sdatislife
in
damned
Night 48: M21-30 Hallway
Shinji was worried. He'd been waiting for a while - Kaworu still hadn't arrived. He didn't know why and as always his insecurities had begun to flare up. Maybe he'd changed his mind. Maybe he didn't really want to see Shinji. Maybe he'd simply been hallucinating the whole thing. Shinji glanced down the darkened hallway, flashlight dangling from his
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Wait.
He lifted an eyebrow. "You want me to try an exorcism on you?"
Though she was right. They needed some ground rules and Ruby was probably the easiest to start with out of the two of them. She was obviously still a demon, judging from the eyes-and he'd stopped dwelling on how it didn't even make him blink anymore, to see her switch them on and off-so it wasn't as though she'd somehow turned entirely human. That left determining just how much demon remained.
Man, if there was one thing he thought he'd never be doing.
"And yeah, the deal," he went on. "She seems to think his soul's hers for grabs anytime since...you know. She's not a demon, so I doubt she can personally reap anything, but." Or could she? There was no telling here, was there. It wasn't as if the realm of the supernatural was the most predictable, but it was usually more grounded than this. This was like walking across a minefield while blindfolded.
He tipped his head back against the pillows, eyes on the ceiling. "I mean, it's not out of the question, right? That he's already, I don't know. Long past his due date."
And if so, what the hell was he supposed to tell Dean? He couldn't bring himself to say anything until he knew for certain, but even the possibility of it, what was he supposed to do with that? The idea of springing this on top of the truth at Dean, goddamn it. He didn't even want to consider it, but if it was true, he couldn't keep it from his brother.
Maybe he shouldn't be jumping the gun yet. Still, his resources were pretty damn limited. All he had to go on here were the words of other people, most of whom were hardly what he'd call reliable. He had no idea what to think about anything.
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Funny how things changed.
"Demons aren't the only ones who take souls," she reminded Sam, “but other than that I don’t know if I can help you.” It would be hard to narrow it down, though, without Sam’s laptop and a way to search for lore. Her familiarity with those kinds of nasties wasn’t that extensive.
As for Dean… “I can’t tell you either way. It’s not as if this is exactly a common occurrence, and I can’t really ask. Not in any way you’d approve of, at least. I haven’t got a silver chalice, and it’s not exactly like I can go around procuring the lifeblood of an innocent. If I had sources to work here, trust me. I’d be asking. This is just too…different.”
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Well, it wasn't the same, that was all. If it came down to a choice between the two, he knew what he'd pick.
He dropped the subject, not too willing to get into it at the moment, not even with Ruby. She was right: there wasn't much either of them could do. They might as well sort out this thing with Ruby first. It was more productive.
"We're out," he replied. Of all the things they could run low on, salt was never one that should've been on the list. Their situation here was more than a little ridiculous; it was bordering precariously on outright pathetic. But they could barely get two steps out of the hallway without getting jumped at this point. "But we could start with a Christo instead."
He glanced at her, and he couldn't decide if he was curious on a strictly objective level or if he was actually a little concerned about what would happen. If it would affect her or not. He didn't know what he'd make of it if it didn't. He'd come across plenty that defied the rules he'd grown up with, but at least those, he'd been able to consider it a result of parallel universes, separate dimensions, or something that caused a twist in the way things worked. There was none of that with Ruby.
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"Well, that answers that question." So some things, at least, hadn't changed. That was comforting, sort of. Apparently whatever was happening to her hadn't changed what was fundamentally demonic. Still, it was slightly disappointing, as well. If Dean decided to start dropping Christos around her, she wouldn't be able to avoid the...awkwardness that would result.
She scooted her chair a little closer to Sam so that her knees brushed against the bed. "A hunter without salt? Kinda sad." They'd probably have go looking for more, wouldn't they? Especially after that ghost from last night.
"Oh, I heard we're going on a field trip tomorrow, by the way," she said conversationally, changing the topic slightly. "You know anything about that?"
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"Tell me about it."
Though the salt was a band-aid solution at best, if even that. You could spin a circle around yourself or you could chuck it at a spirit, but sooner or later, it was gonna come back to bite you in the ass. That was what burning the bones was for, except that wasn't exactly feasible. Tracking down the source of a spirit already took a few days as it was with all their resources on hand.
