(no subject)
Beta by Allie who came to my rescue at very short notice.
This is my response to the Back to School Challenge in...uh, August.
Dear poisontaster,
Here is your stupid story. I hope you like it.
K
Lifting the Veil (Halloween in Gotham)
Gotham’s the same as any other big, East Coast city, if you add on about seventy percent more crime, the rumors of costumed vigilantes and smog so thick Sam imagines it swirling around in his lungs and precipitating out sediment.
Dad said, “There’s definitely something going on here, centrally located on the coast, too,” and the Winchesters had moved from Illinois to New Jersey. It’s not like family’s a democracy-and if he never hears that again, he’ll count his blessings at Thanksgiving over his tv dinner.
Dean likes big cities because it’s easier to get laid and commit petty crimes. Sam finds that reflexively annoying for no real reason other than that Dean is a jackass.
“I hate you,” Sam says as he leaves the house for school in the frosty October early morning. Dean’s barely awake, pillow creases on his face, and drinking coffee in the flickering fluorescent light of the kitchen. His face looks bruised in the weird-spectrum light, purple around his eyes and his freckles like pin-prick wounds over his cheeks and nose.
Sam hoists his backpack up higher on his shoulder watching Dean flip him off, and his base-line buzz of anger fades a little. “Get some sleep for once, Dean.”
He gets a slight smile in return. “Some of us don’t need beauty sleep, Sammy.”
Sam rolls his eyes and slams the door behind him as he leaves.
The sun doesn’t ever seem to really reach the street in some parts of Gotham, and Sam thinks it gives the whole city an air of depression and stagnation that probably annihilates even the impulse towards positivity. He recognizes the circle of crime and poverty and desperation, because he’s seen it most of his life, living on the fringes of society in neighborhoods where no one asks questions or looks you in the eye. The East End isn’t all that different.
Sam watches a man in five layers lying on a grate pull a piece of tattered cardboard up higher to cover his shoulder. He thinks about California, about neat houses that all look just the same with orderly yards and mailboxes with names picked out in plastic letters. As he walks, he wraps the fantasy that he lives in Kansas with his mom and dad in a two story house with a double car garage around him. Today, he imagines Dean in college on a football scholarship calling Sam back home to crow about his sexploits with sorority girls.
Out of the corner of his eye, Sam sees a blur and as he whips his head around, hand on the knife stuck in the back of his jeans, he sees what looks like the edge of a cape zip over the edge of a roof.
*
Two trains and six blocks of walking gets Sam to The Schaefer School where he managed to get a scholarship based on his grades, recommendations from five of his teachers in Peoria plus his guidance councilor, and a pretty convincing sob story he’s been honing for years. It’s not too far from his real story, so it’s easily convincing.
Calculus is boring and Sam thinks having it first period is probably due to some kind of curse by a mummy hand or something else Dean did.
Sam watches the other students and makes up fake life histories for them. The kid right in front of him has a purple and black bruise on the back of his neck peeking out of the collar of dark blue t-shirt. Sam can’t come up with many scenarios for how a person would get a bruise like that he likes very much.
*
Dean gets money somehow; Sam mainly ignores the how. Dad sleeps in the early afternoons when Sam gets home from school, so they barely see each other. That’s probably better anyway since they can’t hardly stand to be in the same room most of the time.
Sam cooks dinner-Hamburger Helper-and runs through an outline on an essay on Wuthering Heights. He really hated the book, and he’s having a hard time finding any sort of enthusiasm for its motifs.
“Gonna hit New Town after dark to see about the missing kids.” Dean eats Doritos and has cheese powder all over his mouth. He’s inviting Sam along, trying to make it seem like Dean’s just being brotherly and friendly instead of coming right out with it and saying Dad ordered them both to go.
“Yeah, ok, got some physics homework, when I get done.” Some battles are lost before they start, and Sam doesn’t feel like fighting right now.
*
Dean hates the subway, but Sam doubts Dean even realizes it’s because he doesn’t like feeling trapped, doesn’t like being under ground. Dad needs the car, though, so Dean and Sam are public-transiting it.
Defaced movie posters blink by the train windows, platform after platform as they travel from the East End to New Town on the Vandenberg Express line.
“So, what do you think? Das Kindertot?” Dean lifts an eyebrow and sticks his tongue between his teeth. Sam figures there’s a hot chick behind him.
