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it all happens so fast trish trusts them to know what they’re doing and so she leads them right to the herald house where she said the ghost would be when she asked them if they could hunt but the ghost shoots trish so fast and they carry her body back to her dad and sammy stares at the blood on his jeans and cries until he falls asleep and dean doesn’t cry but he feels empty, hollow, wishes he had never talked to trish or even seen her or met her, and then they wake to the smell of bacon which isn’t right (because it’s just like every other day they’ve been there, she always makes bacon, it’s her dad’s favorite she’d told them the first morning and her dad can't cook) and when they creep into the kitchen she’s there and alive and standing at the stove but it’s wrong it’s so so so wrong her eyes are empty and dean wants to pull sam back into their bedroom and hide him in the closet so he doesn’t have to see this husk of the girl they’ve been trying to impress for days and break that dog figurine her dad puts on the table because that statue did it, it must have done this to trish, then he can’t remember the rest of the day because he’s so scared because he just knows something is going to happen so they each find a knife and a screwdriver and then it happens and she’s biting out her father’s neck and he’s bleeding and dean does the only thing he can think of and drives the screwdriver through trish’s eye and hears the bone crack and sees her eye burst and fuck oh god he hopes she can’t feel pain anymore and then she’s still and her dad cries one more time and then he’s still and all dean can smell is the blood blood blood and all he can feel is sam’s shaking arm around his shoulder.
“When they were finished, they went upstairs, locked the basement door, and waited for their father to come get them.
It would be the better part of two weeks until John Winchester returned.”
supernatural: carved in flesh, by tim waggoner
day 1.
Even though they've been up for over 30 hours straight at that point, neither one of them sleeps the night after they bury Trish and Walter. Maybe it’s messed up that they could sleep the night after Trish died but not after what happened when she came back, but death they understand. Death’s been following them since Dean was four years old and Sammy was a baby, and Dean thinks he understood that fact before he even really knew the weight of it. What he and Sam saw yesterday, what Trish became and what she did, is new and unfamiliar in the worst possible way; it’s unnatural, and not in the way their Dad’s taught them to fight. Because Trish was human. Dean’s not sure she ever stopped being human.
Dean gets Sam into bed, rubs his back until he thinks his brother’s breathing has steadied enough to be a sign that he’s at least drifting off in the general direction of sleep, then goes to sit alone on the couch and stare at the grainy TV. He doesn’t want to sleep. Part of it is because he knows he won’t be able to get that image out of his brain, of Trish hunched over her dad, his neck bleeding out, and he’ll put off those nightmares as long as possible.
But the part of him that’s keeping a sawed-off he grabbed from Walter’s collection leaning next to the couch is worried that the cursed statue being locked in the basement isn’t enough. That somehow they’re gonna come back, this time both of them. This time he won't get lucky with a screwdriver, that two-against-one is going to be too much, and he won’t be able to keep Sam safe.
The episode of Northern Exposure that he’s watching-but-not-really-watching cuts to commercial right as he hears the bedroom door open and the sound of Sam running down the hall. By the time he’s grabbed the gun and hopped off the couch, he hears Sam throwing up in the bathroom.
“Sammy?” he asks when he cracks the door open and leans the shotgun in the doorway; Dean’s used to being taller than his younger brother, especially now that he’s hit his own growth spurt, but Sam looks so small hunched over the toilet, muscles shaking with the strain of staying upright as he retches over and over. They haven't eaten since the breakfast of burnt bacon the Trish-thing made.
“Hey, hey, hey, hey, Sammy, it’s okay,” Dean says, so fast and so carelessly that the words blend together into a blurred, comforting rhythm, but the words are secondary to crouching down next to Sam and wrapping a steadying arm around his brother’s shoulder. Sam retches once more, and coughs when only acid comes up, but it seems to be the last of it, and Sam throws his arms around Dean and holds him almost painfully tight.
“What are we going to tell Dad?” Sam says into Dean’s shoulder, tears and snot (and probably some vomit, he thinks absently) soaking into the material of his shirt.
Dean thinks about it for a few seconds, rubbing circles into Sam’s back. “Mostly the truth, probably,” he admits. He’s been trying to convince himself that it wasn't their fault — they shouldn’t have let Trish think they knew what they were doing, and Dean’s too ashamed to admit to their Dad that they lied to impress a girl, but in the end, she led them out there, right? Dad will be mad, he’ll be pissed that they followed her, but Dean will handle that.
“Do you think Dad would do something like that for Mom?” Sam asks quietly. “Bring her back?”
Dean doesn’t respond.
day 2.
Dean does drift off eventually, and when he wakes up, Sam is gone. He rolls out of bed, cursing under his breath that he didn’t wake up with the sun and let his tiredness catch up with him, because right now he can’t handle not knowing where Sammy is, not this soon after... He quickly puts a hand down onto the spot Sam was sleeping in, and it's still faintly warm. He hasn't been gone long.
There's a cold haze over the Hansen's yard, and it smells damp and gross, like peat and pondwater. But squinting through the haze from the back porch, Dean sees a familiar silhouette standing under the oak tree, by the graves that are still new enough the dirt’s barely settled.
"What are you doing?" Sam is crouched on the ground, with broken planks he must have gathered from the pile next to the house. He has a permanent marker that Dean's sure wasn’t designed to write on wood, based on the unreadable, patchy, chicken scratch on the board.
"I wanted to give them grave markers. I — just in case their family comes looking.”
“You know what Trish told us. Her mom and uncle are dead.”
“Maybe there were more family members they didn’t tell us about, she didn’t say everyone was there when the werewolf attacked. Or maybe they have friends.”
“Come back inside,” is all Dean says. He worked for hunters, they didn’t have friends, is what he wants to say, but refrains from it because he doesn't really want to get into that, he just wants to go back inside. He feels exposed out here. He doesn’t feel that much safer in the house, but the fog and the freshly dug graves make the skin on the back of his neck crawl.
Sam stands up and wipes his hands on his jeans. “Should we have burnt them?”
Dean had thought about it. Not for long, he was too stunned and panicked to think hard about anything except getting the bodies out of the house as soon as possible, but he had thought about it. “We couldn’t have built two whole pyres by ourselves,” he says. “And they weren’t hunters. Not really.”
Later that day, Dean finds Sam sitting at the kitchen table, hunched over a black and white marbled composition book.
“What are you drawing?” he asks, trying to look over Sam’s shoulder for a glimpse. For a second his brother hunches over the pages, trying to hide it under his forearm, and Dean’s willing to step back — after the last few days, he can give Sam that much at least. But Sam eases up after a quick, suspicious glance, and leans back, spreads his arm off the page and across the table.
“I figured…” Sam starts, and Dean squints at the page. There’s a rectangle, labelled “Hansen’s Cabin,” and circles with types of trees written inside their circumferences — Douglas maple, silver fir, white oak — and then two small rectangles, next to the oak-tree-circle and shaded in.
