title: between the sand and stone

rating: strong T for blood, violence, and naughty language. Oh, and one brief reference to kinkiness.

characters: Dean, Sam, OCs (no pairings)

category: Gen, drama, hurt/comfort

word count: 16,500 for entire story

disclaimer: Not mine; not getting paid; I'm just playing with them.

summary: After BUABS, the boys take refuge in an abandoned cabin, where a new hunt blindsides them.

notes: Belated Sweet Charity fic written for the awesome pdragon76, who gave me great prompts and didn't kick my lazy ass when I went past the deadline. Thanks to smilla02 for the quick and insightful beta. Title from Wherever You Will Go by The Calling.

Dean drove for three hours after they left Bobby's, no real idea where he was going, just away. Sam stayed quiet in the passenger seat, staring out the window. Dean didn't have the energy to crack any more stupid jokes, as much as he'd like to see Sam smile again.

Sometime around midnight, the fuel gauge hit E and Dean pulled into a dimly lit gas station. Sam stirred, stretching his freakishly long arms out in front of him. Dean cleared his throat.

"Let me drive," Sam said without looking at him.

Dean opened his mouth, closed it again. His shoulder had gone from throbbing to screaming over the past hour, and his vision was starting to blur at the edges. Last thing they needed was to end up wrapped around a tree.

"Okay," he said.

The dreaded crease appeared between Sam's eyebrows. "Dean—"

"I gotta take a leak," Dean said, but didn't move. His shoulder was on fire, his face hurt when he talked, and now the rest of his body was stiffening up. Last thing he wanted to do was move. Well, second-to-last. The last thing he wanted to do was piss his pants, which mean he had to move whether he wanted to or not.

Setting his teeth, he levered his legs out of the car and sat there for a minute, hunched forward, left arm draped loosely across his chest. God. This sucked out loud.

"You need help?" Sam said quietly.

"No," Dean snapped, saw Sam recoil a little. Any other time, Sam would have probably rushed around the car and helped anyway. This wasn't any other time.

So Dean climbed out on his own, cursing through gritted teeth, and straightened as much as he could. Weaved his way across the parking lot and pushed on the door that said PULL.

There was a girl behind the counter, maybe twenty-five, dark-haired with an impressive rack. She'd been watching Dean's struggle with the door, but her smirk faded when she saw the side of his face, saw the way he held his arm.

"Got a bathroom?" Dean asked, too tired to look for a sign. She jerked her chin toward the back.

After he pissed, Dean washed his one good hand and then splashed water on his face, trying not to look in the mirror. The bruises were coloring now, darkening his skin from eyebrow to jaw line with blotches of blackberry and mulberry.

That bitch just had to fuck up his face.

On the bright side, he was pretty sure Sam would no longer want to collect on his rain check from that fiasco with Gordon.

Dean staggered out of the bathroom, past racks full of junk food that made his stomach flip. He grabbed a bag of chips; he could always force-feed them to Sam even if he couldn't bring himself to eat.

He made his way to the counter and paid for the chips and the gas Sam had been putting in the Impala. Checkout Girl's eyes kept flicking to him, but she didn't say anything.

He was almost to the door when the lights dimmed and his legs turned to putty. He had enough balance left to realize he was falling, but not enough to do anything about it.

"Hey, hey!" Checkout Girl said, just before Dean's shoulder took out a magazine rack and his skull cracked off the grimy floor.

When Dean woke up — couldn't have been more than a few seconds later — his cheek was pressed hard against the tile. Somebody was beating a gong inside his head, but his shoulder was numb. He figured that meant he shouldn't move.

"Oh my God, oh my God," Checkout Girl said from somewhere above his head. "Should I call an ambulance?"

No! His brain said decisively, but what came out sounded more like, "Nluuh."

The bell above the door jingled, and a new voice joined the party. "No, no, it's okay. I've got him. He's my brother." Sam. The girl probably thought he sounded calm, but Dean recognized the undercurrent. Sam was scared — and pissed.

Well, shit.

Blue jean clad knees dropped into Dean's vision, and the next thing he saw was a ginormous hand headed for his face. He knew better (this was Sam, not Meg, Sam), but the memories were still too close. He jerked away before he could stop himself, and oh shit oh motherfucking FUCK that woke up his shoulder. He strangled a whimper, biting down until he tasted blood.

"His brother, huh?" Checkout Girl had the phone off the hook; Dean could faintly hear the dial tone over the drumbeats reverberating in his head. She sounded skeptical, and Dean thought about what it must look like, with the bruises and his flinch away from Sam's hand. It looked like what it was, pretty much.