“You got a suggestion you didn’t get from Buffy?” Sam’s annoyed Dean can’t even focus for the train ride on the job instead of some chick’s ass. “Dean!”
Dean’s eyes snap right to Sam. He waits a beat. “Aw, come on, baby brother, a man can look.”
Sam glares harder. He doesn’t want to be here, doesn’t want to do the legwork on this case and have dad stroll in at the end to seal the deal without explaining word one of what was really going on.
“You’re never gonna get laid.” Dean slumps back in his seat and crosses his arms across his chest with his chin tucked down. Sulking Dean is better than pussyhound Dean any day of the week.
“You don’t know jack about my love life,” Sam spits out without thinking it through. Dean’s eyes flick back to his face and one corner of his mouth turns up into a smirk.
“That so, Sammy?”
Sam blushes, but he’s not gonna back down because he has no shortage of sexual interest directed his way.
“Yeah, it is, Dean. So fuck off.”
That’s a win for Dean then. Mission accomplished: pissed Sam off enough to get a rise out of him.
*
The missing kids are everywhere on the news, and people buy that Sam and Dean are doing a story for Gotham Grifter-the weekly free paper. Middle class white kids going missing out of their locked homes tends to generate some buzz, even in Gotham.
“Huh,” Dean says after Mrs. Piper gnaws their ears off with a litany of theories ranging from the Mad Hatter to Batman.
“Guess weird stuff happens here a lot,” Sam answers. That’s the same kind of understatement as “succubae are ok-looking”.
They stand on the train platform, Dean hugging the mosaic-inlaid wall. Sam watches Dean framed by blue tiles marching around his head in square, Greek rick-rack.
“I always thought the costumed hooligans thing was a load of hooey.” Dean rubs his chin and looks off into the vague distance. His hair’s getting longish, way longer than Dad likes. His own small kind of rebellion.
“It seems like a pretty elaborate hoax if it isn’t true.” A train rumbles through the station buffeting Sam with a forceful gust of air, rocking him on the balls of his feet.
Dean looks up at him and smiles. “Like the moon landing?
*
Halloween in Gotham is special.
“Isn’t this special?” Dean says as the grocery clerk dressed as The Joker, but like a slutty Joker with only panties on the bottom, hands Dean his change.
Sam is kind of surprised Dean isn’t eating up the eye candy with a soup spoon. “What’s your damage?” Sam eyes him under his bangs.
“It’s just disrespectful. What’s wrong with these people? That guy is a serial killer.” Dean shifts the grocery bag on his hip and roots in his pocket for his car keys.
“Huh,” Sam answers. Sometimes Dean is strangely morally upright, like Dad. Sort of. He opens his car door, but as he does, he catches sight of bright yellow and red out of corner of his eye. He stands with his hand on the handle and stares in that direction until Dean honks the horn.
Dean glares at him then moves on to a total non sequitur. “It’s a week until Halloween anyway, who ever heard of people dressing up for Halloweek?” He makes quote-fingers and Sam resolves to keep Dean away from the WB for a while.
*
The Schaefer School is putting on some kind of pageant, but Sam doesn’t really pay attention in homeroom to the morning announcements because he’s usually so exhausted he has trouble focusing on more than the coffee in his hand. Halloweek is apparently quite the to-do at the school. Tuesday morning, he sips his coffee and ticks off competing theories about the missing kids in his head while staring off into space.
“Hi, Sam, right?” Sam’s eyes focus on a face in his general line of vision. The black-haired kid that sits in front of him in Calculus. His eyes are startlingly robin’s egg blue. Some demons have eyes like that.
Sam smiles his in-public smile and flips his bangs into his eyes. “Uh huh.”
“I’m Tim.” The guy looks around, calmly surveying the room. He seems to be projecting normal from the slightly too long hair to his rumpled but expensive shirt to his untied tennis shoe. The thing is, it seems off somehow. Sam thinks about the bruise and his thoughts just sort of flow around; he’s not ready to make any conclusions here. “Going to the dance?”
Okay, right, a dance, that’s what it is, not a pageant. “Nah, not really my scene. You?”
Tim slips his eyes over the room and land them staring right back at Sam. He blinks and his face softens and instantly Sam knows this guy is putting on something, that he’s acting, dollars to doughnuts, because Sam recognizes it. “No, no date.” There’s some kind of pain there, sadness. Sam can’t tell if it’s real or not. It’s weird to get played and know it at the same time.
The bell rings and Tim smiles up at him and slings his backpack over his shoulder. “Check you later.”
