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amberdreamsTitle: Per aspera ad astra
Author: Me!
Movie Prompt: Starman
Pairing: Sam/Jensen
Rating: R
Word Count: ~10800
Summary: An alternative to the last third of Season 3’s Mystery Spot. Months after Dean’s final death in a parking lot in Florida, Sam is on the road hunting the Trickster. The last thing Sam is expecting is a genuine alien encounter, but that is what he gets.
Notes: This
spn_cinema story originally landed in my head like the Starman on Earth, in an amorphous but promising form. This is not a straight re-telling of the Starman story with Sam as Jenny and Jensen as the Starman – it’s a SPN interpretation, but hopefully it’s faithful to the spirit of the film, and to SPN!
Per aspera ad astra means ‘through hardship to the stars’.
Acknowledgements: Tons of thanks to
jdl71 and 
dollarformyname for a truly last minute beta job. You guys helped tidy up this mess so much! You are both shining stars. Of course, I added stuff after they did their thing, so all mistakes and suckiness are totally mine.
The Impala blew up in the middle of nowhere. Or, to be more precise, in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert, western Texas.
Sam was headed for New Mexico, a town called Loving - which Dean would have found endlessly amusing - but Sam wasn’t thinking about that, because Dean had been dead for nearly six months now and Sam didn’t find humor anywhere much, these days.
There was a possible abchanchu in Loving, sucking dry anyone softhearted enough to offer kindness to this seemingly helpless, elderly traveler. Since Sam currently had zero leads on the Trickster, he was taking jobs as and where he could find them. Every day that went by since that Wednesday in Broward County, when Dean died in Sam’s arms and the clock never reset, killing monsters was the only way he could release the head of steam building inside him. That last unexpected death was more painful than all of the endless fucking Tuesdays with their macabre parade of Dean-deaths, and the pressure never let up.
Speaking of steam, Sam hissed and swore as he burnt his fingers on the Impala’s hood. Ignoring the pain, he flung up the hot metal, opening her up to investigate, even though he knew it was pointless. He needed a mechanic of Dean’s high caliber to fix whatever ailed her. The radiator hissed like a basilisk as Sam exposed the car’s innards to the desert air, and he swore again - a long, colorful stream of invective Dean would have been proud of.
Not thinking about Dean, not thinking…
It was impossible, of course. Sam’s head was more full of Dean now than it ever had been with his brother’s physical presence at his side.
He dragged his gaze from the incomprehensible mess that was the old Chevy’s engine, wishing he’d paid more attention when Dad and Dean had talked mechanics. Now they were both gone and despair mingled with his chronic, simmering rage. Keen though Sam’s eyesight was, there was nothing to see for miles but desert and the gray slash of straight, empty road that stretched out to flat horizons in either direction. The distance was lost in the shimmer of heat haze, north towards the New Mexico border, and south the way he’d come.
Scratch that, there was something here. Just off the roadside there was a town sign, split horizontally through the faded black writing, like someone had been at it with an axe. Angeles, it said.
Sam grimaced. Yeah, like angels were any use when Dean died that final time and Sam prayed to God and all His Angels, like a fool. Dean would have told him, there’s no such thing as angels, Sammy. Still, a place with a name should be on the map, even if it was one belonging to a ghost town. Dean would also have kicked Sam’s ankle for not paying more attention on the road, but Sam’s focus tended to be elsewhere these days, and he couldn’t quite call to mind the last signs of habitation he’d passed through, let alone the last time he’d seen a garage that might do auto repairs.
He was searching out for the battered old road atlas from underneath Dean’s leather jacket on the back seat when off to the east came a flash of blue-white light so bright it dazzled, even with Sam halfway inside the Impala. Sam pulled out of the car, his nostrils twitching with the combined scents of gasoline, ozone and burnt sage. He’d half turned to face the source of the light when there was a dull whump from somewhere in front of him, out in the desert. It wasn’t so much a sound as a vibration, but one powerful enough to rattle the Impala’s windows and doors. Her hood slammed shut behind him, with a bang that made Sam jump.
Sam barely had time to process all this raw data before a blast of hot, dust-filled air hit him like a semi-truck. It threw him backwards, head first into hard metal. The Impala was well built, constructed of solid Detroit steel, and her chassis wasn’t even dented by the impact. The back of Sam’s head, on the other hand, didn’t fare so well. He knew a moment of brief pain and extreme irritation before he lost consciousness.
Just his fucking luck. First a broken down car and now a broken head.
Sam woke up to a raging headache and hallucinations consisting of a large sphere of blue light dancing in front of his eyes. No jokes about blue balls, please, Dean.
He slumped uncomfortably, his head and part of his torso propped up by the Impala, one arm half-draped over the back seat where he’d opened the door to get the map. The rest of him was splayed out in the dirt by the side of the road, his legs on the hardtop. It was a good job nothing had come by and run him over. Oh wait, no, that’s wrong, Sam wanted someone to come by to give him a tow, dammit. Now if that weird blue light would just stop bobbing around in front of his face, he’d be able to concentrate his efforts on getting on his feet and finding the first aid kit.
And water. Water would be…
“Holy crap!”
The blue glow, which he’d thought was some sort of concussion-induced delusion, shone brighter then kind of flowed over Sam’s head and into the Impala. Adrenaline spiked, and Sam was on his feet and leaping away from the car, hand groping at his back for a gun that wasn’t there. He should have been looking around for another weapon the moment he realized he’d lost his Taurus, but he couldn’t tear his gaze away from the eerie scene inside the car. Everything was lit with an eldritch light that leached all the warmth from the sunlight and raised goose bumps on Sam’s forearms. The light gathered around Dean’s leather jacket, which was… Fuck, the jacket was moving.
It was the threat of damage to his brother’s much loved jacket that finally galvanized Sam into action, lunging towards the car, only to be brought to a halt as the light intensified to a luminance that was blinding. Sam covered his eyes, swaying on his feet as the light stabbed painfully into his sore head.
Strong hands grasped his elbows, steadying him. Even before Sam opened his eyes, he knew what he was going to see. His body knew that touch even though his mind screamed impossibility. Sam knew the shape of those blunt fingers, the intimate smell of warm skin.
Sam opened his eyes.
Dean was standing in front of Sam, and suddenly Dean’s grip was the only thing holding Sam up.
“S…salutări la toată lumea?”
The voice was Dean’s but it was all wrong – the hesitation, the language, the mechanical intonation, the stilted phrasing. The inconsistency was jarring, and it was enough to jolt Sam out of his fugue. He staggered backwards, pulling away from those hands, the false offer of comfort, but he couldn’t stop staring.
This – this creature had Dean’s face, Dean’s features – so well remembered, not yet wiped from Sam’s memories by the passage of time – but this wasn’t Sam’s Dean. This was a Dean newly-made and totally naked in every sense; even his face was wiped clean of years of their shared experiences. His skin was unscarred and perfect; though the real Dean would have disagreed with the latter. He’d have complained about the copper smattering of freckles everywhere, even on that full lower lip, and dusted down the smooth stomach to be lost in the tangle of red-gold pubic hair.
Sam averted his gaze before he could be tempted to see if Dean’s (no - not Dean, not his brother) flaccid dick had freckles too. What was he doing? He flushed, angrier at himself than he was with this, this…what the hell was this thing he was looking at? Not a shifter, there was no gloop anywhere to be seen, and besides, a shifter couldn’t impersonate Dean when Dean was fucking dead. In fact, that went for pretty much every mimicking type of monster than Sam could think of. They all needed a live subject, at least at the start of the process, anyhow. There was nothing Sam knew of that could create such a perfect doppelganger without a better template than a stained leather jacket.
“You’re not Dean,” Sam didn’t know why it was important to say it, but the words slipped out almost in spite of himself. Of course this wasn’t Dean. “What are you?”
