough and lazy, loud enough to carry on the still air.
“ - year we should just hit the Grand Canyon again, man. I’m really starting to hate all of this roughing-it shit. And since when did you get into camping? Always a goddamn princess when you were a kid. ‘Daddy, there’s a bug in here!’ ‘I refuse to shit in a field!’ Whatever mid-life crisis you’ve got going on, leave me out of it, okay?”
The speaker’s back is to him. Cropped hair, broad shoulders, no shirt. Hell of a collection of scars on his back. He’s sitting Indian style a few dozen yards away, close enough that John can see his empty hands.
There are a lot of excuses for what happens next, but no reasons. John’s dehydrated, exhausted, bruised to hell. He’s listening to the guy in front of the fire chatter, and it isn’t until he feels the butt of a shotgun come down against the back of his skull that he realizes nobody's talking back.
He hits the ground on his hands and knees and tries to roll, bring the gun up, do anything. The gun is kicked out of his hand before he can move and something - the shotgun butt or a boot, he can’t see - gets him right on the jaw. He goes down. Flat on his back into the dust, trying to see what hit him.
From the darkness, the man’s voice comes again. “You get him?”
“Yeah,” says another voice, right above him, and John flinches when the flashlight clicks on. He can see the glint of the shotgun trained on him, held underneath the flashlight, a shaggy crown of hair. And then, low, choked, “Holy fuck -”
He sees the flashlight shake, sees the barrel of the shotgun dip. He knows what’s going to happen.
The crack of the gun is deafening, and for a moment, John knows that this is it. This is how he goes, he’s dying, he’s dead.
Then his nerves kick back in and the howl of pain in his skull and jaw are deafened by the shrieking of his chest. Hands are all over him in an instant, prying him out of the fetal position he's curled into, framing his face and holding it still. He hears someone calling, “Sammy? Sammy!” over and over, a voice sobbing “Christo” above him, and then nothing at all.
**
Everything hurts. It’s the first thing he’s aware of again, that everything hurts.
“Who are you?”
There’s water on his forehead, chill across his chest. John opens his eyes slowly. There’s a man staring down at him, swiping a wet cloth over John’s forehead. “Who are you?” he asks again.
“You shot me,” John manages. His own voice hurts to hear.
“Yeah,” the man says. “Sorry about that. What’s your name?”
“What’s yours?”
“Jimmy,” the man says. “Don’t be an asshole. I’m gonna lift your head up, okay? Sip it slowly.”
The water’s flat and tastes like it came out of a drain. It’s the best thing John’s ever tasted. Jimmy pulls the cup away when a little bit slops over the side, his eyes watchful. “My name’s John,” John replies, finally.
“Say Saint Michael’s prayer,” Jimmy says. Two years ago, that might’ve made John pause, but he’s met some strange folk since then and it rolls off his tongue easily enough. Jimmy’s face tightens as John recites the prayer, calls on the prince of heavenly armies, and when he gets to the part about binding the old serpent, Jimmy lifts the cup back to John’s mouth again.
“Okay,” he says while John’s drinking. It sounds a little bit like he’s saying it to himself, and he says it again, a little louder. “Okay. So. John. Where were you born?”
“Indiana,” John says. He lets his head flop back down and only then notices that he’s got a pillow under there and a sleeping bag under his back.
“What year?”
“We playing Twenty Questions?” John says. He opens his eyes, meets Jimmy’s square on.
“What the hell were you doing all the way out here, John?” Jimmy replies.
“Hunting,” John says, and Jimmy grins at that, dips his chin into his chest and shakes his head a little.
“Of course.”
John lets that one go, closes his eyes again and takes stock. He feels better, tighter. His chest stings like fuck, but the inside of his mouth is wet and that's all he cares about. He laughs shakily and surprises himself by saying, “Thought I was a goner out there.”
Jimmy just nods, not looking at John. “Yeah,” he says. “I’m uh, I’m gonna let you get some rest. There’s water right here when you need it, just come out whenever you want. We’ll be around.” He’s out of the room before John can say anything, and for a long moment, everything is quiet. He can hear Jimmy’s boots thumping across the hard packed earth and, quietly, voices.
Jimmy didn’t seem too surprised to hear that John was hunting in the badlands. They’ll tell him if they’re hunting the same thing when they’re ready to, he guesses. John’s met a lot of people in the last few years, hollow-eyed and empty or filled with the same sort of things that he is, and he knows better than to pry.
