"Sau and Denu in Sau'win"

Dear Mr Kripke,

Your Hallowe'en gaff; I fixed it for you.

(Rated K+ through sheer lack of blood, gore, salty language or fisticuffs.)

.


.

Parte The Firste: Aardvark

'In The Beginning' was the word, and the word was…

.

.

The hurtling, howling mass of wind and matter swirled around him. It pulled at his hair as if it were the obnoxious child sat behind him in math class, pushing and buffeting his tall frame with ease. Sam raised his hands, trying to protect his face, his head - anything - from the powerful force.

All in vain. His arms sliced through the mist and whirling gas without leaving so much as a parting to show they had been there. The swathes he imagined he saw sealed up faster than a DHL courier packet and he knew he was stuck.

Stuck in nothingness, imprisoned by something so strong, so omnipotent but ultimately, formless. The sound repeated over and over until he almost made out syllables. But no limbs presented themselves, no creature or monster conveniently poked its head out, ready to be shot. There was nothing but shapeless, seamless air and motion, hammering at him mercilessly.

He flailed at it as best he could, hoping to ward off some of the effects. Something solid slammed into the whole length of his front. Momentarily elated to feel something tangible, the pain and smarting soon judged this a Pyrrhic victory based upon the testimonies of the various joints and bones that had been less than flush as he had hurtled into the unforgiving shape.

His eyes popped open. He heard his own panicked breathing, saw something large and brown and… dusty and…

"Crap," Sam cursed, realising he was on the floor of a motel room, face down with his arms above his head. He pushed himself up and over to sit, looking around.

There was a snort and a rumble, and for one fleeting nano-second Sam feared a bear had somehow become trapped in the room. Then he recognised the image of the bear as nothing more than a painting on the wall - and the sound simply that of his slumbering brother.

He bought a ticket and leapt on the tramcar to his feet, dusting himself off and checking he was all there. He looked at his bed, with its twisted up sheets and cool interior, and sighed the great huff of the unjust. He climbed back into bed, put his hands behind his head, and thought back over the odd dream.

In the black movie theatre of his mind, on the huge flickering screen in two foot letters, were the subtitles: ACT ONE: SAM WINCHESTER CLEARLY NEEDS MORE SLEEP.

He turned on his side. He claimed what was rightfully his.

but

then

there

was

"C'mon, Sammy, rise and shine!" Dean bellowed, putting his hand to the bed next to his brother's head and shaking without mercy.

Sam's head worked like a Universal Studios head bobbler of Dracula and he was instantly awake. He opened his eyes and spotted the back of his brother, wrapped only in a towel, and wiped at his own face hurriedly. He sat up with a spurt of energy, surveying the room quickly.

"Dean?" he called, even as the bathroom door was closing.

"Don't start," Dean's voice called back. "I tried to wake you like a hundred times, man. What the hell did you drink last night?"

Sam blinked, rubbing his face. "I didn't."

"Just lucky then," Dean called, the sound of taps and toothbrushes obscuring his words from behind the door.

Sam slid out of bed and looked around. "I had this - this nightmare," he admitted.

The bathroom door opened and Dean, still clad only in a fluffy white towel from the waist down, looked at him.

"Dare I ask?" he grinned, the toothbrush still multi-tasking, at once scrubbing and obscuring.

"Uh - well… It was like I was trapped in… wind," Sam shrugged.

Dean's hand currently in charge of the toothbrush shift clocked off momentarily for a break. "Come again?"

"Wind. Like… I was being blown about and I couldn't do anything about it," Sam said with a marked lack of confidence.

Dean blinked at his sibling - just blinked. Then his features took on the serious look of thoughtfulness that Sam often felt was incongruous on his brother's face.

"That's nothing," Dean informed him, "I had this really assed-out dream the other night. It was like 1955, and I was in this diner sitting next to Dad, right? 'Cept I didn't know it was him yet? And then this big dude comes in and sees us and calls out--"

"That was Back To The Future," Sam interrupted thoughtfully.

