SPN FIC - Journey (Chapter 3, part 3 of 3)
JOURNEY begins here: http://ficwriter1966.livejournal.com/9849.html#cutid1
Chapter 3 starts here: http://ficwriter1966.livejournal.com/11622.html#cutid1
And now, the conclusion of Chapter 3!
JOURNEY
By Carol Davis
CHAPTER THREE
NEW YORK STATE OF MIND (conclusion)
She was no different than Dean, he thought, and what he didn’t need right now was another Dean. I don’t even need a Dean like the one I’ve already got. She talked about the weather, about baseball scores, about the people walking by. Asked him about the states he’d visited since the last time they’d seen each other - but nothing about the hunting, nothing about him. And nothing about herself. Midway through the burger he had started to wonder if there was anybody in the world who would answer a question honestly and without a lot of tap-dancing.
Okay, so maybe there wasn’t anything hugely wrong with Sarah. She was doing a good job of putting away the tuna steak she’d ordered, and the skin around her eyes had stopped crinkling. Maybe she’d just had an argument with her father - an adult still living with a parent kind of made that possibility a given.
Okay, so maybe…
“Good?” Sarah asked.
He had to gesture for her to wait so he could finish chewing a mouthful of burger and swallow it, because with the linen napkins and the nice dishes and him being the only person here who was wearing jeans that were ragged at the backs of the cuffs, this wasn’t the kind of place where you forgot your table manners. Once the mouthful was gone, he nodded, “It’s very good.”
“I ate here once a few years ago. I’m glad it’s still the same.”
“Me too.”
She didn’t say much more until they’d finished their meal. When Sam reached for the leather folder containing the check, she shook her head and told him, “I invited you. I’ve got it. And I got…”
Her head tipped a little, so that she was looking at the brick wall of the building behind Sam. He had to turn in his chair to see the word MARRIOTT spelled out in big white letters.
“What?” he asked.
“A room.”
“A room? You’re…what, staying overnight here for something?”
“Sam.”
Oh. “A room.”
“If you don’t want to…”
Last night suddenly seemed like a million years ago. And the afternoon he had stood at the door of the auction house, kissing Sarah goodbye, seemed like yesterday. Dean, as full of tickled parental glee as if Sam had won The Big Game, had offered with a big goofy grin to stick around New Paltz for a while - but they hadn’t. Sam had said goodbye to Sarah with a kiss, because it’d been too soon, and being with her that way wasn’t right, not then.
Maybe not now.
But Dad had…
Did Dad ever try to find somebody else? he wondered. That single real moment he’d had with his mother drifted through his mind: the look of sorrow on her face, the regret in the only two words she said to him. I’m sorry.
She would have wanted him to be happy. Wanted us to be happy. All of us.
“I do want to,” he said.
By the time Sam reached the middle of the room, Sarah had already kicked off her shoes and dropped her purse on the desk. Sam, who had had every intention of shucking articles of clothing at a similar speed, instead found himself looking around. “This is -“
“Hmmm?”
“A lot nicer than the places Dean and I usually stay at.”
Sarah’s expression asked him a question. The truthful answer would have been It’s like the place Jess and I stayed at for our anniversary. Luckily, enough blood still remained in Sam’s brain to tell him that the truthful answer was less than tactless. “Not really,” he murmured.
“I missed you, Sam.”
Something he suspected was a silly grin crept across his face. “I missed you, too.”
Then she was in his arms, finding his mouth with her own. Her hands moved up his chest, opening the buttons of his shirt, then sliding it back off his shoulders. It landed in a heap on the carpet, followed quickly by his t-shirt. Sam slid his hands around to her back, trying to remember whether it was buttons or a zipper that held her dress together, then stopped himself and stood looking curiously down at her.
“Is everything okay?” she asked him, frowning in a way that said she was trying to figure out what might not be right.
“It’s fine.”
“Then - ?”
For some reason, the room seemed way too bright. And too…something. “What you said, the other day on the phone?” Sam stammered. “I don’t know if I can say that yet. But I think you’re incredible. And I’m sorry about the Telescas, and your friend Evelyn, I really am, but God, I’m glad that painting was haunted. And I sound like a complete whack job, don’t I?”
Sarah shook her head. “No,” she said softly. “I think you sound like you’re nervous.”
“I - yeah.”
Padding barefoot across the carpet, Sarah found the pull for the drapes at the room’s single wide window and tugged on it until the drapes were nearly closed, leaving the room in deep pools of shadow. Then she returned to Sam and tugged at his hand until he sat down at the end of the bed. He looked at her curiously as she sat down beside him, one long leg tucked up underneath her. With a hand on his shoulder, she leaned in close to his ear and murmured, “I’m here, Sam. And everything’s okay.”
