Hope (1/2) for spn_summergen
Title: Hope
Author: septembers_coda
Recipient: spn_summergen
Rating: PG-13, for language and adult concepts
Warnings: None
Word-Count: ~14,600
Author's Notes: All of the prompts were great, but I chose this one: “Sam finds out he's going to be a father and as if that isn't bad enough Crowley informs him that the demon blood in his veins will be passed on to his child.” Many thanks to brightly_lit, who provided not just awesome beta skills, but ideas and inspiration.
Summary: Sam’s been to hell, lost his soul, and gotten it back. When one consequence of being soulless lands in his lap, Sam’s whole world is thrown into turmoil, and nothing he has ever learned can help him now.
“What I figure is this. You do your job, like you always have. And what is our job, Sammy? Saving the world. Now it will just have one more thing in it that you want to save.”
When the pregnant woman showed up, Sam got that feeling again, one he was beginning, horribly, to recognize: familiarity mixed with dread, walled in by an unassailable blankness.
He and Dean were in a bookstore, following a lead on a case. His soul still felt tender inside him, like a bad bruise slowly healing, stabbing him with pain each time he bumped it against the wall Death had erected inside him. He stifled a gasp of pain now as he watched the woman, whom he’d noticed on the way into the store, hesitantly approach Dean and speak to him, looking at her shoes (or in their direction, anyway-Sam doubted she could see them over her belly).
He studied her surreptitiously, trying to trigger even a faint echo of a memory. Typical of his reaction anytime he confronted something that had happened during his soulless time, that feeling that he should know her was all he got.
She was rather small, kind of wispy and insubstantial-looking. Her fair skin was dusted with butterscotch freckles, and she had vividly blue eyes and blonde hair. She was pretty in a delicate way, but she looked exhausted, her small frame overwhelmed by her huge belly. Sam felt a sudden thrill of fear that she would go into labor right in front of him-she looked like she could.
Her voice didn’t carry to Sam through the bookstore, but Dean’s did. “Oh, you know Sam?” he said in his usual easy way with women. “Yeah, he’s here somewhere…”
Well, there was no avoiding it now. Sam came forward reluctantly. The woman looked up as he drew close, and Sam’s heart plummeted at the look of recognition on her face.
“Sam?” she said.
Her voice was layered with emotion. Sam peered at her, trying to discern what that emotion might be, what she felt about whatever had happened between them. He would never get used to this, but he had to get better at it. He was responsible for what he’d done when he was soulless, even if he couldn’t remember it.
She looked happy, even a little excited at first, but her face fell almost immediately at whatever she saw on Sam’s face. Her expression quickly intensified; she covered her mouth, and tears sprang to her eyes before Sam could say a word.
“Um… hi,” she whispered awkwardly. “Sorry. I have to go.” She choked on the last words, turned, and fled the bookstore, moving faster than Sam would have thought possible.
“Wait…” Sam moved to follow her, but was suddenly blocked by a little old lady, the top of her head barely reaching Sam’s chest, who was headed for the magazine rack next to him. Sam dodged her and hurried to the front of the store.
“Hey! Uh…” He was brought up short, realizing he had no idea what the pregnant woman’s name was.
“Poppy,” Dean supplied, stepping up to Sam’s side. His expression was carefully blank, but Sam could feel the smirk underneath.
“POPPY!” shouted Sam, hoping Dean was being straight with him, and wouldn’t choose now for an ill-timed prank.
He hurried out onto the mall. He still felt uncomfortable there, though he and Dean had spent a lot of time trying to track down the source of some strange happenings in the area. A mall wasn’t your typical hub of the paranormal, and Sam had thought that this foreignness, the pure suburban commercialism that he was so unused to, was what had made him uneasy. But maybe it was something else.
He didn’t have to look far for Poppy. She was sitting, thin arms wrapped around her belly, at a bench next to a display of fake plants, just two storefronts away. To Sam’s relief, she looked up at the sound of her name, though she looked down again immediately.
Sam approached carefully, and slowly took a seat on the bench next to her, simply so that he wouldn’t be looming over her. “Um… hey, Poppy,” he said, lamely. Now that he’d caught up to her, he had absolutely no idea what to say.
She glanced over at him, but quickly looked away when he met her eye. Sam’s throat closed with guilt-her face was streaked with tears. She swallowed and brushed her hair forward, trying to look nonchalant. She gestured down at her belly. “This makes a dramatic exit a little more challenging,” she said.
“Yeah… sorry. Are you OK?”
“So far.” She turned a little further away from him, edging down the bench.
There was a brief silence. Sam looked back toward the bookstore. Dean hadn’t followed him out, unsurprisingly. He cleared his throat. “So… why the dramatic exit?” he asked.
She glanced at him edgily. She didn’t answer immediately, but finally said, flatly, “You don’t remember me.”
Sam winced. He knew he’d have to explain that part of it, but if she was this upset about it, there were probably some very good reasons why he should have remembered her. He shoved away a growing intuitive dread.
“I’m sorry, Poppy. But it’s not just you. I don’t remember anything from that whole time period-over a year, actually.”
“Well. That’s convenient. Were you on drugs? You sure seem different now.”
“No… uh, I don’t think so. It’s… I can’t really explain it. But I definitely wasn’t myself.”
“I tried to find you, you know. You really know how to disappear.”
“Yeah… sorry. It’s been kind of necessary for me.”
“Well, I had something kind of important to talk to you about,” she said. Her voice had grown progressively stronger. She sighed irritably and met Sam’s eye. “You gave me chlamydia,” she said bluntly. “Might want to get that checked out, if you haven’t. And yes, I know I got it from you. You’re the only guy I’ve been with for the last year.”
She stood up. It was clear that she wanted to jump up and storm off again, but she wobbled on her feet after heaving herself up with great effort.
Sam leaped up belatedly and grabbed her elbow, but she shook him off… and then grabbed his arm with a squeak of alarm as he sank back down, his vision swimming. He felt the blood drain from his face, the air leave his lungs… in fact, he kind of left his body for a second.
“Sam!” said Poppy, clinging to his arm, pulled down with him to the bench.
“I was… the only… I…” He teetered dangerously on the edge of the bench; Poppy pushed him upright.
Dean strode up then, as if he’d been awaiting his cue. He produced a paper bag with the bookstore’s name on it, held it up to Sam’s face, and held Sam’s shoulder with the other hand. “OK, Sammy, just breathe,” he said with forced patience.
Sam clutched the bag and breathed rapidly, inflating and deflating it. Poppy frowned up at Dean uncertainly.
Dean jerked his head at her belly. “The baby’s his?”
Poppy flushed. “Yes,” she said, with a touch of defiance.
Dean nodded. There was silence for a moment, broken only by the fluttering sound of the bag as Sam hyperventilated. “OK,” Dean said after a minute. “You should know a few things. Sam wasn’t himself when he met you. He’s better now, though, and he’s a good guy. So whatever happened between you two-”
“Did I ask?” said Poppy abruptly. She stood up again, slowly and carefully this time. “No. I’m not asking for anything. I just thought maybe he’d like to know. So now you know,” she said to Sam, who had abandoned the bag and looked up at her. “OK,” she said. “Third time’s the charm. Storming off now. I’d appreciate it if you’d give me a head start.” She turned away.
Sam seemed to have regained some of his faculties. He stood up and moved carefully and gently toward her. “Wait. Poppy, please,” he said. “I… I am so sorry. I’ll never be able to explain in a way that… well… it’s no excuse, but I would never have done what I did if-”
“Not exactly what a girl wants to hear,” she snapped. “What the hell happened to you? Where’s all that… smoldering, effortless charm? You’re like a completely different person.”
