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I.
He dreams.
He dreams Dad drove them into winter, threw a blanket into the backseat and said cover up, you and Sam, we’re headed north, the wool scratchy on Dean’s arms ‘n feet. He itches. Itches again, and it shakes Sammy, where he’s tucked up soft and small, a warm bread-loaf weight on Dean’s chest.
“Sh-h. Sh, Sammy, stay asleep—”
Sammy burbles. Little baby noises, that’s all. I’m here noises, is what—is what Mommy called them, because they sound kinda like crying but don’t mean Sammy’s unhappy or needs to be burped or anything, don’t be so nervous, Deanie, silly bug. I’m gonna take care of him, alright? I’m his mom, too. Except Mommy isn’t—she didn’t—it is Dean’s job, now, to make sure the blanket’s not too rough on Sammy’s skin, that he’s not freezing, that he takes all his naps.
He dreams that he’s hearing Dad’s door squeak open, loud and screechy like the ‘Pala always is, cold air blowing in. Closes his eyes.
Opens them.
The front seat’s empty.
Dad’s missing—Dad’s gone, but Sammy’s snuffling against his shoulder, breathing all fluttery and sleep-slow, and that means Dean has to stay quiet. He’s real careful when he picks up the baby, cradling his head just like Mommy said to do, and he puts Sammy down on the other end of the car seat, gives him the whole blanket, pulled right up to his chin. Dean feels tired, kinda fuzzy, mostly wants to go back under the blanket with Sammy, but he sits up and squashes his face against the window. Looks for Dad.
It’s—really, really cold on his face.
Outside the car seems dark, mostly, except there’s a cool lantern-light-thing hanging off the roof of the gas station, yellow-ish and buzzing. Kinda smells like gas station, too, cold and sweet, from when Dad musta opened the door. Not a lot, but. It's yucky enough to make Dean dizzy. He breathes out hard, fogs the window and has to pull his sleeve up over his fingers, wipe it all off to see. There’s no other cars. Used to be, ‘cause he can see tire tracks, black and shiny and wet through the snow— “looks like Christmas, Sammy; Dad said we couldn’t have it last year, you'll like it, though, I promise—" but no cars now. It’s all empty.
And he can’t see Dad, either, but the store on the other side of the parking lot’s lit up bright, warm.
“Dad’ll be back soon,” he says, super quiet, and he knows Sammy can’t hear him, but it's not like that matters. “Then we’ll keep driving. Going north.”
He counts one road right next to the gas station, long and straight. Another road, and that makes two, splitting off and pointing—not north. Somewhere else.
The stop sign on the corner’s all covered in snow, so much that Dean can’t read the letters, but he spots the red, cherry soda color, and knows what he’s looking at. Past that, even, there’s this edge, where the gas station lights stretch and stretch and disappear—the snow all glittery and marshmallow-y one second, and then dark the next. Dean tries to squint past it, shoves his nose against glass until it hurts, but he still can’t see.
Like there’s nothing out there, maybe. Like maybe the road ends right at the black, and like maybe it’s because Dean can’t see farther that it does that, all erased and dead and—
“I wanna go home.”
It’s too loud. Sam gets startled, gives this wobbly hiccup, face crumpled. His eyelids look pink, swelled-up, like he might be sick, and that makes Dean wanna cry, because he’s scared for Dad and himself and Sammy, most of all.
It’s weird that Dad’s still not back. The air’s starting to get chilly all over, inside the car, which means the heater’s been off for a while. Maybe—maybe Dad’s gone forever, and it’s all because Dean can’t see him, wasn’t watching and let him disappear—maybe something bad happened, and Dean won’t ever know, not unless he opens the door and walks to the building or runs to the end of that road and keeps running running running and never stops until his socks go soggy and he doesn’t remember where he came from—
“Sammy,” he whispers. He’s not gonna cry—he’s big now, he’s not gonna. “I wanna go home.”
Something’s wrong here.
II.
I don’t get it. Why death matters.
The hell are you talking about?
