The Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, Amsterdam and You
Dean paces because he’s run out of things to do. He can’t sit still and he can’t leave the room, not now, not yet. The television is on mute but the scroll on the bottom tells him everything he needs to know.
To the rest of the world it proclaims natural disasters. He sees it as proof of his own personal failure. <i>Take care of Sammy; if he turns you’ll have to kill him.</i> Instead, Sam is wandering the country, the <I>world</I>, and wiping out entire cities, entire area codes. He didn’t even start small, just blew Mount Saint Helen’s and wiped seventy thousand people off the map. Hit the fault line in California and managed to sink most of the state, as well as causing a tsunami that wiped out another fifty thousand on the other side of the Pacific Rim.
Dean watches, the sky gray now, as it is all over, the sun having difficulty getting through the layer of silt and dust and debris. It clears up some with the nifty set of tornadoes that take out a good portion of the Midwest, and then the dust storm follows. Sam seems to be working on a natural disasters greatest hits collection. And all the while Dean knows. He knows that Sam's got a plan. If he didn’t Dean would be hunting him, killing him, and it’s not as if he hasn’t received one or a dozen phone calls asking him, telling him to do it, reminding him that he’s probably the only one who can. It’s the first time Bobby and Ruby have ever wanted the same thing from him, or from Sam. It scares him more than he’d like to admit
For the first few weeks Sam called him daily. When Dean's demands became outright orders, and really, how many people have had to order their little brother to stop ending the world, and I mean it this time! Sam just stopped calling. He still picked up though, at least once in a while, but he didn’t listen and never spoke. Now that number is no longer in service, but it doesn’t matter, wherever Sam is, the towers are down anyway.
Dean shouldn’t even be able to watch television but Sam's spared the area where Dean is, and Dean wonders if he can drive fast enough, settle quickly enough, to spare some other spots. He has a feeling he’d find himself moved before the area was demolished by Sam so he stays put, in this tiny town with a diner and a movie theater, a motel and a Kmart. He stays here with the cable broadcast of his failure and the pancakes, cheeseburgers and pie served by a waitress looking more tired and having lost more family members in other cites every day.
He buys the last of the whiskey from Donny, who’s closing down the bar and moving with most of the town into a compound behind the church. A lot of people think it’s the End of Days. Dean's the only one who really believed in it before the disasters but now he’s not so sure. Then Texas breaks, the Rio Grande floods and Mexico is no longer accessible from the largest state in the union. Hawaii sank over a month ago.
The diner closes. They can’t get any supplies in anyway. Dean stays in the motel with canned goods he looted from the K-mart. The rest of the town spends most of their time on their knees, praying for deliverance. They don’t seem to realize that the only deliverance they might hope for is cleaning his guns in an empty motel room with two queen sized beds.
The town still has electricity, and water and that’s more than a lot of people at this point but they only know that because the cable’s still on and the news still flows, probably from a moving trailer where they’re running away from whatever is destroying the world.
The body count is hovering at almost half a million then Florida goes. It just starts to collapse inward until it’s gone. Dean watches the footage a dozen times and it’s got a familiar cast to it and he doesn’t know why but it’s like he recognizes the pattern. The answer is on the tip of his tongue. He can’t take his eyes off of it. Can’t look away. After a week of the same footage he turns off the mute button and realizes that they’re announcing the longest period of calm since it all started six months ago. Dean's trying to process that when Sam opens the door.
He doesn’t stand in the doorway in a dramatic movie moment. He lets the door close behind him as he drops his key on top of the television and sits down on his bed as if he’d just been out on a beer run. He lies back on the bed, his arms stretched to either side, touching the edges, and Dean is struck by about a thousand instincts at once but this is Sammy so he peels off his jacket and shirt and start’s checking for damage. Sam doesn’t even grumble too much, just lets Dean clean a few scratches, ghost his fingers over a few bruises and hands Sam a silver knife.
“We’re doing this?”
Dean doesn’t look away. “While I’ve still got the first aid kit out.”
Sam sighs but he cuts a line across his forearm. He holds his hand out like a surgeon waiting for a scalpel. Dean hands him the flask of holy water. “I walked over the salt line Dean. I’m sitting under a devil’s trap.”
Dean waits and Sam pours the water. No reaction. He drinks the last of it and opens his mouth, showing Dean the distinct lack of bubbling and smoking.
He hands Sam a cold can of beer. “Put that against your temple.” Sam does and his eyes follow Dean as he putters, putting Sam’s jacket over the other chair, straightening the salt lines. Constantly moving.
