SPN FIC - Journey (Chapter 8, part 2 of 3)
JOURNEY started here: http://ficwriter1966.livejournal.com/9849.html#cutid1
And Chapter 8 continues...
Journey
By Carol Davis
Chapter Eight
It Ain’t Bad Till It’s Bad (continued)
All he was going to get was voicemail.
“I’ll keep watch,” he told Sarah. “We’re all right here.”
She seemed to buy that, at least to the extent that he wanted her to. The majority of accidental deaths happen at home, his mind blabbered at him, and he wanted to laugh. No place was safe; he’d known that since he was old enough to understand what had really happened to his mother. And no one was safe, not really.
Not ever.
* * * * *
Show yourself, you murdering son of a bitch.
He would become a legend, he thought: a hundred years from now there’d be stories about a ghostly black car prowling the streets of Brooklyn. Searching for that sonofabitching thing that had crawled up out of the bowels of hell to amuse itself by slaughtering whoever was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Kids. That guy looking for spare change to buy booze. Maybe the guy in Times Square and the woman who’d been attacked in her car.
Maybe not. Maybe they’d won the lottery with some other sonofabitching thing.
Dean turned the wheel gently and took the car around a corner. Gonna do this dance all night? “Come out, you bastard,” he whispered.
There was a club up ahead, its neon sign flashing purple and blue over the heads of the people waiting in a ragged line along the sidewalk. Dean glanced at them as the Impala moved closer. Most of them were young - his age, a little younger, a little older. He’d never been a part of that - clubbing, drifting from one place to another to listen to the music, dance, drink. Most of the places he drank in had music only on a jukebox, or an old boombox stuck on a shelf over the bar.
High heels, bare legs, thin summer dresses, tight miniskirts. He slowed the car and watched the breeze blow wispy fabric against legs, hips, perfectly rounded behinds.
Last night, a million miles away, he’d followed those two girls back to their apartment. The one who’d picked him up said her name was Valerie, but that was Van Halen’s ex. The other one said “Ashley,” but for all he knew that was bogus too.
Not that it mattered.
He’d spent maybe an hour and a half with them, most of it naked. When it was time to go, Ashley - who seemed to think his name was Eddie - walked him to the door and said good night with a wet, lingering kiss. “You’re somethin’,” she told him.
“Yeah,” he said. “I guess.”
Somethin’. A hunter who kills big dumbass things that look like buffalo, and little bug-eyed blue things that break microwaves.
Yeah, you’re somethin’.
He realized the car was pretty much stopped when a blonde standing outside the club winked at him. She was with somebody, but it was one of those needed-both-hands-to-find-his-own-ass types. If he parked the car, wandered over, made a move, she wouldn’t be hard to woo. She looked a little like Jessica Simpson, excellent rack and all.
Okay, so maybe she didn’t look that much like Jessica Simpson, but she was still watching him. Off and on, so Mr. Hopeless wouldn’t notice.
His dick thought stopping was a much better idea than grid searches.
But that wasn’t why he’d left the church. Left Sam behind. Come out here by himself.
Come out, you…
She was taking a long look at the Impala, giving it a careful visual caress. She hadn’t even been born when the car was new, or maybe she’d been a baby; either way, she winked her approval. Dean smiled back, a slow, crooked response to the signals she was sending.
Her date was screwing with his phone, and the way this was playing out, that was all the screwing that was going to be happening for him tonight. The blonde tipped her head, showing Dean the sign a block down that said Parking, and smiled, easy and a little coy.
Sweet.
Nah, not so much. But female. Somebody to hold. Somebody who could bleed the frustration and the anger and the regret out of him, at least for a little while. Half an hour ago he’d regretted ditching the two longnecks, but they’d come from that hellspawn son of a bitch. Here, inside, he could find replacements. Untainted replacements.
For a minute he sat there, expecting cars to pull up behind him and begin a symphony of horns telling him to move on. That didn’t happen.
He was alone, nobody here to disapprove. Nobody telling him to move on, finish the job, drive the damn grid. Nobody telling him to do anything.
She was waiting by the door when he walked up. “So,” she said.
“Where’s your -?“ Dean asked, leaving date/boyfriend/husband as a fill-in-the-blank. She shrugged, with a repeat of the little smile, and looked at the door. “You want to go in there?”
“Don’t you?”
“Sure.”
He didn’t, but what the hell. There’d be booze inside, and with some luck the music would be decent.
It was decent enough for him to ignore it. He got drinks for both of them, because the theme of the evening seemed to be “You pay, and I’ll smile.” What she requested was one of those crazy fruity concoctions - not the best of choices, since he’d end up with a lot of it in his own mouth. Well, you did what you had to do, and at least she wasn’t asking him to dance.
“Have you ever seen one?” she said close to his ear.
“One what?”