John drowses. Bobs up against the surface of consciousness and sinks again. It’s too hot to do much else. Once, there’s food laid out for him. Twice the water bottle next to his sleeping bag is refilled. The second time the jerky, untouched, is gone again.
He dreams. His boys are tucked into the curve of his arms. Dean’s short hair, damp with sweat, prickly against the sensitive skin of his inner arm. Sammy is a solid weight on top of his chest, smaller than he’s been for half a year. The smell of the desert seeps into the dream, a sort of no-color scent that reminds him of abandoned houses. It blends with the sweet-sour baby smell of his children. Somewhere, he’s aware of voices, flowing over what’s left of his family like the faintest breath of dry air.
He drifts. Water in his veins, sloshing in his stomach. His boys, with him, where they should be. He used to sleep this way sometimes on his days off, after hours in the yard teaching Dean to catch a football or swinging Sam into the air, sprawled out on their Goodwill couch or in the sweet grass in the yard, Sammy sleeping or just staring at John like his daddy was magic. Months where Dean was happier sandwiched between John and Mary than in his brand-new big boy bed that had cost most of a paycheck, his little hands clenched tight around John’s thumbs.
“After this, we’ll go some place on the coast,” he murmurs, stroking a hand over Dean’s hair. “Somewhere that rains all the time. Beaches. I’ve never seen the Pacific before. Not from this side of it. Yeah. Somewhere wet.”
Dean’s wet enough to have been swimming, sweat pooling on the back of his neck where his skin bunches together, underneath where his fingers curl against John’s chest. Sammy’s heavy, as heavy as the toddler he really is, his head sliding across John’s skin. Slicker than it should be, and the heavy tang of iron is in his nose.
And his mouth moves even though his whole body has turned to stone, his lungs frozen, his fingers numb where they cup the backs of his sons’ skulls. “Deano?” he croaks. And he looks, even though he knows what he’s going to see.
It’s already soaked through the sleeping bag underneath him, trickling down his collarbone and to either side of his throat in sullen streams. He can feel it dripping off his skin, Dean’s face buried behind a mask of bruises and gore, his mouth open, the lower lip split in two. His hands are burned where they rest against John’s skin, dead, blackened skin flaking off to reveal oozing sores. And it’s the hardest thing he’s ever done, to drag his eyes up to see his younger son, his baby. To see that Sammy’s head hangs wide from the rest of his body, his soft throat hacked all the way through until John can see bone.
He’s on the ground before he realizes he’s awake, gagging on blood, his hands and shirtfront and face soaked in it, great clots of blood streaming from his nose and mouth. He’s reaching for his sons, his hands scrabbling over the splintered wood. It’s a long, long time before he can uncurl himself, stand up, pinch his nose shut to try and stop the flow of blood. Not real. Not real, not real, not real. Safe with Bill, not getting any vegetables, running ragged and dusty with all those dogs. Safe.
“Safe,” he rumbles, and wipes blood from his face.
It’s dusk when he stumbles out into the open, as cleaned up as he could get with a bottle of water and a clean shirt. The fire’s already going and his - rescuers, he doesn’t know what to call them yet, tough to name a friendship that started off with you getting shot - are sitting on the other side of it. They tense and move apart as if they’ve been stung as soon as they lay eyes on him, which is ... interesting, but not as interesting as the smell of meat they’ve got laid across the coals.
“John,” Jimmy says, after a moment. He stands, brushing dust from the knees of his jeans. “You uh, you hungry? There's rabbit.”
“Yeah,” John says. The other guy stays seated, his eyes flat and unreadable. Something dangerous about them, John thinks. Once, he caught a VC after two steady weeks under fire, two weeks of the bastards following John's unit around from village to village until his unit caught a nest of them, hiding out under some family’s house. One of them, skinny fucker, younger than John was, turned around and shot the three VC who raised their hands in surrender before they could take him down. John had been in the Corps for a while by then but he was new to the jungle. He’d crept forward, the muzzle of his gun still hot, and watched the light go out of the VC’s dark eyes.
He holds the man’s eyes - wide, and green in a way that catches at the edge of his memory - and steps over the clear circle that they’ve carved into the dirt, over the symbols that line its edge. Jimmy introduces his, uh, friend as Robert, or Rob. Robert lifts his chin in greeting, says nothing.
