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Between the motel room and the car, Sam’s face has moved from the flushed, panicked look of before, to grey.
Dean tries to pretend he’s not sending glances Sam’s way every couple seconds, but on the other hand he’s really not doing much to hide it.
He’s seen Sam freaked before; sort of comes with the job especially since they grew up with it, but that was when Sam was small and hunting monsters was still a new territory for him. He’s not that same person anymore. It’s been a long, long time since then.
But Sam sitting next to him is a ball and unrefined tension, curling and pulling and tearing.
Sam’s journal is splayed open across his lap, a license registration scrawled across the paper. His voice is almost congested, tight with pain that Sam’s not saying, and he can’t help but feel a little sympathy for the poor operator on the other end, as Sam all but barks out the combination.
It’s the first prophetic dream he’s had since Kansas, except now nothing is making sense - no obvious personal connection, just a man that Sam saw suffocate in his car in a staged suicide.
It’s too fucking weird to just be a nightmare, especially since Sam’s never seen the man before, and Sam says that those dreams feel different to him. Whatever that means, but Dean’s never been exactly in tune to this sort of ESP shit like Sam always has been, now that he thinks about it, but still, Dean’s hoping to every god he’s ever heard of that the whole thing is just some weird coincidence. Just Sam’s freakishly large brain tripping out.
Then, Sam’s turning towards him, phone still pressed against his ear, face gaunt and haunted, scribbling down a name.
“Saginaw,” Sam is saying. The name of the poor bastard who’s supposed to bite it goes right over his head. Not important right now, and he’s more caught up in the steady decline of colour in Sam’s cheeks.
There’s a few seconds of silence between Sam hanging up the phone and when he speaks again.
“Checks out,” he says. Barely a whisper, and rough, hoarse voice grates the very edge of Dean’s frayed out nerves.
He takes a breath, subtle enough that Sam won’t notice, steadies himself. He needs to be the calm one here since Sam’s well beyond it.
“Look-” Dean says, he’s glancing at the road periodically, mostly to make sure he doesn’t fucking run them off and into a tree because wouldn’t that be the fucking irony of it all - trying to deal with demons and his brother’s ESP shit and they get killed by a tree.
The rest of the words fall apart before they leave his mouth, lost in the hollow stare Sam sends him.
“How far?” Sam asks. The journal is still on his lap, now with an address and a name and knowledge that that person is going to die.
“Couple of hours,” Dean says.
“Drive faster,” Sam’s voice is steel. Dean steps on the accelerator.
Sam’s pinning bits of articles on the wall. There’s a light sheen of sweat that’s glossed across his forehead and neck, but the room’s cramped and stuffy and Sam’s doing the thing where his muscles go tense like a loaded spring and Dean hasn’t seen him do that since Sam and dad used to get into those wall shaking bust up sort of fights. He’s trying to run damage control from where he’s sitting, their guns all laid out on the bed in front of him.
“So, what?” Sam saying. He sits down on the other bed, back to Dean, slumped over like he’s only just holding himself together. “You think Jim Miller killed himself and my dream was just some sorta freakish coincidence?” His voice as an edge to it, sharp but the underlying, rough exhaustion tells Dean it’s not aimed at him.
Dean takes a breath, tries not to spiral himself. Someone’s got to keep a grip on the steering wheel, and he can’t expect the guy with the fucking death nightmares to be the one doing the driving. Dean can look after Sam, surely that’s a skill he has left, despite all the time and miles that stretch between them some days.
“I dunno. I’m pretty sure there’s nothing supernatural about that house.” He feigns nonchalance and trains his eyes on the gun in his hands, focuses on the familiarity, it fits into his palm neatly. The cold metal is more of a comfort than it probably should be.
Sam sighs, somehow manages to slump into himself further, his fingers reach for his temple, the other hand listlessly resting across his knee. “Maybe it had nothing to do with the house,” he twists slightly, like it was involuntary. Dean takes a breath and holds it, and he looks up, watching Sam.
“Maybe it’s just - gosh,” he breaks off this time, and his voice thickens, stuck at the back of his throat like he’s sick, sinuses clogged. “Maybe it’s connected to Jim in some other way.”
He was fine just a second ago - stressed and jittery and exhausted all at once - but there was no risk, he wasn’t worried of something impending. Dean was going to ride out the night until Sam’s brain had run out of theories to go through and then hopefully let Sam get a few hours rest before his head decided to start giving him shit again. He was ready to be the buffer Sam needed sometimes when his thoughts seem even too big for him - and that’s what the night should have been.
Sam curls forward and keeps going, both hands gripped in his hair like he’s trying to tear it out and a sound rips past his throat that Dean never wants to hear again: all pain, raw and flayed.
Sam slips off the bed onto the floor as Dean is standing up, beelining to Sam’s hunched position - and then he’s reaching for Dean blindly, his eyes are wide open.
His breaths come out in short bursts until he’s trembling under Dean’s hands holding him upright.
Sam manages to find the front of Dean’s shirt, and he holds on to it until his knuckles are a splotchy red and white.
He looks up, trying to find Dean’s face, but his eyes flit around, unfocused and his pupils are blown wide, clearly not seeing Dean at all - and Dean has no idea what the fuck is happening.
