Fandoms: Supernatural/Stargate: Atlantis
Codes: Dean Winchester, John Sheppard, Ronon Dex, Teyla Emmagen, others, AU
Rating: NC-17
Summary: Dean remembers Texas as blackland stretching in marker-thick strips of vivid brown and black, broken with the sprawling metroplexes of Dallas and San Antonio and Houston; farms spread with the yellow tops of maize waving in pre-autumn winds, threshers moving complacently through the fields with drowsy men in hats waving at the road. He remembers green and gold fields dotted with cows, half-year calves running on the outskirts of the herds. He remembers these were what he saw between jobs, lives being lived that had nothing to do with creeping twilight and sleeping only behind salt circles and ritual wards.
Author Notes: I have--a lot of people. samdonne issued the challenge back in January for a Dean meets John Sheppard that I couldn't--quite--get out of my head when I asked for prompts, which means I hit a record of answring four of my own prompts. My flist who pre-read and sometimes brutally critiqued (this I love you for), those who stuck around to the end and told me what they liked and what they didn't. cjandre, rheasilva, svmadelyn, eleveninches, and amireal who picked it to pieces and put it back together again. If I missed anyone, my apologies. I think pretty much everyone on my flist January through March who left such helpful and inspiring commentary seriously deserves some kind of award for watching me try to write the rough draft of a novel live.
by jenn
It's a pattern he's followed for almost two years, a circuit that's stretched from northern Oregon south to Panama. He's come up against the hard faced guards in the south who shoot on sight, once walked the northern border for sixteen days until he found an opening before they closed behind barbed wire and watchtowers, men with AK-47s who watch with the blank faces of professional soldiers and never miss a shot. Once upon a time, he bought Sammy's passage with a shielding spell and five thousand dollars in weapons--no one takes money anymore.
There's space after that.
He remembers refueling the car outside the broken remains of Phoenix; the abandoned armories he broke into in Nevada, handguns and molding boxes of bullets stretching down halls that went for miles; the slow ecstasy of napalm and sarin gas in underground bunkers dusty with disuse. He learned how to build bombs from kitchen supplies, sat in abandoned elementary school chemistry labs with calcium nitrate and platinum triggers, banned science fair projects piled around him, learning the slow and hard way the science of demolition; he burned his arm in Green Bay, and was feverish for months after with antibiotics the price of gold; he lost a finger in Chesapeake and two companions just outside Des Moines, whose faces he can barely remember.
He's only been in Texas for two days, but he's already feeling the itch to leave. Coming up in front of the remains of a diner, Dean studies it briefly, looking for signs of recent occupation.
The doors are still locked, but the front windows were broken a long time ago. Dean's careful when he steps through the glass, sharp edges gleaming in the dim light. Overturned tables litter the path to the kitchen in carefully orchestrated carnage, and Dean steps over bodies so long dead the sweet smell is lost beneath the wet rot of wood and lingering scent of smoke. The counter's black from smoke damage, edges charred from two fires he can remember setting and one he can't.
Climbing over, he turns on his flashlight, ducking to the back and the refrigeration unit long since relegated to storage. He's been out of ammo for ten days and no one lives by handgun alone. Padlocks are pointless, like flags to show something's hidden inside, but the booby traps are how he left them, and he disables them by rote, eye on the slow swing of the kitchen door and the orange-grey morning outside, thick with rising dust from the south.
There's less stored here than he remembers, though he doesn't remember the last time at all. Lowering himself to the floor, Dean methodically checks each box; bullets are a scarce commodity and getting scarcer. He might be making his own soon enough.
His body's used to being alert, automatically listening while he cleans his guns, keeping inventory in some part of his mind; what he can replace, what he can't, what he can live without, what he can trade for, fight for, build for himself. The rhythm's always been soothing, a slow trance of automation and habit, maybe too much, maybe too long, when there's a whisper of sound so close he can feel the hairs rise on the back of his neck, a shivering consciousness of something--
He's already on his knees, gun pointed at the thin body posed at the doorway; to his surprise, there's already a gun aimed at him.
There aren't many of Dean Winchester's caliber left anymore. There are reasons he's still alive.
Dean sucks a breath between his teeth, keeping his finger hovering over the trigger. "Who are you?"
The guy doesn't move; Jesus, can't even tell he's breathing, close as he is, grey-dusted shirt of indeterminate color, grey pants, and the blank look of an animal that doesn't know it's been shot. Dean thinks back; he set salt, set the door. Probably human, then. "Who. Are. You?"
The man licks his lips. From here, Dean can see the almost imperceptible tremble in the gun hand, mind cataloguing the weaknesses like his father had taught him--gaunt cheeks, too-straight stance, but there's something else that makes Dean hesitate to pull the trigger. Human. Human. It's been too long.
Christ, it's been too long. Probably too long for this guy, too. He hasn't shot yet, either, which Dean has to consider a plus.
"Dean Winchester," Dean says slowly. He's been out too long, away from other hunters; groups call attention, and Dean's never liked attention. "You?"
The man doesn't answer; it would be just Dean's luck to finally find people and the fucker doesn't even speak English. "Me llamo Dean?" he tries warily, thinking of Nuevo Laredo only three miles away. His Spanish sucks outside protection spells.
The guy doesn't answer for a moment, and Dean can feel sweat pop up beneath his palm, cold and slick. He doesn't kill humans, people, but a Mexican standoff always ends in someone on the ground, and Dean's not going to be that someone.
"Sheppard," the guy says slowly, like he's not sure how to speak, voice a thick drawl that bleeds Midwest by way of Texas. Dean can feel the sudden flare of attention like a spotlight, eyes crawling across his body from head to toe. Dean's vividly aware of the dried blood on his jeans, the holes in his shirt that he hasn't bothered to replace, uncut hair, a messy shave after a run-in with a harpy in Philadelphia. The eyes flicker at the scars--his hand, his arm, the long infected and barely healed scrape down the side of his throat, pulsing red and uneven even in the dimmest light. They're the marks of who he is, of what he is, more indelible than his name has ever been.
Slowly, the other man's gun comes down. "I'm--looking for antibiotics." Dean eases his finger off the trigger, keeping an eye on the guy's gun hand--starved or not, Sheppard's got the same disciplined movements that he remembers from Dad, the same too-easy space in his skin despite the jerky movements of his hands.
"I don't have any." Sheppard's eyes flicker to the boxes, surveying briefly, before coming back to Dean with a nod. Turning on a booted heel, the man is almost out the door before Dean jerks his weapon down, scrambling to his feet. "Hey." Grabbing for the Beretta, he shoves it into the thigh holster, keeping the 9 mm in his hand--no reason to be stupid. He kicks the door closed behind him, going out into the diner to see the man's already outside, walking toward a jeep that looks a hell of a lot better than what Dean's driving these days. Sliding across the dusty counter, he stumbles against a table before he can climb through the window, dodging glass by instinct. "Hey. Where are you--"
Another man, less than three feet away, has something pointed at him he can't even identify. Dean goes perfectly still; at this distance, there's no way this guy'll miss.
"Ronon." The single word snaps through the air like a whip; the guy doesn't hesitate, lowering his gun to point just before Dean's feet. The dark eyes, however, watch Dean's every breath. "Leave him alone."
The guy--Ronon?--nods shortly. He's bigger than Sheppard--huge, actually, now that Dean's not staring down the barrel of a gun. Short hair cut recently from the looks of it, dusty pants of maybe-leather, maybe-not, wearing two holsters and three knives that Dean can see. A professional soldier, sharp edged and wary; Dean knows the type.
Dean keeps his hands where the guy can see them, even after the gun comes down; you don't fuck around with reflexes like that. "You need antibiotics?"
Sheppard stops short. Turning, he pushes back his hair, watching Dean with sharp eyes. "Said so."
Dean licks his lips. "I know where you can find them."
The big guy follows his every move warily. Sheppard just watches.
"There's a guy north, El Paso," Dean says, keeping his voice even. He doesn't want to test his reflexes against Ronon's in a gunfight: there's no reason to let it come to that, anyway. "He can get stuff." Stuff like bullets, if Dean has something to trade, and he's running short. "I gotta stock up first, but I can take you there."
"What's he trade in?" Sheppard's voice is flat but interested. Crazy, maybe--fuck, who wouldn't be when they're living out here--but sharp, very sharp. Dean's learned not to evaluate on a look--that way lies waking up to a knife at your throat and a broken line of salt--but he's good at getting an impression, and this guy's changing every second. The men never look at each other, but they move like they're joined by a rope, and that's practice, years of it.
"Whatcha got?"
One corner of the straight mouth quirks briefly. "Can you give us a map?"
Dean almost snorts, then thinks better of it. "This guy doesn't see strangers."
Sheppard studies him, and Dean can almost feel the weight of his regard, stretching time like taffy, seconds feeling like minutes that pass like hours. "Okay," he says, deceptively soft, turning his back like there's nothing in this world that would put a bullet through it. Maybe there's not, when the other guy stands there like he can wait forever. Dean makes himself turn around, shoulder blades itching as he goes back in, stepping through the glass on autopilot, going back to the refrigerator for his bag.
He needs to restock anyway; taking his last boxes of bullets, two more guns, a new strap for his knife, he fills his bag, glancing around to see what else he might need. There's little left, so he plunders what he's got; he's lucky this place has been ignored so long, and now that it's been seen, he can't use it again. When he comes back outside, he notes the smear he left in the dust of the counter, the way that Sheppard pushed things aside when he came through. No, he won't be able to use this place again.
Outside, Ronon's where Dean left him, and Dean makes himself keep moving, feeling the watching eyes like a cold touch up and down his spine. His keys are getting sweaty against his palm when he ducks into the alley, and when he opens the door, he catches narrowed eyes still watching him in the rearview mirror. Getting in, Dean turns the key and takes a deep breath.
When he looks back, the guy's gone. Dean doesn't for a second think that means he's not being watched.
They keep close, following Dean on pencil-line farm roads between overgrown fields, yellow-brown with untended crops, growing wild over the fences, barbed wire spread like traps. Dean's more careful than he used to be, even knowing the roads as he does, watching for changes in the area, habitation by human and not; both can be equally dangerous, but humans are always more desperate. He keeps one eye on the horizon, stretching sickly pink and grey to his left, the sun a dull smear the yellowed brown of leaves in autumn.
Dean hasn't seen a calendar in years; he knows the seasons by the movement of the sun, the feel of the earth shifting from warm to cold. The world tastes like September, the fleeing of summer heat farther south even this far south.
Dean remembers Texas as blackland stretching in marker-thick strips of vivid brown and black, broken with the sprawling metroplexes of Dallas and San Antonio and Houston; farms spread with the yellow tops of maize waving in pre-autumn winds, threshers moving complacently through the fields with drowsy men in hats waving at the road. He remembers green and gold fields dotted with cows, half-year calves running on the outskirts of the herds. He remembers these were what he saw between jobs, lives being lived that had nothing to do with creeping twilight and sleeping only behind salt circles and ritual wards.
He remembers when he carried his arsenal for those he hunted, not for those who hunted him.
He's been doing this alone for longer than he wants to remember, but he can still feel the phantom body that should be beside him--talks to him too, when the silence grows too heavy. The radio's been useless for so long he's forgotten when he last touched the knobs; the tapes he saves for need, growing thin and weary with repeated use. Some part of him wonders why he doesn't make copies; tapes are easy to find, try any burned-out Wal-Mart in any town in the south, but he never has.
It's not so alone today, even with the creeping silence. The hum of the jeep is close enough to almost feel running along his nerves; irritating, when he's not used to it, but soothing, too.
It would be a ten hour drive at its most ideal--in reality, avoiding highways and major cities, Dean's clocked it at fourteen and change when he's moving fast, thirteen flat when he's desperate. They'll stop for the night in Dryden, a messy collection of abandoned buildings that slept through the apocalypse and died without waking. Far enough from the border and the highways to be something close to safe; nothing and no one sane would choose deserted farmland to hide if they wanted to survive.
Driving can be a deadly rhythm to fall into; it's too easy to get caught up in the unchanging scenery, lose focus. For once, it's easy to keep alert, watch each side of the road, check for disturbances and dissimilarities from what he remembers. In his rearview mirror, he can see the jeep keeping up easily behind him--nice, he has to admit, slick and smooth, like something from a movie, the solid black exterior dusty and scratched but solid. Either amazing luck or one of them's a master mechanic--he wouldn't take bets on either.
At four and a half hours, they pull over just south of Uvalde, where there's still running water, God alone knows how, and Dean gets out, wiping sweaty hands on his legs as he turns to face the jeep that pulls up behind him. He notes the curve of the stop, trying not to admire the clean line of the tires and smooth curve of the engine. He may be a refugee in his own country, but he's still a guy.
"Nice jeep," he says when Sheppard gets out. One eyebrow arches, mouth quirking at one corner, and he looks younger suddenly, pushing back messy hair with one hand before stepping around the engine, leaning back onto warm metal.
"Marines always have the best toys," Sheppard says with a ghost of a smile, arms crossing over his chest. "Breather?"
"We got five more hours before Dryden; we'll have to stop there." He doesn't need to say sundown; this guy wouldn't still be alive if he didn't know the rules of survival. Turning, he ducks into his backseat, knowing that Ronon might be in the jeep but is still watching, and Dean wouldn't be surprised if there was a gun trained on his every move. He keeps two water containers in the back seat for emergencies, various indestructible and vital foods like Twinkies, because if it comes from the Hostess family, it'll survive anything, even the end of the world. Beef jerky by the pound is sealed up in the trunk.
