RBB Art Fic - Fly Away Home Masterpost
Dec. 4th, 2012 08:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
glasslogicFic Title: Fly Away Home
Artist Name:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sammycolt24
Art Masterpost: Here!
Genre: Gen for SPN
Pairing: OC only
Disclaimer: I have no rights to any of the copyrighted characters/material in this fic, and I make no profit from it.
Rating: R
Word count: 11,171
Warnings/Spoilers: None.
Author's Notes: I would like to extend my endless appreciation to the following people who stepped up to help me in my informational and grammatical questing:reapertownusa summerholt, elusive_life_77, caz2y5, redfox_12, lylithj2, etrix, and of course the fantastic artist and lovely lady who created the prompt in the first place, sammycolt24. Please don't hold any of them accountable *dryly* This fic was written for the 2012 SPN Reverse Big Bang. You can also read this story on A03 HERE!
Summary: Sam never liked witches much, and nothing about being sent half a century back in time is likely to change his mind.
Fly Away Home
Sam had always known taking the job in Meeteetse, Wyoming was a mistake. Whatever the state had to offer in open roads and amazing scenery didn't make up for the fact that his brother couldn't even mention the name of the city without snickering. It was a bad sign when he wanted to hit Dean before they even started a job.
His own irritation with his brother didn't make it open season for anyone else though, especially not a teenage witch on their suspect list for multiple attempted murders.
“Look,” Sam finally interrupted Peter’s litany of mumbled nonsense and nervous half-glances over to where Dean lay prone on the barn floor, “take a deep breath, and just tell me what happened. I’m not going to hurt you.” Sam wasn’t entirely sure that last part was a true statement, but he certainly wasn’t going to do anything until he knew what was wrong with Dean. What happened after would depend on what the hell had happened in the first place.
Peter cast another glance at Dean and rubbed sweaty hands on his jeans. He swallowed hard and nodded, still refusing to meet Sam’s eyes. “It was supposed to be me,” the teenager muttered. “He wasn’t -- it was supposed to be me!”
Sam’s eyes narrowed as the narrative broke off.
Peter’s tongue tripped over itself as he hurried to fill in the silence. “It was just a stupid spell. I wanted to find out… it doesn’t matter. I wasn’t hurting anyone! It was supposed to be me,” he repeated, gaze sliding off Sam’s face and back to the shadows of the barn.
“What was supposed to be you?” Sam demanded. “What did you do to my brother?”
“I didn’t do anything! He grabbed me, it wasn’t my fault! If he had just minded his own business, he would be fine!”
Sam swallowed his anger down, struggling to speak calmly. "What does the spell do?”
“It’s a--" Peter twisted his hands together awkwardly, like he couldn’t find the right words to explain. Sam’s fear grew in the long pause while the boy struggled, “--seeing spell.”
“Seeing? Like the 'cute girl from your chemistry class' seeing? Maybe catching her in the shower kind of stuff?” That didn’t sound so bad. At least not on the survivability scale. And it was the sort of thing a teenager might be dabbling in magic for -- but Peter was shaking his head before Sam even finished speaking, and the worried, guilty looks he was giving Dean caused Sam’s stomach to tie itself in knots.
“I’m not allowed to tell you.”
Sam shifted so his jacket swung back, revealing the gun on his hip.
Instead of loosening his tongue like Sam had hoped, the sight seemed to help Peter recover his footing. He gathered the remains of his dignity and straightened up. “You can shoot me if you want, but I can’t tell you. It wouldn’t help you anyways,” he added hastily. “I can’t fix this. I wouldn’t even know where to start. At the best anything I tried would probably just kill him faster.”
“So he’s dying.”
“I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. He surprised me, and I pushed him…”
Sam rubbed at the throbbing spot between his eyebrows. “Did you hex the girls at your school?”
Peter gasped. “What? No! I would never--"
Sam believed him. An entire life spent lying and ferreting out liars had given him excellent instincts, and the kid was already unbalanced by whatever the hell had happened to Dean.
“Someone hurt some of your classmates with magic; the shop owner gave us a few names. You were on it.” Sam managed to keep himself from sneaking his own glance at Dean lying motionless on the hard packed dirt of the barn floor. “He just… wanted to ask you some questions.” They hadn’t actually discussed what the end game was if the witch they were chasing turned out to be a sixteen year old kid when they had split up the shop owner’s list, but it was a moot point now.
“It wasn’t me. I swear.”
“I don’t care about that anymore. I do care about my brother.”
“I told you, I can’t--"
“Fine,” Sam ground out, resisting the urge to hit him. “Who can?”
“What were you thinking?!”
Peter said nothing; having received a hard slap at his first stammered answer he had apparently decided that silence was the better part of valor. The woman facing him down in the room of angry adults was not, in Sam’s experienced estimation, the most dangerous in the room. But she was certainly the most volatile.
“What the hell were you possibly thinking!?”
Peter just stared at his threadbare sneakers, wavy brown hair hanging in a defensive curtain around his face. Sam didn’t think the show of submission would save the teenager from another slap, but it wasn’t his concern. Every minute away from Dean ratcheted his tension up another notch. The barn seemed secure, it was relatively isolated and showed all the signs of being long abandoned -- but Dean was still lying there helpless. Maybe dying. Sam hadn't been sure that with magic involved, moving him was a good idea.
“Maybe you could yell at him later.” It was the first thing Sam has said since entering the house and it caused a ripple of silence as all eyes -- most of them an odd amber tea color that screamed kinship louder than words -- turned towards him, then immediately shifted towards a stooped figure all but lost beneath a dark, enveloping shawl.
“Go upstairs, Peter.” The elderly woman's voice was surprisingly robust, and Peter wasted no time in fleeing the room. “The rest of you can go too.”
Sam caught more hard looks. “But--"
“Leave.” Her tone left no space for further objections and in the space of a minute she and Sam were the only two in the room. She motioned to the recently vacated couch and Sam sat stiffly on the edge. He needed her help more than he needed to argue over details.
