Chapter 5

"Red sky at morning, sailor take warning," Sam murmured to himself a few days later. "Red sky at night, sailor's delight."

So what did a yellow sky in the middle of the afternoon signal?

It had been stiflingly hot for the past couple of days, with an uncharacteristic humidity, cloying and thick. The tips of Sam's hair were perpetually stuck to his face and neck. But now, he noticed, wind through the open door was picking up.

"Dean!"

OOO

Dean was lying in a puddle on the couch, trying to keep all parts of his body from touching any other part. He'd been lying in a puddle on the bed, but he'd run out of dry spots on the sweat-soaked sheets and so decided a change of venue was in order. He'd stripped down to jeans and a threadbare T-shirt, and hadn't had shoes or socks on all day. But the hint of a cool edge on the breeze that had recently begun wafting through the open windows gave him hope that a break in the heat was on the way.

"Dean!" Sam lingered on the ee, pitch rising like an air raid siren. It was his "you'd better come take a look at this" voice. Dean cracked an eyelid and frowned, but resolved to heave himself up.

"What?" he grouched, lolling over to Sam at the screen door on the back of the house.

"Look," Sam instructed.

Rubbing a hand over his face – and then wincing at the way it just smeared the sweat around – Dean groggily moved to the door. It took him a second to figure out what he was looking at, but when he did, all grogginess fell away.

It was like looking through a tinted window. Everything had a sickly yellow tinge. Except the wall of thick black clouds moving their way. Dean looked back over his shoulder to the front windows, where he could see that the sky to the south was still blue with only occasional interruptions by harmless-looking white clouds. That probably wasn't a good sign.

He took a slow look around him, and the house went from crappy-but-livable to sinister and threatening. He could almost here the sound that the cracks creeping up the walls would make as they splintered in half. And he doubted that the tin roof was held down by more than a nail here and there. The house didn't even have a proper foundation. It was set up on cinderblocks and rattled if you moved at more than a shuffle over the floorboards.

But it was all they had. There was no cellar or basement. And since Dad had taken the car this morning, the next nearest option was a good three-mile-walk away. No way could they outrun the storm.

"Sam, go drag the mattress off dad's bed," he said, tersely.

"Drag it where?"

"The bathroom." There were no inside rooms on this house. It was divided into living room and kitchen on one side and two bedrooms and a bathroom on the other. But the bathroom at least had the smallest window in the house.

"Will it fit?" Sam asked, eyeing the closet of a room doubtfully.

"Make it fit," Dean snapped, and Sam's expression immediately turned mulish.

"What are you going to do?" It was more of an accusation than a question. Dean tried not to grind his teeth.

"See that old rake? And that spare tire? And that rusty ax? This storm hits and all that turns into missiles. You've heard the stories about tornados driving straws into trees. I don't know about you, but I don't really want to play the tree to that ax's straw."

"You're going out there?" The petulance was gone, fear left in its place. Unfortunately, Dean didn't have time to comfort him.

"If I don't go out there, it's coming in here. Now. Mattress. Go."

Sam hesitated only a moment more before fleeing to John's room. Dean could hear the loud thumps and the screeching of the bed's metal frame against the wood floors, so he turned back toward the yard. Stepping out onto the porch, it immediately became clear how much the wind had actually picked up. It whipped around the corner of the house and tore the screen door from his hand, slamming it into the wall with a loud crack.

Dean scrambled down the steps of the house's rickety porch and turned in a circle, trying to decide where to start. Was the ax more dangerous? Or the rusted-out hood left from some long-forgotten car? Then again, not much that he could do about the hood, anyway. He might be able to lift it on his own, but where would he put it? He decided to focus on the small things that could be brought inside, first.

Five minutes later he was wrangling an armload of old farm tools and what seemed like a decade's worth of random liter when the rain started. Fat drops of frigid water that quickly turned into a deluge. The wind shifted, driving the rain into horizontal sheets. Dean might just as well have been underwater as he attempted to shield his face with his elbow, without taking a hand off the debris he'd gathered. He'd just lost a half-rotted two-by-four to the wind when he heard the door slam again.

"Dean!"

It was faint, almost drowned out by the pounding of rain on the tin roof, but Dean was programmed to hear that call no matter the circumstances. He spun around to find Sam watching anxiously from the porch.

"Go back inside!" he yelled, trying to make himself heard. "Get under the mattress!"

Dean couldn't hear Sam's reply, but he could interpret the stubborn shake of his head easily enough. "Dammit, Sam, go!"

