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Supernatural Fic: From the Ground (3/4)
Title: From the Ground (3/4)
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
xaara
Rating: PG-13, gen
Timeline: AU (breaks from canon after Dead Man's Blood)
Summary: People have long since forsaken their belief in God. Only ghost stories remain.
Previous Parts: One | Two
From the Ground
Part Three
--
You know, you’re good, Good said. I would never have thought of that. Setting them up with their own family demon, specifically hunting them down.
It’s not just them, Evil said. The demon had a plan of his own. I just encouraged him to include them. Anyway, because of your gift of sight, it fit in with what the demon had in mind.
Which was?
Collecting kids. Young people with telepathic abilities, psychic powers. I think he wanted to form them into some sort of army or something. It would’ve been interesting.
Oh, said Good, well. Too bad. That could have been entertaining for a year or two.
Yeah, said Evil. You’re sure you want to go through with this? We could hang around a little while longer, wait until he has his army put together. Last time I checked, he was working on some way to link the minds of a bunch of people. He might be able to harness that power, use them to knock things over.
I want to go through with it. We have to catch that intelligent life farther on before it gets too complex.
I know. Still...it would just be fun. But yeah. All or nothing. I try to get them to go bad, you try to get them to go good. You have your disguise ready to go?
Oh yes, Good said. They won’t even see me coming. You?
I think I’m going to be hanging out with the demon for a while, said Evil. You are, of course, welcome to take a head start, see if you can get them leaning your way.
They are my Two. Of course they’re leaning my way.
We’ll see, said Evil. The messenger panel is ready to go, too. Judge their souls and all. Four days left.
When the Balance ends, Good mused, it will be a Tuesday.
Will it? I didn’t check.
It will, said Good. Well, may the best moral concept win.
Of course. Of course.
--
Bobby pulls Sam aside after the funeral. “You know what that gun is, right?” he asks. Sam answers in the affirmative. He and Dad and Dean fought tooth and nail for that fucking gun. He knows what it is.
“It’s probably your only chance to kill the demon,” Bobby says. “Only thing is, the demon can possess people. You ready for that?” He looks up seriously, and though Bobby’s disguised in flannel and a baseball cap, Sam sees his intelligence in the precision of his directions and advice. He wonders how his father came to know Bobby, how many other men and women hunt what’s not supposed to exist in the dark.
“There’s a network of us,” Bobby says when Sam asks. “John came in late. Most of us train from when we’re kids, like you.”
He hands Sam a book of protection spells and runes and diagrams, the Colt that’s supposed to kill anything and its last four bullets, a kukri so beautifully precise that it hurts to think of his father using it, cleaning it afterwards, polishing the blade. After Sam loads it all in the back of the car, he turns back to Bobby, offers a hand. “Thanks,” he says. “For, you know.”
“You’re welcome. Whatever you need. Whenever.”
“Same.”
They stare at each other for a long moment, and then Sam slides behind the wheel and turns the key in the ignition. The car roars and wheezes and starts, just like she has every day since Sam can remember. He takes one last look at his father’s truck, which he’s leaving here, in Bobby’s care.
It feels like a beginning. It feels like an ending. Like a question, an answer, a desperate last quest.
He looks straight ahead and pulls away.
--
They drive west. Or more accurately, Sam drives in a westerly sort of direction, because Dean still hasn’t spoken except to answer direct and important yes/no questions and it’s been three days now and Sam’s freaked the fuck out but trying not to think about it in case Dean can hear his thoughts again and they need to come up with a plan if they’re going to kill this thing instead of being killed by it but he’s so tired all he wants is to pull up to a motel and sleep for weeks.
He can’t stop. He doesn’t think he could if he wanted to. The road rolls away, miles and miles of unanswered prayers, last-ditch wishes etched in blacktop and gravel. He’s never been more thankful for their car demon or blessing or whateverthefuck because it means he doesn’t have to stop for gas, means he can drive and drive, ignore his growling stomach and the fact that he’s needed a bathroom for the last fifty miles.
Please, he thinks. Just that, just please. He’s not sure who he’s asking.
Dean might be asleep on the seat beside him; his breathing is slow and regular and his eyes are closed, but something tells Sam that this is the third successive night of restlessness for his brother. He keeps driving. This is the only lullaby he knows.