“Aššuli,” the creature said, Dean’s features blank, Dean’s voice weirdly atonal. He – it paused, expectant. It continued to talk when Sam’s only response was to stare, uncomprehending. After a couple of seconds, Sam realized it was cycling through a series of phrases in different languages. “Āyubōwan! Annyeong haseyo; Milí přátelé, přejeme vám vše nejlepší.”
Finally it hit on a language Sam recognized. “Hola y saludos a todos.”
Sam took a step back, frowning. This Dean facsimile was greeting him - in Spanish and who knew how many other languages. It was bizarre; no, more than that. It was incomprehensible.
“What the fuck?”
Sam’s eloquence deserted him, in contrast to the creature, who seemed to have a light-bulb moment. It tilted its head in an oddly birdlike manner and switched to English.
“As the Secretary General of the United Nations, an organization of one hundred forty seven member states who represent almost all of the inhabitants of the Planet Earth, I send greetings.”
“You have got to be kidding me.”
::::
Sam wanted to leave. Jump into the Impala, floor the pedal and leave. Two things stopped him. The Impala was broken down and this creature was wearing his brother.
“Oh, fuck it,” Sam said. He pushed past the creature, which seemed to be waiting for something from him. Well he - it’d be waiting a long fucking time. Sam popped the trunk and pulled out Dean’s duffel, grabbed some clothes and threw them at the thing.
“Here, put those on. Whatever you are, you can’t walk around naked.”
“Not a Dean,” it said, a slight raise at the end like it wasn’t entirely sure. Like it didn’t know what a ‘Dean’ was, and that was intolerable. Against his will, against his instincts, Sam talked.
“No, you’re not Dean, not my brother. Why are you…how are you wearing his body? What are you?”
The creature stared, wide-eyed and silent. It made no move to pick the clothes up and dress itself. Instead Sam felt uncomfortably like he was being analyzed, a scientific specimen. He bent down and picked up the clothes, jeans first, holding them out, making a barrier between them.
Sam couldn’t look at Dean’s body like this – so beautiful, so longed for, so much a lie.
“Put these on. If anyone drives by with you like that you’ll get arrested for public indecency,” Sam said. The creature tilted its head and though it gave no other visual clues, Sam realized it was expressing puzzlement and incomprehension. He rolled his eyes and sighed. He didn’t even know why he hadn’t just shot the damn thing (except yeah, really, how could he kill something in this body? He hadn’t been able to burn Dean’s actual body, after all). So somehow, here he was, helping something pull on Dean’s second best jeans, a plain black tee and a button-down.
The creature’s skin was warm and soft and undeniably real where Sam’s fingers inadvertently brushed against flesh, and that nearly undid Sam. He was pathetically grateful for the distraction when the creature asked him to “speak more”.
Sam talked. Once he started, it was a floodgate opening on words dammed up since Dean died. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d spoken to anyone, other than to check into a motel room or order a burger. Every phone call he’d received had been from Bobby, and Sam let all those go to voicemail; while every phone call he’d made had been terse demands for information from strangers, business-like transactions, or data collection on the Trickster.
Sam told Pseudo Dean everything. About hunting, the Winchester life. He talked about the Trickster and the petty little god’s war against Sam. He told it about Dean, about all the terrible, lethal Tuesdays and the single gunshot on the Wednesday that had ended everything. It hurt but at the same time loosened something in the middle of Sam’s chest; it felt like his heart had permission to beat again. It didn’t seem to matter that the expression on the creature’s borrowed face was so blank. In fact, that was part of the reason he was able to spill his heart out like this. He wasn’t looking for sympathy or solutions, and yet somehow the darkness that had been driving him across the breadth of the US, from Florida to California and back again, lifted a little as the torrent of words poured out.
He wasn’t sure how long he talked, but the sun was lowering in the west when he ran out of words. The thing that wasn’t his brother was staring at him as if waiting to see if Sam was done, then did that weird mechanical head tilt again before holding out one hand, palm up. Exhausted, Sam looked at the five blue spheres balanced there. The creature picked one of them up between finger and thumb and grimaced. Sam thought it was supposed to be a smile.
“Fix.”
It was Sam’s turn to stare as the creature let go of the ball. Instead of following the laws of gravity, the sphere floated for a moment before darting, sudden as a bird, towards the Impala. It expanded then dropped down to cover the whole car in a shimmering blue light. Before Sam could vocalize a protest, both light and sphere were gone, and the air was filled with the unmistakable rumble of the Impala’s V8 engine. The creature grin-grimaced again and walked in jerky marionette steps to the passenger door of the car. It waited patiently, while Sam thought about moving, about shooting it with silver bullets, about a dozen impossible things before breakfast.
“Help. Help me,” it said, after a moment of Sam doing nothing. Sam swore softly under his breath and strode to the driver’s side. Dean’s side.
“Get in,” he snapped.
The radio was playing even though Sam hadn’t switched it on – he hadn’t been able to listen to music since a hundred Asia moments and Huey Lewis and the News. There was no music now, thank god, just a news item about the USAF shooting down a rumored UFO over New Mexico. A spokesman for the air force was busy denying it. Just a training exercise, nothing for people to get excited about.
The creature was staring at Sam again; he could feel its gaze like the warm touch of the dry desert air on his cheek through the Impala’s open window. He didn’t turn his head.
“Earth is not hospitable,” it said, its inflection matter of fact yet somehow conveying sadness. Sam shivered, because the voice was Dean’s and he wanted to hear it so badly it almost didn’t matter that this version of Dean was stuttering like a robot. Or like an alien learning the language of a different species. Sam leaned across and turned the radio off.
“They shot you down?” he asked, finally turning to look the creature in the face. For the first time since the stranger had materialized out of the light, Sam saw past Dean’s body and recognized a different entity looking out of Dean’s eyes. Eyes that were pleading with him.
“Help me,” it repeated, and under the flat intonation, Sam finally heard the desperation.
He closed his eyes. He was going to regret this, he could tell. “What do you need?”
That was how Sam came to be driving north-by-northwest with an alien Dean-clone riding shotgun, and the weirdest thing about it was that he hadn’t for one moment thought this was the Trickster’s doing.
The sunset was glorious, spreading gold and fire across the vast expanse of sky to their left, but Sam kept his eyes on the straight road ahead, and the flat horizon where New Mexico began. The alien’s Landing Area One was in the middle of nowhere, of course, in a stretch of big empty nothingness to the north of the US Highway 50 between Ely and Eureka. So yeah, another desert – Nevada this time. Sam seemed to remember reading about Highway 50 once; it had been dubbed ‘the Loneliest Road in America’. Dean would have laughed at that. Dean could probably have driven the thousand plus miles in sixteen hours, it would likely take Sam a good eighteen or more. Whatever the creature had done to the Impala had given her a Tron-like heads up display of glowing lines that kind of hovered in front of her windshield, showing their current location and the best route to their destination. Sam wasn’t sure whether Dean would have been as excited as a little kid by this enhancement, or appalled. He wondered if the display was a permanent modification, then shook his head. Having Dean’s body sitting next to him was making his resolve to not think about Dean that much harder to maintain.
Conversation might be a good distraction, even when his companion’s grasp of language wasn’t the best.
“What’s your name? I’m Sam Winchester, by the way. You do have names where you come from, right? Where is it that you’re from, exactly? How’d you find our planet? And why’d you come to earth if all you’re going to do is touch down then leave right away?” Sam’s mouth snapped shut on the babble of questions and he flushed. Smooth, Sammy, real smooth, said Dean, inside his head. Anyone would think you had a thing for him.
