SPN fic: Verbal, part I
Hell, two posts in one day? I'm freakin' spammin' y'all. But here you go...fic. In two parts.
Title: Verbal
Rating: G-13 for language and mature situations. Gen-like, with a twist. That’s your warning.
Summary: Dean spills his guts. Sam is amused, then appalled. Oneshot, complete.
Thanks to the marvelous and amazing betas. Lemmypie mainlined Bonanza for me and then regurgitated it on demand. jmm0001 slapped me upside the head and demanded structure.
a/n 1: This fic makes references to events in my previous fics Red, Dazzleland and Cirque de Céline. How’s that for self-pimping? However, you can totally read this without having read those other things. All you have to know is this: Sam left for Stanford from Niagara Falls, resulting in an annus horribilis for Dean and John (Dazzleland); the boys met a Trickster before the one in Tall Tales (Cirque de Céline); and Sam killed a Big Bad Wolf to save Dean in Washington State (Red).
a/n 2: according to the super-wiki timeline, there’s a bit of a jump between Roadkill and Heart, with many eps possibly coming between look here for more. Rather unadvisedly, I’m going to ignore that very good bit of theorizing, and I hope super-canonical folks don’t freak on my ass, because I’m following the ep airing sequence, which the super-wiki guys (rightfully) suggest might be fucked up. So Verbal takes place between Roadkill and Heart, sometime in late February, Season Two.
a/n 3: This is for Tabaqui, for whom I promised something where they talked to each other.
--
At first, Sam blamed the whole thing on Dean getting laid. But Sam didn’t really want to imagine that, not at all, mostly because Dean was going to flaunt it so spectacularly that there was no point in imagining anything: Dean always filled in the blanks when it came to his sexual adventures.
So he rolled to his side and focused his eyes enough to recognize and eventually read his watch: seven thirty in the morning, and Dean hadn’t gotten in till well after midnight, had been noisy as hell in fact - getting fucking laid always made Dean both cocky and clumsy - and should have slept until at least the time when all the breakfast shows were finished their hysterical banter.
Except Dean wasn’t sleeping, was he? Sam could hear him in the shower, talking to himself. It had woken Sam up, the mutters and growls. Sam could hear Dean’s voice above the blast of shower and the motel owner outside flinging howdy-doody morning greetings at some unsuspecting family come to the Silver Nugget Ranch-o-Rama.
Thin walls and doors; not exactly fortified. Turned that word over in his fuzzy mouth, thinking of wine and banks and all those frontier towns.
Sam stared at the garish table lamp, collecting his thoughts like Cracker Jack toys, which was to say, one at a time and not without a sick feeling in his stomach: last night he’d failed to notice the western-style stitching around the rim of the lampshade, the buffalo horns set above his bed like it was the front of Boss Hogg’s Cadillac. Lucky he hadn’t spiked that sucker through the back of his head, drunk and falling into bed. Wasn’t that a lawsuit waiting to happen.
Where did Dean find these places?
Still, Sam would be the first to admit, finding a Bonanza-themed motel in Reno wasn’t exactly a strenuous activity. Wait. That wasn’t right. They were in Carson City, not Reno. Yesterday morning, Dean had alluded to some prior gambling altercation in The Biggest Little City in the World, had expressed a preference for the presumably clean slate of Carson City. Trust Dean to be running out of down-market Nevada bars in which to ply his stick.
In every sense of the word.
Sam got up, waited for the bathroom, could hear Dean babbling about something in the shower, not singing. For a minute, he wondered if Dean had actually brought someone back with him, the tone of it was so fucking conversational, but no, Sam thought he might have noticed that, given that the girl Dean had been slavering over last night had possessed a loud voice and wasn’t afraid to use it.
“Motormouth,” Sam banged on the door. “Hurry up, would you? I’m dying out here.”
Sam realized that the sound of running water wasn’t exactly conducive to ignoring a full bladder, so he turned on the TV. He rocked from foot to foot, watching a commercial for pull-up diapers, waiting for Dean to finish, awash in irony.
Sam brushed past Dean as soon as he opened the door, steam swirling in eddies like Maine fog, ignoring Dean’s protest.
Relief. Toothpaste. Washcloth. No, man, shower, because he still smelled of bar and the bathroom reeked of urinal deodorant and it wasn’t a good combination. The water was hot and smelled of metal.
“You know,” Dean said as Sam stepped back into the yee-haw room, towel barely big enough to go around, “I’m pretty sure I’ve stayed here before. The horns,” and he gestured with one hand, head tilted to the side. Something was wrong; Sam saw it immediately, mostly because he’d been living in Dean’s pocket for more than a year and a certain way Dean’s eyes slid to the side signaled it: Dean was freaked out.
“What-” Sam managed, but Dean ran right over him.
“I once heard that they have a bunch of bison horns left over from the big hunts in the 1870s, but that’s bullshit. Think they’d keep crap like that? Doubt it. Tatanka,” and he curled his fingers into little horns on either side of his head like in that Costner movie. “Someone’s gonna fucking kill themselves on those one of these days, though you might be able to tie someone up nice and tight to ‘em if that was your kink. The coffee maker doesn’t work, piece of shit, that’s what first clued me in that I’d stayed here before, didn’t work then, either, and Dad just laughed at me, bastard. Think we should get some coffee, because I’m good for exactly fuck all without it.”
He took a breath and Sam stared at him, saw the rim of white around his irises. “What the hell is wrong with me, Sam? ‘Cause I haven’t stopped since I woke up. I opened my eyes and I was talking, man. Yammering away.” Another breath and a half-shrug. “But that girl last night. Really something. She wouldn’t shut up. I wasn’t talking then. Didn’t need to.”
Sam dried himself off, glancing at Dean every once in a while as his brother outlined last night’s sexual conquest in nothing so tactful as ‘broad strokes’. Sam finally pulled on a long-sleeved jersey knit and held up a hand.
Dean’s brows quirked. “Haven’t you been listening to a word I’ve said? Don’t give me The Hand. I can’t fucking shut up.” Enough time to swallow. Experimentally, Dean pressed his lips together, looked for all the world like a little kid refusing to talk.
A long moment passed, Sam looking at him quizzically. Neither said anything, the television providing the only commentary.
Finally, Dean’s breath exploded through his nose like he’d just surfaced from a deep dive. “You know, I’ve seen this one before,” looking at the fuzzy screen, which was tuned in to that tall Texan - Dr. Baldy. “She’s been screwing around with his chiropractor, not sure whose kid it is, but he still wants her back, but he doesn’t want to give up the chiropractor either. Pretty difficult to find a good chiro, apparently. Can’t believe it. Who the hell would go on a show and spill their guts like that? Are people really that desperate?” His eyebrows crooked together, genuinely stumped. Then he sighed. “People have nothing better to do I guess. Wonder how they look at each other once the cameras are off.”
Scattershot attention back on Sam, who was laughing quietly in disbelief. Dean sounded like he’d had his shower at Starbucks and kept his mouth open in the spray.
“Why the fuck don’t you get your hair cut, man? Cause you’re looking like My Little Pony. Why don’t we dye it pink and let the kindergarten girls go wild on your ass? Jesus Christ, there must be coffee around here somewhere. You think the Comstock Pump n’ Ride across the street has coffee? Must have coffee. C’mon, Sam.” Stopped, glared. “You’re fucking enjoying yourself, aren’t you? Don’t look so freakin’ pleased. I sure as hell don’t want to be stuck like this. What’s that German word you used when Gordo got popped by the cops? Schadenfreude. You get that look on your face and it just makes me want to crawl under a rock.”
