fic: Jaws of Life
Fandom: SPN, Sam/Dean
Rating: PG-13, character death
Spoilers: Up through All Hell Breaks Loose, Part II
Summary: Three weeks back from the dead, Sam Winchester knows two things: one, that they're fighting a war that will not be won; and two, that his is the hand that will take Dean's life.
Notes: 4100ish words. And there's also a second part, or a coda to the coda, if you will, (yes, I have a monopoly on pretentious, call me if you need to borrow a cup) called Avalanche, which will be up shortly. is here.
Dean pulled over outside Rock Springs, Wyoming. Still some hours of sunlight left, but they'd both been awake for days. He fell asleep with his right hand still on the wheel, the radio silent. Sam fell asleep watching him, and woke up that way, too.
The last scuttle of sun flushed the brown rock red, and Sam rousted himself enough to turn around and dig for the first aid kit in the back. Dean wasn't bleeding anymore, but Sam had seen the wound, and it was in hearty need of some antiseptic.
They'd exorcised their seventh demon that afternoon: it'd been hiding in a little girl, terrorizing her rancher family. They'd got it out without killing her. She'd taken a scythe to them, though, and Dean had avoided disembowelment by a hairsbreadth. That was enough to count as a victory.
But she was only the seventh out of the hundreds that had flooded from the gate, bent on corrupting enough souls to feed hell's hungry maw for centuries. And there were also the thousand tortured spirits that had escaped and were now wandering demented in a widening spiral around Samuel Colt's graveyard. You couldn't go two feet without running into another one, and the only thing to do was rock-salt them away and hope one day there'd be time to track them all down, burn up all those bones.
Dean jerked awake when Sam cracked the passenger door. “Where you going?” he asked before his eyes were even open. The hand that had been on the wheel fell right immediately, groping for Sam's leg or shirt or hand. Sam looked over and gave a tiny smile, reached out to touch his brother's sweaty palm.
They both leaned against the hood while Sam dabbed peroxide onto the long, shallow rip over Dean's collarbone and Dean picked the rest of his t-shirt out of the dark clot stuck to his ribs.
“You wanna circle west or east?” asked Dean.
“Doesn't really matter, does it?” The things were pretty much everywhere. Scattered in all directions after they'd found the gap in the southwest rail line. They'd find demons wherever they went, now.
“Guess not,” said Dean, and he stopped picking at the wound.
Sam frowned, and bent down to inspect it, started up with the peroxide again. “So west,” he said, after a while, reaching for the bandages.“We could hit Yellowstone on the way north.”
Dean half-smiled, looking off over the edge of the interstate, into the washboard hills. “Never been to Yellowstone.” He got back into the car, flicked on the headlights. Sam joined him.
--
In Sioux Falls a month later they tracked five possessions for two weeks, so careful to be unseen, to lay low and paint up their pentacles without raising a breath of warning. The demons loved cities, loved the bored youth and the drugs and the tired, worn systems of authority. They wrought mayhem easily, in the bodies of pretty teenagers and city cops, luring the weak and vulnerable to foul acts that near burned up their souls on the spot.
Sam thought he'd get one at this particular dive bar, for sure, it was so attractive, with the degenerates and lost causes frequenting it. And eventually the demons did come - all five of them together - a few nights into what had become a stubborn stake-out that Sam refused to call off, no matter what Dean said about wasted time. The possessed wandered in separately, which made Sam nervous enough to ignore Dean's phone calls from outside, where he was set to watching the entrance. He didn't want to blow his cover, nursing a beer by the bathroom where he'd chalked up his devil's trap.
The last demon in was wearing a broad-shouldered detective like a new suit, and he ordered two shots of whiskey from the bartender, and sent one down to Sam. Smiling. At the same time, a brawl broke out between two regulars over the whispered suggestions of a doll-faced, flash-eyed girl, and the entire place was in an uproar in seconds. Sam couldn't see what was going on, but he knew that he'd been found out, and his phone was buzzing in his pocket, and he had his pistol out just to slow down whatever came at him.
He didn't get a chance to use it on the cop-demon, who had a fist in Sam's hair and a mouth against his ear, his arm wrenched behind his back so that shots of pain ran up into his spine with every twitch of the demon's hand. “Your brother is hurting too,” it murmured, “His soul is ours, and we're gonna watch him burn and burn, Sammy.”
Across the room, the girl was perched on the bar, grinning, and the two filthy, old men were cackling and smashing bottles and glasses against the brawlers, like kids at a whack-a-mole booth. He couldn't see the fifth.
“Outside with Dean, tearing off his skin in strips,” the demon's lips brushed his ear. Its fingers dug deep in Sam's arm, his shoulder was pulling out of its socket, slowly.
“No.” Sam said, and it wasn't a protest but a command. The word rippled out like a wave over the room, and four shocked faces turned to him.
The demon's hand released him, and Sam felt its terror. “No.” he said again, and the demon staggered away. The other three were watching, the girl drawing her legs up against her and the old men standing frozen, covered in blood and green glass.
