ten thousand miles [spn][one]
Jul. 5th, 2009 12:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mimblexwimbleThe oldest hath borne most: we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.
~ King Lear
10,000 miles
My own true love
10,000 miles or more
The rocks may melt
And the seas may burn
If I should not return
~ 10,000 Miles, Mary Chapin Carpenter
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.
~ King Lear
10,000 miles
My own true love
10,000 miles or more
The rocks may melt
And the seas may burn
If I should not return
~ 10,000 Miles, Mary Chapin Carpenter
On Saturday, December 27th, Sam and Dean find themselves at another grubby motel room in the middle of nowhere. They’re investigating a rash of brutal murders in the area. Five infants buried alive. Dean thinks it’s a restless spirit, but they have no evidence to support this. No violent deaths – aside from the ones they’re investigating, which don’t count because babies don’t hold grudges. Sam’s beginning to think these murders might not be supernatural at all, but Dean isn’t ready to accept that, so they sit across from each other at the too-small coffee table, flipping through obits and death certificates and newspaper clippings. Sam has his laptop open and they take turns browsing through various websites, switching when their eyes start to smart and their heads start to pound and their hearts clench uncomfortably in their chests. The internet is graphic and this case is painful and neither of them really wants to look at mutilated bodies of infants for too long. It’s 11:13 PM. Dean remembers glancing at the alarm clock on one of the nightstands.
It’s well past midnight (no one has been able to get closer than that to the time) when Dean leans back in his chair and rubs his eyes. Sam suggests they hit the sack but Dean gives a small shake of his head. He doesn’t need to say anything, because Sam knows: sleeping means risking another death and Dean won’t allow it. Already too many lives have ended before they’ve even had a chance to begin.
You sleep, Dean tells Sam in a hoarse, tired voice. Sam just gives Dean a long look, shakes his head and stands up, stretching out for the first time in hours. He walks over to the bathroom and Dean hears him splashing water on his face as he turns to face the tacky lacy curtains that clash with the occult-design of the rest of the room. There are tarot cards hanging in frames on the walls, strange symbols painted in black against red wallpaper. Sam tried to figure out what they meant earlier but hadn’t really gotten anywhere; either they were really old or really fake.
Their room in on the second story and Dean can see the neon vacancy sign flickering on and off outside their window. If he listens hard enough, he can even hear its ominous buzzing over the sound of running water and the whoosh of the occasional car rushing past on the road below. It’s a quiet night. Sam’s in the bathroom for a little less than a minute. No time for anything worth investigating.
At around 3:15 AM, when even the sounds of cars outside have vanished and Dean’s taken to glancing at his watch every five seconds in the hope that it’s finally morning, Sam brings up the possibility of this case not being supernatural-related again. Dean ignores him because he’s good at it and after a while, Sam kindly changes the subject; he wonders if there’s any place that’ll sell coffee at this time. Dean recalls a twenty-four hours gas station he spotted on the drive here, about three miles away. Dean doesn’t want Sam to drive, not when he’s as tired as he is now, but Sam insists and in the end, as always, he gives in. He tosses Sam the keys to the Impala as Sam stuffs his arms into a jacket.
Just one coffee? he asks.
Three, mutters Dean, squinting at the laptop. And if the lady behind the counter’s hot, buy her one too.
If there’s even a lady behind the counter, Sam mutters, unlocking the door. Dean looks up and grins and says there was when they drove by. Sam shakes his head and gives an exasperated laugh before walking out into the cold December night.
Remember the extra sugar, Dean calls, already craving the sweetness more than the caffeine, and the door snaps shut.
It’s 3:19 AM and the last time Dean ever sees Sam.
-
Those are some of the facts and that’s what this case is made of. There are a whole lot of them, little tiny details about Sam and Dean and their life together that none of us ever really knew, and all of them have been hammered into our heads over and over again. They don’t mean anything, though, because they never led to Sam.
-
Dean falls asleep in his chair ten minutes after Sam leaves. When he wakes up, he peers blearily at his watch. He doesn’t remember exactly, but afterwards, he says it was somewhere around 6:40 AM. He stands and stretches out the kinks in his back and neck and then stumbles over to the bathroom. When Bobby wants to know, some weeks later, why he wasn’t immediately aware of Sam’s absence, Dean tells us that he thinks he caught sight of the mussed sheets on one of the single beds and just assumed Sam was under them. He so often was.
Dean answers the call of nature, brushes his teeth and splashes water on his face before leaving the bathroom. When he glances over at the beds again, and realizes that Sam isn’t asleep, his first thought is that he’s gone out to get breakfast; the job automatically goes to whoever gets up first.
So Dean sits back down at the table and pages through the notes he’s made on the case, restarting the laptop (which went into hibernation last night) and adding to his and Sam’s case journal as he goes along. There is a lot to read and even more to type, and the case is so disturbing that he’s easily swept away.
His phone is displaying 7:09 AM when Dean finally goes and fetches it off the nightstand to call Sam. When there’s no answer, even after twenty-six missed calls and a five-minute no-panic waiting period, Dean starts to tear the room apart. He looks for signs that Sam’s been there at all, and finds nothing. The Impala’s keys are gone, Sam’s jacket is missing, there are no coffee cups. But the sheets on the bed are wrinkled and look used and Dean doesn’t remember them being that way when Sam left.
It’s 7:21 AM when Dean’s resolve to not panic breaks and he calls Bobby.
-
At 3:20 AM Sam dashes down the steps and walks across the motel parking lot. The motel has a security guard, hired after a robbery, and he sees Sam. It’s a strange time to be going out for a drive so the guard pays fierce attention, and later, he’s able to give the police millions of details, things that wouldn’t mean anything normally. Things that shouldn’t mean anything, ever. The guard notices a man, approximately six-foot-four, with longer than average hair, broad shoulders and his hands stuffed into his pockets.
The night is especially icy, and Sam’s breath puffs out in front of him as he strides across the lot to the Impala. There’s a light tied to the neon vacancy sign’s pole, and Sam’s path takes him under it. The security guard catches a glimpse of dark jeans and a thick blue jacket zippered to the neck before darkness engulfs Sam once more. At 3:21 or thereabouts, he unlocks the driver’s side door of the Impala and slides in behind the wheel. The guard will tell the police that he thinks Sam sat in the car for about five minutes before he started the engine, and that he was probably on the phone, because the guard heard the sound of a ringtone. But he can’t be sure, because there wasn’t enough light near the Impala to illuminate the inside.
At around 3:27, Sam probably puts the key in the ignition. It takes less than seven seconds for the car to hum to a start and peel away from the parking lot tarmac.
There should be some warning, some sign that would let someone, anyone know that a tragedy is about to occur, but of course, there isn’t. It’s just a quiet Sunday morning. Pebbles and dirt crunch softly under the tires as Sam maneuvers the car onto the main road and drives off. The guard decides the kid is just another insomniac off for a midnight snack, and doesn’t think any more of it.
