SPN FIC - Journey (Chapter 12, part 1 of 2)
JOURNEY began here: http://ficwriter1966.livejournal.com/9849.html#cutid1
Chapter 12 (yee ha, the last chapter) begins...
Journey
By Carol Davis
Chapter Twelve
Tomorrow and Tomorrow
It took all night and most of the next day to put things together. As the pieces began to fall into place, Sam began to think of what he was doing as either a massive un-Christmas, or “This Is Your Life, Dean Winchester.”
Toward the end of the afternoon he borrowed Sarah’s car and made two stops: a video store and a restaurant Sarah recommended as having the best burgers in town. With Dean watching him from the dock, he carried the two massive Adirondack chairs down close to the pond, then brought down a small table on which he placed his bag of take-out.
“What’s all that?” Dean scowled at him.
That was what he’d counted on: that Dean would be too intrigued - and too hungry - to be argumentative. As he unwrapped the burgers and fries, the aroma of which had assaulted him all the way back from the restaurant, Dean wandered over like a skittish stray dog. It didn’t take him long to seize one of the burgers and sit down to eat it. Juice from the meat ran down his chin, the way it ought to if the burger was “done right.”
“Pretty good,” Sam commented around a mouthful.
“‘S okay.”
Sam nodded at the bag. “There’s cake.”
Dean nudged the other bag, the one from the video store, with the toe of his boot. “What’s in there?”
“Couple movies.”
“How come you’re so friggin’ chipper?”
“‘Cause things are okay.”
The younger Winchester let the words sound ambiguous enough for Dean to jump to the conclusion that pleased him the most: that sometime during the day Sam had managed to have sex with Sarah. A few days ago Dean would have started smirking. The best Sam could get from him today was a raised eyebrow, but that would do. It did well enough for Dean to grab a big handful of fries and chew on them pensively rather than throw them into the pond.
“How’re we gonna watch movies?” Dean asked after a while.
“There’s a DVD player in the cabinet under the TV.”
“There is?”
“Yeah, man.”
“So we don’t have to sit with them.”
“Nope.”
“Okay, then.”
The closing credits of “The Big Lebowski” were rolling when Sam decided to unveil the next part of his master plan. Leaving unguarded what was left of the giant plate of nachos he’d fixed in the Blakes’ microwave, he got up off the bed and popped the movie disk out of the DVD player. “I was thinking, maybe we should hit the road this weekend.”
Dean pondered the nachos for a second, then asked, “Yeah? Why is that?”
“We have someplace to go.”
“Like where?” Without giving Sam a chance to reply, Dean sighed, “The roadhouse? Not in the mood for it.”
“Colorado.”
“What’s up there?”
“Our family.”
Dean squinted at his brother as if Sam had suddenly begun speaking Mandarin. “What?”
“Mom’s uncle Raymond. We have cousins. Did you know that?”
“And they’re waiting for us with outstretched arms? Come on, Sam.”
Because Dean seemed to be ready to give up a verbal argument in favor of a long stretch of the Dean Winchester Patented Scowl of That’s the Dumbest Fucking Thing I Ever Heard Of, Sam leaned against the edge of the dresser and let the silence endure for a moment. “I talked to him for almost an hour last night,” he said finally. “He has a wife - he got married again not too long ago. She seems like a nice lady. They each have a couple of kids, and most of the kids have kids. So we have cousins. And they’d like to meet us.”
He waited. Dean said nothing, but there were hairline fractures developing in the scowl. “One of them was actually at Stanford when I was there,” Sam added.
“Huh,” Dean replied.
“He loved Mom. Uncle Ray. He said he called her his sunshine girl, because of her hair.”
That - or maybe it was the fact that Sam was looking so directly at him, without a break - made Dean seek refuge in the bathroom. He didn’t bother closing the door, just stood in there staring at the tub. Because of the way the mirror was positioned over the sink, Sam could still see him from where he stood.
“Dad always said it was Uncle Ray who broke things off - that he didn’t want anything to do with Dad. Which was sort of true, but not entirely. Uncle Ray offered to take us in after Mom died. Until Dad ‘got things straightened out,’ he said. Dad told him to go to hell. He said he tried calling a couple times after that, but Dad wouldn’t talk to him. Then Uncle Ray lost track of us - where we were, what we were doing. He didn’t know about Stanford. He didn’t” - Sam’s voice caught - “know Dad was gone.”
Dean replied softly, wryly, “D’you tell him Dad went to hell?”
Sam ignored that - had to ignore it. “He e-mailed me some pictures. Sarah printed them out for me.” They’d been in his shirt pocket most of the day. Not sure how Dean would react, he took them out and carried them into the bathroom so he could offer them to his brother. With a reluctance that Sam figured wasn’t entirely for show, Dean took them and began to sift through them. “That’s Mom when she was fourteen,” Sam explained. “Pep squad, I think he said. And that’s a wedding picture, Uncle Ray and his wife. The guy in the ugly jacket is his son. And that one - that’s you and Mom. He said you were two.”