This was rich. This was some kind of cosmic justice and Sam didn’t care if it was a psychic hiccup or a curse, or fucking pixie dust. Supernatural shit was rarely so apt and so funny. Dean pulled on a hooded sweatshirt and then his leather coat, because it was late February in the Sierra Nevada and it was cold, even as he was saying something about what you usually found under rocks and fishing and the way worms squirmed as you put them on a hook, poor bastards.
Sam followed him across the parking lot, still laughing at his non-stop brother, sun too bright for this time of day, but thin and insubstantial, like fine crystal, somehow dangerous for all that. Light meshed with air, was like breathing some kind of vapor not of the normal plane of existence: harsh, pure, star fumes.
They crossed Highway 50, the Loneliest Road in America, quiet despite the fact it was morning rush hour, coffee enough incentive for them both. Why did the psychic cross the road? Sam asked himself, but was still too muzzy to come up with anything clever.
“Hey,” Dean said to the gas station clerk. “You got coffee? Is it decent? How long ago was it made?” A sign hung above where the clerk pointed. “That’s the price? Fucking highway robbery.” Dean laughed at his own joke. “Get it? Can you pour it into one of those gas cans?” In the corner by the dog-eared state maps, a pile of red plastic gas jugs was arranged like a Giza burial tomb. “Maybe I’ll just take the pot. No, I’m just kidding.”
He turned to Sam, smiling. “See, Sam? You get your hair cut like this guy and you’d be in business. Bet he gets laid a lot, telling the chicks he works at the Pump n’ Ride.” Clamped his mouth shut at that, visibly struggling. Shook his head a little at Sam’s wide grin. He filled two paper cups, took a handful of sugar packets and jammed them into his pocket. Back to the counter, wallet out, bills thrown across the lotto-ticket blotter. “You want a candy bar, Sam? I’m hungry as hell.”
Sam grabbed a Snickers bar and placed it next to Dean’s Oh Henry. Dean, still talking incessantly about how peanut-free factories had to be the biggest crock of shit on the planet, waved away his change, maybe embarrassed - though Dean didn’t embarrass easily - and shot out the door, the biggest coffee cup imaginable in his hand.
Dean was walking quickly, and Sam had to dance sideways, trying to get his attention. “So, are you just saying anything that crosses your mind?”
Dean shrugged. “I guess.” His mouth pulled into a half-grin, not quite amused. “Can’t really stop it, but you know, I can say one thing while I’m thinking another. I do it all the time, right? You know, I’m sitting at a diner and you’re going on about some metaphysical mystic from the twelfth century and I’m talking back at you, but really I’m thinking about the waitress’s legs or maybe how stupid your hair looks or just how fucking tired I am of hamburgers.” He stopped, head down, looking at the parking lot asphalt. “You see? Right there? I was thinking that I didn’t want to tell you how tired I get, shit I still don’t want to tell you, but now - now I can try to say something else, okay?” He looked at Sam, and Sam’s eyebrows came together.
“What are you trying to tell me, Dean?”
“Just…just, you know. Keep me talking about cars or song lyrics or baseball stats. Otherwise I have no idea what’ll come out.”
Sam grinned. “Sweet.”
Dean was capable of inflicting some pretty vile looks when he put his mind to it.
“Okay, Sam,” Dean said, aiming for the Impala. Sam didn’t know where Dean thought he was going, but the car was home base, was home safe, home free. Home. Maybe he wasn’t going anywhere. “Let’s think this through. I’ve eaten something or picked up a cursed object, or been cursed. Probably not coincidence, right? Not some random thing. Who the fuck would do this to me?” He set the candy bar and coffee on the roof of the car, looking for his keys, “Better yet, who the fuck wouldn’t want to do this to me?”
“Dean-” Sam tried, but Dean just coasted right over him, as relentless as a zombie with noseful of scent.
“I’ve never heard of a curse like this, but who the fuck knows? A talking curse? A curse where you don’t shut up? It’s not natural, right? Couldn’t be some flu bug or psychological tic. A drug? Maybe someone slipped me something? Some super spy-drug?”
Sam was laughing so hard he thought Dean might hit him.
Instead, Dean shook his head. “Nah, someone’s put a whammy on me. Probably at the bar last night. But all I did was fuck her, Sam, and it was not the most remarkable fuck I’ve ever had, fairly standard, actually, compared to other stuff. That would probably have been those girls and their cousin - shit, I think they said he was their cousin - after hours at Disney World. One of them worked there, right? And so they got us in, musta been about 2:30 in the morning, I think. Don’t really remember because I’d had a little too much to drink. One of them was Sleeping Beauty or Snow White or some shit like that, but they knew how to get into the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. Whole thing was surreal. Bunch of fucking pirate costumes,” and Dean wasn’t looking at Sam, was climbing into the car, smiling and shaking his head. He waved and nodded to the Silver Nugget’s owner who actually tipped his hat to them.
Top of the morning to you too, Pa, Sam thought, getting into the passenger seat.
“Was it Disney World? Is that the one in Florida? Or the one in California?” Dean covered his mouth with one hand, closed his eyes momentarily.
Experimentally, like he was adding vinegar to a baking soda solution in chemistry class, Sam said, “Tell me about the last time you were here, with Dad.”
Dean stared at him hard, hand still over his mouth. Between the fingers, Sam heard. “You fucking bastard.” Closed his eyes, angled away, but Sam could still hear him.
“I’m not talking about that.”
Silence. It didn’t last long: “I watched a lot of TV. Was like the fucking Lone Star channel or something, back-to-back episodes of Gunsmoke and Bonanza. I thought I’d go mental.” The hand slipped down to his chin and his words got clearer. “Awful lot of silver in the ground, still. Dad said it used to protect this whole area, like some kinda huge safe house. A lot of it’s been mined. Dad was trying to map out what was left, some ongoing project he had with Bobby, if I remember correctly. I didn’t pay too much attention, was just happy to be in one place. I was flat on my back, recuperating from the last job we’d had. It was a relief, coming someplace where we didn’t have to kill anything.”
Dean turned to him, anger in his eyes, in the set of his expressive brows. “Just stop it, okay? It’s bad enough without you and your fucking lawyer’s questions. Like a freakin’ cattle prod. Like I’m some kind of longhorn you’re trying to get to Dodge City. I think I’ve seen every single episode of Bonanza, you know.”
Sam’s hand was clutching the door handle. He didn’t know if Dean was in any condition to drive, thought maybe he wasn’t, maybe it was a bad idea to maneuver a few tons of steel at high speed while your head was buzzing and your mouth moving like Martin Scorsese on coke.
Dean hadn’t touched the Oh Henry bar. He hadn’t started the car. Dean slumped back against the seat, his hand sliding down to the steering wheel. “So if it’s a curse, maybe one of the chicks last night laid it on me. Maybe we’ve stirred up a coven or something, or some kinda New Age stuff - you piss anyone off? No? Musta been me. I liked the look of the one you were talking to, but it didn’t go anywhere, did it? Do I have to show you how to do everything, Sammy?”
Sam had always known Dean’s capacity for talking about sex to be pretty much inexhaustible, but this was taking it to a whole new level. Besides, they needed to figure it out and Sam couldn’t so much as draw breath when Dean was like this. Abruptly, while Dean was saying, “So if you’d just bought her a drink, fuckwit, she’d have-”, Sam slammed his hand across Dean’s mouth, covering it completely.
The silence was unnerving. Sam sighed. “Jesus, I can’t concentrate with you going on like this. Man.” He took a deep breath. “Dude, if I take my hand away, are you gonna be quiet?”
Slowly, Dean shook his head. Sam thought for a second that his brother might be tearing up he was so freaked. But no, it was just the effort of not ripping Sam’s hand from his mouth. On the steering wheel, Dean’s knuckles were white.
