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The last hitchhiker he’d met had ended up being Meg Masters, and even though she’s not nearly as terrible as she could be, there’s still no way this is a good idea. He’s not kidding himself. But the passenger seat is empty and cold, the worn black leather staring him down, demanding validation, and he’s still got hundreds of miles to cover.
He eases onto the side of the road and puts the car in park.
The kid—he’s more than a hundred years old in time, everyone physically under thirty can now be labeled as a kid—is small and scrawny, in an oversized and faded flannel shirt with a backpack thrown over one shoulder. If he’s accidentally aiding a runaway and gets put on Amber alert, he might put his head through the steering wheel. On the other hand, he’d rather have to deal with that than a demon riding somebody’s body. He’s got standards.
He leans over the gearshift to unroll the passenger window. “You need a ride?”
“Nah, I’m just standing here with my thumb stuck out ‘cause I got nothing better to do.”
The sarcasm is a whip on Sam’s senses, and the middle-American lilt that only comes out of Kansas shoots straight through his temporal lobe, because this was Dean twenty years, seconds, lifetimes ago. His eyes sting. He’d never caught onto that trick of Dean’s or his father’s, the one where sadness and grief manifest through rage.
Sam clears his throat. “Where you headed? I’m going west.”
“I'm not going anywhere-- aiming for Albuquerque right now, though, just to have a destination.” The kid adjusts the strap of the backpack, fiddles with a button on the shirt. Sam knows anxiety when he sees it, and he sympathizes. Understands.
“Bit far out from Albuquerque,” Sam says.
“’S why I’m trying to make it to the next major city. I’ll take a Greyhound from there.”
It’s phrased more as a question than a statement, but Sam takes it. “I could drive you the whole way. It’s a bit of a stretch, but we could get there by morning if we crunch for time.”
The kid’s brow furrows. “You’re letting me hitch a ride?”
“No, I’m just parked on the side of the road with the window rolled down ‘cause I’ve got nothing better to do,” Sam replies, succeeding in drawing a grin from the young hitchhiker. He doesn’t smile anymore, at least not like he used to, but his eyes crinkle at the edges and one corner of his mouth pulls up. He thinks that counts for something. “Come on.”
The kid’s shoes are muddy, but they’re careful to keep them planted on the floorboards. They hold their backpack in their lap, like they’re preparing to make a quick escape if necessary.
“Nobody’s stopped for me before,” they say. “‘S like I’m living some damn Kerouac novel-- I’ve been riding on backs of trucks and stuff, where you can just hop in and they don’t know.”
Sam nods. “Yeah, I’ve been there.”
“You used to hitchhike?”
“Not religiously—“ God, he’s going to have to elaborate and he doesn’t know if he can do this-- “I was with my, uh, my brother. And we fought, and I… I took my bag out of the trunk and left.” He pauses. “Didn’t last long, though. We don’t do as well on our own.”
“Then where is he now?”
Sam’s grip on the steering wheel tightens, and his gaze hardens on the open road in front of him. “That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”
-
They both lean up against the hood, stretching their legs while the tank fills with gas. The price is ridiculous, even with the inflation factor, but Sam’s not worried; it’s not like the credit cards in his wallet are his own. What he is worried about is this kid he’s picked up, because he’s got the feeling that they won’t speak up if they need to eat or sleep. Sam’s own appetite and sleep patterns are so screwed up that he doesn’t know how normal people function anymore, let alone the ones who came towards the end of Generation Y. They can be their own species as far as Sam’s concerned. They’re volatile enigmas filled with bad judgment skills and identity crises.
Putting it that way, he might actually understand them better than he thought at first.
But the issue still stands. Does he even know their name?
“I’m Sam, by the way,” he says. Offering something of himself as a means to learn about others was a method he’d learned mostly through college, but executed through impersonating federal agents with his brother. Funny how things turn out like that.
“Sam,” the kid repeats, testing out the syllable on their tongue, as if they’re searching for traces of inauthenticity. “Good to meet you, Sam.”
He can already tell that this conversation is going nowhere fast, but he tries anyways. “You got a name?”
“Yeah.” The answer ends there.
“And you don’t want to tell me,” Sam guesses.
The kid shrugs. The gas pump makes a popping sound, and Sam pulls it from the tank.
“You don’t have to. I won’t make you.”
He’s turning out of the station and back onto the road when he hears, “I lied—about having a name. I don’t have one, not really.”
