Disclaimer: The characters of Sherlock belong to Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat. The characters of Supernatural belong to Eric Kripke. They do not belong to me.
"John. I can tell something's troubling you."
A clock ticks in the background, slow and even and loud.
"Well. Yes. That's what this therapy's for, isn't it?" John Watson raps his cane against his foot lightly and stares at the ground.
A tut. "John…"
"Yes?" He coughs and tries to sound less aggressive. "Yes."
"Do you want to talk about it?" A silence. "Friends? Sherlock? I can't help you if you don't talk to me, John. Your family?"
"No – no, they're fine. Good. Harry has actually, uh, been trying to stop drinking. So that's…. that's… good. It's all… good." The quiet stretches out. "It's… sleeping."
"You're having difficulties with sleeping."
"Yes."
"What sort of difficulties?"
John sighs, heavily, and continues to examine the carpet fibre. And the voice says "John…" like she can't get enough of the name.
"Nightmares," he says finally.
"They're back?"
He rests his cane against the side of the chair. "Not… exactly." The silence waits. "They're different."
"What's different about them?"
"I – I've been having ni- bad dreams, but they're not… not the same. It's not the war anymore, not Afghanistan…. I'm not sure exactly what it is."
The therapist taps her pen. "Try and describe one of these dreams."
"Well…." He moved his gaze from the floor and glances around the room unseeingly. "It's just… flashes. Red. Black. Fire, lots of fire. It sounds ridiculous but I think…" he scoffs a little at himself. "I think I'm dreaming of Hell. The mediaeval 'fire and brimstone' kind, that is. It's not… anything I've experienced, no people, no anything. It's…. no, it's Hell. Just dreams of Hell, and no, I don't know why."
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Sam leans against a brick wall warmed by the summer heat and watches as Dean's face emerges from the depths of the opened car hood, smeared with grime and sweat.
He slams the hood down and brushes his shirt off, sending dust motes circling into the sun-choked air. Then he walks around the Impala again and stoops down to inspect a small dent in the side, shaking his head in despair. "Son of a bitch left a bullethole in my car."
"Dean," Sam says, but his brother ignores him.
They're outside crappy motel Number God Knows What and Sam would check them in if Dean wasn't holding all the fake credit cards in his pocket, apparently incapable of leaving his car.
Admittedly, there's no hurry. They're not exactly on a busy schedule, having had a grand total of zero cases in, like, two (or three? It's probably three) weeks. They're running low on conversation and gasoline and basically everything and it's weird.
He turns and stares at the motel. The Rest, it says, and there's a picture of a tipping hourglass next to it. Sam wonders if that's supposed to be clever.
"Dean."
The air is hot and still and stifling and Sam is bored. There's a somewhat lackadaisical bird trilling somewhere in the distance but other than that and Dean's mutterings, there's no sound.
Perhaps the boredom is a good thing. Isn't it kind of messed-up to live on the expectation that people are going to get murdered somewhere by supposedly mythical monsters? They should be able to just… be normal. For once.
"Dean."
His brother finally steps away from the Impala. "What?"
"Can we go in?"
"Sure." They crunch up the gravel path and Sam watches Dean with scientific interest. Dean catches this and frowns. "What?"
"Are you – are you limping?"
"What's that supposed to mean?"
Sam rolls his eyes. "You hurt your leg or something? Maybe the muscle's tight."
"No, my muscles are – I'm not limping!"
"Walk on." Sam stops mid-step on the gravel.
Dean looks at him like he's crazy, but takes two even short steps. "You happy?"
"You were limping, like, a second ago." Sam says. He ponders. "You know, you should do stretches. Good for the muscles."
Dean shakes his head. "You're not funny, Sammy," he says as they enter The Rest.
He goes up to the counter where a stony-faced woman waits. On the wall above her there's a tasteless and worn-out painting of a raven. Everything about this motel screams tacky, but what else is new.
In the motel room there's silence. It's seriously weird. No panic, no anything. Sam's on edge for no reason whatsoever and Dean's lying on the quilt cover of his bed humming some stupid rock song under his breath. It smells sort of like barley.
The humming stops.
"Hey," says Dean to the ceiling. "Do you reckon they make foot-long burgers?" Oh god. Sam ignores him but his brother continues regardless. "How would they even make those? Is it still a burger if it's long?"
"Dean, a baguette. You're talking about a baguette."
