ooooDOUBLE TROUBLEoooo
oo..1994, Beaumont, Texas..oo
It was sort of refreshing. Usually, it was the pimps and whores discussions, or the couples arguing, or the shady fellows with shady business that either ended up in gunfights or broken furniture.
This wasn't exactly the place where you'd expect to hear a family discussion. But then again, this wasn't your regular family.
"Fat camp?! You're sending me to fat camp?" A young boy's voice shrieked from across the hallway.
"Careful with that tone, Samuel," a deeper voice warned, quietly defusing what was well on its way to become a full-fledged tantrum. "It's not 'fat camp' –it's a hunting camp run by a friend of mine- and I'm not 'sending you' there, I'm sending the both of you there. Dean's going too."
"Dude... I'm so gonna be the hottest thing in that flabby convention," Dean chipped in, shooting his most dashing smile at the other two males in the room.
The smoothness of the move was rendered useless by the two zits in his right cheek and the fact that both his father and his younger brother were too distracted with their current discussion to even notice.
"Fat chicks, Dean... fat camp will be filled with fat chicks," Sam pointed out, hoping to win his brother's support in this particular argument. For some reason, that completely escaped the younger Winchester's understanding, as of late, 'chicks' seemed to be the magic word to get Dean to do almost anything.
"Exactly," the fifteen year old said, his eyes shinning at the prospect. "Round, snubbed over, wonderfully needy girls, who will just fall at my feet if I as much as wink at them... dude, I'm gonna score so much skirt that-"
"Dean-" His father's warning tone cut in.
"You keep a score?" Sam asked, for a moment getting side-tracked by his brother's strange mind. "A score of what, exactly?"
For one terrifying moment, John imagined Dean answering that question with words that would, not only send Sam in to a barrel of a whole lot other questions, but would forever scar John's ears. Other than the perfunctory 'talk' about safety and 'dos and don'ts' of sex, there were some things that the ex-marine would never want to hear. Especially from his horny fifteen year old to his way-too curious eleven year old.
"Dean- can it," he said quickly, before Dean's opened mouth could emit any incriminating sounds. "Sam, I'm telling you, it doesn't say anywhere that it's a fat c-"
"Concentration camps during World War II didn't exactly advertise their gas chambers either," Sam smart-mouthed, fully using the last couple of history classes he'd taken.
John's mouth dropped. He knew he'd had it too easy with Dean. He knew he would have to pay his debts somehow. "Tell me you didn't just compare Camp IndianSpear -a place people actually pay to be in- to Auschwitz."
"'Come and spend a wonderful couple of weeks at Camp IndianSpear. Make new friends, learn amazing new skills, and get back in to shape while you're having loads of fun!'" Sam read out loud, his eyes searching his father's face over the shiny pamphlet in his hands. "'-get BACK in to shape'... It's fat camp!"
John Winchester snatched the folded paper from his youngest hands and gave it a cursory read through. He knew it had been a bad idea to pick the thing up and show it to Sam. It was like dangling a medical book in front of an hypochondriac. "I can't see where exactly this here says fat camp," John said, tearing the paper in half. "And what's more important, I don't care what it says here... Fred is an old friend from the Corp and he's letting you boys stay there for the next three weeks while I take care of some busi-"
"What are you hunting, dad? Can I come with?"
The older Winchester looked at Dean, seeing the hopeful look in his bright, green eyes and the honest offer painted there. The boy had taken in to hunting like a fish in the water. Still, as a father, it scared the crap out of him every time that his oldest son joined him on a hunt. If something happened to either of his kids...
"Not this one, buddy... you're going with Sam."
"But I'm not fat, he is," Dean pointed out, a mischievous grin in his lips.
John took a deep breath and counted to five. The little prick knew exactly what sort of explosion he as setting off. John managed to reach two before Sam's protests erupted anew.
"It's baby fat!" The eleven year old wailed, using the same argument he'd used every single time his brother teased him about his roundish forms. "And why can't we stay in the motel like all the other times? Or with Pastor Jim... we could stay at Pastor Jim's-"
"Not a option, little dude –Jim's coming with and I don't want you two alone for close to a month," John explained, knowing his son well enough to know that reason went a lot further than barked commands. His patience, however, was starting to run surprisingly low.
"But... it's not fair..."
"What this is not, is open to discussion," John ruled, getting up from his spot in the motel room couch and turning off the TV that had been providing background noise to their conversation. "We'll leave in the morning... now go pack your shi- stuff."
oo..2009, Interstate 39..oo
"Plainfield, Wisconsin," Dean said for the fifth time. Up ahead, the road stretched on for miles of yellow fields cut in half by a straight blue line of empty asphalt. "You sure about that?"
"You're the one who came up with the coordinates," Sam reminded him, his eyes running through the sheets of paper he'd printed the night before. "How did Castiel found those coordinates, anyway?"
"Didn't say... just that there was a 'odd energy surrounding the place' and some demonic comings and goings that made him suspect the Colt was involved."
"Yeah... but why that place? There's nothing special about these coordinates, just empty fields as far as the eye can see," Sam wondered, the files in his hands providing no answer whatsoever.
"Well, maybe that's the reason why the demons hid it there... less chance of someone stumbling across their hiding place."
Sam looked up, watching his brother's profile, the squint of his eyes against the warm sun because he'd forgotten his sunglasses inside his duffel -again.
Dean knew that that was a weak argument, even Sam could see that, but he seemed comfortable with trusting Castiel's word. And Sam guessed that, if his dealings with angels had had less to do with back stabbing and veiled –and sometimes not so veiled- threats and more to do with fighting alongside and being rescued from Hell, he'd probably trust them a little bit more too.
And there was no denying that this angel in particular seemed to have a genuine affection for his brother, so Sam figured that maybe Dean did have reasons to take Castiel's word at face value.
But Lucifer and the demons of this earth were hunting him down to force Sam in letting the fallen angel wear his meat; and Michael and most of the angels hanging around were gang-ho to get their hands on Dean and have him gift-wrapped for the archangel. They couldn't afford to just trust anyone, not even those who'd proven to be trust worthy.
But then again, he was the one with the demon blood in him and who'd started the apocalypse... who was he to talk about trust?
"It can also be just as easily a trap," Sam said anyway, swallowing the bile that rose to his mouth.
Sam hated the fact that his life had taken such a turn that talking to his own brother felt like talking to a complete stranger, never really knowing where his boundaries stood, never truly sure when he'd spoken too much.
Dean had welcomed him back, said that they could have a fresh start, that they only had each other to fight against a fate that wasn't kind to either. But Sam could help to wonder if, had circumstances been different and they didn't had all this mess to deal with, maybe –just maybe- Dean wouldn't have bothered to give him a second chance.
The problem with being given a second chance, glad as Sam was to be given the opportunity to fight alongside Dean rather than alone, was that it felt too much like he was a convict on probation.
Every action measured, every word weighed, every decision held in comparison with the Sam of before.
Like questioning the loyalty of the one angel who had turned his back on everything to stand at their side.
When Dean's eyes turned from the empty road to look at him, Sam was sure that his brother was going to throw just that at his face and flat out tell him to get out.
"You're right," Dean said, his gaze returning to the blue asphalt. "But it's either this lead or sitting on our asses, too scared to go out and actually fight this damn war."
Sam let out a breath that he wasn't aware to be holding hostage inside his chest. Dean was right; the Colt was their only option, other than let Michael take a ride on his body, and any lead on it was a good lead. Trap or no trap, they would deal with it, together.
Sam was just happy that he'd tested yet another boundary and his place still held.
oo..1994, Red Fish Cove, Texas - Camp IndianSpear..oo
John had to admit: a lot of those kids were a bit on the extra-bubble side. But free bed was free bed and he figured it was high time Sam either learned to deal with his figure or loose it. Odds were the boy would be loosing it all anyway when he hit his growth spurt, but until that happen John was growing tired of the constant melodrama that seem to follow his youngest around.
Either way, he was sure Fred would take good care of his boys and they would end up enjoying themselves. Eventually.