“You have no idea,” Sam said softly.
“You really don’t,” Dean agreed.
Poppy sighed. “Maybe I don’t want to. I’m… OK, all right? I’m gonna have a baby. Billions of other women do it; so can I. I don’t need any help from you. Just thought you might want to know you’re a father.” She shook her head and muttered, “If this is the first time.”
Sam just stood, gaping at her. He had no clue what to do or say. He wanted to be responsible. But he had no idea what was going to happen to him tomorrow, let alone next month-whether he would even survive, and if his sanity would. What if the wall broke down while he was holding the baby? Or what if Poppy and the baby came to rely on him, and then he died? Would having a shitty, unreliable father be better than having no father at all?
I should know, he thought. “Poppy,” he said finally. “I’m sure you don’t need help. And honestly, I’m in no position to give it. But I will do whatever I can. Whatever level of involvement you want. If you-”
“What do you want?”
Sam was brought up short. He stared down at her, frozen. What did he want? It had never crossed his mind. He opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He closed it again.
Poppy looked at him. All the bravado faded from her expression, and she was all the more beautiful for it. Sam could see what he’d seen in her, (though he usually avoided blondes, since Jess) but now she just looked sad, tired, and a little bit broken.
“That’s what I thought,” she said quietly. “Listen… if you really don’t remember a whole year, you’ve got enough problems. Here,” she said, digging in her purse. She pulled out a business card and handed it to him. “I gathered from Dean that you’re just ‘passing through’ again. I’m due in four weeks. If you pass through again after that and you want to meet your daughter, call me.”
She looked at him for a moment longer, then touched his face gently. Sam winced, but didn’t pull away. “I knew I was playing with fire when I met you, Sam, and I made my choice. It’s not your fault.” She glanced at Dean. “Is this what he’s really like?”
“Yep. This is the real Sam Winchester.”
She nodded, withdrawing her hand from his face and gazing into Sam’s shell-shocked eyes. “I like you better this way,” she said softly, and walked away.
~ * * * ~
It was very quiet in the hotel room that night. In fact, Sam hadn’t said a word since they’d left the mall hours ago. Dean had given up, kicked his boots off, and settled back in bed, when Sam said, out of nowhere, “A girl.”
Dean rolled over. “Yep. You all right?”
Sam nodded wordlessly. He was staring numbly into space, as he had been all evening. He looked up at Dean for the first time since he’d learned he was about to be a father. “Dean… what am I gonna do?”
“Been thinkin’ about that a lot. I had to think about it once before, you know. Not much you can do, with the life we lead.” Sam just nodded miserably. “But what I figure is this. You do your job, like you always have. And what is our job, Sammy? Saving the world. Now it will just have one more thing in it that you want to save.”
They were silent for a while. Then Sam asked, “Do you think… it’s better if Poppy doesn’t know anything about us? Or maybe it’d be better if we warn her, teach her some things. So she can protect herself and the baby.”
“For that to work, she’d have to believe us.”
“I wonder if I told her anything, or she saw anything last time, to help make her believe. I wish I could remember what happened.”
“Well, you know one thing that happened.” Dean smirked. “Soulless-you had pretty good taste. Your baby mama is hot.”
Sam clutched his belly and groaned. “Dean… don’t call her that!”
Dean wasn’t listening. He’d gotten a distant look in his eye. “Hey… that means I’m an uncle. Uncle Dean… huh. Kinda has a ring to it.”
Sam groaned again. “You’re gonna be the uncle that lets them watch the Spice channel when they’re teenagers and sneaks them their first beer.”
“Hey, I wouldn’t do that with a little girl… probably. And what’s with the ‘them’? You thinkin’ you made lots of little Winchesters while you were soulless? Didn’t I teach you to always keep it wrapped?”
“DEAN.” An edge of hysteria had crept into Sam’s voice.
“Sorry. Thought we’d seen the worst of it when we had to visit the clinic a few weeks back.”
Sam recalled the scene uncomfortably. It was only a day or so after Death had put up the Great Wall of Sam, as Dean liked to call it.
He’d come out of the bathroom and eyed Dean uncertainly. Dean had sat up immediately from where he lounged on his bed in front of the TV. He was still hovering.
“You OK, Sam?”
“Uh… fine. Well… I’m not sure. There’s this… burning sensation…”
“Probably normal, right? I mean, your soul was in the cage with Lucifer; it’s bound to burn a little when it goes back in.”
Sam shifted from foot to foot, rubbing his legs together. He gave a tremendous squirm, and Dean looked at him sharply. “No, uh… this is different, it’s-”
“Sam! Don’t even think about it. And I mean that literally. You heard what Death said. Don’t scratch the wall!”
“No! DEAN. It’s a burning sensation… when I pee.”
“Oh. Oh.” Dean was silent for a minute, and Sam saw him hide a smirk, rubbing his face. “OK, well… we better hit the clinic then. There should be one in town. A little penicillin will fix you right up.” Dean gave up hiding his expression and half-smirked, half-frowned at Sam in exaggerated disapproval. “I thought soulless you was all rational! Condoms are rational, Sammy; didn’t I teach you anything?”
“Oh, sure, Dean; then how come you knew exactly what I was talking about and what to do about it?”
Sam sighed, brought back to the moment. Yeah. He’d thought that was going to be the worst consequence of his soulless exploits, at least in that particular… area. He had been so careful, his entire life, to avoid these kinds of consequences that they had never even crossed his mind, even when looking at a pregnant woman and feeling he should know her. He wanted it to be possible that Poppy was lying, but he knew she wasn’t. He just knew, and Dean, who was more cynical about this kind of thing than just about anyone, seemed to know, too.
“Dean,” he said abruptly. “What if she tells people about me? Wouldn’t that make her a target?”
He regretted the words as soon as they were out of his mouth; before he even looked over at Dean, he could feel the anxious, painful miasma envelop his brother. He closed his mouth firmly, but too late.
“You mean like Lisa and Ben might be?” said Dean bitterly.
Sam sighed. “I guess we’re kind of in the same boat.”
“Yeah. Kinda.”
They were silent for several minutes, then: “Sam.”
“Yeah.”
“Our lives suck.”
“Yeah.”
~ * * * ~
By morning, Sam had made up his mind. He was going to see Poppy, and he had his story all planned out. Hopefully it would give her plenty of reasons not to tell anyone who he was, and to take measures to protect herself.
Dean was going to follow some leads on their case and meet up with Sam afterwards. He dropped Sam off at the address they’d found (illegally) using the cell number Poppy had given Sam. As they drove up, Sam got that horrible, familiar feeling again. He’d seen it before: the not-quite-middle-class neighborhood, with its sprawling trees and aging suburban appeal, and the little, slightly run-down house. How much time had he spent with Poppy?
After Dean wished him good luck and drove off, Sam went to the door, took a deep breath, and knocked. To his surprise, he was immediately answered by a sunny call of “Come in!”
He opened the door and stepped inside hesitantly. “Uh… hello? Poppy?”
“Right he-oh.” She came around the corner, wiping her hands on a dish towel, and stopped short at the sight of Sam. She looked startled, but Sam was encouraged when she didn’t immediately look like she was about to cry, or hit him. “What are you doing here?” she asked, somewhat coolly.
“Um, sorry to barge in. Were you expecting someone?”