He was alone, for a minute or two. Although he felt stupid doing it, he wiggled deeper under the covers, enjoying the feel of the mattress that seemed to snuggle around him and the soft cotton sheets. And the pillows… Idly, he wondered if the hotel staff would notice if they came up a couple of pillows short after he’d left.
“Having fun?”
“There are no words to describe how much fun I’m having.”
Particularly with Sarah standing there naked, backlit by the light from the bathroom. Very unselfconscious, she returned to bed and nestled in beside him. “I win the hotel-picking contest, huh?”
“Big time.”
“That place you said you stayed in last night - I think I’ve seen those.”
Sam winced. “You mean they’re a chain? That scares me worse than haunted paintings. Although…it’s not the worst I’ve ever stayed in.” There was that place in Montana - the one with the fleas, he thought, but he remembered Dean saying Buzzkill, Sammy, and didn’t mention it aloud. “We’ve seen everything from soup to nuts. Mostly nuts.”
“So you’ve never…you’ve only lived in motels all your life?”
“Pretty much. Except for college.” Sam smiled fleetingly. “Been to every state except Alaska and Hawaii. I’m not sure about Alaska, but I think I could convince Dean there’s some weird stuff to investigate in Hawaii. Except I think I’d be doing most of the investigating, while he trails women in very small bathing suits.”
“Maybe you could find something supernatural in a very small bathing suit.”
“Ouch - don’t even go there.”
Sarah didn’t reply. After a moment, Sam gently turned her head so he could see her face. “What’re you thinking?” When she demurred, he offered, “You can say it.”
It took her a minute. “I suppose there’s something romantic about…” She sighed. “The open road. Living like gypsies. But for children not to have a home - that’s…”
“Sad? Yeah, I guess. But we had - I guess it’s a stretch to call them ‘homes,’ but we stayed for a while in a few places. We had a house once, and a bunch of apartments where we stayed for a few months, until something happened and we got kicked out, or we’d -“ Sam cut himself off again, because the end of the sentence was duck out on the rent. “And we stayed almost a year at this trailer park out near Lincoln. Somebody - might’ve been Dean, I’m not sure - convinced my dad we should stick around because of school. So we finished out the school year, but the next day we hit the road again because Dad found out Dean was sleeping with this girl four years older than him.”
“How old was Dean?”
“Fifteen.” Rather than continue looking at Sarah, Sam let his gaze slide up to the ceiling and noticed a couple of small black spots in the light fixture. Dead flies, he decided, even in a place like this. “I think it was the only time Dad ever really paid any attention to what Dean was doing. God knows he never said anything about Dean sleeping around after that.” Sam laughed softly, wryly. “My brother’s either a great advertisement for the reliability of condoms, or there’s a whole collection of little Winchesters scattered around the country. I hope I never find out which.”
Sarah brushed a hand against his cheek. “And you hope you see it someday.”
“See what?”
“Dean taking care of a little Winchester who isn’t you.”
That made Sam’s breath catch in his throat.
Dean…
“You were gone a long time.”
“Yeah, well, now I’m back. Did you do your homework?”
“Where’d you go?”
Dean turned away from him and started gathering up dirty dishes from the coffee table, where they’d sat to eat supper. He was trying to be stern, like Dad, but it was a tough job: when he reached for Sam’s empty glass, he was holding back a grin. When Sam grinned back, Dean tried for “stern” again and this time it worked a little better. “I was talking to Katie.”
The younger Winchester said nothing while Dean was washing the dishes. But after Dean had put everything away and wiped off the counter, Sam asked, “What’s it like?”
“What’s what like?”
“Sex.”
“How would I know?” Dean asked a little too abruptly.
“It was the only time I’ve ever had my own room,” Sam told Sarah. “In the trailer park. It wasn’t big enough for two beds, so Dean slept on the couch.”
“Dean?”
Dean’s face was buried in his pillow. “What, Sam?”
“Where’s Dad?”
“I don’t know, Sam.” After some squirming, accompanied by unhappy mumbling, Dean landed on his back, pushing his hair out of his face with the palm of his hand. “Why? Is something wrong?”
“No. “
“Then go back to bed.”
“I can’t sleep.”
“Sam…you’re not a baby. Go back to bed. There’s nothing in there.”
“But what if there is?” When Dean grunted at him, Sam persisted, “Like those people in Little Rock. The thing ate their cat.”
“We don’t have a cat.”
