Preseries, dovetailing off of the misstep in the pilot that the bros hadn't seen each other in TWO years as opposed to FOUR. Sam calls Dean to Stanford for help with some crazy shit going on.

Lightning Crashes

"The reason lightning doesn't strike twice in the same place is that the same place isn't there the second time."

Willie Tyler

Chapter One

"You know, in almost two years I've never bothered you. Never asked you for a thing."

Fairfax, Oklahoma, Spring 1999

"Sammy! Get down!"

SAM. For the freaking millionth time, my name is SA– Mid-stride, Sam dropped the duffle and then himself, chest thudding against the packed dirt of the graveyard before the words were even fully out of his father's mouth, bracing the fall with flattened palms. He wasn't seven, despite the way his dad insisted on talking to him, and he was well past the point where the loud discharge of the lead-loaded shotgun startled him. But the resulting pieces of exploded gravestone flew past just a skosh too close for comfort. He ground his face harder against the dirt, small rocks digging into his right cheek, and threw his hands over his shaggy hair.

There was an aggravated sigh, a metallic thunk as the discarded gun hit the ground. "Damn it, Sam, I said 'get down!'"

Sam brought his hands away and lifted his head into the cloud of gritty gravestone dust the three inches necessary to glare at his father. "Where do you think I am?" The look he received in return told him in no uncertain terms that, hunt or no hunt, a fight was there if he was really looking for it.

"Really not the time, guys." Sam was assaulted with a second shower of stone as another corner of the marker behind him exploded. Dean came charging into the clearing and there was just enough time for Sam to admire how he took up a stance and made the shot without breaking stride before he was pissed at his brother for how close that same shot came to his head. It was just as much a warning shot to Sam as it was to the spirit, stopping the inevitable fight before it started. Dean would never come seriously close to shooting him, but sometimes he sure liked to make Sam think he would.

Dean flung his right arm out, chucking his gun across the clearing and over Sam's head to their father. He raised his eyebrows at Sam expectantly, awaiting the reload that was apparently too slow in coming. Even gave an exasperated wag of his fingers. So Sam sat up, ripped yet another loaded gun from the duffle at his feet, and threw it at Dean's face instead of his hands.

With reflexes any cat would kill for, Dean caught the gun by the barrel before it was anywhere near smashing into his face, but the action still earned a harsh "Samuel" from across the clearing, which Sam added to the running tally in his head. To be fair to all parties involved, he kept two columns: deserved and undeserved. Chocking this instance up to the fact that this particular spirit had been running the three Winchesters ragged for the better part of the last three hours and everyone's fuses were burned a little short, Sam put this mark in the undeservedcolumn.

Said spirit was currently grinning at Sam from less than twenty feet away, having accurately assessed him as the lesser threat, a weird and unanticipated energy field crackling around it. Despite the slightest raise of Dean's eyebrows, the other Winchesters seemingly remained unfazed by this turn of events. Sam, on the other hand, was decidedly not.

"Dad?" Sam pushed up off of his knees and set himself like a runner awaiting the starting gun. Because that's what he did: sprinted out of the way and let Dad and Dean handle it, the many 'its' they came across in their line of…work. Both men raised their weapons, but the spook's black eyes twinkled mischievously and it vanished into the breeze before either could squeeze the trigger.

"Dad?" Dean echoed Sam's uneasiness and brought his gun down; but not before John, of course.

"Yeah, Dean. I don't know."

