Lazarus Came Forth: Chapter Six
Sep. 14th, 2008 07:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oselleTitle: Lazarus Came Forth, 6/8
Pairings: None (gen)
Rating: R (for language and some violence)
Warnings: Serious angst, some gore, heavily Dean-centric.
Spoilers: Through end of Season Three
Word Count: 5,700 for Chapter Six (43,700 Chapters One through Six)
Disclaimer: The Winchesters and all canon characters are the intellectual property of their creators. All original characters are mine. No money was made in the writing of this story.
Summary: Dean returns from hell and finds himself alive and alone in the stark landscape of an America that gone terribly wrong. Adrift in hostile territory and pursued by hell's bounty hunters, he sets out on a desperate hunt to find Sam. Apocafic.
Recap: If you're just tuning in, a familiar face has rescued Dean in the nick of time from a smorgasbord of grim fates and hidden him in West Virginia, where Dean will finally find out what happened on earth after he died and during the four years he was in hell. Links to previous chapters:
Chapter Five
Chapter Four
Chapter Three
Chapter Two
Chapter One
Lazarus Came Forth
6. Four Years Gone
The night Dean died Bobby saw a blinding light come from inside the house and the demons around it scattered like cockroaches and he thought anything that sent demons packing had to have some good to it. Then inside the house he found Sam with Dean.
Sam said nothing and he picked up his brother's body and put it over his shoulder and left the house without looking back. And Bobby followed right after him and left those Fremonts there with a mess of dead people to account for and no explanation that anyone in his right mind would ever believe. Bobby never found out what happened to them.
Sam straightarrowed back to South Dakota, fifteen hours without ever breaking seventy miles per any of them and Bobby was behind him all the way. By the time they reached Bobby's house Dean's clothes had crusted onto him and his body had become so rigid that Sam had to cut off his clothing. He put it in a pile on the floor and he washed his brother's body and Bobby helped him. And when they finished this Sam took Dean's bloodied clothing and took all the towels and sheets and anything with Dean's blood on it and burned them to ash. Bobby watched and said nothing until finally he asked Sam if he wanted help burning or burying Dean's body. And Sam looked up at Bobby and laughed and said, "Dean'll tear me a new one if I do that, Bobby." And he went and got Bobby's medical supplies and began to sew his brother back together.
* * *
When Sam finished the ritual and Dean was lying in the low and shifting candlelight painted forehead to ankle with sigils of ash that Bobby had never seen before and spoken over with incantations that he'd never heard, he actually felt for a pulse. Put his hand out and felt for some sign of life. There was none but Dean's neck, his body had become warm. Pliant. As if only sleeping. Bobby stood there with his fingers on Dean's still throat and looked at Sam and said, "What is this?"
"Plan B," Sam said. "I'm not letting him go."
* * *
It was near midnight, twenty-four hours after Dean died that Bobby checked on Sam and found him with Dean, dressed now and lying on the bed in the room upstairs where he and Sam had always slept and Sam was finally crying.
He'd taken off the pendant that Dean always wore and had put it on himself and he'd given Dean a saint's medal, St. Michael the Archangel because Dean had once told Sam that their mother had said angels were watching over them. And Sam asked Bobby to take care of him, please take care of him because he had to find Lilith and get his brother back.
Bobby watched Sam drive away and thought, I'm never gonna see that boy again.
* * *
Two years went by and in all that time Bobby heard nothing about Lilith and he wondered if that blaze of white light in New Harmony had pitched her back in hell for good. Bobby heard stories about Sam exorcising people, killing demons, even summoning them and interrogating them and sending them back to hell but he never saw Sam or heard from him and all of Sam's old phone numbers and email addresses had turned to dead air. The everyday world began to disintegrate but the supernatural one that Bobby watched and kept an ear to became very, very quiet and Bobby heard no news of Sam or Lilith or any demon or their manifestations. As if all these things had crawled back to hell once and for all and good riddance to them.
Upstairs Dean's body lay on the bed, breathless, bloodless, unnaturally vivid, the soul it had once housed far, far beyond the reach of any mortal help.
* * *
In the fall of the year two years after Dean died Bobby killed a black dog outside his house. It was the first one he'd seen in years and it didn't act like any other, it wasn't lying in wait to gut someone but sniffing, sniffing around the house right up to the back porch where Bobby killed it with two double-ought silver tipped buckshot shells. He chopped up the carcass and burned it with a pile of trash out in his back dump and it made such a stink that Pete Forrester, county sheriff for as long as Bobby had lived there by the Cheyenne River, came to find out what in the hell old Singer was up to now.
Forrester made Bobby put a lid on his trashfire and stayed on for coffee and told Bobby that he was being retired day after next. Something calling itself the South Dakota Civil Defense was taking over most of the law enforcement duties in the state.
"Ain't that the goddamnest thing you ever heard?" Forrester asked. "Ain't it though?"
A few days later a South Dakota Civil Defender showed up at Bobby's house and stood there on the back porch and asked him questions about Sam and Dean Winchester. Bobby told him they had died years ago and the soldier or officer or whatever the hell he was asked Bobby if he knew where they were buried.
"Buried?" Bobby said. "Well hell, I heard they got blown up for all I know there wasn't nothin left to bury. Say, why don't you come inside, have a cuppa joe?"
The soldier looked down at the salt line across the threshold and Bobby watched him and wasn't surprised when the soldier looked up and said, "No thank you, Mr. Singer." They stood there and stared at each other and there was no sound but the wind and a hiss of dry dirt striking the house's old clapboards and then the soldier raised his head and took a great sniff at the air.
"Smells like you got a dead rat up in your walls. Might wanna check that out."
"Will do, sir," Bobby said and the soldier stepped off the porch and got in his black truck and drove away and Bobby closed the door and went upstairs and ten minutes later he had Dean out of the house and in the back of his Chevelle, bound for Mississippi.
* * *
Catherine Parsons was the last of a line that stretched back to the Yorkshire moors and probably to the Druids and God only knows what before that. The family had been run out of Yazoo City after the fire that took out half the town and they'd settled in Rena Lara near the banks of the Mississippi River and there Catherine had learned about her many weird gifts at her great-grandmother's and grandmother's and mother's knees. She wasn't a hunter and if any hunters had heard of her they probably thought she was dead.
Catherine was maybe fifty years old and lived there by herself and she could still make a fire blaze up in the fireplace just by thinking about it and could move things around the room without lifting a finger and Bobby Singer showing up at her doorstep with a lifelike corpse in his arms didn't even make her blink. He left Dean there like something out of the Brothers Grimm and went back to South Dakota with an arsenal of salt and holy water and silver bullets ready to fight whatever might be waiting for him.
When he drove up the hill to his house that October evening his headlights bounced off the chrome trim and lowslung taillights of a car he'd never expected to see again and he pulled up behind the big black sedan and sat there staring at it.
He got out of his car and put his hand on the Impala's hood and it was still warm. He called out, "Sam?" and no one answered. He had one foot on the first porch step when the back door opened and Bobby expected to see Sam's lanky frame but it wasn't Sam. Bobby stumbled back off the porch step and almost fell down. Then Sam was out of the house and was hugging him and Bobby stared over Sam's shoulder at Dean Winchester standing there with one hand on the doorknob and his shoulder against the door and a smile on his face.
* * *
Dean stared at Bobby. "Me?"
"Yeah," Bobby said. He got up and poured himself a shot and sat down and drank it and looked at Dean.
"Demon? Shapeshifter?"
