AN: I'm back! Sorry this is a little later than usual. I thrive in feedback, so let me know what you thought!
Do You Recall
"There was a time some time ago
When every sunrise meant
A sunny day,"
– REO Speedwagon, "In My Dreams"
V: Keep On Runnin'
The place looks deserted, they said. We'll go back tonight when no one will be sniffing around, they said. It'll be a simple salt n' burn, they said. So stop being so pissy, Dean said.
Well Dean Winchester was a fucking liar.
"Whoa…I know you…"
"Yeah, sure you do, let's see some identification."
"Whoa, whoa wait a second…I know you two."
"…Holy shit."
Dean looked over at Sam in question.
"What?"
"Uh…West Texas, the tulpa we had to take out—those two goofballs that almost got us killed—um…hellhounds or something?"
Dean's expression went slack.
"Fuck me."
"Uh, we're not hellhounds anymore, okay?" The scruffy man in front of Elena seemed indignant, but she was looking from Dean to Sam, hoping they would see how confused she was.
"Ed, what's going on?" his blonde friend in the camouflage outfit asked nervously, though he kept filming with a digital video camera the entire time. He looked skittish. It was obvious to her both of them belonged nowhere near this house.
"It's okay, Corbett, they're not really cops," Ed assured him. Then he noticed Elena. "Friend of theirs?"
"You could say that," she said with a sideways glance to the brothers. The corner of Dean's mouth lifted at seeing the exasperation written all over her face.
"Hey, you had a partner didn't you? A different guy," he said, smirking while holding his flashlight. "He around here somewhere?"
"Y-yeah, yeah. Harry's uh, running around. Chasing ghosts." Ed didn't seem as sure of himself as he wanted them to believe.
"Yeah, okay well you and Rambo need to get your little girlfriends and get the hell out of here," Dean said smoothly, but Ed just laughed him off and stepped closer, going for nonchalance and confidence.
"Listen here, chisel-chest," Elena had to contain a snort of laughter (Dean ignored her), "Okay, we were here first. We've already set up base camp. We beat you."
Dean looked over at Sam, his face unamused. He raised his brows as if to say, "here that, Sam?"
"They were here first." Sam rolled his eyes. Dean chuckled, then pinned Ed against the wall with enough force to really startle the guy. Elena raised a brow and looked over at Sam, who only shook his head.
"Ed?" Dean had his full attention. "Where's your partner."
Ed was pretty complacent after that, though he still tried to give Dean the runaround. As far as Ed Zeddmore was concerned, this was still his case. Or the Ghostfacers, whatever the hell him and his friends were calling themselves. Elena had put together most of the pieces so far, but she still asked Sam what the fuck was going on. He filled in the gaps of when he and Dean met Ed and Harry, and everything that had gone wrong from then on until the brothers managed to undo their mess.
"Sounds like a bunch of Scooby Doo wannabes," she said to him while Dean grilled Ed for information on why he and his team were at this house, the Morton house, on a leap year. When the reported killings happened.
"You're not wrong," Sam said flatly.
"It's for our TV show," Ed explained, and that made Sam perk up.
"Wait, what?" He let his arm drop to his side in aggravation. "Oh, perfect."
"Yeah, nobody's ever spent the night before," said Corbett, who was still filming.
"Uh, actually yeah they have," Dean pointed out.
"We've never heard of 'em," said Ed.
"No surprise there," Elena muttered. Ed gave her a peeved look, but shifted his attention back to Dean, who was walking towards him.
"And you know why?" Dean asked. "Because the ones who have, never lived to talk about it!"
"Oh, God, I don't believe you." Ed rolled his eyes. Sam went on to explain the missing persons reports that left the found body of Freeman Daggett's body as the most suspicious hard evidence.
"These look legit…"
"These are legit, and starting at twelve midnight your friends are going to die," Sam said seriously, and the effect was only enhanced by the frantic sounds of the rest of the Ghostfacers, Harry, a young woman, and another cameraman running down the stairs and into the room to find Ed. Until they noticed the three hunters.