"Yeah, I'm his brother. It's okay. He's okay." Sam's voice had climbed a couple octaves.

" 'M okay," Dean muttered into the floor. His head was lying at a weird angle, but he didn't want to move, because of the hot poker that jammed into his shoulder every time he did.

"Dean, it's me. It's just me." Sam leaned down, puppy eyes set on high beam. (But she'd done that too; she'd worn Sam's sad eyes and guilt issues so well that Dean had believed. God forgive him, he'd believed.)

Dean nodded. The tile felt sticky under his cheek. Sam placed his palm on Dean's neck, thumb against the pulse point.

"Dammit," he muttered after a minute, drawing his hand away. "Why didn't you tell me how bad off you were?"

"Di'n't know," Dean said. The gong in his head was finally falling silent.

Sam didn't look convinced. "Dude," he said, "what if this had happened while you were driving?"

Dean attempted a smile. "Would've sucked?"

Sam shook his head. "He'll be fine," he said to Checkout Girl. "He just needs some rest. I'll get him home."

"Uh-huh," she said flatly. Dean shifted his head so he could see her face. She was staring at him with open concern and just a hint of anger. Made him feel like a battered girlfriend, and if there was anything worse than passing out on a filthy floor in front of a hot chick, it was that.

Dean turned his head back to Sam, encouraged when the gong didn't start back up. Now if he could just figure out how to get the hell out of here without moving anything else.

"Dude, we gotta shag ass," he said quietly. "She's gonna make the call."

"I know," Sam muttered. "Can you get up?"

Dean gritted his teeth. "Maybe. Yeah. Just... help me."

He grabbed Sam's outstretched hand and somehow tamped down the yell that tried to escape when Sam pulled him upright. Swearing through clenched teeth, he hunched forward until the pain ebbed a little. Managed not to pull away when Sam rested a hand on his good arm.

"Look," he said over Sam's shoulder, "we've had a shitty couple of days, okay? We don't need any more."

Checkout Girl gave him a blank stare, not convinced. She probably meant the best, wanted to save him from a bad situation, but her "help" was abso-fucking-lutely the last thing they needed right now.

"Let's get out of here," he said to Sam.

Sam kept an arm around his shoulders all the way out to the car, got him settled into the passenger seat. Sat down heavily on the driver's side with a thundercloud hovering over his head.

"How much blood did you lose?" Sam's voice was too controlled, like Dad's had always sounded just before all hell broke loose.

Dean opened and closed his mouth a couple times. Finally settled on, "Quite a bit."

Sam's hands tightened on the steering wheel. "You should've let me look at it," he said. Still too calm.

"Look, Jo fixed it up. I thought I was fine—"

"Fixed it up before or after it had my thumb in it?" Sam's voice shot up at the end, and Dean jumped, bumping his head on the window.

"I'm sorry," Sam said. "I'm sorry—"

Dean waved his good hand half-heartedly. "Shut up," he said. Flashed back to "So you remember all that?", but didn't say it. "Look, we need a place to lie low for a while. I think I know where. You remember Adam Decker?"

"The name sounds familiar."

"He used to hunt with Dad off and on. We worked with him quite a bit while you were gone. He had a cabin not far from here."

"Should we call or something?"

Dean snorted. "Not unless you want to do a séance. He's dead. Got himself killed hunting zombies."

"What about his cabin?"

"His daughter owns it now, I guess, but she never visits. Dad and me used to crash there sometimes, after Decker died."

Sam considered for a minute. He had dark circles forming under his eyes — looked like he hadn't slept in a week. "What's wrong with a motel?" he said.

"The cabin's close. We could hole up there for a while, wouldn't even need to use the credit cards." It was a motel you went missing from. It was a motel where Meg tried to make me kill you the first time. I've damn well had enough of motels this past week.

Sam sighed, nodded. "Okay," he said.

Dean fell asleep in the passenger seat as soon as the pain in his shoulder receded to a dull throb. It was twilight when he drifted off; Sam woke him later, after dark, when they got close to the turn-off for the cabin.

Dean had a crick in his neck and his eyes were crusted shut, but his shoulder felt blessedly numb. He sat up straighter, reaching to touch his face. It was swollen from eyebrow to jaw, and his left eye didn't open completely, even after he rubbed the grit away.

Sam stared straight ahead, both hands on the wheel. "We're getting close," he said. "Look familiar?"

"Uh...sure." Pine trees looked the same everywhere, but Dean would know the road when he saw it. After Decker's death, he and Dad had stayed at that cabin just about every time they went through Minnesota.