Sam’s train of thought goes immediately to shit, fuck, this kid’s an amnesiac, you picked up a kid who doesn’t even know who they are, let alone where they should be going-- “What do you mean?”
“I haven’t found one that feels right.”
Oh. That’s what this is: the identity crisis part of the enigma. Sam wonders if he’d have been better suited to someone dealing with memory loss. At least that’s in his general field of expertise. This, though… he might be a little out of his depth.
“Okay, well, if you find one before we make it to Albuquerque, just let me know.”
-
A temple rushes past them in a blur as they fly down the road (because this car has held angels enough times to gain honorary wings), biding for time, escaping the ghosts that try to follow at the tailpipe.
The kid watches the building fade away in the side view mirror, eyes dark with thought. Only when it falls out of sight do they say, “Jonah.”
“Huh?”
“The name. I like it.”
They rest their head against the window, clearly fighting to stay awake, and Sam wants to ask how long it’s been since they’ve slept. Instead he settles for agreeing with them.
“It’s a good name. Biblical, though—the prophet Jonah, he got swallowed by a whale. I don’t know if that matters to you.”
“Wasn’t a whale.”
“What?”
Their gaze slides away from the window and over to Sam. “The thing that swallowed Jonah, it wasn’t a whale. That’s just what people tell kids, because whales aren’t scary or violent. But then that begs the question, ‘how could a whale swallow someone?’”
Sam passes three more mile markers before responding with a follow-up question. “You talk like you’ve got a theory. What do you think it was?”
“A Megalodon-- it’s like a Great White, except it can get up to sixty feet long and its teeth are probably like, the size of your head or something.”
“But that thing’s been extinct for one and a half million years, hasn’t it? Jonah only showed up around three thousand years ago.”
“You seriously think we can draw anything conclusive from marine biology?” They ask, cheeky and full of snark, and this is not what Sam signed up for. “We’ve still got ninety-five percent of the ocean to explore and you’ve got the nerve to tell me the Megalodon went extinct. Come on.”
Sam decides that with a profession of killing things that are largely seen as myth, communicating directly with angels, and the fact that his brother was resurrected by the King of Hell and turned into a demon, he doesn’t have a lot of leverage in the realm of arguing against things existing. And in any case, he’s got bigger things to worry about than the biggest shark in history still lurking somewhere at the bottom of the sea.
“You gotta be scared of something that big,” Jonah says, and they sound far away now. “’S a few gallons from being infinite. You don’t know what’s out there; nobody does. And that’s where things get lost.”
-
The windshield wipers beat back and forth, rapid and violent, but the rain comes down in sheets and it’s getting hard to see. Thunder rolls across the sky, painted a dark dangerous blue that stands out against the trees lining the horizon, and he flinches. He’s never been good with storms in the first place, but the past couple years have made it exponentially worse. Loud noises never fail to bring the Cage to the front of Sam’s memory—that, or those agonizing months of Lucifer mocking him nonstop—and combined with the cracks of lightning that remind him only of a merciless, absent father (whether he’s thinking of John or God, he’s not sure), he has to pull over.
“Is everything okay?” Jonah’s voice is small compared to the hammering of the rain and Sam realizes how terrifying this must be. The strange man in the ancient black Impala that’s been used as a hearse more times than he can count (including for himself) who picked them up, pulling over in the middle of a storm to… Hell knows what Jonah thinks he’s going to do.
“Oh, oh my god, this isn’t—“ where are his words, why can’t he speak—“I’m not gonna hurt you, I wouldn’t ever—“
He hates himself for not being able to keep it together for the sake of this kid, this child, who’s got no clue what they’ve gotten themself into by calling shotgun to Albuquerque.
“Is it the storm?” Jonah asks. “I mean, is that what’s got you so rattled?”
He thinks of Dean, which is dumb and masochistic of him, but he can’t stop himself. Dean would clap him on the shoulder, turn up the radio until the storm was far away and it was just the two of them again, sing along to Led Zeppelin off-key, ask about the books Sam had been reading in the bunker, and he’d be there.
He’s not there.
“I just need a minute,” Sam says, clenching his jaw and choking back the urge to scream or cry. “It’s fine, I’m fine, I just—I gotta—“
“Take your time.” That Kansas lilt is still there in Jonah’s voice, but it’s quiet and gentle, no sharp teasing at the edges of the words. “I got nowhere to be tonight. Right here’s as good a place as any.”
