Western Rising, 1/?
Title: Western Rising, 1/?
Fandom: Supernatural
Genre: AU, Drama
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Rating: NC-17 (later)
Summary: Sequel to First Taught the Chosen Seed. Three months have passed since the massacre at the compound. Sam and Dean wander the badlands, but events force them to return to civilization. An unexpected rescue makes Dean a hero in the eyes of Ghosts across the wilderness, and rumours of Sam’s abilities continue to circulate. More and more outcasts are organizing to oppose the State. Meanwhile, a charismatic prodigy named Lilith is rising in the Resistance: a brilliant soldier who burns for the end of the State, and the head of the man she blames for the death of her leader.
Mobi, pdf etc available on A03
Rebels and the revolutionaries are only eddies, they keep the stream from getting stagnant but they get swept down and absorbed, they're a side issue. Quiet desperation is another name for the human condition. If revolutionaries would learn that they can't remodel society by day after tomorrow -- haven't the wisdom to and shouldn't be permitted to -- I'd have more respect for them ... Civilizations grow and change and decline -- they aren't remade.” ― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose
To be weak is miserable- John Milton, Paradise Lost.
Prologue.
Most people were in love with Prometheus, but Lilith believed by the end of his life that she came to love Nick too. The man as well as the visionary, the human as well as the legend. Nick wasn’t the messiah, after all, but he had been the most powerful leader the Resistance had in generations, and to love him was to love their ideals and everything they stood for. She was fourteen the first time she saw him in person, not an image on a flickering telescreen: he had come to Far North on one of his intermittent speaking tours, and the charisma and conviction he projected from the speaker’s podium thrilled her body and mind over acres of hard-packed snow, the crowds between them vanishing until he was speaking only to her. Her breath misted in front of her face, hot prickles trapped by the fur of her collar, and she clenched her fingers and toes unconsciously.
His voice penetrated her dreams.
She couldn’t phyiscally follow him. No-one knew the location of all the other cells, and no-one knew Prometheus’s movements. Besides, she was still a child, in the care of a group home, but at 16 she left and at 17 she made lieutenant, and within the next year she had made enough of a name for herself that he knew who she was. He was spending more time in the North now. The first time she talked to him she was 18 years old and had just finished extracting the whereabouts and aims of a deserter from his remaining family. He was of unknown age, and he was at the barracks for a strategy meeting with the General. The General was a middle aged man with a craggy face, and the strangest eyes Lilith had ever seen, cat-like and almost yellow. After dinner, he called her to his office. Heart pounding, knowing who was waiting for her, Lilith wiped off her knife and checked herself in the mirror - free of mess, uniform impeccable and her straight blonde hair neatly pinned back, her narrow face and pale blue eyes revealed none of her nervousness. She knocked, received word to enter, and saluted.
He had aged. The lines around his eyes and mouth were deeper, but the calm purpose he radiated was as strong as ever.
“Officer,” he’d addressed her in his mild voice. “I’ve heard excellent things about your performance.”
He was relocating his base of operations. She became a member of his personal guard, and she didn’t even have to leave the icy beauty of the North, the frozen expanses and hardy, dark shrubs that were the only home she had known. Later, she became his lover:
“You know what they say about you,” she said one night, her hand low on the warmth of his belly, his face in her hair.
He chuckled low in his throat. “I’m not,” he said.
She was silent.
“There is a savior, Lily, but it isn’t me.”
“They think it is.”
He made a dismissive sound. They were interrupted by an urgent message - a State convoy would be passing near the compound within the hour.
Lilith never trusted Ruby. Maybe she was jealous - but Lilith was better than that, a better soldier, a shrewd judge of character. When Ruby deserted, part of her was relieved, part vindicated, part seething with anger - and when she contacted them again, offering to turn over one of the Special Children in return for amnesty, Lilith didn’t like it.
“I have to go,” Nick told her.
“She could be lying.”
“No,” Nick shook his head: “There’s tape.”
And there was. Nick summoned his personal guards and some of his chief advisors, and displayed the film in his office. Grainy black and white footage, possibly from a pen-camera, displayed a stone room in distorted view. Lilith guessed it was under ground, judging from the quality of the light. Ruby - weirdly stretched but quite recognizable - stood by the far wall, hands folded over her chest, and her eyes were on the room’s other occupants. A boy, very tall with long hair and features that looked vaguely pointed, stood side-on to the camera with one hand extended: he seemed to be expending some intense effort, face pained and twisted. In a corner, just in range of the camera, was a State drone. The drone was tied to a chair. There was no sound, but his mouth was gaping and gasping, eyes wide, and Lilith supposed he was screaming or shouting in agony. Suddenly, with what Lilith imagined as a wet pop, dark blood burst from the drone’s mouth and his eyes rolled back in his skull. His head flopped limply on his neck. The boy dropped his hand and bent double, panting, with his hands on his knees. Ruby jumped a little in delight and hugged him. They moved out of the camera’s range, and left the room. The camera continued to record the body.