“Yeah. Not you, though. Uh, come in, I guess.” She led the way to the kitchen, which was filled with delicious, sugary scents.
Sam followed her in. She glanced at him over her shoulder as she walked to the stove, peeking into the oven. When he didn’t immediately speak, she said, “I’m a hopeless cook, normally. But since about the second month, I’ve craved nothing but cookies and bread and cupcakes-bread was about all I could eat for a while, too. So I figured I might as well learn to bake the stuff myself. Turned out it wasn’t so hard.”
“It all smells great,” said Sam, awkwardly.
She glanced at him, steely-eyed. “I’m sure you didn’t come here for baked goods, Sam.” She added, slightly under her breath, “That’s definitely not what you came here for the last time you were in town.”
Sam felt himself redden. “Poppy, I wouldn’t-that’s not why-”
“Big pregnant chicks not so hot, huh?” she snapped.
Sam sighed. He looked at her for a moment, but she had turned her back to him, and was sliding a tray of cupcakes out of the oven. He said nothing until her shoulders sagged slightly, then, gently: “Poppy, is there any way I could say anything right, here?”
She sighed, and turned to face him. She gave a wry half-smile. “Not really.” She slumped, and turned toward the kitchen table. Sam automatically moved to pull out a chair for her.
She glanced at him as she sat down, slowly balancing her belly as she did so. “Thanks,” she said, with a slightly confused frown. “Um. Have a seat, and a cupcake, if you want. And tell me why you’re here.”
Sam had a list of things he needed to say; he’d prepared for this, but being around Poppy still made his head swim strangely, and in general, her reactions threw him off. So he discarded the script in his head, not really knowing what he would say until he opened his mouth.
“I’ve had some time to think now,” he said, sitting down. “But I am still in no way ready for this. A baby. That’s huge. You obviously know that. Poppy, I honestly never thought I would live long enough.”
She glanced at him, and her gaze had softened a little. She nodded.
“There was a time when I thought I had a chance for a normal life. But I had to give up that dream-and in the last few months, I’ve realized that more than ever. I will never have a normal life. And… no one close to me ever will, either.”
Poppy stared at the table, and nodded again. She opened her mouth to speak, but closed it again without saying anything. She looked up and met his eye briefly, encouraging him to continue.
“So… there are some things I have to tell you, Poppy. And they may seem hard to believe, but I’m telling you because I want to keep you and the baby safe. You might as well know now, Poppy. It’s really dangerous to know me. You might be better off never seeing me again.”
“I know,” she said softly.
He looked at her. All the anger seemed leeched out of her, and there was a deep sadness there that Sam desperately wanted to understand. He thought over his rehearsed story-that he was in witness protection, that she couldn’t ever tell anyone about him and Dean because terrible people might harm her or the baby to get at him… and it wasn’t a bad lie, since it held so much of the truth. But looking at her, and thinking that the child in her was actually part of him-was a Winchester-it was so hard, harder than it ever was, to bring the lies to his lips.
“Poppy,” he said softly. “What did I tell you about myself when you met me?”
“You really… it’s really true that you can’t remember anything? I wouldn’t believe you, except-well, you do seem like a totally different person. But I would normally think you were full of shit. Because my mom was a doctor, Sam. A neurologist. I know more about how this stuff works than most people do. Amnesia doesn’t just happen all the time, like in the soap operas.”
“I know. But yes, it’s true, and no, I’m not anything like I was when you met me.”
“What caused the amnesia?”
Sam sighed. Here he was, having hoped he could avoid lying, pressed up against the one thing she would never believe. Well, you see Poppy, my brother and I were vessels for Lucifer and the archangel Michael; they wanted to use us to start the apocalypse, but I tricked Lucifer and went to Hell, but somehow I got brought back, only without my soul, but my brother made a deal with Death to get it back, so now I can’t remember anything that happened while it was gone!
“It’s… a really long story,” he said. “Poppy… you’d never believe the truth. I just… I really don’t want to lie to you. I had this story all planned out, but… I just don’t want to tell it. I don’t want lies to be the only thing I pass on to my child.”
She looked at him for a long moment. “OK,” she said. “I’m not crazy about lies, either. But when I met you, I don’t think that’s the line you took.”
“Probably not,” Sam acknowledged.
“So, let’s make a deal. I won’t push you on anything you say you can’t tell me, if you tell me whether what you said to me the first time we met was true or not.”
“I may not remember, but I’ll do my best.”
“Also, don’t ever lie to me. I’ll just let it go if you say you can’t tell me.”
“Deal.”
“You said you were an FBI agent, investigating a murder in our town. True or not?”
“Not. Well, I probably was investigating a murder, but I’m not an FBI agent.”
“Why would you be investigating a murder if you’re not an FBI agent, and why would you pose as one?”
Sam sighed. Already something he couldn’t tell her. “Well… I can’t give you details, but Dean and I investigate certain things, and there must have been one of those kinds of things in this town.”
“That’s informative,” she muttered, but she said nothing more. She was thinking hard; Sam could see her calculating a lot of different things at once. She was a smart one, clearly. He would have to be careful. “If you and Dean do this together, why wasn’t he with you then?”
“He didn’t know I was alive.” Sam was surprised that this was what came out; he didn’t have to tell her that. “Since he believed I was gone, he had a chance for that normal life I mentioned… I wanted him to have that.”
“Why did he think you were dead? What happened? Is it the same thing that caused your amnesia?”
Again, Sam was impressed at her quickness. “Yep. Same thing.” He could see her suppress the desire to ask more about this, knowing he couldn’t tell her, trying to figure out what she could ask to get the information she wanted. She’d make a good investigator. Probably time to get her off that track.
“Did I… tell you anything else about myself?” Sam really wanted to know what he’d been like with her, how they had come to sleep together… if he had treated her well.
“Not really. You were even more close-mouthed than now. But you did tell me you had a brother-or rather, your dad did.”
Sam felt the blood drain from his face. “My… my dad? You met my dad?”
“Yeah. Whoa. Umm, some ugly family history there?”
“My dad is dead. You can’t have met him.”
“No? Well, you said he was your father. He was an FBI agent, too-or I guess posing as one. Bald guy, kind of handsome, in his fifties?”
“Oh.” Sam breathed a sigh of relief. Of course, if he and Samuel had decided to tell people they were related for some reason, Samuel couldn’t pass as his grandfather; he wasn’t the right age. “Did he call himself Samuel?”
“Yeah, said it was a family name.”
“Yeah. It is.” Sam didn’t know why he’d said it, but Poppy, eyeing him, didn’t ask.
“You didn’t say much else, but you were… interested in me,” said Poppy. “I think that’s why you came in for a massage.”
Sam gasped. A surge of memory hit him, a sensuous moment, lying on a table, shirtless, with small but strong hands on him… He remembered the card Poppy had given him this time around-he’d barely noticed what sort of business it was for, but yes, she was a massage therapist.
Sam held his head for a moment. Poppy just looked at him. “You OK?” she finally asked, carefully.
“Yeah. Umm… sometimes something triggers a memory, and it can be kind of… intense.”
“Makes sense. Intense was sort of your middle name, when I met you. What did you remember?”
Sam flushed a bit. “Getting a massage from you.”
To his surprise, Poppy smiled. “Well, I wanted it to be memorable. Once I’d made the decision to break my ironclad rule never to sleep with a client, anyway. A female massage therapist has to make sure people know the difference between what we do and, you know, massage parlors.” She eyed him. “You were… this weird combination of really respectful and really persuasive. After I let you talk me into giving you the massage at my house instead of at my office, I knew it was all over.”