Sam sits forward in his seat, rests his forehead against the steering wheel, and tries to breathe. He can’t stand this feeling; the way the whole world comes tumbling down around him without warning, the crushing pressure that makes his knees buckle and give way. He’s forced to tread through oceans of doubt and self-hatred and goddamn loneliness in order to find a shred of hope, or strength, or the will to live-- a flicker of something bright in the dark.
But he’s gotten so tired.
There’s another burst of thunder and Sam’s breath catches, panicked nausea swelling below his ribs. No, no, no, he’s not going to throw up. He’s already scared this kid enough.
“You know, there’s this thing you can do when it’s storming.” They speak softly, which is strange because Sam can still hear them over the ringing in his ears. “You count the seconds between the thunder claps, and that’s how many miles away they are.”
Sam glances over; Jonah’s got this genuine, earnest look on their face, and Sam’s heart feels a little less broken.
“I’m sorry, Jonah, this is—“
“It’s no sweat, that’s what it is. Now do you want me to count? ‘Cause I can count.”
Sam nods, tries his best not to be humiliated.
“Okay.” Jonah looks out at the road, not making eye contact with Sam to provide him with at least a fragment of privacy. There’s a low rumble in the distance. “One one-thousand, two one-thousand, tree one-thousand…”
Jonah reaches seven before the next crash of thunder resonates.
He loses track of time in order to focus on breathing, on not vomiting, on not crying. All he knows is that after a while he’s too exhausted to hold onto the fear, and it subsides. High tide is over.
He sits back, lets his head hit the seat with a dull thud, and wipes a hand over his face.
Sounds of rummaging through a bag come from the passenger seat, and then there’s a bottle of water being passed to him.
“It might help.” In the glow of the highway lights and the iridescent reflection from the rain pounding on the windows, Jonah’s eyes flash bright and blue, the same way Cas’s do. A little darker, even. If Cas is the surface, rippling and golden, then Jonah is thousands of leagues deeper, glittering through the gloom.
Sam unscrews the cap and takes a drink. They sit in the Impala, motionless and silent, Sam regaining control of himself while Jonah watches the rain. Like they’re waiting for someone.
-
The rain doesn’t let up. The minutes drag into hours like sand, individual seconds struggling to remain in the present as they’re pulled back by the waters, dissolve into the rest of the past, indecipherable.
It’s half past one and Sam almost hits a fawn bolting across the road, followed by its mother, who looks aptly pissed off.
“That’s it, I’m calling it.” Sam starts looking for the nearest exit; he’s so sick of this highway and how it seems to be taunting him as it stretches on forever, like the very earth itself is saying, you won’t find him, you can’t save him.
“Are we stopping?” Jonah rubs their eyes with the heels of their hands, out of focus from too much time suspended right above unconsciousness.
“I just need a few hours of shut-eye. I’ll have you in Albuquerque before nine tomorrow—eight if the showers are cold. And if I can get some coffee.”
“No, you need your rest. Seven hours of sleep minimum.” Jonah’s tone is firm, a kind of no-nonsense tone that Sam hasn’t heard since before Metatron skewered Dean through the ribs.
And now he’s thinking about it. The shock that had flashed through Dean’s eyes, red and weary, fading fast. The sickening sound of the First Blade wrenching out of Dean’s skin, his rapid heartbeat underneath Sam’s hand, the blood leaking over his fingers. The horrible waves of quiet surrender that rolled off his brother so strong it almost knocked him over—
No, he can’t think about it, he won’t, no, no no no—
“Sam?”
“I’m okay.”
Even though Lucifer has been out of his head for three years, he’d swear on his life that he hears him now, laughing at how absurd the lie is.
The motel has definitely seen better days, but Sam’s called places like this home for thirty-odd years, and Jonah’s a hitchhiker, so neither of them complain. It’s a relatively clean place to sleep and the fan is fully attached to the ceiling. No threat of getting struck by one of the paddles during sleep is always something to be happy about.
Sam comes out of the bathroom to find Jonah in the middle of changing, and before he can turn away and begin his profuse apologies, he glimpses a painfully familiar pattern of white tallies on the undersides of Jonah’s forearms. There are around a dozen more, littering the sides of their body from the bottom of their ribcage to the middle of their thighs. They stretch and contract in rhythm with Jonah’s movement, like worms. Maggots.
