Knock on the Sky

By EB

©2006

I am but mad north-north-west: When the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw.
(Wm. Shakespeare)

Call me unpredictable, tell me that I'm unreliable
Rainbows I'm inclined to pursue
Call me irresponsible, yes I'm unreliable
But it's undeniably true that I'm irresponsibly mad for you
(Sammy Cahn)

Chapter One

Last Call

It yanked him out of sleep, sitting bolt upright in bed, panting like he'd just finished running a marathon.

Sam looked around, expecting a threat, something. Nothing but the quiet bedroom, the steady red stare of the alarm clock. Four twenty-two, darkest part of the night, and Jess lay on her belly, hands tucked under her pillow and one bare shoulder peeking out from under the covers. Fast asleep, just like he should be.

He rubbed his face and felt the slick of sweat on his forehead. Christ, what, a nightmare? He could feel the details slipping away already, just the feeling left over, fear and shock and urgency like an ache in his bones. Do something, he'd been trying to something in that dream but he couldn't remember what. Only that if he didn't, if he failed, someone was going to die. Jess? Didn't feel like Jess. A friend?

It wasn't until he'd padded into the bathroom and run cold water, splashing it over and over on his face, that he thought, Might have been Dean. Or Dad.

Sam dried his face slowly on a towel, staring at his reflection. Just a dream. Dreams were unsettling, downtime trotting-out of your worries, fears, most deep-seated feelings. Just a brain dump, and he was stressed, finals and the interview a couple of weeks down the line, like a glowing neon sign saying "Your Future Here." Stress. Explained a lot.

But he looked back at the bed, at Jess sleeping in a neat huddle, and knew he wasn't going to rejoin her tonight. Not and take a chance he'd dream again. Brain fart or not, he wasn't going back to whatever that place had been. Not willingly, not tonight.

He made coffee and sipped it on the back step, watching the slow pinking of the sky, thinking the grass was looking pretty damn shaggy and a little dried out, should water instead of just sitting here, and trying to ignore the way the remnants of the dream clung to him like spiderwebs, whispering hurry and danger and death.

After a while he went inside, and by the time he'd refilled his coffee cup Jess was stumbling into the kitchen, her face sleep-blurred and soft. "Were you studying?"

Sam shook his head and got out another cup. "Just woke up early."

"You're stressing," she pronounced, after sipping her own coffee.

"I guess."

"Everyone knows you're gonna do great, Sam. You're borrowing trouble."

No, he thought grimly. I'm not. And I don't know why I know that, how I know it, but I do. "Maybe," he said instead.

She glanced at the clock over the stove. "Shit. I gotta get going."

He sat at the table, listening to her rattling around, the shower coming on, radio playing softly from the bedroom. He didn't want more coffee. Suddenly he felt desperately tired, and the idea of going to class, study group, was just about overwhelming. All he wanted to do was sleep. And not to dream.

Instead he waited until Jess finished her shower, and then shivered under cooling water and forced himself to think about the metaphysics paper due in a week.

That night he went to bed so tired from class, writing, and lack of sleep that he didn't even respond to Jess's overtures. Just mumbled something about sorry, and was asleep before he could check on her reaction to that.

The dream was waiting. Pouncing like a predator well-hidden in shadow, sinking its claws into him, and he thrashed and struggled and jerked awake with Jess staring down at him, brows drawn together in a sleepy frown.

"Honey? You okay?"

Sam swallowed and tried to slow his breathing. "Bad dream," he managed.

"You want one of my Ambien?"

"N-no." He looked at the clock. Earlier, only three forty-four this time. Middle of the night. "Go back to sleep. Sorry I woke you up."

She watched him get up, and said, "I could make you some hot chocolate."

He shook his head, and when he looked back her eyes were closed.

In the living room he got out the bourbon, hands shaking so badly he wasn't sure he could pour without spilling it all on the floor. It tasted like smoke going down, sweet and piercing, and he swallowed two shots before he could make himself consider the images, so clear in his mind. Clearer than any dream should be, potent and throbbing with urgent power.

"It doesn't mean anything," Sam said out loud, staring at the label on the bottle. "Just a nightmare."