"No," says Dean. "They don't have burger meat in baguettes."
Burger meat. Sam gives up.
And nothing happens and nothing happens and nothing happens and then there's a faint whoosh of air sweeping through the room. Deans sits up as Castiel appears in the centre of the room. He looks tired and grim, so Sam assumes all is well.
"Hello Sam. Hello Dean," he says in his gravelly monotone.
"Hey, Cas," says Sam.
"What are you doing here?" says Dean. Because it would kill him to say hello first, it seems. Castiel shifts.
"Let me guess." Dean carries on. "A band of demons. Angelic Thugs trying to end the world?"
"Neither of those," says Castiel.
Dean frowns. "Then what? Leprechauns?"
Cas does the 'Are-We-Speaking-The-Same-Language' Head Tilt. "No," he says, and appears to struggle with himself for a moment. "I'm here because… the situation in Heaven is… bad. The fighting has stopped – for now. But it's very precarious, and certain angels would have me dead. For now it's best that I stay under the radar."
Dean opens his mouth and Sam shoots him a look before his brother says something idiotic. "So what you're saying," says Dean. "Is that you've got some time to kill."
The angel furrows his brow for a second. Sam imagines his mind scouring through centuries of human observation in a couple of seconds.
"Essentially… yes," he concludes.
There's a thump as Dean flops back down on the bed. "Pull up a chair then, and join the club."
Sam contemplates what Castiel has said about Heaven. "Is there anything we can do?" he asks. Or rather, blurts. "About Heaven, I mean."
"No, there's nothing." Castiel looks at him.
Do angels spend time learning to continually look like they're staring into the depths of everyone's soul, or is it just part of the 'Warrior of God' package?
"Okay, then…" Sam trails off, not sure where to take the conversation. "We could-"
He stops, because the angel has disappeared and left him with empty space. Dean sits up to see why his brother has cut himself off, and makes a face. "Freaking angels."
"Maybe something happened in Heaven."
"No," says a voice behind them. The other two both jump and look round. Cas has reappeared by the window. He's frowning. "It was not my… intention to leave."
"Where did you go?"
"I don't know," he says. "I did not have time to see my whereabouts."
"So you just… blipped?" says Dean. There's a beat of silence. "Cas?"
Castiel is staring into space in a decidedly vacant way. It would be funny, except it's Cas so it's not because angels don't blank out. He blinks. "Dean."
Outside, a truck drives down the quiet road, the roaring growing and making the walls of the motel room quiver, then receding, but the walls continue to shake almost imperceptibly.
Dean notices. He stands up and takes an uncertain step.
"Is that you?" he says to Cas, who doesn't reply. "Cas."
"Dean."
Sam is beginning to feel like a third party.
Castiel looks around like he's seeing the motel room for the first time, frowning harder than ever. "Is everything all right?" says Sam.
The walls stop vibrating. Castiel half raises a hand but then retracts it, and looks around again. "I… I shouldn't be here," he says distantly, sounding utterly perplexed.
"Heaven?" says Dean.
"No," says Cas. "It-" And on those conclusive words, he vanishes again.
Sam and Dean exchange a look.
"Well that was weird," says Dean.
"Think he'll come back?"
Dean does the casual shrug that he only does when he's pretending not to worry. "Could be smiting gremlins in Iceland for all I know." A moment of silence. "I'm taking a shower."
He heads to the bathroom, and as he does he starts to limp.
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It is the fifth time that Sherlock has woken from a dream of a man in a beige overcoat. He thinks it's a man, anyway – he only remembers blurs and flickers, like an image curling and blackening in a fire. Sherlock tries to grasp at details. Overcoat suggests businessman, stature suggests soldier….
He loses interest and sits up.
The room is dark since the blinds got stuck and he covered them with a poster of the Periodic Table that John didn't want over the TV, but his phone tells him it's 4:05pm.
He heads to the sitting-room. John's not there, probably gone to see his therapist because he's missed three appointments in a row and she's emailed him to ask about it, more than once.
Sherlock looks around at John's laptop (password ten letters, probably a medical term from the journal he's been reading recently which he thinks Sherlock won't notice and would therefore make a successfully obscure log-in), the Stradivarius on a pile of open books from the last case, the assorted scientific apparatus strewn across the kitchen counter.
Bored.