"You think we didn't consider that? They stayed with me for a week and you...or what we thought was you, passed every test. Exorcism, holy water, he stood right under that Devil's Trap and didn't bat an eye. He was flesh and blood, Dean. He was you, down to the last...gesture. Everything. Even you wouldn't have known the difference."
"Then something got up in my body while you were driving back from Mississippi."
"No scars, no stitches. Timing was all wrong, too. Sam said he'd been with you for weeks already."
Dean ran a hand over his face. "Okay," he said. "Okay. Wait a minute. Wait. My body...this body's stashed away in Mississippi and Sam's sitting there with some phony me."
"Yeah."
"Well fuck, Bobby, did you tell him?"
"What was I gonna tell him? It was you Dean."
"So what, I just walked in the door one day?"
"He said Lilith had given you back."
"Given me back?" Dean said. And then, "Oh shit. Fuck, Bobby...what the fuck did he do?"
"I asked him if he'd made a deal and he said no. I asked him what the hell that meant and he said that Lilith had come to him. She called for a truce. Voided the contract, no strings attached."
"She's a fucking demon, when do they ever come with no strings attached?"
"I don't know, Dean but I believed him. He didn't sign anything, he didn't barter anything, he just...agreed to a truce. And she told him where to find you, I mean, not you...it...him."
"Where was that?"
"Wyoming, near the Devil's Gate. By the time Sam got there he'd been picked up by the cops. They still had cops in Wyoming back then. They'd put him in the state hospital in Evanston, didn't know what else to do with him. Sam got him released and holed up with him until he came around and then they turned up at my place."
Bobby put his mug on the floor beside his chair and looked at Dean. It had gotten dark while he was talking and there was no light in the room but the woodstove's fire and Dean was sitting in the shadows across from him with his hands clasped between his knees staring into the coals. Bobby let him sit like that for a minute and then said, "Dean?"
Dean looked at him and stood up. He grabbed the whiskey bottle by the neck and walked out of the room and through the kitchen and Bobby heard the backdoor open and slam closed.
* * *
Bobby opened the stove door and poked at the embers and threw in some more kindling and got the fire up again. He closed the door and sat there staring at the flames. There was more to tell but for now he could let Dean be alone.
On the last night that Sam and that other Dean stayed in his house Bobby had been woken up at some late hour by the sound of Dean calling for Sam. He'd sounded so lost and in so much pain that Bobby could have cried for both of them. He'd sat up in bed and seen the light come on from their room down the hall and heard the low sound of Sam talking Dean out of his nightmare.
After a few minutes he got up to see if they needed anything and he went down the hall and saw the door standing ajar with a triangle of light spilling onto the floor. Bobby could hear the rustle of their voices and see them through the quarter-open door where Dean sat up on the bed with his legs tucked underneath him and Sam was on the edge of the bed beside him and they had their foreheads together, whispering to each other like that while Sam cupped Dean's face in his hands and Dean ran his hands up and down Sam's arms as if trying to make sure he was real. There was an intimacy to the scene that made Bobby turn to go and just then they put their arms around each other and Dean rested his chin on Sam's shoulder and looked through the open door right at Bobby, unsmiling and his eyes were deep and lambent green in the dim light.
The Dean that Bobby had known from childhood had taken plenty of ribbing about his looks from guys who called him pretty boy and heygorgeous and even Bobby had teased him about it now and then. He'd once heard John say that Dean was too goddamned pretty for his own good, looked just like his mother, that one.
But this Dean. This Dean. Was beautiful. In a way that made Bobby's heart fold in on itself because he knew what he saw hadn't been meant for him. He was beautiful, enough to make Bobby's blood turn to ice. The devil hath power to achieve a pleasing shape, he thought and where had he read that? When had he heard that? He had known Dean since he was eight years old and for all that he was pretty whatever was in that room with Sam was so beautiful it was horrible and it was not him.
Dean had blinked and put his forehead down on Sam's shoulder and when he'd looked up again he'd smiled and said, "Hey, Bobby," and whatever Bobby had seen or thought he'd seen was gone. By morning he hadn't been able to believe he'd seen it at all but it had haunted him ever since and probably always would.
There was more to tell and Bobby would tell it but he would never tell Dean about this. Kid had been through enough.
* * *
Dean must have polished off a good quarter of the bottle by the time Bobby came out on the back porch and he put the bottle down on the boards between his feet before Bobby could say anything about drinking too much with all the meds he was on. He heard the doorjamb creak when Bobby leaned up against it and he didn't turn around and neither of them said anything for a while.
"Getting damn cold out," Bobby said.
"Yeah."
"Early, too. It'll be winter before you know it."
"Bobby," Dean said. "This is the worst fucking small talk I ever heard."
"Thank God one of us said it. I thought you were gonna let me keep yammering like an idiot."
"Well, I considered it."
"You all right?"
Dean stared out across the porch railing. There was nothing to see but the dark treeline. "I'm okay." He shrugged. "Considering I just found out that while I was getting tortured down in hell my brother was up here thinking I was safe. She sure knows her shit, doesn't she?" He turned around and looked at Bobby. "That was Lilith. That...what you thought was me? It was her."
"We sort of figured that out, well, Sam did. Later though, not then."
Dean nodded and looked down and picked up the bottle and took a drink and held it in his hands and peeled the label down in slow strips. "I didn't figure it out. I remember it." He looked at Bobby and Bobby didn't say anything and he looked away. "You thought that was me because it was me. She got it all out of me, Bobby. All of it. What the fuck, why not? I was there for the picking."
"Jesus Christ."
"And it hurt, Bobby, it fucking hurt, you have no idea. You'd think..." He smiled. "You'd think having all your bones broken hurts but not like that, not even close. And I knew why she was doing it. She didn't share the whole plan with me but I knew it was for Sam. She couldn't kill him so she had to find another way to get to him. Pretty fucking brilliant. Me locked up in hell and her playing house with Sam. Jesus..." He grimaced and wiped a hand over his face. "Driving my car too? It just gets better and better."
"There's more to the story, Dean. It doesn't end there."
"Well I'm here so I figured there was."
"You wanna go inside and hear the rest of it or sit out here and freeze our asses off?"
Dean looked at him. "Let's go."
He stood up and Bobby opened the back door and pointed at the bottle on the board floor.
"Bring that."
* * *
A hunter's never going to make it if he doesn't rely on hunches now and then and the one smart thing Bobby did during that whole week that Sam and Dean stayed with him was lie to them about Dean's body. They asked where it was and Bobby told them that the spells hadn't held and he'd had to burn the body. The lie came easy to him and he felt a strange relief when he told it and an even greater relief when they believed it.
They left and the year guttered out. By the beginning of 2011 things started getting bad as if a whole army of demons had woken up. Bobby heard of hunters getting attacked or killed, one after the other, everyone Bobby knew. Jo Harvelle turned up half dead at her mother's house one night and Bobby helped them get out of the country into Canada though where they went from there he didn't know. He left messages for Sam and Dean and never got a response and after a while he began to think they were dead too. By the middle of the year Bobby had been driven out of South Dakota by demons and dust storms and he was on the run and had cast off all his old phone numbers so if Sam or Dean ever called him he wouldn't have known.
The one connection Bobby had to his old life was a post office box in Brainerd, Minnesota, the last of several that he'd had scattered around the country under different names. He showed up there in September to pay the fee on it and found inside it a postcard of Santa Cruz, California. On the back was a six week old postmark and a phone number and two words driven hard into the paper and underlined: NOT HIM.
