SPN fic. Flesh, Blood, Bone. Dean-centric. 1/2
I finally got around to watching "All Hell Breaks Loose, Pt. 1" on Sunday night and woke up Monday morning with this in my brain. It's been distracting me completely from the research I'm supposed to be doing as I struggled to finish it before the final episode.
Title: Flesh, Blood, Bone
Rating: PG13. Gen unless you count the weird, faded out not really sex scene with the demon/fairy. I die from shock. Where has the slasher in me gone to?
Pairing/Characters: Dean
W/C: ~12,500
Spoilers: AHBL Part 1
Disclaimer: Own nothing. Just having fun.
Summary: There is nothing more dangerous than a man with nothing left to lose. AHBL P1 continuation, soon to turn AU. Evil!Dean
Update June 11: Now beta'd! Thank you
delierra, you rock!
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Flesh, Blood, Bone
by Carole
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The echoes of Bobby’s car have barely faded in the distance when Dean stands, his face no longer buried in his hands, in front of the body of his brother. He pulls the Impala around, as close to the door as he can manage.
His brother is a dead weight, literally, and a good three inches taller than Dean. He manages, though, hiding the corpse under brown and orange plaid. The blankets are moth eaten and are far from clean, but they do the job well enough.
Dean just sits in the driver’s seat of the car, staring at nothing, deciding exactly what his plan is going to be. Because there is a plan, the Plan, and that was to fix this. Sammy shouldn’t be dead.
Dean has been a hunter all his life. He knows about all the bad things, all the things that should not exist. You have to, to survive the life he has. That is what makes hunters so deadly if they turn, knowing just enough about a lot of things to be dangerous. Dean might not know the spells off the top of his head, but he knows where to go, who to ask, and who to threaten to learn them.
Jamming the keys into the ignition, he brings the car to life and pulls out, speeding down the dirt road as fast as he dares. What he is going to do is reckless, dangerous and just a little bit stupid, but he has nothing to lose. New Orleans is a long drive and he’s spent far too long here already.
DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN
He just keeps driving, and doesn’t sleep. He can’t. When he pulled over to the side, afraid of driving off the road in exhaustion, Dean wakes screaming and stares at his hands, searching for traces of his brother’s blood. But this does not stop the nightmare. Sam is still dead in the back seat.
New Orleans hasn’t been the same since Katrina, but the places he’s looking for are still there, will probably be there long after the city disappears. There is one in particular that he knows the road to by heart. It is outside the city by a good half hour and he skirts around the main routes. There is no reason to take a chance that someone will figure out what he has in the back seat.
The building doesn’t look like much; there is no paint on the walls and the roof covering the porch at the front has large gaps. It isn’t in the swamp, quite, but it’s close enough that it smells of it as he steps from the car. The trees wave at him and the heavy air blows by him like syrup. Dean closes his eyes for a moment, taking in a deep breath before climbing the stairs. They creak under his feet, the loud squawks of angry birds.
He knocks at the door, even though it would be simple to push it open. There’s no lock. But there are some places even Dean is wary of wandering into uninvited and this is one of them. The boards of the porch squeak under his feet as he shifts his weight.
The door swings open under its own power and he takes that as an invitation, stepping across the threshold. It’s dark inside, but some light filters through the dust-clouded windows and gaps in the walls. Chicken’s feet and bones from things he doesn’t want to name hang from the rafters and jars of unidentifiable substances sit of shelves crookedly attached to the walls.
“Well, sugar, I hadn’t been expectin’ to see you again for a long while.” It is a voice that makes his skin crawl, no matter that he’s heard it before, and no matter that the one doing the talking owes him a favor. Maria-Josephine is not someone you come to lightly. “What you doin’ here, boy?”
There’s no point in dancing around the subject. He can see the bird-bright eyes watching him now, the flash of white teeth in a dark face. “My brother’s dead.”
She doesn’t seem surprised. “An’ you be here to ask for my help with that.” It isn’t a question. Dean doesn’t expect that she gets too many visitors looking for something else. “This’ll cost you, boy, debt or no. Raisin’ the dead right and proper is no small business. You willin’ to pay?”
