Chapter Text
The sun is already in the sky when Sam checks out of the motel. He had woken up two hours prior, when the pale light of the dawn was just starting to fill the sky, visible outside the dirty glass of the window.
He’d gotten as far as changing into his shorts to go running, but he sat down at the desk instead. Stared at the pockmarked off-white of the wall with his shoes unlaced for some indeterminate amount of time before giving up and switching to jeans.
He checks his watch, then the sun outside. It’s 9AM now.
The man at the desk fidgets in his polyester button-up and hardly even looks up as Sam turns in his key.
There’s a stack of those tourist brochures in a particleboard caddy against the wall. Amusement parks and the like. He pulls one out, a photograph of some wooded area on the front, small waterfall in the background.
Hiking Elk River
Sam laughs to himself, grabbing the pamphlet. The guy at the front desk gives him a strange look, so he nods, puts it back in its place and walks out to the car.
He could go for a hike now, if he wanted. There’s nothing left to stop him.
People at Stanford were always talking about hiking the PCT. They had done it that summer, or they were going to do it the next, or they had done it on their gap years.
Sam doesn’t really feel like running into a bunch of college kids in their redwood tree gear hiking the trail. He doesn’t really feel like running into much of anyone at all.
Sam Winchester’s gap year. Maybe the Cage was his gap year, but he figures after that he gets a redo. A vise closes around his heart. He doesn’t want to think about the Cage, about Lucifer, about any of it. Breathe in. The road is in front of him, the painted lines old and fading in the sun. Breathe out. The trees to the side are low and scraggly. A dead squirrel lies crushed on the road.
He opens his phone—no new messages. Opens his browser and googles “long hikes”. The internet is slow out here, but it’s not like he doesn’t have time to kill.
After a period of searching, he chooses the CDT for himself. The Continental Divide Trail, through the middle of the American landmass. It seems fitting. (Plus the idea of a ‘party trail’ at this point makes him want to vomit a little, so the Appalachian is out.) It’s a little late in the year to get started, but whatever. He can walk. And he’s certainly endured worse than a little cold. He’s definitely not going to let some trail through the woods defeat him.
Sam flips back to his messages and hesitates for a second over the threads. After a moment of deliberation, he opens the text thread with Cas and begins drafting.
hey cas. am heading to the trail so I’m sending you my itinerary (best practice). heading up the CDT and will text from silver city in NM next week
He copies the text before closing the thread, pasting it to his notes app. He’ll send it tomorrow when he actually gets moving.
He gets onto the highway and starts driving south, towards the border.
He arrives in El Paso that night. The sun sets late down here, and the light is just finally leaving the sky when he checks into a trucker motel, the last he’ll sleep in for a few months if all goes well.
He’s up early the next morning without an alarm. The anticipation gets him out of bed before the stores open, and he nurses a coffee outside the army supply store until the tired clerk flips the neon light on, declaring it OPEN for business.
Sam packs lightly but thoroughly. Gets a rucksack, an out of date surplus version of what the boot camp Marines use. Deliberates between jungle boots and the heavier waterproof version. Remembers the heat already beating down on him outside and chooses the jungle boots. He can always swap them out in Colorado.
After he checks out at the surplus store Sam makes it to the grocery store. Peanut butter and jelly, nuts, bread, sachets of tuna, dried fruit and powerbars. There’s even coconut oil in a little squeeze pouch. Barely any extra weight at all. He stops for a minute at the beef jerky display, thinking of Dean. He grabs the turkey jerky.
By midday Sam is at the trailhead, filling his pack with food, water, and the old sleeping bag that he still had around from when camping seemed like less of a remote possibility. When he opens his phone again he doesn’t actually have service, but he sends the text anyway and lets it load as he throws his phone into the bag. Whenever he passes a place with some service it’ll send.
He unfolds his map, checks the direction, and starts walking.
--
Back at the bunker, Dean and Cas are left with Chuck. God, now. Somehow they’re still important enough to be part of the conversation here, left with the task that’s always their responsibility. So what next?
They’re in the middle of that conversation/argument now. Bouncing ideas back and forth in a background of increasing hostility.
Chuck sighs. “Okay, so the family therapy thing was sorta a bust. But I’m still God and all, so we probably do have a chance. You guys see if you can come up with anything. I’m gonna go brainstorm.”
Chuck pours himself a whiskey and wanders off to the library.
Dean rolls his eyes and grabs himself a beer, walks back to his room and slams the door. Cas remains where he is, keeping an eye on Chuck.
--
Sam has covered about 5 miles when the sun starts to sink low in the sky and he figures he should set up camp for the night. It’s a beautiful night, if a little chillier than he expected, and he watches the sunset with something like contentment. It really is wonderful to be in the woods, just him and the land. No case, no emergency. He isn’t fighting for his life or trying to figure out how long it would take to get to the nearest hospital. He can just breathe.