-
Bobby tells Dean to go out and look for the car. There haven’t been any demonic omens in the area and nothing that screams supernatural entities, so maybe Sam’s phone’s battery has just run down and he’s had car trouble. Dean wants to laugh incredulously at that, because if Sam had had car trouble, he would have pushed the car behind a tree and walked back. Three miles isn’t far to walk. And he seems to recall that someone recently invented this thing called a payphone and apparently, they’re not all that difficult to use.
But if there’s any chance that there is some Higher Power and He’s actually listening and in the mood to work a miracle, then scoffing at these little assurances and masked prayers would be a bad idea, so Dean runs a hand over his face and agrees to go look for the Impala.
Dean rejects Bobby’s suggestion of catching a ride (after all, three miles isn’t far to walk) and grabs his jacket from the chair it’s draped over. He slips his cell phone into his pocket, swipes the motel keys off the table by the door, and takes one last glance at the alarm clock on the nightstand before leaving.
It’s 7:38 AM.
-
It turns out there are no women at the gas mart – but there is a Joe.
Joe’s busy with the bikers when the bells above the mart’s front entrance jingle. Sam walks by all of them, giving a half-smile and a little stranger’s nod when they look in his direction, the uncomfortable kind you give to people you don’t know but want to be polite to, and strides past all the impulse-buy goods to the back of the store. When Dean, and then the cops, ask him, Joe tells them that it’s not strange to walk to the back. It’s where he keeps the good beer and people who pass through his mart often know their way around the aisles.
Joe had never seen Sam before in his life, but he didn’t pay too much attention to him either way.
The bikers finish their transaction (a few packs of menthols, two beers, a newspaper, a package of bread, aftershave) and leave the store. Sam returns to the front empty-handed and asks for two cups of coffee, black. Joe goes over to the coffee machine and Sam pulls a magazine out of the rack and thumbs through it.
Joe is at the coffee machine for about a minute. He sets the coffee cups in front of Sam, who returns the magazine to its rack and pulls out his wallet. That’s when his phone starts ringing. The first time it rings, Sam gets an odd look on his face, but since Joe doesn’t know Sam, he doesn’t know what the look means either. Sam ignores the phone for six rings and pulls out a couple of bills and two nickels before losing patience and pulling the phone out of his jacket. He stills owes Joe fifty cents so he gives the man a “give-me-a-minute” look and walks out of the door. Joe remembers hearing a harsh, What?, before the door closes behind Sam and the bells drown out the sound of his voice.
Joe stands there for a moment, but it looks like Sam’s going to be on the phone for a while, so he straightens out the boxes and racks on the counter as he waits. Glances impatiently at his watch, even though Sam’s not going to see him doing it. It’s 3:47 AM.
About five minutes later, Joe sees Sam get back into his car and drive off.
He never comes back for his coffee, or his money.
-
Dean finds the Impala near the first mile marker he sees, almost smack-dab in between the motel and the gas station. What gets him is that it’s parked. Intentionally. There aren’t any screech marks on the road, the driver’s door isn’t flung wide open. There isn’t even a scratch on the car. The Impala is just standing there in the winter sun, all gleaming glory. There’s no snow on it, but then, Dean’s pretty sure it wasn’t snowing last night.
And, for God’s sake, the keys are still in the ignition. None of the locks are down. It’s a surprise that the car hasn’t been stolen yet. Dean opens the door, gets in. He digs around for a few minutes, looking for anything odd. He finds three guns, a box of .45 caliber bullets, the car’s registration, two crucifixes, and a five dollar bill under the passenger seat. Aside from the indistinct smell of Sam’s cologne, there’s nothing that even vaguely indicates that Sam’s been in this car in the past few hours. No phone, no jacket, no Sam. Dean turns the key in the ignition and the radio doesn’t turn on. When he leans forward and switches it on manually, the radio doesn’t start blaring music – there aren’t even talk show voices. Just static, crackling and ominous.
Dean rings up Bobby again and relays the news. Bobby tells Dean to stop worrying. If there aren’t any signs of a struggle, then maybe Sam’s perfectly alright. Maybe he’s found a hunt, gotten sidetracked. Dean replies that Sam’s not answering his phone, and if there’s one person who always answers the phone, it’s Sam.
He’d never let me worry like this, Bobby, he says. Dean can hear the shrug in Bobby’s reply: Maybe he just gets lousy coverage, kid. Dean wants to point out that they share the same service provider and his coverage has always been relatively good, but Bobby barrels over him, tells him not to do anything stupid. Interrogating the locals is out of the question. No point in scaring the shit out of half a dozen people for no reason.
How long’s he been gone? asks Bobby.
Dean glances at his watch. 8:15 AM.
Five hours, give or take, he replies.
Give it twenty-four, says Bobby. The cops wouldn’t even look into before then, so we probably shouldn’t either.
Dean represses a snort with great difficulty. Cops know diddly squat about the real world. But he agrees not to go harass the gas station employees and to stop worrying, before ending the call.
Sam’s fine, insists Bobby, just as it disconnects. He’s fine.
Dean jabs at a few more buttons on his cell and presses the phone to his ear again, gazing around at the vast highway. There are a couple of light poles but no cameras in sight. He’s not getting lucky this time. Two cars flash past, the smell of hot rubber marking their paths. Somewhere in the distance, birds are chirping. An icy breeze slips past. The roadside is slushy with half-melted snow. After nine rings, Sam’s voice comes over the line and Dean’s heart leaps into his throat and sinks to his feet just as fast – only voice mail.
Dean hangs up without leaving a message.
He’s tucking the phone back into his jacket when a passing car slows, passenger side window coming down, and Dean’s hand twitches towards his gun.
Hey there, says the guy behind the wheel, leaning across his wife or girlfriend or whoever to get a better look. Need any help?
Just a couple of good Samaritans.
No, uh – thanks, says Dean, unaccustomed to this. He walks closer to the car, looks over his shoulder and runs a hand through his hair and then asks, You guys wouldn’t have happened to driven through here, in the past few hours or so, would you?
The woman shakes her head and the guy smiles and says, Nope. Just passing now.
Okay, says Dean. Okay. Thanks anyway.
They wave as they drive off, all happy and carefree and Dean thinks it’s a funny world.
After five minutes of standing there, watching the Toyota disappear, wondering what to do, he grabs an EMF meter from the Impala’s trunk.
He scours a fifteen foot radius around the car and finds absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. He puts away the EMF meter and stands by the car, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, watching the trees sway to the wind, running his fingers through his hair.