--
The last vacancy is a smoking room. It smells like stale beer and curdled milk, but Dean can’t find it in himself to care. “You okay?” Sam asks and of course the answer is no. Sam knows the answer is no, because he’s asked forty thousand times by now. Dean thinks he might snap eventually, which is probably Sam’s strategy anyway. He doesn’t worry about it too much.
“I’m going to go grab something to eat. Want anything?”
Dean shakes his head, rifles through his duffel bag after a relatively fresh t-shirt and boxers. Closes himself in the bathroom, strips down, runs the shower so hot it scalds him and stands, letting it pound his back, until the steam chokes him. He thinks about shaving, but doesn’t trust his weary hands anywhere near a razor. Instead, he dresses and slides into the bed closest to the door.
When Sam returns, he’s somehow procured fresh fruit, and he stands at the window nibbling at an apple, staring out over the parking lot, out to the road. Dean can almost hear the thoughts humming in Sam’s head, a steady buzz in the back of his mind, like faraway static or the hiss of high-tension wires.
He misses the days when this was about hunting the werewolf that killed three people in town, fucking the pretty girl who smiled slow and easy along the bar, coffee to go please, the road at six in the morning, odometer nearly whirring. He wonders whether those days ever existed. He misses not being sure.
“You remember that water spirit in Meredosia?”
Sam turns and nods, waiting for Dean to continue. Dean swallows, his throat dry from days, years, a lifetime of silence.
“You and me, we were sitting beside the lake, remember, waiting for it to come back up. And it was taking forever, like it knew we were waiting for it and it was just fucking with us. So we waited there for like seven hours, and you wouldn’t shut up--that was during those few months you were in love with Emmi and you thought the world revolved around her--and finally I just started walking away. Just a few steps.” He looks up and meets Sam’s gaze, which has gone clear and blank.
“You were what? Twelve? Couldn’t have been thirteen yet, by then we were farther west. But you, genius, you had to get all pissed off and throw a rock into the lake.”
“I remember,” Sam says.
“That spirit was dragging you in before I could blink.” Dean’s hearing the words as if they’re coming out of a stranger’s mouth, monotone. “You were yelling and I couldn’t even see where to shoot the damn thing without hitting you.
“But Dad was there, you remember that part? He let us think we were going in alone, but he was there, watching for the thing to go sideways. And of course he knew where to shoot and of course he didn’t hit you and we dragged you out of the water and then went back to the motel and you took like a ten-hour shower.”
“I had mud in my socks,” Sam says.
“Whatever.” Dean looks at Sam, then focuses instead on the mass-produced artwork decorating the wall above the bed. “Point is,” he says, slowly, “Dad knew.” And I can’t keep you safe, Sammy, I fuck up sometimes, leave you at a bus stop, walk out of the room, lose it and hate you for a few seconds. That’s all it takes, a few seconds for some evil bastard to get between us and I’m not the brave one, I’m not, Jesus, Sam, it’s not worth this, not worth this fucking hurt all the time, not worth Dad, not worth you--
He sees the exact moment when his words hit home, because Sam’s eyes widen and soften. “It’s not your fault,” he says. “None of it.”
No. None of it. Not his fault he couldn’t keep them together, not his fault Dad was off on his own, not his fault that Sam kicked ass at Stanford and fell in love with a pretty girl and punched Dean for pulling him out of an apartment with her inside. Not his fault that he goes out hunting nights and comes back aching for a fight, for a fuck, for something that he chases down interstates, through uncharted towns, across the glimmer of dew-tipped fields of wheat. They’ve lost bits of their humanity on this pilgrimage, left them flying like prayer flags at mountaintops, at crossroads, sold my soul to the devil and all I got was this lousy guitar.
Sam’s arms encircle him, and Dean feels himself scrabbling at the edge of something, his toes just digging in, tiny avalanches falling down and he can almost see it, and he watches it fall away, and he doesn’t know what the fuck it is, but he knows it’s important, and so he pulls himself back up, inch after inch, and opens his eyes and twists from Sam’s grasp. “Get some sleep,” he says. “Colorado.”
An argument flares, simmers, and dies behind Sam’s careful avoidance of eye contact. “Okay,” Sam says. “Tomorrow.”
Sure. Tomorrow. Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow there’ll be another six hundred miles of empty sun.
--
They arrive in Simla, Colorado just past nine in the morning. Sam sees the laundromat, which looks far too much like a barn for Dean’s peace of mind, and immediately needs to run a load through the wash, like, now.
“You don’t have to make excuses,” Dean says.
“I really need to do laundry,” Sam says.
