Sam and Dean Winchester had been traveling for hours, heading in the general direction of Nebraska when Sam's cell phone rang. Pulling it from his jeans pocket he checked the caller id and frowned.
"It's Ellen," he said apprehensively, wondering when the last time was that he'd gotten a call from Ellen Harvelle that hadn't eventually turned everything to total chaos and crap.
Dean snorted; glad he was no longer on Ellen's phone tree. She refused to talk to him at all if she could avoid it and when she found it couldn't be avoided, she tried to break his balls.
The phone continued to ring and Sam continued to hold it loosely in his hand.
"Answer it," Dean suggested, "It might not be anything shitty for a change."
"Yeah, like Ellen calls just to say 'hey'."
Capitulating to the incessant ringing, Sam finally answered.
"Hello," he said, listened intently until she was done, then snapped the phone shut.
He'd never gotten a word in edgewise and rubbed his forehead, the beginnings of a headache rearing its ugly head.
"Well? Is she OK?" Dean asked smirking smugly, slowing the Impala down as they came up behind a semi.
"Yeah, but..."
"Oh God, Oh God, Oh God."
Sam's legs jerked out and knocked Dean's foot off the accelerator as pain sliced through his brain. When he cried out Dean knew immediately what was happening and steered the Impala onto the shoulder and brought it to a skidding halt.
"Sam, hold on," he shouted as Sam pitched forward.
Dean never knew how the visions would affect his brother but if he could have taken them on himself to spare Sam, he would have. Well, maybe not all of them; especially not this one because when he grabbed Sam's shoulders and pulled him back into an upright position, blood poured from both nostrils.
"Aw crap, Sammy. You hit the dash?"
The pain in his head lessened and Sam blinked owlishly.
"Don't think so," he breathed out, "It just started bleeding. Fuck!"
Sam knew the visions were becoming, if not more frequent, certainly more intense and physically debilitating. He tilted his head back, blood running down the back of his throat, the taste and consistency nauseating and decided he would rather incur Dean's wrath for bleeding all over the car than to gut it.
"Bleed on my seat and die," Dean threatened while reaching into the back seat to snag a box of tissues.
"I'll chance it," Sam retorted miserably.
Jamming his hand into the box, Dean grabbed a fistful and pressed it against Sam's face almost smothering him, "Pinch your nose, that'll stop it."
Dean remembered his dad telling him to do the same thing when a werewolf had reared up and broken his nose. He'd pinched the hell out of it; stopping the bleeding and ultimately snapping the displaced cartilage back into place, leaving his nose straight and his visage "still as handsome as ever," he thought laughingly, truly thankful he wasn't even more scarred up than he was.
His battle scars were just enough to peak a girl's interest and not gross her out but he knew it only took one misstep on a hunt to go from beauty to a beast.
They sat in silence for a short while, Sam breathing noisily through his mouth, his nausea his main concern. The pain in his head had subsided but the whole episode had left his stomach in rough shape.
It seemed his nosebleed was just spontaneous gushing brought on by his gift, or his curse, depending on how one looked at it. Half empty, half full, gift, curse, tomato, tomato it still sucked to be Sam when he was having a vision.
"Well, what'd you see this time? You and me in a resort in Mexico covered in suntan lotion and hot babes?"
Sam only wished.
"It was a woman. Dean, she was so sad and so angry at the same time. There was utter chaos surrounding her, gunshots and screaming. God, the screaming! And the gunshots, automatic weapons fire," he said wiping more blood from his face.
"Do you know who she is? Where she might be? Is it Ellen?"
"Slow down, my head's still spinning," Sam whined then continued, "Not Ellen, not Caucasian. Oriental, dressed in black pants and a long white top."
He paused to think for a minute then added, "Like the pictures in dad's trunk."
"Vietnamese," Dean said reaching back into his memories, taking care not to grab one with thorns. This one was one of the better ones.
Sam had mixed emotions recalling the day they were bored out of their skulls and had picked the lock on John Winchester's old footlocker.
They had delved deep into his past, rifling through the exotic photographs, reading his letters home. They'd also learned their father had been a war hero; as a number of dark blue hinged boxes containing shiny tokens of his country's gratitude were tucked deep down in the trunk.
He had spilled the beans about the two of them snooping and though John hadn't been angry exactly, the footlocker had disappeared and he had been even more remote than usual. And Sam had been so fraught with anxiety that he'd actually thrown up much to his chagrin and much to Dean's delight, until John had ordered Dean to clean up the mess.
"He never talked about it, the war," Sam said massaging his forehead once again.
"Why would he?" Dean asked understanding fully the meaning of shell-shocked, "He only had a few of years of peace before he was sucked back into another war...after Mom."
The yellow-eyed demon had forced John Winchester back into a different though just as deadly fray, conscripting not only the father but eventually the sons.
"It must have been hard to spend so much of his life fighting," Sam said without thought.
He stopped talking and looked at Dean whose eyes so often of late held the thousand-yard stare and what? Should he apologize for their father's bloody legacy? A legacy they both now carried on but that had been foisted on Dean at a very young age, an age where he couldn't say 'no he didn't want to go to war, that he just wanted to be a kid'.
Yeah, maybe he would try.
"Dean, I..."
"It's okay, Sammy. I wouldn't have had it any other way."
"Yeah, sure bro," Sam thought knowing full well what Dean had given up as a child, "If I was eight, I'd rather play whack a troll for real and be scared shitless all the time than play whack a mole in an arcade any day."
Dean turned away from Sam's piteous look and stared out his window. The sun was starting its downward arc and as the poem read:
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
He had promises to keep, promises to his father, promises to Sam and he turned back to his brother and asked, "You okay, now?" his concern quickly turning to disgust.
Totally grossed out by the blood soaked glob of tissue Sam still held up to his nose, his lip curled and he threatened, "Dude, if you leave that in my car, I'm gonna cripple you."
Sam checked his nose in the rear view mirror. It had finally stopped bleeding and he smiled weakly, grabbing an empty McDonald's bag and stuffing the bloody mess into it and fishing in the glove box for a KFC handi-wipe, he cleaned his face and hands then told Dean, "I'm good to go."
But where? he wondered. He had no idea who the woman in his vision was but since the war had been over for decades, he was pretty sure she wasn't a living, breathing woman and until he could get a decent meal, a good night's sleep and a clue, he would put her out of his mind. Then he remembered the phone call.
"Before I spazzed out, Ellen said we need to get to Bobby's. She says something's not right with him."
"How could she tell? Bobby isn't your everyday run of the mill auto mechanic."
"She said he came in and paid his tab...in full."
And without a second thought, Dean said, "Roadhouse it is," and slipped the Impala in gear and moved back onto the blacktop.