He makes a couple of feeble attempts to call out for Sam, feeling stupid. Sam wouldn’t still be in the area. It was too much to hope for that he’d just ducked out of the car to answer the call of nature. Unless something was seriously wrong, that did not take four-plus hours.
He calls Bobby back and tells him that he’s going to talk to the people at the gas station. Only talk, Bobby, I swear, he assures. Won’t point any guns in their faces.
Bobby’s silent for a long time and Dean hears the familiar sounds of rushing wind over the phone line. It wasn’t there ten minutes ago, the last time Dean called. You on a hunt, Bobby? Dean asks.
Nah, replies Bobby. I’m heading to you. Twenty-four hours is…
He trails off, but Dean doesn’t need him to continue.
Go talk to those people. Just don’t kill anyone, boy.
-
Dean drives over to the gas station, finds out who was on duty last night. The lady at the counter says Joe had the late shift. When Dean asks for his number, she tells him it’s not allowed, but he gives her a look and she hands it over, along with an address.
Dean spends about twenty minutes talking to Joe, asking him to relate everything he remembers. His story is pretty simple. Sam came, he saw, he left. Had a phone call, drove off in a hurry, says Joe, after Dean asks him to go over all the details for the third time. That’s it. Now would you let me go back to sleep?
It’s nothing. It’s less than nothing. Dean doesn’t have Sam’s phone to check and he has no idea who could have called him so late at night and why Sam would have reacted so oddly to it. Dean’s seen Sam’s phone’s call log. The list goes Dean, Dean, Dean, Dean, Bobby, Dean, Dean, Dean, Ellen, Dean, Dean, Dean, Dean, Dean, Dean. Who else would call Sam?
And why?
None it makes any sense at all.
Dean rings up Ellen and then Bobby again, just to ask if they called Sam last night.
Both of them say no.
Dean snaps the phone shut, rubs a hand over his face and then starts up the car.
He drives back to the motel in the hopes that somehow, Sam has returned there. But the room is just as he left it. He paces in front of the window for a moment, then sits down at the coffee table, turns to Sam’s laptop. He stands back up, drags the room’s phone to the table and dials their cell phone service provider.
He tells the man who picks up the phone that he’s lost his brother and the damned police aren’t about to do anything for twenty-four hours and the kid refuses to pick up the phone. The truth, he decides, sounds more believable than any lie he’d come up with now. Sure enough, the man on the line gives him the information with an air of sympathy.
Dean taps the numbers into their fields on the website. The map flashes onto the screen and for a long moment, Dean just stares at it. There’s no little red dot or black X or anything. He refreshes the page, just to be sure, enters the information again, asks the guy on the phone if he’s sure he gave Dean the right number.
There’s no marker, Dean says, when the man assures him the number is right. There’s nothing on the map.
Well, then your brother’s buried the phone, or thrown it into a lake. Or he’s simply out of reach of the signal, says the man from the customer service center. You sure this kid wants to be found?
Dean hangs up the phone and slams the laptop shut.
-
After Joe, the convenience store guy, no one else really sees Sam. Or, lots of people see him, they just don’t remember. Sam was never anybody to them, so it’s only natural. A couple of people recall seeing the Impala parked out on the highway, without its driver, but that’s about it.
After Joe, Sam’s story just ends.
At least for Dean, and for us.
For Sam, it might have gone on.
-
They search, not so much for everything as for anything.
At first, it’s just Dean on his own at the library, going through reports from the local Met Office, poring over maps, flipping through page after page of nothing. He looks for demonic omens, and after finding only a few of those, the usual background count that hunters have started to get used to since the Devil’s Gate was opened, he starts looking for any odd deaths or disappearances. And when he doesn’t find any, any that aren’t Sam at least, he starts looking for anything; anything abnormal, anything at all that would explain why this was happening.
Bobby arrives about two hours later, looking frazzled and old, somehow. At Dean’s surprised glance (the drive should have taken much longer), he shrugs, says, Damned kid attracts trouble like dogs attract fleas. Dean can see through the nonchalance; a five hour drive in three is no laughing matter.
They search together then, but for all the hype about two heads being better than one, after six hours of bending over a library table they haven’t gotten any closer to figuring out what might have happened to Sam. Aside from the hunt Dean and Sam were researching, the town and, in fact, all the surrounding counties, are quiet when it comes to the supernatural.
As they leave the library and exit into a blustery wind that lifts snowflakes from the trees and drops them into their hair, Bobby suggests they call the police.
Why? asks Dean. We can do their job better than they can. And we have all the information.
Bobby sighs. You went to the police before, once.
I needed pictures from one of their highway cams, says Dean. And the cop wouldn’t just let me go – took her job way too seriously. It was a one-time thing.
This is different, Dean, says Bobby. This isn’t like the other times. We need help. All the other times you had a lead. Something always led you to Sam. His disappearance fit the MO of whatever you were hunting, or there were cameras, or a lack of demonic omens – a vision, sulfur, something. We’ve got nothing, son. Everything’s absolutely normal, like it should be – except that Sam’s not here.
And I talked to a couple of local hunters while you went out for coffee, he adds, pulling his keys out of his pocket. They’ve called the local hospital and morgue. And… they’ve been combing the place where you found the Impala for signs of Sam: they’ve found jack.
Dean’s standing very still, hand glued to the Impala’s freezing door. It was supposed to have been his next move – he was going to go and search for Sam near that road again, a better search, a proper one. It was one more hopeful glimmer in his heart, one more possibility, one more chance. For a moment he wants to turn around and tell Bobby he had no right – that it was supposed to have been his job.
Bobby gets there first. It saved us time, Dean, he says softly, and Dean sighs.
He’s right, of course.
Fine, replies Dean, pulling open the Impala’s door. It creaks comfortingly at him.
We’ll talk to the police.
-
There’s so much to think about before talking to the police. There’s so much to hide. They rent out a storage compound in a shady part of town where the no-questions-asked policy is law and empty out the Impala’s trunk. They stick most of their fake IDs in the compound too, and Dean spends a long hour trying to remember which identification Sam had on him when he left. Giving the police Sam’s real name is out of the question, and it’s not like Sam has any cards with his real name on them, anyway. Even his phone is registered under an alias now.
After they’ve done all that, they go back to the motel room, the one Sam never returned to. Bobby sits Dean down and asks him to go over everything, all the details he can remember, even the tiniest thing. They have to decide what the police need to know and what they don’t. They have to figure out why Sam decided to duck out for coffee at three, why Dean removed the Impala from the side of the road, why they were in town in the first place.
By the time they’ve sifted through all the fine points and come up with their story, which is technically the truth, minus a few minor details, it’s well past midnight.
Dean calls the police and reports that his brother’s been missing for almost twenty-four hours and are they going to do anything about it? The lady who answers the phone takes his information, but pauses when he relays Sam’s age to her.
Sir, your brother isn’t a minor, she says.