“So I’ve been here.” Sam knew he had. He looked around himself, the familiarity, mixed with that lost feeling, washing over him. It almost itched inside him. Now he understood what Death meant, about not scratching the wall.
“Several times,” said Poppy. “And, umm…” She took a deep breath. “We did use condoms. But one time, it broke.”
“I see.” Sam cleared his throat. “Poppy,” he said seriously. “I didn’t... make you any promises, did I?”
She laughed. “Not at all. That was something else I wanted to ask whether it was true or not. You said you wouldn’t be in town long, and that you liked me, but that you couldn’t afford any attachments, and it was better if I didn’t either, because you lived a really dangerous life.”
He sighed. “Actually, that’s all a hundred percent true.”
“I figured.”
They were silent for a while as Poppy got up to pour more batter into muffin tins. She looked at Sam as she wiped off her hands. “All right, enough already,” she said, and Sam looked up, startled. “Muffin or cupcake?” She gestured at the counter, which was full of cooling racks of both kinds of pastry.
Sam smiled. “Uh, I’ll go with muffin. Thanks.”
She set a muffin on a little plate and set it in front of him. “Good choice. Blueberry, my favorite. Coffee?” She took the carafe from the coffee maker and poured some for herself.
“Sure.” Sam looked around at all the pastries and the gleaming-clean kitchen. There were coffee cups on the table, laid out as if for a guest, along with some bakery boxes, still folded, and one assembled one, full of cupcakes. He took a bite of his muffin and paused, chewing. Pastries weren’t really his thing, but it was delicious. Dean would probably be in heaven right now. “This is great,” he said. “Do you sell your baked goods?”
“Yep. It wasn’t my idea, really. I have this good friend who encouraged me to do it; he’s my main customer, and he’s pretty much built my customer base for me with recommendations. He’s helped me a lot since I told him I was pregnant. That’s how we met, in fact.”
“Really?” Sam sat up straight. His intuition prickled strangely. He had no idea why a friend who wanted Poppy to sell her muffins would give him this feeling of foreboding, but he’d long since learned to pay attention to such signals. “What happened?” he asked.
“Well, I was having a really bad day. My car was in the shop, so I had to take the bus to this massage gig I had, giving chair massages-at the mall where I saw you and Dean today, actually. It was the last massage I gave. I was having a hard time being on my feet so much, and my bump was getting big enough to be in the way. I was giving a massage to some asshole, and nothing was good enough for him-he kept complaining, so I was shifting, trying to get a better angle, and I bumped him with my belly. He just went off on me, asking if I’d gotten knocked up by a client, and could he expect that kind of service, and what made me think getting a massage from a pregnant chick would be sexy… normally I’d tell him off good, but it was just too much. I started crying, and the other therapist I was working with was just staring, not knowing what to do, and then Mark showed up! He grabbed that asshole and yanked him away from me, and man, did he cut him down to size! I’ve never heard such great insults. I wished I’d written them down.
“But while this was happening, I got really light-headed and had to sit down. I was overwhelmed, and I realized I couldn’t work anymore while I’m pregnant, and I don’t have any other income, so I had no idea what I was going to do. Since I have my own business, it’s not like I can get paid while I’m on maternity leave or anything. My parents are dead, and I don’t have any other close family, and… well, I didn’t think I could find you. I knew I was on my own.
“So I couldn’t stop crying, once I’d started, and Mark came over and talked to me. He was really sympathetic. We talked a lot, and he said he had some contacts and could probably find me some easy work to do to while I was pregnant. He was so friendly, and I’m relatively new to town, so it was just really nice that someone was willing to talk to me. You’d be surprised how much prejudice there still is toward unmarried pregnant women, at least in this part of the country. People, especially women, look at me like they’re going to somehow catch it.
“I’d never have wanted to move to the South, but I inherited my grandmother’s house, this house, when she died. Not having to pay rent makes a big difference, so I decided to get a fresh start with my massage business… anyway.
“Mark’s about as different from Southern folks as you can get; he’s English. So we got to be friends. He drove me home that day, and I invited him in for a cupcake. That’s when he got the idea for me to go into business selling them. He even got me started-he bought me the second oven,” She gestured to it; Sam had noticed that one of the ovens was larger and newer than the other regular one under a stovetop, “and got me some materials, all for just a small share of my profits. And free cupcakes, of course.” She smiled proudly, patting the box of cupcakes on the table. “He really loves them. I think he’s doing it just to be kind; he’ll probably never get his money back. He’s always bringing me a new tin or cooling racks or decorating tools. I’m going to try cakes next. You can charge a lot for decorated cakes. But listen to me, babbling…”
She stopped, and looked at Sam quizzically. Sam was gripping the edge of the table, his eyes wide. “You say this Mark is English?” he said sharply. “What does he look like?”
Poppy eyed him. She smiled uncertainly, with a bit of a coy, pleased edge. “Handsome,” she said, watching his face. “I mean, that accent is kind of hot. And he’s really well-dressed. Nice face. He’s pretty short, but, being on the rebound from a really tall guy, that seemed kind of nice.” She cocked her head at Sam. His reaction didn’t seem to be what she was expecting. “Why? You can’t really be jealous, can you? Anyway, he’s a great guy, and he doesn’t mind about the baby, so I might have thought about it, but I think he’s gay.”
“Poppy,” Sam said, trying to swallow the dangerous edge he could hear in his own voice, “this could turn out to be important. What did you tell Mark about me?”
“Well… kind of everything,” said Poppy nervously. “Once we got to be friends, I told him the whole story, and asked if he had any ideas how I might find you. He said I was better off not looking.” She glanced at him edgily. “If you’re interested, you could probably meet him. He said he’d come over sometime today. That’s who I thought it was, when you came to the door.”
Sam stood up so abruptly that Poppy flinched. “I have to call Dean,” he said, but just then, there was a knock on the front door and it opened.
“Poppy, love, you in?” a horribly familiar voice called from the front hall.
~* * *~
Dean put a little extra stank on his usual bat-out-of-hell driving, trying to get back to Sam as soon as possible. Sam was gonna flip when he found out there were demons in the mall-they had some kind of operation going on in the basement-but he was gonna freak even more when he found out Crowley was with them, and in charge of the operation, and that the operation involved more kinds of nasty than they had ever seen together in one place before. This was big, and Dean felt that he needed not just his brother to tackle it, but preferably a whole freakin’ army of hunters.
He’d called Bobby, who had agreed to call around for backup in the area before heading south himself. Dean wasn’t sure he’d get there in time to help them. He’d even thought about praying for Castiel, but something weird was going on with him, and though Dean wouldn’t admit it to Sam or Bobby, he wasn’t sure he trusted him.
He pulled into Poppy’s neighborhood and slowed down as he focused on the car ahead of him. Something about it made him suspicious-namely that it was far too expensive a car for this neighborhood; a sleek, black luxury sedan-but it felt unpleasantly familiar, too. He slowed down and followed the car, about a block behind, and his heart plummeted when he saw it pull up in front of Poppy’s house. Damn it! Sam didn’t even have any weapons with him except maybe a pistol, and hell of a lot of good that would do if this was who Dean thought it was… and as he saw the short, stocky figure walk up to the front door, his worst fears were confirmed.
No sense trying to be subtle now. Dean parked and jumped out of the car, but Crowley had already disappeared into Poppy’s house.