Right. Because it’s not like they stopped last night at a place with washing machines in the basement or anything. “Meet you at the diner.” Sam’s out of the car and hauling his bag across the street before Dean can protest, so Dean pulls into the parking lot beside the Country Corner Café (Homestyle Cook’n) and winces at the doorchime as he enters.
Inside, the waitress pours him a cup of coffee before he even asks, hands him the mug with a nod but no smile. An old woman sits reading a newspaper at one of the window tables, so he moves to sit at the farthest corner booth. She looks up and meets his eyes, waves him forward. “Passing through?” she asks.
“Yes ma’am.”
A silence stretches as he holds the coffee mug between calloused palms and takes a careful sip. It’s hot enough but has a burnt aftertaste, like rusted nails. He grimaces and drinks a second mouthful to erase the first.
Sam told him once, during one of their hushed fights about Dad, that one definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Dean looks down at the cup of coffee.
Fuck insanity. He takes another sip.
“Come on, sit down,” the old woman says, when he’s almost forgotten about her. She points at the seat across her table. “Don’t get many visitors through here. It’s too small for you kids.”
“’m not so much a kid,” Dean protests, and the woman laughs low in the back of her throat. It’s a pleasant sound, comforting, like the smell of chocolate or the weight of a quilt on a cold night. Dean hugs it close about his shoulders, tries to smile, lets it go.
“You’re all kids,” says the woman. A wave of her hand later, Dean finds himself being served a piece of blueberry pie and another cup of coffee. His automatic protest fizzles as the food arrives, and he ducks his head over the meal, picks up a fork.
“I’m Anna,” she offers.
He hesitates. The truth has become awkward, jagged around the edges. He’s no longer sure how to wield it. “I’m Dean,” he says at last. And because he’s uncertain what else to say, “I’m from Kansas.”
Unlike nearly every other person Dean’s met on his winding journey, Anna doesn’t tell him he’s not in Kansas anymore. She simply nods and folds her newspaper. “Good place to be from,” she says. “No place to go but seaward.”
If that’s supposed to mean something, it flies over Dean’s head, so he nods briefly and takes a bite of the pie, swallows it past the bitterness lingering on his tongue. “I’m here with my brother,” he hears himself saying. “We’ll be in town for a few days.”
Anna smiles and leans forward, resting her arms on the table. “You’re traveling?” she asks. “Where are you going?”
He opens his mouth and almost lets the words We’re chasing a demon escape. Weird. He’s never this open with people he’s just met, never--oh. Oh, shit.
Dean doesn’t realize he’s standing until he hears his chair clatter to the floor behind him. “You bitch,” he growls. “You fucking bitch.” He’s here, unarmed, and she knows shit, she’s been prying around in his mind, he can feel it.
The waitress has backed into the kitchen and picked up the phone, but Anna stops her with a raised hand. “No need for the police,” she says. “Dean and I just need to talk.”
And the world stops.
It’s the only word he has to describe it later, because that’s exactly what happens--it just stops, except for him and Anna. The silence crushes the air from the room. So many little noises disappear: the buzz of the refrigerator, the sizzle of the grill, the squeak of the waitress’s sneakers against the linoleum of the floor, the clatter of dishware, the rustle of the wind outside. It all stops.
For a second, all Dean can hear is his own heartbeat.
He forces himself to inhale. Forces himself not to panic, not now, panic leaves you stupid, leaves you slow, buries your survival instincts under a mudslide of adrenaline. It was one of the first rules of combat Dad had taught them, before he had handed either one of them a weapon: trust yourself. Make a mistake, fine, if you’re still alive, move on, keep moving. You panic, you stop, you lose faith in yourself, you’re dead, and there’s no correction can bring you back from that, you got it? Figure out what’s going on, and then react. Wait until you have as much of the situation as possible in hand.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Anna says. “I just need to tell you a few things.”
Dean sets his chair back up and sits in it, his muscles humming with tension. “Talk,” he says.
“Well, to start off, the world as you know it is going to end on Tuesday.”
--
“We are so incredibly fucked,” Dean finishes. “We can’t deal with this, Sam, I have no idea how to deal with this, it’s like we’re guardians or some shit, and we determine the fate of the world but what the fuck? I mean, no, I’m not, I’m nobody’s fucking guardian, nobody’s savior. They can’t ask that, they can’t, can they? We’re just, we’re not.”
