Work Text:
A long track of broken grass, feet and hooves and tires, wormed up the hill to disappear under a golden heat mirage. A caravan had passed some time after the last rain, less than four days ago.
He scanned for a lookout hill to wait on. He was following too close.
He wasn't interested in the caravan.
Dean could sleep like a rock lately.
He figured it was a perk of achieving Nirvana or atrophy of the soul, whatever you wanted to call it (not like he could care anymore). It meant that for six hours every night, he didn't have to think about the vortex of torment that he and Sam had apparently been specially bred to lie in the middle of, or the fact that he and Sam keeping each-other human was optimistic bullcrap of the first order. Not that he cared.
Just another six hours before they lost the game down the drain.
He was dozing off. Sam was rolling and sighing in the other bed, a counterpoint to the freeway noise, and just for an instant, Dean drifted—
He was falling, about to smash his skull and break his arms on rocky ground, sun-blistered grass, and he jerked, too late, but frantic to roll the fall to his shoulder, his chest—
He was sitting up in bed, the springs squeaking. He rolled over and shut his eyes again, and went to sleep for real.
"Can't you douches pick up some new tricks?" he bellowed at the empty sky.
He was on a prairie. Alone, on a prairie in the summer, in his jeans and jacket and a pair of shirts that smelled like lighter fluid and garlic. The keys were in his pocket, but he couldn't see the car.
Or a road, for that matter.
It was hot. He put the sun at his back and walked, every now and then climbing a hill to see the other side. Just more hills. Sometimes there were streams, but they were dry.
Place was ugly, too. It wasn't a Kansas or Idaho prairie—more of a Texas prairie, with sparse grass and pebbles and skies so big they wouldn't even try looking for your body. Little brambly shrubs. Spiky weeds. Vultures.
Dean climbed another hill. There was a flat rock at the top of it, and hand-sized rocks all around, so he stacked some into a Roman archway he could pass his arm through. Man was here.
When he looked up, out of the wilderness a human shape crested a nearby hill, as if summoned. He knocked down the archway, stuck a sharp rock in each coat pocket, and strode down the hillside to meet the native. He hoped he wasn't going to get shot for trespassing on this barren, worthless stretch of scrub. Texans did that.
It was Sam.
Dean had the sun at his back and Sam was staring into it, so of course Sam didn't recognize him. But Dean could see the time of his stride and the angles of his limbs and the laser focus he got when he was curious, so he threw his arms in the air impatiently and bellowed, "Sam!"
Sam's hair was even uglier than usual and he had a ragged beard. "What the hell?" Dean added.
Sam paused at his voice, cocked his head, and broke into a sprint that had Dean looking behind him to see what the hurry was. No angry ranchers. No stampeding longhorns. Dean decided he must have been gone a long time and started to jog over, as Sam slowed, stopped, and planted his feet.
And then Dean was falling, horizontal, staring into the face of the ground that was about to smash his skull like a walnut, whether or not it shattered his arms along the way. He corkscrewed, trying to take the fall on his shoulder though it was too late, too fast for catlike reflexes to keep him alive anymore.
But he didn't hit straight on. He hit at an angle, moving sideways, gouging his cheekbone on a rock, and he kept moving. He skidded down the hill, dragging along like a kite that couldn't get air, bouncing and kicking up dust. He was being pulled.
He stopped sliding abruptly and grunted as his weight seemed to jump from two-ten to two thousand and every stone and bit of gravel stabbed into him from beneath. He was being pinned.
Sam was pinning him.
Sam loomed over his face, moving with that reptilian precision that some demons had when they'd dropped their masks and meant business, that made you wonder how you'd ever taken them for your own species. He held one hand outstretched, fingers splayed.
Dean forced his mouth open to start the exorcism. Sam's hand tightened and twisted, and Dean forgot about the rocks and the words, because he was coming out of his skin.
