Supernatural fic: Reload [Gen, PG-13]
Reload
by dotfic
Gen, PG-13
Word count: ~4,100
Time: set between "The Benders" and "Shadow."
Summary: There's a storm rising. Sam can't find his favorite sweatshirt. Dean hopes for just one moment without any monsters.
A/N: This is a follow up to Recoil and Ricochet. You don't have to read those to read this, but they go together as a trilogy. I indulged a pet theory that kept evolving along with season one (and which was retconned all to heck by reports of a deleted scene from the pilot).
Huge thank yous to my beta readers lalejandra and sargraf.
"Sam, take off your jacket and put it back on inside out right now."
"What?"
Dean was already shrugging out of his. He turned the sleeves inside out before Sam remembered that ninety-nine times out of a hundred, his brother was right about this kind of stuff. When Dean used that tone, sounding an awful lot like Dad, it was a good idea to go along.
But the woods...Sam took another step, his shoes crunching on dead leaves and dry twigs. His flashlight beam bounced off the tree trunks, catching a spindly body, pointed face, an arm, beckoning.
"Sam!" Dean's voice sounded like he was shouting at Sam under water. But it boomed into clarity when Dean grabbed his shoulders and shook him. "Yo, Sam!"
Sam rubbed his eyes with his fingers, aware of the flashlight in his hand again.
"Pixies, tapioca brain." Dean snapped his fingers in Sam's face. He let go, then tugged at the sleeves of Sam's jacket, helping him out of it like Sam was five years old.
"I can do it." He brushed off his brother's anxious hands, pulled off the jacket, turned it inside out, and put it back on again.
Immediately the fuzzy glow vanished from the trees. Sam noticed how bone-achingly tired he was, that the cut on his left cheek itched, and that he was really, really thirsty.
Dean cursed, muttering something anatomically lewd about what all pixies should do with house-elves, then knelt and picked up his flashlight. "Any idea how we get back to the road?"
"That way." Sam aimed his flashlight and started walking.
"Wait. How do you know?"
Sam shrugged. "I don't. But we have to walk in some direction. Unless you want to sit here all night?"
"If we end up in Indiana, I am so gonna kick your ass."
They began hiking. There was nothing like a trail. It felt strange to be in the lead, to find the rocks and roots before Dean did, to tell his older brother to watch out.
"Does it seem to you as if there have been a lot of critters to deal with lately?" Sam pushed aside a low branch, and then held it so it wouldn't snap back on Dean. "More than usual, I mean?"
"Ghouls in Akron," Dean said.
"Harpies in Dayton."
"Werewolves just outside Skokie."
"When's the last time we dealt with a pack that large? How many were there? Twelve?"
"Fourteen," said Dean.
"It's just...a little weird."
"Yeah."
After an hour of hiking, they reached the road only a few hundred yards from the Impala.
"How'd you do that, you mutant?" Dean grinned at Sam and shoved him lightly.
His brother stumbled and shot him a look.
Some people just couldn't take a compliment.
Dean moved the flashlight beam from his brother and slid it over the length of the car. "Those harpies really did a number on the paint job."
"Nah, that was the werewolves." Sam yanked open the passenger-side door, which creaked loudly in the quiet of the Illinois woods.
"How could werewolves scratch her paint job? Harpies, now, they've got these talons..."
"Don't you remember? One of the wolves climbed onto the car. I can still hear its claws scrape." Sam flinched.
"Score marks that deep? It had to be harpies."
"Werewolves."
"Harpies."
Sam climbed into the passenger seat. "I'll bet if we measured the scratch marks..."
"Shut up, geekboy." Dean started the engine and they pulled out onto the road. "It was harpies."
"Fine. It was harpies."
The traveled in silence for a few miles.
Dean glanced over at Sam. "You look terrible, by the way. You get any sleep last night?"
"More than you did. I think."
They didn't talk again until they got back to the motel, but it wasn't an uneasy quiet, just a tired one.
"Have you seen my gray hoodie sweatshirt?" Sam tossed a pair of jeans to one side and rummaged through the bedclothes.
"Why would I know where your gray hoodie is?" Dean, seated with his back against the headboard, crossed his ankles, shoes on the ugly motel bedspread, whetstone in one hand and knife in the other.
Sam knelt on the fuzzy orange carpet and peered under the bed. He heard the flick-flick as Dean continued to sharpen his knife.
"You were the last one to do the laundry." Sam stood up and began to rummage through a duffel bag. He'd taken psych at Stanford and knew enough to know that finding the sweatshirt wouldn't really make everything okay; he just wanted to believe that it would. Still, he liked that sweatshirt. It was threadbare-soft from so many washings and he felt safer wearing it.
"So? Stuff disappears in the wash all the time. Do we have to have the talk again about the interdimensional hole at the back of every dryer? I swear on...on my knives I have not seen your gray hoodie sweatshirt." Dean put down the whetstone and began to carefully put his knives away in their leather sheathes. "Hey. You want to go grab a drink? I saw a bar right across the street and in about fifteen seconds..." Dean glanced at his watch, "It'll be two dollar beers."
"Uh...sure."
"Yeah?"