"Hey…aren't those the assholes from Texas?" Harry exclaimed, then noticed Elena. "Who's she?"
"Yes," Ed answered, and Dean sighed. "She's their friend, but I-uh…what's your name?"
"…Elena," she said eventually with a roll of her eyes.
"All right, let's have this reunion across the street, guys. Come on, come on!" He tried ushering them out, but the Ghostfacers were obstinate, ignoring him in favor of returning to where they had laptops set up to view their footage. "We'll all go for ice cream. My treat, huh? What do you say? Let's go!"
They continued looking at the screens and marveled at what they saw. It was making Elena increasingly frustrated how they had almost no regard for what was actually going on in this dilapidated house.
As it turned out, they hadn't making all that racket out of fear. No, no. They were excited. About a death echo. Those were harmless spirits, just replaying their death on an infinite loop. She followed Sam and Dean away from the team for a moment to actually talk.
"They can't be serious," said Elena. Sam nodded.
"Yeah, I mean, that was just a death echo."
"Yeah, but what's it doing here? Did anybody get shot here?" asked Dean.
"No, not that I could find."
"What's a death echo?" asked one of the cameramen—Spruce, Elena thought she heard Harry call him. Dean shook his head and had to explain what it was to the team, while Sam pointed out that whatever the problem was, a death echo wasn't it. The three of them tried to get the team to pack their stuff and move out as fast as possible, but all at once Ed silenced everyone with a single question.
"Where's Corbett?"
The result was chaos, everyone panicking while Dean tried to stop Ed from leaving the room to go look without a plan. Then they all heard a male scream that resonated throughout the house. The remainder of the team took off up the stairs, despite the hunters' calls to wait, and form a plan. That left them staring up at the open door at the top of the stairs. Elena checked her watch.
10:45PM
"Shit," said Sam. They ran up and followed the boy's screams the best they could, but eventually they died away, leaving all of them looking around without a clue as to where Corbett was taken. The hunters ushered them the best they could down the hall and into another room to regroup, collect themselves, and think strategically. Most of the Ghostfacers were checking on their equipment, charging batteries, all of them in a state of shock, while Sam, Dean and Elena tried to get the front door open.
It wouldn't budge.
"You happy now, Dean?" asked Sam. "'Let's go hunt the Morton House,' you said. 'It's our Grand Canyon.'"
Dean sighed and turned away from the door.
"I don't want to hear it."
"Hey, if I remember correctly, you're the only who found the hunt, Sam," Elena interjected, crossing her arms.
"Yeah, well, that doesn't change the fact that Dean only has two months left," he said angrily in his brother's direction. "Instead, we're gunna die tonight."
He picked up a dusty old stool on the floor and tried busting the door open with it. Elena sighed when it was obvious the door wasn't going to open, but the crashing sound alarmed the Ghostfacers.
"Hey, what's going on?" Spruce asked.
"I'll tell you what's going on," Sam began, fully steaming now. "Every door, probably every exit in this house—they're all sealed."
"W-Why are they sealed?" asked the girl, Maggie, if Elena remembered Ed saying.
"It's a supernatural lockdown, okay?" Dean explained. His exasperation was evident. "The thing that took Corbett doesn't want us to leave. And it's no death echo, it's a bad mother and it wants us scared."
"Or…it just wants us," Maggie finished tremulously. The EMF meter began to sound, and that's when Spruce announced that the camera was on the fritz again.
"Everyone stay close, there's something coming," said Sam, and all the computers began spazzing along with the EMF. Then appeared another death echo; a portly man looking around, seemed a bit drunk.
"Is this the same one you guys saw earlier?" Dean asked.
"Uh, no. Different one," said Spruce.
"Multiple death echoes? What the hell is going on?"
"But that doesn't make any sense…" Elena trailed.
