Episode Six
"The Little Fish"
Chapter Three

"Sam," Dean said. "Sammy, come on, get up, we gotta go."

Sam's eyelids fluttered. They felt heavy, or the universe felt heavy. Sam couldn't move, didn't want to move. Everything was slow. "Dean?"

"No, it's me," Dean said, and as consciousness came, that heavy darkness sped up into Dean is gone that thing took him and threw him over the- Dean is gone Dean is and he sat up only to find hands pressing him back down to the ground. Charlie's face came into focus. "Whoa, easy Sassafrass. Do you know where you are?"

"Sassa..." Sam blinked at her, and then at the little gang of hikers who'd come with her, Robbie and Bridget and Ellie and Chris and one of the blue shirt people Sam didn't know. "American... State Forest something," he mumbled.

"Good enough. Can you stand up?"

"Dean," he said, and flipped over onto his stomach out of their hands to drag himself the three feet to the edge of the ravine. "Dean!"

"Shh! That thing could come back any second!" Charlie and Robbie pulled him backward by the shoulders, and he went easily when Robbie's grip sent tearing agony through his shoulder and collarbone.

Great. Juuuuust great. Sam hissed through his teeth, got his bearings. "Help me up."

Charlie and Robbie got him up, Bridget held a bottle of water out for him. Ellie and Chris stood around looking concerned, but they were a sweet couple to come out looking.

"We followed your GPS - I didn't know you knew about that feature."

Sam braced himself against the hollow tree and drank from Bridget's water bottle, other arm hanging limp. "It's the same as on mine. I was hoping it'd lead you to..." He nodded toward the ravine. "Dean."

"He's not down there," Chris said. She patted Ellie's shoulder in pride. "Ellie's a decent free-climber. She's been down and back up while Charlie's been waking you. Your brother isn't down there."

Sam chewed his lip. "Signs of struggle?"

"Like maybe he'd been dragged? I didn't want to go too far alone..." Ellie said, trailing off and obviously feeling guilty.

"No, no," Sam said. "Of course." Dean was gone. Not dead, maybe. Just gone. "Okay. We're gonna find him. And we're going to get out of here. Everyone's back at the cabin okay?" He handed the water back to Bridget and stepped forward from the tree as he spoke. Charlie regaled him with the daring tree climb and key toss and rush into the cabin while he focused himself, relaxed his arm, bent it at the elbow and then brought his hand to his stomach, away, back, slow slow relaxed and slow until -

The joint popped back into place and Sam almost dropped to his knees in relief.

"Oh my god," Robbie said. "You did not just pop your shoulder back in. Oh my god."

"S'fine now," Sam said. He looked around for his gun.

"Fine now, he says," Robbie was saying.

"He says that a lot," Charlie said. "Looking for this?" She held out Sam's gun.

"Yes, great, okay-"

Ellie and Chris stared. Robbie was shaking his head and looking up at heaven. Bridget frowned and said, "And do we want to know why you brought a gun on a geocaching hike?"

"I can explain, but first we have to get back. I think I must have injured the... thing. Maybe it needed to tend a wound more than it needed to eat me. But we have to get to safety and regroup. Okay?"

Bridget looked like she was going to argue, but Charlie rolled her eyes. "Yeah, let's go. Get a move on. Cripes it's like you guys want to be in a bad SyFy movie."

"Stay close together," Sam said once they were on their way. Only he and Charlie had guns, and Charlie's probably wasn't loaded with silver bullets.

"No shit," Robbie said, huddling in closer to Bridget. Ellie and Chris gave Sam a sympathetic look and walked a little closer to each other too, holding hands.

"You always bargain with fodder?" Charlie asked.

"What?"

She gestured around them. "Out in the middle of monster city here, and you're arguing with these people to trust you? You should have just said, 'move out or I'm leaving you here.'"

Sam chuckled. "Yeah, maybe."

"It's what Dean would have done."

Sam frowned. "Yeah."

"We'll find him."

"I know."

"You really think you injured it?"

Sam shrugged, watched the treeline. "I'm still alive. Maybe I'm just not appetizing enough-"

"No, you're totally appetizing," she reassured.

"Yeah, thanks."

"Gotta get some meat on them bones though."

Sam frowned, flexed his good arm a little. Yeah, okay. He hadn't had much opportunity to get back in shape after having been benched. And the Trials had kinda taken his appetite and replaced it with an over-sensitive gag reflex. Like, one whiff of cooked meat from across the bunker sensitive. But still.