“Sam?” He says, it comes out stunted, like the vowel got lodged in his throat just as Sam goes quiet, like he’s forgotten how to breathe, his eyes are looking somewhere way past Dean, past the motel room walls, every muscle is tensed to fucking snap.
Dean just sits on the floor, hands clenched around Sam’s shirt. He studies Sam’s face and tosses up if this is their kind of thing or drop everything and get to a hospital kind of thing.
Sam’s had migraines before, and the way he was grappling his hair looked a hell of a lot like that, but the open eyes but not seeing anything is not something that has happened before, and the onset wasn't something Dean's seen before either - at least not that Dean knows of. If something happened in the four years that Sam didn’t say. Still.
Dean’s got his phone in his hands, 911 dialled out, finger hovering over the call button, and he decides to give Sam 30 seconds to snap out of it, to come back to him before he’s calling a fucking ambulance. Supernatural or not, Dean has no idea what’s happening. He uses the hand that's holding the phone to find Sam's pulse, his neck slick with sweat - fast, but strong.
Dean’s other hand is gripped in Sam’s shirt, and it’s lucky he’s got a hold of him because Sam comes to life all at once - he takes a breath like it’s his first, gulping in air like a starved fish, his eyes are wide, and they flitter around until he finds Dean’s, and then he’s grabbing Dean and trying to move with limbs that have forgotten how to function.
“It’s fucking happening again,” Sam’s saying, his grip on Dean pulls him forward, towards Sam, and he has to reach out a hand to the ground to steady himself. “Something’s gonna kill Roger Miller.”
Then Sam’s eyes roll back and like a puppet with its strings cut, Sam collapses, he falls forward and Dean’s grabbing him, guiding his fall to the ground, so he doesn’t crack his head open on the floorboards. "Sam," Dean's saying, hoarse and relieved and terrified, more to himself, than to the groaning form of his brother on the fall who clearly isn't hearing him.
Dean leans down, abandons the phone and rests a hand on Sam's head as he twitches - still in pain then. Sam’s eyes are bloodshot as he blinks once, twice, slowly coming back to himself and Dean realises that Sam had a vision.
“We need to go,” Sam is saying from the floor. “Dean, he’s gonna die.” Dean reaches for Sam’s shoulders as he goes to sit up, his arms trembling with the effort.
“Dude,” Dean says as Sam pushes against his efforts to make lay back down “take it easy man, that knocked you around.” He’s not sure if Sam’s really taking in his words, eyes looking outward, at the wallpaper, but somewhere beyond that.
“It’s happening tonight,” he whispers, the words tearing out of his throat like it’s ripping the flesh out of it, grating and old.
“How do you know?” Dean asks, aiming for reason, and apparently missing the mark as Sam’s face twists, into something Dean’s not sure how to interpret.
He pushes at Dean’s arm, his hand on his bicep, early wrapping around it almost completely. “It’s a fucking vision, Dean, I just know it.”
“Yeah, yeah, my bad,” he says. He tries to keep his voice soft, lighter than Sam’s gravelly tones. He eases Sam’s hand off his bicep, instead letting it rest in his own – notes how sweaty he is, catalogue’s the still vacant look about Sam’s eyes that has him on edge. He’s not shaking anymore, which is one thing.
“Hey,” he says, bringing Sam’s eyes back to Dean’s. “You said it was Roger this time?”
“We need to go,” Sam says, nodding, getting his feet underneath him as Dean slips one of Sam's arms over his shoulder, and doesn't resist it when Dean manhandles him to the bed to sit while Dean grabs their coats. Sam trembles a bit then, but his face is set in stone, and Dean knows Sam would walk to Roger Miller’s place if it meant he had a chance to save him – would do anything.
Who is Dean to stand in his way, he’s not the one seeing people die in his head, after all.
Sam says they’re cursed, and Dean’s starting to think he might be on to something.
The Miller’s old neighbour seems nice enough, caught in the middle of a horrific situation, with his hands tied on what to do about it.
He tells them everything without much prompting, and Dean thinks this man is a little desperate that whatever he tells them here will help Max, even years later.
Then: Sam’s face pinches together, eyes squeezed shut and mouth pulled into a hard grimace. His fingers reach up to his temples. The neighbour’s speech falters, gaze falling onto Sam.
Dean’s pretty sure the man says something, and he must reply, because he’s moving, back away from the poor bastard, arm slipped under Sam’s armpit, holding him close to his side, trying to shift his weight onto himself, so Sam doesn’t topple over onto the pavement.
Sam’s eyes are still closed, soft grunts emanating through clenched teeth every other step. Dean’s wrestling the Impala door open, looking away from Sam when he fills the shift, when Sam goes from a sort of shaking kind of agony, to a stiff, coiled up one – and Dean immediately recognises this as the vision part.
He’d done the same thing in the motel, gone tense and stiff and frozen while his mind played out events that had yet to happen. Sam’s hand comes away from his temple, and his eyes are looking out somewhere beyond the houses across the street. His face smooths out, no longer scrunched together, gasping in pain. Dean curses, hard and rough as Sam drifts from him, his face slack and empty.