John eyed his sons as they went around to back to collect their bags. Sam was dragging his feet like a condemned man walking to the gallows and even Dean had lost some of the initial glee at the prospect of easy conquests.
Looking closer, John wonder if his glee was all the boy had lost. Had Dean been looking that pale a few hours ago?
"Dean, you feeling ok?" John asked, the palm of his right hand automatically searching his son's forehead. He felt kind of warm, but then again, it was a warm day and they were close to the sea.
Dean shrugged away from the touch, a smile spreading over his lips. It was as fake as Pamela Anderson's boobs. "I'm fine, dad... stow the touchy-feeling mojo- you'll scare my fans away."
John raised one eyebrow, looking over Dean's head to the chubby kids making their way to the main offices. There weren't that many girls amongst them and the few that were seemed more interested in catching up with their old acquaintances than making new ones.
"John Winchester!"
John turned around, coming to face with Frederico Gianni. The bald version of the man he'd served with twenty years ago. "Fred! What you did you do to your hair, man?" He said, extending a hand to greet the other man. "Lost a bet with your barber?"
The shorter, Italian man smiled broadly, firmly grasping the offered hand. "Nah, man! The ungrateful little bastards file for a divorce and left me with a bald head and a hairy chest!- So, how's things been for you?"
John eyed his two sons, standing a few feet away, quietly watching the rest of the group additions. Mapping the territory. Studying their enemies, or at least Sam was. John was sure of that. "Same old... you know how it goes," John answered vaguely. "Business is going really well for you, I see."
Fred eyed the couple of cars still pulling over and the group of kids, ages varying from ten to sixteen, already gathered near the reception area, waiting to be assigned to their camp groups. "Yeah... figured it was time to grab all that stuff that they taught us in the Corp and put it to some sort of use back home, you know?"
John found himself nodding, not sure what he was agreeing with. He'd give anything to not have to teach his sons what he'd learned in the Marines, what he'd learned since, about hunting monsters. He figured that was not what Fred meant.
"Those your kids?" Fred asked, eyeing the quiet pair.
John nodded, unable to hide the pride in his voice whenever he got to show his boys to his friends. They were the best thing he'd ever accomplish in his life. They were Mary's legacy. "Tall one's Dean, the other's Sam," he pointed out, the boys sending an uninterested look towards the two talking men as they heard their names. John turned to the other man, genuinely thankful to the man, but suddenly unsure about leaving his boys behind for such a long period. "Listen, Fred, I really appreciate your offer-"
"Don't even mention it, Winchester... that's what friends are for- and after all that happen, with Mary and all... I just wish you'd taken my help then –but you just dropped out of the map with those kids. What have you been up to, man?"
John closed his eyes, willing the images of Mary, pinned to the ceiling, burning. "Just surviving, Fred, just surviving."
oo..2009, Plainfield, Wisconsin..oo
Dean stepped out of the car, stretching limbs that had been confined to a small space for too many hours. Extending his fisted hands high above his head, he winced before he could even complete the gesture. The nagging, dull pain on his right side, the one that had been bugging him for days now, had suddenly graduated in to something closer to a needling, stabbing pain.
"You ok?" Sam asked, mimicking his brother's gestures on the other side of the car.
Dean gave him a quick glance, before closing his door with a large squeak and rolling his shoulders. "Sore muscles, that's all," he said, making his way to the abandoned house a couple of yards away.
The place was deserted. Looked like it'd been deserted for years. Better yet, the place was being eaten by the desert, or at least, by Wisconsin's version of it.
Once upon a time, there had been a two story high house in that place, alongside with a barn and what looked like a silo. Now, there was nothing but a creepy house, looking like it might fall apart with the gentlest of winds, one wall of the barn and nothing but the base of the silo. Everywhere, tall weeds had taken over the ground. On the far end of the house, abandoned to its own whims, the cornfield had grown wild and high, looming like a blond giant, waiting to eat the rest of the place.
"Well, gotta give them points for the extra creepiness," Dean muttered, taking in his surroundings and trying to guess where Castiel's coordinates might be pointing to specifically.
"Oh," Sam let out, crouching near a piece of wood half buried in the ground. "I'd say creepy doesn't really begin to cover it."
Dean joined his brother, watching as Sam's long fingers pried the derelict wood from the dirt and dusted it clean enough to make out the black, faded, letters on it. "G-in... Grin?" Dean ventured with a smirk. "The Grins lived here?"
Sam used his nail to wipe the plaque and get a better look at the barely there remaining letter. "I think that's an E, not an R-"
"Gein?" Dean ventured, the name tasting unfamiliar in his lips.
"Oh... geez!" Sam said, throwing the piece of wood away, his face contorting in repulse, like the name alone brought a foul smell to his nose. "No wonder the demons chose this place to hide the Colt. No one would ever set foot here voluntarily," he said, looking around and seeing everything in a complete different view. "Do you realize which abandoned farm this is?" Sam asked, when he looked at Dean's face and didn't see the same disgust reflected there.
Dean looked around, searching for a clue in to what was, apparently, so obvious to his geek brother. "The not-Grin's farm?"
"Edward Theodore Gein," Sam said, looking around like he expected the man to pop up from one of the turfs of weed when called.
"Ed Gein, the serial killer Ed Gein?" Dean asked with a whistle. Sam nodded. "Holy crap!"
"Well, he was convicted on 'only' two accounts of murder, but the number of bodies he picked up from various cemeteries and took home to make... hum... furniture with, is in the dozens. Guy was a really psycho," Sam corrected out of habit.
"That's putting it mildly, dude," Dean piped in, his eyes alight with excitement. "This guy was Hitchcock's inspiration for Psycho, he was Norman Bates --mommy issues wrapped up in a nice bag of crazy with batshit on top--"
"You know what this means, right?" Sam said, not nearly as excited as his older brother as he took out the EMF reader and, predicatively, watch it go crazy for two seconds before exploding in a rain of sparks in his hands.
"Yeah... I know what this mean," Dean said with a sigh.
To say that there might be a couple of pissed off spirits around, not to mention Ed himself, was like saying that the Grand Canyon was a shallow hole on the ground.
oo..1994, Camp IndianSpear..oo
Summer camp sucked ass. He'd often hear the other kids complaining about them in the different schools he'd been at, but Dean had always thought that they were just being drama queens. Turns out, some of them were actually right.
For one, eating healthy was killing Dean's stomach. Dad had always made sure that they ate their vegetables and that they always had plenty of fruit on their plates, but living on the road, more often than not, meant eating at roadside diners and greasy places. Dean's stomach needed its regular coating of grease, or so Dean had started to learn when getting cramps in his belly started to be a regular thing for him, three days in to camp. There was also the puking, but given the stuff they had to eat –and there was no convincing Dean that broccolis weren't part of some evil shapeshifter community plan, whose goal was to turn every human in to one of them- upchucking that green, ugly menace a couple of hours after it'd gotten in, wasn't exactly a source of concern for the young hunter.
And then there were the chores.
The big thing around camp, since day one, had been the boat trip at the end of the week. The fishing day in high sea was meant to be the final prize for the different teams competition but, from the size of preparations, everyone would be going.
The competition, in itself, had been pretty lame. It was mostly chores and PT duty. It wasn't that different from life as John Winchester's sons.
Which was why Dean had pretty much excelled at most of them –paper collages were things of evil and unless there was some salting and burning involved, Dean refused to do them right- without even trying too hard.
The other kids eyed him like he was a freak, though. It had taken him a couple of days, but Dean had finally figured that it was the fact that, every single time that they had physical training, Dean would breeze through the sprints and the push ups and the obstacle courses and the swimming like he was born in to it. Which he kind of was.
The groups monitors didn't like him that much either, but that was the one thing that Dean was kind of proud of, being smart enough to blame it on his smart mouth and know-it-all attitude. But then again, it was hard to keep his mouth shut when the people in charge forced them to sit through things like 'how to built a fire' and 'how to track a deer in the woods' and then expected him to act like he didn't knew all of that already. That he didn't know more than them on a couple of matters too.
