SPN FIC - Bay (Part 4 of 12)
Part 1 is here.
Part 2 is here.
Part 3 is here.
A mysterious message, bearing a single word: BAY. It could be a cry for help, or it could be a trap. Armed with a little information from Bobby, Sam and Dean travel to a tiny town in the New Mexico desert and find themselves surrounded by angry hunters, oddball locals, and an elusive creature that's been slaughtering humans since before The West Was Won.
BTW: Don't let the "AU" put you off. We're simply fast-forwarding a bit, past deals and destinies and demon blood, to a time when the brothers are ... brothers. Saving people, hunting things. The family business.
CHARACTERS: Dean, Sam, Bobby, various OCs
TIMELINE: July 2011, AU after mid-Season 5
RATING: PG
GENRE: Gen
SPOILERS: Nothing after mid-Season 5
LENGTH: Remains to be seen; this part is 3674 words
BAY
By Carol Davis
Four
Fielding looked down at the planchette as if it were a scorpion that had crawled up onto his lap: surprised, a little curious, but ultimately very, very freaked out. He flicked the thing aside, then got up from the floor and brushed his pants off with a couple of fast, jerky movements of his hands. The planchette hadn't left any residue, of course, but the look on his face said he felt like he was marked.
"Jesus," he sputtered, and shifted in place a couple of times, as if he felt like running but had absolutely no idea where to run to, or what might be waiting for him when he got there.
"Son -" Bobby said, but Fielding cut him off.
"We're done with this," he told Bobby.
"It don't necessarily mean anything."
"You're damn right it doesn't mean anything. I went along with this because you knew my dad, and he respected you. But this is - we're done with this."
"Might not've meant you," Dean pointed out.
"I don't care if it meant me. I don't care if it meant anybody."
"We should -" Bobby began.
"You do whatever you want. I can't stop you. But I think you should do it somewhere other than my mother's house. And I'm -" Again, Fielding shuffled in place, aching to run, looking as if he thought any one of them might grab him before he could get out the door. He didn't look as though he trusted anyone, something so familiar it made Sam's gut turn over in sympathy. Rather than say anything, Sam stepped aside, giving Fielding a clear path to the dining room, and, presumably, the back door.
Fielding didn't take the opportunity, though. He stood looking down at the planchette, both hands knotted into fists.
"Let's think this through," Bobby said.
"I hate those things," Monica murmured from the couch. "They cause more grief than they do anything else."
And Dean looked over at Sam: Told you we should've thrown it out.
"I'm going to work," Fielding said, fishing in his pants pocket and pulling out a fist wrapped around something Sam assumed were his car keys. "I missed lunch for this. I'm not going to miss dinner for it, too. You people do what you want."
"Got a good cafeteria there where you work?" Dean asked brightly.
Trying to cheer Fielding up, Sam knew. To distract him.
Fielding, of course, didn't take it that way. "I'm a chef," he snapped. "I make the food. People enjoy it."
Dean's eyebrows did a little jump. "Okay, then. Didn't mean anything by -"
"I'm a good chef. No - I'm a great chef."
"Didn't say you weren't."
Fielding's right foot moved. His intention was clear: he was going to stomp on the planchette, crush it, make sure it didn't deliver any more messages. But a noise jumped out of his throat, a low, visceral grunt of pain, and instead of crushing the planchette he kicked it across the room with the toe of his sneaker, a beautifully precise clip of a very small object, and he stood watching as it rebounded off the glass front of his mother's curio cabinet.
Then he stormed out.
A moment later, Leona got up from the floor and followed him, her rubber sandals flapping softly against her feet as she went.
They heard the door slam: the Winchesters, Bobby, Silvio and Monica. Then they heard voices. A voice, at least.
"Been hard for him, since his dad's been gone," Silvio said.
"It might not be anything," Sam offered. "It might not have meant him."
"If it meant any of us, that's not exactly good news," Silvio replied with a wry smile. "Don't know about you, but I've still got a few things on my bucket list. Not really overjoyed at the idea of checking out any time soon."
They heard a car engine roar into life. Tires shimmying on dirt.
Then, the sound of the engine fading into the distance.
Leona came back inside a couple of minutes later. She looked tired more than anything else, and stood in the doorway rubbing her temples with the fingers of a splayed-out hand. "Stay if you like," she said quietly. "I think I'm going upstairs for a while."
It was something Sam had always admired: the solidarity of women. Leona had barely reached the top of the staircase when Monica got up from the couch and followed her. He could hear nothing from upstairs other than footsteps and the creak of a door, and he envied the two women their connected silence. It made him remember Jess with her friends, a quiet, "It's all right," their firm dismissal of him and any other man who might be present. There might be tea, or a shot of something stronger, or chocolate.