Dinner’s quiet. Jimmy and Robert are staring at him. Every time he puts his head down to eat, John can feel their eyes on him like a physical weight. Jimmy passes a bottle around, bathwater warm, Jameson. Robert hasn’t moved except to turn the rabbit skewers he’s got neatly lined up, pinching a thin strip of meat every few minutes, handing them over to Jimmy when he judges them cooked. He doesn’t take any himself, only drinks from a water bottle and stares.
Maybe they still think John’s some sort of creature, some kind of spirit. He eats carefully even though he wants nothing more than to put away three or four rabbits. He’s never had rabbit before. It tastes better than he would’ve thought. Hell, it’s fucking delicious. “This is great,” he says.
They blink at him. “Thanks,” Jimmy says, after a moment.
Robert grunts and then asks abruptly, “So, what were you doing out there, John?”
John swallows the bite in his mouth, chases it with a swig of water. “Tourists going missing,” he says. “Six of them over the last two years.”
“Maybe they got lost,” Robert says.
John bristles at his tone. “I was in the neighborhood, told a friend I’d do him a favor, check this one out.”
Robert and Jimmy exchange a look. “Funny,” Robert says. “That’s how we wound up out here. You find what you were looking for, Johnny?”
“Yeah,” John says shortly. “I did.”
The sun sets, unwillingly. The air gets cooler. Jimmy gets more water from wherever they’ve got it stored. He’s tall enough that John starts a little every time he gets near. John’s not a small man but Jimmy looms, his shoulders hunched as though he’s too aware of his height. His boots clumping across the shale are slow enough that John could almost forget how blindingly fast they’d moved when they needed to, disarming John as easily as a child.
Robert grudgingly shares his cigarettes with John. He tosses John the pack with a neat flick of the wrist and his mouth twitches a little when John catches it one-handed, uses the lighter stuffed inside. John talks about nothing with Jimmy, hunting and the sort of jobs they’ve worked. He's not a talkative guy, doesn’t like chit chat, but he’s just spent a week in the badlands with nobody around to talk to but bones.
He doesn’t ask, how did you get started in this; he wouldn’t answer the question himself, but he does ask, “How long have you guys been hunting?”
They look at each other again. They do that a lot. Every other sentence is punctuated with some sort of glance, returned or not, that makes John feel like there’s some sort of joke being told behind his back. Through the light of the fire he can see that Jimmy’s hand is wrapped around Robert’s bare foot, the sort of gesture that he thinks he’s not supposed to see, Jimmy’s thumb stroking slowly over the other man’s skin, over and over.
John’s not a religious man, not anymore. He guesses that there’s enough Jesus and Satan and sin leftover in him to feel vaguely queasy, watching two men touch like that, but most of the small things quit looking so damn big two years ago and he never cared too much to know what people did behind closed doors, anyway.
“It’s kinda the family business,” Jimmy says, uncomfortably. Robert rubs the back of his own neck, not looking at either of them. “For both of us. We were raised in it, never really knew much else.”
Robert snorts. “The fuck’re you talking about, college boy?” He jerks his head towards Jimmy. “He graduated from Stanford. Sumna cum awesome.”
“Shut up,” Jimmy mutters. He grins over at Robert anyway, and lets Robert reach over and pinch his cheek. John glances away, out towards the night. Family business. He’d been thinking of teaching Dean to shoot, take him out on Bill’s property and set up a couple of cans on a fence, letting him shoot dry until he was comfortable with it, the weight of it in his hands. He wouldn’t even be thinking about it but Dean’s taken to following him out lately, never asking for it but just watching, his eyes big and dark the way they used to be, when he wasn’t talking or looking anybody in the face but his Daddy.
It could be a birthday present, he thinks, pleased with the idea for just a moment before he thinks of Mary, of what she’d think of Dean’s little hands wrapped around a gun.
“Are you okay?” Jimmy asks, his voice soft.
It startles him, a little. He glances up and then away again, clears his throat. “Yeah, I was just ...” He almost doesn’t say anything, but a laugh, quiet and uncomfortable, comes bubbling out of his chest. “I was just thinking about my boys.”
He doesn’t see his rescuers stiffen, glancing down at his lap as he digs into the pocket of his jeans. “Got two of ‘em ... six and two.”
“What?” Jimmy says, low and flat, nearly overlapped by Robert’s “What’d you just say?”
