"This Above All," NC-17, Sam/Giles (4/7)
The drive back to Stanford is uncomfortable. Neither makes an effort to speak, though Sam has a thousand questions. His lips still hum with phantom pressure, his belly still feels warm with what they’ve done. He knows he’s acting like a schoolgirl, and he can’t find it in himself to care. Nothing remotely like this has ever happened to him before.
He’s terrified.
Thankfully, if Sam Winchester learned nothing else from his father’s less than gentle lessons, it is that fear leads to failure.
You can be afraid, son, he can hear his father saying. But you can’t let fear rule you, or the monsters win.
Sam feels the bitter smile on his lips. He’s better prepared to deal with monsters than with the more complicated formula of feelings to which he’s just been introduced.
Gee, Dad, you never really taught me how to take it like a man, did you?
He snorts then to himself, but it’s audible in the unnatural stillness of the car.
“What?” Giles asks, softly, like he’s afraid he doesn’t really have the right to ask.
Sam looks at him for the first time since they started back toward Palo Alto.
“I was just thinking that I can decipher cuneiform and track a crazy, evil-worshipping killer through the woods by his sign, but I can’t figure out what to think about that kiss.”
Giles’ responding laugh indicates a consonant feeling of confusion.
“I’m sorry, Sam. I shouldn’t have…pursued you. This is the worst possible time for such…things.”
“You were going to say ‘dalliances,’ weren’t you?” Sam guesses, letting his voice indicate that he’s teasing.
“Perhaps.”
“It’s okay, Giles. I get it. I really do. The job comes first. Everything else takes a back seat.”
Giles lets his gaze stray from the road. “You really are a remarkable young man, Sam. Do you know that?”
“One man’s remarkable is another man’s strange,” Sam answers, and Giles laughs again, but sobers after a moment.
“You’re far less strange-or alone-than you might think, Sam.”
Sam nods, squints his eyes a little and looks out the passenger side window. He feels like he can’t quite take a full breath, and his eyes feel a little hot, the skin around them too tight.
He clears his throat. “So you’re heading back to Sunnydale tonight?”
“Yes.” Giles accepts the change of subject gracefully. “But I’ll be in touch. What will you do?”
“I’m going to see if there were any witnesses who saw the murderer leaving the park.”
“There weren’t any listed in the police report.”
“I don’t think the cops found that trail, do you? There’d have been some indication of evidence markers, measuring tapes, that sort of thing. More foot traffic, too.”
Giles nods thoughtfully.
“So I’m thinking maybe the cops didn’t know the right questions to ask.”
It’s a credit to the nature of their mutual “livelihood” that neither man even suggests calling the police to correct their oversight.
“Be careful, Sam. The killer could still be out there, and I don’t want you getting in over your head.”
“I’ll be alright.”
“This isn’t your usual evil, Sam. If this killer is working for The First, he’ll be…powerful, more powerful than any monster you’ve ever hunted. And The First itself loves to play mind games, loves to use what’s in your own head to make you doubt yourself. There aren’t words strong enough for how dangerous this killer could be. Please be careful and don’t take any chances. I know that you can handle yourself, but I’d hate for you to-“
Whatever Giles had been about to confess is interrupted by his need to slam on the brakes to avoid a line of taillights ahead of them.
“Rush hour,” Sam notes, settling in for a California commute.
“Anyway, don’t take anything for granted, and please call me if you’re in any doubt about the situation.”
“Can I call you just to say hello?”
Sam is careful to watch Giles’ reaction only out of the corner of his eye, and he sees the genuine smile of pleasure flit across the older man’s face before he seems to remember the gravity of the situation.
“I’d like that,” he says, despite the grim line of his lips, and Sam swallows back a little crow of triumph at having eked a concession out of the stoic man.
Giles leaves him on Escondido in front of Stern with another litany of warnings and a list of phone numbers-his cell, a landline he rarely uses, and the home phone number of a girl named Buffy. “I’m staying there most of the time,” Giles says without further explanation.
Sam wonders but does not ask.