"Hey, I didn't mean anything by it," she said. He must have been quiet too long. "Just you know. I'm used to you being like four feet wide at the shoulder, and you're like, me-sized now."

Sam twisted his mouth.

"Okay, not me sized. But like, definitely no more than a me-and-a-half, which you know, isn't bad, okay, I just mean-"

"Charlie?"

"What?"

"Shut up."

"Fine, gawd." She bumped her shoulder into him, which was hilarious if only because she hit him at like, elbow level. But she was winking at him and he smiled, okay. Fine.

The trek back to the cabin wasn't short; he'd run quite a way chasing after Dean and the goatman. But they managed to reach the clearing without seeing any action, knocked on the door with the some special knock of Charlie's, and when they were let in, there were like six people in blue left and twelve people in red.

Sam frowned. "Where's everyone else?"

Curtis on the red team said, "They left. They left. Oh God."

"What do you mean, they left?"

"They got sick of waiting here," Michelle supplied. "Like sitting ducks. We should have gone with them."

Sam's heart sank.

"What?" Charlie hissed, tugging him to the side to have a private conversation. "You think they're dead, don't you."

"We don't know that-"

"You do."

Sam pressed his lips together. "I think maybe there's a reason we didn't get attacked on the way back here," he admitted.

"Dammit."

"Okay, listen up," he said, addressing everyone. "This is going to sound crazy-"

"Four people were opened up right in front of us!" someone in blue said.

"I know. And I wish I could tell you something that would make more sense to you, but you're just going to have to trust me. There is something in this woods, and it's not a bear, it's not a wolf, or anything else you've heard about. It's dangerous, but we can protect ourselves until we have a better plan. We all have gear to camp for days, and while it's... uhm, unfortunate that we've lost half our numbers-"

"Unfortunate?"

"-It does mean we can all comfortably stay inside and ration our supplies more generously."

"If it's not a bear or a wolf - man are you saying there's some kinda Bigfoot out there?"

Sam laughed. "I wish. No."

"Then what," from the back.

"Something much worse."

"A wendigo?"

Sam frowned. "How do you know about wendigos?"

"Oh my god, I was joking. Oh my god."

"Okay, everyone just calm down. It's not a wendigo, but yeah, those are real. Sorry. Look, this is kinda what I do. Me and my brother-"

"My brother," Charlie volunteered. Then ducked her head sheepishly. "I mean, not really, but the guy who you thought was my brother, yeah. Just pretending."

"We came out here to hunt this thing."

"Great job!"

"Shut up," Charlie said.

"No, it's fine," Sam said. "We weren't prepared for you guys to be out here. We split ourselves up and did our best, and we've lost people, and my brother's gone, taken by this thing." He watched them, they weren't calming down, but mentioning his missing brother seemed to sober them up a bit about it. "We're gonna survive this. But you have to trust me."

Charlie stood back and watched a moment once everyone had jobs and was making themselves useful. Sam was at the moment helping someone sort the supplies they'd all dumped out of their backpacks, but he'd already guided someone through painting the walls with this weird protective symbol Charlie recognized from the sheets of paper Kevin and Crowley had decorated Sam's walls with.

Another group was scavenging the supplies that had been set up for the winning team, setting up bunks for sleeping. The first thing Sam had done was look for weapons, but for a geocaching game where everyone was mostly supposed to have brought their own stuff, self-defense wasn't something the cabin was outfitted for. There were spare batteries for GPS devices, extra chocolate bars, flashlights in case people had forgotten or broken or lost their own, makings for fresh food so that the winning team didn't have to eat the rations they'd have packed in their backpacks, and three pocket knives.

Sam had frowned at the cache of supplies in thought, then decided they'd share the chocolate, refresh anyone's batteries who needed them, and keep the spare flashlights in a central location. He took the pocket knives and started directing teams to set up sleeping areas, make some food for everyone at the kitchenette, paint protective markings, and sort the supplies.

Charlie watched with a kind of strange detachment. She'd broken her arm in the fight against Dick Roman, she'd come face to face with a crazy actual real life dark wizard guy, almost scored with a hot fairy chick, and gone through some pretty terrible video-game-related PTSD because of that stupid djinn. But none of that stuff had involved watching people get filleted right in front of her. None of it had threatened her life in quite the blood and gore way this whatever it was was threatening it.