Sam nods.
*
At lunch, Sam asks Rebekah about Tim.
“Tim…” She sucks on her juice box and pushes her glasses up. She’s the same sort of person Sam always makes friends with at school-science club, debate team, scholar’s bowl team, smart and socially awkward. He learned that social awkwardness covers a lot of the things he doesn’t want to talk about, and people who have their own issues generally won’t poke at his. Rebekah’s got spiral-curly hair bobbing out of her ponytail holders and quirky black-framed glasses. She can do factors in her head and learned to speak Chinese from kung-fu movies.
“He’s in my homeroom,” Sam says around his turkey sandwich. “Black hair…” Sam was going to give a pretty close run-down of his exact vitals, but the look on Rebekah’s face makes him stop. She’s not weirded out, more totally into it. Sam’s always been friends with girls, so he knows all about boy-kissing videos and fanfiction.
“Tim Drake, probably. He went to Brentwood before.” She says it like that should explain everything. Sam raises his eyebrows and she raises hers back. “You know, the school shooting? I think one of the people killed was his girlfriend.”
Sam vaguely remembers that. Regular violence sort of flies under the Winchester radar, though.
“He’s rich,” Rebekah adds. He has no idea what it means, other than it’s just some stray fact she knows about Tim. “You aren’t really going to major in English in college, are you? I mean, it’s, like, a total waste.”
Sam’s heard that from more than one person in the past. “I want to go to law school.” He smiles at her cluck of annoyance.
“Lame. Seriously. You should totally do micro and go into intellectual property law or something.” They met in debate. She’s one of those lateral thinkers who is amazing at rebuttal, something they have in common.
“Whatever. Gimme your fruit roll-up,” Sam snatches at it and she yanks it away with a laugh.
*
Tim falls into step next to him as Sam walks towards the train station. Sam’s hunched in around himself to keep out the cold and to not draw attention.
“Hey,” Tim says. Sam’s not buying it. There’s something really weird going on here.
“Hey,” Sam answers all the same.
“You going to join the math club next semester?” Tim’s a lot shorter than him, but he keeps up without obvious effort.
“Don’t know, maybe. Depends on if I have to get a job or not.” That’s a total lie. Dean wouldn’t let Sam get a job if Sam tried. He uses the job thing to cover when he has a case, though, when one’s getting real active and he has no free time. He’s had to put after-school activities on hold over and over again with the job excuse.
“That’s rough,” Tim says it like he knows. Sam watches him out of the corner of his eye.
“Uh huh,” he stops on the top step of the Kane Street entrance to the subway and says, “This is my line, catch you in the morning.”
“I’m on the same line,” Tim says with a smile. He has dimples. Sam knows full well that if he has money that Tim has to be on the Carmine or Gotham Heights line. He shrugs.
There’s a butterfly arguing with the station agent over change and a vampire swipes his metrocard over and over when they descend the stairs.
“This city’s weird.” Sam swipes his card and hears Tim laugh behind him.
“Where’re you from?” He says it all casual, but Sam’s suspicious.
“Oklahoma,” he tosses it over his shoulder. Sam can play casual, too.
“Tulsa, Oklahoma City?” Tim asks, and it feels now like they’re walking through some kind of well-mannered skit. Tim doesn’t believe him, and Sam doesn’t know why Tim’s so interested in Sam’s answers.
“Broken Arrow.” They had lived there for a while. Sam knows the town pretty well. Well enough not to get busted on some salient fact about the place. Sam and lies are good, they’re tight, old friends.
Tim smiles again. “Cool name.” Sam wonders what he’s really saying.
They ride together, not talking over the ambient noise of the old train. Tim stands to get off at the Robinson Park hub. He waves and smiles, and Sam waves and smiles back.
Sam stands and watches Tim slouching through the crowd on the platform until he manages to blend himself out of sight.
*
Dean’s not home when Sam gets there, and Dad’s in a mood, so out of spite, Sam doesn’t mention Tim pinging him all wrong. Fuck Dad anyway.
He does homework with his headphones on until Dean comes home with Bat Burgers and strawberry milkshakes. They eat and watch Charmed with two really loud commentary tracks.
“Her ass is a work of art!” Dean moans.
“God, this show sucks!” Sam moans.
*
About eleven, Dean raps on the frame of Sam’s bedroom door smelling like cigarettes and booze. “Heard something weird.”
