This is a disclaimer.
AN: For ultraviolet9a's bday. Title from Tolkien, and inspired by xkcd.
Paths to tread
"Google Maps?" Dean said incredulously. "Google Maps! Are you outta your mind?!"
"Look, man," Sam said, sounding irritable, "I know you don't like 'em. But none of the maps in the store in town actually had this place on them, so I figured I'd better make do."
"Make do!" Dean hollered. "Google Maps is an invention of Satan himself, how many times do I have to tell you that! Remember Illinois? I nearly drove my baby into a lake thanks to Google fucking Maps!"
"Eh, yeah, Dean," Sam said wryly. "The road had flooded. Google Maps was not to blame for that."
"There were other ways we could have gone," Dean growled. "I won't follow those instructions. They're cursed."
"You're paranoid," Sam said flatly. "Turn right up here if you wanna meet up with Bobby before Christmas."
Dean hissed, clenched his hands around the steering wheel till his knuckles turned white, and turned right up there.
*********
"It's a hard-knock life, I tell ya," the ferryman said gloomily. "I mean. I haven't been off this boat in twenty years. Twenty!"
"Yeah," Dean said. "Uh-huh."
"Every time I try, they pull me back in," the ferryman continued. Sam was sitting on the hood of the Impala, feverishly sorting through the pile of printouts he'd made from Google Maps. Dean was sipping terrible coffee and listening to the ferryman whinge by the window of the small cabin. There were no other passengers, and Dean rather doubted there was room for any in the first place.
"I don't suppose you'd know how I could get off?" the ferryman said hopefully. He was just manoeuvring the boat into the harbour. Dean pushed himself off the wall and turned.
"You could always try gettin' another job," he observed sarcastically. "Might need to find a replacement first, though."
The ferryman was looking distinctly thoughtful as they drove off.
*********
Everywhere they looked, trees and trees and yet more trees. The Impala's headlights were the only light Dean could see for miles around – not in itself an unusual occurrence in America, but he was sure there was supposed to be a town somewhere around here.
"You sure we aren't lost?" he asked Sam.
"Positive," Sammy said absently, not looking up from the infamous printouts. "Is there a junction up here? No? Damn."
Dean sighed. Drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. Contemplated the relative advantages of the Black Album over Back in Black. Decided he couldn't be bothered with either of them. Briefly considered putting on the Stones instead. Had that tree been an oak or a beech? It had gone by too fast to tell. Precious few evergreens around here. That was weird. Wasn't it? Reached down to turn the radio on, and when he looked up again, Dean gave a yelp and slammed on the brakes.
The frightened animal standing in the middle of the road took off into the trees with a graceful bound.
"Was that a deer?" Sam asked at last. Dean was not breathing hard. No sir. His elbows weren't locked, either. Nor was his back ramrod straight, or his mouth hanging open.
He swallowed, hard. "Had to be. Had antlers."
"Not... that... many," Sam said slowly. "In fact, I thought I only saw..."
"It was a stag, Sam," Dean snapped.
"Big enough to be a horse, too," Sam said.
"Horses don't have antlers," Dean snapped.
"Horns," Sam muttered.
"What!" Dean demanded.
"Nothing," Sam said. "Um. Straight on down the... the..." he leaned so close to the paper his nose was brushing it. Dean hoped the printer ink came off on it. "The Kingsway."
"The Kingsway," Dean repeated.
"That's what it says."
"I object to this bullshit," Dean announced. "Just so you know. I most firmly and absolutely reject this Google Maps bullshit."
"Good for you," Sam said, and spent the next ten minutes struggling to unknot the headphones of his iPod. The scene rather ruined his melodramatic sulk, Dean thought.
*********
They stopped for gas at an abandoned station. In all fairness, Dean tried to pay. There just didn't seem to be anyone around who was interested in taking his credit card.
Sam had wandered off again by the time Dean returned to the car. He was studying a wooden sign at the roadside rather thoughtfully. It was the sort of thing that tended to advertise nature walks and park ranger's offices, weather-beaten and a bit rickety.
"Well, Mr Chief Navigator," Dean said, coming up beside him. "Or should I say Mr Chief Printer-outer Of The Word Of The Antichrist?"
Sam gave him the Bitchface. Dean had been trying to get his brother to take a patent out on it for year, but it never worked. Besides, the Patent Office people had informed him that they didn't 'do' facial expressions. Dean thought that was highly unfair.