He wondered why Dean sounded like that, like he thought he hadn't heard right. Although maybe Dean thought Sam would now associate going for beer with being kidnapped by insane backwoods folk.
Or maybe Sam just hadn't been real friendly. They spent a lot of time in bars, but it was always with research on the table between them and Sam usually left early.
"I said yes."
"Okay, good."
It only took two beers for Sam to get unusually talkative, his laugh a little quicker. Dean slowly worked on his fourth, enjoying more the feel of the cold bottle against his fingers and the din of the bar more than the actual alcohol buzz. He wasn't trying to get drunk; if the fourth beer could last him a while, that was all to the good. There were no pixies here, no harpies, no poltergeists, no insane dead psychologists or breath-sucking fiends or cursed mirrors -- just Sam telling him some story about his college friends. Like with the beer, the particulars weren't as important as the fact that Sam was talking, telling him a story, and laughing in a way that wiped almost a year from his face.
"Hey, Dean, can I ask you something?" Sam turned his beer bottle with his fingers, making multiple rings of moisture on the battered, scarred wooden table top. "It's just...I've been thinking about it for a while and after what happened in Michigan..."
"All right, spit it out, what?" His perfect no-monsters-here moment skidded off track like a needle scratching across a vinyl record.
"The night Jess died," Sam began.
Dean felt his own face close up. Listening to Sam talk about Jess, ever, even if all he did was mention how she liked to fold her socks, was depressing in a way that made Dean want to go out and kill eight hundred monsters as quickly as he could. "Yeah?"
"I thought you drove away, but then it seemed like you were right there. How did you know?"
Dean's fingers tightened around the beer bottle. He felt oddly warm; the last time he'd felt that self-conscious he'd been in eighth grade and had to give a speech in history class. About five possible responses to Sam's questions ran through his head in rapid-fire succession, none of them the truth.
He opened his mouth to reply. Much to his relief and delight, the buxom waitress returned.
"Can I get you boys anything else?" She clicked her pen.
"Yeah. How about your phone number?"
The waitress, a brunette, put the hand holding her pad on her hip and half-smiled. Her lip gloss looked like it tasted like apricots.
"Nope," she said, and her smile widened.
Sam snickered. "Ask a simple question..."
The waitress winked at Sam before she walked off.
"Maybe if you asked her for her phone number," Dean said, watching her go.
"I don't think so."
Dean sighed. "Have I taught you nothing? Get up and go over there and ask her--"
The waitress' scream cut through the bar conversation, scattering it into startled silence, leaving only the throb of the too-loud jukebox. A low, deep growl managed to drown the music out for a moment.
Three and a half beers or not, Dean was on his feet, hand closing around the grip of his gun, scanning the room for the source of the growl. A bit more slowly, Sam also stood up.
Screams and breaking glass followed in the hell hound's wake. It bounded across the room, knocked over a table, and leapt at Sam.
Two beers not only got Sam talkative, it also apparently screwed his reflexes all to hell.
Dean tackled his brother out of the hound's path. They crashed into a table, beer scattering like raindrops, then hit the floor. Sam rolled in one direction, Dean the other, and both ended in a crouch. Fumbling for the knife he kept strapped to his calf, Sam watched the hound, whose red eyes stayed fixed on him right back. The hound's nostrils flared, and Dean thought of the missing sweatshirt.
"Don't move," Dean muttered. He slowly stood up from his crouch, gun aimed. "Hey, Fido!" He kicked an empty beer glass so it skittered across the floor and rolled to a stop against one massive paw.
The hound's haunches tensed. As the beast sprang, Dean fired. The hell hound's growl turned into a yelp. The shot threw off the trajectory of its leap, and the hound smashed into the faux fireplace. Several sports team pictures slid down the wall, their glass frames cracked.
So, silver bullets did work on them, Dad was wrong about something, go figure.
The hell hound turned in the fireplace, claws scrabbling as it now lumbered for Dean, who shot the beast two more times right in the chest, but this time it wouldn't go down, and what kind of freak nutjob hell hound was this? Maybe Dad was right after all. Dean's soles slipped on the wet floor and he stumbled, grabbed at a chair, then went down anyway with four hundred pounds of hell hound bearing at him.
Sam's knife throw went true, the blade going right into the beast's ribs, into its heart. The hound grunted then thudded heavily sideways, panting like a bellows.
The fumes of the combined spilled drinks on the floor made Dean a little dizzy. As Sam reached down to help him up, Dean's brain got stuck on a series of images of Sam at various ages, only hitting the throwing target fives times ouf of ten no matter how Dad coached, instructed, or raged.
Behind the bar, the waitress slowly stood up, her sleek brown hair mussed, her apricot mouth open in a circle of astonishment. Most of the patrons had fled; the few who'd been too sloshed or stunned to go were picking themselves up, cautiously drawing closer to the fallen creature. In the distance there were sirens.
"Sorry about the mess," Sam and Dean said.
As they left, Dean tossed a twenty onto the bar, which barely began to cover it, but it was all they could spare, they needed the rest for gas, lodging, food and ammo.
But he figured they at least owed the girl a decent tip.
"Red caps."
"I know."
It was annoying that his brother could sound so calm. "I mean...Red Caps? And not the kind that takes your luggage at the train station."