"Charlie?"

Charlie looked up from her daze. Sam had left the supply sorters to their job and now he stood in front of her, looking concerned, holding his backpack by a strap.

"You okay?"

"Uh, yeah, of course, why wouldn't I be okay?" she said. "Are you okay?"

Sam frowned. "I'm not worried about Dean."

Charlie rolled her eyes. "A) you're a terrible liar, and B) that's not what I was talking about." She nodded at his shoulder, and his hand went to it in acknowledgement, massaging gently.

Sam watched her a moment, his face unreadable. Charlie had noticed that, actually. That when he wasn't obviously in pain or happy, he kind of watched things happen, little wrinkle in his forehead, deciding how to react, or maybe how to appear to react.

"I'm fine, Charlie," he said, voice low. Then the side of his mouth crooked up and he said, "Thanks. But I am going to find Dean."

Charlie nodded. "What can I do?"

Sam sighed. "I got two jobs left. You pick. We still make and put up these totems outside." He nodded at the pages now plastering the walls. "I got Ellie and Chris working on making them right now. But the placement has to be precise, the exact cardinal corners of the space we're protecting. It's at least a two man job, someone with a gun, watching the other person's back."

Charlie raised her brows. "What's the other job?"

Sam pulled the three pocket knives from the supply cache from his pocket. "Sharpen these, and then bless them over burning witchlace and salt."

"While chanting in a funny language?"

"Obviously."

"Um, door number two, I guess."

"Good choice."

"Who are you going to take to help you put up the totems?"

Sam looked guilty.

"Sam?"

"I can handle it myself. Better me than some kid who goes out into the woods once a year."

"Sam."

His guilty hangdog look hardened as he stared at nothing, right in front of her he went from morose puppy lion to cold-blooded killer. He reached into his backpack and pulled out a box with etchings carved into it, burned out black, set it on the counter she was leaning against. "Witchlace and sea salt." On top of the box, he put a folded piece of paper, tapped it. "Incantation. You know how to sharpen a blade."

"Y...eah? How did you know I-"

"Get to work," he said, deflated, resigned. His cold exterior resolved into a sort of business-like shell and Charlie thought she got it.

Dean didn't do that, Dean cracked jokes right up until the bloody end. Sam didn't work that way. A pang burned in her belly as she remembered how she'd wanted to go with Dean when they split up, sure for strategic reasons, but also because he was just more fun. Did Sam even have fun? And if he didn't, who could blame him? Their lives had treated them differently, and it wasn't exactly a secret that Dean's "fun" was a defense mechanism the same way Sam's whole down to business thing was. Maybe he was just always in defense mode with brief instances of being able to be sarcastic or kind now and then. God, sad. Charlie felt like an asshole. Sam started to turn away.

"Wait-"

Sam turned back halfway, he looked prepared to argue. Charlie put on her best "pweeeease" face, the thing that got people to do things for her when being Queen wasn't appropriate.

"Stay until I'm done with this, okay. And then I'll help you with the totems."

Sam watched her, looked off after a moment. She knew he was thinking about the daylight they were losing, the time Dean was missing, possibly injured, possibly dying, while they weren't looking for him. He'd put people on jobs to get things done efficiently, and she was putting a wrench in it.

She saw the moment he relented; his shoulders sagged, he shook his head a little and looked at the floor.

"Fine. Okay."

They made a nice little assembly line, actually. Charlie gave the first blade a quick sharpening while Sam prepped the little pyre on the brick of the hearth, drizzled the salt and crushed the leaves, said a little incantation, then he moved on to make the next little pyre while Charlie held the blade in the flame and said her bit. She watched to see if the metal looked different because it was being "blessed" or whatever, and she thought maybe it looked shinier, but she was also fully willing to admit she might have just been looking for magic wherever she could find it. Beside her, Sam's soft low tenor murmured like a prayer, not gravel like Dean, but smooth and practiced. He was so somber where she felt stupid; she tried to mimic him, tried to sound serious, just ended up sounding even stupider.

When she finished blessing her first blade, she looked at him from the side. "I feel like a monk or something."

Sam chuckled. It gave his somber words a bit of a lift, and he paused long enough to say "You're doing great."

