Vamphile's fiction and Stuff

Dean was three things.  A Winchester, a hunter and Sam’s brother.  If asked to put them in order he’d never have been able to.  They were all so entwined that he  couldn’t   be one without the others.  For Dean, it was just that simple.

 It wasn’t so simple for Sam apparently because when he was 18 he decided he didn’t need any of those defining roles anymore and he went to Stanford to be something other than John’s son, or a hunter, or Dean’s brother. 

 Dean, as previously mentioned knew who he was and, didn’t let go of things, like cars, jackets, amulets, or brothers quite so easily.  Once Sam left he and his dad continued hunting with the tacit agreement that if a job kept them too long on the other side of the country or well, away from Palo Alto, they’d go check in.  And so, every six to eight weeks they found themselves hiding the Impala somewhere and separating to survey the area, (the area being Sam).  Dean didn’t ask where dad actually went when he said he was off to check a drop box or meet a contact about info or ammo.  John didn’t ask Dean if he was just going to sit in the car all day and hope to catch a glimpse of his brother. 

 Dean did see him though and sometimes and he noticed Sam looking around, as if he could feel Dean’s presence.  Dean didn’t care as long as Sam was happy, and he seemed to be.  Dean spotted him laughing with friends on campus, eating pizza at some dingy place, the kind they used to love when they were on the road and dad was out for a couple of days.  Sam was doing okay, and getting taller, which was kind of creepy but Dean did some research and couldn’t find anything about supernatural events and odd changes in height so he just thought maybe Sam had stopped stooping or something.

 After a year of this dad started to put up more of an argument about going to Palo Alto “he’s fine Dean. We’d know if he wasn’t.” 

At the beginning of Sam’s sophomore year Dean saw Sam getting a blowjob in the back of a VW bug convertible.  He was really glad his father wasn’t here to see it.  He kind of wished  he   wasn’t here to see it, except that Sam seemed happy, but then he was getting a blow job and what guy  isn’t   happy about that.  The next day he saw Sam kissing the same blonde in front of what was apparently their apartment.  He waited 'til later and checked the mailbox.  Envelopes addressed to Sam Winchester and Jessica Moore.  He wanted to scream.  Sam knew better than to have mail, in his name, sent to the mailbox in front of his actual residence.  Apparently Sam didn’t need to worry about such things anymore and so Dean understood what his dad had been saying and moved on, calling every six weeks or so to leave a voice mail, “we’re good”, assuming Sam might want to know if he and his father were still alive. 

About six months later John  finally   gave Dean the Impala, not just the keys, he’d had those since he was twelve, but the title, (okay in someone’s name that might match a license he had somewhere), but more importantly, John bought the truck and Dean had the car he’d always wanted.  Life was… better. Dean doesn’t think about it but something deep inside knows that life without Sam riding shotgun can be a lot of things, good isn’t one of them.

 John and Dean mostly work their own jobs.  They help each other out though, and Dean takes a certain amount, (a really really lot), of pride in being the first one John calls when he needs a back up.  They stay in touch, making each other aware of jobs in the other’s if they’re not going to get to them quickly enough themselves.

 When they find that they’re within a couple hundred miles of one another they cut costs, share a motel room, get drunk, hustle pool and don’t talk about how much either one is missing Sam because they’re not, and if you ask them before their ninth beer, they’ll tell you that.

 After one such marathon session,  with a couple cases of Miller Genuine Draft and some rib taping for Dean and home stitchery on John’s calf they check out and take off in separate direction.  Dad tells him that he’s going after something big and won’t be reachable for awhile.   Dean has let go of Sam, and Dad’s clearly let go of Dean, and that means that Sam, stupid little brother that he is, was right. It’s better to leave first because this losing you identity due to the fact that other people didn’t want you to use them as a defining characteristic hurts.  He kind of wishes he’d been given that life lesson along with “always take care of your equipment. When you’re not up for the fight, go to ground.  And take care of your little brother.”   He calls dad to make sure he’s okay but it rolls to voicemail.

