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They’ve only been driving for an hour and a half when Dean’s yellow car starts smelling burny every time he pushes it above 65. You don’t mess around with stuff like that, so he signals to Sam---they’re the only ones on the road---and pulls all the way off it. He gets out. If this was the Impala, he’d be fixing the problem, would never have let it get this bad, in fact, but it isn’t, so he just stands and leans back against the cars, gazing up at the inky black sky.
There are so many stars out it looks as if someone spilled a bucket of glitter across the sky, and he has to bite back a laugh that bubbles up at the reminder of Sam’s current state, at the same time as his gut twists at the thought of Cas that had followed the thought of angels that had followed the thought of someone spilling on the sky. He ends up swallowing as if there’s a knife in his throat, and the single chuckle that escapes is mangled and dingy and echoes forlornly through the winter-quiet night.
“What’s wrong?” Sam is suddenly standing in front of him, although Dean isn’t sure if he saw him walking up. He isn’t sure, for a moment, if he hadn’t forgotten Sam was there at all and not in a coma somewhere, or getting beaten up, or in hell. His mind feels like it’s unraveling, the last few years a giant rainbow slinky sluicing (is that even the right word?) down a flight of stairs that never ends, and that thought made so much more sense when he started thinking it, but now it’s just a mess. The slinky in his mind falls forever. Is this the first apocalypse or the third? Maybe it’s the fourth. Maybe he’s just tired.
“Dean?”
“Car’s dying.” he says. “Think I’ll just leave it here.”
Sam nods, accepting, unquestioning. Dean leans forward into the car that’s been his home for the past couple of weeks or days or whatever, gathers up his slinky and his cassette tapes and his rifle, and packs them silently into the beat-up canvas duffel bag in the backseat, feeling the inhuman heaviness from the arsenal of salt and iron and silver that he’s keeping at the bottom with his sweaty clothes when he lifts it over his shoulder. He follows Sammy to the truck, feeling bad for letting the yellow car down (it’s not it’s fault he didn’t love it), and gets in the driver’s side without thinking. He glances over at Sam to see if he minds---this is technically his car, right?---but Sammy looks like he was expecting it, so Dean stays where he is and gets them back on the road while Sam curls up against the window, glitter raining off him and getting stuck in the grooves in his seat. Oh crap, Dean probably got glitter on him when he sat down where Sam was driving. Fuck, it’s funny on Sam, but on him? Any amount of sweat and dirt and blood is more respectable than this stuff of junkies in lion suits and creepy vampires.
“You going to sleep?” he asks Sam. Not as if it isn’t perfectly obvious, kid’s put his head down on the armrest and closed his eyes, but they haven’t exchanged anything other than you okay and car’s dying since the laughter fest outside the Plucky’s, and he’s suddenly desperate for a little interaction. Reassurance. That Sam is Sam.
Sam nods.
“We could stop.” Dean suggests.
“Nah, I’m good here.”
Dean shrugs. He turns his eyes back to the road and watches it slip-slide in and out of focus, empty of anyone but them for miles. It’s too quiet in here. He’d only grabbed the top few cassette tapes out of the Impala before leaving her behind for months. So he’s got the stuff he listens to most---Zeppelin, AC/DC, and Metallica---but that’s it. It’s all stuff Sam would object to right now, and anyway, this truck is probably too modern to even have a tape deck. He yawns. His eyes wander, and what do you know, this truck does have a tape deck.
Sam is almost-but-not-quite asleep, and Dean sees him open his eyes and fumble with the buttons.
Dean grins. He’ll rib Sammy about actually listening to something on tape, considering how scornful he’s always been about them to Dean, when he wakes up. For now Sam flops back against his seat without a word, legs still curled up under the dashboard, as the opening chord of Simon and Garfunkel’s The Boxer fills their small, moving enclave, and the road stretches on forever. It does that on nights like this. A long time ago Dean found it thrilling. The first time the world was ending it was an anguished reminder of how much there was to lose. Now it just makes him more tired.
“I am just a poor boy, though my story’s seldom told...”
Dean likes Simon and Garfunkel. He’s never admitted it to anyone other than himself, and maybe not even that, but the truth is that he has a giant rainbow slinky and Sam looks like a pile of rags and sparkle with that same baby face Dean’s been looking at for as long as he can remember. He survived an attack by Trauma Clowns, and is asleep already, so Dean sings along with the last round of the li-la-li’s, carves his way down the freeway at---oops, faster than he meant, the pedal’s so much lighter here than the Impala, and then sings along with the cheerful rhythm of Baby Driver.
“Hit the road and I'm gone-ah, what's my number, I wonder how your engine feels.”
He wonders where Sam got this album. When. The songs fly by in a rush, and Dean pays just enough attention that the words hurt. Only a few other cars go by, bright lights searching him like they know he’s got no right to be happy right now. Like they can see all the shit he’s done and all the people he’s let die and who’ve left him behind. But they go by quickly, and the road is not theirs. It’s Dean’s, and it’s Sam’s, and if Sam were awake and hearing his thoughts right now he’d say they’ve earned it, the right to call the road theirs. Once it felt like everywhere was theirs, but that was another lifetime. It feels like the countryside goes on forever here.
***
When the album comes to its end, the truck falls almost silent again. The soft, screechy static as the tape unspools past the music is as familiar to him as any song, any lullaby.
Dean yawns. His jaw cracks, and for a second the road blurs. He should really get off and find a hotel soon. But he wants to get somewhere that’s not the middle of nowhere, even though the middle of nowhere had seemed like a good place to be a couple hours ago. But now he’d rather be somewhere, somewhere busy and bustling where it’s harder to think. Somewhere where he can’t hear that the truck is much too quiet. Not the slightest bit of a growl. But then no strange car has ever been right in that. I wonder how your engine feels.
