AN: The Mythbusters would probably say I'm playing fast and loose with physics again, but hey, that's what I do!
Janice, the world's greatest beta, had to do a lot of work on this chapter. A huge thank you to her!
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Magic is believing in yourself. If you can do that, you can make anything happen.
Dean had had enough really rotten days in his life (not even counting after his death, but he didn't think about his stint in Hell if he could help it) that he no longer tried to catalog them in his mind as "bottom 10" or "in the worst third" any longer. That just made him depressed anyway. But if he had categorized lousy days, this one would probably be under the heading of "just plain shitty."
Still recovering from a hunt that went poorly and during which he took a major beating, he was on a new hunt directed by a ghost and accompanied by a spirit dog-thing. Casper the canine wasn't actually so bad, but nothing was really going right on the case. Dean and Sam both got beat up even more, and they hadn't been able to stop people from disappearing, eventually including Sam. Then Dean had to permanently traumatize the only good contact they had in town. And he was a cool enough guy that Dean actually felt kind of guilty about it.
And that was all before he had to go into a forest fire. Which was littered with bodies.
A couple kids were alive, which was fantastic, but Dean wasn't positive that he could keep them that way. In addition, Sam was still trapped by some kind of psycho demonic artifact that was probably affiliated with uber douche Lucifer himself.
Then he had to deal with sharpas, which Dean really hated. And his awesome idea of using the warding bag to combine one of the sharpas with the Nachzehrer tooth that had ended up embedded in his jacket in their warding bag to serve as a distraction and to use up the power of whatever artifact on an ego trip they were facing turned out to be not so awesome after all when the sharpa he'd chosen started flying around like a wasp on PCP. With Dean on its back.
While holding on for dear life, Dean had gotten a quick look at what appeared to be a big-ass chair made out of twisted tree branches or something. Then they'd crashed into a big-ass tree, which really didn't feel great.
Dean took advantage of the stop to work harder at stuffing the rest of the sharpa into the bag, and he'd almost gotten it, too. But some of its friends had come to fight, making Dean drop the bag. At that point, the entire tree began to do the hula and Dean fell, which added to all the suckage.
Then Ace, who was probably the coolest dog Dean had ever been around (even if he was kind of undead or possessed or something) took a nosedive into the warding bag, turning himself into a sort of nightmare fuel supernatural gumbo – a mishmash of all kinds of different monsters.
That was, one, really cool in a holy-crap kind of way; two, pretty helpful, since it caused one hell of a distraction which allowed Dean to finally get to Sam; three, annoying, since the dog had totally taken over Dean's idea, and it had worked for the mutt where it hadn't worked for Dean; and four, really shitty, because if Ace survived the fight with the overgrown demon chair, they'd have to put him down. Somehow.
And the shit icing on the turd cake of the day? Sam was covered in blood. Worse, he said that he had some broken ribs, meaning that he needed to be as still as possible so nothing got punctured inside him.
So, while the erstwhile dog -- now dogosaurus rex, Dean thought randomly -- fought the vine monster (because that makes so much sense), Dean defended Sam and tried to figure out how to safely move him. Until Dean took a hit like a sledgehammer and went flying yet again. He detested flying, even when there was no airplane involved. Especially when there was no airplane involved.
Dean landed hard, back on the ground off the raised area. He huffed and swore and struggled to catch his breath, which took way longer than he could afford. It took even longer for him to sit up. As soon as he caught his breath enough, he called, "Hang on, Sam! I'm coming!" and hoped his brother could hear him over the battle of the colossi.
He'd get there, and he'd get Sam...and Noah and Hannah...to safety, and figure out how the hell you kill a chair later. He just didn't know how he'd do any of it, especially when it took him all of two steps to discover that his leg would hardly hold him, every fight and fall seeming to make the existing injury worse. He would never be able to climb the wall of dirt in front of him.
Except that "never" wasn't a word that Dean Winchester accepted well.