Strangely enough –and annoyingly so- the very same reasons why Dean had become the camp's oddball and earned him more than a couple of stinky eyes, were the exact same reasons that had made Sam in to some sort of wonder boy. The prodigy of the camp.
Like Dean, Sam had earned most of the points that his team had managed to accumulate during the course of the games, excelling in every mental, physical and girlish challenge that the camp people could come up with. He had, after all, been raised under the same drill-sergeant watchful look as Dean, which meant that running three miles and finishing it with two laps in the pool was considered almost as stretching out for any Winchester.
The camp monitors thought Sam was adorable, with his chubby little baby cheeks and his far too grown-up brain. Dean couldn't wait for that fishing trip to come, so that he could drown his adorable little brother.
Because of their age gap, Sam had been placed in a different set of cabins then Dean and the rest of the boys his age. The younger kids' cabins weren't really that far from where Dean was staying, but still far enough to leave the protective older brother worried.
That is, until Dean remembered to corner Gavin, one of Sam's group, and bribe him with unending supplies of bacon-flavored chips, if he kept a close eye on Sam and reported back to Dean. After Dean had forced Sam to salt every door and window in his cabin, of course.
Just because they were playing normal didn't mean that they got to play stupid.
And as it turned out, Dean didn't get to play, period.
There weren't that many girls to begin with, it being a camp that advertised 'gun-training' and 'hunting' and 'experiencing the wilderness' and all; and most of the ones that were there, had clustered together in to some kind of fraternity, where they clapped each others backs and announced, repeatedly to anyone willing to listen –and a lot others who didn't- how they had been tricked and betrayed by their evil parents in to coming to that place of doom.
The only thing they ever did was look at him and giggle, often enough that Dean had started to wonder if there was something funny about his face.
He decided early on that they were all crazy and, therefore, he was safer if he didn't go near them. Well, all crazy, except for Jules.
Jules was in his group and at sixteen, she had all the perks and peaks that Dean enjoyed in his companions of the fairer sex. She also wanted nothing to do with him except for being friends.
Dean had almost made a fool of himself the first time that Jules invited him for a walk on the beach. Figuring that that was girl talk for 'I want to stick my tongue down your throat', all he got himself was a hard push and a soft landing on the sand when he tried to stick his tongue down her throat.
And then she'd just laughed good-naturally and helped him up and their 'walks on the beach' became nothing more than walks on the beach. Dean learned to enjoy that, even if it was a girly thing to do.
Turns out, Jules was a pretty cool chick to hang out with. She took very seriously all the tasks that the camp trainers and monitors gave them, firmly determined to loose whatever extra weight she'd entered the camp with. That girl had goals, and they had nothing to do with being popular or wearing a pretty dress to the prom.
Jules wanted to be a soldier, she'd once told Dean in one of their walks. She wanted to fight for her country, travel the world and save people, help those who couldn't defend themselves... like Batman, she'd said. Dean fell a little bit in love with her, right there and then.
Jules was really, really cool. For a chick.
Summer camp sucked ass, but it wasn't without its perks. Dean and Jules had teamed up and had managed to convince Todd, the camp manager, that it would be a great idea to add snorkeling and underwater spear fishing to the fishing trip's activities. The man had been sort of reluctant to agree to it, at first, but it turned out that Jules puppy-dog blue eyes were just as effective as Sam's.
oo..2009, Gein Farm, Plainfield, Wisconsin..oo
The search in and around the dilapidated structures in the old farm turned out to be a waste of time. There was no sign of demonic presence anywhere outside, except for the slightly off, heavily wrong vibe that the whole place gave the two brothers, which had more to do with its history than the fact that demons might've walked that piece of land recently.
The number of people who had met their end there, not to mention the ones who had been dug up and brought to that farm to be used as trophies and lampposts and key chains and whatever other craziness that had sprouted from Gein's deranged mind, had left a hefty mark there.
Gein had left his mark there too. Dean had heard some rumors that a demon had been involved in the whole sordid mess, but he'd never been able to confirm it. The whole situation had happened over fifty years ago. Not even Bobby was a hunter then. There might be some truth to it, but he knew too damn well how evil ordinary human beings could be; he'd seen the monstrous things that people did to other people. It wouldn't surprise him that much to learn that the demon rumor was nothing but just that... a rumor.
Still, it made sense that the demons would pick a place like this as their secret hide out. The pure evilness that the ground itself exuded there was probably enough to make any lowlife demon feel right at home.
The decaying house was the last place they had to search. The closed off, perfect for a trap, decaying house. Which meant taking some precautions before going in.
Dean wiped the blood from his left palm and finished the anti-angel sigil. One bloody hand pressed against it and they were relatively safe from uninvited angelic visits.
They'd tried a couple of alternatives to the whole 'cutting themselves up' every time they needed to make a place secure, before they started to look like either anemic psychos or frigging Twilight fans.
Other people's blood didn't work. They'd tried with Bobby's, figuring that if they could make his do the job, they might start stoking up at the blood bank.
They hadn't even needed an angel to test it. The tingling feeling that Dean remembered feeling in the tip of his fingers that first time he draw the symbols like he'd seen Anna and Castiel do, just wasn't there when he used Bobby's blood.
The same thing happened when they tried to draw the blood beforehand and store it properly. It had to be their blood and it had to be fresh.
Well, so far, it hadn't so much been 'their' blood, but Dean's blood. Sam kept putting on hold using his blood for the sigil.
They were brothers, Dean had told him countless times. In theory, what worked with Dean's blood, worked with Sam because they were basically the same. Sam would agree on the general idea, get quiet and keep on insisting to draw the devil traps and laying out he salt lines while Dean went all artistic with his blood.
Dean knew exactly of what Sam was afraid of. He could remember all too well the sight of his baby brother sucking the blood off the neck of a poor possessed woman. So Dean didn't insist when Sam refused to put their theories to the test. They were both scared of finding out who was right.
"Got the entrances all covered," Sam announced when he rejoined Dean, throwing the empty spray-paint can in to the pile of empty boxes near the front porch. "Ready to go in?"
Dean nodded, thrusting his uncut hand in a hasty grab for the wall when the world suddenly dimmed around him.
"You ok?" Sam asked, two steps bringing him in to the shadow of his brother. He extended one hand shyly, afraid to complete the gesture and actually touch Dean. "Just how much blood did you use?"
Dean blinked, looking at his bleeding hand like he'd forgotten it was there. There was no way one teeny tiny cut had caused that. "It's just the heat, man... we're in the cold so damn much that anything over 'pleasantly warm' just overcooks my charm," Dean said with a practiced smirk. The second the words were out of mouth, Dean knew that he'd just offered Sam the prefect opportunity to take revenge on all the 'princess' and 'Samantha' remarks that Dean's ever made and call him 'delicate flower' in return.
The witty remark never arrived and after a couple of seconds of relief, Dean found himself actually disappointed for not having been mocked. "Lets just go check this out... this place gives me the creeps. The sooner we're out of here, the better."
Sam lingered for a while, his eyes running over Dean and trying to measure how much of what he was saying was true and how much was crap.
It wasn't unheard of for Dean to be hurt or sick and either not noticing it or worse, knowing it and not telling anyone. Used to be a stubborn thing, one more degree of damage inflicted by their father on Dean's psych, along with the 'always look strong and able to your enemies' crap or the 'a real soldier soldiers on through the thick and thin' bull. It used to annoy the hell out of Sam. Now it scared him.
Now, Sam could never be sure if Dean was hiding something because he was being stubborn like he'd been his whole life or because he thought Sam was the enemy that he had to look strong in front of.
Dean had told him about his little trip to the future which, in itself, had been weird and frightening enough, specially the part where Sam failed to say no to Lucifer and killed his own brother, not to mention the whole world in the crapper part. Sure, they were largely aware that the apocalypse was on and, more than most people, they knew exactly what that meant — but to know exactly hoe millions would die... how a whole existence would be wiped out...
