Title: Still Here I Carry My Old Delicious Burdens
Author: frozen_delight
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: Teen and Up Audiences
Warnings: Mild depictions of violence. Canon typical levels of angst and John Winchester appreciation. :)
Word count: ~ 2300
Beta: Many, many thanks to the fantastic anactoria for all her help, advice and encouragement. All remaining mistakes are mine of course.
Summary: "I get it." Dean twisted the silver knife, watching her snake-like eyes bulge with pain and then go glassy. As he roughly pulled out the knife, she crumpled bonelessly over her partner's dead body. Panting, he stared down at their ashen, reptilian corpses, and his mouth tasted of copper and his tongue felt numb, as though he hadn't used it in a month. "Why you hunt in pairs."
Set pre-series, though the inspiration for this story is a detail mentioned in 7x11 Adventures in Babysitting: While Sam is at Stanford, Dean has a run-in with a pair of vetalas.
A/N: For my dear friend canonisrelative. Merry Christmas!
Still Here I Carry My Old Delicious Burdens
Still here I carry my old delicious burdens,
I carry them, men and women, I carry them with me wherever I go,
I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them,
I am fill'd with them, and I will fill them in return.
(Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road)
Dean doesn't count.
He doesn't count the gas stations he passes, a string of battered beads slung loosely around the proud neck of Miss America, almost disguising the scars on the skin of the nation of hopes and dreams. The fuel gauge still hovers around half-full. The coffee at his last stop (yesterday?) tasted vile, putrid water more than anything (Sam would have thrown a fit, always such a prissy bitch about his coffee). There was sick in the bathroom the clerk pushed him into (Kim, her name tag read, he's pretty sure… well, ninety percent sure). So he keeps on driving. Away, away.
He doesn't count the miles of road that disappear in the rear-view mirror of the Impala like the scales of a slowly uncurling snake, and really, there's something endearingly harmless in the notion compared to all the other horrors Dean has already encountered during accidental glances in one mirror or another. Ahead of him, though, there's always the open road, and he has no idea where it leads, and no matter how much he drives, it's still there, the darkness only multiplying its miles. He wonders when the endless miles of highway became a curse instead of a promise.
Most of all, he doesn't count the spaces between each breath he takes – each breath more labored and shallow than the one preceding it – and the throbs of pain that rush through his arm at shorter and shorter intervals.
Because if he stopped to take account only for a second, he'd realize he's screwed, royally. You're going to go into shock, jackass! his internal Sammy helpfully supplies, sounding equal parts like the seven-year-old Dean taught how to swim in the lake near Bobby's house, the fifteen-year-old who sneered at every word that came out of his big brother's mouth, deeming it gross and pathetic, and the twenty-year-old who said I'm going to hang up now with such finality. Dad's reprimand Son, snap out of it already! echoes through his head at the same time, and Dean tries.
He cranks up his music, cradles his arm against his chest, clenches his teeth, grips the steering wheel tighter with his other hand, and keeps driving. Beneath his aching arm his stomach grumbles – it's almost ironic he can still feel hunger. He's not sure when he last ate. Those greasy pancakes with maple syrup at the diner maybe? (It's strangely difficult to keep track of what goes in his mouth without a smartass younger brother bitching about clogged arteries every time he so much as munches on the corner of a Mr. Goodbar.) He's not even sure what day it is. He might have been out for days, or only for a couple of hours. Somewhere along the line he lost count of the time.
What he does count and recount like a stuck tape, though, are his mistakes. Because fate's a bitch and all that, but he's a stubborn ass and this was all his fault.
Mistake No. 1: Don't go hunting in states where you're wanted.
Of course, there's the little snag that he's wanted in practically every state. Mostly it's not even for stuff he did, just because he was damn slow and stupid. (Sloppy, son, didn't I teach you to do better than that?) So it's not something he can take pride in, no matter how much he might want to (That poster there looks freaking awesome, makes me look like Billy The Kid, right, Sammy? – You wish, jerk.) and it's annoying as fuck.
