Fic: Sasquatch Sightings, French Mexican's, and Mysterious Pie
I really tried to clean this up and give it a more satisfying ending, but real life keeps butting in and I'm tired of fighting with it. I'm hard at work on Dean's actual sequel to Pie, though. This is all unbeta'd and the timeline might be a little screwy because I haven't had the patience to check back through the first story to make sure it jives up.
Title: Sasquatch Sightings, French Mexicans, and Mysterious Pie
AKA Dean’s Side
Rating: PG
Characters: Dean, Jessica Moore, OC's
Summary: The early days of Sam's disappearence.
Sam was missing for three weeks when the first pie appeared. It didn’t seem that out of place at the time, really. Dean’s been searching high and low all over Palo Alto for two weeks, ever since he decided to drop in on Sam all surprise-like to make sure he was okay, make sure he hadn’t changed his mind, and that he was at least taking advantage of frat parties if he was gonna be on campus, you know, the important stuff.
Instead, Dean found his roommate George, higher than a kite and in the middle of an ecstasy orgy, who said Sam hadn’t been back since last Wednesday, but hey, was he interested in scoring some weed?
Dean was, understandably, beside himself with bigger concerns. So when the first pie appeared somewhere between calling Bobby and leaving another message on Dad’s cell phone, he figured he must have forgotten getting the pie and ate it, foregoing the greasy burger from McDonalds.
The pie tasted like real apples, the kind fresh picked from an orchard, not the oversweet crap from the can, and every bite was just right; not too hot, not too cold, even when he didn’t eat the last bite till midnight.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The second time it happened he was in some swanky diner just off campus where Sam liked to study and drink frou-frou coffee, according to the waitress Dorothy.
Dorothy was the most helpful person out of everyone Dean talked to, which was getting ridiculous as his interviews went on. At sixty-three, she was the oldest person working in the establishment and the grandma to every kid that walked in the door, though she had her favorites. Sam was among the fortunate that earned perks like free coffee on late night cramming sessions, or an on the house cinnamon roll when they came in after or during the worst day possible.
She took to Dean once she figured out who he was and why he was there. He didn’t think he’d ever be able to repay her fully for being so nice to Sam and himself, especially after days like today.
The roommate was a complete bust all seven times Dean spoke with him. He thought Dean was some Mexican named Javier and kept speaking to him in mangled French every time he showed up.
Sam’s professors had such big classes that his face and presence hadn’t really registered enough to stand out, though that skeezy art teacher definitely remembered Sam. He made Dean the same offer of nude modeling for his class if he wanted to make a few extra bucks.
It took Dean a very long time to remember why it would be a Bad Thing to shoot the man.
So Dorothy was his favorite person in this god forsaken place, and probably the only thing keeping him sane. Well, her and her one of a kind cinnamon Danishes made of awesome and the size of his head.
“Still no luck, honey?” she asked on his billionth trip in. He’d spent the morning in all the neighboring towns as Agent Ford, going to hospitals, morgues, restaurants, libraries, bookstores, ice cream stands, the whole shebang.
Nothing. Nada.
Dean shook his head, thinking on the unfinished Agent Hamil badge he’d run across in the glove box. He should have picked a different ID to use; the Star Wars aliases were supposed to be a surprised for Sam, before Stanford.
“Well, I might have something,” said Dorothy as she poured him a new cup. She jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “That pretty blonde thing over there by the window, she was asking about him.”
Dean leaned to look around her, and if his heart skipped a few beats out of tune, then only he and Dorothy knew. The blonde was probably Sam’s age, long curly hair, miles of leg, wearing Capris and a vintage cartoon shirt displaying the Smurfs. She stared out the window, sipping one of those iced coffees, her papers and books ignored in front of her.
Dean didn’t have to squint to see that was Sam’s type.
“Thanks, Dorothy.” Dean finished his coffee in a single gulp, ignored the way it burned going down too much too fast.
“I hope she’s got something for you, honey.”
Dean wiped his mouth, hoped the bags under his eyes didn’t scare her away, and approached the table.
“Hi, my name is Dean Winchester. Dorothy said you were asking about my brother?”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Her name was Jessica. Sam was tutoring her in math and geek-boy had totally missed the ninety neon signs she had going on how attracted he was to her. Dean felt like face-palming. At least that thing hadn’t changed about Sam.
