The events of the day had been wearing, so even though the sky was barely beginning to darken Dean already felt the need for sleep pressing down on him. He was contentedly full on the better part of a large meat medley. What clothes he could wash were hanging over the shower curtain rod to dry overnight. He lay on the bed, staring at nothing in particular, nursing one of his ill-gained bottles of water, and wishing that he'd had the foresight to have grabbed a few beers as well.

Fed, relatively safe, as prepared as he could be for whatever came tomorrow, he let himself relax into a tired calm. It relieved him, just like that first drink of water, the sporadic memories of John, the familar ease of being behind the wheel. After a day of frantically chasing his tail from one crises to the next, it was awesome to just lay and sink into semi-wakefulness, knowing that nothing was currently coming at him so fast that he couldn't allow himself the rest he so desperately needed, as surely as he had needed the food and shower. His here and now was, at least for the moment, settled.

Of course, he was going to have to ditch the stolen car. There was no real hurry in replacing it. At the moment, there was no need to go anywhere. He had no destination in mind that would be any improvement over his current location, which he now knew to be just outside of Pontiac, Illinois. He had rolled that around in his head for a bit, hoping it would connect with something, but nada. It was just a place, like so many other places that he had spent his life passing through. He couldn't come up with any good reason why he was here, other than apparently it was where he had been buried.

That was something though. Why had he been buried? He was pretty sure he should have been burned.

Flames licked up at the darkness. He and Sam stood side by side, each lost in their own thoughts. Each stoically repressing their own emotions, taking their own individual paths to coping with their shared loss.

"Did he say anything? You know, before he..." Sam asked.

"No, nothing." Dean lied. He hated lying to Sam, but he couldn't share the truth when he wasn't even ready to face it himself yet.

He should have been burned. Hunters were burned. Dad had been burned.

Lazily Dean just let his mind wander on its own. He was getting too tired to try to continue forcing in it in any particular direction, and fat lot of good that had done him up to now anyway.

Dad had been burned, but before that, Dad had been bad ass. Dad was a superhero, the coolest dad in the world. He killed the bad guys, and nothing could kill him, until something did. Dean choked back a small pained noise at that thought. It had been, he shuffled through slowly organizing memories, two years, somewhere around two years that Dad had been gone. The wound had never really healed.

Over and over the tire iron crashed into the trunk hatch, digging deep gouges into the metal. The noise assaulted his ears, drowning out his own angry, pained cries. He kept up the barrage until exhaustion forced him to stop and the iron fell from his limp hand, hitting the ground with an anti-climactic clang. The pain, the anger wasn't the least bit smaller for his explosion.

The wound had never really healed, but this was like losing Dad all over again, old wounds ripped open and made fresh. Dean's eyes burned a little, maybe teared up, just a bit, but he was just too tired, too emotionally wrung out at this point to manage much more than that.

Sleep and waking, memory and reality were getting all tangled up in his head. Drifting somewhere between all these worlds he could almost see John now, seated at the table, filling the lines of the old leather journal.

"You have to take notes, son, keep records. Don't trust the important information to your memory. It's just like keeping a gun clean, or an engine tuned. You take care of your equipment, and it will take care of you, and information, lore, tracking intel, patterns in events, those are some of the most important equipment a hunter can have. We all have our own preferred weapons, and methods, but information, that's universal. You can't improvise it, or jury-rig it, or half ass it."

Dad had written things down.

"Yeah, all right, Dad. I hear you." Dean mumbled, barely this side of sleep. With sloppy movements, he retrieved the note pad from to bedside table. He ripped off the top page and tossed the useless phone number to the side. After a long time staring at the fresh page, considering what he knew so far, what he could be sure of, he finally wrote:

My name is Dean Winchester.

He looked at it, read it over and over until it began to lose its meaning. The rest of the page taunted him, looking so blank, so big, even though it was ridiculously small for the job at hand. Eventually, he added:

I am a hunter.