SPN FIC - So a Guy Walks Into an Elevator... (Part 4 of 4)
kimmer1227 handed me this bunny a long time ago: "Dean is trapped in an elevator with an expectant mother and a werewolf wannabe." It's been in my notebook ever since, and I've looked at it from time to time without anything clicking over in my brain. Then, the other day, I looked at it again and thought, Yeah.
Let's go back to late-ish in Season 1, when the boys were hunting Wendigos and pranking each other and ... life was good. More or less.
Public place, he reminds himself when a couple of the people waiting with him turn to look. Curiosity, he figures; none of them seems offended. A couple of 'em are smiling, so he smiles back. Cocky. Self-assured. He can work a crowd, yes ma'am, thank you very much.
Part 1 is back here. Part 2 is here. Part 3 is here.
CHARACTERS: Dean, Sam, various OCs
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 7811 words overall; this part is 3123 words
SO A GUY WALKS INTO AN ELEVATOR...
By Carol Davis
The elevator shaft's a little brighter than inside the car; it's got safety lights every ten feet or so, each one of them a dim amber, like a flashlight with bad batteries. Not great for reading, but more than enough for Dean to get the lay of the land.
He can re-tell this later, he thinks. Make himself out to be like Keanu Reeves in Speed.
The cables all look solid and strong. That's a plus. Nothing's on fire. There's no bomb sitting on the roof of the car.
There is, however, a shadowy something looming about six feet away from him.
He kind of expected…well, he's not sure what he expected. A little stone grapefruit with nubby arms and legs, maybe. This isn't that, and it bears no resemblance to anything human. Or animal, for that matter.
Demon? he wonders.
Whatever it is, it doesn't have a face, but he feels like it's looking at him. Like it's aware of him: what he's thinking, what he's capable of.
He rises slowly up out of his crouch and shifts his weight to find secure footing. The car's still wobbling a little, and if it decides to go up or down there's nothing to grab but the cables, which would be all kinds of a bad idea, so he's stuck with riding the roof like a surfboard.
His balance has always been pretty good.
He's kind of hoping not to have to test it.
But he figures he's not that lucky.
"Name's Winchester," he says cheerfully. "And I'm your worst nightmare."
Down below, the Wookiee starts to bay again, low and soft, like he's singing a lullaby in Dog. The idea that maybe he's trying to woo the pregnant chick now that they're alone flits through Dean's mind.
His life, man.
This is so not how he was planning to spend his evening.
He was hoping that whatever was up here would be something he could punt over the side and watch it freefall a couple hundred feet, but it's not any kind of solid, nothing he could get a grip on, nothing he could kick, or stab, or shoot, or set on fire. It's like that line from the old Twilight Zone intro, halfway between shadow and substance, and if he had to pick something to be up against - in an elevator shaft, or anywhere else - it wouldn't be something he can't grab.
The best he can do, he thinks, is keep it distracted long enough for Sammy to do his thing up on 18. If its consciousness is here in the shaft, all present and accounted for, then it's not up in that office on 18. Not anywhere near his brother. Not aware that Sammy's gonna tag and bag its other self and read it a bedtime story in Latin.
Distraction. He can do distraction.
"Thousand years, huh?" he quips. The car starts to shake a little more, and he feels like he's standing on a dryer that's midway through the spin cycle. "Not a lot of elevators around back then. That the deal? You trying to figure out how this thing works?"
The thing moves a little.
Yeah, it's watching him.
"You probably had people who could haul stuff around on ropes, though, huh? Building pyramids, that kind of thing? Yeah. Same principle. You put people in a box and haul 'em up on a rope. Lot easier than climbing eight million stairs. It's a great invention. One of the ten best. Ask anybody. You got bad knees, elevator's the way to go. Probably contributes to the national obesity problem, though. Me, I try to take the stairs when I can. Great for keeping the old ticker in shape, you know what I mean?"
What the Wookiee's singing down below, Dean's got no idea. Maybe it's the friggin' score from Cats.