Whether he could hear Dean or not, Sam evidently was also getting Dean's gist, because there was a split second where Dean could see the scowl forming. Before it was able to fully coalesce, however, Sam's gaze fixed on a point behind Dean and his expression mutated into something more like panic. There was a moment of frozen horror before he launched himself off the porch.

You'd have to be pretty dense to misread that message. Dean spun around just in time to avoid the worst of a collision with the now-airborne car hood. It clipped his shoulder, scattering the debris he'd gathered and knocking him down, but did no major damage. Sam didn't know that, however; by the time Dean began pushing himself up, he was halfway across the yard.

He was about 15 feet away when the first sheet of corrugated tin was ripped off the roof.

Their roles were suddenly reversed, but Sam wasn't watching Dean's face as closely and probably wouldn't have been able to halt his forward momentum quickly enough even if he had been. Dean was on his feet before Sam hit the ground, but still too late to do anything.

"Sam!" he screamed, sliding to his knees by his brother's side.

The relief was almost painful when Sam rolled over, dazed and bleeding from the chin and the back of his head, but awake and mobile. Dean wrenched him up by the arm, but immediately had to drop back down to avoid another tin missile, then another.

About that time, the heavens decided to start raining down hail. They didn't even bother with a marble- or golf ball-sized opening volley. Dean was holding onto one of Sam's shoulders, ready to push him down if he spotted another sheet of roofing heading in their direction, when Sam yelped and yanked his hand out of Dean's grasp. Dean turned back to find him gripping his other shoulder and staring, stunned, at a softball-sized chunk of ice.

Before Dean could really make the connection that this thing had just fallen onto his brother from the sky, a thump a foot away diverted his attention. Then another behind him. One hit the meat of his calf and bounced off; another rebounded from the ground in front of him to catch him square in the stomach. He heard another yelp from Sam and a groan from the direction of the house right before another roofing section peeled off. A mailbox went tumbling by to crash through the window of the living room.

There was no time to make a run for the house. And even if there was and they miraculously managed not to be impaled along the way, it didn't seem in any way certain that the house wouldn't come down around them.

So. If Dean couldn't bring Sam to the shelter, he'd just have to bring the shelter to Sam.

OOO

One minute Sam was blinking up at the sky, trying to figure out what needed shielding the most, and the next, he was lying face down in the mud, just a glimpse of Dean's eyes, wide and wild, to mark the transition.

"Dean," he grunted, wriggling in an effort to get out from underneath his brother. "Dean, get off."

"Be still, Sammy." Dean's voice was loud and sure, right in his ear. It sounded like the calm in the middle of the storm. But it was followed by a gut deep "umph" that Sam knew was Dean trying not to cry out.

"Dean," Sam said, more urgently this time, "let me up. Let me up, we've got to get back to the house."

"Can't," Dean breathed out around two hisses of pain. "We—"

He was cut off by a solid-sounding thunk and promptly went limp, chin suddenly jutting into Sam's neck.

"Dean? Dean!" Sam's wriggling increased tenfold, but between the thickening mud and Dean's bulk, he couldn't move. "Dean!"

Desperate, Sam went completely still and focused on Dean's weight on his back. It was difficult to pick out with everything else going on around them, but … There, he thought, grasping at a mere hint of movement and waiting to see if a pattern emerged. Yes. Dean was breathing. Sam let his own face fall limply into the mud. But a hailstone thumping down four inches from the tip of his nose spurred him back into action. Dean was breathing now didn't mean that he would continue to do so.

One arm was trapped under his chest, and it took some doing to get it free. Then there was the contortion of trying to bend them into the angles he needed to reach up and behind his own head to link his fingers over Dean's. He went through a brief internal debate about whether it was more important to protect Dean's head or his neck; decided to go with the head since it'd already proved a vulnerability.

That done, there was nothing to do but wait and try to keep his mouth above the mud. Hope things didn't get any worse.

The hail began to fall faster, and Sam winced, squeezed his eyes shut and began praying "please don't die, please don't die, please don't die," and readjusted his grip over Dean's head.

In the moment before Dean had tackled him, he was sure he'd seen fear in his eyes. And he was pretty sure now that Dean had been lying the other day when he said he didn't get scared on hunts. Between the way he knew how to keep going despite being afraid, when Sam had been stupidly cowering in the middle of the yard, and the sound of his voice in Sam's ear afterward, it was clear he had already learned somewhere how to ignore his fear.