“Okay,” Sam breathed, leaving his hand where it was. “Okay. I’ll think of something.” His eyes darted around the car, finally landing on the backseat, where Dean had thrown the red toolbox. Duct tape. “I could...tape your mouth shut.” Winced as he said it. Then smiled, almost apologetically.
Dean rolled his eyes and under his hand, Sam could feel his brother’s mouth twitching.
“Okay. I’m going to take my hand away to get the tape. Is that all right?”
Everything in Dean’s stare told him that nothing was all right, but he nodded just a little.
In one motion, Sam vaulted halfway across the backseat, hands grabbing for the toolbox. His right hand was slimy from Dean’s saliva, but he didn’t give himself time to wipe it away. Mostly because...
“Jesus christ, Sam, why the hell can’t I stop this? I ought to be able to just shut up. I’m good at it, shutting up. Stop fucking laughing, I am too. When have I ever told you anything that I didn’t want you to know? Is that my shirt? You’re wearing my shirt! I bought it at that store outside Topeka and I kept thinking what the fuck are we doing in Topeka? It’s ugly there, everything’s ugly in Topeka, just the gray buildings and the chicks, man, the fugly chicks there like orcs or something. Do you think those hobbits were gay? I think they were gay, or maybe not gay, maybe just not really into chicks at all, just like those ones in Topeka-”
Sam knew he’d go insane if he didn’t find the tape in the next five seconds.
“It always drives me nuts when you do that, lean into the back seat. Can’t you just open the fucking door and go around? One time, I banged Tracy Felistra on that seat, right where you are now. Incredible. You and Dad were in the motel room and she was just so hot, not like those hobbit women, not at all, although her sister was even more...you knew that right? I think her sister liked you Sam, even though you were only fifteen and really incredibly pimply. How’d you have such freakin’ bad skin when all you ate was cucumbers I’ll never know, must have been all that chocolate milk, maybe -”
There, the tape, and Sam - mouth set in a hard line - ripped a length off, clapped it over Dean’s mouth, and collapsed against the Impala’s door.
“Tracy Felistra’s sister thought I was hot?”
Dean nodded.
“Dude, why didn’t you tell me?”
Dean shrugged with his fingers, his hand tapping the steering wheel, some tune in his head.
“Dean,” and Sam made a motion for him to get out of the car. “C’mon. Let me get to my laptop, see what I can find out. You write down everything you remember about the girl last night, okay?” Dean scowled, but grabbed the Oh Henry and jumped out. Sam hoped that no one was watching too closely, because duct tape across the mouth usually only screamed I’m being kidnapped, help me.
While Sam tapped out different search vectors on an online database that had proven particularly useful for supernatural phenomenon in the past, Dean spread himself out on the bed, fingering the Oh Henry bar, twitchy like he had mites. Sam was hungry himself. The coffee wasn’t very good, but he’d managed to drink both his and Dean’s while he searched.
Dean scratched away at the notepad Sam had thrown on the bed, tentatively at first, then writing furiously, not stopping. Distracted by the information that there were no fewer than forty-seven known talking spells, curses, or hallucinogenic red herrings masquerading as talking curses, Sam didn’t immediately notice what Dean was doing.
Finally, Dean threw the pad across the room, and it fluttered like a large wounded bird, a seagull hitting a windshield at speed. Sam looked up with alarm and Dean ripped off the tape with one hand. “Oooww!” he roared, balling up the tape and throwing it next to the pad where it bounced around like a possessed gray mouse. “Okay, Sam, okay. I can’t do this. I can’t do the tape thing. All it did was transfer it to the paper,” and he gestured to the blown pad.
While Dean detailed how much he loathed having duct tape residue stuck to his face, commiserating with women who had their eyebrows waxed - or other parts, which led to a relatively restrained recounting of a bikini wax gone wrong - Sam picked up the pad, read the scattered scrawl. Dean’s writing wasn’t exactly neat at the best of times, but this was somewhere up there with Jack Nicholson’s typing skills.
Behind him, Dean’s voice petered out: he was deliberately taking deep breaths, trying to slow down, not be quite as manic. “There’s some stuff in there about last night’s stand - her name is Michelle, very nice woman. A bit talky. And no,” Dean stared hard at Sam, still standing in the middle of the room, pad in hand, trying to parse the salient details from tangential information about everything from Dean’s opinion of athletic socks to a strategy for winning at Crazy Eights. “No, I didn’t tell her to shut up or anything like that. Maybe she just wanted me to open up or something. Wouldn’t be the first. It’s what Cassie needed, and I couldn’t give it to her, no matter how much I wanted to.”
Sam watched as Dean forced himself to a stop. Stuff slipped out if he wasn’t careful. Important things that he kept close, that he didn’t want displayed like produce at a grocery store.
“Tell me more about this Michelle,” Sam prodded, changing the subject for him.
Dean nodded, picking up his thread. “Had a bunch of those scented candles, place smelled like the inside of a Chinese apothecary. Or a bakery - probably cinnamon. I think that cinnamon flavored gum is just the worst thing in the world. Why the fuck would you mess with mint?” He sat on the bed, staring beseechingly at Sam as though he really wanted to know the answer to that question.
Whatever pops into his head, Sam understood. Whatever this is, a curse, whatever, it’s getting stronger. He scanned the lines of prose, looking for anything - there, an address, a description of her house. A description of the underwear she’d been wearing last night.
Meanwhile, Dean was methodically listing off the lyrics to ‘Gallows Pole’ while his knee jumped. Their eyes met, Dean’s mouth turning around the words, quietly now, soft. “You know, the original folktale is about a girl on the gallows and everyone wants to see her hang, except for her true love, who brings a bribe for the hangman. Except in Zeppelin’s version, it’s a guy and he gets hanged anyway. Still a good tune. Don’t think we have it on tape. We should get it.”
“Let’s go,” Sam spoke over his brother’s quiet words, holding his hand out for the keys.
Dean lobbed them over, still talking, almost under his breath. Then, “D’you drink all my coffee? Man, that’s low. Better not go back to the Pump n’ Ride, the clerk thought I was weird.” Smiled through it. “Most people do, I guess.” Ricocheted away from that, jackknifing like an Olympic diver to: “Don’t think I can handle food, I’ll probably choke,” and tossed him the candy bar on the way out the door.
It was better once Sam figured out that he could just turn on music and Dean would sing along. Would invent words when he didn’t know them, resulting in some pretty twisted shit around ‘School’s Out’, which Sam was pretty sure even he knew the words for. But Dean was just fooling with him, making shit up because he was so easily bored, and Sam wondered if Dean had alternative lyrics for every song in his tape collection because he must have played those tapes a thousand times in the last year. And they hadn’t been new a year ago; Sam remembered some of them from before he’d gone to Stanford.
He drove and Dean sang along, neither particularly happy.
Still, it felt more normal for the both of them, more normal than Dean verbalizing every thought that passed through his skull, from the profound to the ridiculous. On the way to Michelle’s house, Sam learned that Alice Cooper was a great golfer and that Nevada was one of his preferred stops. Played in a bunch of tournaments all up and down the west coast. Sam stopped at a corner store and got another coffee and some bottled water. Dean was starting to sound a little hoarse.
Dean tried to drink the water, took a quick slug of it, sputtering, eventually got the hang of drinking and talking. Sam could see it was difficult, though. He started the car, consulted his map on the seat between them, and lifted his eyes to the Sierras, snow-dusted like coffee cakes, air so clear he could almost see to California.
“You know, I always liked this part of the country - real Bonanza stuff. We should go to Virginia City, not so far away, really feel like you’re in the old west. Maybe a bit touristy now, I guess. I like Westerns, though. You remember Alias Smith & Jones and How the West Was Won? Here Come the Brides? Well, that was Seattle, wasn’t it? Not exactly old west, I guess. Logging, not mining or ranching.