Uncle Ray’s “sunshine girl” had her hair bound back into a ponytail. She was wearing jeans and a tank top and looked barely older than she had at fourteen. The toddler standing beside her in shorts and a striped shirt had one arm slung around her leg and the other wrapped around a teddy bear.
“Ralph,” Sam said.
“I didn’t have any damn teddy bear named Ralph,” Dean objected.
“Yeah, you did.”
“That old man’s full of it.”
“He has home movies, Dean. Of Mom. Of her talking. And singing, at Christmas. He can tell us what she was like. I want to go there, man. I want to talk to him. I want to get to know our mother. Please. Let’s go there.”
Dean pressed the pictures back into Sam’s hands. “You go, then.”
“Both of us. They want to see both of us.”
“So we can look at home movies and eat pie or something? She’s not there. It’s just -“
Pouring salt all over something and setting it on fire, Sam thought. But not the way we usually do it. “I know.”
“I don’t want to look at pictures.”
Sam shuffled through the little prints and showed one to Dean. “That’s one of our cousins. Kaylie? Kaylin? Kay something. She’s kinda -“
“What, are you from the Ozarks?” Dean blurted. “She’s your cousin, dude.”
“Maybe she has friends.”
That took some of the starch out of Dean’s objection. “Huh,” he conceded.
There was another piece of information to relay. “He said he was sorry about Dad - that he liked him, before. When Mom and Dad were first married. That Dad was a little intense sometimes but he liked him. So he said he’d be willing to pay for a headstone to put alongside Mom’s. Because Mom would have - he thought Mom would have wanted it.”
“D’you tell him there’s no body?”
“I told him Dad was cremated and we scattered the ashes.”
Dean’s scowl had pretty much disappeared, leaving behind only a small wrinkle between his eyebrows. Making the little huffing noises that meant he was thinking - and was inching toward giving in - he wandered back out to the bedroom and sat at the end of the bed.
Sam followed him. “I made another call…”
“Now what?”
“To Roy LeGrange.”
“What the hell for?”
“So I could ask…about Layla.”
“You want to put up a headstone for her, too?” Dean snapped.
“Don’t need to. She’s alive.”
Dean’s thoughts zipped across his face like a slide show. “She didn’t -?”
“No.”
“Why the hell not?”
The wrongness of that made Sam laugh a little. “Her mother tracked down a doctor who was willing to try some kind of radical treatment on her. Roy didn’t know what it was, but he said he’d talked to them both a couple of weeks ago and Layla was doing okay. I told him my name was Jimmy Don Porter and I’d met her at one of the ‘meetings’ and thought she was just the sweetest thang. He said he was sorry to disappoint me, but she’d met somebody and was going to tie the knot.”
Disappointment was a good enough description for the look that slid across Dean’s face. Sam didn’t think for a moment that Dean was disappointed because Layla had survived. “You liked her,” he offered.
Dean shrugged. “She’s decent.”
“There could be somebody else out there. Like Layla.”
“I don’t know, Sam.”
“Give it a chance. Can we go to Colorado?”
The TV screen was a blank, pale green, but Dean started to stare at it as if the movie was still playing. “Guess,” he muttered. “But if they get all weird on us, I’m bailing.”
“Dude, sheets make you want to bail.”
“I don’t know those people, Sam.”
“You’ve had sex with people you don’t know. All you need to do with these people is talk.”
Sam stopped then, but it was just a pause. A long enough pause that Dean started reaching for the nachos. “What, there’s more?” Dean complained.
“Need to tell you something.”
“You’re pregnant.”
“It’s about Dad.”
“I don’t want to hear it, Sam.”
“I think you need to. Because I figured something out.”
Dean turned away, pointedly, the set of his shoulders saying clearly that he was not interested in negotiating.
Sam went on talking anyway. “He was a hunter for more than twenty years - and a Marine before that. His social skills sucked ass most of the time, but I think he was good at what he put his mind to. More than good. The people we talk to - they tend to hate his guts, but they’re pretty universal in saying he was a good hunter.” He set the pictures down on the dresser and went on, “We’ve been assuming that he made the deal with the yellow-eyed demon to save your life. What if there was more to it than that?”
He had Dean’s attention, even though Dean said nothing. “You knew him better than anyone,” Sam said. “Wouldn’t he try to maximize the situation?”
“How?”
“He needed to know more about the demon. How to kill it. He chased the thing for twenty-three years. Do you think he just gave up? You got hurt, and he wanted to save you, yeah. I don’t doubt that. But you think he just said, ‘Screw it, game over’? That’s not John Winchester.”
Dean’s mouth lolled open a little. “He -“
“He infiltrated the enemy. Tell me - am I wrong? The damn demon must have thought that was it: Dad’s soul and the Colt in exchange for you. But there was more to it than that. Dad got the thing to take him to its nest. And if there’s anybody in the world who’s crazy like a fox enough to figure he could climb back out of Hell - with the Colt - it’s Dad.”
