FIC: WALKING WITH A GHOST 2/10
TITLE: Walking With a Ghost 2/10
RATING: R
WORDCOUNT: 2651
PAIRINGS: None
SPOILERS: Through episode 6x01… after that it goes completely & totally AU.
SUMMARY: Behind him, the kid’s eyes had gone black but Dean didn’t notice. He was too busy thinking about what that cigarette would taste like sliding down his throat, chased down with a cold beer. He was too busy thinking about what the luxury of a single night of not remembering shit about the last year and a half of his life would feel like.
The morning bloomed cold and gray and it stretched out for miles and miles. It felt like there was sand stuck behind his eyelids and Dean had to struggle to keep his eyes open, his fingers rhythmically clenching and unclenching on the steering wheel. He’d been driving for what felt like days with the highway spread out in front of him like dark fingers.
Dean knew that he should stop, get some rest or maybe just get some food in his belly but he can’t. He doesn’t want to stop driving until he has to, put as much distance between him and those burned out bones of Lisa’s house as he could. When Dean wasn’t lying to himself he could admit that he had never thought of it has his. It had never been home the way the feel of the highway underneath his ass and every cheap motel room in the Midwest were home.
He didn’t have much left but he had the clothes on his back and the Impala and the guns and that’s enough for now. He thought there might still be a couple credit cards that were still good and a meager wad of cash stuffed into the glove box but he wasn’t sure. Sometimes, he wondered if maybe the fact that that cash was there at all wasn’t some sort of subconscious sign all along. Maybe he’d always known that he couldn’t stay there forever, he just hadn’t figured it out yet. Maybe if he had figured it out sooner, Lisa and Ben would still be alive.
Shaking his head, Dean ran a shaky hand through his hair and scrubbed his weary eyes with his knuckles. If he’d learned anything by now it should have been that wishes and maybes don’t amount to shit. Wish in one hand and spit in the other and see which one gets full faster, Dean thought, grimly.
The highway had leveled out under him during the night and the everywhere he could see was flat and empty. The sun was just starting to peek up over the edge of the scorched prairie, casting golden shadows on the scrub grass that grew up along the edges of the road. He’d blown through Oklahoma and down into Texas faster than he’d thought he would. But that might have had something to do with his foot on the hammer, all the way down to the floorboard. Every mile that took him farther and farther away from everything he didn’t want to think about anymore was another weight lifted off of his shoulders. Sure, Dean had cared about them but caring about people just got them fucked up or dead or both.
Look at Sam, he thought grimly. A full year Sam had been back, his own fucking brother, and no one had bothered to tell him. Not even Bobby, who he had trusted like a father. Bobby was too busy pushing his own would have been, could have been bullshit on Dean’s shoulders. Bobby, who had never wanted to be a hunter in the first place, not really. He knew enough to know that that Bobby would give his right arm and Dean’s too if he could have his wife back, whole and alive and perfect again. Settle down and have kids, maybe, or at least not jump at every little noise in the dark. If Dean were to be honest with himself the white picket fence life was never his and never would be.
When his eyelids start closing and he couldn’t force them open again, he pulled off into the gravel parking lot of some gritty little no-tell motel just across the Texas state line. He digs out one of Austin Beaumont’s credit cards and the wad of cash just in case that doesn’t work and stumbles, half asleep, through the front door.
A tarnished little brass bell clangs painfully against the glass and a woman who reminds him an awful lot of Ellen Harvelle bobs her head up from where it had been sinking to her chest.
“Wh’can I do for you?” she slurred, still half asleep. She was blonde, probably somewhere brushing against forty but the worn in grooves of her face age her ten years.
“Need a room.” Dean plunked the credit card down on the counter, slid it towards her with two fingers.
The credit card slides through effortlessly and he tucks the cash away in his pocket, he was glad he didn’t have to use it because he knew it would be a few weeks at least before he could pick up another card somewhere along the way. It was getting harder and harder to make do with them anyway with everything going to shit and the banks closing their purse strings. They scrutinized the applications harder and the limits were lower than they’d been once upon a time.