“Goddamn Seattle. That fucking Wolf, picking off guys like we were livestock,” and he choked a little, a sound of denial, of refusal. “Was always glad to take the I-5 outta town. Dad didn’t like going back, either. Didn’t like-
“Drove the 50 a bunch of times, following Dad in that big black truck, checking up on you in California. You never knew about that, right? Hell, I never knew when we were going to do it, either. Sometimes I swear Dad would change his mind around Sacramento, he’d just pull over and make us turn around. Goddamn it, he loved that truck.”
And Sam didn’t want him to stop, he realized, slowed the Impala, made his turn, didn’t look at Dean, wanted all these lost words.
“Don’t know what he had against this old beauty, but he loved that truck to bits. Even when things weren’t going all that well, the truck was a sort of…you know…a salvation.” Sam glanced at Dean, worried that he’d stop, would change the subject.
One finger traced a line on the window, eyes distant, out the front, somewhere between sky and mountain. “Sacramento was like a decompression chamber, this way station between our hunting and checking up on you. But we didn’t check on you that first year. Dad was still too mad. Maybe mad isn’t the right word. Maybe it’s exactly the right word.”
I don’t want to tell you this. Might as well have said it out loud; Sam understood. Typical that this was the only thing Dean wasn’t willing to admit.
“We stayed here for a whole month that first year you were gone. Dad couldn’t decide what he wanted to do. Didn’t put it like that of course. Staying a whole month someplace was so weird. After that stretch in Niagara Falls, we’d been picking up and moving and picking up and moving. Mostly to avoid the cops. Mostly.”
It wasn’t the sort of thing Dean talked about. Not something that Sam had asked about, had never wanted to think about it, at first too clouded by anger and then, later, by guilt. But it had been forced months ago in a Niagara Falls gymnasium, a gun to them both, facing a demonic homicidal teen. Sam could see his brother’s jaw working, his eyes glossing with emotion and this wasn’t fair. This was a form of rape, a violation.
Sam rubbed his face, wanting and needing. It was like eating a whole chocolate cake in one sitting. Gorgeous, he thought, and it was a terrible word.
“Why are we stopping?” Dean asked rhetorically, noticing that Sam had pulled over. “This where Michelle lives? Shit, looks different in daylight, but most things do. I think she had a boyfriend. Maybe I should have mentioned that earlier. But he’s away in Lake Tahoe working the ski hills or something. Maybe he’s a cowboy. Did you know the guys in Bonanza wore the same clothes every episode? Made shooting a breeze. Most people think there’s only two brothers, but there were three. Adam disappeared the fourth season. His horse’s name was Sport, but I don’t think he ever called him that. Little Joe rode Cochise and Hoss - which means big horse, was his nickname, his real name was Eric - Hoss rode Chub. Needed a fucking Clydesdale because Dan Blocker was a whopper. His son Dirk was an actor too, was in Baa Baa Black Sheep, remember that? Robert fucking Conrad, knock my block off. Dude always reminded me of Dad.”
Stopped only to take a breath, voice raw as zoo food. Sam turned in the seat, reached out and gently put his left hand over Dean’s mouth and Dean let him. The silence was remarkable and Sam let it sink in, watched Dean like a hawk.
He’d closed his eyes, sat quietly, but was thrumming with tension, an elastic looped around two fingers getting ready to snap with purpose, sharpshooter accurate. A frustrated exhalation through the nose across the top of Sam’s hand. Sam adjusted himself, rested his right hand on his brother’s shoulder and Dean allowed that, too.
“We’ll figure this out.” Dean wouldn’t like the next part. “I think I should go in there alone. If she’s not our curse-caster, you’ll freak her the hell out. And if her boyfriend’s back from Tahoe, I don’t see how you’ll avoid a fight and that’s the last thing we need right now.”
Dean opened his eyes and shook his head.
Sam tilted his head, hair hanging in his eyes. “No. It’s gotta be this way.” He met Dean’s stare and knew that he was the one in control, that he could get a grip on this while Dean was slowly unraveling. “It’s gotta be this way,” he repeated, but softly. Behind his hand, he could feel Dean twitch, the muscles that usually controlled smiles jumping uproariously, teeth chewing the inside of his mouth.
Sam heard snippets of what Dean thought about the idea of his brother going in alone as he got out of the car, but Dean’s voice was low, almost a growl, and Sam hoped like hell that this Michelle was a cooperative witch, one that would easily see the error of her ways.
A red pickup truck sat beside a tiny Japanese car designed before Japanese cars were considered luxurious, and Sam knew that the boyfriend’s reappearance might be a mitigating factor, might actually work in his favor. Leverage, that’s what this could be.
Problem was, Michelle wasn’t a witch, wasn’t apologetic, and didn’t give a rat’s ass if her boyfriend - who appeared indeed to be a cowboy - knew all about her one night stand. Practically wiped his nose in it. It degenerated into a scream-fest without Sam hardly opening his mouth.
Cowboy called her a whore and Michelle said that at least she had the decency to tell him about her indiscretions - which left Sam wondering whether they were actually indiscretions if she came right out and told her boyfriend about them - and then the cowboy was crying and it was all so awful that Sam backed away realizing that Michelle couldn’t have put together a talking curse to save her life.
Which meant that they needed to find out how to break the curse on their own, because the list of people that a) Dean had pissed off and b) knew how to access curses was really ridiculously long.
“See? I told you,” Dean murmured to the Impala’s quilted roof once Sam jumped back in and gave his pronouncement of failure. “She’s too dumb to come up with a curse. Gonna have to figure out how to break it ourselves. Think you can do that?” He peered at Sam warily, fingers drumming against his thigh. “Shit, you already know how to break it, don’t you? Just don’t want to tell me. Must mean it’s messy. You are so fucking transparent, Sam. No good at poker whatsoever. Easier to find out who laid the curse so they can lift it, right? Because breaking it ourselves is going to involve -”
Almost lazily, Sam had his hand back on Dean’s mouth. “Yeah. It’ll be easier if we can find out who laid it. Think. We helped Molly on that stretch of road up in the mountains. We came down here to the valley. We’ve only been in town a day, Dean. Did anyone else in the bar give you a weird look? Did you make a stop on the way back from Michelle’s? Piss off anyone in a - 7-11 or a gas station?”
Slowly, he took his hand away.
“You wanna trace back all the people I owe an apology to? Like that Earl guy? That’d be some funny ass sitcom, wouldn’t it? Dean Winchester apologizing for all the fucked up things he’s done. So, no, I didn’t stop, drove straight to the Silver Nugget Ranch-o-Rama.” Cleared his throat, kept going of course.
“Can’t really miss the old Silver Nugget, right? That big cowboy hat and the lasso on the sign. When you were in Stanford? That’s when I started scouting out the bizarre motels, I think I was trying to get back at Dad, because he never said a fucking thing to me, I was going crazy and I thought, you know I just thought, that maybe, one time, he’d be so fucking perplexed by the weirdness of the motel that he’d say something, but he never saw the humor in it.”
He was talking about Dad, again. It always came back to that, no matter how hard he tried and Sam loved it and loathed how much he loved it.
“Fuck, he’d find this a particular kind of hell, wouldn’t he? Can you imagine him sitting here, listening to me go on?” Dean laughed but it was choking, a bark close to a sob, voice shattering on it, then collecting itself like the winnings at a crap table. “Hey, maybe he is, maybe he’s sitting in a sound booth in Hell and the yellow-eyed Demon has a little camcorder somewhere in the Impala and Dad’s just writhing in agony, hearing me going on and on about him.”
His eyes showed white and Sam’s hand was back there immediately. Fuck.
“You want to know what breaking the curse is going to involve?”