“Shit,” Dean said.
“Am I wrong?”
“You sure you’re not pregnant?”
“He raised us. He trained us. I think he wanted us to figure out how to help him. And we’ve wasted three months going in the wrong direction.”
“So now you want to waste time going to Colorado?”
Sam glanced down at the pictures. “So we have a foundation, Dean. So we don’t forget what’s here.”
“Yeah, that Kaylie girl.”
“Stop it.”
“The crazy bastard went to Hell to do reconnaissance.”
“Yeah,” Sam said.
“Figures.”
* * * * *
The forty-year-old Impala, rebuilt with loving hands but rebuilt nonetheless, needed a careful going-over before she was asked to climb the mountains of Colorado. No matter that she’d done hard duty without a complaint the last couple of months; there was no point in assuming she was ready to go two-thirds of the way across the country in one haul without problems cropping up.
Or so Dean told his brother.
He was underneath the car tinkering with things that beyond a shadow of a doubt needed to be tinkered with when he heard scuffling footsteps coming across the gravel of the Blakes’ driveway. All he could see was shoes: a pair of beat-up red Connies. They didn’t belong to Sam, they were a little too funky for Sarah, and they certainly didn’t belong to Sarah’s father.
The shoes got within about a yard of him and stopped.
Nothing happened for a minute, then a small, unfamiliar voice said, “Mr. Winchester?”
Dean had been called “Mister” any number of times, but usually connected to the last name on one of his phony credit cards. “Mister” and “Winchester” together was new. And weird.
“Yeah?” he said.
He could see more shoes a little ways away, over by the edge of the front lawn. Three pairs. One of them belonged to Sam.
“I don’t think he’s coming out,” the small voice said.
It was too soon for any of those Colorado people to have shown up here.
Grumbling, but mostly for show, Dean slid out from under the car and started climbing to his feet. Midway he noticed that the small voice belonged to Lemon - but a different Lemon. This one was wearing clean clothes and had apparently taken a shower or six. She had big, dark circles under her eyes and seemed sort of…embarrassed.
“He says I should say thank you.” She tipped her head toward the owners of the other three pairs of shoes: Sam, Sarah, Will Hanson. The “he” she meant was Hanson.
“Sam got the demon out of you,” Dean said.
“I said thank you to him already.”
“We’re leaving,” Will Hanson said as he walked toward Dean. “Going to the Cape. There’s a facility there that’s willing to give us some help. And Chaz would like to see the ocean.”
“Me too,” Lemon added.
“The church -?“ Dean asked.
“I’ll be back. They’ve got someone interested in filling in for me in the meanwhile,” Hanson replied.
Dean looked past the minister and found Chaz sitting on a bench near the Blakes’ front door. The boy was intently watching something that Dean, after a little scrutiny, figured out was a squirrel running along a tree branch. Clock’s ticking, Dean thought. He was still looking at Chaz when Lemon’s fingers touched his hand. She was passing something along to him like it was a secret: a lumpy piece of metal, warmed by her touch.
“It’s flat,” she told him. “Like when that guy shot Superman in the eye?”
He opened his palm and looked. It was a bullet, flattened by having smashed into something. “What -?“
Hanson explained, “We found it in the book rack behind one of the pews.”
“I don’t get it.”
“It’s from your gun,” Sam said. “It must’ve hit something in the ceiling, ricocheted off, and dropped down where they found it.”
“The coroner said Babykay died of massive blood loss,” Hanson picked up. “They found no evidence of a gunshot wound.”
Sam smiled at his brother. “You missed, man.”
“What?” Dean said.
“You missed. You didn’t shoot her.”
“And the cops didn’t find this?”
Lemon nodded. “I think they were tired. Like us. I only found it because I had a dream. The lady in the dream told me where to find it.”
“Lady?”
Another nod. “She knew right where it was.”
Sam and Dean both looked at Hanson, who shook his head. “That’s the first I’ve heard of it. I thought she was straightening up the hymnals. She and Chaz - they’ve been a lot of help.”
“A girl,” Lemon went on. “In my dream, she took my hand and showed me where the bullet was.”
Frowning, Sam reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out the family pictures he’d been carrying around for two days. With a glance at Dean he picked out the one of his mother, Dean, and Ralph the bear. “Is this the girl?” he asked Lemon.
She studied the picture for a minute before deciding. “Uh-huh.”
“You’re sure?”
“Who is it?”
“My mom,” Sam said. “She died a long time ago.”
Lemon’s eyes opened wider. “Yeah? So she’s, like, a ghost?”
“Did she say anything else?”
“No.”
Dean, who had been looking at the bullet, suddenly narrowed his eyes at his brother. “You put her up to this?”
“No. What? No.”