The motel has that aged look, like it’s been rooted in the same spot for longer than Dean had been alive, maybe. They still used metal keys attached to a worn plastic keychain too big to fit into his pocket. The room is sparse but it’s clean enough to do him for a few nights. The walls were a peeling beige that looked like maybe they wanted to be white and the blankets were flimsy burgundy things, hardly thicker than sheets and covered with obnoxious cabbage roses.
Dean’s whole body was screaming to climb into the bed, his joints ached for it. But he needed to figure out what he was working with. He was John Winchester’s son and he didn’t do anything half-assed. He wasn’t left with much, just the stuff that Lisa didn’t want in the house around Ben. His clothes and his cell phone were gone. His shoes. He made a mental note to stop into a Wal-Mart somewhere along the line because he was probably going to need clean underwear, at least.
Dean dragged himself out to the Impala and poked through the backseat, there wasn’t much there.
Just an empty bottle of Jack like a fallen soldier in the back floorboard and that stupid green army man poking up out of the ashtray. Dean pinched the bridge of his nose in a futile effort to stave off the headache that was building; he could still remember the day that Sam, age six, had jammed that thing in there.
The trunk yielded a little bit more. All of his guns, except for the one he had kept tucked underneath the bed he sometimes shared with Lisa, were there. Lined up and in desperate need of some cleaning, they were faded and dingy looking, just like the blades next to them. A thin layer of dust and grit covered everything, a testament to the last time he’d crept down into the garage and cleaned them, loaded them. Those first few months, he had crept into the garage almost every night to clean and polish. He wanted them ready… just in case. Just in case he needed them. He was so sure that he was going to need them.
But he never needed them and after a while he tried to forget that they were there. That they were slowly collecting dust in the trunk of the Impala; that he didn’t need them anymore and wouldn’t ever need them again.
The headache was slowly becoming a dull roar and Dean shouldered the duffel bags cramped into the corners of the trunk. Opened up a third and stuffed as much into it as he could fit and shouldered that one too.
Back in the motel room, he laid them all out on the narrow, low twin bed that he wasn’t using. He laid the guns and the knives out in careful rows, just like John used to do what felt like two lifetimes ago. The other two duffel bags yielded more than just weapons. There were a couple pairs of clothes that he’d forgotten to unpack when he’d finally moved everything up into the closet in Lisa’s bedroom, those would hold him over for a couple days at least. There was a full bottle of Jack that Dean had forgotten about and he held it with the same tenderness he’d seen in Lisa when she’d pulled Ben in for a hug. Dean cracked the lid off of the bottle and let it burn a fire from his throat to his belly. He gulped at it, greedy and desperate, swallowing hard and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
The rest of the bags were filled with books and a half-crushed pack of cigarettes. He’d forgotten that they were there, buried under everything else. He halfheartedly packed them against the back of his hand, remembering the feel a cigarette between his lips. He’d picked it up while Sam was at college, just to piss off his father. Smoked off and on after that until Sam had started sticking nicotine patches on him while he slept, leaving anti-smoking pamphlets in the Impala’s glove box and taping up pictures of smoke blackened lungs to the bathroom mirrors in every flea bag motel they stayed in.
But Sam wasn’t here to nag him. He pulled one out of the pack, a little bent but still, he could smoke it. He flattened it out gently and tucked the end into his mouth, fishing in the bag for a lighter. Every minute that passed he wanted it, his lungs were screaming for it.
He turned the bag over and shook it, hard, but nothing fell out except some dirt that had been lining the bottom of the bag. Dean sighed and slapped the cigarette down on the bedside table, took another drink of the whiskey.
He’d passed a little gas station a few minutes back nestled in between a closed down video store and a nail salon. Heaving a sigh, Dean dug in his pocket for the Impala’s keys and his room key, which had slipped underneath of one of the beds.
***
The gas station was a tiny squat cinder block building with a single gas pump in the middle of the parking lot. The asphalt was cracked and buckling in places and the whole place looked like it had seen more than one generation come and go.