"Oh." Dean looked deflated. "Well like I said, it was some weird crap. God knows what I had been drinking that night."

"Yeah - um - great," Sam shrugged. "So anyway… this wind, it was talking."

Dean's face broke into the most childish smile Sam had ever witnessed. "Nuh-uh, that's just what you call it in polite company."

Sam felt the breath of fury, the carbonated indignation rise up from beyond his ribcage. Untold leagues of air, unimaginable amounts of frustration and despair were smashed together, fashioned into the largest, most terrible amalgamation of might and emotion no human had ever witnessed before. It fought its way out from the young man, making its desperate bid for the wide open space of real air, of utopian room it could dream about but not yet entirely fathom without proof.

Sam huffed.

Dean, completely oblivious to the landmark of physics and personal accomplishment to which his brother had just been a party, simply turned back to the bathroom sink and spat out the faithful toothpaste. He picked up a glass, filling it and rinsing his teeth. That water went the same way as the toothpaste that had outlived its usefulness and Dean set the glass down, looking for a towel.

He pressed it to the lower half of his face, realised Sam was still looking at him, and turned back to him.

"What?"

Sam was looking about as troubled as a girl in a shoe shop two days before pay day, studying something that appeared to occupy the same space as his elder brother's head.

Dean snapped his fingers at him. "Hello? Sammy? What?"

Sam's head bounced slightly. "Uh… nothing," he said faintly. "Nothing."

"Okie dokie. Well I'm just about done here so you get your ass in gear and get showered." Dean moved all his washroom bits and pieces to one side of the bathroom counter, leaving the smallest room. He walked past his brother and back to his own bed. "You stink," he added helpfully.

Sam nodded dumbly and went into the bathroom, closing the door.

Dean's cheerful smile fell like a twenty stone sumo wrestler as he considered the door. Then he sighed, shook his head, and picked up his duffle, upending it to reveal the day's underwear choices. Exciting as the quandary between white and grey Calvin's was, he made an executive decision to go with grey.

It was shaping up to be that kind of day, after all.

because

later

that

day

(using

the

widely

accepted

'sun is in the sky'

method)

Sam was leaning on the rear wing of the Impala, ostensibly holding the petrol nozzle in place but actually daydreaming. In amongst the images of winged lollipops and fearsome, sharp-toothed candy canes with bite radiuses that would put a carcharodon carcharias auditioning for Jaws to shame, the whispered sound of the dream came in breathy reminders every few moments.

He jumped, paying more attention to what he was doing and making an effort not to spill petroleum on his person. Although these days he understood he was losing grasp of the whole Dr P. Venkman scale of Good and Bad, he still had enough of a connection to real-time Earth to understand that free-running hydrocarbon-based products covering flammable material was quite the white-suited Al Pacino with a machine gun.

He stopped the pump, placing it carefully back in the housing and closing up the filler cap, squeaking the wee door closed and looking around to the shop. He spotted his brother's sandy coloured head as he apparently leant over the counter, the current object of his attention a cheeky looking brunette with a winning smile.

"And an impressive rack," he muttered before he could stop himself. Blinking at his own crassness, he opened the passenger door and got back in the car.

A shadow fell over the bonnet and slid up, covering his open window. He looked up to see the station attendant watching him, his face blank.

"Oh, we're good, thanks," Sam said cheerfully.

"Saaaaauuuuuu…"

Time - there. There - no. Melting downwards. Not meeting the edges. Stretching - stretching. Heat - heat? Cooling now. Dripping - up? Up. Time is back? Time is back. We have Time. Houston - we have Time!

Say again - Sam, can you read us? Say again!

We have Time.

A shock and jolt.

A black car. The Sau sitting in the car. The whisper of The Sau's dream echoing past his head. The Sau's creeping fear at the possibility of the nightmare's return.