Sam opened his mouth to say something specific, but then their human puppets were dropping and the bar filled with the stink of sulphur and clouds of black so thick and dark that the drunks stopped yelling and started screaming.
Sam stumbled over the corpses of the dis-possessed, and up the steps outside after the rushing black. Dean's hands found him before he could even see through his stinging eyes. They gripped each other by the arms and Dean pulled him down a side alley, propped him against a wall. “Sam, Sammy, are you okay? What the hell was that - what the hell happened?”
“They knew about us already, they knew,” said Sam, taking in lungfuls of rotten air, still rich with sulphur. “Dean, it said-” Sam's hands moved up his brothers shoulders, touched the wet patch at the back of his neck, not sweat but blood shining black in light. Strips of skin torn off him.
Dean caught his hand, moved it away. “It had me, for a little bit, but then it dropped its body like it'd heard a bell, or something.”
“That was me,” said Sam, blinking. “I told them not to. I told them.”
Dean nodded, like maybe Sam had suggested burgers for dinner. He looked like he did when he was refusing to be scared, when he was refusing despair or rage or a simple conversation about what Dad would've wanted done with the truck.
Right know, Sam knew, Dean was refusing to think about what this meant for his deal at the crossroads.
Instead, he pulled Sam away from the wall, and they left Sioux Falls that same night, without a single kill to chalk up.
--
Every night they went to sleep together in the same room, like they had for Sam's entire life, except for Stanford. But then, Sam hadn't really slept for the first two years at school, just stared at the blank walls and played out waking nightmares about what his brother and dad might be doing, dying, without him. He needed someone there to echo back the sound of his own breathing. Eventually he'd found Jess to play that counterpoint, calm the anxiety of wondering, but she was gone. And soon Dean would be gone, too.
Every night, Sam fell asleep counting his brother's breaths, admiring their regularity, and full of fear for the day when that last exhalation lingered in the air. God, he didn't want to be there for that. If he ever heard it, he knew he'd go mad.
In the motel rooms he was always the first one up, reading and researching through dark winter mornings until Dean's breath would hitch and he'd start awake. Stumble across the room to the shower, and linger there in the yellow light and steam. Dean would always leave the door open, sometimes shout a request for his razor.
Then he'd leave the shower running, step out and dry himself off. Still wet and scalded and mostly naked he'd fall back asleep in the sheets while Sam shed pyjama pants and took his place under the water.
One morning, Sam came back out into the room, dripping, and Dean was dead asleep again, breathing loud and even into his pillow. One leg over the sheets, one leg under, arm curled around an extra pillow and with his head forming a giant wet spot in the bed.
Sam, half dressed and half dry, came closer, just to listen. He watched the rise and fall of the shiny scar on Dean's ribcage, from the farmgirl and her scythe. Not too often that the reaper missed his mark, Sam knew.
He reached down and shook Dean's shoulder. “Sleep when you're dead,” he said, and his voice came out rough and low.
Dean rolled over and opened his eyes as Sam turned back to his duffel to finish dressing. Sam couldn't look at him. He heard Dean let out a long breath, and rustle the sheets as he reached for his own clothes.
They left the motel while it was still dark, and they didn't speak for hours. Sam knew he'd broken a silent agreement, that at least when Dean was asleep they could both pretend things were fine.
--
They were in Tennessee when Ellen called to check up and compare counts. Her and Bobby had stuck mostly north, taking out things where they could and talking to other hunters about getting something more organized struck up. Dean was disinterested, practically rude, as he chewed his sandwich into the mouthpiece, and Sam took the phone away from him. Played polite and helpful and got her off the line quick. He didn't tell her what he'd done in Sioux Falls, what he'd found he could do again, a few times since then.
Ellen didn't need to know, because whatever meagre power yellow-eyes had left him, the benefits were for Dean, and for Dean alone.
--
Spring hit them shockingly fast in Kansas. Sam waited outside in the Impala while Dean was in with Missouri Mosely in her new place. Hunters were calling it the Safehouse, because it was all set up with hoodoo spells and a hundred sigils, five-spots and graveyard dirt laid out to deter anything with malicious intent. She'd opened it up as a hospital for the war.
Sam had chased a demon out of a college kid in Omaha, and so they'd brought him down here because he was still alive, surprisingly enough. They'd rock-paper-scissored to see who'd go into the little house with the white trim and the lilac bushes, and Dean had lost five times in a row before he tossed the kid's arm over his shoulder and slammed the door.
Sam rolled down the window, and listened to the sparrows in the eaves, caught the smell of wet grass on the breeze. She had daffodils in a window box, nodding their yellow heads. Sam felt fear crawling in him, as it always did when he noticed the passage of time. He couldn't help it. He sat in the car, and counted the days forwards and back.
Dean was a long time in coming out, and Sam saw the curtains twitch a few times. They were talking about his half-assed powers, and about the dumbfuck deal Dean had negotiated for himself. Two dead-horse subjects, each more useless than the other. Sam would've beat Dean's scissors twelve times to avoid that kind of empty, sympathetic advice.
