SPN Fanfic: Laundry Day 4/8
Title:Laundry Day - 4/8
Characters: Sam, Dean, OC
Classification: Humour, multi-part, gen
Rating: PG13? K+? Nothing that couldn't have been televised.
Warnings: None. Smatterings of spoilers for Season 1 episodes up to and including "Nightmare"
Word Count: 1914 words
Disclaimer: Still not mine. Wah.
Timeline: Set between the Season 1 episodes "Nightmare" and "Benders"
Summary: The Winchester boys do their laundry. Sounds boring, doesn't it... Sam and Dean can only wish it was.
Originally posted June 6, 2006 at fanfiction.net
Laundry Day - Part 4
by CaffieneKitty
- - -
By the time Dean parked, avoiding a mini-van more interested in rubbernecking than watching the road, the laundromat patrons had scattered.
"Somehow I don't think throwing some potpourri in the dryer is gonna help anymore, Sam."
Sam frowned at the darkened laundromat as they piled out of the car. "I think this is something different than Michael."
"What, you think it's got nothing to do with the kid now? Ooo, I know, maybe it's the old dryer haunting the new dryer they put in five years ago?"
"Be serious." Sam started across the street, checking for traffic.
Dean, with a backward glance at the trunk of the Impala, headed toward the laundromat after Sam. "I am serious. The kid's haunting the dryer, we tried calming him down, and now all hell's breaking loose. Kind of a direct connection there. Remind me to thank Missouri for the recipe for pissing off poltergeists, it's been so much help."
"We probably should have called her anyways to check, not just gone from the notes," Sam admitted reluctantly. "Maybe it's not good for situations like this."
"Oh, ya think? Why didn't you call her, Sam?" Dean fixed a tight-lipped stare on the back of Sam's head.
Sam glanced down at his feet as he stepped up onto the sidewalk. "I... uh-" he pointed at the laundromat window. "Hey, something's still moving in there."
There was a quick motion past the laundromat window and Carl the laundry attendant stumbled out the door. Something hit the door's blinds with a thump as he pushed the door shut and locked it behind him.
"Hey! Carl!" shouted Sam as they approached.
"Sorry, the laundromat is, uh, closed," said Carl, panting and stepping back from the door.
"What happened?" asked Sam.
Carl looked up. "Oh, it's you guys. Uh, I really don't know what happened. One second everything's fine, the next..." he looked from the brothers to the door and back. "It got, uh... weird in there."
"Weird being worse than quirky?" asked Dean.
"Oh yeah," Carl nodded jerkily. "Some kind of freak electrical fault or something. And something wrong with the pipes. And the washers. And uh-"
"Carl." Sam interrupted the panicky attendant. "When exactly did it start?"
"I, uh, a couple minutes ago maybe? Some of the washers opened in mid-cycle, and there was... uh... kind of a noise..."
"What kind of noise?"
"Kind of a scre- uh, squeal. And some banging. And then the lights went out. Then the customers were all shouting and running. One of them kept saying 'I've lost him' in a really strange voice."
Sam and Dean exchanged a glance. "Strange how?"
"Strange like it wasn't a shout, but I could still hear it over all the ruckus."
"You sure it was one of the customers?" Dean asked.
"It must've been. It wasn't me. Then everything kind of went..." he waved his hands around as though conducting an orchestra, "... weird."
"Hm," said Dean. "Anyone left inside there?"
"No."
"Then what hit the door while you were closing it?"
"I dunno. I don't want to know."
"Do you know anything about a family named Hussman?" asked Sam.
"What?" said Carl, confused at the sudden shift of topic. "No, never heard of them."
"What about the family that used to own the place, the Bernoits?"
"No! No, wait...," said Carl, "There was an Amanda Bernoit that killed herself."
"What? When?" said Dean.
"We-ell, I don't know exactly, sometime in the 80's, back when I was in high school."
"Can you narrow it down at all?"
"It was my first year in high school, so that'd make it... '83? Sometime in the spring." He shrugged. "I only remember because the school had some big suicide prevention thing for the rest of the year. She was a senior who'd moved away shortly before. She killed herself in another county."
"Why didn't you say anything about this before?" asked Sam.
"We-ell," Carl said, looking at them oddly, "you were asking about the dryer before... Wait. You two seriously think there's a ghost haunting the laundromat?"
"You were in there just now," said Dean, "What do you think?"