Hugs. There were always hugs.
"Gotta be angry," Dean said, and when Sam glanced at him, Dean was looking at Bobby. "If he's delivering messages like that. 'You die'."
"Elo? Nothing says it's him," Bobby replied.
"Who, then?"
"Might not be a threat. Might be a warning."
"Then we shouldn't have let him go," Dean said, nodding toward the door, meaning Fielding.
"Come here," Bobby said, and pointed to the planchette, lying on the floor in front of the curio cabinet. "Get that. Let's do this."
Dean didn't object, though his reluctance to have anything more to do with the spirit board was plain on his face. Had been plain on his face for three days now, Sam thought, but Dean retrieved the planchette and sat down cross-legged close to the board.
Sam was a long way from eager to have anything to do with the board, himself - but they'd committed themselves to this, he thought, by coming here, by paying attention to the board in the first place. What was the old saying? In for a penny, in for a pound. It was what Dad had taught them; if you're in the game, you're in it.
You don't walk out in the middle of a hand.
It was just a kids' toy, he thought. He'd bought it in a toy store.
Silvio spoke to the board quietly, in that old language he'd used a few minutes ago. Something softer than Bobby's Latin, although maybe it wasn't the language itself, maybe it was the music of Silvio's voice.
The two older men, Silvio and Bobby, wore the same mournful expression, something that made Sam want to ask what had happened out here, what the two of them had shared.
"We're here," Silvio said to the air. "Been a long time, amigo. But I'm listening."
It can help, Sam thought. This thing. It helped before.
He lay two fingers on the smooth plastic of the planchette. Felt nothing. Sensed nothing.
~~~~~
He joined his brother and Bobby out in the yard a little while later, eyes tired, all of him tired from lack of sleep, the dry air, the altitude. He'd begun to understand why Dean felt the way he did about New Mexico - about pretty much anywhere, really. They'd been back on the road for a year, both of them thinking that something would eventually change, that they'd wake up one more and things would be right, but it hadn't happened. Not yet, at least.
He'd slept. Tried to sleep. Dean complained.
They tried to help people. Sometimes succeeded. Sometimes failed.
"What?" Dean asked, and there was something in his voice, a genuine desire to help, the need to care that was as much pure Dean as the jokes and the love of bad food and loud music and the layers of self-protection masquerading as indifference.
"What do we do?" Sam asked Bobby. "The board's not talking, but if Field's in danger, we have to do something."
"Elo wouldn't hurt his boy," Bobby replied. "Ain't a chance in hell."
"Even if he's angry?"
"If he meant to hurt the boy, he would've done it long before now. Wouldn't have bothered saying howdy to you two. But like I said: there ain't no chance. He loved that boy. Was as proud of him as it's possible for a father to be."
"I can see that," Dean said mildly. "Dude's a chef," and there was the smallest bit of mockery in it.
"Would've thought that'd impress you and that gaping maw of yours."
"He said chef. That means -"
"How do we get through to whoever it is?" Sam asked Bobby.
"Sushi," Dean persisted. "Girly food."
Sam raised an eyebrow at him. "Dude. Chef on South Park." Then he turned back to Bobby. "If it's a warning - maybe from his father, maybe from somebody else - maybe we ought to find out if Field's got enemies. A rival. Something. The planchette didn't fly around the room aimlessly - it seemed like it hit him deliberately."
He expected Bobby to reply, to have suggestions. He was surprised when Bobby wandered away a few steps and rested his hands on the battered pickets of Leona Bay's fence.
"You okay, Bobby?" Sam asked, approaching the older man.
"You boys," Bobby said, and cupped the lower part of his face in his hand. He looked no less tired than Sam felt, and it took him a while to take the hand back down and lay it back on the fence. "We spent New Year's out here. Long time ago. The four of us: me, your daddy. Billy Harvelle. And Elo Bay. Spent a couple months, off and on, tracking down a devalpa, and we finally caught the son of a bitch on New Year's Eve. Built a campfire, out in the desert, and we saw the New Year in half-hammered, laughing, feelin' better than we'd felt in a long time."
"Sounds good," Sam said, smiling.
"I'm the last one," Bobby told him, looking Sam in the eye, not blinking, his face a mask of sorrow and regret. "They're all gone. Gonna be no more New Year's Eves sitting out under the stars and drinking a toast to putting things right." He reached out as if he intended to pat Sam's arm, but took his hand back before the gesture was halfway to being complete. "The hell I've been through with you boys, and Jo - and now Field. I don't want to be the last one standing. You understand that? We're not gonna let that happen."