“Marvellous,” crooned Alastair, Nick’s chief interrogator, in his thick, nasal voice. “Have you ever seen anything so beautiful, my dear?” his presence at her back made her tense.
“It’s impressive,” Lilith admitted.
“It’s him,” Nick shrugged. “I don’t know how, or by what chain of events he came there but….there’s only one child of the right age who could possibly have developed that ability. It’s Mary’s son. Killing State soldiers.” He laughed. It was probably the lightest sound Lilith had ever heard from him. “I need him. We need him. I don’t care about Ruby. If she’s gotten any unfortunate ideas, well, she’s easily expendable. I’ll take a guard,” he said, eyes meeting Lilith’s briefly. She volunteered , but he asked her to stay to supervise the reinforcement of the southern electric fence. If he’d ordered she might have argued with him, but he asked. Nick died on that mission, him and all his guard, and though the official line was that they could not know the truth because there were no survivors, Lilith had only two candidates in mind. It was Ruby, or the boy, and now she was robbed of the cold satisfaction now of killing either of them.
1.
Sam sat with his back against the trunk of an ancient cedar, rock cool against his thighs through his trousers as he concentrated on his skinning the hare carcass. The knife was good - Dean had bartered for it yesterday with a convoy of Ghosts, in exchange for a skein of rope that could be used for trapping or climbing. He wasn’t thinking about anything in particular. This was a skill he’d develop over the past months, the ability to not think, to feel only the textures under his hands and the shade of the tree and the rock under him. He could hear the breeze, quiet and faint, and the rasp of the knife against fur. He was tired, and felt marginally hungry, and later he was going to eat. He was not unhappy.
A familiar step alerted him to Dean’s presence. He looked up. His mouth curved up involuntarily as Dean appeared from behind the stones, closer than Sam expected.
“Hunted and gathered.” Dean laid a second hare at Sam’s feet with an exaggerated gesture.
“We’ll dry it,” Sam nodded to the back of the cave where they’d been sheltering the past night.
“You make a good wife.”
Sam rolled his eyes, still smiling. Whenever they were between settlements, Dean reverted to a string of caveman jokes, despite the fact they were eating the hare with a weak beer from the last Ghost town, and starting the fire with lighting fluid. Sometimes it was wiser to play along with his - everything. There wasn’t another word for Dean, and since that night after the massacre at the compound, they had rarely discussed the nature of their relationship. It was hard to keep track of time out here, but by Sam’s reckoning, about three months had passed since Zachariah had found them. It was summer.
It had taken Dean some time to get back to what they were. He couldn’t get past the idea that he was somehow abusing Sam, taking advantage of him, despite the fact that Sam had first instigated the physical side of their relationship. This time, he had to wait for Dean to come to him. And Dean did, one night, when the abandoned hut they’d appropriated was lashed with summer rain, and they were separated by space and silence and rolls of waterproof bedding.
“Fuck,” Dean had muttered, finally, pounding his covers with one arm.
“What?” Sam had asked.
“Just. Fuck it. Sammy, come here.”
Sam hadn’t needed asking twice, he joined Dean in a split second, grinning, delighted, and Dean never told him what thought processes had brought him to invite Sam that night, and he never asked.
It was a hard life, weighed down with uncertainty, and he’d thought that the pointlessness of it would wear on him after a while. His life before had always been full of meaning. Sometimes it did weigh on him - sometimes, at night, his brain grasped at the threads of masterplans, grand narratives….but lately he had simply been…tired. Content to be able to fall asleep, Dean’s warmth against him. There was always the chance that State troops or unfriendly Ghosts or Resistance terrorists could find them in the night, shoot them before they knew what was happening, and when they were in or near populated areas, they took turns on guard. Neither wanted to die. Last night, Sam had fallen asleep in the middle of his watch. That day, they had moved.
“You alright?” Dean asked Sam now.
“Yeah,” said Sam automatically. There wasn’t any point in saying otherwise. He wanted to eat, but the rabbit felt strange in his mouth, hard to swallow, and a vague sick feeling in his stomach. ‘Just some bug’, he thought, ‘I’ll get over it’, but he didn’t even want to say that out loud, to call it a bug, to give it a name, because then it would be something. If there was one thing they couldn’t afford out here, it was sickness.
Dean passed him a plastic bottle of water, first checking the seal. They used iodine when they had to, but bottled water was always safer. It was their last bottle, but Sam took it, and drank without comment.
He fell asleep early.