It takes Dean a minute to formulate a decently sarcastic reply: So?
The woman seems to hesitate. Did your brother just not come back? Did you try calling him?
Of course I tried calling him, says Dean angrily. My brother doesn’t just get up, leave and not come back. Something happened. I wouldn’t be calling if this wasn’t serious.
Another pause, before the woman soothingly informs him that she’s going to send a squad car to their motel.
Thank you, says Dean, and then hangs up the phone. He runs his fingers through his hair, adds sarcastically under his breath, We’re saved.
Bobby gives him a long look. Don’t start doing their job for them, Dean. We did our bit, didn’t find anything. If it isn’t supernatural, it’s human and the cops know human better than we do.
The police arrive and Dean thinks they look extremely pompous. They’re two men with little black notebooks in hand, arrogance coiling off of their suits and ties – Dean has them labeled as schmucks before they sit down. They give their names and hold out their hands to shake. Dean and Bobby take them.
They have a seat and gaze around the room, taking in the oddness of it. Dean wonders if they’ll question it, but they don’t; after all, he doesn’t own the motel.
They ask the basic questions first – name (Sam Adams? asks one of the officers. Like the beer? Dean raises an eyebrow, says, No, like the Founding Father. He’s finally found a worse cop than himself.), age and detailed description – before really digging into the pot. When did Sam leave the motel? Why did he leave so late? Where did he go? What were you two going in town? How long you been on this road trip?
One of the cops sends his partner down to talk to the security guard. And then find out who was on duty at the gas mart, he adds as his partner heads to the door.
Dean stops them. Tells them he knows who was on duty, hands over Joe’s phone number and address. The police ask why he went and talked to Joe and Dean gives them an unbelieving look.
My brother went out for coffee and never came back – did you think I was just going to sit around twiddling my thumbs?
Bobby clears his throat slightly but the policemen nod. They ask for some more information (Did you find the coffee this morning? Do you think Sam came back to the room? What did Sam say to you before he left? Did you and Sam have a fight last night?), until Dean thinks they’re asking questions just to be asking questions. Finally, they get up to leave.
One of them, Detective Peter Mendel, turns around at the door and says that Sam is more than likely perfectly fine. He’s an adult, he says, as if Dean doesn’t know that, as if bad things don’t happen to adults, or as if, by being an adult, Sam’s consented to letting bad things happen to him. We’re going to give it twenty-four more hours before sending out a proper search party, he adds.
What? asks Dean incredulously. Anything could have happened by then. That’s too long.
There are no signs of foul play, says the other officer, the one whose name Dean has already forgotten. That basically means that we are under no pains to search for your brother. He’s an adult, and adults have every right to get up and never come back.
Dean opens his mouth and the officer raises a hand.
However, we will look into Sam’s disappearance, he continues, intoning in a way that’s clearly supposed to mean we’re being generous. But not until we’re sure he didn’t just hitch a ride.
He had the car, says Dean, standing.
Your brother will turn up, sir, says Mendel, not unkindly, just before he leaves.
They always do.
-
Dean regrets talking to them, regrets letting them handle the situation. Only during the darkest part of the night will he admit to himself that he couldn’t have done better or worse.
As hard as it is not to wonder if they really did everything within their power to find Sam, the fact remains – you can only find something if it is there to be found.
-
After the police leave, Bobby somehow manages to convince Dean to return to the hunt. Take your mind off things, he says, and even though Dean agrees to go, he knows that hunting isn’t the way to get his mind off things. Like trying to get your mind off a broken leg by walking.
But he goes back because he said he would. Pulls the pages and pages of research he and Sam had done last night (only last night) out from under the mattress, where he and Bobby had stashed it last-minute, and struggles into his jacket. Bobby gives him a long, hard look and says that he’ll just hole up in the room, if that’s alright with Dean. No point in driving back until we hear something from Sam, he mumbles, half under his breath. He’s heading over to the bathroom, glancing around, putting on a show of pretending that this room might not be his slice of cake.
But Dean catches how he says Sam and not the police, catches the purposefulness behind the statement. Sure thing, Bobby, he replies, as he walks out the door. Stay as long as you like.
He makes it all the way to the Impala’s door, cold but not yet shivering, when he realizes the time. It’s later than late, and the police might be willing to trudge out to a motel and interview someone, but Dean is pretty sure grieving families won’t take kindly to him showing up at their doorstep at this time uninvited.
He gets into the car anyway, because he doesn’t feel like going back to the room just yet.
The faint whiff of Sam’s cologne that was present when Dean found the car has vanished. He sits there, looks straight out of the windshield. Raises his hands, grips the steering wheel. He imagines Sam in this car, driving to the gas station. Getting out of the car, walking into the convenience store, asking for coffee. Receiving a call. Taking it. Going outside to talk, and then, for reasons unknown, just driving off into the night, without money or coffee.
Thinks, Why did you stop? Why didn’t you come back to the room? Who called you?
What happened? Is it still happening? Is there any way to stop it?
He thinks about finding the car and realizes it was pointing in the direction of the gas station, not the motel. Why would Sam turn the car around? What was the sense in that? Dean drags a hand down his face and then looks over at the passenger seat, unusually vacant. Why turn the car? he thinks. Why did you turn the car?
The wind blows, whistles through a tiny crack in the window, a high-pitched screech, a banshee’s scream. Dean reaches for the handle, rolls the window all the way up. The whistling stops.
Eventually, Dean pulls out his phone. He dials Sam’s number and lets it ring. No one answers, of course. Not Sam, not anybody.
It starts to snow again, outside. The white flakes remind Dean of Christmas, and how they celebrated, and how it was one of the best days of Dean’s life and—
And Sam should be here, always here, sitting next to him and being pissy and annoying. Not… out there.
Or wherever he is. Doing whatever he’s doing.
Sam’s voice comes on over the phone line. Hey, this is Sam. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you. If it’s an emergency, you can call my brother Dean at…
Dean finds himself clinging to the sound of Sam’s voice. He plays it over and over again in his head, hears the echoes of his own name in his brother’s voice bouncing off the inside of his skull. Recorded-Sam rattles off Dean’s number, the beep sounds, and the line falls silent, waiting expectantly.
It’s not enough. Dean’s tempted to hang up and dial again.
He doesn’t.
Instead, he musters his words and leaves a message.
He falls asleep in the car, phone only just staying in his lax fingers, as snow settles gently over the world outside. In the moments between wakefulness and dreams, he forgets and heals. He forgets about Bobby up in the motel room, who’ll have a heart attack if he wakes up to find Dean’s bed empty, he forgets finding the Impala on that empty stretch of road, he forgets the raw guilt, something bad might have happened (be happening) to Sam and I wasn’t there to stop it. He forgets that Sam’s not next to him, reading by flashlight late into the night, or sipping at his coffee, or just staring out the window and watching the snowflakes fall from the heavens.