Sam pulled himself to his feet just as a piercing scream broke the night's silence. John was off in a flash with Dean at his heels. The two were out of sight within seconds, neither having spared a glance at each other or even at Sam, to see if he was behind them. Sam was in no hurry. They were more than capable of handling a single spirit without him dragging his ass on the sidelines; didn't need him at all, really. He'd heard he was more of a hindrance than a help on more than one occasion. Usually after a botched hunt, seething and stewing on the receiving end of a lecture as he cleaned and patched wounds he liked to think of as karma. Sam bent to pointlessly brush the dirt and graveyard grime from the knees of his perpetually dingy jeans, rolling his eyes at the nighttime screamer. What person in their right mind is in a cemetery at eleven o' friggin' clock at night? And then he paused because, oh, right . Because while his friends were home watching The Late Show or sneaking out to Ricky Tillman's very un-chaperoned party, or maybe even getting a head start writing their US History term papers – this was what Sam was doing. Tossing reloads and ducking out of the way when the spirit his family was hunting – and just how many things were wrong with that sentence – decided to hover his creepy shit over in Sam's direction.

This particular ghost wasn't the reason they had migrated in the direction of this quaint, monochromatic little town in the middle of Oklahoma, but a few months into their stay the opportunity had presented itself and well, John Winchester hadn't ever been one to turn down a good hunt. Dean, he just did whatever Dad told him to. Sam didn't know much of the details about the ghost, just that he had been hurting people, and that was enough to get Sam to feel a little less bitter about being dragged along that night. Whatever small part he played in this completely whacked-out, avenging-family-on-a-mission-to-rid-the-world-of-evil dynamic they had going; he did it to help people.

Dad and Dean? It was about helping people, sure, but also about so much more. They really got into it on what Sam was lately considering to be unhealthy levels. Illegal levels. The past couple of weeks, while Sam was worrying about finals and how stupid he'd look if he actually worked up the nerve to ask Melissa Greer to the spring formal, the other two-thirds of the Army Winchester had been flashing fake IDs all over town. There was a lot of stuff they didn't talk to Sam about, but from what he had gathered between chapters nine and ten of his calculus textbook, they were pulling the ol' reporter routine.

Yes. His twenty-year-old brother was totally believable as a college-educated newspaper reporter. As it turned out, he was. It seemed Sam was the only one not buying it.

He stooped to retrieve the weapons duffle – what am I, a freakin' pack mule? – and shouldered it, turning towards the same worn path his father and brother had shot down. He was a little tired and truth be told, a little bored, so he took his sweet time, absently picking small pieces of twig from his tee. A shout and twin shotgun blasts changed his attitude and pace dramatically. With the loud crack of the guns, Sam hoofed it through the saplings and brush, slapping branches out his face, 'tired' and 'bored' two of the farthest things from his mind. At the forefront were 'Dean' and 'Dad.'

He broke through a thin wall of dry, scratchy bushes that snagged at his shirt and he stumbled to a halt, tangled in spiny branches and winded from the sprint. The sight before him stole immediately what little breath Sam had left. "Dean!"

John shot him a glare from where he stood a few feet away, his eyes barely meeting Sam's before darting back to the spirit, his gaze parallel with the barrel of his gun. It would seem Sam wasn't allowed to be loud and distracting to his father when his brother was slumped at the base of a tombstone, boneless and not moving with what could only be seen by Sam's eyes as a river of blood running down the side of his face. His dad didn't even seem to notice.

Sam wriggled violently to untangle himself and the weapons duffle so he could get to his brother. He pulled free, lurching forward from the bushes with the rip of his second-favorite tee. He hopped a few steps before righting himself and moved in Dean's direction. He was immediately stopped with a barked, "Sam, don't move!"

Damn it, Dad. "But Dean – "

"– is fine. Just took his eyes off the damn thing." It was a warning and a reprimand. A 'Sammy, please. Just shut up, let me take care of this, and don't get yourself killed.' John was not going to make the same mistake his son had.

Dean's gun was inches from his limp hand, on the side of the ghost currently off-limits, so Sam dropped the duffle to the ground and crouched next to it, rifling quickly through, trying to remember how many guns had been brought along. Surely they'd packed enough for Sam to grab one if he really needed to, and he was certainly feeling like he really needed to. His fingers closed on the grip of a handgun and he pulled it out without thinking, whirling to give his dad some back up, hoping it was one he knew how to use.