The next day, he felt better, and indulged in relief. ‘Fuck you, bug,’ he thought happily. ‘I’m winning’. Dean could tell, and he smiled more, joked around, but didn’t suggest travelling. They holed up, spent most of the afternoon in the cave, talking about nothing, stupid stuff, not kissing by silent agreement. The only thing worse than one of them getting sick out here would be bothof them getting sick. They always kept a pair of bullets for the worst case scenarios.
“Tomorrow we should move on,” said Sam cheerfully.
“Yeah?” Dean asked.
“Yeah. I-” then something moved in his gut, nauseating pain, and he gagged, felt the blood drain from his face .
“Sammy?” Dean asked, propping himself up on an elbow. Sam started to his feet and lurched to the entrance of the cave, just made it out of their living space before he vomited. By the time his stomach was empty, the bile was tinged with blood. ‘Shit,’ he thought in a moment of blind terror, ‘shit’. He irrationally wanted to hide the evidence, but of course Dean had followed him. There was nothing to say. They both knew what it could mean or not mean. Dean brought him some of the water he’d sterilized with iodine earlier, and Sam drank it.
“It’s probably…” Sam said. “I mean, that was it. Better out than in, right?”
“Right,” Dean said.
“The bug’s probably out of my system now.”
“Come and lie down,” Dean said.
Overnight, he vomited again and endured violent diarrhoea, humiliatingly forced to use a bush as far away from the cave as he could make it. Dean didn’t say anything, just kept making him drink water, though by early morning, Sam irrationally thought that since drinking would just make him vomit more, it was better if he didn’t. The cycle continued throughout the next day. He would drink at Dean’s insistence, but his body would purge it in blood-smeared excreta. He was violently nauseous, intermittently wracked by cramping pains in his stomach and abdomen. He wondered if he was going to die, and the thought brought tears to his eyes, which upset him all over again because the last thing he could afford to be doing was wasting moisture. Dean alternated between getting water to purify and sitting with Sam, one hand on his back or head, saying little. By evening, Sam felt shrivelled and wrung out. His entire body hurt, beyond tired, but too uncomfortable to sleep properly. Red sun was leaking into their shelter when he came out of a restless doze to hear Dean zipping up his backpack.
“I’ve been thinking,” Dean said, blowing out his breath.
Sam said nothing.
“You need a doctor,” Dean said. “Probably antibiotics. Something. You’re - getting sicker.” Dean didn’t look at him. Sam wanted to protest, say he was getting better and could get over this, but he’d be lying. He felt hot and disorientated. As though reading his mind, Dean said, “You’ve got a fever. So. We got two choices. One, we can go to the nearest town together. Travelling could make you sicker and will definitely make you more dehydrated. But you won’t have to walk the whole way. If you can make it to within cell phone range, there’s someone I can call in a favour from. He’s got a motorbike. Or, you can stay here. I’ll go. Get a doctor. It won’t take me more than a day.” He did not elaborate on whether he knew any doctors who owed him a favour as well, or planned on more forceful methods. He breathed in, then came to kneel next to Sam, cupping his face with one hand. Sam was tempted to close his eyes and not think - just enjoy this one pleasant sensation after so many awful ones. But he had to think. What would be less bad? To force himself to walk? Or lie here, alone with the sickness, waiting for Dean to come back and deliberately not thinking about any of the things that could happen to either one of them. Really, there was no contest.
“I’ll come,” he said, his voice a cracked parody of itself.
“You sure?”
“Yeah,” Sam closed his eyes, but he could hear Dean smiling.
“I was kinda hoping you’d say that,” Dean admitted. “Come on then. Drink first.”
It was bad. But he’d known it would be bad, and he’d endured worse. Dean kept one arm around Sam and the other near the gun in his belt, and Sam was aware he was always watching, scanning the horizon. If you could shoot and had good hearing, travelling by night was sometimes safer in the badlands. Wild predators meant fewer humans around. Fewer humans meant fewer weapons.
Sam could only look at the ground and concentrate on keeping moving. He was sick and in pain and repressing the urge to vomit constantly - twice they did have to stop, once for Sam to void himself in various ways.
“Oh my God,” he groaned, sitting down with his head in his hands after the second time. Dean wouldn’t let him stay on the ground.
“Come on,” he said, pulling him up. “It’s not much further.”
Sam didn’t ask how Dean knew - cellphone signals were hardly reliable out here. The phone was strictly for emergencies. Dean had inserted a new SIM card into his phone before they left the cave, and to Sam’s relief it came to life. They never used the same SIM card more than once.