“Yeah, but the teeth…”
“What, d’you think it’s gonna start gnawing on your leg or something?” Moaning to himself, Dean struggled up off the couch and, nudging Sam along, shambled down the short hallway to Sam’s bedroom. With eyes at half-mast he flipped on the light, crouched down to look under the bed, then shoved the sliding closet door open and looked in there. “No closet monster, Sammy. Nothing bigger’n a Chihuahua’d fit in there, anyway.” For him, the situation was resolved. But for Sam, in t-shirt and pajama bottoms, with a pillowcase wrinkle on his cheek, it wasn’t. Shaking his head, Dean grabbed the hem of the covers and lifted them up, then pointed at the bed until Sam woefully crawled in.
Sam went on looking woeful until Dean sat down on the kitchen chair next to Sam’s dresser. “Sammy, you gotta stop this,” Dean sighed. “The thresholds and the windows are salted. Nothing’s getting in here.”
“But what if it does?”
“It’s not.”
“Dean…when is Dad coming home?”
“I don’t know, Sammy. Soon.”
“What if he doesn’t come home?”
“He better. Because another couple nights of this and I’m gonna be in the loony bin.”
“Does he know how much you love him?” Sarah asked quietly.
“I hope so,” Sam whispered.
* * * * *
“From them.”
Dean followed the waiter’s gaze to a table near the stairs. “Thanks,” he murmured offhandedly, and the guy moved away.
Two of ‘em, both smiling.
Two. Well, now, that could make for an interesting evening. With a grin teasing the corner of his mouth, he emptied the glass he’d been working on, set it down, and gestured to his benefactors with the new one.
One of them got up and strolled over to his table. “Hi,” she offered.
Little flippy skirt. Bare legs below that. Bare skin above it, too: a strip of midriff he was pretty much looking straight at. He tilted his head a little and considered everything from there up. Cute. Hair a little lighter than Sarah’s, in one of those styles that looked like a five-year-old had gone at her head with a dull pair of scissors. But cute. Breasts that were a good handful each. A second after he’d finished his tour, she slid into the chair next to his.
Dean shifted his weight a little and drawled, “Gonna need to see some I.D., ma’am.”
“But I’m so very legal, officer,” she said, playing along.
“Yeah? Where’s that? Mississippi?”
“Right here. Officer…”
She left a blank for him to fill in his name. “Eddie,” he said. “Van Halen.” He wasn’t sure she’d get the reference, but she did, and snickered. Didn’t offer a name of her own, though, either fake or otherwise.
Her eyes drifted back to her friend, and so did Dean’s. What the hell, he thought. She had “college student” written all over her, but if she was in college, she had to be at least eighteen. Unless she’s one of those whatchamacallits…prodigies…
Her friend looked a little older. Maybe.
If she - either one of them - was jailbait, Sammy was gonna tear him a new one. Then sew it up and tear it open again.
He settled for taking a long gulp of his drink. “My brother,” he said as he put the glass down, “has no sense of humor.”
She glanced around. “Is he here?”
“Nope.”
“Too bad.”
“So…” he said with a lazy smile, “what’s your major?”
“Right now, I think it’s you.”
Dean let out a soft “heh” and took another sip.
“Smells like beer in here,” she commented after a long look around that finished up on him.
“Yeah? Well, that would be amazing, considering it’s a bar.”
“My place smells a lot better. I left the windows open. I love it when the breeze comes through, when it’s warm out at night.”
He shifted his weight again. “Is that safe?”
“I don’t know, Officer Eddie,” she admitted. “Maybe you should come over and take a look around, and make sure there’s nothing hiding under the bed.”
Honey, if you only knew, he thought. “What about your friend?”
“What about her?”
“She a big fan of fresh air, too?”
“You could find out.”
Dean glanced toward the other table. Cute. A little heavier, but that was cool, because it made for soft places to lean into. She’d pulled one foot out of its shoe and was playing with the shoe with her toes.
“Lead the way,” he said.
* * * * *
Sam had slept without dreams, without visions. Without the crash of thunder or the clank of cheap air conditioning or Dean making weird sounds.
Twice he had brushed against Sarah and had drifted half-awake, enough awake to gather her into his arms and rouse her with his lips, his hands, his voice. Once she roused him in a way that surprised him, and when he saw her smiling at him across the flat plane of his stomach he had to grin stupidly because a surprise like that was so much better than a bunch of toys under the tree on Christmas morning.
Once, drifting under the surface of being awake, he thought he heard her whisper “I love you,” but maybe that was wrong, maybe he was only remembering the phone call.
And one more time.
He felt something touch his cheek and opened his eyes to find her crouched beside the bed. “Nuh?” he mumbled.