"I, uh, I think, uh-"
There was sudden clatter. Sam and Dean spun towards the sound and motion. The metal security blinds rolled down over the plate glass windows of the laundromat and locked themselves.
"Gnah!" gasped Carl from behind the brothers. "I think I don't get paid enough to deal with this crap!"
"We could-" began Sam.
"Here!" Carl pushed the keys at Sam, who grabbed them by reflex. "All yours. Do whatever you want. I'm going to a bar. In Wisconsin. If the area manager calls, tell her I quit." Carl took off, not quite running.
"Well that simplifies things," said Dean, snatching the keys from Sam and striding back across the street to the Impala.
Sam jogged after him. "Wait, Dean, we're in the middle of town and it's nowhere near dark. If we-"
"What, you think I'm an idiot?" Dean opened the trunk and glanced at Sam. "Don't answer that. I'm not getting guns. Here." He handed Sam the salt can.
Sam nodded. "Doors and windows."
"Yep." Dean pulled out a tool box and loaded electronic gear into it, "I'll check the stores that share walls with it for EMF variations and cold spots. And establish our cover as repair guys."
"If nothing's spreading, and it's encapsulated inside the laundromat, we have a bit of time to-"
"-yeah, yeah, plan, research, write poetry, whatever. Hey, I forgot this was in here!" He pulled out a battered black and orange 'Closed for Repairs by Order of Management' sign out of the trunk. He wibbled the sign at Sam and grinned. "It's even almost true for once."
- - -
The neighbouring stores showed no signs of otherworldly interference, so Sam had gone back to the library fiche reader to look up Amanda Bernoit, and keep an eye on the laundromat. Dean had returned to the graveyard on the pretext of checking for signs in case Mikey was the one that was annoyed. A quick sweep around the graveyard with the EMF detector turned up nothing but background levels, as expected, leaving Dean to grumble in peace on the way to the boy's grave again.
Since when did Sam dive head first into experimenting with herbology, especially when there was an available information source to tap. It wasn't like Sam not to use every source of information he could get his grubby mitts on. This new schtick of his has Sam freaked, but to the point of it getting in the way of research? That was just... wrong. Why didn't Sam just call-
"Hunh," Dean said to the empty graveyard, stopping still for half a second, then continuing to walk.
Why didn't I just call Missouri? Sam's not the be-all and end-all of data-mining in the family. I coulda called her. Why didn't I?
Dean scuffed his feet on the pathway.
Well, mainly 'coz she hates me and keeps threatening to whack me with a spoon. But also I guess because I wanted Sam to talk to her and work through some of his 'Shining' crap so we don't have this friggin' bugbear with halitosis sitting between us in the car for the next five hundred miles. So instead we now have a minor annoyance ghost that's turned into a not-so-minor problem ghost. All because I was a stubborn dumb-ass. Hell, we're both stubborn dumb-asses. Nobody's got the corner on that market in the Winchester family.
Dean reached Michael's grave again just as his cell phone rang. Little bits of the stuff they'd burnt earlier flecked the grass.
"You got anything, Sam? It's looking pretty calm out here."
"Not much. Amanda Bernoit killed herself with an overdose of sleeping pills in Menominee county two weeks after Michael died, one week after her parents sold the laundromat and moved."
"Pulled up stakes in a hurry for business owners."
"Yeah. There's not a lot in the Menominee papers, just an obit and an in memorium. Only child of Clive and Nancy Bernoit, sixteen years old when she died. I went back to the Alger county papers and found a mention of the suicide prevention thing at her old school that Carl mentioned. Five lines on page seven, below an ad for a shoe sale."
"No wonder the paper went under."
"Hm. I'm thinking this isn't just crappy journalism. There's almost nothing in the papers about either death, and in small towns like these, either one would be the biggest story of the year."
"Respect for the dead?"
"I doubt it. Pay-off, maybe?"
"Maybe. How's the laundromat doing?"
"I went back and checked. It's still dark inside and the water running out the front door is down to a trickle, but the salt line in front of the door was nearly washed away."
"Oh, that's not good."
"I put more salt down, and the rest of the doors and windows were okay. I re-salted the dryer vents too, but the spirit doesn't seem to be even trying to extend beyond the laundromat. Whatever its goal is must be tied up with the building."
Dean brushed at the grass with his foot, watching grass blades flick the black ashy chunks around. "This Amanda girl was the daughter of the original owners. Think she probably worked there?"