Wasn't surprised at all to know he didn't believe that. Not here in the dark, where truth was so hard to evade. He touched the bottle but didn't pour a third shot. Closed his eyes.

By Friday even Jess was fed up.

"Sam, you're not sleeping." She regarded him across the kitchen table, fingertips drumming the wood. "I mean, it's not like you can hide it from me. What's going on?"

He met her frustrated gaze and made himself shrug. "Stress, I guess. Look, I'm all right. It's just – there's a lot to think about right now, you know?"

Her face crumpled a little, and she looked away. "You're lying," she whispered.

"No, Jess. I'm not. It -- I'll pass."

"You look so tired," Jess said. "Is it the dreams?"

He had no idea what to say to her. Yes? Yes, Jess, I'm afraid to go to sleep because what I see in my dreams scares me so bad I can barely breathe? Except I can't say what it is I see, or who?

"Well, when you feel like talking about it," she said tightly, "I guess you know where to find me, don't you?"

He watched her go, his apology dying on his lips. Could tell her. This was Jess, after all; Jess who wasn't the judging type, Jess who had tolerated all of Sam's other little quirks the past year and a half without trying to change him too much, Jess who had seen and touched and kissed all his body's scars. Jess whom he hoped, one day, to marry. If he couldn't tell her this, what did that say about her? Him, their relationship?

"I don't think it's a dream," Sam whispered into the empty air. "I think it's something else."

He closed his eyes, and saw it all again. Never exactly the same, but so close it didn't much matter. Horseshoes and hand grenades. A building, a complex really, sterile and forbidding, fronted by a heavy wrought-iron gate, shaded by heavy trees. A procession of people making a single line out the front door, walking silently to press against the fence, watching him. And someone behind, but he could never quite see who it was. Someone important, the reason for the dreams, he was sure of it, but hidden behind the mass of people, reaching their arms through the fence, hands extended like supplicants. Help us.

And he just had time to taste the sadness in his mouth, the sense that it was too little too late, I'm sorry I wasn't here in time, and each time after the first he'd known what was coming next and it still hit him with all the power of that first dream. Bodies erupting into flame, faces twisting with agony and regret, and the white paint on the iron bubbling with the heat. All those people, subsiding into ash, and a hot dry wind gusting in Sam's face, the building crumbling from the inside. The tumbled remains of a holocaust only he could see.

All gone, and Sam woke each time with a scream on his lips, heart pounding with terror and anguish.

But last night had been different. Just a little, but in spite of the coffee and his own iron-willed determination he'd nodded off over his Ethics text, done a face-plant right over pages 66 and 67, and there it had all been. Building, voiceless faceless people, and he'd known, he had KNOWN it would end as the story built in his mind over decades had, flames and grief. But before that, he'd heard a voice, the first time it had spoken, and he knew that voice. Knew that gruff tone, half-teasing, half-weary: Shit happens, bro. Don't worry about it, you just take care of yourself.

Now, in the bright light of morning, the voice chilled him all over again. "Dean," Sam whispered, pressing his cold fingers to his eyelids. "Is that you?"

No one answered. He shivered, blinked away the afterimages, and climbed wearily to his feet.

Guilt was part of what let him be talked into going out Sunday. Guilt, and his unspoken fear of dreaming. He was an old hand at sleep deprivation, years of late-night study or cram sessions, and before that, much less savory and far more dangerous vigils. But the sense of warning, imminence, was a thousand percent stronger now, enough that he could almost hear an unseen clock ticking, closer and closer, and it might have been panic that made him say, "What the hell, sure," when Jess told him everyone was headed over to O'Shaughnessy's that night, hang out, drink a few beers, practice for the real end-of-term blowout a couple of weeks away.

"All you do is study," Jess said with a wry look. "And I know you know it already. So let's go, okay? Just – be normal for a while. All right?"

Normal. Sure. Sounded great.

So he went, and it was better than he'd thought, better anyway than sitting around trying so damn hard not to sleep, knowing eventually he'd lose the battle and there they'd be, staring at him as if they already knew he'd let them down, let them burn.