“My brother--"
“I know what’s wrong with your brother, Mr. Winchester.”
It was nice that one of them did. Peter had insisted only his family could help Sam, and had given terse directions to his home. Once the front door was open, Peter had gotten less than a sentence out before the room exploded into a torrent of anger in a harsh, foreign language.
"How do you know my name?"
"Peter told me." Sam was pretty damn sure Peter hadn't done anything of the sort.
"Look, Ms--"
"Alexander."
"Ms. Alexander. Peter -- he's done something to my brother. I need your help, or someone's help, undoing it."
"What was your brother doing with my grandson?" she asked calmly.
"What did your grandson do to my brother?" Sam snapped back.
"I know what you are, Mr. Winchester. We’ve weathered hunters before. If you’re here looking for trouble--"
"We're not. We were looking into the incidents at the school. There were some girls hexed, one of them almost died. A shop owner gave us Peter's name and we just wanted to talk to him. I don’t care what you and your family are up too. I just want my brother back. Please."
"Talk to him," she repeated flatly.
"Dying teenagers," Sam countered.
The woman held his gaze, there was something in her eyes that was… indescribable. Sam's glance slid away almost without volition.
"I'd like you to wait here for a few minutes."
"Why?"
"Because I asked nicely. Do you want help or not?"
Sam waited for what felt like a short eternity, perched on the edge of an antique couch forcing himself not to stand up and pace. When he calmed down enough to take it in, the room was really quite astonishing in its broad range of styles and colors. Sam didn't know a lot about furniture or decorating, but he was pretty sure it took some masterful vision to design a room where an elaborate antique sideboard and a cherry red bucket chair from the seventies both just worked. It was like a time capsule of shifting fashion and on a different day, Sam might have been fascinated.
As it was, the unusual nature of the room was all but lost on him.
By the time Ms. Alexander swept back into the room Sam was ready to start climbing the walls. As old as she was, she looked like she had aged ten years.
"Come here."
"I need answers."
"You need to mind your manners. Come here. I want to show you something."
When Sam was by her side, she pointed to a fading black and white portrait of a good looking young man in uniform in a frame that lacked any hint of dust. Sam dutifully examined it, but didn't see anything significant and turned back to her impatiently after a cursory examination. She was still gazing at the picture.
"My grandson, Mitch. He died in World War II."
"I'm very sorry. What does this have to do with Dean?"
Her gaze slid back to the picture. "Everything."
Half an hour later, Sam was sitting on the couch again, a cup of tea in one hand and listening with growing bemusement as "Ms-Alexander-call-me-Tia" spun a bewildering story.
"Mitch was a traitor--"
"He was accused of being a traitor, it was never proven."
"Right, an accused traitor that got his entire squad killed."
"Most of them," Tia agreed. "Including his best friend Jamie Johnston and several other young men that Mitch was good friends with. They said they saw him running off into the woods right before the attack, but he wouldn't have done it, Sam. He simply wouldn't have."
"And Peter was trying to go back in time to prove this? So… Dean is back in the forties fighting Nazis?" Sam stared at her. It was probably better than, say Yeti's, but still…
"Not quite."
"Then what!"
"He's possessing my grandson."
"What does that even mean?!"
"Don't shout at me, Sam." Tia sipped at her mug. "Our family is an old one. Very old. Before the pyramids old. And way back then the gods people worshiped had different names. Different natures. They would grant favors to the favored, if they knew how to ask."
"How do you ask for a god’s favor?"
Tia eyed him over the rim of her cup. "You're too intelligent to ask that question."
"The spell Peter was casting," Sam said flatly.
"All spells are just ways of asking, the difference is what you ask for. And from what."
"What was Peter begging favors from?" Sam asked harshly.
"Our family worshipped Time, Mr. Winchester. We sacrificed at its altars and it favored us greatly in return. Even in these lesser years, when the world has forgotten true majesty and power, we carry some of its grace."
Sam could tell that trying to get to the bottom of that would just open more rabbit holes, and he already felt like Alice. He didn't need a family history. He needed his brother. "Fine. It's your family's spell, can you just… uncast it?"
She sighed and set down the cup. "Peter's in trouble, Sam. But not as much trouble as he would have been in if your brother hadn't interrupted. That interruption probably saved Peter's life. He's an idiot," she added tartly, "but we're still fond of him. Almost no one survives what Peter cast, and to be thrown headlong into it with no warning or anchors… It's not a matter of uncasting for your brother; it's a matter of survival. Someone is going to have to follow him into the past, and I won't risk my family for his life. But I'll help you, if you're willing.
An hour later, Sam was lying on the bare dirt barn floor, bare feet pressed sole to sole against Dean's, and the trickle of dust and oily stench of a kerosene concoction used to scribe runes around him causing him to sneeze.
"The hardest part is going to be remembering who you are."
"I know who I am."
Tia glared at him briefly before turning back to the powders she was mixing in a mortar. "You know who you are now, but you have no idea who you will be then. And Dean has even less of a clue than you will. You have until Mitch dies to bring your brother back to himself, if he falls into that darkness with my grandson, then he will be lost to then and now."
"What will happen to his body?" Sam asked quietly.
"The same thing that happens to other human vegetables. It will continue on for awhile, and then gradually cease to hold life."
Sam stared down at Dean's peaceful face, willing him to wake up before he had to go any further with this. "Was finding out the truth about Mitch so important to Peter?"
"Peter's young, and the young sometimes feel like they have to do stupid, desperate things to prove their worthiness in the world."
"I'm surprised no one had done it before."
"Both of Mitch's sister's tried. Eleanor never came back, but we managed to stop Iris. I want to know the truth of what happened as much as anyone, but I'm not willing to sacrifice my family to do it."
"I don't care about your truth; I only care about my brother."
"Family is important," Tia said simply.
"What about this guy you're sending me to, you sure this is the best one?"