And while Dean had given all the details that he could remember of how Lucifer had attacked using the Croatoan virus and what had happened to the people they cared about and the exact location of the refugee camp and condition of his dilapidated baby, Dean had been a bit vague about everything else.
Like, for example, what happened to him while he was there. He mentioned coming across a creepy little girl, playing with broken glass in the middle of the street; it took Sam walking in on him accidentally when Dean was coming out of the shower for Sam to find out about the four inch cut in Dean's side.
Dean had told Sam about the almost being eaten alive by the zombie-like citizens of the future and how a group of soldiers had showed up in the last frigging minute to blast them all away; he never mentioned that he'd been caught in the cross-fire or that he had a bullet graze on his left arm to prove it.
Or even the mention of being captured by his future self, who was a complete dick, apparently, but completely fail to say that the egg-size bump on his head -from being knocked unconscious by said future-dick- was the main reason why Sam had been driving the car for the next couple of days after that, given that Dean was seeing two of everything.
Sam was sure that seeing a Lucifer-him in the future killing a dick-Dean wouldn't do much to help rebuilt the trust that Sam had shattered by choosing Ruby over his brother. He was also sure that Dean was lying about the whole 'feeling fine' crap. He just couldn't tell if this was some hidden wound that had lingered from the trip to 2014 or something else entirely.
oo..1994, Camp IndianSpear..oo
"You're limping... why are you limping?" Sam looked up from where he was sitting, eating his breakfast.
Meals were usually the time of the day when both Winchester meet up and Sam reluctantly presented his 'report' on daily occurrences to his older brother. Usually they did that over the line, while they waited their turn to get whatever meal it was being served at the time, after which Sam would scowl at Dean and beg him not to embarrass him in front of his new friends.
Not that the nerdy little guys would say anything in front of Dean. Apparently, the only saving grace of being the camp's freak was the fact that they all thought that Dean would beat the crap out of them if they so much as look at Sam weirdly, and that was an assumption that Dean was just fine with maintaining. He probably would, anyway.
"I'm not limping," Dean proclaim. The betraying wince, when he tried to prove his point by walking straighter and without favoring his right side, pretty much made his statement pointless.
That was actually the reason why he was running late and, instead of catching up with Sam in the cafeteria line, was forced to come to his table, where all of Sam's team was huddled over, rudely listening to their conversation. 'A herd of geeks' Dean thought with a chuckle, 'all huddled away from the big, bad wolf... idiots!'
Sam raised one eyebrow at the bald lie, something that he'd learned to do from dad. It looked ridiculously annoying in his round, childish face.
"I think it was the stupid soccer game yesterday," Dean confessed, his hand sneaking away to steal a fry sausage from Sam's plate, ignoring the offended Hey!. "All that kicking a stupid ball around, I must've pulled something... now, if it were proper football-"
Sam scowled and huffed before launching on a long explanation why soccer was much better than football, which –incidentally- was wrongly named because feet were hardly involved, promptly forgetting about Dean's limp and the fact that Dean hadn't even played in said game.
Truth was, Dean had no idea why it hurt like a bitch to move his whole right leg. And just the thought of stretching out or even reaching with his arm to get to a higher shelve, had almost brought Dean to tears the morning before, when it'd been his turn to help out in the kitchen.
He was getting out of shape. That had to be it. Even with the occasional running and the odd sets of crunches and push-ups, it was nothing compared to the Winchester regime. And the fact that his appetite had gone on vacation wasn't helping either. He felt weak, feverish, like hot molasses on a sun-backed asphalt road.
"You're gonna get your own breakfast or do you plan on just standing there, staring at mine?" Sam asked after awhile. Dean hadn't even realized that the whole soccer versus football monologue was already over.
Just to make a point, Dean stole another of Sam's sausages, scattering away over the loud protests of the looted Winchester. "Jerk!"
Dean smiled and took a bite off the greasy piece of pork. The meat seemed to settle like a brick in his stomach. Same thing had happened before, the day before, at dinner. Food just tasted like ash going down and afterwards, it had been an up-hill battle to keep it down... and Dean loved pizza! Maybe it was some stomach bug or something that he'd caught there. Probably from broccolis.
"So, you ready for this?"
Dean turned, the world going slightly out of focus with the movement, until Jules smiling face took form in front of him. "Sweetheart... I was born ready," Dean said, covering his discomfort with the heavy-dosed charm that he knew was sure to piss the girl off.
Instead of pissed, Dean's plan backfired and he was endowed with the opposite reaction. Jules' warm smile dissolved in to a concerned frown. "Are you feeling ok? You look kind of pale and-" her finger traced a line in his forehead, "-sweaty."
Dean swatted her concern away, a sausage greasy hand wiping the beads of sweat that he could feel gathering over his upper lip. The dirty finger left a coat of shiny butter that elicited a giggle from the worried girl. "I'm fine, don't worry," Dean appeased her, twisting his nose like he smelled something vile. The strong odor of fried meat was making him nauseous all over again and Dean hastily swallowed the rising bile down. There was no way Dean Winchester was going to upchuck in front of a girl — in the middle of the cafeteria. "Just stood too long in sun yesterday... I'm a northern boy –too much sun bakes my goods," he added with a wink.
Jules deep blue eyes seemed to be weighting his words, judging the amount of truth in them. "Well, just make sure to stay out of the water if you're not feeling well... I'll hate to have to drag your heavy ass out of the ocean by myself," she finally said with a wink of her own as she turned to stash her empty tray and leave.
Dean sag in relief, adding a smirk when he saw that she was still looking. As expected, Jules puffed on hi smirk and walked away.
"Confess... you love my ass!" Dean yelled to her back. The fact that all heads turned in to his direction at the remark and that at least three of them belonged to camp monitors didn't even faze him.
oo..2009, Gein Farm, Plainfield, Wisconsin..oo
The house actually looked better on the outside than it did on the inside. Right after the front door, a large hole opened into a black chasm in to the depths of the house's foundations, a fetid smell rising from it like from hell itself. The stairway into the second floor was mostly gone, three pathetic steps hanging limply from the upper banister and leading nowhere.
There was trash everywhere; empty beer cans, broken bottles, broken chairs, broken furniture; a brown boot tumbled to the side, allowing the cockroach inside to walk free, running over the smelly remains of something that looked like it'd been a dead dog at some point.
One side of the hall opened in to the kitchen area, where more garbage and decay had gathered to give the place a nice, overwhelming and gagging smell.
Dean used his gun to pull aside the massive cobweb that covered the entrance to the room opposite to the kitchen. A ratty green couch rested in the middle, like a lone soldier holding the felled post. Even from the distance, Dean could hear the rats that had nested inside that smelly thing. He shuddered, giving the thing a wide berth and moving to the broken window. Outside, not even the wind was moving.
The place was completely empty, if you didn't count with the tons of trash that had been accumulated over years of abandonment –some probably were even there when the place was still habited- which meant that they'd have to go through all that crap lying around the house. And how the hell were they going to get to the second story?
"You know, just for once, I just wished they put a big, bright, yellow neon sign saying 'HERE'" Dean huffed, kicking an empty drawer leaning against the wall to see what it might be hiding behind. More cockroaches and what looked like two centipedes linked to each other, scurried away.
"You mean like this?" Sam's disembodied voice came from the entry hall.
Dean retreated from the dead-end, bug-infested living room and turned right to meet up with his brother. Sam's head was leaning back, his eyes fixed on something under the upper deck of the stairs. Dean followed his gaze.
A long colt revolver, with a carved handle and a engraved nuzzled shined like silver against the blackened wood.
The Colt, secured by invisible bounds, was glued to the underside of the upper floor, about twelve feet away, in the dead center of a circular sigil, similar to the ones they'd encountered before, in the funeral home where Alastair planned to kill the reapers. "No angels allowed?"
"Looks that way," Sam agreed, looking around for the best way to reach the weapon. "How the hell do we get up there?"
Dean was still looking around, studying the sigil, and searching the floor around them. This was just too easy. There had to be a catch. "No guards?"
