The phone was sitting right there, burning a hole in his pocket and scorching the flesh off his leg – but he supposed that was better than his ass; thank God for small favors and cell phone pockets. It was right there, right there. All Sam had to do was take it out, press a number on speed dial and wait for the connection to be made. How hard could it possibly be, to enigmatically say "I saved your hide, man, the least you can do is thank me for it", to tell Dean he'd meet him wherever it was that Dean was going. Not that hard at all, but getting around the insults made might be a harder job.
Risk, though, that was the neon sign flashing before his eyes. There was too much of a risk if Sam called Dean and said all the things needed to be said: mainly, the possibility of Dean coming back. As long as that rock-and-roll time warped blonde stayed far, far away from Never Never Land the chances of a run in with a rabid Peter Pan were slim to none.
But the deathwatch stopped, didn't it? Somewhere between goldfish charades and a walk out of the main records room that deathwatch stopped, stopped dead and plunged the world into an all too eerie silence. What did that mean? Was Dean saved or was he even more pegged for an early death than ever before? Would he be lasting another year or find himself at the pearly gates a few decades sooner than planned?
The deathwatch stopped, but what the hell did that mean? Hopefully not that the tie binding the Winchester brothers together had finally been severed, destroyed to the point where Sam wouldn't be able to hear a time bomb go off – a time bomb that might be ticking faster than anytime before.
Crap. Why'd Sam get the bright idea to switch to autopilot? If Dean was doomed no matter what, if he was destined to be struck by a train and that train was coming for him tracks or no (if it had to veer off course just a little and come crashing through the picture window into the living room or do a u-turn for the nearest bar) come hell or high water it was going to happen. So what if plucking Dean off those tracks and sticking him in the middle of a mall twenty miles from any set of train rails wasn't going to do any good?
Mr. Cocky was in his car by now, having driven to the motel room to gather up his things and maybe leave a nasty note tacked to the pillow case behind for Sam, but what if he wasn't speeding away from danger but right into its mouth? What if by shooting Dean in the leg Sam had only made things a whole lot worse? What if he had single handedly flipped to the last page of the book, deciding that the entire middle section of the story wasn't worth reading – just get to the good part, see what happens, who lives and who dies.
Well, there was that fate talk again. Books, trains, the mouth of danger with its rotting teeth and foul breath. And if there really was such a thing as fate, Sam had certainly never prodded at it before.
He had dreamt of Dean's death, of his big brother tied down to an old surgical gurney and essentially giving up the biggest boxing match in the history of the earth. If he dreamt it, that meant it had to play itself out – but Sam had driven his brother away, in the opposite direction of a madman and his basement butcher shop. Holy jeez. What if he opened up a can of worms so big the aftershocks of the outpouring creepy-crawlies would split the world down the middle?
Sam's face twisted into a severe wince.
What had he just done? His brother was suppose to die, but he had manipulated the cards because he loved the guy and did not want that death to happen. Sam had messed with what bigger game board there might have been out there (somewhere, anywhere) and what would the repercussions of that action be? The very fabric of time and space might unravel, catapulting the world into another dark age with its signature black death being a plague of panic and disorder. Barbarianism at its finest, that's what was going to happen to the world because of what Sam had done.
He banged his forehead against the stack of papers in front of him, the musty smell of old age invading his sinuses. This is what Dean must have felt like during school, coming face-to-face with a pop quiz.
Back to Dean again, the kid no longer chained to Death but driving around on roads that would soon crumble below his tires, sizing up women who would fall through the cracks and staring up at a sky that would melt away into fire.
Stupid, stupid, stupid. Sam saved the brother he loved, but the world might implode because of it.
He should have just said nothing, should have just sat there and let his brother think him a bit crazy. He should have gone with Dean to Meyers's basement, should have found and killed the sonofawhore when he went after Dean. He should have not toyed with the space-time continuum, definitely not. Not, not, not.