Dean nearly fell asleep again as soon as Sam stopped talking. He felt drained, and the rumble of the Impala's engine echoed hollowly in his head. He was crashing fast; his body had already been worn down by stress and lack of sleep, even before he got shot.

"Dean, hey." Sam tapped his arm. "Dean, stay awake. You have to tell me where to turn, remember?" He was trying to rein in the worry, but Dean could hear it in his voice anyway.

"Yeah, okay." Dean leaned his head against the window and stared out at the dark shapes of trees sliding past. For a few minutes, neither of them spoke. Dean's eyelids got heavier by the second.

A sliver of unpaved road slid past his vision, pale against the dark trees. Dean blinked. "That was it," he said. "We just passed it."

Sam huffed, then hit the brakes hard enough that Dean would have yelled at him under normal circumstances. Dean's body didn't like the sudden stop, so he settled on a slurred groan instead, shifting to brace his left arm more firmly against his chest. That drew another "sorry" from Sam. Dean ignored it.

"Just turn around, asshat," he said.

"You're the one who was supposed to be navigating!"

"Shut up," Dean muttered. Sam sounded like he was gearing up for an argument, but Dean didn't have it in him. He slumped against the door as Sam flipped a sharp U-turn, listening for the sound of gravel crunching under the tires. Almost there. He was so tired.

Sam had to be exhausted too. God only knew what that bitch had done with his body while she'd had it; Dean was willing to bet that sleeping hadn't been high on her list of priorities. Sam's head was starting to droop forward, which might explain the sharp tone. Sammy always got grumpy when he was tired, ever since he was a baby.

His body just got hijacked and used to commit at least one murder, but yeah, let's blame it on the tiredness. Optimistic bullshit came easy when he was talking to Sam, but it was a little harder to pull off inside his own head.

The road had grown up since Dean had been there last; there was just enough space for the Impala between tangled thickets of pine brush. After a bumpy, tedious twenty-minute drive, they pulled up in front of the cabin.

It looked weathered in the glow of the headlights, more run-down than Dean remembered. Paint was peeling off in long flaky strips, but the basic structure looked intact. All things considered, not a bad place to lie low after their shitty week. Dean hoped that no other hunters would think to look for them there. From the state of the place, it looked like nobody had visited it in a long time.

Dean pushed his door open slowly, and cold night air hit him in the face. It smelled of pine and water and damp earth. A loon called from off in the trees—there was a lake there somewhere, but he had never seen it.

Sam did come around the car and help this time, offering a hand to pull Dean up and then steadying him once he was on his feet. Dean closed his eyes and inhaled. City air never smelled like this.

There were stars showing through the trees overhead; the graceful swoop of the milky way was broken only by the dark clumps of pine. Sam slung both of their bags over his left shoulder and kept his right hand on Dean's arm all the way to the cabin. Probably didn't want a repeat of that fall in the store.

The cabin door was locked, and Sam didn't waste his time hunting for a key, just took a page out of Dean's book and kicked the door open. Dean remembered about two seconds later that the key was hidden in a pine stump in the yard, but he decided not to say anything.

The inside of the cabin smelled musty, but the flashlight showed furniture still covered in plastic, the way he and Dad had left it the last time they'd stayed there. Dean felt a sudden, sharp pang of loss, just looking around. Last time he'd been here, Dad had been with him. He could almost smell the leather and gunpowder, traces of his father hiding in the corners with the dust.

Sam tugged the tarp off the closest couch, sat Dean down on it, and went to find a lantern. The cabin had never had electricity—water came from a hand pump in the back yard, and there was an outhouse set back in the trees. Decker hadn't been much for modern conveniences.

Dean was already dozing, head resting on the arm of the couch, when Sam came back carrying not one but three lanterns. And the medical kit.

Oh, shit.

"Can't this wait 'til morning?" Dean slurred.

"No," Sam said. "I don't want to risk infection. It needs to be done tonight." He pulled the plastic off a nearby coffee table, wiped it down with alcohol, and started spreading out supplies. He kept his head down, and his eyes looked dark in the lantern light.

Dean sighed. He wasn't getting out of this one. "Codeine first?" he asked hopefully. Sam handed him a couple tablets and a flask of water to wash them down with. Dean stared at the silver flask.

On the floor, so so close, while the demon in Sam's skin beat the shit out of him. Just out of reach; his fingertips almost brushed it.

"Hey," Sam said, carefully not looking at the flask. "Hey, you gonna take those?"

Dean nodded, threw back the pills with a gulp of holy water. He handed the flask back, and Sam dropped it on the table like it was burning his hand. Made Dean wonder just how much Sam really did remember. Too much for his own good, probably.