"Beats me," said Sam, and as Dean tried to shock the ghost out of its loop, Sam explained to Harry how though it was rare, it was still possible. Unfortunately, the ghost continued on its loop until it was hit by what sounded like an oncoming train.
Dean looked back at them, just as confused and frustrated, if not more, than he was before.
"I just don't get it. There's no records of any of it," he said. "No one got shot here, obviously no one got run over by a freakin' train."
"There's gotta be something tying them here," Elena said, voice lowered over Sam's call of "Stay close!"
"Did the echoes take Corbett?" Maggie asked.
"Yes…no…I don't—we don't know what's doing what here, that's what we're trying to figure out, okay?" said Dean. Again, Sam reminded them all to stay close, and Elena followed him with a growing sense of unease. Multiple death echoes in one place was one thing. But ones that had never lived or died there? That was unheard of. And with these "Ghostfacers" here, this hunt was rapidly turning sideways.
A lot of things had been turning sideways recently.
But she'd called her boss and quit her job, then called her workmate Val, who spent half an hour grilling Elena for the reason why. She'd lied. Unable to muster up the real reason, she told Val that she would be staying with some family friends for a while, since the family emergency turned into something more extensive that Elena had to take care of. Eventually, Val begrudgingly took her word, and it gave Elena a pang of guilt that she had to lie to the only real friend she'd ever had in the past two years at the museum.
Now she was back in a place that was familiar, yet she still felt out of place and out of practice.
"Seriously, does watching this nightmare through that lens make you feel any better? I mean…" she heard Dean say, and turned around to see Maggie stutter a, "well, yeah," and see Dean shake his head. He caught up to Elena's side and shot her a wry glance. The corner of her mouth kicked upward.
"Simple salt-n-burn, you said?" she teased. He gave her a mocking smile before it vanished into a deadpan look.
They came to what looked to have been a cross between a panic room and a freaky-ass exhibition, with stuffed dead animals on the walls and standing like sculptures. Sam found a certificate of excellence for twenty years of service at Gamble General Hospital, under Freeman Daggett's name.
"So he was a doctor?" asked Dean. Sam inspected the framed paper again.
"Janitor," he corrected.
"This looks like his den," said Dean, peering around with his flashlight in hand. "Did you say he died in '64?"
"Yeah, heart attack."
Elena studied the amount of boxes poorly stacked on a table against the wall, along with large containers covered in dust and cobwebs.
"What are these, C-rations?" she asked.
"Army issued, three squares," Dean replied, glancing at them curiously. "Like a lifetime supply."
"Is that all he ate?" She picked up a can of God-knew what. Probably beans, a million years ago.
"One stop shopping," said Dean.
"Ah hell, guys. This is ridiculous! How the hell is any of this going to find Corbett?" Ed exclaimed, mostly in Dean's direction. "We should be digging up the friggin' floor boards by now!"
"Calm down, we're trying to figure out what took him before we go running in blind," Dean explained, then started breaking the suspicious lock on the refrigerator. Elena held the flashlight so he could utilize both hands.
"Huh," said Sam from where he was crouching on the floor. A pile of papers and records were spread out in front of him. He held an informational booklet that appeared as old as everything else in the house. "'How to Survive an Atomic Attack.' An optimist."
Finally Dean broke the fridge open and pulled out a metal box. He set it on one of the tables they'd cleared and popped it open. There were letters, scattered papers, a book on taxidermy (which explained a lot), and…
"Eww…"
"What?" asked Sam. He and Elena looked over on either side of him.
"We got three toe tags here: one death by a gunshot, train accident, and suicide."
It didn't take long for Sam to piece it together.
"Ewww." Elena looked up at them, confused.
"What—" And then she saw the book on taxidermy, thought of the death echoes, and the obvious hermit behavior of the late janitor and…
"Oh, ick."
"What?" asked Harry.