Sam shook his head, determined to free it from the foggy mire currently surrounding him. He looked up at the unremarkable young man watching him.

"What?" Sam dared.

The man was smiling now. "That's good. You have a good day now, y'hear?" he nodded, turning away from the Impala.

Sam stuck his head out of the window, watching the young lad cross the forecourt to attend to a young woman with rowdy young children in the back of a large blue SUV. He stared, then collected his attention and sat back, thinking back over the craziness of his afternoon and the word he thought he had heard.

A squeak and a joggle interrupted him and he looked to his left to find Dean in the car. The elder Winchester pulled the door shut, tossing some kind of plastic foil-lined packet of snack food at his younger brother.

"There. Don't say I never give you nuthin'," Dean nodded. He leaned forward and started the car. He paused, spying Sam's open mouth. "Dude. Fly patrol. Quit it."

Sam didn't move. Dean reached over and the back of his hand slapped harshly at the underside of Sam's chin. Sam's mouth shot closed and he jumped, flapping limp hands at his elder brother to get him out of his personal space.

Dean just chuckled and pulled the old girl away from the pump, checking the traffic before hitting the road.

"So what's with that face?" he asked directly, settling into the seat.

"What?"

"Your. Face. You know, the fleshy thing attached to the front of your head?" Dean teased. His own cheerful face began to lose coherence and he ended up frowning at the look of absolute concentration on Sam's features. "Ok. What?"

"What?"

"What 'what'?" Dean countered. "What are you thinking about? All day all you've done is sit there with your mouth hanging open. It's freaking me out. Explain the mouth hanging open."

Sam pouted and rested his elbow on the window block, watching the countryside fly by.

"You know I had that weird dream last night?" he ventured. Dean simply waited. "Well I thought the wind was talking to me. Then that guy at the gas station… everything went weird for a minute and I think - I think he was saying the same word that the wind said."

"So what, you're being haunted by wind?" Dean guessed. "I thought that only happened after you ate half a burrito?"

"Dean," Sam tutted, shaking his head slowly. "I think something is trying to tell me something."

"Yeah, I thought something was trying to tell me something once - turns out it was just Mexican take-out telling me not to do absinthe after spicy tacos."

"You know, you're really annoying," Sam accused, his voice wedged high in the top end of his scale with his conviction.

"Oh really?"

"Yeah really."

"Then stop pissing on my sunny day, dude. I got a full tank of gas, I got chips in the glovebox, beer in the trunk, AC/DC in the radio and a pain in the ass brother bitchin' about dreams, of all things. Now shut your cakehole, shotgun. It's a hundred and forty-two miles to Kansas. And no, Dorothy, we are not stopping to pee." Dean leaned back, squirmed in the seat to get comfortable, and let out a long, relaxing breath.

Sam turned and regarded him for a long moment. When it was plain Dean had about as much interest in his sibling as he did in one hundred and one excellent reasons to own a goat, Sam gave up and twisted the other way, to look out of his open window with the kind of resolution that comes to school children in times of parental law.

"Fine," he muttered.

Dean leaned forward and turned up the radio slightly, grinning merrily, eyebrows raised in delight, as the opening strains to Rock n' Roll Train filled the car. He took a deep breath and settled into the seat with complete and utter contentment.

"See? Day's better already," Dean asserted.

And then, in a tone of voice that no more new of its impending foot-shooting than an innocent bolt realises it's about to seal the casing on a nuclear warhead, Dean uttered the most frightfully ominous and probably fate-tempting sentence he could possibly have engineered, had he even known he was doing it:

"Yup. Nuthin's gonna spoil my day."

.


.

Back To The Future homages, Yellow Fever rants, gag reel face-offs, It's A Terrible Life office supplies, Mystery Spot bathroom confessions, Nightmare attempts to avoid talking about dreams, Pilot episode one-liners: These are a few of my favourite things. The vodka+cheese taquitos continue to spew forth odd crap in chapter two.