“A tornado. You’re from Kansas, aren’t you?”
“Once.”
“Were you scared?”
Whether she wanted an honest answer was maybe fifty-fifty. Dean tossed her as much of an “I laugh in the face of danger” look as he could muster, wondering if she’d pursue this line of questioning much farther. The twister’d been years ago, way off in the distance, just a small, wiggling, dark gray blob on a stormy horizon.
A couple of people pushed close, aiming for the bar. She used that as an excuse to move right up against him, hip to hip. “It’s crowded. Want to go upstairs?”
“What’s up there?”
“C’mon, farmboy.”
They had to do a lot of squeezing to get out of the room the bar was in. What this building had been originally, Dean couldn’t imagine; it was obviously old, and had walls in weird places. None of the rooms was more than twenty feet wide, and there were enough people jammed into all of them to max out the occupancy allowances. At one point he lost sight of the blonde and stood there frowning until she backpedaled through the crowd and snagged him by the hand. After another couple of minutes of pushing and squeezing and shuffling, some of it going up a flight of stairs not much wider than Dean’s shoulders, they reached an alcove jutting off toward nothing.
They still weren’t alone. Couples - and in one case, a trio - were pressed together almost on top of each other.
“Listen…” Dean began.
“Too public for you?”
“A little bit of an audience I can do, but this is kinda much.”
“Come on, then.”
She took him up to the roof. It was dark up there, and smelled of warm tarpaper and exhaust and faintly of garbage. Again, they weren’t alone - he could see shapes in the shadows that he knew belonged to people. Couples. None of them admiring the view.
“Private enough?” the blonde asked.
“Better.”
She found a place to set down her glass, then eased up to him, belly to belly, teased her fingers down into the pockets of his jeans and tipped her face up to be kissed. He didn’t need any more encouragement than that, and the taste of the fruity concoction wasn’t as bad as he’d expected. Groping a little, he put his glass down near hers.
“Hey, farmboy,” she murmured.
Her hands were busy inside his pockets - enough so that finding words to respond to what she’d said seemed like a waste of time. “Nuhn?” was all he could come up with.
“Welcome to Brooklyn.”
Button open, zipper down, jeans and underwear sliding down past his hips. He supposed he ought to be bothered - at least a little - about having his ass hanging out in the breeze on the roof of some building in Brooklyn with a bunch of people around, some of whom, okay, had their own asses hanging out in the breeze, but still.
But then she was down on her knees and she had him in her mouth and ah, what the hell. It was dark up here and it wasn’t like anybody was paying any attention and jeeeeeesus she knew what she was doing.
Ohmygod yes.
She took him all the way. Stood up, smiling at him while he caught his breath, and took a couple of big gulps of her drink.
“Hated Brooklyn about an hour ago,” he murmured.
“Yeah?”
“Feeling better about it now.” He seized his glass long enough to take a swig, put it back down on the…whatever that rectangular thing rising out of the roof was, then backed her up against it. It was hip-height. A piece of brilliant foresight on the part of whoever had built this building and put these rectangular things on the roof, yes sir. The blonde grinned at him, glanced down and grinned some more at the jeans and underwear pooled around his ankles.
Grinned some more at his dick, ready for duty again after a minute or two of R&R.
“Corn-fed…?” she frowned.
“What?”
“Isn’t there some line about corn-fed…something…?”
“Chickens,” Dean said.
Enough of that. She wrapped her legs around his hips and yanked him toward her, heels digging into his butt. “Whatever they feed you boys in Kansas,” she said, “it works.”
* * * * *
It struck Sam that almost all of his memories were “me and -. “ Me and Dean. Me and Jess. Very little of his life had happened without one of them involved in it. Okay, almost two years, but what had he done then? Read. Study. Walk. He’d had no car those first two years at Stanford, and knew almost no one he could bum a ride from, so leaving his neighborhood meant walking or using public transportation. Not that there were a lot of places he needed - or wanted - to go to.
Not without Dean. Not until Jess.
How does anybody do this? Be the strong one. How do you pull somebody back from the edge when you’re hanging off of it yourself?
Jess had never needed him to be strong - not like this. Now and then she’d made use (usually begrudgingly) of his maleness, of his sheer size, in bargaining with the landlord, walking back to the apartment after dark. Lifting cartons of books. Changing light bulbs in the ceiling fixtures. She’d never had to lean on him in any significant way, never had to say, “Be my rock.” And God knew before he left for Stanford he was never asked to take the reins. It never would have occurred to Dad or Dean that he could handle something on his own.
He was the baby. Always and forever, baby Sammy.
Now Dad was gone, and Dean was spiraling out of control. Dean was…
You wait for him to hit bottom, and hope he’ll listen then. You - Sam’s lips slid into a wry, involuntary smile - have him committed.
