Fic: It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Lib
Title: It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Lib
Author: brightly_lit
Rating: PG-13 for non-graphic violence, death, a bit o' language
Genre: gen, mostly humor, a little sorrow/angst, casefic
Characters: Sam, Dean, OCs
Word Count: 7,848
Summary: This was for the spn_summergen fic exchange for tattooeddevil. Written for this prompt: "A spirit is haunting a high school, every prom night. Dean and Sam have to go undercover as supervisors to hunt the ghost. One of the high school kids takes a shine to either Sam or Dean and she's very, very insistent." VERY, VERY INSISTENT. Also, there are Mad Libs.
Dean was trying to be patient, but finally he let out a growl. “C’mon, Sammy, you aren’t even trying! These could be really funny if you just gave me some better words.”
“You mean some more suggestive words?”
“Well, yeah!”
“Fine. Bulging.”
Dean came out of the convenience store and got in the Impala with a grin, waving a little notebook at Sam. “Look, Sammy! They had Mad Libs! This’ll be great. Move over; I’m lettin’ you drive so we can do these.”
Sam moved over, already bitchfacing. He was pissy because Dean had been giving him a hard time about his new jacket, but come on, look at it! As he scooted, Sam tossed Dean the newspaper he’d been reading while Dean paid for gas. “I found our next case. Cedaredge High School in Oregon: Four of the last seven years, a student has committed suicide at prom in the maintenance room.”
Dean glanced at the story, tossed the newspaper in the back seat, and got out a pen. These Mad Libs weren’t doing themselves. “Great, that’s a nice long drive from here. We might have time to finish these. Remember when Dad bought us Mad Libs at that little general store in Texas when you were seven? He bought us every one they had!” It felt like they’d won the lottery. That had kept them busy and out of Dad’s hair in the back seat for weeks, giggling hysterically. It was one of Dean’s favorite memories.
Sam started driving and Dean asked him for various words. It was better for Dean to ask since Sam really had all the parts of speech down; it wasn’t as fun when Sam was making fun of him for giving an adjective when he’d asked for an adverb. “Gimme a color.”
“Black.”
“Noun.”
“Car.”
“Okay, verb.”
“Drive.”
“Adjective.”
“Shiny.”
Dean was trying to be patient, but finally he let out a growl. “C’mon, Sammy, you aren’t even trying! These could be really funny if you just gave me some better words.”
“You mean some more suggestive words?”
“Well, yeah!”
“Fine. Bulging.”
Dean read that word to himself in the context of the sentence and snickered. “Better. Oh, this is good: a man’s name.”
Sam considered, then: “Sam.”
Dean guffawed. “Now we’re gettin’ somewhere! Adjective.”
“Handsome.”
“Adverb.”
“Brilliantly.”
“Adjective.”
“Clever.”
Dean growled again. “Sam! Better words!”
“I’m trying to stick with a theme.”
“You have no idea how to do Mad Libs!”
“Actually, I think the problem is that I know exactly how to do Mad Libs.” He finally cracked a little grin.
“Okay, but when this comes out sucking, know it’s your fault. Give me another color.”
“Um ... blue.”
Dean eyed him, unable to hide his smirk. “Really?” he asked innocently. “Not brown?”
Sam let out an irritable noise. “Dean, we are not having this conversation again!”
Dean shrugged diffidently. “I just thought maybe you were gonna say brown, since obviously you’re giving adjectives and stuff about yourself, and I see that brown is your new favorite color.”
“What’s wrong with brown?” Sam asked coolly.
“What’s brown, Sam? Come on. Name the first thing that pops to mind.”
“Well, your boots, for one,” Sam said stiffly. “Your belt. Some of the threads in your plaid shirt.”
“My boots and my belt?! They’re leather! That’s the color of leather! Anyway, a little natural brown is fine, but ... well, and okay, that jacket is also too short.”
Sam’s patience was obviously wearing thin. “Dean, on me, every jacket is too short.”
“Yeah, but that one’s so short, I keep expecting you to whip out a red cape and start bull-fightin’.”
Sam breathed loudly, not unlike an angry bull. “You know, Dean, it’s hard enough for a guy as tall as me to find clothes. I know you always claim you’re tall, too, but you’re still inside the bell curve, unlike me. So if I find a jacket at the thrift store that’ll work, I count myself lucky.”
“Your old jacket wasn’t so beat up that you couldn’t have kept it until you found something better.”
“It was still covered in clown glitter! That stuff doesn’t come off!”
Dean couldn’t help tittering.
“It wasn’t funny, Dean; they almost killed me! Clowns!”
Dean snorted louder. He tried valiantly to put on a straight face, and failed utterly. “I know, Sam, I know. That was terrible. You know, I never really got details of that battle. Did he bounce his big red nose off you?”
“Dean!”
However hilarious this might be, Dean knew when Sam shouted his name like that, he’d better shut his mouth or he might just find Sam’s fist coming at it in the next few seconds. He couldn’t help bursting out with another chortle every now and then, though. “Okay, Sam. Sorry. Name an emotion.”
“Anger.”
“Verb.”
“Punch.”
“Adjective.”
“Bloody.”
Dean chuckled uncertainly. “Still sticking with a theme here, I see. Uh ... an interjection.”
“’I’ll kill you!’”
Dean read that to himself in the sentence. “I think they were just looking for one word, like, ‘Hey!’ or ‘Super!’”
“Okay, then, just ‘Kill!’”
Dean eyed him nervously as he filled in the blank, and shuddered a little at the malevolent smile growing on Sam’s face.
“Ahem. ‘A Day at the Zoo.’” Dean read the title of the second Mad Lib they’d completed, then started reading the story out loud to Sam: “A short, brown bear lay down on a short, brown jacket next to the brown rocks. A short, brown man was watching him from behind the fence. ‘Kill!’ shouted the man.” Dean gave up and tossed the booklet into the backseat. “You’re not even trying,” he complained. “Passive-aggressive much?”
“What? I thought it was a good story,” said Sam, dead-pan.
“I’m sorry I gave you a hard time about your jacket, okay? Jeez! You don’t have to ruin the Mad Libs over it.”
“Why do you even care what kind of jacket I’m wearing, Dean?”
“Because! It’s an embarrassment! I’m trying to look out for you, Sammy. Mark my words: as long as you’re wearing that jacket, you will never, ever get laid. No chick will look twice at you.”
“Dean, I know this may be hard for you to understand, but unlike you, not everyone makes every single life decision based on how it affects their chances of getting laid. There’s more to life. Really, Dean. You might look into it.”
“Look, I know it’s been long enough that you’re practically a virgin again, but the least you could do is not wear chick-repellant clothing! Even I won’t get laid if you’re wearing that thing near me!”
Sam said gently, almost pitying, “You know, Dean, counting that year when I didn’t have a soul ... I’ve done it way more than you. I mean, ten, twenty times as often, maybe more ....” He gave him that sympathetic look that made Dean want to throttle something. “You know you’ll never be able to catch up, right? Even if you spent the rest of your life trying ....”
The smile fell from Dean’s face. Dean scowled out the window, knowing Sam must be looking at him with that maddening victorious grin. He grabbed the Mad Libs out of the backseat again. “Fine, I’ll just do one by myself,” he retorted. “Name of someone in the room: Sam. Emotion: pissy. Adjective: bitch.”
“That’s a noun,” said Sam. “You’d have to make it ‘bitchy’ or ... ‘bitch-like’ ....”
“All right, then, how ’bout: ‘asshole.’”
Sam sounded patient. “No, you’ve got the same problem; you’d have to go with ‘asshole-ish,’ or ... that doesn’t really work. You should probably pick a different word.”
“Sam! Shut your pie-hole. Don’t make me come over there ....”
They made it to Cedaredge with a minimum of bruising, although when Dean reached over to wet-willie Sam, Sam managed to elbow him in the ribs hard enough that it still smarted when anything rubbed against it. Dean was still chortling over the Mad Lib he’d done himself, though. A couple of sentences had come out gold, and he quoted them to Sam at every opportunity. Sam seemed disappointingly unbothered. They fell into their familiar routine when they got to town: Sam went to the library to do research, and Dean went to the school to interview the principal. They met up back at a hotel that evening.
Dean put the bag of food on the table as Sam opened up his laptop, showing Dean the news clippings about the suicides. “Turns out one of them was ruled a homicide, because she was bludgeoned to death with a mop.”
“Hard to kill yourself like that,” Dean agreed, taking out his burger and fries.
“Yeah, and get this: if you look at the way they died, a case could be made that they were all homicides: shooting, stabbing ... one girl fell on a bunch of gardening tools.”
“So why did they call them suicides?”
“Eyewitnesses all said the person was alone when they went to the maintenance room and no one else was around. Also ... I don’t know if this means anything, but all the victims were female except the first.”
“Hm. Well, you might think the principal would be a little more concerned given that prom is coming up this Friday, but you’d think teenagers killed themselves at prom at every school, the way he talked about it.”
“You think he’s involved?”
“No, I think he’s an idiot.”
“So we’re not gonna get any help from him.”
“I don’t think so. Here, Sam, eat.”
Sam took his box of food out of the bag and looked at it in surprise: a chef salad. He glanced at Dean. It was hard to be awkward around the brother you’d been through just about everything with, but Sam sounded awkward when he said, “Thanks.”
“What? Figured you’d had enough fries for one week.”
“Yeah.”
Sam dug in. Dean didn’t get it, but Sam really seemed to like that stuff. Truth be told, Dean was feeling bad about teasing him about his jacket, because Sam really had gotten a beatdown from those clowns. Dean snickered at the thought, wishing for the thousandth time he had video of that fight. He felt bad for Sam ... but man, that must have been quite a sight.
“What?” asked Sam innocently at his snicker.
“Nothing,” Dean said, forcing himself to keep a straight face until he was able to get his burger in front of his mouth to hide his grin.