"...and she was on shift when Michael died? Could be. Police reports would be handy on determining that, since the Bernoits have apparently moved again."
"We don't have time to go dig up archived police records, Sam. We can't to let this go too long, if she's this active in daylight, she'll be a real handful after dark."
"Hm. There's got to be some reason she's doing this though. There's no obvious connection between Michael Hussman and Amanda Bernoit besides this. It's like her ghost had his ghost trapped. But why would Amanda hijack Michael?"
Dean crouched and ran his fingers over the trimmed lawn picking up burnt bits. "Could be vice versa, maybe Michael thinks Amanda killed him and hijacked her."
"Why would he be asking for help then? And why would either of them still be around? You know how these things work. A ghost sticks around because it has something it needs to do. If getting Amanda was what Michael wanted, he'd have moved on. If Amanda was after Michael, same deal, she gets him, she's done. There has to be something else involved."
"Which leaves us back at the start." Dean stood and looked around. A few small white fragments near Michael's headstone caught his eye. "Well, when we lit off your ghost-repellent, the laundromat went nuts."
"If it worked, even partly, it would have reduced Michael's presence."
"So... what if Michael was keeping Amanda calm?"
"Venting off destructive outbursts with the occasional wrecking of laundry?"
"Yeah, maybe she was getting too tough for him and that's what he was asking for help with." He bent down and picked up a white fragment. Flower petal? "Though he could've been more specific, I mean he had the whole other side of my friggin' shirt to write on."
Sam made a rude noise. "So anyway, when Michael mostly disappears, she comes roaring out looking for him. Hence the whole 'I've lost him' thing."
"Dude, did you just say 'hence' in normal conversation?"
"Focus, Dean. It still doesn't explain how they got mixed up together."
"They're both waiting for something." Dean held the mulched flower petal up and scrutinized it. That's interesting.
"Maybe it's the same thing?"
"Maybe. Hey, Sam, that ghost-goop of yours. It didn't have daisies in it, right?"
"What? No. Why?"
"What are you doing to my son's grave?" Dean looked up to see a stern middle-aged woman approaching, holding a bundle of wildflowers like she was about to hit someone with them.
"I'll get back to you on that, Sam." He flipped the phone shut, plastered on a big friendly smile and stood up.
- - -
(Part 3) (INDEX) (Part 5)
Characters: Sam, Dean, OC
Classification: Humour, multi-part, gen
Rating: PG13? K+? Nothing that couldn't have been televised.
Warnings: None. Smatterings of spoilers for Season 1 episodes up to and including "Nightmare"
Word Count: 1914 words
Disclaimer: Still not mine. Wah.
Timeline: Set between the Season 1 episodes "Nightmare" and "Benders"
Summary: The Winchester boys do their laundry. Sounds boring, doesn't it... Sam and Dean can only wish it was.
Originally posted June 6, 2006 at fanfiction.net
Laundry Day - Part 4
by CaffieneKitty
- - -
By the time Dean parked, avoiding a mini-van more interested in rubbernecking than watching the road, the laundromat patrons had scattered.
"Somehow I don't think throwing some potpourri in the dryer is gonna help anymore, Sam."
Sam frowned at the darkened laundromat as they piled out of the car. "I think this is something different than Michael."
"What, you think it's got nothing to do with the kid now? Ooo, I know, maybe it's the old dryer haunting the new dryer they put in five years ago?"
"Be serious." Sam started across the street, checking for traffic.
Dean, with a backward glance at the trunk of the Impala, headed toward the laundromat after Sam. "I am serious. The kid's haunting the dryer, we tried calming him down, and now all hell's breaking loose. Kind of a direct connection there. Remind me to thank Missouri for the recipe for pissing off poltergeists, it's been so much help."
"We probably should have called her anyways to check, not just gone from the notes," Sam admitted reluctantly. "Maybe it's not good for situations like this."
"Oh, ya think? Why didn't you call her, Sam?" Dean fixed a tight-lipped stare on the back of Sam's head.
Sam glanced down at his feet as he stepped up onto the sidewalk. "I... uh-" he pointed at the laundromat window. "Hey, something's still moving in there."
There was a quick motion past the laundromat window and Carl the laundry attendant stumbled out the door. Something hit the door's blinds with a thump as he pushed the door shut and locked it behind him.
"Hey! Carl!" shouted Sam as they approached.
"Sorry, the laundromat is, uh, closed," said Carl, panting and stepping back from the door.
"What happened?" asked Sam.