“Give it up, Sam. Mom’s ghost told her where to find this?” Angrily, he pushed the bullet into Sam’s hand.
“In my dream,” Lemon insisted.
“I didn’t put anybody up to anything, man,” Sam said.
Without much more than a glance, Hanson dismissed Sam, Sarah and Lemon - sent them over to join Chaz in front of the house. Being alone with the minister made Dean glower even more than he had a minute ago. “Give your brother a break,” Hanson said. “Give us all a break. Even yourself.”
“I can’t -“ Dean’s voice was fading.
“You have to take the miracles where you can find them.”
“Get away from me, man, okay? I was working on my car.” When Hanson didn’t move, Dean surrendered to the weakness that had crawled up his legs, and sat down on the gravel next to the car, knees bent, head propped in his hands. “I can’t do this,” he forced out. “I can’t.”
“Do you not want to believe that your mother’s still looking out for you?”
“My mother’s gone.”
“I told Chaz yesterday,” Hanson said mildly, looking off across the yard, “that I don’t know where Heaven is. I don’t think we can understand what it is - I think that’s an answer that’s reserved for when we cross over. The conventional idea is ‘up’ - but maybe it’s right beside us. Another plane of existence parallel with this one. Maybe all it takes to break through into our dreams is a whisper.”
Dean didn’t move his head. He was staring at the ground between his boots - or at nothing.
“I joined the ministry because of Tom - the friend I lost,” Hanson went on. “I looked the thing that killed him right in the eye. I could have gone on sleeping - or the thing could have killed me too. But I woke up, and I looked into its eyes. A few days later, when I was taking a walk, it came to me that God asked me to look at evil and make a decision.” He paused. “Before Tom died, I was going to go into my dad’s cement business.”
“Is that supposed to turn my thinking around?”
“No.”
“Then why even bother saying it? Ask Sam. I don’t believe in miracles.”
To Dean’s surprise, the minister accepted that. With a small, resigned nod, he said, “I want to get out to the Cape before dark. See you around, Dean.”
And he walked away. After a minute Dean glanced up, toward the front of the house, and saw Sarah embrace Hanson and kiss his cheek. They held on to each other for a moment, then Hanson stepped back and led Lemon and Chaz to his car.
Sam and Sarah went inside, leaving Dean alone alongside the Impala.
“You missed, man.”
Fuck that. I didn’t miss.
I know I didn’t miss.
He sat there scowling at the gravel for a while, then, when the quiet of the driveway had gotten to be too much to bear, got up and walked around to the back of the house. Sam was sitting out on the deck, typing on his laptop.
“You researching?” Dean asked, pretending not to be terribly interested.
“Answering e-mail.”
“From who?”
“People you don’t know.”
“Where is it?”
Sam lifted his eyes from the keyboard. “What?”
“The bullet.”
“The fake bullet? The one I made by taking your gun and firing at…what? A brick wall? God, Dean.”
“Do you believe what she said?”
“I can get the coroner’s report if you think they were lying to you.”
“Missouri said…”
More than a year ago, Missouri Moseley had told them their mother had “used herself up” to defeat the poltergeist possessing their house, the home Dad had dragged them away from. She’d made it sound final, like she was talking about a gas tank that had gone dry. “We don’t know, Dean,” Sam told his brother. “What the other side is. What happens when we die. Maybe Mom doesn’t have the power to manifest herself in this world any more. But maybe touching someone’s dreams is easier.”
“I didn’t miss, Sam.”
“Then maybe making a bullet go off course is doable. I don’t know.”
“I feel like…like I’m off course, Sammy. Like I don’t know how to get back.”
“Colorado, man.”
“I don’t know if I can do that, Sam.”
It lay there between them: the promise of being judged and found wanting. As much as Dad had insisted on dragging them from place to place, they had been pushed along the road by people who saw secondhand clothes, cheap haircuts, a lack of manners, a lack of connection. They’d been like military brats, in a way. Military brats whose father had a car trunk full of weapons. Who had been chased and bitten and clawed by things the people who judged the Winchesters would put down as nonsense. As insanity. Ray Hayes’s family would be no different. They knew John Winchester as someone who’d turned into a drifter and a drinker after his wife’s death and could not be told what the truth was - no matter what they could offer in the way of pie and home movies.
“How long’ve you been talking to those people?” Dean sighed.
“A while.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“What would you have said? It took me weeks to convince you to go see Mom’s grave. Uncle Ray wanted to see us then. They all did.”
“We won’t belong there. You know that.”
“Yeah, I know. But I want to go.”
Dean nodded slowly. With a small, crooked smile Sam pulled out of his pocket the picture of Dean and his mom and his bear and handed it to his brother. Dean held it in his palm - gently, careful not to bend it.
“Do you remember it?” Sam asked.
“It was on my bed when we left the house. Got burned up in the fire, I guess.”
“We could get you another one.”
“And you could kiss my ass, too.”