"I know what Red Caps are, Sam." Dean took the container of french fries Sam offered, grabbed six, and put all of them in his mouth at once.
The sunlight felt good after the bad nights they'd been having. Sam slouched a little on the park bench, stretching his long legs out.
On the playground, children played, shrieking as they went down the metal slide.
"It's like Practical Demonstrations in Mythlore 101 lately." Sam grabbed another fry. "Hell hound the other night. Red caps last night. Every single town. What gives?"
"It's the job." Dean's eyes were on the kids.
It was a reliable equation. Being up all night killing a nest of Red Caps equaled happy children on the playground in the morning, with no variables, negative numbers, or margin for error. Just like Dad. A straight line between two points.
"Don't you think it's a little weird?"
"Weird is relative, little brother."
"Aren't you exhausted?" Sam asked as an experiment.
"Maybe."
There was no defensiveness in his brother's voice. It was just another part of the equation, a by-product of the all-holy, all powerful job. Exhaustion never seemed to surprise Dean, while Sam often marveled at how anyone could live this way and examined each new bruise in wonderment.
"There might be a pattern." The fries gone, Sam ran his finger along the bottom of the container to gather the last taste of salt. He licked his finger clean, and then tossed the box into the nearby garbage can. "A reason for it."
"You think something's stirring the critters up on purpose?" Dean yawned. He might as well have been discussing football.
"Maybe. It seems way past the usual level of activity." Sam closed his eyes and watched the colors play against the inside of his lids.
"So we're talking about a very big Twinkie?"
"I don't know." He felt the bench shift and a shadow fall. He opened his eyes.
Dean stood over him, blocking the sunlight. "Then we'd better hit Dad's journals."
"Um, would it be okay if we tried, y'know, sleeping first?"
"You're a genius, Sammy." His big brother moved out of the light, and Sam squinted in the suddenly renewed brightness.
As Sam stood up, his bruises and tired muscles protesting, he noticed that Dean limped as he walked across the gravel parking area towards the car. Or, not so much limped as walked stiffly, his back a bit too straight.
It wasn't that Dean was trying to hide the limp that bothered Sam; it was that he seemed so insufferably certain that Sam would never catch on. As if he wouldn't be looking closely enough to see the stifled wince as his brother slid into the driver's seat of the Impala.
On the slide, a little girl with red pigtails helped her even littler brother up to the top. She sat down with her brother in her lap. The boy's eyes were huge, but he twisted to look at his sister, who grinned at him. As they went down, both shrieked in delight.
Red Caps at night equaled happy children in the morning. Straight lines had their uses.
Sam slid into the front passenger seat and banged the door closed.
"You should probably put some ice on your left knee, and try not to lift anything heavy until your cracked rib heals."
He very much enjoyed the startled, half-guilty look on Dean's face.
The late afternoon sun woke Dean first because his bed was closer to the window. He got up, making no effort not to wince at the twinges in his side because Sam was still asleep and couldn't see. He closed the motel room curtains.
Seemed like Sam's insomnia had just been getting better, and now it was like they were running an all-night monsterbusting service.
Dean left his brother sleeping and ran out for coffee and jelly donuts, because who could do research before they'd had sugar and caffeine?
His brother, apparently. Freak. By the time Dean got back, Sam was awake and paging through Dad's journal.
"Why'd you let me sleep so long?" Sam took the cup of latte Dean handed him.
The curtains were open again and the strong golden light of the setting sun filled the air with dust motes. Sam looked older than his actual age instead of younger for a change. There were dark circles under his eyes.
"You needed it, kiddo. Hey! Don't get any jelly on the--"
"I'm being careful." But Sam pushed the donut on its napkin farther away from the journal.
"Find anything yet?"
"Nothing yet."
Several hours later Dean's stomach growled loudly. He let his hands fall from the laptop keys. "We need to check the histories of the towns we've been in recently. Why don't you start working on that and I'll go out and pick up some dinner." Dean pushed the laptop across the table at Sam. "Burgers and fries okay?"
"That's what we had for breakfast," Sam said without any real objection in his voice.
"So?" He pulled on his jacket and checked that the car keys were in the pocket.
"So, we had jelly donuts and coffee for lunch."
"And your point would be..."
"No point. And you're not going out. I am." Sam looked up from the laptop, his mouth set in a firm line.
"Hold on a second..."
"Cracked rib." Sam ticked the items off on his fingers. "Swollen knee. Bruised shoulder." He stood up and held out his hands for the keys.
This was one of those times when Dean hated, hated the fact that Sam was taller. "Oh, all right." He tossed the keys to Sam, who caught them, fumbled, and dropped them on the floor. Dean snickered as his brother picked up the keys. "You get one scratch on her...I mean besides the one that the harpies--"
"Werewolves--"
"Whatever, left on her, I'll feed you to the hell hounds myself, got it?"
"Sure Dean." Sam rolled his eyes, grabbed his jacket and his gun, and left.
Alone in the room Dean listened to the roar of the Impala's engine fade and watched the last of the red burn from the sky beyond the railroad tracks near the motel. A train whistle sounded distantly and it made him homesick, although their house in Lawrence hadn't been near train tracks.