There was another one of those goddamn bells that jangled hard against the door when he pushed it open, blinking hard into the fluorescent lights. The guy behind the counter was a scrawny little shit who jumped when the door opened. It was a twenty-four hour gas station but Dean figured that the kid didn’t see many people past nine o’clock, there probably weren’t any more than a hundred people living within town limits so far as he could tell.
Dean hefted a six pack of lager underneath one arm and grabbed a couple bags of beef jerky to hold him over until he could find someplace to grab breakfast in the morning. He dumped everything on the counter and threw a lighter on top.
“Gimme a pack of Malboro Reds,” he muttered, rolling his eyes up at the closed circuit TV.
There was nothing but a bunch of static, so it was probably safe to use the credit card sitting in his pocket, if it wasn’t maxed out already. He swiped the card and twisted the plain, grey plastic bags around his wrist, shoved the pack of smokes down into his pocket.
“Have a good night,” the kid chirped, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet like he was anxious for something. Something about the kid, the way he was wobbling around behind the register like he was a little kid who knew that Christmas was coming, didn’t sit right with Dean.
“Yeah,” he muttered, quirking an eyebrow and casting a quick glance back around the store.
“’Night.”
Dean hefted the door open with his free hand and cringed when the fucking bell slammed against the glass again. Behind him, the kid’s eyes had gone black but Dean didn’t notice. He was too busy thinking about what that cigarette would taste like sliding down his throat, chased down with a cold beer. He was too busy thinking about what the luxury of a single night of not remembering shit about the last year and a half of his life would feel like.
“Hey, Dean?”
Dean froze. The boy had never known his name. The credit card he’d used hadn’t had his name on it and he sure as fuck never told him as much. Turning around slowly, he dropped his free hand back behind back and fumbled for the gun stashed in the waistband of his jeans.
“Do y’think that they suffered much?” the kid-no, the demon inside of him-asked, coming out from behind the counter. The kid was barely legal, he wore jeans that were a little too short and didn’t quite reach his ankles and there was a light smattering of freckles on the boy’s cheeks. Dean’s hand froze on his revolver, fingers tight around the handle. Could he kill a kid who hadn’t even had his first real sip of alcohol yet? Probably hadn’t seen a real, honest to god pair of tits, either?
A kid who might have been Ben in just a few short years.
“Who?” Dean growled, his fingers were twitching against the butt of the gun. Maybe he was useless, like Sam and Bobby thought. Grown soft by home cooking and a woman in bed with him every night. Because once he would have pulled that gun out and squeezed off a few shots, no problem. But now, he was frozen, uncertain. He saw Ben’s face super-imposed on the kid’s body.
“Your bitch and her kid,” the demon sneered. “Wonder if they hissed and popped like bacon, what do you think?”
Yeah, he could shoot the kid. Dean whipped the revolver out of his waistband, leveled it against his other wrist and squeezed off a shot just as the fucking demon abandoned ship. The kid had crumpled to the floor like an empty pack of Marlboros and he was steadily vomiting black smoke.
Dean didn’t stay for the finale. He tossed the beer and the beef jerky into the backseat and lay his gun on the passenger seat. Sam’s seat, if he were here. But he wasn’t. Dean gritted his teeth and didn’t let up on the gas until he was a swirling cloud of dust coming to a stop in the motel parking lot. He left the Impala running; he had to keep going, now. He couldn’t stay now that he’d left some snot-nosed kid lying bleeding on the floor.
It took him less than two minutes to throw everything back into the duffel bags and only one more to get it all packed up in the trunk again.
He watched the sun finish its molasses slow ascent into the sky from his rear view mirror while he lit up a cigarette. Fuck, he should have known. He should have known that it would be him that got Lisa and Ben killed one day. He was a hunter and even more than that he was a Winchester. He should have known better than to promise anything to Sam. Should have known better than to think he could keep them safe. Not when every piece of shit demon this side of hell was gunning for him.
He packed his cigarettes against the steering wheel and popped one out of the box. The smoke felt good, harsh in his mouth and he rolled it around his teeth before finally sucking it down. He took another long drag and another.