John's shoulder dropped – barely perceptible. "Sam, just…just stay back."

Sam made a show of pulling back the hammer and bringing the gun up, stepping closer to his father.

A quiet growl came from deep in John's throat. Sam was very familiar with this growl. The ghost, as if sensing the tension and feeling the need to take advantage of it, glided just a few feet to the left, closer to where Dean was splayed, yet to twitch a muscle.

Definitely the wrong move to make. The spirit dissipated into a million little spirit-y pieces in the explosion that cracked from the gun in John's hands. It wouldn't last long, but it bought them a little more time, enough to get Dean out of the way.

Sam crossed the distance between Dean and himself in a few strides and was crouching and gently shaking his brother when he felt the shadow of his father fall over them. He looked up at his dad, who narrowed his eyes and spoke to Sam, but his gaze never left Dean's unmoving form; specifically, the side of his face that was literally blood-red.

"You know where the bastard's grave is?"

Sam squinted and gestured vaguely to the area behind John. "Yeah. It's on the other side of the cemetery, I told you –"

"Help your brother back to the car." John took the gun from Sam's hand, put the safety back on, and tossed it into the duffle. Sam hadn't even realized he was still holding it. John paused for a moment, staring into the bag, and looked back at Sam, his eyes dark, expression unreadable. "And just what were you hoping to accomplish with little bullets like these, Sam?"

Sam ignored him, equal parts embarrassed and indignant, and glanced around at the surrounding grave markers. "Where's the victim?"

"Who?"

"The scream. The person it attacked."

John's eyes drifted back down to Dean. "There was no victim. It was just a lure." He gripped the duffle's straps and started in the direction Sam had pointed.

Sam swallowed, and for a second, he was almost sympathetic towards his dad, regretful of his own constant animosity.

But John stopped and turned, eyes dark and flickering between Sam and the contents of the duffle in his hands. And like he just couldn't help himself: "Where's my shotgun, Sam? Don't tell me you left it back in the clearing. What have I told you about leaving things behind?"

Stanford University

Palo Alto, California, Fall 2003

Rachel wasn't one hundred percent sure what woke her up, why her eyes snapped open from the sweet bliss of a chance encounter with Brad Pitt in Paris to wide-a-fucking-wake, but she had a preeetty good idea. And it did not make her happy.

She rolled to her left and pried open one eye to verify the time on the alarm clock on her bedside table before she proceeded in flipping her lid. It took a couple of blinks to rid her eyes of the blur of sleep. Two goddamn twenty-seven in the morning. I hate her. Third time that week, and it was definitely a lid-flipping circumstance.

Rachel shifted onto her back with an angry groan, dinner (and dessert) with Brad becoming more distant and gauzy by the second. Maybe next time. "Stacey, I told you not to wake me up if you and Josh came back here. I have an eight o'clock class, loser." She'd woken in the middle of the night and interrupted her roommate and boyfriend more than once. However, she most certainly felt that she was the one whose privacy was being violated, not the other way around, and very much justified in feeling so. "Get a room," she muttered. One that isn't mine.

But the room seemed quiet now; no apparent reason for such a rude disruption of her precious sleep. Rachel pulled herself from the comfort of her pillow up on her elbows and squinted across the dorm room, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the darkness. After a few moments, the faint glow of moonlight through a crack in the curtains revealed that Stacey's bed was empty, still made from the previous morning.

Rachel frowned. Then what the hell…

She heard it again then and immediately knew something wasn't right, in that creepy way that makes it so hard to fall sleep after staying up to watch a scary movie, no matter how NOT REAL you know it was. A hissing, coming from somewhere across the room near the door, amplified and demanding attention in the quiet room. Radiator? Not in a million years; dormitory radiators clanked and banged, they didn't hiss, and besides, theirs was on the opposite side of the room, under the window.

Hss.