Bobby left the post office and went and sat in his car and stared at the postcard. Finally he called the number on the card and he heard Sam's voice. The call went to voicemail. Two hours later Sam called him back. By then Bobby was sitting in a motel room in Duluth with salt piled up across the doors and windows and a shotgun in his lap.
"It's not him," Sam said. "It's not Dean."
"Come and see me," Bobby said.
"I can't. They could follow me."
"Find a way," Bobby said.
Three days later they met in the nave of a church in Duluth and even in that low stained-glass light Sam looked twenty years older and little like the kid that Bobby had known.
"Consecrated ground," he said. "I'm surprised I can even walk in here."
He wouldn't tell Bobby anything except that he knew what he'd been living with was not his brother and so Dean was still in hell, had been in hell all this time. Bobby told Sam to stay with him and Bobby smiled and shook his head and said that he was going back.
"I've been wasting my time with every useless fucking demon I could find and now I've got her, Bobby, right where I want her. She's gonna lead me right to him, I know she is."
"Are you crazy? Once she figures out you know, what do you think she's gonna do?"
"She's not gonna figure it out. Her guard is way down right now, I just need to keep it there and wait."
"You don't know what you're doing," Bobby said.
"I have no choice. He's been down there for three years, three years, Bobby. I've gotta get him out."
"What'll you do with him if you do?" Bobby asked and watched Sam. Wary. "He can't come back like you knew him, Sam."
"I don't care," Sam said. "I just want him out of there, like Dad. Just...free."
Bobby almost told Sam then about Dean's body in Mississippi. But too many things had happened and too much was uncertain and he didn't. Couldn't. They parted in Duluth and Bobby thought of following Sam but he waited until he thought it was safe and he went to Catherine Parsons instead. He went upstairs and sat beside the bed and took Dean's warm but lifeless hand in his own and he told him everything. And finished with a prayer, though whether it was to Dean or God or Sam or someone else altogether he couldn't say.
"Please let me do the right thing here. Please."
* * *
In June of 2012 Bobby got a last call from Sam.
"I've got it, Bobby. I'm going in."
"What? When?"
"Tomorrow. Summer solstice, it's gotta be then. I won't get another chance."
"Sam, for Christ's sake..."
"I might not talk to you again."
"Sam, wait..."
"I'll tell Dean you're okay. I love you, Bobby," he said and hung up. Bobby dialed the number back and it rang and rang and he was finally able to get an operator who traced the number to a pay phone in Barstow, California. And he stood there with the phone growing sweaty in his hand and then he got behind the wheel of the militia-issue sedan he'd rigged up for himself and he redlined that thing all the way to Mississippi.
* * *
Summer solstice came and went. It grew thick and hot outside as June turned into July and Dean did not stir. Bobby put his fingers on Dean's neck and there was nothing and he laid his hand on Dean's chest and it was still. He left Catherine Parsons with a semi-automatic handgun and a cartridge of silver bullets and went on the road to find Sam, if he was still on earth at all.
In Barstow he finally sat down beside the pay phone outside a derelict gas station and he put his head in his hands and cried. Crazy old man.
* * *
He heard of the fire in Rena Lara on an Ehrlich Defense newsfeed. He made it there by the second day of September and lied himself into the Clarksdale morgue and saw the three burned bodies.
Catherine Parsons was in the first drawer that the medical examiner opened for him. Her blackened corpse lay there and her skull was horribly caved in and Bobby touched her and turned her dried head to look at where the back of it should have been.
"What in the hell did this?" he asked the medical examiner.
"Can't account for it, sir."
"You can't account for it?"
"Nossir."
"Well, I can. Somebody was having a little fun here. You make sure and write that up, that somebody desecrated this woman's body. Understand?"
"Yessir."
"There were two others?"
"Yessir."
"They've been ID'd?"
"Nossir, just the woman. Funny old gal, lived over in Rena Lara. There were some stories about her but you know how people talk." He pulled out another drawer and Bobby bent down to the body and then looked up.
"Where's the third?"
"Right over here sir."
Bobby held his breath and the medical examiner opened the third drawer. Bobby leaned over the charred remains and studied them and he finally exhaled and straightened up.
"Thanks for your help," he said to the medical examiner and walked out.
* * *
It took him two days to track Dean to the old house twenty miles from Rena Lara and by then the place had been deserted and ransacked. He found the black dog's carcass in the backyard and the Devil's Trap on the kitchen floor and bandages and bloody clothing and he crouched down in the Devil's Trap and looked around helplessly and said, "Goddamnit, Dean," and there was no one to hear him but the flies.
* * *
Bobby had lit a kerosene lamp because he hadn't been able to keep talking about these things in the dark. Now he was finished and he sat there staring at the burning wick and smoky chimney and Dean sat across from him and didn't say anything. He was holding the postcard that Bobby had gotten from Sam and was tracing his fingers over the writing and the ashes rustled and shifted in the stove and made the only sound.
Finally Dean said, "Sam doesn't know I'm alive."
"I don't see how he could."
"We don't know if Sam's alive."
"I never heard from him after June."
Dean shook his head. "I saw him, Bobby. I saw him in hell."
"I believe you."
"He walked out of there with me, I know he did, he..." Dean pressed a hand to his mouth and squeezed his eyes shut, trying to remember. "He turned around and I could touch him I could almost touch him and then..."
There had been a fleeting moment when Sam had turned and reached out to him and Dean had felt him for the first time. And there had been sunlight and he'd said Sam's name, he'd spoken and Sam had heard him. He'd heard him. Then Dean had felt a blow as if he'd been thrown from a height and hit solid concrete and he was blind and sick and in his own body with everything behind him fading to black and he'd slept. For the first time in eternity, he'd slept.
"Dean?"
"I woke up in Mississippi. I didn't even know where I was. I thought I was still in hell. I knew there was someone with me and she took care of me...I couldn't talk. I could barely see. She got me out of the house and told me to run..." He looked up at Bobby. "They killed her. Shot her."
"I know. I don't know how they found her. You must've just been so fresh out that you were easy to track."
"They burned the place too."
Bobby shook his head. "She was a firestarter among other things. Whole place must've gone up when she died. That can happen with people like her."
"Hell of a thank you, huh?"
"There was nothing you could've done. I shouldn't've left. That's on my head, Dean, not yours."
"Does it matter?"
Bobby stood up. He took the empty whiskey bottle in one hand and the cups in the other. "It's been a hell of a long night. Practically morning. Why don't you get some sleep? That's what I'm gonna do, I'm all talked out."
Dean nodded and didn't look at him and Bobby went in the kitchen and put the things away and came back.
"Are you gonna be okay?"
"Yeah," Dean said and he looked up at Bobby. "We're going to California."
"Yeah, I figured you were gonna say that."
"Okay."
Bobby turned to go and at the bedroom door he turned around.
"I've talked more tonight than I have in the last twenty years, but I got one more thing to say."
"All right."
Bobby took a deep breath and let it out and cleared his throat and looked at Dean and Dean got the feeling he was about to hear a speech Bobby had rehearsed to himself and wanted to get right.
"I've known you and Sam since you were kids. And Sam...I love Sam. But you... you're." He sighed and ran his hand up the back of his neck and looked away and looked back at Dean. "At least three times already I thought I lost you and I'm not going through that again. I am too goddamn old for this. You try to do this thing on your own, you try...you even think about trying to go after Sam by yourself and I will break both your legs to keep you here if I have to. You got that?"