He should have known better.
PART ONE.
RATING: R
WORDCOUNT: 2651
PAIRINGS: None
SPOILERS: Through episode 6x01… after that it goes completely & totally AU.
SUMMARY: Behind him, the kid’s eyes had gone black but Dean didn’t notice. He was too busy thinking about what that cigarette would taste like sliding down his throat, chased down with a cold beer. He was too busy thinking about what the luxury of a single night of not remembering shit about the last year and a half of his life would feel like.
The morning bloomed cold and gray and it stretched out for miles and miles. It felt like there was sand stuck behind his eyelids and Dean had to struggle to keep his eyes open, his fingers rhythmically clenching and unclenching on the steering wheel. He’d been driving for what felt like days with the highway spread out in front of him like dark fingers.
Dean knew that he should stop, get some rest or maybe just get some food in his belly but he can’t. He doesn’t want to stop driving until he has to, put as much distance between him and those burned out bones of Lisa’s house as he could. When Dean wasn’t lying to himself he could admit that he had never thought of it has his. It had never been home the way the feel of the highway underneath his ass and every cheap motel room in the Midwest were home.
He didn’t have much left but he had the clothes on his back and the Impala and the guns and that’s enough for now. He thought there might still be a couple credit cards that were still good and a meager wad of cash stuffed into the glove box but he wasn’t sure. Sometimes, he wondered if maybe the fact that that cash was there at all wasn’t some sort of subconscious sign all along. Maybe he’d always known that he couldn’t stay there forever, he just hadn’t figured it out yet. Maybe if he had figured it out sooner, Lisa and Ben would still be alive.
Shaking his head, Dean ran a shaky hand through his hair and scrubbed his weary eyes with his knuckles. If he’d learned anything by now it should have been that wishes and maybes don’t amount to shit. Wish in one hand and spit in the other and see which one gets full faster, Dean thought, grimly.
The highway had leveled out under him during the night and the everywhere he could see was flat and empty. The sun was just starting to peek up over the edge of the scorched prairie, casting golden shadows on the scrub grass that grew up along the edges of the road. He’d blown through Oklahoma and down into Texas faster than he’d thought he would. But that might have had something to do with his foot on the hammer, all the way down to the floorboard. Every mile that took him farther and farther away from everything he didn’t want to think about anymore was another weight lifted off of his shoulders. Sure, Dean had cared about them but caring about people just got them fucked up or dead or both.
Look at Sam, he thought grimly. A full year Sam had been back, his own fucking brother, and no one had bothered to tell him. Not even Bobby, who he had trusted like a father. Bobby was too busy pushing his own would have been, could have been bullshit on Dean’s shoulders. Bobby, who had never wanted to be a hunter in the first place, not really. He knew enough to know that that Bobby would give his right arm and Dean’s too if he could have his wife back, whole and alive and perfect again. Settle down and have kids, maybe, or at least not jump at every little noise in the dark. If Dean were to be honest with himself the white picket fence life was never his and never would be.
When his eyelids start closing and he couldn’t force them open again, he pulled off into the gravel parking lot of some gritty little no-tell motel just across the Texas state line. He digs out one of Austin Beaumont’s credit cards and the wad of cash just in case that doesn’t work and stumbles, half asleep, through the front door.
A tarnished little brass bell clangs painfully against the glass and a woman who reminds him an awful lot of Ellen Harvelle bobs her head up from where it had been sinking to her chest.
“Wh’can I do for you?” she slurred, still half asleep. She was blonde, probably somewhere brushing against forty but the worn in grooves of her face age her ten years.
“Need a room.” Dean plunked the credit card down on the counter, slid it towards her with two fingers.
The credit card slides through effortlessly and he tucks the cash away in his pocket, he was glad he didn’t have to use it because he knew it would be a few weeks at least before he could pick up another card somewhere along the way. It was getting harder and harder to make do with them anyway with everything going to shit and the banks closing their purse strings. They scrutinized the applications harder and the limits were lower than they’d been once upon a time.