As for the field trip. Right, they were heading out again, weren't they? Man, had it only been a week? They must've done some kind of magical hand-waving fix over the town, then, because he was pretty sure that place was looking like it'd been firebombed by the end of the night. No way they could've cleaned that up in a month, never mind a week.
"Yeah, it's, uh, it's a town called Doyleton, about a forty minute ride up a mountain path. I didn't recognize the landscape, no real landmarks. Your typical small town, but in a real Stepford way. Oh, and there are zombies," he added dryly. "They just pop up out of the ground once the sun sets, apparently. I've been leaning towards a curse, but beyond that, I'm out of ideas. I wasn't there for the main action. Dean was pretty messed up, spent most of my time trying to keep him from being a chew toy."
God, he hoped there wasn't going to be a repeat of that night. Even if the survival rate had been unnaturally high. He was glad, of course, but it felt sinister regardless. Stuff like that just didn't happen and if it did, it was usually an indicator of something much worse.
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But still. Zombies. She shook her head. "Wow. First you've got ghosts that shoot swords, and then you have zombies. Oh, and blood-sucking psychiatrists." There was a joke to be made about the last one, but Ruby refrained. It was too obvious, and where was the fun in that?
"We really did end up in a B-horror movie." She was beginning to wonder if the whole thing wasn't one giant curse, but she couldn't think of anything that could be this...extensive. Other than demigods, of course, but they weren't usually this arbitrary, were they? If they did round up more than one person at a time, those people tended to be connected in some way. Given what she read on the bulletin board, some of the people were connected, but not all of them.
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He figured Ruby would find that as unsurprising as he did. There were only so many things that could infect the bloodstream at the same time, after all. The Croatoan virus had made that more than obvious. And while he wasn't going to turn away one of the few good things to having demon blood running through him, he couldn't say it was a comforting thought, either.
Dean's reaction when he'd told him had hardly helped. He knew he couldn't blame his brother for that, but it stung nevertheless, the way Dean always skirted around it or shrugged it away. We're not gonna acknowledge all the ways you're not normal.
He shook it off.
"I, uh, I have-" Sam pushed himself upright, pausing a second until the spike between his eyes died back down to a more tolerable dull throb. Somewhat. He slipped a hand beneath the pillow, fingers closing around the notebook. He hadn't had time to write down all that he'd seen; the notes were haphazard collections off of the board mostly, eyewitness accounts on the various monsters and stuff. He wouldn't call it reliable material, given the source it came from, but it wasn't as if he could afford to be picky about his research tools here.
He handed the notebook off to Ruby. The newspaper he'd taken from Doyleton was folded inside. Useless, except for the thing about the dates. Or lack thereof. No date, no year, just a day of the week that didn't match with the one that he knew it should've been instead. "It's not everything, but you might as well take a look."
As opposed to him explaining it all, in other words, 'cause his brain wasn't going to make it through a full rundown of everything he'd learned. Not tonight.
[orite, notes are here. :|b]
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Ruby paused when Sam did, eyes flicking up and taking in his obvious discomfort. She didn’t say anything, just waited for it to pass. Sam wasn’t expecting any comforting from her (she would have questioned his sanity if he had, since she’d never exactly been caring and matronly before), and calling attention to it wasn’t going to do anything either. She just took the notebook and looked it over. His writing was scrawled all over the pages, a collection of disjointed notes and people spoken to. More interesting than the stuff about zombies was the newspaper itself. “No date,” she said out loud, surprised. What kind of newspaper didn’t put a date on their stuff? Even the ugliest hand-printed newsletter from the lowliest little trailer park in Nowheresville, USA included a full date in its masthead, not just a random day of the week. “There’s no way this is actually legit. If it were, there’d be a date.” It was just as simple as that.
“Do you think it could have been a plant? The place sticks fake newspapers in town to throw people off on where-and when-we could actually be? Seems awfully…elaborate, though.” But this was Landel’s, she had to remind herself, not anywhere that actually played by the rules, and the good doctor himself was currently rambling on about a war and a project of some sort. They were all about the elaborate, illogical solutions.
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"That's pretty much what I've spent the past ten days or something trying to decide," Sam replied. "Half the time, it feels like everything's just fake, you know? I mean, it'd explain everything, I just, I don't know if it's the right answer. It's almost too neat."