"This way if you want dinner," Sam said and headed off into the dark. Dean was about to start after him, and then he paused and turned his flashlight on. Shone it on the signpost. He had to stand so close to the thing his nose was almost brushing the wood to actually read what it said; the paint was fading and the letters illegible. But it seemed Sam was trudging towards the Lion Inn, a hundred yards down the road.
Dean moved back from the signpost and peered into the gloom. He could see Sammy's flashlight beam bobbing up and down along the road with his brother's long strides, and beyond him, through the trees, there did indeed seem to be dim lights glowing. Dean couldn't make out a house, but what else was it supposed to be?
He turned back to the signpost one last time, frowning a little. There was another sign below the one for the inn, the most weather-beaten of the lot, but Dean thought he could make out letters that read Min... irit...
Dean glared at it. "Fucking Google Maps," he muttered, and followed Sam into the darkness.
*********
It took a considerable amount of willpower on Dean's part to actually leave the inn. The girls were dressed as if for an Oktoberfest, and the patrons were loud, drunk and overconfident – the perfect marks. Place was dark, cramped and smoky, the floor was covered in things he didn't want to think about, and the card game over by the fire looked very inviting.
"I hope you've enjoyed your stay, sirs, brief though it was," the girl who'd served them said, smiling.
Dean smiled back at her. "It was perfect," he said. "Um. Can I... ask you something?"
A wary look crossed her face, and he pressed on hurriedly in case she thought he was about to try and get into her panties. Not that he wouldn't have liked to, but something told him she wouldn't say yes.
"It's just. Isn't July a bit early for Oktoberfest?"
She blinked. "Oktoberfest?"
"Yeah, you know," Dean said. "Beer, sausages, giant pretzels. Ninth month of the year, usually."
"Oh, we never feast in the ninth month of the year, sir," she said earnestly. "I do not know whence you come, but nine is considered an unlucky number in these parts."
Dean thought back to the signpost at the gas station. Time to get the Hell outta Dodge, and make sure they kept going in the opposite direction, he decided.
*********
Back on the road again, Sam was absent-mindedly humming the Fellowship theme under his breath as he sorted through the printouts. Dean put on Houses of the Holy to drown it out, and then changed it to Kansas instead. Damn you, Robert Plant. What was with those lyrics, anyway?
"OK, look," Sam said at last. "This is... just listen to this, OK? Don't say anything. Don't say anything because I know exactly what you're going to say, and I agree wholeheartedly –"
"That makes a change," Dean snarked.
"Shut up. We've just gotta hang in there, that's all."
"So what does it say?"
Sam cleared his throat. "Stop at the next barn you come to," he read. "Enter through the window in the back; there is a ladder there. Defeat the occupants and force their leader to tell you his secret."
Kansas chose that most appropriate moment to fade out and click to a stop. The silence that filled the Impala after that was thick as treacle.
Finally, Dean sighed. "Better get the machetes," he said.
*********
They left the barn by the doors an hour later, covered in blood and bruises, but with the key the vampire leader had handed to Dean before being beheaded clenched firmly in Dean's left fist. His right was wrapped so tightly around the machete that his knuckles had gone white. Sam was starting to worry a little; there was an almost manic look on his brother's face.
He'd checked the printouts dozens of times by now, but he just couldn't figure out what had gone wrong. Theoretically, they should be in Richmond by now.
Sam was positive they were nowhere near the place, and the instructions just kept getting curiouser and curiouser.
*********
It became apparent what the key was for when the road stopped in front of a large wrought iron gate across the entrance to the covered bridge they needed to cross.
"And now you expect me to take my baby over the Bridge of Doom," Dean muttered, hauling himself out of the Impala (he was starting to feel pretty stiff after the fight). "There's probably a gaping chasm down there with a river roaring through it and a huge waterfall at one end."
There was.
"Maybe this place forms – according to – according to our own expectations," Sam panted as they shoved the heavy gate back. It groaned at them, scraping reluctantly over the wood, but they managed in the end, and stood back, heaving and sweating with the effort.
"What kind of expectations did you have of the road to Richmond?" Dean gasped when he'd got his breath back.
Sam pursed his lips, on the verge of saying something like, 'not me, you', but then thought better of it for the moment. Dean was talking in italics again. That was always a bad sign.
*********
Sam hung out of the window as they creaked and crawled their way over the bridge. Dean absolutely refused to drive faster than about ten miles per hour, which Sam thought was ridiculous. The faster they were over this thing, the better, right?