“We met twice a week for it wherever was open,” she said. “The last time he got a call and had to leave about twenty minutes after we got here. It sounded urgent, and that’s the last time I saw him. I tried calling, all I get is voicemail.”
Jessica doodled on her napkin absently, a spiral building up into an eye, then a flower. She let out a soft laugh.
“I didn’t need the tutoring, you know. Sam seemed interested, but he never really made a move, so I decided to.”
Dean nodded with a smirk and felt his heart clench. Yeah, that was geek boy, all right. He filed that away and leaned forward on the table, a new cup of coffee steadily cooling in his hands.
“Did you hear anything of the phone call?”
Everything inside him was coiling tight like it did when he finally got a tangible thread on a case. It was worse, now, his blood itching beneath his skin to get out and do something, kill something.
“Something about a bookshop,” said Jessica. “I think he called it Mackey’s? McAlister’s? Something Irish. There’s no bookshop called that in Palo Alto, though. Sorry, that’s all I remember.”
“No, thank you, that’s more than I’ve gotten since I showed up,” he gave her a smile. He felt it straining at the ends as his heart stuttered on faster. California was not going to swallow Sam like a brick in quicksand.
“I hope it helps.”
Jessica shook his hand and left. Dean’s mind spun as he paid for the drinks Dorothy let him and left a twenty dollar tip in the jar when she turned her back. He gave into impulse and kissed Dorothy’s cheek on his way out the door.
He was halfway to the motel when he noticed the apple pie in the passenger seat.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The third pie came the next day. Jessica was wrong, there was a bookstore in Palo Alto called McAlister’s, it just hadn’t been open for business since 1954.
The abandoned shop stood on the corner of Birch and Robin street, smack in the middle of what used to be the thriving downtown of Palo Alto, and now was host to the population of homeless, druggies, gangs, and hookers, all of them too poor to leave or too entrenched in their situations to see if they could.
If Sam had taken a job here, solo, Dean was going kick his ass nine ways from Sunday and back again. Sam was smarter than that, but Dean hadn’t seen Sam in eight months, only talked to him twice, so there was no way of knowing if Sam was still in shape, still practiced anything to keep himself ready.
“College ruins brain cells,” he muttered. “That’s the only explanation.”
The hairs on the back of Dean’s neck stood on end the closer he came to the building, and it wasn’t his mind playing tricks on him. He noticed the few other people out and about; they crossed the street to continue onward so they wouldn’t walk directly in front of the place, eyes shying away before they had a chance to glimpse anything.
He and Dad had taken a few jobs where physical places held that kind of power. Even people who staunchly refused to believe in the paranormal were skittish around them, where the very air felt thick and serrated, like the briefest contact might slice you all to hell before you knew it was happening. They wouldn’t admit it, wouldn’t acknowledge it in any way, but their primal instinct to survive did.
He fleetingly wondered what it said about his family’s instincts that they could feel that and go into those places anyway. Sam once theorized it was defective genes and too many skull fractures. Dean said it was because they’d been handed Badass destinies at birth.
He still thought Sam was right, though.
The back door to the store had been boarded closed until someone or something kicked it in. Dean picked his way through splintered wood and broken glass, each careful step crunching in the unnatural silence. Whatever was making this place Heebie Jeebie central its presence wasn’t registering on the EMF.
There wasn’t anything unusual in the city records about McAlister’s; no unexplainable deaths, no murders, nothing he could see about the land, though those records only went back so far. His eyes were still swimming from all the reading he crammed into the seven hour wait before sunset.
McAlister’s ran great for about twenty years before the neighborhood started going bad, then closed when the competition on the other side of town got too tough, and the owner, a Phillip McAlister, moved to Tampa where he was currently enjoying Canasta on Thursday’s and spying on the bikini lush beaches during his daily oxygen treatments.
Lucky bastard.
Dust hung suspended in the flashlight beam as he swept it around the room, his other hand resting beneath that wrist, trusty Taurus following the light. The floor creaked underneath, parts of it soft and termite ridden. Dean’s breath caught as he swept the flashlight downwards; they caught the trail of a pair of size fourteen shoeprints.
“Yahtzee,” Dean murmured out of habit, but it held none of his usual excited enthusiasm. If Sam was still here, after three weeks gone missing…
Dean followed the footprints through the back and out into the main room of the shop. His feeling of unease went through the roof. Empty bookshelves stood in rows and wrapped around the walls, wood covered in thick dust that hadn’t been disturbed since the last board was nailed over the windows and exits.
