Under a Haystack
By EB
©2006
10. Eleven, twelve, dig and delve
Rockport is hot, and the only thing saving it from unbearable mugginess is the breeze coming in off the Gulf. Sam's still got chiggers from the last trudge through this particular patch of mixed grass and weeds, and he figures he'll have a whole new crop very soon.
Dean gazes up at the gulls and other birds that flock around this restful wild place, and doesn't ask any questions. He's been quiet since they got here, quiet since before then, but his hand is firm in Sam's.
Between two stubby salt-scarred trees Sam stops. A woman faces him, holding her hand up to secure her long, graying hair. Sam nods slowly, and says to Dean, "Stay very close."
With Dean at his right heel, Sam walks slowly over. "I'm looking for Lily," he says carefully. "Do you know where she is?"
He doesn't remember this woman's name; she wasn't directly involved in the confrontation a few weeks ago. Her expression is completely useless to him, blank as paper. "Dead," she says, her eyes flicking down to look at Dean.
Sam stares at her. "But – we didn't –"
"What, kill her? Maybe not by your standards." The woman lifts her chin at Dean. It's still hard to read her, but Sam is sure there is nothing motherly about that look, nothing warm or welcoming. It's just assessing. "This is him, isn't it? The one who was with you."
"My brother, yeah." Sam nods grimly. "That sea air, man, really takes the years off. Doesn't it?"
The woman smiles, a wintry look as inhuman as she is. "If you're looking for Lily's papa, you're wasting your time. He's long gone. They all are. Except me."
"What happened to Lily?"
She just gazes at him, and he fancies he can see the teeth behind her frigid smile, long, sharp. Canine.
"Tell me!" Sam snaps, and feels Dean flinch at his side. "We could have killed her, but we –"
"Should have. Instead you let the pack do it for you. Humans," the woman spits with disgust, the first real human emotion showing in her face. "We don't have time for your mercy. We never have."
Sam is staring at her. A chill creeps up his spine, colder by far than anything the woman says. "The pack?" he echoes stupidly. "The pack – killed her? She didn't do anything."
The woman shrugs, scratching behind one ear and waving at sand flies. "We keep to ourselves. In spite of what you think. But you came around, and you touched her. HE touched her," she adds, staring again at Dean, who looks pale and resolute, staring back. "And the pack won't stand for that. Contamination."
"God, you're acting like we -- we RAPED her, and I swear to GOD, that didn't –"
"What you did, to us, was a kind of rape. It was trespass," the woman says with meaning. "Now the den is ruined, the pack dispersed. It's all over. Unless someone does something, tries to drag us all together again, we'll die out. There have been wolves on this alluvial plain for nearly two hundred years, human. Now thanks to you, we're an endangered species."
A part of him should feel proud of that – werewolves are not nice creatures, although it's rare to find ones as civilized as these. But he only feels shaken, and subtly shamed.
"Was it her father?" Sam asks softly. "Who did this to Dean?"
Now the woman laughs, short and sharp, like a bark. Her golden eyes dance with amusement. "We all did," she says. "Every last one of us. Our last task, I suppose you could say, before going our separate ways."
Sam nods slowly, and whispers, "Why? Why – make him younger?"
"Ask the wind. Maybe the wind knows." Her smile is gone; she looks older, and disinterested. "That's the form it took. We didn't know." And don't care, either, is the unspoken addendum.
"And to break it? The curse?"
But she's turning, her form subtly rippling, and Sam flinches and calls, "Please. Tell me?"
"Break an egg," she calls over her shoulder. "Ask it how it can be fixed."
And then there's a bitch standing where she was, a wolf with the same golden eyes and humorless grin on her face. She noses at the dress her human form had worn, and utters a sharp, lonely-sounding yip before taking up the fabric between her teeth and trotting away.
An hour later Sam sits motionless on the sand, watching Dean venture out into the foamy curls of water, yelping when his toes get wet. They're not entirely strangers to big water, but most of Dean's life so far has been very landlocked, and this is a rare treat.
"What'd you call 'em?" Dean calls over the raucous cries of the many gulls circling overhead.
"Sand dollars. They're round and flat."
"Okay!"
He shades his eyes and watches Dean slowly scanning the sand under his feet, and thinks, This is it. This isn't going to change. Dean is – this way. Growing up all over again.
It doesn't feel as strange as it did, hearing it from Missouri's lips. She was right, but there's a sense of closing the circle now, coming back here and speaking with the werewolf woman. He wonders why she stayed if everyone else left, but there is always someone whose love of home is too strong to break. Maybe she thinks the rest will return one day, and she's keeping the home fires burning. Maybe it's just something werewolf that he not only doesn't understand but can't. He didn't know touching a werewolf would desecrate it in the eyes of its kin, after all. In talking with Lily, in touching her with kindness and staying their weapons, they had killed her as dead as if Dean had let fly with the crossbolts, Sam with his silver bullets.