In the long pause that followed, Sam had time to wonder what it must be like, to have ventured so very far from everything you knew, only to find yourself unwelcome, hunted, and struggling to understand. The creature sitting next to him was the epitome of a stranger in the strangest of lands.
A tiny part of Sam that had been frozen since Dean’s final death thawed in that moment.
“Samwinchester, our names do not transpose very well into human tongue,” it said eventually, just as Sam had almost given up on getting answers at all. “I think mine would sound something like …”
The sounds that followed sounded like nothing more than a jumble of consonants – hissing ‘j’s and ‘n’s – to Sam’s untutored ear, but he guessed he’d just have to make the best of it.
“I see what you mean. Um – can I go with Jensen?” The alien nodded and Sam carried on, relieved. “Okay then, that’s way better than ‘It’.” Sam gave a private shudder at his own Stephen King reference. “And you can just call me Sam.”
“Sam. Jensen.” The alien – no, Jensen – tested the words and appeared to like them well enough because he moved on to answer the rest of Sam’s list of questions.
“Some time ago my species encountered a strange and primitive space vessel. It contained this.” Sam nearly swerved off the road when the heads-up map morphed into a more solid image, a golden circle suspended right in front of his face, obscuring his view of the road ahead. He braked and pulled over, glad the road was so empty. Once parked on the hard shoulder, he took a closer look and felt his eyes widen as he recognized the object in front of him.
“You have gotta be shitting me. Fuck, Dean would love this,” he said, remembering when a fourteen year old Dean had come back from school, full of excitement about the Voyager missions. Dean had spent nearly a week enthusing about space travel and NASA and the minutiae of the two missions until Dad had announced they were moving out of state to hunt a ghoul in Nebraska. Sam had never known Dean to get so excited about school learning before, so it had stuck in his memory. There was no mistaking that this was the gold disk from Voyager One, floating in the Impala’s windshield, shining bright against the Texan night sky like a golden moon.
“Okay then. I see how you ended up here now. Basically, we invited you.”
“Yes. The People of Earth invited visitors, and then they blew up my spaceship. Now my people have given me forty-eight earth hours to reach the rendezvous point, where they will pick me up. If I cannot get there in time, they will be forced to leave. My energy will be depleted and I will die.”
Jensen held out his hand, showing Sam the four remaining blue spheres.
“Wait, those are your energy sources? You just used one on the Impala, right?”
“That is correct. I salvaged seven from my spaceship – I used one to create this human form, and one to send a message to my people. Then to enable you to drive me to the rendezvous in this combustion engine, it was necessary to use another.”
“How long should four last you then?”
“Forty eight of your hours at least, to get me to Landing Area One. More than that I cannot say.”
Jensen waved a hand and the hologram of Voyager’s golden disk vanished, replaced by the hovering lines of light of the interactive map display. Sam looked at the two flashing points that marked their current position and their destination. He nodded.
“Okay then. Let’s get moving.”
Victor Henriksen was in Durango when he heard about the UFO. He almost got whiplash when some crucial additional details filtered through, and his automatic dismissal of the X Files brigade morphed into sharp interest. A sighting of two men and black 1967 Impala on the scene, only five miles from the supposed UFO crash site? Now that had all Victor’s alarm bells ringing louder than if someone had just broken into Fort Knox. Aliens be damned, this had Winchester written all over it.
Using all his charm, Victor called in favor after favor and his persistence finally paid off. NORAD, the USAF and the FBI were tracking the Impala, which was heading north and west from Red Bluff Reservoir in Texas, to destination unknown. He dismissed the reports about aliens and blue lights and focused on the facts. Local PDs said a very tall, longhaired man was driving, and described his companion as shorter and with cropped hair – descriptions that certainly fit Sam and Dean Winchester. The car had by passed Roswell (which Victor thought was pretty ironic) and though initially it had seemed they were heading north, they’d now veered more west towards Albuquerque. Their last reported location, less than thirty minutes ago, was on the I-40 on the outskirts of the city. It looked like they were planning to leave the environs of Albuquerque and head across the Zuni Reservation towards Arizona.
Both the air force and the specialists in the Bureau seemed convinced that the original trajectory of the UFO meant the Impala (with the supposed alien on board) was headed for a desolate spot in Nevada, but Victor didn’t know what to think. This behavior was new and even more unpredictable than usual, but as this was the first real lead he’d had since the Winchesters gave him the slip back in Green River County. He didn’t want to miss this opportunity. He looked at the map and tried to calculate his best bet for intercepting the Winchesters’ route and eventually decided he could just about reach Tuba City before them if he left right now. Reidy didn’t try and second-guess him when Victor called, just jumped into the car and checked his gun while Victor floored the accelerator and headed for Tuba City. Victor had never appreciated Carl Reidy quite so much as in that moment. Though to be fair, since the Winchesters had come onto their radar, Reidy had been a stoic and silent pillar of support.
Maybe Victor could swing the man a commendation once the Winchester brothers were finally locked up tight.
Weariness blurred Sam’s vision and he nearly nodded off a couple of times before he acknowledged defeat. He’d been driving non-stop for over twelve hours since leaving Laredo that morning, apart from that hour or so broken down on the roadside at Angeles. Even Dean would have needed a rest. At Yah-ta-hey they took the AZ-264 towards Window Rock, and Sam started actively looking for somewhere to sleep for a few hours. A few miles down the road he finally saw a motel sign, ironically situated on Winchester Road. Sam decided to take that as a good omen, and took the turn.
The motel itself was about a half mile off the main drag, down a dirt track that would have had Dean wincing at every jolt to the Impala’s suspension, but Sam was too tired to care. Jensen was a silent but warm presence by his side, and it was too easy to forget this wasn’t Dean.
Sam really needed some sleep to regain his edge.
He was pleasantly surprised to find the Red Cliff Motel was a substantial two-story affair, well lit and with a large diner-slash-bar attached, sporting a neon sign declaring it open 24/7. He’d expected something much more run down and low key from the roadside sign and the state of the track. The parking lot was smooth tarmac and hosted several well used 4x4s as well as a couple of large flatbed trucks. One of the trucks had a deer carcass laid across its trunk, roped to the bull-bars. Sam grimaced. He pulled into a space near the diner, putting some distance between them and the dead deer. It was hard not to hear the echo of Dean’s mocking voice complaining about cowardly hunters killing Bambi instead of hunting ghouls or wendigos.
As soon as Sam shut off the engine, Jensen climbed out of the car and walked towards the truck with its sad trophy. Sam caught up as Jensen reached out a hand to stroke the bloodstained pelt. Jensen’s brow creased into a small frown.
“What is this?”
“It’s called a deer. It’s an animal that some humans hunt and kill.” Sam really hoped he wasn’t going to have to explain the earth’s ecological system or man’s role in messing it up; he was too tired to be rational.
“Deer is cold,” Jensen said, moving his hand down its flank. Sam barely restrained himself from just grabbing Jensen’s arm and dragging him away. Man, he really needed some rest.
“Yes, we – deer and humans both – are warm blooded creatures, we get cold when we die and blood stops circulating,” Sam said, half an eye on the diner in the hopes that no one inside was watching. It was never a good thing to be noticed, but with the FBI and the military searching for anything unusual (aliens, Sammy, freaking aliens!), and the Winchester brothers still on the most wanted list, now would be a really bad time to stand out. “Come on, Jensen, let’s go get some food, huh? I can explain anything you want to know while we eat.”
Jensen kept looking over his shoulder at the deer but he followed Sam into the diner without protest.