He forgets it all.
For a while.
It’s well past midnight (no one has been able to get closer than that to the time) when Dean leans back in his chair and rubs his eyes. Sam suggests they hit the sack but Dean gives a small shake of his head. He doesn’t need to say anything, because Sam knows: sleeping means risking another death and Dean won’t allow it. Already too many lives have ended before they’ve even had a chance to begin.
You sleep, Dean tells Sam in a hoarse, tired voice. Sam just gives Dean a long look, shakes his head and stands up, stretching out for the first time in hours. He walks over to the bathroom and Dean hears him splashing water on his face as he turns to face the tacky lacy curtains that clash with the occult-design of the rest of the room. There are tarot cards hanging in frames on the walls, strange symbols painted in black against red wallpaper. Sam tried to figure out what they meant earlier but hadn’t really gotten anywhere; either they were really old or really fake.
Their room in on the second story and Dean can see the neon vacancy sign flickering on and off outside their window. If he listens hard enough, he can even hear its ominous buzzing over the sound of running water and the whoosh of the occasional car rushing past on the road below. It’s a quiet night. Sam’s in the bathroom for a little less than a minute. No time for anything worth investigating.
At around 3:15 AM, when even the sounds of cars outside have vanished and Dean’s taken to glancing at his watch every five seconds in the hope that it’s finally morning, Sam brings up the possibility of this case not being supernatural-related again. Dean ignores him because he’s good at it and after a while, Sam kindly changes the subject; he wonders if there’s any place that’ll sell coffee at this time. Dean recalls a twenty-four hours gas station he spotted on the drive here, about three miles away. Dean doesn’t want Sam to drive, not when he’s as tired as he is now, but Sam insists and in the end, as always, he gives in. He tosses Sam the keys to the Impala as Sam stuffs his arms into a jacket.
Just one coffee? he asks.
Three, mutters Dean, squinting at the laptop. And if the lady behind the counter’s hot, buy her one too.
If there’s even a lady behind the counter, Sam mutters, unlocking the door. Dean looks up and grins and says there was when they drove by. Sam shakes his head and gives an exasperated laugh before walking out into the cold December night.
Remember the extra sugar, Dean calls, already craving the sweetness more than the caffeine, and the door snaps shut.
It’s 3:19 AM and the last time Dean ever sees Sam.
Those are some of the facts and that’s what this case is made of. There are a whole lot of them, little tiny details about Sam and Dean and their life together that none of us ever really knew, and all of them have been hammered into our heads over and over again. They don’t mean anything, though, because they never led to Sam.
Dean falls asleep in his chair ten minutes after Sam leaves. When he wakes up, he peers blearily at his watch. He doesn’t remember exactly, but afterwards, he says it was somewhere around 6:40 AM. He stands and stretches out the kinks in his back and neck and then stumbles over to the bathroom. When Bobby wants to know, some weeks later, why he wasn’t immediately aware of Sam’s absence, Dean tells us that he thinks he caught sight of the mussed sheets on one of the single beds and just assumed Sam was under them. He so often was.
Dean answers the call of nature, brushes his teeth and splashes water on his face before leaving the bathroom. When he glances over at the beds again, and realizes that Sam isn’t asleep, his first thought is that he’s gone out to get breakfast; the job automatically goes to whoever gets up first.
So Dean sits back down at the table and pages through the notes he’s made on the case, restarting the laptop (which went into hibernation last night) and adding to his and Sam’s case journal as he goes along. There is a lot to read and even more to type, and the case is so disturbing that he’s easily swept away.
His phone is displaying 7:09 AM when Dean finally goes and fetches it off the nightstand to call Sam. When there’s no answer, even after twenty-six missed calls and a five-minute no-panic waiting period, Dean starts to tear the room apart. He looks for signs that Sam’s been there at all, and finds nothing. The Impala’s keys are gone, Sam’s jacket is missing, there are no coffee cups. But the sheets on the bed are wrinkled and look used and Dean doesn’t remember them being that way when Sam left.
It’s 7:21 AM when Dean’s resolve to not panic breaks and he calls Bobby.
At 3:20 AM Sam dashes down the steps and walks across the motel parking lot. The motel has a security guard, hired after a robbery, and he sees Sam. It’s a strange time to be going out for a drive so the guard pays fierce attention, and later, he’s able to give the police millions of details, things that wouldn’t mean anything normally. Things that shouldn’t mean anything, ever. The guard notices a man, approximately six-foot-four, with longer than average hair, broad shoulders and his hands stuffed into his pockets.
The night is especially icy, and Sam’s breath puffs out in front of him as he strides across the lot to the Impala. There’s a light tied to the neon vacancy sign’s pole, and Sam’s path takes him under it. The security guard catches a glimpse of dark jeans and a thick blue jacket zippered to the neck before darkness engulfs Sam once more. At 3:21 or thereabouts, he unlocks the driver’s side door of the Impala and slides in behind the wheel. The guard will tell the police that he thinks Sam sat in the car for about five minutes before he started the engine, and that he was probably on the phone, because the guard heard the sound of a ringtone. But he can’t be sure, because there wasn’t enough light near the Impala to illuminate the inside.
At around 3:27, Sam probably puts the key in the ignition. It takes less than seven seconds for the car to hum to a start and peel away from the parking lot tarmac.
There should be some warning, some sign that would let someone, anyone know that a tragedy is about to occur, but of course, there isn’t. It’s just a quiet Sunday morning. Pebbles and dirt crunch softly under the tires as Sam maneuvers the car onto the main road and drives off. The guard decides the kid is just another insomniac off for a midnight snack, and doesn’t think any more of it.
Bobby tells Dean to go out and look for the car. There haven’t been any demonic omens in the area and nothing that screams supernatural entities, so maybe Sam’s phone’s battery has just run down and he’s had car trouble. Dean wants to laugh incredulously at that, because if Sam had had car trouble, he would have pushed the car behind a tree and walked back. Three miles isn’t far to walk. And he seems to recall that someone recently invented this thing called a payphone and apparently, they’re not all that difficult to use.
But if there’s any chance that there is some Higher Power and He’s actually listening and in the mood to work a miracle, then scoffing at these little assurances and masked prayers would be a bad idea, so Dean runs a hand over his face and agrees to go look for the Impala.
Dean rejects Bobby’s suggestion of catching a ride (after all, three miles isn’t far to walk) and grabs his jacket from the chair it’s draped over. He slips his cell phone into his pocket, swipes the motel keys off the table by the door, and takes one last glance at the alarm clock on the nightstand before leaving.
It’s 7:38 AM.
It turns out there are no women at the gas mart – but there is a Joe.