“Shit, oh God, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—“ He pivots to face the wall and covers his eyes for good measure. “It was a total accident, I didn’t know you’d be—changing, right now—Christ, I’m so sorry--”
“Do they scare you?”
The question catches him completely off-guard, and he peeks at the stucco wall through his fingers. “What?”
“You saw them, I know you did.” The sound of rustling fabric paints a reassuring picture, that Jonah is resuming getting dressed, and Sam no longer has a stark naked twenty-something-year-old with him in a motel room. “You got that same face that everybody gets, like you’re disgusted but at the same time you pity me.”
“I’m not—I don’t—“
“Don’t spend the next twelve hours walking on eggshells with me, Sam. That phrase never made sense to me, anyways. If you’re walking on eggshells, why’re you being delicate? Egg’s already broken, so who gives a shit?”
“I don’t pity you,” Sam says. It comes out louder than he’d wanted, making his face heat up, and he tries again. “I don’t.” He drops his hands. “Are you decent?”
“You get way too flustered by non-sexualized nudity. And yes.”
Sam turns, rolls up his shirtsleeves and cuffs them at his elbows. The scar on his palm pulsates weakly. “It’s not pity. It’s me wishing you didn’t understand.”
Jonah is roughly a foot shorter than Sam, maybe a third of his body mass, and their hands look so small when they take one of Sam’s wrists. Long jagged scarring marks up the whole length of his arm, only a few slivers of skin left untouched. It’s been a decade of drawing blood for rituals, of slicing himself open to prove his humanity, of claws and blades and teeth. He can tell the self-inflicted scars apart from the rest; they’re cleaner, parallel and deliberate, ending abruptly instead of fading off at the edges. A lot of them were necessary, separate from his crushing guilt and grief.
But a lot of them were entirely of his volition, on his own time, in isolated spaces where he felt like the angels and even God couldn’t see him.
“These have stories,” Jonah murmurs. They trace their index finger over Sam’s arm, a feather-light touch that Sam can barely feel from beneath all the scar tissue. “Like ‘you’ve seen the end of the world’ kind of stories.”
Sam laughs shortly. “That’s more accurate than you might think.” When Jonah looks at him with heavy suspicion, he adds, “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“Whether I believe it or not, I’m still a sucker for a legend or two. And I’ve always liked scary stories before bedtime.”
There’s only one bed and Sam insists on taking the couch, but Jonah says they don’t mind, and it won’t be weird, and they can’t sleep alone in a bed this big. Sam settles in next to them, careful to keep his distance.
“Tell me,” Jonah says. “Tell me your stories.”
In this room, in this city, that’s all they are. Stories, ones he can disconnect from in the dark. La Junta will be a ghost by morning, nothing but dust and exhaust smoke, and tonight will be put up on a shelf in his memory for him to remember another time, and to forget much later.
He starts off with, “I started the apocalypse, once,” because that’s the root of it all, really; losing his soul, losing his mind, losing Dean, losing his autonomy, and losing Dean again—it’s a chain reaction, one he set off when he was more foolish and less damaged, and he can’t stop it now. Nobody can stop it now.
“I think Lucifer loved you,” Jonah tells him five minutes into listening, and Sam pales. “Or he thought he did. Gratefulness is mistaken for love all the time, you know? If he did love you, it was the same way a dog loves someone who releases it from a pound. There’s loyalty and trust and gratitude, but love—real love—that comes later.” They pull the blankets up to their shoulders. “…Did it? Did he love you later?”
Sam doesn’t know, doesn’t want to know.
The storm outside continues to rage on, and Jonah seems to be ignoring it purposefully and aggressively. The sound of the rain on the roof above them is calming when the thunder is distant and the lightning is out of sight, and Sam is finding it hard to stay awake.
“I’ll get you to Albuquerque, I swear,” he mumbles into the pillow, sleepiness washing through him, weighing down his eyelids. “Tomorrow, you’ll be there, I’ll get you there…”
“I know,” Jonah assures him, and then reaches to turn off the bedside lamp that’s been wavering and buzzing for the past hour. “Don’t worry about it. I’m leaving stuff behind; it doesn’t matter where I’m going or when I get there.”
They turn over, their tank top exposing the warm freckled skin of their shoulders and much of their back, and Sam rouses himself into a stronger state of wakefulness when he sees something strange through his eyelashes. He squints in the dark, deciphers the odd black strokes below the notch in Jonah’s neck as Hebrew letters. It could pass for a tattoo from farther away, but in such close proximity it’s clear that it’s an imprint, like if he were to touch it he would find ridges where the letters begin.