Dean wrenches the door open, hand up to Sam’s head as he moves him into the seat. Sam’s pliant enough, if a little stiff and tense, but he doesn’t fight as Dean’s lifts his feet into the car.
He needs to get them somewhere else, more private before Sam comes out the other side of this. He can’t do this in front of this poor man who has no idea of the mess he’s stumbled into the middle of.
He takes a moment, petting Sam’s knee, and he’s sure Sam can’t feel it, but maybe he can? On some subconscious level, he can feel it. Even if he doesn’t have a real concept of it, it's unlikely, but on the off chance that Dean can do something to help... he's not going to pass that up. Dean jogs around to the driver’s side, and plants his hand on Sam’s chest as he peels out from the curb and whips around the corner.
He remembers how freaked Sam was from the first waking vision, and he doubts this one is going to be any smoother. Sam gets a front row seat of the Miller Family demise, and Dean’s just trying to keep the car on the road.
Dean rounds the corner, and the next street is thankfully quiet and empty. He pulls up next to the curb, throwing the car into park, and then he is watching Sam, still staring out blankly. Dean knows now that Sam will come out of the vision soon, that the panic is yet to come. Still the vacant look in Sam’s face, how slack is facial muscles are, has Dean on edge, even if this time he does know what’s happening.
And then Sam is alive, gasping, and blinking, eyes darting around, not recognising the street, Dean sees the rising panic, and moves in.
“Easy, easy,” he says. His fist is in Sam’s shirt, pulling Sam towards him just enough that Sam’s attention drifts to Dean. “I just drove a street over from that neighbour we were talking to.”
Sam’s eyes lock onto Dean’s and after a moment where Dean’s not sure if Sam’s hearing him, he nods.
“That a vision?” He asks and Sam nods again, blinking hard, trembling in the seat.
Dean hums a response, and debates whether to probe for answers or let Sam work his way through this one. Sam blinks again, big and owlishly, he moves his sights out to the road.
“Max,” he says, and his throat has that raw, scraped down to its bones quality to it again.
“Is he next?”
“No,” and Sam stops, looks at Dean, dark eyes looking right through him.
“He’s doing it.”
Oh. Oh.
Max’s body is sprawled out on the floor, blood and pieces of skull and brain and blood scattered across the carpet. All little pieces of someone that was a person. Dean feels a little insane, thinking about how they’d been here only a few days ago, never imagining that this was the reality.
He’s not sure what’s so different about this scene, of Max’s brutalised body, beaten inside and out, that makes him falter. It’s far from the worst thing he’s seen, but still, it takes him a moment for the burst of static to fade and for sounds to come back to him - Alice’s whimpers behind him, she tumbles to the floor, a sporadic tangle of limbs and sobs, but Dean finds Sam, and he finds himself again, limbs finding motion in one jerky push.
Sam’s looking at Max’s body, his eyes have the hollow, post-vision quality to them, matching the light dusting of sweat across Sam’s face, no trembling this time, just still. Dean reaches out, hands finding Sam’s jacket and pushes him to the ground.
Dean moves, deliberately blocking Max from Sam’s view, one hand still firmly in Sam’s jacket, the other planted on the back of Sam’s neck.
Dean isn’t sure what Sam saw, whether it was Alice’s death, or Max’s or what, but it hardly matters now. Max is dead, and Alice is alone, but they, the two of them are alive, and that’s a fucking win in Dean’s book.
Sam’s skin is clammy, verging on grey – different from the previous two waking visions – but that’s okay, Dean makes a note, stores it away, watches how Sam takes a minute, deathly silent, pulling himself back together.
“Alice,” Dean barks out, a little on the side of harsh, but it jerks her out of the hysteric spiral and that’s what he needs. “You need to call the police,” he says, softer this time now he has her attention, twisting his head to see her.
She’s watching him with eyes wide enough that there’s more white than iris, short, brutal trembles rip through her, but she pulls her phone out of her pocket and so Dean leaves her to it.
Sam’s watching him by the time he turns back, which Dean counts as an improvement, from the empty, terrified gaze of before, searching for Max's corpse, even with Dean blocking the view.
“You gonna be good?” Dean asks, and Sam nods. He looks like shit, like a semi ran him over and left him on the side of the road, but nothing beyond what someone might look like at the scene of a suicide.
“I’m alright,” Sam says, and his hand finds Dean’s shoulder, near engulfing it as he levers himself up. His voice is steady, eyes clear. Nothing in Sam’s face that’s going to lead the cops to the wrong conclusions. They’re going to end up talking about this later, but for now, this is enough.
“I’m alright,” he repeats, straightening, keeping his eyes locked on Dean, not letting his gaze stray to the body behind him, and he’s definitely not fine, but he’s fine enough to face some cops, and at the moment, it’s all Dean can ask of him.
Dean takes a breath, looking at Alice as she holds the phone to her ear, looking at the boy on the ground, at them, at the door like she wants to escape and knows that she can’t, that there’s no running from this.
“It’s alright,” Dean whispers, soft enough that it reaches his ears only. Maybe if he tells himself that enough, it’ll come true.