"In case someone comes looking. Or they need to burn them." Dean wants to tell Sam to stop and tear out the page; he's freaked out by the concept of mapping out the Hansen's graves (even if he understands Sam's logic), even more freaked out seeing it on paper in front of him. He wants to say that it's just another reminder, one that they don't need because he can't get it out of his head or his mind at all in the first place.
“Yeah, okay. Sure. Whatever,” is what he says instead, and goes to watch TV.
day 3.
Dean’s already started on the day’s self-assigned task when Sam wakes up. The sun’s barely over the horizon, and that fog is back that makes everything gross and gray and cold, but Dean’s been up since it was still dark, so even the dull light filtering through the windows and hall is pleasant in comparison.
Sam wrinkles his nose when he smells the stench on the blankets Dean is holding, which Dean can’t blame him for; the scent's been making him a little nauseous since he started working.
“I’m burning the stuff from Walter’s room.”
“Why?”
Dean rolls his eyes a little, and starts walking towards the living room and the back door of the house. Because I don’t like knowing there’s all that blood behind the door is the quick, vulnerable answer on the tip of his tongue, but he bites it back. “Why would we leave it?” he calls back, like it’s dumb Sam would even ask that.
Sam looks at him wearily for a second, then goes into the room and returns to Dean’s side, gingerly holding a stained throw pillow out in front of his body. The two of them trek across the yard, hems of their jeans damp from the dew and rain stuck on the long grass, and deposit them on top of the pile that Dean already started. It’s as far away from the graves and the house as they can get without leaving the property; it's been a pain to drag all this stuff over here, but he doesn’t want it near the house now, and he especially doesn’t want it near the house while they burn it.
“What if the police find the bodies? How are we gonna prove innocence if the crime scene is gone?” Sam asks after they’ve tossed a few rounds of blood-stained stuff onto the pile. Dean rolls his eyes again, a little peeved at the question, annoyed and confused by Sam bringing the law into something so beyond that. But he glances down at Sam and sees his furrowed brow and unfocused gaze and realizes immediately that he’s just trying to think about something that's not the bloody carpet they're dragging strips of out of the house. Apparently, imagining being the subject of a gory murder investigation is easier for his little brother to process than whatever happened to Trish. His brain snags on the fact that he doesn’t actually have any innocence to prove, his prints are on the weapon, but he forces himself to exhale and look back at Sam. Freak, he thinks fondly. He can do this for him.
“Cops aren’t gonna look in a place like this, we’re 50 miles out from any town.”
“Okay, but what if they did?”
“How could they prove guilt without witnesses or motive?” They go back and forth like this for almost 30 minutes, conversation slipping away from being a thinly veiled reference to cleaning up the room that Trish and Walter died into some absurd hypothetical a little more with every retort. There’s a mutual understanding that one of the unspoken rules of this game is that it absolutely has to move further away from their current reality, point by point. Dean digs into a pool of knowledge acquired from years of watching police procedurals on motel televisions; Sam meets every objection with a new what-if that sounds like it’s straight from those murder mystery novels he loves to read.
“Okay, then how would you solve a murder committed with an ice knife?”
“What?”
“A knife made of ice.” Sam peers over the mattress at Dean, like he’s trying to emphasize how serious he is about this hypothetical. “It would melt, and then the murder weapon is gone for real.” It’s fucked up, because they’re dragging a blood-stained mattress out into a yard to burn it 20 yards away from graves they dug two days ago, but that almost makes Dean laugh. At the very least, it’s the lightest Dean has felt since Trish led them out to that house.
When the mattress falls on top of the pile of pillows and blankets and the carpet that they awkwardly pulled up from beneath the bed frame, the energy in the air suddenly drops, the mood hitting the ground harder than the mattress.
“Remember that bonfire we made in New Hampshire?” It’s Sam’s turn to look at Dean and see that he’s just trying to change the subject, but that’s fine; Dean’s not really trying to hide it.
“Yeah, because it was like three months ago. I’m not stupid.”
“I hated that place," Dean starts, trying not to let Sam think too hard about what exactly they're burning right now, as he flicks the lighter open and tosses it into the pile of blood-stained pillows and fabric and carpet. The flame sputters a bit, and Dean quietly prays that it doesn't go out because he just wants all of this shit gone without standing here re-lighting it every fifteen minutes.
"It was nice not having to start at a new school, but it sucked because the place didn't have any television."
"— because the rental didn't have any television," Sam mumbles sarcastically at the same time, words syncing up so well it almost sounds rehearsed. Dean looks down at Sam, and actually does laugh this time, just out of the surprise of how stupidly, uncannily in-sync they were. It comes out of him a little like a cough, uncontrollable and more surprised than actually entertained.
They stand and watch the fire side-by-side for ten minutes or so, which catches pretty well despite the damp air and muddy ground.
“I’m going inside,” Sam mumbles, and is halfway to the back door before Dean has a chance to ask what the matter is, but by the way his brother’s shoulders are hunched over and he’s pulled in on himself, he doubts he’d get a solid answer anyways. He stays and watches it burn until the last blanket is nothing but a bunch of charred threads and ash, and when he goes back inside, Sam is already asleep.
day 4.
Sam is quiet the next day. He walks around the house with a weird, faraway look on his face, and his responses to Dean's questions are short and not nearly as know-it-all as normal. The cabin and yard both still smell like smoke and burnt plasticky fabric, but the steady drizzle means they can't prop the doors and windows open more than a crack. Sam's showered twice, water hot enough he comes out bright red and steams up the whole cabin, but still keeps raising his arm to his nose like he can smell the fire on his skin.
Dean lets him be weird by himself for most of the day. Burning everything from Walter's room made him feel better, so it sucks that it didn't help Sam, but he can't really blame him for feeling like the fire didn't help or change anything.
But by dinner he hasn't changed at all, only giving monotone, one-word answers to anything Dean says, and he's tired of hovering around his brother out of concern he's so upset he'll do something dumb. Sam is smart , he reminds himself, but he's also just a kid. The four years between them seem like a big difference during the best of times, it only seems wider now that they're each struggling to cope in their own ways.
"Okay," Dean says, rummaging through the cluttered drawer of miscellaneous kitchen items until he finds a can opener. "You've been weird since yesterday. Weirder. Talk to me."
"It's nothing," Sam replies, but he won't look anywhere near Dean's eyes, so it's something.
"Come on, I know you know I can tell when something’s wrong.”
“Why do we have to do this?” Sam asks after a moment, and Dean knows that he’s not just talking about heating up the cans of baked beans they dug out of the back of the pantry for dinner, but he kind of wants to pretend that he is.