The shadow-thing leans toward him.
It brushes him, somehow, even though they're still more than arm's reach apart, and what goes through his mind as it does so is Oh SHIT. He's been trapped before in close quarters with one of the things they hunt, has had that happen way more times than he'd ever want to count, so what people generally call "the heebie-jeebies" isn't an unfamiliar sensation. What he just felt, though, was that times ten, the heebie-jeebies cranked up into the red zone, something that makes his heart do the tarantella, makes his throat close up and his stomach seize while the caveman part of his brain tells him Get your dumb ass out of here get it out NOW.
"All the same to you," Dean stammers, "I'm gonna keep my distance. That good for you? 'Cause I'm gonna tell you, we just met."
That thing, there? It burns hot and cold at the same time.
And it's ANGRY.
It's angry at him.
"It's the city, man, right?" he jabbers on. "I hear you. Friggin' hate the city myself. Gimme the open road any time."
If it touches him, he thinks, if it actually touches him full-on he's gonna have a stroke. Right up here on the roof of this elevator. He's gonna have a stroke and die.
On top of a jiggling elevator in the mostly-dark.
Not really how he planned to spend his evening.
Here's the thing, though. Down below, there's a couple of civilians. One of 'em might be completely bugshit crazy, but maybe he's fixable. Maybe somebody cares about him, maybe a lot of people care about him, and maybe with some therapy and a boatload of drugs he can turn back into somebody who doesn't think he's a creature of the night. Somebody who remembers to bathe once in a while.
The other one - she's gonna give birth any time now to her ginormatron of a baby. Boy or girl, doesn't much matter - it's gonna be a brand-new little(ish) person, and she seems like she'll be a good mom. When she hums, that's a sweet sound.
He thinks, fleetingly, of being hummed to, back in that other life, the one he remembers sometimes when he's drifting between asleep and awake, and he swallows hard against the lump it brings to his throat.
This…whatever it is, demon or spirit or something else entirely, it's been messing people up for a long time now.
That needs to end. That seriously needs to end.
If he needs to grab it to distract it, he'll do that.
If he needs to freakin' DIE…
Well.
"Open road," he chirps, and to his own mind he sounds like one of those over-caffeinated jerks on early-morning TV, one of those shows Sammy turns on sometimes in the motel room so they can see what the weather's gonna be. "There's nothing like it in the world, man. You roll the windows down and crank the music up. Sweet breeze comin' through the car and nothing but wide open spaces up ahead. 'Wind comes sweepin' 'cross the plains,' you know that song? Awesome, I'm tellin' you. You can see for a million miles."
He'd really like to hear his brother's voice right now - even if Sammy was bitching about something, he'd even take that - but the phone's in his pocket and he doesn't want this thing in front of him to even be aware that there is a Sam, let alone what he's doing.
Instead, he hears another voice down below. Unfortunately, so does the shadow-thing - he can feel it shift, become aware (or remember) that it's got more quarry down inside the car.
It's the pregnant chick, talking into her phone. Saying, "Honey? Honey, can you hear me?"
She's got a honey at the other end of that damn phone.
A honey who's waiting for her someplace. At home, or maybe right here in this building. Maybe that's where she was going, to meet him so they could go to dinner. A little "you and me" time before the baby comes.
For all he knows, the Wookiee's got a honey too.
Everybody in the whole damn building's probably got one, in some form or other. All of 'em. And all the people who got hurt over the last thousand years. Somebody cares about them, he figures. Or cared, back in the day.
He heard Sam's voice a couple minutes ago. That'll have to do.
"You know what?" he says, and takes a step forward. "I gotta tell you something, you ugly, dumbass son of a bitch. A thousand years? I don't know who died and made you…whatever the hell you think you are, but I don't figure it gives you the right to go around screwing with people. What is it, you have an off day or something, so you trip somebody down the stairs? You crush 'em, or electrocute 'em? The hell is that?"
It's looking at him.
It's got no face, but he's got its attention.