There are avenues he hasn't explored yet. Literature darker than anything you find on the damn internet, the things Dad never talked about unless he'd had a couple of Scotches, and even then only in tones of dire warning. "There are things out there that will make you worse than what you hunt," he'd said one night, the time when they were waiting for Dean, when Sam was fourteen and Dean was supposed to be back already, the night they'd gotten the call from the ER, when Dean was in that wreck. Not his fault. Sam had wanted to know what Dad meant. Worse? How could they be worse? They were the damn good guys. But Dad had gone over to refill his drink and the phone had rung, and Sam watched Dad eat a peppermint on the way to the hospital and knew he wasn't drunk, Dad hadn't ever seemed to GET drunk after a while, just as if any liquor he drank went trickling out the bottom of his shoe instead of metabolizing. And by the time Dean was discharged a week later, Sam had mostly forgotten that bleak hint.
But never completely. He knows there are other avenues to the goal they seek. Roads less traveled, shadowy spooky lanes that parallel the good-guy interstate and might even be shortcuts. But Sam doesn't need Dad, or Dean, or anyone else to tell him the risks that go along with the easy way out. Never has. What's the point of fighting, if all it gets you is a first-class ticket to hell?
He stirs, brushes sand off his jeans. Dean has wandered down the deserted beach about two hundred yards, small and still in the distance, and Sam yells, "Find any?"
Dean shakes his head. "Not yet."
"Here, I'll help you."
They don't find any sand dollars that afternoon. But the Gulf water is blood-warm and comfortable, and it's too shallow to really swim but it's worth getting his shirt and jeans wet to see Dean capering around like a blond-haired seal, giggling and splashing and looking behind him at his footprints, filling with water.
There's a text message from Dad when they get back to the motel room. Coordinates, and a rare real message: Tell Dean I said to wait an hour after he eats before swimming.
Sam swallows. He's always wondered if Dad kept tabs on them, called on one or another of his vast network of weird-ass contacts to check up on them, see what they were doing when he could not. So he knows they're near the beach. Does he know because someone told him? Or because he's next door, hiding as he is so very good at doing?
Doesn't matter. Even if he's a hundred yards away it might as well be a hundred miles, or a thousand. They'll be all right.
He shows Dean Dad's message, and then has to explain why you should wait a while before swimming after you eat. Sam suspects that's kind of an old-wives' tale, but Dean pays earnest attention, and Sam's perfectly certain Dean will always, always wait an hour. Now, and for the rest of his life. It's just the way Dean is.
They eat fat Gulf shrimp at a pretty little restaurant, and Sam sees Dean's nose is going to peel from his sunburn. His freckles are darker, and his hair already lighter. It suits him.
And when they get back, Sam takes out one of the primers he's been carrying around, and makes Dean go over his letters.
"Did Dad tell you I had to do this?" Dean's look is accusing, although not the sort of angry look he's given Sam when he's really upset. More like – testing.
Sam shakes his head. "Nope. This is all my idea." He stretches out on the bed and props his chin on one hand. "You remember what you said, a little while ago, about wanting to help me?"
Dean nods, still looking a little wary.
"Well, if you can read, you can help me a LOT more."
Dean purses his lips, and is for a brief instant really DEAN, the same expression, the same lemme-think-about-it demeanor. And Sam can only smile, because it hurts but it hurts in the right way. Dean didn't die. Changed, oh yes, but Dean hasn't left him, Dean is right here, in the slightly defiant cock of his head, the red lips easing into a reluctant half-smile. The tapping of one impatient foot.
"Like what?" Dean asks.
"Maps, for one. Road signs." Sam glances around dramatically, and then lowers his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "Clues, even."
Predictably and wonderfully, Dean's smile flashes bright. "Yeah," he breathes. "That'd be good. Told you I could help."
Sam smiles and nods. "I never had a single doubt about that, Dean," he says honestly. "Not ever."
He's thinking about where the hell they'll go now, what he'll do. There's a job, and the coordinates tell him it's someplace in rural New Mexico, not that far from where they are now.
But they're down to plastic instead of money, about forty left in cash is all, and he's scared the plastic will be declined pretty soon. He's never bothered with continuing the scam; always had Dean to do that. Now he's thinking he better come up with some kind of plan, fast, or they won't just be driving in the Impala, they'll be sleeping every night in it, too. And his body's just too long to let him do that more than once in a blue moon. Not to mention how much it would suck in a more general way, for Dean, too. Maybe be an adventure for him occasionally, but regularly? No way.
Getting a job, as the older version of Dean used to take some dark pleasure in reminding him on all too many occasions, isn't much of a solution. The money sucks, the hours blow, and you gotta pay taxes. Sam has nowhere to leave Dean while he gets some kind of crap job, anyway.