That might have been the reason he drank more than usual, beer and then Jaeger shots, nasty but effective, oh yeah. Fought down the memory of that first bottle, Dean grinning and saying, "Just don't say a word to Dad, you little shit, but graduation deserves a celebration, right," and the taste of herbs and possibilities on his tongue, along with furtive guilt. Dean hadn't known about the letters in Sam's backpack, the plans percolating in his head. All Dean had known was it was a beautiful night and his kid brother had just graduated high school. Unlike Dean, the guy who'd gotten his GED right at the end of Sam's junior year, and had had to be pushed into that, even then.

He drank and thought, I'm not sure I'll ever see Dean again. He drank to douse the sudden flare of anguish in his chest. And everyone else was drunk, too, a couple of them really drunk, and it was fine. He fit right in.

At closing time he staggered home with Jess, listening to her sweet giggle in his ear and feeling her lithe weight against his side, and saw his cell phone's message light blinking in the dimness.

Sam's buzz wavered and went away, as if someone had just thrown a bucket of ice water over his head. "Just a second," he said to Jess, not looking at her, staring at the phone.

"If you're going to throw up," she told him, pressing a moist beer-scented kiss on his chin, "you'd better make it quick. I'm not waiting forever."

"I'll be right there," he told her absently.

He didn't watch her go into the bedroom, didn't think about the promise of that kiss. His hands didn't shake while he picked up the phone, dialed his voice mail with a numb fingertip. The booze roiled in his stomach queasily.

The number wasn't one he recognized. The voice, though. That he knew. Recognized with a shock that sent the last tattered remnants of his buzz flying out the window.

"Sammy. It's Dad."

Sam sat down hard on one of the kitchen chairs, barely registering the cold wood under his ass.

"I know I'm the last person you expect to hear from right now. All things considered." Gruff, and familiar. "But we have a situation. Your brother -- Dean's missing. I think he's in trouble. He always calls, always stays in touch. He was working alone, this thing in Texas. It's been a month, and I'm – involved with something. A long way from there. Something big."

The demon, Sam thought, blood pounding in his ears. Dad's catching up with it. And right on that thought's heels: He let Dean work alone?

"I can't go, Sammy. Not right now. You've got to go find your brother." His father cleared his throat, and Sam sat up when that voice thinned, became the orders he remembered. "Find him, make sure he's okay. You can get back to your – studies, later. You got it? Your brother needs you. Last known location was Amarillo, Texas. He was finishing up there, supposed to head to New Orleans, but my contacts there say he never made it. Find him, Sammy. Let me know."

Sam swallowed, and flinched when a feminine voice said, "To save this message, press one. To –"

He hit the one button and sat motionless at the table. And then jerked to his feet, half-running, barely making it to the bathroom before beer and Jaegermeister and bile came up, burning like fire.

"Jess. Wake up."

She grunted, then turned slowly, reaching up with her fists to rub her eyes. "What time is it?"

Sam sat on the edge of the bed. "Early. About seven."

Jess blinked at him. "You're already up? Didn't feel you come to bed."

Because I didn't, Sam thought, and drew a careful breath. "Listen. Something's come up. I gotta go out of town for a few days."

"Out of town?" She didn't look as sleepy now, sitting up and staring at him. "Right now? Did something happen?"

"You could say that. Yeah. It's, ah. Dean. My brother."

"You have a brother?" Jess asked blankly.

"He's -- Yeah. I need to take care of this. It's just a few days."

"Sam, you have your interview next WEEK. It's everything you've been working for, all this time, you can't just –"

"He's, ah. He's missing," Sam whispered, standing on shaky legs. "I gotta know, Jess. If my –"

"If what?" She followed, face drawn with lines of worry. "Is this what all this has been about? Why you haven't been sleeping? Tell me, Sam!"

"I'm not sure yet. Jess, I gotta go. I'll call you. Okay?"

"You never even mentioned a brother before, and now you're -- Sam, this is a huge deal, you know?"

He nodded grimly, and made himself kiss her, and bent to pick up the packed bag he'd dropped by the door. "I know. I'll be back as fast as I can."

"But where are you going?" she called after him.

"I'll call you."

TBC. EB