Even so, it was far too clean. The absence of human touch attested to just how long the presence had been around, right since the closing. No homeless, druggies, hell, not even any animals seemed to have been brave enough to use the obvious shelter.
Only Sam’s footprints stood out in the orderly decay, and they led right to a disrupted altar where the cash register and front desk once stood.
“Aw crap.”
Half burned candles, bowls of herbs, a mirror, cat bones, and smeared blood lay scattered on the floor around a black scarf and chalk drawn symbols connecting in a circle. Here, two new sets of footprints appeared in the dust; one was a size nine and the other just a bit bigger and barefoot.
He moved on autopilot, circling out from the altar, taking in details. The struggle had been violent; Sam hadn’t gone down without a fight, taking it clear into what seemed to be the children’s section of the store, leaving smashed bookcases and overturned chairs in his wake.
It ended near a back staircase, the wood so damaged the middle was missing, collapsed years before. Resting on the bottom step were Sam’s cell phone and wallet. The phone was dead and the wallet had fifty dollars, his student ID, a debit card, three fortune cookie papers, and a receipt from a gas station so worn he couldn’t make out the date or items purchased.
Two small smears of blood stained the leather. Spider web cracks spread out over the glass front of his phone.
Dean put them in his jacket pocket, hands trembling. That was it. No footprints led away from the staircase, though there was a fine sheen of black particles to the left of the banister, where the size nine’s disappeared.
Barefoot and Sam seemed to have just vanished from their last tracks.
Dean worked over the rest of the building, circling and scouting until the first rays of light began peeking through the cracks in the boarded windows. He couldn’t help but feel like he’d failed again. Sam had been here, but he was long gone by now. Rage and despair knotted together in a throbbing black ball, situated in the pit of his stomach.
Dean closed his eyes, forced his lungs to draw in air till they pressed against his ribs.
“Alright, this is still good. I’ve got some clues, now,” he said aloud.
The words were kind of empty, but it was something. He made his way back to the front of the store and snapped as many pictures as he could of the ritual area, focusing on the symbols. He’d shoot them to Bobby when he had a signal.
The sun was above the horizon by the time he made it out to the Impala, lighting up the street. Dean wearily climbed into the driver’s seat, the weight of Sam’s belongings pressing against his side.
The third pie sat on the dashboard, permeating the interior with the thick scent of cinnamon and apples.
Title: Sasquatch Sightings, French Mexicans, and Mysterious Pie
AKA Dean’s Side
Rating: PG
Characters: Dean, Jessica Moore, OC's
Summary: The early days of Sam's disappearence.
Sam was missing for three weeks when the first pie appeared. It didn’t seem that out of place at the time, really. Dean’s been searching high and low all over Palo Alto for two weeks, ever since he decided to drop in on Sam all surprise-like to make sure he was okay, make sure he hadn’t changed his mind, and that he was at least taking advantage of frat parties if he was gonna be on campus, you know, the important stuff.
Instead, Dean found his roommate George, higher than a kite and in the middle of an ecstasy orgy, who said Sam hadn’t been back since last Wednesday, but hey, was he interested in scoring some weed?
Dean was, understandably, beside himself with bigger concerns. So when the first pie appeared somewhere between calling Bobby and leaving another message on Dad’s cell phone, he figured he must have forgotten getting the pie and ate it, foregoing the greasy burger from McDonalds.
The pie tasted like real apples, the kind fresh picked from an orchard, not the oversweet crap from the can, and every bite was just right; not too hot, not too cold, even when he didn’t eat the last bite till midnight.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The second time it happened he was in some swanky diner just off campus where Sam liked to study and drink frou-frou coffee, according to the waitress Dorothy.
Dorothy was the most helpful person out of everyone Dean talked to, which was getting ridiculous as his interviews went on. At sixty-three, she was the oldest person working in the establishment and the grandma to every kid that walked in the door, though she had her favorites. Sam was among the fortunate that earned perks like free coffee on late night cramming sessions, or an on the house cinnamon roll when they came in after or during the worst day possible.
She took to Dean once she figured out who he was and why he was there. He didn’t think he’d ever be able to repay her fully for being so nice to Sam and himself, especially after days like today.
The roommate was a complete bust all seven times Dean spoke with him. He thought Dean was some Mexican named Javier and kept speaking to him in mangled French every time he showed up.