“Was this before or after everyone was totally trashed?” Sam moves his headphones to hang around his neck and rolls his spine to crack it.
“Haha, smartass. Tricks of the trade, my man.” Dean’s got a small hickey under his ear. He looks tired. “Everyone seems to think there’s some kind of undead dude stealing souls or something.” He pauses with his eyebrows up for effect. “He’s got ninjas.”
“Dean, please.” Sam turns back to his English paper. “Ninjas? Weak.”
“We’ll see how weak it is when you get your ass kicked by some homo in tights with a boomerang. Or something.” He wanders away.
Sam’s too tired to work any more. He lays on his bed on his back and listens to Dean channel surf for a while.
He must have fallen asleep, because the next thing he knows, Dean’s shaking him awake.
“Come on, Sam, get your ass up.”
Dean’s got his coat on and is popping the chamber of a glock open to look inside. Sam moves instinctively.
“Demon sacrifice was my first call on the missing kids anyway,” Dean says by way of explanation.
Sam yawns hard enough for his jaw to pop. “Uh huh.”
*
The next morning, Sam has bruises around his wrist he’s glad he can wear winter clothes to cover. Demon sacrifice, yes, but not kids. Full-grown mental patients from one of the thousand local booby hatches.
Sam wonders if they’ll move now. Probably.
Tim ignores Sam in homeroom, but when they file out into the hallway, he reaches out casually and wraps his hand around the new bruises on Sam’s arm. Sam doesn’t flinch. He’s very good at not flinching.
Tim looks up at him with a placid expression. He drops his hand without breaking eye contact. Sam’s pulse beats in his fingertips. Tim finally looks away, fades into the crowd in the hall.
Sam supposes there could be a lot of explanations for what just happened, but Sam’s betting on something a whole lot more than Tim just being a freak. There is also that, but there’s something more, too.
*
Rebekah comes home with Sam that afternoon to work on a physics project together. He’d called Dean to let him know, so Dean could regularize the apartment. Sam had convinced Dad years before the never allowing anyone in the house only made people suspicious. That had been an epic battle, one for the ages.
“How’s it going with Tim?” Rebekah says around her soft pretzel.
“It’s not like that.” Sam says even though he knows that's a tar baby.
“Sure,” she says with laughter in her tone. Sam sighs. Is it like that? He thinks about it and he can’t really answer the question. He’s mainly interested in what kind of freak Tim is-Sam’s leaning towards some kind of costumed criminal. But that is mainly.
They round the corner and there’s a guy leaning on the rail to Sam’s stoop. Novick Street forms a sort of wind tunnel, and paper and garbage often pick up and start dancing along the sidewalks and down the middle of the street. The wind blows the man’s hair around his face, shiny black and long. He’s leaning all smooth in a leather motorcycle jacket with his hands in the pockets of his jeans with his ankles crossed in front of him.
Sam and Rebekah approach and he pushes his hair out of his face with one hand, holding it back for a few seconds. His smile is something out of underwear ads in high end magazines.
“Sam?” He stands up all the way and is a little shorter than Dean, probably Dean’s age or around it.
“Yes?” Normally Sam would have lied or parried for info, but with Rebekah in tow, he didn’t think he could sustain it without her getting suspicious. She sort of bumps into him and Sam looks down at her red cheeks, her hands clasped over her ears to warm them. He pushes her with his elbow and hands her his key. “Go inside. I’ll be in in a minute. Get Dean to nuke you some hot chocolate.”
Rebekah looks at the black-haired guy once, then smiles and waves jumping up on the first step of the stoop. “Ok!”
Sam watches her go then turns back around. “Who are you?”
The guy’s still totally casual, huge smile and eyes flying around Sam’s face from his mouth to his chin and down further. Sam lives with Dean, so he’s hardly impressed with the leer-for-info. “Tim’s brother.” His hair flies all over the place and he sort of almost gets it under control but not really. Sam thinks that’s probably for effect.
So. This is weird. Getting weirder and weirder. “And you want what?” Sam can be all business when he has to. He learned how to cow people with his voice when most people were still playing Hungry-Hungry-Hippo.
The guy laughs. He laughs with his head back slapping his thigh. His laughter is so joyous and startling that Sam’s mouth falls open. He clutches his chest and points at himself. “I’m Dick, and you’re…” He sucks in breath. “You’re so totally exactly what I expected.”
Sam has no idea what’s going on here. It’s getting dark and the smell of the river is getting stronger. In the evening half-light, the man in front of him looks like some kind of renaissance angel.