Or you have him arrested.
He’d had to do two things silently, furtively, since Dean had dragged him away from Stanford. One of them Dean thought was funny, and had caught him at a couple of times. The other, Dean wouldn’t think was funny at all. Wouldn’t try to understand Sam’s need to do it, because it wasn’t something that mattered to him. Luckily, it was something that never resulted in sounds Dean could pick up through a closed door.
It wouldn’t require any sound here, now, although that didn’t matter; Dean wasn’t here, and the people who were here were either asleep or would understand his need.
He could kneel if he liked. Fold his hands.
He settled for keeping his seat and folding his hands together on the back of the pew in front of him. He was surprised, a little, by the way his heart shuddered when he closed his eyes - as if he intended to talk to someone he was scared of. Jessica’s father. His own father. This Father, he hoped, would be a lot less judgmental.
Please help me, he thought without preamble. Help me find a way to help my brother. I’ve asked You before, and if You answered me, I guess I wasn’t listening. I’ve tried everything I could think of, but it’s all starting to go off the tracks now. I’m going to lose him. Something’s going to happen and I won’t be able to help him because it’ll be too late.
So please…if there’s a path I should follow, could You maybe mark it a little more clearly?
When he opened his eyes the first thing he saw was Hanson, sitting on the steps at the front of the sanctuary, paging through one of his books. He looked as worn and upset as Sam felt, and a lot more bewildered. Hanson had signed on to be the strong one for a lot of people - even knowing, or at least suspecting, that Evil wasn’t just humans with bad intentions. That made him part of a very small division of God’s P.R. department, one he didn’t look like he wanted to be included in any longer. Sam had only met the minister a few hours ago, and it seemed to him that Hanson had aged ten years since then.
“Reverend?” he said softly.
Hanson lifted his head and responded to the summons with a look. Rather than disturb Sarah and the kids, Sam got up from the pew and went to sit down beside the minister.
“I feel like nobody’s listening,” he said after a minute.
“I’ve felt like that for years.”
Sam blinked, surprised. “What do you -“
“My congregation,” Hanson amended. “The church deacons. The community. The population in general.”
“But you feel like God listens?”
“My faith isn’t made of granite, Sam. I have my doubts.”
“Should you admit that?”
“You plan to turn me in?” The older man smiled, without humor. “I feel like anyone who tells me their faith is unshakeable is asking for a ‘liar, liar, pants on fire.’ Honestly…it’s not that I doubt there’s someone at the other end of the line. I just think the call gets dropped. More often than I’d like it to.”
“And what do you do? When that happens?”
“I remember the times I felt like I got through.”
“You feel like you’ve gotten an answer sometimes? I don’t know that I have. I feel like…like I’m floundering from one thing to another. I feel like a drifter. Like I have no specific destination. I was going to go to law school. Become an attorney. Marry my girlfriend and have a family. Now - I don’t know what I’m doing. I feel like I’m holding onto Dean with both hands, trying to keep him from crashing into a wall.”
Hanson said quietly, “Drifting and careening at the same time.”
“Yes.” Head lowered, looking at the floor between his feet, Sam told the minister what had happened three months ago: the accident, the hospital, Dean’s miraculous recovery and their father’s sudden death. “The doctors had no explanation,” he sighed. “One minute, Dean had massive internal injuries, and Dad was basically all right. Then, all of a sudden, Dean woke up and his injuries were just…gone. Maybe twenty minutes later Dad dropped dead. We believe - we were told - that he made a deal. His soul in exchange for making Dean well.”
Sam paused, glancing at Hanson’s book. “Dean was devoted to my father. It was bad enough that we lost Dad, but knowing why Dad died - it’s been too much for him to bear.”
“Even though your father made the choice freely?”
“I don’t think he feels he’s worthy of that kind of sacrifice.”
“Would you?”
He wouldn’t have done it for me, Sam thought fleetingly. “I don’t know how you could love someone and accept that they -“
“It’s refusing a gift. The ultimate gift.”
“One that cost too much.”
“Would you have done it? Made the same deal.”
“I don’t think my father knew what kind of life he was sending Dean back into,” Sam said heavily.
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“I don’t think Dad ever really knew Dean. I think maybe he thought that Dean and I - that we’d have a good life. He said he wanted me to go back to school, and Dean to have a home. Maybe he thought that would happen. If it were me - it wouldn’t be enough for my brother to live. I’d want him to be happy.”
But he’s never…
Hanson, who had known Dean for a few hours, said gently, “It’s not your responsibility to make him happy, Sam. That’s a bad choice of a verb to begin with. You can’t make him happy. It has to come from inside him.”
“I know.”
He’s back.
