Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Title: Of All Things
Author: Impertinence
Rating: Adult
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Warning: Disturbing content.
Summary: As it turns out, the apocalypse is practically a wet dream for necromancers.



absenteye made me a GORGEOUS banner. \o/ Looky!


Part One

||

“I’m telling you, man, this isn’t normal.”

“Are you honestly surprised?” Sam’s tapping the map, more hyperactive than Dean was that one time Dad left them in a Starbucks for ten hours straight. Dean doesn’t bother asking why. Another job, another town—it’s all they live for now.

“Leprechauns. In. Nebraska.”

“Yeah, so?”

As a general rule Dean would smack him or something, but since his left arm still hasn’t healed from that bitch of an exorcism a couple weeks ago he settles for not-so-accidentally stomping on Sam’s toes.

“Ow!”

And now his little brother’s hopping around with his bitchface on, clutching his sneaker like his life depends on it. Dean’s debating between making a crack about horse shit, since they’re in Kentucky and all, and telling Sam to get his lazy ass down to a Goodwill and buy some boots when it starts to rain.

“Ah, fuck.” He snatches the map off the truck bed and all but runs over to the passenger side. By the time Sam de-pussifies and slides into the driver’s seat he’s got his glasses on and his boots on the dash.

Something smug and funny is on his lips but Sam, the little bastard, beats him to it. “What’s the matter—scared the rain’ll make the hair gel run down and freeze your face?”

“Least it won’t make me smell like a wet dog, Shaggy,” he retorts. He doesn’t open his eyes when Sam turns the ignition, but not because it still hurts him to hear the truck’s rough rumble or anything. Nah. He’s just…too cool to even bother with shit like open eyes.

Yeah.

So Sam starts the car and they drive out, crawling at a snail’s pace because of the fucking rain, and Dean’s not sure if it’s because Sam’s a wimp or because he learned how to drive on the Impala that they’re going so slow.

“You know, making it to Nebraska before I die of old age would be a good thing,” he says after the first hour’s come and gone, joggling his leg impatiently.

Sam doesn’t even look at him. “I don’t feel like hydroplaning, thanks.”

Dean not-so-idly wonders if he could wrestle the wheel from Sam without trashing the truck.

broken glass and bones, Sam whimpering and Dean yelling and Dad, silent as the grave Dean suddenly knows they’ll be putting him in

…maybe not.

Instead he settles for sighing loudly, and shifting, and tapping out a drum solo on the window, and humming Zeppelin, and—

“Would you stop it!”

Instead of answering he pokes Sam’s shoulder.

He expected Sam to bitch, maybe squeal or squeak because Sam does that when he’s frustrated, but instead his little brother grits his teeth and jerks the wheel suddenly to the left.

They screech off the wet road, into the media, and for the first time Dean notices that the rain’s coming down really fucking hard, so much that he can barely see out the window and—holy shit—if Sam fucks this car up he and Dean are going to have some words.

As soon as they stop Dean starts yelling. “What the fuck was that, huh? You tryin’ to kill us both or something?”

“Dean.”

“Shut the hell up, I’m not done. I was joking, man. Pulling that kind of shit on a highway isn’t funny, it’s dangerous, and if I have to drive then so help me—“

“Dean.”

Sam’s voice is way more desperate than it should be given that Dean’s only planning on kicking him around a little, but when he turns and looks out the window again he sees why.

The sky is a dark, murky orange.

Okay. He can deal with this. He can figure out why the sky suddenly changed color and it’s raining and now cars all over the highway are crashing.

It doesn’t occur to him until after Sam unbuckles himself and vaults over the seat, his humongous body squishing Dean’s as a flying hunk of metal just barely misses the truck, that maybe he can’t.

“Get the hell off of me, man!”

But all the wiggling he can manage just makes Sam hold on tighter. “I’m bigger,” Sam yells into his ear, and now is really not a good time to be so fucking close. “Just hold still, okay? We don’t know what’s going on.”