After fifteen minutes or so of trying to decipher Dad's cryptic scrawls, he began to tap his pen on the table, beating out the rhythm of Metallica's "The Four Horsemen."
Whenever he drove the Impala, Sam felt like a guest. He was careful how he handled her, cautious at stop signs. It was weird considering they'd had the car since before he was born and he'd learned to drive in it. Dad and Dean still hadn't found the words "Sam Winchester, age 7 ¾" written in black sharpie on the metal strut underneath the passenger seat.
His stomach growled. Sam went just a little faster. The town was small and there wasn't much traffic.
And then--
--fear not his own hammered his chest. The pen fell to the floor. Dean gripped the edge of the table with both hands and gasped for breath.
This had happened to him before. But only one other time when he was an adult, and he'd hoped he was done with it. His own dread and panicked urgency mingled with fear almost like pain--
--which blinded him as much as the vision itself. He felt the car swerve under his hands. Clarity returned for a few seconds so Sam quickly slowed and pulled over. He heard branches scrape the side of the car and out of habit he thought about how pissed Dean was going to be.
Then the vision hit him again, more detailed and complete. Sam gripped his head with both hands, trying to breathe deep and not pass out.
It stopped, leaving him with his hands shaking so badly he could barely grip the steering wheel. Still he managed to turn the car around with tires squealing, probably leaving skid marks.
He did eighty all the way back to the motel and only had to run one red light which meant he made it in six minutes when it had taken him fifteen to get out there but it wasn't fast enough--
--although it wasn't like Dean was timing himself but the last time he had, it took him three minutes and twenty-seven seconds to jimmy a car lock and hotwire the engine and that was too slow. Too slow.
In five minutes, Dean had gathered up a flask of holy water, a shotgun, and ammo. He was about the hotwire the Toyota parked three doors down from theirs when he heard the Impala.
The black car roared at top speed into the motel parking lot and slammed to a stop so fast it lurched. The engine cut off and Sam scrambled out.
Dean knew he must have a stupid ass expression on his face, a look of complete and utter saywhatnow because Sam had the same expression, mingled with relief.
"What are you--"
"How did you--"
When the thing hit Dean from the side, he only had time to get an impression of a long, scaly body and curving horns before his left side struck the asphalt. Even as the thing grabbed him by the collar of his t-shirt, hauling him up again, Dean looked to check on Sam and saw another one strike at his brother. Sam ducked and rolled, then wriggled to safety underneath the Impala.
Dean stopped worrying about Sam and started worrying about himself as the beast roared in his face, ruffling Dean's hair.
"Gross, man, get some breath mints."
The beast did not look amused.
Oh, God, even more than pixies, he really really hated--
--Turpis Demons. Sam recognized them from a hasty sketch somewhere in Dad's journal, with notes on a hunt Dad and Dean had gone on together while Sam was at Stanford. Sam had tried very hard to try not to feel guilty when he read the injury log.
Motel room doors opened, there were alarmed voices, shrieks, doors slamming shut again. Sam hoped no one would call the police.
The underbelly of the Impala smelled of hot oil and metal. Sam pulled his gun. The demon's clawed, scaly feet stopped just inches from his left hand. Curling his fingers into a fist, Sam looked in the other direction and saw the other demon's legs, with Dean's shoes dangling.
He maneuvered himself a few more inches to the right. With the gun held in both hands, not only because that was easier in the cramped space, but because his fingers still didn't feel quite steady, Sam aimed and fired.
The Turpis Demon gave a tea kettle whistle shriek of rage and pain.
Dean crumpled to the asphalt.
It didn't match the vision exactly: vision Dean had remained still and limp, while this Dean rolled towards the Toyota.
He heard a shotgun blast, the Turpis fell. But then the other demon clamped its claws around Sam's ankle and tugged viciously. He tried to aim his gun properly but couldn't do it at that angle while underneath the car. As soon as he was clear, Sam twisted with the Turpis still clamped around his ankle. But before Sam could fire, the demon reached its other hand down and grabbed Sam's wrist and squeezed. Sam dropped the gun as pain shot through his arm.
There was a second shotgun blast and the grip on his wrist and ankle loosened. The demon fell over gracelessly, right onto the hood of the Impala. Its horns scraped across the metal.
"Dean?" Sam got himself to his feet and ran over to his brother, who was leaning with his back against the side of the Toyota, the shotgun across his knees.
"Goddamn f--"
"--ucking Turpis Demons." It was all Dean had breath for. As Sam helped him up, his ribs felt like fire and he whimpered "paint job" before he could stop himself.
Together they limped towards the motel room. Still no sirens yet, but it was a good bet someone had called the police so they'd have to get gone fast. Just throw everything into the duffel bags, never mind whose underwear was whose for now, and put that town in the rearview mirror. They'd done it before, they'd do it again.
They should maybe dispose of the demon bodies, but Turpis weren't known to revive or regenerate and at the moment, Dean didn't think he had the strength to help Sam move them.
Let people think what they wanted to. Maybe it would do them good to get a glimpse of what was really out there for a change.
He wanted to ask Sam why he was--
--outside the motel room hotwiring a car when he--
They both wanted to ask.