The muffled rumble of the Impala’s engine, a sound that was as familiar to Sam as Dean’s voice, cut off and left silence in its wake. Without explanation Sam pushed himself up from the step and walked rapidly down the aisle to the double doors. He had to stop to unlock them, and step carefully to avoid breaking the line of salt that lay across the threshold.
Dean was outside, sitting on the concrete steps, holding a bottle of beer. Calm, Sam thought, because nothing about Dean’s body language said he was upset.
“What happened?” Sam asked, letting the door close behind him.
“Not much. Or a lot. Depends.”
The Impala was parked on the other side of the street, nose pointing away from the church. The streetlamp closest to it made a pool of amber light on the hood. It was cleaner, Sam realized, than it had been this afternoon. “You went to a car wash?” he frowned.
“Next time you get the impulse to do an arts and crafts project,” Dean said between sips of his beer, “don’t do it on my car.”
“It came off?”
“Do you think it came off, Sam?”
His voice was colorless, tight, controlled. His free hand lay on his knee, fingers moving restlessly.
So…not calm.
“Hanson’s got some books,” Sam offered. “Incantations for protection.”
“What good is playing defense gonna do?”
“Unless you want to summon it…”
“Yeah. Let’s invite him over for pizza. Maybe rent a couple DeNiro movies. Hang out. Just us guys.”
He sounds like…
Like Nicholson in “The Shining.” When he’s telling Wendy to leave him alone. After the hotel’s gotten to him.
After…
“Dean?” Sam said.
Dean turned to look at him and took another swig of beer.
“Dean, are you okay?”
“I’m fan-fuckin’-tastic,” Dean said dryly. “I had three kinds of sex with a stranger on the roof of some building, then I went to an all-night car wash. My blood alcohol is way lower than I want it to be, I’m sitting in a place I don’t like, in the middle of a hunt that’s going nowhere, knowing that a homeless guy died a couple hours ago because he asked me for change, and tomorrow - which is technically already here - promises to be more of the same. My life is so fabulous I ought to be on the cover of fucking People magazine.” After another gulp from his bottle, he grinned at Sam in an amazingly phony way and asked, “How ‘bout you, Sammy? How’s your day going?”
Sam, left without words, shook his head.
His brother stopped looking at him then. “Should have left you at Stanford,” Dean mused. “Should’ve gone looking for Dad myself. Probably would have found him eventually.”
“I want to be here, Dean.”
“In Brooklyn?”
“With you.”
“Then you wanna explain the look on your face? Because it says ‘whither thou goest, I will go’ ain’t lookin’ like such a good plan right now.”
A scream from inside the church snapped them both to attention.
Sam jerked the door open, flinging it wide so that Dean could follow him in. They were halfway up the aisle before either of them could make out the source of the frightened wail: Lemon, sitting in a shuddering heap on the sleeping bag, grabbing at what remained of her hair. Sarah, Babykay and Chaz, all startled awake but still fuzzy, were blinking at her, trying to decide what might be wrong. Hanson had already reached her and was trying to loosen her hands from her hair. As Sam and Dean drew closer she began making wheezing, gulping noises, struggling for breath.
“Heeeeeeee,” she squealed. “Heeeeeee…nooo…heeeee…”
“Stop, now,” the minister pleaded with her. “It’s all right. There’s nothing here. It’s all right.”
“Heeeeeere!” she insisted.
She scrambled away from his hands, got to her feet, palms jammed against the sides of her head. Her eyes ricocheted back and forth in a way that had to hurt. Sam took a step toward her but she backed away, out of his reach.
Sarah and the other two kids were fully awake now. All three of them were looking around, searching for a sign of anything - anyone - that didn’t belong here.
“Did we break the salt line? When we came in?” Sam asked his brother.
“I’ll fix -“ Sarah said.
“That’s not gonna do shit,” Dean snapped. “Leave it.”
Babykay, transfixed and disturbed by the state her friend was in, crawled to her knees and up onto her feet, one hand outstretched. “It’s all right,” she crooned.
As all-instinct as a cornered animal, Lemon scuttled around the younger girl to the aisle that ran between the pews and the wall, close to where Sam’s laptop had landed a few hours ago. Her hands were knotted into fists, white-knuckled, nails digging into her palms. “Here here here,” she keened. “Too late to stop. It’s too late.”
“No, Lemon,” Sam tried to tell her. “There’s nothing -“
“Maybe we should take her to the hospital,” Sarah said quietly. “Have them give her something to quiet her down.”
Dean gave her a sharp look. “Tranquilizers? That’s your take on this?”
“Or we could all get drunk,” Sarah snapped back.
Sam gestured to shut both of them up. “You’re not helping. Just -“
“Just what, Sam? Huh?” Dean demanded.
Oblivious to their arguing, Babykay again began to inch toward Lemon. She was still several yards away when Lemon stopped howling.
“I don’t think so,” Lemon said.