“Can we sleep?”
“Huh?” Dean wonders if Sam's started using the royal we now.
“Us, sleep, you don’t look like you have in a while and I know I haven’t since Florida, so, sleep and then talk?”
Dean nods idly, and he lays down, facing Sam, his eyes wide open.
“Dean, I’ll be here when you wake up. Promise.”
Dean nods but it’s still a while before he can match his breathing to Sam's and let himself fall.
When he wakes up he’s still in the same crappy town, in the same crappy motel, and Sam's gone, but the shower’s running.
Sam comes out with just a towel and smiles ruefully. “Everything I own is rank.”
Dean tosses him a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt that will barely hit Sam's waist but it’ll have to do until the Anti-Christ finds time to go to the Laundromat. He sits down and Dean hands him a bottle of juice from the mini-fridge. “When’s the last time you ate?”
Sam seems to think about it. “Florida.”
“That was over a week ago.”
Dean tosses him a can of ravioli and Sam opens it by looking at it. Dean frowns. “I meant it when I told you to cut that shit out.”
Sam looks up at him with that blinding smile, the one with dimples. The one usually reserved for Dean being stupid and Sam enjoying it way too much. “It’s okay now Dean, I did it.”
“Ended the world? Yeah, I noticed.”
Sam rolls his eyes and Dean considers throwing something at his head but Sam could throw it back without actually having to touch it and that just sucks.
“They’re gone Dean. All of them. I sealed up the last gate to hell three days ago.”
“There was a gate to hell in Florida?”
“Orlando. Explains a lot, huh?”
“The <I>last</I> gate?”
“Yeah, there were nine of them. I closed them, trapped the demons where they are, and then lured the last to Orlando. It was underneath the princess’s castle.”
“Of course.”
“Lillith went with it. It’s done.”
“Apocalypse averted, and the low low cost of half a million lives.”
“Versus six billion, Dean. Six billion, the whole world, gone. I prevented that.”
“Are you sure? I mean, how do you know this wasn’t a trick to get you to use your powers, to get you to kill an innocent, or two, or five hundred thousand.”
“Dammit Dean, you have to trust me on this! I planned it carefully, I knew where to start, how to get her to follow, how to finish, and I did. We’re free. The world, it’s rebuilding. Lillith is dead and Lucifer is trapped.”
“And what’s left?”
“The Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, Amsterdam, and you.”
“And that was the other option right? You and me? We go, or…”
“She wouldn’t have stopped. Lillith would have died, but someone else would have taken her place and we’d be in hell and I won’t do that Dean, I won’t send you back there, I… there was no option.”
And Dean falls heavily into the rickety chair across from Sam's bed because he knew this. This is what he’s known, since it started. Since he woke up to find his car and his brother gone. Since the first volcano took out seventy thousand people, that every one of them was a sacrifice in his name.
“Sam, no.”
Sam shrugged. “I knew you wouldn’t like it, just like you didn’t like it when I pushed you over and took the underage driving ticket instead of letting you get the DUI.
You never like it when you don’t get to play martyr but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t send you back to… not this time, not for me, not if I could stop it.”
“How can you even be sure…?”
“Because it’s one of those things you just <I>know</I>, Dean. The same way that you knew I hadn’t really gone dark side.”
“How many bodies would have classified this as dark side?”
“One.”
Dean shakes his head. “Sam.”
“I mean it Dean. You’re the righteous man who started all this. You had to be protected, not just for me, but for…”
“What, righteous men everywhere?”
“No, for the families we save. Remember, before the angels, before Meg, and Yellow eyes? There was just the family business; saving people, hunting things.”
Sam shrugs into his jacket and grabs Dean’s duffle, still packed after all these months. “Dean, supernatural doesn’t mean demonic.”
“Wait, there’s still…we’re still…hunters?”
“Yeah, and two counties over there’s still a functional diner. I want pancakes.”
Dean shakes his head and snatches the keys out of Sammy's hand. “The next time you try to bring about the End of Days, don’t even <I>think</I> about taking my car.”
“I kept her protected. No lava, no tornado tossing. I didn’t even get her wet when I sank California.”
“Took out both Disney Land and Disney World. Nice work.”
Sam laughs an open happy laugh. “There’s a black dog picking off true believers in Idaho, which I saved for you just to keep you in French fries.”
“You’re awfully kind.”
Sam closed the trunk. “C’mon Dean, we’ve got work to do.”