Flowers and Feathers - Part 1
Feb. 12th, 2018 01:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amberdreamsBack to Masterpost
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stargazingchola
Dean doesn’t like Sam’s new girlfriend right from the start. It isn’t jealousy, he refuses to believe it’s that, even though he knows deep down there might be a touch of jealous rage burning his soul when he sees how she leans into Sam, tucking herself under his arm and into his body like she belongs there. No, there is just something about her that doesn’t ring true. She’s too sweet, too pretty, too lively - and Dean can’t understand why Sam fell so hard, so fast. Except he can understand it totally, because she is too much of everything Sam has ever liked in a woman.
Dean tries not to roll his eyes watching Fleur toss her blonde curls and smile up at Sam with those dark blue eyes. If Dean is reminded of Sarah and Jess, he hates to think what Sam sees when he looks at her. She’s like a construct of all of Sam’s previous loves and Dean just doesn’t like her.
Fleur is a stupid name too – who calls their kid Fleur when her surname’s de Fleurs anyhow? – even if she does smell like flowers, all hints of jasmine and roses and girly-shit. Nobody should smell that good all the time.
So yeah. Dean doesn’t trust her one little bit, so when Sam brings her back to the bunker, Dean can’t help getting a tiny bit stressed. He pulls Sam aside, virtually dragging his giant baby brother into the kitchen, leaving the girlfriend to amuse herself in the War Room. Dean just hopes she doesn’t touch anything while she is unsupervised.
“Sam!” he hisses, while Sam just stares at him as if he’s grown two heads. “You brought her into our secret Bat Cave without a blindfold, showed her what we do, and now she knows everything!”
“Dean. Fleur’s my girlfriend, we’ve been seeing each other for over a month. I trust her and she wanted to see where I live. I don’t think that’s unreasonable.” Sam sounds patient and understanding and Dean hates it. He wants Sam to get angry and maybe punch him for being a dick, not treat him like an emotionally unstable, needy big brother who has spent too many years relying on one person and one person alone. So he cringes inside when instead of taking a swing, Sam absently pats him on the head like he’s a dog, and wanders back to his girl. Dean supposes it’s lucky Sam didn’t also feed him a treat while he was at it.
::::
The first time Fleur sleeps over is the first time Dean hears it.
Not that he thinks there will be much actual sleeping going on in Sam’s room. Fleur won’t be slow to make the most of this opportunity to get Sam in the sack, Dean’s sure. In fact, Dean thinks he can hear them getting it on, not that he’s wandering down the corridors in the middle of the night to check on his baby brother, no way. He just happens to find himself standing outside Sam’s bedroom door, when he realises the noise he’s hearing isn’t heavy breathing or two people in the throes of passion, but a quiet scratch, scratch, scratching. And the noise isn’t coming from his brother’s room. No, it’s coming from inside the walls. Dean pales a little.
Shit. The bunker has rats. Dean hates rats.
::::
“We have a rat problem.” Dean announces over breakfast the next morning, and feels a glum satisfaction when Fleur squeals and grabs Sam’s arm for reassurance. That tiny sliver of glee dissolves when Sam’s arm snakes around her protectively and he pulls her close, turning the full force of his disapproval on Dean.
“What?” Dean says, defensive in the face of Sam’s formidable brows. “I heard them last night, scrabbling around in the walls.”
Sam takes Fleur home, and maybe Dean would have been happy about that, except Sam stays with her in town instead of coming back to the Bat Cave that night, leaving Dean to a restless night alone, dozing fitfully, listening in vain for those tiny claws to come a-scratching. But the Bat Cave is silent, too quiet and empty without Sam’s breathing stirring the dead air.
Fleur is apparently none too happy about the rodent infestation, or so Sam tells him, but unfortunately that doesn’t stop her visiting, and she even stays the night a couple more times. The rats only make a noise when Fleur is around. Dean thinks that’s odd; Sam dismisses his concern.
“Dean, I know you don’t like Fleur. I haven’t heard anything unusual at all. You say you hear these noises in the walls, and if I didn’t know better, I’d think you were just making all this up to make Fleur feel uncomfortable.” Then Sam gives Dean the stare. The one that says don’t try messing with my head because you know I can mess with yours ten times worse if I put my mind to it.
Dean throws up his arms in defeat but decides to investigate next time Fleur stays over. He’s determined to find the source of these strange sounds. If there is the added incentive of maybe exposing Fleur as the fraud he thinks she is, then he isn’t going to admit it, even to himself. Sam has a freaky way of reading his thoughts sometimes and Dean isn’t going to risk exposing his hand too soon.
He doesn’t have to wait many days for Fleur to come back again. Apparently Sam is a regular stud-muffin and she doesn’t want to miss out on hours of rampant sex on the increasingly rare occasion when Sam opts to stay in the Bunker instead of in town for the night. Dean’s lip is chewed raw after standing outside Sam’s door for twenty minutes or so, and it takes a while for the heat to subside in his cheeks. He’d never realised how many times Sam could come in such a short space of time, and in spite of himself, Dean is impressed at his little (maybe not so little) brother’s refractory powers. And maybe a tiny bit envious if he’s perfectly honest. After all, it’s been a while.
About ten minutes after silence had finally descended and Dean’s hot flush has cooled, the scratching starts up in the wall behind him, jolting Dean out of his regretful musings about the lack of action Little Dean had seen since – well, too long. Sam’s door remains firmly shut, so if these noises are anything to do with Fleur, it’s a mystery how she’s causing them. A mystery that Dean is determined will be solved tonight.
The noises are moving, so Dean follows, trailing his hand along the walls so he can feel any vibrations as well as hear the sounds. It was weird from day one but now it seems to be getting weirder. If they are rodents, they are not crawling low to the ground, because Dean can feel tremors at waist level, consistent and repetitive. He tracks the sounds round the bunker, down corridors he’s never yet explored. Those American Men of Letters constantly surprised them with the hidden depths of this construction and this time is no exception. It isn’t long before Dean is lost in the depths of the bunker.
He ends up in an unremarkable, small chamber. It’s dark and cool, and smells of damp concrete and a bitter must. The source of the smell is a congealed pile of guano and feathers in a cone up the base of the wall, as if one or more birds have been roosting somewhere above, even though there’s nowhere to perch. So maybe the bunker doesn’t have rats after all. Maybe it was birds Dean’s been hearing. He peers at the mess. There are tiny bones in there, sticking out of what look like grey balls of fur.
“Owl pellets?” Dean mutters, puzzled.
Apart from the bird detritus, the room is entirely empty except for a plain wooden box in the centre of the floor. Part of Dean screams that this could be a trap, but his reservations aren’t enough to stop moving forward. Before he’s had time to think, he’s kneeling down with his hand outstretched to open the box.
Dean lifts the lid, only to find the contents are something more to Sam’s liking than his own – a leather bound book. All thoughts of scratching, and whether it’s rats or birds, are forgotten, swept away by the odd combination of a sense of anti climax and the caress of the smooth, butter-soft leather cover of the book as he lifts it out.
It’s surprisingly heavy for a volume no larger than the last Harry Potter book. So what? He reads. Just don’t tell anyone he borrowed Sam’s complete set of J K Rowling and binge-read the lot.