Finally, Dean came out with the closed-off look on his face that meant she'd told him something he didn't want to hear. Sam wasn't surprised. They barely spoke, trying to avoid talking about things Dean didn't want to hear. He turned the engine over and said, “You wanna try the coast?”
“Which one?” Dean scowled at the glove compartment.
“Doesn't really matter, does it?” Sam said.
“Pacific, then,” Dean said, pulling out a map.
“Alright.”
--
They found no demons in Crescent City, California. No ghosts, either. Just tourists and trees and a sunny little motel across the street from the ocean.
The third morning, Sam got up and turned on his computer, and Dean yelled at him from bed to stop with the freaking clicking, close the goddamned curtains, and go back to sleep.
Sam did, abandoning google maps reluctantly. When he woke up the second time, went to the door thinking maybe he'd go find them some breakfast, Dean yelled at him again.
“Stop moving around, for fuck's sake, Sam,” Dean's face was half-buried in pillow, but his voice was still sharp, commanding. “Just stay here. Just come back and stay.”
Again, Sam crawled back into bed. Dean fell back asleep, like fifteen hours hadn't been near enough already, and Sam twitched his overheated limbs against the sheets, bored and impatient and angry.
--
The date burned behind Sam's eyes constantly, all through October. They rattled around the northwest like dice in a tin, turning up lucky sometimes, and worse than bad more often. The papers all showed rising crime rates - blamed politicians and television - and an increase in catastrophic disasters, natural or otherwise. Mud slides in state parks, mystery fires that burned down hospitals. And for every demon they exorcised, another dozen turned tail and moved on to work their ill deeds elsewhere.
Dean got quiet, walked around half-asleep all the time, dragging his feet into diners and the odd graveyard. Sam didn't even let him drive anymore, just set him against the passenger door and let him blink out at the landscape. Sometimes he'd perk up, they'd have coffee and blueberry pie and Dean would hook a foot around Sam's, under the table, and bump their knees together while he talked about raking together some cash to buy some winter tires.
On one of those days toward the end, in a little town outside Portland, Sam caught Dean's phone ringing while he was in the washroom. It was Bobby, who knew the date down to the hour, probably. Calling to say what, goodbye? Good luck?
Sam muted the call, and erased the message without listening to it. Dean didn't need more people telling him how badly he'd fucked this one up. How damn melancholy they'd be to see him dead. Sam was pretty jealous of his monopoly on that front.
Dean came back from the washroom whistling. He earned a dirty glance from the world-hating waitress, and sat back down to his pie, smiling. When they left, Sam set down his last twenty as a tip.
They drove for eleven hours through the night, and Dean slept almost the entire way.
--
Sam had a bag in the trunk. A mojo bag, with black haw root, enough goofer dust to tattoo the earth with pepper and powdered rattlesnake skin, graveyard dirt and a handful of white lodestones. He also had a lot - a lot - of bottled water.
He parked the car at a rest stop on the I-80, and as always, Dean's head snapped up when he heard the door squeal open. He crawled out of the car while Sam rummaged through the trunk.
The light off the Bonneville Salt Flats - miles and miles of stretched silver curving into the craggy black spine of the hills - was blinding, even this late in the year. Dean was covering his eyes with his palm and leaning against the Impala. The silence between them stretched wider that the horizon, but the both of them were praying.
Sam filled his backpack, pulled out heavier coats, the pair of sleeping bags from the back seat. He did it all while Dean refused to look at him, refused to look out at the flats. He practically fell asleep again there against the hood of the car, with the wind whipping dry alkali dust in their faces. When Sam had everything, the car locked and the fake IDs shoved in his pockets, he shouted at Dean to rouse him, and they started down the embankment, into the desert.
The wind cut, partly with the cold, and partly with the thousand tiny diamond scratches that salt rasped against bare skin. Sam squinted against it, and watched as the sun rose higher, but didn't warm a thing. When he turned around to look back the way they came, there were no footprints, just the hard, icy-looking surface of the flats. He couldn't see the interstate, or the rail line. Just the bright arc of the sky, smudged along the horizon where clouds gathered to make a break across thirty thousand dry acres of death.
He stopped Dean with a hand on his chest. Looking his brother in the eyes was like looking at a stranger's child, or an amnesiac. In so many ways it was like he was already dead. “Just stay here, alright?” Sam murmured, sat him down on the roll of a sleeping bag. They had an hour. Maybe less.
The goofer's dust was a precaution, the devil's shoestrings planted in bundles of seven in a loose circle another one. Sam knew that nothing could stop a hellhound. The million tons of salt that surrounded them would hold them back for a while, maybe. Sam sprinkled his crossing powder, stepping backwards twenty-one times. He placed the lodestones. The horizons stayed clear.
Dean was sleeping again, and Sam went to sit down beside him. He touched his arm, twisted open some water.
The wind was howling cold and fierce, and the goofer's dust blurred in its sigils, the crossing powder circle stretching oblong already.
Dean opened his eyes, took the water from Sam's hand and drank. “You aren't dead,” he congratulated Sam, his eyes clearer now.