It’s rare for them, because generally if something supernatural is happening then they at least know the cause. But for all they know this isn’t supernatural at all, this is the government or an alien invasion—

And that last thought makes Dean laugh out loud because God, this is War of the Worlds and he’s either Tom Cruise or Dakota fucking Fanning.

He wishes now that he’d convinced Dad to let him see that movie.

They lie like that for—well, to be honest, Dean’s not even sure how long, since the power on the truck’s been killed. Long enough for them to both get sweaty and for the panic to start in. Also long enough for Sam’s arms to give in.

Dean just wraps his arms around Sam tighter when he falls onto Dean’s chest.

After awhile the sound of pounding rain and screeching metals stops and they sit up cautiously. The first thing Dean notices is the smell, a tangle of things he’s way too familiar with: burnt rubber, charred flesh, blood.

The second thing he notices is Sam, because his brother’s collapsing back into the car, staring in shock and horror at the highway in front of them.

“Well, what’d you expect?”

His words fall flat, acerbic and weirdly loud, even though just minutes ago there was so much chaos that Sam wouldn’t’ve even been able to hear him. Sam doesn’t even look at him, just says, “Not this.”

No, not this, because there are dead bodies strewn all over the highway, crashed cars and fires everywhere. Not this, because he can’t see a single living person no matter how far down the pancake-flat road he stares.

“What now?” Sam whispers, and it sounds appropriate. Who knows how many dead they’re mourning now?

“We need to keep moving.” He’s not even sure where the words come from, knows he doesn’t care.

“But—“

“Keep. Moving.”

When Sam still looks at him askance Dean pushes him over and jams the key into the ignition. It’s the first time he’s driven a vehicle since the Impala was totaled and it hurts, but the stench of the dead is an acute enough pain that the other barely even registers.

Panic. It starts when Sam doesn’t bother to buckle his seatbelt, because Jesus. It’s Sam. Yesterday Dean would’ve joked that the world could end and Sam would still follow the rules. Today it did and he’s not, and that’s enough to make his hands shake and his breath come short.

Ghosts, demons, fighting and hunting for twenty-two years. All so they could save a world that’s ending in ashes as they watch.

“Dean, we gotta go offroad.”

Wonderful. Everybody’s dead or dying, but now Sam’s keeping his head. “Why’s that?”

“Look down the road. Dean, how’re we going to get through?”

He looks obediently. The sky still glows orange, dark and menacing. Enough to make him wish, almost pray, that it’d go blue again. Please, anything, just take back the last hour. Please.

“The road, Dean.”

Sam keeps saying his name, soft and enunciated. Dean. Like he needs reminding of who he is, and it pisses him off because he’s not the one always judging by what the outside world thinks. By all rights Sam should be falling apart, especially with the whole psychic thing he’s got going on. Did he hear them cry out in his head? Did he ever dream about this? Did he—

Dean doesn’t realize that he’s staring at the broken bodies and twisted metal littering the road, doesn’t realize that the dancing flames of a burning 18-wheeler have entranced him, until Sam places a huge paw gently over the white-knuckled hand gripping the steering wheel.

“Dean…”

He yanks his hand away like he’s been burned. In that part of his mind that he only explores after a fight or in the hospital facing down death, when maybe and sometimes feel less like sin, he knows that he has been burned in a way. Always is, even when it’s innocent.

And that’s…a thought that he really needs to not be having right now.

His head jerks to the side. Sam’s staring at him, wide eyes concerned and nervous. Dean gulps and yanks on the wheel, pulling them off the road and into the woods. There’s a narrow road where the trucks go to check the power lines; he figures they can follow that.

As they drive Dean sees a bald eagle swooping overhead. For a second he smiles—but then the damn thing coasts down and he realizes it’s just a vulture.

Still: animal life. That means whatever caused the crash was human.