And...the story concludes here: http://ficwriter1966.livejournal.com/20599.html#cutid1
Chapter 12 (yee ha, the last chapter) begins...
Journey
By Carol Davis
Chapter Twelve
Tomorrow and Tomorrow
It took all night and most of the next day to put things together. As the pieces began to fall into place, Sam began to think of what he was doing as either a massive un-Christmas, or “This Is Your Life, Dean Winchester.”
Toward the end of the afternoon he borrowed Sarah’s car and made two stops: a video store and a restaurant Sarah recommended as having the best burgers in town. With Dean watching him from the dock, he carried the two massive Adirondack chairs down close to the pond, then brought down a small table on which he placed his bag of take-out.
“What’s all that?” Dean scowled at him.
That was what he’d counted on: that Dean would be too intrigued - and too hungry - to be argumentative. As he unwrapped the burgers and fries, the aroma of which had assaulted him all the way back from the restaurant, Dean wandered over like a skittish stray dog. It didn’t take him long to seize one of the burgers and sit down to eat it. Juice from the meat ran down his chin, the way it ought to if the burger was “done right.”
“Pretty good,” Sam commented around a mouthful.
“‘S okay.”
Sam nodded at the bag. “There’s cake.”
Dean nudged the other bag, the one from the video store, with the toe of his boot. “What’s in there?”
“Couple movies.”
“How come you’re so friggin’ chipper?”
“‘Cause things are okay.”
The younger Winchester let the words sound ambiguous enough for Dean to jump to the conclusion that pleased him the most: that sometime during the day Sam had managed to have sex with Sarah. A few days ago Dean would have started smirking. The best Sam could get from him today was a raised eyebrow, but that would do. It did well enough for Dean to grab a big handful of fries and chew on them pensively rather than throw them into the pond.
“How’re we gonna watch movies?” Dean asked after a while.
“There’s a DVD player in the cabinet under the TV.”
“There is?”
“Yeah, man.”
“So we don’t have to sit with them.”
“Nope.”
“Okay, then.”
The closing credits of “The Big Lebowski” were rolling when Sam decided to unveil the next part of his master plan. Leaving unguarded what was left of the giant plate of nachos he’d fixed in the Blakes’ microwave, he got up off the bed and popped the movie disk out of the DVD player. “I was thinking, maybe we should hit the road this weekend.”
Dean pondered the nachos for a second, then asked, “Yeah? Why is that?”
“We have someplace to go.”
“Like where?” Without giving Sam a chance to reply, Dean sighed, “The roadhouse? Not in the mood for it.”
“Colorado.”
“What’s up there?”
“Our family.”
Dean squinted at his brother as if Sam had suddenly begun speaking Mandarin. “What?”
“Mom’s uncle Raymond. We have cousins. Did you know that?”
“And they’re waiting for us with outstretched arms? Come on, Sam.”
Because Dean seemed to be ready to give up a verbal argument in favor of a long stretch of the Dean Winchester Patented Scowl of That’s the Dumbest Fucking Thing I Ever Heard Of, Sam leaned against the edge of the dresser and let the silence endure for a moment. “I talked to him for almost an hour last night,” he said finally. “He has a wife - he got married again not too long ago. She seems like a nice lady. They each have a couple of kids, and most of the kids have kids. So we have cousins. And they’d like to meet us.”
He waited. Dean said nothing, but there were hairline fractures developing in the scowl. “One of them was actually at Stanford when I was there,” Sam added.
“Huh,” Dean replied.
“He loved Mom. Uncle Ray. He said he called her his sunshine girl, because of her hair.”
That - or maybe it was the fact that Sam was looking so directly at him, without a break - made Dean seek refuge in the bathroom. He didn’t bother closing the door, just stood in there staring at the tub. Because of the way the mirror was positioned over the sink, Sam could still see him from where he stood.
“Dad always said it was Uncle Ray who broke things off - that he didn’t want anything to do with Dad. Which was sort of true, but not entirely. Uncle Ray offered to take us in after Mom died. Until Dad ‘got things straightened out,’ he said. Dad told him to go to hell. He said he tried calling a couple times after that, but Dad wouldn’t talk to him. Then Uncle Ray lost track of us - where we were, what we were doing. He didn’t know about Stanford. He didn’t” - Sam’s voice caught - “know Dad was gone.”
Dean replied softly, wryly, “D’you tell him Dad went to hell?”
Sam ignored that - had to ignore it. “He e-mailed me some pictures. Sarah printed them out for me.” They’d been in his shirt pocket most of the day. Not sure how Dean would react, he took them out and carried them into the bathroom so he could offer them to his brother. With a reluctance that Sam figured wasn’t entirely for show, Dean took them and began to sift through them. “That’s Mom when she was fourteen,” Sam explained. “Pep squad, I think he said. And that’s a wedding picture, Uncle Ray and his wife. The guy in the ugly jacket is his son. And that one - that’s you and Mom. He said you were two.”
