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apocalypsosTitle: Brother, What A Fight It Really Was
Author: Troll Princess
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 6,700 words
Pairing: None (Gen)
Spoilers: "Devil's Trap"
Warnings: Bad language
Disclaimer: Look, Kripke, a flying elephant! *waits until Kripke turns to look, then grabs the Winchester family and runs off to play with them without permission*
Summary: Following the events of "Devil's Trap", Sam goes on a quest for his father and Dean.
*****
Brother, What A Fight It Really Was
*****
What wakes Sam up is a high-pitched screech, the Impala's radio wailing at him as if someone's dragging nails across a blackboard and snags his jacket to pull him out of unconsciousness at the same time. He jolts awake in the driver's seat like he's full of adrenaline, grabbing at the car's interior with both hands.
Everything feels off somehow, left of center like the car's been pushed to the side by the awkward nudge of some giant's elbow.
That's when he realizes what it is.
The sun's shining. The Impala's in one undamaged piece. The truck's gone.
And Dean and Dad are nowhere to be found.
Oh, it feels like they're there, all right, still slumped over in the car next to him and behind him. It's as if they went to take a walk and left a chalk outline of themselves behind, something that Sam can touch if he just reaches out his hand and presses it against the passenger seat. He'll feel warmth, he figures, the faint memory of his father's body heat and the hint of John Winchester's scent on his palm.
But they're not there there, and that's the whole point, really.
Sam bolts from the car, the driver's side door whining as he shoves it open to stumble out into the road. He doesn't want to think about how long he must have been sitting in that car. The sun is high and the road is hot when he falls forward and has to right himself by pushing his long body up from the ground first. He cups his hands around his mouth to make his voice echo, but something about the way his words ring in the air tell him they would echo even without his help.
"Dean!" he screams. "Dad!"
There isn't any answer, but a large part of him hadn't expected to get one.
Sam can't remember the air being this warm when the semi plowed into the side of the Impala, the air choked off with humidity. He tilts his head up and takes in the clear cloudless sky. Rain threatens to come and come hard but not now, not with the sky such a crystalline shade of blue.
He squeezes his fist shut, twists at the waist, and frowns at the lack of soreness or broken bones. This isn't right. They'd been hit by a tractor trailer, for fuck's sake, and even sitting in the driver's side there should be something. A sprain in his ankle. A bone-deep weariness in his muscles. A cut, a scratch, the hint of a bruise. Something.
The Impala gleams black and ominous in the sunlight like a blatant lie.
*****
The truck and the demon and his whole goddamn family may be gone, but something in Sam's brain orders him to move, move, move. An anxious itch settles in his muscles, and the only time it clears away is when he slides into the driver's seat and starts up the Impala. It rumbles with anticipation and drives like it's brand new. Sam allows himself to ignore it.
When he tries Dad and Dean on his phone, there's nothing but static, not even a connection.
In ten minutes, he turns a corner and a gas station comes into view. Grey wooden shingles on the side, handpainted signs in the windows, an old-fashioned cooler full of Coke bottles just outside the door. Sam could swear he's seen the same one before in Kansas.
When he walks into the garage, the mechanic looks like Sam as if he's seen a ghost.
"Do you have a phone I can use?" Sam asks.
The mechanic shakes it off like Sam's some lingering hangover and goes back to working on the engine in front of him. He doesn't say a damn thing to Sam.
There's taking that as a no and there's just looking for a phone anyway, and Sam ducks into the front office. The phone's a rotary, and just looking at it makes Sam wonder if cracking it open would reveal a hamster running on a wheel to power it.
When he picks up the receiver, there's no dial tone, just a male voice talking in muffled whispers.
Sam covers his other ear, closes his eyes and concentrates, and --
the hell away from me motherfucking demonic assholes kevin burkett 113 wallace drive bailey kentucky you come anywhere near me and i will fucking end you kevin burkett 113 wallace drive bailey kentucky keep out of my goddamn
-- hangs up the phone. Things are weird enough without this, and yet.
And yet.
*****
The ride to Kentucky is a blur, a flipbook of homes and businesses that Sam recognizes to a frightening degree. Every person he passes has a face he could swear he's seen before, and every look he gives them feels like a faint brush of his hand against theirs as they pass on a sidewalk, even if he's driving past them in the Impala at the time.
At a mini-mart just off the highway, a overweight woman herding three small children towards a minivan warns them not to look at Sam. As he drives past a little girl at a playground, she takes one look at him and screams.
As soon as he hits the Kentucky border, the threat of rain in the humid air turns into a fine misting drizzle that doesn't stop.
******
Kevin Burkett's house is a quaint little place with fake maroon shutters bracketing all the windows and a pair of Dobermans barking at Sam from behind the windows of the living room. The windows all have bars on them, the driveway is empty and the front door looks like something that was stolen from a castle somewhere. Just looking at the house makes Sam feels restrained and cold.
When Sam tries the doorknob, it's unlocked.
Someone doesn't want to keep people out as much as it looks like he does, Sam thinks as he walks inside.
The second he steps inside, rough hands shove him up against the wall next to the door hard enough to rattle Sam's teeth. The man before him is only a few years older than him with thinning red hair and a beer belly that might as well be a keg, but something about the dark look in his eyes makes Sam sense a real threat behind the bland exterior.
"Who are you?" The man slams him against the wall again and the back of Sam's head bangs off a picture frame. "What the hell do you think you're doing here? You don't have a right to just --"
"I'm just looking for my family," Sam blurts out. "I didn't have anywhere else to go, so I came here."
It sounds stupid as soon as the words come out of his mouth, but the guy doesn't seem to care.
Sam holds up his arms and there's a photo in his hand of his dad and Dean at Dean's high school graduation. Dad's arm is slung around Dean's shoulders and they're both smiling, grinning like idiots, probably glad Dean can finally stop worrying about school and start worrying about the hunt full-time.
Sam always loved that picture, how normal they both looked in it. If he's remembering correctly, acidic slime from some random demon dissolved the damn thing a few weeks before his acceptance to Stanford arrived.
The man -- Sam assumes he's Kevin Burkett, for lack of any other options -- clenches his fists in Sam's shirt and gives the photo a quick look. "Haven't seen them," he snaps, "now get out."
He pushes Sam towards the door but Sam grabs onto the doorframe before Kevin can even think of kicking him out.
"Wait," Sam says. Kevin's palms are still on his chest, far too hot through the thin cotton of Sam's shirt. "I don't know where they are. I don't even know what's going on or who to ask --"
"Not me, that's for damn sure." Kevin goes to slam the door in Sam's face but Sam puts up a hand to hold it open.
"Look, we were attacked, all right? We were hit by a truck, and I need to find --"
Them. I need to find them.
I think.
Kevin ignores him, gives Sam a good hard shove and forces him to stumble backwards down the front steps of the house. Sam gets his bearings just in time for Kevin Burkett to stare down at him with a coild angry gaze and point to a spot just over Sam's shoulder.
"You bring that anywhere near me again, and I'll kill you," Kevin says.
Sam glances over his shoulder and sees the bushes lining the driveway, the mist growing heavier in the air, the dark shadow of someone that might not be someone lurking nearby.
When Sam turns back to see Kevin shut the door to his house, he could swear Kevin's hands are on fire.
*****
He's just driven into Virginia when the flyers start falling from the sky like autumn leaves, plastering themselves to the windshield of the Impala in the steadily increasing rain that's followed him all the way from Nebraska.
JOSHUA, they all say, a thousand sheets of paper in brilliant shades of blue and green and red. The black-and-white photo of a grungy man appears below it, an address for a small town in Maryland in precise black lettering after that.
Sam pulls over to the side of the road to scrape the papers from the glass. When he gets back into the driver's seat, his hair sticks to his forehead from the rain like it's been glued there.