"Jamie was Mitch's best friend. They knew each other as school boys and were almost inseparable. We know for sure they were in the same camp when it happened. You'll have about thirty hours to find your brother and bring him back to himself. After that… whatever happened will happen. You must remember Sam; you cannot change the past in any meaningful way. Half a century of time since is weighing on it and it will resist any actions you take that cause more than the most gentle of ripples. If it was yesterday, you would have more options."
"Then how am I supposed to warn Dean?!"
"You must find the quiet times, the spaces between that will hold no bearing on subsequent events and try and reach him then. Jarring people loose is not so hard, it's staying suspended that proves the challenge."
"You speak like a woman with a lot of experience."
"It's rude to ask a lady her age," Tia said primly.
"That's why I'm not asking how Mitch and Peter can both be your grandsons," Sam said pointedly.
"Wise child. Do you remember what I said about anchors and talismans?"
"My tattoo."
"It holds power," she agreed. "Personal and magical. Hold it firmly in your mind, what it should look like, where it should be."
"I've been doing that," Sam said irritably.
She ignored him, and set down her mortar to crouch by Dean's side and tug his necklace over his head. She tossed it to Sam. "That too, has power, and personal meaning. It burns with it. It will be of no use to your brother, but it might give you strength."
Sam pulled it over his head and looked at her questioningly.
“Wrap your hand around it.” Sam grabbed hold of the pendent and closed his eyes, clinging to his brother’s necklace like a security blanket that could save them from the mistakes of the past few hours.
“No, tighter. Tight until it cuts into your skin.”
Sam’s eyes flew back open. Tia nodded towards his hand. “It needs to hurt; it needs to be bathed in your blood. It has power, but that power needs to be tied to you deeper than flesh if it’s to help at all.”
“Exactly how is this going to help me again?” Sam asked doubtfully, relaxing back onto the dirt when Tia turned back to the mortar and pestle she was grinding her powders in.
“It might not,” she admitted easily, “or maybe it will be the thread that keeps you tied to yourself. Just like all the others protections I’m trying to give you. Some may work, none may work, or maybe it will just be the one we tossed in at the last minute.”
Sam took the hint and tightened his fist around the pendent until the horns on the tiny mask bit deeply into his palm. Tia’s low chant was a distant background as he grits his teeth and forced the points even deeper. It seemed to bite almost eagerly into his skin and Sam didn’t know if the odd heat was from the pain, or the pendent itself. It had been a gift to his dad from Bobby, what seemed like lifetimes ago, and when their dad had seen it around Dean’s neck, the last-minute theft had been barely worth more than a grunt of acknowledgement.
Neither of them had ever gotten around to asking what the damn thing was supposed to do in the first place, but Sam didn’t see any possibility that was worse than the current predicament.
“Now what?”
“Now you be quiet and close your eyes. I want you to concentrate. Think of your tattoo, and the feel of that amulet in your hand. Think of the rough dirt under your back, and your brother’s skin against your own. Think of everything it means to be Sam Winchester. Good things, bad things, powerful things. Things that are uniquely you.”
The rising tide of something was making his skin prickle and his stomach felt like the floor was falling out beneath him. He struggled to speak. “And Dean? I should focus on Dean, right?”
Somewhere above him Tia huffed a deep breath out and fine dust settled over his skin, every speck with the weight of anvils. He gasped, resisting the urge to struggle even while the air felt crushed from his lungs. “It’s not Dean you should be so concerned about losing. If you can keep yourself, you will find your brother.”
Sam swallowed. He thought about Jessica, and cold Christmas’s in threadbare hotels. The look on his dad’s face when he left for Stanford. The smell of the hospital where he died. Sam struggled to find something that defined himself that wasn’t soaked in pain. He thought about Dean, but forcing his mind past the current crisis was almost impossible.
Sam made the effort; hand tightening impossibly further until the wooden planks overhead and the faint sweetness of straw on the air caused another memory to well. Being nine years old and left with Dean on a friend’s farm. Pounding heat of hot, late summer sun and splinters from the weathered fence rail they'd hung on, bored. The shadow of the crop duster, and the friendly neighbor who indulged the fascination of a stranger’s children and let them crawl all over the plane. Even taking them up once at the end of a long day. Being able to be children for a few days out of a lifetime of adult responsibilities. Sam steeled himself with the memory of his brother’s carefree laughter. Dean had wanted to be a pilot after that summer. For awhile.
Sometimes fate was a bitch.
The sharp crack of a struck match and he couldn’t stop his eyes from flying open just in time to see Tia drop the spark of fire to the runed-circle he was lying in. Her eyes were expressionless as she regarded him. “Goodbye, Sam.”
The rush of catching fire seemed to suddenly eat up his entire field of vision, stars spun in the black space overhead. Dean’s feet burned against his soles and voices streamed through his mind like threads he couldn’t quite catch, wrapping around his name until they tore it to shreds. It was terribly important that he remember something, so terribly important… He wracked his panicking mind for the memory, fighting a losing battle against the drowning tide of darkness until everything was swallowed up by blue… the empty endless blue of the pristine autumn sky.
He couldn’t recall ever noticing a sky so blue back home in Wyoming and wondered if there was something about France that made the air so clear, or if it was just still being alive over hostile territory in the middle of a war that had already killed half the guys he’d trained with.
Or maybe it was being in love. He killed that thought before it could go any further. Static on the radio snapped his wandering thoughts back to the present. Through the racket he could make out the tail end of a bad joke. Jamie frowned and adjusted the tuner. His current assignment was a restless mix of pilots from different areas and different experiences – and not all of them were good at following protocol when the day was so nice and the enemy seemed so distant. He’d survived his own hard lessons, and could only hope that educating the newcomers didn’t get anyone killed.
Death was never that far away in a war.
They wouldn’t be able to irritate him much longer. The runway, cleared for the moment of its disguising tangle of camouflage, spilled out ahead of him. A brief contact with operations and he glided the Mustang smoothly down, the plane as responsive to his desire as others were… stubborn. A specific image started to form but Jamie squashed it ruthlessly. He was sure plenty of people would be lining up on the ground to ruin his perfect day, no reason to get the ball rolling himself.
