Always By Your Side Part 2
Pink Floyd is playing when he wakes up, stiff and sore and unaccountably twitchy from dreams he can’t quite remember.
“There’s someone in my head but it is not me?” It’s Lucifer in the back seat, singing along with Roger Waters on the tape desk. Don’t you think that’s just a little bit on the nose there, Sammy?”
Sam blinks and digs into his palm hard, until Lucifer flickers out. They’ve apparently pulled over into the parking lot of at a highway rest stop. Based on the direction of the sun, it’s late in the afternoon, clear that Sam has been sleeping for a while now as Dean drove on through Iowa, but even Dean needs to take breaks eventually. He looks over, catches Dean studying him with a concerned expression, which Dean (badly) hides with a cough and an arm punch as soon as he realizes Sam is watching.
“Rise and Shine, Sammy. Time for you to get snacks, I’ll fill her up and meet you back here.” Sam obligingly opens his door, lets the rush of over heated air bounce off the pavement and into the car. The cat, who had been sleeping soundly between them, finally stirs grumpily. “I’ll be back,” Sam informs it. Blue eyes blink up solemnly and Sam runs a reassuring hand across it’s fur. It’s still disconcertingly cold, for having spent the better part of the day in an overheated car. He has never been exactly what you would call, good with animals, but he’s finding it strangely hard to leave it alone. The remnants of some prehistorical feline survival tactic, he supposes. Draw humans in with big eyes, and a deceptively delicate body, and what do you know, you’ve got yourself a caretaker for the rest of your natural life span.
“Shake a leg, Sam,” Dean says from the driver’s seat. “Fido is going to stay with me for a little bit.”
Sam shakes his head, as if to clear it, then closes the passenger door.
“Fido is a dog’s name,” he comments through the window.
“Do I look like I care?”
The gas station is a squat, dilapidated building, sitting in the shadow of the highway, that looks like it sees visitors maybe once in a year if it’s lucky.
Sam grabs a key from the sullen clerk with complicated piercings, and he heads around the back of the building in search of the restroom. It’s a unisex, grungy little room, opening directly onto the back alleyway, and exactly the same as every other rest room in every other gas station across the country, down to the unsettling scum of dirt and unidentifiable fluids that’s built up in corners. Sam’s reflection in the tiny, cracked mirror is exhausted, uncertain.
“Better watch out there Sam,” Lucifer comments dryly. He’s fiddling with the hand dryer, making the air come on and off as he slides his hand in and out beneath the spout. The noise is tremendous, a staccato roar of air that’s impossible to ignore. Which is exactly Lucifer’s point.
“You start to lose your looks, who will want you then? You know, you’ve never done so well on your own.” Sam ignores him and turns on the water.
Thick, viscous blood comes out of the tap. Sam shuts it off in a hurry and jumps back. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Lucifer lift a single eyebrow, but he mercifully keeps silent.
Sam fumbles hastily to open the door and nearly face plants over the cat, who is confusingly, not in the Impala, but sitting primly, just in front of the door, as if waiting for him.
“How did you get out of the car? “he asks the cat, who instantly stands up and begins weaving around his legs with apparent urgency. The cat pauses and meows sharply, a noise with so much concern in it that it catches Sam off guard.
“Winchester” says a voice from behind them.
Sam spins on his heel, just in time to see a Leviathan unhinge its jaw. He swallows, and take half a step back, feeling for the hunting knife in his boot. His fingers touch metal as the monster lunges. Sam feints, then jabs upwards, missing it by a mile. The Leviathan sneers at him.
Where the hell is Dean right now anyway?
Sam regroups, intending to dash past the monster, and make his way towards the car. He has barely taken a step, when there is a blur of movement, as a sandy shape dashes past him, perfectly timed to make him trip over his feet.
He falls humiliatingly back across the threshold and into the bathroom, arms flung wide onto on to the scummy restroom floor, landing painfully on his knees. The floor under his is wet with something foul. drops fly up and splash his shirt. The door bangs closed with finality.
Sam twists and scrambles around, grabbing the door handle and pulling, but the door is not opening any time soon. His phone is in the car, because, of course it is. Dean will give him hell for that.
Dean is out there and he has no idea what kind of danger he’s in right now.
Sam punches the wall, and all that earns him is a hurt hand.
What is going on out there?
He pauses, listening, and hears only silence.
The air is stale, rank.
Seconds pass, and is that his own breathing in his ears, rasping like sandpaper?
He shouts, once, twice, just for the hell of it.
Nothing happens.
“Seriously Sam, what are you going to do, even if you do get out there? It’s not like you actually know how to kill that thing,” Lucifer says helpfully from the corner. He’s squatting, pulling the wings off a struggling fly. “If it’s still out there, Dean is probably dead already. He would have never seen it coming, you know? So busy worrying about your One-Flew-Over-Cuckoo’s-Nest Ass, all that thing would have needed to do is walk up, and chomp.
Oh come on, don’t give me that face Sam, you’d like that better than the alternative I bet. Because, the alternative is that Dean just left you here and ran for it. You know, it would actually be the smart thing to do, for once in your brother’s life. Cut his losses, I think that’s the phrase? Dean’s human, after all. Would you blame him for putting himself first, just this once?”
Sam studies the room, assessing his options. The door is thick, but not impossibly so. He backs up a few steps, intending to try a running kick. Lucifer performs a drum roll.