*****
The ride to Maryland goes by in a flash, a heartbeat. Sam feels like he's in Kentucky one minute, takes one long easy stride eastward and there Maryland is under the soles of his feet.
He sees faces in between, though. The people who look vaguely familiar mostly ignore him or treat him like a malevolent spirit. They pretend he doesn't exist and hum when he asks them questions. They scream, they avert their eyes, they hitch their breath and shake their heads like they're trying to shake away bad memories.
But the ones he doesn't know, the strangers whose gazes connect with his with polite understanding ... those are the ones Sam really worries about.
Just outside of the town Sam's headed to is a park he stops in because he gets the weirdest feeling he's supposed to meet someone there, that nervous energy of anticipation flowing through his veins. He sits there for ten minutes before a little boy walks past hand in hand with an older man who looks too much like him not to be his father. The little boy's dark eyes light up as soon as he spots Sam and he tugs his hand from his father's grasp, racing to Sam's side and cupping one small brown hand over Sam's ear.
"My mommy died in a fire, too," he says, then runs back to his dad as if he hadn't just broken Sam's heart with a few simple words.
*****
When Sam finds Joshua, he's perched on the stone steps of the local courthouse regardless of the rain, crouching down on the stone balustrade and leaning over with an odd sort of grace to peer into the ears of passersby as if he can see straight through into their minds. Joshua's suit is tattered but expensive, his briefcase a fancy black leather number with dents in the sides and corners.
Sam thinks Joshua looks a little too crazy to be worth his time, but then Joshua spots him and it doesn't matter anymore.
"You've come," he yelps, and bounds down the steps towards Sam like a rolypoly puppy.
Sam barely resists the urge to pull out a weapon he doesn't even have.
Joshua runs up and grabs onto Sam with far too clean hands. A broad smile crosses Joshua's face, twisted and strange. "Knew you were coming, " Joshua says. "Saw the dotted line cross the map." He reaches up and taps his temple.
And it's like all of the confusion of the past few daysweeksmonthsyears catches up to Sam in an instant, a long empty time in a world that doesn't fit and fits him perfectly all at the same time. He lets out a harsh breath and staggers backwards. Joshua makes this face and suddenly there's a brick wall at Sam's back, a hard solid surface he grabs at with his hands like a lifeline.
"Where am I?" he asks.
Joshua grins and crouches at Sam's feet in one smooth movement. "Found a question, but not the right one. Where aren't you? That's the sixty-four dollar question, Sammy."
Sam doesn't bother to ask how Joshua knows his name. Some things, he'd just rather not know. "I'm looking for my family."
Joshua cocks his head. "Looking for them, or looking for something because they can't?"
Dead silence, and if there are words out there, Sam can't reach them with his hands flat on the wall behind him.
"Thought so," Joshua says with a laugh. The brittle sound makes Sam picture someone throwing a champagne flute into a fireplace.
The rain grows heavy all of a sudden, like someone high above has tipped over a bucket of water, and Joshua tugs up his suit jacket until it covers his head. He grins wickedly, staring up at Sam from where he's crouching on the sidewalk, ignoring the people going about their day around them.
And that's the thing, too, the way they just keep walking through the rain like it's not even there. A woman in a business suit stands not far away buying a hot dog from a vendor at a shiny cart, rain pounding against her cheeks and rolling down her face. Children run past with their hair plastered to their foreheads. A beautiful teenage girl stalks past them both with a toss of her head, not seeming to care what the rain is doing to her tight little tank top.
"Do you know anything about demons?" Sam hears himself say.
He has no idea where the question comes from.
Joshua hums for a moment, like he's contemplating the answer. "I know your footsteps in the snow," he says, and flips upward in a dizzying maneuver until he's standing a few feet in front of Sam. "My feet are small. They fit right into your footprints if I know the dance."
Sam finds the strength to move away from the wall, and takes a step across the wet sidewalk towards where he parked the Impala. "I can't do this now. Dad and Dean need me to --"
Before Sam can walk away, Joshua's there with his palm presses against Sam's chest. "You're the only one with the maps out of the labyrinth. I can see them in your pocket. You know the rules about right and left turns, don't you? No one getting out of the maze without you."
Sam frowns. "You're talking about the visions."
"We split the deck, you and I. Born in fire, both of us."
"Is that what drove you insane?"
Something cynical and amused settles in Joshua's gaze. "You should hear the snow from this side of the glass, Sammy."
Overhead, thunder rolls.
*****
Joshua leads Sam to a quiet room in the courthouse with his name on the door, if you can count bounding ahead of Sam in giddy leaps as "leading." It's pretty damn obvious that Joshua likes it here, that he thrives in his own way in this off-kilter version of the world that they're stuck in.
He shuts the door to his office behind them like he's affording them some privacy, as if everyone in the world isn't ignoring everything they do.
Law books on the shelves, diplomas on the wall. Outside the window is a playground, and the sound of children screaming with glee sets Sam on edge.
Rain slams against the window. The storm's getting that much worse, and nobody seems to give a damn.
"Bounce, bounce, bounce from one place to the next," Joshua says. He waves a finger in Sam's direction as he tosses his briefcase across the room to land neatly on a leather chair and swings up to perch on the desk. "You can't play hopscotch in other people's heads forever, Sammy. Recess is almost over, you know, and someone's looking for his lost kitten by the swing set."
He cocks his head towards the window and Sam looks outside.
There's a shadow of a man by the jungle gym, so black and solid Sam almost expects it to climb the damn monkey bars.
"Do you have any idea where I'm supposed to go to next?"
Joshua shakes his head. "Didn't get the answer key. Only saw you drive to the test."
"Great," Sam mutters. "That's really helpful."
"Shift gears, that's the trick. Ease into reverse like a trick driver. Slide into neutral and do parlor tricks with parlor furniture, is what you should do."
Sam freezes, looking over at Joshua with an unsettled feeling in his stomach. "That only happened once."
"Once I tried to juggle," Joshua says. "Dropped the balls and never picked them up again. Now I throw rocks in the air and get concussions." He tilts his head again in that curious-puppy-dog way, that angle that says he's not half as insane as he appears to Sam. "Shame how that works, don't you think?"
"I don't want to learn how to move things with my mind." Sam's fists clench at his sides. "Hell, I don't even want these fucking visions."
"Grandma gave you that sweater, and you'll wear it when she comes to visit whether you like or not." Joshua barks the words out in the same tone of voice Dad used to use to get Sam to learn one more weapon, one more protective sigil, one more defensive maneuver before bed. Then that shining smile returns and Joshua adds, "Look at the bright side. It keeps you warm and safe."
Sam presses his hand against the window pane, the glass cooled by the rain, and tries not to picture a gun firing a shot clear through Dean's head.
"I just want this over with, damn it," Sam says.
Joshua stares at him with a steadiness to him like he's got to concentrate damn hard to do it and says in an eerily even voice, "Dean doesn't want to die in the backseat, Sam."
It's the sanest thing Joshua's said so far.
*****
Afterwards Sam sits in the driver's seat of the Impala for a minute or so before muttering, "Fuck it," and getting onto the highway headed towards Pennsylvania.
If he's supposed to be a goddamn seer, then he's got a destination in mind whether he knows it or not.
The sky rolls black with storm clouds now, the rain like a waterfall swollen by flood. Sam drives through slightly rolling lands spotted with dairy farms and speeds up at the first sign of a tornado.
By the time he pulls off an exit near the New York border, the tornadoes are everywhere.
*****
He makes left and right turns whenever he damn well feels like it, it seems, until he ends up in the middle of nowhere on some back country road that you could only call paved if you were being polite. Twisters dance around the car, spinning around in the rolling fields enough to make him dizzy at the sight.
They don't approach, though, teasing and taunting Sam as he turns onto a long dirt driveway leading towards a small gray farmhouse.