Dean nodded emphatically.
So Sam told him.
--
And, on to Part II
-
Title: Verbal
Rating: G-13 for language and mature situations. Gen-like, with a twist. That’s your warning.
Summary: Dean spills his guts. Sam is amused, then appalled. Oneshot, complete.
Thanks to the marvelous and amazing betas. Lemmypie mainlined Bonanza for me and then regurgitated it on demand. jmm0001 slapped me upside the head and demanded structure.
a/n 1: This fic makes references to events in my previous fics Red, Dazzleland and Cirque de Céline. How’s that for self-pimping? However, you can totally read this without having read those other things. All you have to know is this: Sam left for Stanford from Niagara Falls, resulting in an annus horribilis for Dean and John (Dazzleland); the boys met a Trickster before the one in Tall Tales (Cirque de Céline); and Sam killed a Big Bad Wolf to save Dean in Washington State (Red).
a/n 2: according to the super-wiki timeline, there’s a bit of a jump between Roadkill and Heart, with many eps possibly coming between look here for more. Rather unadvisedly, I’m going to ignore that very good bit of theorizing, and I hope super-canonical folks don’t freak on my ass, because I’m following the ep airing sequence, which the super-wiki guys (rightfully) suggest might be fucked up. So Verbal takes place between Roadkill and Heart, sometime in late February, Season Two.
a/n 3: This is for Tabaqui, for whom I promised something where they talked to each other.
--
At first, Sam blamed the whole thing on Dean getting laid. But Sam didn’t really want to imagine that, not at all, mostly because Dean was going to flaunt it so spectacularly that there was no point in imagining anything: Dean always filled in the blanks when it came to his sexual adventures.
So he rolled to his side and focused his eyes enough to recognize and eventually read his watch: seven thirty in the morning, and Dean hadn’t gotten in till well after midnight, had been noisy as hell in fact - getting fucking laid always made Dean both cocky and clumsy - and should have slept until at least the time when all the breakfast shows were finished their hysterical banter.
Except Dean wasn’t sleeping, was he? Sam could hear him in the shower, talking to himself. It had woken Sam up, the mutters and growls. Sam could hear Dean’s voice above the blast of shower and the motel owner outside flinging howdy-doody morning greetings at some unsuspecting family come to the Silver Nugget Ranch-o-Rama.
Thin walls and doors; not exactly fortified. Turned that word over in his fuzzy mouth, thinking of wine and banks and all those frontier towns.
Sam stared at the garish table lamp, collecting his thoughts like Cracker Jack toys, which was to say, one at a time and not without a sick feeling in his stomach: last night he’d failed to notice the western-style stitching around the rim of the lampshade, the buffalo horns set above his bed like it was the front of Boss Hogg’s Cadillac. Lucky he hadn’t spiked that sucker through the back of his head, drunk and falling into bed. Wasn’t that a lawsuit waiting to happen.
Where did Dean find these places?
Still, Sam would be the first to admit, finding a Bonanza-themed motel in Reno wasn’t exactly a strenuous activity. Wait. That wasn’t right. They were in Carson City, not Reno. Yesterday morning, Dean had alluded to some prior gambling altercation in The Biggest Little City in the World, had expressed a preference for the presumably clean slate of Carson City. Trust Dean to be running out of down-market Nevada bars in which to ply his stick.
In every sense of the word.
Sam got up, waited for the bathroom, could hear Dean babbling about something in the shower, not singing. For a minute, he wondered if Dean had actually brought someone back with him, the tone of it was so fucking conversational, but no, Sam thought he might have noticed that, given that the girl Dean had been slavering over last night had possessed a loud voice and wasn’t afraid to use it.
“Motormouth,” Sam banged on the door. “Hurry up, would you? I’m dying out here.”
Sam realized that the sound of running water wasn’t exactly conducive to ignoring a full bladder, so he turned on the TV. He rocked from foot to foot, watching a commercial for pull-up diapers, waiting for Dean to finish, awash in irony.
Sam brushed past Dean as soon as he opened the door, steam swirling in eddies like Maine fog, ignoring Dean’s protest.
Relief. Toothpaste. Washcloth. No, man, shower, because he still smelled of bar and the bathroom reeked of urinal deodorant and it wasn’t a good combination. The water was hot and smelled of metal.
“You know,” Dean said as Sam stepped back into the yee-haw room, towel barely big enough to go around, “I’m pretty sure I’ve stayed here before. The horns,” and he gestured with one hand, head tilted to the side. Something was wrong; Sam saw it immediately, mostly because he’d been living in Dean’s pocket for more than a year and a certain way Dean’s eyes slid to the side signaled it: Dean was freaked out.
“What-” Sam managed, but Dean ran right over him.
“I once heard that they have a bunch of bison horns left over from the big hunts in the 1870s, but that’s bullshit. Think they’d keep crap like that? Doubt it. Tatanka,” and he curled his fingers into little horns on either side of his head like in that Costner movie. “Someone’s gonna fucking kill themselves on those one of these days, though you might be able to tie someone up nice and tight to ‘em if that was your kink. The coffee maker doesn’t work, piece of shit, that’s what first clued me in that I’d stayed here before, didn’t work then, either, and Dad just laughed at me, bastard. Think we should get some coffee, because I’m good for exactly fuck all without it.”
He took a breath and Sam stared at him, saw the rim of white around his irises. “What the hell is wrong with me, Sam? ‘Cause I haven’t stopped since I woke up. I opened my eyes and I was talking, man. Yammering away.” Another breath and a half-shrug. “But that girl last night. Really something. She wouldn’t shut up. I wasn’t talking then. Didn’t need to.”
Sam dried himself off, glancing at Dean every once in a while as his brother outlined last night’s sexual conquest in nothing so tactful as ‘broad strokes’. Sam finally pulled on a long-sleeved jersey knit and held up a hand.
Dean’s brows quirked. “Haven’t you been listening to a word I’ve said? Don’t give me The Hand. I can’t fucking shut up.” Enough time to swallow. Experimentally, Dean pressed his lips together, looked for all the world like a little kid refusing to talk.
A long moment passed, Sam looking at him quizzically. Neither said anything, the television providing the only commentary.
Finally, Dean’s breath exploded through his nose like he’d just surfaced from a deep dive. “You know, I’ve seen this one before,” looking at the fuzzy screen, which was tuned in to that tall Texan - Dr. Baldy. “She’s been screwing around with his chiropractor, not sure whose kid it is, but he still wants her back, but he doesn’t want to give up the chiropractor either. Pretty difficult to find a good chiro, apparently. Can’t believe it. Who the hell would go on a show and spill their guts like that? Are people really that desperate?” His eyebrows crooked together, genuinely stumped. Then he sighed. “People have nothing better to do I guess. Wonder how they look at each other once the cameras are off.”
Scattershot attention back on Sam, who was laughing quietly in disbelief. Dean sounded like he’d had his shower at Starbucks and kept his mouth open in the spray.
“Why the fuck don’t you get your hair cut, man? Cause you’re looking like My Little Pony. Why don’t we dye it pink and let the kindergarten girls go wild on your ass? Jesus Christ, there must be coffee around here somewhere. You think the Comstock Pump n’ Ride across the street has coffee? Must have coffee. C’mon, Sam.” Stopped, glared. “You’re fucking enjoying yourself, aren’t you? Don’t look so freakin’ pleased. I sure as hell don’t want to be stuck like this. What’s that German word you used when Gordo got popped by the cops? Schadenfreude. You get that look on your face and it just makes me want to crawl under a rock.”
This was rich. This was some kind of cosmic justice and Sam didn’t care if it was a psychic hiccup or a curse, or fucking pixie dust. Supernatural shit was rarely so apt and so funny. Dean pulled on a hooded sweatshirt and then his leather coat, because it was late February in the Sierra Nevada and it was cold, even as he was saying something about what you usually found under rocks and fishing and the way worms squirmed as you put them on a hook, poor bastards.