Touchdown on the dirt runway jostled him from the easy glide of flight, and he was glad to be able to shut her down under the overhang of ancient trees. A lot of effort had gone into trying to make the temporary airfield look like a natural forest clearing and some ramshackle huts. So far the illusion was holding, but no one imagined it would hold forever. The heap of tarps and branches that would cover his sweet girl lay a few feet away, but there was maintenance to be done first. And then maybe some clean clothes. He loved flying, but that trip down the dirt runway always left him feeling bathed in sand.
“Aren’t you ever going to name that plane, Johnston?”
Jamie grinned and jumped down. “Not in this lifetime, Richards. I hear it’s bad luck.”
“Better bad luck than bad manners. You keep calling her by her numbers and she might take a dislike to you one of these days.”
Jamie gave the plane an affectionate pat and raked his greeter with a glance. “I see they sent you back in one piece. Did you bring what I asked you for?”
Richards snorted, and then his lowered voice took on a surprisingly serious tone. “Yeah, I got your stuff. Stashed it under your pillow. It’s not the only thing I brought back, though.”
“Trouble?”
“Not yet, but--" Richards hesitated. “Some French guy and his aide, or something. They’re here to get the Major up to speed and maybe do some work in the area. I don’t know.”
Jamie shrugged. “People come and go. What’s the problem?”
“There isn’t a problem. Yet. But I don’t think your buddy likes him.”
“The plane? She doesn’t mind meeting new people.”
“I’m talking about--"
“I know who you’re talking about,” Jamie cut in impatiently. He knew. Oh, how he knew, and the surge of affection and irritation did nothing to help his growing headache. “He doesn’t like strangers.”
“You’ve got to talk to him. The new guy’s been in camp less than an hour and I think even the damn squirrels know exactly how he feels already. If the Major has to step in--"
“I’ll take care of it.”
“Jamie--"
“I said I’d handle it, Richards. It won’t be a problem.”
Richards nodded, shoulders visibly relaxing. “Better you than me. Want me to put your nameless lady to bed?”
“You mean do your job?” Jamie raised an eyebrow. He usually hung around to do the maintenance himself, or at least help out. But the lure of a quick clean up was attractive, and he apparently had other things to see too as well. He nodded. “I’ll swing back by later.”
Richards rolled his eyes and made a good natured gesture in Jamie’s direction that he would never have risked if anyone else had been close enough to catch it. Being from the same part of the same state made a man almost a brother on the killing fields of a foreign country. Almost, but there were some things even closer. And vastly more… complicated.
With an inwards sigh, Jamie walked past his shared tent and made his way into the heart of camp. The flyover had been routine, debriefing would only take a few minutes. And maybe he could meet the new guy and see what it was about him that had set a certain someone’s teeth on edge.
There was nothing about Captain Mathieu Durand or his aide, Sergeant Julien Blanc, which struck Jamie as odd. They seemed tired and focused on the business at hand, but spoke good English and had been perfectly polite when Major Davis introduced them. It was obvious Richards hadn't been exaggerating the situation though; Davis had dropped more than one veiled remark in Jamie's direction that indicated there had better not be any international friction while the visitors were in camp. Jamie intended to deliver the message clearly, but its intended recipient had been notably absent since Jamie touched ground barely an hour before. So instead he went to get cleaned up before someone found him something else to do.
The inside of the tent was warmer than the blustery weather outside, an entire day worth of heat baking on canvas kept the rough accommodations comfortable long into the night. In the middle of the afternoon it was almost too warm, but not for a quick wash. Jamie tossed his jacket and gear onto his cot and made quick work of the buttons on his uniform shirt. It wasn't in bad shape for cleanliness and a quick shake rid it of the worst of the grit. The t-shirt was another matter; he'd wash it in the river with the rest of his clothes when he bathed later, but for now it was definitely going in the dirty pile.
With a damp cloth, he wiped at his skin to remove the worst of the grit, paying no special attention to the myriad of half healed scratches and bruises he'd accumulated helping to cut the airfield out of the forest in the first place. They weren't of any significance and would heal fine on their own. Of more significance was the six inch long scar just above the belt on his left side, still raw enough that the little holes that had held stitches still clearly lined the puckered gash. A souvenir of the crash landing that had destroyed his last plane. Jamie wasn't complaining though, he'd walked away and safe into the hands of allies. Most pilots who went down couldn't say the same.
He wracked his brain for the mess schedule while cleaning up. Was it meatloaf or spaghetti on Tuesdays?
Left wrist, up his arm.
Probably meatloaf, it seemed like spaghetti was a Wednesday thing.
Over his bicep where a pulled muscle reminded him that he should really be favoring that arm for awhile. Jamie glanced down to see if there was any bruising there… and Sam reeled back. Or didn't, because Jamie continued his cursory inspection and musing over the meal plan while Sam fought down panic and the sense of being trapped that came from inhabiting a body he couldn't control. He could feel the washcloth in his hand and the warm air pressing against his skin. He could feel the blink of his eyes and the movement as Jamie went to grab a clean shirt from his gear, but it was completely disconnected from Sam's own will.
Sam floundered, was it meatloaf? Panic surged again and he struggled, trying to find something to hold himself away from Jamie, to keep himself Sam and not drown in the other's identity. He remembered what Tia had said about talismans and wished he had taken her more seriously. She had spoken of losing one's identity and not even knowing it was lost, Sam had envisioned something like daydreaming and drifting away, he'd figured his focus on rescuing Dean would keep him safe from that.
It didn't, not even close. He had a complete and total understanding of why the spell killed so many. Even now, with adrenaline singing through nerves he no longer had, the riptide pull of Jamie's perspective was smothering. Sam abandoned his lingering hope that Dean would be aware and reachable. He had gone in fully warned, and armed, and charmed -- and if Jamie hadn't accidentally invoked the specter of Sam's missing tattoo and jarred him free with the discrepancy, he would still be idly wondering about dinner. He couldn't worry about Dean; it was everything he could do to worry about himself.