Carl looked up. "Oh, it's you guys. Uh, I really don't know what happened. One second everything's fine, the next..." he looked from the brothers to the door and back. "It got, uh... weird in there."
"Weird being worse than quirky?" asked Dean.
"Oh yeah," Carl nodded jerkily. "Some kind of freak electrical fault or something. And something wrong with the pipes. And the washers. And uh-"
"Carl." Sam interrupted the panicky attendant. "When exactly did it start?"
"I, uh, a couple minutes ago maybe? Some of the washers opened in mid-cycle, and there was... uh... kind of a noise..."
"What kind of noise?"
"Kind of a scre- uh, squeal. And some banging. And then the lights went out. Then the customers were all shouting and running. One of them kept saying 'I've lost him' in a really strange voice."
Sam and Dean exchanged a glance. "Strange how?"
"Strange like it wasn't a shout, but I could still hear it over all the ruckus."
"You sure it was one of the customers?" Dean asked.
"It must've been. It wasn't me. Then everything kind of went..." he waved his hands around as though conducting an orchestra, "... weird."
"Hm," said Dean. "Anyone left inside there?"
"No."
"Then what hit the door while you were closing it?"
"I dunno. I don't want to know."
"Do you know anything about a family named Hussman?" asked Sam.
"What?" said Carl, confused at the sudden shift of topic. "No, never heard of them."
"What about the family that used to own the place, the Bernoits?"
"No! No, wait...," said Carl, "There was an Amanda Bernoit that killed herself."
"What? When?" said Dean.
"We-ell, I don't know exactly, sometime in the 80's, back when I was in high school."
"Can you narrow it down at all?"
"It was my first year in high school, so that'd make it... '83? Sometime in the spring." He shrugged. "I only remember because the school had some big suicide prevention thing for the rest of the year. She was a senior who'd moved away shortly before. She killed herself in another county."
"Why didn't you say anything about this before?" asked Sam.
"We-ell," Carl said, looking at them oddly, "you were asking about the dryer before... Wait. You two seriously think there's a ghost haunting the laundromat?"
"You were in there just now," said Dean, "What do you think?"
"I, uh, I think, uh-"
There was sudden clatter. Sam and Dean spun towards the sound and motion. The metal security blinds rolled down over the plate glass windows of the laundromat and locked themselves.
"Gnah!" gasped Carl from behind the brothers. "I think I don't get paid enough to deal with this crap!"
"We could-" began Sam.
"Here!" Carl pushed the keys at Sam, who grabbed them by reflex. "All yours. Do whatever you want. I'm going to a bar. In Wisconsin. If the area manager calls, tell her I quit." Carl took off, not quite running.
"Well that simplifies things," said Dean, snatching the keys from Sam and striding back across the street to the Impala.
Sam jogged after him. "Wait, Dean, we're in the middle of town and it's nowhere near dark. If we-"
"What, you think I'm an idiot?" Dean opened the trunk and glanced at Sam. "Don't answer that. I'm not getting guns. Here." He handed Sam the salt can.
Sam nodded. "Doors and windows."
"Yep." Dean pulled out a tool box and loaded electronic gear into it, "I'll check the stores that share walls with it for EMF variations and cold spots. And establish our cover as repair guys."
"If nothing's spreading, and it's encapsulated inside the laundromat, we have a bit of time to-"
"-yeah, yeah, plan, research, write poetry, whatever. Hey, I forgot this was in here!" He pulled out a battered black and orange 'Closed for Repairs by Order of Management' sign out of the trunk. He wibbled the sign at Sam and grinned. "It's even almost true for once."
- - -
The neighbouring stores showed no signs of otherworldly interference, so Sam had gone back to the library fiche reader to look up Amanda Bernoit, and keep an eye on the laundromat. Dean had returned to the graveyard on the pretext of checking for signs in case Mikey was the one that was annoyed. A quick sweep around the graveyard with the EMF detector turned up nothing but background levels, as expected, leaving Dean to grumble in peace on the way to the boy's grave again.
Since when did Sam dive head first into experimenting with herbology, especially when there was an available information source to tap. It wasn't like Sam not to use every source of information he could get his grubby mitts on. This new schtick of his has Sam freaked, but to the point of it getting in the way of research? That was just... wrong. Why didn't Sam just call-
"Hunh," Dean said to the empty graveyard, stopping still for half a second, then continuing to walk.