She’s not talking money and he knows it. This is just one step down from the deal Dad had made, if that.
“He’s my brother.” That’s all the answer there is. Whatever it takes, he’ll do. Dean is a small price to pay for Sam.
He brings Sam’s body in from the car.
DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN
“This ain’t no good, sugar.” She’s been looking at Sam, who is laying cold on the table. Eyes pierce Dean somewhat accusingly. “You didn’t mention no demon.”
He hadn’t thought that would matter, not with this. “A man killed him.”
“Maybe so, but it's still got a grip on his flesh. There ain’t nothin’ I can do.”
And that was it. He could practically feel his soul leaving with that last bit of hope. If he could, he would summon that damn yellow-eyed monster and make the same deal as his father, his life for Sam, no hesitation. The problem is, Dean isn’t his father, the living legend that Hell had tried to get a piece of for years, and he isn’t Sam with that damn psychic gift that makes… made him look like a tasty treat to anything from down under. He is just Dean Winchester, a guy with a ’67 black Impala, a trunk full of rock salt, and enough weapons to start his own sporting goods store.
That he’s managed to piss of most of the beings that people would get the kind of mojo he needs from certainly isn’t a point in his favor either.
Dean stares at Sam, who is already beginning to decay. He should burn the corpse; it is what his father would do. He should not even be here, listening to the wind rustle through the bayou. For a moment, is seems like everything is still, as if the universe is holding its breath. Maria is looking at him, the eyes, waiting, just like the rest of the world, for his choice. It really isn’t a choice at all.
If the demon still has a grip on Sam’s flesh, then Dean will just have to kill the demon first.
The world starts moving again as Dean turns to the woman, the witch, this queen of death, eyes burning feverishly. “Is there any way to keep him from rotting?”
DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN
The boards are rough under him, poking up at angles just large enough to jar. Dean sits on the porch and stares at the setting sun. The light is poring honey smooth over the trees and it's turning this land of green decay into something beautiful, but Dean can’t bring himself to care. He’s mentally going through lists of options. There is no point in flipping through Dad’s journal again. There’s nothing in it that he doesn’t already have memorized.
The ringing of his cell interrupts his thoughts and derails them mid-stride. He almost lets it go to voice mail. There is only one person left, maybe two, who have this number. Neither of them are the one who was important.
He answers it anyway. “Yeah?”
“Dean, it’s Bobby. I just wanted to see how you were holding up.” I just wanted to see if you were alive. I just wanted to see if you’ve finally decided to do the right thing and get rid of Sam.
“Yeah, I’m okay.” The answer is clearly a lie. There is no way anything could be okay when Sammy is still dead. “I’ve just finished…” Dean pauses, trailing off. “I’ve just finished taking care of Sam.”
It’s true, in a way. Let the hunter assume what he wants, let him assume that Dean has stood vigil over his brother turning to ash, breathing in smoke instead of fumes from candles, herbs and potions that Dean can’t even put a name too as Maria prepared the corpse. It would last as long as Dean needed, until the end of the world if necessary. That might not be that far away, if the rumors are true.
“You got anything?”
He can practically see Bobby shake his head over the phone. “Not yet. But I’ll let you know as soon as I find anything.”
“You do that.”
“Dean, take care of yourself, all right?”
“Sure, Bobby. When do I not?”
He hangs up the phone without a goodbye, without any well wishing. He just doesn’t have it in him right now. Yeah, Dean has always managed to take care of himself just fine. However, it was Sam that he was supposed to be taking care of.
He pushes himself off the porch and lands on his feet. Dean has a pretty good idea where he’s going to be headed.
It isn’t exactly practical to take Sam with him, risky enough that Dean brought him this far. He calls in the rest of Maria’s debt and leaves the body until he can come back and fix this. There isn’t anywhere his brother would be safer. No one in their right mind is going to come here to take him.