The cover is embossed - The Mabinogion. Dean doesn’t even attempt to pronounce it in his head. He’s sure Sam will know what it is. Unlike The Deathly Hallows, Dean feels no urge to read the book, but neither does he want to put it down. Instead, he leaves the empty box in the middle of the empty chamber, and makes his way back to his own room, which turns out to be a lot closer than he’d thought.
He smiles. Home from home; walls lined with weapons and the best bed he’s ever had. He doesn’t care that it’s 2am and his skin is goose-bumped from all that wandering in the cold corridors, or that he never discovered the source of the scratching in the walls. Dean gives none of that a second thought. He doesn’t even bother to undress, just throws himself down on top of the covers and rolls over onto his back. He’s asleep with seconds, the book clasped to his chest like a knight with his sword on a medieval tomb.
::::
Dean is in a meadow. It’s lush and green and beautiful. The air is heavy and warm on his skin, and fragrant with the mingled scents of sweet cicely, feverfew, ladies bedstraw, chamomile, marjoram, meadowsweet and cowslips. He doesn’t question how he knows all the ingredients of this olfactory potpourri that surrounds him, he just does. The wildflowers splash the carpet of green grass with pinks and whites and yellows. It’s idyllic.
He breathes deeply, relishing the rare tranquillity.
He moves deeper into the field, trailing his hand across the plants like Maximus in Gladiator, a thought that makes him grin. The scene is so peaceful, he can’t help wondering if he’s slipped sideways into someone’s heaven. Maybe Mom, Dad and Bobby will be waiting for him in the misty distance. That thought disturbs his serenity, and has him looking around anxiously for the one thing more important than his lost family members. It doesn’t matter whose heaven Dean might be in, it would all be meaningless without Sam.
Behind him the lush vegetation is untouched by his passage, not a blade of grass out of place, no fallen petals or broken stems. Round the edges of the field the previous veil of pale mist has given way to an ominous darkness that moves when Dean isn’t looking directly at it.
There’s no sign of Sam. There’s no sign of anything living, not a bird or even a measly fly.
His fragile peace shattered, his heart thuds inside his ribcage, insistent, loud.
He turns full circle before he sees the stone. It is massive, a dark jagged looming mass that should have been impossible to miss, though he’d swear it wasn’t there moments before. As he approaches, he can see that the monolith is pierced right through by a hole large enough to take the barrel of his 32-gauge shotgun. He moves close enough to touch, so he can run a finger over the strangely smooth edges, wondering what made it. The hole is practically at his eye level, so of course he accepts the invitation to peer through. Dean draws a breath as he focuses his gaze. There on the other side, some distance away so that he is perfectly framed by the rough circle of the hole, is Sam.
Something inside Dean loosens at the sight of his brother, but he has less than a second to enjoy the feeling. Something ice-cold passes straight through his heart and his chest tightens. He looks down and there’s a long spear in his right hand, the blade narrow and wickedly sharp. The weight of it feels good as he hefts it to his shoulder, ready to cast. Although Dean’s never thrown a spear like this before, his body knows the weapon, remembers how it feels to fight and kill with it. The coldness in his heart is full of betrayal and anger and is hungry for blood. His heart pumps chill through his veins. The deadly intent flows through his body and gathers in the tip of the spear. His muscles bunch and loose as he casts, accurate and true, sending the spear through the hole in the dark stone.
The alien cold sense of satisfaction leaves Dean as swiftly as the spear flies. Sam is standing, oblivious, in the spear’s path, and Dean can do nothing except watch in helpless horror. He doesn’t even have time to cry out a warning before the blade pierces Sam’s broad chest, and Sam goes down without a sound.
Dean does shout out then, fear and denial. The stone has gone as if it never existed, and there’s nothing to obstruct Dean’s view of the blood blossoming red where the spear sprouts from Sam’s prone body, as if someone’s planted a lethal sapling in his brother’s fertile soil. He shakes off the horror that’s frozen him in place and races across the meadow to the spot where Sam had fallen, but there is nothing there. Just as with Dean’s earlier passage through the meadow, there’s not a single blade of grass is broken, not a petal crushed by Sam’s fall. There’s no blood, no spear; there’s not a single sign that anyone apart from Dean had ever been there.
Bewildered, Dean spins around until he’s dizzy with it – the guilt and the heartache and the too strong perfume of the flowers overwhelming him. The edges of the meadow are shrinking in on him, the shroud of darkness seems closer now, and he flinches and ducks when an owl like an omen hoots and swoops down low over his head.
He wants to tear the stupid bird out of the sky and shake it until its feathers fall out. If that was supposed to be a warning, it was too fucking late.
::::
Dean wakes, still clutching the book to his chest. He’s drenched in a fevered sweat, his heart’s racing like he’s been in a fight with a dozen zombies, and fuck, that was one horrible, vivid, weird-ass dream. He sits up and peels his damp fingers off the book’s cover with a grimace. He puts it down next to his old fashioned analogue clock, which tells him it’s 7am. It’s already light outside, so he figures, what the hell. Might as well go rustle up some breakfast for Sam and his too-perfect girl.
He sniffs at the armpit his t-shirt and grimaces. Okay. Shower first, then top of his list of priorities are coffee and bacon. He hesitates for a second outside Sam’s door then tears himself away. He’s not a kid, he doesn’t need the reassurance of seeing Sam to know that it was just a bad dream, right?
Right.
Fresh from the shower and wrapped in a dead man’s robe, he heads for the kitchen with a single minded intensity that is perfect for blocking out pesky things, like disturbing dreams. He’s got the fridge door open, balancing eggs, bacon, hash browns, butter and milk in the perfect example of a lazy-man’s load when a waft of scent hits him like a physical blow. The dream meadow rushes back as he breathes in – sweet and flowery. No. Not merely flowery – Fleur. He recognises it now. It is Fleur’s perfume, drifting through the corridors into kitchen. Dean sighs with resignation and turns around as she enters the room. He puts the food down on the counter. Looks like breakfast is going to have to wait.
“Dean? Have you seen Sam?”
Dean’s heart flips, but he’s overreacting again, he’s sure. Dude’s a fitness freak, Sam’s probably gone for one of his sickeningly healthy early morning runs.
“You’re the one sleeping with him, doll,” he says. “Didn’t you keep him entertained enough last night to keep him in your bed this morning?” Ooh bitchy, Dean. He winces a little inside at the momentary look of hurt that flits cross her face, but he keeps his own as blank as possible. He’s trying real hard not to panic right now. His resolution melts faster than ice cream in a heat wave when Fleur’s next words sink in.
“It was weird,” she says. “I had this dream - well, nightmare really. I was walking through a pretty meadow full of flowers. We were standing in the sunshine, looking at a massive boulder with a hole in it. Sam looked like a hero, all tall and strong and beautiful, but then a spear came out of nowhere, right through the hole in the rock and Sam was lying on the ground. He was dead, and I knew it was my fault though I don’t know who threw the spear, and I was screaming and screaming, but then I woke up, and the room was empty. I’ve looked all over but I can’t find him. Sam’s gone.”
Fleur is twisting her slender hands together and Dean doesn’t believe he’s ever seen anyone actually wringing their hands before. But that is what she’s doing all right, and she must have caught his heart between those slim fingers and she’s twisting it to pulp, because he thinks it might just have stopped beating for a moment right then, when she described his dream and claimed it as her own.