Surely two arms and one good leg was plenty of limbs if you had enough willpower. Dean painfully limped to the spot where he'd tumbled over the edge, switched the knife that he was still holding to his left hand, and drew the demon-killing knife with his right hand. He didn't like to abuse weapons this way, but he was clean out of pitons. All his weight on his one good leg, he reached up and stabbed the longer knife into the dirt, then the other to the side and slightly lower than the first.
Using just his arms, Dean did a kind of pull up until his chin was level with the lower hand, then bent one knee and dug the toe of his boot into the dirt until he could put some weight on the foot and straighten his leg. Balancing carefully, Dean pulled out the knife he was holding with his left hand and reached up as high as he dared, then stabbed it in again. When that was as secure as it could be, he did the same with his right, again slightly higher than the left.
Progress was glacially slow, and the dirt wasn't terribly stable, but Dean made progress. He ignored the sounds of Ace's fight and the bits of detritus that flew over the edge. He also ignored his own trembling muscles. He had no time for anything but getting to Sam.
He was a mere two feet from the top when something long and slender came sailing over the edge above him. With the grace of an Olympic-caliber diver and the accuracy of a heat seeking missile, it arced in the air and came down precisely on his left hand. That hand that happened to be the only one that was currently holding him up, since his right hand was upraised to reach a new spot. Dean's hand spasmed from the force of the hit, leaving him with nothing but an iffy foothold to keep him up. By the time he realized that the crappy little dent he'd kicked in the dirt had no hope of preventing him from falling, Dean was lying flat on his back on the ground getting hit in the face by the stick that had caused all of his problems.
"Son of a…" he wheezed. How many times in one damn day was he going to fall?
As he worked to suck in some air, Dean came to the disturbing revelation that what he'd thought was merely a stick was squirming and twisting. "F – snake!" he gasped, still not fully oxygenated. He grabbed the thing and squeezed, wondering if strangling a snake with your bare hands was as bad-ass as it sounded.
But it really wasn't a snake. It was nothing more than a long, smoothed bit of wood. That was alive.
A lightbulb went off in Dean's air-deprived brain. It didn't look much like an "artifact," but then again, once he'd almost been killed by a booby-trapped grimoire spelled to look like a recipe card for apple muffins. Some of the most dangerous things looked innocuous…until they weren't.
"You!" he yelled at it inanely, absurdly grateful to have something on which to vent his utter ire about everything rotten that had happened in the last week and a half.
With adrenaline-fueled strength, Dean rolled over and got to his feet. (Well, foot.) He began to swing the stupid stick like a baseball bat, smashing it into the dirt wall over and over again. It twisted and writhed in his hands but didn't seem to be able to do more. But it didn't break either.
Vines came flying down toward him, clearly intent on defending their...boss, or brain, or whatever you wanted to call it. Linchpin, Sam had said. Well, that was just fine with Dean. He used the stick itself to beat the vines back. He whimsically (and vindictively) imagined it screaming as he smashed its (nonexistent) face into each vine that came for him.
The vines retreated and Dean paused, panting with exertion. Then he had a thought. He threw the stick to the ground and fell (more literally than he would have liked) to the ground next to it. With a battle cry, he used the Kurdish demon killing knife to pin it to the ground. It was still moving, so Dean grabbed the first thing he found, which turned out to be a broken off bit of a stony vine, and began to beat it. He was only vaguely aware of how manic he must look, because the truth was, he didn't care. The stick was going to die.
Frustrated at how little damage he was doing, Dean pulled his gun and took a couple potshots, which weren't any more effective than his other blows.
A completely human cry of fear pulled Dean out of his murderous rage, and he saw that his nemesis had found a new strategy and gone after Hannah and Noah, herding them from their hiding place like dogs flushing quails.
Dean pictured the vines going after Sam the same way and he spouted the most venomous swear words he could think of as he limped/ran toward the kids as fast as he could, using the stick as a walking stick. He shot the closest vine, but another clipped Hannah's shoulder, sending her to the ground. Noah cried out and fell too, another vine gripping his ankle. "No, you don't," Dean growled. He shot the vine pulling Noah away, then reached Hannah's side and used the stick in a golf-style swing to hit yet another one away.