There, that's it, he thinks, and even with the storm growing around him, he finally relaxes.
He skids the Impala to a stop not far from the front of the house, throwing open the driver's side door and bounding up the steps through the torrents of rain from above. He doesn't even get a chance to knock on the front door before it opens a crack. A young woman stands there, a riot of red curls falling past her shoulders. Bottle-green eyes peer out at him, a warm gaze laced with steel taking him in.
"There'd better be a good reason for you to be at my front door," she says.
"I need your help. My family was in an accident, and I think ..." Sam chokes on the words, but they finally come. "I think they're dying."
She gives him a confused look like she's about to ask him where he got her address, then shakes it off and opens the door wide enough for him to enter.
There's a shotgun in her hands, and it looks so monstrous in her grasp it just makes her appear that much tinier in comparison.
She points it out into the darkness past his shoulder.
"Get in," she snaps.
Sam doesn't even give himself time to question it. He ducks into the house and she immediately slams the door shut, letting out a ragged exhale. She runs her fingertips over the wood, muttering under her breath. It sounds to Sam like a protective spell he found once in one of Dad's research books, but he figures that might just be wishful thinking.
"Sorry about that," she says. She puts the shotgun in the umbrella stand next to the door. Sam's struck with the sudden irrational thought that that's where she keeps all of her lethal weapons. " When it storms like this, it's because someone's showing off and he knows exactly what they're doing."
"He?"
Her gaze is steady when she turns to him and says, "Do I really need to answer that question?"
Sam runs his fingers through his hair at that, pushing soaking wet waves from his eyes. "The demon can find me if I use my powers?"
"How do you think he finds us in the first place?"
Us, she says. Sam almost wants to throw up, if he can even do that here.
The farmhouse is cozy, the scents of baking bread and cherry pie heavy in the air. There's wood burning in the fireplace and a sofa in the living room that looks so damn soft Sam's sure he could sink into it and sleep forever. Someone's comfortable in this place, Sam thinks, and the woman drifts into his line of sight with a smile far too maternal for someone as young as she is.
"I'm Sam," he says. "Sam Winchester."
When he holds out her hand, she shakes it with a smile. "Holly Keats," she says. "We'll be safe in here."
The roof rattles as the wind whistles above them, and she glares up at it.
"For now."
*****
"I don't know if I can do this."
Sam and Holly sit facing each other in dining room chairs, the hem of Holly's white dress pulled primly down over her knees. Her small pale hands rest in Sam's palms. One of her hands has a long deep gash in the back of it, and Sam can't remember how it got there.
Hell, he can't remember how they got here, from the roof shaking above them to the chairs pulled into the foyer.
Outside, the wind howls, and he shudders.
"You're going to have to do this, Sam," she says. He may be cupping her hands in his own but it feels like one of hers is pressed against his cheek, encouraging him. "I'm a little geographically disadvantaged. Besides, that's why you're came here."
He shakes his head. "I don't even know how I got here. I just remember getting into the crash and then things got ... weird."
Holly shifts in her chair, tilting her head so that she can see a little better past the still-damp curtain of his thick hair. The effect is startling, an abrupt rush of haze and fog through his entire body. It's like the air pressure in the room's gone just right, hit some atmospheric low note that relaxes every single one of his muscles. "How badly off do you think your family was the last time you saw them?"
Sam has to force himself to remember the scene. All he can see and smell is blood, feel it under his fingertips, taste copper on his tongue. He isn't all that sure they weren't just struck by a tidal wave of the stuff, there's so much of it.
Or maybe he's just imagining it.
"Uh, Dad had a gunshot wound in his leg. Plus, he was on the side of the car the truck hit first. Dean had internal injuries, I think. When the demon attacked him, he was bleeding from ... God, from everywhere."
Holly nods with a sigh. "I could do a lot more if I were there."
"Can you teach me?"
"I can teach you enough, I hope."
They both look down at her hands, at the glaring slash in her skin, and Sam feels like there's two conversations going on. There's the one they're having out loud, and there's the quiet lecturing voice in his head, steady and memorable and going a thousand miles an hour. He wonders if this is what it would be like if someone were beaming his law school classes into his brain while he was off hunting with Dean, if they sped it all up so he could subliminally pick it all up over a stop for coffee in Iowa or something.
She turns her uninjured hand over to trace the lines in his palm and there's a cut there, deep and dark. He can't feel a thing.
Holly drags a fingertip over it and the damn thing seals up like her touch is laced with industrial-strength adhesive.
"How long have you been able to do that?"
She smiles uneasily, a wistfull look in her glittering green eyes. "A week after my wedding, my husband was thrown from his horse and broke his leg. Scared the hell out of both of us when I healed it, but Frank's an understanding kind of guy."
Someone pounds on the front door, and they both flinch.
"We have to hurry," Holly says.
Sam jerks his head in a frantic nod and takes her injured hand in both of his. He pictures the skin pulling together and shutting like a Ziploc bag, invisible stitches closing the wound. "Is this really such a good idea?" he asks, but he's doing it. A little tug at the skin at both ends, hardly anything, but he's pulling it off.
"You can do it," she says. "We can all do some of it at least, if we need to do it enough. That's why we're such a threat."
"It's not that." He keeps staring at her hand, wanting, wanting, and the cut might be closing but it doesn't mean he thinks he's up for the real challenge. "It's just ... what if I screw this up?"
"Sam, you wanted so badly to help your family that your mind used every psychic between you and me as a jumping-off point. I don't think you can screw this up."
The door shakes again, like an elephant's slammed into it.
Holly winces. "Sam ..."
And he doesn't look up, can't look up, can't be distracted when he thinks he knows what he's doing. It's like fixing Dad and Dean after a hunt, really, except without the first aid kit or antiseptic or needle and thread. It's sheer force of will and desire and need, really needing that pale skin to heal, damn it, heal --
"I think I've got it," he says.
The door shakes again, and the world skips like a broken record.
"Sam, hurry," Holly says. "You can do this."
He knows he can. He knows.
He knows ...
"Sam?"
*****
Sam!
-- jerks awake in the driver's seat of the Impala, air hissing past his teeth as he sucks in a shuddering breath. He glances around almost frantically, trying to orient himself to the sudden sensory overload of pain flooding his body and his father and brother lying frighteningly still in their seats.
Oh, Jesus.
"Dad?"
Dad's first, of course, because he's got to be first with a bullet hole in his leg and his body so broken Sam can barely stand to look at it. Sam's hands tremble as he reaches out to touch Dad's arm, wincing at the grinding of shattered bones. He can't see the truck driver anywhere, possessed or not, but sirens wail in the distance, and he has to be quick.
He has to be quick about something he's never even fucking tried before.
Shit. Shit.
"Dad, listen to me," Sam says, even though there's a part of him that's positive Dad can't hear him anymore. "I'm going to try something, all right? Just hang on."
He squeezes his eyes shut and concentrates. He concentrates to the point that he thinks his knees would buckle if he was standing up. He can feel a migraine coming on already from the strength of his desire, from trying to fix damaged flesh and broken bones through force of will.
He wants.
He wants so damn much he wouldn't be surprised to open his eyes again and turn out cross-eyed from the effort.
There's heat in his hands, heat far warmer than the usual connection of palm to skin, and Sam forces his eyes open to stare down at the bullethole in Dad's leg. His breath hitches in his chest, because fresh dark blood still soaks through his father's pant leg but Sam could swear there's clear unblemished skin visible through the tear in the fabric.
"It's really working," he says, and he holds on and holds on and holds on through the novelty of it.
Dean.
The sirens wail, just that much closer, and Sam mutters, "Damn it," before leaning over the seat to grab onto Dean's knee. It's the closest part of him Sam can reach, the way he's slumped over back there like his skeleton's turned to rubber.