Sam looked at him. He'd wondered about the same thing. The path had been pretty much clear and open for them to get there. No demons, no spells, no curses. "Maybe they didn't want to call attention to themselves? Besides, who else, other than Castiel, knows that we're even searching for this thing? As far as everyone knows, Bela gave the Colt to Lilith and Lilith melted it down."
"So, you don't think this is a trap anymore?" Dean said, pulling a torn up tarp from over a pile of trash and peeking underneath. Nothing there either; no hidden demons, no poisoned darts, no pointed guns, nothing.
"Oh, this is most definitely a trap... but can we really just sit here and not take the Colt with us?"
Dean nodded. There was a knot in his stomach that refused to go away, but Sam was right. The Colt was right there and it was their only chance of killing Lucifer without destroying more than half the planet in the process. "Ok, then... how do you wanna do this?"
"Well... I didn't see any ladder outside. So, we have two choices: your feet on my shoulders, or my feet on yours," Sam said.
He already knew perfectly well which one Dean would pick. Sam had always weighed the most in between the two of them. First, and for a brief couple of years during his teens, it had been the awkward chubbiness that had earn him hours of teasing from Dean and one fatidic trip to the fat camp that wasn't a fat camp; and then Sam had just gotten bigger than his older brother.
"I climb, you Sasquatch freak," Dean predictably announced, placing his shotgun against the wall and waving at Sam's legs for him to bend his knees.
This, at least, felt like old times, Sam thought as he helped Dean escalate his body. Right foot over left knee, left foot on right hand and one last careful step on to his shoulders. They'd been doing stuff like that ever since Sam learned how to walk. Like a circus number, they knew how to work each other like professionals.
It seemed crazy, because Sam was doing it literally rather than metaphorically, but it felt good to carry his brother's weight on his shoulders. It felt like a step forward for them.
"Got it?" Sam asked, his voice slightly strained from both carrying Dean's weight and the level of concentration he had to maintain to keep them both upright.
Slowly, Dean let go of Sam's hands and unfolded himself, standing straight on Sam's shoulders. "Got it."
Dean looked up, stretching his arms out for balance. A couple of black, hairy spiders scattered away, managing to look offended at the intrusion on their domain. Even from this close, Dean couldn't tell what was holding the Colt up. If this turned out to be anything like the hoodoo coin in the wishing well, they were royally screwed.
Even with their combined height, Dean had to stretch his arm to reach the Colt. He started out with slow and careful movements, knowing that it wouldn't take much to disrupt their balance. The pain that erupted in his right side was like a stabbing, hot knife, piercing him from stomach to groin and back again.
With a stifled of agony, Dean folded over himself and promptly made both brothers loose whatever precarious balance they'd been keeping.
oo..1994, Gulf of Mexico..oo
Despite the presence of too many young kids, running around like crazies and making way too much noise; despite the fact that Sam was giving him the bitchy-silent treatment ever since the 'sausages event' that morning and even despite the constant twinge that he could feel in his right side, Dean had to admit that the whole fishing trip gig was pretty awesome.
The sun was shinning over the water, planting a silver trail ahead of their boat, the potent engines leaving a trail of white foam behind.
The salted water that rained all over them, stirred up by the speeding boat as it cut through the waves, tasted of freedom and safety. There was no way anything evil could come to those parts; nothing evil to hurt them there, not when they were surrounded by that much salt.
The day was warm and, despite having been nagged to cover himself in sun block, Dean could already feel his skin on fire. He couldn't wait to get in to that invitingly cool water.
Sam was always saying that he was surely part shark. It was suppose to be offensive, but Dean thought it was actually kind of cool. He did swim like a fish, they both did. The difference was, Dean felt at home in the water and Sam saw it as one more task to be accomplished.
There would be six of them, two monitors inside the water with two teens each. Dean and Jules were a team.
In the end, they ended up not fishing a damn thing because the fish refused to just stand around and be speared, but the goofing around and shooting hoops through coral formations had been fun enough. The fish around there were too small for harpoon fishing anyway, but they were fun to chase around. Or at least, Jules was having fun chasing them around.
It had felt wonderfully well to get inside the water, where gravity went away and he could just float in to nothingness, but half way in to the fifteen minutes that they'd been allowed outside the boat, Dean couldn't do more than lazily float around, occasionally kicking with his left leg to stay afloat. The right one was on fire.
Whatever muscled he'd pulled, it was getting worse.
"Dean, are you ok?" One of the camp monitors that had joined them in the water, a blond named Clara, asked. Her brown eyes looked huge behind the snorkeling mask and the florescent green tube rising up from her mouth in to the air wasn't helping matters. She looked like the Loch Ness monster on crack.
Dean giggled and promptly stifled a moan when his stomach muscles cramped over the laugh.
"Dean, what's wrong honey?" Clara asked again, her voice rising up above the slapping of water of her flapping fins.
"I-" the teen started, panic rising in his chest, as he looked at the short distance their boat was at. It dawned on him that there was no way he'd be able to swim over there. His right leg had grown completely stiff and his stomach was cramping so badly that it hurt all the way in his back. "I can't-"
Clara seemed to understand exactly what he was trying to say two seconds before Dean lost the ability to keep his head above water. Fighting the urge to struggle against the older woman's hold, Dean forced himself to relax against her chest as Clara swam around him and started to drag them both back to the boat. "It's ok, sweetie, just relax... everything is gonna be just fine," she kept whispering over and over again.
Dean wanted to say that she was full of crap, that he didn't needed her help, that he was half her age and had already rescue more people than she ever would in her whole life, but he couldn't. Half of those would be a lie and the other half even he didn't buy.
All Dean wanted to do was curl on himself and slip under some warm blankets. The female voice whispering incentives in his ear became generic, became a mom's voice, became safety and Dean let himself slip away.
At a distance, he could hear Jules's worried words, screaming in fear over what was wrong with him.
But hell if he knew.
oo..1994, Gulf of Mexico..oo
"Dean... Dean... Dean, please wake up," the young voice pleaded over and over again.
Dean wanted nothing more than to sink even further in to the dark unawareness from which he could feel himself slowly slipping away. His body ached fiercely and there was a ball of fire centered on his groin. "Oh... gaww... what happened?" He whispered, opening a slit of his eyes to peak at the concerned face of his kid brother.
"Dean, can you tell us exactly what you're feeling?" A voice much older than Sam's asked him.
Dean tried to make an inventory of all the aches and pains in his body. It wasn't something unfamiliar to him, this assessment of life threatening conditions, this prioritizing of what was wrong so that his father could made an educated decision. This was, however, very different from anything he'd ever felt. He felt sick, weak, fragile he couldn't even stand the touch of the waistband of his swim trunk shorts on his waist "I'm fine... just-"
He just needed to get up, needed to show everyone that, whatever weakness they'd thought he had, they were wrong. He could even prove it.
Despite being pretty sure that that would be a terrible idea, Dean tried to sit up.
It was embarrassing enough to have his younger brother looking at him like that -like he was some fragile glass flower that might shatter away at any moment- when he was hurt on a hunt. It was downright pathetic to be looked at like that when he knew that the most dangerous thing he'd done lately was peeling potatoes with a blunt knife the day before.
As expected, using his stomach muscles for anything other than lying flat hurt like a mother. Dean screamed out before he could help it, sweat breaking anew on his face, color draining away like someone had flushed all the blood away from his head. It certainly felt like that, anyway.
"What the hell is wrong with him? Do something!"
The words sounded kind of far away, but Dean was pretty sure that was Sam's changing voice doing the shrill ups and downs, demanding answers. The rest of room was pretty quiet.
He could feel the purr of the boat's engines under his body, the cot he was lying in paper-thin and sending every vibration and bump cursing like a knife through his aching stomach. Who the hell would've thought that plain water was that damn bumpy?
"Sam, please, calm down... we've already radioed ahead -an ambulance will be on the docks, waiting for your brother," someone, an older man answered the younger Winchester.
The mention of an ambulance only served to rally the nerves on both Winchesters.
There had been only two occasions in their young lives where an ambulance and urgent transportation to a hospital had been needed. And in both they thought they were going to loose their father forever.