"Sheppard." The big guy steps out of the passenger side of the car. Sheppard doesn't turn around, eyes on Dean, but he lifts one shoulder in acknowledgement. "She wants out."
Sheppard pauses, tensing, eyes fixing on Dean for a moment before sliding away. "Hold on." Circling the engine, he goes to the back of the jeep, and Dean can see the back open up, a low voice that's got to be Sheppard's, then the sound of feet hitting dirt. A tiny sound muffled immediately, and Sheppard comes back around, leading a limping woman with an arm beneath her shoulders. She squints, looking around them with the same sharp eyes as the men, but even Dean can see the limp she's trying to hide, and a too-quick step, the bandage curled up beneath the leg of her pants.
Antibiotics, yeah, got it. The smooth caramel skin is yellowed across her cheeks from strain, and he can see the flush of early fever starting in her face. She doesn't make a sound, even when Sheppard braces her gently against the side of the jeep.
She's gorgeous, though, and Dean may be tired, but he sure as hell isn't dead. A smile curves his lips automatically as he slides into a person he barely remembers, the one that could hit on women over bars still wearing a werewolf's blood drying on his jeans and caught beneath his nails. "Hey."
She turns her head, just enough to see him. "Hello. You are Dean Winchester?" Her voice is as good as her looks but shows the same strain as her body. He wonders how long she's had the infection.
"The same. And you are--"
Sheppard's hand tightens on her arm; she ignores it. "Teyla Emmagen." Her eyes flicker to Sheppard. "I thank you for your assistance." She pauses, and anyone else might not realize it was to breathe. "It has been a long time since we have seen other people."
He'd bet, from the look of them. Familiar, the look of people who ran into their own kind and learned hard and fast that even here, even now, human doesn't mean trustworthy. "Where you from?" he asks, unwrapping a Twinkie. He motions an offer of another, but Teyla shakes her head quickly, mouth tight. Nausea. Not good. Sheppard and Ronon don't bother to respond.
"Not around here," Sheppard says, leaning casually into the jeep beside Teyla. "Been on the road a while."
Humans have places, Dean knows. Canada's safe, a nearly impenetrable wall that's held for five years. South American's falling, or so he's heard--the border guards are restless with the trigger. The road's a place of last resort--pockets of humans here and there through the continent, dying slow or dying fast, either one. Even the best magic runs thin, and the last place he stayed he watched five hundred die screaming.
Getting attached had been a mistake.
They stand in uneasy silence; not talkers, these people. Teyla leans back, head tilted toward the sun, but her jacket's thin and even the afternoons are too cold now to remain outside long. After a few minutes, her hand touches Sheppard's, a subtle question, and he leads her back. Dean can see the limp this time, the way she favors her side. Something got her but good.
"What was it?" he asks when Sheppard comes back, waving his water bottle in the general direction of the jeep. Sheppard hesitates, eyes flickering to Ronon, then back.
"Werewolf," he says slowly, like he can't quite believe he's saying it. Dean's seen people after their first attack; no matter how much they thought they understood, they never knew, not really, not until the first time they see it, hear it, feel it. "She seemed okay."
"It happens." Claws could carry rotted meat from their last victims, dirt from the ground, whatever they picked up sprinting across miles of ground for their prey. Finishing his bottle, Dean bites back the next question; he doesn't think they'll answer. Crumpling the cellophane wrapper, he shoves it in his pocket "All right. Let's go."
Dryden has one gas station; using the manual pumps, Ronon gets them filled up in record time as they all keep an eye on the slowly dipping sun. Dean can count daylight by instinct; they're okay so far.
There are places all over town, but Dean's got his favorite; a basement blessed by a priest and read by a psychic before she went across the border like the others.
"Come on," he says, circling to the driver's side and sliding into his seat. Glancing back, he sees Ronon and Sheppard exchange a glance. "Look, nightfall's less than thirty minutes off. You want to get through the night? I got a place."
Dean watches in his rearview mirror as the two men pause briefly, weighing the pros and cons, before the sound of the jeep's engine jerks his attention back to the road. There are no street signs left, just twisted metal rusting in corners, wound 'round trees, or lying against cracked asphalt and concrete. He could find the building blind, winding down the remains of the small town streets, coming up beside a storefront as shabby as the others, crumbling brick walls dusted grey from soil and rock. Driving into the alley, he keeps an eye to the west as he sidles the car around a forgotten dumpster and against the tall wood fence at the back.
He grabs his bag before he gets out, circling to the trunk as Sheppard comes up behind him, edging around the dumpster that is the only thing they have for subterfuge. When he finishes unloading, Sheppard's picking up the woman, her head resting against his shoulder, her eyes closed. Fever-heat is crawling up her face and he knows red lines will have started their creep up her flesh from the wound. A part of his mind marks out her time, too: not long. Not long at all.
Slamming the trunk shut, he pulls the rifles over his head, slinging the backpack over one arm, duffle in his hand. When he turns around again, both men have military-issue grey bags almost as tall as they are and are waiting for his lead.
"It's a little weird," he says, eyes flickering to Ronon's gun hand hovering too close to his hip. Pushing the warped back door open, the smells of decay overwhelms him for a second, but they're nothing new. It's a slow journey across the floor--the boards are old and rotting, and some have broken already. Behind the remains of an industrial stove, there's a door below the staircase, as warped and rotted as the rest.
Special, though, and he takes a breath, glancing behind him, noticing how they follow in his footsteps with care. Licking his lips, he gets out his knife, hoping to God Ronon doesn't shoot first and ask questions later.
There's a hissed breath behind him that he can't afford to notice as he touches the tip of the blade to his finger. The first time, he'd felt like he was bleeding out when they set it to his body. Now it's just recognition.
He wipes the finger across the wood, bracing himself for the shock of cold that seems to reach through his entire body, every vein frozen, air going solid in his lungs like he's underwater and drowning slowly. The room goes silent, thick, like he's encased in solid stone, the second stretching.
Then it's over, and the door opens with a creak.
Behind him, he hears a breath let out in a shocked hiss and wonders what it looked like to them.
"It's a sanctuary spell," he says, trying not to shake too obviously. His fingertips are numb. Blood magic, even this kind, never feels quite right. "Come on."
Resetting it is less traumatizing than opening it up, but he still takes the time to lay a line of salt. Some habits shouldn't be broken, and this is one of them.
When he gets to the bottom, Sheppard has stretched Teyla out on one of the mattresses in the corner. Dean finds the kerosene lamps by the light of Ronon's flashlight, getting out his lighter and setting them in the four corners of the room. From habit, he studies the straight lines of the reinforced ceiling, glancing to take in the street-level barred windows, blackout blinds from the forties draped over each.
Sheppard seems to know the tricks, getting a chair to reach the first window, laying a line of salt with the careful precision of someone who's done this many times and still finds it new. Dean alternates windows until all four are covered, pulling the cheap blinds back into place so the light from the room doesn't penetrate the outside.
The bunker's an old one, the first he built after the change, when Sam was still with him. They'd spent weeks building it, slow and methodical, patching the ceiling and reinforcing the walls with concrete made from thrice-blessed water, mixed while he recited every protection spell he'd ever learned. It's safe, as safe as anything in this country can be, and it's home, in a way that nowhere else is.
Though Dean can feel the sharp eyes follow him wherever he moves, Ronon keeps his distance, sticking close to Sheppard's side as if Dean might turn on them at any moment. Not surprising. "Make yourself at home," he says with a grin at Ronon's narrow-eyed frown. "Mi casa es su casa. Whatever."
Getting a chair, he sets aside the rifles carefully, as openly as he can, before he sits down, watching the other two men circle the room, careful and meticulous as they check every corner. Military, definitely, Sheppard, too, disciplined in a way that reminds him so much of his father it makes him ache.
Sheppard finally settles by the cot, pulling a chair close enough to reach Teyla easily. Ronon leans against the wall between the cot and Dean. He's not holding a weapon, but it doesn't fool Dean into thinking he's safe. He's seen the man move.
"So," Dean says, wondering what kind of conversation he's supposed to make. He's years out of practice with chatting. His hands free of weapons feel naked. He's too used to being armed when he has company.
Sheppard's eyes flicker from Teyla. "Interesting place," he says. Dean can't figure out if he's being sarcastic or not.
"We built it when it--started," Dean says, glancing around the room. He can feel Sam here sometimes--psychic residue, maybe, or just wishful thinking. He's a zero on the psychic meter, but he likes to think that being brothers gives him something, lets him feel Sam even now. "It's safe."
Sheppard's head tilts slightly. "We?"
"My brother." Even to himself, his voice is too short. Sheppard raises an eyebrow but doesn't respond, turning his attention back to Teyla.
"How long?" he asks. When Sheppard looks at him again, he nods toward Teyla. "Since she got hurt."
Sheppard hesitates, gaze flickering briefly to Ronon. It might be the lamps, but his face seems to darken. "A week since she was attacked. Symptoms about two days ago."
Dean nods, letting the silence stretch over the room, mind blanking. It's been too long since he's been around people. It's an effort now to talk.
Time passes. Sheppard and Ronon aren't chatty, even with each other, though Ronon's more restless, moving around the room like something caged, fingers brushing the concrete every so often. Three or four rounds of the room bring him back to his bag, and Dean watches in interest as he settles on the second cot and opens the bag up, pulling out the kind of weapons cache that is the stuff of extremely good dreams.
He starts with his own gun, a model that Dean's sure he's never seen, and he's pretty sure he's seen them all. A quick breakdown reveals a completely alien configuration, the parts not as intuitive in their disassembly as anything Dean's worked with, and he uses cleaning supplies that Dean's never seen before.
"Nice," he says, and Ronon's head comes up sharply, a searching look before a quick, toothy grin. He keeps going, flipping the barrel this way and that with practiced ease, natural showmanship, and Dean finds himself studying the design. Thicker barrel, with a slight oval shape; not ideal for bullets. Not ideal for anything Dean can think to shoot. The fluid's different, too, evaporating in the cool of the room even faster than alcohol. There's no bullet chamber he can see, the hilt a single solid sheet, no visible jointure.
Former military, maybe prototype? Dean's fingers itch to touch, and it's a physical effort not to cross the space between them, get a good close look at it. Somehow, he just doesn't think Ronon would appreciate it.
Sheppard glances over every so often, but his focus remains on Teyla, now fallen into an uneasy sleep.
There's something about them, though; Sheppard, ex-military, has to be, from the easy way he wears a thigh holster to the way he watches the room, subtle and sharp, missing nothing. He's too thin, tense everywhere even at rest, like a wire pulled too taut, and there are familiar strain marks around his eyes that tug at Dean's memory. Sleep deprivation can do that, but that's nothing new in their brave new world. He looks like he could use about two days worth dead on his back, though..
"So, you folks been on the road long?"
Sheppard's head twists around, looking at Dean with unconcealed surprise. Dean shrugs. There's no way they can sleep fourteen hours down here. Might as well talk.
"Few months," Sheppard says warily.
"From up north?"
Sheppard's mouth quirks. "Colorado." From the corner of his eye, Dean catches Ronon's sharp look. Sheppard's head tilts, the focus sharpening so abruptly that Dean can feel it like a weight, pressing against every bone and every muscle in his body--who the fuck is this guy?
Then he's someone else, melting back into his chair like it's a part of him, lean lazy body and wary eyes. "We were following some people that vanished on us. We heard they might try a border crossing."
Dean snorts softly. The Mexican border is porous, but that doesn't make it any less dangerous. Old witches built their own defenses into the earth, last-ditch efforts as dangerous to humans as they are to anything else. "Nuts," he says, and Sheppard's eyebrows rise curiously. "Look, you folks survive this long, you know what the borders are like." He pauses as Sheppard shrugs. "Did you find them?"
Sheppard's mouth quirks slightly. It's not a smile by any stretch of the imagination, but there's amusement beneath. "We will."
Dean wonders why, but he doubts he'll get an answer, not with Ronon staring at them like Sheppard just pulled a rabbit out of his ass and left it bloody on the floor. Shrugging to himself, he thinks about cleaning his gun, but Ronon's too twitchy, and Sheppard's little smirk makes him nervous the way people always make him nervous. For the life of him, he can't figure out why the fuck he brought them here, his safe place that's never known another life but Sammy's.
He's been alone too fucking long.
"Get some sleep," Ronon says abruptly, eyes trained on Sheppard. Sheppard turns around, a wordless exchange that involves no facial expression and a lot of glaring, but Sheppard shrugs, levering himself out of the chair in a fluid motion that belies the exhaustion seeping from beneath his skin. He shifts Teyla over, sliding in beside her so smoothly she barely stirs; they're both so thin they fit on the cot easily with space to spare. His head touches the pillow inches from hers and he's out like a light.
Ronon watches with an unreadable expression before going back to his gun, dismissing Dean's presence like an annoying insect. Dean shifts back in his chair, resigned to a night of mindblowing boredom.
He hadn't known he was asleep until he wakes to sudden activity, bringing his gun up automatically, aiming from instinct. Ronon's huge back is to him--something Dean hadn't thought would ever happen--big hands on Sheppard's thin shoulders to hold him down while he flails, every muscle tense. Ronon's pinned him to the cot with his knees, but he's barely keeping his seat, jerked by Sheppard's body as he fights the restraint.
Dean holsters the gun, coming around to get a better look. Ronon's head snaps up, teeth bared. "Get back."