His fingers are in his pocket, yanking out his phone and dialling Sam’s number before he’s even thought about it. It rings, and rings. Fleur’s head lifts and she rushes from the room, returning in moments holding Sam’s phone in her hand, still playing Bobby Darin’s Not for Me. Dean had thought that was a good joke when he’d hacked Sam’s phone the other day to set that ring tone. He wasn’t smiling now.
Think, Winchester, think.
The book.
The dreams, Sam going missing. There must be some connection between the two, and the only link Dean could think of was that fucking book. He spins so fast he feels dizzy for a second, his stomach lurching with the dream memories again. He shakes it off and almost runs to his bedroom, ignoring Fleur’s half started question.
He’s back before Fleur has closed her mouth, dropping the book onto one of the stainless steel counters with a bang that makes both of them jump a little. The pages fall open and a long brown feather flutters to the floor. Absently Dean bends down, picks it up and tucks it into the back of the book without taking a closer look. It’s forgotten as soon as it’s out of sight.
He stabs at the open page with an aggressive finger and glares at Fleur.
“What do you know about this?”
“I don’t understand,” Fleur protested, glancing towards the Bunker’s exit. “Shouldn’t we be out there looking for Sam? What’s the point of reading some musty old book now?”
“Because I’m sure this book has something to do with our dreams.”
“Our dreams? Wait, you dreamt about Sam too?”
Dean bites back the urge to confront her, to yell like you don’t know, bitch! He can almost hear Sam’s voice telling him to give her the benefit of the doubt, and, to be fair, imaginary Sam does have a point. Dean can’t see anything except genuine distress on Fleur’s face. So he tells her about his dream, leaving out the part where it was him casting that damn spear, because he doesn’t want to think about that, or what it could mean.
Fleur sits next to him so she can look at the book, close enough that he can feel the warmth of her skin in the cool air of the bunker, and her perfume overwhelms the musty parchment scents of the pages as they turn.
::::
The golden eagle soars. He climbs on a thermal, circling in slow, lazy swoops. Kansas is spread out beneath his wings, a manmade patchwork of precise squares that offends him. He gains altitude and allows the currents to carry him until the geometrical rigidity of the landscape fades into more the pleasing fractals of river courses and ridges of hills. He’s high enough now that the curve of the earth is visible. To the east and north stretch the flatlands, the farmlands of Kansas and Missouri, and the bleakness of Nebraska’s Great Plains. Neither direction holds any appeal for him. The red soils of the south hold a promise of warmth, while to the west the snow covered mountain ranges of Colorado call to him.
He twitches his tail feathers and drifts west, following the call.
::::
If the book holds any answers, it isn’t giving them up easily.
Fleur refuses to touch it, wrinkling her nose at the parchment pages. Dean’s nascent suspicions dissolve before they form when she tells him she’s vegetarian and doesn’t want to touch a dead animal. He rolls his eyes. Of course Sam would hitch up with a hippy, veggie flower-child.
Going through page after page of densely written script in a language Dean doesn’t recognise or understand, with minimal marginal notes or illustrations, leaves him frustrated and angry in equal measures. After a few minutes pressed against Dean’s side, Fleur gives it up as a bad job. She can’t even help decipher the handwriting, let alone translate it. She drifts away – to search the bunker again, to sleep, whatever, Dean doesn’t care and barely notices she’s gone.
He’s staring at one of the few drawings – a sketch of a flower he thinks might be meadowsweet – when Fleur announces her return by placing a plate full of hot food under Dean’s nose. Dean’s stomach rumbles loudly in response and he realises it’s mid afternoon already, and he’s eaten nothing since the previous evening. His breakfast is still on the table, untouched and uncooked.
With a surprised grunt of thanks, he tucks into what turns out to be a really tasty hotdish. He half smiles in spite of the persistent undercurrent of worry. He’s always had a soft spot for Mid West cuisine.
He makes short work of the tater tots and mac cheese and doesn’t even complain that it’s meat-free. He sits back in his chair while Fleur brings him a second helping. Maybe she isn’t so bad, after all, he thinks. He turns to where Sam should be, to tell him marry that girl, Sammy; catches himself just in time.
Shit.
Fleur slides into the chair beside him and he notices she’s not eating anything. The thought slips away when she points at the book on the table, careful not to touch it.
“Did you find anything?”
“Nothing useful. There are a few words in Latin but the rest is some language I don’t recognise, and the only pictures are of some flowers and a freaky interlace pattern that looks like a woman’s face mixed up with an owl,” Dean chews and swallows, suddenly mindful of Sam’s disgust at him talking with his mouth full and for once not finding it funny to do it anyway. The starch and cheese sits heavy in his stomach where moments before it had warmed and satisfied.
“I’m sure this book has something to do with it though.”
Fleur leans in closer, ostensibly to get a better look at the page Dean has open, and Dean can feel the soft give of her small breast pressing into his arm. His dick twitches and he shifts, uncomfortable. Sure, it’s been a long time since he had a woman in his arms, but this is his brother’s girl, and besides. Sam’s missing. There’d be no fun in stealing Sam’s girl when Sam isn’t there to tease about it.
His eyes widen and he stands. The squeal of his chair on the polished floor echoes in the silent bunker. Why is he thinking about sex at all? Especially with Fleur. He doesn’t even like the girl. He dumps the half full bowl in the sink and tries to think logically. Since he’d woken from that dream his brain has been muddled and his attempts at Sam-like research is getting him nowhere.
The bunker is warded against just about anything supernatural that was known to the Men of Letters, and yet Sam had somehow vanished while deep inside the wards. So either something unknown had penetrated the bunker’s defences, or they had inadvertently brought something inside the wards that made them vulnerable – first to the dreams, and then physically, in Sam’s case. Is it Dean’s fault? Had he triggered something when he’d fallen asleep with that book in his hands?
Maybe he’s missed something obvious. He drags his hands over his face, tries to concentrate. First things first. Search the bunker from top to bottom. If Sam had gone missing here, surely there should be a clue, some indication of where and how he’d vanished – whether it was a door left open that should be closed, a hex box missing from a shelf, a scuff mark in the dust on a store-room’s floor – something.
He doesn’t know why he hadn’t done a search straight away, but he’s going to put that right now.
He shoves the book into his jacket and drags Fleur around with him. For some reason, he doesn’t want to let her out of his sight.
They find precisely nothing, either inside the bunker or for about a mile radius outside when they venture out into the bitter Kansas cold. There’s no vegetation to hide behind, the trees and bushes are stripped bare by winter. His only consolation is that the snow that the north wind is promising hasn’t arrived yet, so at least Sam’s not fallen, hypothermic, into a drift.
Darkness and the below freezing temperatures it brings forces them back into the bunker, when even Dean has to acknowledge the futility of carrying on. In the war room Dean thumps both fists on the eternally lit-up map table. Frustration and worry lodge in his throat, choking him. He wants to hit something, kill something, but the only person there is Fleur. The bunker’s central heating is suddenly stifling.