He'd never had the chance to appreciate his body as a container before, not until now, when he felt like oil falling through a sieve. He was splitting in half, part of himself collapsing into chaos like a crazy guy pawing through his looted bag of mementos muttering "no, no, no," the other half outside, turned inside-out and alien, screeching and tearing and failing to claw its way back in. Light flashed behind his eyelids. Light flashed against the backs of Sam's closed eyes, over his serene smile.
He screeched and clawed at his body, desperate and failing to get back in, until with a snap the force restraining him let go, and in a blink he was settled again, he was a human being with a name again, he was seeing out of his eyes.
"You're alive," Sam remarked, staring down at him. His eyes had no color, and there was a steel collar around his throat, padded by his shirt.
"Christo," Dean coughed.
"You think you're Dean," Sam said, his voice as colorless and carnivorous as his dark eyes.
"I am Dean," Dean growled.
"Like I said."
Dean panted and sat up. Sam didn't offer him a hand, but he didn't back off like he was supposed to if he thought Dean was a shapeshifter, either. Idiot. "So I'm dead now," he grunted. "Wanna give me a date for future reference when I get back home?"
"May second, 2008. Eleven-forty three PM."
"No, wait," Dean protested, confused.
"You let a floor-level crossroads demon talk you down to one year for my life, like you could pick up a new soul at the Salvation Army. Hellhounds clawed your guts out onto the living room carpet in a yuppie housing development while Bobby and I watched. Any of that ring a bell?"
"Yeah," said Dean, flinching at the glass-melting fury banked behind Sam's voice. It was Sammy, but the pressure valves were gone. "Yeah, I know all that. Am I—shit, am I AWOL? Did I say Yes?"
Sam cocked his head. "You're in Hell," he enunciated.
"Again?"
Sam…switched off. His signals were all wrong—this wasn't how people looked at each-other, not topside. Dean hit the ground again and couldn't roll over to get back up.
Sam twisted his fingers and Dean's back convulsed. He did it again and a gibbering, unreasoning terror swept over him, gone as soon as it came, except for the building hum that was his own, real, fear.
Sam had figured out how to make a person squeal like a Fender Stratocaster. Dean decided this future could nuke itself into glass and the angels and demons could wipe each-other out over the ruins. "Stop playing," Sam was snarling. "If you thought getting that piss-rag you call a soul ripped out was no fun, you should see what I'll do to get information. What are you?"
"I'm your brother," Dean grunted.
"Dean's in Hell," Sam repeated, and Dean felt like an idiot, a trusting idiot, because for all he really knew, Sam could have been 'full on Vader' all through the summer of '08, and this was the Sam he had missed.
But maybe he could change that. Maybe he had changed that.
"I get out," he insisted. "I'm from the future, from twenty-ten. Somebody else—screw it, angels are gonna drag me out of Hell for their sick wargames. It's gonna be—I'm not a demon. You don't have to kill anybody, just get clean. That's all." Maybe he could change everything.
"What month?" Sam demanded, sharp.
"September," said Dean. "They pull me out September of '08. I'm alive, but things are gonna go bad in a year unless you drop the Lilith thing. It's a conspiracy—Heaven, Hell, they're both gonna want you to ice her, and when you do, it'll hit the kill switch on the entire planet, the Devil breakin' out of his chains, Four Horsemen on the road, both sides ready to wipe Humanity out like bug smears in the springtime. She's a bitch, but we can't kill her."
Sam had some expression now. Apparently he thought Dean was insane, and had killed and stuffed his puppy so it could ride along in the car without messing up the seats. "It's twenty-ten now," he said. "I killed Lilith two years ago. Haven't found you yet."
Alternate reality, Dean thought. That's technically new.
That left the question of what Sam was doing alone on the forbidding rangelands of central Texas.