“As long as you don't try to worm your way out of the deal,” said Sam. “You just sit here and wait for them to come get you.”
Dean started to say something, but he stopped, cut himself off. He turned his head to look north, the way they'd come.
Sam could almost, almost hear it himself: a raging howl coming from a mile back.
“Already?” Dean asked. He sighed, but didn't close his eyes. He watched Sam go to his backpack. “What do you think, maybe a thunder storm? A mile-long sinkhole? She'll just wash away a stretch of this, and clear a path.”
“Maybe,” said Sam. “Maybe she'll just come here and get you herself.” Or maybe she couldn't reach that far, across miles of white salt. Couldn't reach that far out to grab him, and they'd spend the rest of their lives out here, grow long white beards.
They ate some sandwiches, drank more water. Sam sat with his back facing north. Every time Dean flinched and looked that way, he saw Sam's face, not hounds. But it was quiet, and a muddy brine was soaking up through the salt crust where they placed their weight. Sam had never planned out staying out here long, but Christ, it was colder than he'd thought.
Dean looked north for the fiftieth time and Sam said, “Are they still there?”
“Yes,” Dean said, “But they're quiet.”
The clouds on the horizon, roiling and blue, were expanding out over the plain. Sam sat with his elbows on his knees, watching them lap like waves, fast as an ocean tide toward them.
“Looks like a storm, I guess,” said Sam.
Dean looked over his shoulder and watched for a while. Then he gave himself a shake and rubbed his hands together for warmth. God, his eyes were clearer than they'd been all year. They flashed, sly, under his lashes as he leaned forward. The smirk Sam recognized, it was the one that surfaced after a prank well pulled. “She is so pissed right now,” Dean couldn't wipe the smirk off his face, it stuck to him and they both laughed.
The wind was rising and the salt was flying off the flats in streamers as tall as buildings. Dean sat facing it for a while, but as the clouds overtook them he turned back to Sam. They could see rain pouring in sheets not so far away. At first it looked like it was evaporating before it could hit the ground, but then the clouds boiled in on themselves and grated out thunder, and then the rain was pouring straight down, turning the plain to an expanse of corrosive mud thirty feet deep.
Sam counted maybe a minute before it hit them and washed away all his hoodoo tricks. Dean stood frowning into blur of water and wind, and Sam knew the hounds were coming, too.
“Dean,” he said, hearing a tightness in his voice that frightened him. “Don't look at them.”
Dean turned back, and came to sit beside him. He cleared his throat like he might crack a joke, but Sam's left hand found his and he just said, “Sammy, I hope you got a good plan for getting yourself out of this.”
“I got a good plan, don't worry.” Sam's hand was curled, loose, around the steel of his 9mm, hidden under his right thigh, away from Dean. He tried to lift it, but the hand wouldn't move. Instead, Dean's warm palm wrapped around the fingers of his other hand and squeezed.
Then the rain was on them like a mudslide, freezing cold and so thick it was hard to breathe. Dean didn't move, but Sam either heard or felt his sudden inward rush of of breath as the dogs got close enough to spring.
Sam reached out with his mind, trying to find them, order them down. Erect some kind of wall between the hellhounds and his brother. Just a few seconds of that, just that. He strained out the command into the blind downpour, hoping.
And then he felt them scrabbling against his mind, their shrieks of rage rumbling huge and silent. Around them, in a patchy circle no more than a dozen feet across, the rain stopped falling. It fell around them instead, diverted from a space that ran from their circle of mud straight up for a mile into the atmosphere. A bare little gunshot of blue sky floated above them. Sam looked at Dean's face and saw relief there, saw hope kindled into a blaze.
Sam pulled the gun between them. Dean's hand was in his hair, and his face was wet with salt. Sam buried his face in his brother's shoulder, pushed the muzzle straight up into Dean's ribs.
They each felt the kick of cold steel when he pulled the trigger. The rush of hot death leaking between them. The rush of Dean's protected soul, upwards.
Dean's head fell forward on Sam's shoulder, and the strength of his grip dissipated. Sam held him close, didn't let himself look at the faint line of a smile on Dean's face. Didn't let himself hear that last long rattle of lungs.
But he felt the strength of his commands dissolve, the confusion and frustration of the hellhounds as they broke through the barrier only to stop in their tracks. The storm fell back in on him, furious and raging, and he let it, huddled in the mud. He did not move from his brother's corpse, and the demon did not come to claim either of them.
--
There was one morning that dawned cold and grey, and Sam thought for a second he'd woken up in Antarctica, or in hell. Aching cold and numb, his fingers didn't want to bend or flex, and everything he'd carried in had sunk deep in a brackish swamp that stunk like a dead ocean.
He propped himself up on one elbow, and turned to touch his brother's shoulder. No breath rose there, or warmed the dirty skin. He thought, I won't ever sleep again.
But he was wrong. When the wet and the cold got too much for his canvas jacket and leather boots, the wan sun both blinding and cold, he closed his eyes. And imagined, in the brush of wind across the flats, that he heard his own breath echoed back again. And he slept.