“Call me if you find anything-anything at all.” It’s an exhortation Sam’s already heard several times, so he just pats the roof of the car, leans in the open passenger window, and says, “I had a good time today,” just as if they’d been on a picnic after all.
Giles blushes-honest-to-god blushes-and stammers a “Yes, well,” before giving a little wave and pulling the car away from the curb.
Sam enters Donner House smiling.
The week moves with arthritic slowness, Sam trying to focus on the things due before spring break, trying to care about ancient Greek syllabic transposition and the economic exigencies of Central American villagers in the nineteen-eighties and all the other things that he’d found so interesting just two weeks before. But mostly, he bounces his leg through classes, hands in assignments that he’d ordinarily consider first drafts, and spends every off hour searching for a translation to the symbol.
So caught up is he in the hunt for information and in planning his further investigation on the weekend that Sam doesn’t remember Becky’s plans for spring break until he asks if he can borrow her car on Friday afternoon.
“Of course not, you dork,” she says, picking up a pre-packaged salad and making her way to the cashier. Sam follows behind with his own lunch.
“Why not?” He asks, wondering if he’s asked one too many times, if this is another of those social conventions he just never learned growing up.
“Because we’re leaving for Malibu right after your 1:15 lets out, that’s why.”
Sam must not school his face fast enough because Becky sees something there that has her stopping him in an aisle between dining hall tables. “You aren’t backing out on us, are you, Sam?”
Sam thinks furiously, trying to come up with a good excuse. He can’t very well tell her that he’s on the trail of a murderous psychopath in the employ of a power so evil that the world itself is in peril.
He tried that once in the eleventh grade. He got slapped for his troubles, and when his father found out about it through a school counselor, Sam was grounded for a month.
So he says the first reasonable thing that comes to mind. “I’ve got to write that final paper for my honors seminar, and I’m thinking I should find a job for the summer now, before there’s too much competition. And, you know, my brother might swing by…”
The first two excuses, while true, are pretty weak. The third, though stronger, is a complete lie.
Luckily for Sam, Becky doesn’t know him as well as she thinks she does.
“Your brother Dean? Really? You haven’t seen him since October, right?”
Sam nods, remembering the awkward afternoon he’d spent showing his uncomfortable brother around campus. Though Dean had mentioned staying the night, he’d found a reason to leave just as dark was falling, citing an urgent phone call from Dad with coordinates to meet up in Nebraska.
Sam swallows his lie, swallows the wish he has that it wasn’t a lie, that Dean was coming to see him next week.
“Yeah. Yeah, it’s been awhile, and I’d really like to see him.”
“Okay. That sucks, but it’s okay. We’ll miss you, though.”
Sam offers an apologetic smile, Becky returns it with a hug, and they sit down to talk about Zach’s latest adventure in Kiwiland over their lunches.
Friday afternoon can’t come soon enough for Sam, who by then is about useless in terms of his academics. Thankfully, his last classes are cancelled-professors like vacation time too, go figure-and he’s at the curb on Embarcadero, receiving his rental with a grateful smile and signing off on the perfectly legal credit card with his actual name at the bottom of it.
His father would be so disappointed in him.
Sam slides behind the wheel of the rental, throwing his backpack on the passenger seat, and pops in a CD he’s brought just for the occasion. Road trips used to mean heavy metal and fast food. He drives to the sparsely inhabited outskirts of Grant County Park accompanied by Matchbox 20.
Deciding to try the houses nearest the access road where the murderer’s truck had been parked, and having already downloaded a county maintenance map of the area, Sam has little trouble finding the double-wide trailer set back from the road a ways, skirted by neatly painted coffee cans planted with spring flowers.
The walk to the door from the unpaved drive, Sam can’t help but notice, is lined with natural crushed albacore. He stifles a sigh at the sense that he’s on a wild goose chase, and just as he’s raising his hand to knock, the inside door is swung wide to reveal a middle-aged woman in a faded housedress, a damp dishrag in one hand indicating that he’s interrupted her housework.
“Can I help you?” She doesn’t sound especially friendly, but she doesn’t shoo him off, either.
He tries the truth. “I’m looking for a truck that might’ve come through here last week, maybe Monday or Tuesday? Would’ve been old, kind of big, maybe a Ford?”
