Dean leaves the ward with a black hole yawning in the pit of his stomach.
It's been a bad day, one of the worst, riddled with hallucinations and memories of Hell that left Sam arching off the bed, screaming himself to insanity with the phantom feeling of knives carving his skin. He'd stared at the corner, mumbling under his breath, frantic, hunted eyes tracking Lucifer's movements through the shadows. When he'd slept, there'd been no change: feverdreams of waking melting into icy nightmares. No drugs they had could keep him under, could help him stumble his way to peace.
After a month, nothing helped; Sam thinned out, sprouted a furring of facial hair, slipped further and further away. Dean's thumb pressing into his palm wasn't enough to bring him back anymore, not for an hour or even a short minute.
Dean's run ragged, he's chasing himself to nowhere, and people are dying, Leviathans are still on the move but he can't bring himself to leave Sam's side. Things are happening that Dean can't control; like the time a week back when a demon tried to creep into Sam's room, masquerading as a doctor and catching them both unawares. And like the friction of a sunburst, Sam's latent powers had flashed out, striking the demon dead in the doorway.
Sam is losing his grip, and Dean is losing Sam. And he can't bear to pull himself away until Sam asks him to.
Tonight is the first night, in a long time, that Sam's been lucid enough to send him out.
But an hour ago Dean was flipping through a hospital magazine and Sam coughed, a parched, feeble sound, and whispered, "Dude. Don't need a babysitter."
Dean sat up, and stared at him. "Hey. You good?"
Sam licked his lips. "Feel like crap, but…m'okay." He regarded Dean with eyes that were, for once, anchored in the present. "You look like crap."
"Right back atcha." Dean shifted his seat from the uncomfortable bedside chair to the equally uncomfortable bed itself. "Y'know, that scruffy look is growing on me."
"It's growing on me, too." Sam thumbed the bristly stubble on his jaw. "Dean, you should go back to the motel. Get a shower, get some sleep."
Dean didn't have the heart to remind him that he'd been a resident of the ward himself, sacking out on the floor of Sam's room on the better nights and sleeping in the hallway when Sam wasn't allowed visitors. "No way, man. Free food and hot nurses in here. I'm set."
"Dean," Sam repeated, and the intent of his tone sloughed off the joking. "You need to go outside for two minutes. I know you're kind of taking root in that chair and it's not…it's not right, you're a hunter, you gotta get back out there."
"Not without you."
"It's one night, Dean," Sam insisted. "Just go for a drive. Trust me. I've got a surprise for you, anyway."
Sam was a few screws loose, but Dean played along. "Right. Another slinky?"
Sam shook his head. "Better. Trust me. It's gonna rock your world. Just go out for a drive, clear your head."
And, Dean thinks now with the light falling in a crosshatch over the hood of the car, he would do anything Sam asked him to, right now. Even give him some space. Even against his better judgment, because, after he squeezed Sam's shoulder and let himself out, the nurse pulled him aside.
"Mister Winchester, I don't want to worry you, but something about your brother's vitals has me…" She trailed off, seeming to hunt her words carefully under the beacon of Dean's glare. "He just seems to be slowing down."
Dean considered the weeks of drug regiments to keep Sam's racing heart from turning into tachycardia; the ventilator that sometimes had to regulate his erratic breathing. "Slowing down's good, right?"
"Well," The nurse hesitated. "He's resting, but the abrupt shift in his body's output is just a little concerning, that's all."
Dean had spent more time with these nurses than any one person since Bobby had died; longer than he ever had with Castiel, or any of the marks on a case. "Just level with me, sweetheart, all right?"
"Usually, when we see this rapid decline in a patient, they don't last the night."
Dean took it like a punch, glancing through the open door into Sam's room; Sam was watching him, holding on to his vivid moment of clarity, and when their eyes met Sam dimpled a smile that was so familiar it stabbed into Dean's heart. When he mouthed, Go, Dean's world split in two.
"He wants me to take a drive," Dean said gruffly. "I'll be back."
The nurse's forehead whorled with sympathy. "I'll call you if he pass—" She broke off the morbid vow at another furious glare from Dean. "I'll call."
"In that case, I'll talk to you tomorrow morning, when I get back."
Driving, now, Dean rakes a hand through his hair. He doesn't know what Sam's doing, but Sam's doing something. Dean knows that conspiratorial glint in Sam's eye, the same one that's always preceded hands in the cookie jar, or a mad plunge on a case. And whatever Sam has in mind, Dean knows this much: that ward is killing him, it's sapping Sam's will to live and he's coming back just long enough to take Sam home with him.
And not in a piece of crap Cavalier.
He breaks every traffic law known to man on his way to Iowa, to a storage facility in the middle of nowhere. He ditches the Cavalier, vaults the fence and hunts down the locker they purchased months ago.
Dean misses the Impala, the only home he's known since he was four, and he knows Sam does, too. He knows that if he's bringing Sam back, it means bringing him back between the four doors they grew up in. It means giving everything they've got to bring him back from the edge.
Dean's fingers itch with excitement to see her, his baby, locked away and gathering dust for far too long. He unlocks the ribbed blue door and heaves it up the coil, revealing the dark pit of the storage unit.