Nothing immediately grabs his attention so he stares out the window at the distant murmur of movement and traffic and city life, trying to read people (middle-aged woman going to meet someone, probably an affair, older woman who just visited a distant relative in hospital-), but his eyes keep leaping to to deceptive details: a beige jumper, a trench coat, a far-off figure disappearing in the midst of crowds, disappearing-
Sherlock has never been distracted by a dream before. They are meaningless reconfigurations of the day and therefore irrelevant.
John returns twenty-eight minutes later. His footsteps are uneven up the stairs, which means he's troubled. It's been a bad session at the therapist's.
He is now standing in the doorway, looking at Sherlock lying on the sofa looking at a book in his hand. There is a pause as the doctor leans his cane against the wall.
"I'm putting the kettle on," he says.
Patters have started against the windowpane, but there was no soft thump of John tossing a coat over the arm of a chair, so it's probably not cold. That mild kind of summer rain, then, likely the beginning of a storm.
Sherlock sits up because his arm has started to go numb and is now tingling unpleasantly.
"So," says John from the kitchen. "Solve any cases while I was gone?"
There's a squeak as the fridge door opens and closes again.
Sherlock sighs. "No. The criminals of London are losing their creativity, if Lestrade can solve the cases without me. Or perhaps he's acquired a few brain cells."
"Right." John re-emerges with two cups of tea, the faint steam spiralling up and fading away. The patters on the window are getting louder.
The consulting detective watches him as he settles in the armchair and picks up a half-read newspaper. His eyes are flicking randomly over the page, not taking anything in, just skimming.
A pause.
John looks up. "What are you reading?"
"The Bible."
John blinks and glances at the book to make sure Sherlock's not just trying to insult him in some way. Sherlock can see on his face that he's deciding whether or not to question this, whether he wants to know the answer. In the meantime, Sherlock takes a gulp of the tea. Almost scalding and not enough milk.
"Why?" John takes the plunge.
Sherlock picks up the Bible and flips through the pages. "Bored."
Dropping the book, he gets up and goes to the rain-streaked window again. There are fewer people now. Instead just a haze of umbrellas, black and grey and striped. And absolutely no beige overcoats.
After a few moments have passed he gets the sensation that John has said something. The silence manages to be expectant, anyhow. He combs back over his auditory memory but comes up blank. He turns. "What?"
John says whatever he was saying again but Sherlock still doesn't take it in, he's distracted by the way his flatmate is holding his arm, like there's something wrong with it. Stiffness, maybe. Maybe it's nothing.
"Do you ever wonder about Heaven, John?" He interrupts.
His flatmate looks inordinately surprised at the query. He's trying to cover it though, his face goes still and he blinks once or twice in that way he does when he's trying to process something.
"Did you-" he laughs. "Did you just ask a religious question?"
To be perfectly honest, Sherlock himself doesn't know why he asked. It's just an urge, a need to know. "I find it fascinating how common minds can take so much time to contemplate issues such as whether there is indeed, a 'Heaven' or a 'Hell,' when the answer should be completely clear that there can be no such thing. I was wondering if you would, for once, enlighten me."
John opens his mouth, closes it again and takes a sip of tea with his right arm.
"Well," he says finally. "Haven't you ever wondered?"
"No." Sherlock sits down at the desk and checks his phone. Nothing from Lestrade. He looks up and sees John watching him. "Oh god," he says. "Don't tell me you believe in an afterlife."
"Well," John says. He has a knack for starting every other sentence with a vaguely reproving 'well.' "I don't know. It's nice to think though, isn't it? That there might be."
"That there might be a Hell?" Sherlock scoffs. "No."
He turns to the laptop, but he can feel John's eyes on him longer than usual, somewhat questioningly, and he puts it down to the surprise of a religion-oriented conversation.
"What's wrong with your arm?" says Sherlock.
"What?"
"You've been favouring your right arm more than usual since you arrived."
John flexes his left arm. "Feels like my shoulder's burning. Must have wrenched it."
Sherlock loses interest, but he still feels restless and bored and as if there is something he should be doing but he can't pinpoint what. So he goes to the window for a third time and watches the world.
He won't admit to himself that he's searching, yet he can't help but notice that the streets are emptying and shining with rain and the sky is dust grey, and there is absolutely nobody wearing a beige overcoat.
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There is something wrong with Dean.
Not that there is isn't usually, but this time it's different. Sam's actually a bit concerned, if not outright freaked.