"Nobody's gonna die," Dean said. "Ain't happening."
"I'm glad you're so positive."
"Of course I'm positive. I got that can-do attitude, man. We're here, we're conscious, we're capable, and we're gonna fix this thing."
"That's assuming they want us to fix it," Sam told his brother.
"Why wouldn't they?"
"Because these people know each other. And we just walked in here off the -"
"Off the I-15? The spirit contacted us, man. It must figure we know what we're doing."
"Or you just happened to have a Ouija board sitting on the table," Bobby pointed out. "Everybody else who had one handy was probably a thirteen-year-old girl." He waved away Dean's attempt at a response and sucked in a breath. "You're right, Sam - they don't need us here. They've handled things in this part of the state pretty much single-handed for a long time. But I'll talk to Leona, after she's had a chance to get her thoughts together. See what she wants us to do."
"And if she wants us to leave?" Dean protested. "What then?"
"Then we move on," Bobby said.
But he didn't sound like that was what he intended to do. He had turned around, and was looking at the house.
He didn't sound like he intended to leave, no matter who told him to do it.
All three of them turned to look when Silvio came out of the house, bouncing a set of keys up and down on his palm. "Monny's staying," he told Bobby. "I got a place to run. You need me, call, but whatever it is, Monny can handle it just as well as I can."
He left at the wheel of the Suburban Sam had assumed was Leona's. But maybe it was like that out here: take the car, bring it back when you can.
"A place to run?" Dean said. "Is he kidding?"
"You'd be surprised," Bobby replied.
~~~~~
As he'd expected, Kim called out to him the moment he came near the bar. "What's going on?" she asked, leaning over the bar so she wouldn't have to raise her voice. "Jerry said you had some kind of a family thing. Is your mom okay?"
Fielding looked past her, found his reflection in the long mirror behind the rows of bottles. He looked like shit on toast, he figured - bad in a way he hadn't looked since school. Since those first nights away from home, wondering how the massive undertaking called Life On Your Own was going to play out.
"Yo," Kim said, prodding.
"She's fine. She's - yeah, she's fine. Just got something I need to figure out, is all."
"Money?"
It hadn't been money for a long time, although in one sense or another it was always about money. The car, the apartment, his student loans. He counted himself lucky the restaurant hadn't gone under during the recession, and that management hadn't decided to find themselves a different chef. He thought of that song Jerry liked to whistle - Luck, be a lady tonight - and it made him smile, though without any humor behind it.
"I'm fine," he told Kim, and shook his head. "Nothing important."
She reached out and patted down the collar of his shirt. "Good. If she shows up again tonight," she teased, "you wanna be lookin' good and feelin' fine."
She.
Fielding looked down the length of the bar, at the seat she'd occupied the last few nights, sipping a single drink and smiling coyly when he showed up to sit beside her. The first night, she'd watched his reflection in the mirror. He'd noticed but had done nothing about it until Kim asked him if he was an idiot.
"Because -?" he asked.
"You want her to e-mail you? Send you a Tweet? Hit you over the head?"
"She's not looking at me. Is she?"
"My God," Kim had groaned. "You're whole new kinds of an idiot."
Her name was Alexandra, she'd said a few minutes after he sat down beside her. New in town. From Arizona, near Sedona.
He'd heard Luck, be a lady being whistled behind him, glanced back there to see Jerry looming alongside one of the tables, flexing his eyebrows like Groucho Marx.
"What's she see in me?" he asked Kim.
"I have no idea."
"But she's coming back, right?"
"Four nights in a row? Honey. She's coming back."
She had: four nights in a row, arriving just before the kitchen closed at eleven. She always sat in the same seat at the bar, sipped a single drink, watched the other patrons in the mirror and seemed to be content to let life circulate around her. If other men approached her, Kim told Fielding, she smiled and turned down their offer of a drink.
"What's she see in me?" he persisted. "A woman that looks that good."
"You have a cute smile."
"And that's it?"
"I'm sure she's interested in your acute business sense."
"Stop."
"And your ability to slice a tomato paper-thin."
"You're like my mother," he complained. "'Of course she likes you, honey. You're my sweet baby boy, and there isn't a woman walking the earth who could resist your innumerable charms.' Give me a break. I'm a glorified fry-cook."
"Suit yourself," Kim said. "But there's that tomato thing. Gets me every time."
"But you're you."
"Wow. Thanks."
"That's not what I meant."
"I know what you meant. Loser."
"She's coming back, right? You think she's coming back?"
Alexandra from Sedona.
Luck, be a lady…
He checked himself out in the men's room mirror. Made sure there were no stains on his shirt, that his pits didn't stink, did the blowing-into-your-hand thing to check his breath. He had a couple of condoms in his wallet, plenty of cash, a tankful of gas.