Dean put his head down and nodded and looked up. "Yeah. Okay, Bobby."
"Okay. You better believe okay. Now get some sleep."
"Yes, sir."
"And don't give me that sir shit," he said and went to bed.
* * *
Bobby walked in the door and threw something at him.
"You're kidding, right?"
"No. I don't want you getting picked out on the first security cam we run into. It's not just demons that're after you, y'know."
"Gee, Bobby is this really my custom color?"
"Just get in there and slap it on. You gonna need help?"
"No, but you can give me a nice mani-pedi while my color sets." He grinned at him.
"Smartass," Bobby said.
Dean got up and went in the bathroom and frowned over the haircolor instructions. He glanced up at himself in the mirror and muttered, "This is stupid..." and then he stood there and stared at himself. He had gray all through his hair. He hadn't noticed it before.
* * *
They tried to find Lilith with Bobby's torquetum and the pointer remained completely still.
"She's in hell."
"No," Bobby said. "It hasn't moved in years. Not for her anyway."
"Not even when Sam was with her?"
"Not even then."
Dean looked down at the map. His eyes roamed from West Virginia to Minnesota to California, Santa Cruz and Barstow.
He said, "Guess it's easy to hide when you're someone else."
* * *
"Don't lose that," Bobby said. "I'm not gonna be able to get you another one."
Dean looked down at the ID book in his hand. Gary had had one just like it. His new name was Michael Ellis.
"We couldn't have gone with Robert Plant or something?"
"This ain't just some fake ID, this is state of the art identity trafficking. Michael Ellis was real, all that info on him is real. The only thing fake is your picture. Like I said, don't lose it...Michael."
"How bad is it? I mean, is it full-on Big Brother or what?"
"They think it is but the security net's so big there's plenty of holes in it. We've just gotta keep our heads down and stay clear of the cities. We'll go west as far as we can and then cut north and down. Middle of the country's one big dustbowl and God knows we can't go anywhere near Texas."
"Yeah, God knows." He looked at Bobby. "What do we worry about more? Demons or people?"
"Both. There ain't much difference these days."
"Bobby."
"What?"
"All this...this, what's been going on. Are demons behind this? Because I gotta tell you I was only on the road for a few days and the shit I saw...the things I heard..." He shook his head. "How did it get this bad?"
"I don't know, Dean. It's been coming to this for a long time and I don't think Lilith showing up when she did was some coincidence. I think she's been waiting for this. They've all been waiting."
"Ruby said Sam could destroy Lilith without moving a muscle."
"Who even knows if that was true?"
"What if it was?"
Bobby shrugged. "What're you getting at, Dean?"
"If Sam could've stopped her and didn't...he let the world go to hell for me, Bobby. Maybe now it's too late."
"No," Bobby said. "No...no. You don't know anything like that." He shook his head. "No."
How many people have to die so that you can live?
"Okay, Bobby. I guess you're right."
* * *
The night before they left West Virginia he dreamt of himself in a place that he'd never seen before, a crumbling apartment building whose walls were covered in violent graffiti and stairwells were filled with garbage. The lights were out and there were people in the shadows begging for help but he couldn't stop for any of them, he could only keep going up. At the top of the stairs was a woman in rags and she said, inside, inside, and motioned him towards an apartment whose door was standing open. There was a window in the hallway and outside he saw plains turned to ash and cities burning in the distance and inside the apartment there was a mattress on the floor and Sam was lying on it, bloody and dead and his own hands were full of blood.
He woke up sweating and shaken and stumbled through the dark cabin into the kitchen where he bent over the sink thinking he was going to throw up. He turned on the tap before remembering they didn't work and then Bobby was beside him with a battery lantern and a cup of water.
"Nightmare?"
"Yeah," Dean said. He took the cup and saw Bobby studying him in the pale light.
"We don't have to go tomorrow."
"No. We have to go."
"You've been in a pretty bad way. Maybe you need more time."
Dean shook his head. "There is no more time, Bobby."
"Okay," Bobby said. He put a hand on Dean's back. "All right."
They left before dawn, headed west.
Go ahead to Chapter 7.
Pairings: None (gen)
Rating: R (for language and some violence)
Warnings: Serious angst, some gore, heavily Dean-centric.
Spoilers: Through end of Season Three
Word Count: 5,700 for Chapter Six (43,700 Chapters One through Six)
Disclaimer: The Winchesters and all canon characters are the intellectual property of their creators. All original characters are mine. No money was made in the writing of this story.
Summary: Dean returns from hell and finds himself alive and alone in the stark landscape of an America that gone terribly wrong. Adrift in hostile territory and pursued by hell's bounty hunters, he sets out on a desperate hunt to find Sam. Apocafic.
Recap: If you're just tuning in, a familiar face has rescued Dean in the nick of time from a smorgasbord of grim fates and hidden him in West Virginia, where Dean will finally find out what happened on earth after he died and during the four years he was in hell. Links to previous chapters:
Chapter Five
Chapter Four
Chapter Three
Chapter Two
Chapter One
Lazarus Came Forth
6. Four Years Gone
The night Dean died Bobby saw a blinding light come from inside the house and the demons around it scattered like cockroaches and he thought anything that sent demons packing had to have some good to it. Then inside the house he found Sam with Dean.
Sam said nothing and he picked up his brother's body and put it over his shoulder and left the house without looking back. And Bobby followed right after him and left those Fremonts there with a mess of dead people to account for and no explanation that anyone in his right mind would ever believe. Bobby never found out what happened to them.
Sam straightarrowed back to South Dakota, fifteen hours without ever breaking seventy miles per any of them and Bobby was behind him all the way. By the time they reached Bobby's house Dean's clothes had crusted onto him and his body had become so rigid that Sam had to cut off his clothing. He put it in a pile on the floor and he washed his brother's body and Bobby helped him. And when they finished this Sam took Dean's bloodied clothing and took all the towels and sheets and anything with Dean's blood on it and burned them to ash. Bobby watched and said nothing until finally he asked Sam if he wanted help burning or burying Dean's body. And Sam looked up at Bobby and laughed and said, "Dean'll tear me a new one if I do that, Bobby." And he went and got Bobby's medical supplies and began to sew his brother back together.
* * *
When Sam finished the ritual and Dean was lying in the low and shifting candlelight painted forehead to ankle with sigils of ash that Bobby had never seen before and spoken over with incantations that he'd never heard, he actually felt for a pulse. Put his hand out and felt for some sign of life. There was none but Dean's neck, his body had become warm. Pliant. As if only sleeping. Bobby stood there with his fingers on Dean's still throat and looked at Sam and said, "What is this?"
"Plan B," Sam said. "I'm not letting him go."
* * *
It was near midnight, twenty-four hours after Dean died that Bobby checked on Sam and found him with Dean, dressed now and lying on the bed in the room upstairs where he and Sam had always slept and Sam was finally crying.
He'd taken off the pendant that Dean always wore and had put it on himself and he'd given Dean a saint's medal, St. Michael the Archangel because Dean had once told Sam that their mother had said angels were watching over them. And Sam asked Bobby to take care of him, please take care of him because he had to find Lilith and get his brother back.
Bobby watched Sam drive away and thought, I'm never gonna see that boy again.
* * *
Two years went by and in all that time Bobby heard nothing about Lilith and he wondered if that blaze of white light in New Harmony had pitched her back in hell for good. Bobby heard stories about Sam exorcising people, killing demons, even summoning them and interrogating them and sending them back to hell but he never saw Sam or heard from him and all of Sam's old phone numbers and email addresses had turned to dead air. The everyday world began to disintegrate but the supernatural one that Bobby watched and kept an ear to became very, very quiet and Bobby heard no news of Sam or Lilith or any demon or their manifestations. As if all these things had crawled back to hell once and for all and good riddance to them.