“Sam, I have to go.”
That didn’t compute. He blinked a couple of times and when that did nothing to clear his vision, rubbed at his eyes with his knuckles. Okay, Winchester, try for English. “Go where?”
“I have to…meet my father. I’m sorry I can’t have breakfast. It’s almost eight, and I’m late.”
Still confused, Sam pushed himself into a sitting position. “Will you be back?”
“I…not here.”
“I can meet you somewhere.”
She looked at him distractedly, as if coming up with words was a bigger task than she could manage. “I’ll call you later, okay?”
“I guess,” Sam frowned. “Are you -“
He was going to say “all right” but she didn’t give him the chance. As she got up from her crouch, she brushed a kiss against his cheek, then found her purse and headed for the door. Before Sam could object, she was gone.
“Well, that was…abrupt,” he muttered.
Gone like Cinderella, and she hadn’t even left behind a glass slipper.
Still fuzzy, he got out of bed and shambled into the bathroom, thankful that the lights were off. Whoever had designed the guest rooms had a lightbulb and mirror fetish, obviously, and the brilliance would have blinded him. Or killed him outright.
Call you later. Okay, so…dinner?
He managed to figure out the shower with eyes half-closed and stood in there for a long while, letting the hot water wake him up little by little. He was still in there when something began to compete with the sound of the spraying water. When he realized it was his cell phone he stumbled out, grabbed one of the hotel’s fabulously oversized towels, and fumbled around the room until he found the phone. It had fallen out of his jeans pocket onto the floor and been pushed half under the bed. By the time he hit the Talk button it had rung at least fifty times. His voicemail was set for five rings, which meant whoever was at the other end had called ten times.
It could only be Dean, and it was. “Dude, where the hell are you?” his voice demanded.
“I’m at the Marriott.”
There was a long silence at the other end.
“Dean?” Sam prompted.
“What’re you doing at the Marriott?”
“Up until about twenty minutes ago, I was sleeping.”
Another silence. Then Dean asked crossly, “Which card did you put that on?”
“I didn’t. Sarah paid for the room.” Before Dean could respond, Sam said, “Did you want something?”
“I - yeah.”
“Which would be?”
“Is she there?”
“What? No. Dean, what do you want?”
Yet another silence, not as long, then the rustling of paper. “In the Post. This morning. Homeless girl found a murdered kid in an abandoned meat plant in Brooklyn. Whoever did it skinned the hide off of him.”
“And it’s not just some psycho?”
“This is the second one, in pretty much the same place. Couple blocks apart. First one was in pieces in a Dumpster, remember? It was in the paper yesterday.”
Sam nodded to himself. “Yeah, I remember.”
“This one - the cops found smudges of some burnt stuff on the walls, the floor, all around where the body was.”
“Burnt stuff?”
“Guy they quoted said it smelled like matches.”
“Sulfur.”
“Yeah.”
“And all the kid’s skin was gone.”
“Yeah. Article didn’t have a whole lot of detail, so I called. The guy from the Post saw the body. The way he described it - he said there weren’t any edges like there’d be if it was done with a knife or a scalpel. He said it looked like it was all just…gone.”
There was more, something Dean wasn’t saying, and the tone of Dean’s voice stopped Sam from trying to prompt him with anything approaching humor. “And?” Sam said quietly.
The answer didn’t come right away. “A few years ago, up in Michigan. Outside of Saginaw. You weren’t with us. A bunch of kids were killed.”
“You don’t mean the Pied Piper thing, do you? I thought they convicted a guy for that.”
“He didn’t do it.”
“He was innocent?”
Dean grunted softly. “He summoned the thing that did it - wanted to get even with somebody. Ex-wife’s new husband, I think. So it was his fault, even though he never laid a hand on anybody. Dad and me, we got the demon. And I think Mr. Revenge Is Sweet is getting his ass kicked pretty regular. Or…maybe not kicked. But something. Cons don’t much like kid killers.”
He made a noise near the phone, something like clearing his throat. Sam had heard it before. “And this -?”
“Isn’t just some nutball. Isn’t human. Or if it’s human, they’ve got help. Like Saginaw. I’ll lay money on it, Sammy.”
Sam was already groping for his clothes with the hand that wasn’t holding the phone. “I’ll meet you in five minutes, where you dropped me off yesterday. Where are you? Do you need more time to get here?”
“Gimme fifteen.” Then Dean cut himself off. “It could wait a couple hours.”
“I don’t need it.”
“You get your groove back, Stella?”
“Dean,” Sam said.
“This ain’t good, Sam.”
“I know,” Sam grunted, and cut off the phone.