Fed suits on, they managed to arrange interviews with all the students who had any connection to the victims from earlier proms, claiming the Bureau had reopened the case as possible homicides. The seniors were especially informative, since they’d been around when several of the deaths had taken place. Some even had older siblings who’d talked to them about the first deaths when these kids were in middle school and elementary school. On the other hand, this was high school, so though there were rumors aplenty, it was hard to sort fact from fantasy. Nonetheless, there were two kids who were particularly helpful: a busybody who seemed to thrive on knowing everything going on in every corner of the school at every moment, and the brother of the second victim.
“I know who did it,” he said flatly. He had a haunted look Dean found all too familiar: it was the same look Dean had had that whole year when Sam was gone.
“Yeah?” Sam said, leaning forward, keenly interested. “Who?”
“It was that guy who faked his death the year before.”
“The first victim?” Sam asked. Sam and Dean eyed each other. Most people would dismiss this as poppycock, but this was their first indication all the clues might be coming together.
“Why do you say that?” Dean asked the kid.
“Because he asked her to prom two days before he killed her! She was all freaked out because he was supposed to be dead, but then there he was, plain as day, asking her out.”
“... And you think he killed her because ....”
“Because she said no,” said Todd, years-old anger lining his mouth. “He was a psycho, just like that. You know that’s why he faked his death in the first place: because he got stood up at prom, and he wanted to punish his date for it. You find that little bastard, but you let me at him before you take him away. Just five minutes; that’s all I need.”
Dean had to smile at the kid’s attitude, because it would be his own. “You bet we will, if we find him,” Dean said, nodding at him, and he saw the gratitude in the kid’s eyes.
Once the kid was gone, Dean looked at Sam. “Any chance he’s right and the kid’s still alive?”
“Trevor Goudy? Pretty sure not.” He handed Dean photos from the scene. Dean had seen a lot of bloody death scenes, but this was one of the bloodiest. There seemed to be blood on every single surface: walls, ceiling, covering the floor tiles.
Then Dean peered closer. “Wait a minute. I thought you said all the deaths happened in a maintenance room. This looks like a bathroom.”
“It was a bathroom,” Sam said, “but none of the kids would use it, saying it was haunted, so they turned it into a maintenance room.”
Dean winced and handed him back the photo. “All right, well, let’s interview that girl you thought might know something.”
Did Dean imagine Sam’s reluctance as he went to call her in? She bounded into the room, making a lightning-fast circle around Sam before hurling herself into her chair. “Hi!” she said to Dean. She eyed Sam sidelong as he returned to his seat. “Hi, Sam,” she said seductively. Dean had to use every bit of will he had not to drop character and burst into peals of hysterical laughter, but Sam caught his delighted smirk and met it with a warning frown.
“Hi again, Nellie,” said Sam nicely. “This is my partner, Agent Murdock, and if you don’t mind, we’d like to ask you a few questions ....”
“You act more like brothers,” she announced, looking between them shrewdly.
Sam and Dean both looked away from each other quickly. Dean cleared his throat. “Yeah, but we don’t look a thing alike, do we?” he said, smiling at her warmly. He already liked her. Anyone who promised this much Sam-related entertainment automatically had his goodwill.
She stared hard at them for another second, then shrugged and let it go, on to the next thing. “So let me tell you about the murders! They were murders, and here’s how I know ....”
It had taken forty-five minutes just to get her to stop talking. They finally had to leave the room, but she jumped up and followed, running to get in front of them and walk backward to keep regaling them with her tales. This might have been all right, except that she’d finished telling them everything she knew about the case twenty minutes before, and now she was relating all the school gossip she was privy to as if the details were state secrets she believed the federal government needed to be made aware of. It was plain from the reaction of her fellow students that she was a pariah. Dean couldn’t really fault them, since she was in their business all the time, and making it everyone else’s, too.
She followed them to the Impala, and even ran alongside it a little ways as they drove away, but not before leaving them with a steamy, “’Bye, Sam.”
As soon as they managed to get back on the road, Dean finally let out the merriment he’d had to fight so hard to keep in. Sam tried to ignore him.
“She calls you ‘Sam’? That’s pretty familiar.”
“Earlier today it was Agent Baracus.”
Dean snickered with delight. “She moves fast. Let it never be said that Sam doesn’t have sex appeal,” declared Dean. “Even if only for the freaks and geeks.”
“Dean ....” He had that saintly tone.
“Hey, she’s a senior--might even be legal.”
Sam looked even more tolerant. “She’s almost half my age.”
“Round up! Two-thirds.”
“Not my thing.”
“C’mon. She’s kind of cute. Weird, but cute.”
“I didn’t even date high-school girls in high school.”
“Yeah, but not by choice.”
“Yes by choice! They were too immature for me even then. You think I’m gonna start now? Just because you would--”
Dean sighed as this got less funny the more seriously Sam took it. “Nah. Not my thing, either. Still, you might want to drum up a wife or girlfriend or bodyguard or something; she doesn’t seem to take no for an answer.”
“Like our ghost, if that’s what it is. What do you think of her theory that the killer only killed the ones who rejected him and that’s why there were years when there were no deaths?”
“I think it’s a pretty good one.”
“We’ll start there then.”
As they returned to their hotel with food that night, something jumped out of the bushes at them. Its battle cry sounded like “SAMMEEE!” They both let out a shout and drew their weapons, but Sam wasn’t even able to take aim before it was on him. Dean was a split second away from wasting it when he realized what--or rather, who--it was.
“There you are!” Nellie was saying, talking so fast she sounded like an auctioneer, shoving her arm through Sam’s and beginning to walk with him. “I have two things to tell you and one thing to ask you. The first thing I have to tell you is that it’s that guy, the one in the picture you showed me. The thing I have to ask you is, will you go to prom with me? And the other thing I have to tell you is I rented a limo and I got a hotel and I made reservations at the best restaurant in town. We’re going to have SOOO much fun! This’ll be my first prom. My first prom! Because nobody asked me last year, or the year before, or--”
“Wait a minute,” Dean interrupted her, since Sam still seemed too stunned to function. “What do you mean, ‘it’s that guy in the picture’?”
“You know, that guy, who faked his own death,” she said, waving Dean away dismissively, barely looking at him.
“How do you know?” Dean demanded.
“Because he just asked me to prom.”
Dean and Sam looked at each other quickly. Sam held her away from him, gripping her tightly by the arms, which Dean could tell she was enjoying a lot. “And what did you say?” he asked urgently.
“I said ‘no,’ duh, because I’m going with you!”
“But--but you’re the one who guessed he’s killing the girls who reject him!” Dean exclaimed, bewildered.
“But you’ll be there, Sammy, and you’ll protect me!” she cooed shrilly, and nuzzled her head avidly into Sam’s armpit.
Sam and Dean looked at each other in alarm, but Dean’s expression all too soon gave way to pure joy. This was just too, too good.
“What’re you talking about?! Of course you have to go to prom with her! How else are you going to keep her safe?” Dean was trying hard to keep a straight face, but it was no use; Sam would see through him no matter what expression he concocted.
“We aren’t even going to be in town by the time prom rolls around, because we’re gonna kill this ghost first.”
“I told you--they cremated him.”
“I know, we’ve just got to find the lock of hair or baseball glove or whatever it is he’s holding onto.”
Dean waited for Sam to put two and two together. He was usually quicker on the uptake than this. Maybe he was so desperate to get out of going to prom with Nellie that he refused to see the obvious, so Dean finally had to help him out. “Sam ... Trevor’s not haunting his house; he’s haunting the school.”
“So? That’s even better; we’ll just find it at the school and destroy it.”
“Yeah, about that .... Easier said than done, ’cause I’m pretty sure I know what it is.”
“Well then, what is it?”
“You did see that picture you showed me, right, of the scene of his death? There was blood everywhere: ceiling, walls ... it probably seeped into the grout of the tile ....”
Dean waited the two seconds it took for it to click in Sam’s brain. “Oh, fuck,” he said with feeling. He thought hard for a few seconds with a pained expression. “Then how are we going to do this, Dean?” Sam’s voice had taken on a rare quality of whiny desperation. The man could fight a nest full of vampires without flinching, but prom? Sheer terror.
Dean shrugged. “I only have one idea: torch the room.”
“That could torch the school.”
“Yep, but at least nobody’ll die at prom anymore.”
“We can’t do that.”
“Do you have any better ideas?”
“We could ... convince them they need to replace the tile ....”
“And the ceilings, and the walls ...? Then how do we get our hands on the replaced tile to burn it? At least right now we know where it is--and where Trevor’s gonna be.”
Sam thought about it, that look of compassion growing on his face. When he spoke, it was with real feeling. “We can’t burn down their school right before prom, Dean.”
“Before or after, your choice. Before: you get to leave town before your date with Nellie the Peppy Stalker. After: the kids get their prom, but we have to guard Nellie and that maintenance room like Fort Knox.”
Sam slumped, but Dean knew he would do the right thing, because he always did. Fortunately, this time, the right thing was going to be hysterical.
Dean had dozens of photos of Sam all decked out for prom, each one better than the last. It was like a slideshow where Nellie looked progressively more overjoyed as Sam looked more hangdog. Dean had a picture of Nellie pinning a rather large bouquet of flowers to the buttonhole on Sam’s fed suit. He had a photo of them in front of the limo, with a bonus of the chauffeur rolling his eyes in the background. Dean accompanied them to dinner, because he wasn’t going to miss this, and he had photos of Nellie shoving cake in Sam’s face as she screamed that they would someday do this at their wedding. Man, and Becky, too. What was it about Sam that was so appealing to stalker chicks? That he seemed so unavailable, probably. Plus, he was all soulful and damaged; girls loved that shit.
Dean had mentioned to Sam that part of what he was enjoying so much about this was that Sam never got to go to prom when he was in high school, and now he finally did, but for some reason Sam took no comfort from that. Maybe it was because Nellie had no filter, and regaled both of them with all the details of her fantasies not just about Sam, but also about celebrities and other guys known to her, many of whom, she declared, were even cuter than Sam. She also didn’t appear to have a volume control, and soon everyone in the restaurant was also privy to her not-so-private fantasies. Sam got this stare, as if praying something might come through the door at any moment to save him. Maybe he was literally praying to Cas, but if so, apparently angels didn’t provide salvation from prom, at least not for a Winchester.