 He’s not a Brother, and with no one to know it, does it matter if he’s a Winchester?  Dean doesn’t want to think about it.  He figures at least he’s still a hunter and so he leaves a trail of dead supernatural things in his wake as he averages 100 miles per hour criss-crossing the country. Except if you followed his path really carefully from Illinois, where he and John last met, to now, you’d see that it’s not so much criss-crossing as cutting a jagged path back to northern California.  He stops and kills whatever he can find.  Salts and Burns whatever’s asking for it.  Flings a few demons back to hell and mostly gets away unscathed, because god apparently, looks out for idiots and Dean Winchester. 

 He sprains his wrist chasing after a Hunkus, but it’s only his left wrist so he doesn’t worry about it too much, just takes some aspirin, wraps it well and gets back on the road. He calls John again, but still gets voicemail.  He thinks maybe he should worry, but then figures maybe he isn’t supposed to. 

 Dean catches wind of something and is going after it full force when he trips.  He cuts his hand but manages to do damage to the serpent that has apparently been devouring the local picnickers.  Unfortunately it’s a Joint snake, which he only finds out later, so it takes a lot more time, a deep snake bite in his thigh, and a bunch of salt, holy water and eventually consecrated iron rounds to kill the six of them he creates before he’d really manages to get a handle on what the fuck these things are.  He lights the mess of them on fire and toasts the dying embers with a beer before he taking off. 

He’s in eastern Nevada dealing with the kind of pun-making, smiling wood desert hobgoblin that gives supernatural creatures bad names to begin with.  The thing is short, so short that when it bites him the teeth sink in to the flesh and tendon at the back of his knee, which hurts.  He finally backs away enough to shoot it, and the thing still doesn’t die.  It pushes him down and skewers his arm with his little walking stick.   Dean yanks the stick out of the ground and then out of his arm and impales the little bugger on it.  Surprised, it falls backwards and turned to ash.  Dean makes a mental note to put that in his journal so that someone who stumbles upon another one will know how to kill it.  He calls dad again, hating himself for even trying.  This is his job right? Dean’s role was to keep holding the family together even when they wanted to be apart.  He doesn’t leave a message this time.

 Something is protecting the woods in southern Oregon.  Anything that gets more than four hundred feet into the Siskiyou National Forest gets tossed right back out... shredded.

 Dean stops for supplies in Cave Junction and gets more stories on the recent number of careless hikers being mauled.  He sits at the diner and listenes, then he sits at the bar and listens.  He  considers the money he’d just won hustling pool, not even because he needs the money, but because old habits die hard.  He decides to treat himself to a motel room, it’s been a while.  The back seat of the Impala is surprisingly comfortable when you were bone weary and maybe closer to drunk than sober.

 He almost pulls a gun on some freaky thing in the motel bathroom until he realized it’s his own reflection.  Dark circles under his eyes, hard angles to his face, a bruise he doesn’t recall getting and scratch he’s pretty sure he should have felt when it happened.  He pours some alcohol over the puncture in his arm and the bites on his leg, (one from the joint snake, and one from that dessert stab-it-with-its-own-stick thing), and then passes out on the bed closest to the door although he knows the only reason for two beds now is so that his weaponry can be at arms reach and laid out with more space.  Even his favorite glock doesn’t take the place of family.

 The hiker-shredder, and no, he can’t find any more information, or a better name for it no matter how hard he looks, doesn’t seem to do it’s thing until late so he spends some time healing, which means leafing through porn and flipping through TV channels.  He thinks about food but isn’t hungry.  He grabs a protein bar from his bag though.  Can’t do this with no reserves.  Dad taught him that.

 He packs the Impala, checks out, and heads into the woods with silver bullets, rock-salt loaded shot-gut, holy water, salt, and a few herbs that have worked on other woodland based nasties.  He’s not fifty feet in when he feels something he hasn’t felt in a long time.  There are warm strong hands around him.  He’s being lifted like a child, palms under his armpits, fingers pressing into his back, except he’s not being pulled forward the way dad did, and mom might have and then he remembers to open his eyes and he lifts his shotgun but before he can shoot he feels something else that’s even more familiar.  Sam’s hand is on his ankle, pulling him back down, and as he’s falling he hears the shot.  He sees the shadow bearing down on him and starts to roll away.  Sam's hand is clammy wrapped around his wrist.  When the thing lands, its elbow is on Dean’s shoulder and its fingertips are spread over Dean’s ankle.  This thing is fucking huge.  Dean can hear Sam breathing heavily but he hasn’t said anything yet.

