Title: Walls, Barricades and Other Fortifications
Author: Chya
Rating: PG-13
Category: Gen/Supernatural
Summary: Dean disappears when he and Sam split up.
Notes/Warnings: Anytime between Shadow and Dead Man's Blood. Gratuitous Dean uh, stuff that doesn't actually work well enough to call it anything really. Oh, and the tiniest bit of Sam angst but only if you don't blink.
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"I'm telling you Dean, Dad is in trouble! We need to go to him now! Not tomorrow, or the next day, or after we've burned whatever bones will keep some stranger from having a heart attack, but now!" Sam paused for breath and Dean jumped right in.
"And dad gave us a new gig not five minutes ago, Sam, he's fine and we do what Dad wants us to do!"
"Please, for once in your life, Dean, just think for yourself! I've had the same vision every damned day and night for the past three days. Dad is probably going to die, and we have to stop it happening!"
"And if we don't stop this spirit, seven people are going to die in the next seven days. Look Sammy-"
"It's Sam so don't try and pull the big brother crap with me!"
"You've left a dozen messages for Dad, Sam and he still sent us this case to deal with. Don't you think he might be saying he's got a handle on whatever's going on? That he wants us to trust him to do what he has to do, while he trusts us to do what he wants us to do?"
"Just listen to yourself, Dean!" Sam broke off what he was about to say, afraid of saying anything irrevocable, but his brother got there ahead of him.
"Why, because I'm sounding like a loyal son who trusts his father?" Dean snapped, lashing out to hurt before he could be hurt. "Or were you going to use that other thing, toy soldier wasn't it?"
Sam nodded and, fuming, picked his backpack off the bed. "I'm going to find Dad. You can come with, or go find other people to save."
"You're leaving." Dean's tone was taken aback and strangely flat.
"Yes, Dean, I'm leaving. Again," Sam said. "And if you need me to pull your sorry ass out of trouble, call me and ask. It won't kill you, I promise."
"I – I just." Dean's gaze wavered between Sam and the laptop that displayed a website their father had directed them to for the case. "You're not going alone."
Sam paused, then said softly, "I'm not going to take a detour to save strangers because it never ends. There'll always be someone else and Dad'll be the one we don't save."
Dean was clearly torn. If it was a choice between himself and Sam, then Sam would win every time, but it wasn't that simple. "Do you know where Dad is? Or where he's supposed to, uh, supposed to thing?"
"Warrington, it's –"
"I know, around one hundred clicks west of here." Dean paced and Sam dropped his pack to the floor. Neither one of them wanted to leave things the way had last time they'd fought like this.
Sam waited for Dean to think this through, knowing that they both knew the answer, but that Dean needed a little time before committing to it. Finally, Dean paused by the laptop. "I'll take you to the bus depot. I should be done in a couple of days and I'll join you then."
"Sure," said Sam lightly. "We cover all bases that way."
"Just make sure you call," Dean said gruffly, making a point of putting his own cell in his front pocket.
"Jerk," Sam agreed, waving his own cell at Dean who picked his own pack and the laptop up.
"Bitch."
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Sam went to Warrington and hooked up with his Dad who was happy to see him, but upset that Sam had come alone and that his boys had split up. Nevertheless, he was quick to have Sam along for the ride when Sam assured him the Dean would be along in a couple of days.
The hunt so nearly went badly wrong that Sam thought that both he and John were going to die, but being forewarned by Sam's visions, they were able to pull a last minute save and destroy the ghoul that would have undoubtedly killed John had Sam not been there.
When it was over, they were both bleeding and broken, both incapable of walking more than two steps, each fumbling the bandages and painkillers as they tried to patch each other up. And both waiting for Dean to come and take care of them. At different points in the early part of their incoherent convalescence they each tried to call Dean, giving up when the out of service message came up.
Dean never arrived to take care of them.
Two weeks after they'd killed the monster that nearly killed them, Sam told his father that he was going to look for his brother.
John called a couple of contacts and told Sam that the people Dean had gone to save hadn't died.
Sam wanted John to come with him, asked him if he really cared. John told him if he didn't care then he would go, but he cared enough that he couldn't put his sons in danger.
Sam never felt as alone in the world as he did when he found the last traces of his brother on a lonely road in the middle of nowhere. A pair of straight skid marks that ended in the middle of the road right next Dean's crushed cell phone.
