Who? Dean! What? Running away to save the world? Where? Various places, far from Lawrence. When? Various, starting just after the notes were left this morning. Rating? Not terrifying.
They wouldn’t find him, this time.
With the car and the phone left behind in Lawrence, they’d still be looking locally - but he wasn’t staying close, to do this. He’d stolen a car (a bright red convertible, keys left right there in open sight on the dash, like asking to have it stolen, so he’d obliged) and taken it only as far as the next town before he’d ditched it, left it sitting at a gas station.
From there, he’d hitchhiked. There would be no trail of stolen cars to follow, and he did his best not to be memorable to anyone, either those who did or didn’t pick him up and take him a couple hours away... And that’s all he’d tell them, when they asked where he was heading. “As far from Kansas as you can get me.” It felt like running away, but it wasn’t. He just needed the buffer of space between him and his family so that when Michael took over, no one would get hurt.
Dean still didn’t really know what was going to happen, what the Archangel planned to do with him. He knew Lucifer would die, though, and that was enough. He’d been thinking about this for a while, now, and he knew what he’d ask for - terms of the deal, so to speak, because he wasn’t going to let anyone get screwed over while he was doing this.
By the time he was two states over, he was really starting to feel the fact that he’d spent the night before drinking and smoking and hadn’t really slept more than an hour or two before he’d taken off. His head was killing him, had been all day, but with the combined effect of the exhaustion, it was too much to keep moving. He got a hotel room, a burger, and a six-pack of beers - paid in cash for everything, he’d been sticking to the cards for weeks, saving whatever cash he could get when he hustled pool, or the one poker game he’d won back in Lawrence, so there would be nothing to trace when he finally left.
He didn’t eat more than a bite or two of the burger. He felt a little too sick to be eating, blamed it on the cheap burger and not on the way his stomach was churning uncomfortably with something that might have been guilt and worry. The beer disappeared pretty fast, though, and he suddenly found himself wishing he’d brought his phone or his computer, feeling the restless edge of worry that ordinarily would have him poking around online to make sure everyone was still there and okay, or have him calling up Sam or something, but now he couldn’t do that. He turned on the tv, instead, and settled for watching some kind of crappy action movie until he fell asleep.
-
When Dean woke up it was to the sound of the motel manager banging on the door, telling him to get his ass out or pay extra, giving him five minutes, so he got cleaned up - he didn’t have any bags or anything to take with him, hadn’t even taken his shoes off before he fell asleep, so his old clothes went right back on after a quick, too-cold shower - and he exited the motel room even more empty-handed than he’d arrived.
Dean tried to eat something, a late breakfast in a diner where the waitress, who was probably at least twenty years older than he was, smiled at him in a way that made him think of Mom and called him honey and sweetie and sat down at his booth to watch him worriedly while he stared at the menu, trying to order something that he could eat, something that sounded good, eventually ordering a slice of apple pie and choking down most of the ice cream off the top and maybe two bites of the pie itself before he left, large tip on the table and he hadn’t said a single word so far.
He hitched a ride with a group of teenagers heading for California. A road trip, enjoying winter break and they were heading back to college the long way. He felt the irony of it choking him with laughter he wasn’t letting himself indulge in (it wasn’t really that funny, anyway) and let the girl in the front passenger seat hand him a bottle of soda with a small smile that said he looked a lot more pathetic than he’d realized, but clearly not scary or these kids wouldn’t have picked him up, so at least that was one thing going his way, so far.
At the next rest stop, he headed into town on foot, trying not to look at anyone, trying not to notice anyone, not to notice where he even was or think about the fact that if this town goes down in flames because of him, because of Michael, these people will die. If there are no people there are no deaths so he doesn’t look at them, acts like he is alone,and when he checks the map that’s in the drawer beside the bed, he thinks he’s far enough from Lawrence to give this thing a shot.