Dean knows what he needs is a plan and a hell of a lot more information than he has, but 20 years of work hasn’t yielded up its secrets the old way. He curses Ashe’s reluctance to talk over the phone. Dean has no delusions that he’ll figure it out that way; his skill with computers sufficient, but not amazing. There are other methods of chasing this thing that they, he, have not tried, and this time he’ll use them. He’ll use them and damn the consequences.
DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN
He makes sure that the car is far enough off the road not to be spotted. It is going to be here for a while and he doesn’t want anyone making off with his baby.
Dean opens the back door. There are a few bags in the back seat and a bucket on the floor filled with plants he’s spent the past week collecting, one for each night. He checks his watch. There’s still another 20 minutes before sunset, but he might as well get started and begins pulling off his boots and socks.
The broken branches and needles poke into the soles of his feet and it is too damn cold. Good thing it isn’t winter.
He strips off his shirt before pulling the replacement out of the bag. It looks too much like a rejected ghost costume or some sort of new age “druid” outfit for his liking and it’s far from warm enough. It is white, though, and stitched by his own hand all of three hours ago. The one shoulder is not quite level with the other, but it is so loose that when he has it one you can’t really tell. At least he hadn’t had to knit the thing himself out of nettle or his own hair because that would have taken awhile and he wasn’t going to wait another month for this.
He pulls off the rest of his cloths and checks his watch one more time. There are 12 minutes left until the sun will vanish completely, but the woods make it look like it has already gone.
Dean takes the watch off and places it in the back seat before carefully lifting out the bucket.
It has been 16 days and 23 hours since Sam.
DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN
His flashlight flickers off, and Dean had made sure there was a new battery in it before he left the car. He shakes it, flicking the switch on and off.
“Shit.”
He can’t see a thing; the woods are not quite pitch in color, but that’s not going to help him much. Dean’s arms and legs are covered in gooseflesh. The weather isn’t Canadian, but it’s close enough, especially with him wandering around in what amount to a damn sheet and bare feet. Without the flashlight, he’s not going to be going anywhere fast. There’s no moon tonight, something he has been planning around for the past two weeks, and he has no clue how he’s going to keep going. It had been hard enough stumbling over roots, dead branches and stones when he could see--something the bruises and cuts on his limbs and most especially, feet, can attest to.
He takes a step forward anyways and has a narrow miss with a low hanging branch. He raises a hand to steady himself, careful not to crush the crown of flowers that he holds in his left hand. Dean would rather be holding a gun, but given what he does for a living and whom he is trying to meet, projecting hostile intentions had not seemed like a good idea back at the car. He hears a coyote howl in the distance. That planning will no doubt come back to bite him in the ass when he gets eaten by wolves.
As if that was not bad enough, he’s wearing another crown on his head too, one made of cane and nettle, which itches like crazy. It is also leaving scratches all over his forehead, along with a few nasty cuts from when it caught in a branch and tried to take his scalp along in a daring bid for freedom.
Dean swears again, just to relieve the tension, shivering. “Shit. Goddamn fucking trees.”
The night birds have gone quiet and, at first, he thinks that it is his fault for marching through the woods like a wounded elephant. That is until he feels something brush against his back. It’s a quick touch from a small hand and Dean turns towards it, heart racing. He can’t see two feet--hell, one foot--in front of his face, so he can’t tell if there is anyone there.
Laughter like tinkling bells sounds out to his right. It makes his blood run cold, but he has come to this place willingly and under his own power for a reason. It is far too late to back out now.
Dean drops to his knees, wincing as they land awkwardly, one on a branch and the other sinking into needles of rotting pine. The flashlight rolls on the ground beside him as he holds the crown aloft.
“Lady, you servant beseeches you. Lend me your aid.”
There is no true ritual for the words he has chosen to speak. The ritual was before, the preparation, and the after, the price that he’s willing to pay.
She’s there, with him. The trees are sighing and he doesn’t know what direction to turn in. The voice comes from everywhere at once. “What aid do you seek?”
He wants to say vengeance, but if he does then that is all he’ll get. After all, the demon didn’t kill Sam with his own hands and it is not enough to take out the son of a bitch who shoved a knife in his brother’s back. For that, Dean doesn’t need any help.