Upstairs Dean's body lay on the bed, breathless, bloodless, unnaturally vivid, the soul it had once housed far, far beyond the reach of any mortal help.
* * *
In the fall of the year two years after Dean died Bobby killed a black dog outside his house. It was the first one he'd seen in years and it didn't act like any other, it wasn't lying in wait to gut someone but sniffing, sniffing around the house right up to the back porch where Bobby killed it with two double-ought silver tipped buckshot shells. He chopped up the carcass and burned it with a pile of trash out in his back dump and it made such a stink that Pete Forrester, county sheriff for as long as Bobby had lived there by the Cheyenne River, came to find out what in the hell old Singer was up to now.
Forrester made Bobby put a lid on his trashfire and stayed on for coffee and told Bobby that he was being retired day after next. Something calling itself the South Dakota Civil Defense was taking over most of the law enforcement duties in the state.
"Ain't that the goddamnest thing you ever heard?" Forrester asked. "Ain't it though?"
A few days later a South Dakota Civil Defender showed up at Bobby's house and stood there on the back porch and asked him questions about Sam and Dean Winchester. Bobby told him they had died years ago and the soldier or officer or whatever the hell he was asked Bobby if he knew where they were buried.
"Buried?" Bobby said. "Well hell, I heard they got blown up for all I know there wasn't nothin left to bury. Say, why don't you come inside, have a cuppa joe?"
The soldier looked down at the salt line across the threshold and Bobby watched him and wasn't surprised when the soldier looked up and said, "No thank you, Mr. Singer." They stood there and stared at each other and there was no sound but the wind and a hiss of dry dirt striking the house's old clapboards and then the soldier raised his head and took a great sniff at the air.
"Smells like you got a dead rat up in your walls. Might wanna check that out."
"Will do, sir," Bobby said and the soldier stepped off the porch and got in his black truck and drove away and Bobby closed the door and went upstairs and ten minutes later he had Dean out of the house and in the back of his Chevelle, bound for Mississippi.
* * *
Catherine Parsons was the last of a line that stretched back to the Yorkshire moors and probably to the Druids and God only knows what before that. The family had been run out of Yazoo City after the fire that took out half the town and they'd settled in Rena Lara near the banks of the Mississippi River and there Catherine had learned about her many weird gifts at her great-grandmother's and grandmother's and mother's knees. She wasn't a hunter and if any hunters had heard of her they probably thought she was dead.
Catherine was maybe fifty years old and lived there by herself and she could still make a fire blaze up in the fireplace just by thinking about it and could move things around the room without lifting a finger and Bobby Singer showing up at her doorstep with a lifelike corpse in his arms didn't even make her blink. He left Dean there like something out of the Brothers Grimm and went back to South Dakota with an arsenal of salt and holy water and silver bullets ready to fight whatever might be waiting for him.
When he drove up the hill to his house that October evening his headlights bounced off the chrome trim and lowslung taillights of a car he'd never expected to see again and he pulled up behind the big black sedan and sat there staring at it.
He got out of his car and put his hand on the Impala's hood and it was still warm. He called out, "Sam?" and no one answered. He had one foot on the first porch step when the back door opened and Bobby expected to see Sam's lanky frame but it wasn't Sam. Bobby stumbled back off the porch step and almost fell down. Then Sam was out of the house and was hugging him and Bobby stared over Sam's shoulder at Dean Winchester standing there with one hand on the doorknob and his shoulder against the door and a smile on his face.
* * *
Dean stared at Bobby. "Me?"
"Yeah," Bobby said. He got up and poured himself a shot and sat down and drank it and looked at Dean.
"Demon? Shapeshifter?"
"You think we didn't consider that? They stayed with me for a week and you...or what we thought was you, passed every test. Exorcism, holy water, he stood right under that Devil's Trap and didn't bat an eye. He was flesh and blood, Dean. He was you, down to the last...gesture. Everything. Even you wouldn't have known the difference."
"Then something got up in my body while you were driving back from Mississippi."
"No scars, no stitches. Timing was all wrong, too. Sam said he'd been with you for weeks already."
Dean ran a hand over his face. "Okay," he said. "Okay. Wait a minute. Wait. My body...this body's stashed away in Mississippi and Sam's sitting there with some phony me."
"Yeah."
"Well fuck, Bobby, did you tell him?"
"What was I gonna tell him? It was you Dean."
"So what, I just walked in the door one day?"
"He said Lilith had given you back."
"Given me back?" Dean said. And then, "Oh shit. Fuck, Bobby...what the fuck did he do?"
"I asked him if he'd made a deal and he said no. I asked him what the hell that meant and he said that Lilith had come to him. She called for a truce. Voided the contract, no strings attached."
"She's a fucking demon, when do they ever come with no strings attached?"
"I don't know, Dean but I believed him. He didn't sign anything, he didn't barter anything, he just...agreed to a truce. And she told him where to find you, I mean, not you...it...him."
"Where was that?"
"Wyoming, near the Devil's Gate. By the time Sam got there he'd been picked up by the cops. They still had cops in Wyoming back then. They'd put him in the state hospital in Evanston, didn't know what else to do with him. Sam got him released and holed up with him until he came around and then they turned up at my place."
Bobby put his mug on the floor beside his chair and looked at Dean. It had gotten dark while he was talking and there was no light in the room but the woodstove's fire and Dean was sitting in the shadows across from him with his hands clasped between his knees staring into the coals. Bobby let him sit like that for a minute and then said, "Dean?"
Dean looked at him and stood up. He grabbed the whiskey bottle by the neck and walked out of the room and through the kitchen and Bobby heard the backdoor open and slam closed.
* * *
Bobby opened the stove door and poked at the embers and threw in some more kindling and got the fire up again. He closed the door and sat there staring at the flames. There was more to tell but for now he could let Dean be alone.
On the last night that Sam and that other Dean stayed in his house Bobby had been woken up at some late hour by the sound of Dean calling for Sam. He'd sounded so lost and in so much pain that Bobby could have cried for both of them. He'd sat up in bed and seen the light come on from their room down the hall and heard the low sound of Sam talking Dean out of his nightmare.
After a few minutes he got up to see if they needed anything and he went down the hall and saw the door standing ajar with a triangle of light spilling onto the floor. Bobby could hear the rustle of their voices and see them through the quarter-open door where Dean sat up on the bed with his legs tucked underneath him and Sam was on the edge of the bed beside him and they had their foreheads together, whispering to each other like that while Sam cupped Dean's face in his hands and Dean ran his hands up and down Sam's arms as if trying to make sure he was real. There was an intimacy to the scene that made Bobby turn to go and just then they put their arms around each other and Dean rested his chin on Sam's shoulder and looked through the open door right at Bobby, unsmiling and his eyes were deep and lambent green in the dim light.
The Dean that Bobby had known from childhood had taken plenty of ribbing about his looks from guys who called him pretty boy and heygorgeous and even Bobby had teased him about it now and then. He'd once heard John say that Dean was too goddamned pretty for his own good, looked just like his mother, that one.