He spreads peanut butter on a powerbar and eats it for dinner along with one of the apples he’s backed, biting through the whole core so he doesn’t have to carry it out. The only part he leaves uneaten are the seeds themselves, which he buries in the dirt like a shallow grave. It’s not like they’ll grow out here anyway. The seeds have probably been genetically engineered to not bear fruit, anyway.
The sun is fully gone now, and the stars are visible in the sky. It’s faint, but he thinks he can even see the pattern of the Milky Way if he looks hard enough.
Sam puts on all the layers he has, curls up in his sleeping bag, and falls asleep under the stars.
--
Back at the bunker, life goes on. Sort of.
Last time Dean asked Chuck what his fucking plan was, Chuck told him that he was on standby.
He may or may have not tried to fistfight God, just a little. And gotten frozen where he stood for his trouble. So now he’s just drinking instead. In the war room, where he can keep an eye on Chuck at the same time. Two birds, one stone, all that.
Cas won’t let Chuck or Dean out of his sight, so he’s standing in the corner of the library where he can see them both. It’s annoying.
They’re still in his house, though, so when Dean makes dinner for himself he halfheartedly makes enough for Cas and Chuck. Neither of them probably have to eat at this point but Chuck at least probably will.
Chuck does eat, it turns out, and enjoys the burger. Dean glares at him and drinks through three beers while half-heartedly eating his own burger.
And Cas makes some sort of comment—it’s not even that pointed, really, it’s something Dean usually could just shrug off.
But he loses his cool and yells.
He doesn’t even remember exactly what he said, now that he’s stormed off and locked himself in his room. Just knows that it makes Cas look down and away. Which, good. He thinks.
He’s pissed off at Sam for leaving him right in the middle of this whole mess to clean it up, for not having his back against Amara. The world might be ending, and he walks??
He’s pissed at Cas, too, for saying yes to Lucifer.
Not that it would have helped much at that point to say no.
But he’s still mad, because Sam’s not here for him to keep an eye on and Cas certainly didn’t help on that front.
Cas knocks on his door. (He can tell it’s Cas and not Chuck because, well, obviously.)
He stands up and walks to the door to open it rather than just inviting Cas in.
Cas is bitter but contrite.
I’m sorry, he tells Dean. Sorry that Sam is gone. He apologizes for having a part in it. But says that it was out of line for Sam to leave Dean during a crisis, but that it’s time to stand up and face it anyway.
Dean loses his cool at that. Tells Cas to keep Sam’s name out of his mouth.
Cas leaves.
Once he’s sure there’s no more footsteps in the hall, Dean goes to the kitchen to get a bottle of whiskey. Drinks himself to sleep, convinced that when he wakes up Cas will have left too and he’ll be left all alone.
--
Sam’s next several days on the trail are a little harder. He figures he should be hitting about 20 miles a day in order to get to Silver City next week like he told Cas he was going to do, so he starts out early each morning.
It’s fine at first—his feet are hurting, of course, but it’s about what he expected. The land is desert scrub, hard and dry, and the only water he can find is in grubby cowpools. He treats the water at least (he isn’t stupid, he has a little bottle of iodine with him), but the combined taste of cow dung and iodine is a hard cocktail to get through. So he’s definitely dehydrated at this point, and he’s probably going to get giardia anyway. He can only hope that his immune system is up to the task.
The nights are starting to dip lower in temperature than he was prepared for, as well, and he’s been waking up in the middle of the night and shivering for a couple hours before making it back to sleep. But it’s not like his sleep is blissfully uninterrupted most of the time either, so it’s nothing he doesn’t know how to handle.
The rain, however, hits on the fourth day. He awoke already up in pain, blisters multiplying and his feet starting to swell a bit. The rigors of the trail. But midmorning and the sky starts to darken, the clouds swelling bruised and hanging low. There’s a heavy stillness in the air, a promise of what’s to come, the flood over the desert.
When it does hit, the rain is cold. It’s cleansing, at first, rinsing away the dirt and the grime, leaving him shivering and reborn.
As the rain continues, however, his jeans become heavy and wet, sticking to his body and chafing uncomfortably against his clammy skin. His feet squelch in his boots, making a sucking sound every time he takes a step, and as the skin softens he can feel a blister pop, suffusing his foot with the warmth of the pus for a moment before it goes cold.
He would seek shelter, ride it out, but there’s no way to do that in the desert. The trees, if you could call them that, are all shorter than him and devoid of any leaves. There’s no rock outcroppings or anything like that—it’s just him and the water coming from the sky. He could set up his tent, he supposes, but it seems stupid to waste a day just because of some rain. Presumably there will be other days of inclement weather during this trip—isn’t it supposed to take something like five months to hike the whole thing?—so he doesn’t really have a choice here but to continue walking.
