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The door creaks open and Sam says, "Move over. I'm driving."
Dean blinks at him and uncurls his fingers from the steering wheel. "What?"
Sam doesn't roll his eyes, doesn't make a face, only repeats: "Move over."
Sliding across the seat is easier than asking Sam to explain, so Dean does as he's told, kicking the box of cassette tapes as he settles his feet on the floor on the passenger side. Sam folds himself behind the wheel and starts the engine, switches the headlights on and angles the car out of the drive. It's late, well after midnight by Dean's best guess, and the only lights are pinpricks of yellow and white shining from farmhouses across empty fields.
Twenty minutes and a few turns later it's clear Sam isn't heading into town, so Dean takes a deep breath and asks, "Where're we going?"
Sam doesn't answer immediately. Dean listens to the silence, stares at the yellow lines on blacktop flashing under the car, thinks about all the things he's not sure he wants to say. Seriously, dude, where the fuck are we going? and Sure you don't want to leave me behind this time too? and Fuck your secrets, I'm not a fucking invalid. But he says none of it, easy as the words fill his chest and rise in his throat.
Instead he digs around in the box of tapes until he finds one with its label long worn off, black ink rubbed away to a dark smear, and jams it into the tape deck. He doesn't remember what songs are on the tape, but he doesn't know if that's because he doesn't remember or if it's because he never thought it was important in the first place.
He feels Sam glance his way and turns the volume down before Sam says anything.
"There's something I have to show you," Sam says finally. His eyes are on the road, both hands gripping the wheel, and he sounds tired. "It's a ways--couple of hours at least. You should sleep."
Dean says, "Okay," but he doesn't sleep. They drive for hours across the dark prairie without saying a word, passing lonely farms in flashes of light and listening to the wind rush by the windows. Even with the heat cranked up Dean can feel the winter cold seeping into the car. He wishes he'd thought to grab his jacket before leaving the house--leaving the argument, the reminders that are never enough, Sam--for the relative peace and quiet of the car. He hadn't expected Sam to follow him, sure as hell hadn't expected a middle-of-the-night road trip to the middle-of-nowhere, but it's a little late to say anything now.
He tries to keep track of where they were going, catching town names and highway signs as they flick into the headlight glow and disappear again, but all he gets is a vague, unsettling feeling that he ought to know these roads, this route, this destination that's another lost memory over the edge of the horizon. They're driving north, that much he knows, and he holds onto that one fact through the miles and silence.
The smooth prairie eventually ripples into hills, and Sam turns off the main highway onto a narrow dirt road. It's still dark, pitch black beyond the windows, but he drives as if he knows where he's going, and Dean tries not to think about why they're so far from anything and everything. Branches brush the car on the passenger side, and Dean winces at the sound, high and ugly like bony, grasping fingers on a chalkboard.
"Dude, watch it," he says, the words more instinct than intent, but even as he clamps his jaw shut and glances warily at Sam, Sam is shaking his head and smiling a little. It's no more than a quirk of the lips, but it's enough, and Dean relaxes.
"Don't worry," Sam says. "We're almost there."
"There" turns out to be a grove of trees in the bottom of a hollow. Sam stops the car in the middle of the road--there's no place to pull over--and shoves his door open. He cusses quietly when the bitter wind whips through the car. "Well, okay," he says doubtfully, "maybe this will be faster than I thought, so we don't freeze to death."
He doesn't sound angry anymore, just sort of tired and resigned, like it was Dean who dragged him out here rather than the other way around. But Dean follows, hurrying into the trees after Sam and the bobbing of his flashlight, crunching through hard-crusted snow and ducking beneath barren branches until they come to a clearing.
Sam stops abruptly at the edge. "This is where--"
He lets the sentence hang. In the light of the flashlight, Dean sees the blackened ground beneath patches of snow, an absence of dormant grass and underbrush, and he knows. He remembers in a flash, a blinding flare of firelight and the choking scent of smoke, the cold air of another dark night behind them and the raging heat of a funeral pyre before them.
"Dad," he says, when the quiet has stretched so long he knows Sam isn't going to continue.
"Yeah." Sam nods, jerky and quick like he's a marionette moving against his will. He casts the flashlight around them, peering into the trees and darkness as though he's looking for something. He's not looking at Dean when he says, "And you. I mean--the guy I thought. There wasn't much left. Just, you know. Bone fragments. But I thought..."
Sam's voice trails off helplessly. Dean nods even though Sam isn't looking at him.
"I thought--I didn't just." Sam's words are short, chopped, bitten off before he finishes. "I didn't just stop, Dean. I really thought--"
Dean starts to say something. He doesn't know if it's I or you or something else entirely, only that it's half a word and enough to make Sam fall quiet again. Dean's shivering and his nose is running, and there's too much rattling in his head: tears on Sam's face on another night, in another life, the memory of hospital-tainted clothes, charred bones in a box and grief for a nameless stranger, a funeral pyre that's all fuel, no flesh, waiting, waiting, waiting for someone to open the door in the dark, and two winters of dry, driven prairie snow burying the ashes.
"Yeah," he says. He doesn't know if Sam hears I know in that word, if he hears stop apologizing or whatever or drop it, doesn't even know which of those he means. "You drove me all the way out here just to tell me that?"
Sam blinks at him, eyes wide in a flashlight-pale face, then he smiles crookedly. "Whatever. It's nothing compared to the time you drove us three states out of our way just because you wanted to see the SPAM Museum."
Dean doesn't remember that day, that argument and that whim, but he shakes his head and lets Sam have that memory, just one stupid thing without a question or a challenge. He knows that Sam is as tired of asking Do you remember...? as Dean is of answering No, no, I don't.
"Okay," Sam says, and he turns to go, his mission apparently accomplished. "We're not far from Bobby's place. Let's go wake him up and make him give us coffee for the drive home."
Dean barely remembers Bobby either, little more than a blur of trust and recognition and a face amongst so many others who have visited in the past weeks. But it's too damn cold and he's tired and he likes to know that Sam has--that they have, both of them, because he remembers enough to know how it works--someone they can safely wake up before dawn on a random Tuesday in February.
He turns his back on the clearing, on the empty space where their father burned and a faceless stranger crumbled to ashes in his place, and he follows Sam back to the car.