"Following a community," said Sam, forging through the forbs. Dean had never been forced to hustle to keep up with Sam walking before, and he didn't like it. He figured it was one of Sam's least distressing new habits what with him apparently running on demon blood full-time, so he focused on stretching his own stride to its limits and jogging a step or two when he was sure Sam wasn't paying attention.
"Community," Dean muttered, trying to deconstruct whatever PC code word that was supposed to be. "Like a cult?"
"Like a community of survivors," Sam said, and that level of scorn was uncalled for. Sam glanced over his shoulder and huffed at him. "From the bombing. You know, the bombs? With the shockwaves and the nuclear winter and the dead birds everywhere?"
"Damn," Dean said. The nukes had cut loose, but the planet was still left.
"If your world didn't get bombed, what are you whining about?"
"Like I said—Lucifer crawlin' outta Hell, Horsemen on the hoof."
"Seriously?" Sam asked. "Thought you were being metaphorical."
"If I was, it'd be funnier. With blasphemy and sexual references," Dean muttered. "So it just—World War Three?"
"Demons did it."
"Course they did."
"Turned out Lilith didn't want to invade Earth," Sam explained. "When she died, it was like it cut the reins and all the other principalities made a rush on us. Devil's Gate opened back up. The demon with the Colt—"
"Crowley?"
"You met him?" Sam snapped, halting.
"Dealing demon, with a funny sense of self-preservation," Dean recalled. "Gave us the Colt."
"He had a reason," Sam guessed.
"Yeah."
"He's in charge of the Gate now. Everyone makes deals with him, humans, demons, on anything to do with who goes up or down. House always wins. He keeps the demons in check, enough to make sure there's still humans around, but he's turning them into game. The US is a hunting preserve."
What about you? Dean almost asked. He had a good idea of the answer, but he didn't want to hear it.
On the other hand, he didn't care anymore. "And you hunt them back," he said.
Sam paused, looked away. "Everybody over ten Hunts."
Dean started walking again, just a straight line to nowhere, and passed him, prodding gingerly at the hot bruising tear on his cheek. He heard Sam's footsteps behind him veer off a bit, so he dropped back to his side, wondering where Sam was headed. He gestured to his neck. "What's with the hardware?"
Sam smiled. It was a bad smile, full of jaded grief and poison. The heavy collar glinted with sigils that looked like they'd been engraved with a drill press. It had a bevel at the top that reminded Dean of GMC frames. Sam held up his right pinkie, which had a dull ring on it of a similar make. "Going away present," said Sam, baring his teeth around the words. "Pretty sure Bobby didn't expect me to take his hand off at the same time—"
"Jeezes!" Dean panted.
"—but you saw what I can do—"
"No, I know, Sam, I know how it works." You don't have to paint a picture.
Demons running loose and Sam's taint becomes a weapon he can't afford to do without, too convenient and too potent to go to waste, but uncontrollable and tormenting, so Sam turns to Bobby, the last man on earth he can trust, to put a leash on him. But on the blood, Sam gets hot-headed, thirsty, and uncomfortably numb, until pretty soon he doesn't care why he took the leash in the first place. Dean had a picture.
"So you follow survivors around and wait for demons to show up," Dean said. "What about the hosts?"
"Out here, it's not usually an issue," Sam replied. Not in the sun and the dry grass.
Dean followed him up a hill, where they looked out over the empty rangeland, where the heat shimmer flashed away toward the horizon. A column of vultures swirled like a thundercloud in the north.
Sam was looking westward at a pair of human shapes tracing a ribbon of tire tracks over the grass. "They made it," he muttered, pleased.
"So, what's the plan?" Dean asked, as they waited on the back of a hillside for the two demons to pass into Sam's range, however far that was. Dean could see the tire tracks winding around the base of the hill below their vantage point.
"Thought you knew how this works," Sam said.
"Yeah, but after you get yourself some demon Slurpie and juice up. Long-term. You going anywhere with this, or is this just another fix?"