Sam followed him across the parking lot, still laughing at his non-stop brother, sun too bright for this time of day, but thin and insubstantial, like fine crystal, somehow dangerous for all that. Light meshed with air, was like breathing some kind of vapor not of the normal plane of existence: harsh, pure, star fumes.
They crossed Highway 50, the Loneliest Road in America, quiet despite the fact it was morning rush hour, coffee enough incentive for them both. Why did the psychic cross the road? Sam asked himself, but was still too muzzy to come up with anything clever.
“Hey,” Dean said to the gas station clerk. “You got coffee? Is it decent? How long ago was it made?” A sign hung above where the clerk pointed. “That’s the price? Fucking highway robbery.” Dean laughed at his own joke. “Get it? Can you pour it into one of those gas cans?” In the corner by the dog-eared state maps, a pile of red plastic gas jugs was arranged like a Giza burial tomb. “Maybe I’ll just take the pot. No, I’m just kidding.”
He turned to Sam, smiling. “See, Sam? You get your hair cut like this guy and you’d be in business. Bet he gets laid a lot, telling the chicks he works at the Pump n’ Ride.” Clamped his mouth shut at that, visibly struggling. Shook his head a little at Sam’s wide grin. He filled two paper cups, took a handful of sugar packets and jammed them into his pocket. Back to the counter, wallet out, bills thrown across the lotto-ticket blotter. “You want a candy bar, Sam? I’m hungry as hell.”
Sam grabbed a Snickers bar and placed it next to Dean’s Oh Henry. Dean, still talking incessantly about how peanut-free factories had to be the biggest crock of shit on the planet, waved away his change, maybe embarrassed - though Dean didn’t embarrass easily - and shot out the door, the biggest coffee cup imaginable in his hand.
Dean was walking quickly, and Sam had to dance sideways, trying to get his attention. “So, are you just saying anything that crosses your mind?”
Dean shrugged. “I guess.” His mouth pulled into a half-grin, not quite amused. “Can’t really stop it, but you know, I can say one thing while I’m thinking another. I do it all the time, right? You know, I’m sitting at a diner and you’re going on about some metaphysical mystic from the twelfth century and I’m talking back at you, but really I’m thinking about the waitress’s legs or maybe how stupid your hair looks or just how fucking tired I am of hamburgers.” He stopped, head down, looking at the parking lot asphalt. “You see? Right there? I was thinking that I didn’t want to tell you how tired I get, shit I still don’t want to tell you, but now - now I can try to say something else, okay?” He looked at Sam, and Sam’s eyebrows came together.
“What are you trying to tell me, Dean?”
“Just…just, you know. Keep me talking about cars or song lyrics or baseball stats. Otherwise I have no idea what’ll come out.”
Sam grinned. “Sweet.”
Dean was capable of inflicting some pretty vile looks when he put his mind to it.
“Okay, Sam,” Dean said, aiming for the Impala. Sam didn’t know where Dean thought he was going, but the car was home base, was home safe, home free. Home. Maybe he wasn’t going anywhere. “Let’s think this through. I’ve eaten something or picked up a cursed object, or been cursed. Probably not coincidence, right? Not some random thing. Who the fuck would do this to me?” He set the candy bar and coffee on the roof of the car, looking for his keys, “Better yet, who the fuck wouldn’t want to do this to me?”
“Dean-” Sam tried, but Dean just coasted right over him, as relentless as a zombie with noseful of scent.
“I’ve never heard of a curse like this, but who the fuck knows? A talking curse? A curse where you don’t shut up? It’s not natural, right? Couldn’t be some flu bug or psychological tic. A drug? Maybe someone slipped me something? Some super spy-drug?”
Sam was laughing so hard he thought Dean might hit him.
Instead, Dean shook his head. “Nah, someone’s put a whammy on me. Probably at the bar last night. But all I did was fuck her, Sam, and it was not the most remarkable fuck I’ve ever had, fairly standard, actually, compared to other stuff. That would probably have been those girls and their cousin - shit, I think they said he was their cousin - after hours at Disney World. One of them worked there, right? And so they got us in, musta been about 2:30 in the morning, I think. Don’t really remember because I’d had a little too much to drink. One of them was Sleeping Beauty or Snow White or some shit like that, but they knew how to get into the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. Whole thing was surreal. Bunch of fucking pirate costumes,” and Dean wasn’t looking at Sam, was climbing into the car, smiling and shaking his head. He waved and nodded to the Silver Nugget’s owner who actually tipped his hat to them.
Top of the morning to you too, Pa, Sam thought, getting into the passenger seat.
“Was it Disney World? Is that the one in Florida? Or the one in California?” Dean covered his mouth with one hand, closed his eyes momentarily.
Experimentally, like he was adding vinegar to a baking soda solution in chemistry class, Sam said, “Tell me about the last time you were here, with Dad.”
Dean stared at him hard, hand still over his mouth. Between the fingers, Sam heard. “You fucking bastard.” Closed his eyes, angled away, but Sam could still hear him.
“I’m not talking about that.”
Silence. It didn’t last long: “I watched a lot of TV. Was like the fucking Lone Star channel or something, back-to-back episodes of Gunsmoke and Bonanza. I thought I’d go mental.” The hand slipped down to his chin and his words got clearer. “Awful lot of silver in the ground, still. Dad said it used to protect this whole area, like some kinda huge safe house. A lot of it’s been mined. Dad was trying to map out what was left, some ongoing project he had with Bobby, if I remember correctly. I didn’t pay too much attention, was just happy to be in one place. I was flat on my back, recuperating from the last job we’d had. It was a relief, coming someplace where we didn’t have to kill anything.”
Dean turned to him, anger in his eyes, in the set of his expressive brows. “Just stop it, okay? It’s bad enough without you and your fucking lawyer’s questions. Like a freakin’ cattle prod. Like I’m some kind of longhorn you’re trying to get to Dodge City. I think I’ve seen every single episode of Bonanza, you know.”
Sam’s hand was clutching the door handle. He didn’t know if Dean was in any condition to drive, thought maybe he wasn’t, maybe it was a bad idea to maneuver a few tons of steel at high speed while your head was buzzing and your mouth moving like Martin Scorsese on coke.
Dean hadn’t touched the Oh Henry bar. He hadn’t started the car. Dean slumped back against the seat, his hand sliding down to the steering wheel. “So if it’s a curse, maybe one of the chicks last night laid it on me. Maybe we’ve stirred up a coven or something, or some kinda New Age stuff - you piss anyone off? No? Musta been me. I liked the look of the one you were talking to, but it didn’t go anywhere, did it? Do I have to show you how to do everything, Sammy?”
Sam had always known Dean’s capacity for talking about sex to be pretty much inexhaustible, but this was taking it to a whole new level. Besides, they needed to figure it out and Sam couldn’t so much as draw breath when Dean was like this. Abruptly, while Dean was saying, “So if you’d just bought her a drink, fuckwit, she’d have-”, Sam slammed his hand across Dean’s mouth, covering it completely.
The silence was unnerving. Sam sighed. “Jesus, I can’t concentrate with you going on like this. Man.” He took a deep breath. “Dude, if I take my hand away, are you gonna be quiet?”
Slowly, Dean shook his head. Sam thought for a second that his brother might be tearing up he was so freaked. But no, it was just the effort of not ripping Sam’s hand from his mouth. On the steering wheel, Dean’s knuckles were white.
“Okay,” Sam breathed, leaving his hand where it was. “Okay. I’ll think of something.” His eyes darted around the car, finally landing on the backseat, where Dean had thrown the red toolbox. Duct tape. “I could...tape your mouth shut.” Winced as he said it. Then smiled, almost apologetically.