Rating: PG-13, character death
Spoilers: Up through All Hell Breaks Loose, Part II
Summary: Three weeks back from the dead, Sam Winchester knows two things: one, that they're fighting a war that will not be won; and two, that his is the hand that will take Dean's life.
Notes: 4100ish words. And there's also a second part, or a coda to the coda, if you will, (yes, I have a monopoly on pretentious, call me if you need to borrow a cup) called Avalanche, which will be up shortly. is here.
Dean pulled over outside Rock Springs, Wyoming. Still some hours of sunlight left, but they'd both been awake for days. He fell asleep with his right hand still on the wheel, the radio silent. Sam fell asleep watching him, and woke up that way, too.
The last scuttle of sun flushed the brown rock red, and Sam rousted himself enough to turn around and dig for the first aid kit in the back. Dean wasn't bleeding anymore, but Sam had seen the wound, and it was in hearty need of some antiseptic.
They'd exorcised their seventh demon that afternoon: it'd been hiding in a little girl, terrorizing her rancher family. They'd got it out without killing her. She'd taken a scythe to them, though, and Dean had avoided disembowelment by a hairsbreadth. That was enough to count as a victory.
But she was only the seventh out of the hundreds that had flooded from the gate, bent on corrupting enough souls to feed hell's hungry maw for centuries. And there were also the thousand tortured spirits that had escaped and were now wandering demented in a widening spiral around Samuel Colt's graveyard. You couldn't go two feet without running into another one, and the only thing to do was rock-salt them away and hope one day there'd be time to track them all down, burn up all those bones.
Dean jerked awake when Sam cracked the passenger door. “Where you going?” he asked before his eyes were even open. The hand that had been on the wheel fell right immediately, groping for Sam's leg or shirt or hand. Sam looked over and gave a tiny smile, reached out to touch his brother's sweaty palm.
They both leaned against the hood while Sam dabbed peroxide onto the long, shallow rip over Dean's collarbone and Dean picked the rest of his t-shirt out of the dark clot stuck to his ribs.
“You wanna circle west or east?” asked Dean.
“Doesn't really matter, does it?” The things were pretty much everywhere. Scattered in all directions after they'd found the gap in the southwest rail line. They'd find demons wherever they went, now.
“Guess not,” said Dean, and he stopped picking at the wound.
Sam frowned, and bent down to inspect it, started up with the peroxide again. “So west,” he said, after a while, reaching for the bandages.“We could hit Yellowstone on the way north.”
Dean half-smiled, looking off over the edge of the interstate, into the washboard hills. “Never been to Yellowstone.” He got back into the car, flicked on the headlights. Sam joined him.
--
In Sioux Falls a month later they tracked five possessions for two weeks, so careful to be unseen, to lay low and paint up their pentacles without raising a breath of warning. The demons loved cities, loved the bored youth and the drugs and the tired, worn systems of authority. They wrought mayhem easily, in the bodies of pretty teenagers and city cops, luring the weak and vulnerable to foul acts that near burned up their souls on the spot.
Sam thought he'd get one at this particular dive bar, for sure, it was so attractive, with the degenerates and lost causes frequenting it. And eventually the demons did come - all five of them together - a few nights into what had become a stubborn stake-out that Sam refused to call off, no matter what Dean said about wasted time. The possessed wandered in separately, which made Sam nervous enough to ignore Dean's phone calls from outside, where he was set to watching the entrance. He didn't want to blow his cover, nursing a beer by the bathroom where he'd chalked up his devil's trap.
The last demon in was wearing a broad-shouldered detective like a new suit, and he ordered two shots of whiskey from the bartender, and sent one down to Sam. Smiling. At the same time, a brawl broke out between two regulars over the whispered suggestions of a doll-faced, flash-eyed girl, and the entire place was in an uproar in seconds. Sam couldn't see what was going on, but he knew that he'd been found out, and his phone was buzzing in his pocket, and he had his pistol out just to slow down whatever came at him.
He didn't get a chance to use it on the cop-demon, who had a fist in Sam's hair and a mouth against his ear, his arm wrenched behind his back so that shots of pain ran up into his spine with every twitch of the demon's hand. “Your brother is hurting too,” it murmured, “His soul is ours, and we're gonna watch him burn and burn, Sammy.”
Across the room, the girl was perched on the bar, grinning, and the two filthy, old men were cackling and smashing bottles and glasses against the brawlers, like kids at a whack-a-mole booth. He couldn't see the fifth.
“Outside with Dean, tearing off his skin in strips,” the demon's lips brushed his ear. Its fingers dug deep in Sam's arm, his shoulder was pulling out of its socket, slowly.
“No.” Sam said, and it wasn't a protest but a command. The word rippled out like a wave over the room, and four shocked faces turned to him.
The demon's hand released him, and Sam felt its terror. “No.” he said again, and the demon staggered away. The other three were watching, the girl drawing her legs up against her and the old men standing frozen, covered in blood and green glass.