It almost sounded like a…like a snake. Like a lot of them, actually. It wasn't, obviously, because that was a completely ludicrous thought, and it was just your run-of-the-mill-wakes-you-in-the-middle-of-the-night sound and she was just awake-in-the-middle-of-the-night-for-no-reason tired and out of it, and was SO going to kick Stacey's ass in the morning for not being there.

Hssss.

But if that was true, then what was that chill running down her spine? Rachel scooted up in her bed, eyes wide and roaming over the various black blobs of the room's landscape. If there was anything in the world she was terrified of, it was snakes, and there was no mistaking that sound. Her little brothers had been tormenting her for years, and she avoided Animal Planet like it carried the plague. Fucking crazy crocodile hunter. No, she knew that sound.

The light switch was all the way across the room, and there was no fucking way she was putting her bare feet on the floor in the dark, no matter how much of a baby that might make her.

Hss. Hssss.

Definitely no fucking way. Not with noises like that being made in the room. Maybe she was just having a nightmare. A really, really vivid nightmare. One she was aware she was having. Rachel swallowed and pinched her arm, feeling stupid and about five years old, but she didn't wake up any more than she already was, and the hissing didn't stop. Rachel groped on her nightstand for her cell phone, honest to God wishing Stacey and her annoying as hell boyfriend were canoodling across the room and that was all she had to deal with.

She flipped the phone open and held it away at arm's length, sweeping it from side to side like an improvised flashlight. It took her about thirty full seconds to realize it didn't really do any good unless her eyes were open.

She pried the right one open first. A soft blue glow illuminated three feet of the room at a time, and another creepy hiss had Rachel's arm trembling as her eyelids slammed shut again.

"Stupid, stupid, stupid," she chanted to herself in a whisper. "You're so fucking stupid." You're going to feel like such a retard in the morning…

She opened her eyes just as the light hit the floor in front of the door, near the foot of her bed, and Rachel screamed.

Des Moines, Iowa, two weeks later, Sunday

"Son of a bitch!"

Dean dove to the ground as the wall behind him detonated in a shower of plaster dust and chunked drywall, little pieces raining down like drab, matte confetti. He crashed to the floor, his gun slipping out of his grip and clattering across the concrete to be lost in a shadowy corner of the warehouse.

He pushed himself up and scrubbed quickly at his grainy eyes, coughing a couple times at the rough dustiness coating his tongue. He spit a grainy glob of saliva to the side and cast a quick look around the corner of the stacked boxes he was using as cover, all the while keeping his crouched position. "Oh, you son of a bitch," he muttered, rubbing his shoulder.

But Dean didn't have time to sit and lick his wounds and feel sorry for himself; he had to move fast, because this thing was nasty and he was hunting alone. Once upon a time, he would have had backup. Hell, he would have been the backup. Hunting alone was just another something he had gotten used to. Hadn't had a choice.

John had given him a quick rundown of the situation and two days to take care of it and meet him in Richmond: a poltergeist was terrorizing nightshift workers at a packaging warehouse on the outskirts of Des Moines. Considering the drive was sixteen hours at best, Dean wondered if his dad had figured travel time into this, and decided no, probably not. Two days was "more than enough time." Not that it would have been up for debate if it wasn't.

"You've done this a dozen times, Dean. I think two days is pretty generous."

Yeah, it would have been – if the freakin' thing was actually nothing more than a mischievous spirit just dicking around for shits and giggles.

Dean had no idea what this thing was, but it sure as hell was no poltergeist. A poltergeist Dean knew what to do with; could be ten years younger and asleep and know what to do with it. This thing was all pointy teeth and fiery eyes and making things explode and Dean was just about done with this hunt. Was suddenly really pissed at his dad for not having more, or at least better, information for him. It was really unlike him…unless it was one of those 'Dean'll figure it out' kind of hunts that Bobby had hinted about the last time he'd seen him.