Chapter 8 concludes here: http://ficwriter1966.livejournal.com/17760.html#cutid1
And Chapter 8 continues...
Journey
By Carol Davis
Chapter Eight
It Ain’t Bad Till It’s Bad (continued)
All he was going to get was voicemail.
“I’ll keep watch,” he told Sarah. “We’re all right here.”
She seemed to buy that, at least to the extent that he wanted her to. The majority of accidental deaths happen at home, his mind blabbered at him, and he wanted to laugh. No place was safe; he’d known that since he was old enough to understand what had really happened to his mother. And no one was safe, not really.
Not ever.
* * * * *
Show yourself, you murdering son of a bitch.
He would become a legend, he thought: a hundred years from now there’d be stories about a ghostly black car prowling the streets of Brooklyn. Searching for that sonofabitching thing that had crawled up out of the bowels of hell to amuse itself by slaughtering whoever was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Kids. That guy looking for spare change to buy booze. Maybe the guy in Times Square and the woman who’d been attacked in her car.
Maybe not. Maybe they’d won the lottery with some other sonofabitching thing.
Dean turned the wheel gently and took the car around a corner. Gonna do this dance all night? “Come out, you bastard,” he whispered.
There was a club up ahead, its neon sign flashing purple and blue over the heads of the people waiting in a ragged line along the sidewalk. Dean glanced at them as the Impala moved closer. Most of them were young - his age, a little younger, a little older. He’d never been a part of that - clubbing, drifting from one place to another to listen to the music, dance, drink. Most of the places he drank in had music only on a jukebox, or an old boombox stuck on a shelf over the bar.
High heels, bare legs, thin summer dresses, tight miniskirts. He slowed the car and watched the breeze blow wispy fabric against legs, hips, perfectly rounded behinds.
Last night, a million miles away, he’d followed those two girls back to their apartment. The one who’d picked him up said her name was Valerie, but that was Van Halen’s ex. The other one said “Ashley,” but for all he knew that was bogus too.
Not that it mattered.
He’d spent maybe an hour and a half with them, most of it naked. When it was time to go, Ashley - who seemed to think his name was Eddie - walked him to the door and said good night with a wet, lingering kiss. “You’re somethin’,” she told him.
“Yeah,” he said. “I guess.”
Somethin’. A hunter who kills big dumbass things that look like buffalo, and little bug-eyed blue things that break microwaves.
Yeah, you’re somethin’.
He realized the car was pretty much stopped when a blonde standing outside the club winked at him. She was with somebody, but it was one of those needed-both-hands-to-find-his-own-ass types. If he parked the car, wandered over, made a move, she wouldn’t be hard to woo. She looked a little like Jessica Simpson, excellent rack and all.
Okay, so maybe she didn’t look that much like Jessica Simpson, but she was still watching him. Off and on, so Mr. Hopeless wouldn’t notice.
His dick thought stopping was a much better idea than grid searches.
But that wasn’t why he’d left the church. Left Sam behind. Come out here by himself.
Come out, you…
She was taking a long look at the Impala, giving it a careful visual caress. She hadn’t even been born when the car was new, or maybe she’d been a baby; either way, she winked her approval. Dean smiled back, a slow, crooked response to the signals she was sending.
Her date was screwing with his phone, and the way this was playing out, that was all the screwing that was going to be happening for him tonight. The blonde tipped her head, showing Dean the sign a block down that said Parking, and smiled, easy and a little coy.
Sweet.
Nah, not so much. But female. Somebody to hold. Somebody who could bleed the frustration and the anger and the regret out of him, at least for a little while. Half an hour ago he’d regretted ditching the two longnecks, but they’d come from that hellspawn son of a bitch. Here, inside, he could find replacements. Untainted replacements.
For a minute he sat there, expecting cars to pull up behind him and begin a symphony of horns telling him to move on. That didn’t happen.
He was alone, nobody here to disapprove. Nobody telling him to move on, finish the job, drive the damn grid. Nobody telling him to do anything.
She was waiting by the door when he walked up. “So,” she said.
“Where’s your -?“ Dean asked, leaving date/boyfriend/husband as a fill-in-the-blank. She shrugged, with a repeat of the little smile, and looked at the door. “You want to go in there?”
“Don’t you?”
“Sure.”
He didn’t, but what the hell. There’d be booze inside, and with some luck the music would be decent.
It was decent enough for him to ignore it. He got drinks for both of them, because the theme of the evening seemed to be “You pay, and I’ll smile.” What she requested was one of those crazy fruity concoctions - not the best of choices, since he’d end up with a lot of it in his own mouth. Well, you did what you had to do, and at least she wasn’t asking him to dance.
“Have you ever seen one?” she said close to his ear.
“One what?”
“A tornado. You’re from Kansas, aren’t you?”
“Once.”