“Let’s see what’s behind the velvet curtain, kids.”
This time, the door swings open easily and Sam stumbles through, feeling more than a little ridiculous.
He’s alone in the alley, no sign of the Leviathans, so he dashes back around front.
Dean had clearly been perched across the hood of the parked Impala, waiting for Sam, but he slides off now, looking seriously alarmed by Sam’s appearance.
“Hey, man you alright? Did you see it come this way?” Sam skids to a halt in front of his brother.
“See what?” Dean says carefully.
“The…Leviathan.” Sam finishes, feeling suddenly ridiculous.
“Wait, hang on, you saw a Big Mouth?” Dean’s whole body languages changes within an instant, hand dropping automatically to his gun, barely perceptible changes to his stance, gaze doing a sweep of their surroundings.
“Yeah, just outside the bathroom, I rushed it, but it locked me in there somehow, and fuck man, it knew who I was. I figured it would be coming after you next, and-”
Dean is staring at him. “Hey, hey Sam, stop for a second. Can you do that for a second and listen to me?”
Sam obediently quiets.
His brother is silent for a moment as well, uncharacteristically choosy about his words. His hand has fallen away from his gun holster. “Okay…Sam, I don’t how to say this, but listen to yourself dude. You happen to run into a Leviathan, totally randomly, outside a shit gas station in bumfuck nowhere, and instead of eating you it…locks you in the bathroom and then just disappears?”
Sam’s jaw tightens fractionally. “Dean, I know how it sounds, but I’m telling you I know what I saw.”
“Sammy, I get that, but I’m sorry dude, you’re not exactly the most reliable witness right now. More to the point though I’ve been sitting here for at least 10 minutes and haven’t seen anyone come around the corner until you Rambo’ed over here.”
The condescension he sees in his brother is breathtaking, because Sam knows, he knows the difference between his hallucinations and real life, right?
In his peripheral vision, Lucifer raises a quizzical eyebrow. Sam fingers the scar on his palm warningly. Lucifer pulls his expression into a comically large sulk.
Sam knows the difference, because otherwise, going on the road with Dean, going on a hunt with Dean and having his back, starts to sound like a breathtakingly stupid idea, and Sam is trying to be done with those.
“Sammy, you good?”
He looks backs over to where he came from. The walls are concrete, high, with no obvious outlet save the one.
Nowhere else for a monster on the hunt to go, save in the direction of his brother.
No, he had seen it. Somehow… somehow the Leviathan had disappeared. In which case, since they don’t actually know how to kill the damn things yet, isn’t it better that they count their blessings and hightail it out of there?
Yeah, Sam is good. He’s good. He’s fine.
“Because before we get back on the road again, how about you change your shirt? You’re covered in something that I ain’t interested in smelling all afternoon. I gotta ask, did your Leviathan put your head in the toilet too or something?”
“What? No,” Sam says absently, as he goes to the trunk for his duffle. It was the cat that tripped me.”
Dean stops. “What?”
“Dude, you already think I’m a nut job, do you really need to hear everything?”
“No, I’m serious Sam, what did you say about the cat?”
“It was like, waiting for me or something outside the bathroom. Got in between me and the Leviathan, got underfoot, and you are absolutely never going to let me live this down, but I tripped over it and I face planted. Look I know it’s ridiculous, but it saved my life. Where is it?”
Dean’s face is an interesting mixture of alarm and guilt. It’s a uniquely Dean kind of look. “It um, kind of got away from me.”
Sam closes the trunk and looks at his brother, hard. “What happened?”
Dean mumbles something.
“What?”
“I may have tried to run some more tests.”
Sam raises his eyebrows, dangerously. “Did it pass?”
“It clawed me and jumped through the window. Ran off towards the highway, before I could finish dabbing it with the holy oil.”
“Yeah no shit, genius. It’s a cat, they tend to do that when you mess with them too much.”
“Since when you are the cat expert anyway?” Dean is crossing his arms, clearly looking for some way to get off the defensive. Sam isn’t really interested in giving him an opening.
“Well somebody has to be, because you just let an animal loose near a major highway!”
“Sam, dude. You weren’t there. It wasn’t just a normal cat reaction. It was…something more than anger.”
Dean actually looks unnerved as he recalls it, which infuriates Sam. He’s not exactly sure where this intense protective rage started, but he feels a little high off it. “That’s weak Dean. Real weak. Because from where I’m sitting, it looks like the great Dean Winchester was outmatched by a fucking cat, and his ego can’t manage it.”
“Think, Sammy! If it’s just a “fucking cat,” why are you so attached to it again? Can you tell me that? It’s a stray that shows up out of the blue two days ago, and now all of a sudden you’ve gone full crazy cat lady over it? You don’t think that’s just a little bit weird?”
I think you’re obsessed, Dean. God forbid. I try to make friends with a stray. God forbid I show affection to someone or something outside of my family. Outside of my psychotically obsessed big brother.”
Dean pounds the hood of the Impala. Then he shuts his mouth abruptly, like he’s thought better of whatever it was he was about to say. Sam waits as Dean takes 3 deep breaths, before turning back to get into the driver’s seat. “Get in the goddamn car Sam. I want to make Milwaukee by nightfall. If that…cat, whatever it is, has followed you this far, it can manage Wisconsin.