It's been a day since Cas dropped by and left (or, as Dean put it, 'blipped out') without a warning. Sam hasn't mentioned it since, but he's caught Dean pausing and glancing around as if expecting to the angel to suddenly manifest again. Which wasn't too crazy, since it was Castiel and that guy did have a tendency to just… pop out of nowhere.
That's not what's worrying Sam.
During the past day, they've mainly been hanging around the motel room, searching online for news that could be up their street, but nothing. It's like the world's dead to them, unresponsive as a corpse…. Wait. Sam pauses and wonders when their similes had got so messed-up.
Anyway, that's not what's worrying him.
Half an hour ago, Dean arose from the bed with so much difficulty you'd think Dracula himself was dragging himself out of a hundred-year-old coffin with stiff limbs.
"'M going into town to get supplies," he had declared, which in the Dean-to-World Translator means I'm going to get a load of beer, because Sam got actual supplies earlier that day and it's starting to get dark outside anyway. "And a pie."
Five minutes ago he had returned, but not… not…
Sam watches his brother warily as he settles himself by the blackening window – limping, Sam isn't sure he wants to know what that's about - and leans against the floral pattern wallpaper that has a smattering of dubious stains, with a contented look. He's even humming a bit under his breath.
"Dean," Sam begins. "Are you…. alright?" He keeps an eye on the laptop screen so as to look casual, although it's only showing the desktop.
"Mmm? Oh yes, yes I'm fine. Splendid." Dean gives him a kindly smile.
Splendid. Right. Sam stares at the start-up menu for a few more moments, glancing up his brother at intervals. Finally he turns and sets the laptop down on the bed.
"Can I – can I just ask?" he says.
"Ye-es?"
Sam clears his throat awkwardly. "Why are you drinking a cup of tea?"
Dean looks at him uncomprehendingly, then his gaze moves down to the cup and saucer in his hand. There's a split-second of silence and his brother suddenly swears, drops the tea as if it were a snake.
The saucer lands with a thud and rolls away, and the cup tips, letting brown liquid seep out and into the grimy carpet. Just another stain to add to the collection in this room, Sam thinks.
Dean's eyebrows are rapidly traversing up his forehead.
"Dude, what the hell?" he says, staring from his hands to the damp carpet and back.
Perhaps this is it, this is when his brother finally loses his last grain of sanity and tries to marry his Impala and the locals will start calling him 'The Mad Car Man' and children will make it a game on Halloween to try and put a pencil in his overgrown beard…
What? Sam refocuses.
Dean fixes his gaze on him. "Dude," he says, and indicates the cup and saucer with excessively dramatic arm movements to punctuate each word. "What. The. Hell?"
Sam shrugs. "I don't know, Dean, you tell me."
He leans to fish the offending dishware from the ground before Dean steps on one of them as he starts to pace back and forth.
"I went out for beer," he says.
"Uh, yeah."
"That is not beer!"
"You mean you didn't decide to get tea instead?" Where the hell did he even get tea from?
"How can you even ask that?" says Dean, as if Sam is suggesting that his brother has taken up romantic poetry. "No!"
The pacing gets more agitated, and he starts to lean a little on one side, favouring one leg over the other.
"Dean, you're-"
His brother jumps as if only just aware of his presence, and spins round to face him. "What? Did you – what did you just call me?"
Sam pauses. "Uh, what?"
"Did you just call me-" He stops himself and paces a bit more. "What?"
"…What?"
"What?"
Okay, well that's not getting them anywhere. Sam gets up cautiously, as if his brother is a grenade who might explode at any moment. "Dean, what's happening?"
Dean jolts again. His face is a strange shade of grey. "There! You did it again!"
"Did what?" says Sam, throwing up his arms helplessly.
"Called me J-"
"Hello Dean. Hello Sam."
This time Sam is the one jumps at the unexpected low voice behind him. Thank God for good timing. He turns. "Cas!"
The angel looks tired, more dishevelled than usual and his face is dark – but maybe Sam's just making stuff up now. He's pretty weirded out as it is.
"Cas, what happened?" asks Sam. "You just disappeared on us yesterday."
"Yeah, did you get beamed up to Heaven or something?" says Dean. Whatever the deal with the tea is, it's briefly forgotten.
Castiel grimaces. He seems vaguely distracted in the way he looks around the room. "No."
A pause.
"You wanna elaborate?" says Dean. His face is resuming its normal shade.
The angel appears to contemplate this question. "No."