Just now she was vividly imagining out loud what living with her fantasy husband (currently, with Sam in the featured role) would be like. It seemed to involve lots of candlelit baths, scented bath gel, brass fixtures, and wheat-colored his-and-hers robes.
“Nah,” Dean informed her. “With Sam, you’d be lucky if you could get him to put his underwear on.”
Sam seemed past the capacity to react, but Nellie certainly wasn’t. “Ew, no! We don’t talk about that! Shh! Real men wear underwear.”
“I’m a real man, and I only wear ’em when I have a clean pair, which is not all that often, I’m gonna tell you,” Dean parried. “It isn’t always easy to find a laundromat, and underwear takes up a lot of valuable space in a duffle bag that could be used for ... other, more important things.”
“... And that’s why I’m never gonna marry you!” she announced, like Dean wasn’t even in the same category of man as Sam.
“Then why would you want to marry Sam?! He’s even worse about the underwear than I am!--” Sam did spare him a tired, pained look as the nice-looking couple at the adjacent table stared at Sam, glancing at his nether regions uncomfortably.
“I’d make him.”
“All right, then could you do something about the Mad Libs?” said Dean. “He ruins them, every time! I finally had to do one by myself just to get a funny one, and it’s so lame to do them by yourself!”
“OH MY GOD, I LOVE MAD LIBS!” she squealed. “Can we do one, can we??”
“Sure,” said Dean, “but they’re in the Impala, so you’d have to ditch the limo, or maybe do it later.” Finally, a decent Mad Libs partner!
“I’ll just have the limo follow us!,” she said brightly. “Hey, wait a minute,” she said suddenly, that lightspeed brain of hers kicking in. “What kind of agents do Mad Libs together and walk around naked in front of each other? You’re brothers! I knew it!!”
This time, she would not be dissuaded, and Dean saw no particular reason to try. “Yeah, you caught us. We’re actually ghost-hunters, here to kill that ghost.”
“Oh, that makes sense,” she said, as if it was as easy as that. Dean grinned. He liked her. She was smart and funny and liked to have a good time, and she was so weird, she was never going to be the one calling them freaks. That got a little old. Plus, once Sammy got used to her, she’d be good for him. He needed someone who would pull him out of his shell, someone cheery who would prevent him from getting mired too deep in his thoughts.
“Hey, Sam, maybe we should bring her with us! She’s the one who figured out who the ghost was and his m.o., and she seems cool with us being hunters. It’d be nice to have female company. Plus, she likes Mad ....” He trailed off at the look Sam gave him.
“No,” she quashed Dean’s idea unceremoniously. “I’m going to graduate, then I’m going to Columbia and getting a double major in economics and archaeology, and then I’m going to work my way up to V.P. at Google before getting married. Sorry,” she murmured sweetly to Sam, patting his hand, which automatically flinched away from hers.
“Ah, well,” said Dean, grinning and rubbing his full belly, full of actually good food, for once, although Nellie made him pay for his own meal, even though she paid for Sam’s. Her traveling with them was a pipe dream and he knew it, but Nellie was actually fun to be around, unlike Sam, and with that superbrain of hers, hunting would be a cinch; she’d probably have the monster identified from the news story that alerted them to the first indication of trouble. “I had to ask.”
“Of course you did,” she said magnanimously, collecting their doggie bags. “And now we dance!”
All the way to prom, Sam tried to reason her out of making him dance, but logic obviously had little impact on her. “What kind of twenty-nine-year-old takes a high schooler to prom? Everyone’s going to be wondering what the perv is doing there,” Sam complained.
“No, they’re going to be wondering how I snagged a sexy older man,” she said, tossing her hair. “Now--Mad Libs!” She grabbed it up from the backseat beside her and opened it up. She read a couple of the finished ones. “You’re right; these are terrible. All right, Sam: noun.”
“Jailbait,” he hissed, while Dean snickered.
“Dean, color.”
“Brown,” he said instantly.
“And me, I get to pick the next one!” she cried. “An emotion: love!” She wrote it down, laboring over it for some reason. “Okay, Sam: verb.”
“Run.”
“Dean, a woman’s name.”
“Nellie,” he said, and winked at her, grinning at her instant delight.
“Me, a man’s name: Sam! Sam Sam Sam!” She took a while writing this down, too. “Sam, give me an adverb.”
After a moment’s thought, he said, “Desperately.”
“Yay!” she shrieked. “Dean, give me a wonderful verb, something like ‘smile’ ....”
“Hey! No cheating. I give you the verb I want to give. Um ... stare,” he said, eying Sam, who was back to staring at some point in the far distance.
“Yay, and I get to finish it, me!,” Nellie screamed, “and I finish it with a noun, ‘MARRIAGE’! This is the best Mad Libs ever!! Want to hear it? Okay, here it is: “’True Love: This is the story of a man and his jailbait. He first admired her beautiful brown hair.’ Which is perfect because my hair really is brown! It’s like you knew, Dean!” Dean smirked and said nothing, not that he could have gotten a word in edgewise. She went on: “’It was love at first sight. It made him want to run every time he thought of marrying his lovely Nellie. Sam was desperately in love. He knew he would always stare whenever he imagined their inevitable marriage.’ WASN’T THAT SO GOOD? It was perfect! So perfect!” she cried, clutching it to her breast and swaying back and forth with it.
“Yeah, that was ... way better than any of the others, anyway,” Dean acknowledged, glancing at Sam, who perked up suddenly.
“There’s the school!” he said eagerly. “Dean, you and I need to man the maintenance room.”
“No, Sam, I need to man the maintenance room; you need to man Nellie.” He winked at him. Sam actually, literally gritted his teeth.
“But--but--”
“You go ahead and dance and drink punch and have a good time while I do the dirty work, Sam,” Dean said breezily as Sam glared daggers at him. “I don’t mind, because I’m such a good brother--right Nellie?”
“Yeah, whatever,” she said, opening the door before the car had even come to a stop. “Sam, come on, it’s time!!”
Dean’s last sight of Sam was of him being dragged away, gazing back pitiably at Dean.
Prom was uneventful--for Dean, at least. He kicked around the maintenance room all night, but never saw any sign of the ghost, though he did pick up a lot of EMF. He desperately wanted to go to the gym and get some more pictures of Sam, but there was always the chance the killer had asked other students to prom, as well; he dared not leave the maintenance room unattended.
Finally, at midnight, Nellie and Sam joined him there. Sam looked overfondled and exhausted, while Nellie looked utterly happy and satisfied. Sam seemed like he might have had at least a little fun--he was smiling as he bantered rather fondly with Nellie as they arrived. She’d finally grown on him.
“See anything?” asked Dean.
“Nope; nothing,” said Sam. “You?”
“Not a thing. Maybe he’s not after the ones who rejected him; maybe there’s some other reason he skips some years.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” said Sam, and turned to smile at Nellie. “You’re safe and we can go home now.”
“You mean to the hotel,” she said suggestively.
Sam said it as gently as he could. “Nellie, we talked about this. This is the end of the night. We’re going back to our hotel, and you’re going home. I’m sorry, but if you’re really desperate to spend the night with a guy, it’s not going to be me. Okay? We can drive you home if you like.”
“No, I’ll just take the limo,” she sighed. “I made him wait all this time; I may as well.”
They all walked out to the parking lot together, where Sam gave her a hug goodbye and Dean high-fived her. She was beaming again already. Dean admired her unsinkable spirit.
They got in the Impala and drove away, giving her one last wave as she talked to the chauffeur.
“So how was it?” asked Dean.
Sam shrugged. “Actually, it was okay. The chaperones stared, but most of the kids seemed to take it as pretty normal that I was there.”
“Don’t try to pretend you didn’t have fun; I can tell you did.”
Sam smiled. “Yeah. It was kind of fun.”
“Sammy finally got to go to prom!” He patted his brother, who rolled his eyes. “I thought it was too late, but life’s just full of surprises.”
“Yeah, well, you went to how many? Ten?”
“Eight, tops.”
“And how did you manage that again?”
“It’s the nice thing about moving around a lot, Sammy. Claim you’re a nice boy from the next town over and you can hit every prom in a twenty-mile radius.”
“It didn’t hurt that you got asked every year starting when you were a freshman.”
“Another nice thing about moving around: you can lie about your age.” He winked at Sam. “How did you end up NOT going to prom?”
Sam shrugged diffidently. “I guess I’m ... pickier than you.”
“You play hard to get, is what it is.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Sam agreed.
They just drove a little while, basking in the satisfaction of another case completed with no one hurt.
“Honestly,” Dean said thoughtfully, “if we’re gonna torch the place, now’s probably a better time than any. All the kids are gonna be as far away from school as they can get, going at it like rabbits.” Dean thought back fondly on all the proms he’d been to. It was one of the few situations where you were guaranteed of getting lucky. There had even been one year when he managed to hit three proms at three different schools on subsequent weekends.
“Okay, but I’m not staying in this suit one more second.”
“What, are you gonna get naked in the car? It’s just cruel of you,” Dean teased, “to get naked the second Nellie isn’t around to enjoy it anymore.”
“As naked as I have to,” said Sam, not taking the bait. Sure enough, as Dean turned around and headed back for the school, Sam stripped off his fed suit jacket and white dress shirt and replaced them with his usual western shirt and his short, brown jacket. “Better,” he sighed.
They walked the halls of the school, looking for any stragglers. Dean was right; there wasn’t a soul in sight. “Awesome,” Dean said as they headed back to the maintenance room. “I got the kerosene and the tire iron--you’ve got the salt rounds, right?”
Sam nodded, slinging the shotgun over his shoulder. “I think if--”
They were interrupted by a scream. It came from the maintenance room. They ran the rest of the way to the maintenance room, where they were greeted by the sight of Nellie, in her prom dress, lying bleeding on the floor. Sam tossed away his shotgun. “Nellie!” He ran to her side and lifted her gently, and she made a soft noise. “Nellie, no,” Sam moaned.
Her eyes opened a little, and even now, she smiled a bit to see Sam. “I knew ... you’d rescue me,” she managed to say.