 Dean has a thousand things he wants to say but he turns his head and goes with “knew you missed me.”

 Sam looks almost aggravated but its dark even in the daylight in these woods, and now  it’s almost four in the morning so it’s hard to tell.   Sam stands up, and moves the thing’s arm off of Dean.  Dean stands staring at it.  “Is it dead? It doesn’t seem dead.”

 “It’s not.  Consecrated iron round to the head, silver bullet in each heart.”

 “Each?”

 Sam shrugs and Dean retrieves his gun.  “They in the usual places?”

 “More or less.”

 Dean empties the clip into it and the thing seems to deflate.  “We should salt and burn it, just to be sure.”

 “No!” 

 Dean looks over at Sam and raises an eyebrow.  Sam either doesn’t see it or chooses to ignore it. They walk back out of the woods in silence.  They’re almost at the Impala when Dean realizes that of all the questions he has, how Sam actually got here is one that hasn’t occurred to him.  The answer becomes clear when Sam’s standing near a large ten year old white pickup truck parked somewhat sloppily in front of the Impala.   “That yours?”

 “Not really.”

 “You steal it?”  Dean’s almost proud.

 “Not really”

 Dean circles the truck

 “I borrowed it from a friend.  I’ll call him and tell him where to find it.”

 Sam's sort of standing uncomfortably, as if he’s not sure what to do next.  Dean looks in to see a pristine interior and the clear signs of the car being hotwired.  “Does he know you borrowed it?”

 Sam almost smiled.  “Not Really”

 The sun is coming up and backlighting Sam.  Dean watched him rock from one foot to another and pick at his fingers.  He walks to the car and opens the trunk, throwing Sam’s bag from the back of the pickup into the Impala.  “You need anything else from in there?”

 Sam shakes his head.

 “So get in.”

 Sam nods and folds himself into the passenger seat.  Now that the sun isn’t directly behind him Dean sees the dirt and can smell… fuck, not dirt, smoke.  If he asked now, Sam might bolt, the way he used to when he was fourteen and the topic of girls came up.  So Dean just starts the car and tries to remember if there is a hospital in Cave Junction or if they’ll have to drive further.

 He catches Sam’s movement out of the corner of his eye and as the sun gets brighter the picture gets more disturbing.  Sam is rubbing his palms on knees of his jeans, not in itself odd or cause for concern, but his hands are leaving bloody smudges and clearly have been for a while from the looks of the jeans.  When he looks more closely he sees that there is skin peeling off his brother’s finger.  He pulled over. 

 Sam looked startled.  “You okay, Dean?”

 “Me?  I’m not the one with second degree burns all over my hands.”

 Sam flinches and turns slightly to look at Dean before he looks away Dean realizes that Sam doesn’t just  smell   like smoke, he’s still covered in soot.  He still has untreated marks and Dean wants to say something snide about beach bonfires and coeds but he knows that this was something else and that he didn’t know what, and goddammit, he gets to know what tried to hurt his brother. That was part of the whole being a brother thing.  Technically so is  acting like a dick, but if he does that now, Sam won’t tell him anything.  “Let’s get you cleaned up, okay?”

 Sam nods.

 Dean waits until the car is  back on the road and up to speed to push his luck.  “This is gonna take professionals.”

 Sam sets his jaw like he wants to argue but doesn’t.  “So does your arm.”

 “What?”

“Your arm.  The blood stains are fresh, but there are old ones in the same place, you never took care of whatever that is.”

 “I cleaned it.”

 “By yourself.”

 And Dean heard every meaning implied and otherwise in that phrase.

 “Fine.”

 They have to drive another hundred miles and with each one of the first fifty Dean resists the urge to touch Sam, to force him to talk about what happened.  In the end, as Sam stares distractedly at his oozing palm and picks at the skin on his fingers Dean grabs his wrist “cut it out.”

 Sam looks up, surprised.  But puts his hands flat on his thighs and doesn’t rub them against the denim for at least another twenty miles.  By then Dean only has to say “Sam” In just the right tone and Sam stops because some habits die hard.