"Fuck off. What's wrong with him?" Epileptic, would be ironic in some way, or maybe just a bad dream. Sheppard's back arches like a bow, jerking Ronon up with the kind of strength Dean wouldn't have suspected the guy even had, and then the green eyes flicker open, glazed over and wide with horror, blood spotting his lip and smeared around his nose, and Dean knows exactly what he's been missing.
Jesus Christ and holy fuck. "You have a fucking psychic out here?" He's grabbing for the salt by instinct, even if the room's salted, even though the wards on this place are the strongest ever created, even though he knows if there's anything out there that sensed him, there's jack shit Dean can do about it now. Sheppard's head snaps back onto the thin mattress with an audible thump, and Dean watches the eyes close briefly before snapping open again, seeing the world as it is.
If it's better than what he's been seeing, Dean doesn't ever want to know what he saw. "New Mexico," Sheppard breathes. His head turns to the side, staring past Dean at the wall. "They died screaming."
Dean closes his eyes. "Psychic." Jesus fucking Christ, someone brought a fucking psychic on the open road. "What the fuck are you doing here?"
Sheppard looks at him, confused, and Dean wonders where the fuck this guy has been all this time--secret underground bunker in the middle of bumfuck nowhere? Hiding out with other humans who were so fucking stupid they didn't deserve to breathe? Shoving his shaking hands deep in his pockets, Dean checks the wards from rote, wondering if any of that got through, if they'll have things waiting at the door when they come out. No one's been in here since Sammy, and they'd never really known for sure if even cold iron laced concrete could block everything.
Eventually, Ronon climbs off Sheppard, sitting in Sheppard's chair and staring at him with naked worry. No fucking wonder they don't talk. They don't need to.
After a while, Sheppard sits up. Swiveling, he brings his feet to the floor, leaning over to rest his head in his hands as he breathes out, like Sammy would do at the beginning, when it would hit him hard and fast and unprepared. Ronon doesn't touch him, but the watching's enough.
"You didn't tell me," Dean says, voice shaking. "This is not something you don't tell, man. This is something you say right off when you're going into a place that's fucking warded."
Sheppard lifts his head, swiping at his nose with his sleeve. "It's not something I'm used to talking about," which isn't even close to an apology. Not thinking about it either--Dean knows all about that kind of denial. Just how the fuck the guy's been denying it is a mystery; now that Dean knows what he's seeing, it's written all over him.
"I don't believe this." Pacing to the far edge of the basement--not nearly enough room down here to pace, barely enough room to think--Dean stares up the stairs. Psychic zero he might be, but it's his blood that binds this place, his and Sammy's, and he'd know if something was breaching it. When he turns around, Ronon's looking at him now, in a way that Dean knows too well. Slowly, Dean lets his hand drift toward his gun. He can probably get to it before Ronon can shoot him. Probably.
"Stand down," Sheppard says, voice thin but firm. Ronon hesitates. "He's not a threat. I'd know."
Remembering the feeling of Sheppard watching him earlier, Dean twitches. "Have you been reading me?"
Sheppard hesitates, which is an answer in itself, then shrugs. "More like testing a mood than--whatever that is." He pauses, looking awkward and uncomfortable. "It's not like I know what I'm doing. It just happens."
Like Sam. Dean tries not to compare, but the slump of shoulders is so familiar that he can't help it, anger melting like snow. "Jesus."
Ronon grumbles something, which makes Sheppard roll his eyes. "I know things, yeah. You look for people like me. Sometimes. I know your brother's here, somehow. I just--" Sheppard stops, with that peculiar look people always get when they have to talk about something that sounds plain nuts. "I don't know how."
Ronon shifts uneasily, and Sheppard lifts his head, looking up at him with an unreadable expression. Dean makes himself relax; most of the psychics he runs across these days are already nuts. At least Sheppard seems to be relatively sane still, or faking it brilliantly. Dean will take the faking happily. "When did you--"
"It started a few months ago," Sheppard says slowly, like he's picking out every word from an unreliable memory. "We--didn't understand what it was. Or what it was doing until it was too late." Dean wonders what the 'too late' was, could have been. Countless possibilities hover around the words, and few are pleasant. He's seen enough of them, from the would-be prophet who got herself blown up in California along with her followers, to the ones strung up in trees in the deep south, where superstition is as ingrained as skin color.
"And now?"
Sheppard's eyes go flat. It seems the sharing portion of the evening is over. "Doesn't matter. We just want antibiotics for Teyla."
Dean crosses his arms, leaning back into the wall. Psychic in denial. Right. "And that group you're looking for."
Sheppard nods with no expression. "Yeah."
Like Sammy at the beginning, Sheppard's wired for a couple of hours after: restless, jerky movement that makes the tiny room feel smaller, then falls dead to sleep with a push of Ronon's hand. Dean watches the slow ease of strain wistfully as Ronon covers Sheppard and Teyla with a blanket, one hand resting on Sheppard's shoulder before he pulls away. Removing to the other cot, Ronon drops down onto the thin mattress, tense beneath his skin and restless in every deliberate movement.
"Doesn't sleep much," Dean says, jerking Ronon's gaze to him. Leaning forward, Ronon rests his elbows on his knees, looking smaller--feeling smaller, too, maybe. Dean knows all about that.
"Alcohol won't make it stop. Drugs won't. Sleep won't. It comes when it comes and then it goes when it's done. But I bet you know that already."
Ronon hesitates, then nods. "We learned."
He did, they did, they had to, the ones after Sam, something in them waking up in this new world. The ones that got drunk on cheap alcohol from abandoned bars and trapped themselves in nightmares that followed them back to morning. The kids with burned out eyes on sidestreets and wandering the desert; new junkies eating bullets in basements as the sun rose. He picks them up when he finds them, buries them when he has to, bone and ash sowed with salt and laced with iron as far into Nevada's desert as he can drive in four hours. His hands itch at the old memory of the first graves he ever dug, so intense he can taste his own sweat and the blood from cracked knuckles on his tongue.
Dean realizes he's holding his knife again, still sheathed by his knee, hilt between his fingers. Not threat, but relaxation, tension leaking away at the touch of supple leather wrapped around steel, familiar grooves from his fingers, the easy balance of a perfect blade when he pulls it out. Ronon tenses but doesn't move, eyes fastened on the shining edge with a kind of hungry appreciation. Flipping it, Dean hands it over hilt-first. "Check it out."
Ronon pauses with an unreadable look that could be amusement, but he barely hesitates before he reaches out, and Dean watches him turn the blade, studying it with the professional interest of a hunter. He runs one thick, callused hand a breath above the blade, checking the weight and balance. It's not for throwing, but it'll do in a pinch. "Nice," Ronon murmurs, handing it back. The hilt's warm from someone else, sliding smoothly into Dean's hand, and he clenches around it for a second, making it his again before he slides it back into its sheathe. "Little small."
Dean smirks. "Oh yeah?"
Something that crosses the line between a butcher knife and a machete materializes in one broad hand, and Dean catches his breath. "Yeah."
Dean thinks he could like these guys.
Dean always wakes for sunrise--his body knows the rhythms of the world, the slumber of the earth waking to a dreary yellow-grey dawn, and he leads them back outside just as the east spreads fingers of pale gold across the world, peering from behind the building and puddling in the street. Teyla's barely conscious against Ronon's shoulder, and Sheppard's pale, tight-lipped and silent, strained like he never slept at all.
Sheppard's thinking of the New Mexico that followed him into his dreams, technicolored bodies and tactile screams he'll carry with him for the rest of the day, the rest of his life.
Dust puffs up around their boots as Dean checks the alley with habitual wariness, watching for disturbances in the dirt, new marks on their vehicles, the smell of the air around them, as dry and dusty as the roads. From the corner of his eye, he sees Sheppard watch the same way, knowing another part of him is searching too, though he may not know it. Dean uses Sheppard's body to read the world, the tiny tells of someone who doesn't yet know what he can sense but his body can still recognize. When Sheppard relaxes, Dean does too.
It's safe. As safe as this place can be, anyway.
"We'll stop again in three hours," Dean says as he opens the backseat, throwing his bag inside. His mind's mapping El Paso now, marking the safehouses he can send them to; Sheppard's got to be like a torch, and he's so new at it he'll be easy for anyone who likes to collect psychics. Someone's always watching, and it's been a while since Dean traveled with a psychic. "Look, no matter what--no matter what you see, don't stop. Not without me. Not out here."
And if they haven't learned that little lesson in survival already, Dean's gonna say they're the luckiest people alive.
Ronon grunts something unintelligible before he ducks around, going to the back of the jeep. From here, Dean can see the mattress laid out, the careful shading on the back windows to keep her safe from the sun, the nest of blankets gathered around her. She hasn't woken up yet. It's possible she won't wake up at all.
Sheppard goes to the passenger side seat; Dean can't imagine him trying to drive, closing his own door as Sheppard leans against the morning-cool metal, eyes closing briefly before Ronon comes back around. He straightens, shoulders jerking back before he climbs inside, and Dean wonders if Sheppard really think he's hiding shit right now. With a nod to Ronon, he gets into the car, fingers wrapped around the gear shift as he closes his eyes and imagines a highway filled with cars speeding ninety miles an hour to nowhere in particular.
Then he gets over it and turns the key.
They stop twice; once for Sheppard to stumble out, throwing up in a ditch. Dean averts his eyes, watching Ronon in the rearview mirror. Ronon stays behind the wheel, like Dean finally learned to, learned Sam's need for space and air and a wide open sky above him when it hits.
Sheppard comes up off his knees with a look on his face that makes Dean think of hunters in out of the way bars, the ones that lived too long and would live far longer, running on adrenaline and hate and the creeping insanity of remembering everything they'd seen. Sheppard takes the water bottle Ronon offers wordlessly through the passenger side window, spitting out half before he finishes it off.
The second time's planned, a quick lunch of dried meat and an unfamiliar flatbread that Sheppard offers from his pack. It's a cross between a tortilla and a pancake, slightly sweet, with a tang that his road-trained tongue finds exotic. Sheppard stays in back with Teyla while Ronon wordlessly watches the road, stoic and quiet and vibrating with worry like a tuning fork; even Dean can feel him.
It gets better, Dean would lie, but he doesn't think the guy would believe him. Though it does in some ways, not in others. It gets easier to see the visions coming, feel them coming, that scratch on the edges of Sam's mind that he'd come to recognize. Dean watches with him, leaning against the warm grill of the jeep, chewing on not-pancakes on a clear day during a season he might have called fall once upon a time.
"Will this guy have the stuff we need?" Ronon asks, and Dean's so surprised to hear him talk that it takes a second to form an answer.
"If he doesn't, no one does." It's weird; in a world where there are miracle healers hawking their gift for food and safe sleep, antibiotics are what they can almost never find. Hospitals full of expired pills, pre-med dropouts growing it with their chemistry sets. Infections kill more people than even the creatures do. When he glances at Ronon, the tight line of his mouth makes Dean wince. He covers it with a drink of water. "Yeah. He'll have it."
Ronon grunts softly, arms crossing over his chest. The guy's huge--Dean's starting to feel a lot smaller than he actually is. Sure, this guy can bench-press a Buick, but it's not like there's much call for that out here. Though he supposes the guy's at an advantage when the big things come out to hunt. Dean pities whatever would think this guy's an easy mark.
"It's quiet out here."
Dean considers. West Texas is old, but not like the east, not the metroplexes of Houston and Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, where wars were fought and won and lost. It's quiet, even at night, a stretch of flattened land and red-brown sandstone, towns like bumps in the road. By highway, it'd be faster, but by highway, they might not make it all the way.
"Where've you been?"
Ronon shrugs, scratching the back of his neck. "Colorado. Some places around there. Following Sheppard." He pauses, staring into the west, like he might see something if he looks hard enough. Dean could tell him he will. It won't be any more real than an oasis in the desert, but he'll see something. "The visions. They're pulling him north."
Dean takes a drink of water. They're all pulled north, every one of them. "He won't go?"
"No."
Searching for something down here, a group, a person, a place, whatever. Dean doesn't ask about it, doesn't really want to know. Anyone who stays down here has reasons, and some of them even have good ones. Pushing off the truck, Dean finishes his bottle, tossing it in the car as he gets inside. "Four hours," he says over his shoulder, watching Ronon in the rearview mirror. "Unless you have one hell of a good reason, don't stop until we get there."
El Paso started as Spanish settlements, following the twists of the Rio Grande on both sides of the border, a pausing place on the Camino Real. People died for gold that was never found, for land that was never truly claimed. Before roads were built and the footprints of Catholicism stamped their way across the country, before railroads and airplanes and cell phones, there were Indians who wandered the hunting grounds, leaving their mark on the land in ways that the children of the Europeans never did.
Dean can't feel it, but Sam did, once upon a time, eyes wide and surprised as he turned in slow circles in a town that was once modern, in a world that's anything but.
It's two hours to dusk when they come into the city, skirting the edges until Dean finds an unblocked road. People come and go, fortifying this town and that building, blocking streets and setting fires before moving on, and Dean's never sure what will be safe and what won't. It's funny, in that way that Dean's found life to be, that he tends to worry more about people than the things that crawl out at night, that shadow their steps during the day. Those things only want to take you, eat you, kill you, bleed you out. People are infinitely more complex.
There are smaller groups here, barricaded in buildings, peering out the windows to watch them pass. Some wave, recognizing him as the car crawls down the potholed streets , and he waves back and wonders who they are.