Sam turned long enough to scream, “Dean, call 9-1-1!” Dean just stared, making no move. “Dean!” Sam looked at his face to see why he wasn’t calling, then followed his eyes to the floor beneath Nellie, where there grew an ever-widening pool of blood. “No,” Sam groaned, holding her tightly against him. “No, no, not again.” He stroked her face, and left a smear of her blood on her cheek.
“Did you come back for me?” she asked, her voice rasping in her throat. “The limo’s ... still here; we could go to ... the ... hotel ....” These were her last words. Dean saw the very bright spark of life go out of her. Sam must have felt it, too. He hung his head, and his shoulders shook. Dean looked down, his own eyes filling with tears. He tried to give Sam as much time as he could, but though Sam was too distraught to realize it, Dean couldn’t forget what was likely to appear any second, especially once it realized they’d come bearing kerosene and a lighter. If it could kill every intended victim, even someone as quick and clever as Nellie, it must be violent and strong as hell.
“Sam,” he said finally. Sam turned his head slightly. “We’ve gotta do this.”
As if summoned by his words, the ghost of Trevor Goudy appeared, smiling grimly down at Sam still holding Nellie. “You may have taken her to prom, but she’s mine now,” said Trevor.
“You son of a bitch.” Sam let go of Nellie and launched himself at the ghost.
“Sam!” cried Dean, and tossed him the tire iron. Sam attacked it with the tire iron, and it disappeared. “Don’t fight it, just kill it! We’ve got to do it now!”
Sam looked anxiously at Nellie’s body. “But--but Nellie ....”
“She died a violent death, Sam. If he really is keeping the ghosts of his victims prisoner around here somewhere ... one way or another, we need to give her a hunter’s funeral, too.”
Sam’s face showed his agony at the idea, but logic won out, and he nodded. Trevor’s ghost reappeared as they sprayed kerosene over every surface of the room, including the walls and ceiling, but he only hunkered over Nellie’s body protectively. “I don’t know what you’re doing, but she’s already dead. You can’t save her.”
“You’ve got kind of a one-track mind, kid,” Dean said, lighting a match. Once he and Sam were out of the room, he threw it inside, and watched as Trevor picked up and held Nellie’s lifeless body. “She’s mine!” he shouted. “She’s mine!” Even as the ghost went up in flames and he finally seemed to realize what they’d done, he shouted, “I don’t care; she’s mine!” and then he was gone.
They looked at each other, their sadness mirrored on the other’s face. A small explosion in the maintenance room got their attention. “We’ve got to get out of here,” said Dean. They ran down the hall and out to the car, and were away even before they heard sirens.
It was a long drive, both of them mired in sorrow. They could hash over the details, of what they could have done differently, but that was a song they knew by heart, so there was no point in saying any of it out loud. They couldn’t save everyone, no matter how hard they tried. At last, Dean finally said the only thing he could: “It’s good you went to prom with her, Sam. Maybe it was just a dance, but she died with a smile on her face.” It was true; she really did.
Sam nodded, head down, trying to hide that he was crying. “Yeah,” was all he managed to say in response.
They stopped after four hours once they’d crossed the state line, and they got a hotel room. Sam was covered with Nellie’s blood, so Dean checked in for both of them. Sam stood over the bathroom sink for a long time, trying to get the blood out of his hideous jacket, but really, Dean suspected, tormenting himself with guilt over Nellie. Finally Dean intervened, patting his shoulder gently. “It’s okay, Sam; I’ll take care of it. You get some sleep.” Sam nodded gratefully and went to bed after showering. Dean worked on the blood stains for a while like a good brother, but that was the thing about blood: it never really came out, especially not after it sat there drying during the four-hour drive. He left the jacket to soak and went to bed, too.
Dean wasn’t quite asleep when he heard someone say, “Ooh, Sam! You got us a hotel after all!” It sounded like a female voice. Dean rolled over. “Sam? Did you say something?”
“Ew!” she cried. “You invited your brother?!”
Sam, awake but confused, squinted as Dean turned on the light. Sam never yelled in fright pretty much no matter what happened, but he did now as he leaped out of bed, wearing only ratty old sweatpants--the bed in which Nellie lay beside where he’d been an instant before. “Nice,” Nellie said approvingly as she took in the view of shirtless Sam, still wearing her prom dress. Then she turned to glare at Dean. “There is a time and a place, you know! Get your own room! ’Cause you know what they say: ‘Off like a prom dress!’” She giggled madly, her same old self, then launched herself off the bed at Sam and hung off him, nuzzling his chest with her cheek. “Sammy!” she cried. “You’re so sexy! Your chest and arms are perfect!! You need to do something about the underwear, though. Those sweats leave nothing to the imagination.”
Sam finally found his tongue. “Nellie?! How--how--?”
“The jacket,” sighed Dean, figuring it out, and he saw understanding hit Sam at the same time. Her blood all over it.
“Crap,” said Sam, which was the world’s biggest understatement. They were gonna have to kill Nellie all over again.
“So how was it?” Dean teased Sam. Not having the heart to do otherwise, Sam had indeed spent the rest of the night alone with Nellie, which included breaking the news to her that she was now a ghost and they were going to have to help her move on from this plane.
Sam, so restrained for this whole case, finally exploded. “Seriously, Dean? You think I had sex with a ghost??”
Dean shrugged, grinning irrepressibly. “No strings.”
“I’m not quite that desperate.”
Dean had a good laugh, but sobered after a bit. “How’d she take it?”
“How does she take everything? Really, really well. Just ....”
“Just what?”
“Just ... as long as I’m ... you know, there ... with her, when we do it.” He was looking diffidently out the window, and Dean was sure that was not all she’d asked for.
“’There’ doing what?”
“Nothing I’m gonna do.” Dean snorted, and Sam frowned at him. “Not THAT. Just ... she wanted a kiss.”
Dean sighed. “Poor girl, dyin’ a virgin, maybe never been kissed. That’s, like, my worst nightmare.”
“I’m pretty sure you’ve thoroughly prevented that from ever, ever happening to you, Dean.”
“Yeah, but with the rehymenation, if that happens every time we die ....” Sam shook his head, smirking. “And you, if you’ve been rehymenated since the last time you were killed, you really might die a virgin, Sam!”
Sam could only laugh.
They arrived at a spot out of town in the woods, and Dean quickly built up a little campfire. Sam carefully took his jacket out of the trunk. “Nellie?” he called softly. “Are you here?”
She appeared, beaming, then sobering as she saw the jacket and the fire. “But--but, Sam!”
Even in death, she tested his patience. “What?”
“But ... can’t we ...?”
“Nellie, you already got your dinner out, and your prom--which you’ll recall I really didn’t want to go to with you--and your night in the hotel room!”
“Yeah, but marriage was on the horizon,” Dean said helpfully, grinning when Sam rounded on him.
“What he said!” Nellie said eagerly.
Sam closed the distance between them and took Nellie’s hands. He looked right into her eyes. “Nellie, I’m sorry, but the time has come. Don’t be afraid. If anyone’s going to heaven, you are.”
“You’ll be in my heaven!” she cried, which would have been real flattering, if she hadn’t proceeded to add a bunch of other guys’ names to her heaven’s population, but Sam only seemed charmed.
“Sounds good,” he said, smiling down at her.
She gazed up at him. “Sam?”
“Yeah?”
“Never forget me, okay?”
“Nellie, believe me. You’re impossible to forget.”
She grinned, belying the tears in her eyes, and hugged Sam tight, pressing her head to his chest. Sam held her back, swaying her gently, then nodded to Dean over her head. Dean laid the jacket on the fire, and indomitable Nellie turned to flame and disappeared in Sam’s arms.
“Verb,” said Dean.
“Drive.”
“Sam! Better words! I swear, if you were lookin’ at a gas station, you’d say ‘gas station’!”
“Only that wouldn’t be a verb.”
“Gimme a verb, Sammy,” Dean said dangerously. “A decent one.”
“Um ... party.”
“That’s a noun!”
“Not in the modern vernacular.”
With a growl, Dean gave up. “Nellie was so much better at this!”
“She really was,” Sam agreed.
Dean flipped back through the Mad Libs they’d completed. “Short, brown, short, brown--God, you suck!”
“Don’t pretend you’re not glad that jacket’s gone.”
“I’m not pretending! That’s the one good thing to come out of this case.”
“I saw your smile when you set it on fire.”
“I’m still smilin’.”
“So now I need a new jacket.”
“Yeah. Let me pick it this time, will you? At least let me help.”
“Fine.”
As Sam drove, Dean kept flipping through the Mad Libs they’d done, coming to rest on Nellie’s story, “True Love.” She’d had to labor over her own words because she surrounded each of them with lots of hearts and stars and fireworks. “Well, I’ll give Nellie one thing,” he said. “The girl’s persistent. You’ve had stalkers before, but she’s the only one who managed to stalk you even after she was dead.”
Sam chuckled. Dean turned another page and stopped short. He glanced at Sam. “Looks like Nellie was busy when we had the jacket out here in the car.” Dean cleared his throat. “’Lazy Sunday.’ ‘One hunky Sunday, Sam and Nellie decided to go on a picnic. They packed a tall basket with plenty of fish, fries, and juice. They went to a sexy field and sat on the super-hot grass. Sam looked into Nellie’s eyes and fuckably said, “I smell you,” and Nellie said, “I smell you, too.”’ Hey, Sam, how ’bout that? That’s way better than any of the garbage you and I have come up with. ‘He fuckably said, “I smell you.”’” He dissolved in hysterics. He turned the page. “Another one! ‘First Date.’ Oh, this is gonna be good ....”
Sam looked pained as Dean flipped through the rest of the booklet. She’d done every last one. “Yes! Great reading for the rest of the drive, and we didn’t even have to do any of it ourselves!” Dean launched into the next story about Sam and Nellie, and no amount of begging from Sam was going to stop him.
~ The End ~
Notes: There is a commentary on this fic that can be found here, if you're interested, but I will say here that if anyone would like to write a Supernatural-themed Mad Lib and put it in the comments for us all to have fun filling in the blanks for, I will worship them!!
