Episode 909 Teaser!
Content subject to final editing.
Below the Read More is a brief look at the next episode of Lustra, currently in edits. If you have not read up through 908, click through at your own risk! There be spoilers ahead!
Episode 909 “Dirty Water Dying” Chapter One
He is in the back of the car, his knees are bent and he is lying in the back of the car. But his knees don’t hit the back of the passenger seat, his shoulders aren’t hunched forward trying to fit, his head isn’t quirked up at an odd sideways angle against the door, it’s propped up on a lap.
There’s blood in his mouth, there’s a warm hand on his side. He is twelve.
“Shh, Sammy. It’s okay.”
Dean, Dean.
His leg is wet and filled with heat, as he wakes up the ache grows and it’s sharp with every bump in the road, they’re going fast he realizes, so fast, and it’s nighttime, and Dad is so quiet.
He shouldn’t have been out, he wasn’t allowed out, but Dean had forgotten the binding thing, the string Uncle Bobby had given them to bind the monster and Dad and Dean were going to get killed if they didn’t have what they needed, so Sam had gone out in the snow to find them, to give it to them, and --
He hadn’t seen it. Dad was yelling and he should have listened, but he needed to give Dad the string, and he hadn’t seen the monster and then all he saw was Dean’s face, worried and pale in the moonlight, crying and yelling, angry, scared--
He is lying with his head in Dean’s lap. One of Dean’s hands is on his side, soothing and heavy and warm. The other is smoothing Sam’s hair, and Sam is hurt, he’s hurt and he’s dying, he knows it, and he’s sorry, he’s sorry--
“Did we get it?” he says, and in the front, Dad draws in a sharp breath through his nose, stiff and annoyed.
Dean frowns. “Yeah. We got it.”
“Dean--”
He doesn’t go on. He doesn’t need to. Dean squeezes him at the hip, smooths his hair down over his ear, his hand comes to rest on Sam’s forehead, heavy and warm and solid Dean’s hand on his forehead, and Dean says, “You’re okay, kiddo. You’re gonna be okay.”
He hums. The tune is so familiar, but Sam can’t place it. Dean is singing, but he can’t make out the words. The radio isn’t on, but he hears the gentle unresolving chords, the lyrical lead guitar line over top of the jangling strum on repeat, the story in the words he can’t make out, Dean is almost plaintive, like this song is for Sam, to Sam, like he’s afraid Sam will leave him someday, like Sam can ever leave, or like he’d ever want to. Like he can see a life for himself beyond this car, beyond Dad and Dean and the smell of blood and gunpowder and leather, beyond the soothing bump of the road as sure as any lullaby.
Like there is another place besides Dean that could ever be home.
He did not wake up in the dungeon. He was in his bed, warm, wounds dressed, he could feel the stitches pull, he could feel the ache of his relocated thumb. His memory of the last couple of weeks faded back to him like remembering a dream, the feel of it more vibrant and clear than the actual details.
Flowers in a silver crown, the bright bright red of sacred (tainted) blood in a porcelain bowl. The sulfur in the back of his throat. Days and days and days of hoping, of giving up.
Dean had come. Dean had come.
Episode 909, "Dirty Water Dying," will be released as a fully complete multi-chaptered episode. Please pardon the wait as there are five chapters planned for this one. Thanks!!