“I don’t get it.” Dean was looking at Fleur but he didn’t really see her, he was thinking too hard. “When it comes to the supernatural, this is the safest place in the continental US. It’s screwed down tighter than a Supermax. It makes no sense, how Sam can be gone without a single thing being out of place. There are no weapons missing, and I don’t think he’s taken any spare clothes. His jacket’s still on the back of his door, for fuck’s sake. Wherever he is, he’s unarmed and practically naked.”
“Do you think we should,” Fleur hesitates and waves a hand vaguely. “I don’t know, search wider?”
Dean closes his eyes. He can’t bear the blandness of Fleur’s anxiety. “Search wider,” he almost spits out the words. “We’re almost at the centre of the USA, we’ve got thousands of miles of wide in every fucking direction and no idea where to start.”
His eyes fly open at a soft touch. Fleur is holding his clenched fists in both hands. She presses them to her breast, her cornflower-blue eyes wide and earnest.
“Dean, I know how anxious you feel, but we’re no good to Sam if we’re tired and hungry. Let me warm up some of that stew then we should get some sleep. Maybe the morning will bring some good news, or fresh information to help us search in the right places. At the very least we should be able to think clearer with some food inside us.”
Dean wants to protest. How can he rest when Sam might be injured or worse? But he’s so very weary. Somehow he finds himself sitting down again, this time with a bowl of steaming, fragrant stew in front of him. He has to admit, the food warms him and he feels more hopeful when he’s cleaned up his plate with the fresh bread Fleur produced out of nowhere.
He fights against the post-food coma for all of three minutes before he gives in and follows Fleur to his room. He baulks at her coming in with him, which she seems to be hinting at, waving her off towards Sam’s room and kicking his door shut. For the second night running he doesn’t bother to undress, just throws himself face down and lets the memory foam welcome him home.
::::
For many years Lozen of the Chiricahua Apache dream-walks through the sacred mountains, until one day her peace is disturbed by the distant cry of an eagle that is not a bird. Curious, she wakes. Stepping out of the cave, Lozen’s moccasins touch Apache soil for the first time in a very long time. The air on the Sierra Blanca is thin and laden with the ice of winter, but she breathes deep, in spite of the daggers of pain the cold sends through her lungs. Pain is useful, it’s part of life. After decades sleeping, it’s a good thing to be reminded of that.
She follows the thread of sentience that woke her from her dreaming, climbing high amongst the wind-sculpted sandstone slopes of the White Mountain to the snow line and back, until her thighs protest from the strain and her calves cramp. She’s not as young as she was when she rode with her brother, Victorio, and could fight for days and nights on end against their enemies. She is older now, and the land feels different. She avoids the few white people she sees and lets them live. She has other business to attend to, more important than fighting a battle that was lost a long, long time ago, though it pains her heart to let the past go.
She finds the golden eagle high in the branches of an old bare-branched Ponderosa pine, surrounded by dense stands of juniper. He’s scrawny, exhausted and bedraggled. There are dark stains of blood matting his feathers, but he refuses to come down when she calls. He glares at her, his tawny eyes wild and stubborn even through the dullness of pain. She can see the man inside the bird, but she can also see that he has no awareness of his humanity. Whatever the enchantment is that is laid on him, it is strong.
First things first.
Lozen camps beneath the pine and sets out to charm the eagle down from its perch using the song of the Sacred Cave. Perhaps the wordless sounds bequeathed by a long lost spirit to an unnamed medicine woman will enable another medicine woman to speak to this troubled spirit’s heart. She keeps her voice low and soft as she starts to chant.
::::
Below his tree, the eagle watches the human woman fold her legs and sit. She doesn’t appear to be armed, unlike the hunter who’d shot at him some hours ago, when the eagle had been foolish enough to swoop too low over the Cibola National Forest outside of Albuquerque. Weariness and hunger had made him stupid, and the rifle bullet that clipped him had been his reward. He isn’t sure how he’d made it this far, but he knows his flight ends here. Weak to the point of no return, his claws grip the branch as if it was prey, in a death grip.
The woman is making noises; strange, rhythmical and hypnotic. She’s quiet, but his hearing is sharp. Not as sharp as his eyesight, but good enough.
He’s cold and hungry and his thoughts are full of pain. The throbbing has spread through his left side, but somehow the voice below is beginning to distract him. He ruffles his feathers then gapes his beak, hissing as even that slight movement intensifies the agony.
The woman is holding out her arm like a branch. The rhythm of her chant alters, dropping a subtle fifth, and the eagle stretches out his wings in defiance – of her, of the pain, of a memory he can’t quite grasp. He understands that this is likely to be his last act.
He drops, finds the offered perch of flesh and bone and grips tight, eye-to-eye with the strange human for a few seconds before he loses consciousness.
::::
Lozen has forgotten much during her long absence, but she remembers how to heal. She gathers the herbs she needs and uses a smooth rock to mix the poultice. She stokes her fire and boils water in birch bark, adding hot stones to heat it. The bird’s wound looks to have been made by a bullet, though thankfully it had passed cleanly through, so there was no excavation required. The eagle is thinner than it should be, lighter than optimum flying weight, and she wonders how long he was on the wing before some damn fool shot him. She wonders what the human inside the bird was fleeing from that bound him to this form so tightly.
She talks to him while she works, feels his dual consciousness return even before the feathers flinch under her fingers and the golden eye opens. Something of the man is there, in the evenness of the bird’s gaze, and he doesn’t struggle. He stays still and quiet, as if that human part of him knows what is needed to mend his torn flesh. The broken feathers are harder to deal with, but most will heal in time. His full magnificence may be somewhat marred by the gaps left by missing pinions, but he’ll be functional.
While he heals, she tries to reach out to the human spirit inside the bird. He’s stubborn and wary, and locked into the eagle at a fundamental level she’s never experienced before. She’s more than surprised to find he’s a white man. She’d been convinced he was eastern Apache, or Navajo at a push. He could also have been Cheyenne or Pawnee from the images of the Great Plains that ran through his memories. Lozen isn’t stupid. She knows the world has moved on during her dreaming. She’d seen some of the changes when she’d trekked over the White Mountain, following the eagle’s silent call. But still, finding a white man who can change into his spirit-shape is unexpected.
Perhaps that explains why he’s bound so tightly to this form. Inexperience and ignorance are a combination that’s likely to mess up a first shape change. It seems unlikely this man had any guidance, or he would not be in this sorry situation.
Lozen delves into the eagle’s mind and finds a few recent memories, enough to see that he’d flown many miles from the plains to find his way to the sacred mountain, but the man himself is elusive. All she gleans is a great sense of hurt and loss, and two names, paired spirits. Sam and Dean.
“Ah,” Lozen whispers, “you are brothers.”
Sam’s spirit is trapped in the eagle, grieving and alone without his brother. Lozen closes her eyes against a familiar pain. This she understands. The emptiness in her heart where Victorio should be is cold as a snowstorm, and his death feels like it happened yesterday.
Restoring Sam may be harder than she thought, without the brother’s presence to help him find his way.
Lozen hunts. She kills mule deer and uses their hides and juniper branches to build a wikiup to shelter her and the eagle from the winter winds. The wikiup smells good, of new cut wood and home, but the deer meat smells even better as she roasts it over her fire. She feeds the eagle raw meat and watches the brightness return to his eyes.
When he flies for the first time she doesn’t expect him to return.
The white man inside the eagle surprises her for a second time when he does.