"I don't know where you come from, pal," he snarls, "but where I come from, that kind of crap doesn't fly. You don't get to mess with people for shits and giggles. My name is Dean Winchester, you cheesy son of a bitch, and I am your worst fuckin' nightmare."
Gonna be a repeat of that thing with the taser, he thinks, and Sammy is gonna go ballistic. He's gonna go all purple-faced and scream, "The hell is wrong with you? Huh? What is the matter with you? I saved you so you could do this?"
Yeah, Sam, he thinks. You pretty much saved me for this.
There's a hum in the cables, like they're carrying sound. Or current, he realizes: there could be as much juice in them as there was in the wires from that taser he cranked all the way up to Deep-Fried Extra Crispy. Really they're just there for support, not to carry electricity, but there's the real world and there's his life, and right now there's a thousand-year-old pissed-off thing that's channeling a whole lot of energy looking him dead in the eye.
Beneath his boots the car shimmies and vibrates and the Wookiee kicks things up a notch, goes from late-night crooner to rock star, aiming to blow the eardrums out of everybody in the cheap seats. The cables are gonna let go, Dean thinks - they're gonna overheat and snap, and the car's gonna go plummeting down…
Like a…
Just out the window, Sammy said.
He doesn't dare grab his phone. Doesn't dare let that thing know that there's another Winchester, up on the 18th floor.
Sam might be the college boy, but they both dropped things out the window when they were kids.
Water balloons, mostly, but there was a rock or two. With luck, Sam remembers that. Remembers what happens when things hit the ground from a long way up. Open the window, or bust it, and overboard we go.
That statue's made of rock, but the 18th floor's a long way up.
"Hey, dumbass," Dean says, pretty loud, so he can hear himself over the Wookiee's caterwauling. "You ever hear this story? Guy walks into an elevator -"
Him and Sammy. They're tuned in to each other. Finish each other's sentences, once in a while. It's a good feeling, being back with Sam. Knowing someone's got his back. Knowing someone understands the plan, without either one of them saying anything.
The guy in Wilkes-Barre told them bagging the thing wouldn't be good enough. That they'd need to take it somewhere and crush it. They were figuring on the wrecking yard they passed out on the Interstate.
Gravity's a decent substitute.
Underneath him, the car's building up towards escape velocity. C'mon, Sammy, come ON, Dean thinks as the shadow-thing starts to loom forward. It does have a face, he decides - if you look at it dead-on, there's definitely something there. It's whole new kinds of ugly, and all it is now is smoke and shadows, but at some point, way back when, it might have been human.
Because that's what it wants (and somehow, maybe because he's too close, it's also what he wants), Dean leans forward too and lets the thing take a good long look at him while he soaks in a little of what it is and what it's feeling.
RAGE is what he gets at first - pure and stark, so absolute that it sends a bolt of cold through Dean's soul.
Then, there's more. Hopelessness. Grief.
Pain.
A thousand years of pain.
Because Sam's mostly right, because in some ways he is an idiot, he shoves his gun into its accustomed place in the small of his back, adjusts his balance - the damn elevator's gonna break the surly bonds of earth, and if that pregnant chick and the Wookiee haven't crapped their drawers by now, he has no idea why - and sticks out his now-empty hand.
"Pleased to meet you, you hellspawn son of a bitch," he says, and plunges his hand into the middle of the shadow-thing.
Needed a nap, he thinks as he swims up toward consciousness.
"My God, Dean," Sam's voice says from somewhere nearby, and, predictably, Sam is pissed. "Could you be any more of an idiot? What did you go up there for? I had it under control. All you had to do was wait."
"Not real good at that."
"No kidding."
He can sit up on his own, but once he's up he clutches at Sam's arm for support, because WOW he's lightheaded. He's on solid ground - he can figure out that much even though everything around him is spinning and WOW he's spinning too, like he's a Dean-shaped Tilt-a-Whirl - but where exactly he is isn't clear until he squints past Sam and sees a water fountain and a pried-open elevator door.