He almost says power, but that has its dangers too. The power, the visions, hadn’t saved his brother. What good that would do him depended entirely on the being in these woods.
He wishes he could just ask for Sam, but he knows he doesn’t have enough to sell to bring him back from the grave. Even his soul would not be sufficient for this one. She has no need for them to be bought and sold. The ones she wants, she takes.
Hands clutch his face. They are delicate, fine boned, but he knows they can rip his head off with ease. They tilt his face upwards as if to look at him. Dean may not be able to see anything, but that’s not to say that she can’t.
His throat dry and scratchy, he answers, forcing air passed vocal cords which do not want to respond.
“Knowledge.” That is what he wants, knowledge enough to find the Demon, enough to kill it.
The nails on his face are talon sharp and they run down the sides of his neck, cutting just into the skin, before dragging down his arms and talking the crown, flowers crushed from his grip, from between numbed fingers.
“Are you willing to pay the price, little hunter?”
They seal their bargain on the forest floor. It should be no different from all the other times he’s done this, but it is and Dean isn’t the one in the driver’s seat, not even over his own flesh.
On the outside it feels good, but on the inside, worms are burrowing inside his brain. If he had any control over his body, he would not have been able to respond to her at all, no matter how perfect she feels against him. He would have been screaming instead.
The tendrils eat from memory to memory, swallowing all the emotions, all the feelings as they travel, picking their way through each woman in his life he has ever cared for, that he has ever loved. From one instant to the next, he can feel the tugging to go back to Cassie one more time, knotted emotions turning to curious detachment as those feelings are ripped from him, bleeding, turning into only a mere intellectual understanding that he had, at some point, cared for her. He struggles with them, trying to keep the power out now that he understands exactly what he’s sold, but that only makes it hurt more.
When she is done, when they are done, the Lady lays one final kiss over his heart and the voice of his mother singing him to sleep is no longer a cherished possession, but a strange quick of memory that it has managed to stay in his thoughts all these years. He can feel the lips burn into his flesh and knows that the scar they leave behind will not fade.
When he looks back, it wasn’t really that painful. Could have even been fun if he hadn’t been fighting it. Dean skims through the memories, trying to see why he made it so hard on himself and realizes that he doesn’t get it. It’s not as if they are that important.
As far as he is concerned, he’s gotten the better end of the deal.
DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN
It is a moon and a day later when Dean Winchester walks out of the woods, the shadows under his eyes dark and his face pale. The car is still where he left it and he unlocks the door, grabs his abandoned clothes and puts them on with smooth practiced motions before slipping into the front seat.
He picks up his cell phone, turning it on and flips through to see if he has any messages from Bobby. There’s nothing there about new information, just a few checks to see if he’s still among the living. Dean doesn’t bother responding to them. He has places to go and someone to see.
The engine purrs to life like a contented cat, happy to have her rightful master back behind the wheel.
It’s been 49 days since Sam.
DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN
Jake is the man’s name. Dean hadn’t known that before, only catching a glimpse of him as the soldier fled Bobby’s wrath. Dean had been too busy concentrating on his brother dying. Well, this looks like it is going to be his chance to catch up on lost time.
“Hello, Jake.” His head tilts to the side, following the motion of the man groaning on the ground, looking up at him with pain filled eyes. Gut shots are a painful way to die, agonizing and slow. The cap that Dean has put in each knee probably is not helping. Super strength cannot save you from a sniper’s bullet.
Dean shows his teeth. It is not a smile, but a snarl. “I don’t think we’ve ever been properly introduced. I’m Dean, Sam’s brother.”
Understanding joins agony. “I’m sorry. I had no choice.” It was him or me. Well, asshole, you should have picked Sam.
Dean has the urge to plug the guy in the head until he runs out of bullets, but that will screw up all of his carefully laid plans. Jake seems to be inching towards him and Dean steps back out of range of the guy’s arms. He may be hurt, but this guy can rip through large chunks of metal using only his hands. Dean has no urge to find out what they can do to his legs.
Pulling out his knife, he lets the light play down its edge. The knife isn’t his. He had given it to Sam when he was 11.