Apart from three over-loud bearded white guys dressed in camouflage gear, Jensen and Sam were the only customers in the place. Sam assumed the loud guys must be the ones responsible for the dead mule deer. What the hell these rednecks were doing in Zuni territory hunting Zuni deer, Sam didn’t know. He wondered if they had permits – they didn’t look the kind to bother with asking permission before shooting something, that’s for sure. A yawn hit him out of the blue, and he looked at his watch. It wasn’t really that late. Exhaustion had his body and brain protesting, but it wasn’t even midnight yet. The redneck hunters looked like they were just getting started on the whiskey and tequila shots, and the dark haired barkeep had a weary expression that probably rivaled Sam’s.
Sam’s brooding was interrupted by the rumble of a stomach loud enough to carry over the raucous laughter of the three rednecks propping up the bar. In spite of his weariness, Sam nearly laughed out loud at the comical surprised expression on Jensen’s face. The reminder was timely. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten, and presumably, Jensen never had. Which was a bizarre thought. Sam clapped Jensen on the shoulder and steered him away from the bar to one of the tables in the window.
“Food first, sleep later,” he declared, still smiling as he slid into the red vinyl bench opposite Jensen, who was looking adorably puzzled. It was becoming easier to see Jensen as a person in his own right and not a Dean clone, especially when Sam was reminded of the most basic information that Jensen didn’t know or begin to understand.
“We need to eat,” he explained, “to fuel our bodies. Do you understand the concept?”
“Food is fuel?”
Sam whiled away a few minutes explaining how human bodies worked while pointing out some healthy eating choices on the diner’s menu. When the waitress finally extricated herself from the demands of the rednecks, Sam ordered the tofu salad and a wheatgrass smoothie, and was about to order for Jensen when the alien interrupted.
“Banana milkshake and apple pie.” Jensen pointed to the relevant pictures and his features smoothed into the first real-looking smile Sam had seen. Sam’s heart lurched, the pain a sudden knife to his chest. Maybe his confidence in his ability to be rational about having Jensen sitting opposite him in his dead brother’s body had been a little premature.
He barely heard the Zuni waitress asking Jensen if he wanted whipped cream or ice cream with his pie, the rush of memories was too loud inside his head.
::::
Sam finished his salad and asked the barkeep for the key to the restroom. He thought he’d made sure Jensen was fully occupied with his pie and ice cream before he went to relieve himself but when he returned just minutes later, Jensen was nowhere to be seen. Sam’s heart skipped a beat, then another, erratic as a falling boulder and twice as heavy inside his rib cage. The waitress must have seen the panic on his face, because she was quick to point through the window to where a lone figure was crossing the parking lot. It took Sam a second to realize Jensen was heading, not for the Impala but for the truck with the dead deer.
Sam ran outside, filled with an inexplicable foreboding. As he approached, he could hear Jensen talking to the deer, low and soft. An instant later Jensen’s form was outlined with a familiar blue glow. Behind him, Sam heard the hunters yelling, but he was mesmerized by the sight of Jensen’s blunt capable fingers buried in the pale fur, and the way the deer’s flank shuddered under his touch. Then the ribs expanded with a swift panicked rise and fall and the bloodstained ropes fell away, the knots unraveling at Jensen’s touch. The deer’s legs flailed wildly as it pushed free from the bull bars. Its hoofs clattered on the tarmac as it found its footing and then it was gone, wide-eyed and impossible, into the night.
The biggest of the rednecks waved a handgun wildly as if he’d never had a day’s weapon training in his life, puce-faced and swearing. His companions looked more shocked than angry but were clearly ready to back their idiot friend up in a fight. Sam sighed.
“There goes my four hours in a nice comfy bed,” he muttered under his breath. The redneck’s focus was on Jensen, who was staring in fascination at the guy, with no idea how much danger he was in right now. Sam took the opportunity to pull his Taurus and point it at the ringleader.
“I wouldn’t wave that toy gun around if I were you,” he said in an amicable tone, his aim steady as a rock. “It might go off and hurt someone.”
The steel in Sam’s gaze must have pierced the alcoholic haze of the guy’s friends, as both of them backed up, hands raised.
“Come on, Abe, it was just a scrawny buck,” one of them said, tugging at the dense one’s jacket. Abe wasn’t inclined to see reason.
“That was a six point stag, you fuckers,” Abe declared, “and it was my kill.”
Sam sidestepped so he was in front of Jensen, who was standing motionless by the truck, the coils of rope at his feet a silent accusation of guilt.
“Looks like you didn’t do such a great job with the killing part, Abe,” Sam pointed out, reasonably, he thought, in the circumstances. “Seeing as how that supposed ‘kill’ just ran off on its own four legs.” Sam kept his Taurus aimed squarely at Abe while reaching behind him to urge Jensen in the direction the Impala. He wished he’d parked her closer now, but who’d have thought they’d need a quick getaway from a miracle resurrection? So much for keeping a low profile, let alone getting some much needed rest.
“We’ll be leaving now, Abe. We don’t want any trouble.” Jensen hadn’t moved, so Sam spoke without turning his head or taking his eyes off Abe and his gun. “Jensen, go get in the car.”
Sam waited, giving Jensen time to reach the Impala, but Abe wasn’t so inclined to be patient. The moment Jensen moved away, Abe’s gun followed.
“That fucking retard,” he yelled, and as if in slow motion, Sam saw Abe’s thick forefinger twitch on his trigger. Abe was drunk and stupid, and Sam was neither of those things. Sam narrowed his eyes and fired, shooting the heavy pistol right out of Abe’s hand. With the benefit of hindsight, he probably wouldn’t have discounted Abe’s companions so readily, or assumed they were more intelligent than their leader.
If the sound of another shot was a surprise, then the impact of the bullet smashing into his solar plexus more of a horrible shock. Sam staggered, one knee hitting the ground with a sickening crunch he barely felt over the burn in his gut.
The next few moments were a confused blur. He was aware of Jensen pushing into his side and taking his weight. There was a lot of shouting and possibly a blast from a shotgun, maybe from the diner, and then the world was tilting and somehow he was in the Impala, clutching his stomach with both hands and no idea where his gun had gone. The air was rich with the smell of his own hot blood and exhaust fumes as the Impala’s engine roared in protest. Her gears crunched, then he was gasping in agony as the car lurched forwards.
“F—fuck, Jensen,” Sam gritted out between teeth clenched so hard he thought they might shatter. “You don’t even know how to drive.”
“I can drive, Samwinchester,” Jensen replied. The unfamiliarity of Jensen’s matter of fact tone where Dean’s would have been full of suppressed fear was strangely soothing. “I have been observing you since we left Angeles. It seems relatively straightforward. This is a very primitive machine.”
Sam’s head thunked back against the seat and he closed his eyes. “Don’t let Dean hear you call his baby primitive,” he muttered, feeling a wave of darkness welling up, ready to sweep him away. He let it take him, and was gone before Jensen could reply.
They were still moving when Sam surfaced. The sky was dark and the road ahead lit only by the twin beams of the Impala’s headlights. His brain catalogued, analyzed – he was cold – blood loss and shock. His thoughts skittered away from the obvious then returned. He was going to die if he didn’t get treatment; it might already be too late. His hands were limp across his stomach but still wet, which meant the blood wasn’t clotting, and he could feel where his back was sticking to the leather bench seat, so the bullet must have passed right through. He was leaking, full of holes, and for some reason that thought made him want to laugh. He turned his head – with difficulty, it felt so damned heavy – to gaze at Dean’s profile as his brother drove through the night, like so many times before.
Sam longed to reach out and touch, to run his hand down that perfect cheekbone, and trace the line of that strong jaw. He wished he’d kissed those beautiful lips, prettier than any girls, just once in his life, before the darkness seeped into all his cracks. He wanted to apologize – for failing Dean, for letting Dean die, for not saving Dean from the Trickster, or from the deal that had sent Dean to hell and taken Sam with him. The lingering sense of bitterness, sorrow and regret followed Sam into the deepest dark.
On to Part 2
Author: Me!