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Cruising in his borrowed car into the next town, Sam spotted the Impala without even trying. The salvage yard owner, Rick Harman said the car had been found abandoned out on the road with its driver's door wide open so like any good Samaritan he'd towed it in and he'd take five hundred dollars for his trouble thank you very much.
The town sheriff wasn't much interested in the abandoned car and wasn't much interested in Sam's missing brother. After a little drinking and a little lost boy flirting, the bar maid told Sam that no one paid the abandoned car much mind because whoever the poor bastard was that had been in it, the town was just grateful that it hadn't been one of them.
Every year seven people over seven days disappeared off the lonely highway. Every year the townsfolk stayed indoors for that week. Every year the sheriff and Rick would pull seven abandoned cars off the highway. Except for this year when there'd only been the one car, and absolutely no enquiries after any missing persons and the barmaid knew that because the sheriff was her cousin. And no, she didn't know where the disappeared persons went, no one did, but gossip had it there was some beast in the woods.
Sam checked out the missing persons, the sheriff not much bothered about any cover story Sam might have tried to cook up. He was used to people trawling through his files every year and sat back with a large mug of coffee while Sam helped himself. But none of the missing persons had ever been seen again. Sometimes friends and relatives would claim a car and occasionally some would go lay flowers by the side of the road, but nothing ever brought the missing back.
Up in the woods there was an old shrine that might have been an anchor for a demon and Sam could only guess that once upon a time someone ignorant had played around with things they knew nothing about. But there was no power there now. Whether the demon had left, been exorcised or trapped elsewhere, Sam had no way of knowing. Crude symbols told him that it was a minor demon, unworthy even of its own name and worse, no longer in residence in these woods.
For days, Sam searched and researched trying to find the demon that he was sure had stolen his brother, leaving his father to continue searching for the demon that had taken his mother and his lover. Perhaps John decided that Sam had searched enough, but after the days turned into weeks, Sam's father sent him coordinates. At first Sam thought John had found a lead on Dean, but it turned out to be a poltergeist and the message Sam left for his father afterwards would have scorched the most hardened ears.
After a while Sam realised that John was trying to keep him focussed, trying to keep him away from burying himself in an obsession that might take over twenty years to solve. They already had one obsession like that and they didn't need another. Neither one of them would ever stop looking, but they needed to not be stuck in an ever-shrinking hole.
Weeks turned into months and exactly seven weeks after Sam drove the Impala out of the town where his brother had disappeared, coordinates came from his dad. But this time the coordinates were followed by four heart lurching letters. Dean.
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Dean had no concept of time, place or anything that might be relevant in the real world.
He remembered texting Sam as he was driving, something snarky and inappropriate that he never got to send. He remembered the fangs and piercing eyes that seemed to sear flesh with a just look rearing up in the road. He remembered skidding to a stop and reaching into the glovebox to grab a gun. And he remembered white hot fire and black ice snap violently over his entire being.
Since then there had only been the wall.
It wasn't made of anything in particular but it stretched endlessly in all directions, and Dean somehow knew that his job was to make sure it stayed there. He'd tried to step away once, but it started crumbling and the thing on the other side had nearly broken through. He'd patched the wall back up and concentrated on making sure it stayed patched up, and that's all he did. He had to concentrate too hard to think about anything else, but sometimes his mind would wander and then the thing would try to break through, and he would have to exhaust himself trying to patch it all back up again.
And he was very tired. Sometimes there was a feeling like he'd zoned out, like he'd been sedated, but he didn't worry about those times because the thing on the other side of the wall seemed to zone out a bit too.
He didn't know why it was so important to keep the wall from crumbling, but he didn't know how much longer he could hold it all together. The thing was constantly watching, constantly waiting for the slightest opening to break through.
He noted that even this small introspection had allowed the thing to poke a tiny bit through and Dean focussed on plugging up that hole, consciously erasing all other thoughts from his mind.
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Somehow the state mental institution somewhere in the mid-west was anti-climatic, Sam thought. It was just an ordinary facility in an ordinary town several hundred miles away from where Dean had disappeared.
The polite but tired receptionist was expecting Sam and sent him straight on up to see Dr Askew. Apparently John had already been in touch and told them Sam would try to identify the John Doe they had in residence.