Sam’s professors had such big classes that his face and presence hadn’t really registered enough to stand out, though that skeezy art teacher definitely remembered Sam. He made Dean the same offer of nude modeling for his class if he wanted to make a few extra bucks.
It took Dean a very long time to remember why it would be a Bad Thing to shoot the man.
So Dorothy was his favorite person in this god forsaken place, and probably the only thing keeping him sane. Well, her and her one of a kind cinnamon Danishes made of awesome and the size of his head.
“Still no luck, honey?” she asked on his billionth trip in. He’d spent the morning in all the neighboring towns as Agent Ford, going to hospitals, morgues, restaurants, libraries, bookstores, ice cream stands, the whole shebang.
Nothing. Nada.
Dean shook his head, thinking on the unfinished Agent Hamil badge he’d run across in the glove box. He should have picked a different ID to use; the Star Wars aliases were supposed to be a surprised for Sam, before Stanford.
“Well, I might have something,” said Dorothy as she poured him a new cup. She jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “That pretty blonde thing over there by the window, she was asking about him.”
Dean leaned to look around her, and if his heart skipped a few beats out of tune, then only he and Dorothy knew. The blonde was probably Sam’s age, long curly hair, miles of leg, wearing Capris and a vintage cartoon shirt displaying the Smurfs. She stared out the window, sipping one of those iced coffees, her papers and books ignored in front of her.
Dean didn’t have to squint to see that was Sam’s type.
“Thanks, Dorothy.” Dean finished his coffee in a single gulp, ignored the way it burned going down too much too fast.
“I hope she’s got something for you, honey.”
Dean wiped his mouth, hoped the bags under his eyes didn’t scare her away, and approached the table.
“Hi, my name is Dean Winchester. Dorothy said you were asking about my brother?”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Her name was Jessica. Sam was tutoring her in math and geek-boy had totally missed the ninety neon signs she had going on how attracted he was to her. Dean felt like face-palming. At least that thing hadn’t changed about Sam.
“We met twice a week for it wherever was open,” she said. “The last time he got a call and had to leave about twenty minutes after we got here. It sounded urgent, and that’s the last time I saw him. I tried calling, all I get is voicemail.”
Jessica doodled on her napkin absently, a spiral building up into an eye, then a flower. She let out a soft laugh.
“I didn’t need the tutoring, you know. Sam seemed interested, but he never really made a move, so I decided to.”
Dean nodded with a smirk and felt his heart clench. Yeah, that was geek boy, all right. He filed that away and leaned forward on the table, a new cup of coffee steadily cooling in his hands.
“Did you hear anything of the phone call?”
Everything inside him was coiling tight like it did when he finally got a tangible thread on a case. It was worse, now, his blood itching beneath his skin to get out and do something, kill something.
“Something about a bookshop,” said Jessica. “I think he called it Mackey’s? McAlister’s? Something Irish. There’s no bookshop called that in Palo Alto, though. Sorry, that’s all I remember.”
“No, thank you, that’s more than I’ve gotten since I showed up,” he gave her a smile. He felt it straining at the ends as his heart stuttered on faster. California was not going to swallow Sam like a brick in quicksand.
“I hope it helps.”
Jessica shook his hand and left. Dean’s mind spun as he paid for the drinks Dorothy let him and left a twenty dollar tip in the jar when she turned her back. He gave into impulse and kissed Dorothy’s cheek on his way out the door.
He was halfway to the motel when he noticed the apple pie in the passenger seat.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The third pie came the next day. Jessica was wrong, there was a bookstore in Palo Alto called McAlister’s, it just hadn’t been open for business since 1954.
The abandoned shop stood on the corner of Birch and Robin street, smack in the middle of what used to be the thriving downtown of Palo Alto, and now was host to the population of homeless, druggies, gangs, and hookers, all of them too poor to leave or too entrenched in their situations to see if they could.
If Sam had taken a job here, solo, Dean was going kick his ass nine ways from Sunday and back again. Sam was smarter than that, but Dean hadn’t seen Sam in eight months, only talked to him twice, so there was no way of knowing if Sam was still in shape, still practiced anything to keep himself ready.
“College ruins brain cells,” he muttered. “That’s the only explanation.”
The hairs on the back of Dean’s neck stood on end the closer he came to the building, and it wasn’t his mind playing tricks on him. He noticed the few other people out and about; they crossed the street to continue onward so they wouldn’t walk directly in front of the place, eyes shying away before they had a chance to glimpse anything.