Sam sounds tired, not tired like he gets when he stays up too late to finish homework, or when he’s drifting off in the back of the Impala, but a bone-deep tired that reminds Dean of their Dad. Which is wrong. Sam shouldn’t remind him of their Dad, Sammy is the different one, the weird one, and he doesn’t think that meanly because they love him, but their Dad has a pile of problems taller than the Empire State Building, and Sam shouldn’t sound tired like that. “Why does anyone have to do this? Hunt.”
“Walter wasn’t a hunter,” Dean points out as he put the cans on the stove, because picking a fight over a stupid phrase like that is easier than trying to have this conversation with a ten year-old. It's not a conversation Sam should have with their Dad instead, because their Dad wouldn't tolerate it at all, but Dean just point-blank doesn’t want to talk about this. Not again. And now he's a little annoyed too that he started this conversation in the first place, because they've talked about this before, and Sam should get it by now.
“He worked for hunters. Close enough to get killed like one,” Sam mutters, kicking the leg of the kitchen table. Dean gets bowls out of the cabinet and puts them on the counter a little harder than he needs to, then changes his mind and puts them back and slams spoons on the counter instead. He’s mad about this conversation and sick of doing dishes, they can eat beans out of a can instead of a bowl this one night.
“Here,” he says. “Eat your beans.” Sam frowns at him, reaches for one of the cans, and pulls his hand back with a wince.
“Ow! This can is hot, Dean!”
“Yeah, it was just on the stove, dumbass.” Sam glares, gingerly grabs the can and pulls it towards him, shoves the spoon into the can, and crosses his arms. Dean sits down across from him and takes a bite of his own dinner, but Sam just sits there.
“You’re changing the subject.”
"Yeah, I am, because Walter wasn't a hunter, and he didn't die because of hunting. He died because we lied to his daughter about knowing how to kill ghosts and followed her into a situation when we knew better than that,” Dean snaps. “And then he messed with some powerful magic because he was too stupid to know not to."
"People who don't know about hunting don't go looking for ghosts on purpose in the first place," Sam mutters, and Dean does a piss-poor job of trying to hide his irritation, shoving his own spoon back into the can after getting it halfway to his mouth. "They don't have evil Egyptian statues laying around their house that they use to make their children into … undead dolls,” Sam says with disgust. “They're safe."
"People who don't know about this buy stuff like that statue at a shitty yard sale and do a whole lot more damage fucking around with them." Sam isn't entirely wrong on the details because he's right, a hunter definitely gave Walter that statue. But he's missing the big picture, so Dean’s not about to concede anything, because Sam needs to understand. If there’s anything he’s learned from their Dad, it’s that this questioning half-commitment is the kind of mentality that gets hunters hurt. And as long as they're a family, which is always, they’ve got to be a united front. "They get killed, Sam, just like her mom and uncle. They die bloody."
"Hunters do too,” Sam snaps back. Dean picks his spoon back up and looks away from the glare Sam is still sending his way and keeps eating his own dinner. The beans are weirdly grainy, and the sauce in the can didn’t heat all the way through, but he shovels it into his mouth until he can't stand Sam staring at him like that anymore.
“Hunters hunt because someone has to. So shut up and eat.”
“I’m not hungry anymore,” Sam says, and shoves his can away from him before getting up and stomping to their room, the effect of slamming the door shut a little dulled by the fact that there’s no lock and they’re sharing a space. Dean sits at the table and finishes his dinner, but doesn’t touch Sam’s. Just in case he gets hungry later.
day 5.
Sam sleeps on the couch that night and sulks the next day, which is weirdly comforting. Obviously Sam’s not okay, Dean doesn’t know how to be okay while they’re stuck here waiting for their Dad after what happened, but Sam sulking like the annoying kid he is at least normal. Familiar. Dean gives him space, lets him frown into his books and scowl into his oatmeal without any more fighting, and goes to do a quick patrol around the cabin.
It’s beautiful outside, and while Dean is glad the rain and haze are gone, the sun feels wrong in different ways. The dirt on top of Trish and Walter’s graves has finally dried to a ghosty grey, damp patches of brown still there in spots sheltered from the sun by trees.
His foot hits something in the grass, and he looks down, expecting to see a rock, or a piece of brick or something, but it’s plastic and metal, dried blood and flesh stuck to the shaft. He yanks his hand back before he even gets within six inches of touching it, and then he stares at it. Dean has no idea how the screwdriver got outside — his memories of moving the bodies out are pretty blurry to begin with — Or how it got out of Trish’s eye, he thinks with a nauseating lurch to his stomach. They’ve been walking around the yard the past few days and neither of them had noticed it before, and he wishes it had just stayed out of view until they left.
He hears Sam approaching, but he still feels frozen, and half of his brain is screaming at him to move, dumbass, it’s just a screwdriver, don’t freak Sammy out , but he can’t, because the other half of his brain is stuck in the moment the tip of the screwdriver went through the soft tissue of her eyes and the bone in Trish’s face gave out like a plate shattering under her skin. He stands there, torn between staring at the screwdriver and feeling like he’s going to be sick remembering the sensation of it in his hand, the weight of it as he threw his entire body forward to drive it into — he squeezes his eyes shut, like maybe that will make the image go away.
“What’s the matter?” Sam asks, and while there’s a slight edge of lingering irritation there from the fight yesterday, he’s also worried. Dean is halfway to choking out a “I’m fine,” when Sam gets close enough to look at the object in the grass in front of Dean's feet. He recognizes it, and Dean’s not so far gone he doesn’t miss that the blood drains from Sam’s face too.
“Stay here,” Sam says, and Dean doesn’t argue with him because he’s not really sure he could. He’s not sure how long Sam is gone, but his little brother leaves the back door open and Dean can hear him rummaging around in the kitchen, the bedroom door opening and closing, finally his footsteps coming back out through the door. Dean looks over to see Sam struggling with an armload of stuff, and that’s what finally snaps him out of his trance enough to move.
“Give me that,” Dean says, and blindly reaches out to take something from Sam. Helping his kid brother, this is something he can do. This feels right, even if everything else here isn’t. Sam passes over what Dean quickly recognizes as Walter’s tacklebox, followed by a fishing rod.
Sam doesn’t say anything, just reaches down and picks up the screwdriver with an old rag between his skin and the tool, and drops it into a plastic shopping bag he’s also brought out that he promptly ties shut, like he's taking out the trash. Dean doesn’t say anything either, but he follows when Sam starts walking out towards the lake, and though he didn’t really think Sam would lead them there, is relieved when they take the path going in the direction away from the Herald House.
He's not sure where they're going until they get there, because they hadn't been out here with the Hansens. Walter was going to take you fishing here, he thinks to himself when he sees the pier, and almost freezes up again, but forces himself to follow when Sam walks out onto it, dragging his lead legs one at a time until they reach the end.