Askew was tired and worn too, but seemed to care about his patients. "If this young man is your brother," he warned, "then you should be aware that he's not really with us, as it were." He guided Sam to an observation window overlooking a common room where a handful of patients were engaged in a variety of activities, and others were just sitting and watching the world outside the barred windows. "Do you see him here?"
Sam's heart fell as he failed to spot Dean and he came close to giving up. Until he realised that one of those sitting impossibly still was his brother. "Yes," he said excitedly, turning to push past the doctor and charge in there, "that's him, that's Dean."
Askew blocked him and asked Sam to let them bring Dean out to them. It wouldn't do to disturb the other patients. Sam paced the visitors' area restlessly as Askew tried to explain that Dean had been found awake but unresponsive and without ID in the doorway of a local Seven Eleven and the hospital had promptly referred him to the institution.
That had been exactly seven weeks ago.
Since then, Dean had periodically broken his catatonia with violence and seizures, mostly minor, but he'd broken an orderly's jaw on one occasion and stabbed himself with a rogue pen on another. Hence the precautionary straight jacket.
When Dean was escorted into the visitor's room, Sam wanted to hug him with joy, but hung back in the knowledge that Dean didn't like spontaneous acts of affection very much. And then Sam decided that he wasn't sure that finding Dean was such a good thing, because his brother really wasn't home. Big empty hazel eyes in face pale and drawn focussed somewhere in the middle distance.
"Um, drugs?" Sam asked, but Askew shook his head.
"Only sedatives when he has an attack. We have no real diagnosis and therefore no real treatment program. We've tried some therapies, ECT for example, but they simply escalated the attacks and while some theories suggest that to be an acceptable course to take, I don't believe that in this case the patient would survive the cure. Therefore, we can only deal with the symptoms as they happen, try and build a profile of his illness."
Sam didn't know what to do. "Dean, look at me." There was no response although much as he hoped and willed it, he didn't really expect one, but he kept talking anyway, kept touching his brother, a hand on a shoulder, the other gently pushing Dean's head back, trying to force him look. "It's Sam, you know me. I need you to focus on me, I need you to give me some sign that you're still in there, I need some clue, Dean, I need you to help me here, tell me how to fix this. I want to help you Dean, but I can't unless I know what we're dealing with."
Sam glanced at Askew who was looking on thoughtfully, and turned back to Dean who was still firmly out of touch, shadowed eyes elsewhere. "I'm sorry, man," he told Dean, "but I have to try. Christo," he whispered.
The effect was instantaneous. Hazel eyes turned black as a shudder ran through Dean, and if his brother's hands had been free, Sam was certain he would have been in trouble. As it was, he was forced to block a seething Dean who seemed to be trying to rip his throat out with his teeth, pushing Sam down hard against the wall.
Which suddenly stopped as black and hazel mixed in swirling chaos and Dean fell away, spine bending backwards as an inhuman wail escaped silent lips and all the visible muscles stood proud with the increasing tension. Tremors racked the rigid body as paralysed lungs fought to draw breath.
And then it was all over. Askew stood back with the now empty syringe as Dean relaxed with the abrupt limpness of a rapidly deflating balloon. Sam had a glimpse of hazel eyes clear of both the blackness and the blankness that told him that Dean was still in there before his brother's eyes closed in enforced slumber.
Sam wanted to check Dean out of there and perform the exorcism in the nearest motel room or even the back of the car, but until he could get everything together, remaining under Askew's care was the safest place for him. As they took Dean away, Sam promised Askew that he would be back and almost ran from the building.
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Dean knew that Sam was around, but worked hard to ignore that. He was able to take some strength from the knowledge that Sam would be trying to end this, but he was still tiring, finding it increasingly difficult to maintain concentration on the wall. Some of the holes he'd patched up didn't look as strong or complete as his earlier attempts and he was surrounded by a constant non-specific ache that was pressing in on him.
He heard the incoming whistle of the bomb that he couldn't see and heard the explosion behind the wall, the screams of the thing tearing at his eardrums and the holes he'd worked so hard to fix ripping open again. He threw himself at the wall, pushing the razor sharp extremities of the thing back through the holes, building barricades the keep the thing in, emergency repairs until he could fix the crumbling wall before cracks could set in.
And then that zoned out sensation slowed everything to a stop.
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