Chapter 4 begins here: http://ficwriter1966.livejournal.com/12877.html#cutid1
Chapter 3 starts here: http://ficwriter1966.livejournal.com/11622.html#cutid1
And now, the conclusion of Chapter 3!
JOURNEY
By Carol Davis
CHAPTER THREE
NEW YORK STATE OF MIND (conclusion)
She was no different than Dean, he thought, and what he didn’t need right now was another Dean. I don’t even need a Dean like the one I’ve already got. She talked about the weather, about baseball scores, about the people walking by. Asked him about the states he’d visited since the last time they’d seen each other - but nothing about the hunting, nothing about him. And nothing about herself. Midway through the burger he had started to wonder if there was anybody in the world who would answer a question honestly and without a lot of tap-dancing.
Okay, so maybe there wasn’t anything hugely wrong with Sarah. She was doing a good job of putting away the tuna steak she’d ordered, and the skin around her eyes had stopped crinkling. Maybe she’d just had an argument with her father - an adult still living with a parent kind of made that possibility a given.
Okay, so maybe…
“Good?” Sarah asked.
He had to gesture for her to wait so he could finish chewing a mouthful of burger and swallow it, because with the linen napkins and the nice dishes and him being the only person here who was wearing jeans that were ragged at the backs of the cuffs, this wasn’t the kind of place where you forgot your table manners. Once the mouthful was gone, he nodded, “It’s very good.”
“I ate here once a few years ago. I’m glad it’s still the same.”
“Me too.”
She didn’t say much more until they’d finished their meal. When Sam reached for the leather folder containing the check, she shook her head and told him, “I invited you. I’ve got it. And I got…”
Her head tipped a little, so that she was looking at the brick wall of the building behind Sam. He had to turn in his chair to see the word MARRIOTT spelled out in big white letters.
“What?” he asked.
“A room.”
“A room? You’re…what, staying overnight here for something?”
“Sam.”
Oh. “A room.”
“If you don’t want to…”
Last night suddenly seemed like a million years ago. And the afternoon he had stood at the door of the auction house, kissing Sarah goodbye, seemed like yesterday. Dean, as full of tickled parental glee as if Sam had won The Big Game, had offered with a big goofy grin to stick around New Paltz for a while - but they hadn’t. Sam had said goodbye to Sarah with a kiss, because it’d been too soon, and being with her that way wasn’t right, not then.
Maybe not now.
But Dad had…
Did Dad ever try to find somebody else? he wondered. That single real moment he’d had with his mother drifted through his mind: the look of sorrow on her face, the regret in the only two words she said to him. I’m sorry.
She would have wanted him to be happy. Wanted us to be happy. All of us.
“I do want to,” he said.
By the time Sam reached the middle of the room, Sarah had already kicked off her shoes and dropped her purse on the desk. Sam, who had had every intention of shucking articles of clothing at a similar speed, instead found himself looking around. “This is -“
“Hmmm?”
“A lot nicer than the places Dean and I usually stay at.”
Sarah’s expression asked him a question. The truthful answer would have been It’s like the place Jess and I stayed at for our anniversary. Luckily, enough blood still remained in Sam’s brain to tell him that the truthful answer was less than tactless. “Not really,” he murmured.
“I missed you, Sam.”
Something he suspected was a silly grin crept across his face. “I missed you, too.”
Then she was in his arms, finding his mouth with her own. Her hands moved up his chest, opening the buttons of his shirt, then sliding it back off his shoulders. It landed in a heap on the carpet, followed quickly by his t-shirt. Sam slid his hands around to her back, trying to remember whether it was buttons or a zipper that held her dress together, then stopped himself and stood looking curiously down at her.
“Is everything okay?” she asked him, frowning in a way that said she was trying to figure out what might not be right.
“It’s fine.”
“Then - ?”
For some reason, the room seemed way too bright. And too…something. “What you said, the other day on the phone?” Sam stammered. “I don’t know if I can say that yet. But I think you’re incredible. And I’m sorry about the Telescas, and your friend Evelyn, I really am, but God, I’m glad that painting was haunted. And I sound like a complete whack job, don’t I?”
Sarah shook her head. “No,” she said softly. “I think you sound like you’re nervous.”
“I - yeah.”
Padding barefoot across the carpet, Sarah found the pull for the drapes at the room’s single wide window and tugged on it until the drapes were nearly closed, leaving the room in deep pools of shadow. Then she returned to Sam and tugged at his hand until he sat down at the end of the bed. He looked at her curiously as she sat down beside him, one long leg tucked up underneath her. With a hand on his shoulder, she leaned in close to his ear and murmured, “I’m here, Sam. And everything’s okay.”