Sam pulls his arm back, and throws the bagged-up screwdriver as far out into the lake as he can. He's 10, and scrawny despite all the training their Dad puts them through, so it doesn't land a mile away, but it’s far enough out that it's not coming back to shore anytime soon. Maybe never, Dean hopes.
For good measure, he also pulls out the knives they’d grabbed from the kitchen and tosses them into the dark water, spinning in the air, one falling in handle-first and one blade-first. He’s glad to see them gone, but doesn’t feel the same rush of relief that he did watching the screwdriver go under.
“Think they’ll hit any fish on the way down?” Dean asks, and it’s a weak attempt at a joke; he realizes how quiet and tired his voice is as the words leave his lips.
“That’s how some cultures do it, I think,” Sam says, swings his legs over the side of the dock, sits down, and looks out over the lake. Sam says something else, but Dean’s on the verge of opening his mouth and interrupting to ask what Sam’s doing — why is he sitting down when they should be heading back to the house? — when he realizes he’s still holding the fishing rod. He likes fishing, has ever since their Dad taught him. He taught Sam how to cast lines last summer, but he never quite got the hang of it; he always said that he’d rather sit on the dock and watch Dean.
“Dean?” Sam asks, and he finally moves, leans over and places the tacklebox onto the dock next to Sam.
“What, toss kitchen knives in the water and hope they get lucky? Wait for the dead ones to float to the surface?” Dean says, ties a lure onto the line.
“Use knives, jerk. Slit their throats so they die faster,” Sam says, heels banging against the dock’s piling. Dean bends over and flicks open the latch to the tackle box. “I said that, you just weren’t listening. They taste better that way, I think.”
“Sorry,” Dean says, and casts a line out. “Guess ours will just taste like shit.”
day 6.
Dean wakes up to a bloodcurdling scream, and shit it’s close. It sounds almost human but not quite and it’s in their room and oh shit oh shit oh shit is the only thing he can think of as he reaches across the space between their beds to try and wake up Sam so they can run and hide. But the second his hand touches Sam’s shoulder, the scream turns into a gasp, and Sam shoots up in bed. He’s sweating like crazy, shirt stuck to his back and hair plastered to his face, and he immediately starts crying when he opens his eyes.
Dean doesn’t pull his hand away, but he’s frozen for a second. Sam’s had nightmares before — he doesn’t like to talk about them, but Dean thinks they’re mostly about their Dad dying on a hunt, never coming back to the motels he leaves them in — but in 10 years of sharing a room with his brother, Dean has never heard Sam make a noise like that in his sleep.
“You were screaming,” he says flatly when Sam finally seems to process who he is and where they are, and Sam wipes his eyes with the back of his hand as he tries to sit up straight in bed.
“Sorry,” Sam mutters.
“It’s okay,” Dean says, and gives Sam an awkward pat on the shoulder, because it’s not okay, not at all, but he doesn’t know how else to respond to Sam apologizing for that noise. There's nothing he can throw in the lake to make the nightmares go away. “Do you want to try to go back to sleep or should I turn the lights on?”
“I’ll try to sleep,” Sam says, and Dean hears the rustling of blankets and the creak of the mattress as Sam lays back down. “Sorry for waking you up.”
“Dude, don’t apologize. It was a nightmare.” Sam seems to take that as enough forgiveness for now, and pulls the blanket up over himself.
“Should I wake you up next time?” Sam whispers into the dark a minute or two later, and Dean turns back over to face his brother’s bed.
“What?”
“When you scream, I… I’m never sure if I should wake you up. I thought it might scare you more. And then by the time I think about it you’re quiet again.”
Dean doesn’t reply. He stares up at the ceiling and ignores Sam’s whispered “Dean? ” until he hears his brother turn over and pull the covers back over himself, then waits long enough to be sure Sam’s fallen back asleep before letting out a shaking breath. He doesn’t go back to sleep, just holds onto his necklace and stares up through the dark at the ceiling. He’s relieved that the next day Sam doesn’t mind curling up on the couch with one of his dog-eared novels while Dean watches Scooby-Doo all day.
day 7.
A week in, Dean starts to wonder if the electricity will get turned off. He doesn’t mention it to Sam at first, just pokes around the kitchen to see if he can find any bills, anything that might clue them into if somewhere there’s a countdown hanging over their heads that they're not even aware of. He doesn’t find many papers in the kitchen, just a few creased and stained grocery lists and some of Trish’s homeschool work. The living room is similarly useless, which just makes him worry more, because they could be fine, or they could be a day away from being in the cold and dark with no water 50 miles from a town and hundreds of miles from their dad. There was nothing in Walter’s room when they gutted it, he’d checked in the nightstands, and bills wouldn’t be in Trish’s room, so there’s only one place they could be.
“Maybe we should call Bobby,” Dean says while they eat peanut butter sandwiches made with the very last of the bread. They’re each eating a sandwich with one normal piece and one heel of bread in the name of fairness, though Dean scraped a little bit of mold off his and gave Sam the staler (but safer) piece instead.
“The only phone’s in the basement,” Sam replies, a smear of peanut butter on his cheek. “And we locked the door.”
“Wipe your face. If we both agree to it then we can go down there,” Dean says, trying to shift the goalposts of the rules they set after Walter’s death as smoothly as possible while he hands Sam a napkin. “We didn’t bury the key or anything. We just need to get to the phone on his desk. No drawers, no shelves, no cabinets or anything.”
Sam takes another bite of his sandwich, chewing thoughtfully. “What do you want to ask Bobby?”
“Maybe he’s heard from Dad.” Sam scrutinizes Dean across the table, like he thinks something is up but can't quite put his finger on it, which is fine by Dean. He's not going to bring up the potential looming threat of them losing electricity and everything that comes with that unless he absolutely has to, and he'd rather sneak down alone at night than let Sam freak out about that. But talking to Bobby is an easy excuse.
"Okay, I guess."
The stairs creak under their feet as they walk back down to the basement for the first time in a week, where everything is exactly where they left it after they locked up the other night. There’s stuff everywhere, maps on the walls, gun racks, a whole wall of dusty filing cabinets. The desk is the neatest area in the cellar, and it’s still covered with forgeries (some finished, some not) and papers that Dean tries to read as subtly as possible while sitting down at it to call Bobby. Nothing that looks like a bill stands out to him at first glance, but he continues to sneak glances while he calls Bobby’s house.
“Hello?” Bobby’s voice comes over the line, which crackles but doesn’t break up.
“Hey, Uncle Bobby,” Dean says, and tries to play it off cooly, but hearing someone else’s voice for the first time in a week is the best sound he’s ever heard probably, at least equally as good as the first time he heard Physical Graffiti on vinyl and a hundred times more of a relief.