Not like—emotionally speaking. But logically, purely logically, death isn’t—death, y’know? It’s just a shift in the—in the arrangement of a few atoms in a never-ending universe. Uh—atoms that existed as something else before they were human, and they’ll be something else after the human, so really, the human was such a minute, random moment—
Dude, we’ve literally been to Heaven and Hell, remember? We know there’s something that—I dunno, that persists. Ghosts. Souls. Just memories, maybe.
No. What I know is that everything decays.
III.
“I want out of this place,” Sam says, robot-flat.
He sounds miserable. Dean can empathize.
“Are you—” his voice breaks. Throat’s sore, gravel-scrubbed and raw. “Talkin’ about this middle-a nowhere place? Or New Mexico in general?”
No response.
Around them, New Mexico in general’s gaping wide open, a sinkpit of sand and asphalt and plastic-blue skies sagging down into the desert, Sam and Dean’s voices drowning in the sheer friggin’ vastness of it all. Onset of summer in the Southwest’s a change Dean always feels first behind his knees: heat blistering in the pinch-point of denim on skin, sweat running down his calves. And it is summer. Sweltering. Air too thick, too dust-choked, to breathe. Like the mirage haze-wavering on the road ahead of them’s a factual thing, the true texture of oxygen at this temperature.
There’s a gas station, heat-blurred, comin’ up in front of them. Can’t be more than a quarter mile out.
“Dude—” gasp for breath, spit it out, repeat— “y’know that’s literally what we’re doing, yeah? Getting out of here. Gonna meet up with Dad, outside Carlsbad.”
And then it’s smooth sailing from there, Sammy off his feet, Dean back behind the wheel, and Dad gone on a solo hunt. Again. Best case scenario.
If nothing else, John Winchester’s whip-smart with cash and fake cards, so he’ll have found a replacement for that fossilized truck of his, no problem. Which means he’ll stop breaking down to parts and getting stranded on backroads mid-hunt, and that means he’ll stop asking to borrow (demanding to use) the Impala. Easy logic. Though, this time around, Dean thinks he'd never have let Dad take the Impala if he knew the bastard wasn’t planning on swinging back ‘round to grab him and Sammy.
Should mean something, that she’s Dean’s car. It should, dammit.
His foot skids against pavement. Catches, but his heart staggers beneath a hard shot of adrenaline. Problem is his shoes don’t have any tread left on ‘em, and the sand out here’s got a real fine grain, slick as snow. So. He’s gonna need new shoes, cheap as they come, if the gas station’s got a decent convenience store. Gonna need sunscreen, too, for the inferno roaring down on their faces, blistering. For now, Dean rips his flannel off his waist, shakes the grit out of it and ties it up over his forehead.
Sam—
His little brother’s not doing so good.
Sam’s cheeks are dark with sunburn, hair slicked down black with sweat. He’s squinting, and that could just be the brightness, but Sammy stumbles, gives a little moan, and Dean knows it’s more likely he’s dehydrated. Delirious with it. It’s—it could be really dangerous, depending on how much water Sam’s lost.
“De’, there’s no way outta here. I remember,” Sam’s wheezing, and it takes Dean a long, achy second to realize it, hear it. “Think—I think I remember that, tha’ there’s not s’pposed to be a way out.”
“Dude, what?” Dean shakes his head, feels like his brain’s rattling. “Dammit, Sam, a way out of where?”
When he stops, glances behind him, Sam’s a good way back, chest heaving. Feet parked. There’s a spacey, halting quality to the way his beanpole body moves, twisting around real shakily to stare down the highway, at the Mars hills dissolving into the distance, rust-red. His voice is soft. “Haven’t seen any cars in a while.”
A plastic bag tosses down the median, white-and-pink faded. It’s moving in the opposite direction to them, travelling, and Dean—Dean has the eerie urge to follow it, wander back down the road, figure out how—
How they got here. Where they walked from.
Sam, a way out of where?
“‘M thirsty,” Sam whispers, all croaky, like he’s gonna cry. Don’t be a baby, Dean wants to say, because his brother’s started growing taller than him, and is usually tough as nails—but it’s different, out here. Even Dean’s legs are shaking at the knees, vision swimming. Sam is hurting, and all Dean wants is to make it stop.