He'd bounced back and forth with this issue on and off constantly, including earlier today, and he'd come up with no solid leads, not even close. He'd told Dean he wanted to look into it, figure this out, but Dean had asked him how, and yeah, he didn't know. Somehow was starting to feel less and less like a good response.
Besides, if the dates were false, and the town was false, and the institute, where did it even stop? At the events that occurred within it or at the patients? What about the ones like Peter's brother who'd gone and come back and gone again? Sam had managed to turn off that part of his brain that kept nagging that Dean wasn't really here (and Christ, in that case, who knew if Ruby was real at that?) because he didn't think he could deal with the uncertainty of Dean's actual existence, but the question reared up from time to time.
And honestly, he was surprised no one had truly brought this up. Not to the full extent that it needed to be explored, that was, not even back before the nurses had started cracking down on that board everyone used as a public forum.
Then again, he was the only one here with a brother who had an expiration date. His focus was probably different from the others here.
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At any rate, Sam did have point. It was tempting to think that they were just stuck in the Matrix and that all of this was fake. It made sense. They were basically powerless here, both physically and psychologically. Their days were regimented, and so, to an extent, were their nights. Still, Sam was right. It was too neat. It made entirely too much sense for it to actually be true.
The demon laughed. "Whatever it is, it's not like we have Lawrence Fishburne here to help us out. So don't go all existential on me, okay? We'll figure it out." She got up, sat on the edge of the bed. Sam was pretty easy to read sometimes, and he was going into broody mode. He had a one-track mind, and that track usually pointed towards his brother. Especially here, not knowing that Dean had broken the first seal and gotten busted out of Hell. Plus, there was the whole problem with Dean's deal. She honestly didn't know how to deal with that, or if she even should. Dean's sudden arrival had thrown the grand plan a little out of whack, and it was tempting to claim ignorance and let things run their course (again). She missed how it had been, when it was just the two of them. "We're all here. I'm here, you're here, Dean's here. And we're real, okay?"
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Still, Ruby was right. When in doubt, default to what was gonna keep you sane. Relatively speaking.
Sam shifted over a bit without thinking when she sat down. He had to admit, it was...easier to be talking about this with Ruby instead of Dean. There was less tiptoeing, less keeping himself in check in case he tipped Dean off. Even with Stanford lurking between them when he'd first gone on the road with Dean, things had never been this tense.
He let out a quiet huff of laughter. "I'm comforted, I promise." Besides, real or not, both options came with their own set of problems. A damn large set, in fact. He shook his head. "Anyway, forget it. If something's going to turn up, it's not gonna be tonight."
It was clear there wasn't a whole lot he could do. Not only in terms of at this moment, but for the next little while. Maybe that was the point. Maybe he needed to quit thinking about it so much and just see what came up over the next couple of days. He could afford a couple of days, couldn't he? It wasn't like if he dug extra hard, he'd find something within forty-eight hours. He'd gone over all the information he had a million times. Until something new came his way, there was nothing left to think on. He didn't like to admit it, part of him thinking that he had to have missed something, that he'd find it if he just looked a little harder, but no. He'd hit a dead end and he knew it.
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She leaned back, resting on her elbows, and gave Sam a long look. “How are you feeling, by the way? You still look like crap, but your color’s starting to come back.” He looked slightly less like he wanted to crawl into a ditch and die than he had when she’d first come in. That was improvement, at least. Mixing sedatives with Sam’s already weakened powers obviously hadn’t worked very well. Was it the specific mix of sedatives, or was it just this place? There was no way to know, really.
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With Dean back, it somehow made him more conscious of it all, too, and he didn't know how he felt about that.
"I'm fine. Or, better," he said. "I've had worse, just...not in awhile. Wouldn't say no to an aspirin, though."
And the thing was, he'd barely done anything. A single burst of power shouldn't have knocked him down this bad. Maybe during the very first couple of times he'd started, but otherwise-
It was getting annoying. There wasn't much occasion for him to use his abilities here if at all, he knew that, but it was the principle of the matter. They were his. He could do something with them and he didn't like the feeling that he was losing his hold. It wasn't as if he had a lot going for him in the first place when it came to the whole you-have-demon-blood deal.
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