John Winchester had been on some kind of super-hunter kick over the last couple of months – the last couple of years, actually – and was dragging Dean right along with him. Ever since Sam had taken off it was just one hunt after another. No stops, no breaks; not for more than minor injury recovery time, and even those were hurried. John had still had a hell of a limp when they left Greenburg. Over the past few months, he was sending Dean to hunt alone more often and was checking in less and less. These hunts usually came in the form of John either sending him off with a clipped description, or just flat-out leaving him behind to go off on his own hunt, calling a few days later with a separate job for him. Such was this instance.

There wasn't a whole hell of a lot he could sleep through, but his dad was one stealthy bastard, and Dean had woken two days earlier to an otherwise empty motel room. No note, no explanation, just the smaller of their two weapons duffels by the door and the assumption Dean had enough cash to cover the bill. He didn't, but he could get it quick at the bar a few blocks over. Days like that used to drive him crazy. But now, it was just the way things were. He knew his dad had his reasons, and if there was something going down Dean needed to be involved in, he would be. He was pretty sure. Like ninety percent sure.

Dean went to swallow and gagged at the plaster dust still in his mouth. He spat again and made a face at his gun, or, rather, in the general direction of where he thought his gun might be. He'd managed to fire off one of the barrels rather ineffectively, but hoped another well-placed round of rock salt might at least buy him enough time to get his ass out of the building and regroup. He had an entire fucking arsenal in the trunk of the car, and if he could just get out there –

A fire extinguisher case mounted on the wall over his head suddenly shattered, sending glass shards of every shape and size exploding outwards all over Dean. He flung his hands over his head and threw his body against the wall, putting himself behind as much of the cascade of broken glass as he could.

When the shards had all clinked to the floor, he lowered cut, stinging hands and popped his head around the edge of the packing crate. "Alright, already!"

Stanford University, Monday

Sam was sure Professor Nagle was lecturing about something important. In the very least, something he should be paying some sort of attention to. It was twenty minutes into the class, the tweedy little dwarf of a man was really starting to get into it, and the third and most difficult exam of the semester was next Monday, and he still had a lot of recopied notes to highlight. Sam was a diligent student; he was part of that small, elite group who actually read and took notes over assigned readings, every one of them, and was keeping a steady A average. Three and a half semesters into his college career and he was maintaining that coveted 4.0. Sam paid attention, and averaged about five pages of notes per class regardless of the subject matter or actual length of the professor's lecture.

In short, most of his fellow students hated him. Especially if there was a curve.

But today, Sam hadn't even written down the date, let alone a single word of the day's lecture. He couldn't tear his eyes away from the newspaper article resting on top of his unopened notebook, but he wasn't really reading it. Didn't need to; he practically had it memorized by then, had read it over and over since he'd first picked up the Daily that morning. There were more hastily ripped-out articles tucked away inside his book bag.

It was the third "freak accident" of the past ten days. Freshman Rachel Spitzer last week, and then the two sophomores; Darrell Davis over the weekend, and now Nicole Fox. All three had been students. No one had died, but the things that were happening were just…freaky, on a level that Sam often wished he didn't know existed.

The night before, in Owen Hall, Nicole had apparently been found shrieking and running from the sixth floor showers, clinging to the towel she had grabbed to cover herself. She claimed the drain had backed up, the door had jammed, and she'd been stuck there to drown in steaming hot shower water, screaming for nearly twenty minutes before she was finally heard. The thing was; she hadn't been alone in the showers. The other two sophomore girls who had been there at the time swore up, down, and sideways they hadn't known she was there, hadn't known she was in trouble, and it wasn't a prank. They didn't even know Nicole any more than seeing her every now and then on the floor.

Sam had clipped the newspaper articles, the ones from both The Stanford Daily and the Palo Alto Daily News, and put all of the clippings in a notebook he wasn't using anymore, stuffed between pages of old psych 101 notes. He wasn't really sure why he had done it, but news of the accidents had jumped out at him with waving arms, shouting 'something about me isn't right!' Try as he might to forget, Sam had spent his entire life being educated firsthand about how dangerous it was to ignore these types of things.