Another building's crumbling, blackened concrete and old brick tumbled over: could be ritual magic, a pyro, or just an idiot too stupid to live. Winding up a road made narrow by broken asphalt, chunks ripped up and strewn like blocks, he glances back once. Ronon's so close that Dean can see the gleam of bared teeth, Sheppard slumped in his seat like he might be asleep.
Dean doubts it, though. Sheppard doesn't look the type.
The place he's looking for isn't a building at all; Dean slows down as he comes into the empty lot, pulling in, keeping a wary eye on the few people scattered nearby. Warding's all well and good, but if they know who he is, they know he keeps supplies, and he's not a guy that kills over unpolluted water. Coming to a stop, he pulls out the keys, tucking them in one pocket before he gets out, breathing out the warding spell before turning around to see Sheppard climbing out of the jeep.
"Sheppard," Ronon says, but his voice says a lot more.
"Stay with Teyla and watch the jeep," Sheppard says quietly. Ronon's hands clench into fists. "That's an order."
Ronon pauses, eyes narrowing, like he might just tell Sheppard where he can put those orders, but the moment passes, and Ronon turns on Dean with an expression that Dean recognizes from his own face. "If he doesn't come back--"
"You'll kill me, I get it." And he does. He does. Ronon doesn't strike him as someone who makes idle threats. "Try, anyway. Ready?"
Sheppard nods with a repressing glance at Ronon, pulling a bag from the ground and hooking it over one shoulder. One corner of his mouth quirks upward. "Let's go."
The girl at the door is younger than the last one.
Dean fights down nausea as she stares at him from dark-ringed, hollow blue eyes, painted lips tight, dress too large for her undeveloped body. Soft blonde hair falls in a ragged line down her back, covering her eyes whenever she lowers her head.
"Hey," Dean says, smiling by reflex, lowering his voice as she starts, already stepping farther back behind the door. "Tell Marty that Dean's here to see him."
She hesitates, leaning heavily onto the door, one bare foot pressed against the wood. "He's not trading today."
"He will with me. Go tell him."
Last time, it was a leggy brunette, tall and skeletal, temporary written all over her, and before that, a pretty blonde that could pass for legal if you squinted. Marty never changes. The girl hesitates, eyes fixing on something behind him. Dean turns to see Sheppard studying the high-rise dirtied pink exterior, broken windows as high as the eye can see. A flutter of ragged curtains, or heads popping out, those that don't mind a ten flight walk if it means safe sleeping for the night. Stupid people say Marty made a deal with the devil to keep it standing, keep the plumbing, which is funny, because if Marty had been making deals with the devil, he'd ask for considerably more than this piece of shit, and he'd sure as hell have better generators.
Sheppard's gaze slides down, catches Dean, then settles on the girl.
"I dreamed of you," she whispers, startling them both. She sways a little, softening into a practiced sensuality that makes the hair rise on the back of Dean's neck. Something flickers jagged in Sheppard's eyes, and Dean surreptitiously steps to the side, blocking direct access to the door.
"Go tell Marty," Dean says soothingly, feeling Sheppard's sharp gaze like a knife against his spine. She steps back inside, closing the door with a click, and Dean turns around. "You say shit, your friend dies."
Sheppard doesn't move. "What kind of place--"
"One where you do what you gotta to survive." Dean tries not notice, but he always does. He noticed the brunette who brought coffee and the blonde who smiled at him with fear-filled eyes, the girls before her, and he'll remember those that come after, too. Every goddamn one. "Shut up and let me do the talking."
Sheppard's head tilts slightly, and Dean wonders if this guy could possibly be stupid enough to start shit in the only place in the southwest they can reliably find supplies. A click of the door jerks his attention back, and Marty's smirking benevolently at him in too-small shorts and a brightly colored shirt, eyes as flat and empty as the city.
Marty's an old acquaintance, old enough that Dean knows to fake a smile. Gnarled, desert-dry arms wrap around his shoulders, a whisper of words against his skin to prove identity. Used to be he had to shed blood, but these days, Marty can do it with a touch. The welcoming smile fades as he takes in Dean's companion, eyebrows drawn together sharply. Marty's not an idiot and has never been a psychic null. He knows exactly what he's looking at.
"Passing through?" Marty asks, though he's got to know better. The sharp eyes already flickered over Sheppard once, taking him in, filing him in his mental rolodex of names and faces and events. "Unusual company."
"Need a trade," Dean says. Marty grunts.
"Trading him?"
Jesus fuck. Marty's getting stupid. "I'd be careful," Dean says lightly as he passes Marty at the door and drops into a chair, slouching while Marty looks between them. "You remember what Sam did when you got grabby." The chair puts Dean close enough to move if Sheppard takes it badly, but far enough away that Marty won't be sure he can stop Sheppard. Draping an arm over the back, Dean waits until Marty's got his brain back. "Antibiotics. And bullets if you got any."
It's almost funny to watch the struggle on Marty's face, balancing trade with opportunity presented, weighing Dean's business and Sheppard against whatever the fuck he thinks he could do with a captive psychic. "Right." Marty looks between them, then motions. "Come on and I'll see what I got."
Sheppard follows Dean, eerily quiet, as they cross out of what once had been a small meeting room, down a hall carpeted in faded red and to the door. Marty sells aboveground to anyone who wants a space, but the only safe places are below. Dean pauses at the top the stairwell, feeling Sheppard's gaze fixed on the back of his neck like a brand. As quietly as they all move, Sheppard's practically a ghost behind him, and Dean fights the urge to turn around and make sure he's still there.
"Got a line on a tinhat," Marty says casually, jerking Dean's attention.
"Where?"
Marty shrugs. "New Mexico last I heard, claiming second coming. The usual shit."
Dean carefully doesn't glance back at Sheppard, but he thinks he'd better consider asking Sheppard what he saw last night. "How long ago?"
"Swung through pretty recently." Marty makes a show of thinking. "Week or so. One of them your type."
His type being crazy psychics. Right.
Marty's head turns sharply, fixing Dean with an avaricious smile. "Thought you might be interested."
"That's not much to go on." It's not. New Mexico is big, and psychics can move fast when they think they're being followed, and even when they're not. Marty has the info; he just likes to see Dean twitch.
"Might remember more if I think on it," Marty offers generously. "It's been a while."
Right. That kind of information. "Right."
They pass an industrial refrigerator, a laundry room, the exit to the underground parking lots that no one sane would step in for anything less than death. Some doors with broken knobs, splintered wood, long-dried blood staining the dingy frame. When Marty looks back, opening a door with a quiet word, Dean glances back too, just to see if Sheppard's still there, and finds him close enough to touch.
Dean wonders how Sheppard did that without Dean feeling him.
"Antibiotics," Marty's saying cheerfully, turning in a slow circle. It's a familiar room, stacked with rotting boxes of prescription bottles from pharmacies and hospitals. There are other rooms like this, filled with painkillers and antibiotics, maybe even a lab if Marty's managed to find a replacement chemist since the last one up and died on him after going outside past dusk. Marty sorts through the unlabeled boxes, unlabeled bottles, coming back to them with a grin. "Trade's private, Winchester," Marty says genially, rocking back on his heels. "You know that." Dean almost objects, but Sheppard shrugs, slinging his bag on the floor.
"I know the drill." There's a wary resignation on his face that says maybe he does, too. Dean nods shortly, going back out the door and shutting it behind him. He can just hear the murmur of voices on the other side, and he figures if Sheppard loses his shit, he can probably get back inside fast enough to stop outright murder. Probably.
Reaching in his pocket, he pulls out the half pack of stale cigarettes he picked up two states ago, rolling it between his fingers to get the feel of the paper, smell musty tobacco and remember a time that payments was tendered with credit cards and cash.
After a while, the door opens, Marty grinning as Sheppard zips up his bag. Glancing down, Dean sees the bottle in one hand before Sheppard slips it into the pocket of his jacket, looking at Dean with unreadable eyes. Marty has the glee of a man who pulled off a good trade, and Dean wonders what Sheppard gave up. "So, Dean? Bullets?"
They barter for a few nights below-ground. Marty's defenses are good, better than anywhere else in the city, and it's not like Dean's got anyplace he has to be just yet. He throws his duffle onto the bed, thinking its been a long time since he spent so many nights running on a mattress. His back thanks him for the thought; the backseat of the Impala is getting old. And so is he.
Sheppard doesn't say much, feeding Teyla carefully crushed pills, slowly wiping a wet cloth across her face. Ronon hovers, no surprise there, hands opening and closing on empty air as Teyla falls into restless sleep. It's going to take more than a few hours to wipe an infection like that.
"Sheppard. You need to rest." Ronon pries the cloth from his hand, hip checking him off the edge of the bed. It may say something, that Sheppard doesn't fight him, getting up to lean against the wall, letting gravity drag him down. "You're going to fuck up if you don't sleep," Ronon says, relentlessly honest. "We can't afford that."
"Thanks for the newsflash," Sheppard answers without heat, leaning his head back against the wall, eyes closed. One hand absently scratches at his neck, over an uneven patch of skin that looks like an old scar. "I was just thinking I needed to go for a jog."
Ronon frowns at him, like he's not sure Sheppard's joking. Honestly, Dean's not sure he is, either.
"They come every night?" Dean asks, keeping his voice disinterested when he's anything but.
Sheppard pauses, shaking his head. "Not every night." Running a hand through his hair, he opens his eyes to stare at the door. "Just most nights."
Dean nods, taking out his guns, spreading them in a neat circle as he starts to break them down. Ronon doesn't leap for a weapon and Sheppard closes his eyes, so Dean figures that either they believe him or they're too tired to care. Taking out his kit, Dean pops it open, looking at the soft clothes, the oils, the worn brushes and bottles that have served two generations of Winchester men.
Sheppard shifts on the floor, and Dean watches in interest as he takes out his 9 mm, frowning at it before he shakes himself, reaching for the pack Ronon brought in. Dean loses himself in his work, aware that Sheppard's doing the same, practiced, automatic movements that speak of long familiarity. "You should go north," Dean says abruptly. "It's safer."
Sheppard doesn't look up, hands moving smoothly through the disassembly of what looks like a rifle, ignoring him so thoroughly that Dean almost wonders if he imagined he'd spoken. Snapping the barrel back on, Dean sights it before setting the gun aside, reaching for another one. "It's worse down here," Dean says, and this time, he doesn't think of Sammy at all. "On the road--"
"We're good."
Ronon's pretending not to watch them now, hand slowing against Teyla's skin. The smells of gun oil and leather almost cover the stench of the moldy carpets and dry-rot walls, thinly coated with peeling paint more yellow than white. Dean puts his case aside, wondering why he's even bothering. The tinhat, probably.
"Staying'll drive you nuts," Dean says quietly. "I've seen enough of you over the years. I know what it'll do to you after too long."
Sheppard's fingers stutter, just a moment, and Dean forcibly keeps Sam from his mind, too-private memories that he can't stand for someone else to see. "Why north?"
Dean shrugs. "I don't know." He doesn't know why north, why Canada, not really, not even when Sam was drawn, waking with the names of cities he's never seen on his lips. "But it's better there. Safer. The things here are drawn to you. People too. Sooner or later--" Something gets them. Or they get themselves. Dean's taken ten to the border, barely sane, hoping wherever they were going, it was better than here. Knowing somehow, that anything was better than here. Anything. "The longer you're down here--"
"The worse it gets," Ronon says flatly. "Sheppard--"
"No." Sheppard sets aside the reassembled rifle, stretching lazily before he turns to Dean. "What's a tinhat?"
Well, fuck. Dean leans back into the wall with a sigh. "Marty's word."
Sheppard waits, eyebrows raised in polite inquiry.
"Psychic that goes nuts, starts--" A religion, a cult, wanders around thinking crazy and taking others down with them. "Look, it's your future is what it is, if you don't blow your own brains out."
But Sheppard's not listening, focusing on Dean with that strange weight that makes Dean feel like he's being slowly crushed by air. "This one. He said New Mexico."
"That was a week ago." Marty's memory's trickier the less Dean has to trade. Dean taps thoughtfully against his thigh, watching Sheppard. "You think your vision was about this?"
Sheppard just looks back. Right. Dean doesn't sigh, but it's hard. "Guy goes into the desert, comes out thinking he's God. Like I said--"
"They go crazy." Sheppard's fingers stroke slowly over the barrel of the gun. Dean figures it's not supposed to be a threat. "You going after him?"
Dean wonders if Sheppard somehow picked that up from his thoughts, or if he's just that good at guessing. "I do sometimes."
Sheppard's head tilts thoughtfully. "You need help?"
Dean pretends he's sticking around to see what happens to the woman and make sure they'll be okay. Marty's girl watches him constantly, a reminder that Marty's always up for new and interesting forms of profit, and while Dean's pretty sure Ronon could kick the ass of anyone trying to get at them, Marty's a good magician. Sheppard's feral, like a trapped animal, playing human badly with nerves on the outside of his skin, rubbed raw. Dean gets him out of the building and into fresh air after twenty-four hours, when even Ronon's looking like he might commit random homicide if it means Sheppard stops pacing.
He pretends he's there to trade with Marty, scavenge through the city with a curious Sheppard at his back, who still studies the world with incredulous eyes. He pretends he's there for any reason but the one that's true.
Teyla emerges from fever in two days, with sallow skin and too-bright eyes but a sweetly amused smile at the men hovering over her bed, and Dean thinks he's almost as relieved as Sheppard and Ronon.