But at least he had ample opportunity to study the walls. The wood was old but obviously cared-for, and many timbers had been replaced or strengthened recently, a sure sign that the bridge was well-used. The older beams were gorgeous, intricate lines of carving spiralling along them like vines. Sam thought the patterns used looked vaguely Celtic, but he was no expert.
"See anything that says 'Eat me', Alice?" Dean asked.
"I was hoping for 'Drink', actually," Sam said.
"You and me both, kid," Dean said. "So, our expectations."
"Well – maybe? I mean, once it had got started?"
"Hmm," Dean said.
*********
When the Impala finally rumbled off the bridge, Dean put his foot down. The road had changed from tarmac to paving stones, huge uneven slabs that curved convexly in the centre of the road, so that the rainwater would run into the gutters. Sam frowned at it.
"Like a Roman road," he said.
Dean's eyes cut across to him, and then back to the road. He didn't turn his head, and he didn't say anything else.
*********
Sooner or later, the road forked, as all roads must.
"What now?" Dean asked, killing the engine and looking at his brother.
Sam snapped his flashlight on and bent over the papers. They were looking a bit tattered by now, the corners curling, creased and folded and stained blue where Sam had been keeping them in the pocket of his jeans.
"It says here..." he said slowly. "Leave your car. Walk to the exact centre of the junction."
Dean grimaced. No need to ask why; a T-junction was close enough to a crossroads that neither of them felt comfortable standing in the exact centre of one for any reason. The memories were too close, and too painful.
"Spin around widdershins three times," Sam said.
Dean turned to look at him silently.
"It's true!"
"Gimme that," Dean snapped, snatching the papers off him. "Once in the centre of the junction, spin around widdershins three times. Then wait. A guide will appear to you."
Sam snatched the papers back off him. "Spin away, flyboy," he said.
"You first," Dean said.
"Forget it. Simultaneously."
Dean heaved a sigh. "Is this going to be like that time I put lemon juice in your breakfast cereal, and you spent the next week switching cups with me and then waiting for me to take a drink before you would?"
"I was seven," Sam said dangerously. "It was practically child abuse."
"Now who's talking in italics?" Dean said.
"Dad flayed you alive for it," Sam said.
"I fail to see how this is pertinent to the question of which of us has to spin around in a circle like a five year old on Ecstasy," Dean said.
"Both of us," Sam said stubbornly. "Or neither, in which case no guide appears, and we're stuck at this junction for the rest of our natural lives, or until Lilith unleashes the Apocalypse, whichever comes first."
"You're bluffing," Dean said, arms crossed, eyes narrowed.
Sam folded up the Google Maps papers with unwarranted precision considering the state they were in, tucked them carefully into the back pocket of his jeans and assumed a vaguely pugilistic stance, one fist held out, the other at his back.
"Best of three," he said.
*********
The wolf that appeared to them, eyes gleaming in the Impala's headlights, led them off the road a ways and into a deserted cemetery. This would have probably been more worrying to two people who hadn't spent as much time in places like these as the Winchesters had.
"She's gorgeous," Dean murmured as they walked. "Look at her."
Sam frowned. "It's a wolf," he said. "They eat people sometimes, you know."
"So do other people," Dean pointed out, sounding quite cheerful. "Come on, Sam. All that grace and power..."
"You always did have a thing for wolves," Sam said. "David Eddings' fault."
"He had the right idea," Dean said. "Wolves are awesome, admit it. Loyal and true and beautiful – look at her – and can rip your throat out in a minute."
"It explains a lot about you, this little monologue," Sam said.
Dean just grinned. Wolfishly.
It didn't take them long to come to the mausoleum the wolf wanted them to see. She'd stepped lightly and noiselessly over the fallen branches, the dead leaves, moving around the headstones like a wraith while they bickered and fiddled with the flashlights. Now she sat down by the entrance to the mausoleum and curled her bushy tail around herself.
"You want us to go in?" Dean said, crouching down so that they were almost on a level. The wolf had strange eyes, a colour between green and the more usual gold, and she let her tongue loll out in answer.
"It looks kinda unstable," Sam said doubtfully, flashlight beam dancing over the rotting wooden doors, the crumbling stone.
Dean reached out to their guide, and she licked his palm.
"So does my sanity right now," he said out loud. "We're going in. Will you come with us?" This last, quite politely, to the wolf.
She lay down.