Dean's insides take a sharp plummet, and he registers two things at once.
The Impala is gone. Simply, gone.
And there are people here. Two of them.
Dean isn't sure whether to draw down, or stare, so he chooses the latter.
They're huddled against the back wall, blinking in the fluorescent glow of streetlights stretching around Dean's stocky body. One is a woman, and there's something about her that calls back to Mary: though Mary's hair was flax and this woman's is sleek black, and where Mary smelled of peaches-and-cream body wash, there's a distinct scent of oil and leather to this chick.
She's folded against the wall, inside of Dean's old leather jacket and a pair of Sam's jeans lashed around her wide hips. Things they left in the trunk. There's a child in her lap, and he's the reason Dean hasn't drawn his weapon.
This boy is thin; a mop of sandy hair, bronzed skin and hooded eyes, pouting lips. He's hunkered inside an old flannel shirt that covers him to the knees. He can't be, Dean figures, much older than seven or eight years old.
When he sees Dean, he scrambles to escape the woman's grasp, but she holds him back. Dean thinks he hears her whisper, "Ssh. He doesn't know us yet."
The boy quiets, staring at Dean with a kind of hunger that makes him uncomfortable. He remembers that Sam used to look at him that way, as a provider and a caretaker and someone to share breathing space with.
Dean finally finds his voice. "Uh," He begins, intelligently, "How the hell did you get inside my storage unit?"
"You'll never believe this," The woman says, and her voice is husky, a warm, rattling purr. "But you put us in here."
Dean is full to the brim of crazy-talk and this nearly cracks him. "Come again?"
And when she shrugs, widely, he adds, "Lady, I haven't been back here in…" He tries to remember, but the days get fogged and knotted somewhere around Bobby's death. "A really freaking long time. Shouldn't you be, I dunno, dead? You look pretty healthy to me."
"I look small," She complains, which Dean can't factor because with those hips, those eyes, and her other endowments she seems fine to him.
"You lost me," He admits.
"Oh, hell," She swears, and that sounds almost like Ellen Harvelle. "Dean, I'm your car. I'm the Impala."
Dean waits for the statement to rock his world, but somehow it doesn't; either he's too tired or it just doesn't matter, but all he can do is rub a hand down his unshaven jaw, and chuckle.
"What?" The Impala demands.
"Nothin', it's just…my dad always said you were gonna grow legs and a mouth too big for your size someday, so I'd better treat you right."
"Define right. You had sex inside of me."
Dean winces. "Awkward."
The boy squirms and scrambles and the Impala finally lets him down; the kid runs, bolts straight toward Dean on ungainly legs and when he launches himself, Dean's instinct is to catch him. He's not sure what to do after that, when the boy curls cat-like to his chest, arms linked around Dean's neck with his head over Dean's heart.
"Well, hi there," Dean says, not entirely sure he's not being attacked. "What're you doin', kid?"
"I'm back," He has a high voice, a happy once, and it takes Dean a second to understand what that means.
"Is he—?" He points to the kid, meeting the Impala's eyes over that thatch of blond hair.
"Your amulet." The Impala confirms.
"I'mma gift from Sammy!" The amulet says, all happiness and effervescence, and Dean knows how the kid knows that; how many times has Dean said it, proudly? This thing's from Sammy. Don't touch it. It was a gift.
"Okay." Dean kneels, and detaches the boy's arms, setting him on the floor. "This is all kinds of trippy, but…how the hell are you guys—?" He gestures vaguely to them.
"Human?" The Impala rises shakily to her feet, like she isn't quite sure she can trust the ground away from all-fours. "It was the weirdest thing. We were just—in stasis, just waiting for you boys to come home, and then there was this light. This heat, it was incredible. Like the pulse of a dying star. And we both heard a voice, just one voice: Take care of him. And then we woke up, like this."
"Walking, talking, the whole nine-yards?" Dean verifies
"We've heard you talk your whole life, Dean," The Impala points out dryly. "It's not difficult."
Dean's mind is finally catching up to the surreal atmosphere of the situation, not least of all the fact that his car has been sentient all along. It leaves him with some rather promiscuous debts to return to the dark-haired beauty standing before him, but that can wait. There's something that still needles at him.
"This voice. Did you recognize it?"
The Impala's eyes shade with a maternal warmth that makes Dean realize why she'd reminded him of Mary in the first place. "Of course I do, Dean. It was Sam's." Dean's throat swells with shock and denial. "How did he—?"
"Honey, you know how strong Sam is." The Impala closes the distance between them, almost tripping on her bare feet, and Dean catches her wrists to steady her, and thinks she smells warm and close and alive, but still somehow she's cold steel and exhaust fumes. "You know the power he has inside of him. And I think he did something, maybe something he shouldn't have. There's all kinds of spell-work that would make mice into men."
"Yeah, okay, I get that. But why? Why would Sam—?"
The Impala rests a slender nail, black polish chipped in a starry pattern, to his lips. "We both know the answer to that." She scoops up the boy and balances him on her hip, and he reaches out, fisting a hand in the front of Dean's shirt. "You know why we're here, Dean. He sent us to take care of you, and then he just…he was gone."
Dean murmurs, "No."
And the phone in his pocket starts to ring.