He’s not sure if that makes it better or worse.

The going is slow simply because the road is narrow, and Dean doesn’t want to hit the gas too hard anyways. There’s a little voice in the back of his mind that keeps reminding him of the likelihood that the next gas station they come to will be abandoned (or full of dead people, but no he’s not thinking about that) and dry.

He’s not sure how long they keep it up, weaving through God knows how many miles of wood, straight south by Dean’s estimation. They ought to have hit a highway by now; the thought occurs that they’re traveling alongside the highway, and it makes him shake.

“It’s okay to be scared, you know.”

The word makes him jerk the car sharply to the left, almost plowing into the electrical pole. And who knows, he thinks wildly, if there’s even electricity in it anymore? For all he knows the electric plants have all been bombed, or hit with the whatever-it-was that happened on the highway.

God. He’s going insane.

He doesn’t realize he’s stopped driving until Sam embraces him tightly, doesn’t realize he’s shaking until he feels Sam’s body shaking too. And it’s okay, this fear, because Sam’s got it too. The vibrations reverberate through them both, reminding Dean that he and Sam. They’re alive.

For now, anyway.

Minutes, hours, pass and they just sit there, stretched across the seat, arms entwined. Dean’s got his forehead on Sam’s shoulder and an ankle looped around Sam’s leg and no, he’s not going to start thinking about how right this feels, because—no.

The whole world’s falling apart, and the same bit of him that sometimes thinks maybe knows that right now the answer is never.

After awhile though the shaking stops, and Dean takes a deep breath before pulling away.

“We gotta get a move on,” he says grimly.

“Are you—“

He bears down on the gas and they lurch forward. The side of the truck scrapes against a tree; Dean very carefully doesn’t think about how pissed Dad would be that he fucked up the truck and Sam doesn’t say a word, just clutches the door that much tighter.

||

It’s almost dark when the car revs through a cultivated line of bushes and onto an open road.

Dean’s stopped noticing little things, like how the radio and clock are both dead and how Sam’s whoop-de-doo-dah satellite time GPS thingy watch won’t work, but when the car breaks out onto the dirt road and almost gets sideswiped by a minivan, he’s still aware enough to freak the fuck out.

“What the hell is your problem?” he demands, jumping out of the truck, and the way his words still seem to echo doesn’t matter because Jesus fucking Christ, a few more inches and that son of a bitch would’ve hit Sam.

“Dean, wait!“

“Hell no. This jackass wants to go, then we’ll—“

The minivan door slides open to reveal a Glock aimed steadily at his forehead.

For a second everything stops. The sky stays orange and no one else drops dead, but it’s the same kind of freakish re-alignment that happened back on the highway, when the whole world changes in the blink of an eye.

Then the guy’s lying on the ground—the Glock flies up and shoots backwards—and Dean turns just in time to see Sam grab the gun out of thin air like it’s nothing.

Well, that’s just terrific.

It’s even better when the other guy in the van jumps on Dean’s back and sticks a knife in his side because hey, the world apparently didn’t suck quite enough. Now, though, there’s pain tearing through him and yelling and world-spinning for real. It’s the apocalypse all over again, except this time he cares.

He’s distantly aware of Sam yelling some word he’s not even sure he knew about before Sammy let loose with it, but he blacks out before he has a chance to laugh.

||

“You really are a jackass, you know.”

Sam’s voice is inches from his ear and Dean reaches out automatically to slap him away—but the second he flings his right arm out his entire side catches on fire.

“Augh, shit!”

Large, cool hands closing around his shoulders, forcing him to lie back down—where? His eyelids feel like lead but he opens them anyway.

Sam’s concerned face comes into focus first, followed by the peaked fabric overhead. He’s lying on a sleeping bag, but the bruises on his back make the ridged bed of the truck that much more uncomfortable. “Sure the tent is safe?”