Sam’s managed to distil parts of the story from Dean’s disjointed retelling, and the gist, as far as he can tell, is that there’s some sort of cosmic balance of good and evil and somehow he and Dean are involved and the human incarnation of good is currently an old woman with a cup of coffee and some pie sitting in the diner across the street.
Huh.
“What are we supposed to do again?” he asks. Because in this line of work, that’s always the first question. Followed by How do we kill it? And then possibly How do we make it never come back?
He’s pretty sure he’s not supposed to kill Good. He’s pretty sure he can’t kill Evil. And he still doesn’t see where their demon fits in. Hell, he doesn’t see where he and Dean fit in.
“We finish the job,” he says finally. “We kill the demon. Other stuff, that can wait.”
“Did you not hear me the first time?” Dean asks. “She said the world as we know it is going to end on Tuesday. Tomorrow.”
Sam looks at his brother, sees reflected in his eyes window-shattering fires and bus stops and frantic retreats. Dean’s hovering, so wound he doesn’t stop moving until Sam lays a hand on his arm, manhandles him to a stop. “The world as we knew it ended on a Thursday the first time,” Sam says softly. “And nineteen years after that and three years after that and last week.”
“I know,” Dean whispers. There’s something he’s not sharing, something important about what’s going to happen that he doesn’t think Sam should know.
Sam thinks he might as well know the whole goddamn story. “What it is?”
“What’s what?” Dean studies his hands, scrapes a line of dirt from beneath one fingernail.
“What aren’t you telling me about Tuesday?”
“Nothing,” Dean says, but for all he puts on identities and tells people his name is Phil Campbell or Steve Harris from the FBI, I’ll need to have a look at that crime scene, he’s a shit liar, especially where Sam’s concerned. His eyes shift sideways and his breath comes out in little puffs and his voice slides up a few tones.
“What is it?”
There’s a moment when Sam is sure Dean won’t tell him, will keep whatever this is a secret until the time to do something about it has long passed. That is, after all, the way these things usually work. At least in that regard, Dean’s a lot more like Dad than Sam ever figured before.
“Judgment,” Dean says. “It’s up to us.”
Which doesn’t make any sense.
“On Tuesday, our souls will be judged against the weight of the world.” He’s quoting something, Sam knows, maybe the woman or something he heard once or fucking Mesopotamian edicts.
But he understands enough. Because he’s not sure, either, and he’s scared, too.
“Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting,” Sam says, and thinks We can’t save everybody.
“I know,” Dean says. “But we have to try.”
--
Frank Stewart is a normal enough man, heavyset, sagging in the middle. His eyebrows are dark and large and curl above recessed brown eyes. He’s a biology teacher and volunteer firefighter and on weekends he flies kites with his oldest daughter, an eight-year-old named Leslie, who everyone calls Les.
Tomorrow night, his nursery will catch fire and his house will burn to the ground with everything he owns inside.
Sam and Dean watch him as he arrives home, kisses his wife and hugs his daughter, hoists the latter up onto his shoulder and carries her inside despite her squeals of protest. His wife--Evelyn, Dad said, her name is Evelyn--grins and rolls her eyes before following them in.
“What do we tell them?” Sam asks. Dean doesn’t respond; the question isn’t directed at him, not really.
“Let’s go back and talk to Anna,” Dean suggests instead, but when they arrive at the diner, the waitress doesn’t know where she’s gone or even who they’re talking about.
“I don’t remember any old woman,” she says, and Dean nods and thanks her for her time, because it fucking figures.
“So we wait,” Sam says. They’re back in the motel room, their weapons laid out on newspaper atop the sloppily made beds. Dean hefts the Colt, his fingertips sliding along its frictionless surface.
Dean shrugs. “Not much you can do about judgment day,” he says. He wonders whether it’ll be like that painting in Rome, with some dude sitting in the middle telling people whether they get to join his party or have to watch from the outside, stuck forever in some shitty furnace or pushing a boulder up a mountain. The first time he saw a picture of that painting, in a textbook or something at school, he’d stared at it for an hour, caught up in the swirl of motion, in the focus on the one man who had the right to tell you whether you could go or whether you’d just be dropped, sorry Bub, you didn’t measure up. He remembers thinking, clearly, Who the fuck gave him that right?
“We have to try,” Sam says, echoing Dean’s earlier words. “Whatever happens, we have to try.”
Dean looks up, meets Sam’s eyes. “I know,” he says.