“You’re name isn’t really Dick…” Sometimes, Sam channels Dean.
The laughter bubbles and shakes around them. “’Fraid so.” Dick steps almost into Sam’s personal space. “I was born in the circus.” He says that like it’s an explanation, and Sam figures that if he expanded it to a metaphor, it would be a decent explanation for Sam’s own life.
“What do you want?” Sam could ask a lot of other things, but it’s better to just start here, with the basics.
“Tim has control issues. He wouldn’t tell me anything.” The amusement’s still there, but there’s a darker current under the words. “I wanted to talk to you myself.” And that last bit has bite to it. It’s a warning or a threat of some kind.
Sam feels his focus tighten like he does when he’s on a job. He looks down at Dick and he knows exactly where everyone else on the sidewalk is, knows the trajectories of the cars, sees the paper fluttering next to the row of trash cans. “Why?”
Dick watches him for several long seconds. He opens his mouth and pulls himself up straight. He makes a loud clicking sound in the back of his throat. “I think we both know why.”
Sam really doesn’t, though.
Dick turns, pulls out a set of keys from his jacket pocket. The lights on a blue motorcycle sitting a bit down the block flash. “You should be careful. Gotham eats teen-aged idealists by the fistful.”
He strolls away with his hair flying everywhere.
Sam stands there staring for a while. He feels like he just had an encounter with the Loch Ness Monster or Mothra. He takes the steps to the front entrance two at a time. When he bursts into the kitchen, Rebekah is chopping a carrot into rounds and Dean is frying something.
Dean looks genuine, like he’s enjoying himself for no real reason.
“I don’t know, the potential slayers didn’t need to be that lame. It was just crappy writing,” Rebekah says.
“Lame to the ass,” Dean responds. Rebekah laughs.
“Huh,” Sam says. They both look at him. He has no energy to be angry at Dean for putting the charm on his only friend. Normally, he’d bring Armageddon over this, but right now he has to figure out what to do about Tim.
He should probably get rid of Rebekah and tell Dean about Dick, but he won’t. It’s not immediately dangerous.
*
Thursday morning, Tim is waiting for him in the Novick Street station with two cups of coffee. He hands one to Sam when Sam walks up to him.
“Poisoned?” Sam asks before he sips on it. Tim cocks his head and looks back with a blank sort of assessing expression that Sam instantly knows is his real face.
“I won’t say it didn’t occur to me.” Tim sips his coffee and watches the people around them. There’s a large black woman dressed as a crawfish behind Tim. She’s close enough her antennae almost brush him.
“Are you gonna tell me what the hell’s going on?” Sam’s going to lose his temper. He hates mornings and he hates being in the dark.
Tim’s eyes float to Sam’s face and his look is so sharp that Sam’s skin tightens and his eye twitches once. He’s ready to pull a weapon or hit the bricks, whatever is called for.
“There was an exorcism in the Bowery earlier in the week…” Tim takes a drink of his coffee and faux-casually watches an au pair with a set of blonde twins. “Dick likes you.” He says it with the sort of resignation that Sam reserves himself for discussing Dean and Dad and their relationships with cars.
“Are you a hunter?” That’s not what Sam would have expected, but that possibility was always there.
Tim half-smiles. “Yeah. I am.” Sam opens his mouth to say something, but Tim meets his eyes and says. “What are you doing for Halloween?”
Sam could say a lot of things. He chooses the truth. “It’s a busy night for me.”
Tim nods once, abrupt. “Me, too.” That’s all he says before a train stops and doors open right in front of him like he’d measured perfectly where to be on the platform.
*
Tim treats Sam just like he does everyone else at school. Sam’s pretty damned impressed with his act. Tim is awful close to the All-American Boy as he acts bored in class and shrugs and smiles shyly at girls. Sam’s watching now, and he doesn’t buy it one bit.
*
Rebekah, incidentally, asked Dean to the damned Halloween dance. Sam would normally blow up and cause WWIII over this, but he’s got some stalking to do and brooding to accomplish, plus he’s got a history test.
Instead, Sam just glares. Dean smirks. “She’s eighteen, dude.”
He says things like that, like he thinks that legality is all that matters in any kind of dating scenario. Maybe for Dean is it is. Who knows.
*
Tim appears in Sam’s window at about two in the morning. Sam would maybe be startled, but he’s getting used to Gotham. People just appear randomly and people take the entire week to celebrate Halloween and the criminals dress up in bright costumes and have pithy catch-phrases.