The woman gives him the look he’d expected from his vague description of the murderer’s vehicle.
“Whaddya want with the truck, kid? This some sorta gang thing? ‘cause I don’t wanna get involved, if that’s the case.”
Sam wonders what kind of gangs roam the back roads of Santa Clara County, but he keeps his face neutral and tries again.
“I was in the park last week and had my backpack stolen. I think whoever was in that truck might’ve taken it.”
It’s thin. Sam knows it.
So, apparently, does the woman.
“I don’t know what you really want, kid, but I’m not interested. Get off my property, or I’m callin’ the cops. If you really did lose somethin’, maybe you should do the same yourself.”
Sam says, “Thank you,” like she hadn’t just threatened to have him arrested and heads back to the rental.
At the next house, he tries a variation on the theme but implies instead that he’s a private investigator. This, naturally, earns him a suspicious glance and a demand to see some I.D., which Sam doesn’t have.
The third and fourth houses are unoccupied, owners out for the day, probably working. The fifth house has a chain link fence, three big dogs, and several hand-painted warning signs about the wrath of God.
Sam decides not to try that one.
The sixth and last house near the access road is the worst yet in terms of upkeep. A sagging single-wide propped up on pitted cinder blocks and sporting a year’s worth of uncut weeds in the front yard, it looks like it shouldn’t be inhabitable much less home to the three barefooted kids playing near the rusted propane tank that must serve as the “house’s” fuel source.
“Your mom at home?” He asks the oldest, a boy with holey jeans and a belligerent glare.
“Who the fuck are you?” The kid answers, pulling himself up to his full height.
Sam appreciates the bravado, even if he doesn’t like the tone. He’s spared responding by a smoke-wrecked voice of indeterminate age and gender that rasps, “If yer here fer the rent, you can ferget it. I ain’t got it and I won’t, neither, till my check comes.”
He spies a face, shadowed by the rusted screen door of the trailer home, and says, “I’m not here for the rent. I wanted to ask you if you’ve seen a truck that might have been through here a couple of weeks ago.”
The door squeals open and a dirty slipper appears, above which is a bare leg, the ragged edge of a bathrobe, and finally a set of sagging breasts and two bloodshot eyes in a rat’s nest of hair that might once have been blonde.
“Maybe I have and maybe I ain’t.” She answers, giving him a speculative look. “What’s it to you?”
Sam smiles his best disingenuous smile and says, “We’re looking for the truck in relation to some vandalism at the park,” implying that he’s official without overtly identifying himself.
Her eyes go sly and one corner of her mouth quirks up. “Maybe I seen somethin’ a coupla weeks ago. There a reward?” Accent on the first syllable.
Reaching for his wallet, which he’s glad he’s replenished with cash from his dwindling book stipend, Sam pulls out a twenty.
Seeing the denomination, the woman shakes her head in the negative. “Naw, guess I was wrong.”
He adds a second twenty and pointedly puts his wallet away.
Apparently satisfied that this is the best she’ll do, the woman says, “Yeah, I seen a truck a coupla times…when was it? Hey, Ben, when’d we see that truck cruisin’ through here…was it a coupla Mondays ago?”
“How the fuck should I know?” Ben answers, disappearing around the end of the house.
The woman shrugs as if Ben’s words and tone are typical and turns her eyes back to Sam’s.
“I think it was Monday or Tuesday. Anyway, big white truck, some sorta coverin’ on the back, kinda rusted out.”
“Did you happen to get a look at the driver or the plates?”
The woman snorts. “I look like freakin’ Columbo to you?”
Sam gives her a bland smile, hands her the money, and says, “Thank you for your time.”
She makes another indefinite noise and then turns to go back in the trailer, and Sam makes his way to the car, already considering his next move.
He knows what the truck looks like, or at least that it’s white, old, rusted, and has a cap or some other enclosure on the back. He knows that it’s been in a parking lot with crushed abalone dyed bright pink.
He knows damned well that the murderer is probably long gone.
Still, Sam learned patience from a man who learned it himself in a sniper’s nest, so he takes a breath, turns off of the access road and starts working the grid of roads and streets around greater San Jose.