John pauses, his wallet in his hand, but any reply he’d care to make is cut off as Robert stands abruptly. He’s a little shorter than Jimmy, probably a little shorter than John himself, and he glares down at both of them. “No,” he says. “You know what? Fuck this. Fuck you,” he says to Jimmy, “and fuck you,” he adds, to John. “I’ve had it up to here with all of this crap - no, fuck off, seriously,” he says as Jimmy grabs at him, stepping neatly away before he spins on his heels and stalks into the darkness, pausing only to kick open the circle that had been carefully drawn into the sand.
They’re quiet for a long time. John almost wants to ask Jimmy if he’s gonna go after his boyfriend or what, but Jimmy just looks at him with these sad, unreadable eyes, and after a few moments shuffles over on his knees to John’s side of the fire and says, hesitantly, “If you’ve got pictures in there, can I see?”
**
“He thinks it’s 1985.”
He can’t see Dean but Sam knows that he’s out there. The horses wicker at him, the gray stretching its neck out in hopes of a nose rub or a carrot or something. Sam pats it absently, staring into its placid face.
“Yeah,” Dean says. “I got that, what with the whole six and two thing. Thanks.”
It takes him a moment to find Dean, who’s sitting up against the outlying building, his knees drawn up, his head tilted back. Sam sits next to him, gingerly, leaving a couple feet between them. Dean doesn’t look at him. From this angle, the horses’ thick bodies block out nearly all the stars.
“What do you think this is?” Sam asks. “Some sort of apparition?”
“He’d been bleeding when he came out earlier. I know you saw it.”
Sam settles carefully against the wall, a few feet away from Dean, mindful of the space between them. “If he’s physical,” Sam says softly, and then Dean cuts him off.
“It’s not him.”
“What if it is?”
“It’s not him.”
Sam edges a bit closer. “He says he came out here on a hunting trip and lost some sort of contest with a spirit, and he’s been wandering the desert ever since. It’s been at least a few days, maybe a week - long enough that he should’ve died, or at least been close to it, but apart from some dehydration and the rock salt in his chest, he’s pretty much okay. I was thinking - we’re sitting on a ley line, right? All we’ve been doing is trying to open a connection to whatever it that Bill sent us after - what if he’s been walking some sort of Path of the Dead and it led him straight to us?”
Dean grunts. Sam scoots closer. “I’m not saying that it’s - that it’s us. That we did this. I don’t think - he’s not Dad, not really. I mean, he is, or he might be, but we didn’t call up his spirit. We made sure that that wasn’t possible.”
“So what is he?” Dean says, unwillingly. He’s still not looking at Sam but he lets his shoulder slip down against Sam’s.
“He’s young,” Sam says, and can’t find anything else to say. He’s thought it out, added up the numbers and whoever Sam left sitting by the fire with the last rabbit ka-bob is younger than they are now. He’s missing two scars on his face and the beard that covers up the one high on his throat but what’s bothering Sam the most is his eyes. They’re different in a way he can’t put his finger on, not yet.
Dean’s shoulder is warm against Sam’s. “I’m starving,” he says. “It’s been three days. This isn’t working. All the visions I’m having are of steak and beer. I’m done with this.”
Sammy lets his head hang down, his hands dangling between his knees. “Yeah,” he says. “You already left the circle, whatever contact we made has probably been broken anyway.”
“Yeah,” Dean says. Everything that they can’t bring themselves to say fills up the air between them, thick, the weight of years behind it. Sam doesn’t look over when he lays his hand over the back of Dean’s neck but eventually, Dean’s whole side is pressed against him, shoulder and elbow and hip.
“What if,” Dean says, and clears his throat. “What if it is him?” Sam can feel him breathing, feel the thud-thud of Dean’s heartbeat. “What if he figures it out?”
Sam turns his brother’s face towards him, close enough that the hand that was around Dean’s neck slips easily around and cups his cheek. Two years ago, Dean wouldn’t have let him but he allows it, closes his eyes and lets Sam tug him forward. The stars are bright enough that Dean’s eyelashes leave smudgy shadows on his cheekbones.
Dean hesitates for just a second, long enough for Sam to think he’s going to say something, he’ll see or but what if or just no, the way he used to. Sam steels himself for it but Dean only makes this sound low in his throat, and when he kisses Sam it’s desperate in the way it used to be, back when they barely had the space to breathe. And when Sam kisses back it’s just as hard, biting Dean’s lips, and he doesn’t have to admit that he has no answers for Dean, that he’s scared too.
Chapter Two