Noah ran back to them and dropped to his knees next to Hannah. "I'm alright," she said a little breathlessly. She started to get up then ducked under a vine that got past Dean's furious but waning defense. The move made her drop the little air tank she was still carrying and gave Dean an idea. He picked up the tank from the ground and made sure it was the full one. "Cover your heads," he warned the young siblings. They complied instantly.
Then Dean tossed the stupid, still-flailing stick away and rolled the air tank over to it like he was bowling. It slid right up to the stick to rest against it. Standing as firmly on one foot as he could, Dean took aim and shot the tank three times in a row.
His aim was perfect and the tank exploded. The sound was so loud that it felt like Dean's eardrums burst, and the concussion knocked him onto his ass (again). The bang echoed around the forest, and then splinters and dirt were raining all around and on top of them.
"I didn't think that would actually blow up," Dean said aloud, hardly able to hear his own voice. "Probably should have thrown it a little farther, though."
Wait, splinters. As the air cleared and the dirt settled, Dean looked around. Every vine he could see was dead still and there was no sign of the evil stick. The very air felt lighter, at least once it cleared enough to be breathable.
"Ha," Dean said without inflection. "We win." He wanted to raise his hands in the signal for touchdown but instead laid down on the ground on his side. In celebration. Or exhaustion, either way. He just needed one minute.
"Dean? Dean?" Noah called, sounding distressed, and Dean realized that he'd drifted for a moment.
"I'm okay," Dean managed, then somehow got up again. He was embarrassed by the lapse. If he'd laid there much longer, he might never have moved, and he desperately needed to see his brother. "You two hurt? I mean worse than you already were?" He noticed his hearing was a little better already.
The kids answered in the negative, still clinging to each other. But they protested tearfully when Dean tried to tell them to stay behind and wait for him. He didn't argue, reasoning that the first time he'd tried to shield them from all the shit going down by hiding them away hadn't worked out so well.
Fortunately, the explosion had destabilized the side of the dirt mound, forming a pretty serviceable ramp. They made their way up it somehow. Hannah wasn't much steadier than Dean, so they all sort of helped each other struggle through the loose dirt and plant flotsam.
The top of the little mesa was a disaster area. Ace, the monster mutt, was lying on his side breathing heavily. Vines and other things were all over him and even stabbing into him a few places. Dean couldn't see Sam anywhere in the mess. Ace lethargically turned an eye toward Dean and slowly lifted one front paw.
Sheltered behind the leg, clearly purposely protected by Ace's body, lay Sam.
Dean made a sound in the back of his throat and got to Sam's side faster than he should have been able to move. He heroically fell next to Sam (since sliding in superhero-style was out of the question) and tapped Sam's cheek.
"Yeah, yeah," Sam breathed. When his eyes opened, they were glassy with pain and there was a suspicious whistling sound to his breathing, but he was breathing. More than that, he was awake and pissy, and Dean must have gotten something in his eyes because they started to sting. "You okay? You look like shit."
All of the gratitude he felt just to have Sam still alive backed up in Dean's throat and all he could say was, "I killed the stick."
Sam sort of, kind of smiled. It was weak but Dean appreciated the effort "Good. It belonged to Luci – Lucifer." He coughed, winced and his eyes rolled back in his head. Dean felt his pulse and found it steady, if a bit fast. He ran a careful hand over Sam's torso and sighed, closing his eyes in relief (and because they might be stinging again) to find a broken rib or two but nothing hot, horrifically swelled, or obviously mangled.
"'S okay," he told Sam. "Stand down." Dean fumbled in an inside pocket but unsurprisingly found only phone pieces. "Dammit."
He started to look for Sam's phone. He knew he had brought it along but couldn't remember what pocket he'd stuck it in after finding the Nachzehrer tooth in the usual pocket. He was still looking when Ace made a terrible noise. It sounded like a cat trying to hack up a hairball, if the cat were the size of a school bus and the hairball as big as a Volkswagen. Dean wondered if they were all about to be drowned in monster puke. That was definitely not the way he'd pictured going out.