Uncle Ray’s “sunshine girl” had her hair bound back into a ponytail. She was wearing jeans and a tank top and looked barely older than she had at fourteen. The toddler standing beside her in shorts and a striped shirt had one arm slung around her leg and the other wrapped around a teddy bear.
“Ralph,” Sam said.
“I didn’t have any damn teddy bear named Ralph,” Dean objected.
“Yeah, you did.”
“That old man’s full of it.”
“He has home movies, Dean. Of Mom. Of her talking. And singing, at Christmas. He can tell us what she was like. I want to go there, man. I want to talk to him. I want to get to know our mother. Please. Let’s go there.”
Dean pressed the pictures back into Sam’s hands. “You go, then.”
“Both of us. They want to see both of us.”
“So we can look at home movies and eat pie or something? She’s not there. It’s just -“
Pouring salt all over something and setting it on fire, Sam thought. But not the way we usually do it. “I know.”
“I don’t want to look at pictures.”
Sam shuffled through the little prints and showed one to Dean. “That’s one of our cousins. Kaylie? Kaylin? Kay something. She’s kinda -“
“What, are you from the Ozarks?” Dean blurted. “She’s your cousin, dude.”
“Maybe she has friends.”
That took some of the starch out of Dean’s objection. “Huh,” he conceded.
There was another piece of information to relay. “He said he was sorry about Dad - that he liked him, before. When Mom and Dad were first married. That Dad was a little intense sometimes but he liked him. So he said he’d be willing to pay for a headstone to put alongside Mom’s. Because Mom would have - he thought Mom would have wanted it.”
“D’you tell him there’s no body?”
“I told him Dad was cremated and we scattered the ashes.”
Dean’s scowl had pretty much disappeared, leaving behind only a small wrinkle between his eyebrows. Making the little huffing noises that meant he was thinking - and was inching toward giving in - he wandered back out to the bedroom and sat at the end of the bed.
Sam followed him. “I made another call…”
“Now what?”
“To Roy LeGrange.”
“What the hell for?”
“So I could ask…about Layla.”
“You want to put up a headstone for her, too?” Dean snapped.
“Don’t need to. She’s alive.”
Dean’s thoughts zipped across his face like a slide show. “She didn’t -?”
“No.”
“Why the hell not?”
The wrongness of that made Sam laugh a little. “Her mother tracked down a doctor who was willing to try some kind of radical treatment on her. Roy didn’t know what it was, but he said he’d talked to them both a couple of weeks ago and Layla was doing okay. I told him my name was Jimmy Don Porter and I’d met her at one of the ‘meetings’ and thought she was just the sweetest thang. He said he was sorry to disappoint me, but she’d met somebody and was going to tie the knot.”
Disappointment was a good enough description for the look that slid across Dean’s face. Sam didn’t think for a moment that Dean was disappointed because Layla had survived. “You liked her,” he offered.
Dean shrugged. “She’s decent.”
“There could be somebody else out there. Like Layla.”
“I don’t know, Sam.”
“Give it a chance. Can we go to Colorado?”
The TV screen was a blank, pale green, but Dean started to stare at it as if the movie was still playing. “Guess,” he muttered. “But if they get all weird on us, I’m bailing.”
“Dude, sheets make you want to bail.”
“I don’t know those people, Sam.”
“You’ve had sex with people you don’t know. All you need to do with these people is talk.”
Sam stopped then, but it was just a pause. A long enough pause that Dean started reaching for the nachos. “What, there’s more?” Dean complained.
“Need to tell you something.”
“You’re pregnant.”
“It’s about Dad.”
“I don’t want to hear it, Sam.”
“I think you need to. Because I figured something out.”
Dean turned away, pointedly, the set of his shoulders saying clearly that he was not interested in negotiating.
Sam went on talking anyway. “He was a hunter for more than twenty years - and a Marine before that. His social skills sucked ass most of the time, but I think he was good at what he put his mind to. More than good. The people we talk to - they tend to hate his guts, but they’re pretty universal in saying he was a good hunter.” He set the pictures down on the dresser and went on, “We’ve been assuming that he made the deal with the yellow-eyed demon to save your life. What if there was more to it than that?”
He had Dean’s attention, even though Dean said nothing. “You knew him better than anyone,” Sam said. “Wouldn’t he try to maximize the situation?”
“How?”
“He needed to know more about the demon. How to kill it. He chased the thing for twenty-three years. Do you think he just gave up? You got hurt, and he wanted to save you, yeah. I don’t doubt that. But you think he just said, ‘Screw it, game over’? That’s not John Winchester.”
Dean’s mouth lolled open a little. “He -“
“He infiltrated the enemy. Tell me - am I wrong? The damn demon must have thought that was it: Dad’s soul and the Colt in exchange for you. But there was more to it than that. Dad got the thing to take him to its nest. And if there’s anybody in the world who’s crazy like a fox enough to figure he could climb back out of Hell - with the Colt - it’s Dad.”