.
Artist Name:
sammycolt24Art Masterpost: Here!
Genre: Gen for SPN
Pairing: OC only
Disclaimer: I have no rights to any of the copyrighted characters/material in this fic, and I make no profit from it.
Rating: R
Word count: 11,171
Warnings/Spoilers: None.
Author's Notes: I would like to extend my endless appreciation to the following people who stepped up to help me in my informational and grammatical questing:
reapertownusa summerholt, elusive_life_77, caz2y5, redfox_12, lylithj2, etrix, and of course the fantastic artist and lovely lady who created the prompt in the first place, sammycolt24. Please don't hold any of them accountable *dryly* This fic was written for the 2012 SPN Reverse Big Bang. You can also read this story on A03 HERE!Summary: Sam never liked witches much, and nothing about being sent half a century back in time is likely to change his mind.
Fly Away Home
Sam had always known taking the job in Meeteetse, Wyoming was a mistake. Whatever the state had to offer in open roads and amazing scenery didn't make up for the fact that his brother couldn't even mention the name of the city without snickering. It was a bad sign when he wanted to hit Dean before they even started a job.
His own irritation with his brother didn't make it open season for anyone else though, especially not a teenage witch on their suspect list for multiple attempted murders.
“Look,” Sam finally interrupted Peter’s litany of mumbled nonsense and nervous half-glances over to where Dean lay prone on the barn floor, “take a deep breath, and just tell me what happened. I’m not going to hurt you.” Sam wasn’t entirely sure that last part was a true statement, but he certainly wasn’t going to do anything until he knew what was wrong with Dean. What happened after would depend on what the hell had happened in the first place.
Peter cast another glance at Dean and rubbed sweaty hands on his jeans. He swallowed hard and nodded, still refusing to meet Sam’s eyes. “It was supposed to be me,” the teenager muttered. “He wasn’t -- it was supposed to be me!”
Sam’s eyes narrowed as the narrative broke off.
Peter’s tongue tripped over itself as he hurried to fill in the silence. “It was just a stupid spell. I wanted to find out… it doesn’t matter. I wasn’t hurting anyone! It was supposed to be me,” he repeated, gaze sliding off Sam’s face and back to the shadows of the barn.
“What was supposed to be you?” Sam demanded. “What did you do to my brother?”
“I didn’t do anything! He grabbed me, it wasn’t my fault! If he had just minded his own business, he would be fine!”
Sam swallowed his anger down, struggling to speak calmly. "What does the spell do?”
“It’s a--" Peter twisted his hands together awkwardly, like he couldn’t find the right words to explain. Sam’s fear grew in the long pause while the boy struggled, “--seeing spell.”
“Seeing? Like the 'cute girl from your chemistry class' seeing? Maybe catching her in the shower kind of stuff?” That didn’t sound so bad. At least not on the survivability scale. And it was the sort of thing a teenager might be dabbling in magic for -- but Peter was shaking his head before Sam even finished speaking, and the worried, guilty looks he was giving Dean caused Sam’s stomach to tie itself in knots.
“I’m not allowed to tell you.”
Sam shifted so his jacket swung back, revealing the gun on his hip.
Instead of loosening his tongue like Sam had hoped, the sight seemed to help Peter recover his footing. He gathered the remains of his dignity and straightened up. “You can shoot me if you want, but I can’t tell you. It wouldn’t help you anyways,” he added hastily. “I can’t fix this. I wouldn’t even know where to start. At the best anything I tried would probably just kill him faster.”
“So he’s dying.”
“I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. He surprised me, and I pushed him…”
Sam rubbed at the throbbing spot between his eyebrows. “Did you hex the girls at your school?”
Peter gasped. “What? No! I would never--"
Sam believed him. An entire life spent lying and ferreting out liars had given him excellent instincts, and the kid was already unbalanced by whatever the hell had happened to Dean.
“Someone hurt some of your classmates with magic; the shop owner gave us a few names. You were on it.” Sam managed to keep himself from sneaking his own glance at Dean lying motionless on the hard packed dirt of the barn floor. “He just… wanted to ask you some questions.” They hadn’t actually discussed what the end game was if the witch they were chasing turned out to be a sixteen year old kid when they had split up the shop owner’s list, but it was a moot point now.
“It wasn’t me. I swear.”
“I don’t care about that anymore. I do care about my brother.”
“I told you, I can’t--"
“Fine,” Sam ground out, resisting the urge to hit him. “Who can?”
~~~~~
“What were you thinking?!”
Peter said nothing; having received a hard slap at his first stammered answer he had apparently decided that silence was the better part of valor. The woman facing him down in the room of angry adults was not, in Sam’s experienced estimation, the most dangerous in the room. But she was certainly the most volatile.
“What the hell were you possibly thinking!?”
Peter just stared at his threadbare sneakers, wavy brown hair hanging in a defensive curtain around his face. Sam didn’t think the show of submission would save the teenager from another slap, but it wasn’t his concern. Every minute away from Dean ratcheted his tension up another notch. The barn seemed secure, it was relatively isolated and showed all the signs of being long abandoned -- but Dean was still lying there helpless. Maybe dying. Sam hadn't been sure that with magic involved, moving him was a good idea.
“Maybe you could yell at him later.” It was the first thing Sam has said since entering the house and it caused a ripple of silence as all eyes -- most of them an odd amber tea color that screamed kinship louder than words -- turned towards him, then immediately shifted towards a stooped figure all but lost beneath a dark, enveloping shawl.
“Go upstairs, Peter.” The elderly woman's voice was surprisingly robust, and Peter wasted no time in fleeing the room. “The rest of you can go too.”
Sam caught more hard looks. “But--"
“Leave.” Her tone left no space for further objections and in the space of a minute she and Sam were the only two in the room. She motioned to the recently vacated couch and Sam sat stiffly on the edge. He needed her help more than he needed to argue over details.
“My brother--"
“I know what’s wrong with your brother, Mr. Winchester.”