By nighttime the rain has stopped, but his skin is still cold, his clothes soaked. He knows enough to know that he’ll be warmer if he takes them off, but it still takes a significant degree of willpower to strip in the cold night. He hangs his jeans and flannels up to dry on top of the scrub bushes, hoping it doesn’t rain again before morning comes.
He feels stupid as he climbs almost naked into his sleeping bag, limbs aching and feet shot to hell. If anyone comes up to him in the night—person, monster, creature—he’s going to be defending himself in his underwear against the half of the world that wants him dead.
--
Dean is in the kitchen the next morning nursing a cup of coffee against his hangover when he hears a mug break and Chuck swear from the library.
He jumps up on instinct, gun drawn (to defend God?).
When he looks around the corner, gun drawn ahead of him, Chuck is standing in front of some sort of aged rocker, talking with his hands.
“If you’re not going to be a team player,” he addresses the dude, “then you’re nothing. No one. You think I can’t take away your powers? That I won’t throw you back in the Cage?”
Well, that provides some context at least.
“You don’t get,” Chuck hisses, “to leave the story. That’s not your call.”
Dean hears footsteps behind him, feels Cas’ presence at the door.
Hair metal Satan steps forward into Chuck’s space. Chuck staggers back a step.
Dean takes some vicious pleasure in that. He may be God now, but he’s still just Chuck in the ways that matter.
“If you won’t let me quit, then, Dad, then I’m going to be your worst fucking nightmare.”
Chuck grins. “Isn’t that why I created you? You’re my court jester. So go dance.”
Lucifer grabs the front of Chuck’s shirt and opens his mouth as if to start another speech, but Chuck snaps and he’s gone.
Cas speaks softly from behind him, and Dean allows himself to be led back to the kitchen. He tops off his own coffee, hands Cas his own mug.
“We should call Sam,” Dean finally speaks. “He should know.”
Cas nods, pulls out his phone.
Sam doesn’t answer. Not when they call on Dean’s phone either.
Dean is about to launch a full scale investigation, but Cas chooses this moment to speak.
“He’ll call from Silver City when he gets in. It shouldn’t be more than a couple days. He’s probably just out of service right now.”
“Why,” Dean demands, “is he out of service?”
Cas holds up his phone, a text from Sam visible.
“He’s out hiking.”
“Why the fuck did he tell you that and not me? And why did you,” he points accusingly at Cas, “not tell me?”
“Well,” responds Cas, responding to Dean with just as much frustration as he feels, as if Cas isn’t the one in the wrong here, “it didn’t seem critical at the time. Also you were refusing to make eye contact with me or speak to me when it came in.”
Dean opens his mouth. Closes it again. Lowers his finger.
So Sam is off the map, Lucifer is untethered and out of his mind, and God is in the bunker without a plan to kill the Darkness. It’s gonna be a great week, then.
--
Sam has been doggedly walking on his blistered feet for days now. They hurt, of course, along with the twisting in his guts that let him know that if he doesn’t make it to Silver City soon he’s going to have more pressing issues to deal with than the pain in his feet.
So he walks, one foot in front of the other. It’s far from the worst pain he’s ever felt. It’s almost laughable, he thinks, as he stumbles over a rock and sucks in a breath at the impact of his toes with the stone, catches himself on the dusty ground and wipes palms off on his jeans. The lightheadedness that comes with dealing with this level of pain for an extended period is almost enjoyable. It feels right, feels visceral. There’s no one here to twist the knife for him, to make it worse than he can keep on walking through.
What can a trail through the woods do to him?
So he lets himself take pleasure in the pain, and keeps walking. When the sun sinks and the light thins into dusk, he can see the lights of the city ahead of him. He might as well walk through the night to get to it.
He stops to eat a protein bar with the last of his peanut butter spread on top.
He looks up at the lights of the town, glimmering faintly. Each pinprick is a house, a family, a life surrounding them.
A wave of exhaustion finally hits him. The lightness is gone, and he feels the weight of tears in his eyes. Distantly, as if they’re not his own. Feels them fall, feels his chest tighten and his breath heaves.
He’s crying, he realizes with a mixture of apprehension and amusement. In the middle of the woods. No threat, nothing coming after him. And he’s crying.
A particularly rough sob twists his already delicate intestines, and he leans forward and spits out bile and peanut butter. He dry heaves, but nothing else comes out.
At some point he decides he needs to be done, and stands up in some bemusement. He’s certainly not interested in thinking too deeply about where that came from, and he has somewhere to be.
Miles to go, before I sleep.
He keeps walking, and when the morning arrives the lights have transformed just into regular buildings.