“Shit,” Dean said.
“Am I wrong?”
“You sure you’re not pregnant?”
“He raised us. He trained us. I think he wanted us to figure out how to help him. And we’ve wasted three months going in the wrong direction.”
“So now you want to waste time going to Colorado?”
Sam glanced down at the pictures. “So we have a foundation, Dean. So we don’t forget what’s here.”
“Yeah, that Kaylie girl.”
“Stop it.”
“The crazy bastard went to Hell to do reconnaissance.”
“Yeah,” Sam said.
“Figures.”
* * * * *
The forty-year-old Impala, rebuilt with loving hands but rebuilt nonetheless, needed a careful going-over before she was asked to climb the mountains of Colorado. No matter that she’d done hard duty without a complaint the last couple of months; there was no point in assuming she was ready to go two-thirds of the way across the country in one haul without problems cropping up.
Or so Dean told his brother.
He was underneath the car tinkering with things that beyond a shadow of a doubt needed to be tinkered with when he heard scuffling footsteps coming across the gravel of the Blakes’ driveway. All he could see was shoes: a pair of beat-up red Connies. They didn’t belong to Sam, they were a little too funky for Sarah, and they certainly didn’t belong to Sarah’s father.
The shoes got within about a yard of him and stopped.
Nothing happened for a minute, then a small, unfamiliar voice said, “Mr. Winchester?”
Dean had been called “Mister” any number of times, but usually connected to the last name on one of his phony credit cards. “Mister” and “Winchester” together was new. And weird.
“Yeah?” he said.
He could see more shoes a little ways away, over by the edge of the front lawn. Three pairs. One of them belonged to Sam.
“I don’t think he’s coming out,” the small voice said.
It was too soon for any of those Colorado people to have shown up here.
Grumbling, but mostly for show, Dean slid out from under the car and started climbing to his feet. Midway he noticed that the small voice belonged to Lemon - but a different Lemon. This one was wearing clean clothes and had apparently taken a shower or six. She had big, dark circles under her eyes and seemed sort of…embarrassed.
“He says I should say thank you.” She tipped her head toward the owners of the other three pairs of shoes: Sam, Sarah, Will Hanson. The “he” she meant was Hanson.
“Sam got the demon out of you,” Dean said.
“I said thank you to him already.”
“We’re leaving,” Will Hanson said as he walked toward Dean. “Going to the Cape. There’s a facility there that’s willing to give us some help. And Chaz would like to see the ocean.”
“Me too,” Lemon added.
“The church -?“ Dean asked.
“I’ll be back. They’ve got someone interested in filling in for me in the meanwhile,” Hanson replied.
Dean looked past the minister and found Chaz sitting on a bench near the Blakes’ front door. The boy was intently watching something that Dean, after a little scrutiny, figured out was a squirrel running along a tree branch. Clock’s ticking, Dean thought. He was still looking at Chaz when Lemon’s fingers touched his hand. She was passing something along to him like it was a secret: a lumpy piece of metal, warmed by her touch.
“It’s flat,” she told him. “Like when that guy shot Superman in the eye?”
He opened his palm and looked. It was a bullet, flattened by having smashed into something. “What -?“
Hanson explained, “We found it in the book rack behind one of the pews.”
“I don’t get it.”
“It’s from your gun,” Sam said. “It must’ve hit something in the ceiling, ricocheted off, and dropped down where they found it.”
“The coroner said Babykay died of massive blood loss,” Hanson picked up. “They found no evidence of a gunshot wound.”
Sam smiled at his brother. “You missed, man.”
“What?” Dean said.
“You missed. You didn’t shoot her.”
“And the cops didn’t find this?”
Lemon nodded. “I think they were tired. Like us. I only found it because I had a dream. The lady in the dream told me where to find it.”
“Lady?”
Another nod. “She knew right where it was.”
Sam and Dean both looked at Hanson, who shook his head. “That’s the first I’ve heard of it. I thought she was straightening up the hymnals. She and Chaz - they’ve been a lot of help.”
“A girl,” Lemon went on. “In my dream, she took my hand and showed me where the bullet was.”
Frowning, Sam reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out the family pictures he’d been carrying around for two days. With a glance at Dean he picked out the one of his mother, Dean, and Ralph the bear. “Is this the girl?” he asked Lemon.
She studied the picture for a minute before deciding. “Uh-huh.”
“You’re sure?”
“Who is it?”
“My mom,” Sam said. “She died a long time ago.”
Lemon’s eyes opened wider. “Yeah? So she’s, like, a ghost?”
“Did she say anything else?”
“No.”
Dean, who had been looking at the bullet, suddenly narrowed his eyes at his brother. “You put her up to this?”
“No. What? No.”
“Give it up, Sam. Mom’s ghost told her where to find this?” Angrily, he pushed the bullet into Sam’s hand.