He’s more familiar with Latin because being a hunter requires exorcism spells, and if you don’t know them by heart you’re fucked, but he’s able to put the words together piece by piece:
.קום לך אל נינוה
Goosebumps jump out on his arms and the back of his neck, and he closes his eyes against the bold branding on Jonah’s skin.
-
He thinks he’d dreamt it, or he prays that’s what it had been. He knows watching Dean die again had been a dream, because as real as it had felt (blood everywhere, hot and metallic; his brother clammy and pale and struggling to breathe; the slow slump of his body as life faded out of it), it had already happened. And as much as he wants to change the ending, he can’t.
It’s what had come after that he isn’t sure about. He can’t tell where reality starts up again, or if it ever had.
He remembers, dream or no, rolling off of the creaky motel mattress and searching blindly for the trashcan in the corner of the room. He remembers being violently ill and trying his damnedest to keep quiet even as tears roll down his flushed face. He closes his eyes and Dean’s stare back at him, changing color each time he blinks, from trees in the summertime to oil slick on asphalt.
His fingers curl into the dirty carpet as he retches a second time.
Jonah stirs behind him and pulls back the blankets, sliding out of bed with a grace that seems surreal at four in the morning.
“Are you sick?”
The nausea recedes enough for him to speak. “Nightmare,” he manages, and then turns back to the bin, breathing heavily through his mouth.
They join him on the floor, and for a moment in the dimness, their eyes look black, too. Sam’s whole body reacts when he heaves, rocking him forward as another gag rips up his throat, strings of saliva dripping from his lips like ectoplasm, like he’s expelling the ghosts that haunt him. Jonah rests a hand on his spine, offering some comfort.
“We can stay,” they whisper, “if you need. We have time.”
“Don’t have time,” he chokes. “I don’t have time, I need to—to find him, I have to.”
“Does he want to be found?”
His heart stutters and he bows his head, letting the rest of his tears fall into the bin with a faint crinkle from the plastic lining.
“Someone’s trying to find me, too. And believe me, Sam, all we want is to be able to stop running.”
“Then why don’t you?”
Jonah’s expression gains more shadows. “The game only ends when the cat quits chasing the mouse. The mouse stops running and it gets eaten. You told me you’ve done your fair share of running just like me, just like your brother. So don’t act like it’s that easy ‘cause you know it’s not.”
What happens after is a blur. Jonah might have had Sam rinse his mouth and then dumped the trash, which makes the most sense, but there aren’t many times where things are as simple as that. And that’s why he can’t be certain that what came next wasn’t real.
The two boys (Jonah isn’t a boy, Sam corrects himself, despite their name and general appearance. There’s still ambiguity in them, in their body; the strength of their jaw and the soft curve of their shoulders, their thick brows and long lashes) slip back into bed, Sam covered in a light sheen of cold sweat, Jonah wound up and antsy. The storm surges on around them, showing no signs of subsiding, and Jonah keeps scratching at the mark on their back like it’s an old burn:
.קום לך אל נינוה
“Where’d you get that from?” Sam asks.
Jonah flips over, stares Sam dead in the eye, and says, “I don’t know. I don’t remember.”
“It’s beautiful,” Sam finds himself saying, even though it looks ancient and powerful and rouses unease in him. It is beautiful, but not in a gentle way. It’s the kind of beauty that terrifies, the kind you can’t look at for too long.
“You think so?”
“Yeah.”
That’s not even what Sam’s hung up on, although that’s part of it. No, it’s the moment when Jonah props themself on their elbows and kisses him, and all the moments that follow.
He tells them no at first. Or rather, he makes a startled noise and scrambles away from their touch. “What—what are you doing?”
The space above the bridge of Jonah’s nose creases with confusion. “You… you don’t want…?”
“Jonah, I don’t know you.”
“I’m twenty-five, this is okay.”
“That’s not what I meant.” But it does lower his panic. “I just—I don’t want you doing something you’ll regret.”
The furrow in Jonah’s brow deepens. Then it melts away and they’re smiling. “You said you thought I should stop running. I’m giving that to you; this is me standing still, at least until the sun comes up.”