But this Dean. This Dean. Was beautiful. In a way that made Bobby's heart fold in on itself because he knew what he saw hadn't been meant for him. He was beautiful, enough to make Bobby's blood turn to ice. The devil hath power to achieve a pleasing shape, he thought and where had he read that? When had he heard that? He had known Dean since he was eight years old and for all that he was pretty whatever was in that room with Sam was so beautiful it was horrible and it was not him.
Dean had blinked and put his forehead down on Sam's shoulder and when he'd looked up again he'd smiled and said, "Hey, Bobby," and whatever Bobby had seen or thought he'd seen was gone. By morning he hadn't been able to believe he'd seen it at all but it had haunted him ever since and probably always would.
There was more to tell and Bobby would tell it but he would never tell Dean about this. Kid had been through enough.
* * *
Dean must have polished off a good quarter of the bottle by the time Bobby came out on the back porch and he put the bottle down on the boards between his feet before Bobby could say anything about drinking too much with all the meds he was on. He heard the doorjamb creak when Bobby leaned up against it and he didn't turn around and neither of them said anything for a while.
"Getting damn cold out," Bobby said.
"Yeah."
"Early, too. It'll be winter before you know it."
"Bobby," Dean said. "This is the worst fucking small talk I ever heard."
"Thank God one of us said it. I thought you were gonna let me keep yammering like an idiot."
"Well, I considered it."
"You all right?"
Dean stared out across the porch railing. There was nothing to see but the dark treeline. "I'm okay." He shrugged. "Considering I just found out that while I was getting tortured down in hell my brother was up here thinking I was safe. She sure knows her shit, doesn't she?" He turned around and looked at Bobby. "That was Lilith. That...what you thought was me? It was her."
"We sort of figured that out, well, Sam did. Later though, not then."
Dean nodded and looked down and picked up the bottle and took a drink and held it in his hands and peeled the label down in slow strips. "I didn't figure it out. I remember it." He looked at Bobby and Bobby didn't say anything and he looked away. "You thought that was me because it was me. She got it all out of me, Bobby. All of it. What the fuck, why not? I was there for the picking."
"Jesus Christ."
"And it hurt, Bobby, it fucking hurt, you have no idea. You'd think..." He smiled. "You'd think having all your bones broken hurts but not like that, not even close. And I knew why she was doing it. She didn't share the whole plan with me but I knew it was for Sam. She couldn't kill him so she had to find another way to get to him. Pretty fucking brilliant. Me locked up in hell and her playing house with Sam. Jesus..." He grimaced and wiped a hand over his face. "Driving my car too? It just gets better and better."
"There's more to the story, Dean. It doesn't end there."
"Well I'm here so I figured there was."
"You wanna go inside and hear the rest of it or sit out here and freeze our asses off?"
Dean looked at him. "Let's go."
He stood up and Bobby opened the back door and pointed at the bottle on the board floor.
"Bring that."
* * *
A hunter's never going to make it if he doesn't rely on hunches now and then and the one smart thing Bobby did during that whole week that Sam and Dean stayed with him was lie to them about Dean's body. They asked where it was and Bobby told them that the spells hadn't held and he'd had to burn the body. The lie came easy to him and he felt a strange relief when he told it and an even greater relief when they believed it.
They left and the year guttered out. By the beginning of 2011 things started getting bad as if a whole army of demons had woken up. Bobby heard of hunters getting attacked or killed, one after the other, everyone Bobby knew. Jo Harvelle turned up half dead at her mother's house one night and Bobby helped them get out of the country into Canada though where they went from there he didn't know. He left messages for Sam and Dean and never got a response and after a while he began to think they were dead too. By the middle of the year Bobby had been driven out of South Dakota by demons and dust storms and he was on the run and had cast off all his old phone numbers so if Sam or Dean ever called him he wouldn't have known.
The one connection Bobby had to his old life was a post office box in Brainerd, Minnesota, the last of several that he'd had scattered around the country under different names. He showed up there in September to pay the fee on it and found inside it a postcard of Santa Cruz, California. On the back was a six week old postmark and a phone number and two words driven hard into the paper and underlined: NOT HIM.
Bobby left the post office and went and sat in his car and stared at the postcard. Finally he called the number on the card and he heard Sam's voice. The call went to voicemail. Two hours later Sam called him back. By then Bobby was sitting in a motel room in Duluth with salt piled up across the doors and windows and a shotgun in his lap.
"It's not him," Sam said. "It's not Dean."
"Come and see me," Bobby said.
"I can't. They could follow me."
"Find a way," Bobby said.
Three days later they met in the nave of a church in Duluth and even in that low stained-glass light Sam looked twenty years older and little like the kid that Bobby had known.
"Consecrated ground," he said. "I'm surprised I can even walk in here."
He wouldn't tell Bobby anything except that he knew what he'd been living with was not his brother and so Dean was still in hell, had been in hell all this time. Bobby told Sam to stay with him and Bobby smiled and shook his head and said that he was going back.
"I've been wasting my time with every useless fucking demon I could find and now I've got her, Bobby, right where I want her. She's gonna lead me right to him, I know she is."
"Are you crazy? Once she figures out you know, what do you think she's gonna do?"
"She's not gonna figure it out. Her guard is way down right now, I just need to keep it there and wait."
"You don't know what you're doing," Bobby said.
"I have no choice. He's been down there for three years, three years, Bobby. I've gotta get him out."
"What'll you do with him if you do?" Bobby asked and watched Sam. Wary. "He can't come back like you knew him, Sam."
"I don't care," Sam said. "I just want him out of there, like Dad. Just...free."
Bobby almost told Sam then about Dean's body in Mississippi. But too many things had happened and too much was uncertain and he didn't. Couldn't. They parted in Duluth and Bobby thought of following Sam but he waited until he thought it was safe and he went to Catherine Parsons instead. He went upstairs and sat beside the bed and took Dean's warm but lifeless hand in his own and he told him everything. And finished with a prayer, though whether it was to Dean or God or Sam or someone else altogether he couldn't say.
"Please let me do the right thing here. Please."
* * *
In June of 2012 Bobby got a last call from Sam.
"I've got it, Bobby. I'm going in."
"What? When?"
"Tomorrow. Summer solstice, it's gotta be then. I won't get another chance."
"Sam, for Christ's sake..."
"I might not talk to you again."
"Sam, wait..."
"I'll tell Dean you're okay. I love you, Bobby," he said and hung up. Bobby dialed the number back and it rang and rang and he was finally able to get an operator who traced the number to a pay phone in Barstow, California. And he stood there with the phone growing sweaty in his hand and then he got behind the wheel of the militia-issue sedan he'd rigged up for himself and he redlined that thing all the way to Mississippi.
* * *
Summer solstice came and went. It grew thick and hot outside as June turned into July and Dean did not stir. Bobby put his fingers on Dean's neck and there was nothing and he laid his hand on Dean's chest and it was still. He left Catherine Parsons with a semi-automatic handgun and a cartridge of silver bullets and went on the road to find Sam, if he was still on earth at all.
In Barstow he finally sat down beside the pay phone outside a derelict gas station and he put his head in his hands and cried. Crazy old man.
* * *
He heard of the fire in Rena Lara on an Ehrlich Defense newsfeed. He made it there by the second day of September and lied himself into the Clarksdale morgue and saw the three burned bodies.
Catherine Parsons was in the first drawer that the medical examiner opened for him. Her blackened corpse lay there and her skull was horribly caved in and Bobby touched her and turned her dried head to look at where the back of it should have been.
"What in the hell did this?" he asked the medical examiner.
"Can't account for it, sir."
"You can't account for it?"
"Nossir."