He and Dad had taken a few jobs where physical places held that kind of power. Even people who staunchly refused to believe in the paranormal were skittish around them, where the very air felt thick and serrated, like the briefest contact might slice you all to hell before you knew it was happening. They wouldn’t admit it, wouldn’t acknowledge it in any way, but their primal instinct to survive did.
He fleetingly wondered what it said about his family’s instincts that they could feel that and go into those places anyway. Sam once theorized it was defective genes and too many skull fractures. Dean said it was because they’d been handed Badass destinies at birth.
He still thought Sam was right, though.
The back door to the store had been boarded closed until someone or something kicked it in. Dean picked his way through splintered wood and broken glass, each careful step crunching in the unnatural silence. Whatever was making this place Heebie Jeebie central its presence wasn’t registering on the EMF.
There wasn’t anything unusual in the city records about McAlister’s; no unexplainable deaths, no murders, nothing he could see about the land, though those records only went back so far. His eyes were still swimming from all the reading he crammed into the seven hour wait before sunset.
McAlister’s ran great for about twenty years before the neighborhood started going bad, then closed when the competition on the other side of town got too tough, and the owner, a Phillip McAlister, moved to Tampa where he was currently enjoying Canasta on Thursday’s and spying on the bikini lush beaches during his daily oxygen treatments.
Lucky bastard.
Dust hung suspended in the flashlight beam as he swept it around the room, his other hand resting beneath that wrist, trusty Taurus following the light. The floor creaked underneath, parts of it soft and termite ridden. Dean’s breath caught as he swept the flashlight downwards; they caught the trail of a pair of size fourteen shoeprints.
“Yahtzee,” Dean murmured out of habit, but it held none of his usual excited enthusiasm. If Sam was still here, after three weeks gone missing…
Dean followed the footprints through the back and out into the main room of the shop. His feeling of unease went through the roof. Empty bookshelves stood in rows and wrapped around the walls, wood covered in thick dust that hadn’t been disturbed since the last board was nailed over the windows and exits.
Even so, it was far too clean. The absence of human touch attested to just how long the presence had been around, right since the closing. No homeless, druggies, hell, not even any animals seemed to have been brave enough to use the obvious shelter.
Only Sam’s footprints stood out in the orderly decay, and they led right to a disrupted altar where the cash register and front desk once stood.
“Aw crap.”
Half burned candles, bowls of herbs, a mirror, cat bones, and smeared blood lay scattered on the floor around a black scarf and chalk drawn symbols connecting in a circle. Here, two new sets of footprints appeared in the dust; one was a size nine and the other just a bit bigger and barefoot.
He moved on autopilot, circling out from the altar, taking in details. The struggle had been violent; Sam hadn’t gone down without a fight, taking it clear into what seemed to be the children’s section of the store, leaving smashed bookcases and overturned chairs in his wake.
It ended near a back staircase, the wood so damaged the middle was missing, collapsed years before. Resting on the bottom step were Sam’s cell phone and wallet. The phone was dead and the wallet had fifty dollars, his student ID, a debit card, three fortune cookie papers, and a receipt from a gas station so worn he couldn’t make out the date or items purchased.
Two small smears of blood stained the leather. Spider web cracks spread out over the glass front of his phone.
Dean put them in his jacket pocket, hands trembling. That was it. No footprints led away from the staircase, though there was a fine sheen of black particles to the left of the banister, where the size nine’s disappeared.
Barefoot and Sam seemed to have just vanished from their last tracks.
Dean worked over the rest of the building, circling and scouting until the first rays of light began peeking through the cracks in the boarded windows. He couldn’t help but feel like he’d failed again. Sam had been here, but he was long gone by now. Rage and despair knotted together in a throbbing black ball, situated in the pit of his stomach.
Dean closed his eyes, forced his lungs to draw in air till they pressed against his ribs.
“Alright, this is still good. I’ve got some clues, now,” he said aloud.
The words were kind of empty, but it was something. He made his way back to the front of the store and snapped as many pictures as he could of the ritual area, focusing on the symbols. He’d shoot them to Bobby when he had a signal.
The sun was above the horizon by the time he made it out to the Impala, lighting up the street. Dean wearily climbed into the driver’s seat, the weight of Sam’s belongings pressing against his side.
The third pie sat on the dashboard, permeating the interior with the thick scent of cinnamon and apples.