Time to call his brother and warn him about the funny strange things about to be afoot. Give him a head's up about the cats with three tails and trees with fins.
Lifting his head up from the record books with a heaving sigh, Sam reached into the smoldering pants pocket that held his cell phone. He pressed the appropriate key for reaching his brother and bobbed his head back and forth
("Two little monkeys sittin' in a tree, one is blind and the other can't see.")
with the dial tone as he waited for Dean to (a) shut off his cell phone and bring Sam to leave a voice mail never to be listened to or (b) to get sick of hearing the ring, ring, ringing of the phone and pick up just to tell Sam to cease and desist. So far neither happened and
("All day long they throw their coconuts down,")
Sam was reduced to continue on passing the time with a silly song he always used to sing when he was bored. In this case he was nervous, wondering if Dean was sitting in that Chevy with a smile on his face, knowing that his brother was being driven insane with the incessant dial tone. At least get a decent ring tone, Sam thought bitterly, along with other things like: maybe he can't pick up the phone because Meyers got to him the moment I wasn't looking. That was irrational, though, being as how Meyers could only hack at people's organs when they were asleep
("I know because one hit me on the crown.")
and convinced that a ghost wielding psycho tools with the density of air could actually hurt them. So for the moment Dean wasn't being the subject of exploratory surgery, wasn't being tethered to a table forced to look at pictures of suggestive women (most if not all disemboweled) and have his… member coated with an ugly nasty acid if an unwanted reaction happened (which most often did, the patients being bombarded with sexual stimuli on top of seeing those poor mutilated women – they couldn't control themselves, really) – but the least he could do was answer the damned phone.
Apparently Dean was still sore. When Sam got through the whole song, began rewinding it in his head without his brother answering the phone – just the voice mail kicking in – he gave it up as a bad job and hung up. Leaving a message was dumb, it would just be erased and if it wasn't surely when Dean heard "Watch out for zebra's with purple stripes" he would not only think Sam horrendously off but a drug addict as well.
But loopy drug addicts could still perform investigations, could still turn to page 138 and find out where they needed to be in order to light up the bad guy like a Christmas tree and send him packing.
&&&
When he left the building the cold island air seemed to be like shrink wrap pressed onto his face, making his skin so tight it was a wonder it didn't tear right in half. His face might not have cracked and fallen off, but the feeling of having plastic over his head made Dean uneasy. He couldn't breathe.
It was all psychological, of course, that notion of trying to get air in a vacuum chamber, but his body didn't want to believe that. There was no oxygen, none what so ever, and if he didn't get to the car soon the pavement would have a crash course in Dean Winchester 101.
Fumbling around like a blind man, Dean reached his baby and opened up the driver's door, practically throwing himself into the car and pulling the door closed behind him. As soon as the door was shut, all the windows up like the car was more of a hermetically sealed bubble than an automobile, Dean started breathing in explosive gasps. Panicky, shamed gasps for air that had never tasted sweeter.
He had been drowning, that's what tripped his mind into panic mode, and only now did his head breach the surface of the water. Powerless, that what he had felt like, simply thrashing around beneath the glass top of the ocean with a force one hundred times bigger than he was holding his head down. That force, the one with hands the size of a small country, had been the undeniable truth Sam had wanted him to admit to.
Frankenstein's monster would have done better around a forest fire than Dean reacting to and dealing with things inside the record hall. Shock could do some pretty crazy things to you if you weren't careful and Dean hadn't been. He had been able to not let it slip, to have one of those boughts of rage in which you let everything out along with the insults, but he had let Sammy read too much into him… hadn't he? Hadn't he written it all over his face for his little brother to read, the little brother who by all rights shouldn't have been poking around his head like that?
How did he know, anyway? How did that little punk know what to ask and how to go about asking it?