Mistake No. 2: Don't start fights with random strangers in states where you're wanted.
Okay, so it wasn't Dean's choice to hang out at that seedy bar. Dad sent him there to take care of what seemed like a vetala abducting and killing people disguised as a cheap hooker. But it's not like Dean needs Dad or Uncle Bobby to hold his hand during a hunt. He's twenty-five, he can take care of himself. Of course, he shouldn't have drawn unnecessary attention to himself back at the bar. (Man up, son, no need to give people ideas.) Surviving on his cocky charm alone was always going to bite him in the ass one day. He just hadn't been prepared for it to happen quite so literally. Fucking stupid. He shouldn't have panicked in that dark alley behind the bar, no matter how disgusting the leer on that hulk's ugly mug, how hot and heavy his hands. If only he'd fought him off quick and efficient – then he might already have been gone by the time the cop rounded the corner.
Mistake No. 3: Don't hunt monsters while you're running from the cops.
If he hadn't been so busy hiding, running, backtracking, surely he would have noticed? The signs had been there all along. Enough to trigger his alarm bells, to make him realize that there was more to the case than Dad had thought.
"Sugar, it was so dumb of you to come here," said a high female voice behind him. Twisting around, he found himself face to face with another vetala. "Don't you know that we like to hunt in pairs?"
Pathetic. No one should ever get the jump on him like that.
Mistake No. 4: Don't get yourself injured on a hunt while you're running from the cops.
Dean's still not quite sure how he escaped from his bonds and shook off the paralyzing venom that coursed through his blood. He remembers stabbing one of his two captors, then having his arm pierced brutally by the other, before he finally got the upper hand in the struggle. He remembers being unforgivably maudlin.
"I get it." Dean twisted the silver knife, watching her snake-like eyes bulge with pain and then go glassy. As he roughly pulled out the knife, she crumpled bonelessly over her partner's dead body. Panting, he stared down at their ashen, reptilian corpses, and his mouth tasted of copper and his tongue felt numb, as though he hadn't used it in a month. "Why you hunt in pairs."
He remembers crawling back to his car, and a sudden assault of blue lights and didn't have the time to stop and rest and stitch himself up. He was alone.
It hurts like hell. And he'll pass out soon. And he's alone.
Glancing at the empty shotgun seat, he's honestly not sure if that's the biggest mistake he's ever made or the only thing he ever did right.
And I've given up hope on the afternoon soaps and a bottle of cold brew blazes from the loudspeakers. He starts singing along and no one shoots him weird looks and no one joins him, and there's another ache right there, right beneath his bleeding arm. And like his arm he ignores it. Is it any wonder I'm not crazy? Is it any wonder I'm sane at all? Well I'm so tired of losing…
He passes a run-down, faded house, miles from anywhere, and then an equally remote bus station. Is it any wonder I'm null and void? He accelerates with all the force he can still put into his right leg, but he can't quite outpace the memories.
"I thought you knew." Sam's face was pale and determined. Maybe sad, too. But definitely more determined than sad.
Of course Dean had known, on some level. Why else would he have started saving some of his pool winnings, rather than spending them all on burgers, girls and booze? But he hadn't known that it would come so soon. And so absolutely. He still doesn't really get how Dad could lose it like that.
"Salt the door and windows. If you get lazy, I'll come over and kick your ass."
Great parting words. He's repeated them each time they've talked since. (Not that they've done a lot of that. Not that Dean's done a lot of that in general. The most he's spoken in the past few weeks has been to cops who wanted to arrest him, pervy douches who wanted to bone him or sharp-fanged monsters who wanted to kill him. Ugh. Pathetic right there for you.) And Sam always laughed. Even then.
Sam let out a broken little laugh and all but threw himself at Dean, strangling him in a weird half-embrace. "Dean," he said urgently, "it's not – you know it's not –"
Dean shook him off. Shook his head. "Don't be a stranger, Sam." He turned on his heel and left Sam standing there, waiting for a bus to his new life.
He wonders if Sam's nice new life also includes nice coffee. He never asked.