Elevator.
Yeah.
So not getting on an elevator ever again.
"Is it gone?" he mutters.
Sam reaches somewhere out of Dean's field of (WOW, spinning) vision and produces the bag they got from the guy in Wilkes-Barre. There's something inside it, but nothing with a definable shape. Looks like Sam's holding a bag of dirt. "Cool," Dean says, feeling a really-excellent-weed kind of high. "You drop it out the window?"
"What? No."
"No?"
"It was sandstone. I smashed it with a paperweight."
"Oh."
"Why did you want me to drop it out the window? If there'd been anybody down on the ground, it would have -"
Pain, he thinks. A thousand years of pain. "I just thought -"
"What?"
"Nothing."
There's a long bench down the hall a ways. The pregnant chick's sitting on it, with a guy in a suit. When she spots Dean, sees that he's back among the living, she gets up from the bench and makes her way over to him. Wobbling a little, but doing okay, from the (spinning) look of it. "You're all right," she says. "Thank God. I'm so glad you -"
"Not a problem," Dean replies.
She frowns a little at that, which doesn't make sense until he realizes that from her perspective, he didn't really do much of anything.
It takes him a moment to locate the Wookiee. He's a little farther down the hall, sitting on the floor with his arms wrapped around his head. There's a woman crouched beside him. His mom, maybe, or a nurse.
"He okay?" Dean asks.
"Keeps saying something about a monster," Sam replies.
Bit by bit, propping himself a couple of times with a hand laid flat against the wall, Dean works himself to his feet and inches close enough to the open elevator doors to peer inside the shaft. The roof of the car is five or six feet down, and there's a guy in coveralls standing on it, tinkering with the cables. He doesn't seem at all unnerved, but watching him isn't really something Dean feels like doing.
Now, or, pretty much, ever.
"We good?" he asks Sam quietly. "Can we -"
He turns over the car keys without a quarrel. Pretty much has to, because the whole world's a big lazy Susan; if he tried to drive, he'd have them up over the curb and embedded in the front of a building before they got half a block. Sam makes a face at the way the Impala's boxed in by the cars parked in front of and behind her, but he deposits Dean in the passenger seat without saying anything, then circles around and slides in behind the wheel.
"You okay, man?" he asks finally. "What happened up there?"
Dean quirks the corner of his mouth, goes for a show of good humor that he doesn't feel. "Vulcan mind meld."
"What?"
"I kinda -"
"What?"
"Nothing."
The bag's in the trunk. They're taking it back to the guy in Wilkes-Barre. He'll give it what amounts to a proper burial.
That's what the thing wanted.
To rest in peace.
And he gets that. He gets it more than he wants to admit.
It takes them almost half an hour to get out of the city. They've been on the open road only a couple of minutes when Dean asks his brother to pull over, and Sam has barely stopped the car when Dean thrusts the door open and clambers out to stand in a cluster of weeds alongside the road, bent low, hands on his knees. It's full dark, broken only by a thin sliver of moon, and the city they left behind is hidden beyond a long row of trees.
"You okay?" Sam asks, taking long steps through the weeds.
It's not cold out, but Dean shudders. When he's finished with that, he feels like he's gotten rid of something.
"It's all good, right?" he asks Sam.
Sam blinks, not he's not sure what Dean's asking, then says, "Sure. I guess so."
The pregnant chick didn't figure Dean did much of anything. The Wookiee probably didn't figure anybody did much of anything.
But the thing is…
"Guy walks into an elevator with a pregnant chick and a Wookiee," Dean says as he straightens up, wondering if his stomach's going to stay where it belongs.
Sam gets it. "Like, two priests and a rabbi walk into a bar."
"It was evil. Now it's just -" Dean thinks about the bag. "It's just dust."
Sam doesn't say anything for a minute, allowing Dean his little bit of reverie. Then he says, in the tone they use when there's no point in thinking about a thing any more, "You want to stop somewhere? Get a beer?"