Part 2
Author: septembers_coda
Recipient: spn_summergen
Rating: PG-13, for language and adult concepts
Warnings: None
Word-Count: ~14,600
Author's Notes: All of the prompts were great, but I chose this one: “Sam finds out he's going to be a father and as if that isn't bad enough Crowley informs him that the demon blood in his veins will be passed on to his child.” Many thanks to brightly_lit, who provided not just awesome beta skills, but ideas and inspiration.
Summary: Sam’s been to hell, lost his soul, and gotten it back. When one consequence of being soulless lands in his lap, Sam’s whole world is thrown into turmoil, and nothing he has ever learned can help him now.
“What I figure is this. You do your job, like you always have. And what is our job, Sammy? Saving the world. Now it will just have one more thing in it that you want to save.”
When the pregnant woman showed up, Sam got that feeling again, one he was beginning, horribly, to recognize: familiarity mixed with dread, walled in by an unassailable blankness.
He and Dean were in a bookstore, following a lead on a case. His soul still felt tender inside him, like a bad bruise slowly healing, stabbing him with pain each time he bumped it against the wall Death had erected inside him. He stifled a gasp of pain now as he watched the woman, whom he’d noticed on the way into the store, hesitantly approach Dean and speak to him, looking at her shoes (or in their direction, anyway-Sam doubted she could see them over her belly).
He studied her surreptitiously, trying to trigger even a faint echo of a memory. Typical of his reaction anytime he confronted something that had happened during his soulless time, that feeling that he should know her was all he got.
She was rather small, kind of wispy and insubstantial-looking. Her fair skin was dusted with butterscotch freckles, and she had vividly blue eyes and blonde hair. She was pretty in a delicate way, but she looked exhausted, her small frame overwhelmed by her huge belly. Sam felt a sudden thrill of fear that she would go into labor right in front of him-she looked like she could.
Her voice didn’t carry to Sam through the bookstore, but Dean’s did. “Oh, you know Sam?” he said in his usual easy way with women. “Yeah, he’s here somewhere…”
Well, there was no avoiding it now. Sam came forward reluctantly. The woman looked up as he drew close, and Sam’s heart plummeted at the look of recognition on her face.
“Sam?” she said.
Her voice was layered with emotion. Sam peered at her, trying to discern what that emotion might be, what she felt about whatever had happened between them. He would never get used to this, but he had to get better at it. He was responsible for what he’d done when he was soulless, even if he couldn’t remember it.
She looked happy, even a little excited at first, but her face fell almost immediately at whatever she saw on Sam’s face. Her expression quickly intensified; she covered her mouth, and tears sprang to her eyes before Sam could say a word.
“Um… hi,” she whispered awkwardly. “Sorry. I have to go.” She choked on the last words, turned, and fled the bookstore, moving faster than Sam would have thought possible.
“Wait…” Sam moved to follow her, but was suddenly blocked by a little old lady, the top of her head barely reaching Sam’s chest, who was headed for the magazine rack next to him. Sam dodged her and hurried to the front of the store.
“Hey! Uh…” He was brought up short, realizing he had no idea what the pregnant woman’s name was.
“Poppy,” Dean supplied, stepping up to Sam’s side. His expression was carefully blank, but Sam could feel the smirk underneath.
“POPPY!” shouted Sam, hoping Dean was being straight with him, and wouldn’t choose now for an ill-timed prank.
He hurried out onto the mall. He still felt uncomfortable there, though he and Dean had spent a lot of time trying to track down the source of some strange happenings in the area. A mall wasn’t your typical hub of the paranormal, and Sam had thought that this foreignness, the pure suburban commercialism that he was so unused to, was what had made him uneasy. But maybe it was something else.
He didn’t have to look far for Poppy. She was sitting, thin arms wrapped around her belly, at a bench next to a display of fake plants, just two storefronts away. To Sam’s relief, she looked up at the sound of her name, though she looked down again immediately.
Sam approached carefully, and slowly took a seat on the bench next to her, simply so that he wouldn’t be looming over her. “Um… hey, Poppy,” he said, lamely. Now that he’d caught up to her, he had absolutely no idea what to say.
She glanced over at him, but quickly looked away when he met her eye. Sam’s throat closed with guilt-her face was streaked with tears. She swallowed and brushed her hair forward, trying to look nonchalant. She gestured down at her belly. “This makes a dramatic exit a little more challenging,” she said.
“Yeah… sorry. Are you OK?”
“So far.” She turned a little further away from him, edging down the bench.
There was a brief silence. Sam looked back toward the bookstore. Dean hadn’t followed him out, unsurprisingly. He cleared his throat. “So… why the dramatic exit?” he asked.
She glanced at him edgily. She didn’t answer immediately, but finally said, flatly, “You don’t remember me.”
Sam winced. He knew he’d have to explain that part of it, but if she was this upset about it, there were probably some very good reasons why he should have remembered her. He shoved away a growing intuitive dread.
“I’m sorry, Poppy. But it’s not just you. I don’t remember anything from that whole time period-over a year, actually.”
“Well. That’s convenient. Were you on drugs? You sure seem different now.”
“No… uh, I don’t think so. It’s… I can’t really explain it. But I definitely wasn’t myself.”
“I tried to find you, you know. You really know how to disappear.”
“Yeah… sorry. It’s been kind of necessary for me.”
“Well, I had something kind of important to talk to you about,” she said. Her voice had grown progressively stronger. She sighed irritably and met Sam’s eye. “You gave me chlamydia,” she said bluntly. “Might want to get that checked out, if you haven’t. And yes, I know I got it from you. You’re the only guy I’ve been with for the last year.”
She stood up. It was clear that she wanted to jump up and storm off again, but she wobbled on her feet after heaving herself up with great effort.
Sam leaped up belatedly and grabbed her elbow, but she shook him off… and then grabbed his arm with a squeak of alarm as he sank back down, his vision swimming. He felt the blood drain from his face, the air leave his lungs… in fact, he kind of left his body for a second.
“Sam!” said Poppy, clinging to his arm, pulled down with him to the bench.
“I was… the only… I…” He teetered dangerously on the edge of the bench; Poppy pushed him upright.
Dean strode up then, as if he’d been awaiting his cue. He produced a paper bag with the bookstore’s name on it, held it up to Sam’s face, and held Sam’s shoulder with the other hand. “OK, Sammy, just breathe,” he said with forced patience.
Sam clutched the bag and breathed rapidly, inflating and deflating it. Poppy frowned up at Dean uncertainly.
Dean jerked his head at her belly. “The baby’s his?”
Poppy flushed. “Yes,” she said, with a touch of defiance.
Dean nodded. There was silence for a moment, broken only by the fluttering sound of the bag as Sam hyperventilated. “OK,” Dean said after a minute. “You should know a few things. Sam wasn’t himself when he met you. He’s better now, though, and he’s a good guy. So whatever happened between you two-”
“Did I ask?” said Poppy abruptly. She stood up again, slowly and carefully this time. “No. I’m not asking for anything. I just thought maybe he’d like to know. So now you know,” she said to Sam, who had abandoned the bag and looked up at her. “OK,” she said. “Third time’s the charm. Storming off now. I’d appreciate it if you’d give me a head start.” She turned away.
Sam seemed to have regained some of his faculties. He stood up and moved carefully and gently toward her. “Wait. Poppy, please,” he said. “I… I am so sorry. I’ll never be able to explain in a way that… well… it’s no excuse, but I would never have done what I did if-”
“Not exactly what a girl wants to hear,” she snapped. “What the hell happened to you? Where’s all that… smoldering, effortless charm? You’re like a completely different person.”