It’s maybe the closest to I love you he’s ever going to come.
Part Four
Author:
xaaraRating: PG-13, gen
Timeline: AU (breaks from canon after Dead Man's Blood)
Summary: People have long since forsaken their belief in God. Only ghost stories remain.
Previous Parts: One | Two
From the Ground
Part Three
--
You know, you’re good, Good said. I would never have thought of that. Setting them up with their own family demon, specifically hunting them down.
It’s not just them, Evil said. The demon had a plan of his own. I just encouraged him to include them. Anyway, because of your gift of sight, it fit in with what the demon had in mind.
Which was?
Collecting kids. Young people with telepathic abilities, psychic powers. I think he wanted to form them into some sort of army or something. It would’ve been interesting.
Oh, said Good, well. Too bad. That could have been entertaining for a year or two.
Yeah, said Evil. You’re sure you want to go through with this? We could hang around a little while longer, wait until he has his army put together. Last time I checked, he was working on some way to link the minds of a bunch of people. He might be able to harness that power, use them to knock things over.
I want to go through with it. We have to catch that intelligent life farther on before it gets too complex.
I know. Still...it would just be fun. But yeah. All or nothing. I try to get them to go bad, you try to get them to go good. You have your disguise ready to go?
Oh yes, Good said. They won’t even see me coming. You?
I think I’m going to be hanging out with the demon for a while, said Evil. You are, of course, welcome to take a head start, see if you can get them leaning your way.
They are my Two. Of course they’re leaning my way.
We’ll see, said Evil. The messenger panel is ready to go, too. Judge their souls and all. Four days left.
When the Balance ends, Good mused, it will be a Tuesday.
Will it? I didn’t check.
It will, said Good. Well, may the best moral concept win.
Of course. Of course.
--
Bobby pulls Sam aside after the funeral. “You know what that gun is, right?” he asks. Sam answers in the affirmative. He and Dad and Dean fought tooth and nail for that fucking gun. He knows what it is.
“It’s probably your only chance to kill the demon,” Bobby says. “Only thing is, the demon can possess people. You ready for that?” He looks up seriously, and though Bobby’s disguised in flannel and a baseball cap, Sam sees his intelligence in the precision of his directions and advice. He wonders how his father came to know Bobby, how many other men and women hunt what’s not supposed to exist in the dark.
“There’s a network of us,” Bobby says when Sam asks. “John came in late. Most of us train from when we’re kids, like you.”
He hands Sam a book of protection spells and runes and diagrams, the Colt that’s supposed to kill anything and its last four bullets, a kukri so beautifully precise that it hurts to think of his father using it, cleaning it afterwards, polishing the blade. After Sam loads it all in the back of the car, he turns back to Bobby, offers a hand. “Thanks,” he says. “For, you know.”
“You’re welcome. Whatever you need. Whenever.”
“Same.”
They stare at each other for a long moment, and then Sam slides behind the wheel and turns the key in the ignition. The car roars and wheezes and starts, just like she has every day since Sam can remember. He takes one last look at his father’s truck, which he’s leaving here, in Bobby’s care.
It feels like a beginning. It feels like an ending. Like a question, an answer, a desperate last quest.
He looks straight ahead and pulls away.
--
They drive west. Or more accurately, Sam drives in a westerly sort of direction, because Dean still hasn’t spoken except to answer direct and important yes/no questions and it’s been three days now and Sam’s freaked the fuck out but trying not to think about it in case Dean can hear his thoughts again and they need to come up with a plan if they’re going to kill this thing instead of being killed by it but he’s so tired all he wants is to pull up to a motel and sleep for weeks.
He can’t stop. He doesn’t think he could if he wanted to. The road rolls away, miles and miles of unanswered prayers, last-ditch wishes etched in blacktop and gravel. He’s never been more thankful for their car demon or blessing or whateverthefuck because it means he doesn’t have to stop for gas, means he can drive and drive, ignore his growling stomach and the fact that he’s needed a bathroom for the last fifty miles.
Please, he thinks. Just that, just please. He’s not sure who he’s asking.
Dean might be asleep on the seat beside him; his breathing is slow and regular and his eyes are closed, but something tells Sam that this is the third successive night of restlessness for his brother. He keeps driving. This is the only lullaby he knows.
--
The last vacancy is a smoking room. It smells like stale beer and curdled milk, but Dean can’t find it in himself to care. “You okay?” Sam asks and of course the answer is no. Sam knows the answer is no, because he’s asked forty thousand times by now. Dean thinks he might snap eventually, which is probably Sam’s strategy anyway. He doesn’t worry about it too much.