Thinking back to how he'd been comparing Dean to Jim Bowie, imaging himself and Dean fighting side by side at the Alamo, he suddenly felt ridiculous and childish. Being a hero is not fun, not exciting, not romantic. It's horrible.

A hailstone hit him square on the fourth and middle fingers of his right hand and he saw white for what seemed like an eternity. He grit his teeth and pressed his forehead into the mud, trying to ride through the pain. He was pretty sure something had broken. Biting his lips and trying not to breath, he gingerly readjusted his grip, telling himself to buck up – better his finger than Dean's skull.

When he had the capacity again for thinking of something else, he noticed that he could feel the ground vibrating a bit. He frowned and peered out into the rain, wondering if they were going to have an earthquake on top of everything else. He remembered from his book that Texas occasionally had an earthquake, but couldn't call up the frequency, locations or severity.

But no. If he squinted, Sam could make out through the rain, a smudge in the pasture next to their house. And it was moving closer. Within seconds, he could tell that it was the horses from next door, but moving more like a flock of birds.

Stampeding.

Sam again began frantically trying to squirm out from under Dean. He almost had to stop when another hailstone glanced off the tip of his elbow, sending a jolt through his entire body that made him nauseous and teary. He worked through it, but might as well have stopped, as he had no better luck this time. He held his breath as the horses came closer to the barbed wire that separated the pasture from the property the Winchesters were renting.

The lead horses suddenly turned away, leading the herd around the edge of the fence, and Sam might have collapsed in relief if he hadn't seen in that moment what was chasing them.

A ragged black funnel cloud suddenly dropped from the sky behind the horses. It raced a few feet and was sucked back up, only to drop down again and teeter a bit farther.

It did this three more times as Sam watched, frozen. On what little bare skin he still had exposed to the open air, he could feel the wind around him shift and shimmy as the tornado wobbled in this direction or that. Bits of the porch and more roofing sheets flew in its direction as if the funnel was some sort of magnet. Sam was too dumbfounded to do more than stare by this point.

And then, it disappeared and stayed gone.

That seemed to have been the storm's finale, because a few minutes later, the hail tapered to a stop, followed by the rain. And then watery sunlight was breaking through the clouds, and everything was cool, shiny and freshly scrubbed. Sam would have wondered if he'd imagined it all, except Dean was still heavy on his back.

Trembling, Sam lowered his cheek to the mud and let his eyes slip closed. When he opened them again, it was to the sound of a car horn blaring frantically, getting louder and louder as it got closer to the house. Moments later, the Impala roared up the long driveway. Then John was bursting out at a run, footsteps heavy through the mud and puddles. He called Dean's name, then Sam's, but before Sam could answer, Dean was being rolled gently off of him.

The sudden absence of his brother's weight was almost as stunning as its introduction had been, and Dad had to roll him over too, repeating his name anxiously. Sam blinked up at him, but couldn't find it in him to do much more. After that, things began to blur. There was the car, somehow … and then the hospital, a madhouse of sobs and pleas and shouting. There was a period – he didn't really know if it was long or short – of waiting, and then tests (lots of tests) and stitches (the gashes on the back of his head and chin) and a cast (two broken fingers – he also had a chipped ulna, which would hurt, but a cast wouldn't help much).

Dad flitted in and out of the scene, and at the end showed up again to take him to Dean, who would be fine, but very, very sore. Serious concussion, but no skull fracture, at least. Three broken ribs, a black and blue back of everything and a hairline fracture in his heel that would heal fine but hurt a whole lot in the meantime.

Dad was again there sometimes and not, others, and Sam was sitting alone by Dean's bed a good half the time while they waited for Dean to wake up. So he had plenty of time to think about the day's events.

He kept coming back to that look in Dean's eyes and how it matched up with the sound of his voice a moment later. Fear and calm cool. How it was more badass if you did it even though you were scared. How it still hurt, even if it was for a good cause.

Wrestling with alligators, sailing with pirates.

Drawing lines in the sand.

He wouldn't mind if he never saw another horse again.

Notes: For the record, I've experienced a tornado here and there, including one with softball-sized hail. However, I stayed inside for all of them. So most of the tornado stuff I got watching videos of tornados on youtube.
The Texas stuff, however, is all 100 percent accurate and verifiable, though I've exaggerated toward the stereotype a bit. Oh. Except maybe the stampeding horses. I imagine that there are large herds of them somewhere, but I don't know of any, personally.