He clears his throat. “I hear ya.” Canteen’s close to empty, no weight to it, just hollow metal hooked to his belt, clanking against his thigh. “There’s a gas station, okay? Think you can make it?”
“‘S just dust to dust to dust—”
“More to us than dust, Sammy.”
“How do you know that?”
“How do you not?” And Sammy shakes his head at that, swaying, but lurches forward. Places one, clumsy foot in front of the other.
They’re still a good hundred yards out from the rest stop when Dean notices it’s boarded up. Empty. Something cracks wide open and wet in his chest, but he breathes through it, deep, stinging inhalations. Focus. Gas station’s painted green, the stuff peeling off in brittle curls, company logo long-gone. “Think it’s a Sinclair?” he asks, like it matters. Like he cares. “Looks defunct.”
“There’s shade,” Sam chokes. He elbows past Dean, picks up an unsteady half-sprint, half-limp, like one of those baby horses standing up for the first time.
Moment he’s out of the sun, the kid drops his duffel bag, collapses against one of the pumps.
Dean follows, just—slowly. There’s something about the scuff of his footsteps, the pounding heartbeat in his skull, something that’s—pushing, almost, at the silence hanging heavy around the tiny old convenience store, just behind shattered-glass windows. Something spasming in his chest and feeling, knowing, hey, you really don’t wanna be here.
The pump behind Sam is all corroded, metal seriously warped at the bottom, like a car collided with it. Proof of life. “Maybe we’ll find traffic up ahead,” he suggests, kicks at Sammy’s knee. “Hitch a ride?”
Sam hums, vaguely. A mist of sweat—in tiny, sparse droplets—collects on his forehead, trickles down, catching on clenched-shut eyelashes. Which probably burns, but besides an aborted twitch, Sam doesn’t bother reaching up to wipe it. There’s dirt under his chewed fingernails, reddish, and a frayed hole worn ragged through the toe of his left sneaker, where one, dirt-clogged sock peeks through, wriggling. Dean’s transfixed by it, by the sight of the stitching spiralling loose.
“You think it’s haunted?”
“Hm?” Dean follows the length of Sam’s arm, pointing loosely at the weathered front of the convenience store. The whole thing’s listing sideways, a lethargic sort of collapse. Melting in the heat, like that painting with the clocks. He’s not in the mood to fuck around about it. “Moron. Just ‘cause shit’s abandoned don’t mean it’s haunted.”
Ignore the fact that the words don’t fit right in his mouth, fear-sharp in the back of his throat. Dean just—rocks back on his heels, lets the motion carry him backward, into the sun, out of the sandblasted skeleton of the gas station: gutted, steel-boned.
Sammy doesn’t seem to perceive the wrongness of it, limp and scattered all over the floor, careless.
He’s got the Good Book, yellowed and ratty, peeking outta the top of his duffel, and the kid looks like a genuine Bible thumper right here, sweating one out for the Lord. Drowsy, Sam runs a finger along the binding, what used to be good, solid leather, rich brown. “Were there not ten cleansed?” he murmurs, quotes it with a crooked cadence, head cocked sideways, like it’s a joke. Like it’s something fun.
“Can you shut up about the Bible, man, for two seconds, ‘s all—”
“Imagine the tenth leper didn’t ask to be cured.” Sam cracks one eye open, tugs his knees up to his chest in stiff increments. His lips are chapped white, skin cracking where it stretches. “I figure if I were him, I’da turned around and said, y’know, give it back. And make it fatal. Been sick a long time, Dean.”
“You ain’t sick, Sammy.”
Look again, says something. The sand. The wind. ‘S all barren and puckered up out here, heartbeat-pulsing, churning in a way that echoes in Dean’s stomach, deep and dark. Everything fading, and Sam—the dirt sweat-caked to his palms, the blood beading water-bright on his lip—is the last thing left that’s solid. Last thing breathing. It’s too hot, Dean thinks.
So hot he can feel himself shivering.
IV.
The driving’ll be good, once they put the sunset behind them.