“Dean, good to hear from you. You boys still at the Hansen’s?” Sam’s head is close enough to hear Bobby through the receiver, and they exchange a look. There’s certain things their Dad has made it clear they don’t share with other hunters, on the rare occasion they’re ever around them. Sometimes Dean gets it, sometimes he doesn’t; he just knows it’s not worth disagreeing with his Dad.
They’re not sure where this situation falls yet.
“Yeah,” Dean says, and keeps his eyes on Sam as he continues, trying to make sure they’re on the same page here. “Trish and Walter are in town buying supplies.” Sam nods.
"Well tell them I say hi."
"Sure, Bobby. Hey," Dean continues, talking fast because if he doesn't he might lose his nerve or let something about the Hansens slip. "Have you heard from our Dad the last few days?"
There's a pause on the other line, and both of them hold their breath while they wait for Bobby to respond.
"Ye-ah," Bobby replies, crackling over the phone line dragging the word into two syllables, and Sam’s eyebrows fly up in surprise, an expression Dean knows he’s mirroring himself. "He called me from a payphone outside of Fairbanks two days ago."
Where’s Fairbanks? Dean mouths at Sam, who draws out a rough outline of the shape of Alaska with his finger in the air, then points somewhere in the middle. Far away from them. He doesn't know much about Alaska, but Sam won his class's geography bee a few schools back, so he trusts him.
“Just in case he’s back there, what’s the number of the phone booth?” Bobby’s quiet on the other line for a second.
"He's probably a couple hundred miles North by now, son."
"Yeah, right, I know, but — just in case?" There’s another long pause, and under the desk, Dean crosses his fingers where Sam can’t see. They’re both holding their breath, waiting.
“Alright. You got pen and paper?” Sam leans against the desk as Dean carefully writes down the number Bobby reads out to him, 9-0-7 written with more focus and concentration than he’s ever devoted to an area code. The fact that this phone call was mostly a ploy to get into Walter’s desk doesn’t even cross his mind.
"Thanks, Bobby."
"You boys need anything else? Everything good up there?"
"Yeah Bobby, we're good.”
“I’ll give ya’ a call if I hear from your dad again. Say hi to Walter for me.” Dean hangs up the phone slowly, trying to give himself more time to look through the papers. When he still doesn’t see anything on the top layer, he takes a more drastic measure, picking up a mostly finished passport and holding it up.
“Some of these forgeries are pretty wild,” he comments, picking up a fake shipping manifest and moving it to the side.
“I guess,” He glances at Sam, who’s not even looking in his direction anymore, instead taking in the basement but mostly looking towards the stairs. Dean looks down, and there’s a real electric bill. Overdue for October. Shuts off at the beginning of next month. They have until December 1st.
“Let’s go back upstairs,” Sam says, hovering by the railing, visibly uncomfortable being down here. Dean can’t blame him. He stands up and pushes the chair away from the desk, leaving the bill but taking the phone number upstairs with him.
day 8.
They’ve hit a rhythm, which freaks Dean out. They both wake up a little past sunrise every day, usually Dean first and Sam shortly after. They don’t talk about their nightmares. They make themselves breakfast, and they’re starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel on their options for that meal, so it’s mostly been plain grits the past few mornings. (There was bacon left in the back of the fridge, but neither one of them feels like eating bacon.)
Sam spends a few hours each day working through the packets they were sent by the Sioux Falls School District distance learning program before their Dad left for Alaska; Dean’s sit untouched and crumpled in the bottom of his duffel bag. He’s teased Sam about it, tried to convince him not to worry about it, but the kid actually likes schoolwork, and if it makes Sam feel better while they’re stuck here, then sure. Go wild , he thinks when he sees his little brother carefully underlining passages in My Side Of The Mountain and double-checking fractions.
Dean will go out mid-morning while Sam’s working through his math homework and do a quick patrol of the clearing around the house, sometimes go a little further into the trees if it’s nice out or he needs some space. The cabin is small, but it’s made much more claustrophobic by all the reminders around them of Trish and Walter that they avoid — the cabin is barely five rooms as is, and they don’t go into two of them.
They’ll eat lunch together, usually something canned. In the afternoon, Dean will fish and Sam will read, either one of the books he brings with him everywhere for the 50th time, or one of the ones scattered around the Hansen’s living room, which are mostly about nature and seem a little dry even for Sam’s boring taste. They both know Trish’s room has a whole bookshelf full of novels and comics, and they both know that neither of them are going in there, so they both don’t mention it.
“Two weeks.”
“What?”
“We’ll give Dad five more days, then we need to leave. We’re running low on food, and getting to Colville and buying food on our own is too risky. Someone might notice we’re on our own.”
“You just said two weeks.”
“Two weeks total, smartass.”
Sam nervously taps his pencil on the table, the eraser at the end of it bouncing it upwards just a little more than the movement of his fingers would naturally, and Dean finds himself irrationally distracted and annoyed by it while he waits for Sam to collect his thoughts. “Can you stop that tapping?”
Sam looks up at him and narrows his eyes, stops for maybe five seconds, max, then starts tapping again. “And then what?”
“We go to Bobby’s.”
"How will Dad know?"
"We'll leave him a note here. And he can call Bobby to confirm it.”
“What if he gets here right after we leave and he calls Bobby and we’re not there yet?”
“How do you always come up with the most smartass questions?”
“It’s a real question.”
“That’s not gonna happen, but even if it did, we could call Bobby from a bus stop payphone.” Sam stops tapping his pencil again, and Dean sighs in relief. It lasts a few more seconds this time before he starts up again. “Do we have a plan?” There isn’t really any alternative being given here, so maybe asking Sam at all is a little pointless, but he wants Sam to get some kind of security from this, to know that might be scary but no matter what, they’re gonna stick together. That his big brother will keep him safe.
“Yeah,” Sam says, not looking all that relieved, flipping the pencil around in his hand and turning his attention back to his social studies homework. “We have a plan.”
day 9.
Dean wakes up around 4:45 A.M. the morning of the ninth day since Trish came back and died again from another nightmare. He didn't know he'd screamed in his sleep, but Dean's been remembering his nightmares this whole time, which is how he knows this one is particularly bad. But what’s he supposed to do, tell Sam? His brother saw the same stuff he did, so even if he didn’t have the screwdriver in his hand, he was there too. Write them down in a diary? Maybe that’s something Sam would do, like a girl, but not Dean.
Instead, he just lays in bed and tries to will the dream away until he gives up and decides to just get dressed and go for a walk. He gets out of bed, but the dream keeps playing in his head, flashes and images crowding the front of his skull and making him dizzy with anxiety, so he sits back down on the edge of his bed and takes deep breaths in the dark.