“Here,” Dean said, stopping suddenly. He’d been checking the phone intermittently since they’d come to more pen land, somehow monitoring that on top of everything else he was doing. He allowed Sam to sink to ground against a protective boulder, and dialled a number from memory. Sam didn’t think about what he’d do if nobody answered. Dean said,
“Hey, Richie,” and Sam sighed in internal relief, then tensed again when he realized Dean was speaking to an answerphone. Dean kept one hand on Sam’s shoulder as he spoke: “It’s Dean. Call me back as soon you as get this. ASAP, alright man?” The phone beeped again.
“Normally screens his calls,” Dean said almost apologetically.
“Uh huh,” Sam said.
“How’re you doing?”
“Alright.”
Dean’s mouth twisted in perception of the lie. “Wanna drink some more?”
“No.”
Dean squatted and felt Sam’s face again, gauging his temperature. “I think you’re a little cooler,” he said.
‘That’s because it’s night in the desert’, Sam did not respond. There was no point.
Dean stood up and surveyed the land briefly. “We’re exposed,” he said. “But if we move I could lose the cell signal.”
“It’s alright,” Sam said. He was beyond tired. It was difficult to imagine this scenario ending well.
“Hey,” Dean seemed to sense something change in him and he jostled Sam’s shoulder, though not hard: “You’re gonna be fine, alright? We got out of worse than this, right?”
“Right.”
“I ever tell you about the time I had to kick two terrorists’ asses at once in order to get to a bomb under a village? It was primed to go off in like thirty seconds and the handler had a wire in my ear, but somebody fed her some false information and these guys had the drop on me…”
Dean had, in fact, told this story from his days in the Guard at least once before, but Sam was reasonably sure that wasn’t the point of him telling it. He focused on Dean’s voice and the action of breathing, allowing himself to close his eyes until the nausea in his stomach which moving had intensified started to ease off slightly.
The phone rang.
“Richie?” Dean cut himself off to answer on the first ring. “Yeah, yeah man I need that favor.
Still got that glorified scooter? I’m about a mile south of where the railroads intersect.”
Until he had seen the abandoned railroads that cut through the desert east and west, Sam never knew people used to travel here. He always meant to ask if the the badlands had once been the territory of the State, or if the Ghosts or the Resistance had ever been organized enough for that kind of infrastructure. “No I’m fine. It’s…a friend of mine. Ha ha. No, he’s pretty sick. Need to get him to a doctor. Okay. Okay, cool. Fifteen minutes.”
“He’ll be here,” Dean said, and Sam could hear the relief in his voice, the release of fear neither of them would put words to.
* * *
It was longer than fifteen minutes, Sam thought, but probably less than an hour. Time was hard to judge. At first, the buzzing in the distance sounded like insects, but too far away for insects to be audible. A dust-cloud appeared on the horizon and Dean straightened from his posture leaning against the rock, one hand on his gun still but an anxious expression of expectation on his face.
“It’s Richie,” he affirmed a moment later, blowing out his breath. Assured, he removed the used SIM from the cellphone and snapped it in four pieces. One he pocketed; the rest he scattered in the dirt. Not one, but two motorcycles materialized, and came on rapidly over the firm ground. The sound of the engines were jarring, intrusive in the desert night. They pulled up, and the riders dismounted. Dean stepped forward to clasp the hand of the larger vehicle’s rider: a short, dark-haired man with a prominent nose and an easy smile. Richie, Sam presumed. His companion was a blonde woman in her late twenties, with long legs and a strong face. Both wore jeans, and the man a battered leather jacket.
“Hey Deano, long time no see,” said Richie. Sam blinked. He doubted he’d ever met such a cheerful ghost. The woman was more of the usual type - quiet, wary. She nodded to both of them. “This is Janine,” Richie said, slipping an arm around her waist.
“Good to meet you,” Dean shook her hand, absently, automatic, and it marked his preoccupation that he didn’t even spare a glance for her fit, well-proportioned body. “This is Sam,” he helped Sam up, but subtly, hand on his arm.
“Hey, I heard about you,” Richie sounded surprised. “Didn’t you ice that security chief when the compound got overrun?”
“No,” said Sam, confused, and filing it away to find out at some point what that rumour was about. “I mean, I was there but…someone else killed him. One of the communists. She’s dead.”
“Oh,” Richie looked vaguely disappointed. “Any case, sorry I couldn’t meet you under better circumstances. Any friend of this guy….”
“We should get going,” Dean said. “I’ll call you when I get a new SIM about returning it.”
“Do that,” said Janine, speaking up at last. “This is a serious favor.”
“His word’s good, babe,” Richie assured her. “Plus I owe the guy. You guys look out for yourselves.”
“You too,” said Dean. Sam made some generic appropriate farewell, and got up behind Dean on the bike that Richie had vacated. Richie took a seat behind his girlfriend and she kicked the bike into gear, revved aggressively, and drove off.