Can’t find his sunglasses. They could be stockpiling dust beneath the seats somewhere, could be back at the Bunker. Dean doesn’t remember packing ‘em. It’s been—
A long time. Been a real long time since they were home.
Dean pulls them off the road for a refill and a breather. The sun’s slipping down fast and easy, molten, spewing dirty light like burnt exhaust over the dust-blue span of the horizon. Less picturesque, more Betadine stain. Not that Dean’s complaining, right, because he’s always found something striking about the world at its most honest, all billboards and dirt roads like scars, dull sunsets.
Grain—corn, maybe, kinda looks like it—looms tall and tattered on the opposite side of the street, some faint wind rustling through it.
He doesn’t bother closing his door behind him, after he crawls out of the Impala. Sam’s sleeping, and for all its familiarities, Baby ain’t a young car anymore, still built solid and hefty, never exactly sensitive on the ears of exhausted little brothers. Dean’s knees compensate for the silence, though, giving a low, wobbly creak he hears more than feels. He aches. Too many hours on the road.
How many?
Just—hours. Who cares?
It’s getting old, this body of his. Little bit startling, maybe, when he does heavy lifting and some joint starts giving out before his muscles do, but Dean doesn’t have it in him to worry about it. He’s a hunter, and tired, and Hell-aged—there’s something inherently satisfying about skin and bones wearing out to match where he’s at in his head. A hey, finally sort of moment.
The gas station’s waiting behind him: two pumps, all kitschy and antique. Well-maintained, metal painted teal, polished, despite the weird fact that there are no other buildings on the lot. Meaning no stores, bathrooms, sheds, nada. Completely functional, yet completely unsupervised. Something about it rubs him the wrong way, and Dean breathes in deep, just to prove he can, just to feel the gritty stretch of stiff muscle in his chest and hear air hiss through his throat, alive. Genuine.
This can’t be some hyperrealistic djinn thing—it’s one stretch of empty road, two-lane, unfolding for miles, and fields, and a gas station, nothing that Dean loves, nothing he fears.
Seems more sad here than anything.
He lets the wind breathe for him, just for a minute, air cool against the nervous overheat in his lungs. Smell of gasoline’s pretty strong here, bloated and bittersweet, but it doesn’t make Dean sick like it used to when he was a kid. Too much memory attached, reluctant fondness and all that crap—stuff he gets to swallow down deep, never admit to. Sammy’s always griping about carcinogens, zealously, but Dean’s got a suspicion his kid brother's got his own soft spot for the smell.
The sun crawls down another inch. Or maybe the Earth rotates, some ten, twenty miles per minute, from some distant point of view.
And Dean’s head feels blurry.
The Impala shifts against the backs of his legs, passenger door groaning open. “Hey, Dean?”
“Hey,” Dean echoes. He spins himself around, props elbows against the Impala’s roof.
Sammy, he's—not looking a hundred percent online. Idiot almost bangs his head on his way outta the car, and he’s blinking hard, half-asleep, gangly like a kid coming off of a bad nap. Humongous, though, and coarse with his roadtrip-stubble and long, shaggy hair, kinda greasy at the roots. Temples greying. The contradiction catches Dean off-balance for a second.
“You waiting on someone?”
Sarcastic brat. “Just you, apparently,” Dean says, and this little grin starts twitching over Sam’s mouth, blooms honey-bright and dimpled. There’s drool crusted faint at the corners of his lips, and a sheen of sweat all over his face, because of course there is; take the polar opposite of Sleeping Beauty and you've got Dean's little brother. And just like that, the imploded weight in Dean’s chest unravels, gives way to steady warmth, because here’s Sammy. Here’s his best friend, and only Dean knows how freaking stupid Sam looks when he’s been napping too long, all double-chinned and halitosis-ed. Only Dean gets to be here, like this, at all.
He wants to enjoy it.
But the gas station’s vacant and Sammy’s smile is faltering. A low, seeping uncertainty trickles between them, just the first itch of adrenaline on Dean’s nerves, threatening to cannibalize itself into panic. Yeah. Something’s up.
“You didn’t have to come outside,” Dean observes, question implied.
