What Will Sustain Us

The situation at hand is this: Ruby had called him to say that Sam was asking for him. And there were two things about that right off: 1) Ruby called him to tell him Sam was asking for him—-which was so far outside her standard operating procedure that five-alarm sirens started going off in Dean's head the minute Sam's name came up on his phone and he heard her voice instead; and 2) Ruby called him to tell him Sam was asking for him—which meant that Sam was too hurt, too sick, or too otherwise fucked up, to make the call himself. And it was that that had sent Dean hurtling three hours south, one hand turning the Impala's keys while the other was still buttoning his shirt, not bothering to find out more than the address of the motel they were holed up in. Old habits die hard.