Movie Prompt: Starman
Pairing: Sam/Jensen
Rating: R
Word Count: ~10800
Summary: An alternative to the last third of Season 3’s Mystery Spot. Months after Dean’s final death in a parking lot in Florida, Sam is on the road hunting the Trickster. The last thing Sam is expecting is a genuine alien encounter, but that is what he gets.
Notes: This
spn_cinema story originally landed in my head like the Starman on Earth, in an amorphous but promising form. This is not a straight re-telling of the Starman story with Sam as Jenny and Jensen as the Starman – it’s a SPN interpretation, but hopefully it’s faithful to the spirit of the film, and to SPN!Per aspera ad astra means ‘through hardship to the stars’.
Acknowledgements: Tons of thanks to
dollarformyname for a truly last minute beta job. You guys helped tidy up this mess so much! You are both shining stars. Of course, I added stuff after they did their thing, so all mistakes and suckiness are totally mine.~0~0~0~
The Impala blew up in the middle of nowhere. Or, to be more precise, in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert, western Texas.
Sam was headed for New Mexico, a town called Loving - which Dean would have found endlessly amusing - but Sam wasn’t thinking about that, because Dean had been dead for nearly six months now and Sam didn’t find humor anywhere much, these days.
There was a possible abchanchu in Loving, sucking dry anyone softhearted enough to offer kindness to this seemingly helpless, elderly traveler. Since Sam currently had zero leads on the Trickster, he was taking jobs as and where he could find them. Every day that went by since that Wednesday in Broward County, when Dean died in Sam’s arms and the clock never reset, killing monsters was the only way he could release the head of steam building inside him. That last unexpected death was more painful than all of the endless fucking Tuesdays with their macabre parade of Dean-deaths, and the pressure never let up.
Speaking of steam, Sam hissed and swore as he burnt his fingers on the Impala’s hood. Ignoring the pain, he flung up the hot metal, opening her up to investigate, even though he knew it was pointless. He needed a mechanic of Dean’s high caliber to fix whatever ailed her. The radiator hissed like a basilisk as Sam exposed the car’s innards to the desert air, and he swore again - a long, colorful stream of invective Dean would have been proud of.
Not thinking about Dean, not thinking…
It was impossible, of course. Sam’s head was more full of Dean now than it ever had been with his brother’s physical presence at his side.
He dragged his gaze from the incomprehensible mess that was the old Chevy’s engine, wishing he’d paid more attention when Dad and Dean had talked mechanics. Now they were both gone and despair mingled with his chronic, simmering rage. Keen though Sam’s eyesight was, there was nothing to see for miles but desert and the gray slash of straight, empty road that stretched out to flat horizons in either direction. The distance was lost in the shimmer of heat haze, north towards the New Mexico border, and south the way he’d come.
Scratch that, there was something here. Just off the roadside there was a town sign, split horizontally through the faded black writing, like someone had been at it with an axe. Angeles, it said.
Sam grimaced. Yeah, like angels were any use when Dean died that final time and Sam prayed to God and all His Angels, like a fool. Dean would have told him, there’s no such thing as angels, Sammy. Still, a place with a name should be on the map, even if it was one belonging to a ghost town. Dean would also have kicked Sam’s ankle for not paying more attention on the road, but Sam’s focus tended to be elsewhere these days, and he couldn’t quite call to mind the last signs of habitation he’d passed through, let alone the last time he’d seen a garage that might do auto repairs.
He was searching out for the battered old road atlas from underneath Dean’s leather jacket on the back seat when off to the east came a flash of blue-white light so bright it dazzled, even with Sam halfway inside the Impala. Sam pulled out of the car, his nostrils twitching with the combined scents of gasoline, ozone and burnt sage. He’d half turned to face the source of the light when there was a dull whump from somewhere in front of him, out in the desert. It wasn’t so much a sound as a vibration, but one powerful enough to rattle the Impala’s windows and doors. Her hood slammed shut behind him, with a bang that made Sam jump.
Sam barely had time to process all this raw data before a blast of hot, dust-filled air hit him like a semi-truck. It threw him backwards, head first into hard metal. The Impala was well built, constructed of solid Detroit steel, and her chassis wasn’t even dented by the impact. The back of Sam’s head, on the other hand, didn’t fare so well. He knew a moment of brief pain and extreme irritation before he lost consciousness.
Just his fucking luck. First a broken down car and now a broken head.
~0~0~0~
Sam woke up to a raging headache and hallucinations consisting of a large sphere of blue light dancing in front of his eyes. No jokes about blue balls, please, Dean.
He slumped uncomfortably, his head and part of his torso propped up by the Impala, one arm half-draped over the back seat where he’d opened the door to get the map. The rest of him was splayed out in the dirt by the side of the road, his legs on the hardtop. It was a good job nothing had come by and run him over. Oh wait, no, that’s wrong, Sam wanted someone to come by to give him a tow, dammit. Now if that weird blue light would just stop bobbing around in front of his face, he’d be able to concentrate his efforts on getting on his feet and finding the first aid kit.
And water. Water would be…
“Holy crap!”
The blue glow, which he’d thought was some sort of concussion-induced delusion, shone brighter then kind of flowed over Sam’s head and into the Impala. Adrenaline spiked, and Sam was on his feet and leaping away from the car, hand groping at his back for a gun that wasn’t there. He should have been looking around for another weapon the moment he realized he’d lost his Taurus, but he couldn’t tear his gaze away from the eerie scene inside the car. Everything was lit with an eldritch light that leached all the warmth from the sunlight and raised goose bumps on Sam’s forearms. The light gathered around Dean’s leather jacket, which was… Fuck, the jacket was moving.
It was the threat of damage to his brother’s much loved jacket that finally galvanized Sam into action, lunging towards the car, only to be brought to a halt as the light intensified to a luminance that was blinding. Sam covered his eyes, swaying on his feet as the light stabbed painfully into his sore head.
Strong hands grasped his elbows, steadying him. Even before Sam opened his eyes, he knew what he was going to see. His body knew that touch even though his mind screamed impossibility. Sam knew the shape of those blunt fingers, the intimate smell of warm skin.
Sam opened his eyes.
Dean was standing in front of Sam, and suddenly Dean’s grip was the only thing holding Sam up.
“S…salutări la toată lumea?”
The voice was Dean’s but it was all wrong – the hesitation, the language, the mechanical intonation, the stilted phrasing. The inconsistency was jarring, and it was enough to jolt Sam out of his fugue. He staggered backwards, pulling away from those hands, the false offer of comfort, but he couldn’t stop staring.
This – this creature had Dean’s face, Dean’s features – so well remembered, not yet wiped from Sam’s memories by the passage of time – but this wasn’t Sam’s Dean. This was a Dean newly-made and totally naked in every sense; even his face was wiped clean of years of their shared experiences. His skin was unscarred and perfect; though the real Dean would have disagreed with the latter. He’d have complained about the copper smattering of freckles everywhere, even on that full lower lip, and dusted down the smooth stomach to be lost in the tangle of red-gold pubic hair.
Sam averted his gaze before he could be tempted to see if Dean’s (no - not Dean, not his brother) flaccid dick had freckles too. What was he doing? He flushed, angrier at himself than he was with this, this…what the hell was this thing he was looking at? Not a shifter, there was no gloop anywhere to be seen, and besides, a shifter couldn’t impersonate Dean when Dean was fucking dead. In fact, that went for pretty much every mimicking type of monster than Sam could think of. They all needed a live subject, at least at the start of the process, anyhow. There was nothing Sam knew of that could create such a perfect doppelganger without a better template than a stained leather jacket.
“You’re not Dean,” Sam didn’t know why it was important to say it, but the words slipped out almost in spite of himself. Of course this wasn’t Dean. “What are you?”