“Did you know that I pulled Sam out of a burning building when I was four?” Jake’s eyes are following the knife, thinking he knows how this will all go down. There is no second apology. “That fire destroyed our lives. Yeah, the demon killed my mom. After that it was just the three of us.” Dean drops the bag he has been carrying in his other hand on the ground. There isn’t much in it. The best spells are always the simplest ones.
“Dad started hunting it, and Sam became my responsibility. It was my job to protect him.” Dean is sure that the pain in his own eyes can more than match the ones looking back at him. “Sam was all I had.”
He has it all planned out. Dean is Sam’s full brother, and Sam is, even in death, tied to the Demon. It isn’t enough, but it’s a start. A charm of flesh and bone, bound to its purpose by blood is what he has in mind.
He does not know its name, even the Lady had not known that, but she had shown him means and ways to find out, ways to find where it hid, and ways to gain the power he needed to destroy it.
The fingers aren’t really an option; they are too useful, too important for what he’s going to have to do. It’s a pretty easy choice.
Dean walks to the car, confident that Jack isn’t going anywhere. It doesn’t hurt nearly as much as many of the injuries he’s suffered in the past, the sharpened metal going through flesh easily. The bone is tougher and he grits his teeth as he saws through. Seeing no reason to risk infection, he carefully bandages where the last toe on his left foot used to be. As long as it is still warm, there shouldn’t be any problems. The flesh is only necessary for the ritual, to be culled from bone with deliberate strokes.
He doesn’t try to put his foot into his shoe, just eases the sock back over it. It might have been easier to cut his right, but that foot he needs to drive and this is going to be annoying enough as it is until it heals up.
He limps back to Jake who is, thankfully, still breathing. He needs living blood for what he has planned.
DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN
Dean pulls out his map, laying it flat on the car hood and grips the string with one hand and holding the paper down against the with breeze with the other. His foot is aching and he leans back, taking the weight onto his right.
The charm whirls in a wide, loose circle. Dean goes at it for five minutes before giving up.
“What the fuck?” After all he’s been through the damn thing doesn’t work. “You’d think that a demon would be easy to track.” The demon’s connection to Dean’s family, to Dean’s life and his father’s death, to Sam and to Jake’s blood should have been more than enough, especially when added to Dean’s need and will when he carved the flesh from his own body and marked himself with Jake’s blood. Nevertheless, he does not know its name and, without that, you can never be sure.
He glances back at Jake’s body, thinking. Gordon had said that these psychics were soldiers for the coming war. Well, if he can’t get at the big guy himself, he’ll whittle down the troops until the demon stands alone or the trail leads to that yellow-eyed fuck. If the spell isn’t strong enough now, he would just have to renew it until it is.
Dean concentrates on the map again, this time not looking for the demon, but its minions, its “special children”. At first, he thinks that he is imagining it, but the circle the bag of cloth and bone makes is tightening. The string is bent at a good 20-degree angle as it circles the western states.
Well, just buy him a quartz crystal dowsing set, some spoons and call him Uri Geller.
Dean strings the charm around his neck where it falls beside the bronze head his mother had given him as a child.
It’s been 54 days since Sam.
DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN
The second one is harder than the first, in more ways than one. It takes him weeks of searching, of sitting in hotel rooms with his map and his bag of cloth and bone, weeks on the road playing hot and cold. He’s almost sure he’s made a mistake.
Trisha seems normal. Friendly and outgoing, she gets along with everyone. The only thing weird about her is the heat that burns at his neck when gets within ten feet of her and the way his divining always points to her house.
It is almost a good thing that she makes the first move.
“Why are you following me?”
Dean comes back to reality with a start, realizing that he had dozed off at the wheel of his car. One person cannot do a stakeout like this 24x7. It just is not physically possible.
He wants to lie, to come up with some blithe excuse. Me, follow you. You’re just imagining things. He can’t. It is Andy all over again. “I’m here to see if I have to kill you.” Not exactly an answer that will endear you to a girl’s heart. The kicker is that she doesn’t seem surprised.
That’s when Dean knows for sure that he has the right person.