Sam opened his mouth to say something specific, but then their human puppets were dropping and the bar filled with the stink of sulphur and clouds of black so thick and dark that the drunks stopped yelling and started screaming.
Sam stumbled over the corpses of the dis-possessed, and up the steps outside after the rushing black. Dean's hands found him before he could even see through his stinging eyes. They gripped each other by the arms and Dean pulled him down a side alley, propped him against a wall. “Sam, Sammy, are you okay? What the hell was that - what the hell happened?”
“They knew about us already, they knew,” said Sam, taking in lungfuls of rotten air, still rich with sulphur. “Dean, it said-” Sam's hands moved up his brothers shoulders, touched the wet patch at the back of his neck, not sweat but blood shining black in light. Strips of skin torn off him.
Dean caught his hand, moved it away. “It had me, for a little bit, but then it dropped its body like it'd heard a bell, or something.”
“That was me,” said Sam, blinking. “I told them not to. I told them.”
Dean nodded, like maybe Sam had suggested burgers for dinner. He looked like he did when he was refusing to be scared, when he was refusing despair or rage or a simple conversation about what Dad would've wanted done with the truck.
Right know, Sam knew, Dean was refusing to think about what this meant for his deal at the crossroads.
Instead, he pulled Sam away from the wall, and they left Sioux Falls that same night, without a single kill to chalk up.
--
Every night they went to sleep together in the same room, like they had for Sam's entire life, except for Stanford. But then, Sam hadn't really slept for the first two years at school, just stared at the blank walls and played out waking nightmares about what his brother and dad might be doing, dying, without him. He needed someone there to echo back the sound of his own breathing. Eventually he'd found Jess to play that counterpoint, calm the anxiety of wondering, but she was gone. And soon Dean would be gone, too.
Every night, Sam fell asleep counting his brother's breaths, admiring their regularity, and full of fear for the day when that last exhalation lingered in the air. God, he didn't want to be there for that. If he ever heard it, he knew he'd go mad.
In the motel rooms he was always the first one up, reading and researching through dark winter mornings until Dean's breath would hitch and he'd start awake. Stumble across the room to the shower, and linger there in the yellow light and steam. Dean would always leave the door open, sometimes shout a request for his razor.
Then he'd leave the shower running, step out and dry himself off. Still wet and scalded and mostly naked he'd fall back asleep in the sheets while Sam shed pyjama pants and took his place under the water.
One morning, Sam came back out into the room, dripping, and Dean was dead asleep again, breathing loud and even into his pillow. One leg over the sheets, one leg under, arm curled around an extra pillow and with his head forming a giant wet spot in the bed.
Sam, half dressed and half dry, came closer, just to listen. He watched the rise and fall of the shiny scar on Dean's ribcage, from the farmgirl and her scythe. Not too often that the reaper missed his mark, Sam knew.
He reached down and shook Dean's shoulder. “Sleep when you're dead,” he said, and his voice came out rough and low.
Dean rolled over and opened his eyes as Sam turned back to his duffel to finish dressing. Sam couldn't look at him. He heard Dean let out a long breath, and rustle the sheets as he reached for his own clothes.
They left the motel while it was still dark, and they didn't speak for hours. Sam knew he'd broken a silent agreement, that at least when Dean was asleep they could both pretend things were fine.
--
They were in Tennessee when Ellen called to check up and compare counts. Her and Bobby had stuck mostly north, taking out things where they could and talking to other hunters about getting something more organized struck up. Dean was disinterested, practically rude, as he chewed his sandwich into the mouthpiece, and Sam took the phone away from him. Played polite and helpful and got her off the line quick. He didn't tell her what he'd done in Sioux Falls, what he'd found he could do again, a few times since then.
Ellen didn't need to know, because whatever meagre power yellow-eyes had left him, the benefits were for Dean, and for Dean alone.
--
Spring hit them shockingly fast in Kansas. Sam waited outside in the Impala while Dean was in with Missouri Mosely in her new place. Hunters were calling it the Safehouse, because it was all set up with hoodoo spells and a hundred sigils, five-spots and graveyard dirt laid out to deter anything with malicious intent. She'd opened it up as a hospital for the war.
Sam had chased a demon out of a college kid in Omaha, and so they'd brought him down here because he was still alive, surprisingly enough. They'd rock-paper-scissored to see who'd go into the little house with the white trim and the lilac bushes, and Dean had lost five times in a row before he tossed the kid's arm over his shoulder and slammed the door.
Sam rolled down the window, and listened to the sparrows in the eaves, caught the smell of wet grass on the breeze. She had daffodils in a window box, nodding their yellow heads. Sam felt fear crawling in him, as it always did when he noticed the passage of time. He couldn't help it. He sat in the car, and counted the days forwards and back.
Dean was a long time in coming out, and Sam saw the curtains twitch a few times. They were talking about his half-assed powers, and about the dumbfuck deal Dean had negotiated for himself. Two dead-horse subjects, each more useless than the other. Sam would've beat Dean's scissors twelve times to avoid that kind of empty, sympathetic advice.