The first one had been a poltergeist in New Mexico. The thing had started playing with the kitchen knives, throwing them at anything that moved. Unfortunately for John, he was the only moving thing then, the owners of the house long gone. The blade that managed to hit him had buried itself in their John's chest to the hilt.
Dean, who was keeping guard outside, watching over a sleeping Sam, would never forget the hissing sound that came from that wound, as air escaped his father's lungs alongside with the rivers of blood running down his shirt.
John had almost died on the way to the hospital that time.
The second time was just a couple of months before and the memories were still too fresh for either brother. A couple of werewolves, in Tennessee, hunting in pairs. The thing had flat out killed a fellow hunter that John was working with and clawed the hell out of their dad's leg before John managed to put them down.
Dean hadn't been with them then. But he was the one that drove a stolen car all the way to the forest where his father was bleeding to death and was forced to call in for help because he could stop the red from pooling on John's groin.
John had died on the OR that time, or so the doctors told Dean, when all was over and John was back amongst the living and breathing through a tube.
"No... please... I-" Dean started, the pain growing stronger just from the memory of those long, miserable days that he'd spent looking at his father through a glass window.
Sam seemed to read his brother's mind. "Can't you do something for him here? When my stomach's upset I usually take this pink medicine and it fixes me right u-"
"Sam-" someone, a woman this time, tried to cut in.
"No! He doesn't to go to a hospital! No hospitals! People die in them!"
Dean searched the room for his brother, not liking the sobs he could hear in Sam's voice. Looking around for the first time, Dean could see that they'd brought him to the boat's cabin. And now that he looked closely, he could also see that there were too many people in there.
He could see Sam, wrangling his hands on the seat next to Dean's cot; Clara, the one who had, apparently, pulled his sorry ass from the water; there was Jim, the camp monitor responsible for his group; and the group of curious heads, peaking out through the window to the deck. All looking at him. Dean felt like digging a hole and crawling inside.
"Sam-" The woman repeated, this time grabbing the young boy's shoulder. "This seems to be a bit more than just an upset stomach, sweetie. He needs to see a doctor, someone who can figure what's wrong and help him."
"We'll reach the shore in twenty minutes," another man said. The captain, Dean figured.
Just his luck. Not only was he the freak at fat camp, he'd also managed to be the solely responsible for cutting short the one truly fun thing that all of them had been eagerly awaiting for ever since they got there. And if Dean ended up in the hospital, they would probably try calling his dad, which meant dragging John away from a hunt... if they could reach him at all.
Visions of the hospital failing to contact their father and their family being torn apart by Child Protection Services flashed in to Dean's feverish brain, stealing whatever was left of color in his face. Bile was rising up in his throat at the same rhythm as words poured out. "It's ok... I'm feeling better already... used to have this things all the ti-"
Dean wasn't able to finish his blatant lie. The second he rolled over to pull himself up and off the cot, pain exploded on his right side, a hot, sharp pain that traveled like an electric shock all the way down his right leg and all the way up his spine, detonating in a million bright lights inside his brain. "Oh, G-" he managed to whisper, just as the world slipped from view and Dean hit the ground with the weight of a man ten times his size and all the grace of a man ten times his age.
oo..2009, Gein Farm, Plainfield, Wisconsin..oo
"Dean... Dean, wake up."
The insistent voice in itself wasn't so bad. It sounded familiar and had a sense of safety and love attached to it. It was the repeated jerking of his right shoulder that accompanied each ignored plea that was pissing him off. And hurting like hell.
Every time the huge hand he could feel holding his shoulder would shake his bones, his entire body ached. Dean cracked one eye open, firmly intended to send the annoying person away, only to be faced with the very concerned face of his brother, looming over him.
"What the hell happen?" Dean asked, looking right and left to confirm that, yes, he was sprawled over the filthiest floor he'd come across in the past decades. "Help me up," he demanded, one hand reaching for Sam's arm.
Sam pulled away, grabbing Dean's hand instead. "You were moaning, rolling over the floor like your back was on fire... I don't think getting up is such a good idea."
Dean glared. Granted, he felt sick as a dog and his back did feel on fire, but it was his stomach that was giving him fits. All he wanted to do was crawl back to the Impala, drive back to some motel and curl asleep on a soft bed. Or a hard bed. Didn't really matter, just as long as it was flat.
The feeling was all too familiar and he really, really hoped he was wrong, but Dean was starting to get a pretty good idea of what was wrong with him. "I don't moan," he eventually said, slightly offended by Sam's description of whatever had happened while he was out. "Did we get the Colt?" He asked, his gaze traveling up and not seeing the weapon where it'd previously been. He didn't remember actually touching the Colt and getting it down, but maybe they'd gotten lucky and the thing had fallen down at the same time they did.
Sam shook his head, almost curly hair dancing over his ears. "There was no Colt," Sam said.
"What?!" Dean jumped in, his intent to sit up cut short by the pain in his stomach. "Goddamit!"
"Take it easy," Sam offered, his eyes sympathetic but his forehead creased in a concerned frown.
"I'm not taking it easy... what the hell happened here?"
"They did," Sam said, jerking his head towards the front door and stepping aside to allow Dean to see. "The Colt was an illusion, created by them to draw us here."
There were at least seven shimmering figures standing behind Sam, all with varying degrees of disfigurement. Three men were missing their noses and all the skin in their upper bodies; there was one particularly gruesome woman whose breasts had been cut away and replaced by candlesticks. The rest, some were missing their heads, some were missing their limbs. Gein's victims, all of them.
"What the fuck-"
"They want to made a deal," Sam explained, wearily turning his back on the spirits once again. "With the angels... they keep us trapped in here until the angels come and get us and in return, they're hoping that the angels will let them enter Heaven."
"Angels don't have that kind of p— are they insane? Who buys that load of crap?" Dean exploded once again. Fat beads of sweat pooled all over his face and his eyes screwed shut in pain and his hands clasping the muscle around his stomach. "Dammit!"
"They're dead, Dean. Logic flew out the window the minute they were dragged away from eternal rest, whatever that means," Sam said with a sigh. He didn't really care what the ghosts' reasons were. He was just worried about the consequences for Dean.
Sam could see his brother trying to swallow the pain away. He'd already checked, while Dean was passed out, looking for anything that their ungraceful fall might've broken or bruise. There was nothing that would explain the level of pain Dean was in. Nothing that Sam could see, anyway. "Will you just tell me what the hell is wrong with you?" Sam finally asked when he couldn't stand silent any longer. His face pale and his nostrils were flaring in frustration. If Dean opened his mouth to say he was fine one more time...
Dean tried to glare once again, silently point out all that was wrong in there and that had absolutely nothing to do with him, but he was growing cold and nauseous and sarcasm took a forced step back. Instead, Dean found himself taking in the honest concern in his brother face and, instead of his usual reaction of denial and soldier on, allowed that concern to surround him and keep the pain at bay.
Dean needed Sam. If there was one thing that he had learned from his forced trip to the future, was that he needed Sam just as much as Sam had needed him his whole life.
"Remember when you were about... ten or eleven, I guess -- that summer we spent in that Camp... in Texas, near the Gulf of Mexico?" Dean eventually said.
Sam nodded, his clueless face clearing stating that he had no idea why Dean was bringing that up now. "What does that ha-"
"Remember how... the fishing trip... ended?" Dean asked, biting his lip bloody to stop himself from screaming. He didn't recall it hurting so bad before. It was surprising for Dean to realized that, after all he'd been through ever since those summer camp days, something this ordinary could still make his eyes water so badly.
It was easy to catch the moment realization dawned on Sam's face. His eyes grew round and his lips formed a perfect 'O' shape, right before color bleed away from his face and Sam's eyebrows joined over the bridge of his nose. "That's impossible... you already had yours taken out," he pointed out, as if logic would make everything right and set all straight. "No one has appendicitis twice... it's impossible, Dean."