“Who are you?”
“Dean Winchester.” Again, no surprise. He wonders how the demon knew he was coming here. Or maybe it hadn’t, maybe the name doesn’t startle because she has never heard of it.
She gets in the car and tells him to drive. From the way she gives directions, it is clear that she has done this before. She takes him out into the desert and Dean tries to stop her, tries to fight the compulsion. It isn’t working too well. The only difference between this time and before is he knows that she is putting the whammy on him, that she’s fucking with him and that this isn’t his idea. It’s not much of an accomplishment if he’s still going to end up dead at the end of it.
They stop and he pulls the gun out from under his seat when he’s asked to. It wavers in his hand as he puts it to his temple and she gets out of the car. He can hear her voice through the window telling him to pull the trigger. He can feel it in his hand, under his finger as he starts to squeeze, and this is the end, Dean Winchester’s big finale, just another depressed and troubled young man taking his own life, a cry for help come too late. She tells him again, getting impatient, but her voice isn’t as loud as the one that screaming “Sam is dead” and that he still has to fix it, because if he dies here, there won’t be anyone left to fix anything.
Some other hunter might go after these things, these people, but no one else is going to try to help Sam and, while Dean might accept his own death, Sam is something else entirely.
Dean’s finger eases off the trigger and he pulls the barrel away from his head, pointing it at the petite brunette. Her mouth forms an “o” of surprise and Dean is sure that this is the first time this has happened to her in months, when someone doesn’t do exactly what she asks them to. Too bad for her it was over something important.
He doesn’t kill her. Instead, he clocks her in the head as she tries to run away. Heels really aren’t meant for that sort of thing. The binding on the amulet calls for living blood and he pulls out the knife, swallowing bile. Trisha is still human, after all.
The cuts are small, precise. He takes exactly what he needs and no more, the words thick in his mouth as he calls on elements, on spirits, as he writes the names around him and is so careful where he places everything, where blood meets skin. Wouldn’t it be a kicker to catch some sort of disease from all this. He wonders if whoever came up with these rituals had thought of that.
Dean’s not sure what he’ll do when she wakes up. The pragmatist in him knows that he can’t let her live. She’s already proved how dangerous she is.
But she isn’t Jake. She didn’t kill his brother.
One shot to the head, merciful, and he salts and burns, just as he’s been taught. He wipes himself off with part of one of the ugly blankets still sitting in the back seat and then throws up beside the car before getting inside. He goes back to the main road and just starts driving, pushing a tape into the player without checking who he’s chosen. Sam is still dead. Dean jacks the stereo up. Maybe it will drown out the voice in his head.
It’s been 68 days since Sam.
DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN
Dean has an even closer call with the third. The house has a green roof and white walls, and the barn, gray and weathered to one side, looks like it has seen better centuries. It isn’t a farm now, that’s clear enough. The only animal Dean can see is the chocolate brown dog pulling at the end of its chain. It’s barking at him, tail wagging, but the bark is playful and it lowers itself on its front paws as he walks by. Dogs, like small children, have always taken to Dean. A disappointed whine comes out of its throat as he walks towards the front door without stopping.
Dean turns, thinking to give it a consolatory pat, and that action saves his live as the sound of a gun tears through the air and pain flares on his left shoulder. Dean doesn’t pause; he dodges behind the large tree in the yard. Looks like he has the right place.
He glances around the tree. The dog isn’t barking any more. It’s lying still on the lawn. It’s too bad; it had seemed like a nice dog. It reminds him of the puppy Sam had admired for weeks back when he was 10, large, floppy paws too big for its body and wet nose pressed against the window of the pet store. Sam had begged and pleaded for weeks with Dad, but to no avail. It's hard to have a dog that size when you spend your time living out of a car.
Dean starts mentally calculating possible trajectories, the skills that have stood him so well while hustling pool becoming useful in yet another situation. Moving his shoulder experimentally, he pulls out his gun with the other hand. The wound stings, but its small, just grazing his shoulder. Dean's coat is the worst casualty.