He hates the laughter that escapes Sam right then. His face looks—not joyful, the way it should whenever Sam laughs. Weary. Cynical, even. “Nothing’s safe.”

“Shut the fuck up. You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, it should be fine.” Sam leans against the side of the truck, stretching the tent fabric. “We need to have someplace to stay.”

“Motel rooms are—“

“Filled with dead people.” And the quiet pain in that voice makes Dean wonder just what happened when he was out.

“Sammy—“

“I killed the guys and raided their supplies. That’s where the bandages came from.” A long, thin finger brushes the bandage. Dean tells himself it’s the pain that makes his stomach twist like that. “There was a motel down the road, but…”

Now Sam’s the one who’s shaking. Dean tries to embrace him but his right arm won’t fucking move, so instead of flinging an arm around his brother’s shoulders he slings his left arm over Sam’s chest and rolls over, flopping down on top of him.

“Hi,” he says, grinning into Sam’s astonished face.

“Okay, forget the whole jackass thing. You’re just crazy.”

“What? I’m tired and you’re a lot less lumpy than the damn truck bed.” He’s feeling oddly giddy—hysteria, the part of him that still has common sense tells him. But who said he had to listen to it?

His fingers stray down to his baby brother’s stomach, which is just fit enough to make him vaguely jealous. “Actually, you’re kind of lumpy too.”

“Dean. C’mon, man, stop it.”

Sam still doesn’t even sound remotely annoyed, which pisses Dean off because he’s practically panicking. Completely unfair that they both shouldn’t be freaking out.

Desperate times, then. “So, how long do you think we’ve got before we bite it?”

But instead of freaking out Sam just grips his arms hard enough to bruise. Little bastard.

Or actually, he thinks as Sam flings him over and down onto the sleeping bag again, big bastard.

“Go back to sleep,” Sam orders, voice as steady as if this is just a normal day and they’re not maybe going to die any second. “We’ll deal with the fact that you’ve clearly gone insane tomorrow.”

He’s got a biting retort, he really does—but it’s lost when the pain creeps up on him again. Dean falls asleep clenching his jaw, hands in fists, just trying to hold on.

||

When he wakes up again the tent cover’s off the truck bed and he’s staring up at the bright orange sky. He can feel Sam behind him, probably stretched out horizontal and making himself as uncomfortable as hell. “How long was I out?”

“Couple hours. It’s midnight now.”

The sky is fucking glowing. “Hunh.”

“Yeah.”

A pause as Dean thinks back on before. His side still hurts but it’s a little less acute, enough so that he remembers his behavior and flushes with embarrassment. Nice, Dean. Real nice. “So...”

“So.”

“End of the world.”

“So it seems.”

Damn, they’ve got their work cut out for them. “Think government records’ll be down?”

“They might be. The Internet would still technically exist even if whatever happened wiped out all the phone lines, since a lot of it’s wireless now, but whether or not the stuff is actually accessible depends on if the satellites have...” Sam drifts off, his babbling turning into painful silence.

Dean doesn’t bother looking up, doesn’t waste time with asking what’s wrong, just pats the sleeping bag beside him. “Lie down, Sir Geek.”

“What, we’re knights now?”

“Sure, why not? For all we know, we’re the last people on earth.”

The truck’s fucking huge so it doesn’t even move when Sam lies down beside him; Dean tilts his head a little to look at his brother’s profiles, small and scared in the orange light form the sky. “Would you stop joking about it?”

Sam doesn’t get it, never has. Doesn’t understand that jokes are all Dean has left and if he lets go of them then he’ll look up at the sky and see what it really is, the end, a huge pair of scissors snipping off the timeline and leaving them to fall right off of it.

He never even got to rent The Da Vinci Code, dammit.

“Never mind,” Sam says, and Dean realized he never answered. Well.

Doesn’t matter.

Dean moves over just a bit and Sam lets him, his arm coming out and pulling Dean in like it’s the most natural thing in the world. Maybe it is right now.