"Well that explains why all the death echoes were here," said Sam. When the others just blinked at him, he restrained a sigh. "They're here, because they're bodies are here…somewhere in the house."
Dean almost shook his head. With these people, you had to explain things in plain terms they could understand.
"Daggett brought their bodies home from the morgue…to play."
There was a beat of silence, then collective "ewww"s from the other three guys.
"That's nasty man," Spruce added.
"Right," said Sam, and he looked over at Dean, who had a pensive look on his face.
"Wait a minute," said Dean. "Wasn't there a girl with you?"
Ed and Harry looked around.
"My sister, Maggie," said Ed worriedly. "Oh God, where'd she go?"
Dean sighed and gave Sam and Elena a parting look, then stared hard at the former Hellhound ghost hunters.
"Stay. Here."
Elena and Sam looked to one another with mirrored looks of unease.
"I don't like this, Sam."
"Yeah, I know." He felt kind of bad about that. He had been the one to find this hunt, thought it would be something easy to get Elena back into the swing of things after…well, after her being at a steady, normal job for two years where the most she had to worry about was getting there on time and making sure people didn't steal old vases. And after what happened in Utah…she wasn't completely on her feet yet. Even Sam could see that, even if he didn't know her that well.
He and Dean had tested her and made sure she was brushed up on her survival skills as far as hand-to-hand combat, which she thought wasn't really fair, considering how much bigger both of them were compared to her. Dean pointed out that pretty much anything they'd be up against would be bigger than her. She conceded that, after she'd punched him in the kidney.
As it turned out, she was better at slipping out of someone's grasp and using their weight against them than handling any kind of weapon.
And that brought them to guns. When she quietly but firmly refused, Dean didn't push her. It was the closest they came to talking about what Mirah had taunted her with. Sam and Dean had seen her shoot Greenwood in the cave and, from the way she'd handled herself, they could assume she knew how to shoot correctly. But later Dean looked a little angry when he told his brother that he'd caught her with one of his extra hand guns. She'd been stumbling through taking it apart and putting it back together, and slowly but surely emptying the barrels and putting the bullets back in.
It was clear Jack had made sure she knew her way around a gun, even after her brother's death.
Then Sam understood why Dean was angry. It said something about Jack Hayes.
"Found a straggler," Dean announced his presence with Maggie trailing behind him. Both Ed and Harry asked if she was okay, but then the EMF meter started spazzing along with Spruce and Maggie's cameras.
"Whoa, something huge is coming! Ed, look!" Harry said, showing Ed the spiking EMF signal. "It's past eleven, you guys."
"Nobody move!" said Dean, though the whirring sound was beginning to grate on his nerves. Then, all at once, there was nothing at all, and the EMF and the cameras shorting were silent.
"Sam?" said Elena in alarm. He'd been standing right next to her. But her shout alerted Dean.
"Sam?" he said. He searched the whole room with his flashlight, but it was clear Sam wasn't here. Not anymore. "Sam!"
Elena picked up the fallen flashlight and looked up at Dean fearfully. Not for herself, but for Sam.
The next half hour they spent looking for Sam and Corbett throughout the house. Elena felt increasingly guilty with every room she and Dean checked together that came up empty.
"Sammy?" Dean called out. "Where are you, man?"
"He's not in this room," Elena determined after closing a closet.
"You sure you didn't see anything?" Dean asked as they went back into one of many hallways they had crossed. "He was standing right next to you, for fuck's sake."
"Look, I'm sorry. I really didn't see anything," she promised. "I didn't even hear him, with the EMF going off and everything else."
Dean sighed. And then they heard yelling farther down the hall. Not the "I'm in danger, please help," kind of yelling, but the kind of racket people make when there's a fight going on. The two of them rushed into the room and found Ed and Harry wrestling and slapping at each other, while Maggie watched, shouting at them to stop. Spruce was getting it all on camera.
Dean immediately held Elena back by the shoulder and brushed past her to break it up.