Of course something about it wasn't right. It wasn't normal to wake up with dozens of hissing snakes in your dorm room only to find the room empty when you made it to the light switch. People would have just laughed it off and thought Rachel Spitzer had just had a very vivid nightmare, if not for the bite on her ankle.

A bite from a phantom snake was one thing, but the documented marks on Darrell Davis's body were something completely different. Sam had only seen the one picture that had been released to journalists, the one that had been on the evening news on Saturday, but it had been enough. Second degree burns? From a fire no one else said existed? Yes, some very weird things were going on.

Sam had years and years of training under his belt. He knew when something was up and when that something was not of the realm of the natural. He knew there was something very wrong when someone was burned in a fire that no one else could see, bitten by snakes that weren't really there.

And about what had happened to Nicole? Sam wasn't used to having more questions than he had answers and despite how very much he hated it – he needed the answers. He had spent all week wondering what there was he could do about it. The answer was, disappointingly, not a whole hell of a lot.

Sam had a class with Nicole, and it was just days after the incident when he was sitting in his front-row seat in Stats gazing across the room at the petite girl, pale and jumpy three days after the incident and rubbing at pink, sensitive skin that had clearly been scalded. He had pulled the clipping out of his notebook again, and spent the rest of the hour reading and rereading and staining the tip of his yellow highlighter with cheap black ink.

He wasn't sure why.

Later that afternoon, Sam was walking in front of the Union when snippets of a hushed conversation hit his ears.

"The girl's a fucking nutcase. I was there, and – "

"You were there?"

"Will you let me tell my fucking story?"

"Sorry. God."

"I was studying, had the door open, and then she just comes running out of the showers and down the hall screaming about the bathroom being, like, haunted."

"You go in there?"

"Are you kidding me? I'm showering on the fifth floor."

"How's Nicole?"

"A goddamn mess. She's still loony."

And so here he was, spacing out during his classes. Sam knew he couldn't just sit back and wait for things to get worse. He was going to get proactive, no matter how much he didn't want to. He hated to admit to himself that he knew this was probably about more than an influx of "fucking nutcases" on the Stanford campus.

Tuesday

"Sam? I think this is turning into something of an unhealthy obsession."

Sam snorted as his roommate entered the room, not taking his eyes from the spread before him. He drummed his fingertips on the tabletop, thoughtful and frustrated both. "Oh, this is nothing."

Tuesday night, and Sam had finally given in. He had taken his two weeks' worth of clipped articles and laid them out on the coffee table in a makeshift timeline, trying to establish some kind of pattern through the chronology, and failing miserably. His eyes just weren't picking up the seemingly insignificant details as well they used to. God, he was rusty as hell. Ben was going to need a tetanus shot just from talking to him. A now-room temperature can of Coke was making a ring of condensation on the tabletop, and the television was on, volume low and for background noise only.

Ben cocked an eyebrow and crossed his arms, stepping up next to him. "This isn't nothing, dude. This is you, staring at articles detailing strange and gruesome accidents. For the past hour and a half. This is, like, serial killer behavior, man."

Sam laughed lightly, rubbed a hand across his chin. "Nah, this is just research."

"For what, exactly?"

With a dismissive wave of his hand, Sam said, "Just a thing." His ears suddenly perked and his head snapped up. He narrowed his eyes at the television. "Hey, turn that up."

Ben's eyes were wide, staring at Sam as though he had just sprouted a second head, but he obliged, grabbing the remote and tapping the volume button to bring the breaking newscast to an audible level.

"…Body of nineteen-year-old Brandon Perry was found this morning in the courtyard outside of Stephen Maxwell Hall. No reports have yet been released about the cause of death, but several close friends of the Stanford student have told the police Perry had been acting 'out of it' for the past few days, claiming someone was out to get him…"

"It's escalating," Sam breathed.

While the reporter had been talking, Ben had slowly sunk onto the couch next to Sam, eyes on the screen, mouth a perfect 'o'. "What's escalating?"