Author: brightly_lit
Rating: PG-13 for non-graphic violence, death, a bit o' language
Genre: gen, mostly humor, a little sorrow/angst, casefic
Characters: Sam, Dean, OCs
Word Count: 7,848
Summary: This was for the spn_summergen fic exchange for tattooeddevil. Written for this prompt: "A spirit is haunting a high school, every prom night. Dean and Sam have to go undercover as supervisors to hunt the ghost. One of the high school kids takes a shine to either Sam or Dean and she's very, very insistent." VERY, VERY INSISTENT. Also, there are Mad Libs.
Dean was trying to be patient, but finally he let out a growl. “C’mon, Sammy, you aren’t even trying! These could be really funny if you just gave me some better words.”
“You mean some more suggestive words?”
“Well, yeah!”
“Fine. Bulging.”
Dean came out of the convenience store and got in the Impala with a grin, waving a little notebook at Sam. “Look, Sammy! They had Mad Libs! This’ll be great. Move over; I’m lettin’ you drive so we can do these.”
Sam moved over, already bitchfacing. He was pissy because Dean had been giving him a hard time about his new jacket, but come on, look at it! As he scooted, Sam tossed Dean the newspaper he’d been reading while Dean paid for gas. “I found our next case. Cedaredge High School in Oregon: Four of the last seven years, a student has committed suicide at prom in the maintenance room.”
Dean glanced at the story, tossed the newspaper in the back seat, and got out a pen. These Mad Libs weren’t doing themselves. “Great, that’s a nice long drive from here. We might have time to finish these. Remember when Dad bought us Mad Libs at that little general store in Texas when you were seven? He bought us every one they had!” It felt like they’d won the lottery. That had kept them busy and out of Dad’s hair in the back seat for weeks, giggling hysterically. It was one of Dean’s favorite memories.
Sam started driving and Dean asked him for various words. It was better for Dean to ask since Sam really had all the parts of speech down; it wasn’t as fun when Sam was making fun of him for giving an adjective when he’d asked for an adverb. “Gimme a color.”
“Black.”
“Noun.”
“Car.”
“Okay, verb.”
“Drive.”
“Adjective.”
“Shiny.”
Dean was trying to be patient, but finally he let out a growl. “C’mon, Sammy, you aren’t even trying! These could be really funny if you just gave me some better words.”
“You mean some more suggestive words?”
“Well, yeah!”
“Fine. Bulging.”
Dean read that word to himself in the context of the sentence and snickered. “Better. Oh, this is good: a man’s name.”
Sam considered, then: “Sam.”
Dean guffawed. “Now we’re gettin’ somewhere! Adjective.”
“Handsome.”
“Adverb.”
“Brilliantly.”
“Adjective.”
“Clever.”
Dean growled again. “Sam! Better words!”
“I’m trying to stick with a theme.”
“You have no idea how to do Mad Libs!”
“Actually, I think the problem is that I know exactly how to do Mad Libs.” He finally cracked a little grin.
“Okay, but when this comes out sucking, know it’s your fault. Give me another color.”
“Um ... blue.”
Dean eyed him, unable to hide his smirk. “Really?” he asked innocently. “Not brown?”
Sam let out an irritable noise. “Dean, we are not having this conversation again!”
Dean shrugged diffidently. “I just thought maybe you were gonna say brown, since obviously you’re giving adjectives and stuff about yourself, and I see that brown is your new favorite color.”
“What’s wrong with brown?” Sam asked coolly.
“What’s brown, Sam? Come on. Name the first thing that pops to mind.”
“Well, your boots, for one,” Sam said stiffly. “Your belt. Some of the threads in your plaid shirt.”
“My boots and my belt?! They’re leather! That’s the color of leather! Anyway, a little natural brown is fine, but ... well, and okay, that jacket is also too short.”
Sam’s patience was obviously wearing thin. “Dean, on me, every jacket is too short.”
“Yeah, but that one’s so short, I keep expecting you to whip out a red cape and start bull-fightin’.”
Sam breathed loudly, not unlike an angry bull. “You know, Dean, it’s hard enough for a guy as tall as me to find clothes. I know you always claim you’re tall, too, but you’re still inside the bell curve, unlike me. So if I find a jacket at the thrift store that’ll work, I count myself lucky.”
“Your old jacket wasn’t so beat up that you couldn’t have kept it until you found something better.”
“It was still covered in clown glitter! That stuff doesn’t come off!”
Dean couldn’t help tittering.
“It wasn’t funny, Dean; they almost killed me! Clowns!”
Dean snorted louder. He tried valiantly to put on a straight face, and failed utterly. “I know, Sam, I know. That was terrible. You know, I never really got details of that battle. Did he bounce his big red nose off you?”
“Dean!”
However hilarious this might be, Dean knew when Sam shouted his name like that, he’d better shut his mouth or he might just find Sam’s fist coming at it in the next few seconds. He couldn’t help bursting out with another chortle every now and then, though. “Okay, Sam. Sorry. Name an emotion.”
“Anger.”
“Verb.”
“Punch.”
“Adjective.”
“Bloody.”
Dean chuckled uncertainly. “Still sticking with a theme here, I see. Uh ... an interjection.”
“’I’ll kill you!’”
Dean read that to himself in the sentence. “I think they were just looking for one word, like, ‘Hey!’ or ‘Super!’”
“Okay, then, just ‘Kill!’”
Dean eyed him nervously as he filled in the blank, and shuddered a little at the malevolent smile growing on Sam’s face.
“Ahem. ‘A Day at the Zoo.’” Dean read the title of the second Mad Lib they’d completed, then started reading the story out loud to Sam: “A short, brown bear lay down on a short, brown jacket next to the brown rocks. A short, brown man was watching him from behind the fence. ‘Kill!’ shouted the man.” Dean gave up and tossed the booklet into the backseat. “You’re not even trying,” he complained. “Passive-aggressive much?”
“What? I thought it was a good story,” said Sam, dead-pan.
“I’m sorry I gave you a hard time about your jacket, okay? Jeez! You don’t have to ruin the Mad Libs over it.”
“Why do you even care what kind of jacket I’m wearing, Dean?”
“Because! It’s an embarrassment! I’m trying to look out for you, Sammy. Mark my words: as long as you’re wearing that jacket, you will never, ever get laid. No chick will look twice at you.”
“Dean, I know this may be hard for you to understand, but unlike you, not everyone makes every single life decision based on how it affects their chances of getting laid. There’s more to life. Really, Dean. You might look into it.”
“Look, I know it’s been long enough that you’re practically a virgin again, but the least you could do is not wear chick-repellant clothing! Even I won’t get laid if you’re wearing that thing near me!”
Sam said gently, almost pitying, “You know, Dean, counting that year when I didn’t have a soul ... I’ve done it way more than you. I mean, ten, twenty times as often, maybe more ....” He gave him that sympathetic look that made Dean want to throttle something. “You know you’ll never be able to catch up, right? Even if you spent the rest of your life trying ....”
The smile fell from Dean’s face. Dean scowled out the window, knowing Sam must be looking at him with that maddening victorious grin. He grabbed the Mad Libs out of the backseat again. “Fine, I’ll just do one by myself,” he retorted. “Name of someone in the room: Sam. Emotion: pissy. Adjective: bitch.”
“That’s a noun,” said Sam. “You’d have to make it ‘bitchy’ or ... ‘bitch-like’ ....”
“All right, then, how ’bout: ‘asshole.’”
Sam sounded patient. “No, you’ve got the same problem; you’d have to go with ‘asshole-ish,’ or ... that doesn’t really work. You should probably pick a different word.”
“Sam! Shut your pie-hole. Don’t make me come over there ....”
They made it to Cedaredge with a minimum of bruising, although when Dean reached over to wet-willie Sam, Sam managed to elbow him in the ribs hard enough that it still smarted when anything rubbed against it. Dean was still chortling over the Mad Lib he’d done himself, though. A couple of sentences had come out gold, and he quoted them to Sam at every opportunity. Sam seemed disappointingly unbothered. They fell into their familiar routine when they got to town: Sam went to the library to do research, and Dean went to the school to interview the principal. They met up back at a hotel that evening.
Dean put the bag of food on the table as Sam opened up his laptop, showing Dean the news clippings about the suicides. “Turns out one of them was ruled a homicide, because she was bludgeoned to death with a mop.”
“Hard to kill yourself like that,” Dean agreed, taking out his burger and fries.
“Yeah, and get this: if you look at the way they died, a case could be made that they were all homicides: shooting, stabbing ... one girl fell on a bunch of gardening tools.”
“So why did they call them suicides?”
“Eyewitnesses all said the person was alone when they went to the maintenance room and no one else was around. Also ... I don’t know if this means anything, but all the victims were female except the first.”
“Hm. Well, you might think the principal would be a little more concerned given that prom is coming up this Friday, but you’d think teenagers killed themselves at prom at every school, the way he talked about it.”
“You think he’s involved?”
“No, I think he’s an idiot.”
“So we’re not gonna get any help from him.”
“I don’t think so. Here, Sam, eat.”
Sam took his box of food out of the bag and looked at it in surprise: a chef salad. He glanced at Dean. It was hard to be awkward around the brother you’d been through just about everything with, but Sam sounded awkward when he said, “Thanks.”
“What? Figured you’d had enough fries for one week.”
“Yeah.”
Sam dug in. Dean didn’t get it, but Sam really seemed to like that stuff. Truth be told, Dean was feeling bad about teasing him about his jacket, because Sam really had gotten a beatdown from those clowns. Dean snickered at the thought, wishing for the thousandth time he had video of that fight. He felt bad for Sam ... but man, that must have been quite a sight.
“What?” asked Sam innocently at his snicker.
“Nothing,” Dean said, forcing himself to keep a straight face until he was able to get his burger in front of his mouth to hide his grin.