"What the fuck are you doing?" he bellowed, sending Harry on one side of the room and Ed on the other. "Cut it out! We're down by two people."
Dean rolled his eyes when the two looked appropriately chastened and walked out the door, continuing the search for his brother. Elena sighed and followed after him.
"So Daggett was a Cold War nut, right?" Dean started, flipping through the papers Sam had been scanning through not an hour before. Elena and the remaining Ghostfacers were following his lead, skimming through to find more information they might have missed. "He was an amateur taxidermist, he like to slow dance with cadavers and all the C-rations…so what the hell are we looking for?"
"Horrible little life," Maggie commented.
"A lonely life," said Dean, inspiration striking, "A Cold War life. He was scared."
"Dean?" asked Elena.
"He was scared. He was scared," Dean continued, slamming the papers in his hand down on the table and moving toward the other end of the room.
"Scared of what?" Harry said in exasperation, but Dean took off, out the door and down the stairs. Elena huffed in aggravation and ran after him, and she could hear the others behind her.
"Down here?" she asked when they got to a decrepit wooden door on the first floor of the house.
"Guys like Daggett—back then, the ones who were really scared of the ruskies—they built bomb shelters. I'm guessing he's got one," Dean explained, then wasted no more time in walking through the door. Elena and Spruce followed next, and then the door slammed closed behind them. It made her jump and gasp in surprise.
"Uh, hey, that's not cool," said Spruce. They could hear Ed, Harry and Maggie on the other side of the door just as confused. "What's going on?"
"It wants to separate us," Dean said, climbing back up the stairs. He tested the door and, like he thought, it wouldn't move an inch.
"Oh for fuck's sake," Elena breathed, and he gave her a wry look before getting close to the door.
"Ed! Listen to me. There's some salt in my duffel. Make a circle and get inside."
There was a pause, until Ed's voice called back out to him,
"Inside your duffel bag?"
"Inside the salt, you idiot!"
"Ah! Okay."
"Goddamn it," he muttered and turned away from the door. Elena rolled her eyes.
They made their way down the stairs and through the remains of cobwebbed taxidermy and mildew along the walls. The shotgun filled with rounds of salt was heavy in the waistband of Elena's jeans, but she didn't feel like carrying it when she had her flashlight. Any excuse to ignore its presence was one she took. She only had it on her now because the one thing (of many things) her father had insisted on was a shotgun filled with salt for any kind of angry spirit. It was the best defense short of iron (though she did have an iron rod the length of a wrench in her belt).
"Can I ask you something?" Spruce said to Dean, which was odd, because Spruce didn't actually say much as far as initiating conversation.
"What?" Dean said, without turning around, though Elena looked at the cameraman with veiled curiosity.
"Earlier, you and Sam. You said you had two months left?"
Elena's heart sunk at that particular reminder, and her gaze traveled to the ground.
"Eh, it's complicated…a while ago, Sam…" Dean started, but then he noticed the camera was still definitely rolling. He chucked humorlessly and looked straight into the lens. "Ah no, no, I'm not gunna whine about my fucking problems to some bullshit reality show. I'm gunna do my fucking job."
He turned his back on Spruce and the camera and resumed his search with Elena for a door.
"Is it…cancer?"
"Shut up."
Elena shook her head and turned to where Dean was next to a wide shelf, trying to find the door.
"Do you hear that?" Dean asked. She paused and listened.
"Music?"
"It's coming from behind this wall."
Again, Elena held the flashlights while Dean pulled the shelf away from the wall by himself with a grunt of effort.
"Wow," said Spruce. "You're strong."
Dean flipped off the camera, making Elena smirk. Between the two, they were able to get the door open just in time to see the ghost looming over a seated and bound Sam. It was a tall man, broad shoulders and an unseemly appearance. He looked more like a burly farmer than a janitor and taxidermist.
"Sam!"