Sam tosses a shrug over one shoulder, wanders over to Dean’s side. “Yep.” Cryptic with the depth Sammy takes on, sometimes, slotting his thoughts away neat where Dean can’t see or touch. Hidden inside the corrugated half-grimace lingering around Sam’s eyes and cheeks, maybe, or distributed through the long line of his body, slanted back against the Impala, too tense to be casual.
Dean makes the first move, shuffles his foot up against Sam’s, heel to mid-toe, best he can do against the sheer length of Sam’s Sasquatch feet. Brother-code. Talk to me, Sammy.
“You—” Sam exhales hard through his nose, shoves against Dean’s side, two hundred pounds of muscle and annoyance. “Dude, you’re so repressed.”
“Am not.”
“Mm-hm,” Sam hums, sing-song, lets Dean reorient himself—and sure, he stumbled, but he’s not gonna hold that against himself after a hip-check from Bigfoot—before pressing back into Dean’s ribs. The kid hunches down like he can still fit easy under Dean’s arm, and dammit, Sammy’s right. It’s better this way, half-hugging without a centimeter of space left unfilled between them, Sam leaning his weight on Dean like he’s trying to mesh their atoms. The wind cuts through their clothes, just t-shirts and threadbare flannels, but Sam’s a furnace beside him, body heat soaking through thin fabric.
It’s almost comfortable. Perfect, if Dean’s gonna be cliché, through the uneven imperfection of it all, the sense that they still have time to figure things out, and Dean—he nudges Sam with his shoulder, gentle. Off-topic. “‘S nice out, isn’t it?”
Sky’s still a wash of orange and blue, colors mixing harshly, browned all over. Sammy tilts his head up, considers it for a good minute as he chews on his bottom lip, right where the skin’s always raw, peeling. “Yeah,” he decides, in the same way Dean thinks about it, with a little edge to his voice, squinted eyes. Feeling out his path past what’s visible to the unspoken stuff underneath. Then: “it makes sense, I think, the way we visualize this place. Dunno what else I expected.”
Dean blinks. Can’t figure out if it’s just him, or if a grand total of zero things made sense about what Sam just said. “What the hell?”
“You know. Like Enochian, or a demon’s true form. There are these aspects of reality that the human brain isn’t exactly wired to understand, not at face value, so we don’t. We adjust, we, uh—we just hear high-pitched screeching, or see endless roads with no one else driving on 'em."
“Still don’t get it, Sammy.”
“How did you find me?” Sam asks, but without the uptick at the end of the sentence, like he’s aware the question’s unanswerable. Stubborn enough to give voice to it, though.
Dean shakes his head, dude, you never left, lets the conversation slip outta his hands, lull into a pause.
It’s a subtle motion that catches his eye—Sam’s left foot working against the confines of his steel-toed boot, flexing, over and over. Almost as if he’s waiting for the shoe to split open, metamorphose into a too-small, chewed-up sneaker crumbling against the wear-and-tear heat of a deserted highway in New Mexico. Almost as if nothing’s changed, between then and now, decades lost in a moment. They never did meet up with John Winchester, in the outskirts of Carlsbad.
Just—kept walking.
“We’re driving to a hunt,” Dean says, tastes, and the words don’t fit right between his teeth.
“No.”
“We running away from somethin’?”
“No,” Sam repeats, then softens it, “naw, Dean. It’s more like wandering.”
Dean swallows, throat swollen, dry. “That’s fine, I guess,” he says, and abruptly, it is.
Sam’s still entranced by the sky, smiling a little, tired and happy. It’s the kind of numbed peace Dean sometimes carries against the back wall of his chest, takes to mean I’m just glad I’m tired here with you. And maybe something wistful is lurking in the edges of Sam's expression, a slow sorrow that he's been hauling around for—for a decent while, Dean thinks. Holding it in, away from Dean, and he—dammit. He remembers. Wonders for how long Sam’s known, brilliant kid that he is. How long it took him to figure it out, where they are.
Why it is that nothing makes sense here, except for the other person, and how—
How much time has it been since—
Worn down heavy, Dean slips one hand up to the nape of Sam’s neck. Squeezes it, feels warmth, living warmth, and the drag of Sam’s throat as it catches, convulsively.