Fed suits on, they managed to arrange interviews with all the students who had any connection to the victims from earlier proms, claiming the Bureau had reopened the case as possible homicides. The seniors were especially informative, since they’d been around when several of the deaths had taken place. Some even had older siblings who’d talked to them about the first deaths when these kids were in middle school and elementary school. On the other hand, this was high school, so though there were rumors aplenty, it was hard to sort fact from fantasy. Nonetheless, there were two kids who were particularly helpful: a busybody who seemed to thrive on knowing everything going on in every corner of the school at every moment, and the brother of the second victim.
“I know who did it,” he said flatly. He had a haunted look Dean found all too familiar: it was the same look Dean had had that whole year when Sam was gone.
“Yeah?” Sam said, leaning forward, keenly interested. “Who?”
“It was that guy who faked his death the year before.”
“The first victim?” Sam asked. Sam and Dean eyed each other. Most people would dismiss this as poppycock, but this was their first indication all the clues might be coming together.
“Why do you say that?” Dean asked the kid.
“Because he asked her to prom two days before he killed her! She was all freaked out because he was supposed to be dead, but then there he was, plain as day, asking her out.”
“... And you think he killed her because ....”
“Because she said no,” said Todd, years-old anger lining his mouth. “He was a psycho, just like that. You know that’s why he faked his death in the first place: because he got stood up at prom, and he wanted to punish his date for it. You find that little bastard, but you let me at him before you take him away. Just five minutes; that’s all I need.”
Dean had to smile at the kid’s attitude, because it would be his own. “You bet we will, if we find him,” Dean said, nodding at him, and he saw the gratitude in the kid’s eyes.
Once the kid was gone, Dean looked at Sam. “Any chance he’s right and the kid’s still alive?”
“Trevor Goudy? Pretty sure not.” He handed Dean photos from the scene. Dean had seen a lot of bloody death scenes, but this was one of the bloodiest. There seemed to be blood on every single surface: walls, ceiling, covering the floor tiles.
Then Dean peered closer. “Wait a minute. I thought you said all the deaths happened in a maintenance room. This looks like a bathroom.”
“It was a bathroom,” Sam said, “but none of the kids would use it, saying it was haunted, so they turned it into a maintenance room.”
Dean winced and handed him back the photo. “All right, well, let’s interview that girl you thought might know something.”
Did Dean imagine Sam’s reluctance as he went to call her in? She bounded into the room, making a lightning-fast circle around Sam before hurling herself into her chair. “Hi!” she said to Dean. She eyed Sam sidelong as he returned to his seat. “Hi, Sam,” she said seductively. Dean had to use every bit of will he had not to drop character and burst into peals of hysterical laughter, but Sam caught his delighted smirk and met it with a warning frown.
“Hi again, Nellie,” said Sam nicely. “This is my partner, Agent Murdock, and if you don’t mind, we’d like to ask you a few questions ....”
“You act more like brothers,” she announced, looking between them shrewdly.
Sam and Dean both looked away from each other quickly. Dean cleared his throat. “Yeah, but we don’t look a thing alike, do we?” he said, smiling at her warmly. He already liked her. Anyone who promised this much Sam-related entertainment automatically had his goodwill.
She stared hard at them for another second, then shrugged and let it go, on to the next thing. “So let me tell you about the murders! They were murders, and here’s how I know ....”
It had taken forty-five minutes just to get her to stop talking. They finally had to leave the room, but she jumped up and followed, running to get in front of them and walk backward to keep regaling them with her tales. This might have been all right, except that she’d finished telling them everything she knew about the case twenty minutes before, and now she was relating all the school gossip she was privy to as if the details were state secrets she believed the federal government needed to be made aware of. It was plain from the reaction of her fellow students that she was a pariah. Dean couldn’t really fault them, since she was in their business all the time, and making it everyone else’s, too.
She followed them to the Impala, and even ran alongside it a little ways as they drove away, but not before leaving them with a steamy, “’Bye, Sam.”
As soon as they managed to get back on the road, Dean finally let out the merriment he’d had to fight so hard to keep in. Sam tried to ignore him.
“She calls you ‘Sam’? That’s pretty familiar.”
“Earlier today it was Agent Baracus.”
Dean snickered with delight. “She moves fast. Let it never be said that Sam doesn’t have sex appeal,” declared Dean. “Even if only for the freaks and geeks.”
“Dean ....” He had that saintly tone.
“Hey, she’s a senior--might even be legal.”
Sam looked even more tolerant. “She’s almost half my age.”
“Round up! Two-thirds.”
“Not my thing.”
“C’mon. She’s kind of cute. Weird, but cute.”
“I didn’t even date high-school girls in high school.”
“Yeah, but not by choice.”
“Yes by choice! They were too immature for me even then. You think I’m gonna start now? Just because you would--”
Dean sighed as this got less funny the more seriously Sam took it. “Nah. Not my thing, either. Still, you might want to drum up a wife or girlfriend or bodyguard or something; she doesn’t seem to take no for an answer.”
“Like our ghost, if that’s what it is. What do you think of her theory that the killer only killed the ones who rejected him and that’s why there were years when there were no deaths?”
“I think it’s a pretty good one.”
“We’ll start there then.”
As they returned to their hotel with food that night, something jumped out of the bushes at them. Its battle cry sounded like “SAMMEEE!” They both let out a shout and drew their weapons, but Sam wasn’t even able to take aim before it was on him. Dean was a split second away from wasting it when he realized what--or rather, who--it was.
“There you are!” Nellie was saying, talking so fast she sounded like an auctioneer, shoving her arm through Sam’s and beginning to walk with him. “I have two things to tell you and one thing to ask you. The first thing I have to tell you is that it’s that guy, the one in the picture you showed me. The thing I have to ask you is, will you go to prom with me? And the other thing I have to tell you is I rented a limo and I got a hotel and I made reservations at the best restaurant in town. We’re going to have SOOO much fun! This’ll be my first prom. My first prom! Because nobody asked me last year, or the year before, or--”
“Wait a minute,” Dean interrupted her, since Sam still seemed too stunned to function. “What do you mean, ‘it’s that guy in the picture’?”
“You know, that guy, who faked his own death,” she said, waving Dean away dismissively, barely looking at him.
“How do you know?” Dean demanded.
“Because he just asked me to prom.”
Dean and Sam looked at each other quickly. Sam held her away from him, gripping her tightly by the arms, which Dean could tell she was enjoying a lot. “And what did you say?” he asked urgently.
“I said ‘no,’ duh, because I’m going with you!”
“But--but you’re the one who guessed he’s killing the girls who reject him!” Dean exclaimed, bewildered.
“But you’ll be there, Sammy, and you’ll protect me!” she cooed shrilly, and nuzzled her head avidly into Sam’s armpit.
Sam and Dean looked at each other in alarm, but Dean’s expression all too soon gave way to pure joy. This was just too, too good.
“What’re you talking about?! Of course you have to go to prom with her! How else are you going to keep her safe?” Dean was trying hard to keep a straight face, but it was no use; Sam would see through him no matter what expression he concocted.
“We aren’t even going to be in town by the time prom rolls around, because we’re gonna kill this ghost first.”
“I told you--they cremated him.”
“I know, we’ve just got to find the lock of hair or baseball glove or whatever it is he’s holding onto.”
Dean waited for Sam to put two and two together. He was usually quicker on the uptake than this. Maybe he was so desperate to get out of going to prom with Nellie that he refused to see the obvious, so Dean finally had to help him out. “Sam ... Trevor’s not haunting his house; he’s haunting the school.”
“So? That’s even better; we’ll just find it at the school and destroy it.”
“Yeah, about that .... Easier said than done, ’cause I’m pretty sure I know what it is.”
“Well then, what is it?”
“You did see that picture you showed me, right, of the scene of his death? There was blood everywhere: ceiling, walls ... it probably seeped into the grout of the tile ....”
Dean waited the two seconds it took for it to click in Sam’s brain. “Oh, fuck,” he said with feeling. He thought hard for a few seconds with a pained expression. “Then how are we going to do this, Dean?” Sam’s voice had taken on a rare quality of whiny desperation. The man could fight a nest full of vampires without flinching, but prom? Sheer terror.
Dean shrugged. “I only have one idea: torch the room.”
“That could torch the school.”
“Yep, but at least nobody’ll die at prom anymore.”
“We can’t do that.”
“Do you have any better ideas?”
“We could ... convince them they need to replace the tile ....”
“And the ceilings, and the walls ...? Then how do we get our hands on the replaced tile to burn it? At least right now we know where it is--and where Trevor’s gonna be.”
Sam thought about it, that look of compassion growing on his face. When he spoke, it was with real feeling. “We can’t burn down their school right before prom, Dean.”
“Before or after, your choice. Before: you get to leave town before your date with Nellie the Peppy Stalker. After: the kids get their prom, but we have to guard Nellie and that maintenance room like Fort Knox.”
Sam slumped, but Dean knew he would do the right thing, because he always did. Fortunately, this time, the right thing was going to be hysterical.
Dean had dozens of photos of Sam all decked out for prom, each one better than the last. It was like a slideshow where Nellie looked progressively more overjoyed as Sam looked more hangdog. Dean had a picture of Nellie pinning a rather large bouquet of flowers to the buttonhole on Sam’s fed suit. He had a photo of them in front of the limo, with a bonus of the chauffeur rolling his eyes in the background. Dean accompanied them to dinner, because he wasn’t going to miss this, and he had photos of Nellie shoving cake in Sam’s face as she screamed that they would someday do this at their wedding. Man, and Becky, too. What was it about Sam that was so appealing to stalker chicks? That he seemed so unavailable, probably. Plus, he was all soulful and damaged; girls loved that shit.
Dean had mentioned to Sam that part of what he was enjoying so much about this was that Sam never got to go to prom when he was in high school, and now he finally did, but for some reason Sam took no comfort from that. Maybe it was because Nellie had no filter, and regaled both of them with all the details of her fantasies not just about Sam, but also about celebrities and other guys known to her, many of whom, she declared, were even cuter than Sam. She also didn’t appear to have a volume control, and soon everyone in the restaurant was also privy to her not-so-private fantasies. Sam got this stare, as if praying something might come through the door at any moment to save him. Maybe he was literally praying to Cas, but if so, apparently angels didn’t provide salvation from prom, at least not for a Winchester.