“You have no idea,” Sam said softly.
“You really don’t,” Dean agreed.
Poppy sighed. “Maybe I don’t want to. I’m… OK, all right? I’m gonna have a baby. Billions of other women do it; so can I. I don’t need any help from you. Just thought you might want to know you’re a father.” She shook her head and muttered, “If this is the first time.”
Sam just stood, gaping at her. He had no clue what to do or say. He wanted to be responsible. But he had no idea what was going to happen to him tomorrow, let alone next month-whether he would even survive, and if his sanity would. What if the wall broke down while he was holding the baby? Or what if Poppy and the baby came to rely on him, and then he died? Would having a shitty, unreliable father be better than having no father at all?
I should know, he thought. “Poppy,” he said finally. “I’m sure you don’t need help. And honestly, I’m in no position to give it. But I will do whatever I can. Whatever level of involvement you want. If you-”
“What do you want?”
Sam was brought up short. He stared down at her, frozen. What did he want? It had never crossed his mind. He opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He closed it again.
Poppy looked at him. All the bravado faded from her expression, and she was all the more beautiful for it. Sam could see what he’d seen in her, (though he usually avoided blondes, since Jess) but now she just looked sad, tired, and a little bit broken.
“That’s what I thought,” she said quietly. “Listen… if you really don’t remember a whole year, you’ve got enough problems. Here,” she said, digging in her purse. She pulled out a business card and handed it to him. “I gathered from Dean that you’re just ‘passing through’ again. I’m due in four weeks. If you pass through again after that and you want to meet your daughter, call me.”
She looked at him for a moment longer, then touched his face gently. Sam winced, but didn’t pull away. “I knew I was playing with fire when I met you, Sam, and I made my choice. It’s not your fault.” She glanced at Dean. “Is this what he’s really like?”
“Yep. This is the real Sam Winchester.”
She nodded, withdrawing her hand from his face and gazing into Sam’s shell-shocked eyes. “I like you better this way,” she said softly, and walked away.
~ * * * ~
It was very quiet in the hotel room that night. In fact, Sam hadn’t said a word since they’d left the mall hours ago. Dean had given up, kicked his boots off, and settled back in bed, when Sam said, out of nowhere, “A girl.”
Dean rolled over. “Yep. You all right?”
Sam nodded wordlessly. He was staring numbly into space, as he had been all evening. He looked up at Dean for the first time since he’d learned he was about to be a father. “Dean… what am I gonna do?”
“Been thinkin’ about that a lot. I had to think about it once before, you know. Not much you can do, with the life we lead.” Sam just nodded miserably. “But what I figure is this. You do your job, like you always have. And what is our job, Sammy? Saving the world. Now it will just have one more thing in it that you want to save.”
They were silent for a while. Then Sam asked, “Do you think… it’s better if Poppy doesn’t know anything about us? Or maybe it’d be better if we warn her, teach her some things. So she can protect herself and the baby.”
“For that to work, she’d have to believe us.”
“I wonder if I told her anything, or she saw anything last time, to help make her believe. I wish I could remember what happened.”
“Well, you know one thing that happened.” Dean smirked. “Soulless-you had pretty good taste. Your baby mama is hot.”
Sam clutched his belly and groaned. “Dean… don’t call her that!”
Dean wasn’t listening. He’d gotten a distant look in his eye. “Hey… that means I’m an uncle. Uncle Dean… huh. Kinda has a ring to it.”
Sam groaned again. “You’re gonna be the uncle that lets them watch the Spice channel when they’re teenagers and sneaks them their first beer.”
“Hey, I wouldn’t do that with a little girl… probably. And what’s with the ‘them’? You thinkin’ you made lots of little Winchesters while you were soulless? Didn’t I teach you to always keep it wrapped?”
“DEAN.” An edge of hysteria had crept into Sam’s voice.
“Sorry. Thought we’d seen the worst of it when we had to visit the clinic a few weeks back.”
Sam recalled the scene uncomfortably. It was only a day or so after Death had put up the Great Wall of Sam, as Dean liked to call it.
He’d come out of the bathroom and eyed Dean uncertainly. Dean had sat up immediately from where he lounged on his bed in front of the TV. He was still hovering.
“You OK, Sam?”
“Uh… fine. Well… I’m not sure. There’s this… burning sensation…”
“Probably normal, right? I mean, your soul was in the cage with Lucifer; it’s bound to burn a little when it goes back in.”
Sam shifted from foot to foot, rubbing his legs together. He gave a tremendous squirm, and Dean looked at him sharply. “No, uh… this is different, it’s-”
“Sam! Don’t even think about it. And I mean that literally. You heard what Death said. Don’t scratch the wall!”
“No! DEAN. It’s a burning sensation… when I pee.”
“Oh. Oh.” Dean was silent for a minute, and Sam saw him hide a smirk, rubbing his face. “OK, well… we better hit the clinic then. There should be one in town. A little penicillin will fix you right up.” Dean gave up hiding his expression and half-smirked, half-frowned at Sam in exaggerated disapproval. “I thought soulless you was all rational! Condoms are rational, Sammy; didn’t I teach you anything?”
“Oh, sure, Dean; then how come you knew exactly what I was talking about and what to do about it?”
Sam sighed, brought back to the moment. Yeah. He’d thought that was going to be the worst consequence of his soulless exploits, at least in that particular… area. He had been so careful, his entire life, to avoid these kinds of consequences that they had never even crossed his mind, even when looking at a pregnant woman and feeling he should know her. He wanted it to be possible that Poppy was lying, but he knew she wasn’t. He just knew, and Dean, who was more cynical about this kind of thing than just about anyone, seemed to know, too.
“Dean,” he said abruptly. “What if she tells people about me? Wouldn’t that make her a target?”
He regretted the words as soon as they were out of his mouth; before he even looked over at Dean, he could feel the anxious, painful miasma envelop his brother. He closed his mouth firmly, but too late.
“You mean like Lisa and Ben might be?” said Dean bitterly.
Sam sighed. “I guess we’re kind of in the same boat.”
“Yeah. Kinda.”
They were silent for several minutes, then: “Sam.”
“Yeah.”
“Our lives suck.”
“Yeah.”
~ * * * ~
By morning, Sam had made up his mind. He was going to see Poppy, and he had his story all planned out. Hopefully it would give her plenty of reasons not to tell anyone who he was, and to take measures to protect herself.
Dean was going to follow some leads on their case and meet up with Sam afterwards. He dropped Sam off at the address they’d found (illegally) using the cell number Poppy had given Sam. As they drove up, Sam got that horrible, familiar feeling again. He’d seen it before: the not-quite-middle-class neighborhood, with its sprawling trees and aging suburban appeal, and the little, slightly run-down house. How much time had he spent with Poppy?
After Dean wished him good luck and drove off, Sam went to the door, took a deep breath, and knocked. To his surprise, he was immediately answered by a sunny call of “Come in!”
He opened the door and stepped inside hesitantly. “Uh… hello? Poppy?”
“Right he-oh.” She came around the corner, wiping her hands on a dish towel, and stopped short at the sight of Sam. She looked startled, but Sam was encouraged when she didn’t immediately look like she was about to cry, or hit him. “What are you doing here?” she asked, somewhat coolly.
“Um, sorry to barge in. Were you expecting someone?”