Okay then.
Nobody seems very sure how to proceed after that, and a silence falls in the room to mirror the night falling outside. Sam watches Cas. If he didn't know better he would say the guy is disorientated. His eyebrows are drawn together more than usual, and he seems to be looking inwards rather than paying attention to the other two.
Sam looks from the angel to the still-damp stain on the carpet that isn't clearing up, and thinks of Dean's leg. Something is seriously screwed up here.
And as if confirm his hypothesis, Castiel sways and starts to keel over.
"Whoa, whoa whoa, Cas-" Sam goes to catch him, but the man is toppling too fast and they end up in an awkward half-collapsed tangle against the edge of the bed, Sam's arm stuck uncomfortably around Castiel's elbow.
Extricating himself from the sudden mass of trench coat on him, Sam manages to lug Castiel onto the bed with Dean's assistance, where he lies still in a sprawled mess, one arm dangling over the edge of the mattress.
"Is he hurt?" says Dean, looking as perplexed as Sam feels.
Sam shakes his head. "I don't – I don't know."
Either way, they peel off his coat and check for bloodstains or cracked bones, check his heartbeat and check he's breathing (although neither of them knows whether angels need to breathe anyway) and find nothing. Sam isn't sure if that's good or bad, because it means they still don't have a clue what's wrong with the guy.
Dean stands back and stares at Castiel. "Angels don't just pass out, Sammy."
"Wait…" Sam observes the angel's haggard appearance and a strange, and not entirely reassuring thought comes to him. "Actually, I think he's just…. asleep."
A beat of silence.
"Angels don't just fall asleep, Sam!"
"Well, I don't know."
A pensive silence follows this. They both watch the faint rise and fall of Castiel's chest. Maybe they should try and wake him up – he might be falling into some kind of divine coma or something. Could angels do that? Sam makes a mental note to start asking the guy about these things. Could come in useful someday.
Sam moves forward cautiously. "Cas?" he says. Then, louder: "Castiel!"
Nothing happens. His brother watches as if severely doubting his sanity, though he's in no position to judge so he can just shut up. Wondering if he's committing an obscure form of blasphemy, Sam shakes Cas a little. Still nothing.
He steps back with a sigh. "Dean."
"What?"
The response is so unexpectedly frantic that Sam jumps. "What?"
"My. Name. Is. Dean," says Dean. His eyebrows have rocketed back up his forehead.
"Uh. Yeah." Sam decides that now is not the time for this. "You try."
"To wake him?" Dean looks vaguely scandalised. "Dude, maybe we should just let him sleep. He looks kind of peaky."
"We have to find out what's wrong with him-" Just in time, Sam swallows back Dean's name in case he triggers this weird hang-up about it now. Of all the things… "So tap into your profound bond and wake him."
Dean inelegantly kicks the bed, which makes the mattress springs squeak, but that's it.
He frowns down at Castiel. "Wake up already. I don't need a holy tax accountant taking up my bed, I'm not sleeping on the floor for you." This is a lie. He would.
They wait expectantly.
"Maybe if I play a ringtone loud enough-" Sam's hand is sliding into his denim pocket as Castiel's eyes open and he sort of… sputters awake.
"Cas!" Apropos of nothing, the angel has gone from silent and prone, to bursting into action so suddenly that he doesn't so much get off the bed as roll, with a touch of panicked flailing. There is a loud flurry of movement as he barely manages to land on his feet, and fights for balance for a precarious second.
"Oh." With a slow blink, Castiel begins to rearrange his coat, ignoring the brothers' exclamations and attempts to get him to sit. His hair is askew, which does nothing for his still-haggard appearance.
"What was that all about?" says Dean, poised to catch the guy if he feels an urge to be horizontal again.
"I have returned." Cas looks at them as if he wants them to confirm this. He seems surprised.
Returned is not exactly how Sam would have put it, but oh well.
Dean laughs uncertainly. "Cas, you never left."
The motel room smells of cigarette smoke. This detail hits Sam out of the blue. Why this should suddenly be drawn to his attention, he has no clue: you find all kinds of crap in motel rooms and residue cigarette butts would not be the worst they've found, but once he's noticed the smell he finds he can't ignore it.
"No…" Cas frowns. "I was in London."
There's a pause where Dean appears to be struggling to make some sort of inane pun or joke about this, but the angel's declaration so unexpected that he just goes: "Uh, sorry to break your bubble, but you didn't leave the bed."