It was nice that one of them did. Peter had insisted only his family could help Sam, and had given terse directions to his home. Once the front door was open, Peter had gotten less than a sentence out before the room exploded into a torrent of anger in a harsh, foreign language.
"How do you know my name?"
"Peter told me." Sam was pretty damn sure Peter hadn't done anything of the sort.
"Look, Ms--"
"Alexander."
"Ms. Alexander. Peter -- he's done something to my brother. I need your help, or someone's help, undoing it."
"What was your brother doing with my grandson?" she asked calmly.
"What did your grandson do to my brother?" Sam snapped back.
"I know what you are, Mr. Winchester. We’ve weathered hunters before. If you’re here looking for trouble--"
"We're not. We were looking into the incidents at the school. There were some girls hexed, one of them almost died. A shop owner gave us Peter's name and we just wanted to talk to him. I don’t care what you and your family are up too. I just want my brother back. Please."
"Talk to him," she repeated flatly.
"Dying teenagers," Sam countered.
The woman held his gaze, there was something in her eyes that was… indescribable. Sam's glance slid away almost without volition.
"I'd like you to wait here for a few minutes."
"Why?"
"Because I asked nicely. Do you want help or not?"
~~~~~
Sam waited for what felt like a short eternity, perched on the edge of an antique couch forcing himself not to stand up and pace. When he calmed down enough to take it in, the room was really quite astonishing in its broad range of styles and colors. Sam didn't know a lot about furniture or decorating, but he was pretty sure it took some masterful vision to design a room where an elaborate antique sideboard and a cherry red bucket chair from the seventies both just worked. It was like a time capsule of shifting fashion and on a different day, Sam might have been fascinated.
As it was, the unusual nature of the room was all but lost on him.
By the time Ms. Alexander swept back into the room Sam was ready to start climbing the walls. As old as she was, she looked like she had aged ten years.
"Come here."
"I need answers."
"You need to mind your manners. Come here. I want to show you something."
When Sam was by her side, she pointed to a fading black and white portrait of a good looking young man in uniform in a frame that lacked any hint of dust. Sam dutifully examined it, but didn't see anything significant and turned back to her impatiently after a cursory examination. She was still gazing at the picture.
"My grandson, Mitch. He died in World War II."
"I'm very sorry. What does this have to do with Dean?"
Her gaze slid back to the picture. "Everything."
~~~~~
Half an hour later, Sam was sitting on the couch again, a cup of tea in one hand and listening with growing bemusement as "Ms-Alexander-call-me-Tia" spun a bewildering story.
"Mitch was a traitor--"
"He was accused of being a traitor, it was never proven."
"Right, an accused traitor that got his entire squad killed."
"Most of them," Tia agreed. "Including his best friend Jamie Johnston and several other young men that Mitch was good friends with. They said they saw him running off into the woods right before the attack, but he wouldn't have done it, Sam. He simply wouldn't have."
"And Peter was trying to go back in time to prove this? So… Dean is back in the forties fighting Nazis?" Sam stared at her. It was probably better than, say Yeti's, but still…
"Not quite."
"Then what!"
"He's possessing my grandson."
"What does that even mean?!"
"Don't shout at me, Sam." Tia sipped at her mug. "Our family is an old one. Very old. Before the pyramids old. And way back then the gods people worshiped had different names. Different natures. They would grant favors to the favored, if they knew how to ask."
"How do you ask for a god’s favor?"
Tia eyed him over the rim of her cup. "You're too intelligent to ask that question."
"The spell Peter was casting," Sam said flatly.
"All spells are just ways of asking, the difference is what you ask for. And from what."
"What was Peter begging favors from?" Sam asked harshly.
"Our family worshipped Time, Mr. Winchester. We sacrificed at its altars and it favored us greatly in return. Even in these lesser years, when the world has forgotten true majesty and power, we carry some of its grace."
Sam could tell that trying to get to the bottom of that would just open more rabbit holes, and he already felt like Alice. He didn't need a family history. He needed his brother. "Fine. It's your family's spell, can you just… uncast it?"
She sighed and set down the cup. "Peter's in trouble, Sam. But not as much trouble as he would have been in if your brother hadn't interrupted. That interruption probably saved Peter's life. He's an idiot," she added tartly, "but we're still fond of him. Almost no one survives what Peter cast, and to be thrown headlong into it with no warning or anchors… It's not a matter of uncasting for your brother; it's a matter of survival. Someone is going to have to follow him into the past, and I won't risk my family for his life. But I'll help you, if you're willing.
~~~~~
An hour later, Sam was lying on the bare dirt barn floor, bare feet pressed sole to sole against Dean's, and the trickle of dust and oily stench of a kerosene concoction used to scribe runes around him causing him to sneeze.
"The hardest part is going to be remembering who you are."
"I know who I am."
Tia glared at him briefly before turning back to the powders she was mixing in a mortar. "You know who you are now, but you have no idea who you will be then. And Dean has even less of a clue than you will. You have until Mitch dies to bring your brother back to himself, if he falls into that darkness with my grandson, then he will be lost to then and now."
"What will happen to his body?" Sam asked quietly.
"The same thing that happens to other human vegetables. It will continue on for awhile, and then gradually cease to hold life."
Sam stared down at Dean's peaceful face, willing him to wake up before he had to go any further with this. "Was finding out the truth about Mitch so important to Peter?"
"Peter's young, and the young sometimes feel like they have to do stupid, desperate things to prove their worthiness in the world."
"I'm surprised no one had done it before."
"Both of Mitch's sister's tried. Eleanor never came back, but we managed to stop Iris. I want to know the truth of what happened as much as anyone, but I'm not willing to sacrifice my family to do it."
"I don't care about your truth; I only care about my brother."
"Family is important," Tia said simply.
"What about this guy you're sending me to, you sure this is the best one?"