 The hospital is surprisingly empty but Dean thinks even if it had been packed they may have taken Sam back quickly, the fluorescent glare does nothing to help his grayish-green complexion which is hidden in some spots by soot and clearly revealed in the lines that the tears have traced.  Yeah, Dean really needs to know what happened.

 Sam explains that he’d been driving, his car stopped, he lifted the hood and the whole thing went up in flames. His cell phone had been in the car so it had taken him a several miles of back roads to find a phone, call his brother and get here.  Sam lies well, which is  great for things like the ER and terrible for things like being his brother, but he is  hoping Sam won’t lie to him, and that he’ll still be able to tell if he does.

 They do all the stupid, light shining, temperature taking, assessing they always do  before actually dealing with the damage.  The doctor comes to the same conclusion Dean had, first and second degree burns, 24 hour stay for observation and IV fluids, antibiotics and pain relief.

 New Conclusions come once the doctor starts asking Sam further questions.

 “You’re dehydrated.  When did you last eat or drink.”

 Sam shrugged.  “What’s today?”

 “November fifth”

 Sam frowns, trying to do math in his head when he can barely think.  Dean cuts in.  “It’s been three days.” he knows he’s 100% accurate.   November second. There had been a fire, in front of Sam on November second.  He wants to step out of the room.  He wants to call dad.  He wouldn’t really mind passing out right now but Sam looks up at him.  “November second.”

 Dean just nods and watched as they soak Sam’s shirt off in order to peel it away from his damaged flesh.  The burns, as Dean would have predicted, were minimal on his legs.  There were marks though where the fire had heated the buttons on Sam’s denim jacket.  He might have those red circles on his chest for life. 

They find enough healthy skin to insert and IV and take him up to a room, but before they do Sam mumbles about Dean’s arm.  “Sam, I’m not leaving.”

 The pain medication is kicking in and Dean hears Sam mumble, “promised me.”

So Dean lets them sew up his arm, because it’s damn hard to put stitches in your own right arm.  He watches them pull a small tooth from the snake bite in his leg, which explains why it hadn’t been healing properly and he graciously lets them re-tape his ribs before he pulls his shirt back on.  He feels unable to breathe properly until he sees for himself that Sam is not on the ceiling gutted and burning.

 He sits next to Sam and watches him wake going from a drugged stupor straight into adrenaline fueled fear.  “Dean.”

 “Right here.”

 Sam looks around. 

 “We’re alone.”

 “It gutted her.”

“Jessica?”

 Sam doesn’t seem surprised that Dean knows her name.  Dean isn’t in the mood to play games about that.

 “Yeah, just like mom.  She was there, staring at me, trying to…“ Sam’s voice breaks and Dean has to ask the next question, even if he was afraid of the answer.  “How long?”

 Sam looks up.  “What?”

 “Your buttons were almost fused to your chest. You have second degree burns on your neck and hands, your nose is peeling like the world’s worst sunburn.  Sam, how long did you stand in there with her?  How long did you wait until you decided you weren’t going to burn to death too?”

 Sam lets his hair cover his eyes.  “My neighbor pulled me out I think.”

 Dean stands up.  He can’t sit not when he wants to either throttle his brother or throw something out the window just to hear the reassuring tones of breaking glass.  “So you never…”

 “I never decided one way or the other.”

 “That’s the same fucking thing!  Hold on tight or you may as well just let go.”

 Sam looks up at him.  “I know.  That’s why I found you. I’m not letting this go. We have to find it Dean.  It has to die.  For Mom, for Jess, for Dad, for  You  ”

 Dean nodded.  “And for You.”

 Twelve hours later he helps Sam into the Impala while Sam lets out a long suffering sigh.  “I’m not an invalid.”

 “Just discharged from the hospital, so yes you are.”

 “Okay, so dad will know where this thing is?”

 “I think so.”

 “Where’s dad?”

 “I lost track of him three weeks ago.”

 “What!”

“I’ll tell you about it on the way.  Last place anyone saw him was Jericho, California.”

 “Dean?”

 

Dean looked over towards Sam. 

 “I wasn’t really gonna…”

 Dean nods but he doesn’t believe because he knows from personal experience how easy it is to just let go.