"Hi," he said as he slid onto the stool next to hers. "You came back."
"I did," she replied, and smiled.
~~~~~
Dean shifted slowly up out of sleep listening to the whispering of a quiet house: the hum of the ceiling fan, the steady tuck-cluck of one of Leona's antique clocks, the wet snuffle of his brother's breathing. Sam, much too long for Leona's couch, had unrolled a sleeping bag on the floor and was sprawled out on top of it, shucked down to t-shirt and jeans, barefoot, one hand shoved up under his head to serve as a pillow. The couch wasn't sized any better for Dean but he'd made do, legs propped on the armrest, feet dangling in midair.
Leona and Monica and Bobby were all asleep upstairs. No footsteps, no voices.
Leona's invitation to stay had included a simple dinner, access to a couple of sixes of beer and plenty of coffee, and use of any available horizontal surface when it came time to lie down and get a few hours of rest. She'd moved through the house slowly, almost expressionless, saying little, leaving it to Monica to issue a few instructions, show the Winchesters where the bathroom was, warn them about the cupboard door that had a habit of swinging shut on its own and leaving bruises on anyone searching for a coffee mug.
"I'm sorry," Dean told her before she went upstairs for the night.
"Not your fault," she said.
He'd spent a lot of time - as far back as grade school - wondering why hideous shit happened to good people. Himself, for instance. He'd been a good kid. He remembered helping his mother with Sammy, folding clean washcloths for her, stretching up to set out forks and spoons on the table when it was getting close to time for supper. Dad, too: Dean had helped him tidy up his tools and put them away in the big red toolbox.
Sam might have been a good kid, too, he figured, if he'd gotten a fair shake. As it was, he'd only had the chance to poop and cry and suck on his toes before Dad grabbed the two of them and hit the road.
When he got tired of staring up at the ceiling he eased off the couch and padded silently through the house to the back door, pressed it open and went out onto the tiny back porch, holding onto the door as it closed so it wouldn't creak, wouldn't wake anyone.
That amazing swath of stars, the best part of being out in the desert, greeted him when he tipped his head back.
Made him feel at home, somehow.
He heard a soft rustle and decided it was just a breath of wind ruffling the trees, though it might have been something on the prowl. He sipped in breath and listened but didn't hear it again.
He tried asking himself: Stay here?
He'd taken to doing that everywhere he and Sam stopped, and a few of the places they simply rolled on through. Stay here? But the answer was always No. Sam would have agreed, he thought, if he had ever announced that the answer was Yes - that he wanted to try to make a go of it, find a house or a trailer or a couple of rooms over a store and call it home base, set up a place to come back to in between jobs, a place to leave some stuff, that he could look forward to going back to.
Maybe Sam had been asking himself the same question this past year and had found any number of places that merited a yes; if he had, he hadn't said so. Maybe he was content to let the miles unspool behind them, to leave everyplace behind, let the rest of his life unfold one day at a time.
Whatever the truth was, Sam hadn't said.
The smell was wrong, Dean decided after a while. The dryness of it, the way it prickled his nose and set up a dull ache behind his eyes.
No, he thought. No.
And he went back inside.
He'd been lying down for only a minute or two when the scratching began: that slow slide of something against something else. It made a tight grab inside his chest as he levered himself into a sit and looked at the spirit board, there on Leona's coffee table with her magazines and her TV remote and a little cactus in a ceramic pot. On the other side of the table, Sam lay fast asleep, snuffling through irritated sinuses, twitching in his dreams like a dog bounding after prey.
D.
Sam? Dean thought, but something kept him silent.
A.
N.
He leaned forward a little, fingers moving, wanting to touch the planchette, communicate with it, although it was communicating perfectly well on its own.
G. E. R.
The little plastic triangle lay still for a moment, then began its journey again.
D.
A.
"Got that, Will Robinson," Dean whispered. "Gonna need some more to go on, okay? You talking about Fielding? Fielding's in danger?"
YES.
Down on the floor, Sam rolled onto his belly and muttered something into the sleeping bag. Dean looked down at him, at his brother's unworried, easy sprawl.
Then he reached out and tapped the planchette with the tip of his index finger.
"You," he whispered. "Are you Fielding's dad?"
He thought for a moment that it wasn't going to answer him. That it couldn't, or didn't want to.
Then it told him NO.
"Who -"
The planchette didn't respond. It sat silent and unmoving for so long that Dean leaned forward again and pulled in a breath, intending to use it to rouse his brother.
The planchette moved.
Slid slowly across the board.
And came to rest on top of the letter J.
Part 5…