Hours later, the sun’s down and Sam’s hungry and tired; his eyes feel dense with road grit and the strain of trying to watch the road and spot his target at the same time. More than once over the course of the long afternoon, he’d really missed his brother, the way he and Dean would make it a contest who could find what Dad was looking for first.
A little soul-weary and a lot discouraged, he pulls into a diner just outside the city of San Jose limits, locks the rental, walks inside, finds a seat at the counter near the register, and orders the usual burger plate.
He’s halfway through his fries when a jocular Southern voice catches his attention.
“Myrtle, dear, that grub smells great, but I haven’t got time to sit and visit. Can you box up the turkey club special? You know the way I like it.”
The owner of the voice shoulders up next to him, says, “Pardon me,” and offers a smile that, while on the surface pleasant sets off a cascade of ice in Sam’s belly.
Gut instinct is something he learned to trust a long time ago, so he drops a half-eaten fry, bunches up his napkin, and picks up the check, pushing back from the circular seat and finding his feet just as the man turns to look up and give him a more significant once-over.
“You a local boy?” The man asks, like he’s got some right to hear the answer.
Sam smiles in patented John Winchester fashion and says, “Just passing through.”
“Down from the college, then?”
And it’s eerie, like the man already knows the answer. Sam has to suppress an involuntary shiver and wishes Myrtle would hurry up and get back to the register. He wants to get outside, someplace where he has more room to maneuver, to defend himself.
Every internal alarm is screaming now, and he’s considering a dine and dash when the improbably blonde-haired Myrtle comes back with the Southerner’s dinner in a cellophane-wrapped Styrofoam box, takes his money, gives him his change, and indulges in a little mild flirtation, which the man kindly but firmly rebuffs.
“Now, Myrtle, none of that. You’re a married woman.”
The man exchanges a nod with Sam as he turns to go, and Sam steps wide to give him passage.
He pays quickly, offering Myrtle nothing to work with in the way of banter, and makes the parking lot just as a big, old white Ford 350 pulls out onto the road.
Sam feels the unease blossom into real fear and sucks in a deep breath, tries to still the shaking of his hands, which he attributes to adrenaline and not the inexplicable terror coursing through him.
He backs out, avoiding an elderly couple making their turtle-like way across the lot, and makes the turn to follow the truck.
Spotting it two corners ahead, Sam speeds up a little, pretty sure he hasn’t been made. It’s not like the Southerner had any reason to put Sam together with the car, nor any suspicion at all that Sam might be looking for him.
Still, he can’t help but feel he’s letting himself be led into a trap, and he gets out his cell phone, turns it on, scrolls through the numbers there.
He pauses over Dean’s a long minute, eyes on the taillights of the truck ahead of him, mind elsewhere, remembering the comfort of his brother at his back.
Stupid, he thinks. Dean could be anywhere.
He skips to Giles’ numbers, considers, then shuts the phone off and tosses it on the seat. Giles is three hundred miles away in Sunnydale, and it’s not like Sam’s about to confront the guy or anything. Hell, the Southerner might not even be their guy. It might just be a coincidence that he raises all of Sam’s red flags and drives a truck that matches the vague description of a vehicle that might’ve been driven by a psycho killer.
Generally speaking, though, Winchesters don’t believe in coincidences, so Sam’s not surprised to see the truck turn into the parking lot of a cheap mom-and-pop motel just off of 680. A parking lot covered in crushed, unnaturally pink abalone shells.
He drives past, not even looking that way, not wanting to take a chance that the man will see him and remember him from the diner.
A half-mile down the road, Sam pulls into a boarded up service station and stares hard at the holes in the concrete where the gas pumps used to be.
One part of him, the California convert who goes to classes and writes papers on urban hegemony and the hierarchy of street gangs, is urging that he call for back-up, get Giles up here before he does anything else.
The other part, the part that’s been a hunter far longer than he’ll ever be a student, is telling him that he should gather more intel before getting Giles involved. After all, it could be nothing. He could be over-reacting. The guy could be a bible salesman.
This way to Chapter Five.