Joe’s busy with the bikers when the bells above the mart’s front entrance jingle. Sam walks by all of them, giving a half-smile and a little stranger’s nod when they look in his direction, the uncomfortable kind you give to people you don’t know but want to be polite to, and strides past all the impulse-buy goods to the back of the store. When Dean, and then the cops, ask him, Joe tells them that it’s not strange to walk to the back. It’s where he keeps the good beer and people who pass through his mart often know their way around the aisles.
Joe had never seen Sam before in his life, but he didn’t pay too much attention to him either way.
The bikers finish their transaction (a few packs of menthols, two beers, a newspaper, a package of bread, aftershave) and leave the store. Sam returns to the front empty-handed and asks for two cups of coffee, black. Joe goes over to the coffee machine and Sam pulls a magazine out of the rack and thumbs through it.
Joe is at the coffee machine for about a minute. He sets the coffee cups in front of Sam, who returns the magazine to its rack and pulls out his wallet. That’s when his phone starts ringing. The first time it rings, Sam gets an odd look on his face, but since Joe doesn’t know Sam, he doesn’t know what the look means either. Sam ignores the phone for six rings and pulls out a couple of bills and two nickels before losing patience and pulling the phone out of his jacket. He stills owes Joe fifty cents so he gives the man a “give-me-a-minute” look and walks out of the door. Joe remembers hearing a harsh, What?, before the door closes behind Sam and the bells drown out the sound of his voice.
Joe stands there for a moment, but it looks like Sam’s going to be on the phone for a while, so he straightens out the boxes and racks on the counter as he waits. Glances impatiently at his watch, even though Sam’s not going to see him doing it. It’s 3:47 AM.
About five minutes later, Joe sees Sam get back into his car and drive off.
He never comes back for his coffee, or his money.
Dean finds the Impala near the first mile marker he sees, almost smack-dab in between the motel and the gas station. What gets him is that it’s parked. Intentionally. There aren’t any screech marks on the road, the driver’s door isn’t flung wide open. There isn’t even a scratch on the car. The Impala is just standing there in the winter sun, all gleaming glory. There’s no snow on it, but then, Dean’s pretty sure it wasn’t snowing last night.
And, for God’s sake, the keys are still in the ignition. None of the locks are down. It’s a surprise that the car hasn’t been stolen yet. Dean opens the door, gets in. He digs around for a few minutes, looking for anything odd. He finds three guns, a box of .45 caliber bullets, the car’s registration, two crucifixes, and a five dollar bill under the passenger seat. Aside from the indistinct smell of Sam’s cologne, there’s nothing that even vaguely indicates that Sam’s been in this car in the past few hours. No phone, no jacket, no Sam. Dean turns the key in the ignition and the radio doesn’t turn on. When he leans forward and switches it on manually, the radio doesn’t start blaring music – there aren’t even talk show voices. Just static, crackling and ominous.
Dean rings up Bobby again and relays the news. Bobby tells Dean to stop worrying. If there aren’t any signs of a struggle, then maybe Sam’s perfectly alright. Maybe he’s found a hunt, gotten sidetracked. Dean replies that Sam’s not answering his phone, and if there’s one person who always answers the phone, it’s Sam.
He’d never let me worry like this, Bobby, he says. Dean can hear the shrug in Bobby’s reply: Maybe he just gets lousy coverage, kid. Dean wants to point out that they share the same service provider and his coverage has always been relatively good, but Bobby barrels over him, tells him not to do anything stupid. Interrogating the locals is out of the question. No point in scaring the shit out of half a dozen people for no reason.
How long’s he been gone? asks Bobby.
Dean glances at his watch. 8:15 AM.
Five hours, give or take, he replies.
Give it twenty-four, says Bobby. The cops wouldn’t even look into before then, so we probably shouldn’t either.
Dean represses a snort with great difficulty. Cops know diddly squat about the real world. But he agrees not to go harass the gas station employees and to stop worrying, before ending the call.
Sam’s fine, insists Bobby, just as it disconnects. He’s fine.
Dean jabs at a few more buttons on his cell and presses the phone to his ear again, gazing around at the vast highway. There are a couple of light poles but no cameras in sight. He’s not getting lucky this time. Two cars flash past, the smell of hot rubber marking their paths. Somewhere in the distance, birds are chirping. An icy breeze slips past. The roadside is slushy with half-melted snow. After nine rings, Sam’s voice comes over the line and Dean’s heart leaps into his throat and sinks to his feet just as fast – only voice mail.
Dean hangs up without leaving a message.
He’s tucking the phone back into his jacket when a passing car slows, passenger side window coming down, and Dean’s hand twitches towards his gun.
Hey there, says the guy behind the wheel, leaning across his wife or girlfriend or whoever to get a better look. Need any help?
Just a couple of good Samaritans.
No, uh – thanks, says Dean, unaccustomed to this. He walks closer to the car, looks over his shoulder and runs a hand through his hair and then asks, You guys wouldn’t have happened to driven through here, in the past few hours or so, would you?
The woman shakes her head and the guy smiles and says, Nope. Just passing now.
Okay, says Dean. Okay. Thanks anyway.
They wave as they drive off, all happy and carefree and Dean thinks it’s a funny world.
After five minutes of standing there, watching the Toyota disappear, wondering what to do, he grabs an EMF meter from the Impala’s trunk.
He scours a fifteen foot radius around the car and finds absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. He puts away the EMF meter and stands by the car, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, watching the trees sway to the wind, running his fingers through his hair.
He makes a couple of feeble attempts to call out for Sam, feeling stupid. Sam wouldn’t still be in the area. It was too much to hope for that he’d just ducked out of the car to answer the call of nature. Unless something was seriously wrong, that did not take four-plus hours.
He calls Bobby back and tells him that he’s going to talk to the people at the gas station. Only talk, Bobby, I swear, he assures. Won’t point any guns in their faces.
Bobby’s silent for a long time and Dean hears the familiar sounds of rushing wind over the phone line. It wasn’t there ten minutes ago, the last time Dean called. You on a hunt, Bobby? Dean asks.
Nah, replies Bobby. I’m heading to you. Twenty-four hours is…
He trails off, but Dean doesn’t need him to continue.
Go talk to those people. Just don’t kill anyone, boy.
Dean drives over to the gas station, finds out who was on duty last night. The lady at the counter says Joe had the late shift. When Dean asks for his number, she tells him it’s not allowed, but he gives her a look and she hands it over, along with an address.
Dean spends about twenty minutes talking to Joe, asking him to relate everything he remembers. His story is pretty simple. Sam came, he saw, he left. Had a phone call, drove off in a hurry, says Joe, after Dean asks him to go over all the details for the third time. That’s it. Now would you let me go back to sleep?