But neither of them did.
END
by dotfic
Gen, PG-13
Word count: ~4,100
Time: set between "The Benders" and "Shadow."
Summary: There's a storm rising. Sam can't find his favorite sweatshirt. Dean hopes for just one moment without any monsters.
A/N: This is a follow up to Recoil and Ricochet. You don't have to read those to read this, but they go together as a trilogy. I indulged a pet theory that kept evolving along with season one (and which was retconned all to heck by reports of a deleted scene from the pilot).
Huge thank yous to my beta readers lalejandra and sargraf.
"Sam, take off your jacket and put it back on inside out right now."
"What?"
Dean was already shrugging out of his. He turned the sleeves inside out before Sam remembered that ninety-nine times out of a hundred, his brother was right about this kind of stuff. When Dean used that tone, sounding an awful lot like Dad, it was a good idea to go along.
But the woods...Sam took another step, his shoes crunching on dead leaves and dry twigs. His flashlight beam bounced off the tree trunks, catching a spindly body, pointed face, an arm, beckoning.
"Sam!" Dean's voice sounded like he was shouting at Sam under water. But it boomed into clarity when Dean grabbed his shoulders and shook him. "Yo, Sam!"
Sam rubbed his eyes with his fingers, aware of the flashlight in his hand again.
"Pixies, tapioca brain." Dean snapped his fingers in Sam's face. He let go, then tugged at the sleeves of Sam's jacket, helping him out of it like Sam was five years old.
"I can do it." He brushed off his brother's anxious hands, pulled off the jacket, turned it inside out, and put it back on again.
Immediately the fuzzy glow vanished from the trees. Sam noticed how bone-achingly tired he was, that the cut on his left cheek itched, and that he was really, really thirsty.
Dean cursed, muttering something anatomically lewd about what all pixies should do with house-elves, then knelt and picked up his flashlight. "Any idea how we get back to the road?"
"That way." Sam aimed his flashlight and started walking.
"Wait. How do you know?"
Sam shrugged. "I don't. But we have to walk in some direction. Unless you want to sit here all night?"
"If we end up in Indiana, I am so gonna kick your ass."
They began hiking. There was nothing like a trail. It felt strange to be in the lead, to find the rocks and roots before Dean did, to tell his older brother to watch out.
"Does it seem to you as if there have been a lot of critters to deal with lately?" Sam pushed aside a low branch, and then held it so it wouldn't snap back on Dean. "More than usual, I mean?"
"Ghouls in Akron," Dean said.
"Harpies in Dayton."
"Werewolves just outside Skokie."
"When's the last time we dealt with a pack that large? How many were there? Twelve?"
"Fourteen," said Dean.
"It's just...a little weird."
"Yeah."
After an hour of hiking, they reached the road only a few hundred yards from the Impala.
"How'd you do that, you mutant?" Dean grinned at Sam and shoved him lightly.
His brother stumbled and shot him a look.
Some people just couldn't take a compliment.
Dean moved the flashlight beam from his brother and slid it over the length of the car. "Those harpies really did a number on the paint job."
"Nah, that was the werewolves." Sam yanked open the passenger-side door, which creaked loudly in the quiet of the Illinois woods.
"How could werewolves scratch her paint job? Harpies, now, they've got these talons..."
"Don't you remember? One of the wolves climbed onto the car. I can still hear its claws scrape." Sam flinched.
"Score marks that deep? It had to be harpies."
"Werewolves."
"Harpies."
Sam climbed into the passenger seat. "I'll bet if we measured the scratch marks..."
"Shut up, geekboy." Dean started the engine and they pulled out onto the road. "It was harpies."
"Fine. It was harpies."
The traveled in silence for a few miles.
Dean glanced over at Sam. "You look terrible, by the way. You get any sleep last night?"
"More than you did. I think."
They didn't talk again until they got back to the motel, but it wasn't an uneasy quiet, just a tired one.
"Have you seen my gray hoodie sweatshirt?" Sam tossed a pair of jeans to one side and rummaged through the bedclothes.
"Why would I know where your gray hoodie is?" Dean, seated with his back against the headboard, crossed his ankles, shoes on the ugly motel bedspread, whetstone in one hand and knife in the other.
Sam knelt on the fuzzy orange carpet and peered under the bed. He heard the flick-flick as Dean continued to sharpen his knife.
"You were the last one to do the laundry." Sam stood up and began to rummage through a duffel bag. He'd taken psych at Stanford and knew enough to know that finding the sweatshirt wouldn't really make everything okay; he just wanted to believe that it would. Still, he liked that sweatshirt. It was threadbare-soft from so many washings and he felt safer wearing it.
"So? Stuff disappears in the wash all the time. Do we have to have the talk again about the interdimensional hole at the back of every dryer? I swear on...on my knives I have not seen your gray hoodie sweatshirt." Dean put down the whetstone and began to carefully put his knives away in their leather sheathes. "Hey. You want to go grab a drink? I saw a bar right across the street and in about fifteen seconds..." Dean glanced at his watch, "It'll be two dollar beers."
"Uh...sure."
"Yeah?"