“I’m going to go grab something to eat. Want anything?”
Dean shakes his head, rifles through his duffel bag after a relatively fresh t-shirt and boxers. Closes himself in the bathroom, strips down, runs the shower so hot it scalds him and stands, letting it pound his back, until the steam chokes him. He thinks about shaving, but doesn’t trust his weary hands anywhere near a razor. Instead, he dresses and slides into the bed closest to the door.
When Sam returns, he’s somehow procured fresh fruit, and he stands at the window nibbling at an apple, staring out over the parking lot, out to the road. Dean can almost hear the thoughts humming in Sam’s head, a steady buzz in the back of his mind, like faraway static or the hiss of high-tension wires.
He misses the days when this was about hunting the werewolf that killed three people in town, fucking the pretty girl who smiled slow and easy along the bar, coffee to go please, the road at six in the morning, odometer nearly whirring. He wonders whether those days ever existed. He misses not being sure.
“You remember that water spirit in Meredosia?”
Sam turns and nods, waiting for Dean to continue. Dean swallows, his throat dry from days, years, a lifetime of silence.
“You and me, we were sitting beside the lake, remember, waiting for it to come back up. And it was taking forever, like it knew we were waiting for it and it was just fucking with us. So we waited there for like seven hours, and you wouldn’t shut up--that was during those few months you were in love with Emmi and you thought the world revolved around her--and finally I just started walking away. Just a few steps.” He looks up and meets Sam’s gaze, which has gone clear and blank.
“You were what? Twelve? Couldn’t have been thirteen yet, by then we were farther west. But you, genius, you had to get all pissed off and throw a rock into the lake.”
“I remember,” Sam says.
“That spirit was dragging you in before I could blink.” Dean’s hearing the words as if they’re coming out of a stranger’s mouth, monotone. “You were yelling and I couldn’t even see where to shoot the damn thing without hitting you.
“But Dad was there, you remember that part? He let us think we were going in alone, but he was there, watching for the thing to go sideways. And of course he knew where to shoot and of course he didn’t hit you and we dragged you out of the water and then went back to the motel and you took like a ten-hour shower.”
“I had mud in my socks,” Sam says.
“Whatever.” Dean looks at Sam, then focuses instead on the mass-produced artwork decorating the wall above the bed. “Point is,” he says, slowly, “Dad knew.” And I can’t keep you safe, Sammy, I fuck up sometimes, leave you at a bus stop, walk out of the room, lose it and hate you for a few seconds. That’s all it takes, a few seconds for some evil bastard to get between us and I’m not the brave one, I’m not, Jesus, Sam, it’s not worth this, not worth this fucking hurt all the time, not worth Dad, not worth you--
He sees the exact moment when his words hit home, because Sam’s eyes widen and soften. “It’s not your fault,” he says. “None of it.”
No. None of it. Not his fault he couldn’t keep them together, not his fault Dad was off on his own, not his fault that Sam kicked ass at Stanford and fell in love with a pretty girl and punched Dean for pulling him out of an apartment with her inside. Not his fault that he goes out hunting nights and comes back aching for a fight, for a fuck, for something that he chases down interstates, through uncharted towns, across the glimmer of dew-tipped fields of wheat. They’ve lost bits of their humanity on this pilgrimage, left them flying like prayer flags at mountaintops, at crossroads, sold my soul to the devil and all I got was this lousy guitar.
Sam’s arms encircle him, and Dean feels himself scrabbling at the edge of something, his toes just digging in, tiny avalanches falling down and he can almost see it, and he watches it fall away, and he doesn’t know what the fuck it is, but he knows it’s important, and so he pulls himself back up, inch after inch, and opens his eyes and twists from Sam’s grasp. “Get some sleep,” he says. “Colorado.”
An argument flares, simmers, and dies behind Sam’s careful avoidance of eye contact. “Okay,” Sam says. “Tomorrow.”
Sure. Tomorrow. Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow there’ll be another six hundred miles of empty sun.
--
They arrive in Simla, Colorado just past nine in the morning. Sam sees the laundromat, which looks far too much like a barn for Dean’s peace of mind, and immediately needs to run a load through the wash, like, now.
“You don’t have to make excuses,” Dean says.
“I really need to do laundry,” Sam says.