Sam helped Dean out of his coat and outer shirt, sucked in a breath when he saw the ragged, bloody gauze, half of it shoved into the bullet hole.

Dean's head was already buzzing; powerful painkillers on an empty stomach didn't take long to kick in. His hands felt tingly and numb and he couldn't keep his eyes focused.

"Jus' do it," he slurred, and passed out.

Dean lost consciousness before Sam could even touch the wound, which was good. What wasn't good was the fact that the crusted gauze was embedded in the bullet hole. (Sam tried not to think about how it had gotten that way.) Ripping it off wasn't an option — the last thing he wanted to do was re-start the bleeding. He'd have to soak it out.

Sam took one of the lanterns and headed out to get water from the yard. He'd need to build a fire in the fireplace, to heat the water and the cabin itself. There was firewood already stacked against the wall in the living room, so at least he didn't have to worry about that. He wondered who had cut it — Dean, maybe, or Dad, back when Sam was still at Stanford, before everything went to hell.

On the way back from the pump, Sam stumbled twice and then almost walked straight into the wall. He was barely still on his feet, but Dean was out, and this was probably the best chance he'd get to clean the wound without causing his brother excruciating pain.

With Dean snoring on the couch, Sam built a fire, then paced a crooked, wobbly trail while waiting for the water to heat. He was afraid he'd fall asleep if he sat down.

Upon soaking off the gauze, he found that the wound didn't look as bad as he had anticipated. Sure, it was ragged and ugly and still oozing blood, but he saw no signs of infection. It was too late for stitches, so he cleaned the wound, bandaged it with fresh gauze, and made a mental note to start Dean on antibiotics just to be safe.

Toward the back of the cabin, Sam found a walk-in closet stacked high with clear plastic tubs, most of them labeled clearly with DECKER in a man's no-nonsense handwriting. One of the tubs — toward the back of the closet — said MALLORY in loopy, pretty letters. It contained blankets; Sam pulled out two. One he threw over Dean, and the other he took with him to the second couch.

He tugged off the tarp, sneezed into the resulting cloud of dust, and flopped down. The couch was scratchy and the springs were poking out and his legs hung off the end. It was perfect. He pulled the blanket up and turned onto his side, where he could see Dean.

The burn on Sam's arm was hurting, knife-sharp and bone-deep, but he fell asleep before he could do anything about it.

Dean spent the next twenty-six hours dead to the world. Sam slept fitfully for the first ten, tormented by jerky silent-film dreams filled with arterial bleeding and sudden, ugly death. (They might be memories, he thought, and it made him want to crawl out of his own skin, shed his bloodstained hands.)

He roused Dean three times to make him drink water, and once convinced him to pee into a jar, which would have provided permanent blackmail material under different circumstances. Dean didn't wake up, not really; his half-mast eyes were always glazed, and he never managed to get out a intelligible word before falling back asleep.

By hour seventeen, Sam was already going stir-crazy. He'd found an old broom and dustpan and had swept up the years-old layer of dust on the floor. He'd carried in more firewood from the yard. He was running out of ways to keep himself busy.

As happy as he was to be alone inside his own head, he couldn't stand the silence. There were too many things he didn't need to think about right now, and he'd never been good at not thinking. Sam Winchester: hunter, scholar, over-analyzer.

(He'd dreamed of a child, a little boy no more than five, and the way the boy's last breaths sounded and the way Dean wouldn't pull the trigger.)

Sam finally found an axe leaned up against the back wall of the cabin, and with it he attacked a small dead pine not far from the outhouse. It was mindless, repetitive work, which was exactly what he'd been looking for.

The weather was overcast, with a breeze that made a sound like the ocean in the pine trees behind the cabin. The air was chilly, but Sam was sweating before long. The sweat stung when it ran into the burn on his arm — sparked off a deep, hair-raising ache that set his teeth on edge — but he didn't stop. Not until Dean said, "Dude, what did that tree do to you?"

Sam dropped the axe and turned. Dean was on the porch, good shoulder against a beam, looking like he might fall over if the wind picked up. His eyes were bloodshot and he was squinting against the dim sunlight in a way Sam recognized from too many post-vision migraines.

"What are you doing?" Sam clattered up the steps, put a hand on Dean's elbow before he could stop himself. "You should be in bed."

"Dude, I've been in bed forever." Dean shook off Sam's hand. "I'm fine. I needed rest, and I got it."

"Yeah, sure. Rest was all you needed." Sam snorted. Up close, he could see that Dean's color was a little better, but nowhere close to normal. He was still running low on blood and even lower on energy.

"Dude, your hands," Dean said. Sam jerked them up reflexively, heart hammering. (blood, still warm, sticky between his fingers) It was a relief to see only popped blisters, ugly little raw circles oozing clear fluid. They hurt, now that he was thinking about them.