She beamed at him, then set the blessed blade aside and started sharpening the second one. About ten minutes later, they were finished with all three of them. Sam pocketed one, pushed the other two into Charlie's hands, and said, "Come on. These totems aren't gonna stick themselves into the ground."

The ground outside was soft from a recent rain, which was a blessing. Sam was pretty good at judging distance, had his old-school compass out to pinpoint the exact location for each of the totems. The totems themselves had been carefully fashioned from live wood, tall and thin with cross pieces at precise angles, a splash of paint in three slashes at the base of it, three dots, then two more slashes. Charlie could lift one of them without it getting too unwieldy, but of course Sam could carry all four of them easily and still get coordinates worked out with his injured arm. He'd pressed his gun into her hands with a soft cover me, and she wondered how he thought he was going to do all of it alone before.

"The knife," she said, "and these totems and the symbols inside the cabin - I thought you didn't know how to kill a goatman."

"We don't. These are protective against danger, really general. It's always better," he said, grunting as he twisted the northmost totem into the dirt, "to use something specific to the creature. But when you don't have that..." He shrugged.

"Right. And the knives?"

Sam picked up the last totem and they headed for the east corner of the clearing. "Specific to the location here, and the sort of... classification of the creature - as in, it's a beast of some sort, not a ghost or a demon. And those are the silver bullets in that gun," he added, nodding at the gun in her hands. "Kind of all-purpose."

"So you're basically saying you came out here with practically nothing."

Sam stopped and looked at her. "People were dying, Charlie. We didn't have time to keep researching a dead end."

"Okay okay. I just thought. You're usually the prepared one."

Sam was quiet. He started toward the eastern point again. "I rushed us into this hunt," he said after a moment. "I thought he'd - but now he's gone."

"Like you said, people were dying. You had to come, right?"

"Right." Sam footed the totem into the soft soil and heaved downward with both arms, grimacing.

Charlie watched him. Somewhere in there, she'd said the wrong thing. She meant to say something about how awesome it was that he knew stuff that could help them, stuck in the middle of the woods without the benefit of research books or whatever. She'd had this image in her mind of him sitting around with papers just reading and highlighting and translating, probably because of that dumb book series, but he was able to give people things to do, ways to be useful. The crazy terror that had paralyzed everyone in the group into shouting and crying had vanished once people had purpose, and she was going to tell Sam thanks for that, good job on that, way to go, bro. But it didn't come out like that. Maybe it was Sam, his tendency to downplay, the way he just dripped guilt, and she'd gotten caught up in it, she'd gotten wound up in how little he and Dean had come into this hunt knowing. Off guard by the idea that-

-crap. The idea that they did this all the time, walked in without knowing whether they'd be walking back out. And she'd gotten irritated.

"Sam-"

"Charlie," Sam said. He half turned to her, didn't look her in the face, and now he was resigned. "Take care of these kids."

"Sam, wait-"

"I gotta get going." He looked up at the sky; it promised maybe a few hours of daylight before dark. "And I'm going alone."

"No. I'm coming with you. You aren't the only one who cares about him-"

"This isn't about that, Charlie. It's about them. They're who we came out here to save."

"They're protected now-"

"And what happens when someone decides to make a break for it, Charlie? We've already lost too many people. They need you, your level head. Keep this," he said, putting his hand over hers on his gun. "You're a better shot than any of them, if something happens. Look out for the smell of copper, or ozone."

"Blood or rain."

"Yeah. And do a head count every half hour. You know these people by now. If you ever come up with an extra person, don't be too obvious about it. But take that person out. They're counting on you, Charlie. I'm counting on you."

"Sam, this is crazy-"

"No kidding," he said, chuckling. "Give that second knife to someone you trust. I suggest Bridget-"

"Bridget with the... arm?"

"She can handle a knife just fine. Watch her when she's working sometime. And she's got a level head like you."

"Okay."

"Charlie. You got this."

"No."

"Yes."

"Hey, wait." She pulled her GPS out of her jacket pocket and gave it to him. "If you get hurt, or you need help with Dean, or whatever - just hit the bat signal, okay?"

Sam looked at the yellow device in his hands, then up at her, and she saw that if the thing wasn't dead, if it wasn't safe for her to come out, there was no way in hell he'd push the button, and her heart raced thinking he would rather die than have someone risk themselves to come save him.

"Okay?" she pressed.

"Okay," he lied.