Part Two
Fandom: Supernatural
Genre: AU, Drama
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Rating: NC-17 (later)
Summary: Sequel to First Taught the Chosen Seed. Three months have passed since the massacre at the compound. Sam and Dean wander the badlands, but events force them to return to civilization. An unexpected rescue makes Dean a hero in the eyes of Ghosts across the wilderness, and rumours of Sam’s abilities continue to circulate. More and more outcasts are organizing to oppose the State. Meanwhile, a charismatic prodigy named Lilith is rising in the Resistance: a brilliant soldier who burns for the end of the State, and the head of the man she blames for the death of her leader.
Mobi, pdf etc available on A03
Rebels and the revolutionaries are only eddies, they keep the stream from getting stagnant but they get swept down and absorbed, they're a side issue. Quiet desperation is another name for the human condition. If revolutionaries would learn that they can't remodel society by day after tomorrow -- haven't the wisdom to and shouldn't be permitted to -- I'd have more respect for them ... Civilizations grow and change and decline -- they aren't remade.” ― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose
To be weak is miserable- John Milton, Paradise Lost.
Prologue.
Most people were in love with Prometheus, but Lilith believed by the end of his life that she came to love Nick too. The man as well as the visionary, the human as well as the legend. Nick wasn’t the messiah, after all, but he had been the most powerful leader the Resistance had in generations, and to love him was to love their ideals and everything they stood for. She was fourteen the first time she saw him in person, not an image on a flickering telescreen: he had come to Far North on one of his intermittent speaking tours, and the charisma and conviction he projected from the speaker’s podium thrilled her body and mind over acres of hard-packed snow, the crowds between them vanishing until he was speaking only to her. Her breath misted in front of her face, hot prickles trapped by the fur of her collar, and she clenched her fingers and toes unconsciously.
His voice penetrated her dreams.
She couldn’t phyiscally follow him. No-one knew the location of all the other cells, and no-one knew Prometheus’s movements. Besides, she was still a child, in the care of a group home, but at 16 she left and at 17 she made lieutenant, and within the next year she had made enough of a name for herself that he knew who she was. He was spending more time in the North now. The first time she talked to him she was 18 years old and had just finished extracting the whereabouts and aims of a deserter from his remaining family. He was of unknown age, and he was at the barracks for a strategy meeting with the General. The General was a middle aged man with a craggy face, and the strangest eyes Lilith had ever seen, cat-like and almost yellow. After dinner, he called her to his office. Heart pounding, knowing who was waiting for her, Lilith wiped off her knife and checked herself in the mirror - free of mess, uniform impeccable and her straight blonde hair neatly pinned back, her narrow face and pale blue eyes revealed none of her nervousness. She knocked, received word to enter, and saluted.
He had aged. The lines around his eyes and mouth were deeper, but the calm purpose he radiated was as strong as ever.
“Officer,” he’d addressed her in his mild voice. “I’ve heard excellent things about your performance.”
He was relocating his base of operations. She became a member of his personal guard, and she didn’t even have to leave the icy beauty of the North, the frozen expanses and hardy, dark shrubs that were the only home she had known. Later, she became his lover:
“You know what they say about you,” she said one night, her hand low on the warmth of his belly, his face in her hair.
He chuckled low in his throat. “I’m not,” he said.
She was silent.
“There is a savior, Lily, but it isn’t me.”
“They think it is.”
He made a dismissive sound. They were interrupted by an urgent message - a State convoy would be passing near the compound within the hour.
Lilith never trusted Ruby. Maybe she was jealous - but Lilith was better than that, a better soldier, a shrewd judge of character. When Ruby deserted, part of her was relieved, part vindicated, part seething with anger - and when she contacted them again, offering to turn over one of the Special Children in return for amnesty, Lilith didn’t like it.
“I have to go,” Nick told her.
“She could be lying.”
“No,” Nick shook his head: “There’s tape.”
And there was. Nick summoned his personal guards and some of his chief advisors, and displayed the film in his office. Grainy black and white footage, possibly from a pen-camera, displayed a stone room in distorted view. Lilith guessed it was under ground, judging from the quality of the light. Ruby - weirdly stretched but quite recognizable - stood by the far wall, hands folded over her chest, and her eyes were on the room’s other occupants. A boy, very tall with long hair and features that looked vaguely pointed, stood side-on to the camera with one hand extended: he seemed to be expending some intense effort, face pained and twisted. In a corner, just in range of the camera, was a State drone. The drone was tied to a chair. There was no sound, but his mouth was gaping and gasping, eyes wide, and Lilith supposed he was screaming or shouting in agony. Suddenly, with what Lilith imagined as a wet pop, dark blood burst from the drone’s mouth and his eyes rolled back in his skull. His head flopped limply on his neck. The boy dropped his hand and bent double, panting, with his hands on his knees. Ruby jumped a little in delight and hugged him. They moved out of the camera’s range, and left the room. The camera continued to record the body.