He jumps when two high piano notes suddenly fly out of the speakers, glassy and sharp before they turn soft. He lets out a breath. For a second, he’d almost wondered if the truck was haunted, but obviously the tape just turned itself over.
“When you’re weary - feeling small - when tears are in your eyes
I will dry them all. I’m on your side.
Oh when times get rough and friends just can’t be found
Like a bridge over troubled water
I will lay me down.
Like a bridge over troubled water
I will lay me down.”
***
Two months later, Dean’s checking a near-comatose Sammy out of the hospital he’d spent the last two weeks planning to die in. He’s lucid only long enough to object to leaving Cas there, as if there were another option, then he lets Dean guide him gently into the passenger seat and is dead to the world as soon as the engine starts. Dean smiles down at him and drives as fast as he safely can away from all the disaster that happened here. Tries to ignore the fact that he’s driving away from a newly broken Cas too, and concentrates on Sam, listing against the window, and snoring softly the way he only does when he’s completely zonked. Dean can’t seem to stop looking at him and smiling.
He turns on the radio and music from the classic rock station he’d found three days ago---when he was sitting outside the hospital with no purpose whatsoever---floods the car.
“When you’re down and out, when you’re on the street
When evening falls so hard
I will comfort you”
Sam shifts a little, snuffling against the seat. There’s stubble on his chin and bags under his eyes, but he looks peaceful. Dean clamps down on a yawn, and resists the urge to card his fingers through Sam’s hair. He’s not a sap.
“I’ll take your part, oh when darkness comes
And pain is all around”
The road is busy with monday morning traffic. Dean navigates around a randomly-parked-in-the-middle of the road pickup truck, swerves out of the path of an oncoming car. Sam’s eyelashes flutter, but he doesn’t wake up.
"Like a bridge over troubled water
I will lay me down.
Like a bridge over troubled water...”
Sam is asleep, and thank God---no, not God---Cas---Cas isn’t God---Cas was God---Cas was never God---God is Cas---well, anyway, it’s good that Sam is finally getting some sleep. All Dean can do now is pray to fuck that when Sam wakes up, he’ll be okay.
That Sam will sleep through the afternoon, they’ll both sleep through the night, and tomorrow will be a new beginning.
He’s not praying for that though. Who would he be praying to? Sam is the one who prays.
“Sail on silvergirl
Sail on by.
Your time has come to shine.
All your dreams are on their way
See how they shine.
If you need a friend
I’m sailing right behind
Like a bridge over troubled water
I will ease your mind.”
Dean sings along with the last two lines. Because no one will ever know.
***
The blanket smells like mildew and cigarette smoke, and it scratches at his skin. He isn’t comfortable in bed. It’s soft, although not particularly soft, and he’s used to sleeping on the hard, packed ground in Purgatory, now.
But he’s back now.
He’s back, and he can’t get his body to stop shaking. But that’s ridiculous, it shouldn’t be like this, the alcohol withdrawal happened in Purgatory, almost a year ago. A year...
He’s back. He isn’t sure what that even means.
He’s back, but Sammy didn’t look for him. And he left Cas behind. Cas, who fought with them and killed with them and who let go. Why would he do that? Dean shouldn’t be back. He failed everyone. Even Sammy’s better off him without him, right? Why else wouldn’t he look? He should’ve let Sammy keep his damn girl and his damn dog and his damn---
But here they are in a motel again. Musty and contained, and Purgatory was wide-open spaces forever and air that always smelled a little like blood. Purgatory was trees twisting up above him like little monsters themselves, the swift touch of something that wanted to kill him and fighting alongside Benny and Cas--- Cas who’s still there, Cas who he failed, Cas whose eyes make him----goddamnit. Damn it!
Dean shoves the stupid blankets to the floor and gets up. The air smells wrong here, smoky and decaying. Not like Purgatory though. He just needs some space.
Somehow he ends up in the Impala. He curls up into a little ball in the familiar seat, letting his head rest on the dashboard. It’s hard, but it’s comfortable. He isn’t cramped, not here. He knows how to fit in this car. This car he’s been fitting into since he was a baby, since before everything even fell apart, that first time. He used to sit in his mom’s lap in here, and she’d stroke his hair and sing “Hey Jude” to him as they rumbled down the streets. All traces of her presence are gone now.
He used to sit here while Sam kicked him repeatedly because he wanted to sit in the front. Ignoring it because that annoyed him most. And between the two, he used to the sit in the back, with Sam’s head in a headlock, or cleaning up his spilled milk.
This car knows him.
He likes it here.
He can see the moon through the window, and the stars, and the pine trees that aren’t Purgatory at all.
The door clicks open behind him, and Sam folds himself into the car with a little sigh. “Hey.” he says.
Dean doesn’t say anything. Pretends to be asleep.
Sam sighs again, and Dean thinks he’s going to leave. The thought hurts, strangely, huge and dull, an ache, like Sammy not looking for him, like Sammy not caring.
He only adjusts himself though, and Dean doesn’t understand why he doesn’t leave. It’s nice though, listening to his breathing while he tries to fall asleep. It’s the most familiar sound in the world---in any world, even when it’s loud, and rough, ebbing and flowing like some kind of---
Wait a minute.
There’s a song winding through his head, and it doesn’t make sense, because Dean hasn’t heard it in like a year and a half. It’s there though, filling his mind and relaxing him even though it sounds awful.
“Like a bridge over troubled water”
There’s no way.
“I will ease your mind.”
Dean feels like he hasn’t slept in a lifetime.
Dean sleeps.
Sam listens to his breathing.