Luckily, Ace struggled to his feet and staggered a good fifteen feet away before leaning down on his front elbows and making the noise again. Dean watched in consternation and confusion as Ace did it again, his sides rippling like he was trying to turn himself inside out. He made the sound once more, and a dark miasma poured out of his mouth and nose, far too much like a demon coming out of a host for Dean's taste.
It wasn't a demon, however, just an inky cloud that was impossible to see through. It obscured Ace completely for a moment and there was a nasty wet splatting sound. Then the nasty fog dissipated to nothing as fast as it had appeared, leaving behind just Ace. But not monster Ace. No, Ace looked like he had before his epic transformation, and next to him was a pile of steaming goo with bits of bone and other things Dean didn't want to imagine.
Dean blinked at Ace, who blinked back, shuffled over, and laid down against Sam's side again with his chin on his paws, tongue lolling out in clear exhaustion. The dog was beat up and missing fur here and there, but he seemed surprisingly intact. He didn't look any worse than he had after the run-in with the ungulus, and Dean shook his head. He regretted the movement when it made the world dance around a little. "Did you puke out the monster parts?" Dean asked him rhetorically. He patted the dog's side. "I don't say this often, but Ace, you are a very good dog."
With an obvious effort, Ace lifted his head and turned it enough to give Dean's hand a couple of wet licks in response before settling back down again, seemingly determined to get in a nap wedged up against Sam.
How about that? They were all alive, even the pooch (which was back to only as much of a monster as it had been before the foray into the warding bag), and Lucifer's stick was dead, a phrasing that made Dean snicker in the privacy of his own mind. They even had cavalry they could call in, assuming that Grant hadn't responded to everything he'd learned by checking himself into the closest Froot Loops factory.
"Ew!" said Noah, reminding Dean of where he was and what he was supposed to be doing.
"Yeah, don't look at it," he instructed, assuming the kid was looking at the pile of regurgitated monster bits. He returned to his phone search. He found it in his boot and grinned triumphantly. Noting it was working just fine, he resolved to take a more serious look at the "unbreakable" phone case Sam raved about.
He woke up the phone and struggled to find Grant's information because his vision was starting to swim even without him moving his head around. He found it but missed the button twice. When he finally hit it, he handed the phone over to Hannah. "Tell Grant who you are and that you're with Dean and Sam." He struggled to keep his thoughts in order for at least another few moments. "Tell him the thing's dead and to head toward the explosion and bring help," Dean told her, hearing himself slurring the words. He laid on his back, fighting back the gray fog that was trying to engulf his brain. He put a clumsy hand on whatever part of Sam he could reach – arm, probably – so his brother would know Dean was there if he woke up.
"Mr. Dean? He wants to know who to bring," Hannah said from some place far away.
Dean wanted to watch over everyone until help arrived, but he couldn't keep the creeping unconsciousness at bay any longer. "Everybody," he said and closed his eyes. "Tell him to send everybody he's got."
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AN: There, not really a cliffie (for once).
Christine: Thank you! You are always so sweet and I appreciate it.
sylvia37: I know how much you love Sam! He wasn't in this chapter so much, but he definitely did his part in this story.
Long Live BRUCAS: Deanish is my new favorite word! From now on, everything SPN related I write I'll ask myself "is this Deanish enough?" *g*
muffinroo: So glad you're happy with the story! We didn't have as much Sam in this chapter, but at least help is on the way. Schmoop may be imminent too.
Colby's girl: It's raining sideways here today, but I'm just so darn glad it's only rain! I have some rose of Sharons that I dug up and need to replant...and they're going to have to wait until it's warmer!
Timelady66: I couldn't let Goethe go! I figure that an undead dog might be able to puke out the monster bits. LOL!
Kathy: I love the fact that you thank Janice too, because she certainly deserves it! I feel like I messed with poor Dean a lot in this story even before he took a ride on a sharpa. LOL. Both guys are pretty beat up by now.
Spnlady: Thank you!! You are too kind. I'm so glad I appealed to your sense of humor with Dean taking an accidental ride. Lots of action here too, and I hope you enjoyed it!