Dean immediately pulled up his shotgun and fired. The ghost scowled and disappeared on impact, and Dean and Elena rushed in to break Sam out of his bonds. Dean saw that his little brother was a worse for wear with a black eye and blood streaming from a cut on his forehead, but besides that and the party hat on his head, he was fine. Dean didn't dwell on anything else than that.
Sam groaned once he was out of the chair and rubbed at his chafed wrists. Once seeing that he was all right, Dean took in his less than pleasant surroundings. Dead and decayed bodies were strapped to chairs all around the table where there were plates and utensils set, a cake that would probably cave within itself if it were to be touched, and finally…Corbett.
"Oh no…" Spruce groaned. "Corbett."
Finally, he lowered the camera away from his face and looked back at the solemn hunters, both sad and imploring. He sure didn't know what to do. Now he knew none of his team had a fucking clue of what they were getting into by coming down here.
"All right, let's get out of here," said Dean. None of them could agree more. They made their way into the hall, and Dean almost sighed when Spruce once again started asking questions.
"So what's with this Daggett guy anyway?"
"Loneliness," Sam answered, fending off the flashlight on Spruce's camera from his bruised eye.
"He never heard of a RealDoll?" asked Dean.
"No, no, Daggett's the 'stuff-your-mother' kind of lonely."
"Again, ick," said Elena, and she and Dean shared a grimace.
"He lifted these bodies from the morgue and threw a birthday party…except these are the only people that would come," Sam finished, touching his eye gingerly. "At midnight, he locked them in the bomb shelter and OD'd on some horse tracks."
Dean gave Sam a look that said he was curious, but didn't really want to ask the question.
"How do you know this?" Sam's expression was frank.
"'Cause he told me."
"…Oh," Dean nodded. "So now that he's dead, same song, different verse? Trying to get people to come to his party?"
"That's what it looks like," said Elena. She restrained a shiver and crossed her arms instead, rubbing her chilled arms discreetly.
"Yeah, pretty much," Sam agreed, "and stay here forever."
"All right, well I'm not waiting around for party favors," said Dean, and led them back up the stairs to the still sealed door. Seeing that it wouldn't budge, he tried using the back of his gun to pound against the wood.
Sam glanced behind him and saw that Spruce had resumed filming.
"You still shootin'?"
"Yeah." As if he would miss any of this.
"It makes him feel better. Don't ask," Dean quipped, and continued hammering against the door.
"We're not gunna get through with the ghost still on our ass," said Elena from where she stood at the head of the steps, close to Sam to give Dean room for his bulldozing.
"Well we can't just sit on our asses, can we?" Dean shot back without pausing. She restrained a sigh.
"I'm saying, maybe we can find another way out."
"Um…guys," said Spruce from behind Sam, but it didn't seem like any of them heard him. Dean clenched his hands on the gun and finally faced Elena.
"All there is down there is the fucking basement and a whole lot of decaying crap, okay? There's not gunna be a—a hidden passageway or underground tunnel," he snapped, gesturing down the steps. "This isn't Indiana Jones and what mummified those people ain't the damn Ark of the Covenant."
Despite him getting annoyed with her, she couldn't help but tease, "Does that make me Marion?"
"Okay, calm down," Sam said when he saw his brother's jaw clench in sheer aggravation.
"Guys!" Spruce said, finally getting their attention. "Getting a ghost roll thing, something's coming."
Before they could react, Daggett appeared behind Spruce and effectively threw the guy back into the room downstairs. Spruce groaned, letting his hand holding the camera fall to the ground as his eyes closed. The hunters bolted down the stairs, though Dean was faster in drawing his gun and once again fed the ghost salt rounds while Elena checked on Spruce. He groaned again and she laid a hand on his shoulder.
"You okay?" she asked.
"Yeah…think so," he nodded, and Sam helped him stand back up while Elena took out her iron rod from her belt. Sam steadied him, and then the camera was good and rolling again. Spruce brought it up to his face and nearly swore.