Finally, Dean came out with the closed-off look on his face that meant she'd told him something he didn't want to hear. Sam wasn't surprised. They barely spoke, trying to avoid talking about things Dean didn't want to hear. He turned the engine over and said, “You wanna try the coast?”
“Which one?” Dean scowled at the glove compartment.
“Doesn't really matter, does it?” Sam said.
“Pacific, then,” Dean said, pulling out a map.
“Alright.”
--
They found no demons in Crescent City, California. No ghosts, either. Just tourists and trees and a sunny little motel across the street from the ocean.
The third morning, Sam got up and turned on his computer, and Dean yelled at him from bed to stop with the freaking clicking, close the goddamned curtains, and go back to sleep.
Sam did, abandoning google maps reluctantly. When he woke up the second time, went to the door thinking maybe he'd go find them some breakfast, Dean yelled at him again.
“Stop moving around, for fuck's sake, Sam,” Dean's face was half-buried in pillow, but his voice was still sharp, commanding. “Just stay here. Just come back and stay.”
Again, Sam crawled back into bed. Dean fell back asleep, like fifteen hours hadn't been near enough already, and Sam twitched his overheated limbs against the sheets, bored and impatient and angry.
--
The date burned behind Sam's eyes constantly, all through October. They rattled around the northwest like dice in a tin, turning up lucky sometimes, and worse than bad more often. The papers all showed rising crime rates - blamed politicians and television - and an increase in catastrophic disasters, natural or otherwise. Mud slides in state parks, mystery fires that burned down hospitals. And for every demon they exorcised, another dozen turned tail and moved on to work their ill deeds elsewhere.
Dean got quiet, walked around half-asleep all the time, dragging his feet into diners and the odd graveyard. Sam didn't even let him drive anymore, just set him against the passenger door and let him blink out at the landscape. Sometimes he'd perk up, they'd have coffee and blueberry pie and Dean would hook a foot around Sam's, under the table, and bump their knees together while he talked about raking together some cash to buy some winter tires.
On one of those days toward the end, in a little town outside Portland, Sam caught Dean's phone ringing while he was in the washroom. It was Bobby, who knew the date down to the hour, probably. Calling to say what, goodbye? Good luck?
Sam muted the call, and erased the message without listening to it. Dean didn't need more people telling him how badly he'd fucked this one up. How damn melancholy they'd be to see him dead. Sam was pretty jealous of his monopoly on that front.
Dean came back from the washroom whistling. He earned a dirty glance from the world-hating waitress, and sat back down to his pie, smiling. When they left, Sam set down his last twenty as a tip.
They drove for eleven hours through the night, and Dean slept almost the entire way.
--
Sam had a bag in the trunk. A mojo bag, with black haw root, enough goofer dust to tattoo the earth with pepper and powdered rattlesnake skin, graveyard dirt and a handful of white lodestones. He also had a lot - a lot - of bottled water.
He parked the car at a rest stop on the I-80, and as always, Dean's head snapped up when he heard the door squeal open. He crawled out of the car while Sam rummaged through the trunk.
The light off the Bonneville Salt Flats - miles and miles of stretched silver curving into the craggy black spine of the hills - was blinding, even this late in the year. Dean was covering his eyes with his palm and leaning against the Impala. The silence between them stretched wider that the horizon, but the both of them were praying.
Sam filled his backpack, pulled out heavier coats, the pair of sleeping bags from the back seat. He did it all while Dean refused to look at him, refused to look out at the flats. He practically fell asleep again there against the hood of the car, with the wind whipping dry alkali dust in their faces. When Sam had everything, the car locked and the fake IDs shoved in his pockets, he shouted at Dean to rouse him, and they started down the embankment, into the desert.
The wind cut, partly with the cold, and partly with the thousand tiny diamond scratches that salt rasped against bare skin. Sam squinted against it, and watched as the sun rose higher, but didn't warm a thing. When he turned around to look back the way they came, there were no footprints, just the hard, icy-looking surface of the flats. He couldn't see the interstate, or the rail line. Just the bright arc of the sky, smudged along the horizon where clouds gathered to make a break across thirty thousand dry acres of death.
He stopped Dean with a hand on his chest. Looking his brother in the eyes was like looking at a stranger's child, or an amnesiac. In so many ways it was like he was already dead. “Just stay here, alright?” Sam murmured, sat him down on the roll of a sleeping bag. They had an hour. Maybe less.
The goofer's dust was a precaution, the devil's shoestrings planted in bundles of seven in a loose circle another one. Sam knew that nothing could stop a hellhound. The million tons of salt that surrounded them would hold them back for a while, maybe. Sam sprinkled his crossing powder, stepping backwards twenty-one times. He placed the lodestones. The horizons stayed clear.
Dean was sleeping again, and Sam went to sit down beside him. He touched his arm, twisted open some water.
The wind was howling cold and fierce, and the goofer's dust blurred in its sigils, the crossing powder circle stretching oblong already.
Dean opened his eyes, took the water from Sam's hand and drank. “You aren't dead,” he congratulated Sam, his eyes clearer now.