“Marvellous,” crooned Alastair, Nick’s chief interrogator, in his thick, nasal voice. “Have you ever seen anything so beautiful, my dear?” his presence at her back made her tense.
“It’s impressive,” Lilith admitted.
“It’s him,” Nick shrugged. “I don’t know how, or by what chain of events he came there but….there’s only one child of the right age who could possibly have developed that ability. It’s Mary’s son. Killing State soldiers.” He laughed. It was probably the lightest sound Lilith had ever heard from him. “I need him. We need him. I don’t care about Ruby. If she’s gotten any unfortunate ideas, well, she’s easily expendable. I’ll take a guard,” he said, eyes meeting Lilith’s briefly. She volunteered , but he asked her to stay to supervise the reinforcement of the southern electric fence. If he’d ordered she might have argued with him, but he asked. Nick died on that mission, him and all his guard, and though the official line was that they could not know the truth because there were no survivors, Lilith had only two candidates in mind. It was Ruby, or the boy, and now she was robbed of the cold satisfaction now of killing either of them.
1.
Sam sat with his back against the trunk of an ancient cedar, rock cool against his thighs through his trousers as he concentrated on his skinning the hare carcass. The knife was good - Dean had bartered for it yesterday with a convoy of Ghosts, in exchange for a skein of rope that could be used for trapping or climbing. He wasn’t thinking about anything in particular. This was a skill he’d develop over the past months, the ability to not think, to feel only the textures under his hands and the shade of the tree and the rock under him. He could hear the breeze, quiet and faint, and the rasp of the knife against fur. He was tired, and felt marginally hungry, and later he was going to eat. He was not unhappy.
A familiar step alerted him to Dean’s presence. He looked up. His mouth curved up involuntarily as Dean appeared from behind the stones, closer than Sam expected.
“Hunted and gathered.” Dean laid a second hare at Sam’s feet with an exaggerated gesture.
“We’ll dry it,” Sam nodded to the back of the cave where they’d been sheltering the past night.
“You make a good wife.”
Sam rolled his eyes, still smiling. Whenever they were between settlements, Dean reverted to a string of caveman jokes, despite the fact they were eating the hare with a weak beer from the last Ghost town, and starting the fire with lighting fluid. Sometimes it was wiser to play along with his - everything. There wasn’t another word for Dean, and since that night after the massacre at the compound, they had rarely discussed the nature of their relationship. It was hard to keep track of time out here, but by Sam’s reckoning, about three months had passed since Zachariah had found them. It was summer.
It had taken Dean some time to get back to what they were. He couldn’t get past the idea that he was somehow abusing Sam, taking advantage of him, despite the fact that Sam had first instigated the physical side of their relationship. This time, he had to wait for Dean to come to him. And Dean did, one night, when the abandoned hut they’d appropriated was lashed with summer rain, and they were separated by space and silence and rolls of waterproof bedding.
“Fuck,” Dean had muttered, finally, pounding his covers with one arm.
“What?” Sam had asked.
“Just. Fuck it. Sammy, come here.”
Sam hadn’t needed asking twice, he joined Dean in a split second, grinning, delighted, and Dean never told him what thought processes had brought him to invite Sam that night, and he never asked.
It was a hard life, weighed down with uncertainty, and he’d thought that the pointlessness of it would wear on him after a while. His life before had always been full of meaning. Sometimes it did weigh on him - sometimes, at night, his brain grasped at the threads of masterplans, grand narratives….but lately he had simply been…tired. Content to be able to fall asleep, Dean’s warmth against him. There was always the chance that State troops or unfriendly Ghosts or Resistance terrorists could find them in the night, shoot them before they knew what was happening, and when they were in or near populated areas, they took turns on guard. Neither wanted to die. Last night, Sam had fallen asleep in the middle of his watch. That day, they had moved.
“You alright?” Dean asked Sam now.
“Yeah,” said Sam automatically. There wasn’t any point in saying otherwise. He wanted to eat, but the rabbit felt strange in his mouth, hard to swallow, and a vague sick feeling in his stomach. ‘Just some bug’, he thought, ‘I’ll get over it’, but he didn’t even want to say that out loud, to call it a bug, to give it a name, because then it would be something. If there was one thing they couldn’t afford out here, it was sickness.
Dean passed him a plastic bottle of water, first checking the seal. They used iodine when they had to, but bottled water was always safer. It was their last bottle, but Sam took it, and drank without comment.
He fell asleep early.