"Well, I can. Somebody was having a little fun here. You make sure and write that up, that somebody desecrated this woman's body. Understand?"
"Yessir."
"There were two others?"
"Yessir."
"They've been ID'd?"
"Nossir, just the woman. Funny old gal, lived over in Rena Lara. There were some stories about her but you know how people talk." He pulled out another drawer and Bobby bent down to the body and then looked up.
"Where's the third?"
"Right over here sir."
Bobby held his breath and the medical examiner opened the third drawer. Bobby leaned over the charred remains and studied them and he finally exhaled and straightened up.
"Thanks for your help," he said to the medical examiner and walked out.
* * *
It took him two days to track Dean to the old house twenty miles from Rena Lara and by then the place had been deserted and ransacked. He found the black dog's carcass in the backyard and the Devil's Trap on the kitchen floor and bandages and bloody clothing and he crouched down in the Devil's Trap and looked around helplessly and said, "Goddamnit, Dean," and there was no one to hear him but the flies.
* * *
Bobby had lit a kerosene lamp because he hadn't been able to keep talking about these things in the dark. Now he was finished and he sat there staring at the burning wick and smoky chimney and Dean sat across from him and didn't say anything. He was holding the postcard that Bobby had gotten from Sam and was tracing his fingers over the writing and the ashes rustled and shifted in the stove and made the only sound.
Finally Dean said, "Sam doesn't know I'm alive."
"I don't see how he could."
"We don't know if Sam's alive."
"I never heard from him after June."
Dean shook his head. "I saw him, Bobby. I saw him in hell."
"I believe you."
"He walked out of there with me, I know he did, he..." Dean pressed a hand to his mouth and squeezed his eyes shut, trying to remember. "He turned around and I could touch him I could almost touch him and then..."
There had been a fleeting moment when Sam had turned and reached out to him and Dean had felt him for the first time. And there had been sunlight and he'd said Sam's name, he'd spoken and Sam had heard him. He'd heard him. Then Dean had felt a blow as if he'd been thrown from a height and hit solid concrete and he was blind and sick and in his own body with everything behind him fading to black and he'd slept. For the first time in eternity, he'd slept.
"Dean?"
"I woke up in Mississippi. I didn't even know where I was. I thought I was still in hell. I knew there was someone with me and she took care of me...I couldn't talk. I could barely see. She got me out of the house and told me to run..." He looked up at Bobby. "They killed her. Shot her."
"I know. I don't know how they found her. You must've just been so fresh out that you were easy to track."
"They burned the place too."
Bobby shook his head. "She was a firestarter among other things. Whole place must've gone up when she died. That can happen with people like her."
"Hell of a thank you, huh?"
"There was nothing you could've done. I shouldn't've left. That's on my head, Dean, not yours."
"Does it matter?"
Bobby stood up. He took the empty whiskey bottle in one hand and the cups in the other. "It's been a hell of a long night. Practically morning. Why don't you get some sleep? That's what I'm gonna do, I'm all talked out."
Dean nodded and didn't look at him and Bobby went in the kitchen and put the things away and came back.
"Are you gonna be okay?"
"Yeah," Dean said and he looked up at Bobby. "We're going to California."
"Yeah, I figured you were gonna say that."
"Okay."
Bobby turned to go and at the bedroom door he turned around.
"I've talked more tonight than I have in the last twenty years, but I got one more thing to say."
"All right."
Bobby took a deep breath and let it out and cleared his throat and looked at Dean and Dean got the feeling he was about to hear a speech Bobby had rehearsed to himself and wanted to get right.
"I've known you and Sam since you were kids. And Sam...I love Sam. But you... you're." He sighed and ran his hand up the back of his neck and looked away and looked back at Dean. "At least three times already I thought I lost you and I'm not going through that again. I am too goddamn old for this. You try to do this thing on your own, you try...you even think about trying to go after Sam by yourself and I will break both your legs to keep you here if I have to. You got that?"
Dean put his head down and nodded and looked up. "Yeah. Okay, Bobby."
"Okay. You better believe okay. Now get some sleep."
"Yes, sir."
"And don't give me that sir shit," he said and went to bed.
* * *
Bobby walked in the door and threw something at him.
"You're kidding, right?"
"No. I don't want you getting picked out on the first security cam we run into. It's not just demons that're after you, y'know."
"Gee, Bobby is this really my custom color?"
"Just get in there and slap it on. You gonna need help?"
"No, but you can give me a nice mani-pedi while my color sets." He grinned at him.
"Smartass," Bobby said.
Dean got up and went in the bathroom and frowned over the haircolor instructions. He glanced up at himself in the mirror and muttered, "This is stupid..." and then he stood there and stared at himself. He had gray all through his hair. He hadn't noticed it before.
* * *
They tried to find Lilith with Bobby's torquetum and the pointer remained completely still.
"She's in hell."
"No," Bobby said. "It hasn't moved in years. Not for her anyway."
"Not even when Sam was with her?"
"Not even then."
Dean looked down at the map. His eyes roamed from West Virginia to Minnesota to California, Santa Cruz and Barstow.
He said, "Guess it's easy to hide when you're someone else."
* * *
"Don't lose that," Bobby said. "I'm not gonna be able to get you another one."
Dean looked down at the ID book in his hand. Gary had had one just like it. His new name was Michael Ellis.
"We couldn't have gone with Robert Plant or something?"
"This ain't just some fake ID, this is state of the art identity trafficking. Michael Ellis was real, all that info on him is real. The only thing fake is your picture. Like I said, don't lose it...Michael."
"How bad is it? I mean, is it full-on Big Brother or what?"
"They think it is but the security net's so big there's plenty of holes in it. We've just gotta keep our heads down and stay clear of the cities. We'll go west as far as we can and then cut north and down. Middle of the country's one big dustbowl and God knows we can't go anywhere near Texas."
"Yeah, God knows." He looked at Bobby. "What do we worry about more? Demons or people?"
"Both. There ain't much difference these days."
"Bobby."
"What?"
"All this...this, what's been going on. Are demons behind this? Because I gotta tell you I was only on the road for a few days and the shit I saw...the things I heard..." He shook his head. "How did it get this bad?"
"I don't know, Dean. It's been coming to this for a long time and I don't think Lilith showing up when she did was some coincidence. I think she's been waiting for this. They've all been waiting."
"Ruby said Sam could destroy Lilith without moving a muscle."
"Who even knows if that was true?"
"What if it was?"
Bobby shrugged. "What're you getting at, Dean?"
"If Sam could've stopped her and didn't...he let the world go to hell for me, Bobby. Maybe now it's too late."
"No," Bobby said. "No...no. You don't know anything like that." He shook his head. "No."
How many people have to die so that you can live?
"Okay, Bobby. I guess you're right."
* * *
The night before they left West Virginia he dreamt of himself in a place that he'd never seen before, a crumbling apartment building whose walls were covered in violent graffiti and stairwells were filled with garbage. The lights were out and there were people in the shadows begging for help but he couldn't stop for any of them, he could only keep going up. At the top of the stairs was a woman in rags and she said, inside, inside, and motioned him towards an apartment whose door was standing open. There was a window in the hallway and outside he saw plains turned to ash and cities burning in the distance and inside the apartment there was a mattress on the floor and Sam was lying on it, bloody and dead and his own hands were full of blood.
He woke up sweating and shaken and stumbled through the dark cabin into the kitchen where he bent over the sink thinking he was going to throw up. He turned on the tap before remembering they didn't work and then Bobby was beside him with a battery lantern and a cup of water.