In this dream, their Mom was the one tearing into their Dad's neck, climbing into the king bed Dean distantly remembers from the house in Lawrence. Blood dripped from her mouth to her chin to her nightgown, tacky and dark in her light hair, sinews from her husband’s neck caught between her teeth when she looked up at Dean. And that image in itself is terrifying, an image he would give anything to get out of his head, but his Dad had Walter's eyes. Not the color, or the shape, those were just John Winchester's, but that look Dean had seen in them as Walter bled out in front of them — that look of pure care and concern for Trish in them, like it was all going to be okay. What was happening was fine because it was Trish (or Mom, in the dream) and he loved her, loves her, and didn't want her to go hungry or hurt, even at the expense of his life.
Love is scary. Love is terrifying. Dean wants to get out of here as fast as possible, away from the graves in the backyard and the pile of ashes where the bloody blankets were and the two empty rooms and the ghost that killed Trish still just a few miles south of them. He wants to be on the other side of the world right now, and he needs their Dad.
He rummages through his bag until he finds the key to the basement, then after a final glance at Sam to make sure he’s still asleep, unlocks the basement door and goes back downstairs. He’s kept the copy of the phone number Bobby gave them on him since he wrote it down, but he doesn’t even need to check it as he dials Walter’s phone and waits. He wonders what time it is in Alaska. It rings four times, and then goes silent, but maybe there’s voicemail, who knows. He starts talking.
“Hey, uh, Dad. Bobby said this was the last place he heard from you. Um, I just wanted to let you know that Sam and I miss you a lot. Um, some stuff happened that messed Sammy up pretty bad. Not physically, but uh — it’s really bad. I know you're on a super important hunt right now, and I know you need to get the thing that killed Mom, but we're alone out here and know we can't get anyone else involved because something happened to Walter too, so um… Just, please when you get this —"
A three-tone dial comes through the earpiece, high-low-high and tinny, followed by a woman's hollow voice announcing This number does not have voicemail. Please hang up and try again.
day 10.
“Is Dad gonna be mad that we haven’t been keeping up our drills?” Sam asks one afternoon, when the two of them are taking a walk around the house and near the lake while there’s a brief break in the clouds. It's nice outside — Dean hasn't loved the Pacific Northwest, because it's usually wet and frequently cold, but the air is dry and crisp enough now that the cold feels more refreshing than oppressive. Dean's surprised when Sam asks about their drills for a couple of reasons, the main one being that Sam hates doing drills and it sometimes feels to Dean like he’s never turned down an opportunity to fight with their Dad over them.
“I dunno,” Dean replies, snapping another twig off the branch he’d picked up to keep his hands busy and letting it drop to the ground. “It’s not like he told Walter that we had to keep them up while we stayed with them or anything like that."
“Yeah, but I don’t think he thought he would be gone this long, right?”
“I dunno,” Dean repeats, letting the rest of the stick fall to the ground. It lands silently on top of the bed of pine needles that cover the ground in this part of the woods. He knows it’s a little paranoid, but Dean doesn’t like the way they muffle all the sounds around them, which is another strike against the Pacific Northwest. “He said it could be a few weeks.”
“I know you don't want to talk about this, Dean, but I really don’t think I can do this my whole life. Not like Dad.” Sam’s quiet, and he sounds scared and he's right, Dean doesn’t want to hear it, but he also doesn't want to pick a fight the way he did the other day. He breaks off another branch from a pine tree and starts to pick at some of the dry sap, thinking Dad hasn’t been doing this his whole life, just yours.
“Don’t you want something else? Be a mechanic, or?” Sam seems to stumble in his words for a second, like it’s hard for him to even come up with an idea of what Dean could do besides follow in their Dad’s footsteps, and Dean isn’t sure how he’s supposed to feel about that.
“It’s not gonna be forever, Sammy,” Dean says. “Just until Dad finds the thing that killed Mom.” Sam doesn’t say anything, he’s not convinced. Dean’s not sure it’s worth trying to convince him, or if he really believes it enough to do that successfully. When their Dad is here, he does believe it. He sees how hard their Dad is working and knows how many people they're saving along the way. But they're two weeks out from any contact with him, and he’s not sure he wants to be the one trying to convince Sam to keep the faith.
"I don't know if I can," Sam says, quietly, barely louder than the rustle of branches around them; quiet enough that Dean pretends he can’t hear it.
"And he's getting closer," Dean continues, trying to put some pep into it. “Maybe he’ll even get the thing in Alaska. Maybe he already did. It might be over, and we don’t even know it.”
“Right.”
“Look,” Dean says after a few silent steps, avoiding eye contact with his little brother and exhaling. “It’s cold enough that you can see your breath.”
day 11.
“What are you reading?” Dean asks as he comes in through the back door that evening, a decent-sized bass and a scrawny perch in the cooler. It's not one of Sam's school books or one of his beat-up paperbacks, so it must be one of the boring-looking hardcovers Walter let gather dust next to the TV. “Learn anything?”
“Can I show you?” Sam asks, and Dean leans the rod against the wall and puts the cooler in the fridge. "Not now," he adds. "Once it gets dark out." Dean's not totally sure what that means, but Sam sounds so open and genuine in his excitement, and it's late November so it'll be dark soon anyways, so he lets it go and takes the cooler right back out.
"Okay, but only if I show you this first," Dean says, pulling the perch out of the cooler and laying it on the counter next to a kitchen sink. "Come here." Sam pulls a face, but walks over, and does at least try to pay attention while Dean shows him the right knife to use and the right way to hold the fish to get the skin off. Sam's not enthusiastic about it, but they've been stuck in the woods near a lake for a week and a half now, so there's no better time to learn how to gut and bone a fish.
They make it through cooking dinner with minimal injury, just a nick on Sam's pinky that barely bleeds into the food at all. Sam manages to get almost all of the fine bones out on his first go, and it tastes perfectly fine, though Dean is a little sick of fish. But Sam hasn't complained at all, and they're pretty far past the point of being able to be picky when it comes to their meals.
“So I found a book Walter had about space,” Sam says, and pulls it out from where he’d shoved it behind couch cushions. He flips open to a dog-eared page, a black-and-white map of the night sky covered with dots, and lines, and labels so tiny Dean has to squint to read the star names. “There’s too many to learn at once, but I want to show you the ones I think I got today.” They both throw on the heaviest coats they brought with them, but Sam stops right before throwing the back door open and almost slams into Dean when he suddenly turns around.
“I’m going to grab a blanket too, the ground is probably wet.”
“It is,” Dean confirms with a glance down at his boots, still a little muddy from the morning’s rain that hadn’t dried and the night’s dew already starting to form on the grass. Sam returns with a musty blanket from the towel closet, too moth-eaten to sleep with but
“Okay, so you see those 5 stars right above us?” Sam starts and raises his hand, and Dean shifts over a bit, closer to Sam so he can better see where his brother is pointing.
“Yeah, I think so? Kinda bent?”
“Exactly,” Sam says, and Dean has to hold back a smile at how serious he sounds, like he’s a teacher standing in front of a captive class instead of a 10 year-old kid pointing out the sky while laying on a wet blanket in a yard that isn’t theirs. “So that’s Cygnus.”