“Yeah. Not you, though. Uh, come in, I guess.” She led the way to the kitchen, which was filled with delicious, sugary scents.
Sam followed her in. She glanced at him over her shoulder as she walked to the stove, peeking into the oven. When he didn’t immediately speak, she said, “I’m a hopeless cook, normally. But since about the second month, I’ve craved nothing but cookies and bread and cupcakes-bread was about all I could eat for a while, too. So I figured I might as well learn to bake the stuff myself. Turned out it wasn’t so hard.”
“It all smells great,” said Sam, awkwardly.
She glanced at him, steely-eyed. “I’m sure you didn’t come here for baked goods, Sam.” She added, slightly under her breath, “That’s definitely not what you came here for the last time you were in town.”
Sam felt himself redden. “Poppy, I wouldn’t-that’s not why-”
“Big pregnant chicks not so hot, huh?” she snapped.
Sam sighed. He looked at her for a moment, but she had turned her back to him, and was sliding a tray of cupcakes out of the oven. He said nothing until her shoulders sagged slightly, then, gently: “Poppy, is there any way I could say anything right, here?”
She sighed, and turned to face him. She gave a wry half-smile. “Not really.” She slumped, and turned toward the kitchen table. Sam automatically moved to pull out a chair for her.
She glanced at him as she sat down, slowly balancing her belly as she did so. “Thanks,” she said, with a slightly confused frown. “Um. Have a seat, and a cupcake, if you want. And tell me why you’re here.”
Sam had a list of things he needed to say; he’d prepared for this, but being around Poppy still made his head swim strangely, and in general, her reactions threw him off. So he discarded the script in his head, not really knowing what he would say until he opened his mouth.
“I’ve had some time to think now,” he said, sitting down. “But I am still in no way ready for this. A baby. That’s huge. You obviously know that. Poppy, I honestly never thought I would live long enough.”
She glanced at him, and her gaze had softened a little. She nodded.
“There was a time when I thought I had a chance for a normal life. But I had to give up that dream-and in the last few months, I’ve realized that more than ever. I will never have a normal life. And… no one close to me ever will, either.”
Poppy stared at the table, and nodded again. She opened her mouth to speak, but closed it again without saying anything. She looked up and met his eye briefly, encouraging him to continue.
“So… there are some things I have to tell you, Poppy. And they may seem hard to believe, but I’m telling you because I want to keep you and the baby safe. You might as well know now, Poppy. It’s really dangerous to know me. You might be better off never seeing me again.”
“I know,” she said softly.
He looked at her. All the anger seemed leeched out of her, and there was a deep sadness there that Sam desperately wanted to understand. He thought over his rehearsed story-that he was in witness protection, that she couldn’t ever tell anyone about him and Dean because terrible people might harm her or the baby to get at him… and it wasn’t a bad lie, since it held so much of the truth. But looking at her, and thinking that the child in her was actually part of him-was a Winchester-it was so hard, harder than it ever was, to bring the lies to his lips.
“Poppy,” he said softly. “What did I tell you about myself when you met me?”
“You really… it’s really true that you can’t remember anything? I wouldn’t believe you, except-well, you do seem like a totally different person. But I would normally think you were full of shit. Because my mom was a doctor, Sam. A neurologist. I know more about how this stuff works than most people do. Amnesia doesn’t just happen all the time, like in the soap operas.”
“I know. But yes, it’s true, and no, I’m not anything like I was when you met me.”
“What caused the amnesia?”
Sam sighed. Here he was, having hoped he could avoid lying, pressed up against the one thing she would never believe. Well, you see Poppy, my brother and I were vessels for Lucifer and the archangel Michael; they wanted to use us to start the apocalypse, but I tricked Lucifer and went to Hell, but somehow I got brought back, only without my soul, but my brother made a deal with Death to get it back, so now I can’t remember anything that happened while it was gone!
“It’s… a really long story,” he said. “Poppy… you’d never believe the truth. I just… I really don’t want to lie to you. I had this story all planned out, but… I just don’t want to tell it. I don’t want lies to be the only thing I pass on to my child.”
She looked at him for a long moment. “OK,” she said. “I’m not crazy about lies, either. But when I met you, I don’t think that’s the line you took.”
“Probably not,” Sam acknowledged.
“So, let’s make a deal. I won’t push you on anything you say you can’t tell me, if you tell me whether what you said to me the first time we met was true or not.”
“I may not remember, but I’ll do my best.”
“Also, don’t ever lie to me. I’ll just let it go if you say you can’t tell me.”
“Deal.”
“You said you were an FBI agent, investigating a murder in our town. True or not?”
“Not. Well, I probably was investigating a murder, but I’m not an FBI agent.”
“Why would you be investigating a murder if you’re not an FBI agent, and why would you pose as one?”
Sam sighed. Already something he couldn’t tell her. “Well… I can’t give you details, but Dean and I investigate certain things, and there must have been one of those kinds of things in this town.”
“That’s informative,” she muttered, but she said nothing more. She was thinking hard; Sam could see her calculating a lot of different things at once. She was a smart one, clearly. He would have to be careful. “If you and Dean do this together, why wasn’t he with you then?”
“He didn’t know I was alive.” Sam was surprised that this was what came out; he didn’t have to tell her that. “Since he believed I was gone, he had a chance for that normal life I mentioned… I wanted him to have that.”
“Why did he think you were dead? What happened? Is it the same thing that caused your amnesia?”
Again, Sam was impressed at her quickness. “Yep. Same thing.” He could see her suppress the desire to ask more about this, knowing he couldn’t tell her, trying to figure out what she could ask to get the information she wanted. She’d make a good investigator. Probably time to get her off that track.
“Did I… tell you anything else about myself?” Sam really wanted to know what he’d been like with her, how they had come to sleep together… if he had treated her well.
“Not really. You were even more close-mouthed than now. But you did tell me you had a brother-or rather, your dad did.”
Sam felt the blood drain from his face. “My… my dad? You met my dad?”
“Yeah. Whoa. Umm, some ugly family history there?”
“My dad is dead. You can’t have met him.”
“No? Well, you said he was your father. He was an FBI agent, too-or I guess posing as one. Bald guy, kind of handsome, in his fifties?”
“Oh.” Sam breathed a sigh of relief. Of course, if he and Samuel had decided to tell people they were related for some reason, Samuel couldn’t pass as his grandfather; he wasn’t the right age. “Did he call himself Samuel?”
“Yeah, said it was a family name.”
“Yeah. It is.” Sam didn’t know why he’d said it, but Poppy, eyeing him, didn’t ask.
“You didn’t say much else, but you were… interested in me,” said Poppy. “I think that’s why you came in for a massage.”
Sam gasped. A surge of memory hit him, a sensuous moment, lying on a table, shirtless, with small but strong hands on him… He remembered the card Poppy had given him this time around-he’d barely noticed what sort of business it was for, but yes, she was a massage therapist.
Sam held his head for a moment. Poppy just looked at him. “You OK?” she finally asked, carefully.
“Yeah. Umm… sometimes something triggers a memory, and it can be kind of… intense.”
“Makes sense. Intense was sort of your middle name, when I met you. What did you remember?”
Sam flushed a bit. “Getting a massage from you.”
To his surprise, Poppy smiled. “Well, I wanted it to be memorable. Once I’d made the decision to break my ironclad rule never to sleep with a client, anyway. A female massage therapist has to make sure people know the difference between what we do and, you know, massage parlors.” She eyed him. “You were… this weird combination of really respectful and really persuasive. After I let you talk me into giving you the massage at my house instead of at my office, I knew it was all over.”