"Jamie was Mitch's best friend. They knew each other as school boys and were almost inseparable. We know for sure they were in the same camp when it happened. You'll have about thirty hours to find your brother and bring him back to himself. After that… whatever happened will happen. You must remember Sam; you cannot change the past in any meaningful way. Half a century of time since is weighing on it and it will resist any actions you take that cause more than the most gentle of ripples. If it was yesterday, you would have more options."
"Then how am I supposed to warn Dean?!"
"You must find the quiet times, the spaces between that will hold no bearing on subsequent events and try and reach him then. Jarring people loose is not so hard, it's staying suspended that proves the challenge."
"You speak like a woman with a lot of experience."
"It's rude to ask a lady her age," Tia said primly.
"That's why I'm not asking how Mitch and Peter can both be your grandsons," Sam said pointedly.
"Wise child. Do you remember what I said about anchors and talismans?"
"My tattoo."
"It holds power," she agreed. "Personal and magical. Hold it firmly in your mind, what it should look like, where it should be."
"I've been doing that," Sam said irritably.
She ignored him, and set down her mortar to crouch by Dean's side and tug his necklace over his head. She tossed it to Sam. "That too, has power, and personal meaning. It burns with it. It will be of no use to your brother, but it might give you strength."
Sam pulled it over his head and looked at her questioningly.
“Wrap your hand around it.” Sam grabbed hold of the pendent and closed his eyes, clinging to his brother’s necklace like a security blanket that could save them from the mistakes of the past few hours.
“No, tighter. Tight until it cuts into your skin.”
Sam’s eyes flew back open. Tia nodded towards his hand. “It needs to hurt; it needs to be bathed in your blood. It has power, but that power needs to be tied to you deeper than flesh if it’s to help at all.”
“Exactly how is this going to help me again?” Sam asked doubtfully, relaxing back onto the dirt when Tia turned back to the mortar and pestle she was grinding her powders in.
“It might not,” she admitted easily, “or maybe it will be the thread that keeps you tied to yourself. Just like all the others protections I’m trying to give you. Some may work, none may work, or maybe it will just be the one we tossed in at the last minute.”
Sam took the hint and tightened his fist around the pendent until the horns on the tiny mask bit deeply into his palm. Tia’s low chant was a distant background as he grits his teeth and forced the points even deeper. It seemed to bite almost eagerly into his skin and Sam didn’t know if the odd heat was from the pain, or the pendent itself. It had been a gift to his dad from Bobby, what seemed like lifetimes ago, and when their dad had seen it around Dean’s neck, the last-minute theft had been barely worth more than a grunt of acknowledgement.
Neither of them had ever gotten around to asking what the damn thing was supposed to do in the first place, but Sam didn’t see any possibility that was worse than the current predicament.
“Now what?”
“Now you be quiet and close your eyes. I want you to concentrate. Think of your tattoo, and the feel of that amulet in your hand. Think of the rough dirt under your back, and your brother’s skin against your own. Think of everything it means to be Sam Winchester. Good things, bad things, powerful things. Things that are uniquely you.”
The rising tide of something was making his skin prickle and his stomach felt like the floor was falling out beneath him. He struggled to speak. “And Dean? I should focus on Dean, right?”
Somewhere above him Tia huffed a deep breath out and fine dust settled over his skin, every speck with the weight of anvils. He gasped, resisting the urge to struggle even while the air felt crushed from his lungs. “It’s not Dean you should be so concerned about losing. If you can keep yourself, you will find your brother.”
Sam swallowed. He thought about Jessica, and cold Christmas’s in threadbare hotels. The look on his dad’s face when he left for Stanford. The smell of the hospital where he died. Sam struggled to find something that defined himself that wasn’t soaked in pain. He thought about Dean, but forcing his mind past the current crisis was almost impossible.
Sam made the effort; hand tightening impossibly further until the wooden planks overhead and the faint sweetness of straw on the air caused another memory to well. Being nine years old and left with Dean on a friend’s farm. Pounding heat of hot, late summer sun and splinters from the weathered fence rail they'd hung on, bored. The shadow of the crop duster, and the friendly neighbor who indulged the fascination of a stranger’s children and let them crawl all over the plane. Even taking them up once at the end of a long day. Being able to be children for a few days out of a lifetime of adult responsibilities. Sam steeled himself with the memory of his brother’s carefree laughter. Dean had wanted to be a pilot after that summer. For awhile.
Sometimes fate was a bitch.
The sharp crack of a struck match and he couldn’t stop his eyes from flying open just in time to see Tia drop the spark of fire to the runed-circle he was lying in. Her eyes were expressionless as she regarded him. “Goodbye, Sam.”
The rush of catching fire seemed to suddenly eat up his entire field of vision, stars spun in the black space overhead. Dean’s feet burned against his soles and voices streamed through his mind like threads he couldn’t quite catch, wrapping around his name until they tore it to shreds. It was terribly important that he remember something, so terribly important… He wracked his panicking mind for the memory, fighting a losing battle against the drowning tide of darkness until everything was swallowed up by blue… the empty endless blue of the pristine autumn sky.
He couldn’t recall ever noticing a sky so blue back home in Wyoming and wondered if there was something about France that made the air so clear, or if it was just still being alive over hostile territory in the middle of a war that had already killed half the guys he’d trained with.
Or maybe it was being in love. He killed that thought before it could go any further. Static on the radio snapped his wandering thoughts back to the present. Through the racket he could make out the tail end of a bad joke. Jamie frowned and adjusted the tuner. His current assignment was a restless mix of pilots from different areas and different experiences – and not all of them were good at following protocol when the day was so nice and the enemy seemed so distant. He’d survived his own hard lessons, and could only hope that educating the newcomers didn’t get anyone killed.
Death was never that far away in a war.
They wouldn’t be able to irritate him much longer. The runway, cleared for the moment of its disguising tangle of camouflage, spilled out ahead of him. A brief contact with operations and he glided the Mustang smoothly down, the plane as responsive to his desire as others were… stubborn. A specific image started to form but Jamie squashed it ruthlessly. He was sure plenty of people would be lining up on the ground to ruin his perfect day, no reason to get the ball rolling himself.