“In my dream,” Lemon insisted.
“I didn’t put anybody up to anything, man,” Sam said.
Without much more than a glance, Hanson dismissed Sam, Sarah and Lemon - sent them over to join Chaz in front of the house. Being alone with the minister made Dean glower even more than he had a minute ago. “Give your brother a break,” Hanson said. “Give us all a break. Even yourself.”
“I can’t -“ Dean’s voice was fading.
“You have to take the miracles where you can find them.”
“Get away from me, man, okay? I was working on my car.” When Hanson didn’t move, Dean surrendered to the weakness that had crawled up his legs, and sat down on the gravel next to the car, knees bent, head propped in his hands. “I can’t do this,” he forced out. “I can’t.”
“Do you not want to believe that your mother’s still looking out for you?”
“My mother’s gone.”
“I told Chaz yesterday,” Hanson said mildly, looking off across the yard, “that I don’t know where Heaven is. I don’t think we can understand what it is - I think that’s an answer that’s reserved for when we cross over. The conventional idea is ‘up’ - but maybe it’s right beside us. Another plane of existence parallel with this one. Maybe all it takes to break through into our dreams is a whisper.”
Dean didn’t move his head. He was staring at the ground between his boots - or at nothing.
“I joined the ministry because of Tom - the friend I lost,” Hanson went on. “I looked the thing that killed him right in the eye. I could have gone on sleeping - or the thing could have killed me too. But I woke up, and I looked into its eyes. A few days later, when I was taking a walk, it came to me that God asked me to look at evil and make a decision.” He paused. “Before Tom died, I was going to go into my dad’s cement business.”
“Is that supposed to turn my thinking around?”
“No.”
“Then why even bother saying it? Ask Sam. I don’t believe in miracles.”
To Dean’s surprise, the minister accepted that. With a small, resigned nod, he said, “I want to get out to the Cape before dark. See you around, Dean.”
And he walked away. After a minute Dean glanced up, toward the front of the house, and saw Sarah embrace Hanson and kiss his cheek. They held on to each other for a moment, then Hanson stepped back and led Lemon and Chaz to his car.
Sam and Sarah went inside, leaving Dean alone alongside the Impala.
“You missed, man.”
Fuck that. I didn’t miss.
I know I didn’t miss.
He sat there scowling at the gravel for a while, then, when the quiet of the driveway had gotten to be too much to bear, got up and walked around to the back of the house. Sam was sitting out on the deck, typing on his laptop.
“You researching?” Dean asked, pretending not to be terribly interested.
“Answering e-mail.”
“From who?”
“People you don’t know.”
“Where is it?”
Sam lifted his eyes from the keyboard. “What?”
“The bullet.”
“The fake bullet? The one I made by taking your gun and firing at…what? A brick wall? God, Dean.”
“Do you believe what she said?”
“I can get the coroner’s report if you think they were lying to you.”
“Missouri said…”
More than a year ago, Missouri Moseley had told them their mother had “used herself up” to defeat the poltergeist possessing their house, the home Dad had dragged them away from. She’d made it sound final, like she was talking about a gas tank that had gone dry. “We don’t know, Dean,” Sam told his brother. “What the other side is. What happens when we die. Maybe Mom doesn’t have the power to manifest herself in this world any more. But maybe touching someone’s dreams is easier.”
“I didn’t miss, Sam.”
“Then maybe making a bullet go off course is doable. I don’t know.”
“I feel like…like I’m off course, Sammy. Like I don’t know how to get back.”
“Colorado, man.”
“I don’t know if I can do that, Sam.”
It lay there between them: the promise of being judged and found wanting. As much as Dad had insisted on dragging them from place to place, they had been pushed along the road by people who saw secondhand clothes, cheap haircuts, a lack of manners, a lack of connection. They’d been like military brats, in a way. Military brats whose father had a car trunk full of weapons. Who had been chased and bitten and clawed by things the people who judged the Winchesters would put down as nonsense. As insanity. Ray Hayes’s family would be no different. They knew John Winchester as someone who’d turned into a drifter and a drinker after his wife’s death and could not be told what the truth was - no matter what they could offer in the way of pie and home movies.
“How long’ve you been talking to those people?” Dean sighed.
“A while.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“What would you have said? It took me weeks to convince you to go see Mom’s grave. Uncle Ray wanted to see us then. They all did.”
“We won’t belong there. You know that.”
“Yeah, I know. But I want to go.”
Dean nodded slowly. With a small, crooked smile Sam pulled out of his pocket the picture of Dean and his mom and his bear and handed it to his brother. Dean held it in his palm - gently, careful not to bend it.
“Do you remember it?” Sam asked.
“It was on my bed when we left the house. Got burned up in the fire, I guess.”
“We could get you another one.”
“And you could kiss my ass, too.”
And...the story concludes here: http://ficwriter1966.livejournal.com/20599.html#cutid1