“Aššuli,” the creature said, Dean’s features blank, Dean’s voice weirdly atonal. He – it paused, expectant. It continued to talk when Sam’s only response was to stare, uncomprehending. After a couple of seconds, Sam realized it was cycling through a series of phrases in different languages. “Āyubōwan! Annyeong haseyo; Milí přátelé, přejeme vám vše nejlepší.”
Finally it hit on a language Sam recognized. “Hola y saludos a todos.”
Sam took a step back, frowning. This Dean facsimile was greeting him - in Spanish and who knew how many other languages. It was bizarre; no, more than that. It was incomprehensible.
“What the fuck?”
Sam’s eloquence deserted him, in contrast to the creature, who seemed to have a light-bulb moment. It tilted its head in an oddly birdlike manner and switched to English.
“As the Secretary General of the United Nations, an organization of one hundred forty seven member states who represent almost all of the inhabitants of the Planet Earth, I send greetings.”
“You have got to be kidding me.”
::::
Sam wanted to leave. Jump into the Impala, floor the pedal and leave. Two things stopped him. The Impala was broken down and this creature was wearing his brother.
“Oh, fuck it,” Sam said. He pushed past the creature, which seemed to be waiting for something from him. Well he - it’d be waiting a long fucking time. Sam popped the trunk and pulled out Dean’s duffel, grabbed some clothes and threw them at the thing.
“Here, put those on. Whatever you are, you can’t walk around naked.”
“Not a Dean,” it said, a slight raise at the end like it wasn’t entirely sure. Like it didn’t know what a ‘Dean’ was, and that was intolerable. Against his will, against his instincts, Sam talked.
“No, you’re not Dean, not my brother. Why are you…how are you wearing his body? What are you?”
The creature stared, wide-eyed and silent. It made no move to pick the clothes up and dress itself. Instead Sam felt uncomfortably like he was being analyzed, a scientific specimen. He bent down and picked up the clothes, jeans first, holding them out, making a barrier between them.
Sam couldn’t look at Dean’s body like this – so beautiful, so longed for, so much a lie.
“Put these on. If anyone drives by with you like that you’ll get arrested for public indecency,” Sam said. The creature tilted its head and though it gave no other visual clues, Sam realized it was expressing puzzlement and incomprehension. He rolled his eyes and sighed. He didn’t even know why he hadn’t just shot the damn thing (except yeah, really, how could he kill something in this body? He hadn’t been able to burn Dean’s actual body, after all). So somehow, here he was, helping something pull on Dean’s second best jeans, a plain black tee and a button-down.
The creature’s skin was warm and soft and undeniably real where Sam’s fingers inadvertently brushed against flesh, and that nearly undid Sam. He was pathetically grateful for the distraction when the creature asked him to “speak more”.
Sam talked. Once he started, it was a floodgate opening on words dammed up since Dean died. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d spoken to anyone, other than to check into a motel room or order a burger. Every phone call he’d received had been from Bobby, and Sam let all those go to voicemail; while every phone call he’d made had been terse demands for information from strangers, business-like transactions, or data collection on the Trickster.
Sam told Pseudo Dean everything. About hunting, the Winchester life. He talked about the Trickster and the petty little god’s war against Sam. He told it about Dean, about all the terrible, lethal Tuesdays and the single gunshot on the Wednesday that had ended everything. It hurt but at the same time loosened something in the middle of Sam’s chest; it felt like his heart had permission to beat again. It didn’t seem to matter that the expression on the creature’s borrowed face was so blank. In fact, that was part of the reason he was able to spill his heart out like this. He wasn’t looking for sympathy or solutions, and yet somehow the darkness that had been driving him across the breadth of the US, from Florida to California and back again, lifted a little as the torrent of words poured out.
He wasn’t sure how long he talked, but the sun was lowering in the west when he ran out of words. The thing that wasn’t his brother was staring at him as if waiting to see if Sam was done, then did that weird mechanical head tilt again before holding out one hand, palm up. Exhausted, Sam looked at the five blue spheres balanced there. The creature picked one of them up between finger and thumb and grimaced. Sam thought it was supposed to be a smile.
“Fix.”
It was Sam’s turn to stare as the creature let go of the ball. Instead of following the laws of gravity, the sphere floated for a moment before darting, sudden as a bird, towards the Impala. It expanded then dropped down to cover the whole car in a shimmering blue light. Before Sam could vocalize a protest, both light and sphere were gone, and the air was filled with the unmistakable rumble of the Impala’s V8 engine. The creature grin-grimaced again and walked in jerky marionette steps to the passenger door of the car. It waited patiently, while Sam thought about moving, about shooting it with silver bullets, about a dozen impossible things before breakfast.
“Help. Help me,” it said, after a moment of Sam doing nothing. Sam swore softly under his breath and strode to the driver’s side. Dean’s side.
“Get in,” he snapped.
The radio was playing even though Sam hadn’t switched it on – he hadn’t been able to listen to music since a hundred Asia moments and Huey Lewis and the News. There was no music now, thank god, just a news item about the USAF shooting down a rumored UFO over New Mexico. A spokesman for the air force was busy denying it. Just a training exercise, nothing for people to get excited about.
The creature was staring at Sam again; he could feel its gaze like the warm touch of the dry desert air on his cheek through the Impala’s open window. He didn’t turn his head.
“Earth is not hospitable,” it said, its inflection matter of fact yet somehow conveying sadness. Sam shivered, because the voice was Dean’s and he wanted to hear it so badly it almost didn’t matter that this version of Dean was stuttering like a robot. Or like an alien learning the language of a different species. Sam leaned across and turned the radio off.
“They shot you down?” he asked, finally turning to look the creature in the face. For the first time since the stranger had materialized out of the light, Sam saw past Dean’s body and recognized a different entity looking out of Dean’s eyes. Eyes that were pleading with him.
“Help me,” it repeated, and under the flat intonation, Sam finally heard the desperation.
He closed his eyes. He was going to regret this, he could tell. “What do you need?”
That was how Sam came to be driving north-by-northwest with an alien Dean-clone riding shotgun, and the weirdest thing about it was that he hadn’t for one moment thought this was the Trickster’s doing.
~0~0~0~
The sunset was glorious, spreading gold and fire across the vast expanse of sky to their left, but Sam kept his eyes on the straight road ahead, and the flat horizon where New Mexico began. The alien’s Landing Area One was in the middle of nowhere, of course, in a stretch of big empty nothingness to the north of the US Highway 50 between Ely and Eureka. So yeah, another desert – Nevada this time. Sam seemed to remember reading about Highway 50 once; it had been dubbed ‘the Loneliest Road in America’. Dean would have laughed at that. Dean could probably have driven the thousand plus miles in sixteen hours, it would likely take Sam a good eighteen or more. Whatever the creature had done to the Impala had given her a Tron-like heads up display of glowing lines that kind of hovered in front of her windshield, showing their current location and the best route to their destination. Sam wasn’t sure whether Dean would have been as excited as a little kid by this enhancement, or appalled. He wondered if the display was a permanent modification, then shook his head. Having Dean’s body sitting next to him was making his resolve to not think about Dean that much harder to maintain.
Conversation might be a good distraction, even when his companion’s grasp of language wasn’t the best.
“What’s your name? I’m Sam Winchester, by the way. You do have names where you come from, right? Where is it that you’re from, exactly? How’d you find our planet? And why’d you come to earth if all you’re going to do is touch down then leave right away?” Sam’s mouth snapped shut on the babble of questions and he flushed. Smooth, Sammy, real smooth, said Dean, inside his head. Anyone would think you had a thing for him.
In the long pause that followed, Sam had time to wonder what it must be like, to have ventured so very far from everything you knew, only to find yourself unwelcome, hunted, and struggling to understand. The creature sitting next to him was the epitome of a stranger in the strangest of lands.