The motel has that aged look, like it’s been rooted in the same spot for longer than Dean had been alive, maybe. They still used metal keys attached to a worn plastic keychain too big to fit into his pocket. The room is sparse but it’s clean enough to do him for a few nights. The walls were a peeling beige that looked like maybe they wanted to be white and the blankets were flimsy burgundy things, hardly thicker than sheets and covered with obnoxious cabbage roses.
Dean’s whole body was screaming to climb into the bed, his joints ached for it. But he needed to figure out what he was working with. He was John Winchester’s son and he didn’t do anything half-assed. He wasn’t left with much, just the stuff that Lisa didn’t want in the house around Ben. His clothes and his cell phone were gone. His shoes. He made a mental note to stop into a Wal-Mart somewhere along the line because he was probably going to need clean underwear, at least.
Dean dragged himself out to the Impala and poked through the backseat, there wasn’t much there.
Just an empty bottle of Jack like a fallen soldier in the back floorboard and that stupid green army man poking up out of the ashtray. Dean pinched the bridge of his nose in a futile effort to stave off the headache that was building; he could still remember the day that Sam, age six, had jammed that thing in there.
The trunk yielded a little bit more. All of his guns, except for the one he had kept tucked underneath the bed he sometimes shared with Lisa, were there. Lined up and in desperate need of some cleaning, they were faded and dingy looking, just like the blades next to them. A thin layer of dust and grit covered everything, a testament to the last time he’d crept down into the garage and cleaned them, loaded them. Those first few months, he had crept into the garage almost every night to clean and polish. He wanted them ready… just in case. Just in case he needed them. He was so sure that he was going to need them.
But he never needed them and after a while he tried to forget that they were there. That they were slowly collecting dust in the trunk of the Impala; that he didn’t need them anymore and wouldn’t ever need them again.
The headache was slowly becoming a dull roar and Dean shouldered the duffel bags cramped into the corners of the trunk. Opened up a third and stuffed as much into it as he could fit and shouldered that one too.
Back in the motel room, he laid them all out on the narrow, low twin bed that he wasn’t using. He laid the guns and the knives out in careful rows, just like John used to do what felt like two lifetimes ago. The other two duffel bags yielded more than just weapons. There were a couple pairs of clothes that he’d forgotten to unpack when he’d finally moved everything up into the closet in Lisa’s bedroom, those would hold him over for a couple days at least. There was a full bottle of Jack that Dean had forgotten about and he held it with the same tenderness he’d seen in Lisa when she’d pulled Ben in for a hug. Dean cracked the lid off of the bottle and let it burn a fire from his throat to his belly. He gulped at it, greedy and desperate, swallowing hard and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
The rest of the bags were filled with books and a half-crushed pack of cigarettes. He’d forgotten that they were there, buried under everything else. He halfheartedly packed them against the back of his hand, remembering the feel a cigarette between his lips. He’d picked it up while Sam was at college, just to piss off his father. Smoked off and on after that until Sam had started sticking nicotine patches on him while he slept, leaving anti-smoking pamphlets in the Impala’s glove box and taping up pictures of smoke blackened lungs to the bathroom mirrors in every flea bag motel they stayed in.
But Sam wasn’t here to nag him. He pulled one out of the pack, a little bent but still, he could smoke it. He flattened it out gently and tucked the end into his mouth, fishing in the bag for a lighter. Every minute that passed he wanted it, his lungs were screaming for it.
He turned the bag over and shook it, hard, but nothing fell out except some dirt that had been lining the bottom of the bag. Dean sighed and slapped the cigarette down on the bedside table, took another drink of the whiskey.
He’d passed a little gas station a few minutes back nestled in between a closed down video store and a nail salon. Heaving a sigh, Dean dug in his pocket for the Impala’s keys and his room key, which had slipped underneath of one of the beds.
***
The gas station was a tiny squat cinder block building with a single gas pump in the middle of the parking lot. The asphalt was cracked and buckling in places and the whole place looked like it had seen more than one generation come and go.