Part 2 this way!
Feathers and Flowers
Art by
stargazingcholaDean doesn’t like Sam’s new girlfriend right from the start. It isn’t jealousy, he refuses to believe it’s that, even though he knows deep down there might be a touch of jealous rage burning his soul when he sees how she leans into Sam, tucking herself under his arm and into his body like she belongs there. No, there is just something about her that doesn’t ring true. She’s too sweet, too pretty, too lively - and Dean can’t understand why Sam fell so hard, so fast. Except he can understand it totally, because she is too much of everything Sam has ever liked in a woman.
Dean tries not to roll his eyes watching Fleur toss her blonde curls and smile up at Sam with those dark blue eyes. If Dean is reminded of Sarah and Jess, he hates to think what Sam sees when he looks at her. She’s like a construct of all of Sam’s previous loves and Dean just doesn’t like her.
Fleur is a stupid name too – who calls their kid Fleur when her surname’s de Fleurs anyhow? – even if she does smell like flowers, all hints of jasmine and roses and girly-shit. Nobody should smell that good all the time.
So yeah. Dean doesn’t trust her one little bit, so when Sam brings her back to the bunker, Dean can’t help getting a tiny bit stressed. He pulls Sam aside, virtually dragging his giant baby brother into the kitchen, leaving the girlfriend to amuse herself in the War Room. Dean just hopes she doesn’t touch anything while she is unsupervised.
“Sam!” he hisses, while Sam just stares at him as if he’s grown two heads. “You brought her into our secret Bat Cave without a blindfold, showed her what we do, and now she knows everything!”
“Dean. Fleur’s my girlfriend, we’ve been seeing each other for over a month. I trust her and she wanted to see where I live. I don’t think that’s unreasonable.” Sam sounds patient and understanding and Dean hates it. He wants Sam to get angry and maybe punch him for being a dick, not treat him like an emotionally unstable, needy big brother who has spent too many years relying on one person and one person alone. So he cringes inside when instead of taking a swing, Sam absently pats him on the head like he’s a dog, and wanders back to his girl. Dean supposes it’s lucky Sam didn’t also feed him a treat while he was at it.
::::
The first time Fleur sleeps over is the first time Dean hears it.
Not that he thinks there will be much actual sleeping going on in Sam’s room. Fleur won’t be slow to make the most of this opportunity to get Sam in the sack, Dean’s sure. In fact, Dean thinks he can hear them getting it on, not that he’s wandering down the corridors in the middle of the night to check on his baby brother, no way. He just happens to find himself standing outside Sam’s bedroom door, when he realises the noise he’s hearing isn’t heavy breathing or two people in the throes of passion, but a quiet scratch, scratch, scratching. And the noise isn’t coming from his brother’s room. No, it’s coming from inside the walls. Dean pales a little.
Shit. The bunker has rats. Dean hates rats.
::::
“We have a rat problem.” Dean announces over breakfast the next morning, and feels a glum satisfaction when Fleur squeals and grabs Sam’s arm for reassurance. That tiny sliver of glee dissolves when Sam’s arm snakes around her protectively and he pulls her close, turning the full force of his disapproval on Dean.
“What?” Dean says, defensive in the face of Sam’s formidable brows. “I heard them last night, scrabbling around in the walls.”
Sam takes Fleur home, and maybe Dean would have been happy about that, except Sam stays with her in town instead of coming back to the Bat Cave that night, leaving Dean to a restless night alone, dozing fitfully, listening in vain for those tiny claws to come a-scratching. But the Bat Cave is silent, too quiet and empty without Sam’s breathing stirring the dead air.
Fleur is apparently none too happy about the rodent infestation, or so Sam tells him, but unfortunately that doesn’t stop her visiting, and she even stays the night a couple more times. The rats only make a noise when Fleur is around. Dean thinks that’s odd; Sam dismisses his concern.
“Dean, I know you don’t like Fleur. I haven’t heard anything unusual at all. You say you hear these noises in the walls, and if I didn’t know better, I’d think you were just making all this up to make Fleur feel uncomfortable.” Then Sam gives Dean the stare. The one that says don’t try messing with my head because you know I can mess with yours ten times worse if I put my mind to it.
Dean throws up his arms in defeat but decides to investigate next time Fleur stays over. He’s determined to find the source of these strange sounds. If there is the added incentive of maybe exposing Fleur as the fraud he thinks she is, then he isn’t going to admit it, even to himself. Sam has a freaky way of reading his thoughts sometimes and Dean isn’t going to risk exposing his hand too soon.
He doesn’t have to wait many days for Fleur to come back again. Apparently Sam is a regular stud-muffin and she doesn’t want to miss out on hours of rampant sex on the increasingly rare occasion when Sam opts to stay in the Bunker instead of in town for the night. Dean’s lip is chewed raw after standing outside Sam’s door for twenty minutes or so, and it takes a while for the heat to subside in his cheeks. He’d never realised how many times Sam could come in such a short space of time, and in spite of himself, Dean is impressed at his little (maybe not so little) brother’s refractory powers. And maybe a tiny bit envious if he’s perfectly honest. After all, it’s been a while.
About ten minutes after silence had finally descended and Dean’s hot flush has cooled, the scratching starts up in the wall behind him, jolting Dean out of his regretful musings about the lack of action Little Dean had seen since – well, too long. Sam’s door remains firmly shut, so if these noises are anything to do with Fleur, it’s a mystery how she’s causing them. A mystery that Dean is determined will be solved tonight.
The noises are moving, so Dean follows, trailing his hand along the walls so he can feel any vibrations as well as hear the sounds. It was weird from day one but now it seems to be getting weirder. If they are rodents, they are not crawling low to the ground, because Dean can feel tremors at waist level, consistent and repetitive. He tracks the sounds round the bunker, down corridors he’s never yet explored. Those American Men of Letters constantly surprised them with the hidden depths of this construction and this time is no exception. It isn’t long before Dean is lost in the depths of the bunker.
He ends up in an unremarkable, small chamber. It’s dark and cool, and smells of damp concrete and a bitter must. The source of the smell is a congealed pile of guano and feathers in a cone up the base of the wall, as if one or more birds have been roosting somewhere above, even though there’s nowhere to perch. So maybe the bunker doesn’t have rats after all. Maybe it was birds Dean’s been hearing. He peers at the mess. There are tiny bones in there, sticking out of what look like grey balls of fur.
“Owl pellets?” Dean mutters, puzzled.
Apart from the bird detritus, the room is entirely empty except for a plain wooden box in the centre of the floor. Part of Dean screams that this could be a trap, but his reservations aren’t enough to stop moving forward. Before he’s had time to think, he’s kneeling down with his hand outstretched to open the box.
Dean lifts the lid, only to find the contents are something more to Sam’s liking than his own – a leather bound book. All thoughts of scratching, and whether it’s rats or birds, are forgotten, swept away by the odd combination of a sense of anti climax and the caress of the smooth, butter-soft leather cover of the book as he lifts it out.
It’s surprisingly heavy for a volume no larger than the last Harry Potter book. So what? He reads. Just don’t tell anyone he borrowed Sam’s complete set of J K Rowling and binge-read the lot.