A tiny part of Sam that had been frozen since Dean’s final death thawed in that moment.
“Samwinchester, our names do not transpose very well into human tongue,” it said eventually, just as Sam had almost given up on getting answers at all. “I think mine would sound something like …”
The sounds that followed sounded like nothing more than a jumble of consonants – hissing ‘j’s and ‘n’s – to Sam’s untutored ear, but he guessed he’d just have to make the best of it.
“I see what you mean. Um – can I go with Jensen?” The alien nodded and Sam carried on, relieved. “Okay then, that’s way better than ‘It’.” Sam gave a private shudder at his own Stephen King reference. “And you can just call me Sam.”
“Sam. Jensen.” The alien – no, Jensen – tested the words and appeared to like them well enough because he moved on to answer the rest of Sam’s list of questions.
“Some time ago my species encountered a strange and primitive space vessel. It contained this.” Sam nearly swerved off the road when the heads-up map morphed into a more solid image, a golden circle suspended right in front of his face, obscuring his view of the road ahead. He braked and pulled over, glad the road was so empty. Once parked on the hard shoulder, he took a closer look and felt his eyes widen as he recognized the object in front of him.
“You have gotta be shitting me. Fuck, Dean would love this,” he said, remembering when a fourteen year old Dean had come back from school, full of excitement about the Voyager missions. Dean had spent nearly a week enthusing about space travel and NASA and the minutiae of the two missions until Dad had announced they were moving out of state to hunt a ghoul in Nebraska. Sam had never known Dean to get so excited about school learning before, so it had stuck in his memory. There was no mistaking that this was the gold disk from Voyager One, floating in the Impala’s windshield, shining bright against the Texan night sky like a golden moon.
“Okay then. I see how you ended up here now. Basically, we invited you.”
“Yes. The People of Earth invited visitors, and then they blew up my spaceship. Now my people have given me forty-eight earth hours to reach the rendezvous point, where they will pick me up. If I cannot get there in time, they will be forced to leave. My energy will be depleted and I will die.”
Jensen held out his hand, showing Sam the four remaining blue spheres.
“Wait, those are your energy sources? You just used one on the Impala, right?”
“That is correct. I salvaged seven from my spaceship – I used one to create this human form, and one to send a message to my people. Then to enable you to drive me to the rendezvous in this combustion engine, it was necessary to use another.”
“How long should four last you then?”
“Forty eight of your hours at least, to get me to Landing Area One. More than that I cannot say.”
Jensen waved a hand and the hologram of Voyager’s golden disk vanished, replaced by the hovering lines of light of the interactive map display. Sam looked at the two flashing points that marked their current position and their destination. He nodded.
“Okay then. Let’s get moving.”
~0~0~0~
Victor Henriksen was in Durango when he heard about the UFO. He almost got whiplash when some crucial additional details filtered through, and his automatic dismissal of the X Files brigade morphed into sharp interest. A sighting of two men and black 1967 Impala on the scene, only five miles from the supposed UFO crash site? Now that had all Victor’s alarm bells ringing louder than if someone had just broken into Fort Knox. Aliens be damned, this had Winchester written all over it.
Using all his charm, Victor called in favor after favor and his persistence finally paid off. NORAD, the USAF and the FBI were tracking the Impala, which was heading north and west from Red Bluff Reservoir in Texas, to destination unknown. He dismissed the reports about aliens and blue lights and focused on the facts. Local PDs said a very tall, longhaired man was driving, and described his companion as shorter and with cropped hair – descriptions that certainly fit Sam and Dean Winchester. The car had by passed Roswell (which Victor thought was pretty ironic) and though initially it had seemed they were heading north, they’d now veered more west towards Albuquerque. Their last reported location, less than thirty minutes ago, was on the I-40 on the outskirts of the city. It looked like they were planning to leave the environs of Albuquerque and head across the Zuni Reservation towards Arizona.
Both the air force and the specialists in the Bureau seemed convinced that the original trajectory of the UFO meant the Impala (with the supposed alien on board) was headed for a desolate spot in Nevada, but Victor didn’t know what to think. This behavior was new and even more unpredictable than usual, but as this was the first real lead he’d had since the Winchesters gave him the slip back in Green River County. He didn’t want to miss this opportunity. He looked at the map and tried to calculate his best bet for intercepting the Winchesters’ route and eventually decided he could just about reach Tuba City before them if he left right now. Reidy didn’t try and second-guess him when Victor called, just jumped into the car and checked his gun while Victor floored the accelerator and headed for Tuba City. Victor had never appreciated Carl Reidy quite so much as in that moment. Though to be fair, since the Winchesters had come onto their radar, Reidy had been a stoic and silent pillar of support.
Maybe Victor could swing the man a commendation once the Winchester brothers were finally locked up tight.
~0~0~0~
Weariness blurred Sam’s vision and he nearly nodded off a couple of times before he acknowledged defeat. He’d been driving non-stop for over twelve hours since leaving Laredo that morning, apart from that hour or so broken down on the roadside at Angeles. Even Dean would have needed a rest. At Yah-ta-hey they took the AZ-264 towards Window Rock, and Sam started actively looking for somewhere to sleep for a few hours. A few miles down the road he finally saw a motel sign, ironically situated on Winchester Road. Sam decided to take that as a good omen, and took the turn.
The motel itself was about a half mile off the main drag, down a dirt track that would have had Dean wincing at every jolt to the Impala’s suspension, but Sam was too tired to care. Jensen was a silent but warm presence by his side, and it was too easy to forget this wasn’t Dean.
Sam really needed some sleep to regain his edge.
He was pleasantly surprised to find the Red Cliff Motel was a substantial two-story affair, well lit and with a large diner-slash-bar attached, sporting a neon sign declaring it open 24/7. He’d expected something much more run down and low key from the roadside sign and the state of the track. The parking lot was smooth tarmac and hosted several well used 4x4s as well as a couple of large flatbed trucks. One of the trucks had a deer carcass laid across its trunk, roped to the bull-bars. Sam grimaced. He pulled into a space near the diner, putting some distance between them and the dead deer. It was hard not to hear the echo of Dean’s mocking voice complaining about cowardly hunters killing Bambi instead of hunting ghouls or wendigos.
As soon as Sam shut off the engine, Jensen climbed out of the car and walked towards the truck with its sad trophy. Sam caught up as Jensen reached out a hand to stroke the bloodstained pelt. Jensen’s brow creased into a small frown.
“What is this?”
“It’s called a deer. It’s an animal that some humans hunt and kill.” Sam really hoped he wasn’t going to have to explain the earth’s ecological system or man’s role in messing it up; he was too tired to be rational.
“Deer is cold,” Jensen said, moving his hand down its flank. Sam barely restrained himself from just grabbing Jensen’s arm and dragging him away. Man, he really needed some rest.
“Yes, we – deer and humans both – are warm blooded creatures, we get cold when we die and blood stops circulating,” Sam said, half an eye on the diner in the hopes that no one inside was watching. It was never a good thing to be noticed, but with the FBI and the military searching for anything unusual (aliens, Sammy, freaking aliens!), and the Winchester brothers still on the most wanted list, now would be a really bad time to stand out. “Come on, Jensen, let’s go get some food, huh? I can explain anything you want to know while we eat.”
Jensen kept looking over his shoulder at the deer but he followed Sam into the diner without protest.