“Were you scared?”
Whether she wanted an honest answer was maybe fifty-fifty. Dean tossed her as much of an “I laugh in the face of danger” look as he could muster, wondering if she’d pursue this line of questioning much farther. The twister’d been years ago, way off in the distance, just a small, wiggling, dark gray blob on a stormy horizon.
A couple of people pushed close, aiming for the bar. She used that as an excuse to move right up against him, hip to hip. “It’s crowded. Want to go upstairs?”
“What’s up there?”
“C’mon, farmboy.”
They had to do a lot of squeezing to get out of the room the bar was in. What this building had been originally, Dean couldn’t imagine; it was obviously old, and had walls in weird places. None of the rooms was more than twenty feet wide, and there were enough people jammed into all of them to max out the occupancy allowances. At one point he lost sight of the blonde and stood there frowning until she backpedaled through the crowd and snagged him by the hand. After another couple of minutes of pushing and squeezing and shuffling, some of it going up a flight of stairs not much wider than Dean’s shoulders, they reached an alcove jutting off toward nothing.
They still weren’t alone. Couples - and in one case, a trio - were pressed together almost on top of each other.
“Listen…” Dean began.
“Too public for you?”
“A little bit of an audience I can do, but this is kinda much.”
“Come on, then.”
She took him up to the roof. It was dark up there, and smelled of warm tarpaper and exhaust and faintly of garbage. Again, they weren’t alone - he could see shapes in the shadows that he knew belonged to people. Couples. None of them admiring the view.
“Private enough?” the blonde asked.
“Better.”
She found a place to set down her glass, then eased up to him, belly to belly, teased her fingers down into the pockets of his jeans and tipped her face up to be kissed. He didn’t need any more encouragement than that, and the taste of the fruity concoction wasn’t as bad as he’d expected. Groping a little, he put his glass down near hers.
“Hey, farmboy,” she murmured.
Her hands were busy inside his pockets - enough so that finding words to respond to what she’d said seemed like a waste of time. “Nuhn?” was all he could come up with.
“Welcome to Brooklyn.”
Button open, zipper down, jeans and underwear sliding down past his hips. He supposed he ought to be bothered - at least a little - about having his ass hanging out in the breeze on the roof of some building in Brooklyn with a bunch of people around, some of whom, okay, had their own asses hanging out in the breeze, but still.
But then she was down on her knees and she had him in her mouth and ah, what the hell. It was dark up here and it wasn’t like anybody was paying any attention and jeeeeeesus she knew what she was doing.
Ohmygod yes.
She took him all the way. Stood up, smiling at him while he caught his breath, and took a couple of big gulps of her drink.
“Hated Brooklyn about an hour ago,” he murmured.
“Yeah?”
“Feeling better about it now.” He seized his glass long enough to take a swig, put it back down on the…whatever that rectangular thing rising out of the roof was, then backed her up against it. It was hip-height. A piece of brilliant foresight on the part of whoever had built this building and put these rectangular things on the roof, yes sir. The blonde grinned at him, glanced down and grinned some more at the jeans and underwear pooled around his ankles.
Grinned some more at his dick, ready for duty again after a minute or two of R&R.
“Corn-fed…?” she frowned.
“What?”
“Isn’t there some line about corn-fed…something…?”
“Chickens,” Dean said.
Enough of that. She wrapped her legs around his hips and yanked him toward her, heels digging into his butt. “Whatever they feed you boys in Kansas,” she said, “it works.”
* * * * *
It struck Sam that almost all of his memories were “me and -. “ Me and Dean. Me and Jess. Very little of his life had happened without one of them involved in it. Okay, almost two years, but what had he done then? Read. Study. Walk. He’d had no car those first two years at Stanford, and knew almost no one he could bum a ride from, so leaving his neighborhood meant walking or using public transportation. Not that there were a lot of places he needed - or wanted - to go to.
Not without Dean. Not until Jess.
How does anybody do this? Be the strong one. How do you pull somebody back from the edge when you’re hanging off of it yourself?
Jess had never needed him to be strong - not like this. Now and then she’d made use (usually begrudgingly) of his maleness, of his sheer size, in bargaining with the landlord, walking back to the apartment after dark. Lifting cartons of books. Changing light bulbs in the ceiling fixtures. She’d never had to lean on him in any significant way, never had to say, “Be my rock.” And God knew before he left for Stanford he was never asked to take the reins. It never would have occurred to Dad or Dean that he could handle something on his own.
He was the baby. Always and forever, baby Sammy.
Now Dad was gone, and Dean was spiraling out of control. Dean was…
You wait for him to hit bottom, and hope he’ll listen then. You - Sam’s lips slid into a wry, involuntary smile - have him committed.
Or you have him arrested.