They don’t sleep, just stare at the sky for what feels like forever, watching the colors shift from orange to black and then back to orange.

There’s a joke about Halloween in there somewhere, Dean thinks, but he doesn’t know how to find it anymore.

||

For three days they drive, taking back roads and side highways, doing anything they can to avoid the huge black columns of smoke and the stench of rotting flesh that lurks just off the next exit. Once or twice Dean mentions getting food, but then a squirrel will walk by and Sam’ll shoot it or Dean will take out a rabbit and they’re good for another day.

Dean doesn’t ask what’ll happen if the animals start dying too, and in return Sam doesn’t ask what happens when the bullets run out.

Sam drives most of the time because Dean’s side is fucking killing him. He doesn’t mention infection and neither does Sam, not even every night when they stop and Dean clutches Sam’s hand in the bed of the truck as Sam douses the cut in alcohol and mutters healing words.

On the third day they pass still another exit. They’ve been following this highway for awhile now; they chose it simply because what cars there are have crashed mostly on the side of the road. Four hours ago, on a different road, they ran into a ten-car pileup. Dean doesn’t think he’s likely to forget the look on Sam’s face when they turned around any more than he’ll forget seeing the broken bodies, oozing fluid from the few spots that weren’t obscured by swarms of red-eyed flies.

They’re about to pass Exit 237A, but Dean feels—something—just different enough for him to say, “Stop.”

His voice is hoarse; he can’t remember the last time either of them spoke.

“Why?” But Sam’s easing off the gas and turning towards the exit. “You sure, man?”

“Yeah.”

His right hand tenses on the seat as they pull up onto the ramp and creep forward cautiously. Dean knows that they won’t find anything—and that’s another funny thing, the knowing, but if Sam’s gonna leave it alone then he sure as hell is too—but all the same, he almost winces when they pull out onto the road a few hundred feet up.

They both stop short at the sight before them, and for one wild moment Dean wishes they’d just found a passel of dead bodies instead of the sight before them.

Tents cover the highway, at least ten of them—a few colorful, most plain canvas. The few open bits of pavement reveal scorch marks, and either side of the highway is littered with twisted metal. Dean doesn’t even want to know what they’ve done with the bodies.

“Should we turn around?” Sam asks in a low voice.

Dean opens his mouth to answer in the affirmative, maybe with a few choice cuss words tossed in, but when he speaks he says, “No. Not yet.”

Sam shoots him a sideways glance. Dean tries to stay casual, like he actually knew what he was going to say before he said it. “Okay, then.”

“Hey there!”

A woman comes out of the nearest tent. She’s small and stout, dependable looking; the image is reinforced by the toddler trailing behind her. Dean puts on a charming smile. “Hello there, ma’m. Can I ask what we’ve stumbled on?”

“Buncha lost people, what’s it look like?”

Sam holds in laughter as she sizes them up. Dean debates on stepping on his toes or ‘accidentally’ kicking him in the shins, but settles for smiling at the woman in what he hopes is a charming way. “We’re just passing through, but we were hoping—“

“Everyone’s just passin’ through,” she interrupted him. “We’re all wanderers. That’s why we’re still alive.”

“What do you mean?” Sam interrupts hastily.

“The virus was targeted towards civilians,” a crisp voice says. Dean whirls around, but the newcomer isn’t exactly a threat—he’s the weedy scientist type. “It was dispensed through nuclear-powered stealth bombs, with each strain of the virus being targeted towards a certain body of people. Being travelers, none of us caught it.”

“So…why’re you sticking around?”

The man smiles wryly. “From the bandage on your side, I gather you’ve discovered that some of the remaining inhabitants of this planet are less than friendly.”

It’s a hell of a lot of words to say that they’re sticking together because there’s strength in numbers, but since the geek hasn’t tried to kill him yet and the woman hasn’t decided to cook him Dean decides they can put up with these people. His instincts (or freakish Winchester psychic powers—whatever) are almost never wrong.