After playing the same tape three times and singing himself hoarse, he finally crosses the border into Utah and decides that it's safe to stop the car and tend to his injuries. The cops won't chase him here. He steers the car off the road, stops the engine and turns off the music. It's quiet, all of a sudden, save his wheezing breaths.
His performance throughout this hunt has been spectacularly crappy (no Hunter of the Month award for him this time). So it goes without saying that he notices only now how it's too dark to attempt to stitch up the gash on his arm, and after a few feeble tries he quickly aborts the attempt at holding the flashlight between his teeth. He'll have to wait for the morning.
He wrenches off his bloodied shirt and wraps it around his injured arm. Then he rummages one-handedly in his duffel for a clean shirt, but a trip to the laundromat is already long overdue, so the best he finds is one that smells of smoke and liquor and musk and cheap perfume. Probably – what was her name again? – Kim's. He pulls it on anyway. His jeans are covered in blood and dirt, and he doesn't bother changing out of them. They're torn, too, he notices as he glances down, all the way across his thigh. It was his favorite pair. Damn.
Tired and sore, he crawls out of the car and flops down onto the grass, leaning his back against the cool metal of the side door. His gun is digging uncomfortably into his back, but he's glad to feel it there. It makes him feel safe and slightly less alone. He removes a squashed Snickers bar from his pocket and devours it greedily. The chocolate sticks to the roof of his dry mouth and he flushes it down with a swig from the half full bottle of tequila he found under his seat. Something inside him loosens at the warm burn of the liquor at the back of his throat. He hugs his injured arm more tightly against his chest and closes his eyes.
He wonders where he'll go next, now that he's no longer on the up with Dad, once he finds out where he is? Go to Bobby's? He'd like to go somewhere.
The silence is broken by the sound of his phone. With a huge effort, he claws it from his pocket, knocking over the bottle (there goes the rest of his tequila), and then he stares dumbly at the display. He must have lost more blood than he thought, because he's seeing the area code 650 and obviously this is just wishful thinking, and the next morning he'll wake up to discover all of this was just a hallucination. He hasn't spoken to Sam in a year, not since that night when he drunk-dialed him, and Dean's still not quite sure what he did wrong, but he's feeling guilty and embarrassed all the same, because all he can remember clearly is Sam's voice when he said I'm going to hang up now.
He answers the phone anyway and does a quick mental calculation of when he can be in Palo Alto.
"Dean."
It's not a hallucination. And it's not Sam.
It's Dad.
"You took care of that vetala, son?" Dad asks.
"Yeah," Dean answers, and he knows he should tell Dad that they hunt in pairs, but his mind is stuck on creepy strangers and vile coffee and You walk out that door, don't you ever come back, and his tongue won't work properly, and Dad's already talking, something about chupacabras in New Mexico, telling Dean to take down some coordinates. Dean grits his teeth and tries hard to keep his hand steady as he scrawls them over his naked thigh where his jeans are torn.
"What about you?" he asks then. Why are you in Palo Alto? is what he really wants to know. I'm scared, is what he really wants to say.
"I've got a lead to follow up here," Dad says. Of course he has. And he'll check up on Sam on the way, and Sam will never know. And Dean will take down some chupacabra in New Mexico, and Sam will never know either. Sam who probably drinks perfect coffee every morning, just how he likes it. Sam who's probably surrounded by friends and doesn't miss doing things in pairs, just the two of them against the world.
"Dean," Dad says, his voice sharp, "that was an order." Clearly, he's been silent too long.
He really should tell Dad about the vetalas. But that would mean admitting that they got the better of him, that he's hurt, that he's running from the police, that he fucked up. They're the Winchesters, it's hardly the first thing they're not talking about. So he simply says, "Yes, sir." and hangs up.
Then he lies back down in the damp, cool grass, presses his wounded arm against his chest, gazes up at the starless sky and prepares to wait for the first morning light. At least it'll be here sooner than in Palo Alto. It can't be more than two or three hours now.
He doesn't count.
Thanks for reading. Happy Christmas!