.rogue variable.

.sam.

"Almost there." Deacon stepped over the decayed body without a glance, and opened the door. "In here."

Sam choked on a cough as he and Deacon entered the torn-up bookstore. Musty wood was probably not the ambience the original owners were going for; this trashed, former haven of bookworms looked like a forgotten heap of wood meant for recycling. It must have been raided long ago too, for it lacked many books. Remnants of spines clasping torn pages sat on few shelves. Sam hoped to find just one to carry him through this final night of waiting. With Preston off to the Castle, and everyone else carrying out their part of the plan in Goodneighbor, he was now alone with Deacon, who was pretty great at stunting the kind of conversations that passed time. He was a lot like Dean in that way. Tomorrow, the two of them would reach this Goodneighbor place, where Hancock was supposedly the mayor. Maybe, finally, they'd find Castiel.

Deacon took the second floor, while Sam the first. After announcing them clear of hostiles, they joined up beside an abandoned, empty cash register.

"How much farther 'til Goodneighbor?" Sam dusted off an overturned shelf. He tested its stability, then sat down, rubbing his knees. He was a physically fit person, but he was not used to this much walking on an uncontrolled diet.

"Maybe two, three minutes." Deacon overturned another shelf and sat near Sam. "Hell, we might even be able to break into Goodneighbor if we took a hammer to that wall over there. We'd probably end up in Marowski's office." He chuckled and pulled out a cylinder of water for each of them. "Here. Noticed yours was getting low."

"Thanks." Sam took the container and opened it. After swallowing, he realized that this was the first time since arriving here that he hadn't given a second thought to drinking it. The purified water still scared him, because despite all he knew, he still had no idea how to remove radiation from water. This unwary sip came with a settling familiarity, and a growing acceptance of the fact that they would not leave this world. "How long have you been with the Minutemen?"

"Oh, me? A year ago, give or take. Still not official, per se, but only because I'm too much of a happy-go-lucky type to become a police officer."

Sam laughed. Over the years, he and Dean had developed and evolved their bullshit detectors. Deacon had a rigidity to him despite his overt, carefree nature. Sam had first noticed this when he kept taking bathroom breaks near old trash receptacles and rusted mail bins. An odd rule, but one that Sam had thought odd in its specificity. Yet people did unusual things to maintain their privacy, things that became rules which could never be broken. Sam also noticed Deacon's rules in the way he moved, cautious, as if not entirely used to operating with a group, but very used to conducting missions alone. Sam had met people like him before. Maybe he's ex-Brotherhood, or… No. Danse would've mentioned that, maybe, or perhaps that was where the unspoken hostility between them came from. Maybe not. What was that other group again? Gunners? An ex-Gunner, maybe? Or perhaps he was part of a more elite group within the Minutemen, something not as public as the Companions, and lying about it made it more invisible to the average citizen.

"It's true," said Deacon. "Honest."

Sam's brows dipped and he smirked. "Sure." He sipped his water.

"We'll get you home," Deacon said, in an entirely different tone of voice. "But if it makes you feel better about this whole thing, you can ask me whatever you want about the Minutemen."

"Honestly?"

"With that? Yeah."

Sam believed him. "Okay, I guess I'm curious about how the whole thing works. Are you a collection of city-states? Or I suppose, independent settlements?"

"Sort of. At first, it was about convincing settlements that the Minutemen were back, doing jobs for them to prove we could be there when they needed us. Then slowly, they started to join us. Some even asked us to help secure new spots to settle in."

"But what does the government look like?"

"Uh, the General pretty much says something is law and it's law. I mean, she kind of runs it by us before she does, Preston first, usually."

Sam nodded. "And what did you mean by the Minutemen being 'back'? Did something bad happen to dissolve them?"

"That's probably something to ask Preston next time you see him."

"That bad?"

"More like I don't actually have the specific details. I just know the Minutemen went away and settlements who needed them didn't realize it until it was too late."

"Oh."

"Yeah."

Sam's stomach rumbled. Usually, this was the sort of thing to apologize for, make an immediate excuse for, as it fell somewhere beneath sneezing on the scale of "important natural human noises considered embarrassing enough to acknowledge." In this world, a rumbling stomach was too common for something like that. Deacon didn't mention it. "Are you hungry?" was a question so obvious it would be insulting, because the answer was likely, "Of course I'm hungry."