He was alone, for a minute or two. Although he felt stupid doing it, he wiggled deeper under the covers, enjoying the feel of the mattress that seemed to snuggle around him and the soft cotton sheets. And the pillows… Idly, he wondered if the hotel staff would notice if they came up a couple of pillows short after he’d left.
“Having fun?”
“There are no words to describe how much fun I’m having.”
Particularly with Sarah standing there naked, backlit by the light from the bathroom. Very unselfconscious, she returned to bed and nestled in beside him. “I win the hotel-picking contest, huh?”
“Big time.”
“That place you said you stayed in last night - I think I’ve seen those.”
Sam winced. “You mean they’re a chain? That scares me worse than haunted paintings. Although…it’s not the worst I’ve ever stayed in.” There was that place in Montana - the one with the fleas, he thought, but he remembered Dean saying Buzzkill, Sammy, and didn’t mention it aloud. “We’ve seen everything from soup to nuts. Mostly nuts.”
“So you’ve never…you’ve only lived in motels all your life?”
“Pretty much. Except for college.” Sam smiled fleetingly. “Been to every state except Alaska and Hawaii. I’m not sure about Alaska, but I think I could convince Dean there’s some weird stuff to investigate in Hawaii. Except I think I’d be doing most of the investigating, while he trails women in very small bathing suits.”
“Maybe you could find something supernatural in a very small bathing suit.”
“Ouch - don’t even go there.”
Sarah didn’t reply. After a moment, Sam gently turned her head so he could see her face. “What’re you thinking?” When she demurred, he offered, “You can say it.”
It took her a minute. “I suppose there’s something romantic about…” She sighed. “The open road. Living like gypsies. But for children not to have a home - that’s…”
“Sad? Yeah, I guess. But we had - I guess it’s a stretch to call them ‘homes,’ but we stayed for a while in a few places. We had a house once, and a bunch of apartments where we stayed for a few months, until something happened and we got kicked out, or we’d -“ Sam cut himself off again, because the end of the sentence was duck out on the rent. “And we stayed almost a year at this trailer park out near Lincoln. Somebody - might’ve been Dean, I’m not sure - convinced my dad we should stick around because of school. So we finished out the school year, but the next day we hit the road again because Dad found out Dean was sleeping with this girl four years older than him.”
“How old was Dean?”
“Fifteen.” Rather than continue looking at Sarah, Sam let his gaze slide up to the ceiling and noticed a couple of small black spots in the light fixture. Dead flies, he decided, even in a place like this. “I think it was the only time Dad ever really paid any attention to what Dean was doing. God knows he never said anything about Dean sleeping around after that.” Sam laughed softly, wryly. “My brother’s either a great advertisement for the reliability of condoms, or there’s a whole collection of little Winchesters scattered around the country. I hope I never find out which.”
Sarah brushed a hand against his cheek. “And you hope you see it someday.”
“See what?”
“Dean taking care of a little Winchester who isn’t you.”
That made Sam’s breath catch in his throat.
Dean…
“You were gone a long time.”
“Yeah, well, now I’m back. Did you do your homework?”
“Where’d you go?”
Dean turned away from him and started gathering up dirty dishes from the coffee table, where they’d sat to eat supper. He was trying to be stern, like Dad, but it was a tough job: when he reached for Sam’s empty glass, he was holding back a grin. When Sam grinned back, Dean tried for “stern” again and this time it worked a little better. “I was talking to Katie.”
The younger Winchester said nothing while Dean was washing the dishes. But after Dean had put everything away and wiped off the counter, Sam asked, “What’s it like?”
“What’s what like?”
“Sex.”
“How would I know?” Dean asked a little too abruptly.
“It was the only time I’ve ever had my own room,” Sam told Sarah. “In the trailer park. It wasn’t big enough for two beds, so Dean slept on the couch.”
“Dean?”
Dean’s face was buried in his pillow. “What, Sam?”
“Where’s Dad?”
“I don’t know, Sam.” After some squirming, accompanied by unhappy mumbling, Dean landed on his back, pushing his hair out of his face with the palm of his hand. “Why? Is something wrong?”
“No. “
“Then go back to bed.”
“I can’t sleep.”
“Sam…you’re not a baby. Go back to bed. There’s nothing in there.”
“But what if there is?” When Dean grunted at him, Sam persisted, “Like those people in Little Rock. The thing ate their cat.”
“We don’t have a cat.”