Sam twitched and Dean felt something run down his spine like a gallon of smelted iron had splashed down and barely missed him. "I'm a lot better than that," he said, eyes on the prize. "I don't drain and dump."
"You can store it?" Dean asked.
Sam smiled, another of those restrained, stretched-on smiles that looked like he was planning how to kill him when he was done playing. "Don't even need a cooler in the back of the Impala."
So Sam was never clean anymore. Just great.
A shadow spilled over the edge of the hill below, quickly swallowed up in the shade. Sam froze, watching for the shadow's owner, and Dean watched Sam. Wasn't like a demon was going to be much of a problem with this Sam around.
Sam suddenly crouched behind a stand of dead seedy plants, yanking Dean after him by the arm. One demon strode into view, then the other, walking in the tire tracks, their heads turned to the trail. They didn't seem to know they were being watched—until Sam straightened, grabbed hold of the air like he was throttling it, and twisted.
The demons shrieked. Dean could hear Hell behind the screams of the hosts.
Sam marched down the hill, unconcerned as the demons twisted against his grip, still screaming.
One reached its hand under its shirt, drawing a gun.
"Sam!" Dean bellowed.
The demon flung its gun hand skyward and fired off a flare, which burst dim and glittering against the slanting daylight.
Sam did something and the demons' screams rose higher. Then he tightened his fist and dragged them, as he headed for a sloping boulder sticking out of the hill. They rolled and scrabbled against the ground, scraping out blood, breaking hands, fingers.
"Winchester," one snarled, as Sam hoisted it by one ankle and flung it with way too much strength onto the boulder, where it lay immobilized, head down. "You gotta make a deal, cowboy. Boss knows you're a one-man army, but we're Legion, got it?" It panted. "You're not gonna wipe us out."
Sam stacked the other demon next to the first. "Crowley know where you are?" he asked.
The demons writhed and glowed faintly, as if they'd been Knifed. Their screams grew echoey and unintelligible.
"Then I don't need to leave a survivor," Dean heard Sam say, and he turned around. He didn't want to see Sam gnawing on their throats like a wild animal.
Sam had evidently been doing this a long time. He could handle feeding on one and pinning the other.
Dean descended the hillside and picked up the fallen flaregun, only to spot another one lying in the broken drag trail leading to Sam. Probably still loaded, dropped by the other demon when Sam grabbed them. These two were advance scouts, bait, maybe a peace offering, and if they knew Sam was in the area, they'd gone into this knowing they'd be facing real death, not exorcism. Forty-odd years was nowhere near long enough to be an expert in demon psychology, not when demons lived for centuries of centuries, but Dean knew that whatever compelled them to stick to this plan had to be pretty nasty.
Alastair, the big scary enforcer in his own world, had been completely on board with the Apocalypse plan. With Lilith dead here, he'd either dropped her carcass like a smoking stink bomb, or Crowley's crew had torn him to bits and replaced him. Out with the old, in with the new.
That left the question of what had happened to Other-Dean. Without the Righteous-Man-Sheds-Blood-in-Hell appointment, maybe they'd stopped making him the damn offer. He might still be on the Rack.
Dean shuddered.
He forgot what Sam was doing for an instant, and looked back. Sam had gone to town with a boot knife. One of the hosts had a bib of flesh peeled down off its throat, leaving a gaping rectangle of bloody meat and windpipe. The other, Sam was still working on, crouched over it, his face buried behind its jawbone as its eyes bulged up at the sky, flickering between black and gray. Sam's hands rested lightly, one on the stone, one on its host's forehead, and the steel collar tilted back and forth with the muscles of his throat.
Dean watched until Sam stood, cut off a scrap of a host's polo shirt, and cleaned his knife, his face, and his scraggly beard.
"Crowley hunting you?" Dean asked.
Sam waved at the flare gun Dean held. "Now would be a first." He squinted at him. "You're still here," he observed.