Dean rolled his eyes and under his hand, Sam could feel his brother’s mouth twitching.
“Okay. I’m going to take my hand away to get the tape. Is that all right?”
Everything in Dean’s stare told him that nothing was all right, but he nodded just a little.
In one motion, Sam vaulted halfway across the backseat, hands grabbing for the toolbox. His right hand was slimy from Dean’s saliva, but he didn’t give himself time to wipe it away. Mostly because...
“Jesus christ, Sam, why the hell can’t I stop this? I ought to be able to just shut up. I’m good at it, shutting up. Stop fucking laughing, I am too. When have I ever told you anything that I didn’t want you to know? Is that my shirt? You’re wearing my shirt! I bought it at that store outside Topeka and I kept thinking what the fuck are we doing in Topeka? It’s ugly there, everything’s ugly in Topeka, just the gray buildings and the chicks, man, the fugly chicks there like orcs or something. Do you think those hobbits were gay? I think they were gay, or maybe not gay, maybe just not really into chicks at all, just like those ones in Topeka-”
Sam knew he’d go insane if he didn’t find the tape in the next five seconds.
“It always drives me nuts when you do that, lean into the back seat. Can’t you just open the fucking door and go around? One time, I banged Tracy Felistra on that seat, right where you are now. Incredible. You and Dad were in the motel room and she was just so hot, not like those hobbit women, not at all, although her sister was even more...you knew that right? I think her sister liked you Sam, even though you were only fifteen and really incredibly pimply. How’d you have such freakin’ bad skin when all you ate was cucumbers I’ll never know, must have been all that chocolate milk, maybe -”
There, the tape, and Sam - mouth set in a hard line - ripped a length off, clapped it over Dean’s mouth, and collapsed against the Impala’s door.
“Tracy Felistra’s sister thought I was hot?”
Dean nodded.
“Dude, why didn’t you tell me?”
Dean shrugged with his fingers, his hand tapping the steering wheel, some tune in his head.
“Dean,” and Sam made a motion for him to get out of the car. “C’mon. Let me get to my laptop, see what I can find out. You write down everything you remember about the girl last night, okay?” Dean scowled, but grabbed the Oh Henry and jumped out. Sam hoped that no one was watching too closely, because duct tape across the mouth usually only screamed I’m being kidnapped, help me.
While Sam tapped out different search vectors on an online database that had proven particularly useful for supernatural phenomenon in the past, Dean spread himself out on the bed, fingering the Oh Henry bar, twitchy like he had mites. Sam was hungry himself. The coffee wasn’t very good, but he’d managed to drink both his and Dean’s while he searched.
Dean scratched away at the notepad Sam had thrown on the bed, tentatively at first, then writing furiously, not stopping. Distracted by the information that there were no fewer than forty-seven known talking spells, curses, or hallucinogenic red herrings masquerading as talking curses, Sam didn’t immediately notice what Dean was doing.
Finally, Dean threw the pad across the room, and it fluttered like a large wounded bird, a seagull hitting a windshield at speed. Sam looked up with alarm and Dean ripped off the tape with one hand. “Oooww!” he roared, balling up the tape and throwing it next to the pad where it bounced around like a possessed gray mouse. “Okay, Sam, okay. I can’t do this. I can’t do the tape thing. All it did was transfer it to the paper,” and he gestured to the blown pad.
While Dean detailed how much he loathed having duct tape residue stuck to his face, commiserating with women who had their eyebrows waxed - or other parts, which led to a relatively restrained recounting of a bikini wax gone wrong - Sam picked up the pad, read the scattered scrawl. Dean’s writing wasn’t exactly neat at the best of times, but this was somewhere up there with Jack Nicholson’s typing skills.
Behind him, Dean’s voice petered out: he was deliberately taking deep breaths, trying to slow down, not be quite as manic. “There’s some stuff in there about last night’s stand - her name is Michelle, very nice woman. A bit talky. And no,” Dean stared hard at Sam, still standing in the middle of the room, pad in hand, trying to parse the salient details from tangential information about everything from Dean’s opinion of athletic socks to a strategy for winning at Crazy Eights. “No, I didn’t tell her to shut up or anything like that. Maybe she just wanted me to open up or something. Wouldn’t be the first. It’s what Cassie needed, and I couldn’t give it to her, no matter how much I wanted to.”
Sam watched as Dean forced himself to a stop. Stuff slipped out if he wasn’t careful. Important things that he kept close, that he didn’t want displayed like produce at a grocery store.
“Tell me more about this Michelle,” Sam prodded, changing the subject for him.
Dean nodded, picking up his thread. “Had a bunch of those scented candles, place smelled like the inside of a Chinese apothecary. Or a bakery - probably cinnamon. I think that cinnamon flavored gum is just the worst thing in the world. Why the fuck would you mess with mint?” He sat on the bed, staring beseechingly at Sam as though he really wanted to know the answer to that question.
Whatever pops into his head, Sam understood. Whatever this is, a curse, whatever, it’s getting stronger. He scanned the lines of prose, looking for anything - there, an address, a description of her house. A description of the underwear she’d been wearing last night.
Meanwhile, Dean was methodically listing off the lyrics to ‘Gallows Pole’ while his knee jumped. Their eyes met, Dean’s mouth turning around the words, quietly now, soft. “You know, the original folktale is about a girl on the gallows and everyone wants to see her hang, except for her true love, who brings a bribe for the hangman. Except in Zeppelin’s version, it’s a guy and he gets hanged anyway. Still a good tune. Don’t think we have it on tape. We should get it.”
“Let’s go,” Sam spoke over his brother’s quiet words, holding his hand out for the keys.
Dean lobbed them over, still talking, almost under his breath. Then, “D’you drink all my coffee? Man, that’s low. Better not go back to the Pump n’ Ride, the clerk thought I was weird.” Smiled through it. “Most people do, I guess.” Ricocheted away from that, jackknifing like an Olympic diver to: “Don’t think I can handle food, I’ll probably choke,” and tossed him the candy bar on the way out the door.
It was better once Sam figured out that he could just turn on music and Dean would sing along. Would invent words when he didn’t know them, resulting in some pretty twisted shit around ‘School’s Out’, which Sam was pretty sure even he knew the words for. But Dean was just fooling with him, making shit up because he was so easily bored, and Sam wondered if Dean had alternative lyrics for every song in his tape collection because he must have played those tapes a thousand times in the last year. And they hadn’t been new a year ago; Sam remembered some of them from before he’d gone to Stanford.
He drove and Dean sang along, neither particularly happy.
Still, it felt more normal for the both of them, more normal than Dean verbalizing every thought that passed through his skull, from the profound to the ridiculous. On the way to Michelle’s house, Sam learned that Alice Cooper was a great golfer and that Nevada was one of his preferred stops. Played in a bunch of tournaments all up and down the west coast. Sam stopped at a corner store and got another coffee and some bottled water. Dean was starting to sound a little hoarse.
Dean tried to drink the water, took a quick slug of it, sputtering, eventually got the hang of drinking and talking. Sam could see it was difficult, though. He started the car, consulted his map on the seat between them, and lifted his eyes to the Sierras, snow-dusted like coffee cakes, air so clear he could almost see to California.
“You know, I always liked this part of the country - real Bonanza stuff. We should go to Virginia City, not so far away, really feel like you’re in the old west. Maybe a bit touristy now, I guess. I like Westerns, though. You remember Alias Smith & Jones and How the West Was Won? Here Come the Brides? Well, that was Seattle, wasn’t it? Not exactly old west, I guess. Logging, not mining or ranching.