“Dumb name.”
Dean swears he can hear Sam rolling his eyes next to him. “It’s named that because it’s a swan. Those stars are the wings, and the ones intersecting it are the body,” he continues, and points to stars that kinda form a shape, if Dean focuses really hard on them. “And then those stars inside of it are called the Northern Cross.”
“Okay, show me one that’s not a bird.”
Dean’s seen the night sky from the middle of nowhere plenty of times before, but can’t remember the last time he focused on it with any intensity. Most of the times he’s looked at the stars it’s been to find the North Star, more a navigational tool than a celestial body. He knows he’s never wanted the moon to be less bright just so he can see what someone is pointing out to him before, even if he can’t visualize the images the stars are sketching out as well as his brother. Sam points out one that’s supposed to be Pegasus, which does not come anywhere close to resembling a horse, let alone a horse with wings.
“Be honest with me, do you really see the shapes? Like, do you actually think they look like the shapes they're named after?"
"Mostly?" Sam says. “I mean, I only really focused on a few today, but Uncle Bobby’s shown me some. The dippers do look like dippers. Or scoops. Ladles?”
“Okay, so you agree the names are all bullshit.”
“I do not,” Sam replies, indignant. “They were just... more creative back then.”
They lay out there till it’s far too late, till Dean can’t feel the tips of his fingers or his feet from the cold. The blanket they’re on gets damp, and then stiff as it freezes, the ground underneath them crunching as frost forms on the grass and fallen leaves. They argue about whether or not the Greeks had any good ideas about what’s in the stars. Sam says he saw a shooting star, and Dean accuses him of lying about it, but asks him what he wished for a few minutes later anyways. They realize that they’re far enough away from any cities that the sky is dark enough to see the whole Milky Way, stretching across the sky like a pale column of smoke.
And for the first time since It happened, Dean actually feels okay. He and Sam have each other and they have the stars and the sky, and they won't be here forever, and their Dad sees the same stars they do from Alaska, and they're all going to be okay.
day 12.
They’re dangerously low on food by the twelfth day, and it’s raining again. The two things aren’t directly related, but the rain isn’t just rain. It’s been storming since a particularly loud crack of thunder woke both of them up early, and Dean’s not dumb enough to try and catch fish by a lake when there’s lightning in the air. There’s enough food for each of them to have a small bowl of grits for breakfast, and a fish in the back of the freezer that Dean’s going to skin and cook for dinner that night. Neither one of them wanted to eat the bacon, but it had gone rancid anyways. No lunch. They’ll live, but by eleven or so in the morning Dean’s stomach is already growling loud enough that it’s audible over the rain on the cabin’s roof.
Their routine is thrown off, both because of the weather and the meals, so they’re both testy already, and after a few hours of sniping at each other, Dean is sick of it, so he pulls up his coat over his head and sprints through the rain to Walter’s shed. It’s the kind of rain that’s so heavy it doesn’t seem like there’s any way it’s just falling; it feels like it’s actively being hurled at the ground from the sky.
He didn’t have a plan when he decided to go out to the shed, just needed to get some air, but he manages to pass an hour or two messing around with stuff laying around on the workbench. It doesn’t totally distract him from his hunger, but tools are significantly less irritating than his brother right now. He takes apart a rusted boat engine that looks like it’s covered in a decade’s worth of cobwebs, mangling it a little in the process by using a pocket knife and pliers instead of a screwdriver, and gets about a third into putting it back together when he hears the rain stop for the first time since they woke up. He leaves the engine for later, gathers an armful of logs from under the tarp by the shed, and heads back to the house.
He opens the door with the tips of his fingers, struggling to grab the knob with arms full, and drops the logs on the floor with a clunk once he manages to get inside.
“Dean, look what I found,” Sam says as Dean shuts the door behind him, turning around and peering over the back of the couch. Dean sees what he’s found, six or seven vacuum-sealed packets piled up on the kitchen table, and immediately knows where they came from. With the exception of Trish’s room and the basement, Dean’s pored over every inch of this house and the storage shed, and he’s pretty sure Walter wasn’t keeping a month’s worth of MREs in his teenage daughter's room.
He walks into their room without looking in Sam’s direction, rifles through his duffel bag until he finds the pair of jeans he’s hidden the key in, and feels through the fabric. It’s still there. “I picked the lock,” Sam calls from the couch in the other room, voice suddenly small enough to barely carry through the doorway. Dean curses under his breath, shoves the jeans back in the bag and walks back into the hallway, pissed.
“Why did you go back down there? We’ve been locking the door for a reason, Sam!”
“I didn’t touch the statue! I didn’t even go near the drawer,” Sam snaps back. “And I know you went down there alone to call Dad the other night. I wasn't asleep."
“I did not,” Dean replies, reflexively lying even though he knows it’s a dumb thing to lie about, and Sam’s response is telling — he doesn’t even snap back with a ‘yes you did,’ just narrows his eyes and pulls his knees up to his chest, turning away from Dean and closing himself off.
Lightning strikes close by, and there’s a bright flash through the kitchen window, then thunder loud enough to shake the pile of MREs on the table, shifting them just enough that one of them slides close to the edge of the table. The lights flicker, and then with a mechanical whine from somewhere in the house, goes out.
“Shit,” Dean swears, and searches through his coat pocket until he curses again and remembers that his lighter melted when they burned everything from Walter’s room. Squinting, he fumbles through the kitchen drawers until his hand hits one, just enough fluid left in it for the flame to catch when he strikes the wheel. It isn’t pitch black out yet, but it’s late and stormy enough that the flame doesn’t light anything other than a tight radius around him. Sam doesn’t move from the couch into the light, and the only noises for a few minutes while Dean looks for candles in the kitchen are cabinets opening and closing and the storm raging on outside.
Part of Dean wants to keep yelling, because going down there to make a phone call is different than rummaging around among a bunch of weapons and random artifacts, but when he sees how tired and withdrawn Sam is, he forces it down. All we have is each other, Dean reminds himself, thinks back to the brief glimpse of hope that thought gave him last night. It’s always been true, but it’s literal out here. He puts one candle on the table, lighting up the meal packs, and carries another one to the couch.
“I’m sorry,” Sam says when Dean just sits down on the couch next to him, putting a candle on the floor in front of them. They’ve almost been able to fool themselves into thinking this couch is… not theirs, but not not theirs. It was a dumb thing to think; this is the last place they should be letting themselves get comfortable in. "I just can’t stop thinking — what if Dad dies in Alaska? What if he never comes back? I just figured at least we don't have to starve while waiting to find out."