The next day, he felt better, and indulged in relief. ‘Fuck you, bug,’ he thought happily. ‘I’m winning’. Dean could tell, and he smiled more, joked around, but didn’t suggest travelling. They holed up, spent most of the afternoon in the cave, talking about nothing, stupid stuff, not kissing by silent agreement. The only thing worse than one of them getting sick out here would be bothof them getting sick. They always kept a pair of bullets for the worst case scenarios.
“Tomorrow we should move on,” said Sam cheerfully.
“Yeah?” Dean asked.
“Yeah. I-” then something moved in his gut, nauseating pain, and he gagged, felt the blood drain from his face .
“Sammy?” Dean asked, propping himself up on an elbow. Sam started to his feet and lurched to the entrance of the cave, just made it out of their living space before he vomited. By the time his stomach was empty, the bile was tinged with blood. ‘Shit,’ he thought in a moment of blind terror, ‘shit’. He irrationally wanted to hide the evidence, but of course Dean had followed him. There was nothing to say. They both knew what it could mean or not mean. Dean brought him some of the water he’d sterilized with iodine earlier, and Sam drank it.
“It’s probably…” Sam said. “I mean, that was it. Better out than in, right?”
“Right,” Dean said.
“The bug’s probably out of my system now.”
“Come and lie down,” Dean said.
Overnight, he vomited again and endured violent diarrhoea, humiliatingly forced to use a bush as far away from the cave as he could make it. Dean didn’t say anything, just kept making him drink water, though by early morning, Sam irrationally thought that since drinking would just make him vomit more, it was better if he didn’t. The cycle continued throughout the next day. He would drink at Dean’s insistence, but his body would purge it in blood-smeared excreta. He was violently nauseous, intermittently wracked by cramping pains in his stomach and abdomen. He wondered if he was going to die, and the thought brought tears to his eyes, which upset him all over again because the last thing he could afford to be doing was wasting moisture. Dean alternated between getting water to purify and sitting with Sam, one hand on his back or head, saying little. By evening, Sam felt shrivelled and wrung out. His entire body hurt, beyond tired, but too uncomfortable to sleep properly. Red sun was leaking into their shelter when he came out of a restless doze to hear Dean zipping up his backpack.
“I’ve been thinking,” Dean said, blowing out his breath.
Sam said nothing.
“You need a doctor,” Dean said. “Probably antibiotics. Something. You’re - getting sicker.” Dean didn’t look at him. Sam wanted to protest, say he was getting better and could get over this, but he’d be lying. He felt hot and disorientated. As though reading his mind, Dean said, “You’ve got a fever. So. We got two choices. One, we can go to the nearest town together. Travelling could make you sicker and will definitely make you more dehydrated. But you won’t have to walk the whole way. If you can make it to within cell phone range, there’s someone I can call in a favour from. He’s got a motorbike. Or, you can stay here. I’ll go. Get a doctor. It won’t take me more than a day.” He did not elaborate on whether he knew any doctors who owed him a favour as well, or planned on more forceful methods. He breathed in, then came to kneel next to Sam, cupping his face with one hand. Sam was tempted to close his eyes and not think - just enjoy this one pleasant sensation after so many awful ones. But he had to think. What would be less bad? To force himself to walk? Or lie here, alone with the sickness, waiting for Dean to come back and deliberately not thinking about any of the things that could happen to either one of them. Really, there was no contest.
“I’ll come,” he said, his voice a cracked parody of itself.
“You sure?”
“Yeah,” Sam closed his eyes, but he could hear Dean smiling.
“I was kinda hoping you’d say that,” Dean admitted. “Come on then. Drink first.”
It was bad. But he’d known it would be bad, and he’d endured worse. Dean kept one arm around Sam and the other near the gun in his belt, and Sam was aware he was always watching, scanning the horizon. If you could shoot and had good hearing, travelling by night was sometimes safer in the badlands. Wild predators meant fewer humans around. Fewer humans meant fewer weapons.
Sam could only look at the ground and concentrate on keeping moving. He was sick and in pain and repressing the urge to vomit constantly - twice they did have to stop, once for Sam to void himself in various ways.
“Oh my God,” he groaned, sitting down with his head in his hands after the second time. Dean wouldn’t let him stay on the ground.
“Come on,” he said, pulling him up. “It’s not much further.”
Sam didn’t ask how Dean knew - cellphone signals were hardly reliable out here. The phone was strictly for emergencies. Dean had inserted a new SIM card into his phone before they left the cave, and to Sam’s relief it came to life. They never used the same SIM card more than once.