“Yeah, but the teeth…”
“What, d’you think it’s gonna start gnawing on your leg or something?” Moaning to himself, Dean struggled up off the couch and, nudging Sam along, shambled down the short hallway to Sam’s bedroom. With eyes at half-mast he flipped on the light, crouched down to look under the bed, then shoved the sliding closet door open and looked in there. “No closet monster, Sammy. Nothing bigger’n a Chihuahua’d fit in there, anyway.” For him, the situation was resolved. But for Sam, in t-shirt and pajama bottoms, with a pillowcase wrinkle on his cheek, it wasn’t. Shaking his head, Dean grabbed the hem of the covers and lifted them up, then pointed at the bed until Sam woefully crawled in.
Sam went on looking woeful until Dean sat down on the kitchen chair next to Sam’s dresser. “Sammy, you gotta stop this,” Dean sighed. “The thresholds and the windows are salted. Nothing’s getting in here.”
“But what if it does?”
“It’s not.”
“Dean…when is Dad coming home?”
“I don’t know, Sammy. Soon.”
“What if he doesn’t come home?”
“He better. Because another couple nights of this and I’m gonna be in the loony bin.”
“Does he know how much you love him?” Sarah asked quietly.
“I hope so,” Sam whispered.
* * * * *
“From them.”
Dean followed the waiter’s gaze to a table near the stairs. “Thanks,” he murmured offhandedly, and the guy moved away.
Two of ‘em, both smiling.
Two. Well, now, that could make for an interesting evening. With a grin teasing the corner of his mouth, he emptied the glass he’d been working on, set it down, and gestured to his benefactors with the new one.
One of them got up and strolled over to his table. “Hi,” she offered.
Little flippy skirt. Bare legs below that. Bare skin above it, too: a strip of midriff he was pretty much looking straight at. He tilted his head a little and considered everything from there up. Cute. Hair a little lighter than Sarah’s, in one of those styles that looked like a five-year-old had gone at her head with a dull pair of scissors. But cute. Breasts that were a good handful each. A second after he’d finished his tour, she slid into the chair next to his.
Dean shifted his weight a little and drawled, “Gonna need to see some I.D., ma’am.”
“But I’m so very legal, officer,” she said, playing along.
“Yeah? Where’s that? Mississippi?”
“Right here. Officer…”
She left a blank for him to fill in his name. “Eddie,” he said. “Van Halen.” He wasn’t sure she’d get the reference, but she did, and snickered. Didn’t offer a name of her own, though, either fake or otherwise.
Her eyes drifted back to her friend, and so did Dean’s. What the hell, he thought. She had “college student” written all over her, but if she was in college, she had to be at least eighteen. Unless she’s one of those whatchamacallits…prodigies…
Her friend looked a little older. Maybe.
If she - either one of them - was jailbait, Sammy was gonna tear him a new one. Then sew it up and tear it open again.
He settled for taking a long gulp of his drink. “My brother,” he said as he put the glass down, “has no sense of humor.”
She glanced around. “Is he here?”
“Nope.”
“Too bad.”
“So…” he said with a lazy smile, “what’s your major?”
“Right now, I think it’s you.”
Dean let out a soft “heh” and took another sip.
“Smells like beer in here,” she commented after a long look around that finished up on him.
“Yeah? Well, that would be amazing, considering it’s a bar.”
“My place smells a lot better. I left the windows open. I love it when the breeze comes through, when it’s warm out at night.”
He shifted his weight again. “Is that safe?”
“I don’t know, Officer Eddie,” she admitted. “Maybe you should come over and take a look around, and make sure there’s nothing hiding under the bed.”
Honey, if you only knew, he thought. “What about your friend?”
“What about her?”
“She a big fan of fresh air, too?”
“You could find out.”
Dean glanced toward the other table. Cute. A little heavier, but that was cool, because it made for soft places to lean into. She’d pulled one foot out of its shoe and was playing with the shoe with her toes.
“Lead the way,” he said.
* * * * *
Sam had slept without dreams, without visions. Without the crash of thunder or the clank of cheap air conditioning or Dean making weird sounds.
Twice he had brushed against Sarah and had drifted half-awake, enough awake to gather her into his arms and rouse her with his lips, his hands, his voice. Once she roused him in a way that surprised him, and when he saw her smiling at him across the flat plane of his stomach he had to grin stupidly because a surprise like that was so much better than a bunch of toys under the tree on Christmas morning.
Once, drifting under the surface of being awake, he thought he heard her whisper “I love you,” but maybe that was wrong, maybe he was only remembering the phone call.
And one more time.
He felt something touch his cheek and opened his eyes to find her crouched beside the bed. “Nuh?” he mumbled.
“Sam, I have to go.”