Sam thinks about how he really wants to open a window.
Cas looks as if he's concentrating hard. He shakes his head slightly and the room gets a tad bit colder, something Sam has learnt to associate with the angel's departure. The teacup on the bedside table rattles a bit, or perhaps that's just his imagination.
"Something's wrong," says Cas, lapel inside-out. A faint wind starts.
Dean moves in front of Castiel, apparently also sensing his imminent departure. "Wait, wait, stop. Just stop a minute, alright?"
After a few seconds of what Sam has termed 'deep-soul-searching-gazing-thing', the room is still again and the normal temperature is resumed.
"Okay." Dean relaxes and moves back. "What's the matter with you, Cas? You've been acting kind of weird lately."
This is pretty hypocritical. Sam forgets the cigarette smoke. "Dean, you've been acting pretty weird too."
Dean looks at him uncomprehendingly and turns back, disregarding the comment as some sort of joke. There's something about it – the lack of recognition, maybe, as if he's already forgotten the deal with the tea and the limp – that kind of scares Sam.
But maybe he's just being ridiculous and it's nothing and he's being, as Dean would say, a 'Samantha.' Still, the doubt lingers in his mind like an itch he can't ignore.
"Something's wrong," says Castiel again, his voice getting rougher and deeper as it does when he's thinking hard.
Dean gestures for him to continue. "You wanna enlighten us?"
A grimace. "I was in London," says Cas. "But I wasn't in it. I was… in some abstract concept of London from the imaginings of a civilian." He must see from their faces that he's lost them, because he sighs. "I was in someone's dream."
"Someone was dreaming about you?" says Sam.
"Not exactly." A pause as Cas seems to try and find the words to explain to their simple, mortal minds. Or something. "If that were the case, it would not physically affect me. I was pulled into their dream. What I don't know is how."
Dean visibly processes this information. "Do you know whose dream it was?"
Cas shakes his head. "I was not there long enough."
This leads to a brief dead end in the conversation, because it's clear none of them have encountered something like this before.
"So now what?" says Dean. "I mean, is this normal? Should we do something?"
"I have not heard of this happening before."
"London." Dean says it like he's having an epiphany. "London, London, London."
The other two wait for some enlightening statement to follow, but none does. The hunter continues to mutter 'London, London' under his breath like some sort of chant. Sam wants to intervene but saying Dean's name might make it worse.
He exchanges a glance with the angel. Castiel is doing his confused-squinty-eye thing, at first, but then he moves towards Sam's brother and does the Head Tilt and stares in the 'soul-searching-gazing-thing' way. Dean isn't reciprocating.
It seems for a second that Cas recognises something, or has a realisation, and Sam waits. Dean has quietened. "What is it?" says Sam.
A sigh. "Something's wrong," Cas tells him, which is getting to be pretty old news by now.
"Yeah," says Sam, repressing an urge to bash his head against the wall. "What?"
It's pretty dark in the room now, they should really turn another light on to support the dim orange glow from the bedside lamp in the far corner, struggling to extinguish the shadows. Castiel's features are thrown into darkness and it only serves to make the whole situation more unsettling.
"Dean," says the angel with that insufferable profound calm. "Is not… Dean."
And the room fills with a faint and brief breeze which wafts the smell of cigarettes around, and the 'holy tax accountant' is gone, leaving Sam and Dean in the dying light.
Dean looks worried. "I'm not me?" He looks down at himself, checkered-shirt-denim-jeans, classic Dean all over. "I feel like me."
He shoves his hand in his pockets in order to begin his worried pacing again, but instead stops. He pulls out something and opens his fist to reveal a crumpled strip of paper, tattered as if a page torn from a notebook in a hurry.
They exchange a look.
"What is it?" says Sam. By which he means 'what now?'
Dean hands it to him and Sam goes to turn on the other light to alleviate the gloom. The motel room floods with pale yellow-whiteness. He looks down at his hand.
There, in Dean's handwriting, it says:
Hope.
"What-" Sam begins to say, but when he looks up his brother is pulling something else out of his pocket, another freaking piece of paper, wrinkled and greyish, straightening it out and frowning down at the writing.
Sam reaches it for it. Dean's handwriting, again, but scrawled and rushed, with the h unexpectedly jagged, as if he's been jogged, or writing on an uneven surface.
There is no hope.