Lying gets you a lot of things, but lying to yourself just gets you killed. On the fourth day, when Sheppard gears up with practiced ease, guns and knives concealed on a body that isn't as skeletal as only a week before, strain lines eased from silent, dreamless nights and Teyla on Ronon's arm making slow progress through the hotel as she regains her strength, Dean admits to himself this one thing; he's not ready to let them go.
It's been too long, he thinks wryly as Sheppard heaves a rifle over one shoulder, exchanging smiles with Teyla across the room. He's a hunter who's never learned to forget he wasn't always alone. Sheppard's not Sammy, but taking him through narrow streets and teaching him what to look for in the swirls of dust, the yawning doorways of abandoned buildings, the strange plants that glow even during full daylight, satisfies something in him. He falls into the rhythm of it, sixteen again to Sammy's twelve, the little brother that fought him every step of the way yet never stopped going where Dean led him.
Sheppard's good at this, which Dean thinks shouldn't surprise him, asking questions like a man who's never seen the world before, like he's been saving them up all this time. Some are weird--when did this happen, how? How many years ago?--some are interesting--"So that thing with five heads--" "Hydra. Only on the big rivers. Just stay away from the Mississippi."--and some don't have any context at all.
"Do you recognize this?" Sheppard says one day while Dean clears a house on the outskirts of the town. Canned goods are still fairly common, but sometimes he finds cases of bullets hidden beneath the bed and under the sink--this is Texas, home of the highest gun per capita rate in the country, even now. Like today, emerging with a box of .38's and a strong sense of personal satisfaction to find Sheppard in the abandoned living room, toes almost brushing a long-rotted frozen dinner disintegrating slowly into carpet that used to be blue. He has a book in his hand, a curiously intense expression on his face as he flips through the pages.
"Huh?" Dean circles around, leaning over one narrow shoulder to see nothing but tiny print and a picture of a grey stone. Sheppard's always looking at books; Dean remembers leaving Sheppard at the library a couple of days before, half-burned and gutted, coming back to find an ashy and pissy Sheppard staring at the remains of the building like it personally offended him. Reaching out, Dean flips the book to see the cover. "Egyptian mythology?" The name Dr. Jackson on the cover doesn't mean anything to him.
Sheppard shrugs, but he's tense in a way that suggests there's something here that Dean's missing in an epic way. "Required reading for the new world order," Sheppard says lightly, flipping it open to glance at the page with the smooth grey stone. "This was found in Colorado."
Dean shrugs but doesn't protest when Sheppard stuffs the book in his pack. He's right, in a way, though Dean would have picked Americana horror if they were going to be relevant to time and place. Hydras came up all over the world, but he's never heard a case of Osiris wandering anywhere but Egypt proper. "Sure." Sheppard's looking at the books, tracing the titles with eyes that are searching for something very specific. Dean leaves him to it, checking the rest of the house for anything that could be of use.
Candles he can still find anywhere, but it never hurts to take what he finds, stockpile for the future. Kerosene beneath the sink, always good to keep a supply around. He goes through the clothes by rote, though there are still department stores out there filled to the brim. Malls are dangerous, though, creatures creeping into the protected, wide-open spaces to wait for humans in dry comfort with plenty of space to play before they make a kill.
When he notices the pale green fog slowly seeping through the bedroom window, however, he knows it's time to go. "Sheppard!" Grabbing his bag off the floor, Dean swings it over his shoulder, emerging into the living room to see Sheppard crouching to check something on the bookshelf. "We gotta go."
Sheppard frowns, checking his watch. "It's not noon--"
"And it's getting gamey out there. Get up and come on." Dean motions to the window. It's still bright enough to see, but it won't be for very long. Grabbing Sheppard's discarded bag, Dean waits impatiently as Sheppard grabs some book off the shelf, herding him toward the front door.
The day's turned an oiled brown-green that makes the skin on Dean's back itch. He'd parked in the front yard, as close as he could get to the door, just in case, but even ten feet feels like miles to cross when the air grows greasy and thick. Sheppard blinks in surprise as they come out on the front porch. "What the hell--"
"Less chat, more movement. Get in as fast as you can." Dean covers his mouth as the taste begins to penetrate, a sickly sweetness like a swamp of rotting bodies coating his tongue and filling his throat. He'll smell and taste nothing else for days now. "If you feel something touch you, don't stop to find out what the fuck it is." And with those words, Dean ducks out, the car a pale dark shape vanishing into the fog.
The sun's already misted over, melting pale orange into the slow green-black of the sky as the mist thickens, reminding him of pea soup at roadside diners. His lungs hurt from breathing, making him feel heavy and unbalanced, and the sounds are muffled like he's hearing from a distance. The ground is wet and spongy beneath his feet with too much give for honest dirt.
Blindly, he gets a hand on the handle, already slick, warm, soft as roast pork, and even though his mind knows it's an illusion, he can't stop the first instinctive flinch before he squeezes and jerks the door open. Getting inside, he pulls the door shut fast, letting as little of the fog as he can into the car with him, turning the key even as he throws his bag over the back of the seat.
There's no way to see now--the windshield is all misty greens and pale gold from the remains of the sun, and Sheppard--where the fuck is Sheppard? Dean has the words of the warding spell on the tip of his tongue, burning to be spoken, and it's an effort to hold them in. Once it's set, Sheppard's dead, and Dean realizes he's not ready to face that yet.
Then the passenger door opens with a sharp jerk, and Sheppard tumbles inside surrounded in a filmy green haze that seems to cling to his skin. The hazel eyes are dilated black and there are red abrasions up and down one arm, like sunburn, blistering sickly white and angry green.
"Close the door!" Dean hisses, ignoring the relief, even as Sheppard jerks his legs inside, slamming the door behind him, and Dean shifts into reverse and hits the gas even as he murmurs the words of the warding spell.
Sheppard is still half-bent in the seat, breathing hard, and Dean takes a second to wonder if all the water's in the trunk before he thinks he feels asphalt beneath the wheels. He never loses his sense of direction, knows to turn them right, feeling the bump of the car that tells him they made it over the curb. Taking a deep breath, Dean puts the car in drive, staring at the blank nothingness outside.
After a few seconds, Sheppard sits up. Dean goes slowly; he's got to now, the roads are tricky on a clear day. "What is that?" Sheppard says, voice harsh and broken. He breathed too much of it.
"Dunno. There's water in the backseat, I think." Whiskey would be better, something to cover the sickly taste, but Dean's pretty sure that's actually in the trunk, more fool him. Sheppard turns in the seat, slow, like he's not sure of his body anymore, throwing his own bag in the back before he goes half over the seat to look.
Keeping his hands on the steering wheel, Dean lets instinct guide him, feeling the asphalt beneath the tires like it's beneath his boots. "Don't throw up," Dean warns when Sheppard makes a gagging sound. That's more aesthetics than anything--the fog is bad enough. He doesn't want to drive with the smell of vomit as well. "Find any water?"
"Yeah," Sheppard says breathlessly, tipping over the seat more before struggling back, two bottles clutched in his hand. He opens one with shaking hands, almost tearing the plastic with the spastic twitches before he gets it to his mouth, taking a fast drink that spills water down his chin. Dean doesn't watch that either, or tells himself he doesn't, reaching for the second bottle. "Jesus. That was--"
"Nasty," Dean says, taking a drink of water. It cuts the taste a little. "Just sit back and breathe."
Sheppard braces one foot on the dash, a crime that Dean would kick his ass for he didn't look like he might throw up, warning or not. On the scale, he can oil the dash back to gloss, but getting new carpeting and more cleaning supplies will be trickier, so he lets it go, trying not to smile at the way Sheppard drinks down water like a man just come from a fasting spell in the desert.
Checking the speedometer, Dean sighs. Fifteen miles an hour at best. It'll be a couple of hours before they get back to the relative safety of the hotel.
"I've never seen that before," Sheppard says finally, half a bottle of water down, bottle cradled between his thighs. Dean shrugs; they're more likely in wooded regions, stretching from Oregon to Minnesota, but they still come here, vanishing after hours or days like the sun dries them out. They do better under soft green canopies, draped in humidity. "What the hell was it?"
"Fog," Dean says, then, just to be an asshole, "forms when relative humidity reaches one hundred percent at ground level depending on what side of the dewpoint the temp--"
"God," Sheppard says, looking at him in horror. "Shut up."
Dean smirks. "It's fog. It's just--different." Though these days, fog seems to create its own humidity--it's fucking El Paso--and the only warning is watching it form. Dean sees Sheppard rub a hand over his forehead shakily. "Did you see something?" Dean never has, but Sammy had. Sammy had seen a lot of things. Felt them, too.
"Yeah." Sheppard tips his head back against the seat. "I saw something."
Dean doesn't ask. If Sheppard wants to share, cool, but Dean's seen enough somethings. He doesn't need to add any more.
"There's a first aid kit in the glove compartment," he says, reaching over to pop it open. "Get something on your arm. Burns?"
"Felt cold." Sheppard shivers, then leans forward, retrieving the box and going through it with professional curiosity. Gauze, some precut strips for common wounds. Antibiotic cream--still fairly easy to get. Hydrocortisone for freaky plantlife, lidocaine for burns--Dean learned to stock those the hard way. Morphine in careful pre-measured doses, epipens, vicodin and oxy just in case. Tylenol. Tape, pre-cut and on a roll, scissors. Sheppard fumbles out the gauze and tape, and Dean gives it a second to see if his hand steadies before throwing the car into park.
Sure, it's the middle of the road, but who the hell is going to hit him anymore? "Hold still."
Sheppard freezes at the first touch of Dean's fingers on his wrist, and Dean can feel the muscles beneath his fingers go solid and stiff. After a few long seconds, Sheppard breathes out, nodding, and Dean reaches for the antiseptic, rubbing it quick and professional over the blisters, wrapping the gauze loosely over, taping it in place. Sheppard watches him the entire time, gaze following Dean's movements like he's watching for mistakes. When the last piece of pre-cut tape is in place, Dean pulls back, watching Sheppard slowly flex his arm, trying and failing not to look a little freaked.
"Good?" Dean asks. "There's Tylenol--" Sheppard gives him an incredulous look, shutting Dean down. Right. That type of guy. "If you want it," he says, settling back in his seat and putting the car into drive.
"Do a lot of field dressing?" Sheppard says neutrally.
Dean shrugs, wishing he'd thought to pack gum. "Dad taught me."
"Marine?" Dean's face must show something, because Sheppard smirks. "Spent a lot of time with Marines."
"You're not."
Sheppard shifts his boot against the dashboard and Dean bites his lip against commentary. "Air Force."
"Planes. Huh." And he doesn't even flinch when he says it. Dean can see this guy as a pilot--thin and rangy, sharp eyes turned on the sky. "Where were you stationed?"
"McMurdo." Sheppard pauses, like he knows Dean has no clue where that is. "Antarctica."
Huh. That would explain why he didn't know shit about what happened. Antarctica might be safe, if anywhere in the world could be. Even a determined demon would probably find all that ice fucking depressing. "You just got back?"
Sheppard pauses, staring out the windshield before his eyes flick down and away. Seeing something in the shifting grey, maybe. Probably. "Pretty much." Moving back in the seat, Sheppard shifts his arm to a comfortable position on his thigh, shaking his head. "When are we leaving for the tinhat?"
The word sounds weird in Sheppard's mouth. Affectionate, like a nickname, drawled over his tongue in a way that makes Dean wonders seriously where this guy grew up. "You don't have to come."
Sheppard nods. "I know."
"What you're looking for--"
"Isn't in Texas anymore." Sheppard's voice is quiet, and Dean wonders what he's been dreaming. "What do you do with them? The crazy ones?"
Jesus, what did he do. Dean's hands tighten on the wheel. "Send them north if they'll go."
"And if they don't?"
If they don't. The crazy ones never did. "A crazy psychic--" Dean stops, wondering how he can frame it. "There's something--when they go bad, they go bad. They build armies, cults. They get careless and stupid. And they're the most dangerous thing on this planet." The strong ones, anyway, and God knows, there are a lot of them, too many. Like something is waking up in ordinary people the longer this lasts, turning them into something that forgot they were human. Had been human.
"So you kill them."
Dean takes a deep breath. "I make sure they can't hurt anyone else."
Sheppard doesn't answer, but Dean thinks he can feel silent judgment from across the seat. Or hell, maybe Sheppard's weighing pro and con on whether to tell Dean that he's flipped to the dark side and plans to announce his godhead. Sheppard taps a discordant rhythm on his knee, gazing at the dashboard before he nods, like he's carrying on a conversation that Dean can't hear.
Jesus, he could be, for all Dean knows.
"Is that why you left your brother in Canada?"
If they'd been going sixty miles an hour, there would have been an accident. Now there's only a short skid and then Dean's foot is slammed into the brake. Putting the car in park, Dean fights the urge to reach across the seat, grab Sheppard by the collar, and use his fists the way God intended. But when he turns in the seat, Sheppard's just watching him, neutral and pale and practically oozing discomfort.
"Son of a bitch." Not a lot of psychics could have read that. Dean lived with Sam too long. "How did you--"
Sheppard shakes his head wearily. "I told you. It just happens." He looks as frustrated as Dean feels. "It's--flashes. Like the visions. Then it goes off." His mouth twists in amusement as he stares down at his knee. "Teyla--she was working with me to bring it under control." Sheppard shrugs. "So far, not much help."