Sam rubbed his stomach. "What kind of jobs does the average Minuteman do?"

"Stuff like this, you know, finding missing people and getting them home safely. Kidnappings are pretty frequent here, especially in places with lots, and I mean lots of mutfruit."

"Has anyone ever thought of offering these people a place in their settlements?"

Deacon chuckled. "With that kind of idealism, you'd be a perfect fit for the Minutemen."

Sam took one last sip of his water before setting it aside for later. "Just trying to have a back-up plan to the back-up plan, you know?"

"Oh, I get it. Not that I've ever fallen into another world and been forced to swallow a reality almost entirely different from the one I spent my whole life in, but I get the need to plan while everyone else tells you to 'go with the flow.' "

"Were you listening to my brother and I back at Starlight?"

"No, surprisingly," Deacon smirked, "but if he said that, it can't be that great a feeling for you. Me? I like a mix of both. The plan has to account for, uh, rogue variables, but not so much that it leaves you stagnant."

Sam shrugged his brows at that sentiment. That's what the problem was: with no information, he felt stagnant. He was banking on finding Cas, and if he didn't, then the back-up was to stay. But how could he account for these "rogue variables"? He barely knew anything about this world, or if Cas' powers were still limited here, or even worse, non-existent. Could Cas even survive on his own here? What would radiation poisoning do to an angel, given his ability to heal quickly? That's how mutations formed, Sam knew that much, damaging the cells, forcing the DNA to repair something more often resulting in an increased chance of a mis-copy, a mutation. That's how it worked, right? That's how things like cancer developed, wasn't it? Would it affect Cas' vessel, or his spirit? Wasn't his vessel dead now, and wasn't Cas' body a gift, an anomaly in the spirit-vessel rulebook?

"You okay there, Winchester?"

"Yeah, um, just hoping my friend was as fortunate as Dean and I were when we got here."

"Worried he's gonna turn into a ghoul?"

Would Dean hate him? "I'm not sure that'd happen to him."

"Why, is he some kind of ghost?" Deacon joked. Only Sam didn't laugh. "Wait, is he really a ghost? Because he's gonna be a little harder to find if—"

"He's an angel. That's why he has powers to get us home."

"…I have no witty response to that."

Shit, Sam thought. Deacon was all for killing that deathclaw, but he also seemed against the senseless murder and ostracizing of ghoul citizens. Maybe Sam had made a mistake, but it was too late to recover from. "I don't know what mythology you guys have here, but Castiel is an angel, like one of God's actual angels. Sibling of Archangels and the whole thing."

"Oh, we have that, only it's not true here," said Deacon. He stood, and Sam wondered if maybe he had broken him. "What kind of abilities does this friend of yours have?"

"Here? I'm not sure. If he's lost his powers here, we're screwed. Dean and I tried to get some sigils we know to work, you know, to get home, but Cas has a library of information in him that doesn't always come out until we need it. He just doesn't think some of it's important to mention. So maybe he has another sigil that would work here, or maybe his angelic battery has enough juice to make the sigils we know work."

"Sigils?"

"Symbols."

"I know that, but you're telling me you have magical sigils that you just write down somewhere and poof, you've cast a spell, and now you're on your way home?"

"Yeah."

"Tell me you haven't left any trace of these here."

Which organization is he so afraid of? "No. We couldn't risk anyone else accidentally activating them or repeating them."

"Good." Deacon held his chin in thought. "If that deathclaw was possessed, then maybe your friend's still got the goods." He reached for his water. "Is this guy as, shall we say, unrelenting as your brother on certain things?"

Watching Deacon drink reminded Sam of his thirst. His stomach rumbled again as he reached for his water. He wanted to save it for tonight, but if things got really bad, they could break the plan and hit Goodneighbor earlier than intended. "He used to be, but he's a lot more understanding now." Sam took a sip. "Wait, how do you know that about Dean?" Sam set his water down—whoa, no way, his hunger had apparently turned into dizziness. He took another long drink. "Were you…were you listening to…"

The water tumbled from his hand as a hazy Deacon leaned over to catch him.

"Sorry," Deacon muttered as Sam closed his eyes.