Which leaves him with several options, none of which are all that palatable. Beg, borrow, steal, hustle. He's not ready to beg, and there's no one at this point to borrow from. Stealing's an option. Hustling -- Well, everything he knows about that, he learned from the little fellow just now biting his lip over drawing endless series of letters in a manila-colored notebook on the floor. Sam is nowhere near Dean's former brand of slick, but he's not without his own strong points. It's worth a shot.
As it turns out, he doesn't have to do it. In the middle of lunch, a sandwich eaten while Dean pores over the ruled tablet on the table, his phone chimes a message, and tells him to pick up something at the local HEB. The something is money, wired, he is sure, through their father, and Sam doesn't care how Dad got it, or knew they were flat broke. He just cares that it'll see them through for a little while.
Child support. Something like that. Whatever.
The next day, they head for New Mexico. It's a shedu, lurking around the outskirts of Roswell, and the morning after they arrive Sam sees its footprints in the ashes he's spread outside the door. He kills it that night, no return of Dean to the rescue but Sam handling it with dispatch and not a little satisfaction, and the next day they spend the morning at the UFO Museum, and Sam buys them both tee shirts and takes pictures with a cheap disposable camera. When he drops it off to be developed, he prints one of Dean's many P.O. box addresses on it, and hopes he'll remember to check the next time they're in Reno.
They're heading generally westward, no destination in particular, and Sam isn't sure if he's waiting for something from Dad, or just for inspiration to strike. Dean has been happier since his talk with his father, applying himself with reluctant diligence to the homework Sam gives him, the basic math and reading and writing. Dean catches on fast enough that Sam suspects he really did learn something his first two years in school, just never really had any time to enforce it.
On a dusty highway just past Tuba City, Arizona, Sam opens his mouth to point something out to Dean off to their right, a hawk of some kind. And there's a moment when the world goes still, an instant flash-photo of desert landscape and a bird frozen in flight, a sense of pressure in the bridge of Sam's nose and the feel of his eyes bulging in their sockets. Then everything dissolves into black, and then vivid color, a lightning-quick series of images.
When he comes back, there is blood in his mouth, the car is tilted at a crazy angle in the ditch, and Dean is tugging Sam's arm and yelling his name in a hysterical tone Sam has never heard before.
Dean looks unhurt. But his terror touches something deep inside Sam's breast, something hot and uncomfortable and afraid, and he ignores the cut on his mouth from biting the steering wheel, doesn't think about how the hell they'll get the car out of the ditch. He just grabs Dean, hugs him. Thanks God they survived another of Sam's brain-bomb specials.
If he can't be trusted to drive, they're truly screwed. But that night, sucking on a piece of ice and wishing his Tylenol would kick in faster, he thinks maybe this was a blessing. He can learn to recognize the signs, take action before the precog strikes. Pull over, at the very least. As long as it's consistent. If it is, it's doable.
It is. It takes two days to get the Impala's bent front axle repaired, and Sam chucks the credit card after paying because it's gonna bounce like the proverbial India-rubber ball after that highway robbery. And outside Boulder, meandering their way toward another set of coordinates, he sees the photo-effect again, and jerks the car off the highway, a tiny, nondescript roadside park, jolts them to a stop before the images explode behind his eyes.
When it's done, and he's caught his breath, he looks into Dean's anxious eyes. "We have to go to California," Sam says rustily. "Right now."
Dean nods soberly, and picks up the map. "Where?"
A headache is coming. Ravening over the horizon, black eyes narrowed and pitiless, and Sam can't avoid it. Can only hope to endure it, hope it doesn't last. "Just a second," he slurs, and opens the door to throw up.
He can barely see, and it takes Dean's voice to calm him enough to start the car again, guiding them with his own eyes and descriptions to a motel not too many miles down the highway. "I can't," Sam manages, when they creak to a stop by the front office. "Sorry."
Dean takes his wallet and nods. "I'll do it."
Sam doesn't have the wherewithal to object. And Dean does, comes back with a key and steers Sam to their nearby room. "Told him my dad had a migraine," Dean says softly, and Sam is hurting too much to wonder where Dean learned the term. He crawls onto the bed, and eases a pillow over his head.
It's Dean who brings him the med kit a little while later, helps him find their stash of Vicodin, and fetches a wastebasket for Sam to throw up in. It should be humiliating, being nursed by a little kid, but Sam is only grateful, thankful that some of the painkillers stay down, that they're safe and Dean is effortlessly quiet, the only sounds the AC and the scribble of crayons on paper.
When Sam wakes up the next morning, Dean is curled next to him, still fully dressed, long lashes dusky on his cheeks. Sam's headache is gone; the urgency – go now, California, now now NOW – isn't. But he smiles anyway, reaches out and runs his thumb over Dean's freckled cheek. "Thanks, buddy," Sam whispers, although Dean is asleep, can't hear him. "Couldn't do it without you."
Dean's eyelids flicker, and he sighs a little in his sleep but doesn't move.
Concluded in ch. 11