"Come on, Dean," he says, and closes his eyes.
He thinks of broken bones knitting together and bleeding organs mending. He thinks of his big brother in one uninjured piece, of Dean alive and healthy to keep his promise not to let this whole psychic thing go to Sam's head.
He wishes, and wishes hard.
*****
Hiding who they are isn't an option now, not with the car accident, not with the Impala registered in Dean's real name and the police sniffing around thanks to his unfortunate legally-dead status. Sam has to get used to hearing people call him Mr. Winchester again, a year's worth of aliases putting a sizable dent in that small slice of normalcy.
Dad and Dean lie in the ICU not half as injured as they should be. The nurses whisper the word "miracle" like it's a curse, and Sam almost agrees.
He spends two days drinking shitty coffee and falling uncomfortably asleep in waiting room chairs. He ignores the nurses and doctors when they give him information on where to stay until his father and brother recover from their injuries and is as polite as he can manage to the police.
And he stares at his hands a lot. Stares and stares until he expects he'll bore holes right through the flesh of his palms.
One day, he wakes up in one of the waiting room chairs to see a pair of familiar bottle-green eyes bracketed by far too many wrinkles staring down at him. He stretches out his long legs and rubs at his eyes like the vision will clear, but there she is.
"Holly?"
The old woman before him smiles. "Sleeping in chairs like that's a one-way ticket to a hunchback, you know."
For the first time in days, Sam feels the urge to smile right back at someone. "Yeah, I'll bet."
*****
It doesn't take as long as Sam thinks it will to reconcile the pretty redheaded girl with the old woman who gives him a comforting hug and offers to buy him whatever the hospital cafeteria's making that's not terrifyingly bland. Holly Keats can't be a day under seventy-five, but she gives him a flirty pat on the arm when she tells it'd be a crime not to feed him before he starts to shrink, tall handsome man that he is.
When her palm connects with his skin, it sends a wave of energy through his flesh that feels like a shot of pure caffeine and makes him shiver.
Sam spills the whole story to Holly over a tasteless grilled cheese sandwich and a fresh salad that cost more than it probably should have. He doesn't bother leaving out anything, not the last year on the road with Dean, not having to shoot his own father, not the demon or the fire or the last twenty years of their own underground war. He suspects she already knows anyway.
"Oh, my," she finally says with a sigh, "and I thought that damn thing screwed up my life."
The corner of his lips tugs upwards at that. "Yeah, well, I guess if anything prepares you for suddenly getting mind-numbingly painful visions, a lifetime of hunting things like that will do it."
"I imagine that's true."
Sam shifts uncomfortably in his seat as Holly watches him, rubs at the back of his neck and mutters, "God, I'm almost afraid to know what I'm turning into."
"You know, Sam, you're lucky I don't resent that considering I'm not above smacking you upside the head, car accident or not."
"I didn't mean --"
"I know what you meant." Holly pokes absently at her salad with her fork and it suddenly strikes Sam just how little of it she's eaten. "I wondered that myself, from time to time after Rudy died."
"Rudy?"
"My first husband. He died in a fire, just like my mama."
Her gaze connects with Sam as she lets that sink in. Sam's skin feels chilled as if he just ducked into a walk-in freezer in a T-shirt and boxers. He hears the crunch of Holly's fork piercing through fresh lettuce like it's happening in another room.
"You're not the first, you won't be the last, and I can safely assure you that this isn't a new thing. And I may have lost my Rudy, but I've managed to keep my Frank for over fifty years now." There's something soft and grateful about the look in her eyes, and Sam lets himself feel real hope about something other than his father and brother for the first time in days.
Sam spots a hospital security guard out of the corner of his eye, and he's not one of the ones keeping an eye on Dean's room but the uniform hits something in Sam just the same. He forces himself to look down at his grilled cheese sandwich, picking at the bread. "I need to get them out of here," he says to Holly.
"I figured as much," she says. "I didn't hop a flight on short notice for nothing."
"They keep asking me these questions I can't answer. What am I supposed to say, a demon drove a truck into our car, but I bounced from psychic to psychic across the country until I found one who could help me heal them with my hands?"
Holly frowns. "Well, you could say that, I suppose, but I'm guessing it would ruin your social life for a good long while."
And he can't take his gaze off her hands, wrinkled and soft and strong all at once. She drums her fingertips on the counter like she knows what he's looking at, why he can't stop looking at her.
"Did you ever think of just stopping? Of just trying to be normal?"
She's silent for a long moment before she reaches out and takes one of his hands. He bristles with the energy of her touch, sharp and undeniable. "Sam, up until I retired, I was a nurse. Being normal seems downright cruel when you can help like this, wouldn't you say?"
Sam thinks of letting himself open up, of letting visions of monsters and demons and things that go bump in the night flow into his mind every night, and nods reluctantly.
They get up then, tossing out the cold remnants of their lunch as they head out of the cafeteria. Holly puts her hand on his arm again and Sam looks down at her, the intent in her eyes pretty clear.
"Holly?"
"Yes?"
"I'm guessing it's too much to hope that you can lay hands on a car to fix it, right?"
"Yes, Sam, just a little too much to hope for."
"Well, can't say I didn't ask."
*****
When Dean comes to, he's in a hospital bed, and if there were tubes and things attached to him and in him, there sure as hell aren't any now. There's a strange old woman holding his hands, an odd flood of tingling warmth flowing from her palms like heat from summer pavement.
"Shh," she whispers, and there's something about her that reminds him so much of Sam his chest aches. "I'm here to help."
One of her hands slips to his forehead, the pain behind his temples flying away in an instant at the touch. The more she touches him, the more the cloudiness in his vision clears, the easier it is to see Dad and Sam standing next to the bed. When one isn't looking at him with hopeful eyes, the other shoots worried glances at the door.
Dean knows that look on both of their faces, that desire to hurry and escape.
The old woman's hands slide along his skin again, heated pressure that comforts and soothes. "How do you feel?" she asks, in this tone of voice like she already knows the answer.
He takes a deep hesitant breath and the pain he had been feeling right before the accident is a distant memory.
"Never better," Dean says, and means it.
He looks up and suddenly Sam's there, Sam in one piece, Sam without a goddamn scratch on him. Thank God for small favors. "Hey, Dean," he says.
He smiles, and Dean smiles right back. "Hey, Sammy."
Dean feels the light weight of something on his chest and looks down. Sam's pushing clothes towards him, a T-shirt, a pair of jeans, a pair of sneakers.
"Let's get out of here," he says.
Dean grins as he sits up in the hospital bed. "Sounds like a plan to me."
Author: Troll Princess
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 6,700 words
Pairing: None (Gen)
Spoilers: "Devil's Trap"
Warnings: Bad language
Disclaimer: Look, Kripke, a flying elephant! *waits until Kripke turns to look, then grabs the Winchester family and runs off to play with them without permission*
Summary: Following the events of "Devil's Trap", Sam goes on a quest for his father and Dean.
Brother, What A Fight It Really Was
*****
What wakes Sam up is a high-pitched screech, the Impala's radio wailing at him as if someone's dragging nails across a blackboard and snags his jacket to pull him out of unconsciousness at the same time. He jolts awake in the driver's seat like he's full of adrenaline, grabbing at the car's interior with both hands.
Everything feels off somehow, left of center like the car's been pushed to the side by the awkward nudge of some giant's elbow.
That's when he realizes what it is.
The sun's shining. The Impala's in one undamaged piece. The truck's gone.
And Dean and Dad are nowhere to be found.
Oh, it feels like they're there, all right, still slumped over in the car next to him and behind him. It's as if they went to take a walk and left a chalk outline of themselves behind, something that Sam can touch if he just reaches out his hand and presses it against the passenger seat. He'll feel warmth, he figures, the faint memory of his father's body heat and the hint of John Winchester's scent on his palm.