“So I’ve been here.” Sam knew he had. He looked around himself, the familiarity, mixed with that lost feeling, washing over him. It almost itched inside him. Now he understood what Death meant, about not scratching the wall.
“Several times,” said Poppy. “And, umm…” She took a deep breath. “We did use condoms. But one time, it broke.”
“I see.” Sam cleared his throat. “Poppy,” he said seriously. “I didn’t... make you any promises, did I?”
She laughed. “Not at all. That was something else I wanted to ask whether it was true or not. You said you wouldn’t be in town long, and that you liked me, but that you couldn’t afford any attachments, and it was better if I didn’t either, because you lived a really dangerous life.”
He sighed. “Actually, that’s all a hundred percent true.”
“I figured.”
They were silent for a while as Poppy got up to pour more batter into muffin tins. She looked at Sam as she wiped off her hands. “All right, enough already,” she said, and Sam looked up, startled. “Muffin or cupcake?” She gestured at the counter, which was full of cooling racks of both kinds of pastry.
Sam smiled. “Uh, I’ll go with muffin. Thanks.”
She set a muffin on a little plate and set it in front of him. “Good choice. Blueberry, my favorite. Coffee?” She took the carafe from the coffee maker and poured some for herself.
“Sure.” Sam looked around at all the pastries and the gleaming-clean kitchen. There were coffee cups on the table, laid out as if for a guest, along with some bakery boxes, still folded, and one assembled one, full of cupcakes. He took a bite of his muffin and paused, chewing. Pastries weren’t really his thing, but it was delicious. Dean would probably be in heaven right now. “This is great,” he said. “Do you sell your baked goods?”
“Yep. It wasn’t my idea, really. I have this good friend who encouraged me to do it; he’s my main customer, and he’s pretty much built my customer base for me with recommendations. He’s helped me a lot since I told him I was pregnant. That’s how we met, in fact.”
“Really?” Sam sat up straight. His intuition prickled strangely. He had no idea why a friend who wanted Poppy to sell her muffins would give him this feeling of foreboding, but he’d long since learned to pay attention to such signals. “What happened?” he asked.
“Well, I was having a really bad day. My car was in the shop, so I had to take the bus to this massage gig I had, giving chair massages-at the mall where I saw you and Dean today, actually. It was the last massage I gave. I was having a hard time being on my feet so much, and my bump was getting big enough to be in the way. I was giving a massage to some asshole, and nothing was good enough for him-he kept complaining, so I was shifting, trying to get a better angle, and I bumped him with my belly. He just went off on me, asking if I’d gotten knocked up by a client, and could he expect that kind of service, and what made me think getting a massage from a pregnant chick would be sexy… normally I’d tell him off good, but it was just too much. I started crying, and the other therapist I was working with was just staring, not knowing what to do, and then Mark showed up! He grabbed that asshole and yanked him away from me, and man, did he cut him down to size! I’ve never heard such great insults. I wished I’d written them down.
“But while this was happening, I got really light-headed and had to sit down. I was overwhelmed, and I realized I couldn’t work anymore while I’m pregnant, and I don’t have any other income, so I had no idea what I was going to do. Since I have my own business, it’s not like I can get paid while I’m on maternity leave or anything. My parents are dead, and I don’t have any other close family, and… well, I didn’t think I could find you. I knew I was on my own.
“So I couldn’t stop crying, once I’d started, and Mark came over and talked to me. He was really sympathetic. We talked a lot, and he said he had some contacts and could probably find me some easy work to do to while I was pregnant. He was so friendly, and I’m relatively new to town, so it was just really nice that someone was willing to talk to me. You’d be surprised how much prejudice there still is toward unmarried pregnant women, at least in this part of the country. People, especially women, look at me like they’re going to somehow catch it.
“I’d never have wanted to move to the South, but I inherited my grandmother’s house, this house, when she died. Not having to pay rent makes a big difference, so I decided to get a fresh start with my massage business… anyway.
“Mark’s about as different from Southern folks as you can get; he’s English. So we got to be friends. He drove me home that day, and I invited him in for a cupcake. That’s when he got the idea for me to go into business selling them. He even got me started-he bought me the second oven,” She gestured to it; Sam had noticed that one of the ovens was larger and newer than the other regular one under a stovetop, “and got me some materials, all for just a small share of my profits. And free cupcakes, of course.” She smiled proudly, patting the box of cupcakes on the table. “He really loves them. I think he’s doing it just to be kind; he’ll probably never get his money back. He’s always bringing me a new tin or cooling racks or decorating tools. I’m going to try cakes next. You can charge a lot for decorated cakes. But listen to me, babbling…”
She stopped, and looked at Sam quizzically. Sam was gripping the edge of the table, his eyes wide. “You say this Mark is English?” he said sharply. “What does he look like?”
Poppy eyed him. She smiled uncertainly, with a bit of a coy, pleased edge. “Handsome,” she said, watching his face. “I mean, that accent is kind of hot. And he’s really well-dressed. Nice face. He’s pretty short, but, being on the rebound from a really tall guy, that seemed kind of nice.” She cocked her head at Sam. His reaction didn’t seem to be what she was expecting. “Why? You can’t really be jealous, can you? Anyway, he’s a great guy, and he doesn’t mind about the baby, so I might have thought about it, but I think he’s gay.”
“Poppy,” Sam said, trying to swallow the dangerous edge he could hear in his own voice, “this could turn out to be important. What did you tell Mark about me?”
“Well… kind of everything,” said Poppy nervously. “Once we got to be friends, I told him the whole story, and asked if he had any ideas how I might find you. He said I was better off not looking.” She glanced at him edgily. “If you’re interested, you could probably meet him. He said he’d come over sometime today. That’s who I thought it was, when you came to the door.”
Sam stood up so abruptly that Poppy flinched. “I have to call Dean,” he said, but just then, there was a knock on the front door and it opened.
“Poppy, love, you in?” a horribly familiar voice called from the front hall.
~* * *~
Dean put a little extra stank on his usual bat-out-of-hell driving, trying to get back to Sam as soon as possible. Sam was gonna flip when he found out there were demons in the mall-they had some kind of operation going on in the basement-but he was gonna freak even more when he found out Crowley was with them, and in charge of the operation, and that the operation involved more kinds of nasty than they had ever seen together in one place before. This was big, and Dean felt that he needed not just his brother to tackle it, but preferably a whole freakin’ army of hunters.
He’d called Bobby, who had agreed to call around for backup in the area before heading south himself. Dean wasn’t sure he’d get there in time to help them. He’d even thought about praying for Castiel, but something weird was going on with him, and though Dean wouldn’t admit it to Sam or Bobby, he wasn’t sure he trusted him.
He pulled into Poppy’s neighborhood and slowed down as he focused on the car ahead of him. Something about it made him suspicious-namely that it was far too expensive a car for this neighborhood; a sleek, black luxury sedan-but it felt unpleasantly familiar, too. He slowed down and followed the car, about a block behind, and his heart plummeted when he saw it pull up in front of Poppy’s house. Damn it! Sam didn’t even have any weapons with him except maybe a pistol, and hell of a lot of good that would do if this was who Dean thought it was… and as he saw the short, stocky figure walk up to the front door, his worst fears were confirmed.
No sense trying to be subtle now. Dean parked and jumped out of the car, but Crowley had already disappeared into Poppy’s house.
Part 2