He’d had to do two things silently, furtively, since Dean had dragged him away from Stanford. One of them Dean thought was funny, and had caught him at a couple of times. The other, Dean wouldn’t think was funny at all. Wouldn’t try to understand Sam’s need to do it, because it wasn’t something that mattered to him. Luckily, it was something that never resulted in sounds Dean could pick up through a closed door.
It wouldn’t require any sound here, now, although that didn’t matter; Dean wasn’t here, and the people who were here were either asleep or would understand his need.
He could kneel if he liked. Fold his hands.
He settled for keeping his seat and folding his hands together on the back of the pew in front of him. He was surprised, a little, by the way his heart shuddered when he closed his eyes - as if he intended to talk to someone he was scared of. Jessica’s father. His own father. This Father, he hoped, would be a lot less judgmental.
Please help me, he thought without preamble. Help me find a way to help my brother. I’ve asked You before, and if You answered me, I guess I wasn’t listening. I’ve tried everything I could think of, but it’s all starting to go off the tracks now. I’m going to lose him. Something’s going to happen and I won’t be able to help him because it’ll be too late.
So please…if there’s a path I should follow, could You maybe mark it a little more clearly?
When he opened his eyes the first thing he saw was Hanson, sitting on the steps at the front of the sanctuary, paging through one of his books. He looked as worn and upset as Sam felt, and a lot more bewildered. Hanson had signed on to be the strong one for a lot of people - even knowing, or at least suspecting, that Evil wasn’t just humans with bad intentions. That made him part of a very small division of God’s P.R. department, one he didn’t look like he wanted to be included in any longer. Sam had only met the minister a few hours ago, and it seemed to him that Hanson had aged ten years since then.
“Reverend?” he said softly.
Hanson lifted his head and responded to the summons with a look. Rather than disturb Sarah and the kids, Sam got up from the pew and went to sit down beside the minister.
“I feel like nobody’s listening,” he said after a minute.
“I’ve felt like that for years.”
Sam blinked, surprised. “What do you -“
“My congregation,” Hanson amended. “The church deacons. The community. The population in general.”
“But you feel like God listens?”
“My faith isn’t made of granite, Sam. I have my doubts.”
“Should you admit that?”
“You plan to turn me in?” The older man smiled, without humor. “I feel like anyone who tells me their faith is unshakeable is asking for a ‘liar, liar, pants on fire.’ Honestly…it’s not that I doubt there’s someone at the other end of the line. I just think the call gets dropped. More often than I’d like it to.”
“And what do you do? When that happens?”
“I remember the times I felt like I got through.”
“You feel like you’ve gotten an answer sometimes? I don’t know that I have. I feel like…like I’m floundering from one thing to another. I feel like a drifter. Like I have no specific destination. I was going to go to law school. Become an attorney. Marry my girlfriend and have a family. Now - I don’t know what I’m doing. I feel like I’m holding onto Dean with both hands, trying to keep him from crashing into a wall.”
Hanson said quietly, “Drifting and careening at the same time.”
“Yes.” Head lowered, looking at the floor between his feet, Sam told the minister what had happened three months ago: the accident, the hospital, Dean’s miraculous recovery and their father’s sudden death. “The doctors had no explanation,” he sighed. “One minute, Dean had massive internal injuries, and Dad was basically all right. Then, all of a sudden, Dean woke up and his injuries were just…gone. Maybe twenty minutes later Dad dropped dead. We believe - we were told - that he made a deal. His soul in exchange for making Dean well.”
Sam paused, glancing at Hanson’s book. “Dean was devoted to my father. It was bad enough that we lost Dad, but knowing why Dad died - it’s been too much for him to bear.”
“Even though your father made the choice freely?”
“I don’t think he feels he’s worthy of that kind of sacrifice.”
“Would you?”
He wouldn’t have done it for me, Sam thought fleetingly. “I don’t know how you could love someone and accept that they -“
“It’s refusing a gift. The ultimate gift.”
“One that cost too much.”
“Would you have done it? Made the same deal.”
“I don’t think my father knew what kind of life he was sending Dean back into,” Sam said heavily.
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“I don’t think Dad ever really knew Dean. I think maybe he thought that Dean and I - that we’d have a good life. He said he wanted me to go back to school, and Dean to have a home. Maybe he thought that would happen. If it were me - it wouldn’t be enough for my brother to live. I’d want him to be happy.”
But he’s never…
Hanson, who had known Dean for a few hours, said gently, “It’s not your responsibility to make him happy, Sam. That’s a bad choice of a verb to begin with. You can’t make him happy. It has to come from inside him.”
“I know.”
He’s back.
The muffled rumble of the Impala’s engine, a sound that was as familiar to Sam as Dean’s voice, cut off and left silence in its wake. Without explanation Sam pushed himself up from the step and walked rapidly down the aisle to the double doors. He had to stop to unlock them, and step carefully to avoid breaking the line of salt that lay across the threshold.