There was another one of those goddamn bells that jangled hard against the door when he pushed it open, blinking hard into the fluorescent lights. The guy behind the counter was a scrawny little shit who jumped when the door opened. It was a twenty-four hour gas station but Dean figured that the kid didn’t see many people past nine o’clock, there probably weren’t any more than a hundred people living within town limits so far as he could tell.
Dean hefted a six pack of lager underneath one arm and grabbed a couple bags of beef jerky to hold him over until he could find someplace to grab breakfast in the morning. He dumped everything on the counter and threw a lighter on top.
“Gimme a pack of Malboro Reds,” he muttered, rolling his eyes up at the closed circuit TV.
There was nothing but a bunch of static, so it was probably safe to use the credit card sitting in his pocket, if it wasn’t maxed out already. He swiped the card and twisted the plain, grey plastic bags around his wrist, shoved the pack of smokes down into his pocket.
“Have a good night,” the kid chirped, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet like he was anxious for something. Something about the kid, the way he was wobbling around behind the register like he was a little kid who knew that Christmas was coming, didn’t sit right with Dean.
“Yeah,” he muttered, quirking an eyebrow and casting a quick glance back around the store.
“’Night.”
Dean hefted the door open with his free hand and cringed when the fucking bell slammed against the glass again. Behind him, the kid’s eyes had gone black but Dean didn’t notice. He was too busy thinking about what that cigarette would taste like sliding down his throat, chased down with a cold beer. He was too busy thinking about what the luxury of a single night of not remembering shit about the last year and a half of his life would feel like.
“Hey, Dean?”
Dean froze. The boy had never known his name. The credit card he’d used hadn’t had his name on it and he sure as fuck never told him as much. Turning around slowly, he dropped his free hand back behind back and fumbled for the gun stashed in the waistband of his jeans.
“Do y’think that they suffered much?” the kid-no, the demon inside of him-asked, coming out from behind the counter. The kid was barely legal, he wore jeans that were a little too short and didn’t quite reach his ankles and there was a light smattering of freckles on the boy’s cheeks. Dean’s hand froze on his revolver, fingers tight around the handle. Could he kill a kid who hadn’t even had his first real sip of alcohol yet? Probably hadn’t seen a real, honest to god pair of tits, either?
A kid who might have been Ben in just a few short years.
“Who?” Dean growled, his fingers were twitching against the butt of the gun. Maybe he was useless, like Sam and Bobby thought. Grown soft by home cooking and a woman in bed with him every night. Because once he would have pulled that gun out and squeezed off a few shots, no problem. But now, he was frozen, uncertain. He saw Ben’s face super-imposed on the kid’s body.
“Your bitch and her kid,” the demon sneered. “Wonder if they hissed and popped like bacon, what do you think?”
Yeah, he could shoot the kid. Dean whipped the revolver out of his waistband, leveled it against his other wrist and squeezed off a shot just as the fucking demon abandoned ship. The kid had crumpled to the floor like an empty pack of Marlboros and he was steadily vomiting black smoke.
Dean didn’t stay for the finale. He tossed the beer and the beef jerky into the backseat and lay his gun on the passenger seat. Sam’s seat, if he were here. But he wasn’t. Dean gritted his teeth and didn’t let up on the gas until he was a swirling cloud of dust coming to a stop in the motel parking lot. He left the Impala running; he had to keep going, now. He couldn’t stay now that he’d left some snot-nosed kid lying bleeding on the floor.
It took him less than two minutes to throw everything back into the duffel bags and only one more to get it all packed up in the trunk again.
He watched the sun finish its molasses slow ascent into the sky from his rear view mirror while he lit up a cigarette. Fuck, he should have known. He should have known that it would be him that got Lisa and Ben killed one day. He was a hunter and even more than that he was a Winchester. He should have known better than to promise anything to Sam. Should have known better than to think he could keep them safe. Not when every piece of shit demon this side of hell was gunning for him.
He packed his cigarettes against the steering wheel and popped one out of the box. The smoke felt good, harsh in his mouth and he rolled it around his teeth before finally sucking it down. He took another long drag and another.
He should have known better.
PART ONE.