Touchdown on the dirt runway jostled him from the easy glide of flight, and he was glad to be able to shut her down under the overhang of ancient trees. A lot of effort had gone into trying to make the temporary airfield look like a natural forest clearing and some ramshackle huts. So far the illusion was holding, but no one imagined it would hold forever. The heap of tarps and branches that would cover his sweet girl lay a few feet away, but there was maintenance to be done first. And then maybe some clean clothes. He loved flying, but that trip down the dirt runway always left him feeling bathed in sand.
“Aren’t you ever going to name that plane, Johnston?”
Jamie grinned and jumped down. “Not in this lifetime, Richards. I hear it’s bad luck.”
“Better bad luck than bad manners. You keep calling her by her numbers and she might take a dislike to you one of these days.”
Jamie gave the plane an affectionate pat and raked his greeter with a glance. “I see they sent you back in one piece. Did you bring what I asked you for?”
Richards snorted, and then his lowered voice took on a surprisingly serious tone. “Yeah, I got your stuff. Stashed it under your pillow. It’s not the only thing I brought back, though.”
“Trouble?”
“Not yet, but--" Richards hesitated. “Some French guy and his aide, or something. They’re here to get the Major up to speed and maybe do some work in the area. I don’t know.”
Jamie shrugged. “People come and go. What’s the problem?”
“There isn’t a problem. Yet. But I don’t think your buddy likes him.”
“The plane? She doesn’t mind meeting new people.”
“I’m talking about--"
“I know who you’re talking about,” Jamie cut in impatiently. He knew. Oh, how he knew, and the surge of affection and irritation did nothing to help his growing headache. “He doesn’t like strangers.”
“You’ve got to talk to him. The new guy’s been in camp less than an hour and I think even the damn squirrels know exactly how he feels already. If the Major has to step in--"
“I’ll take care of it.”
“Jamie--"
“I said I’d handle it, Richards. It won’t be a problem.”
Richards nodded, shoulders visibly relaxing. “Better you than me. Want me to put your nameless lady to bed?”
“You mean do your job?” Jamie raised an eyebrow. He usually hung around to do the maintenance himself, or at least help out. But the lure of a quick clean up was attractive, and he apparently had other things to see too as well. He nodded. “I’ll swing back by later.”
Richards rolled his eyes and made a good natured gesture in Jamie’s direction that he would never have risked if anyone else had been close enough to catch it. Being from the same part of the same state made a man almost a brother on the killing fields of a foreign country. Almost, but there were some things even closer. And vastly more… complicated.
With an inwards sigh, Jamie walked past his shared tent and made his way into the heart of camp. The flyover had been routine, debriefing would only take a few minutes. And maybe he could meet the new guy and see what it was about him that had set a certain someone’s teeth on edge.
~~~~~
There was nothing about Captain Mathieu Durand or his aide, Sergeant Julien Blanc, which struck Jamie as odd. They seemed tired and focused on the business at hand, but spoke good English and had been perfectly polite when Major Davis introduced them. It was obvious Richards hadn't been exaggerating the situation though; Davis had dropped more than one veiled remark in Jamie's direction that indicated there had better not be any international friction while the visitors were in camp. Jamie intended to deliver the message clearly, but its intended recipient had been notably absent since Jamie touched ground barely an hour before. So instead he went to get cleaned up before someone found him something else to do.
The inside of the tent was warmer than the blustery weather outside, an entire day worth of heat baking on canvas kept the rough accommodations comfortable long into the night. In the middle of the afternoon it was almost too warm, but not for a quick wash. Jamie tossed his jacket and gear onto his cot and made quick work of the buttons on his uniform shirt. It wasn't in bad shape for cleanliness and a quick shake rid it of the worst of the grit. The t-shirt was another matter; he'd wash it in the river with the rest of his clothes when he bathed later, but for now it was definitely going in the dirty pile.
With a damp cloth, he wiped at his skin to remove the worst of the grit, paying no special attention to the myriad of half healed scratches and bruises he'd accumulated helping to cut the airfield out of the forest in the first place. They weren't of any significance and would heal fine on their own. Of more significance was the six inch long scar just above the belt on his left side, still raw enough that the little holes that had held stitches still clearly lined the puckered gash. A souvenir of the crash landing that had destroyed his last plane. Jamie wasn't complaining though, he'd walked away and safe into the hands of allies. Most pilots who went down couldn't say the same.
He wracked his brain for the mess schedule while cleaning up. Was it meatloaf or spaghetti on Tuesdays?
Left wrist, up his arm.
Probably meatloaf, it seemed like spaghetti was a Wednesday thing.
Over his bicep where a pulled muscle reminded him that he should really be favoring that arm for awhile. Jamie glanced down to see if there was any bruising there… and Sam reeled back. Or didn't, because Jamie continued his cursory inspection and musing over the meal plan while Sam fought down panic and the sense of being trapped that came from inhabiting a body he couldn't control. He could feel the washcloth in his hand and the warm air pressing against his skin. He could feel the blink of his eyes and the movement as Jamie went to grab a clean shirt from his gear, but it was completely disconnected from Sam's own will.
Sam floundered, was it meatloaf? Panic surged again and he struggled, trying to find something to hold himself away from Jamie, to keep himself Sam and not drown in the other's identity. He remembered what Tia had said about talismans and wished he had taken her more seriously. She had spoken of losing one's identity and not even knowing it was lost, Sam had envisioned something like daydreaming and drifting away, he'd figured his focus on rescuing Dean would keep him safe from that.
It didn't, not even close. He had a complete and total understanding of why the spell killed so many. Even now, with adrenaline singing through nerves he no longer had, the riptide pull of Jamie's perspective was smothering. Sam abandoned his lingering hope that Dean would be aware and reachable. He had gone in fully warned, and armed, and charmed -- and if Jamie hadn't accidentally invoked the specter of Sam's missing tattoo and jarred him free with the discrepancy, he would still be idly wondering about dinner. He couldn't worry about Dean; it was everything he could do to worry about himself.
.