"Guess I got carried away," was all he said. Dean shot him a disbelieving look, but didn't say anything.

"You really do need to go back to bed," Sam said, returning to safer ground. When Dean bristled and started to protest, Sam gave him a gentle shove. He nearly fell over backward — only a desperate grab at the beam saved him — and his face went white again.

"Fine, huh?" Sam said.

"All right, dammit." Dean sounded like he was almost as sick of sleeping as Sam was of watching him sleep. In any case, he let Sam help him back to the couch, and didn't even complain too much when Sam checked his shoulder. The wound appeared to be closing up cleanly. Sam insisted that Dean start on antibiotics anyway. Dean retaliated by insisting that Sam clean and bandage his own burned arm and blistered hands.

"And don't even think about going near that axe again," he said. "You've cut enough firewood to last a whole winter."

Sam rolled his eyes, but he wouldn't have been able to pick up the axe again, anyway — his hands were already stiffening and the muscles in his back and shoulders were getting sore.

Dean settled back down onto the couch and his eyes started to drift closed. That was it. Sam couldn't sit around and listen to Dean snore for another day.

"How big is this place, anyway?" he asked abruptly.

Dean's eyes snapped back open. "You mean Decker's property?" At Sam's nod, he continued, "Forty, sixty acres, I think. There's a lake back through the trees, I guess, but I haven't seen it. Decker always said it wasn't worth the walk."

A boring lake: better than spending another day cooped up in here. "Look, you get some rest," Sam said. "I'm gonna walk back and take a look at that lake."

Dean tensed. "By yourself?"

"Dude. I'm twenty-three."

That earned Sam a sour look, but Dean must have already realized he wasn't going to win this one. "Be careful," he said. "Take a gun. You still got that charm Bobby gave you?"

Sam narrowly resisted the urge to roll his eyes again. Echoes of the old days: Yes, Dean, I have my school books. Yes, Dean, I have my knife.

"I'll keep my phone on," he said. "If you need anything, just call, okay? Anything at all. Don't be an idiot and try to do too much."

"Yes, Mommy." Dean didn't respond to the mother hen act nearly as gracefully as Sam did.

There was still a faint trail winding through the trees, and Sam followed it, walking like he had somewhere to be. It felt good to stretch his legs. Felt good to be able to stretch his legs.

(The demon had used every inch of his height, had played up his sheer size in ways he never did. He remembered that much.)

Twenty minutes in, the trail opened up to a small white sand beach. Sam stopped at the edge of it, breathing deeply. The lake was big — much bigger than he'd expected — and, in his opinion, well worth the walk. Ripples lapped at the shore, and the air smelled of mud and lake weeds.

He walked out onto the sand, glancing up and down the shoreline. The forest almost met the lake in places, but where he stood there was a sizeable sand bar separating trees from water. The sand near the water was dirty, spotted with bits of wood and dead weeds.

The water itself was gray and opaque, a mirror reflecting the monotone clouds. Sam knelt and poked a finger in; it was cold. Would be year-round, probably, but especially now, when the weather was chilly.

"I know what you did," a woman's voice said.

Sam shot to his feet, whirled to look behind him. There was no one there, nothing but sand and trees and overcast sky.

"I know what you did to her."

A flash of memory: A small woman with blond hair, tied down, face turned away from him. Jo? Someone else he didn't remember?

"I know. What. You. Did. To her!"

He saw her then, wild-eyed, blood streaming from her chest and the corner of her mouth. She stood where there had been empty sand five seconds earlier. Her skin was gray, darkening to black around sunken eye sockets. He had never seen her before.

She stepped forward, reached out toward him. He couldn't move. He couldn't move.

"I know what you did," she said, and with a flick of her hand, she threw him into the water.

It was cold. Oh God it was cold. Sam's mouth opened in a reflexive, airless gasp, and he left a trail of bubbles through the murky water. He tried to wave his arms, kick his legs, but it felt like he was tangled in a fishing net that was dragging him down down down.

His foot hit bottom, sending up a lazy swirl of silt. His lungs screamed and his heartbeat pounded in his head. He needed out, needed air, but he couldn't move. She was wrapped around him, tangled like yarn, holding him to the bottom.

He struggled, flailing limbs that had already gone numb from the cold. The more he fought, the tighter she held. Just before his vision went, he saw her face, heard her voice in his head: "This is justice."

His chest strained under the crushing weight, and his mouth opened against his will. Water flooded in, poured down his throat and filled his lungs.

It felt exactly like dying.

tbc...