Dean was outside, sitting on the concrete steps, holding a bottle of beer. Calm, Sam thought, because nothing about Dean’s body language said he was upset.
“What happened?” Sam asked, letting the door close behind him.
“Not much. Or a lot. Depends.”
The Impala was parked on the other side of the street, nose pointing away from the church. The streetlamp closest to it made a pool of amber light on the hood. It was cleaner, Sam realized, than it had been this afternoon. “You went to a car wash?” he frowned.
“Next time you get the impulse to do an arts and crafts project,” Dean said between sips of his beer, “don’t do it on my car.”
“It came off?”
“Do you think it came off, Sam?”
His voice was colorless, tight, controlled. His free hand lay on his knee, fingers moving restlessly.
So…not calm.
“Hanson’s got some books,” Sam offered. “Incantations for protection.”
“What good is playing defense gonna do?”
“Unless you want to summon it…”
“Yeah. Let’s invite him over for pizza. Maybe rent a couple DeNiro movies. Hang out. Just us guys.”
He sounds like…
Like Nicholson in “The Shining.” When he’s telling Wendy to leave him alone. After the hotel’s gotten to him.
After…
“Dean?” Sam said.
Dean turned to look at him and took another swig of beer.
“Dean, are you okay?”
“I’m fan-fuckin’-tastic,” Dean said dryly. “I had three kinds of sex with a stranger on the roof of some building, then I went to an all-night car wash. My blood alcohol is way lower than I want it to be, I’m sitting in a place I don’t like, in the middle of a hunt that’s going nowhere, knowing that a homeless guy died a couple hours ago because he asked me for change, and tomorrow - which is technically already here - promises to be more of the same. My life is so fabulous I ought to be on the cover of fucking People magazine.” After another gulp from his bottle, he grinned at Sam in an amazingly phony way and asked, “How ‘bout you, Sammy? How’s your day going?”
Sam, left without words, shook his head.
His brother stopped looking at him then. “Should have left you at Stanford,” Dean mused. “Should’ve gone looking for Dad myself. Probably would have found him eventually.”
“I want to be here, Dean.”
“In Brooklyn?”
“With you.”
“Then you wanna explain the look on your face? Because it says ‘whither thou goest, I will go’ ain’t lookin’ like such a good plan right now.”
A scream from inside the church snapped them both to attention.
Sam jerked the door open, flinging it wide so that Dean could follow him in. They were halfway up the aisle before either of them could make out the source of the frightened wail: Lemon, sitting in a shuddering heap on the sleeping bag, grabbing at what remained of her hair. Sarah, Babykay and Chaz, all startled awake but still fuzzy, were blinking at her, trying to decide what might be wrong. Hanson had already reached her and was trying to loosen her hands from her hair. As Sam and Dean drew closer she began making wheezing, gulping noises, struggling for breath.
“Heeeeeeee,” she squealed. “Heeeeeee…nooo…heeeee…”
“Stop, now,” the minister pleaded with her. “It’s all right. There’s nothing here. It’s all right.”
“Heeeeeere!” she insisted.
She scrambled away from his hands, got to her feet, palms jammed against the sides of her head. Her eyes ricocheted back and forth in a way that had to hurt. Sam took a step toward her but she backed away, out of his reach.
Sarah and the other two kids were fully awake now. All three of them were looking around, searching for a sign of anything - anyone - that didn’t belong here.
“Did we break the salt line? When we came in?” Sam asked his brother.
“I’ll fix -“ Sarah said.
“That’s not gonna do shit,” Dean snapped. “Leave it.”
Babykay, transfixed and disturbed by the state her friend was in, crawled to her knees and up onto her feet, one hand outstretched. “It’s all right,” she crooned.
As all-instinct as a cornered animal, Lemon scuttled around the younger girl to the aisle that ran between the pews and the wall, close to where Sam’s laptop had landed a few hours ago. Her hands were knotted into fists, white-knuckled, nails digging into her palms. “Here here here,” she keened. “Too late to stop. It’s too late.”
“No, Lemon,” Sam tried to tell her. “There’s nothing -“
“Maybe we should take her to the hospital,” Sarah said quietly. “Have them give her something to quiet her down.”
Dean gave her a sharp look. “Tranquilizers? That’s your take on this?”
“Or we could all get drunk,” Sarah snapped back.
Sam gestured to shut both of them up. “You’re not helping. Just -“
“Just what, Sam? Huh?” Dean demanded.
Oblivious to their arguing, Babykay again began to inch toward Lemon. She was still several yards away when Lemon stopped howling.
“I don’t think so,” Lemon said.
Chapter 8 concludes here: http://ficwriter1966.livejournal.com/17760.html#cutid1