Just now she was vividly imagining out loud what living with her fantasy husband (currently, with Sam in the featured role) would be like. It seemed to involve lots of candlelit baths, scented bath gel, brass fixtures, and wheat-colored his-and-hers robes.
“Nah,” Dean informed her. “With Sam, you’d be lucky if you could get him to put his underwear on.”
Sam seemed past the capacity to react, but Nellie certainly wasn’t. “Ew, no! We don’t talk about that! Shh! Real men wear underwear.”
“I’m a real man, and I only wear ’em when I have a clean pair, which is not all that often, I’m gonna tell you,” Dean parried. “It isn’t always easy to find a laundromat, and underwear takes up a lot of valuable space in a duffle bag that could be used for ... other, more important things.”
“... And that’s why I’m never gonna marry you!” she announced, like Dean wasn’t even in the same category of man as Sam.
“Then why would you want to marry Sam?! He’s even worse about the underwear than I am!--” Sam did spare him a tired, pained look as the nice-looking couple at the adjacent table stared at Sam, glancing at his nether regions uncomfortably.
“I’d make him.”
“All right, then could you do something about the Mad Libs?” said Dean. “He ruins them, every time! I finally had to do one by myself just to get a funny one, and it’s so lame to do them by yourself!”
“OH MY GOD, I LOVE MAD LIBS!” she squealed. “Can we do one, can we??”
“Sure,” said Dean, “but they’re in the Impala, so you’d have to ditch the limo, or maybe do it later.” Finally, a decent Mad Libs partner!
“I’ll just have the limo follow us!,” she said brightly. “Hey, wait a minute,” she said suddenly, that lightspeed brain of hers kicking in. “What kind of agents do Mad Libs together and walk around naked in front of each other? You’re brothers! I knew it!!”
This time, she would not be dissuaded, and Dean saw no particular reason to try. “Yeah, you caught us. We’re actually ghost-hunters, here to kill that ghost.”
“Oh, that makes sense,” she said, as if it was as easy as that. Dean grinned. He liked her. She was smart and funny and liked to have a good time, and she was so weird, she was never going to be the one calling them freaks. That got a little old. Plus, once Sammy got used to her, she’d be good for him. He needed someone who would pull him out of his shell, someone cheery who would prevent him from getting mired too deep in his thoughts.
“Hey, Sam, maybe we should bring her with us! She’s the one who figured out who the ghost was and his m.o., and she seems cool with us being hunters. It’d be nice to have female company. Plus, she likes Mad ....” He trailed off at the look Sam gave him.
“No,” she quashed Dean’s idea unceremoniously. “I’m going to graduate, then I’m going to Columbia and getting a double major in economics and archaeology, and then I’m going to work my way up to V.P. at Google before getting married. Sorry,” she murmured sweetly to Sam, patting his hand, which automatically flinched away from hers.
“Ah, well,” said Dean, grinning and rubbing his full belly, full of actually good food, for once, although Nellie made him pay for his own meal, even though she paid for Sam’s. Her traveling with them was a pipe dream and he knew it, but Nellie was actually fun to be around, unlike Sam, and with that superbrain of hers, hunting would be a cinch; she’d probably have the monster identified from the news story that alerted them to the first indication of trouble. “I had to ask.”
“Of course you did,” she said magnanimously, collecting their doggie bags. “And now we dance!”
All the way to prom, Sam tried to reason her out of making him dance, but logic obviously had little impact on her. “What kind of twenty-nine-year-old takes a high schooler to prom? Everyone’s going to be wondering what the perv is doing there,” Sam complained.
“No, they’re going to be wondering how I snagged a sexy older man,” she said, tossing her hair. “Now--Mad Libs!” She grabbed it up from the backseat beside her and opened it up. She read a couple of the finished ones. “You’re right; these are terrible. All right, Sam: noun.”
“Jailbait,” he hissed, while Dean snickered.
“Dean, color.”
“Brown,” he said instantly.
“And me, I get to pick the next one!” she cried. “An emotion: love!” She wrote it down, laboring over it for some reason. “Okay, Sam: verb.”
“Run.”
“Dean, a woman’s name.”
“Nellie,” he said, and winked at her, grinning at her instant delight.
“Me, a man’s name: Sam! Sam Sam Sam!” She took a while writing this down, too. “Sam, give me an adverb.”
After a moment’s thought, he said, “Desperately.”
“Yay!” she shrieked. “Dean, give me a wonderful verb, something like ‘smile’ ....”
“Hey! No cheating. I give you the verb I want to give. Um ... stare,” he said, eying Sam, who was back to staring at some point in the far distance.
“Yay, and I get to finish it, me!,” Nellie screamed, “and I finish it with a noun, ‘MARRIAGE’! This is the best Mad Libs ever!! Want to hear it? Okay, here it is: “’True Love: This is the story of a man and his jailbait. He first admired her beautiful brown hair.’ Which is perfect because my hair really is brown! It’s like you knew, Dean!” Dean smirked and said nothing, not that he could have gotten a word in edgewise. She went on: “’It was love at first sight. It made him want to run every time he thought of marrying his lovely Nellie. Sam was desperately in love. He knew he would always stare whenever he imagined their inevitable marriage.’ WASN’T THAT SO GOOD? It was perfect! So perfect!” she cried, clutching it to her breast and swaying back and forth with it.
“Yeah, that was ... way better than any of the others, anyway,” Dean acknowledged, glancing at Sam, who perked up suddenly.
“There’s the school!” he said eagerly. “Dean, you and I need to man the maintenance room.”
“No, Sam, I need to man the maintenance room; you need to man Nellie.” He winked at him. Sam actually, literally gritted his teeth.
“But--but--”
“You go ahead and dance and drink punch and have a good time while I do the dirty work, Sam,” Dean said breezily as Sam glared daggers at him. “I don’t mind, because I’m such a good brother--right Nellie?”
“Yeah, whatever,” she said, opening the door before the car had even come to a stop. “Sam, come on, it’s time!!”
Dean’s last sight of Sam was of him being dragged away, gazing back pitiably at Dean.
Prom was uneventful--for Dean, at least. He kicked around the maintenance room all night, but never saw any sign of the ghost, though he did pick up a lot of EMF. He desperately wanted to go to the gym and get some more pictures of Sam, but there was always the chance the killer had asked other students to prom, as well; he dared not leave the maintenance room unattended.
Finally, at midnight, Nellie and Sam joined him there. Sam looked overfondled and exhausted, while Nellie looked utterly happy and satisfied. Sam seemed like he might have had at least a little fun--he was smiling as he bantered rather fondly with Nellie as they arrived. She’d finally grown on him.
“See anything?” asked Dean.
“Nope; nothing,” said Sam. “You?”
“Not a thing. Maybe he’s not after the ones who rejected him; maybe there’s some other reason he skips some years.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” said Sam, and turned to smile at Nellie. “You’re safe and we can go home now.”
“You mean to the hotel,” she said suggestively.
Sam said it as gently as he could. “Nellie, we talked about this. This is the end of the night. We’re going back to our hotel, and you’re going home. I’m sorry, but if you’re really desperate to spend the night with a guy, it’s not going to be me. Okay? We can drive you home if you like.”
“No, I’ll just take the limo,” she sighed. “I made him wait all this time; I may as well.”
They all walked out to the parking lot together, where Sam gave her a hug goodbye and Dean high-fived her. She was beaming again already. Dean admired her unsinkable spirit.
They got in the Impala and drove away, giving her one last wave as she talked to the chauffeur.
“So how was it?” asked Dean.
Sam shrugged. “Actually, it was okay. The chaperones stared, but most of the kids seemed to take it as pretty normal that I was there.”
“Don’t try to pretend you didn’t have fun; I can tell you did.”
Sam smiled. “Yeah. It was kind of fun.”
“Sammy finally got to go to prom!” He patted his brother, who rolled his eyes. “I thought it was too late, but life’s just full of surprises.”
“Yeah, well, you went to how many? Ten?”
“Eight, tops.”
“And how did you manage that again?”
“It’s the nice thing about moving around a lot, Sammy. Claim you’re a nice boy from the next town over and you can hit every prom in a twenty-mile radius.”
“It didn’t hurt that you got asked every year starting when you were a freshman.”
“Another nice thing about moving around: you can lie about your age.” He winked at Sam. “How did you end up NOT going to prom?”
Sam shrugged diffidently. “I guess I’m ... pickier than you.”
“You play hard to get, is what it is.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Sam agreed.
They just drove a little while, basking in the satisfaction of another case completed with no one hurt.
“Honestly,” Dean said thoughtfully, “if we’re gonna torch the place, now’s probably a better time than any. All the kids are gonna be as far away from school as they can get, going at it like rabbits.” Dean thought back fondly on all the proms he’d been to. It was one of the few situations where you were guaranteed of getting lucky. There had even been one year when he managed to hit three proms at three different schools on subsequent weekends.
“Okay, but I’m not staying in this suit one more second.”
“What, are you gonna get naked in the car? It’s just cruel of you,” Dean teased, “to get naked the second Nellie isn’t around to enjoy it anymore.”
“As naked as I have to,” said Sam, not taking the bait. Sure enough, as Dean turned around and headed back for the school, Sam stripped off his fed suit jacket and white dress shirt and replaced them with his usual western shirt and his short, brown jacket. “Better,” he sighed.
They walked the halls of the school, looking for any stragglers. Dean was right; there wasn’t a soul in sight. “Awesome,” Dean said as they headed back to the maintenance room. “I got the kerosene and the tire iron--you’ve got the salt rounds, right?”
Sam nodded, slinging the shotgun over his shoulder. “I think if--”
They were interrupted by a scream. It came from the maintenance room. They ran the rest of the way to the maintenance room, where they were greeted by the sight of Nellie, in her prom dress, lying bleeding on the floor. Sam tossed away his shotgun. “Nellie!” He ran to her side and lifted her gently, and she made a soft noise. “Nellie, no,” Sam moaned.
Her eyes opened a little, and even now, she smiled a bit to see Sam. “I knew ... you’d rescue me,” she managed to say.