“You don’t want to do this, I promise you—“
“Yes, I do.” Jonah takes Sam’s face in their hands, their thumbs running across his cheekbones. “Just tell me you want it, too.” Their pupils are blown wide, circled by a thin ring of navy, as if they had pulled it from the fabric of the night sky and used it to see through. “No one’s watching us, no one’s gonna hear.”
He’s exhausted, he needs rest, but Hell if Jonah isn’t gorgeous, and he’d do anything right now to forget his life, his tragedies, his stories. He wouldn't do this if he thought he could make it through the night without it. Without forgetting.
“If I lose myself—“ he starts, unsure of where he's going with that or what he means.
“’S okay,” Jonah says. “Retrace your steps; you’ll find you again.”
“Is that what you’re doing?”
Jonah moves until their forehead touches Sam’s. “It’s the exact opposite of what I’m doing. But you’re a good man, one of the best, I think. You’re worth finding.”
They kiss him, and this time Sam doesn’t protest. Jonah tastes like the sea, like saltwater and warmth and the rain, and Sam guides them down onto the mattress, holding them by the small of their back.
“I don’t have anything to use—“
“I’m clean—“
“I meant for the, you know, the other thing—“
“I’m not built with that kind of equipment.”
Sam stops, sits up. “Oh.”
“Yeah, oh. Now come on.” Jonah intertwines their fingers at the nape of his neck and pulls him in.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” Sam says into their collarbones, aware of every move he makes, every part of their body he touches, every bone he could break if he isn’t careful.
“You won’t hurt me,” Jonah promises. “I trust you.”
How, Sam wonders, can this kid (he can’t call them a kid anymore, he’s about to fuck them, they are not a kid) trust a stranger? Sam doesn’t trust them, not even with their hand around his dick and his tongue in their mouth. He doesn’t know what they’re running from, he doesn’t know their story.
His ability to think wanes the harder he gets. They’re small and thin but they’ve got him in a vice-like grip, drawing low moans from his chest and causing heat to pool in his stomach. The building tension has the muscles in his thighs quivering, and he sinks into the divide between Jonah’s legs, creates friction from the movement of his hips. Then he puts his fingers there, one after another until there are three, and Jonah digs their nails into Sam’s shoulder blades, their own body moving in tandem with his. Sam finds their throat and rolls the delicate skin in his teeth, earning a whine from Jonah and more scratches raked down his back.
“In me,” they growl, feral and feverish. “Get your stupid dick in me and quit playing games.”
“Need a second, don’t want to hurt you,” Sam repeats, but is cut short by Jonah grabbing a fistful of his hair and pulling.
“Now you’re hurt. So go ahead and make us even.”
It’s not even five a.m. and he’s fucking a stranger, trying to go slow in a last-ditch effort not to cause them any pain. But he doesn’t have anything to slick up with, and skin against skin chafes raw no matter what, and they’re both panting and dripping sweat, and God, it’s so good. Jonah never lets go of his hair, and their fingers dig into his scalp, pull hard on the strands caught in their grasp. It hurts, and it hurts badly, but goddamn, he can forget everything now—
“This alright?” They ask, buried in the crook of his shoulder and gasping for breath.
“It’s alright,” Sam assures them. “It’s perfect, you’re perfect.”
“Don’t get mushy on me.” But Sam can feel them smile into his neck.
A sharp cry of pain and pleasure blooms from Jonah’s lungs, because Sam had lost his rhythm and had gone from driving in halfway to striking home. Guilt immediately hits him square in the chest.
“Shit, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—“
“Oh my God, shut up and do it again.”
It doesn’t take long because they’re both desperate, tense with rage at the world and the need to let go of what's behind them. That unquenchable desire to become anonymous, to blend into someone else in a cheap motel bed, to forget for just one night before their lives resume and they're caught in the whirlwind-- it burns in both of them like holy fire. It's white hot and it purifies.
Jonah comes with a noise that Sam will remember until the day he dies (for real, when it's permanent, and isn't it ridiculous that he needs to specify that?), and he quickly follows suit, barely having half a mind to pull out before he does.
He collapses onto the sheets next to them, watching how they blink up at him, lashes fluttering like butterfly wings. His arm circles around their shoulders, brushing over the words on their back--
--קום לך אל נינוה
and the two of them slowly drift under.
-
The memory—dream—brings blood rushing to his cheeks, staining them red. That’s all it is, a dream. A bizarre one, but a dream nonetheless. Outside the realm of reality.