"But you'll wait for us."
Brief movement of that bushy tail. She was too dignified for Dean to call it a wag.
"Thank you," he said, and stood up.
*********
Getting inside the mausoleum was child's play after that damn bridge. The doors were heavy but rotting, and they practically disintegrated when Dean and Sam put any kind of weight on them.
Inside, the mausoleum was pitch dark. Dean stepped over a pile of door and yelped; he'd hit his shoulder on something that seemed to be protruding from the ceiling. Sam's flashlight showed it to be a torch.
"You OK?" he said worriedly.
"Yeah," Dean grated. "Use the torch. It made itself known for a reason."
Sam wanted to argue with that, but he wasn't entirely sure how. Dean, for all his protesting, seemed to have an innate knowledge of the way this place worked that Sam couldn't understand. He'd never once suggested turning round and going back the way they'd come, for example. And he'd never really disregarded any of their instructions, as if he had innate faith in the fact that they were real, or good, somehow.
Sam, left to his own devices, would have stopped at that old gas station and started researching, checking into things, asking questions. With Dean alongside him, he'd just... gone along with it all.
"Are you sure we're doing the right thing?" he asked suddenly. Dena looked up at him. He was holding his Zippo to the torch, and the firelight made his face glow and his eyes shine greener than ever.
"Yes," he said simply.
"How?"
Dean shrugged. "I just am."
"Maybe that's not enough here, Dean."
"Maybe sometimes, it has to be," Dean said. "You're the one with all the faith, Sam."
He'd said that time and time again over the last two years, teasing or serious, but Sam was beginning to think that it wasn't actually true.
"What if somebody's deliberately leading us wrong with these instructions?" he tried again. Dean answered instantly.
"They're not, Sam. We killed vampires, remember? And that wolf is no agent of evil."
"Is that all you've got?"
"The girl at the inn who served us," Dean said. "She said nine is an unlucky number in these parts."
"In Biblical numerology, nine signifies – endings, judgements," Sam said. "There's loads of stuff about it, and not all of it is good."
Dean actually, honest-to-God stamped his foot. "Nine for the Mortal Men, doomed to die, Sam!" he shouted.
Sam gaped. "Are you seriously telling me you think that –"
"What I think," Dean yelled, loud enough to both drown his brother out and make the ceiling tremble, "what I think, Sam, is that places like this one have their own rules. That have nothing to do with us."
Confronted once more with those italics, Sam fell silent again.
The mausoleum was a fairly standard example of its kind, and even with the added light from the torch neither Sam nor Dean could, at first, make out anything unusual about it. Of course, what with the dust and the dirt and the cobwebs it was lucky they could make out the walls, Dean thought, but finally Sam paused in front of one of the plaques lining the walls. They were about the size of an A4 paper, plain and black and unadorned. Dean couldn't see what was special about them at all.
"Dude, come and see," Sam said, and started wiping at the plaque with his sleeve.
"Sammy, I'm not sure if this is your standard grave-desecration-friendly cemetery here," Dean said. The way the wolf had looked at him had made him feel like she was telling him not to disturb what he didn't have to, but Sam had already wiped the plaque more or less clean.
"Dean, the torch," he said, touch of urgency in his voice.
Dean stepped over a gooey-looking puddle in the floor and held the torch up to the plaque.
There was nothing written on it.
"It's not the only one," Sam said. "They're all blank. I'm sure of it."
"No, they're not," Dean said. "That one over there – that I was standing next to –"
Of course it couldn't be written in shining gold on the single plaque situated on the western wall of the mausoleum, or anything. The brass letters were nearly illegible, and the plaque itself was hidden at just above waist-height on the northern wall of the mausoleum. A judicious application of coat sleeves and torchlight brought the word to the fore.
"I can't even pronounce that," Dean said after they'd stared at it for a few depressingly silent minutes.
Sam reached into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out the little bundle of Google Maps instructions.
"Got a pen?" he asked.
Dean produced one from inside his leather jacket and held it up.
*********
The wolf guided them back to the Impala, tail swinging in a way that Dean felt looked rather smug. She licked his palm again, and nosed at Sam's. Then she backed out of the reach of the Impala's headlights, eyes glowing green, heading along the left-hand fork.
By the time they'd got in the car and revved the engine, she'd vanished into the dark.