Little Miss Sith Lord had been surprised to have been followed. He hadn’t even started narrowing his search down this time and this had only been the second stop on his list. This is already turning into some kind of shitty Mexican standoff.
He smartens up quickly after that, not letting the unexpected get to him, going with the flow. Dean’s always been adaptable. Sam may have been the one who can spout occult trivia off the top of his head at the drop of a hat, but Dean was the one who could come up with a strategy in the middle of a fight.
It takes a bit of time, but he manages to work his way inside without getting riddled with holes, lucky as hell that the neighbors are a few miles down the road. When he leaves, he lets the barn go up like the tinderbox it is, taking most the evidence of his presence with it.
He gets better with practice. Dean has spent his whole life hunting things that are stronger, faster, hell, sometimes smarter. This isn’t really that different. The more experienced he becomes, the easier it ends up being. People will walk right into things any sane animal or monster would avoid.
The prescients, the ones like Sam, are still the hardest. They're the ones that try to run or set traps, the ones he had to spend extra effort hunting down. They’re the ones it is hardest to fool. Still, he doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to watch Firestarter again for as long as he lives… or Carrie for the matter.
It’s been 96 days since Sam.
DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN.DEAN
He’s been on the road long enough to stop making accidental comments to someone in the seat beside him who isn’t there. This time it's his tenth state in two weeks and the hotels are all the same, always browning around the edges. The television signal is never clear, something that seems to annoy him more and more. He could swear it is getting worse, but how the hell does that make sense? The ache behind his eyes that he’d noticed a few weeks back is getting worse too, not quite a headache. Probably some goddamn tumor. He’s not too shaken. Dean never expected to die old and in bed surrounded by grandkids. He just has to last long enough to do what he had to do.
Dean does one more walk around of the room, checking the wards and protections on each entrance. His blade gets slipped under his pillow and he settles himself on the bed, staring at the television. He only watched the news now, looking for clues, for hints. The problem these days wasn’t finding signs, it was filtering out the ones that were unimportant. Earthquakes hit in places where no fault lines existed, freak weather washing small costal villages into the sea.
The static on the screen seems to get more intense as something catches his interest, but that’s probably just the weather outside. It has been raining for a week.
The water in the entire northeast region of China has turned red. There is not really much solid information on it. Would have been a different story if it had happened elsewhere, but the Chinese government is closed-mouthed as always, a few scientists muttering something about iron deposits. You can’t con a con. Dean knew they did not have a clue… or they did and that they were even more scared of the answer. He doesn’t make it to the end of the hour before nodding off into sleep.
The next thing Dean knows he’s turning away from the sun falling on his face. The rain has finally stopped in the night. He gives a quick look out the window and pulls himself out of bed. The television is still on and he glances at it on his way to the shower, then stops.
Energy, Illinois has experienced a bit more than a summer thunderstorm, thousands of frogs descending from the sky like some sort of biblical plague. It’s a new one on him. The part that's funny is that is where he was planning to head today.
A week after that, he’s leaving Energy, the new frog capital of the US of A. The weight of the charm on his neck seems heavier than it has in a long time, and it bounces off his chest with the bronze head as he swings himself inside the car. He’s dirty and needs a shave and shower. Dean grimaces at the state he’s in. Yes, a shower is in order as soon as he can manage one.
His fingers beat in time to the music, pounding in time to drums leaving sticky fingerprints. There may have been a time Dean would have cared about the blood marking the seats, but that was when Sam was beside him, complaining about the volume and he would have yelled at him for getting shit on the leather. Dean looks at the empty seat before turning his eyes back onto the road. There is only so much one can do with a dry towel.
Dean hunts for more than the children, he hunts for knowledge. What he has gained is not enough. For the most part, the psychics he finds cannot give it to him. Either they know nothing, or he’s forced to kill them too quickly before they kill him.
This latest hadn’t known anything useful, but he’d had to be sure.
When he looks in the rear view mirror, he takes in the smudge of reddish brown on his cheek, and the eyes which look too large for his face and much too green. They reflect the world like mirrors, everything ugly and wrong echoing in their depths.
It has been 123 days since Sam.
PART TWO