“As long as you don't try to worm your way out of the deal,” said Sam. “You just sit here and wait for them to come get you.”
Dean started to say something, but he stopped, cut himself off. He turned his head to look north, the way they'd come.
Sam could almost, almost hear it himself: a raging howl coming from a mile back.
“Already?” Dean asked. He sighed, but didn't close his eyes. He watched Sam go to his backpack. “What do you think, maybe a thunder storm? A mile-long sinkhole? She'll just wash away a stretch of this, and clear a path.”
“Maybe,” said Sam. “Maybe she'll just come here and get you herself.” Or maybe she couldn't reach that far, across miles of white salt. Couldn't reach that far out to grab him, and they'd spend the rest of their lives out here, grow long white beards.
They ate some sandwiches, drank more water. Sam sat with his back facing north. Every time Dean flinched and looked that way, he saw Sam's face, not hounds. But it was quiet, and a muddy brine was soaking up through the salt crust where they placed their weight. Sam had never planned out staying out here long, but Christ, it was colder than he'd thought.
Dean looked north for the fiftieth time and Sam said, “Are they still there?”
“Yes,” Dean said, “But they're quiet.”
The clouds on the horizon, roiling and blue, were expanding out over the plain. Sam sat with his elbows on his knees, watching them lap like waves, fast as an ocean tide toward them.
“Looks like a storm, I guess,” said Sam.
Dean looked over his shoulder and watched for a while. Then he gave himself a shake and rubbed his hands together for warmth. God, his eyes were clearer than they'd been all year. They flashed, sly, under his lashes as he leaned forward. The smirk Sam recognized, it was the one that surfaced after a prank well pulled. “She is so pissed right now,” Dean couldn't wipe the smirk off his face, it stuck to him and they both laughed.
The wind was rising and the salt was flying off the flats in streamers as tall as buildings. Dean sat facing it for a while, but as the clouds overtook them he turned back to Sam. They could see rain pouring in sheets not so far away. At first it looked like it was evaporating before it could hit the ground, but then the clouds boiled in on themselves and grated out thunder, and then the rain was pouring straight down, turning the plain to an expanse of corrosive mud thirty feet deep.
Sam counted maybe a minute before it hit them and washed away all his hoodoo tricks. Dean stood frowning into blur of water and wind, and Sam knew the hounds were coming, too.
“Dean,” he said, hearing a tightness in his voice that frightened him. “Don't look at them.”
Dean turned back, and came to sit beside him. He cleared his throat like he might crack a joke, but Sam's left hand found his and he just said, “Sammy, I hope you got a good plan for getting yourself out of this.”
“I got a good plan, don't worry.” Sam's hand was curled, loose, around the steel of his 9mm, hidden under his right thigh, away from Dean. He tried to lift it, but the hand wouldn't move. Instead, Dean's warm palm wrapped around the fingers of his other hand and squeezed.
Then the rain was on them like a mudslide, freezing cold and so thick it was hard to breathe. Dean didn't move, but Sam either heard or felt his sudden inward rush of of breath as the dogs got close enough to spring.
Sam reached out with his mind, trying to find them, order them down. Erect some kind of wall between the hellhounds and his brother. Just a few seconds of that, just that. He strained out the command into the blind downpour, hoping.
And then he felt them scrabbling against his mind, their shrieks of rage rumbling huge and silent. Around them, in a patchy circle no more than a dozen feet across, the rain stopped falling. It fell around them instead, diverted from a space that ran from their circle of mud straight up for a mile into the atmosphere. A bare little gunshot of blue sky floated above them. Sam looked at Dean's face and saw relief there, saw hope kindled into a blaze.
Sam pulled the gun between them. Dean's hand was in his hair, and his face was wet with salt. Sam buried his face in his brother's shoulder, pushed the muzzle straight up into Dean's ribs.
They each felt the kick of cold steel when he pulled the trigger. The rush of hot death leaking between them. The rush of Dean's protected soul, upwards.
Dean's head fell forward on Sam's shoulder, and the strength of his grip dissipated. Sam held him close, didn't let himself look at the faint line of a smile on Dean's face. Didn't let himself hear that last long rattle of lungs.
But he felt the strength of his commands dissolve, the confusion and frustration of the hellhounds as they broke through the barrier only to stop in their tracks. The storm fell back in on him, furious and raging, and he let it, huddled in the mud. He did not move from his brother's corpse, and the demon did not come to claim either of them.
--
There was one morning that dawned cold and grey, and Sam thought for a second he'd woken up in Antarctica, or in hell. Aching cold and numb, his fingers didn't want to bend or flex, and everything he'd carried in had sunk deep in a brackish swamp that stunk like a dead ocean.
He propped himself up on one elbow, and turned to touch his brother's shoulder. No breath rose there, or warmed the dirty skin. He thought, I won't ever sleep again.
But he was wrong. When the wet and the cold got too much for his canvas jacket and leather boots, the wan sun both blinding and cold, he closed his eyes. And imagined, in the brush of wind across the flats, that he heard his own breath echoed back again. And he slept.