Except he’s naked, and the sheets are sticky, and when he catches sight of Jonah pulling on their boots, there’s a rather large purple splotch on their neck that hadn’t been there before.
“Did we…?” Sam trails off. He’s not finishing that sentence, absolutely not.
“Yeah,” they reply anyways. “Don’t look so embarrassed. It was good. Better than the other times I’ve done it with someone.”
Sam gets out of bed and starts searching for his clothes. “And you’re… you’re okay?”
“You give yourself too much credit. You don’t have the ability to tear me in half. Leaving me sore… that’s different.”
Sam sits on the mattress as he tugs on his jeans. The whole thing reeks of sex, and he’s slapped in the face with a very real fear that he’s just bought Jonah a death sentence. Panic floods him, robs him of the ability to breathe.
“Hey, hey.” Jonah takes a seat next to him, places a palm on his shoulder. “What’s going on with you?”
“We shouldn’t have done it.” Sam can’t even look at them, instead chooses to focus on his trembling hands. “This was such a big mistake.”
“Was it bad for you?” Jonah’s deadpan tone helps him to snap out of it a little.
“What? No, no, of course not. You were—it was—shit, I’m sorry, we just shouldn’t have done it, I shouldn’t have...”
Jonah is quiet; processing the fragments of sentences Sam’s given them. “I’m not sure I see what there is to regret, Sam. I mean, it was good for us both, you didn’t break me, and neither of us contracted herpes. So… I dunno, I’d call that a win in the grand scheme of one night stands.”
Is this what it’s like for normal people (Jonah can’t possibly be normal, not with that imprint on their spine and the obscure past they’re running from)? To not know what will kill you, to be oblivious to fate? To not know where your story is headed?
“This doesn’t have to mean anything, if you’ve got a girl at home. Or a boy. Or another gender-nonconforming person.”
Sam combs a hand through his hair, and then stops when he remembers how Jonah had had it in their fist not too long ago.
He can’t tell them; he must already seem crazy from what he’d told them last night, and he’s not looking to add onto that list. He’ll let them be, leave them in the safety of their oblivion.
“No, I—I don’t have anybody.”
Jonah grins, crooked and devilish. “Well in that case, you’ve got me ‘till Albuquerque.”
-
The storm hasn’t stopped, hasn’t even slowed, but it’s easier to see in the daylight and Sam is okay to drive. For the first hour, Jonah watches the rain, radiates homesickness and grief, and Sam wants to ask why they’re trying to escape something they miss so much. It’s better not to know.
The second hour ticks by, harmless. No demons swoop out of nowhere and gut Jonah from the backseat. The earth doesn’t open up and swallow them. No bolts of lightning strike through the top of the car.
By the time the two of them reach Valmora, Sam has relaxed, albeit only slightly. Jonah sneaks a bottle of soda and a bag of M&Ms in their jacket, because they’ve “gotta save cash for Greyhounds and Amtrak routes.”
When they make it across the border to New Mexico, Jonah’s found Dean’s cassette tapes.
“I didn’t think there were still people who owned cassettes,” Jonah says. A part of Sam thinks he should be pissed that they’re going through Dean’s stuff, but they’re handling the tapes with great care, looking at them like works of art, and Sam thinks Dean would have loved Jonah for that.
If he lost himself the night before, he’s found now. Dean forces his way to the front of his mind, where he should be, whether his eyes are green or black or empty. It’s still about Dean. It’s always been about Dean.
“What if he left because he doesn’t want you getting hurt?”
“I’m an adult, I can handle myself.”
“Okay, and I also happen to be an adult, but that didn’t prevent you from worrying you’d snap me like a twig,” Jonah points out. “He might have left to keep you safe.”
“Is that why you’re running? To keep people safe?” That jab hadn’t been necessary, and Sam wishes he could take it back as soon as he says it. “Look, all I mean—“
“I know what you meant.” Jonah’s gaze is hardened and fixed on the road in front of them. “And you’re right. I can’t run forever, can’t spend the rest of my life going nowhere. But that doesn’t mean I’m not gonna.”
-
The rain worsens in Santa Fe, and it’s starting to get weird. Storms don’t hold such a large radius, and there’s no news on potential hurricanes or flooding in the southwest.
Sam spares a glance at Jonah and the brand that peaks out from under their collar. It looks angrier than it did yesterday.
Yeah, there’s definitely no correlation.