But they're not there there, and that's the whole point, really.
Sam bolts from the car, the driver's side door whining as he shoves it open to stumble out into the road. He doesn't want to think about how long he must have been sitting in that car. The sun is high and the road is hot when he falls forward and has to right himself by pushing his long body up from the ground first. He cups his hands around his mouth to make his voice echo, but something about the way his words ring in the air tell him they would echo even without his help.
"Dean!" he screams. "Dad!"
There isn't any answer, but a large part of him hadn't expected to get one.
Sam can't remember the air being this warm when the semi plowed into the side of the Impala, the air choked off with humidity. He tilts his head up and takes in the clear cloudless sky. Rain threatens to come and come hard but not now, not with the sky such a crystalline shade of blue.
He squeezes his fist shut, twists at the waist, and frowns at the lack of soreness or broken bones. This isn't right. They'd been hit by a tractor trailer, for fuck's sake, and even sitting in the driver's side there should be something. A sprain in his ankle. A bone-deep weariness in his muscles. A cut, a scratch, the hint of a bruise. Something.
The Impala gleams black and ominous in the sunlight like a blatant lie.
The truck and the demon and his whole goddamn family may be gone, but something in Sam's brain orders him to move, move, move. An anxious itch settles in his muscles, and the only time it clears away is when he slides into the driver's seat and starts up the Impala. It rumbles with anticipation and drives like it's brand new. Sam allows himself to ignore it.
When he tries Dad and Dean on his phone, there's nothing but static, not even a connection.
In ten minutes, he turns a corner and a gas station comes into view. Grey wooden shingles on the side, handpainted signs in the windows, an old-fashioned cooler full of Coke bottles just outside the door. Sam could swear he's seen the same one before in Kansas.
When he walks into the garage, the mechanic looks like Sam as if he's seen a ghost.
"Do you have a phone I can use?" Sam asks.
The mechanic shakes it off like Sam's some lingering hangover and goes back to working on the engine in front of him. He doesn't say a damn thing to Sam.
There's taking that as a no and there's just looking for a phone anyway, and Sam ducks into the front office. The phone's a rotary, and just looking at it makes Sam wonder if cracking it open would reveal a hamster running on a wheel to power it.
When he picks up the receiver, there's no dial tone, just a male voice talking in muffled whispers.
Sam covers his other ear, closes his eyes and concentrates, and --
the hell away from me motherfucking demonic assholes kevin burkett 113 wallace drive bailey kentucky you come anywhere near me and i will fucking end you kevin burkett 113 wallace drive bailey kentucky keep out of my goddamn
-- hangs up the phone. Things are weird enough without this, and yet.
And yet.
The ride to Kentucky is a blur, a flipbook of homes and businesses that Sam recognizes to a frightening degree. Every person he passes has a face he could swear he's seen before, and every look he gives them feels like a faint brush of his hand against theirs as they pass on a sidewalk, even if he's driving past them in the Impala at the time.
At a mini-mart just off the highway, a overweight woman herding three small children towards a minivan warns them not to look at Sam. As he drives past a little girl at a playground, she takes one look at him and screams.
As soon as he hits the Kentucky border, the threat of rain in the humid air turns into a fine misting drizzle that doesn't stop.
Kevin Burkett's house is a quaint little place with fake maroon shutters bracketing all the windows and a pair of Dobermans barking at Sam from behind the windows of the living room. The windows all have bars on them, the driveway is empty and the front door looks like something that was stolen from a castle somewhere. Just looking at the house makes Sam feels restrained and cold.
When Sam tries the doorknob, it's unlocked.
Someone doesn't want to keep people out as much as it looks like he does, Sam thinks as he walks inside.
The second he steps inside, rough hands shove him up against the wall next to the door hard enough to rattle Sam's teeth. The man before him is only a few years older than him with thinning red hair and a beer belly that might as well be a keg, but something about the dark look in his eyes makes Sam sense a real threat behind the bland exterior.
"Who are you?" The man slams him against the wall again and the back of Sam's head bangs off a picture frame. "What the hell do you think you're doing here? You don't have a right to just --"
"I'm just looking for my family," Sam blurts out. "I didn't have anywhere else to go, so I came here."
It sounds stupid as soon as the words come out of his mouth, but the guy doesn't seem to care.
Sam holds up his arms and there's a photo in his hand of his dad and Dean at Dean's high school graduation. Dad's arm is slung around Dean's shoulders and they're both smiling, grinning like idiots, probably glad Dean can finally stop worrying about school and start worrying about the hunt full-time.
Sam always loved that picture, how normal they both looked in it. If he's remembering correctly, acidic slime from some random demon dissolved the damn thing a few weeks before his acceptance to Stanford arrived.
The man -- Sam assumes he's Kevin Burkett, for lack of any other options -- clenches his fists in Sam's shirt and gives the photo a quick look. "Haven't seen them," he snaps, "now get out."
He pushes Sam towards the door but Sam grabs onto the doorframe before Kevin can even think of kicking him out.
"Wait," Sam says. Kevin's palms are still on his chest, far too hot through the thin cotton of Sam's shirt. "I don't know where they are. I don't even know what's going on or who to ask --"
"Not me, that's for damn sure." Kevin goes to slam the door in Sam's face but Sam puts up a hand to hold it open.
"Look, we were attacked, all right? We were hit by a truck, and I need to find --"
Them. I need to find them.
I think.
Kevin ignores him, gives Sam a good hard shove and forces him to stumble backwards down the front steps of the house. Sam gets his bearings just in time for Kevin Burkett to stare down at him with a coild angry gaze and point to a spot just over Sam's shoulder.
"You bring that anywhere near me again, and I'll kill you," Kevin says.
Sam glances over his shoulder and sees the bushes lining the driveway, the mist growing heavier in the air, the dark shadow of someone that might not be someone lurking nearby.
When Sam turns back to see Kevin shut the door to his house, he could swear Kevin's hands are on fire.
He's just driven into Virginia when the flyers start falling from the sky like autumn leaves, plastering themselves to the windshield of the Impala in the steadily increasing rain that's followed him all the way from Nebraska.
JOSHUA, they all say, a thousand sheets of paper in brilliant shades of blue and green and red. The black-and-white photo of a grungy man appears below it, an address for a small town in Maryland in precise black lettering after that.
Sam pulls over to the side of the road to scrape the papers from the glass. When he gets back into the driver's seat, his hair sticks to his forehead from the rain like it's been glued there.
The ride to Maryland goes by in a flash, a heartbeat. Sam feels like he's in Kentucky one minute, takes one long easy stride eastward and there Maryland is under the soles of his feet.
He sees faces in between, though. The people who look vaguely familiar mostly ignore him or treat him like a malevolent spirit. They pretend he doesn't exist and hum when he asks them questions. They scream, they avert their eyes, they hitch their breath and shake their heads like they're trying to shake away bad memories.
But the ones he doesn't know, the strangers whose gazes connect with his with polite understanding ... those are the ones Sam really worries about.
Just outside of the town Sam's headed to is a park he stops in because he gets the weirdest feeling he's supposed to meet someone there, that nervous energy of anticipation flowing through his veins. He sits there for ten minutes before a little boy walks past hand in hand with an older man who looks too much like him not to be his father. The little boy's dark eyes light up as soon as he spots Sam and he tugs his hand from his father's grasp, racing to Sam's side and cupping one small brown hand over Sam's ear.
"My mommy died in a fire, too," he says, then runs back to his dad as if he hadn't just broken Sam's heart with a few simple words.
When Sam finds Joshua, he's perched on the stone steps of the local courthouse regardless of the rain, crouching down on the stone balustrade and leaning over with an odd sort of grace to peer into the ears of passersby as if he can see straight through into their minds. Joshua's suit is tattered but expensive, his briefcase a fancy black leather number with dents in the sides and corners.