*********
The left-hand fork of the Roman road culminated in a farmyard. The house to their left was big and old and... well, rambling, the kind of place you dream of growing up in as a kid. Dean swore he saw a tree house in the old oak next to the road. The light in the windows glowed warmly, flickered across the yard. Fire, or candles. Sam got out of the Impala and walked to the edge of her headlight beams.
"There's three roads here," he called to Dean. "Leading off in different directions."
"What does Google Maps say?" Dean asked, trying and failing to keep the sarcasm to a minimum.
Sam consulted with the cursed papers by the glow of the headlights. His mouth twisted into weird and wonderful shapes as he did so, inventing whole new aspects of the Bitchface. Finally, he looked up and sighed.
"I'm not gonna like it?" Dean said. He had a foot inside the car, leaning on the driver's door. Elbow on the roof, fingers tapping on the metal.
Sam shrugged resignedly.
Dean gestured at him to get on with it.
"Knock three times on the farmhouse door, wait one minute exactly, and then knock twice more," Sam read. "Jake will open the door to you. If you show him the key, he'll put you up for the night; if you tell him the password, he'll tell you how to continue."
"Will he, perchance, do both?" Dean asked.
Sam shrugged again. "We could ask," he said.
They did so. Jake shook his head regretfully. "Sorry, fellas. One or the other."
Dean sighed. There was a rather tempting smell of roast... something... wafting from inside the house, and he wasn't in all that big a hurry to meet Bobby. In fact, the old man had probably given them up for dead already. The firelight was warm and inviting, and someone was coming down the corridor behind Jake towards them – a slender someone, with hips that swished interestingly and long dark hair.
Sam was edging closer to the doorway already. Dean patted his jacket pocket to ensure that he still had the key to the gate at the bridge, and then reached into Sam's jeans.
Sam yelped. "Dude, get outta there!"
Dean held up the Google Maps papers triumphantly. "Sorry, Sam. There's chocolate in the car."
"Dean..." Sam whined, sounding like a sulky ten year old.
"Here's your password," Dean said to Jake, holding it out.
Jake took it and smiled at them. "Did you thank her?"
"Of course," Dean said, a little offended.
"Good. It pays to be polite around these parts."
"It pays not to stop for long in inviting-looking places, too," Dean said.
"You're a dangerous young man for a firstborn, Dean Winchester," Jake said. "Let me show you the way."
Boots rang loud on the cobbles of the yard as they crossed it. Jake stopped where Sam had earlier, in front of the branching of the three roads.
"One leads to your destination," he said. "One leads home. One leads onwards. Choose."
"But we don't know which is which," Sam said slowly.
"Choose, and I will tell you," Jake replied.
"It's a riddle, then," Sam said. "I mean, onwards? The only way to get to our destination is by going onwards. And I suppose you could say that home is everybody's destination –"
"Except ours," Dean said suddenly. "Except ours, because we don't have one."
Jake didn't say anything. He stood with his arms crossed over his chest and waited patiently for Dean to work his way through it, the same way Dad always had.
"We don't have a home. So that road would lead to – nothingness. Or death. Our destination was Richmond, originally. For all we know now, we've passed that place earlier in the night, so going onwards might not work for that. The road to our destination is the road to Richmond, pure and simple."
"And the road onwards?" Sam said. "What about that? Where does it lead?"
Dean glanced across at him. "I don't know, Sam," he said. "No one knows. Onwards is... onwards is more. Onwards is continuing without a destination. Without a destiny. Or a reason. Onwards is forever till the roads run out. Onwards is freedom."
Jake watched them silently. Sam looked down at the printouts in his hands, and then up at Dean. He knew perfectly well which road his brother wanted to take. Hell, he knew which one he wanted to take.
"Dean," he said, unsure if the word was a plea or a question or an order.
Dean sighed. "We'll take the road to our destination, please," he said to Jake.
The farmer, if such he was, lifted a hand and pointed silently along one of the three roads. Dean turned and got back in the Impala; Sam joined him instantly. The car jerked over the cobblestones uncomfortably, but Jake disappeared into the rearview as quick as anyone they'd ever left behind over the years.
*********
The next time Dean was on the laptop, he set up that family protection software stuff-thing so that Sam could never access that site again. Google Maps, his sorry ass. Winchesters used the paper versions, thank you very much.
They were three days late to meet with Bobby, and the hunt was already as good as over. He was pissed, of course, but Sam talked them out of it in the end. It wasn't like taking a dressing-down from Dad, that was for sure.
Besides, Dean was not, in point of fact, actually sorry.