It’s not like he can change their mind and convince them to go back to wherever they’re running from. It would be futile; Jonah’s relentless and unapologetic, not to mention the fact it would be abysmally hypocritical. If someone had suggested it to him, ten years younger with a duffel bag slung over his shoulder and a scholarship to Stanford clutched in his hand like a lifeline, he wouldn’t put up with it for a second. This is my future, this is who I want to be.
But that ‘screw the family business’ mentality hadn’t lasted long. Maybe if things had been different, if Jess hadn’t died (don’t think about it, don’t think about it, don’t think about it) and he’d gotten that full ride to law school, he might have become the person he thought he would, back when he was eighteen, bright-eyed and bold.
If it weren’t his own pathetic excuse for a life, he might laugh. But it is his. This is what he’s got to work with. And he’s going to make it work.
Maybe Jonah’s trying to make it work, too.
-
He parks by the Greyhound station in Albuquerque because Jonah doesn’t tell him to go anywhere specific and they’d kept mentioning Greyhound buses. It’s a small building for such a major city, but it’s open and there are people milling about beneath their umbrellas, waiting to go home or to leave home-- or in Jonah’s case, to go nowhere at all.
Sam gets out of the car and is almost instantly soaked by the torrential downpour. Jonah pulls their hood up over their head, but it does nothing. Both of them hurry inside the building, and Jonah pays for a ticket to Phoenix with a wad of crumpled twenties.
They both stand under the awning, out of the rain, waiting.
He’s asking for a fight by asking, he realizes, but the silence is gnawing at his brain and he doesn’t care. “Are you sure you wanna do this?”
Jonah looks at him the same way they did before they kissed him last night in the motel, and Jesus, it feels like lifetimes have passed since he picked them up outside Lebanon.
Instead of the short-tempered reply Sam is expecting, Jonah responds with, “What else am I gonna do?”
“You could go home.”
“Not an option.”
“What the hell are you running from, Jonah?” I could help you.
Jonah clenches their jaw, adjusts the strap on their backpack. It lasts less than a second, but their line of vision flickers to the rumbling grey sky, and suddenly Sam understands everything.
“You know the story,” Sam says. “You know what happens if you keep running.”
“I’m not gonna get swallowed by a freakin’ Megalodon,” Jonah snaps. “Why do you think I’m hitchhiking all over the middle of the country? I told you—the ocean’s where things get lost. I’m not fucking around with something like that.”
“You’ll wear yourself down until you have nothing left,” he says, his tone leaving no room for arguments. “That’s when they’ll get you, when you’re out of steam and defenseless. And they won’t be kind with you.”
“Then what do you want me to do, huh?” Jonah’s eyes are watering and Sam’s heart splinters. “You think I should give in?”
“No, I think you should pick your battles. You can’t win this one. You can’t beat them.”
So much for letting them have their oblivion.
Jonah shakes their head, takes a faltering step backwards. “I can’t. I can’t say yes, I can’t preach for them. I won’t.”
“They aren’t giving you a choice.” Sam takes them by the shoulders, steadies them. "You have to, even if it's just to keep yourself safe, please, Jonah... Please."
A few tears slip down Jonah’s cheeks, drip off their chin and collect with the rain. Then a large Greyhound pulls around the corner. Jonah takes a deep, wavering breath, and steps out of Sam's hold, into the downpour. They turn back to look at Sam, tired and scared, and Sam is helpless.
“If they catch me, they catch me,” Jonah says, and offers a weak, shaky grin that isn’t fooling anyone. “But I'm not gonna throw in the towel and call it quits just yet. Who knows? Whether a Megalodon swallows me whole or not, I might get a story written about me, too. And you know me; I'm a sucker for stories."
Sam watches as they board the Greyhound, doesn’t look away until they’ve disappeared completely behind the tinted windows. A few minutes pass, a new driver gets in, and the bus is leaving the station.
Thunder booms and Sam winces.
One one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand…
He gets back in the car, shotgun empty and worn black leather staring at him once more. He sits there for a while, not even thinking, just sitting and breathing and surviving, and it’s not enough.
Albuquerque is a few miles behind him, caught up in the rest of the ghosts of cities that stream behind the tailpipe, when the rain stops.
-
We all flee
from uncomfortable conversations
the drip of a hospital IV
the truths we don't want to own
the work we don't want to do.
Now we're in the belly of the whale,
someplace deep and strange.