Sam thinks Joshua looks a little too crazy to be worth his time, but then Joshua spots him and it doesn't matter anymore.
"You've come," he yelps, and bounds down the steps towards Sam like a rolypoly puppy.
Sam barely resists the urge to pull out a weapon he doesn't even have.
Joshua runs up and grabs onto Sam with far too clean hands. A broad smile crosses Joshua's face, twisted and strange. "Knew you were coming, " Joshua says. "Saw the dotted line cross the map." He reaches up and taps his temple.
And it's like all of the confusion of the past few daysweeksmonthsyears catches up to Sam in an instant, a long empty time in a world that doesn't fit and fits him perfectly all at the same time. He lets out a harsh breath and staggers backwards. Joshua makes this face and suddenly there's a brick wall at Sam's back, a hard solid surface he grabs at with his hands like a lifeline.
"Where am I?" he asks.
Joshua grins and crouches at Sam's feet in one smooth movement. "Found a question, but not the right one. Where aren't you? That's the sixty-four dollar question, Sammy."
Sam doesn't bother to ask how Joshua knows his name. Some things, he'd just rather not know. "I'm looking for my family."
Joshua cocks his head. "Looking for them, or looking for something because they can't?"
Dead silence, and if there are words out there, Sam can't reach them with his hands flat on the wall behind him.
"Thought so," Joshua says with a laugh. The brittle sound makes Sam picture someone throwing a champagne flute into a fireplace.
The rain grows heavy all of a sudden, like someone high above has tipped over a bucket of water, and Joshua tugs up his suit jacket until it covers his head. He grins wickedly, staring up at Sam from where he's crouching on the sidewalk, ignoring the people going about their day around them.
And that's the thing, too, the way they just keep walking through the rain like it's not even there. A woman in a business suit stands not far away buying a hot dog from a vendor at a shiny cart, rain pounding against her cheeks and rolling down her face. Children run past with their hair plastered to their foreheads. A beautiful teenage girl stalks past them both with a toss of her head, not seeming to care what the rain is doing to her tight little tank top.
"Do you know anything about demons?" Sam hears himself say.
He has no idea where the question comes from.
Joshua hums for a moment, like he's contemplating the answer. "I know your footsteps in the snow," he says, and flips upward in a dizzying maneuver until he's standing a few feet in front of Sam. "My feet are small. They fit right into your footprints if I know the dance."
Sam finds the strength to move away from the wall, and takes a step across the wet sidewalk towards where he parked the Impala. "I can't do this now. Dad and Dean need me to --"
Before Sam can walk away, Joshua's there with his palm presses against Sam's chest. "You're the only one with the maps out of the labyrinth. I can see them in your pocket. You know the rules about right and left turns, don't you? No one getting out of the maze without you."
Sam frowns. "You're talking about the visions."
"We split the deck, you and I. Born in fire, both of us."
"Is that what drove you insane?"
Something cynical and amused settles in Joshua's gaze. "You should hear the snow from this side of the glass, Sammy."
Overhead, thunder rolls.
Joshua leads Sam to a quiet room in the courthouse with his name on the door, if you can count bounding ahead of Sam in giddy leaps as "leading." It's pretty damn obvious that Joshua likes it here, that he thrives in his own way in this off-kilter version of the world that they're stuck in.
He shuts the door to his office behind them like he's affording them some privacy, as if everyone in the world isn't ignoring everything they do.
Law books on the shelves, diplomas on the wall. Outside the window is a playground, and the sound of children screaming with glee sets Sam on edge.
Rain slams against the window. The storm's getting that much worse, and nobody seems to give a damn.
"Bounce, bounce, bounce from one place to the next," Joshua says. He waves a finger in Sam's direction as he tosses his briefcase across the room to land neatly on a leather chair and swings up to perch on the desk. "You can't play hopscotch in other people's heads forever, Sammy. Recess is almost over, you know, and someone's looking for his lost kitten by the swing set."
He cocks his head towards the window and Sam looks outside.
There's a shadow of a man by the jungle gym, so black and solid Sam almost expects it to climb the damn monkey bars.
"Do you have any idea where I'm supposed to go to next?"
Joshua shakes his head. "Didn't get the answer key. Only saw you drive to the test."
"Great," Sam mutters. "That's really helpful."
"Shift gears, that's the trick. Ease into reverse like a trick driver. Slide into neutral and do parlor tricks with parlor furniture, is what you should do."
Sam freezes, looking over at Joshua with an unsettled feeling in his stomach. "That only happened once."
"Once I tried to juggle," Joshua says. "Dropped the balls and never picked them up again. Now I throw rocks in the air and get concussions." He tilts his head again in that curious-puppy-dog way, that angle that says he's not half as insane as he appears to Sam. "Shame how that works, don't you think?"
"I don't want to learn how to move things with my mind." Sam's fists clench at his sides. "Hell, I don't even want these fucking visions."
"Grandma gave you that sweater, and you'll wear it when she comes to visit whether you like or not." Joshua barks the words out in the same tone of voice Dad used to use to get Sam to learn one more weapon, one more protective sigil, one more defensive maneuver before bed. Then that shining smile returns and Joshua adds, "Look at the bright side. It keeps you warm and safe."
Sam presses his hand against the window pane, the glass cooled by the rain, and tries not to picture a gun firing a shot clear through Dean's head.
"I just want this over with, damn it," Sam says.
Joshua stares at him with a steadiness to him like he's got to concentrate damn hard to do it and says in an eerily even voice, "Dean doesn't want to die in the backseat, Sam."
It's the sanest thing Joshua's said so far.
Afterwards Sam sits in the driver's seat of the Impala for a minute or so before muttering, "Fuck it," and getting onto the highway headed towards Pennsylvania.
If he's supposed to be a goddamn seer, then he's got a destination in mind whether he knows it or not.
The sky rolls black with storm clouds now, the rain like a waterfall swollen by flood. Sam drives through slightly rolling lands spotted with dairy farms and speeds up at the first sign of a tornado.
By the time he pulls off an exit near the New York border, the tornadoes are everywhere.
He makes left and right turns whenever he damn well feels like it, it seems, until he ends up in the middle of nowhere on some back country road that you could only call paved if you were being polite. Twisters dance around the car, spinning around in the rolling fields enough to make him dizzy at the sight.
They don't approach, though, teasing and taunting Sam as he turns onto a long dirt driveway leading towards a small gray farmhouse.
There, that's it, he thinks, and even with the storm growing around him, he finally relaxes.
He skids the Impala to a stop not far from the front of the house, throwing open the driver's side door and bounding up the steps through the torrents of rain from above. He doesn't even get a chance to knock on the front door before it opens a crack. A young woman stands there, a riot of red curls falling past her shoulders. Bottle-green eyes peer out at him, a warm gaze laced with steel taking him in.
"There'd better be a good reason for you to be at my front door," she says.
"I need your help. My family was in an accident, and I think ..." Sam chokes on the words, but they finally come. "I think they're dying."
She gives him a confused look like she's about to ask him where he got her address, then shakes it off and opens the door wide enough for him to enter.
There's a shotgun in her hands, and it looks so monstrous in her grasp it just makes her appear that much tinier in comparison.
She points it out into the darkness past his shoulder.
"Get in," she snaps.
Sam doesn't even give himself time to question it. He ducks into the house and she immediately slams the door shut, letting out a ragged exhale. She runs her fingertips over the wood, muttering under her breath. It sounds to Sam like a protective spell he found once in one of Dad's research books, but he figures that might just be wishful thinking.
"Sorry about that," she says. She puts the shotgun in the umbrella stand next to the door. Sam's struck with the sudden irrational thought that that's where she keeps all of her lethal weapons. " When it storms like this, it's because someone's showing off and he knows exactly what they're doing."