Apart from three over-loud bearded white guys dressed in camouflage gear, Jensen and Sam were the only customers in the place. Sam assumed the loud guys must be the ones responsible for the dead mule deer. What the hell these rednecks were doing in Zuni territory hunting Zuni deer, Sam didn’t know. He wondered if they had permits – they didn’t look the kind to bother with asking permission before shooting something, that’s for sure. A yawn hit him out of the blue, and he looked at his watch. It wasn’t really that late. Exhaustion had his body and brain protesting, but it wasn’t even midnight yet. The redneck hunters looked like they were just getting started on the whiskey and tequila shots, and the dark haired barkeep had a weary expression that probably rivaled Sam’s.
Sam’s brooding was interrupted by the rumble of a stomach loud enough to carry over the raucous laughter of the three rednecks propping up the bar. In spite of his weariness, Sam nearly laughed out loud at the comical surprised expression on Jensen’s face. The reminder was timely. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten, and presumably, Jensen never had. Which was a bizarre thought. Sam clapped Jensen on the shoulder and steered him away from the bar to one of the tables in the window.
“Food first, sleep later,” he declared, still smiling as he slid into the red vinyl bench opposite Jensen, who was looking adorably puzzled. It was becoming easier to see Jensen as a person in his own right and not a Dean clone, especially when Sam was reminded of the most basic information that Jensen didn’t know or begin to understand.
“We need to eat,” he explained, “to fuel our bodies. Do you understand the concept?”
“Food is fuel?”
Sam whiled away a few minutes explaining how human bodies worked while pointing out some healthy eating choices on the diner’s menu. When the waitress finally extricated herself from the demands of the rednecks, Sam ordered the tofu salad and a wheatgrass smoothie, and was about to order for Jensen when the alien interrupted.
“Banana milkshake and apple pie.” Jensen pointed to the relevant pictures and his features smoothed into the first real-looking smile Sam had seen. Sam’s heart lurched, the pain a sudden knife to his chest. Maybe his confidence in his ability to be rational about having Jensen sitting opposite him in his dead brother’s body had been a little premature.
He barely heard the Zuni waitress asking Jensen if he wanted whipped cream or ice cream with his pie, the rush of memories was too loud inside his head.
::::
Sam finished his salad and asked the barkeep for the key to the restroom. He thought he’d made sure Jensen was fully occupied with his pie and ice cream before he went to relieve himself but when he returned just minutes later, Jensen was nowhere to be seen. Sam’s heart skipped a beat, then another, erratic as a falling boulder and twice as heavy inside his rib cage. The waitress must have seen the panic on his face, because she was quick to point through the window to where a lone figure was crossing the parking lot. It took Sam a second to realize Jensen was heading, not for the Impala but for the truck with the dead deer.
Sam ran outside, filled with an inexplicable foreboding. As he approached, he could hear Jensen talking to the deer, low and soft. An instant later Jensen’s form was outlined with a familiar blue glow. Behind him, Sam heard the hunters yelling, but he was mesmerized by the sight of Jensen’s blunt capable fingers buried in the pale fur, and the way the deer’s flank shuddered under his touch. Then the ribs expanded with a swift panicked rise and fall and the bloodstained ropes fell away, the knots unraveling at Jensen’s touch. The deer’s legs flailed wildly as it pushed free from the bull bars. Its hoofs clattered on the tarmac as it found its footing and then it was gone, wide-eyed and impossible, into the night.
The biggest of the rednecks waved a handgun wildly as if he’d never had a day’s weapon training in his life, puce-faced and swearing. His companions looked more shocked than angry but were clearly ready to back their idiot friend up in a fight. Sam sighed.
“There goes my four hours in a nice comfy bed,” he muttered under his breath. The redneck’s focus was on Jensen, who was staring in fascination at the guy, with no idea how much danger he was in right now. Sam took the opportunity to pull his Taurus and point it at the ringleader.
“I wouldn’t wave that toy gun around if I were you,” he said in an amicable tone, his aim steady as a rock. “It might go off and hurt someone.”
The steel in Sam’s gaze must have pierced the alcoholic haze of the guy’s friends, as both of them backed up, hands raised.
“Come on, Abe, it was just a scrawny buck,” one of them said, tugging at the dense one’s jacket. Abe wasn’t inclined to see reason.
“That was a six point stag, you fuckers,” Abe declared, “and it was my kill.”
Sam sidestepped so he was in front of Jensen, who was standing motionless by the truck, the coils of rope at his feet a silent accusation of guilt.
“Looks like you didn’t do such a great job with the killing part, Abe,” Sam pointed out, reasonably, he thought, in the circumstances. “Seeing as how that supposed ‘kill’ just ran off on its own four legs.” Sam kept his Taurus aimed squarely at Abe while reaching behind him to urge Jensen in the direction the Impala. He wished he’d parked her closer now, but who’d have thought they’d need a quick getaway from a miracle resurrection? So much for keeping a low profile, let alone getting some much needed rest.
“We’ll be leaving now, Abe. We don’t want any trouble.” Jensen hadn’t moved, so Sam spoke without turning his head or taking his eyes off Abe and his gun. “Jensen, go get in the car.”
Sam waited, giving Jensen time to reach the Impala, but Abe wasn’t so inclined to be patient. The moment Jensen moved away, Abe’s gun followed.
“That fucking retard,” he yelled, and as if in slow motion, Sam saw Abe’s thick forefinger twitch on his trigger. Abe was drunk and stupid, and Sam was neither of those things. Sam narrowed his eyes and fired, shooting the heavy pistol right out of Abe’s hand. With the benefit of hindsight, he probably wouldn’t have discounted Abe’s companions so readily, or assumed they were more intelligent than their leader.
If the sound of another shot was a surprise, then the impact of the bullet smashing into his solar plexus more of a horrible shock. Sam staggered, one knee hitting the ground with a sickening crunch he barely felt over the burn in his gut.
The next few moments were a confused blur. He was aware of Jensen pushing into his side and taking his weight. There was a lot of shouting and possibly a blast from a shotgun, maybe from the diner, and then the world was tilting and somehow he was in the Impala, clutching his stomach with both hands and no idea where his gun had gone. The air was rich with the smell of his own hot blood and exhaust fumes as the Impala’s engine roared in protest. Her gears crunched, then he was gasping in agony as the car lurched forwards.
“F—fuck, Jensen,” Sam gritted out between teeth clenched so hard he thought they might shatter. “You don’t even know how to drive.”
“I can drive, Samwinchester,” Jensen replied. The unfamiliarity of Jensen’s matter of fact tone where Dean’s would have been full of suppressed fear was strangely soothing. “I have been observing you since we left Angeles. It seems relatively straightforward. This is a very primitive machine.”
Sam’s head thunked back against the seat and he closed his eyes. “Don’t let Dean hear you call his baby primitive,” he muttered, feeling a wave of darkness welling up, ready to sweep him away. He let it take him, and was gone before Jensen could reply.
They were still moving when Sam surfaced. The sky was dark and the road ahead lit only by the twin beams of the Impala’s headlights. His brain catalogued, analyzed – he was cold – blood loss and shock. His thoughts skittered away from the obvious then returned. He was going to die if he didn’t get treatment; it might already be too late. His hands were limp across his stomach but still wet, which meant the blood wasn’t clotting, and he could feel where his back was sticking to the leather bench seat, so the bullet must have passed right through. He was leaking, full of holes, and for some reason that thought made him want to laugh. He turned his head – with difficulty, it felt so damned heavy – to gaze at Dean’s profile as his brother drove through the night, like so many times before.
Sam longed to reach out and touch, to run his hand down that perfect cheekbone, and trace the line of that strong jaw. He wished he’d kissed those beautiful lips, prettier than any girls, just once in his life, before the darkness seeped into all his cracks. He wanted to apologize – for failing Dean, for letting Dean die, for not saving Dean from the Trickster, or from the deal that had sent Dean to hell and taken Sam with him. The lingering sense of bitterness, sorrow and regret followed Sam into the deepest dark.
On to Part 2