Dean has to shift his footing a little; the ground's uneven under his feet, but - thank God - it's not moving.
And the city's a long way behind them.
He's got enough room to smile. "You're buying," he says to Sam.
* * * * *
Let's go back to late-ish in Season 1, when the boys were hunting Wendigos and pranking each other and ... life was good. More or less.
Public place, he reminds himself when a couple of the people waiting with him turn to look. Curiosity, he figures; none of them seems offended. A couple of 'em are smiling, so he smiles back. Cocky. Self-assured. He can work a crowd, yes ma'am, thank you very much.
Part 1 is back here. Part 2 is here. Part 3 is here.
CHARACTERS: Dean, Sam, various OCs
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 7811 words overall; this part is 3123 words
SO A GUY WALKS INTO AN ELEVATOR...
By Carol Davis
The elevator shaft's a little brighter than inside the car; it's got safety lights every ten feet or so, each one of them a dim amber, like a flashlight with bad batteries. Not great for reading, but more than enough for Dean to get the lay of the land.
He can re-tell this later, he thinks. Make himself out to be like Keanu Reeves in Speed.
The cables all look solid and strong. That's a plus. Nothing's on fire. There's no bomb sitting on the roof of the car.
There is, however, a shadowy something looming about six feet away from him.
He kind of expected…well, he's not sure what he expected. A little stone grapefruit with nubby arms and legs, maybe. This isn't that, and it bears no resemblance to anything human. Or animal, for that matter.
Demon? he wonders.
Whatever it is, it doesn't have a face, but he feels like it's looking at him. Like it's aware of him: what he's thinking, what he's capable of.
He rises slowly up out of his crouch and shifts his weight to find secure footing. The car's still wobbling a little, and if it decides to go up or down there's nothing to grab but the cables, which would be all kinds of a bad idea, so he's stuck with riding the roof like a surfboard.
His balance has always been pretty good.
He's kind of hoping not to have to test it.
But he figures he's not that lucky.
"Name's Winchester," he says cheerfully. "And I'm your worst nightmare."
Down below, the Wookiee starts to bay again, low and soft, like he's singing a lullaby in Dog. The idea that maybe he's trying to woo the pregnant chick now that they're alone flits through Dean's mind.
His life, man.
This is so not how he was planning to spend his evening.
He was hoping that whatever was up here would be something he could punt over the side and watch it freefall a couple hundred feet, but it's not any kind of solid, nothing he could get a grip on, nothing he could kick, or stab, or shoot, or set on fire. It's like that line from the old Twilight Zone intro, halfway between shadow and substance, and if he had to pick something to be up against - in an elevator shaft, or anywhere else - it wouldn't be something he can't grab.
The best he can do, he thinks, is keep it distracted long enough for Sammy to do his thing up on 18. If its consciousness is here in the shaft, all present and accounted for, then it's not up in that office on 18. Not anywhere near his brother. Not aware that Sammy's gonna tag and bag its other self and read it a bedtime story in Latin.
Distraction. He can do distraction.
"Thousand years, huh?" he quips. The car starts to shake a little more, and he feels like he's standing on a dryer that's midway through the spin cycle. "Not a lot of elevators around back then. That the deal? You trying to figure out how this thing works?"
The thing moves a little.
Yeah, it's watching him.
"You probably had people who could haul stuff around on ropes, though, huh? Building pyramids, that kind of thing? Yeah. Same principle. You put people in a box and haul 'em up on a rope. Lot easier than climbing eight million stairs. It's a great invention. One of the ten best. Ask anybody. You got bad knees, elevator's the way to go. Probably contributes to the national obesity problem, though. Me, I try to take the stairs when I can. Great for keeping the old ticker in shape, you know what I mean?"
What the Wookiee's singing down below, Dean's got no idea. Maybe it's the friggin' score from Cats.
The shadow-thing leans toward him.
