This was not the first or last time Bobby would spend an entire night ringing their phones out into oblivion. He called them both. They never answered. He wondered why they didn't answer. Then, he wondered if they were alive or dead. There was no one to call to see how they were. If he called their father, he'd only get the same rhetoric as before, that Sam needed to be done the mercy of being put out of his misery as the monster he was now known by the hunting world to be.
Bobby sat on the floor of his kitchen, head in one hand, phone in the other. It rang and it rang into oblivion.
On the other end of that phone was Dean, collapsed next to a soda machine somewhere outside Detroit. When he saw whose name it was, he'd bowed over his knees. He fought the urge to vomit. At this point, he should let him know that they were both okay, but he, God help him, could not pick up the phone. He was afraid that the demon would overhear them. That hunters somehow had wire tapped Bobby's house, and could overhear this conversation on little microphones. Dean was being paranoid, which wasn't like him.
Then again, being a fugitive on the run, drunk as a bicycle leaning against a soda machine wasn't like him either.
Bobby let the phone ring out. He called Sam instead. The phone rang and rang.
Sam was in the shower, as he had been for 30 minutes, laying in a ball on the shower floor. He shrieked. All of the cold water that went over him felt like the same blood that, in his mind, had ended his humanity.
Bobby felt the tears prick his eyes as he left a voice mail for the umpteenth time.
"One of you boys could pick up if you're alive. Did your thumbs fall off? You can text or something..."Bobby heard his voice echo into the silence. That frozen, icy silence of the road that lay between him and his boys.
Angry now, angry that none of his contacts that he once had trusted could or would help find him for fear of crossing John. Angry that his own field searches had turned up short, that even Rufus couldn't find them, APB and all. He was angry that they woud go so far off the grid that it felt as if they had vanished from the face of the earth. He was angry at the thought they may have scrapped their old phones, angry that they may not be alive to hear these calls, that all of his calls may be going to a dead phone with a battery as lifeless as their once beating hearts.
He pounded his fist in the floor and called Dean again. Dean didn't answer. That's because Dean had crawled inside the motel and dropped the phone in a stray pizza box. He curled up under the little table at the kitchenette they'd rented, because to hell with being on the run let him come and take them!, a bottle of liquor in one hand. He'd drank the whole thing and another besides it, as Sam's broken voice died in the shower's cold rush.
Sam got out and toweled himself dry, but he never wiped the blood away. Then, he looked at the sink and his phone sitting on it. He jumped out of his skin when he realized it was ringing_no one called him anymore. Then, he swallowed, wondering if it was one of his random friends from school wondering where he was. They had stopped calling after the first few weeks of his absence. They had moved on as people do and Sam had disappeared as if he didn't exist.
"No, Bobby...No..."Sam gasped, as he saw Bobby's name on the phone's little caller ID screen. He snapped it closed, with a growl.
"Stop...Please? Please..."He shushed the phone as it rang again, as if it was a crying child, and dropped it in the laundry basket. He dressed himself, clenching his teeth as Bobby left another angry message.
"Sam! You and your idgit brother better answer the damn phone, or I...I...Please, Sam? You've been gone for weeks..."
Sam covered his mouth to keep from uttering another mortal shriek, and scaring this entire block again as he had before. Someone had tried to call the police, but then said scream was attributed to some kids partying down the road. He looked and saw Dean under the table.
"Got room for one more?" He whispered, crawling over to where Dean lay on his belly, on the verge of blacking out.
"Sammy...do yourself a favor? Don't become an alcoholic..." Dean swilled the bottle until there was nothing left, same as his soul.
Sam sighed.
"No, man, one of us has gotta stay awake in case those guys figure out where we went. I just didn't want to leave you by yourself down here." Sam smiled and lay on his back, watching the gum continue to dry on the bottom of the table. Dean let the bottle roll across the floor.
"I wanna tell him we're okay, but I also want him to stop calling us...What if...Yellow...Yellow Eyes?" Dean looked up at Sam. Sam nodded.
"Yeah, I get it...I've been freezing him out too. He'll probably hate us for it, but it's easier for him to never know what happened to us than for him to get mixed up in whatever the Hell will happen now." Sam lay flush with the floor. The phones rang again one after the other, until Bobby had fallen asleep by his phone, far away in South Dakota.
"You think he'll ever forgive us for disappearing into oblivion?" Dean choked out.
Sam smiled.
"I don't know. I hope so..."
Dean nodded and drew his knees up to his chin.
"Sam?" Dean's voice echoed off the ceiling fan. Sam was starting to doze off here on the cool floor that felt nothing like the fire that baptized him before.
"Yeah?"
Silence waited; silence won. Dean may have forgotten what he wanted to ask, but Sam understood.
Don't ever disappear.