Set after 5.14.

You may be strongly reminded of Sam's situation in Rahmi's In Need of Endurance, because it was very strongly inspired by Rahmi's In Need of Endurance, only not as good. Rahmi rocks.

CW, please do not prosecute your adoring and light-fingered fanbase.

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A long track of broken grass, feet and hooves and tires, wormed up the hill to disappear under a golden heat mirage. A caravan had passed some time after the last rain, less than four days ago.

He scanned for a lookout hill to wait on. He was following too close.

He wasn't interested in the caravan.

Dean could sleep like a rock lately.

He figured it was a perk of achieving Nirvana or atrophy of the soul, whatever you wanted to call it (not like he could care anymore). It meant that for six hours every night, he didn't have to think about the vortex of torment that he and Sam had apparently been specially bred to lie in the middle of, or the fact that he and Sam keeping each-other human was optimistic bullcrap of the first order. Not that he cared.

Just another six hours before they lost the game down the drain.

He was dozing off. Sam was rolling and sighing in the other bed, a counterpoint to the freeway noise, and just for an instant, Dean drifted—

He was falling, about to smash his skull and break his arms on rocky ground, sun-blistered grass, and he jerked, too late, but frantic to roll the fall to his shoulder, his chest—

He was sitting up in bed, the springs squeaking. He rolled over and shut his eyes again, and went to sleep for real.

"Can't you douches pick up some new tricks?" he bellowed at the empty sky.

He was on a prairie. Alone, on a prairie in the summer, in his jeans and jacket and a pair of shirts that smelled like lighter fluid and garlic. The keys were in his pocket, but he couldn't see the car.

Or a road, for that matter.

It was hot. He put the sun at his back and walked, every now and then climbing a hill to see the other side. Just more hills. Sometimes there were streams, but they were dry.

Place was ugly, too. It wasn't a Kansas or Idaho prairie—more of a Texas prairie, with sparse grass and pebbles and skies so big they wouldn't even try looking for your body. Little brambly shrubs. Spiky weeds. Vultures.

Dean climbed another hill. There was a flat rock at the top of it, and hand-sized rocks all around, so he stacked some into a Roman archway he could pass his arm through. Man was here.

When he looked up, out of the wilderness a human shape crested a nearby hill, as if summoned. He knocked down the archway, stuck a sharp rock in each coat pocket, and strode down the hillside to meet the native. He hoped he wasn't going to get shot for trespassing on this barren, worthless stretch of scrub. Texans did that.

It was Sam.

Dean had the sun at his back and Sam was staring into it, so of course Sam didn't recognize him. But Dean could see the time of his stride and the angles of his limbs and the laser focus he got when he was curious, so he threw his arms in the air impatiently and bellowed, "Sam!"

Sam's hair was even uglier than usual and he had a ragged beard. "What the hell?" Dean added.

Sam paused at his voice, cocked his head, and broke into a sprint that had Dean looking behind him to see what the hurry was. No angry ranchers. No stampeding longhorns. Dean decided he must have been gone a long time and started to jog over, as Sam slowed, stopped, and planted his feet.

And then Dean was falling, horizontal, staring into the face of the ground that was about to smash his skull like a walnut, whether or not it shattered his arms along the way. He corkscrewed, trying to take the fall on his shoulder though it was too late, too fast for catlike reflexes to keep him alive anymore.

But he didn't hit straight on. He hit at an angle, moving sideways, gouging his cheekbone on a rock, and he kept moving. He skidded down the hill, dragging along like a kite that couldn't get air, bouncing and kicking up dust. He was being pulled.

He stopped sliding abruptly and grunted as his weight seemed to jump from two-ten to two thousand and every stone and bit of gravel stabbed into him from beneath. He was being pinned.

Sam was pinning him.

Sam loomed over his face, moving with that reptilian precision that some demons had when they'd dropped their masks and meant business, that made you wonder how you'd ever taken them for your own species. He held one hand outstretched, fingers splayed.

Dean forced his mouth open to start the exorcism. Sam's hand tightened and twisted, and Dean forgot about the rocks and the words, because he was coming out of his skin.

He'd never had the chance to appreciate his body as a container before, not until now, when he felt like oil falling through a sieve. He was splitting in half, part of himself collapsing into chaos like a crazy guy pawing through his looted bag of mementos muttering "no, no, no," the other half outside, turned inside-out and alien, screeching and tearing and failing to claw its way back in. Light flashed behind his eyelids. Light flashed against the backs of Sam's closed eyes, over his serene smile.

He screeched and clawed at his body, desperate and failing to get back in, until with a snap the force restraining him let go, and in a blink he was settled again, he was a human being with a name again, he was seeing out of his eyes.

"You're alive," Sam remarked, staring down at him. His eyes had no color, and there was a steel collar around his throat, padded by his shirt.

"Christo," Dean coughed.

"You think you're Dean," Sam said, his voice as colorless and carnivorous as his dark eyes.

"I am Dean," Dean growled.

"Like I said."

Dean panted and sat up. Sam didn't offer him a hand, but he didn't back off like he was supposed to if he thought Dean was a shapeshifter, either. Idiot. "So I'm dead now," he grunted. "Wanna give me a date for future reference when I get back home?"

"May second, 2008. Eleven-forty three PM."

"No, wait," Dean protested, confused.

"You let a floor-level crossroads demon talk you down to one year for my life, like you could pick up a new soul at the Salvation Army. Hellhounds clawed your guts out onto the living room carpet in a yuppie housing development while Bobby and I watched. Any of that ring a bell?"

"Yeah," said Dean, flinching at the glass-melting fury banked behind Sam's voice. It was Sammy, but the pressure valves were gone. "Yeah, I know all that. Am I—shit, am I AWOL? Did I say Yes?"