He wondered why Dean sounded like that, like he thought he hadn't heard right. Although maybe Dean thought Sam would now associate going for beer with being kidnapped by insane backwoods folk.
Or maybe Sam just hadn't been real friendly. They spent a lot of time in bars, but it was always with research on the table between them and Sam usually left early.
"I said yes."
"Okay, good."
It only took two beers for Sam to get unusually talkative, his laugh a little quicker. Dean slowly worked on his fourth, enjoying more the feel of the cold bottle against his fingers and the din of the bar more than the actual alcohol buzz. He wasn't trying to get drunk; if the fourth beer could last him a while, that was all to the good. There were no pixies here, no harpies, no poltergeists, no insane dead psychologists or breath-sucking fiends or cursed mirrors -- just Sam telling him some story about his college friends. Like with the beer, the particulars weren't as important as the fact that Sam was talking, telling him a story, and laughing in a way that wiped almost a year from his face.
"Hey, Dean, can I ask you something?" Sam turned his beer bottle with his fingers, making multiple rings of moisture on the battered, scarred wooden table top. "It's just...I've been thinking about it for a while and after what happened in Michigan..."
"All right, spit it out, what?" His perfect no-monsters-here moment skidded off track like a needle scratching across a vinyl record.
"The night Jess died," Sam began.
Dean felt his own face close up. Listening to Sam talk about Jess, ever, even if all he did was mention how she liked to fold her socks, was depressing in a way that made Dean want to go out and kill eight hundred monsters as quickly as he could. "Yeah?"
"I thought you drove away, but then it seemed like you were right there. How did you know?"
Dean's fingers tightened around the beer bottle. He felt oddly warm; the last time he'd felt that self-conscious he'd been in eighth grade and had to give a speech in history class. About five possible responses to Sam's questions ran through his head in rapid-fire succession, none of them the truth.
He opened his mouth to reply. Much to his relief and delight, the buxom waitress returned.
"Can I get you boys anything else?" She clicked her pen.
"Yeah. How about your phone number?"
The waitress, a brunette, put the hand holding her pad on her hip and half-smiled. Her lip gloss looked like it tasted like apricots.
"Nope," she said, and her smile widened.
Sam snickered. "Ask a simple question..."
The waitress winked at Sam before she walked off.
"Maybe if you asked her for her phone number," Dean said, watching her go.
"I don't think so."
Dean sighed. "Have I taught you nothing? Get up and go over there and ask her--"
The waitress' scream cut through the bar conversation, scattering it into startled silence, leaving only the throb of the too-loud jukebox. A low, deep growl managed to drown the music out for a moment.
Three and a half beers or not, Dean was on his feet, hand closing around the grip of his gun, scanning the room for the source of the growl. A bit more slowly, Sam also stood up.
Screams and breaking glass followed in the hell hound's wake. It bounded across the room, knocked over a table, and leapt at Sam.
Two beers not only got Sam talkative, it also apparently screwed his reflexes all to hell.
Dean tackled his brother out of the hound's path. They crashed into a table, beer scattering like raindrops, then hit the floor. Sam rolled in one direction, Dean the other, and both ended in a crouch. Fumbling for the knife he kept strapped to his calf, Sam watched the hound, whose red eyes stayed fixed on him right back. The hound's nostrils flared, and Dean thought of the missing sweatshirt.
"Don't move," Dean muttered. He slowly stood up from his crouch, gun aimed. "Hey, Fido!" He kicked an empty beer glass so it skittered across the floor and rolled to a stop against one massive paw.
The hound's haunches tensed. As the beast sprang, Dean fired. The hell hound's growl turned into a yelp. The shot threw off the trajectory of its leap, and the hound smashed into the faux fireplace. Several sports team pictures slid down the wall, their glass frames cracked.
So, silver bullets did work on them, Dad was wrong about something, go figure.
The hell hound turned in the fireplace, claws scrabbling as it now lumbered for Dean, who shot the beast two more times right in the chest, but this time it wouldn't go down, and what kind of freak nutjob hell hound was this? Maybe Dad was right after all. Dean's soles slipped on the wet floor and he stumbled, grabbed at a chair, then went down anyway with four hundred pounds of hell hound bearing at him.
Sam's knife throw went true, the blade going right into the beast's ribs, into its heart. The hound grunted then thudded heavily sideways, panting like a bellows.
The fumes of the combined spilled drinks on the floor made Dean a little dizzy. As Sam reached down to help him up, Dean's brain got stuck on a series of images of Sam at various ages, only hitting the throwing target fives times ouf of ten no matter how Dad coached, instructed, or raged.
Behind the bar, the waitress slowly stood up, her sleek brown hair mussed, her apricot mouth open in a circle of astonishment. Most of the patrons had fled; the few who'd been too sloshed or stunned to go were picking themselves up, cautiously drawing closer to the fallen creature. In the distance there were sirens.
"Sorry about the mess," Sam and Dean said.
As they left, Dean tossed a twenty onto the bar, which barely began to cover it, but it was all they could spare, they needed the rest for gas, lodging, food and ammo.
But he figured they at least owed the girl a decent tip.
"Red caps."
"I know."
It was annoying that his brother could sound so calm. "I mean...Red Caps? And not the kind that takes your luggage at the train station."