Sam’s about to walk over and open the window when Tim does it himself. Tim whips himself through the window and closes it back silently. He stands there with fever-bright cheeks right outside the small bubble of light made by Sam’s desk lamp.
“You’ll move after Halloween.” It’s not a question. Sam’s already realized this fact himself. Dad’s gone more than around, which means he’s on to the next big case. That means he’ll want to up-root and get closer to the problem.
“What’s happening to the kids up on the Hill?” Sam has no doubt Tim knows.
“The Doll Maker.” He doesn’t explain, but he doesn’t have to. Sam has the internet. He’ll find out. “Turn off your lamp.”
It’s only as Sam complies that he realizes they weren’t whispering, that Tim must have known that Sam was alone. He probably watched Dad and Dean leave separately and waited. He should be really creeped out by that, but oddly isn’t.
The lamp bulb leaves a ghost image on Sam’s retinas as he closes his eyes. Tim’s fingers are cold against his cheek.
“Okay?” Tim says, his knee brushing Sam’s. Sam’s really not sure okay applies here. His blood pressure’s through the roof. Tim’s probably a member of a band of contract killers or high class cat burglars, the sort of thing that only exists in Gotham and Sam’s so hard he’s shaking.
Sam’s always been the “safe” boy with curious female friends, the kind of guy who benefits by being comfortable. He had his first real kiss at fourteen and hit third base not too long after that. Sam’s never kissed a boy, but he’s thought about it enough, more than enough.
Tim leans down, all grace and silence, and touches Sam’s top lip with the tip of his tongue. He slides the two fingers touching Sam’s cheek down to rest on the pulse in Sam’s neck. Sam tips up, kisses up, which is new and thrilling because Sam always kisses down, and presses his mouth against Tim’s. He opens his mouth just a little, and Tim’s tongue is just there, Tim is just everywhere, straddling Sam’s lap and rubbing everywhere.
Tim presses against Sam’s pulse hard enough to make Sam light-headed. It might be a warning, might be a threat, but it definitely turns both of them on because the rubbing angles and shifts so that hard-ons press and bump together and Sam’s already so close to coming, so close. Tim adds twisting his other hand in the collar of Sam’s shirt to the pressing of his jugular, and Sam comes moaning into Tim’s wide open mouth.
Tim makes a shocked, sharp noise as Sam shoves at his ass to fit them even closer, to help Tim. He goes rigid and bites Sam’s mouth, still as silent as the moment before someone says something really horrible.
They sit for several seconds breathing recycled air between them. Sam doesn’t know what to say, and Tim seems even more intent on keeping his secrets than Sam is his own. Sam understands control and fear and lies. He just lets Tim alone as he stands and slides out the window he opens for himself.
Sam sits in the dark and stares at the opaque surface of the closed window. It reflects back the near blackness of the room.
*
Sam skips school the next day and sits in Robinson Park talking periodically with a homeless guy who explains about the chip in his head. It’s apparently a relay beacon for aliens under the earth.
“Why are they under the earth if they’re aliens?” Sam eats a hot dog with hot pepper relish and ketchup.
Chet, the homeless guy, eats the hot dog Sam bought him and skewers him with a look. “The hole in the ozone layer.”
Chet distracts Sam from thinking about Tim and how he knows for sure that Tim only came over because he thinks Sam’ll be gone soon. That’s seriously fucked up on a level that even the Winchesters might be below.
*
Dean’s dressed as a pirate when Sam gets home. He has a bandana around his head, an eye patch on and a knife stuck in his belt. The eye patch and knife are real.
His smirk tells Sam all he needs to know as to whether Dean’s enjoying riling Sam up here.
“Dad’s in Edge City,” Dean says whipping his knife out and biting down on it with a sneer.
“Great, I’ll be in my room for the weekend.” He slams his door behind him.
*
He wakes up with Rebekah sitting on the edge of his bed dressed as a saucy wench or something stupid like that. She has on a frilly, low-cut top and a gypsy skirt. Her hair is bundled up to fall around her face in a complex way. She's still got on her glasses; she's the kind of girl who only makes certain concessions.
She smiles crookedly down at him.
“This is ok, right?”
He’s been avoiding the topic, because usually once girls start sniffing around Dean, it’s a lost cause. Rebekah’s smile dims and fades away. Sam realizes she really cares if he minds, that if he says so, she’ll go home and spurn Dean. That’s special right there.