Sam cocked his head. "You're in Hell," he enunciated.

"Again?"

Sam…switched off. His signals were all wrong—this wasn't how people looked at each-other, not topside. Dean hit the ground again and couldn't roll over to get back up.

Sam twisted his fingers and Dean's back convulsed. He did it again and a gibbering, unreasoning terror swept over him, gone as soon as it came, except for the building hum that was his own, real, fear.

Sam had figured out how to make a person squeal like a Fender Stratocaster. Dean decided this future could nuke itself into glass and the angels and demons could wipe each-other out over the ruins. "Stop playing," Sam was snarling. "If you thought getting that piss-rag you call a soul ripped out was no fun, you should see what I'll do to get information. What are you?"

"I'm your brother," Dean grunted.

"Dean's in Hell," Sam repeated, and Dean felt like an idiot, a trusting idiot, because for all he really knew, Sam could have been 'full on Vader' all through the summer of '08, and this was the Sam he had missed.

But maybe he could change that. Maybe he had changed that.

"I get out," he insisted. "I'm from the future, from twenty-ten. Somebody else—screw it, angels are gonna drag me out of Hell for their sick wargames. It's gonna be—I'm not a demon. You don't have to kill anybody, just get clean. That's all." Maybe he could change everything.

"What month?" Sam demanded, sharp.

"September," said Dean. "They pull me out September of '08. I'm alive, but things are gonna go bad in a year unless you drop the Lilith thing. It's a conspiracy—Heaven, Hell, they're both gonna want you to ice her, and when you do, it'll hit the kill switch on the entire planet, the Devil breakin' out of his chains, Four Horsemen on the road, both sides ready to wipe Humanity out like bug smears in the springtime. She's a bitch, but we can't kill her."

Sam had some expression now. Apparently he thought Dean was insane, and had killed and stuffed his puppy so it could ride along in the car without messing up the seats. "It's twenty-ten now," he said. "I killed Lilith two years ago. Haven't found you yet."

Alternate reality, Dean thought. That's technically new.

That left the question of what Sam was doing alone on the forbidding rangelands of central Texas.

"Following a community," said Sam, forging through the forbs. Dean had never been forced to hustle to keep up with Sam walking before, and he didn't like it. He figured it was one of Sam's least distressing new habits what with him apparently running on demon blood full-time, so he focused on stretching his own stride to its limits and jogging a step or two when he was sure Sam wasn't paying attention.

"Community," Dean muttered, trying to deconstruct whatever PC code word that was supposed to be. "Like a cult?"

"Like a community of survivors," Sam said, and that level of scorn was uncalled for. Sam glanced over his shoulder and huffed at him. "From the bombing. You know, the bombs? With the shockwaves and the nuclear winter and the dead birds everywhere?"

"Damn," Dean said. The nukes had cut loose, but the planet was still left.

"If your world didn't get bombed, what are you whining about?"

"Like I said—Lucifer crawlin' outta Hell, Horsemen on the hoof."

"Seriously?" Sam asked. "Thought you were being metaphorical."

"If I was, it'd be funnier. With blasphemy and sexual references," Dean muttered. "So it just—World War Three?"

"Demons did it."

"Course they did."

"Turned out Lilith didn't want to invade Earth," Sam explained. "When she died, it was like it cut the reins and all the other principalities made a rush on us. Devil's Gate opened back up. The demon with the Colt—"

"Crowley?"

"You met him?" Sam snapped, halting.

"Dealing demon, with a funny sense of self-preservation," Dean recalled. "Gave us the Colt."

"He had a reason," Sam guessed.

"Yeah."

"He's in charge of the Gate now. Everyone makes deals with him, humans, demons, on anything to do with who goes up or down. House always wins. He keeps the demons in check, enough to make sure there's still humans around, but he's turning them into game. The US is a hunting preserve."

What about you? Dean almost asked. He had a good idea of the answer, but he didn't want to hear it.

On the other hand, he didn't care anymore. "And you hunt them back," he said.

Sam paused, looked away. "Everybody over ten Hunts."

Dean started walking again, just a straight line to nowhere, and passed him, prodding gingerly at the hot bruising tear on his cheek. He heard Sam's footsteps behind him veer off a bit, so he dropped back to his side, wondering where Sam was headed. He gestured to his neck. "What's with the hardware?"

Sam smiled. It was a bad smile, full of jaded grief and poison. The heavy collar glinted with sigils that looked like they'd been engraved with a drill press. It had a bevel at the top that reminded Dean of GMC frames. Sam held up his right pinkie, which had a dull ring on it of a similar make. "Going away present," said Sam, baring his teeth around the words. "Pretty sure Bobby didn't expect me to take his hand off at the same time—"

"Jeezes!" Dean panted.

"—but you saw what I can do—"

"No, I know, Sam, I know how it works." You don't have to paint a picture.

Demons running loose and Sam's taint becomes a weapon he can't afford to do without, too convenient and too potent to go to waste, but uncontrollable and tormenting, so Sam turns to Bobby, the last man on earth he can trust, to put a leash on him. But on the blood, Sam gets hot-headed, thirsty, and uncomfortably numb, until pretty soon he doesn't care why he took the leash in the first place. Dean had a picture.

"So you follow survivors around and wait for demons to show up," Dean said. "What about the hosts?"

"Out here, it's not usually an issue," Sam replied. Not in the sun and the dry grass.

Dean followed him up a hill, where they looked out over the empty rangeland, where the heat shimmer flashed away toward the horizon. A column of vultures swirled like a thundercloud in the north.

Sam was looking westward at a pair of human shapes tracing a ribbon of tire tracks over the grass. "They made it," he muttered, pleased.