"He?"
Her gaze is steady when she turns to him and says, "Do I really need to answer that question?"
Sam runs his fingers through his hair at that, pushing soaking wet waves from his eyes. "The demon can find me if I use my powers?"
"How do you think he finds us in the first place?"
Us, she says. Sam almost wants to throw up, if he can even do that here.
The farmhouse is cozy, the scents of baking bread and cherry pie heavy in the air. There's wood burning in the fireplace and a sofa in the living room that looks so damn soft Sam's sure he could sink into it and sleep forever. Someone's comfortable in this place, Sam thinks, and the woman drifts into his line of sight with a smile far too maternal for someone as young as she is.
"I'm Sam," he says. "Sam Winchester."
When he holds out her hand, she shakes it with a smile. "Holly Keats," she says. "We'll be safe in here."
The roof rattles as the wind whistles above them, and she glares up at it.
"For now."
"I don't know if I can do this."
Sam and Holly sit facing each other in dining room chairs, the hem of Holly's white dress pulled primly down over her knees. Her small pale hands rest in Sam's palms. One of her hands has a long deep gash in the back of it, and Sam can't remember how it got there.
Hell, he can't remember how they got here, from the roof shaking above them to the chairs pulled into the foyer.
Outside, the wind howls, and he shudders.
"You're going to have to do this, Sam," she says. He may be cupping her hands in his own but it feels like one of hers is pressed against his cheek, encouraging him. "I'm a little geographically disadvantaged. Besides, that's why you're came here."
He shakes his head. "I don't even know how I got here. I just remember getting into the crash and then things got ... weird."
Holly shifts in her chair, tilting her head so that she can see a little better past the still-damp curtain of his thick hair. The effect is startling, an abrupt rush of haze and fog through his entire body. It's like the air pressure in the room's gone just right, hit some atmospheric low note that relaxes every single one of his muscles. "How badly off do you think your family was the last time you saw them?"
Sam has to force himself to remember the scene. All he can see and smell is blood, feel it under his fingertips, taste copper on his tongue. He isn't all that sure they weren't just struck by a tidal wave of the stuff, there's so much of it.
Or maybe he's just imagining it.
"Uh, Dad had a gunshot wound in his leg. Plus, he was on the side of the car the truck hit first. Dean had internal injuries, I think. When the demon attacked him, he was bleeding from ... God, from everywhere."
Holly nods with a sigh. "I could do a lot more if I were there."
"Can you teach me?"
"I can teach you enough, I hope."
They both look down at her hands, at the glaring slash in her skin, and Sam feels like there's two conversations going on. There's the one they're having out loud, and there's the quiet lecturing voice in his head, steady and memorable and going a thousand miles an hour. He wonders if this is what it would be like if someone were beaming his law school classes into his brain while he was off hunting with Dean, if they sped it all up so he could subliminally pick it all up over a stop for coffee in Iowa or something.
She turns her uninjured hand over to trace the lines in his palm and there's a cut there, deep and dark. He can't feel a thing.
Holly drags a fingertip over it and the damn thing seals up like her touch is laced with industrial-strength adhesive.
"How long have you been able to do that?"
She smiles uneasily, a wistfull look in her glittering green eyes. "A week after my wedding, my husband was thrown from his horse and broke his leg. Scared the hell out of both of us when I healed it, but Frank's an understanding kind of guy."
Someone pounds on the front door, and they both flinch.
"We have to hurry," Holly says.
Sam jerks his head in a frantic nod and takes her injured hand in both of his. He pictures the skin pulling together and shutting like a Ziploc bag, invisible stitches closing the wound. "Is this really such a good idea?" he asks, but he's doing it. A little tug at the skin at both ends, hardly anything, but he's pulling it off.
"You can do it," she says. "We can all do some of it at least, if we need to do it enough. That's why we're such a threat."
"It's not that." He keeps staring at her hand, wanting, wanting, and the cut might be closing but it doesn't mean he thinks he's up for the real challenge. "It's just ... what if I screw this up?"
"Sam, you wanted so badly to help your family that your mind used every psychic between you and me as a jumping-off point. I don't think you can screw this up."
The door shakes again, like an elephant's slammed into it.
Holly winces. "Sam ..."
And he doesn't look up, can't look up, can't be distracted when he thinks he knows what he's doing. It's like fixing Dad and Dean after a hunt, really, except without the first aid kit or antiseptic or needle and thread. It's sheer force of will and desire and need, really needing that pale skin to heal, damn it, heal --
"I think I've got it," he says.
The door shakes again, and the world skips like a broken record.
"Sam, hurry," Holly says. "You can do this."
He knows he can. He knows.
He knows ...
"Sam?"
Sam!
-- jerks awake in the driver's seat of the Impala, air hissing past his teeth as he sucks in a shuddering breath. He glances around almost frantically, trying to orient himself to the sudden sensory overload of pain flooding his body and his father and brother lying frighteningly still in their seats.
Oh, Jesus.
"Dad?"
Dad's first, of course, because he's got to be first with a bullet hole in his leg and his body so broken Sam can barely stand to look at it. Sam's hands tremble as he reaches out to touch Dad's arm, wincing at the grinding of shattered bones. He can't see the truck driver anywhere, possessed or not, but sirens wail in the distance, and he has to be quick.
He has to be quick about something he's never even fucking tried before.
Shit. Shit.
"Dad, listen to me," Sam says, even though there's a part of him that's positive Dad can't hear him anymore. "I'm going to try something, all right? Just hang on."
He squeezes his eyes shut and concentrates. He concentrates to the point that he thinks his knees would buckle if he was standing up. He can feel a migraine coming on already from the strength of his desire, from trying to fix damaged flesh and broken bones through force of will.
He wants.
He wants so damn much he wouldn't be surprised to open his eyes again and turn out cross-eyed from the effort.
There's heat in his hands, heat far warmer than the usual connection of palm to skin, and Sam forces his eyes open to stare down at the bullethole in Dad's leg. His breath hitches in his chest, because fresh dark blood still soaks through his father's pant leg but Sam could swear there's clear unblemished skin visible through the tear in the fabric.
"It's really working," he says, and he holds on and holds on and holds on through the novelty of it.
Dean.
The sirens wail, just that much closer, and Sam mutters, "Damn it," before leaning over the seat to grab onto Dean's knee. It's the closest part of him Sam can reach, the way he's slumped over back there like his skeleton's turned to rubber.
"Come on, Dean," he says, and closes his eyes.
He thinks of broken bones knitting together and bleeding organs mending. He thinks of his big brother in one uninjured piece, of Dean alive and healthy to keep his promise not to let this whole psychic thing go to Sam's head.
He wishes, and wishes hard.
Hiding who they are isn't an option now, not with the car accident, not with the Impala registered in Dean's real name and the police sniffing around thanks to his unfortunate legally-dead status. Sam has to get used to hearing people call him Mr. Winchester again, a year's worth of aliases putting a sizable dent in that small slice of normalcy.
Dad and Dean lie in the ICU not half as injured as they should be. The nurses whisper the word "miracle" like it's a curse, and Sam almost agrees.
He spends two days drinking shitty coffee and falling uncomfortably asleep in waiting room chairs. He ignores the nurses and doctors when they give him information on where to stay until his father and brother recover from their injuries and is as polite as he can manage to the police.
And he stares at his hands a lot. Stares and stares until he expects he'll bore holes right through the flesh of his palms.
One day, he wakes up in one of the waiting room chairs to see a pair of familiar bottle-green eyes bracketed by far too many wrinkles staring down at him. He stretches out his long legs and rubs at his eyes like the vision will clear, but there she is.
"Holly?"
The old woman before him smiles. "Sleeping in chairs like that's a one-way ticket to a hunchback, you know."