“So,” he says with a grin. “Got a spare spot for our truck?”

||

A week after the attack of Who the Fuck Knows What, as Dean’s privately termed it, and they’re sitting round a campfire telling stories to the other survivors. Or, more accurately, Dean’s sitting around the fire whose shifting colors match the sky, and Sam’s over in their tent, brooding.

After he’s finished telling the group of kids about the Wendigo he says goodnight and hops into the tent, ignoring the giggles that always follow him.

“What crawled up your ass and died?” he asks by way of greeting.

Sam looks up, those huge puppyish eyes of his making him look more tragic than the Who the Fuck Knows attack, Hiroshima, and the Titanic combined. “Why are we here, Dean?”

It’s a good question; too bad he doesn’t have an answer. “Look, I just know we need to stick around here for awhile.”

“But there’s dozens of people wandering around without any way to protect themselves. We shouldn’t be staying in one place, we should be out there helping!”

The fact that Sam’s nauseatingly right pisses Dean off. “Look, man, can’t you just let it rest? I told you, we gotta stay here for awhile. I never acted like this when you went all Ghost Whisperer on me.”

“Yes you did.”

Dammit. Fucking logic. “And you told me to shut up, so now I’m telling you: quit bitching, or I’ll feed you to that rottweiler.” The dog in question belonged to one scary-ass group of dykes. Dean’s balls hurt just looking at them.

Silence greets his order. Dean takes it to mean assent and even forgiveness, so he flops down on top of Sam—body heat conservation and all that—and falls asleep.

||

Two weeks.

Dean wakes up feeling fresh as a daisy. He’s almost used to this, getting up and feeling healthy and awake. It would freak him out if it wasn’t for the weird feeling in the pit of his stomach.

Stay, it whispers, and Dean listens.

Last time he didn’t, Dad died.

Sam is snoring next to him. Putting the greenish tent up over the truck bed is routine, not because they need the covering (it hasn’t rained. Two weeks, and it hasn’t rained), but more because staring up at an orange sky and trying to sleep is a bit much even for them.

But the sky’s more intense than it was awhile ago and the tent is starting to heat up, so Dean figures it’s daytime.

“Wake up, man.”

It’s funny, seeing Sam sleep, because until this thing started Sam was always up and researching hours before Dean even started considering maybe getting out of bed. There’s probably something Sam’s not telling him, some reason that he tosses and turns and scowls even when he’s supposed to be off in dreamland, but if there is he’s not telling.

This is the first time in twenty-two years of living with Sam that Dean’s been willing to just let sleeping dogs lie.

Sleeping. Lie. Heh.

Sam’s eyes fly open—there’s no in between with them, no slow waking up. Dean remembers being amazed, first time he fell asleep with a girl, at how she drifted awake, yawning and mumbling for so fucking long he started to wonder if she had a disease. He figured at the time it was a girl thing, but then he slept with a guy and learned that no, waking up like you’re being attacked is just a Winchester thing.

“Morning already?” Sam grouses, sitting up.

“Close as it ever gets to morning anymore.”

“Good.”

Sam reaches up, same as he does every morning, and unzips the tent. Dean doesn’t really expect to see anything specific, since the scene’s always different each time—but if he had formed expectations, they wouldn’t have involved swarms of flies picking at the prostrate bodies of dozens of their fellow survivors.

“Oh, God!” Sam yells, recoiling. For a second Dean thinks it’s because of the smell, but then he realizes that Sam is clutching his forehead desperately.

“Sam? Sam!” And he’d like to be saying something more useful but Sam’s crouching on the ground, clearly in pain, and everyone outside—the dykes, that hot girl Mary, the cute little boy Brad—they’re all dead.

“I can hear them,” he grits out through clenched teeth. “Dean, they’re—“

But then something grabs the back of his neck, and he figures out the problem for himself.