And not much interest in trying, Dean thinks, taking a deep breath. Sheppard looks too freaked out to be lying. Dean had stayed up nights, once upon a time, watching Sam sleep, wondering what it was like. Watching the fine line of Sam's sanity shift sometimes a little too far, then come back from the edge just to teeter close again. And Sammy had been used to it by the time this happened.
"Could be worse," Dean offers lightly. Sheppard plays with his bottle, eyes blank. "I mean, hey, natural advantage when--"
"I hate it," Sheppard whispers. There's something dark in his voice--that place, that line, that fragile barrier coming too close, treading its edge. Yeah, if it started when he got here, it would feel like insanity. He wonders how long Sheppard's walked it. "There's nothing--" he stops short, mouth tight.
"North," Dean says clearly. Sheppard rolls his eyes, suddenly back inside himself so smoothly that Dean almost feels alone in the car. Sheppard's lips curve in a plastic, impersonal smile, body lazy and at ease.
"Maybe later." Leaning the seat back, Sheppard's head turns, smirking. Dean can't read anything in his eyes. "Let's drive."
The hotel's locked up tight, the fog still thick and too heavy to risk even running for a door that Dean could guarantee is unwarded. And Marty's door is always warded. Pulling into what his memory tells him is the lot, Dean puts the car in park, turning off the engine.
When he turns his head, he sees Sheppard staring straight ahead. His lips seem to be moving, but Dean can't be sure.
"Sheppard?"
Sheppard reaches out one hand, brushing dreamily against the windshield, face slack and strangely peaceful.
"Sheppard?"
Long fingers trickle down the glass, and Dean thinks the fog is thickening there, mirroring the touch in thin slices of almost solid grey and pale green, twisting and weaving together in an eye-distracting pattern that holds Dean for a second, long enough for Sheppard's other hand to reach for the door handle.
Dean pulls himself from the shimmering patterns, lunging across the car, catching Sheppard wrist just before he can open the door and unmake the ward. "Sheppard! Snap the fuck out of it!" Sheppard fights him, hand still reaching, and Dean digs his fingers into the tendons, keeping his hand from closing. Getting a knee under him, Dean pushes himself up, getting his face between Sheppard and the fog, using his other hand to grab his jaw, locking him in place. "Sheppard! Look at me."
The hazel eyes drift to him, blank and unseeing, an almost visible glaze coating pupils blown wide and black. For a second, he keeps fighting, then goes limp all at once, the glaze clearing between one slow blink and the next.
Dean doesn't move, keeping his weight on Sheppard's injured arm and his hip, enough to shift and pin him down if he has to. "Sheppard? You tracking?"
Sheppard stares at him, slowly shaking his head. "I saw--"
"It wasn't real."
Sheppard nods tiredly, going limp beneath him. Warily, Dean moves back to the seat, letting go of Sheppard's hand. It falls into his lap like a broken bird, fingers loose. "It was home."
Dean glances out the windshield. He could be imagining it, but the fog seems to be thinning--if he stares, he thinks he can see the outline of buildings. "You saw home?"
Sheppard closes his eyes, nodding tiredly. "Yeah. It was--" He shakes his head. "I have to get out of here." There's a desperate look on his face, something small and trapped, something that will chew its own leg off to escape; Dean doesn't think he's talking about the fog anymore.
Reaching over him, Dean lays the seat out flat, so Sheppard's staring at the roof.
"Soon," Dean says, looking at the fog. It's slow, but yeah, it's dispersing. "I'll tell you when."
That night, Dean dreams of Canada.
"Dean," Sam says, looking like he always did when Dean wasn't doing what he wanted, exasperated and angry and indulgent frustration. "So the thing for strays seems to be growing. Now you're picking up groups?"
Dean tries to argue, but his head is stuffed with clouds. They're standing on some grassy spot that looks like spring feels, fresh and clean, a bright blue sky stretched overhead; all this moment needs is singing birds and it'd be a Disney flick.
"I didn't know you could do this," Dean says. It's too real to be a dream; he's been around long enough to know the difference.
Sam smirks. "There's a lot you don't know anymore."
Dean ignores the jibe for once. Sam. Sam's here. "I miss you," Dean hears himself say, staring at his brother. He looks good, Dean thinks vaguely, remembering the skeletal man he left in the rearview mirror. "Your hair still sucks."
Sam rolls his eyes, crossing his arms. "Asshole," Sam says affectionately, but the smile fades. "Dude, you gotta listen. There's not a lot of time. You gotta just go with what I'm saying, okay? Think you can manage?"
Dean frowns. "Sammy--"
"Listen. This shit isn't easy. This is one of those times that everything's moving too fast. I need total attention here."
"Okay?" Dean can almost feel Sam's sigh. Jesus, it's like he's standing with him right now. "Sammy--"
"You're not listening. Dean, it's all--look, you gotta stick with them, okay? No dumping the crazy guy on the border and forgetting his name, not this time. Something's coming, you get that? It's coming and you have to be ready. Are you listening?"
"Listen, got it." Dean watches Sam's smile fade. "Listen to what again?"
Sammy's hand feels more real than the last five years of Dean's life when it lands on his shoulder. "Me, asshole. Are you paying attention here?"
What the fuck? "Could you be any more fucking cryptic?" Something aches in him when Sam pulls away, a Sam-shaped hole that hurts like a motherfucker when he thinks about it too long. His skin's cold where Sam touched. "Come on, get over the oracle shit. Just say it."
Sam's head tilts in amusement; Dean can feel his affection like the sun. "I don't know what it is yet. Just remember and be ready, okay? You'll know it when you see it."
The grass clears like a fast-forward in a movie, earth turning dark and crumbling, and Dean watches as Sam fades beneath grey cast skies swirling like a whirlpool above him. The clearing is cold and too bright, ultrasharp, like looking at a black and white photo.
"Sam?" he whispers, and feels cold fingers brush the back of his neck.
"You won't remember," the voice whispers into his ear.
Dean wakes up to a dark, dank room, curled on a pallet on the floor with Sheppard snoring on the bed above him. His face is wet with tears, and so is his pillow, but for the life of him, he can't figure out why.
He goes back to sleep with the taste of spring that's wiped away all trace of the fog.
Marty's not happy to see them go; Dean can't quite figure out if it's the regular trade or Sheppard. From the look on Ronon's face, he's wondering the same thing.
Finished with his own packing, Dean circles around the car, coming around to see Sheppard and Ronon studying the back of the jeep. Glancing in himself, he lets out a low whistle. "Sweet," he murmurs, looking at the arsenal that's replaced the mattress. With a glance for permission, Dean picks up the Glock, so new it's almost shiny, smelling gun oil, fitting warm and comfortable against his palm. A sweet submachine gun, well-used. P-90s, four stacked against the back seat. Something that looks like batons that Dean can't place. An M 24, beloved of snipers everywhere. Two MK11 carbines that could bring tears to his eyes if he looks at them too long. AK-47's like a wet dream. A few things he can't place, though he recognizes them from trade magazines, his dad's collections, growing up learning to strip and clean and shoot whatever he was given. "Jesus," he says reverently. "You clean out an armory?"
"Just what we liked," Sheppard says. Dean squints at him; he's looking better rested than Dean would have expected, though Dean thinks part if it could be attributed to Teyla walking out of the building under her own power. With a regretful sigh, Dean puts them back, amused as Ronon fussily rearranges everything before closing the back of the jeep. "So. I assume you know where we're going?"
Dean scratches at the back of his neck, cool air prickling his skin. Days are always chilly after a fog. "Got an idea," he says, leaning against the jeep as Teyla circles around, looking at them with curious impatience. Dean tries and fails not to stare. She'd been hot before. She's smoking now. "Marty didn't have great directions. It's gonna be more a--" he waves in the air. A little of this, a little of that. "Tracking."
Sheppard rocks back on his heels. "But you have a plan."
Dean does. It's not a good plan. "They tend to recruit," Dean says, fumbling his back pocket until he comes up with the map he unearthed this morning while Sheppard and Ronon packed up. Spreading it against the jeep's back window, he points. "People still congregate in the cities. If they're in New Mexico, Albuquerque and Phoenix. Since you saw Albuquerque, we try there. First stop, though--"
Sheppard's finger drops on the map. "Las Cruces," he says with a little smile. Dean raises an eyebrow. "Easy stop for the night before tackling Albuquerque."
"Right." Dean watches Sheppard studying the map, remembering his investigation of Fort Bliss the first year with Sammy, clearing out what they could from the deserted buildings. Sammy had been half-awake through the entire thing, a weird blank look on his face as he wandered the halls, head turning to voices that Dean couldn't hear. "Las Cruces is deserted, pretty much."
"Too close to the missile range," Sheppard murmurs. Ronon gives him a sideways look then grunts, turning to Teyla. The two of them exchange a complex series of glances before he follows her around to the front of the jeep.
Sheppard rolls his eyes but doesn't remark on it, finger following a line from Albuquerque to Phoenix. "I'm assuming you have good reasons to stay off the highways."
"High death counts," Dean says. Sheppard's head tilts, eyebrows drawn tightly together. "Those eighteen car pileups leave a bitch of a resonance behind. Attracts everything for miles." Not to mention the vehicles abandoned there already, making four lane highways an exercise in avoidance. The shorter distance didn't make up for the loss of speed.
"Huh."
Dean's got to wonder how he doesn't know this yet. Sheppard's still staring at the map, looking for something. "What the hell are you looking for?" Dean asks as Sheppard ghosts a line across the mountains.
"The tinhats. They have a pattern?"
Dean lets the map slide closed, busying himself with stuffing it in his jeans. "They go where there're people. The strong ones--the really strong ones--hit the cities, pull up followers."
"For what?"
Dean shrugs. "For whatever their crazy is. Girl out in New York started blood sacrifices to some god she probably read about on the internet when she was a kid. Started with cats, eventually--" Sheppard's eyes widen briefly as he gets what that particular nightmare escalated to. "Eventually called up a demon, ended up wiping the whole cult out."
And that hadn't been a pleasant hunt in any shape or form.
"We get close enough, you'll start feeling it," Dean says, closing the map with a snap and shoving it back in his pocket. His mind already knows the route, every turn of it. "If the guy's stronger than you--" He lets that trail off. Sheppard nods sharply, head turning away. "I'm just saying--"
"I got it. It won't happen."
"It can. It does. You start feeling anything--"
"I know." Dean wonders suddenly if Sheppard's met another psychic before now, if he knows more than he's saying about what they can do. The closed-off face turns away as Sheppard pushes himself off the jeep. "Okay, we're wasting daylight. Let's move out."
Dean hesitates, but it's a dismissal if he's ever heard one, and there's shit to be gained standing here. Nodding sharply, he goes back to the car as Sheppard climbs into the driver's seat of the jeep. As the jeep turns on with a purr like a cream-filled cat, Dean makes himself nod and ignore the prickling feeling of Sheppard's eyes following his every move.
Las Cruces has been a ghost town for five years; all broken, hollowed-out buildings like corpses rotting in the glare of the sun. Vague, black-purple blobs lurch over the eastern horizon, the Organ mountains that Dean had wanted to climb as a kid.
Of course, he'd also wanted to eat that ten foot enchilada they would show at the festival every year, so really, what the hell? Getting his bag out, Dean loops it over one shoulder, watching the streets warily.
Sam had hated Las Cruces, the ghosts that wandered voiceless and harmless through the streets at night, murdered girls with burned holes for eyes and red lips spread in welcoming smiles over slashed throats, boys who sing in high, clear voices in Spanish-accented Latin, dressed in blood-drenched robes. It'd been too late by then for the internet, but the libraries had given them parts of the story. Dean had spent a futile three days trying to find nine crosses that had vanished into history over a century before he was born.
He eyes Sheppard as he steps onto the dusty street with a curious look around, turning slightly like he's making way for something, but either he doesn't have Sam's sensitivity or he's better at controlling himself than any psychic Dean's ever met.
"Nice town," Sheppard says with a raised eyebrow, coming up to lean against the side of the car. Behind him, Ronon and Teyla are just getting out, looking with wide, thoughtful eyes around them.
"It's safe." It is, though Dean's not sure why. To the south is the Rio Grande that drowned more people than the population this city once housed; to the west is Fort Bliss. The town hosts the scene of a folklore massacre, and a single boy is forever burying his dead beneath nine white crosses that vanish come morning. Dean dug ten feet down and found nothing but rock. "Just ignore the--stuff." He indicates the empty streets with a flicker of his fingers. "It won't hurt you."
The air tastes faintly of salt and sand, the slow encroachment of the Chihuahuan Desert from the south, reaching thin fingers into the fertile Rio Grande watershed. With a shrug, he leads them toward the city hall, a common stopping place for travelers on their way north. "It's pretty dead here," and he can almost feel Sheppard's ironic look, "a few ghosts, but they're harmless. There's a kid--"
"Burying his dead," Sheppard says, too softly. Dean stops, glancing at the sun still well above the horizon, then at Sheppard, eyes fixed on ground that's long settled from Dean's grave digging efforts, a lowering mound coated in thick yellow-green Johnson grass, insects buzzing around Indian paintbrush and golden-brown ferns, heads dipping toward the earth.
"It's somewhere different every time," Dean says as Ronon and Teyla come up behind Sheppard, exchanging a look that he's pretty sure would piss Sheppard off if he could see it. "He doesn't do anything. Just--well, the burying thing is pretty much it. Come on."