The cover is embossed - The Mabinogion. Dean doesn’t even attempt to pronounce it in his head. He’s sure Sam will know what it is. Unlike The Deathly Hallows, Dean feels no urge to read the book, but neither does he want to put it down. Instead, he leaves the empty box in the middle of the empty chamber, and makes his way back to his own room, which turns out to be a lot closer than he’d thought.
He smiles. Home from home; walls lined with weapons and the best bed he’s ever had. He doesn’t care that it’s 2am and his skin is goose-bumped from all that wandering in the cold corridors, or that he never discovered the source of the scratching in the walls. Dean gives none of that a second thought. He doesn’t even bother to undress, just throws himself down on top of the covers and rolls over onto his back. He’s asleep with seconds, the book clasped to his chest like a knight with his sword on a medieval tomb.
::::
Dean is in a meadow. It’s lush and green and beautiful. The air is heavy and warm on his skin, and fragrant with the mingled scents of sweet cicely, feverfew, ladies bedstraw, chamomile, marjoram, meadowsweet and cowslips. He doesn’t question how he knows all the ingredients of this olfactory potpourri that surrounds him, he just does. The wildflowers splash the carpet of green grass with pinks and whites and yellows. It’s idyllic.
He breathes deeply, relishing the rare tranquillity.
He moves deeper into the field, trailing his hand across the plants like Maximus in Gladiator, a thought that makes him grin. The scene is so peaceful, he can’t help wondering if he’s slipped sideways into someone’s heaven. Maybe Mom, Dad and Bobby will be waiting for him in the misty distance. That thought disturbs his serenity, and has him looking around anxiously for the one thing more important than his lost family members. It doesn’t matter whose heaven Dean might be in, it would all be meaningless without Sam.
Behind him the lush vegetation is untouched by his passage, not a blade of grass out of place, no fallen petals or broken stems. Round the edges of the field the previous veil of pale mist has given way to an ominous darkness that moves when Dean isn’t looking directly at it.
There’s no sign of Sam. There’s no sign of anything living, not a bird or even a measly fly.
His fragile peace shattered, his heart thuds inside his ribcage, insistent, loud.
He turns full circle before he sees the stone. It is massive, a dark jagged looming mass that should have been impossible to miss, though he’d swear it wasn’t there moments before. As he approaches, he can see that the monolith is pierced right through by a hole large enough to take the barrel of his 32-gauge shotgun. He moves close enough to touch, so he can run a finger over the strangely smooth edges, wondering what made it. The hole is practically at his eye level, so of course he accepts the invitation to peer through. Dean draws a breath as he focuses his gaze. There on the other side, some distance away so that he is perfectly framed by the rough circle of the hole, is Sam.
Something inside Dean loosens at the sight of his brother, but he has less than a second to enjoy the feeling. Something ice-cold passes straight through his heart and his chest tightens. He looks down and there’s a long spear in his right hand, the blade narrow and wickedly sharp. The weight of it feels good as he hefts it to his shoulder, ready to cast. Although Dean’s never thrown a spear like this before, his body knows the weapon, remembers how it feels to fight and kill with it. The coldness in his heart is full of betrayal and anger and is hungry for blood. His heart pumps chill through his veins. The deadly intent flows through his body and gathers in the tip of the spear. His muscles bunch and loose as he casts, accurate and true, sending the spear through the hole in the dark stone.
The alien cold sense of satisfaction leaves Dean as swiftly as the spear flies. Sam is standing, oblivious, in the spear’s path, and Dean can do nothing except watch in helpless horror. He doesn’t even have time to cry out a warning before the blade pierces Sam’s broad chest, and Sam goes down without a sound.
Dean does shout out then, fear and denial. The stone has gone as if it never existed, and there’s nothing to obstruct Dean’s view of the blood blossoming red where the spear sprouts from Sam’s prone body, as if someone’s planted a lethal sapling in his brother’s fertile soil. He shakes off the horror that’s frozen him in place and races across the meadow to the spot where Sam had fallen, but there is nothing there. Just as with Dean’s earlier passage through the meadow, there’s not a single blade of grass is broken, not a petal crushed by Sam’s fall. There’s no blood, no spear; there’s not a single sign that anyone apart from Dean had ever been there.
Bewildered, Dean spins around until he’s dizzy with it – the guilt and the heartache and the too strong perfume of the flowers overwhelming him. The edges of the meadow are shrinking in on him, the shroud of darkness seems closer now, and he flinches and ducks when an owl like an omen hoots and swoops down low over his head.
He wants to tear the stupid bird out of the sky and shake it until its feathers fall out. If that was supposed to be a warning, it was too fucking late.
::::
Dean wakes, still clutching the book to his chest. He’s drenched in a fevered sweat, his heart’s racing like he’s been in a fight with a dozen zombies, and fuck, that was one horrible, vivid, weird-ass dream. He sits up and peels his damp fingers off the book’s cover with a grimace. He puts it down next to his old fashioned analogue clock, which tells him it’s 7am. It’s already light outside, so he figures, what the hell. Might as well go rustle up some breakfast for Sam and his too-perfect girl.
He sniffs at the armpit his t-shirt and grimaces. Okay. Shower first, then top of his list of priorities are coffee and bacon. He hesitates for a second outside Sam’s door then tears himself away. He’s not a kid, he doesn’t need the reassurance of seeing Sam to know that it was just a bad dream, right?
Right.
Fresh from the shower and wrapped in a dead man’s robe, he heads for the kitchen with a single minded intensity that is perfect for blocking out pesky things, like disturbing dreams. He’s got the fridge door open, balancing eggs, bacon, hash browns, butter and milk in the perfect example of a lazy-man’s load when a waft of scent hits him like a physical blow. The dream meadow rushes back as he breathes in – sweet and flowery. No. Not merely flowery – Fleur. He recognises it now. It is Fleur’s perfume, drifting through the corridors into kitchen. Dean sighs with resignation and turns around as she enters the room. He puts the food down on the counter. Looks like breakfast is going to have to wait.
“Dean? Have you seen Sam?”
Dean’s heart flips, but he’s overreacting again, he’s sure. Dude’s a fitness freak, Sam’s probably gone for one of his sickeningly healthy early morning runs.
“You’re the one sleeping with him, doll,” he says. “Didn’t you keep him entertained enough last night to keep him in your bed this morning?” Ooh bitchy, Dean. He winces a little inside at the momentary look of hurt that flits cross her face, but he keeps his own as blank as possible. He’s trying real hard not to panic right now. His resolution melts faster than ice cream in a heat wave when Fleur’s next words sink in.
“It was weird,” she says. “I had this dream - well, nightmare really. I was walking through a pretty meadow full of flowers. We were standing in the sunshine, looking at a massive boulder with a hole in it. Sam looked like a hero, all tall and strong and beautiful, but then a spear came out of nowhere, right through the hole in the rock and Sam was lying on the ground. He was dead, and I knew it was my fault though I don’t know who threw the spear, and I was screaming and screaming, but then I woke up, and the room was empty. I’ve looked all over but I can’t find him. Sam’s gone.”
Fleur is twisting her slender hands together and Dean doesn’t believe he’s ever seen anyone actually wringing their hands before. But that is what she’s doing all right, and she must have caught his heart between those slim fingers and she’s twisting it to pulp, because he thinks it might just have stopped beating for a moment right then, when she described his dream and claimed it as her own.