"You can’t start thinking like that,” Dean says and holds his arm out, offering a space against his side for Sam to lean into, which his brother does. And he decides to let the basement thing go, because Sam’s right. He went down there to call their Dad, they’re hungrier than they've been in years (at least Dean is), for all the dumb stuff Sam does, Dean knows he wouldn't touch that statue or anything that had even the slightest whiff of magic or danger about it. Their Dad taught them better than that, and they learned the same lesson a hundred times over when they followed Trish out to Herald House.
“I’m always thinking like that, Dean,” Sam says, and his voice is starting to sound a little wavering and choked up. “Ever since I learned. I’m so scared, and Trish and Walter — you said they weren’t hunters but they were close enough, and they were as safe as you can get with this kind of stuff, and look what happened to them.”
“It’s not our fault,” Dean says, even though he knows that’s not really what Sam’s saying.
“I know that! I’m just so sick of being scared,” Sam says, voice breaking on ‘sick.’ “I’m just so tired of thinking about it, but I can’t stop because I know what’s out there.”
“I know, Sammy,” and he does. He’s more used to it by now, and Sam is more nervous by nature, but he does know. They're some of the only people in the world who know. He'll tease his brother for getting caught with a knife at school because he's his brother, and that's part of the job description, but Dean's been carrying a switchblade in his coat since he was younger than Sam is now.
Dean doesn’t know when he’ll be able to hold a screwdriver again without thinking about Trish lying still in a puddle of her dad’s blood. He knows. He wishes he knew what to say to make it better, but he doesn’t, and he hopes Sam gets that. If he could, he would do anything in his power to make Sam feel better, but he just doesn't know. He does know how to wrap an arm around his little brother’s shoulder and sit with him while wind whips branches against the side of the house and wind howls through the chimney. They sit together until the worst of the storm has passed, Dean rubbing Sam’s back until he finally unfolds himself and looks like he’s calmed down.
“How did you know Walter had those, anyways?” Dean picks up an MRE packet from the floor by the couch, where Sam’s stacked a few more packets he brought up, and holds it up to a candle to investigate the pouch. They’re pretty new, new enough that they’re packaged with those flameless heaters, and the prospect of a warm dinner and a full stomach instantly pushes away any lingering ire about Sam going down there on his own.
“I saw them in the corner when we were calling Bobby. I got some turkey dinner ones,” Sam says, but says it like there’s something Dean should be responding to besides the type of meat in them. “It’s Thanksgiving,” he adds, mildly exasperated, after a pause when Dean doesn’t respond. Dean’s eyes widen for a second as he does the mental math and it registers that this is, in fact, the fourth Thursday of November.
“Well, shit,” he says, and tugs Sam back into a hug. “Happy Thanksgiving.” He’s not sure exactly what about that is so funny to Sam, but it's the first time he hears his little brother laugh in two weeks, so he'll take it.
day 13.
The rain stops overnight, but the power doesn’t come back on the next morning, and Dean wakes up shivering. Sam’s always run a little warm, and when he glances at his brother he seems fine, no chills or anything. Dean puts on as many layers as possible while getting dressed, and keeps his hands shoved in his pockets as he slips out of the room quietly. He throws a couple logs into the fireplace and starts it again, staring into the flame and holding his hands out to warm up as the heat slowly starts to spread through the cabin.
One more day. One more day, then Dean drives 45 miles early enough in the morning so no one sees them, they leave Walter’s truck on the side of the road, walk five miles to the Greyhound station in Colville, buy tickets with money he took from the desk in the basement, take the bus to Spokane, then to Coeur d’Alene and eventually Sioux Falls. After that, who knows. It’s a solid enough plan; he has a fake driver’s license that says he’s 16, but they’re young enough that the plan still avoids most risks that could get CPS involved. At least no one gives a shit on a Greyhound.
He hasn’t let himself think too much about the worst that could have happened in Alaska, because Sam’s doing enough of that for the both of them. But the better-than-worst case scenarios aren’t all that great either — what are they going to say to their Dad? He’d told Sam “mostly the truth,” but what parts do they leave out?
Dean does still feel guilty when he walks out into the backyard and stands in front of their graves, the way he has most mornings since he and Sam dug them together. They’re covered in a thin layer of frost, underscoring how close to winter it is, how soon the lake will freeze over. He hates that they buried them in the fall, and can't help thinking about how the dirt over their bodies is going to stay bare until it warms up and grass starts growing again.
Almost two weeks out from it, he feels less guilty about what he did that night, because Trish was far gone enough to kill her own father, and she was moving towards them, and no way in hell was he letting her get close to Sam.
It’s just a more general guilt that things happened the way they did. He and Sam were stupid, but so was Trish; he knows it’s a mean thing to think about a dead girl and he knows it’s the harsh truth. Maybe Trish would still be alive on this exact day if she hadn’t met them, but she was the dangerous kind of curious about hunting and ghosts, and neither her nor her dad were prepared for the kind of stuff they got tangled up in.
He’d yelled at Sam the other day at dinner because hunters can't waver. And they wavered, by going hunting at all in the first place when they both knew in their gut that they were just doing it to impress Trish, but with the deadline to leave suddenly in front of him, Dean’s struggling to stay committed to the plan he’d laid out for Sam, because it’s just going to take them back to the start. Their Dad will come get them from Sioux Falls and they’ll head out together again somewhere new. It’s not that he wants to run away from hunting, which is the only thing that’s let him process and understand what they saw and what they went through here, and he doesn’t want to run away from his Dad, who he misses like hell, or from Bobby, who’s always good to them; he just wants to buy him and Sam a Greyhound ticket to somewhere they’ve never been where no one will know them or bother them, just for a bit. Maybe Canada. Maybe San Diego, it’s warm there.
He can’t, and won’t, and running away wouldn’t fix anything anyways. The whole thing makes him feel a little helpless, and it makes him wish their Dad was here. Because after he's done being mad that they could have gotten hurt, after he runs them through double their normal drills to make up for them slacking, they’re still a family, he’s still their Dad, and he still loves them.
And love is scary, but Dean’s starting to realize it’s one of the only things anyone has in this life. Which is why, as much as he wants to hate Walter for bringing Trish back, he’s finding it really hard to. The specifics are easier to get upset about — he hates that Walter messed around with some heavy magic, he hates how deep he pushed himself into denial to pretend everything was fine with his daughter when everything was clearly wrong. But he didn’t have anything else to live for except Trish.
And Dean… gets it. He’d never do something like that himself, seeing Trish undead and not even close to right like that was enough to banish whatever wisp of a possibility that he ever would, but in a horrible, fucked-up, upsetting way, he gets it. When someone else is all you have, it’s hard to let them go.
From on the other side of the house, Dean hears the far-off-but-getting-closer noise of tires crunching down gravel. It’s so still and silent out in the woods that it’s probably still half a mile away when he recognizes the sound of the Impala’s engine.
He looks at the graves one last time, and goes to wake Sammy up.