The older hunter looked at the group of ghosts, apparently content in just waiting by the door, waiting for a redemption that Dean knew the angels could not and would not deliver. "Impossible?- Really?" He asked over a pointed look. "I told you, Sam... when they brought me back... no broken bones... no scars... no-"
"Dammit!" Sam said, watching his solid logic run out the window and being left with a brother writhing in pain on a filthy floor, held hostage by a group of ghosts, waiting on the angels to show up and screw their lives for good. "That's just—Dammit!"
oo..1994, St. Mary's Hospital, Galveston..oo
The smell of the disinfectant was so strong he could taste it in his mouth and the sheets were rubbing against his skin in all the wrong ways. But he was finally cooler and there was absolutely no pain and Dean didn't really wanted to question the first two too much, afraid that the last two would run away.
"You awake?" Sam's voice cut in through the fog of bliss that Dean was experiencing.
"No," Dean whispered, his voice sounding grave and detached from his mouth. He sounded like the over-dramatic guy who always does the voice-over for movie trailers.
Dean giggled, imagining what the trailer of his life would sound like.
'Dean was just an ordinary kid, living his ordinary life. Until one day... something no one could ever imagine happened to him-"
"Dean... are you even listening to me?" Sam insisted, not at all amused by the trailer of Dean's life that was currently being aired inside Dean's head.
Dean frowned. Come to think of it, the fact that Dean was seeing it inside his mind would make it a little bit harder for Sam to follow. "Do you wanna see the trailer too?" Dean offered, closing his eyes to better see the pictures being shown.
"Oh, God... you're baked on painkillers," Sam let out, sounding annoyed at the fact. "I just had to si-"
Dean ignored him. It was a good trailer. There was mom, baking chocolate muffins in the kitchen and almost burning the whole thing to the ground; there was dad, grabbing him safely under his arms and leaning over the giant Christmas tree, so that Dean could hang the white plastic angel on the top and almost taking the whole thing down when they lost their balance; there was Sam, mostly toothless smile as he wobbled his way across the motel room to reach Dean's tiny arms, failing epically midway and falling on his diaper-cushioned butt, crying like someone had just-
"-and you almost died. Do you know what that means? D.I.E.D. as in frigging stopping to breath in the middle of surgery, as in a fucking ruptured appendix because you decided that a fever and a swollen abdomen were not worthy of mention and dad would've never left us here if he even suspected that something like this was happening and they still haven't been able to reach him but he's just going to be so pissed when he hears-"
"Breath, Sammy... please," Dean finally managed to cut in, Sam rising panic and speeding voice completely drowning any attempt that trailer-voice-guy could have of continuing to narrate anything. "I had surgery?"
Sam blinked, like the fact that Dean was actually there with him was registering for the first time. "Yeah... appendicitis. They had to take it out."
Dean gingerly raised the thin sheet covering his chest and tried to take a peek at the right side of his stomach. Sure enough, there was a massive white bandage tapped from just bellow his navel to dangerously close to his- "Well... fuck!"
oo..2009, Gein Farm, Plainfield, Wisconsin..oo
"I don't get it," Dean whispered from his spot on the floor. He'd flat out refused to let Sam move him to the rat-infested couch and the ghosts heed no pleas to let them out, right after they'd had they ghostly faces blasted by a couple of rock salt shots. The place was under supernatural lock down and there was nothing short of a bulldozer that would provide an exit for the Winchester brothers.
Shooting the ghosts with salt had proved pointless all the same, every single time that Sam had tried it. The spirits of Gein's victims were just as trapped there as they were, both by the mutilations they had suffered at his hands after dying, effectively binding them to that house, as from the lines of salt that Sam had planted all around the place from the outside.
The ghosts weren't even attacking them. They just stood there, waiting to be put to rest.
"Get what?" Sam asked, collecting the piece of cloth he'd set by the ghost of the man without arms and with half the skin of his face missing. There was no running water and Dean was running a fever that just kept getting higher and higher. Sam had resorted to use the ghosts' cold spots to chill his bandana and used it to cool Dean's forehead in turn.
"Where the hell... are the angels?" Dean said. He closed his eyes and sighed in relief when he felt the cold cloth settle over his forehead. "It's not like... they need to take the... bus."
Sam sat back on his heels and gently lifted the edge of Dean's shirt. After much protest, Dean had finally conceded that he felt slightly better with his belt loose and the his jeans' button undone. The skin going from his side to his groin on the right was puffy and red, hot to the touch. Even the cotton thin shirt felt like sandpaper, touching Dean's sensitive skin.
Sam needed to take him out of that place and in to a hospital, where they could get to his infected appendix before that thing exploded inside Dean's guts and killed him.
Problem was, every single time he'd tried to bully his way out, Sam had ended up flying against the far wall, earning him nothing more than some bruises of his own and, on one terrifying moment when he'd waken up to find Dean lying in a pool of his own vomit because he'd seen Sam get his head smashed against the plaster and had tried to get up to reach him, the realization that if he did nothing, Dean was going to die in there.
They tried calling for help, but that too had proven to be another dead-end. With that many spirits around them, the accumulated energy had burned more than just the EMF reader. Both Dean's and Sam's cell phones had been toasted the minute they'd tried to use them. No calling Castiel to get them out; no calling Bobby to help them out. They were truly on their own for the first time in a very long time.
"Maybe they got lost? Got a flat wing?" Sam said, in a feeble attempt at humor. It fell flat. Truth was, he too was wondering why Zachariah wasn't there already, bragging about his oh-so-clever idea of, not only using questionable humans to work as his spies, but also putting a supernatural bounty on the Winchesters heads.
It was painfully clear to see now, that it hadn't been Castiel sending them the coordinates there, or if it was him, the angel had been just as tricked as they were. Zachariah knew where they were, and by now their ghostly escort had probably informed him, that they were as trapped as blind mice. Why wasn't he there already, breaking Sam's legs again, forcing Dean to say yes?
"It's like they're waiting on something," Dean said, his voice hitching in pain.
Looking at the steadily graying face of his brother, Sam suddenly realized with a frightening clarity exactly what the angels were waiting for to make their appearance. It wasn't like they hadn't tried to use a disease before to force Dean to say yes to Michael.
"You think?" Dean asked, his eyes opened once more and fixed on Sam's face, reading his every expression, guessing his every thought.
Sam nodded, his eyes showing nothing of the powerful being that he'd become just a short month ago. Now, now he was all scared kid brother, faced with an impossible situation and with no way out.
"Those self righteous... dickless... pompous... pric-"
"Wow, there!" A voice jumped in over Dean's tirade on angelic attributes. "Words hurt too, you know?"
Sam turned on his feet, instinctively standing in front of Dean, gun raised and ready to be used. "Who the hell are you?" He asked the bearded man dressed in ratty drabs, his hair so dirty it hung in fake, dark, dreadlocks around his weathered face.
The homeless man took one step forward, his blue eyes sharp and unnaturally brilliant in the middle of his grubby face. "Guess who?-- I'll even given you three chances to get it right," the stranger said with a smile.
It was eerie the way Dean could feel inside his bones the connection with the being in front of them, like thunder and lightening. "Michael," Dean whispered, his face at the same time worried and defiant. "I was... hoping for... Cate Blanchett," he said with a spotless smirk. "You came a long way to get... a big fat... no to your face."
He should've guessed that, if Lucifer had managed to grab himself a substitute vessel, Michael would be able to do the same.
The archangel tilted his head sideways, in a gesture too similar to Castiel's, and smiled. "I didn't ask any question... yet."
"So, does that mean that you don't want a ride in my brother's skin anymore?" Sam jumped in, his voice rebellious but with a hint of hope, trying to break the tension he could feel building up between the other two like static.
The bearded man studied Sam at length, hard enough to make the taller man uncomfortable under the close scrutiny. Sam felt naked to his very soul.
"You're Lucifer's chosen vessel," Michael finally said, sounding pleased. "My brother always was a bit vain," he added with a chuckle, turning his gaze once more towards Dean. He took one step forward.
"Stay away from him!" Sam barked, unsure of what he could possibly do to stop the powerful archangel from doing anything, but willing to die trying ever the same. "Stay away, or I swear to G-"
"God does not listen to you, Sam... you should know that already," Michael said, his words stopping Sam, a simple gesture of his hand sending him flying backwards until he hit the far wall.