It’s nothing. It’s less than nothing. Dean doesn’t have Sam’s phone to check and he has no idea who could have called him so late at night and why Sam would have reacted so oddly to it. Dean’s seen Sam’s phone’s call log. The list goes Dean, Dean, Dean, Dean, Bobby, Dean, Dean, Dean, Ellen, Dean, Dean, Dean, Dean, Dean, Dean. Who else would call Sam?
And why?
None it makes any sense at all.
Dean rings up Ellen and then Bobby again, just to ask if they called Sam last night.
Both of them say no.
Dean snaps the phone shut, rubs a hand over his face and then starts up the car.
He drives back to the motel in the hopes that somehow, Sam has returned there. But the room is just as he left it. He paces in front of the window for a moment, then sits down at the coffee table, turns to Sam’s laptop. He stands back up, drags the room’s phone to the table and dials their cell phone service provider.
He tells the man who picks up the phone that he’s lost his brother and the damned police aren’t about to do anything for twenty-four hours and the kid refuses to pick up the phone. The truth, he decides, sounds more believable than any lie he’d come up with now. Sure enough, the man on the line gives him the information with an air of sympathy.
Dean taps the numbers into their fields on the website. The map flashes onto the screen and for a long moment, Dean just stares at it. There’s no little red dot or black X or anything. He refreshes the page, just to be sure, enters the information again, asks the guy on the phone if he’s sure he gave Dean the right number.
There’s no marker, Dean says, when the man assures him the number is right. There’s nothing on the map.
Well, then your brother’s buried the phone, or thrown it into a lake. Or he’s simply out of reach of the signal, says the man from the customer service center. You sure this kid wants to be found?
Dean hangs up the phone and slams the laptop shut.
After Joe, the convenience store guy, no one else really sees Sam. Or, lots of people see him, they just don’t remember. Sam was never anybody to them, so it’s only natural. A couple of people recall seeing the Impala parked out on the highway, without its driver, but that’s about it.
After Joe, Sam’s story just ends.
At least for Dean, and for us.
For Sam, it might have gone on.
They search, not so much for everything as for anything.
At first, it’s just Dean on his own at the library, going through reports from the local Met Office, poring over maps, flipping through page after page of nothing. He looks for demonic omens, and after finding only a few of those, the usual background count that hunters have started to get used to since the Devil’s Gate was opened, he starts looking for any odd deaths or disappearances. And when he doesn’t find any, any that aren’t Sam at least, he starts looking for anything; anything abnormal, anything at all that would explain why this was happening.
Bobby arrives about two hours later, looking frazzled and old, somehow. At Dean’s surprised glance (the drive should have taken much longer), he shrugs, says, Damned kid attracts trouble like dogs attract fleas. Dean can see through the nonchalance; a five hour drive in three is no laughing matter.
They search together then, but for all the hype about two heads being better than one, after six hours of bending over a library table they haven’t gotten any closer to figuring out what might have happened to Sam. Aside from the hunt Dean and Sam were researching, the town and, in fact, all the surrounding counties, are quiet when it comes to the supernatural.
As they leave the library and exit into a blustery wind that lifts snowflakes from the trees and drops them into their hair, Bobby suggests they call the police.
Why? asks Dean. We can do their job better than they can. And we have all the information.
Bobby sighs. You went to the police before, once.
I needed pictures from one of their highway cams, says Dean. And the cop wouldn’t just let me go – took her job way too seriously. It was a one-time thing.
This is different, Dean, says Bobby. This isn’t like the other times. We need help. All the other times you had a lead. Something always led you to Sam. His disappearance fit the MO of whatever you were hunting, or there were cameras, or a lack of demonic omens – a vision, sulfur, something. We’ve got nothing, son. Everything’s absolutely normal, like it should be – except that Sam’s not here.
And I talked to a couple of local hunters while you went out for coffee, he adds, pulling his keys out of his pocket. They’ve called the local hospital and morgue. And… they’ve been combing the place where you found the Impala for signs of Sam: they’ve found jack.
Dean’s standing very still, hand glued to the Impala’s freezing door. It was supposed to have been his next move – he was going to go and search for Sam near that road again, a better search, a proper one. It was one more hopeful glimmer in his heart, one more possibility, one more chance. For a moment he wants to turn around and tell Bobby he had no right – that it was supposed to have been his job.
Bobby gets there first. It saved us time, Dean, he says softly, and Dean sighs.
He’s right, of course.
Fine, replies Dean, pulling open the Impala’s door. It creaks comfortingly at him.
We’ll talk to the police.
There’s so much to think about before talking to the police. There’s so much to hide. They rent out a storage compound in a shady part of town where the no-questions-asked policy is law and empty out the Impala’s trunk. They stick most of their fake IDs in the compound too, and Dean spends a long hour trying to remember which identification Sam had on him when he left. Giving the police Sam’s real name is out of the question, and it’s not like Sam has any cards with his real name on them, anyway. Even his phone is registered under an alias now.
After they’ve done all that, they go back to the motel room, the one Sam never returned to. Bobby sits Dean down and asks him to go over everything, all the details he can remember, even the tiniest thing. They have to decide what the police need to know and what they don’t. They have to figure out why Sam decided to duck out for coffee at three, why Dean removed the Impala from the side of the road, why they were in town in the first place.
By the time they’ve sifted through all the fine points and come up with their story, which is technically the truth, minus a few minor details, it’s well past midnight.
Dean calls the police and reports that his brother’s been missing for almost twenty-four hours and are they going to do anything about it? The lady who answers the phone takes his information, but pauses when he relays Sam’s age to her.
Sir, your brother isn’t a minor, she says.
It takes Dean a minute to formulate a decently sarcastic reply: So?
The woman seems to hesitate. Did your brother just not come back? Did you try calling him?
Of course I tried calling him, says Dean angrily. My brother doesn’t just get up, leave and not come back. Something happened. I wouldn’t be calling if this wasn’t serious.
Another pause, before the woman soothingly informs him that she’s going to send a squad car to their motel.
Thank you, says Dean, and then hangs up the phone. He runs his fingers through his hair, adds sarcastically under his breath, We’re saved.
Bobby gives him a long look. Don’t start doing their job for them, Dean. We did our bit, didn’t find anything. If it isn’t supernatural, it’s human and the cops know human better than we do.
The police arrive and Dean thinks they look extremely pompous. They’re two men with little black notebooks in hand, arrogance coiling off of their suits and ties – Dean has them labeled as schmucks before they sit down. They give their names and hold out their hands to shake. Dean and Bobby take them.
They have a seat and gaze around the room, taking in the oddness of it. Dean wonders if they’ll question it, but they don’t; after all, he doesn’t own the motel.
They ask the basic questions first – name (Sam Adams? asks one of the officers. Like the beer? Dean raises an eyebrow, says, No, like the Founding Father. He’s finally found a worse cop than himself.), age and detailed description – before really digging into the pot. When did Sam leave the motel? Why did he leave so late? Where did he go? What were you two going in town? How long you been on this road trip?