His fingers are in his pocket, yanking out his phone and dialling Sam’s number before he’s even thought about it. It rings, and rings. Fleur’s head lifts and she rushes from the room, returning in moments holding Sam’s phone in her hand, still playing Bobby Darin’s Not for Me. Dean had thought that was a good joke when he’d hacked Sam’s phone the other day to set that ring tone. He wasn’t smiling now.
Think, Winchester, think.
The book.
The dreams, Sam going missing. There must be some connection between the two, and the only link Dean could think of was that fucking book. He spins so fast he feels dizzy for a second, his stomach lurching with the dream memories again. He shakes it off and almost runs to his bedroom, ignoring Fleur’s half started question.
He’s back before Fleur has closed her mouth, dropping the book onto one of the stainless steel counters with a bang that makes both of them jump a little. The pages fall open and a long brown feather flutters to the floor. Absently Dean bends down, picks it up and tucks it into the back of the book without taking a closer look. It’s forgotten as soon as it’s out of sight.
He stabs at the open page with an aggressive finger and glares at Fleur.
“What do you know about this?”
“I don’t understand,” Fleur protested, glancing towards the Bunker’s exit. “Shouldn’t we be out there looking for Sam? What’s the point of reading some musty old book now?”
“Because I’m sure this book has something to do with our dreams.”
“Our dreams? Wait, you dreamt about Sam too?”
Dean bites back the urge to confront her, to yell like you don’t know, bitch! He can almost hear Sam’s voice telling him to give her the benefit of the doubt, and, to be fair, imaginary Sam does have a point. Dean can’t see anything except genuine distress on Fleur’s face. So he tells her about his dream, leaving out the part where it was him casting that damn spear, because he doesn’t want to think about that, or what it could mean.
Fleur sits next to him so she can look at the book, close enough that he can feel the warmth of her skin in the cool air of the bunker, and her perfume overwhelms the musty parchment scents of the pages as they turn.
::::
The golden eagle soars. He climbs on a thermal, circling in slow, lazy swoops. Kansas is spread out beneath his wings, a manmade patchwork of precise squares that offends him. He gains altitude and allows the currents to carry him until the geometrical rigidity of the landscape fades into more the pleasing fractals of river courses and ridges of hills. He’s high enough now that the curve of the earth is visible. To the east and north stretch the flatlands, the farmlands of Kansas and Missouri, and the bleakness of Nebraska’s Great Plains. Neither direction holds any appeal for him. The red soils of the south hold a promise of warmth, while to the west the snow covered mountain ranges of Colorado call to him.
He twitches his tail feathers and drifts west, following the call.
::::
If the book holds any answers, it isn’t giving them up easily.
Fleur refuses to touch it, wrinkling her nose at the parchment pages. Dean’s nascent suspicions dissolve before they form when she tells him she’s vegetarian and doesn’t want to touch a dead animal. He rolls his eyes. Of course Sam would hitch up with a hippy, veggie flower-child.
Going through page after page of densely written script in a language Dean doesn’t recognise or understand, with minimal marginal notes or illustrations, leaves him frustrated and angry in equal measures. After a few minutes pressed against Dean’s side, Fleur gives it up as a bad job. She can’t even help decipher the handwriting, let alone translate it. She drifts away – to search the bunker again, to sleep, whatever, Dean doesn’t care and barely notices she’s gone.
He’s staring at one of the few drawings – a sketch of a flower he thinks might be meadowsweet – when Fleur announces her return by placing a plate full of hot food under Dean’s nose. Dean’s stomach rumbles loudly in response and he realises it’s mid afternoon already, and he’s eaten nothing since the previous evening. His breakfast is still on the table, untouched and uncooked.
With a surprised grunt of thanks, he tucks into what turns out to be a really tasty hotdish. He half smiles in spite of the persistent undercurrent of worry. He’s always had a soft spot for Mid West cuisine.
He makes short work of the tater tots and mac cheese and doesn’t even complain that it’s meat-free. He sits back in his chair while Fleur brings him a second helping. Maybe she isn’t so bad, after all, he thinks. He turns to where Sam should be, to tell him marry that girl, Sammy; catches himself just in time.
Shit.
Fleur slides into the chair beside him and he notices she’s not eating anything. The thought slips away when she points at the book on the table, careful not to touch it.
“Did you find anything?”
“Nothing useful. There are a few words in Latin but the rest is some language I don’t recognise, and the only pictures are of some flowers and a freaky interlace pattern that looks like a woman’s face mixed up with an owl,” Dean chews and swallows, suddenly mindful of Sam’s disgust at him talking with his mouth full and for once not finding it funny to do it anyway. The starch and cheese sits heavy in his stomach where moments before it had warmed and satisfied.
“I’m sure this book has something to do with it though.”
Fleur leans in closer, ostensibly to get a better look at the page Dean has open, and Dean can feel the soft give of her small breast pressing into his arm. His dick twitches and he shifts, uncomfortable. Sure, it’s been a long time since he had a woman in his arms, but this is his brother’s girl, and besides. Sam’s missing. There’d be no fun in stealing Sam’s girl when Sam isn’t there to tease about it.
His eyes widen and he stands. The squeal of his chair on the polished floor echoes in the silent bunker. Why is he thinking about sex at all? Especially with Fleur. He doesn’t even like the girl. He dumps the half full bowl in the sink and tries to think logically. Since he’d woken from that dream his brain has been muddled and his attempts at Sam-like research is getting him nowhere.
The bunker is warded against just about anything supernatural that was known to the Men of Letters, and yet Sam had somehow vanished while deep inside the wards. So either something unknown had penetrated the bunker’s defences, or they had inadvertently brought something inside the wards that made them vulnerable – first to the dreams, and then physically, in Sam’s case. Is it Dean’s fault? Had he triggered something when he’d fallen asleep with that book in his hands?
Maybe he’s missed something obvious. He drags his hands over his face, tries to concentrate. First things first. Search the bunker from top to bottom. If Sam had gone missing here, surely there should be a clue, some indication of where and how he’d vanished – whether it was a door left open that should be closed, a hex box missing from a shelf, a scuff mark in the dust on a store-room’s floor – something.
He doesn’t know why he hadn’t done a search straight away, but he’s going to put that right now.
He shoves the book into his jacket and drags Fleur around with him. For some reason, he doesn’t want to let her out of his sight.
They find precisely nothing, either inside the bunker or for about a mile radius outside when they venture out into the bitter Kansas cold. There’s no vegetation to hide behind, the trees and bushes are stripped bare by winter. His only consolation is that the snow that the north wind is promising hasn’t arrived yet, so at least Sam’s not fallen, hypothermic, into a drift.
Darkness and the below freezing temperatures it brings forces them back into the bunker, when even Dean has to acknowledge the futility of carrying on. In the war room Dean thumps both fists on the eternally lit-up map table. Frustration and worry lodge in his throat, choking him. He wants to hit something, kill something, but the only person there is Fleur. The bunker’s central heating is suddenly stifling.