"Nothin' else to do," Dean explained. He dropped the empty flare gun, let it clatter on a rock. "What's the demon king selling?"
"Nothing I want," Sam said.
"Not like he's got much options," Dean remarked, watching Sam.
Sam grinned, bloody teeth. "Yeah, no," he said. The staring got uncomfortable. "I like having you here, man. I mean, when my Dean died, I missed him like Hell. Lately, I just—I guess I still want him back anyway."
Dean took a breath. Two years, two centuries. "Sam…whatever's left down there…"
"I know," said Sam, turning away.
"Right," Dean muttered to his boots.
A shot went off and he jumped. Sam had fired the second flare gun and was marching up the hill.
Dean followed slowly.
The sun reached across the hilltop, low and orange, its grip slipping. Dean crested the hill, and across a valley, over three branches of a dry creek, at the top of another hill, a posse of horsemen was waiting.
Sam was sauntering down to the valley, and Dean wanted to bawl him out for giving up the high ground, walking under the muzzles of the guns they surely had. Texans did love their firearms. So did Hunters.
Sam didn't look worried. Dean hoped Sam had friends here and these guys were some of them, but they'd never been that lucky. Then he noticed the blindfolds on the horses. That was weird. Some of the guys didn't have hats, and after just an afternoon in this sun, Dean had been dying for a hat for the first time in his life.
As Sam approached, the ones on the edges steered their horses closer to the middle of the group, and as he crossed the first creekbed, they drew an assortment of rifles and pistols.
Sam stopped.
Dean couldn't think of anything to do.
"Did you bring him?" Sam bellowed.
One of the men, the only one unarmed, kicked his horse in the sides and it bounced jerkily down the hill, stumbled at the creek banks, bucked and faltered and wheezed its way to Sam. Some stranger, white, short hair. Black eyes. "Hey, Sammy," it said.
Sam marched closer, putting the demon and the horse between himself and the guns. "Dean," he croaked, and the demon swung itself down and swaggered over.
Dean hid in the grass as he watched Sam hug the ruined thing, wrapping around its shoulders like the demon was the only thing left in the world. The demon, watching around Sam's back, spotted him and snarled silently. Across the valley, the other horsemen leveled their guns.
Sam flung out a hand and the demon's horse screamed, reared, and toppled over, then he dived for the cover of its carcass, yanking the demon after him. The other riders split around and charged, pouring down the hill to reclaim their shot, but they must have passed too close, because as they crossed the creek they began to convulse and slump down from their horses, clawing at their throats as smoke poured, flaring like coals, into the ground.
Two of the horsemen yanked their animals to a stop at the last second and bolted aside. A dozen-demon hit squad, now just dying hosts and blinded horses.
Sam and the demon stood. The demon sat with a huff on the dead horse's chest. "Thanks, man," it said.
Sam stared it in the eyes, one hand light on its shoulder. "I summoned you," Sam said. "It worked."
"Still me," replied the demon. "Sorta." It grinned up into Sam's face, carefree and joyful. Dean saw Sam give it a gentle shake.
The demon glowed from within and gasped. "Sammy?" it demanded, shocked.
"You meant well," Sam said, flaring the demon again. "I'm making it quick."
Dean heard something crackle in the grass behind him, and as he checked over his shoulder, he felt a sharp punch in his chest, a burning in his ribs. One of the escaped demons was standing behind him, a rifle in its hands spitting out spent brass and swinging down toward Sam.
Dean wheezed in a breath and couldn't push it out again.
His vision tunneled. Sam must have run himself low; he saw him go for his knife and yank the struggling Dean-demon's throat closer, slash it, drop the knife, dig in, stretch out his arm.
Dean fell.
He sat up in bed, the springs squeaking. After toweling the sweat off onto a sheet, he stood in the dark and checked on Sam.
Sam's face was lined with concentration, one arm outstretched, throttling the blankets.
Dean went back to bed and let him dream.