"Uh…guys…"
Daggett appeared behind Dean, pissed as ever, and despite Elena's warning shout, Dean was thrown against a metal table. Elena swung with the rod, but the ghost grabbed her arm and by her shirt and tossed her more effortlessly than he had Dean, and hard, right into Sam. She felt something hard smack into the back of her head and the world grew fuzzy. Maybe she even blacked out for a minute, because when she opened her eyes, Corbett was standing there.
"Corbett?" she heard Sam say coarsely.
Daggett turned around from where he had cornered Spruce, and Corbett rushed at him, latching on and wrestling with the bigger man until the entities of the two ghosts meshed in silvery light. They heard Corbett's struggles until both spirits disappeared into oblivion.
Elena heard Sam grunt behind her and felt his hand on her shoulder. They helped each other up and met a groaning Dean in the middle of the room.
"You guys okay?" asked Spruce. The three of them turned and incidentally faced directly into the camera. "Damn. You look rough."
Dean took the liberty of grabbing the camera.
"What do you think's gunna happen tonight, huh? Just say what you think's gunna happen on this trip."
"I think tonight…I really do…I think all of our dreams are gunna come true." Corbett finished packing the rest of the tools into the Ghostfacers van. "Does that sound stupid?"
"Kinda does, yeah," Spruce replied. Corbett laughed it off and shrugged, offering one more smile to the camera.
Elena remembered the final moments of the video with a sense of nostalgia. All in all, it had been put together pretty well, even if the entire thing had to be completely scrapped (which Sam and Dean took care of). There was a part of her that wished it could be shown to the world. Maybe that poor boy's death would seem a little less in vain. But as they drove away to the outraged shouts of the Ghostfacers, she knew they'd made the right decision.
"So what's next?" Dean asked, "Got a stretch of road ahead of us."
"I dunno, you're ready for another one already?" Sam asked, unable to completely veil the concern in his eyes. They only had so much time left to figure out how to save him, and Dean was already on the next hunt. "Sure you don't wanna stop somewhere for the night, get some sleep?"
"Yeah, Sammy. Sleep off that shiner in the car. We're burnin' daylight," Dean said, tossing a grin back to Elena via rearview mirror. Sam saw her slowly return it, and then saw his brother's grin directed at him. Sleep wasn't what Dean needed, Sam realized. Or Elena, for that matter. They needed to keep the momentum moving, keep on running. He couldn't begrudge either of them that, even if his muscles (and his swollen eye) ached.
Sam let out an inaudible sigh.
"All right, let's get some food on the way though. I'm starved."
"God, me too," added Elena, rubbing her painfully empty stomach. Dean's smile became a little more genuine.
"You got it."
Then the radio was on, music blasting over the sound of the Impala's motor. His foot pressed more steadily on the accelerator, bringing his Baby nearly flying over the blacktop as the sun rose higher in the sky.
"We climb, and climb
And at the top we fly…"
"Aw no, not this shit again," Dean refused, hand immediately reaching out to change the station. Suddenly a hand shot out from behind him and slapped his away. It startled him enough that the car veered right and then left.
"Leave REO on, goddamn it!"
"Fucking hell, Elena! What are you trying to do, kill us all?"
"Leave it on the fucking station!"
"Let the world go on below us,
We are stuck in time…"
"It's my goddamn car—"
"Guys, I already have enough of a headache!"
"And I don't know really what it means…"
"If this is how it's gunna be the whole ride, I'm dumping your ass off here," Dean threatened.
"Psh. As if," she snorted. "I'd track you down and then I'd really be pissed."
Dean reached his right arm into the back seat and she coiled away, slapping at his fingers.
"Dean, you're veering again!" Sam exclaimed.
"Shut up, I'm trying to concentrate!"
"And I don't know really what it means…"
"I swear to God, we have a better chance of dying here than we did by Daggett's angry ghost."
"In my dreams."