That didn’t compute. He blinked a couple of times and when that did nothing to clear his vision, rubbed at his eyes with his knuckles. Okay, Winchester, try for English. “Go where?”
“I have to…meet my father. I’m sorry I can’t have breakfast. It’s almost eight, and I’m late.”
Still confused, Sam pushed himself into a sitting position. “Will you be back?”
“I…not here.”
“I can meet you somewhere.”
She looked at him distractedly, as if coming up with words was a bigger task than she could manage. “I’ll call you later, okay?”
“I guess,” Sam frowned. “Are you -“
He was going to say “all right” but she didn’t give him the chance. As she got up from her crouch, she brushed a kiss against his cheek, then found her purse and headed for the door. Before Sam could object, she was gone.
“Well, that was…abrupt,” he muttered.
Gone like Cinderella, and she hadn’t even left behind a glass slipper.
Still fuzzy, he got out of bed and shambled into the bathroom, thankful that the lights were off. Whoever had designed the guest rooms had a lightbulb and mirror fetish, obviously, and the brilliance would have blinded him. Or killed him outright.
Call you later. Okay, so…dinner?
He managed to figure out the shower with eyes half-closed and stood in there for a long while, letting the hot water wake him up little by little. He was still in there when something began to compete with the sound of the spraying water. When he realized it was his cell phone he stumbled out, grabbed one of the hotel’s fabulously oversized towels, and fumbled around the room until he found the phone. It had fallen out of his jeans pocket onto the floor and been pushed half under the bed. By the time he hit the Talk button it had rung at least fifty times. His voicemail was set for five rings, which meant whoever was at the other end had called ten times.
It could only be Dean, and it was. “Dude, where the hell are you?” his voice demanded.
“I’m at the Marriott.”
There was a long silence at the other end.
“Dean?” Sam prompted.
“What’re you doing at the Marriott?”
“Up until about twenty minutes ago, I was sleeping.”
Another silence. Then Dean asked crossly, “Which card did you put that on?”
“I didn’t. Sarah paid for the room.” Before Dean could respond, Sam said, “Did you want something?”
“I - yeah.”
“Which would be?”
“Is she there?”
“What? No. Dean, what do you want?”
Yet another silence, not as long, then the rustling of paper. “In the Post. This morning. Homeless girl found a murdered kid in an abandoned meat plant in Brooklyn. Whoever did it skinned the hide off of him.”
“And it’s not just some psycho?”
“This is the second one, in pretty much the same place. Couple blocks apart. First one was in pieces in a Dumpster, remember? It was in the paper yesterday.”
Sam nodded to himself. “Yeah, I remember.”
“This one - the cops found smudges of some burnt stuff on the walls, the floor, all around where the body was.”
“Burnt stuff?”
“Guy they quoted said it smelled like matches.”
“Sulfur.”
“Yeah.”
“And all the kid’s skin was gone.”
“Yeah. Article didn’t have a whole lot of detail, so I called. The guy from the Post saw the body. The way he described it - he said there weren’t any edges like there’d be if it was done with a knife or a scalpel. He said it looked like it was all just…gone.”
There was more, something Dean wasn’t saying, and the tone of Dean’s voice stopped Sam from trying to prompt him with anything approaching humor. “And?” Sam said quietly.
The answer didn’t come right away. “A few years ago, up in Michigan. Outside of Saginaw. You weren’t with us. A bunch of kids were killed.”
“You don’t mean the Pied Piper thing, do you? I thought they convicted a guy for that.”
“He didn’t do it.”
“He was innocent?”
Dean grunted softly. “He summoned the thing that did it - wanted to get even with somebody. Ex-wife’s new husband, I think. So it was his fault, even though he never laid a hand on anybody. Dad and me, we got the demon. And I think Mr. Revenge Is Sweet is getting his ass kicked pretty regular. Or…maybe not kicked. But something. Cons don’t much like kid killers.”
He made a noise near the phone, something like clearing his throat. Sam had heard it before. “And this -?”
“Isn’t just some nutball. Isn’t human. Or if it’s human, they’ve got help. Like Saginaw. I’ll lay money on it, Sammy.”
Sam was already groping for his clothes with the hand that wasn’t holding the phone. “I’ll meet you in five minutes, where you dropped me off yesterday. Where are you? Do you need more time to get here?”
“Gimme fifteen.” Then Dean cut himself off. “It could wait a couple hours.”
“I don’t need it.”
“You get your groove back, Stella?”
“Dean,” Sam said.
“This ain’t good, Sam.”
“I know,” Sam grunted, and cut off the phone.
Chapter 4 begins here: http://ficwriter1966.livejournal.com/12877.html#cutid1