Sam turned long enough to scream, “Dean, call 9-1-1!” Dean just stared, making no move. “Dean!” Sam looked at his face to see why he wasn’t calling, then followed his eyes to the floor beneath Nellie, where there grew an ever-widening pool of blood. “No,” Sam groaned, holding her tightly against him. “No, no, not again.” He stroked her face, and left a smear of her blood on her cheek.
“Did you come back for me?” she asked, her voice rasping in her throat. “The limo’s ... still here; we could go to ... the ... hotel ....” These were her last words. Dean saw the very bright spark of life go out of her. Sam must have felt it, too. He hung his head, and his shoulders shook. Dean looked down, his own eyes filling with tears. He tried to give Sam as much time as he could, but though Sam was too distraught to realize it, Dean couldn’t forget what was likely to appear any second, especially once it realized they’d come bearing kerosene and a lighter. If it could kill every intended victim, even someone as quick and clever as Nellie, it must be violent and strong as hell.
“Sam,” he said finally. Sam turned his head slightly. “We’ve gotta do this.”
As if summoned by his words, the ghost of Trevor Goudy appeared, smiling grimly down at Sam still holding Nellie. “You may have taken her to prom, but she’s mine now,” said Trevor.
“You son of a bitch.” Sam let go of Nellie and launched himself at the ghost.
“Sam!” cried Dean, and tossed him the tire iron. Sam attacked it with the tire iron, and it disappeared. “Don’t fight it, just kill it! We’ve got to do it now!”
Sam looked anxiously at Nellie’s body. “But--but Nellie ....”
“She died a violent death, Sam. If he really is keeping the ghosts of his victims prisoner around here somewhere ... one way or another, we need to give her a hunter’s funeral, too.”
Sam’s face showed his agony at the idea, but logic won out, and he nodded. Trevor’s ghost reappeared as they sprayed kerosene over every surface of the room, including the walls and ceiling, but he only hunkered over Nellie’s body protectively. “I don’t know what you’re doing, but she’s already dead. You can’t save her.”
“You’ve got kind of a one-track mind, kid,” Dean said, lighting a match. Once he and Sam were out of the room, he threw it inside, and watched as Trevor picked up and held Nellie’s lifeless body. “She’s mine!” he shouted. “She’s mine!” Even as the ghost went up in flames and he finally seemed to realize what they’d done, he shouted, “I don’t care; she’s mine!” and then he was gone.
They looked at each other, their sadness mirrored on the other’s face. A small explosion in the maintenance room got their attention. “We’ve got to get out of here,” said Dean. They ran down the hall and out to the car, and were away even before they heard sirens.
It was a long drive, both of them mired in sorrow. They could hash over the details, of what they could have done differently, but that was a song they knew by heart, so there was no point in saying any of it out loud. They couldn’t save everyone, no matter how hard they tried. At last, Dean finally said the only thing he could: “It’s good you went to prom with her, Sam. Maybe it was just a dance, but she died with a smile on her face.” It was true; she really did.
Sam nodded, head down, trying to hide that he was crying. “Yeah,” was all he managed to say in response.
They stopped after four hours once they’d crossed the state line, and they got a hotel room. Sam was covered with Nellie’s blood, so Dean checked in for both of them. Sam stood over the bathroom sink for a long time, trying to get the blood out of his hideous jacket, but really, Dean suspected, tormenting himself with guilt over Nellie. Finally Dean intervened, patting his shoulder gently. “It’s okay, Sam; I’ll take care of it. You get some sleep.” Sam nodded gratefully and went to bed after showering. Dean worked on the blood stains for a while like a good brother, but that was the thing about blood: it never really came out, especially not after it sat there drying during the four-hour drive. He left the jacket to soak and went to bed, too.
Dean wasn’t quite asleep when he heard someone say, “Ooh, Sam! You got us a hotel after all!” It sounded like a female voice. Dean rolled over. “Sam? Did you say something?”
“Ew!” she cried. “You invited your brother?!”
Sam, awake but confused, squinted as Dean turned on the light. Sam never yelled in fright pretty much no matter what happened, but he did now as he leaped out of bed, wearing only ratty old sweatpants--the bed in which Nellie lay beside where he’d been an instant before. “Nice,” Nellie said approvingly as she took in the view of shirtless Sam, still wearing her prom dress. Then she turned to glare at Dean. “There is a time and a place, you know! Get your own room! ’Cause you know what they say: ‘Off like a prom dress!’” She giggled madly, her same old self, then launched herself off the bed at Sam and hung off him, nuzzling his chest with her cheek. “Sammy!” she cried. “You’re so sexy! Your chest and arms are perfect!! You need to do something about the underwear, though. Those sweats leave nothing to the imagination.”
Sam finally found his tongue. “Nellie?! How--how--?”
“The jacket,” sighed Dean, figuring it out, and he saw understanding hit Sam at the same time. Her blood all over it.
“Crap,” said Sam, which was the world’s biggest understatement. They were gonna have to kill Nellie all over again.
“So how was it?” Dean teased Sam. Not having the heart to do otherwise, Sam had indeed spent the rest of the night alone with Nellie, which included breaking the news to her that she was now a ghost and they were going to have to help her move on from this plane.
Sam, so restrained for this whole case, finally exploded. “Seriously, Dean? You think I had sex with a ghost??”
Dean shrugged, grinning irrepressibly. “No strings.”
“I’m not quite that desperate.”
Dean had a good laugh, but sobered after a bit. “How’d she take it?”
“How does she take everything? Really, really well. Just ....”
“Just what?”
“Just ... as long as I’m ... you know, there ... with her, when we do it.” He was looking diffidently out the window, and Dean was sure that was not all she’d asked for.
“’There’ doing what?”
“Nothing I’m gonna do.” Dean snorted, and Sam frowned at him. “Not THAT. Just ... she wanted a kiss.”
Dean sighed. “Poor girl, dyin’ a virgin, maybe never been kissed. That’s, like, my worst nightmare.”
“I’m pretty sure you’ve thoroughly prevented that from ever, ever happening to you, Dean.”
“Yeah, but with the rehymenation, if that happens every time we die ....” Sam shook his head, smirking. “And you, if you’ve been rehymenated since the last time you were killed, you really might die a virgin, Sam!”
Sam could only laugh.
They arrived at a spot out of town in the woods, and Dean quickly built up a little campfire. Sam carefully took his jacket out of the trunk. “Nellie?” he called softly. “Are you here?”
She appeared, beaming, then sobering as she saw the jacket and the fire. “But--but, Sam!”
Even in death, she tested his patience. “What?”
“But ... can’t we ...?”
“Nellie, you already got your dinner out, and your prom--which you’ll recall I really didn’t want to go to with you--and your night in the hotel room!”
“Yeah, but marriage was on the horizon,” Dean said helpfully, grinning when Sam rounded on him.
“What he said!” Nellie said eagerly.
Sam closed the distance between them and took Nellie’s hands. He looked right into her eyes. “Nellie, I’m sorry, but the time has come. Don’t be afraid. If anyone’s going to heaven, you are.”
“You’ll be in my heaven!” she cried, which would have been real flattering, if she hadn’t proceeded to add a bunch of other guys’ names to her heaven’s population, but Sam only seemed charmed.
“Sounds good,” he said, smiling down at her.
She gazed up at him. “Sam?”
“Yeah?”
“Never forget me, okay?”
“Nellie, believe me. You’re impossible to forget.”
She grinned, belying the tears in her eyes, and hugged Sam tight, pressing her head to his chest. Sam held her back, swaying her gently, then nodded to Dean over her head. Dean laid the jacket on the fire, and indomitable Nellie turned to flame and disappeared in Sam’s arms.
“Verb,” said Dean.
“Drive.”
“Sam! Better words! I swear, if you were lookin’ at a gas station, you’d say ‘gas station’!”
“Only that wouldn’t be a verb.”
“Gimme a verb, Sammy,” Dean said dangerously. “A decent one.”
“Um ... party.”
“That’s a noun!”
“Not in the modern vernacular.”
With a growl, Dean gave up. “Nellie was so much better at this!”
“She really was,” Sam agreed.
Dean flipped back through the Mad Libs they’d completed. “Short, brown, short, brown--God, you suck!”
“Don’t pretend you’re not glad that jacket’s gone.”
“I’m not pretending! That’s the one good thing to come out of this case.”
“I saw your smile when you set it on fire.”
“I’m still smilin’.”
“So now I need a new jacket.”
“Yeah. Let me pick it this time, will you? At least let me help.”
“Fine.”
As Sam drove, Dean kept flipping through the Mad Libs they’d done, coming to rest on Nellie’s story, “True Love.” She’d had to labor over her own words because she surrounded each of them with lots of hearts and stars and fireworks. “Well, I’ll give Nellie one thing,” he said. “The girl’s persistent. You’ve had stalkers before, but she’s the only one who managed to stalk you even after she was dead.”
Sam chuckled. Dean turned another page and stopped short. He glanced at Sam. “Looks like Nellie was busy when we had the jacket out here in the car.” Dean cleared his throat. “’Lazy Sunday.’ ‘One hunky Sunday, Sam and Nellie decided to go on a picnic. They packed a tall basket with plenty of fish, fries, and juice. They went to a sexy field and sat on the super-hot grass. Sam looked into Nellie’s eyes and fuckably said, “I smell you,” and Nellie said, “I smell you, too.”’ Hey, Sam, how ’bout that? That’s way better than any of the garbage you and I have come up with. ‘He fuckably said, “I smell you.”’” He dissolved in hysterics. He turned the page. “Another one! ‘First Date.’ Oh, this is gonna be good ....”
Sam looked pained as Dean flipped through the rest of the booklet. She’d done every last one. “Yes! Great reading for the rest of the drive, and we didn’t even have to do any of it ourselves!” Dean launched into the next story about Sam and Nellie, and no amount of begging from Sam was going to stop him.
~ The End ~
Notes: There is a commentary on this fic that can be found here, if you're interested, but I will say here that if anyone would like to write a Supernatural-themed Mad Lib and put it in the comments for us all to have fun filling in the blanks for, I will worship them!!