Dean woke without moving, no indrawn breath of shock, nothin'. Wherever he was, it was quiet. Nothing moving, drip drip of some water somewhere and the echo sounded like he was in some cave somewhere. Great.

Well, he wasn't hung up like a microwavable dinner in a wendigo's pantry, which was a plus. He was on his side on the ground, rocks digging into his bruised ribs. He opened his eyes a crack when he was pretty sure nothing big was moving around. Dark, but there was some light out of his peripheral, yellow like an oil-burning lamp. The smell of ozone hung around the place, but he thought maybe it was like, residual or whatever.

So Dean tried to move, just flex first, to see - and yeah, no he wasn't tied up. Maybe the thing thought he was gonna be out longer. And, oh, frick, yeah his head ached when he turned it, but he did get a better view of the place. Seemed like the thing had left him alone. But who knew when it'd come back?

Dean levered himself up, a shock of pain in his leg, another pounding throb of his head, the whole thing took his breath away, but he was sitting up after minutes of effort, sweating as he sat back against a rock. Yep, a cave. Awesome. Dripping water, critters with lots of legs, the works. The mouth of the cave emptied into the kind of black that meant there was a tunnel between him and freedom. Against the farther wall, half of a kind of makeshift table was lit in light, just a flat slab of stone really, but it had cloth and at least one knife, a bundle of... herbs? Shit, was this thing going to cook him? Jesus.

Okay, okay. Take stock, stupid. Lately he'd been waking up badly, sitting straight up or waking with surprise, but he thought that was about the stress of Sam and Lucifer or Sam and Trials or Sam and his damned shoulder or his inability to eat or his nightmares - but it was always Sam and on some level, he hoped, he must have known it was safe to wake up like that. Now, without something to reassure him, he was waking up like they'd been trained again. Which was good, and also kind of really fucking sad. God he missed his own bed.

But yeah - wow, he had taken a knock on the noggin, because thoughts appeared and swam away without really taking hold, but he could do this - Winchester up.

Head: maybe a concussion? Definitely a goose-egg right there behind his ear, tacky with dried blood. Leg: well, there was a tear in his jeans, stiff, again with dried blood. The gash burned, but had stopped bleeding and when he reached down to try to assess the damage, he found the cut was packed with some kind of weird antiseptic smelling mud. Because of course, you don't want your meat to be tainted when you slice and dice it. Gross.

Everything else seemed to just be bruising, his ribs, across his chest, his hip where he'd been laid on the floor of the cave. But he attempted to get up only to find he couldn't quite put weight on his leg, sank back down the floor anyway because the world tilted. Dammit.

In the distance, echoing a bit down the tunnel and coming like an accusation into the cave, the sound of a thing, moving toward him, a kind of shuffling step, a hiss like the thing was in pain. He'd heard a gunshot - maybe Sam had injured it. Oh God, Sam - please be okay, please be okay-

Dean took a breath, a second, then pushed himself forward. The uneven rocky ground scraped against his bruised chest, but he army crawled at speed for the table, for that glinting blade on it, some kind of advantage, he was going down fighting, if he was going down. And God he was gonna keep from going down, because if Sam was alive, he knew the kid wasn't going to stop looking for Dean until he was dead, until this thing killed him. Whatever Dean thought about how well Sam could take care of himself, the fact was, Sam went off the rails without him. Sam on demon blood might be able to take this thing out even if it wasn't a demon, but what he'd do to himself to get revenge, what he'd give up because Dean was gone - and yeah he'd really wanted to talk out the whole Purgatory thing and now unless he survived this, he'd never get the chance to talk to Sam about what was different about the last time Dean "died," when he really needed saving, what made Sam think it wasn't worth trying-

But be nice about it, Dean thought, reaching to pull himself up to the table. The last thing he needed to do was push Sam over the edge when he was pretty sure Sam was kinda like, barely holding on or whatever.

The shuffling in the tunnel got closer, kicked a stone into the wall and the sound echoed. Dean froze, hand on the handle of the knife, prepping himself for the tear and burn that he'd have to fight through to fight this thing hand to hand. A deep breath, the thought of Sam out there chasing him. Dean needed to survive because if he died, he was pretty sure Sam would be close behind, one way or the other.

The thing growled at the door, slow-moving, Sam must have winged it, and Dean turned with his knife hand hidden, and he said:

"Come and get it."