Sheppard nods, controlling an incipient freak-out by dint of reaching for his gun. Dean hides his smile, crossing the street and the overgrowth of the lawn in front of the city hall. When he looks back, Sheppard's staring straight ahead, but the look on his face tells Dean that he's listening to something--singing, maybe, the low chant of a Mexican priest, or just the high, frightened sounds of nine people who died screaming, leaving a single boy behind to honor the dead. "Sheppard."
Sheppard's head snaps up, flat hazel eyes boring into Dean as Ronon comes up just behind him, face creased in worry. Dean turns back, opening the front door, frowning at the thickening smell--sweet and sickly, so familiar that Dean's already backing away before his mind catches up to what he's seeing--finger-shaped, rusting brown stains circling the door.
"Jesus," Sheppard whispers, coming up beside him. Dean grabs a handful of shirt, jerking Sheppard back before he can get a foot in the door. "What--"
"Don't go in there," he says hoarsely. The smell's so strong that Dean wonders how he could have missed it before: musty-thick, maybe a week or less. "Marty didn't say shit about this one being this far gone," Dean spits out. Nausea rolls slowly through his stomach, but he controls it by habit, checking on Sheppard before he pats himself down for salt.
"I've seen dead bodies," Sheppard says, but he's white around the mouth, lips thin, staring at the blood stains around the doorframe with an expression that Dean can't decipher.
"Not like this." Focusing on the doorway, he cocks his head, trying to work out the squiggles that look a lot less random than they did at first glance. Squinting, he tries to identify the symbols, aware that Sheppard's come up behind him, touching the doorway with light fingers. "Ritual magic."
"Something like that," Sheppard says, sounding strangled. "Teyla, can you--"
"I am." Dean glances back to see Teyla with a pad, sketching down the symbols. "Are you sure--"
"Pretty sure." Backing off another step, Sheppard's lips move--counting, Dean realizes. "Eight."
"You recognize this?" There's something familiar about them, but Dean's not quite sure what it is--not quite a memory, exactly, and he gives up trying to nudge it out. It'll come when it comes. "What is it?"
Sheppard hesitates. "It's Egyptian, sort of. I've seen it before." He pauses, pulling his hand from the doorframe like he just realized it burned. "Kind of an--address."
"An address."
"Kind of." Reaching for the door, Sheppard pushes it open, and Dean has just enough time to think of stopping him before Sheppard's already inside.
The smell's worse, soaked into the walls as Sheppard follows some kind of inner map. Dean follows helplessly, knowing that Sheppard's found what he's looking for when he comes to a dead stop just inside a slowly swinging door. It's so quiet that Dean can hear it when Sheppard stops breathing.
Dean takes a careful breath through his mouth, tasting rot, and comes up beside him.
Before--before, ritual magic had been fairly rare when idiots weren't trying to call up demons for fun and profit. It had been clean. Neat chalk outlines and candles, symbolically shed blood for a sane, orderly world where magic had been pushed into the periphery, where even the monsters knew the rules of survival and didn't step outside them.
This is nothing like it.
"Jesus," Sheppard whispers, hand closing over the frame of the door, knuckles white. Dean wonders if he's going to pass out, a joke hovering on the tip of his tongue before he thinks better of it, stepping by Sheppard and just short of the chalk.
The walls were once a bare, clean white, now splattered with red-black smears of dried blood, long loops that could be words that Dean mentally catalogues for study before turning his attention to the floor. The faint remains of chalk and grease circle just above the head of a nameless woman, and Dean follows it to the next body, running through every one of these he's ever seen for a parallel. There's a faint hint of a wide circle, bodies neatly spaced at three foot increments--hell, he'd almost think the guy had a fucking ruler it's so perfect. Eight have knives shoved into their chests. Kneeling at the third, Dean studies the blood-smeared forehead over wide, dust-glazed eyes that stare into the ceiling. Dean looks up, just to be sure, but nothing's there.
"Ancestors," comes from the door, and Dean steals a quick glance at Teyla and Ronon, both staring into the room in disbelief. Sheppard pulls away from the door, pacing the outside of the circle, gun in one hand. Which is pretty fucking hilarious, or would be if Dean didn't have a hand close to his gun too.
"There's something on their foreheads," Dean says, frowning slightly as he checks the slashes. Sheppard kneels beside him, thigh brushing his, and Dean approves of the calm; he would approve even more if Sheppard was about thirty feet outside the building and still communing with dead children. "Teyla, bring me that notebook."
Over his head, he can feel them exchange glances, but he doesn't look up, reaching blindly with his right hand and feeling the notebook slap into his palm. Teyla did good work; from the messy scribbles, Dean identifies the first symbol as the one on the second woman's forehead. "Egyptian," he murmurs, shaking his head. Calling what, Egyptian gods? What the hell good would that do?
Getting up, he goes to the next body--no. Not the next one either, but the one after it, second symbol, matched with the knife in her chest. Dean pulls the pencil from the spiral binding and stops, making a second column and drawing each one, circling the ones that match the ones from the doorway. It's slow work, and he glances up once to see Sheppard with his back to the bodies, staring at the walls with a blank expression, mouth a thin, hard line. Teyla's beside him, murmuring softly into his ear as they pace the length of the room. Ronon, at the door, has his gun out, like that can do fuck-all in a situation like this.
Dean glances quickly out the window, then starts drawing faster. When he meets the woman again on the other side, he counts up the total, stepping back to try and get some kind of perspective on what he's seeing.
There's been worse, he's seen worse, but never anything quite like this. "Thirty nine," he says slowly, coming up against the far wall as he takes in the entire floor. "I need a ladder or something."
From the door, Ronon grunts something, going out the door, while Sheppard comes up beside him, looking over his shoulder in curiosity. "Thirty nine?"
"Eight matches to the ones outside," Dean says, scratching just above his ear. Looking at it doesn't make any kind of intuitive sense--the chalk outline houses only the bodies, each one laid out straight, bare feet only inches apart toward the center. "You said it's an address?" Sheppard doesn't answer--he's still staring at the far wall. "Sheppard?"
Sheppard blinks, shaking himself. "Yeah."
That doesn't even make sense. "To what? Wrigley Field? Hell? Another dimension?"
Sheppard flinches. "Something like that." Almost like he's not aware he's moving, he steps toward the circle again. "It's not--whatever it is, it didn't work." Sheppard frowns, rubbing a thumb and forefinger against his temple. "At least, I can't--" Sheppard's mouth twists uncomfortably. "Feel anything."
Kneeling, Sheppard looks at one of the bodies, one hand hovering briefly before he brushes careful fingers against bright blonde hair. Teyla, with a quick glance at Dean, comes over, dropping neatly beside him, hand covering his. Dean can't make out the words, but whatever she says makes Sheppard stiffen up, back going straighter than Dean had thought would be possible.
"No," he says finally, pulling away as if Teyla's touch burned. "Give me a second here. I can--"
"Got it," Ronon says as he shoves ten feet of metal ladder against the wall. Dean checks the angle, then climbs up. Ronon holds the bottom with two huge hands. Just as his head brushes the ceiling, Dean pauses, bracing a hand against the top and turns, looking down.
It's fucking perfect. Like the guy drew a circle with a protractor, the bodies as flawlessly spaced as he'd suspected, making a thirty-nine point circle. The bodies bearing the eight symbols sketched on the doorway are the only ones who seemed to have a post-mortem stabbing. "I haven't seen this before," Dean says slowly. "It's a perfect circle, thirty-nine sacrifices. The eight that match these symbols were stabbed, maybe to key the spell--" Dean breaks off, making a quick sketch on the next page, thinking that this is one of those times that his high school art class is actually coming in useful.
"They just lay there and let their throats be cut," Dean says, fighting to keep his voice even. The floor around each body is unmarked and clean, no signs of a struggle, like everyone of them just lay down there and offered up their throats. It's not unfamiliar, but it makes the hairs raise on the back of Dean's neck.
A tinhat, definitely. And one who has some damned good control of his powers.
Sheppard's silent, stealing brief glances at the wall, and Dean frowns, taking a moment to study it all at once. Not smears, not exactly--wide loops, smaller spaces, continuous lines that end a predictable pattern. Words. None he's ever seen, but--"That's a language, isn't it?" Dean flips a page, trying to reproduce it, but he can't tell what's run-off from blood and what's part of the actual words. "You've seen this before."
It's not even a question. Sheppard doesn't answer, pacing to the far side of the room, but Teyla at the foot of the ladder nods briefly. "It is Ancient."
Dean waits. Then stops waiting, because dragging this out piecemeal is getting pretty fucking ridiculous. "Ancient what?"
Teyla's eyes flicker up, looking at him in surprise. "Ancient. It is the language of the Ancestors."
Oh Jesus Christ. Nudging Ronon with his foot, Dean comes back down after a quick glance--got the circle, got the order of the symbols, close enough. Jumping the last three steps, Dean checks out the window. Too close. Jesus, what he wouldn't give for a camera these days. "Okay, we gotta get going." Teyla opens her mouth, but Dean has a plan. It's not a good plan. It'll take two days to burn and bury them, but leaving this here is just asking for Las Cruces to become the next hot spot. So. "Out of the building, salt a line around it until I can get back--"
"We could blow it," Sheppard drawls. When he turns around, he looks fairly normal, pallor receded, and the hazel eyes are bright and focused.
Dean had thought that, thanks. "Look, much fun as it would be to watch a bonfire, there's more to it than just fire pretty, okay? To make it worth it, temperature has to--" "Pour salt and an accelerant on the corpses and start them burning first," Sheppard answers. He nods sharply at Ronon. "Temperature won't be a problem. Get the stuff. This I've done before."
Dean blinks between them as Ronon heads back out the door. Teyla reaches into the satchel over one shoulder, coming out with a thin cloth bag, worked over in designs Dean doesn't recognize. Kneeling by the first body, she looks up at him. "This is to prevent their return?"
Dean nods slowly.
"My people once had a similar ritual." That seems news to Sheppard, who gives her a startled look. Carefully, Teyla rubs away the chalk circle, breaking whatever's left of the binding, and pulls the knife free, setting it aside like something soiled. Dean watches as she pours a careful measure of salt on the chest, nodding to herself as she stands up. "This is correct?"
"That depends on what you're trying to do."
"We're going to blow the building," Sheppard says, going to Teyla and reaching into her satchel. Taking out a bag, he goes to the next body, staring at it for a long second before he pours out the salt.
Dean feels something like a tug of affection for these people. "Do you have enough stuff?"
Sheppard nods as he gets up, passing Teyla to go to the next body. Belatedly, Dean gets out his own salt. "Yeah, we do."
What Sheppard has is C-fucking-4, which is almost enough to make Dean cry a little in sheer joy. "Jesus," he says, fighting not to pull it out of Ronon's hands. "You guys know how to pack."
Sheppard smiles a little as he and Ronon go to set the charges. Teyla, looking tired, leans against the Impala, brushing a stray strand of hair from her face. "We have found it is useful."
And isn't that the understatement of the year. Dean watches as they set it at the four corners of the building--very traditional--with Sheppard going inside with a second set; Dean guesses the room itslef. "Four corners," Dean calls out quickly. Sheppard gives him an eyebrow, yeah, whatever. It's ritual magic. God alone knows what the fuck that thing actually was supposed to do. "We need an accelerant," Dean says thoughtfully. Teyla's head tilts in question. "For the bodies. Gasoline, maybe." Not that he'd waste gas if he could help it.
"To assure the bodies are destroyed?" Teyla nods thoughtfully, watching the building with narrowed eyes. "We have a small supply of kerosene."
So does Dean, but once the world runs out of batteries, or until someone rediscovers electricity in a big way, kerosene's a hot commodity. On the other hand, the sun's getting close to the horizon and this needs to be done now. "Get it."
Teyla pushes easily off the hood, circling with slow, deliberate movements that she might think hides how tired she still is, favoring her leg so slightly that if you didn't know what you were looking at, you'd probably never guess. Dean has seen two bandage changes since, the slowly deflating wound smeared with antibiotic cream and a small bundle of herbs. Even so, she's healing fast--faster than Dean would have expected.
Turning his attention back to the building, Dean fingers the notebook, memorizing the symbols as Teyla rummages in the jeep behind them. Stuffing it in his bag--he can pretty much guess Sheppard's going to take it back, and the way they're acting about it, Dean will be lucky to glimpse that thing again--Dean goes back inside, finding Sheppard pacing the room in a slow circle, carrying a digital camera. One of their bags is open by the doorway, and Dean can see the eight knives are inside, wrapped up in some kind of cloth.
"How are you going to get the pictures?" Dean asks curiously as Sheppard snaps photographs. "You have a laptop?"
"Yeah. You already sketched it?" Sheppard climbs up three steps on the ladder and Dean moves to brace it, watching as the man snaps three more pictures." Dean moves hastily as he comes back down, noting the four corners of the room are already packed with the explosive. "Put some in the center of the circle," Dean says. "And give me the camera." Sheppard gives him an odd look but hands him the camera, going back to his bag.
"You've seen this before," Dean says, going to one corner of the room to snap another picture. Sheppard doesn't answer. "Okay, secrets, fine. Everyone has them. Except this is kind of important. I need to know what this is."
Sheppard pauses as he feeds out the line from the C-4, connecting it methodically to the others. "I've seen it before, but not like this." Finishing, Sheppard turns around. "It's based off Egyptian mythology, a portal that creates a stable Lorentzian wormhole that allows transportation of matter over long distances at near instantaneous speed."