It brushes him, somehow, even though they're still more than arm's reach apart, and what goes through his mind as it does so is Oh SHIT. He's been trapped before in close quarters with one of the things they hunt, has had that happen way more times than he'd ever want to count, so what people generally call "the heebie-jeebies" isn't an unfamiliar sensation. What he just felt, though, was that times ten, the heebie-jeebies cranked up into the red zone, something that makes his heart do the tarantella, makes his throat close up and his stomach seize while the caveman part of his brain tells him Get your dumb ass out of here get it out NOW.
"All the same to you," Dean stammers, "I'm gonna keep my distance. That good for you? 'Cause I'm gonna tell you, we just met."
That thing, there? It burns hot and cold at the same time.
And it's ANGRY.
It's angry at him.
"It's the city, man, right?" he jabbers on. "I hear you. Friggin' hate the city myself. Gimme the open road any time."
If it touches him, he thinks, if it actually touches him full-on he's gonna have a stroke. Right up here on the roof of this elevator. He's gonna have a stroke and die.
On top of a jiggling elevator in the mostly-dark.
Not really how he planned to spend his evening.
Here's the thing, though. Down below, there's a couple of civilians. One of 'em might be completely bugshit crazy, but maybe he's fixable. Maybe somebody cares about him, maybe a lot of people care about him, and maybe with some therapy and a boatload of drugs he can turn back into somebody who doesn't think he's a creature of the night. Somebody who remembers to bathe once in a while.
The other one - she's gonna give birth any time now to her ginormatron of a baby. Boy or girl, doesn't much matter - it's gonna be a brand-new little(ish) person, and she seems like she'll be a good mom. When she hums, that's a sweet sound.
He thinks, fleetingly, of being hummed to, back in that other life, the one he remembers sometimes when he's drifting between asleep and awake, and he swallows hard against the lump it brings to his throat.
This…whatever it is, demon or spirit or something else entirely, it's been messing people up for a long time now.
That needs to end. That seriously needs to end.
If he needs to grab it to distract it, he'll do that.
If he needs to freakin' DIE…
Well.
"Open road," he chirps, and to his own mind he sounds like one of those over-caffeinated jerks on early-morning TV, one of those shows Sammy turns on sometimes in the motel room so they can see what the weather's gonna be. "There's nothing like it in the world, man. You roll the windows down and crank the music up. Sweet breeze comin' through the car and nothing but wide open spaces up ahead. 'Wind comes sweepin' 'cross the plains,' you know that song? Awesome, I'm tellin' you. You can see for a million miles."
He'd really like to hear his brother's voice right now - even if Sammy was bitching about something, he'd even take that - but the phone's in his pocket and he doesn't want this thing in front of him to even be aware that there is a Sam, let alone what he's doing.
Instead, he hears another voice down below. Unfortunately, so does the shadow-thing - he can feel it shift, become aware (or remember) that it's got more quarry down inside the car.
It's the pregnant chick, talking into her phone. Saying, "Honey? Honey, can you hear me?"
She's got a honey at the other end of that damn phone.
A honey who's waiting for her someplace. At home, or maybe right here in this building. Maybe that's where she was going, to meet him so they could go to dinner. A little "you and me" time before the baby comes.
For all he knows, the Wookiee's got a honey too.
Everybody in the whole damn building's probably got one, in some form or other. All of 'em. And all the people who got hurt over the last thousand years. Somebody cares about them, he figures. Or cared, back in the day.
He heard Sam's voice a couple minutes ago. That'll have to do.
"You know what?" he says, and takes a step forward. "I gotta tell you something, you ugly, dumbass son of a bitch. A thousand years? I don't know who died and made you…whatever the hell you think you are, but I don't figure it gives you the right to go around screwing with people. What is it, you have an off day or something, so you trip somebody down the stairs? You crush 'em, or electrocute 'em? The hell is that?"
It's looking at him.
It's got no face, but he's got its attention.
"I don't know where you come from, pal," he snarls, "but where I come from, that kind of crap doesn't fly. You don't get to mess with people for shits and giggles. My name is Dean Winchester, you cheesy son of a bitch, and I am your worst fuckin' nightmare."