"I know what Red Caps are, Sam." Dean took the container of french fries Sam offered, grabbed six, and put all of them in his mouth at once.
The sunlight felt good after the bad nights they'd been having. Sam slouched a little on the park bench, stretching his long legs out.
On the playground, children played, shrieking as they went down the metal slide.
"It's like Practical Demonstrations in Mythlore 101 lately." Sam grabbed another fry. "Hell hound the other night. Red caps last night. Every single town. What gives?"
"It's the job." Dean's eyes were on the kids.
It was a reliable equation. Being up all night killing a nest of Red Caps equaled happy children on the playground in the morning, with no variables, negative numbers, or margin for error. Just like Dad. A straight line between two points.
"Don't you think it's a little weird?"
"Weird is relative, little brother."
"Aren't you exhausted?" Sam asked as an experiment.
"Maybe."
There was no defensiveness in his brother's voice. It was just another part of the equation, a by-product of the all-holy, all powerful job. Exhaustion never seemed to surprise Dean, while Sam often marveled at how anyone could live this way and examined each new bruise in wonderment.
"There might be a pattern." The fries gone, Sam ran his finger along the bottom of the container to gather the last taste of salt. He licked his finger clean, and then tossed the box into the nearby garbage can. "A reason for it."
"You think something's stirring the critters up on purpose?" Dean yawned. He might as well have been discussing football.
"Maybe. It seems way past the usual level of activity." Sam closed his eyes and watched the colors play against the inside of his lids.
"So we're talking about a very big Twinkie?"
"I don't know." He felt the bench shift and a shadow fall. He opened his eyes.
Dean stood over him, blocking the sunlight. "Then we'd better hit Dad's journals."
"Um, would it be okay if we tried, y'know, sleeping first?"
"You're a genius, Sammy." His big brother moved out of the light, and Sam squinted in the suddenly renewed brightness.
As Sam stood up, his bruises and tired muscles protesting, he noticed that Dean limped as he walked across the gravel parking area towards the car. Or, not so much limped as walked stiffly, his back a bit too straight.
It wasn't that Dean was trying to hide the limp that bothered Sam; it was that he seemed so insufferably certain that Sam would never catch on. As if he wouldn't be looking closely enough to see the stifled wince as his brother slid into the driver's seat of the Impala.
On the slide, a little girl with red pigtails helped her even littler brother up to the top. She sat down with her brother in her lap. The boy's eyes were huge, but he twisted to look at his sister, who grinned at him. As they went down, both shrieked in delight.
Red Caps at night equaled happy children in the morning. Straight lines had their uses.
Sam slid into the front passenger seat and banged the door closed.
"You should probably put some ice on your left knee, and try not to lift anything heavy until your cracked rib heals."
He very much enjoyed the startled, half-guilty look on Dean's face.
The late afternoon sun woke Dean first because his bed was closer to the window. He got up, making no effort not to wince at the twinges in his side because Sam was still asleep and couldn't see. He closed the motel room curtains.
Seemed like Sam's insomnia had just been getting better, and now it was like they were running an all-night monsterbusting service.
Dean left his brother sleeping and ran out for coffee and jelly donuts, because who could do research before they'd had sugar and caffeine?
His brother, apparently. Freak. By the time Dean got back, Sam was awake and paging through Dad's journal.
"Why'd you let me sleep so long?" Sam took the cup of latte Dean handed him.
The curtains were open again and the strong golden light of the setting sun filled the air with dust motes. Sam looked older than his actual age instead of younger for a change. There were dark circles under his eyes.
"You needed it, kiddo. Hey! Don't get any jelly on the--"
"I'm being careful." But Sam pushed the donut on its napkin farther away from the journal.
"Find anything yet?"
"Nothing yet."
Several hours later Dean's stomach growled loudly. He let his hands fall from the laptop keys. "We need to check the histories of the towns we've been in recently. Why don't you start working on that and I'll go out and pick up some dinner." Dean pushed the laptop across the table at Sam. "Burgers and fries okay?"
"That's what we had for breakfast," Sam said without any real objection in his voice.
"So?" He pulled on his jacket and checked that the car keys were in the pocket.
"So, we had jelly donuts and coffee for lunch."
"And your point would be..."
"No point. And you're not going out. I am." Sam looked up from the laptop, his mouth set in a firm line.
"Hold on a second..."
"Cracked rib." Sam ticked the items off on his fingers. "Swollen knee. Bruised shoulder." He stood up and held out his hands for the keys.
This was one of those times when Dean hated, hated the fact that Sam was taller. "Oh, all right." He tossed the keys to Sam, who caught them, fumbled, and dropped them on the floor. Dean snickered as his brother picked up the keys. "You get one scratch on her...I mean besides the one that the harpies--"
"Werewolves--"
"Whatever, left on her, I'll feed you to the hell hounds myself, got it?"
"Sure Dean." Sam rolled his eyes, grabbed his jacket and his gun, and left.
Alone in the room Dean listened to the roar of the Impala's engine fade and watched the last of the red burn from the sky beyond the railroad tracks near the motel. A train whistle sounded distantly and it made him homesick, although their house in Lawrence hadn't been near train tracks.