“Here,” Dean said, stopping suddenly. He’d been checking the phone intermittently since they’d come to more pen land, somehow monitoring that on top of everything else he was doing. He allowed Sam to sink to ground against a protective boulder, and dialled a number from memory. Sam didn’t think about what he’d do if nobody answered. Dean said,
“Hey, Richie,” and Sam sighed in internal relief, then tensed again when he realized Dean was speaking to an answerphone. Dean kept one hand on Sam’s shoulder as he spoke: “It’s Dean. Call me back as soon you as get this. ASAP, alright man?” The phone beeped again.
“Normally screens his calls,” Dean said almost apologetically.
“Uh huh,” Sam said.
“How’re you doing?”
“Alright.”
Dean’s mouth twisted in perception of the lie. “Wanna drink some more?”
“No.”
Dean squatted and felt Sam’s face again, gauging his temperature. “I think you’re a little cooler,” he said.
‘That’s because it’s night in the desert’, Sam did not respond. There was no point.
Dean stood up and surveyed the land briefly. “We’re exposed,” he said. “But if we move I could lose the cell signal.”
“It’s alright,” Sam said. He was beyond tired. It was difficult to imagine this scenario ending well.
“Hey,” Dean seemed to sense something change in him and he jostled Sam’s shoulder, though not hard: “You’re gonna be fine, alright? We got out of worse than this, right?”
“Right.”
“I ever tell you about the time I had to kick two terrorists’ asses at once in order to get to a bomb under a village? It was primed to go off in like thirty seconds and the handler had a wire in my ear, but somebody fed her some false information and these guys had the drop on me…”
Dean had, in fact, told this story from his days in the Guard at least once before, but Sam was reasonably sure that wasn’t the point of him telling it. He focused on Dean’s voice and the action of breathing, allowing himself to close his eyes until the nausea in his stomach which moving had intensified started to ease off slightly.
The phone rang.
“Richie?” Dean cut himself off to answer on the first ring. “Yeah, yeah man I need that favor.
Still got that glorified scooter? I’m about a mile south of where the railroads intersect.”
Until he had seen the abandoned railroads that cut through the desert east and west, Sam never knew people used to travel here. He always meant to ask if the the badlands had once been the territory of the State, or if the Ghosts or the Resistance had ever been organized enough for that kind of infrastructure. “No I’m fine. It’s…a friend of mine. Ha ha. No, he’s pretty sick. Need to get him to a doctor. Okay. Okay, cool. Fifteen minutes.”
“He’ll be here,” Dean said, and Sam could hear the relief in his voice, the release of fear neither of them would put words to.
* * *
It was longer than fifteen minutes, Sam thought, but probably less than an hour. Time was hard to judge. At first, the buzzing in the distance sounded like insects, but too far away for insects to be audible. A dust-cloud appeared on the horizon and Dean straightened from his posture leaning against the rock, one hand on his gun still but an anxious expression of expectation on his face.
“It’s Richie,” he affirmed a moment later, blowing out his breath. Assured, he removed the used SIM from the cellphone and snapped it in four pieces. One he pocketed; the rest he scattered in the dirt. Not one, but two motorcycles materialized, and came on rapidly over the firm ground. The sound of the engines were jarring, intrusive in the desert night. They pulled up, and the riders dismounted. Dean stepped forward to clasp the hand of the larger vehicle’s rider: a short, dark-haired man with a prominent nose and an easy smile. Richie, Sam presumed. His companion was a blonde woman in her late twenties, with long legs and a strong face. Both wore jeans, and the man a battered leather jacket.
“Hey Deano, long time no see,” said Richie. Sam blinked. He doubted he’d ever met such a cheerful ghost. The woman was more of the usual type - quiet, wary. She nodded to both of them. “This is Janine,” Richie said, slipping an arm around her waist.
“Good to meet you,” Dean shook her hand, absently, automatic, and it marked his preoccupation that he didn’t even spare a glance for her fit, well-proportioned body. “This is Sam,” he helped Sam up, but subtly, hand on his arm.
“Hey, I heard about you,” Richie sounded surprised. “Didn’t you ice that security chief when the compound got overrun?”
“No,” said Sam, confused, and filing it away to find out at some point what that rumour was about. “I mean, I was there but…someone else killed him. One of the communists. She’s dead.”
“Oh,” Richie looked vaguely disappointed. “Any case, sorry I couldn’t meet you under better circumstances. Any friend of this guy….”
“We should get going,” Dean said. “I’ll call you when I get a new SIM about returning it.”
“Do that,” said Janine, speaking up at last. “This is a serious favor.”
“His word’s good, babe,” Richie assured her. “Plus I owe the guy. You guys look out for yourselves.”
“You too,” said Dean. Sam made some generic appropriate farewell, and got up behind Dean on the bike that Richie had vacated. Richie took a seat behind his girlfriend and she kicked the bike into gear, revved aggressively, and drove off.
Part Two