Right. Because it’s not like they stopped last night at a place with washing machines in the basement or anything. “Meet you at the diner.” Sam’s out of the car and hauling his bag across the street before Dean can protest, so Dean pulls into the parking lot beside the Country Corner Café (Homestyle Cook’n) and winces at the doorchime as he enters.
Inside, the waitress pours him a cup of coffee before he even asks, hands him the mug with a nod but no smile. An old woman sits reading a newspaper at one of the window tables, so he moves to sit at the farthest corner booth. She looks up and meets his eyes, waves him forward. “Passing through?” she asks.
“Yes ma’am.”
A silence stretches as he holds the coffee mug between calloused palms and takes a careful sip. It’s hot enough but has a burnt aftertaste, like rusted nails. He grimaces and drinks a second mouthful to erase the first.
Sam told him once, during one of their hushed fights about Dad, that one definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Dean looks down at the cup of coffee.
Fuck insanity. He takes another sip.
“Come on, sit down,” the old woman says, when he’s almost forgotten about her. She points at the seat across her table. “Don’t get many visitors through here. It’s too small for you kids.”
“’m not so much a kid,” Dean protests, and the woman laughs low in the back of her throat. It’s a pleasant sound, comforting, like the smell of chocolate or the weight of a quilt on a cold night. Dean hugs it close about his shoulders, tries to smile, lets it go.
“You’re all kids,” says the woman. A wave of her hand later, Dean finds himself being served a piece of blueberry pie and another cup of coffee. His automatic protest fizzles as the food arrives, and he ducks his head over the meal, picks up a fork.
“I’m Anna,” she offers.
He hesitates. The truth has become awkward, jagged around the edges. He’s no longer sure how to wield it. “I’m Dean,” he says at last. And because he’s uncertain what else to say, “I’m from Kansas.”
Unlike nearly every other person Dean’s met on his winding journey, Anna doesn’t tell him he’s not in Kansas anymore. She simply nods and folds her newspaper. “Good place to be from,” she says. “No place to go but seaward.”
If that’s supposed to mean something, it flies over Dean’s head, so he nods briefly and takes a bite of the pie, swallows it past the bitterness lingering on his tongue. “I’m here with my brother,” he hears himself saying. “We’ll be in town for a few days.”
Anna smiles and leans forward, resting her arms on the table. “You’re traveling?” she asks. “Where are you going?”
He opens his mouth and almost lets the words We’re chasing a demon escape. Weird. He’s never this open with people he’s just met, never--oh. Oh, shit.
Dean doesn’t realize he’s standing until he hears his chair clatter to the floor behind him. “You bitch,” he growls. “You fucking bitch.” He’s here, unarmed, and she knows shit, she’s been prying around in his mind, he can feel it.
The waitress has backed into the kitchen and picked up the phone, but Anna stops her with a raised hand. “No need for the police,” she says. “Dean and I just need to talk.”
And the world stops.
It’s the only word he has to describe it later, because that’s exactly what happens--it just stops, except for him and Anna. The silence crushes the air from the room. So many little noises disappear: the buzz of the refrigerator, the sizzle of the grill, the squeak of the waitress’s sneakers against the linoleum of the floor, the clatter of dishware, the rustle of the wind outside. It all stops.
For a second, all Dean can hear is his own heartbeat.
He forces himself to inhale. Forces himself not to panic, not now, panic leaves you stupid, leaves you slow, buries your survival instincts under a mudslide of adrenaline. It was one of the first rules of combat Dad had taught them, before he had handed either one of them a weapon: trust yourself. Make a mistake, fine, if you’re still alive, move on, keep moving. You panic, you stop, you lose faith in yourself, you’re dead, and there’s no correction can bring you back from that, you got it? Figure out what’s going on, and then react. Wait until you have as much of the situation as possible in hand.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Anna says. “I just need to tell you a few things.”
Dean sets his chair back up and sits in it, his muscles humming with tension. “Talk,” he says.
“Well, to start off, the world as you know it is going to end on Tuesday.”
--
“We are so incredibly fucked,” Dean finishes. “We can’t deal with this, Sam, I have no idea how to deal with this, it’s like we’re guardians or some shit, and we determine the fate of the world but what the fuck? I mean, no, I’m not, I’m nobody’s fucking guardian, nobody’s savior. They can’t ask that, they can’t, can they? We’re just, we’re not.”