Why didn't I just call Missouri? Sam's not the be-all and end-all of data-mining in the family. I coulda called her. Why didn't I?
Dean scuffed his feet on the pathway.
Well, mainly 'coz she hates me and keeps threatening to whack me with a spoon. But also I guess because I wanted Sam to talk to her and work through some of his 'Shining' crap so we don't have this friggin' bugbear with halitosis sitting between us in the car for the next five hundred miles. So instead we now have a minor annoyance ghost that's turned into a not-so-minor problem ghost. All because I was a stubborn dumb-ass. Hell, we're both stubborn dumb-asses. Nobody's got the corner on that market in the Winchester family.
Dean reached Michael's grave again just as his cell phone rang. Little bits of the stuff they'd burnt earlier flecked the grass.
"You got anything, Sam? It's looking pretty calm out here."
"Not much. Amanda Bernoit killed herself with an overdose of sleeping pills in Menominee county two weeks after Michael died, one week after her parents sold the laundromat and moved."
"Pulled up stakes in a hurry for business owners."
"Yeah. There's not a lot in the Menominee papers, just an obit and an in memorium. Only child of Clive and Nancy Bernoit, sixteen years old when she died. I went back to the Alger county papers and found a mention of the suicide prevention thing at her old school that Carl mentioned. Five lines on page seven, below an ad for a shoe sale."
"No wonder the paper went under."
"Hm. I'm thinking this isn't just crappy journalism. There's almost nothing in the papers about either death, and in small towns like these, either one would be the biggest story of the year."
"Respect for the dead?"
"I doubt it. Pay-off, maybe?"
"Maybe. How's the laundromat doing?"
"I went back and checked. It's still dark inside and the water running out the front door is down to a trickle, but the salt line in front of the door was nearly washed away."
"Oh, that's not good."
"I put more salt down, and the rest of the doors and windows were okay. I re-salted the dryer vents too, but the spirit doesn't seem to be even trying to extend beyond the laundromat. Whatever its goal is must be tied up with the building."
Dean brushed at the grass with his foot, watching grass blades flick the black ashy chunks around. "This Amanda girl was the daughter of the original owners. Think she probably worked there?"
"...and she was on shift when Michael died? Could be. Police reports would be handy on determining that, since the Bernoits have apparently moved again."
"We don't have time to go dig up archived police records, Sam. We can't to let this go too long, if she's this active in daylight, she'll be a real handful after dark."
"Hm. There's got to be some reason she's doing this though. There's no obvious connection between Michael Hussman and Amanda Bernoit besides this. It's like her ghost had his ghost trapped. But why would Amanda hijack Michael?"
Dean crouched and ran his fingers over the trimmed lawn picking up burnt bits. "Could be vice versa, maybe Michael thinks Amanda killed him and hijacked her."
"Why would he be asking for help then? And why would either of them still be around? You know how these things work. A ghost sticks around because it has something it needs to do. If getting Amanda was what Michael wanted, he'd have moved on. If Amanda was after Michael, same deal, she gets him, she's done. There has to be something else involved."
"Which leaves us back at the start." Dean stood and looked around. A few small white fragments near Michael's headstone caught his eye. "Well, when we lit off your ghost-repellent, the laundromat went nuts."
"If it worked, even partly, it would have reduced Michael's presence."
"So... what if Michael was keeping Amanda calm?"
"Venting off destructive outbursts with the occasional wrecking of laundry?"
"Yeah, maybe she was getting too tough for him and that's what he was asking for help with." He bent down and picked up a white fragment. Flower petal? "Though he could've been more specific, I mean he had the whole other side of my friggin' shirt to write on."
Sam made a rude noise. "So anyway, when Michael mostly disappears, she comes roaring out looking for him. Hence the whole 'I've lost him' thing."
"Dude, did you just say 'hence' in normal conversation?"
"Focus, Dean. It still doesn't explain how they got mixed up together."
"They're both waiting for something." Dean held the mulched flower petal up and scrutinized it. That's interesting.
"Maybe it's the same thing?"
"Maybe. Hey, Sam, that ghost-goop of yours. It didn't have daisies in it, right?"
"What? No. Why?"
"What are you doing to my son's grave?" Dean looked up to see a stern middle-aged woman approaching, holding a bundle of wildflowers like she was about to hit someone with them.
"I'll get back to you on that, Sam." He flipped the phone shut, plastered on a big friendly smile and stood up.
- - -
(Part 3) (INDEX) (Part 5)