“I don’t get it.” Dean was looking at Fleur but he didn’t really see her, he was thinking too hard. “When it comes to the supernatural, this is the safest place in the continental US. It’s screwed down tighter than a Supermax. It makes no sense, how Sam can be gone without a single thing being out of place. There are no weapons missing, and I don’t think he’s taken any spare clothes. His jacket’s still on the back of his door, for fuck’s sake. Wherever he is, he’s unarmed and practically naked.”
“Do you think we should,” Fleur hesitates and waves a hand vaguely. “I don’t know, search wider?”
Dean closes his eyes. He can’t bear the blandness of Fleur’s anxiety. “Search wider,” he almost spits out the words. “We’re almost at the centre of the USA, we’ve got thousands of miles of wide in every fucking direction and no idea where to start.”
His eyes fly open at a soft touch. Fleur is holding his clenched fists in both hands. She presses them to her breast, her cornflower-blue eyes wide and earnest.
“Dean, I know how anxious you feel, but we’re no good to Sam if we’re tired and hungry. Let me warm up some of that stew then we should get some sleep. Maybe the morning will bring some good news, or fresh information to help us search in the right places. At the very least we should be able to think clearer with some food inside us.”
Dean wants to protest. How can he rest when Sam might be injured or worse? But he’s so very weary. Somehow he finds himself sitting down again, this time with a bowl of steaming, fragrant stew in front of him. He has to admit, the food warms him and he feels more hopeful when he’s cleaned up his plate with the fresh bread Fleur produced out of nowhere.
He fights against the post-food coma for all of three minutes before he gives in and follows Fleur to his room. He baulks at her coming in with him, which she seems to be hinting at, waving her off towards Sam’s room and kicking his door shut. For the second night running he doesn’t bother to undress, just throws himself face down and lets the memory foam welcome him home.
::::
For many years Lozen of the Chiricahua Apache dream-walks through the sacred mountains, until one day her peace is disturbed by the distant cry of an eagle that is not a bird. Curious, she wakes. Stepping out of the cave, Lozen’s moccasins touch Apache soil for the first time in a very long time. The air on the Sierra Blanca is thin and laden with the ice of winter, but she breathes deep, in spite of the daggers of pain the cold sends through her lungs. Pain is useful, it’s part of life. After decades sleeping, it’s a good thing to be reminded of that.
She follows the thread of sentience that woke her from her dreaming, climbing high amongst the wind-sculpted sandstone slopes of the White Mountain to the snow line and back, until her thighs protest from the strain and her calves cramp. She’s not as young as she was when she rode with her brother, Victorio, and could fight for days and nights on end against their enemies. She is older now, and the land feels different. She avoids the few white people she sees and lets them live. She has other business to attend to, more important than fighting a battle that was lost a long, long time ago, though it pains her heart to let the past go.
She finds the golden eagle high in the branches of an old bare-branched Ponderosa pine, surrounded by dense stands of juniper. He’s scrawny, exhausted and bedraggled. There are dark stains of blood matting his feathers, but he refuses to come down when she calls. He glares at her, his tawny eyes wild and stubborn even through the dullness of pain. She can see the man inside the bird, but she can also see that he has no awareness of his humanity. Whatever the enchantment is that is laid on him, it is strong.
First things first.
Lozen camps beneath the pine and sets out to charm the eagle down from its perch using the song of the Sacred Cave. Perhaps the wordless sounds bequeathed by a long lost spirit to an unnamed medicine woman will enable another medicine woman to speak to this troubled spirit’s heart. She keeps her voice low and soft as she starts to chant.
::::
Below his tree, the eagle watches the human woman fold her legs and sit. She doesn’t appear to be armed, unlike the hunter who’d shot at him some hours ago, when the eagle had been foolish enough to swoop too low over the Cibola National Forest outside of Albuquerque. Weariness and hunger had made him stupid, and the rifle bullet that clipped him had been his reward. He isn’t sure how he’d made it this far, but he knows his flight ends here. Weak to the point of no return, his claws grip the branch as if it was prey, in a death grip.
The woman is making noises; strange, rhythmical and hypnotic. She’s quiet, but his hearing is sharp. Not as sharp as his eyesight, but good enough.
He’s cold and hungry and his thoughts are full of pain. The throbbing has spread through his left side, but somehow the voice below is beginning to distract him. He ruffles his feathers then gapes his beak, hissing as even that slight movement intensifies the agony.
The woman is holding out her arm like a branch. The rhythm of her chant alters, dropping a subtle fifth, and the eagle stretches out his wings in defiance – of her, of the pain, of a memory he can’t quite grasp. He understands that this is likely to be his last act.
He drops, finds the offered perch of flesh and bone and grips tight, eye-to-eye with the strange human for a few seconds before he loses consciousness.
::::
Lozen has forgotten much during her long absence, but she remembers how to heal. She gathers the herbs she needs and uses a smooth rock to mix the poultice. She stokes her fire and boils water in birch bark, adding hot stones to heat it. The bird’s wound looks to have been made by a bullet, though thankfully it had passed cleanly through, so there was no excavation required. The eagle is thinner than it should be, lighter than optimum flying weight, and she wonders how long he was on the wing before some damn fool shot him. She wonders what the human inside the bird was fleeing from that bound him to this form so tightly.
She talks to him while she works, feels his dual consciousness return even before the feathers flinch under her fingers and the golden eye opens. Something of the man is there, in the evenness of the bird’s gaze, and he doesn’t struggle. He stays still and quiet, as if that human part of him knows what is needed to mend his torn flesh. The broken feathers are harder to deal with, but most will heal in time. His full magnificence may be somewhat marred by the gaps left by missing pinions, but he’ll be functional.
While he heals, she tries to reach out to the human spirit inside the bird. He’s stubborn and wary, and locked into the eagle at a fundamental level she’s never experienced before. She’s more than surprised to find he’s a white man. She’d been convinced he was eastern Apache, or Navajo at a push. He could also have been Cheyenne or Pawnee from the images of the Great Plains that ran through his memories. Lozen isn’t stupid. She knows the world has moved on during her dreaming. She’d seen some of the changes when she’d trekked over the White Mountain, following the eagle’s silent call. But still, finding a white man who can change into his spirit-shape is unexpected.
Perhaps that explains why he’s bound so tightly to this form. Inexperience and ignorance are a combination that’s likely to mess up a first shape change. It seems unlikely this man had any guidance, or he would not be in this sorry situation.
Lozen delves into the eagle’s mind and finds a few recent memories, enough to see that he’d flown many miles from the plains to find his way to the sacred mountain, but the man himself is elusive. All she gleans is a great sense of hurt and loss, and two names, paired spirits. Sam and Dean.
“Ah,” Lozen whispers, “you are brothers.”
Sam’s spirit is trapped in the eagle, grieving and alone without his brother. Lozen closes her eyes against a familiar pain. This she understands. The emptiness in her heart where Victorio should be is cold as a snowstorm, and his death feels like it happened yesterday.
Restoring Sam may be harder than she thought, without the brother’s presence to help him find his way.
Lozen hunts. She kills mule deer and uses their hides and juniper branches to build a wikiup to shelter her and the eagle from the winter winds. The wikiup smells good, of new cut wood and home, but the deer meat smells even better as she roasts it over her fire. She feeds the eagle raw meat and watches the brightness return to his eyes.
When he flies for the first time she doesn’t expect him to return.
The white man inside the eagle surprises her for a second time when he does.
Part 2 this way!