Gonna be a repeat of that thing with the taser, he thinks, and Sammy is gonna go ballistic. He's gonna go all purple-faced and scream, "The hell is wrong with you? Huh? What is the matter with you? I saved you so you could do this?"
Yeah, Sam, he thinks. You pretty much saved me for this.
There's a hum in the cables, like they're carrying sound. Or current, he realizes: there could be as much juice in them as there was in the wires from that taser he cranked all the way up to Deep-Fried Extra Crispy. Really they're just there for support, not to carry electricity, but there's the real world and there's his life, and right now there's a thousand-year-old pissed-off thing that's channeling a whole lot of energy looking him dead in the eye.
Beneath his boots the car shimmies and vibrates and the Wookiee kicks things up a notch, goes from late-night crooner to rock star, aiming to blow the eardrums out of everybody in the cheap seats. The cables are gonna let go, Dean thinks - they're gonna overheat and snap, and the car's gonna go plummeting down…
Like a…
Just out the window, Sammy said.
He doesn't dare grab his phone. Doesn't dare let that thing know that there's another Winchester, up on the 18th floor.
Sam might be the college boy, but they both dropped things out the window when they were kids.
Water balloons, mostly, but there was a rock or two. With luck, Sam remembers that. Remembers what happens when things hit the ground from a long way up. Open the window, or bust it, and overboard we go.
That statue's made of rock, but the 18th floor's a long way up.
"Hey, dumbass," Dean says, pretty loud, so he can hear himself over the Wookiee's caterwauling. "You ever hear this story? Guy walks into an elevator -"
Him and Sammy. They're tuned in to each other. Finish each other's sentences, once in a while. It's a good feeling, being back with Sam. Knowing someone's got his back. Knowing someone understands the plan, without either one of them saying anything.
The guy in Wilkes-Barre told them bagging the thing wouldn't be good enough. That they'd need to take it somewhere and crush it. They were figuring on the wrecking yard they passed out on the Interstate.
Gravity's a decent substitute.
Underneath him, the car's building up towards escape velocity. C'mon, Sammy, come ON, Dean thinks as the shadow-thing starts to loom forward. It does have a face, he decides - if you look at it dead-on, there's definitely something there. It's whole new kinds of ugly, and all it is now is smoke and shadows, but at some point, way back when, it might have been human.
Because that's what it wants (and somehow, maybe because he's too close, it's also what he wants), Dean leans forward too and lets the thing take a good long look at him while he soaks in a little of what it is and what it's feeling.
RAGE is what he gets at first - pure and stark, so absolute that it sends a bolt of cold through Dean's soul.
Then, there's more. Hopelessness. Grief.
Pain.
A thousand years of pain.
Because Sam's mostly right, because in some ways he is an idiot, he shoves his gun into its accustomed place in the small of his back, adjusts his balance - the damn elevator's gonna break the surly bonds of earth, and if that pregnant chick and the Wookiee haven't crapped their drawers by now, he has no idea why - and sticks out his now-empty hand.
"Pleased to meet you, you hellspawn son of a bitch," he says, and plunges his hand into the middle of the shadow-thing.
Needed a nap, he thinks as he swims up toward consciousness.
"My God, Dean," Sam's voice says from somewhere nearby, and, predictably, Sam is pissed. "Could you be any more of an idiot? What did you go up there for? I had it under control. All you had to do was wait."
"Not real good at that."
"No kidding."
He can sit up on his own, but once he's up he clutches at Sam's arm for support, because WOW he's lightheaded. He's on solid ground - he can figure out that much even though everything around him is spinning and WOW he's spinning too, like he's a Dean-shaped Tilt-a-Whirl - but where exactly he is isn't clear until he squints past Sam and sees a water fountain and a pried-open elevator door.
Elevator.
Yeah.
So not getting on an elevator ever again.
"Is it gone?" he mutters.