Sam shook his head solemnly, chewing the nail of his right ring finger. "I don't know yet."

"Sam, I gotta tell you, man. You're not making much sense."

Sam didn't respond to that, didn't have any way to respond. Just knew he was out of his league on this.

Des Moines, Tuesday

His two days were long up.

Dean had arrived in town on Saturday. Late at night, but, still. It was late in the afternoon and quickly leaking into the evening hours. His dad hadn't called and wasn't answering any of the messages Dean had left over the span of the past few days. He was not now and had damn never been the one to wear the SuperNerd cape in their little troupe of avengers, and while he was perfectly capable of working his way around a library reference section, he was finding himself extremely frustrated with all of the nowhere he had gotten on this hunt.

He finally made a couple of calls to people who were known to actually answer their phones every now and then and figured he was as ready as he was going to be for round two with unidentified explosion-happy ghost freak. Dean loaded himself up with as much as he could carry on his person and headed out to the warehouse, the whole outing being something of an experiment.

An hour later, Dean didn't so much carry his shotgun back to the car as drag it. Experiment or not, Bobby had been right about the silver. It might have been nothing more than a guess, but it had worked; a single knife thrown into where Dean guessed its chest to be, and explosion-happy ghost freak was down for the count. He still wasn't sure what the damn thing was, but it was dead and looked to stay that way, and that was really all that mattered in the end. It had put up a hell of a fight, though.

The splintering of more than one window had created new cuts on his hands and face and reopened some of the existing ones. Any movement of his right arm brought a hammer down on those railroad spikes in his shoulder blade, the hotspot of what was going to be quite the colorful bruise, rivaled only by the mark that would be appearing on his knee by morning. He was going to have to start wearing padding.

Dean leaned against the cool metal of the Impala and let out a breath, a small cloud in the chill autumn air. When his back met the frame of the car he winced and pulled away, reaching behind to pull the second, lead-loaded handgun from his waistband. He hissed as the cuts on his hand brushed against the material of his shirt. Dean half-turned and tossed the gun through the open window, disgusted at how utterly useless the thing had been, what a waste of some perfectly good bullets. And then fell back with a thud against the side of the car.

He contemplated very seriously just taking off; he had everything in the car, usually did just in case, and could very easily ditch the motel bill – booked under a fake name anyway – and be on his merry way. It was a tempting thought, but Dean didn't really have anywhere to go. He wouldn't mind dropping in on that redhead he met back in Lincoln, had actually hung onto her number, but just didn't have it in him at the moment.

He was fully capable of handling a variety of hunts on his own, and had been doing so for years, but he was feeling run-down; older and more tired than someone his age should. Dean certainly wasn't one to get all touchy-feely and 'remember when', but this whole hunting thing had just seemed so much easier back when it was the three of –

The sudden trill of the cell phone in his pocket caused Dean to jump and he knocked his elbow into the side of the car. He shook his head at himself and rubbed a hand over his face, reaching for the phone. The kind of crap he dealt with on a daily basis and a cell phone spooked him?

It was a number he didn't recognize, and at the moment, he couldn't even place the area code, though it seemed vaguely familiar. Dean snapped open the phone. "Hello?"

There was silence on the other end. Dean squinted, pressing the phone harder against his ear, trying to pick up any background noises. An area code he didn't recognize… "Dad?"

At that, there was a quick, shaky intake of breath, a sound almost like a laugh. "Dean, hey."

And the laugh made sense, because it was absurd. Not Dad. Not even close.

Dean's mouth opened and closed a few times, unable to create any coherent sounds. If possible, he leaned even more heavily against the car, letting his body nearly melt into it. The timing was…concerning.

"It's, uh, it's me. It's Sam."

The automatic response of his quick-with-a-wit brain was something along the lines of 'no shit, Sherlock,' but for one of the few times in his life, Dean's mouth had nothing to say.

To be continued...