What the hell had gotten into him, that's all Dean had wanted to know and then that had to happen. The atomic bomb to end all atomic bombs, with a mushroom cloud that would be in the air until the next ice age – and well beyond, most likely. He could feel it in his lungs, the acrid smoke and radiation from that cloud, and with each exhalation he could see the word DOOMSDAY written out in the little fog puffs spread onto the window.
Pulsing and glowing red like blood, the word hammered into Dean's cold forehead as it rested on the driver's side window. First it was like a beating heart and then seemed to roll over, twist itself into a rapid ticka-ticka-ticka march. It was a mocking sound, relentlessly reminding Dean of all those nights and hours wasted lying wide awake under the bed clothes ("Feign asleep for Sammy, he doesn't need another thing to worry about" he had told himself) and flicking gold coins into the wishing well, eventually giving that up to make his diseased rubber band ball to throw into it with a cannon of an arm.
Ticka-ticka-ticka.
Sammy found out, somehow.
Ticka-ticka-ticka.
But he doesn't really know, not yet anyway and I won't be the one to tell him. I won't be the one to tell him how he's right, how I really would let everything go if I could just have It. Maybe I'm the one who needs to have some CAT scans, huh?
Ticka-ticka-ticka.
And the radiation poisoning is already settling in, has been for a while now. If I can't trust Sammy and Sammy can't trust me, we're both screwed this side of Sunday. But I just can't let him know, not when It is such a small thing in his eyes. Here we go, bringing on the Apocalypse over a silly wish to be genuinely loved.
Ticka-ticka-ticka.
Dean must have sat in that car for a good half hour, thinking about how pathetically fragile his relationship was with his Sammy. His phone rang some time into the pity party, but he didn't answer it. He already knew who it was and how the conversation would go: if one of them didn't start off with the "Yeah, I forgot to tell you this back there, asshole" line then they'd be walking on eggshells until one of them stepped down too hard.
With that in mind, how he was positive if he had answered the call the first thing he would have said was, "You need me already? I should have known. You couldn't even piss by yourself until you were twenty" out of sheer humiliation, Dean started up his Impala and drove to the Driftwood Motel. Once there he gathered up what few things he carried around with him on his travels and stood there, at the base of Sam's bed, and stared at the straightened comforter until he turned old and grey.
He didn't know where'd he go or how long he'd stay there, but he told the otherwise empty room that he'd "come back when the pot of water starts boiling". That was one of his mother's sayings, sparked by what Sam had said about DAMIRCOBS. Whenever Little Person Dean had been upset about something, mainly about what so-and-so did or said she'd tell him to leave some space to breathe, but to make sure to come back when the water pot started boiling. That pot, she'd say, was a very large one and it was filled to the top with water, but eventually it would come to a boil and when eventually came… "get a whole bunch of rags to clean up the mess".
Dean had never understood that mantra, not once in his twenty-seven years, until just then. He would leave, drive around Maine for a while until he felt calm enough to not sock Sam in the jaw if he ever saw him again, and then he'd come back. Hopefully in time to shove his boot up Jonathan Meyers's ass, but he wasn't going to rush anything.
Still more ashamed of himself than angry at Sam (thought he was, oh Lordy was he ever), Dean unfolded a roll of bills and shoved it in one of his brother's socks. Even the grass knew the kid was too awkward to grab a job – let alone find a decent romp in one of these small island towns. He also left a note, torn from a sheet of scrap paper (actually, it was a Fat Little Notebook page a girl five states ago had written her phone number on and gave to him giggling to no end) and tried to write something witty on the side of the page without an area code on it.
Nothing came.
Leaving it blank, figuring that his Sammy was smart enough to realize that the message was – in a dude-ly way, of course – "you're more important to me than some strange chick's number… but I wrote it on my hand, don't worry" Dean walked out into the early winter afternoon to wage another battle with plastic wrap.
Dean was his father's son all right, that's what the ticka-ticka-ticka greeted him with when the rushing blood in his ears died down enough to let him hear again.