"Nightmare?"
"Yeah," Dean said. He took the cup and saw Bobby studying him in the pale light.
"We don't have to go tomorrow."
"No. We have to go."
"You've been in a pretty bad way. Maybe you need more time."
Dean shook his head. "There is no more time, Bobby."
"Okay," Bobby said. He put a hand on Dean's back. "All right."
They left before dawn, headed west.
Go ahead to Chapter 7.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-09-15 12:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-16 10:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-15 12:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-16 10:47 pm (UTC)Re: omg sam dead...
Date: 2008-09-16 10:47 pm (UTC)*evil cackle*
no subject
Date: 2008-09-15 02:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-16 10:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-15 03:38 am (UTC)This continues to be excellent, both plot and characterization. And the twist with Lilith impersonating Dean was just awesome.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-16 10:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-15 01:29 pm (UTC)*is being very patient*
♥
no subject
Date: 2008-09-16 10:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-17 05:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-15 03:53 pm (UTC)I love the way you told the story here, how it was just laid out very plainly since that's the way Bobby would tell it and think about it. There's just this regret in everything, like this is the way it is and they have to just say it, but there's also this sadness about how it had to be this way. Not just from the boy's pov, how Sam had to do what he did and Dean had to die the way he did, but the way the rest of the world was so open to the demon invasion that they could take over as easily as they could.
For some reason my favorite line in this chapter was this one: "In Barstow he finally sat down beside the pay phone outside a derelict gas station and he put his head in his hands and cried. Crazy old man." Because this is one of those stories where the people who look like nobody and who have been so flawed their whole lives are the heroes!
no subject
Date: 2008-09-16 10:45 pm (UTC)You continue to hit the nail on the head with your interpretation of this story. Sadness and regret -- yes. And poor Bobby, at the end of his rope and helpless and yet he keeps going on. I could probably write a dozen ficlets off this story just about Bobby barrelling across the country trying to get to California and back to Mississippi and everything that went through his head.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-15 07:28 pm (UTC)Poor Sam, fooled by her for two whole years. All that time when he could have been fighting for a way to save Dean, only he thought he already had him back :( But I'm loving how the plot is thickening, slowly but surely finding out what happened when Dean was gone. So Sam got him out, but then what? What happened?! Where did he go? Thank god Bobby was able to track Dean. And how much do I love that guy just can't handle losing Dean again?
"If Sam could've stopped her and didn't...he let the world go to hell for me, Bobby. Maybe now it's too late."
I do hope that's not the case, although with these boys, it wouldn't surprise me.
Loving this! Can't wait for the final two chapters although crap. That'll mean it's over. And as I'm going on holiday I'll probably miss the next chapter for a while. Double crap.
But hey, you gotta let us know what colour Dean's hair is now. :)
no subject
Date: 2008-09-16 10:41 pm (UTC)I'm seeing Dean in a dark auburn. Something that would match his facial hair when it grows in, but is still dark enough to make him look different...
no subject
Date: 2008-09-17 05:22 am (UTC)Lol! I wish! No, only until the end of the month unfortunately (though fortunately where SPN is concerned) so I should be okay then?
But I WILL complete it!!
Oh please, please, please! Besides, not to add to the pressure or anything, but I've promised the girls at TWoP who don't like to read WiP's that I'll let them know as soon as this is finished... ;o)
I'm seeing Dean in a dark auburn.
Hmmm, yes. I like that.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-17 10:50 pm (UTC)I actually used to post over there until the insane rules and the mods and Demian's general assholery finally drove me out.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-18 02:14 am (UTC)Ah, have no fear! I hear you on that one. Already have two warnings next to my name and I'm still not sure for what. Lol.
Naw, I'm just there for the links and the info and the pics. I only post for special reasons. :)
Another great chapter...
Date: 2008-09-16 06:24 pm (UTC)And your characterization of Dean is spot on...him worrying about how he helped the demon get to his brother (even though he could not have stopped it), or blaming himself for how the world had changed and the people who had died to save him...and of course his being upset because the demon had driven the Impala :)
I can't wait for the next chapter - and I really hope that the boys are finally together by then.
Re: Another great chapter...
Date: 2008-09-16 10:39 pm (UTC)Glad you're enjoying the story and thanks for commenting!
no subject
Date: 2008-09-16 10:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-16 10:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-17 05:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-17 10:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-18 12:42 am (UTC)It's been remiss of me not to comment on this earlier, but I have to say this whole fic is amazing. The concept, characterisation, simple turn of phrase that packs a serious punch. Love it!
no subject
Date: 2008-09-20 06:52 pm (UTC)I think that's why Bobby was able to listen to his hunch (in spite of all evidence to the contrary) and Sam wasn't. Sam must have so desperately wanted this to be Dean that he wouldn't even allow himself to imagine that it wasn't. Glad you're enjoying the story!
no subject
Date: 2008-09-18 08:51 am (UTC)Your Dean is terrific, too, so strong and determined. He just. Does. Not. Quit, does he? His memories of hell, as they've emerged over the course of the fic, are all the more terrifying because we know they (almost) broke a character this tough.
There are so many well-imagined moments here that I can't possibly list them all, but for some reason the detail that sticks with me the most from this chapter is the way Bobby recognizes that fake!Dean is fake -- he's too beautiful. Such a perfect thing for a demon to get ever so slightly wrong. Everything she took from Dean (including his beauty) was something she wanted to use to obtain Sam's cooperation, so she overdid it. Fantastic stuff. I'm looking forward to the rest!
no subject
Date: 2008-09-20 06:49 pm (UTC)Such a perfect thing for a demon to get ever so slightly wrong.
Well, she's wrapping Sam around her finger is what she's doing. And there could be a whole other fic about the relationship between Sam and fake!Dean but that might wind up with a different rating.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-18 04:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-20 06:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-19 09:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-20 06:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-21 10:32 pm (UTC)I read the first 5 chapters before the season premiere, and this chapter after, and I have to say it's blowing my mind how similar so many of their storylines are, but your story has YOU stamped all over it. SPN would be lucky to have you as a writer. :-)
no subject
Date: 2008-09-22 01:41 am (UTC)The challenge now is to stick to my own outline and not let any S4 sneak into it. I'm really digging this Castiel guy but he's not gonna work in my story. I started this story in June and I'd really hoped to get it wrapped up before the new season but some of those chapters turned out a lot longer than I'd expected so...I think we're looking at a completion date around Christmas or something. Maybe Thanksgiving.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-23 11:56 pm (UTC)i can't wait to read more!
no subject
Date: 2008-09-24 09:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-02 02:58 pm (UTC)I wonder what made Sam realize that that wasn't Dean. I do hope we're going to be told about that!
no subject
Date: 2008-10-05 09:40 pm (UTC)Maybe it was when "Dean" climbed into bed with him and started nuzzling his neck and Sam sort of enjoyed it and then the next thing you know they were engaged in a passionately twisted incestuous affair that so befuddled Sam's head that it took him a whole year to figure out that this wasn't really his brother and by then he was sort of wondering if he actually even wanted his real brother back because y'know, hot demon-sex with "Dean" vs. actual brother who eats onions in the car and has not, up to this point, offered hot sex to Sam despite their constant proximity, Sam really had to think about that one...
(I am totally kidding, of course!)
no subject
Date: 2008-10-05 10:09 pm (UTC)( Totally not kidding. )
:D
no subject
Date: 2008-10-06 01:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-19 11:02 pm (UTC)