“Goddamn Seattle. That fucking Wolf, picking off guys like we were livestock,” and he choked a little, a sound of denial, of refusal. “Was always glad to take the I-5 outta town. Dad didn’t like going back, either. Didn’t like-
“Drove the 50 a bunch of times, following Dad in that big black truck, checking up on you in California. You never knew about that, right? Hell, I never knew when we were going to do it, either. Sometimes I swear Dad would change his mind around Sacramento, he’d just pull over and make us turn around. Goddamn it, he loved that truck.”
And Sam didn’t want him to stop, he realized, slowed the Impala, made his turn, didn’t look at Dean, wanted all these lost words.
“Don’t know what he had against this old beauty, but he loved that truck to bits. Even when things weren’t going all that well, the truck was a sort of…you know…a salvation.” Sam glanced at Dean, worried that he’d stop, would change the subject.
One finger traced a line on the window, eyes distant, out the front, somewhere between sky and mountain. “Sacramento was like a decompression chamber, this way station between our hunting and checking up on you. But we didn’t check on you that first year. Dad was still too mad. Maybe mad isn’t the right word. Maybe it’s exactly the right word.”
I don’t want to tell you this. Might as well have said it out loud; Sam understood. Typical that this was the only thing Dean wasn’t willing to admit.
“We stayed here for a whole month that first year you were gone. Dad couldn’t decide what he wanted to do. Didn’t put it like that of course. Staying a whole month someplace was so weird. After that stretch in Niagara Falls, we’d been picking up and moving and picking up and moving. Mostly to avoid the cops. Mostly.”
It wasn’t the sort of thing Dean talked about. Not something that Sam had asked about, had never wanted to think about it, at first too clouded by anger and then, later, by guilt. But it had been forced months ago in a Niagara Falls gymnasium, a gun to them both, facing a demonic homicidal teen. Sam could see his brother’s jaw working, his eyes glossing with emotion and this wasn’t fair. This was a form of rape, a violation.
Sam rubbed his face, wanting and needing. It was like eating a whole chocolate cake in one sitting. Gorgeous, he thought, and it was a terrible word.
“Why are we stopping?” Dean asked rhetorically, noticing that Sam had pulled over. “This where Michelle lives? Shit, looks different in daylight, but most things do. I think she had a boyfriend. Maybe I should have mentioned that earlier. But he’s away in Lake Tahoe working the ski hills or something. Maybe he’s a cowboy. Did you know the guys in Bonanza wore the same clothes every episode? Made shooting a breeze. Most people think there’s only two brothers, but there were three. Adam disappeared the fourth season. His horse’s name was Sport, but I don’t think he ever called him that. Little Joe rode Cochise and Hoss - which means big horse, was his nickname, his real name was Eric - Hoss rode Chub. Needed a fucking Clydesdale because Dan Blocker was a whopper. His son Dirk was an actor too, was in Baa Baa Black Sheep, remember that? Robert fucking Conrad, knock my block off. Dude always reminded me of Dad.”
Stopped only to take a breath, voice raw as zoo food. Sam turned in the seat, reached out and gently put his left hand over Dean’s mouth and Dean let him. The silence was remarkable and Sam let it sink in, watched Dean like a hawk.
He’d closed his eyes, sat quietly, but was thrumming with tension, an elastic looped around two fingers getting ready to snap with purpose, sharpshooter accurate. A frustrated exhalation through the nose across the top of Sam’s hand. Sam adjusted himself, rested his right hand on his brother’s shoulder and Dean allowed that, too.
“We’ll figure this out.” Dean wouldn’t like the next part. “I think I should go in there alone. If she’s not our curse-caster, you’ll freak her the hell out. And if her boyfriend’s back from Tahoe, I don’t see how you’ll avoid a fight and that’s the last thing we need right now.”
Dean opened his eyes and shook his head.
Sam tilted his head, hair hanging in his eyes. “No. It’s gotta be this way.” He met Dean’s stare and knew that he was the one in control, that he could get a grip on this while Dean was slowly unraveling. “It’s gotta be this way,” he repeated, but softly. Behind his hand, he could feel Dean twitch, the muscles that usually controlled smiles jumping uproariously, teeth chewing the inside of his mouth.
Sam heard snippets of what Dean thought about the idea of his brother going in alone as he got out of the car, but Dean’s voice was low, almost a growl, and Sam hoped like hell that this Michelle was a cooperative witch, one that would easily see the error of her ways.
A red pickup truck sat beside a tiny Japanese car designed before Japanese cars were considered luxurious, and Sam knew that the boyfriend’s reappearance might be a mitigating factor, might actually work in his favor. Leverage, that’s what this could be.
Problem was, Michelle wasn’t a witch, wasn’t apologetic, and didn’t give a rat’s ass if her boyfriend - who appeared indeed to be a cowboy - knew all about her one night stand. Practically wiped his nose in it. It degenerated into a scream-fest without Sam hardly opening his mouth.
Cowboy called her a whore and Michelle said that at least she had the decency to tell him about her indiscretions - which left Sam wondering whether they were actually indiscretions if she came right out and told her boyfriend about them - and then the cowboy was crying and it was all so awful that Sam backed away realizing that Michelle couldn’t have put together a talking curse to save her life.
Which meant that they needed to find out how to break the curse on their own, because the list of people that a) Dean had pissed off and b) knew how to access curses was really ridiculously long.
“See? I told you,” Dean murmured to the Impala’s quilted roof once Sam jumped back in and gave his pronouncement of failure. “She’s too dumb to come up with a curse. Gonna have to figure out how to break it ourselves. Think you can do that?” He peered at Sam warily, fingers drumming against his thigh. “Shit, you already know how to break it, don’t you? Just don’t want to tell me. Must mean it’s messy. You are so fucking transparent, Sam. No good at poker whatsoever. Easier to find out who laid the curse so they can lift it, right? Because breaking it ourselves is going to involve -”
Almost lazily, Sam had his hand back on Dean’s mouth. “Yeah. It’ll be easier if we can find out who laid it. Think. We helped Molly on that stretch of road up in the mountains. We came down here to the valley. We’ve only been in town a day, Dean. Did anyone else in the bar give you a weird look? Did you make a stop on the way back from Michelle’s? Piss off anyone in a - 7-11 or a gas station?”
Slowly, he took his hand away.
“You wanna trace back all the people I owe an apology to? Like that Earl guy? That’d be some funny ass sitcom, wouldn’t it? Dean Winchester apologizing for all the fucked up things he’s done. So, no, I didn’t stop, drove straight to the Silver Nugget Ranch-o-Rama.” Cleared his throat, kept going of course.
“Can’t really miss the old Silver Nugget, right? That big cowboy hat and the lasso on the sign. When you were in Stanford? That’s when I started scouting out the bizarre motels, I think I was trying to get back at Dad, because he never said a fucking thing to me, I was going crazy and I thought, you know I just thought, that maybe, one time, he’d be so fucking perplexed by the weirdness of the motel that he’d say something, but he never saw the humor in it.”
He was talking about Dad, again. It always came back to that, no matter how hard he tried and Sam loved it and loathed how much he loved it.
“Fuck, he’d find this a particular kind of hell, wouldn’t he? Can you imagine him sitting here, listening to me go on?” Dean laughed but it was choking, a bark close to a sob, voice shattering on it, then collecting itself like the winnings at a crap table. “Hey, maybe he is, maybe he’s sitting in a sound booth in Hell and the yellow-eyed Demon has a little camcorder somewhere in the Impala and Dad’s just writhing in agony, hearing me going on and on about him.”
His eyes showed white and Sam’s hand was back there immediately. Fuck.
“You want to know what breaking the curse is going to involve?”
Dean nodded emphatically.
So Sam told him.
--
And, on to Part II
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