“Sometimes, I think I’m going insane again,” Sam says, conversationally. “I don’t feel real.”
“Well, gas stations are a bitch like that.” Sure, there's something wrong here, lapping up constantly against the edges of Dean’s perception—but it’s never been because of Sammy. Not his kid, fidgeting, shifting under Dean’s grip, every muscle and mannerism and sweat-matted strand of hair accounted for on some level. Physical, maybe. Spiritual. “I meant it, when I said you’re not sick. Maybe you feel like you are, or you’re trying to make yourself be, but I see you.”
Sees every piece of what’s left of him, Dean’s baby brother.
“I know you. You don’t get realer than that, man.”
Sam nods, once. Curt. Doesn’t say a thing. Overhead, the clouds shift, billow, and Dean closes his eyes, counts out eleven minutes, six hundred plus seconds, careful. Just to check that he can. At eleven and a half, Sam’s pulse cuts out beneath Dean’s thumb. The sound of the corn, the wind—it all stops.
Dean blinks. Breathes, the rush of it like thunder in his skull.
“Dean?”
“Right here,” he promises. And Sammy’s pulse, his heartbeat, is running hard enough, strong enough in the soft corner of his throat that the competing twitch of blood in Dean’s thumb doesn’t even register. Another, hard blink, dust raw in his eyes, and he notices the sky taking on time, real time, getting dark. There’s a deterioration, somewhere—the world moldering around them, rotten corn thick on the breeze.
He ducks his face into Sam’s shoulder, his last solid thing, and hides.
“My theory is we’ll let go of it, eventually,” Sam murmurs, the tip of his nose in Dean’s hair a cold, blunt touch. He’s reading the details of Dean’s posture, maybe, or something rooted deeper, primordial and infinite, the unspoken answer to Sam's question: how did you find me? “These gas stations, the car, human things. None of it means much to me anymore.” A shiver ripples through him, into Dean’s skeleton, seems to knock something loose inside Sam as he slumps. “I am sorry.”
“You don’t—Sammy, it’s not your fault.”
“I’m not afraid.” Sam shakes his head. “I’m sorry I’m not more afraid. I’ve had a while to process.”
“I hear ya,” Dean absolves, nothing inside him built to hate his little brother, his kid, nothing inside him willing to let him go. Thing is, he gets the sense he won’t have to, which is crucial, and he’s gotta tilt himself out of the breath-damp spot on Sam’s sleeve to speak clearly, emphasize it. "It's gonna be alright, kiddo. You're stuck with me.”
They'll figure it out together, like Winchesters always do.
“If we ever find it again, we should take a turn down that other road,” Sam muses, scuffing a boot against asphalt, rhythmic noise. Appreciating it while he can, probably, the kind of sentimentality that Sam’s prone to and that Dean chokes on, because his little brother grew up ten feet tall with a proportional heart and the genius to use it. Sam clears his throat, specifies, "the one road in the snow, with the stop sign?” and Dean raises his eyebrows, doesn’t bother reminding Sam there's no way he should be able to remember that road. The guy was only a baby, when Dean woke up inside the Impala that first time, already aching with a loss he's just now starting to understand.
We adjust, is what Sam said. Filling in the empty spaces with the Impala and endless gas stations and—
“Okay,” Dean promises. It’ll be good, maybe, to see something through the darkness there, one last time. “Yeah, okay, Sammy. We can do that.”
V.
I can’t.
You can. Just hang on for me, man. Hang on.
She s-said no. No second chances—
Hey, sh. Don’t try to talk.
Doesn’ hurt much. Not’nymore.
Okay. ‘S okay, bud, that’s good. I’m gonna be right there with you the whole time. Gonna go with you, alright? I'll be right behind you, and I'm gonna come find you, no matter if—no matter where you are. Just the two of us out there together, alright? And I know we don't—that I've never—I know you. I—I—I've always known you, I've been right there with you, since before birth, before anything, and this ain’t gonna take that away from us. You hearin’ me?
...
Sammy, can you hear me?