Sam’s managed to distil parts of the story from Dean’s disjointed retelling, and the gist, as far as he can tell, is that there’s some sort of cosmic balance of good and evil and somehow he and Dean are involved and the human incarnation of good is currently an old woman with a cup of coffee and some pie sitting in the diner across the street.
Huh.
“What are we supposed to do again?” he asks. Because in this line of work, that’s always the first question. Followed by How do we kill it? And then possibly How do we make it never come back?
He’s pretty sure he’s not supposed to kill Good. He’s pretty sure he can’t kill Evil. And he still doesn’t see where their demon fits in. Hell, he doesn’t see where he and Dean fit in.
“We finish the job,” he says finally. “We kill the demon. Other stuff, that can wait.”
“Did you not hear me the first time?” Dean asks. “She said the world as we know it is going to end on Tuesday. Tomorrow.”
Sam looks at his brother, sees reflected in his eyes window-shattering fires and bus stops and frantic retreats. Dean’s hovering, so wound he doesn’t stop moving until Sam lays a hand on his arm, manhandles him to a stop. “The world as we knew it ended on a Thursday the first time,” Sam says softly. “And nineteen years after that and three years after that and last week.”
“I know,” Dean whispers. There’s something he’s not sharing, something important about what’s going to happen that he doesn’t think Sam should know.
Sam thinks he might as well know the whole goddamn story. “What it is?”
“What’s what?” Dean studies his hands, scrapes a line of dirt from beneath one fingernail.
“What aren’t you telling me about Tuesday?”
“Nothing,” Dean says, but for all he puts on identities and tells people his name is Phil Campbell or Steve Harris from the FBI, I’ll need to have a look at that crime scene, he’s a shit liar, especially where Sam’s concerned. His eyes shift sideways and his breath comes out in little puffs and his voice slides up a few tones.
“What is it?”
There’s a moment when Sam is sure Dean won’t tell him, will keep whatever this is a secret until the time to do something about it has long passed. That is, after all, the way these things usually work. At least in that regard, Dean’s a lot more like Dad than Sam ever figured before.
“Judgment,” Dean says. “It’s up to us.”
Which doesn’t make any sense.
“On Tuesday, our souls will be judged against the weight of the world.” He’s quoting something, Sam knows, maybe the woman or something he heard once or fucking Mesopotamian edicts.
But he understands enough. Because he’s not sure, either, and he’s scared, too.
“Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting,” Sam says, and thinks We can’t save everybody.
“I know,” Dean says. “But we have to try.”
--
Frank Stewart is a normal enough man, heavyset, sagging in the middle. His eyebrows are dark and large and curl above recessed brown eyes. He’s a biology teacher and volunteer firefighter and on weekends he flies kites with his oldest daughter, an eight-year-old named Leslie, who everyone calls Les.
Tomorrow night, his nursery will catch fire and his house will burn to the ground with everything he owns inside.
Sam and Dean watch him as he arrives home, kisses his wife and hugs his daughter, hoists the latter up onto his shoulder and carries her inside despite her squeals of protest. His wife--Evelyn, Dad said, her name is Evelyn--grins and rolls her eyes before following them in.
“What do we tell them?” Sam asks. Dean doesn’t respond; the question isn’t directed at him, not really.
“Let’s go back and talk to Anna,” Dean suggests instead, but when they arrive at the diner, the waitress doesn’t know where she’s gone or even who they’re talking about.
“I don’t remember any old woman,” she says, and Dean nods and thanks her for her time, because it fucking figures.
“So we wait,” Sam says. They’re back in the motel room, their weapons laid out on newspaper atop the sloppily made beds. Dean hefts the Colt, his fingertips sliding along its frictionless surface.
Dean shrugs. “Not much you can do about judgment day,” he says. He wonders whether it’ll be like that painting in Rome, with some dude sitting in the middle telling people whether they get to join his party or have to watch from the outside, stuck forever in some shitty furnace or pushing a boulder up a mountain. The first time he saw a picture of that painting, in a textbook or something at school, he’d stared at it for an hour, caught up in the swirl of motion, in the focus on the one man who had the right to tell you whether you could go or whether you’d just be dropped, sorry Bub, you didn’t measure up. He remembers thinking, clearly, Who the fuck gave him that right?
“We have to try,” Sam says, echoing Dean’s earlier words. “Whatever happens, we have to try.”
Dean looks up, meets Sam’s eyes. “I know,” he says.
It’s maybe the closest to I love you he’s ever going to come.
Part Four