One of the cops sends his partner down to talk to the security guard. And then find out who was on duty at the gas mart, he adds as his partner heads to the door.
Dean stops them. Tells them he knows who was on duty, hands over Joe’s phone number and address. The police ask why he went and talked to Joe and Dean gives them an unbelieving look.
My brother went out for coffee and never came back – did you think I was just going to sit around twiddling my thumbs?
Bobby clears his throat slightly but the policemen nod. They ask for some more information (Did you find the coffee this morning? Do you think Sam came back to the room? What did Sam say to you before he left? Did you and Sam have a fight last night?), until Dean thinks they’re asking questions just to be asking questions. Finally, they get up to leave.
One of them, Detective Peter Mendel, turns around at the door and says that Sam is more than likely perfectly fine. He’s an adult, he says, as if Dean doesn’t know that, as if bad things don’t happen to adults, or as if, by being an adult, Sam’s consented to letting bad things happen to him. We’re going to give it twenty-four more hours before sending out a proper search party, he adds.
What? asks Dean incredulously. Anything could have happened by then. That’s too long.
There are no signs of foul play, says the other officer, the one whose name Dean has already forgotten. That basically means that we are under no pains to search for your brother. He’s an adult, and adults have every right to get up and never come back.
Dean opens his mouth and the officer raises a hand.
However, we will look into Sam’s disappearance, he continues, intoning in a way that’s clearly supposed to mean we’re being generous. But not until we’re sure he didn’t just hitch a ride.
He had the car, says Dean, standing.
Your brother will turn up, sir, says Mendel, not unkindly, just before he leaves.
They always do.
Dean regrets talking to them, regrets letting them handle the situation. Only during the darkest part of the night will he admit to himself that he couldn’t have done better or worse.
As hard as it is not to wonder if they really did everything within their power to find Sam, the fact remains – you can only find something if it is there to be found.
After the police leave, Bobby somehow manages to convince Dean to return to the hunt. Take your mind off things, he says, and even though Dean agrees to go, he knows that hunting isn’t the way to get his mind off things. Like trying to get your mind off a broken leg by walking.
But he goes back because he said he would. Pulls the pages and pages of research he and Sam had done last night (only last night) out from under the mattress, where he and Bobby had stashed it last-minute, and struggles into his jacket. Bobby gives him a long, hard look and says that he’ll just hole up in the room, if that’s alright with Dean. No point in driving back until we hear something from Sam, he mumbles, half under his breath. He’s heading over to the bathroom, glancing around, putting on a show of pretending that this room might not be his slice of cake.
But Dean catches how he says Sam and not the police, catches the purposefulness behind the statement. Sure thing, Bobby, he replies, as he walks out the door. Stay as long as you like.
He makes it all the way to the Impala’s door, cold but not yet shivering, when he realizes the time. It’s later than late, and the police might be willing to trudge out to a motel and interview someone, but Dean is pretty sure grieving families won’t take kindly to him showing up at their doorstep at this time uninvited.
He gets into the car anyway, because he doesn’t feel like going back to the room just yet.
The faint whiff of Sam’s cologne that was present when Dean found the car has vanished. He sits there, looks straight out of the windshield. Raises his hands, grips the steering wheel. He imagines Sam in this car, driving to the gas station. Getting out of the car, walking into the convenience store, asking for coffee. Receiving a call. Taking it. Going outside to talk, and then, for reasons unknown, just driving off into the night, without money or coffee.
Thinks, Why did you stop? Why didn’t you come back to the room? Who called you?
What happened? Is it still happening? Is there any way to stop it?
He thinks about finding the car and realizes it was pointing in the direction of the gas station, not the motel. Why would Sam turn the car around? What was the sense in that? Dean drags a hand down his face and then looks over at the passenger seat, unusually vacant. Why turn the car? he thinks. Why did you turn the car?
The wind blows, whistles through a tiny crack in the window, a high-pitched screech, a banshee’s scream. Dean reaches for the handle, rolls the window all the way up. The whistling stops.
Eventually, Dean pulls out his phone. He dials Sam’s number and lets it ring. No one answers, of course. Not Sam, not anybody.
It starts to snow again, outside. The white flakes remind Dean of Christmas, and how they celebrated, and how it was one of the best days of Dean’s life and—
And Sam should be here, always here, sitting next to him and being pissy and annoying. Not… out there.
Or wherever he is. Doing whatever he’s doing.
Sam’s voice comes on over the phone line. Hey, this is Sam. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you. If it’s an emergency, you can call my brother Dean at…
Dean finds himself clinging to the sound of Sam’s voice. He plays it over and over again in his head, hears the echoes of his own name in his brother’s voice bouncing off the inside of his skull. Recorded-Sam rattles off Dean’s number, the beep sounds, and the line falls silent, waiting expectantly.
It’s not enough. Dean’s tempted to hang up and dial again.
He doesn’t.
Instead, he musters his words and leaves a message.
He falls asleep in the car, phone only just staying in his lax fingers, as snow settles gently over the world outside. In the moments between wakefulness and dreams, he forgets and heals. He forgets about Bobby up in the motel room, who’ll have a heart attack if he wakes up to find Dean’s bed empty, he forgets finding the Impala on that empty stretch of road, he forgets the raw guilt, something bad might have happened (be happening) to Sam and I wasn’t there to stop it. He forgets that Sam’s not next to him, reading by flashlight late into the night, or sipping at his coffee, or just staring out the window and watching the snowflakes fall from the heavens.
He forgets it all.
For a while.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-07-06 05:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-08 08:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-06 06:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-08 08:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-06 09:16 pm (UTC)Can't wait to continue!
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Date: 2009-07-08 08:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-08 08:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-08 08:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-10 04:14 pm (UTC)anyway, loved chapter 1. im excited to read chapter 2. :)
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Date: 2009-07-14 01:06 pm (UTC)Read on! :)
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Date: 2009-07-12 11:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-14 01:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-18 06:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-18 07:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-26 07:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-31 07:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-17 04:36 pm (UTC)Duuuuuude. I've been waiting ALL SUMMER to get time to read this, and I STILL don't have time, but I thought to myself, screw it, LOL, and NGH. I am SO HOOKED, lady. I love the tone of it, I love the way that the lack of quotation marks makes it feel more tense somehow, like remembering a bad dream, I love that I'm just as panicked and clueless at this point as Dean is, I just love everything! *hands*
I do HATE, however, that it is time to go to work. *bitchface*
I'm sure I'll be thinking about this ALL DAY HOMG. *mentally paces around in circles*
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Date: 2010-01-05 10:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-05 07:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-07 07:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-07 07:05 pm (UTC)Hurry back!