Zombies are a bitch to deal with no matter what, but Dean thinks that in some ways they’re worse when the bodies are fresh. The skin feels almost right but a bit too rubbery to be alive, and the eyes are still moist enough to glint from their sockets.

Rotting skin and shriveled-up eyes are pretty fucking disgusting, yeah, but at least they’re honestly wrong. This not-quite-right-ness of the one currently dragging him backwards is almost enough to make him puke.

“Sam!” he yells again, but Sam’s collapsed against the truck bed—he’s not going to be any help. Dean yanks downwards, pulling his head out of the thing’s fierce grip, before turning around and dealing it the hardest punch he can.

The corpse’s head flies to the side and Dean hears the sickening crunch and tear of bones breaking. It won’t kill the thing, of course, but it slows it down enough so that Dean can run up into the truck and grab a gun.

“Hold on, man,” he tells Sam, who somehow manages to glare at him despite clutching his head desperately. Dean grins and fires the gun, aiming for the head then the chest—where the damn thing’s most likely to be vulnerable.

The bullet hits right between its forehead and then it’s down, a normal corpse again. He takes a deep breath, trying to make it okay, trying to stop the panic that’s making his hands shake—but.

The camp had around twenty people, and right now they’re all getting up and moving towards him and Sam. Joan, the camp’s cook, is clutching a ladle like she intends to use it as a weapon.

Well, fuck.

There’s Brad, just a few feet away. He holds his toy rocket nose-first in his fist; blood still drips sluggishly out of his eye socket. Jesus, Dean played with the kid just last night, talked him into going to bed when his mom told him to. Now Brad and his mom, Joan and her husband—they’re all dead.

And Dean has to put them to rest.

He focuses on Sam behind him, on the pain his brother’s suffering and on the fact that there’s only one way to end that pain for sure. Gritting his teeth, he pulls the trigger.

Lock, load, and fire over and over again; it’s getting easier to remember that they’re not human any more because they just keep shuffling forwards, not even registering when the people—things—beside them fall. There’s blood and…tissue flying everywhere, but not for nothing did John teach his sons vigilance in all situations.

Lock, load, fire—and above all, don’t think.

It’s only when every single body in the camp has been laid to rest that Dean’s ears register the moans coming from behind him. He sets the safety and lays the gun down carefully before turning and hopping up into the truck bed.

“You alright, baby brother?”

The moniker earns him a swat to the thigh. Good, Dean thinks, pulling his hand up and massaging Sam’s neck.

When Sam lifts his head, his cheeks are shiny where tears have fallen—not clear tracks but blotches that reveal how he’s tried to rub them off, how he’s clutched his own cheeks tightly like he thinks it’ll stop the pain.

The twist in Dean’s stomach is almost more nauseating than the smell around them.

“I can hear them,” he chokes out. “God, Dean—their minds were dead. Worse than dead. Empty and—evil. And I could feel it.”

Dean embraces him the only way he knows how: rough, manly, definitely less than comforting. “Get up front,” he mutters. “We’re gonna get the hell out of here.”

||

The thing about the end of the world is that he keeps remembering the dumbest shit.

It’s like driving off for vacation and realizing he left the stove on—or what Dean thinks driving off for vacation and realizing he left the stove on would feel like, at any rate. This little niggling suspicion at the back of his mind that he forgot something, the annoying nagging tic of not quite right.

They’ve raided the tents of the camp and come up with enough ammo to keep them stocked for weeks, months if they’re careful. Dean knows now that that’s why they had to stay—but seeing Sam hold his head and try to block out his memories is enough to make that bit of guiltrememberingpain overwhelm him.

“Sam.”

Their eyes meet in the rearview mirror, looking forward and back at the same time. Dean swallows heavily.

“I—“

Love you.

But it won’t come.

“Buckle your seatbelt.”

Sam laughs a little, hollowly, and obeys.

||