“Yeah, it’s okay. Make him buy you dinner first, though.” He ducks as she smacks at his head. Dean's going to get his heart broken again, Sam can see that like he can read Dean's moods by the set of his shoulders.
*
Tim appears as Sam’s about to order pizza. He’s just standing right in the kitchen and doesn’t even bother to look sorry or apologetic. He's wearing a dark blue t-shirt over a long-sleaved black shirt, artfully pre-distressed jeans and blue Chucks. He has his hands in his pockets.
Sam realizes that Tim’s showing him what he’s really like, who he really is, in a shorthand kind of way. He wears a costume to fit in; he can break into the apartment any time he wants; he can get the drop on Sam. That’s probably important. Sam’s tired of difficult people. He just wants to sit in an internet café in Palo Alto and be bored by his roommate’s musical taste or to go into a church once for something other than a possession or to crib holy water.
“I get tired sometimes, too.” Tim stares at him with the weird, unreadable expression and Sam feels like shit. It’s not Tim’s fault that Sam’s had enough strange in his time that more weird is less intriguing than wearying. “They need us, though.”
They need us. They need us. Sam reassesses on the spot. He’s good at rapid thinking. It’s one of his skills, like spell-casting and Latin.
“Watch tv?” Sam turns and carries the hand set into the living room. “I’m about to order pizza.”
They watch Law and Order and make out over pepperoni like normal kids. Sam’s hyper-aware of how normal it all is, though. He’s pretty sure Tim is, too. That sort of ruins it.
Sam’s asleep on the couch when Dean comes home smelling like pot and sex. Tim’s gone, but Sam knew he would be.
*
Halloween night, the city burns. Fires catch from the bay to the river. Ash falls so thick that City Hall advises people not to go out without a face mask. Sam and Dean sit in Kane Cemetery with scarves over their mouths sharing a thermos of coffee. The smoke is thinner here, smelling of green wood and flowers.
“This sucks,” Dean put it succinctly.
“Yup,” Sam grumbles back. He’s cold and bored and tired of this. He wants to go to a costume party for once, sit around and get stupid drunk off jell-o shots and maybe see what kind of fancy costume Tim would wear. Not the regular, daily-wear one.
They wait for someone to raise the dead, like the do every year. Sam’s more in the mood to let zombies have their revenge for being revived. Dean would make them stay anyway, so arguing about it directly is pointless. Instead Sam huffs and shifts in an angry way causing Dean to glare and flip him off and mouth “fuck off.”
Sam gets a measure of pleasure at having pissed Dean off. He smiles. Dean rolls his eyes and wipes ash from his face. He has tear tracks through the soot on his face.
The stillness of the graveyard has been broken periodically by drunk idiots, so Sam’s not surprised when something crashes to their right. However, the woman in the green tights and unitard with streaming red hair being chased by a guy in a black Kevlar suit is…surprising.
“What. The. Fuck.” Dean breathes. Sam pretty much agrees.
“Batman. Probably.” It's not probably.
“No shit, Sherlock.” Dean stands up. “This spot’s busted.” He reflexively touches his gun under his coat.
They move. In the end they stop two raisings and a suicide by a kid trying to sell his soul to the devil.
*
The children kidnapped by The Doll Maker are returned minus two just like they’d been taken. They just reappeared in their homes in the middle of the night the night after Halloween. Sam imagines Tim carrying toddlers through second story windows, the kids strapped to his back in his school back pack.
*
Dad comes home the Monday after Halloween and is all smiles and big gestures. Sam hears the door bang open and dad's bag hitting the counter. He smells chinese. “This is a good location. I think we’ll stay here until Sam finishes school.”
Sam listens from the other room. Dad’s talking to Dean. Sam thinks it’s pretty perfect that Dad picked Gotham to settle in for almost a year. The only way he could have been more ironic is if he’d bought a house in the Saint Louis Cemetery Number One in New Orleans.
Sam looks out the window of his room and sees the Bat signal flash in the distance, strobing over the city with quiet menace. He’s going to get out of here, out of this whole life sooner or later, but he wonders what it’s like for people who don’t have that promise, those people who are left behind in this place.
**
PS poisontaster: I left it open for other people to write you more or for you to make some too.
*
The St. Louis Cemetery is one of the most famous in America. It's where Marie Laveau is buried. Amongst other things. Sam would know it.