Sam closed his eyes against the pain of the impact, the world dimming around the edges for a couple of seconds. When he managed to focus again, it was only to find the other man leaning over Dean. "Please, leave him alone," Sam begged, his body unresponsive no matter how hard he tried to fight the invisible bonds that trapped him to the wall.
On the other side, the group of ghosts just stood and watched, mesmerized by the presence amongst them, any fear or eagerness to see their end of the deal fulfilled completely forgotten. They were as immobile as Sam, silent and patient spectators in a play where only one character moved.
Dean didn't flinch when the archangel leaned down and crouched next to him, studying his face just as hard as he'd studied Sam's.
"Lovely," Michael whispered against Dean's face, the hot breathe sending goosebumps all over the hunter's chilled body. One hand with blackened, long and torn fingernails reached out to pull Dean's sweat-wet hair out of his forehead. "When I do ask the question, you will say yes, and we'll be wondrously beautiful and deadly frightening to our enemies."
The strain of keeping still and looking strong while the archangel stood that close to him was taking its toll on Dean's body. He could feel his limbs trembling from pain and exhaustion. What was worse, he knew Michael could feel it too, standing as close as he was. "If... if you're not... after a meat suit for... yourself," Dean said through clenched teeth, "then... why the hell... are you here?"
"Setting things right," the archangel said, carefully picking up the, now warm, cloth that Sam had abandoned. Holding the bandana near his mouth, Michael blew a gush of air on it and settled the cloth back on Dean's head. "Regional management can be a pain in the ass when it screws up," he said with a mischievously wink.
Baffled by the archangel's words, the hunter couldn't help but sigh in relief when the wet and cool piece of cloth touched his skin, its freshness and smoothing touch spreading all over him like a healing balm.
"Be safe, Dean" the archangel whispered in his ear. "We'll be together soon enough."
oo..1994, Interstate 29..oo
Bobby ended up coming to the rescue, posing as John Winchester and generally saving the day for the two teens and a bunch of paper work for Child Services. Dean repaid him in kind by puking all over his brand 'new' Chevelle when he insisted that he could do the whole trip back to the Singer's Auto Salvage sitting up.
They never went back to the camp to get their things, the risk of someone remembering a different John Winchester too big, not to mention the high possibility of running in to Fred, who actually knew John and was dying to apologize to his old buddy for returning his kid with one less piece inside of him. Granted, it was a rotten piece that had no business being there in the first place, but the man was still feeling guilty.
Be it as it may, they all pretty much agreed that they were done with Camp IndianSpear, even Bobby, who had never set foot inside it but disliked it simply because it was the place where Dean was when he'd gotten sick.
Sam never went back to say good-bye to all of his new friends. And Dean never saw Jules again.
oo..2009, St. Mary's Hospital, Galveston..oo
"... and then there was this bright, blinding light and next thing I knew, we were here," Sam said, walking behind Dean.
The older brother paused, gave one quick look around and, failing to see any shiny black cars in that row, turned his gaze on Sam. "Just like that? No big speeches about owing him, or how the fate of the world hung in the balance... nothing?"
"I'm telling you, he just... went away," Sam finished with a fling of his hand that, from his unsatisfied look, did no justice to the actions of the archangel. "Took the ghosts with him too, I think."
For a couple of moments back then, Sam had felt like his life had ended. Seeing that bright light surrounding Dean and Michael, he'd figured that the archangel had found some way around the whole consent issue and had just jumped in to Dean. But then he'd felt the grass beneath his hands and found himself in a sitting in a garden, in the middle of a parking lot, looking at a sign that told him he was in St. Mary's Hospital, Dean lying peacefully right next to him.
Sam remembered that hospital well. He could remember every single hospital and clinic where he'd seen either his father or his brother bleed or being sick. He figured that Michael had to have some twisted sense of humor to bring them here of all places.
Before he could infer any more on angelic humor and reasons why they were there and not surrounded by ghosts in Wisconsin, Dean had sprung to life like a drowning man finding his head out of the water.
"JESUS H. CHIST! What the fuck happened?"
Even the two old ladies sitting on the wooden bench near by who, by all rules should be deaf as doors, turned their heads and gave Sam twin disapproving looks. There was no point in trying to explain it hadn't been him. Sam was simply the biggest target around.
The fact that Dean had managed to jump off the grass and immediately start pacing back and forth around him, told Sam what he'd already suspected. Michael had transported them to the hospital just for the joke. Dean's appendicitis had, apparently, remained back at the Gein Farm.
"You sure you're feeling fine?" Sam asked for the tenth time since they'd started their search for the Impala. They were working on the assumption that Michael had been nice enough to 'beam out' their car with them, which, for some reason, Dean was sure he had. "I mean, we're AT the hospital... we might as well make sure..."
Dean gave him a pointed look, resuming his hurried walk around the hundreds of cars parked there. "I'm fine, dude... quite your worrying and use that freakish height to see if you can spot my baby."
Sam sighted. It was like coming home, Dean dismissing his own health and calling Sam a freak for one reason or another. "So... after all that's happened, you think Michael's one of the good guys or just a really smart salesman?" He asked after awhile.
Dean's steps barely faulted, the only indication he gave that he was pondering the matter. Sam knew that the question had been on his brother's mind ever since he'd woken up and discovered that his body was still his own. And what was even worse, Sam feared that some sort of connection had been established between the two of them, even if Dean wasn't saying a word about what Michael had whispered in his ear.
"Good guy, good salesman... he's a goddamn dead pigeon if I don't find my car in the next five minutes," he said, half his outrage from taking so long to find a car that he was sure had to be there, half because he truly couldn't tell.
"Well, I guess he's safe then," Sam said with a smile as he spotted the Impala two rows away. His freakishly high stature did come in handy. Once in while.
Dean dry swallowed. Michael was safe... and he was also coming back. And Dean just could decide if that was a bad or a good thing. "Lead the way, bitch," he said with an honest smile. Either way, Sam would have his back, he was sure of that now.
Sam turned back, trying to judge the bite behind Dean's words. He could feel the weight of the world lifting from his shoulders when the sun dipped away ever so slightly and Dean's relaxed smile was revealed in all its relieving glory. "Jerk."
The end
A.N.: This story was written as a birthday gift for my friend, conspiracy partner, writer and all around beta-reader extraordinaire, Jackfan2, also known as Julie.
She's a sucker for hurt Dean (as am I *g*) so, I figured that the one thing better than hurtDean, was double hurtDean.
This story is my first attempt at two separate time lines (which I hope I haven't totally screwed up), but I could not resist the idea of playing with poor Dean's appendix on two separate occasions.
Remember back in season 1, in the episode Bugs, when they needed an excuse to get the kid and his family out of the cursed house? Dean described to the dot all the symptoms of appendicitis without even giving it a name. Now, going out on a limb, I'm gonna assume that –like any other ordinary person- Dean would not know those symptoms so close and well, unless either he or Sam, or even John, had crossed paths with that disease. And, voilá, Dean gets appendicitis on two separate occasions. Because he's a lucky guy like that, who is brought back from Hell with his appendix intact and all set to get infected again *g*.
And as for chubbySam... please don't hit me! Sam himself was the one, can't recall in which episode now, saying that Sammy was a chubby 9?, 11? Year old... so, a part of this story happens exactly in those days.
Last, but certainly not least, I want to point out how awesome Immortal_Jedi was. This story could have never be done on time and with proper beta-reading correction if it weren't for the lightning fast (we're talking hours here, people—HOURS!), brilliant efficiency that Immortal_Jedi granted me. Thank you! You were my salvation!
Any mistakes that you might've stumbled with during your reading are, of course, my fault alone, because I bug people to beta-read for me and then add more stuff on their backs *g*... it's a disease, I know. I'm taking my pills, don't worry ;o)
Julie, I hope you have enjoyed this little pressy. May it have brought at least a smile to your face in this troubled year :oX