Dean cocks an eyebrow. "Do you even know what that means?"
"Not really," Sheppard admits with a wry twist of lips. "Just go with it. In physics, it's the ultimate shortcut. It just takes a lot of power to run."
"And this thing--"
"Looks a lot like it."
Dean opens his mouth to ask--because obviously, there's a lot more going on here than just some crackpot trying to build a--wormhole? Really?--a wormhole, but Teyla comes in, carrying several small containers. "Accelerant," she says at Sheppard's look.
"Good idea." Taking one, Sheppard eyes the bodies with a kind of cool curiosity. "Okay, Dean, your call. How do we do this?"
Ritual magic isn't like the movies, except in all the ways it is; honestly, Dean's been surprised how often Hollywood gets it almost right. There's power in what was done here--even if it didn't work--and they have to make sure that the explosion clears both the physical bodies and the remains of whatever the crazy people were actually trying to do.
Dean can feel them watching him as he sets the purification spell to clear the building of the residue; salt and burn is all well and good for the bodies, but even Dean can sense the edges of unused power, a greasy slickness that coats the air and thickens in his lungs, and that shit tends to stick around.
He knows spells in more languages than he can count, but Latin was his first, his best; he knows every word, every nuance, every shade of meaning. He can do it in his sleep, exhausted after a hunt, half-conscious and burning with fever, string words into patterns that shape power to his will. Magic, real magic, is all about will. Someone could sit forever yelling every spell in the book and get exactly nowhere if they didn't have the will to back it up.
Kneeling in the circle of bodies, Dean takes out his lighter, watching the flame flare orange and bright, staring at it as he breathes the final words and the flame turns incandescent, the glaring white of untouched snow on a sunny day. Across the room, Sheppard blinks, eyes fixing on the empty air like Sammy used to. Not for the first time, Dean wonders what magic looks like to psychics, what they see.
Then the flame snuffs out, and when Dean takes a breath, all that's left is clean air. "Got it," he says, tucking the lighter back in his pocket. Teyla looks at him in wonder, questions filling her eyes, while Ronon grunts and turns away, going to the bag by the door and pulling out the remote.
Sheppard though, watches him, hazel eyes blank and pupils blown wide and dark, before he turns on his heel, walking out of the room. Teyla, looking unsettled, follows him out, Ronon on her heels. Dean checks the room one more time, marking the position of the C4 in the corners, the blinking lights that will set it off, the careful chalk outlines between them that connect them and demarcate the limits of the room. Giving them a few more seconds, Dean plays with his lighter, then feeds out the fuse to start the kerosene burning.
When he gets outside, Ronon and Teyla are already at the jeep. Sheppard's staring at the building with an expression that's very close to fascination. "That'll do it?" Sheppard asks as Dean crouches, picking up the end of the fuse.
"Should." Tilting his head, Dean snorts. "It doesn't make sense. Any of this."
Sheppard wanders toward the mound of tangled weeds with a curious expression, pausing with his head cocked slightly as he murmurs something to empty air. Ronon and Teyla keep watch a little ways away, and if watching Sheppard talking to nothing is freaking them out, they're hiding it pretty damn well.
It's close enough to sundown that Dean can just start seeing the outlines if he looks closely--which he doesn't, not at all. Quick way to drive yourself nuts, seeing everything there is to see.
A few minutes pass before Sheppard stops short, head cocked. With a little nod, he turns away, coming back to them like he hadn't been say, acting crazy. "Crazy people do crazy things," he says easily, answering Dean's earlier comment like he hadn't just spent five minutes staring into space. "Look, I could be wrong about it being a gate"
"Yet somehow, I don't think you are."
Sheppard pastes on a bland look.
"Oh whatever, man. Come on, it's nearly sundown. This thing needs to go and we need to be out of here."
Sheppard doesn't ask why, which argues that either he's aware that hanging around a recent violent supernatural mass murder is a bad idea; he believes Dean knows what he's talking about; or he just doesn't care enough to ask. Dean's guessing on the second; they spent enough time together in El Paso that Dean thinks he's got this guy down pretty well.
"Okay, let's move," Sheppard says. "Ronon, you and Teyla take the jeep out of town, about five miles. When this goes, it's going to take a lot of the buildings around with it."
Ronon looks like he might argue, but Teyla grabs his arm, pulling him back toward the jeep. "How much gas is in the jeep?"
Sheppard pauses. "We filled up back in Dryden. Why?"
"We're gonna have to drive the night." And God does Dean hate that. "Camp is a last resort at the best of times--"
"Yeah, I remember." Sheppard nods at the fuse still in Dean's hand. "Ready?"
"Yeah." Dean glances back to make sure that Teyla and Ronon are in the jeep, then lights the fuse, watching as it starts a slow crawl toward the building. Usually he'd watch the burn himself, but with all that kerosene, he doesn't think he should chance it. Straightening, he nods at Sheppard, following him back to the Impala.
Sheppard settles in the seat beside him as Dean starts up, feeling the Impala purring beneath him, and it feels so weirdly right--finally, to have someone there, finally someone else, and Dean thinks how much he missed this. Missed people, sure, though not enough to go looking for them. But allies? Yeah. He's missed that.
Teyla and Ronon are already on their way out of town--Dean puts the car in reverse, watching Sheppard from the corner of his eye. "What's the range on that thing?"
"Couple of miles." Sheppard studies the remote, then nods as Dean puts the car into drive. "Get us one mile out. That should be close enough to watch it go."
Dean smirks. "You just want to watch it blow."
Sheppard looks like he's fighting a smile. Good compartmentalization skills, Dean thinks, remembering Sheppard when he'd seen the room. He's seen worse, learned to deal with it. So few people could. "Oh yeah."
It's a fucking awesome explosion.
From the hood of the car, Dean watches as the C-4 does truly spectacular things, going up in a bright flash of orange red twice as high as the original building, taking out everything in a fifty foot radius on either side. "I have got to get me some of that," Dean breathes. This is better than a straightforward burn; the fire and salt to purify and reduce, then the explosion to scatter whatever remains.
There's a good chance that if the Las Cruces bodies are in range, they'll go, too. He can hope.
"Next base we go by, we'll restock." Sheppard pauses, studying the remote for a second before stuffing it back in his satchel. The sun's barely a orange crescent above the horizon. Sheppard turns his head, examining it briefly. "Teyla and Ronon already set the--the wards on the jeep. So straight to Albuquerque?"
"Better than stopping." Sliding off the hood, Dean murmurs the start of the spell under his breath, ending the last words just as he turns the ignition. He's always thought he should be able to feel something when that happens, but he never has. Sam had learned to, though, and Dean wonders if Sheppard's learned, too. "How'd you learn to set wards?" The first year, Dean had taught it to everyone he met, even the stupid ones, the ones that didn't, couldn't believe what they were seeing, even when it was in their face, trying to eat them alive.
"People we ran into early on showed us how. Took a while to master. Teyla does them the best." Leaning back, Sheppard stares deliberately ahead, probably counting the minutes until full sundown. Dean could tell him it's five. Five minutes until they keep driving and don't stop for anything at all.
"Teyla's 'people' familiar with that sort of thing?"
Sheppard's head snaps around. "Her people are a lot more open to this shit than we are." With elaborate casualness, Sheppard relaxes again as Dean slows down by the jeep.
"Don't open the window. The--"
"Ward will unmake. We figured that out, too." When they're even with the jeep, Sheppard makes a complex series of hand gestures that remind Dean faintly of Dad teaching them to follow orders like that. He thinks Sheppard's telling them to follow and not stop, but hell, he could be telling them Dean's holding him captive and set the rest of the C-4 to blow them up. It's been a while. "Okay," Sheppard says, turning back around, like Ronon isn't glaring at them as if Dean kidnapped Sheppard right from under them, "We're good."
Dean shakes his head but hits the accelerator, aware that Ronon's gonna be riding his ass for pretty much the entire trip. "I really hope you don't need to piss, or this is going to be pretty uncomfortable."
Sheppard smiles blandly. "I went before we left."
Sheppard's not a talker--that Dean knew from El Paso--but he's not quiet, either, not when there's nothing to do but watch the sides of the roads move, or see hitchhikers like mirages on either side, begging for help. No one sane goes out in the middle of the night, so Dean feels fine with driving by like they don't exist.
Sheppard keeps his eyes fixed on the dashboard, where his boot's taken residence again. "--back near Austin, that chainsaw massacre movie--"
"Yeah." Dean squints at a young woman who watches them with dark, empty eyes from the side of the road, throat slit into a wide red smile beneath her chin. "Don't go around there."
"Kind of figured that out." Sheppard jerks his gaze back inside the car as they go by. See you later, ghost girl.
"Picked up one of those?" Dean asks quietly as Sheppard starts playing with his knife, unearthing a sharpener from somewhere in his pockets for a blade that can probably slice air into neat pieces.
"Not exactly." Sheppard checks the blade. "Some people. We met up with them in Colorado, traveled them for a while. We thought we knew them pretty well."
"And they fucked you over."
Sheppard shakes his head. "Just one of us."
Shit. Dean glances back at the rearview mirror. At least Ronon's gotten over flipping on the high beams at random to make sure Dean's not trying to kill Sheppard while driving or something. "Sorry, man."
Sheppard shrugs. "We should have been more careful. I knew something was wrong."
And if his weirdness about himself is any indication, probably didn't believe what he was feeling. Dean wonders if the guy wants sympathy or a serious change in topic. He's really hoping for the latter. "They who you're looking for?" Revenge makes sense, especially in this world, with every life so easy to lose. Losing it to other people--
"Yeah." Sheppard watches the knife intently, in a way that Dean recognizes. "They're good at disappearing. No surprise there. But we'll find them."
Dean kind of thinks they will. Sheppard doesn't look the type to give up easily. Or for that matter, at all. "There are ways of locating people," he offers. "If you have something of theirs you can use as a focus. Especially you."
Sheppard looks up sharply. "Me?"
Dean almost smiles. Sheppard probably thinks about what he is as little as possible. "You're a psychic man. This kind of comes with the package."
And kind of like he figured, Sheppard changes the subject right away.
"So how'd you get so good at this?"
Dean shrugs. "Grew up to it. I mean--before this. Me and my family were hunters." Dean waits for the inevitable questions, but Sheppard just nods. And who would think John Winchester's obsession would be the new world order? Who'd really thought that would fucking happen?
"The La Cruces kid," Sheppard starts, then stops with a peculiar look on his face, like he swallowed something wrong. "He told me something."
Dean nods easily, keeping his eyes on the road. Something vine-like and snake fast runs out in front of them, but Dean ignores it. The car bumps as it goes over. "About?"
"He watched the--whatever it was."
Huh. "He know what they were doing?" And Dean would pay in bullets and blood to have heard that conversation.
"No, but he said there were a lot of them." Sheppard puts away his knife, staring at his knee for an intent moment. "If this works on variations on a theme, the next group will be forty-seven--thirty-nine for the gate, and eight separate for the address."
Sheppard looks like he's trying to figure out a way to ask a question with the minimum of discomfort, so Dean decides to nudge. "And?"
Sheppard struggles for a second. "There are these--they can force you to do stuff. Nuts stuff. And you think it's fine, as long as they--"
"Yeah. Ran across that before." Dean gives Sheppard a sharp look. "You got hit by it?"
"I was the only one that wasn't." The car goes quiet, broken by Sheppard's even breathing. "There were--there were about eight people, and all of them--"
Dean nods, turning it over in his head. "So your tinhat is my tinhat."
"I don't know." But Sheppard doesn't look unsure about it at all.
"That kid," Dean says, when Sheppard's silence goes on too long. "You said he told you about them."
"Yeah." Sheppard licks his lips, hands clenching into fists. "He said it didn't work this time. That it's coming. And that we have to be ready."
Dean glances sharply at Sheppard's face, but he can't see anything but pure profile. Something about the words resonate briefly, flickering images of a grey sky and a hand on his arm that's as familiar as his own flesh. Then it's gone. "What's coming?"
"That's all he said."
Right. Because that's all they ever say. God forbid a fucking warning ever come with actual information.
The quiet's comfortable, stretching out between them in near-palpable ease, which Dean hasn't felt in years. Sheppard rifles through his bag impatiently, obviously looking for something to distract him, then searches the floorboard, coming up with the box of tapes. "Oh no," Dean says, but Sheppard's grinning, pulling out one with the look of a man who has found God.
"Metallica. The tape deck work?" Even as he's saying it, Sheppard shoves it in, looking so pleased that Dean really doesn't bother explaining the tapes are for emergency use only. As the speakers rumble to life, the hard edge of guitar filling the small space, something relaxes in Dean that's been tight for years. "Okay, this is cool," Sheppard says, picking out tape after tape. "Hey, you got any Twisted Sister?"
They're twenty miles shy of the Albuquerque city limits when Dean sees it.
"Fuck!"
Sheppard jerks awake beside him, grabbing for the dashboard as Dean runs off the road, just missing what appears to be--and is, that's no fucking illusion--a pile of rocks and tree trunks that extends off the country road and onto the shoulder as far as the broken remains of a fence.
It's going to be bad, Dean knows it.
Dirt and barbed wire knock into the front of the car as they keep going, skidding into what used to be a field, and Dean hits his head on the steering wheel once before everything goes red-black and unhappily painful. Slamming his foot on the brake, Dean is thrown back in his seat before the car's still, steaming into the night.
Dean takes a second, reaching up to check for an open wound,