Sam reaches somewhere out of Dean's field of (WOW, spinning) vision and produces the bag they got from the guy in Wilkes-Barre. There's something inside it, but nothing with a definable shape. Looks like Sam's holding a bag of dirt. "Cool," Dean says, feeling a really-excellent-weed kind of high. "You drop it out the window?"
"What? No."
"No?"
"It was sandstone. I smashed it with a paperweight."
"Oh."
"Why did you want me to drop it out the window? If there'd been anybody down on the ground, it would have -"
Pain, he thinks. A thousand years of pain. "I just thought -"
"What?"
"Nothing."
There's a long bench down the hall a ways. The pregnant chick's sitting on it, with a guy in a suit. When she spots Dean, sees that he's back among the living, she gets up from the bench and makes her way over to him. Wobbling a little, but doing okay, from the (spinning) look of it. "You're all right," she says. "Thank God. I'm so glad you -"
"Not a problem," Dean replies.
She frowns a little at that, which doesn't make sense until he realizes that from her perspective, he didn't really do much of anything.
It takes him a moment to locate the Wookiee. He's a little farther down the hall, sitting on the floor with his arms wrapped around his head. There's a woman crouched beside him. His mom, maybe, or a nurse.
"He okay?" Dean asks.
"Keeps saying something about a monster," Sam replies.
Bit by bit, propping himself a couple of times with a hand laid flat against the wall, Dean works himself to his feet and inches close enough to the open elevator doors to peer inside the shaft. The roof of the car is five or six feet down, and there's a guy in coveralls standing on it, tinkering with the cables. He doesn't seem at all unnerved, but watching him isn't really something Dean feels like doing.
Now, or, pretty much, ever.
"We good?" he asks Sam quietly. "Can we -"
He turns over the car keys without a quarrel. Pretty much has to, because the whole world's a big lazy Susan; if he tried to drive, he'd have them up over the curb and embedded in the front of a building before they got half a block. Sam makes a face at the way the Impala's boxed in by the cars parked in front of and behind her, but he deposits Dean in the passenger seat without saying anything, then circles around and slides in behind the wheel.
"You okay, man?" he asks finally. "What happened up there?"
Dean quirks the corner of his mouth, goes for a show of good humor that he doesn't feel. "Vulcan mind meld."
"What?"
"I kinda -"
"What?"
"Nothing."
The bag's in the trunk. They're taking it back to the guy in Wilkes-Barre. He'll give it what amounts to a proper burial.
That's what the thing wanted.
To rest in peace.
And he gets that. He gets it more than he wants to admit.
It takes them almost half an hour to get out of the city. They've been on the open road only a couple of minutes when Dean asks his brother to pull over, and Sam has barely stopped the car when Dean thrusts the door open and clambers out to stand in a cluster of weeds alongside the road, bent low, hands on his knees. It's full dark, broken only by a thin sliver of moon, and the city they left behind is hidden beyond a long row of trees.
"You okay?" Sam asks, taking long steps through the weeds.
It's not cold out, but Dean shudders. When he's finished with that, he feels like he's gotten rid of something.
"It's all good, right?" he asks Sam.
Sam blinks, not he's not sure what Dean's asking, then says, "Sure. I guess so."
The pregnant chick didn't figure Dean did much of anything. The Wookiee probably didn't figure anybody did much of anything.
But the thing is…
"Guy walks into an elevator with a pregnant chick and a Wookiee," Dean says as he straightens up, wondering if his stomach's going to stay where it belongs.
Sam gets it. "Like, two priests and a rabbi walk into a bar."
"It was evil. Now it's just -" Dean thinks about the bag. "It's just dust."
Sam doesn't say anything for a minute, allowing Dean his little bit of reverie. Then he says, in the tone they use when there's no point in thinking about a thing any more, "You want to stop somewhere? Get a beer?"
Dean has to shift his footing a little; the ground's uneven under his feet, but - thank God - it's not moving.
And the city's a long way behind them.
He's got enough room to smile. "You're buying," he says to Sam.
* * * * *