For the first time in days, Sam feels the urge to smile right back at someone. "Yeah, I'll bet."
It doesn't take as long as Sam thinks it will to reconcile the pretty redheaded girl with the old woman who gives him a comforting hug and offers to buy him whatever the hospital cafeteria's making that's not terrifyingly bland. Holly Keats can't be a day under seventy-five, but she gives him a flirty pat on the arm when she tells it'd be a crime not to feed him before he starts to shrink, tall handsome man that he is.
When her palm connects with his skin, it sends a wave of energy through his flesh that feels like a shot of pure caffeine and makes him shiver.
Sam spills the whole story to Holly over a tasteless grilled cheese sandwich and a fresh salad that cost more than it probably should have. He doesn't bother leaving out anything, not the last year on the road with Dean, not having to shoot his own father, not the demon or the fire or the last twenty years of their own underground war. He suspects she already knows anyway.
"Oh, my," she finally says with a sigh, "and I thought that damn thing screwed up my life."
The corner of his lips tugs upwards at that. "Yeah, well, I guess if anything prepares you for suddenly getting mind-numbingly painful visions, a lifetime of hunting things like that will do it."
"I imagine that's true."
Sam shifts uncomfortably in his seat as Holly watches him, rubs at the back of his neck and mutters, "God, I'm almost afraid to know what I'm turning into."
"You know, Sam, you're lucky I don't resent that considering I'm not above smacking you upside the head, car accident or not."
"I didn't mean --"
"I know what you meant." Holly pokes absently at her salad with her fork and it suddenly strikes Sam just how little of it she's eaten. "I wondered that myself, from time to time after Rudy died."
"Rudy?"
"My first husband. He died in a fire, just like my mama."
Her gaze connects with Sam as she lets that sink in. Sam's skin feels chilled as if he just ducked into a walk-in freezer in a T-shirt and boxers. He hears the crunch of Holly's fork piercing through fresh lettuce like it's happening in another room.
"You're not the first, you won't be the last, and I can safely assure you that this isn't a new thing. And I may have lost my Rudy, but I've managed to keep my Frank for over fifty years now." There's something soft and grateful about the look in her eyes, and Sam lets himself feel real hope about something other than his father and brother for the first time in days.
Sam spots a hospital security guard out of the corner of his eye, and he's not one of the ones keeping an eye on Dean's room but the uniform hits something in Sam just the same. He forces himself to look down at his grilled cheese sandwich, picking at the bread. "I need to get them out of here," he says to Holly.
"I figured as much," she says. "I didn't hop a flight on short notice for nothing."
"They keep asking me these questions I can't answer. What am I supposed to say, a demon drove a truck into our car, but I bounced from psychic to psychic across the country until I found one who could help me heal them with my hands?"
Holly frowns. "Well, you could say that, I suppose, but I'm guessing it would ruin your social life for a good long while."
And he can't take his gaze off her hands, wrinkled and soft and strong all at once. She drums her fingertips on the counter like she knows what he's looking at, why he can't stop looking at her.
"Did you ever think of just stopping? Of just trying to be normal?"
She's silent for a long moment before she reaches out and takes one of his hands. He bristles with the energy of her touch, sharp and undeniable. "Sam, up until I retired, I was a nurse. Being normal seems downright cruel when you can help like this, wouldn't you say?"
Sam thinks of letting himself open up, of letting visions of monsters and demons and things that go bump in the night flow into his mind every night, and nods reluctantly.
They get up then, tossing out the cold remnants of their lunch as they head out of the cafeteria. Holly puts her hand on his arm again and Sam looks down at her, the intent in her eyes pretty clear.
"Holly?"
"Yes?"
"I'm guessing it's too much to hope that you can lay hands on a car to fix it, right?"
"Yes, Sam, just a little too much to hope for."
"Well, can't say I didn't ask."
When Dean comes to, he's in a hospital bed, and if there were tubes and things attached to him and in him, there sure as hell aren't any now. There's a strange old woman holding his hands, an odd flood of tingling warmth flowing from her palms like heat from summer pavement.
"Shh," she whispers, and there's something about her that reminds him so much of Sam his chest aches. "I'm here to help."
One of her hands slips to his forehead, the pain behind his temples flying away in an instant at the touch. The more she touches him, the more the cloudiness in his vision clears, the easier it is to see Dad and Sam standing next to the bed. When one isn't looking at him with hopeful eyes, the other shoots worried glances at the door.
Dean knows that look on both of their faces, that desire to hurry and escape.
The old woman's hands slide along his skin again, heated pressure that comforts and soothes. "How do you feel?" she asks, in this tone of voice like she already knows the answer.
He takes a deep hesitant breath and the pain he had been feeling right before the accident is a distant memory.
"Never better," Dean says, and means it.
He looks up and suddenly Sam's there, Sam in one piece, Sam without a goddamn scratch on him. Thank God for small favors. "Hey, Dean," he says.
He smiles, and Dean smiles right back. "Hey, Sammy."
Dean feels the light weight of something on his chest and looks down. Sam's pushing clothes towards him, a T-shirt, a pair of jeans, a pair of sneakers.
"Let's get out of here," he says.
Dean grins as he sits up in the hospital bed. "Sounds like a plan to me."
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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Date: 2006-06-22 10:54 am (UTC)*goosebumps*
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Date: 2006-06-22 11:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-22 12:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-22 01:20 pm (UTC)Joshua stares at him with a steadiness to him like he's got to concentrate damn hard to do it and says in an eerily even voice, "Dean doesn't want to die in the backseat, Sam."
It's the sanest thing Joshua's said so far.
That part may have broken me a little bit inside.
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Date: 2006-06-22 01:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-22 01:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-22 02:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-22 02:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-22 02:25 pm (UTC)"Sam, you wanted so badly to help your family that your mind used every psychic between you and me as a jumping-off point. I don't think you can screw this up."
Sammy would be the one to play psychic Hop-scotch, wouldn't he? *giggles*
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Date: 2006-06-22 02:29 pm (UTC)*gasps for breath*
Dayum... this was. Dude, this was GOOD!!
*blinks*
Whoa....
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Date: 2006-06-22 02:54 pm (UTC)*hugs Sam. And Dean, so they'll be equal*
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Date: 2006-06-22 03:23 pm (UTC)Favorite lines:
The Impala gleams black and ominous in the sunlight like a blatant lie.
I love that line. Beautifully written.
Joshua stares at him with a steadiness to him like he's got to concentrate damn hard to do it and says in an eerily even voice, "Dean doesn't want to die in the backseat, Sam."
*whimpers* Hurry, Sam.
"You're not the first, you won't be the last, and I can safely assure you that this isn't a new thing. And I may have lost my Rudy, but I've managed to keep my Frank for over fifty years now." There's something soft and grateful about the look in her eyes, and Sam lets himself feel real hope about something other than his father and brother for the first time in days.
I loved that section, how Holly’s story gives Sam hope. And I liked how she went from a young woman in Sam’s head to an older woman in reality. That was a nice twist.
"I'm guessing it's too much to hope that you can lay hands on a car to fix it, right?"
*g* Nice use of humor there.
Thanks for a great read!
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Date: 2006-06-22 04:04 pm (UTC):)
Cool stuff, loved how weird and jangly the start was and how it just sort of flowed, then, when he knew what he had to do.
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Date: 2006-06-22 04:31 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2006-06-22 07:19 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2006-06-23 04:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-24 04:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-25 07:02 pm (UTC)It was cool that Holly was so young in the vision and so old in real life. She probably imagines herself as young, so that was a neat detail.
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Date: 2006-06-26 10:00 pm (UTC)Best line, absolutely. Goodness, and I love the idea of Sam having healing powers...how helpful is that?
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Date: 2006-06-29 03:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-05 01:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-13 03:40 am (UTC)