After fifteen minutes or so of trying to decipher Dad's cryptic scrawls, he began to tap his pen on the table, beating out the rhythm of Metallica's "The Four Horsemen."
Whenever he drove the Impala, Sam felt like a guest. He was careful how he handled her, cautious at stop signs. It was weird considering they'd had the car since before he was born and he'd learned to drive in it. Dad and Dean still hadn't found the words "Sam Winchester, age 7 ¾" written in black sharpie on the metal strut underneath the passenger seat.
His stomach growled. Sam went just a little faster. The town was small and there wasn't much traffic.
And then--
--fear not his own hammered his chest. The pen fell to the floor. Dean gripped the edge of the table with both hands and gasped for breath.
This had happened to him before. But only one other time when he was an adult, and he'd hoped he was done with it. His own dread and panicked urgency mingled with fear almost like pain--
--which blinded him as much as the vision itself. He felt the car swerve under his hands. Clarity returned for a few seconds so Sam quickly slowed and pulled over. He heard branches scrape the side of the car and out of habit he thought about how pissed Dean was going to be.
Then the vision hit him again, more detailed and complete. Sam gripped his head with both hands, trying to breathe deep and not pass out.
It stopped, leaving him with his hands shaking so badly he could barely grip the steering wheel. Still he managed to turn the car around with tires squealing, probably leaving skid marks.
He did eighty all the way back to the motel and only had to run one red light which meant he made it in six minutes when it had taken him fifteen to get out there but it wasn't fast enough--
--although it wasn't like Dean was timing himself but the last time he had, it took him three minutes and twenty-seven seconds to jimmy a car lock and hotwire the engine and that was too slow. Too slow.
In five minutes, Dean had gathered up a flask of holy water, a shotgun, and ammo. He was about the hotwire the Toyota parked three doors down from theirs when he heard the Impala.
The black car roared at top speed into the motel parking lot and slammed to a stop so fast it lurched. The engine cut off and Sam scrambled out.
Dean knew he must have a stupid ass expression on his face, a look of complete and utter saywhatnow because Sam had the same expression, mingled with relief.
"What are you--"
"How did you--"
When the thing hit Dean from the side, he only had time to get an impression of a long, scaly body and curving horns before his left side struck the asphalt. Even as the thing grabbed him by the collar of his t-shirt, hauling him up again, Dean looked to check on Sam and saw another one strike at his brother. Sam ducked and rolled, then wriggled to safety underneath the Impala.
Dean stopped worrying about Sam and started worrying about himself as the beast roared in his face, ruffling Dean's hair.
"Gross, man, get some breath mints."
The beast did not look amused.
Oh, God, even more than pixies, he really really hated--
--Turpis Demons. Sam recognized them from a hasty sketch somewhere in Dad's journal, with notes on a hunt Dad and Dean had gone on together while Sam was at Stanford. Sam had tried very hard to try not to feel guilty when he read the injury log.
Motel room doors opened, there were alarmed voices, shrieks, doors slamming shut again. Sam hoped no one would call the police.
The underbelly of the Impala smelled of hot oil and metal. Sam pulled his gun. The demon's clawed, scaly feet stopped just inches from his left hand. Curling his fingers into a fist, Sam looked in the other direction and saw the other demon's legs, with Dean's shoes dangling.
He maneuvered himself a few more inches to the right. With the gun held in both hands, not only because that was easier in the cramped space, but because his fingers still didn't feel quite steady, Sam aimed and fired.
The Turpis Demon gave a tea kettle whistle shriek of rage and pain.
Dean crumpled to the asphalt.
It didn't match the vision exactly: vision Dean had remained still and limp, while this Dean rolled towards the Toyota.
He heard a shotgun blast, the Turpis fell. But then the other demon clamped its claws around Sam's ankle and tugged viciously. He tried to aim his gun properly but couldn't do it at that angle while underneath the car. As soon as he was clear, Sam twisted with the Turpis still clamped around his ankle. But before Sam could fire, the demon reached its other hand down and grabbed Sam's wrist and squeezed. Sam dropped the gun as pain shot through his arm.
There was a second shotgun blast and the grip on his wrist and ankle loosened. The demon fell over gracelessly, right onto the hood of the Impala. Its horns scraped across the metal.
"Dean?" Sam got himself to his feet and ran over to his brother, who was leaning with his back against the side of the Toyota, the shotgun across his knees.
"Goddamn f--"
"--ucking Turpis Demons." It was all Dean had breath for. As Sam helped him up, his ribs felt like fire and he whimpered "paint job" before he could stop himself.
Together they limped towards the motel room. Still no sirens yet, but it was a good bet someone had called the police so they'd have to get gone fast. Just throw everything into the duffel bags, never mind whose underwear was whose for now, and put that town in the rearview mirror. They'd done it before, they'd do it again.
They should maybe dispose of the demon bodies, but Turpis weren't known to revive or regenerate and at the moment, Dean didn't think he had the strength to help Sam move them.
Let people think what they wanted to. Maybe it would do them good to get a glimpse of what was really out there for a change.
He wanted to ask Sam why he was--
--outside the motel room hotwiring a car when he--
They both wanted to ask.
But neither of them did.
END