SPN FIC - The Box (Part 3 of 6)
The story began here.
Summer 2000. John, the boys, and Bobby are in a small Connecticut coastal town investigating signs of demon activity. Or John and Bobby are, at least. Dean's delivering pizza (with a side order of Dean) and Sam has taken a job doing yard work for a young couple with a big, rambling house on a bluff overlooking the ocean. A nice way to spend the summer, right? Um ... not so much. The nice young couple has their secrets, and some digging for a rose garden unearths something that was long-buried for a very good reason.
CHARACTERS: Sam (age 17), Dean (age 21), John, Bobby, various OCs
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG for language and some pondering about sexin'
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: Remains to be seen; Prologue and 6 parts (this part is 4726 words)
THE BOX
By Carol Davis
"You know what your problem is?" Dean said during a commercial break, around a mouthful of Hostess cupcake. "You act like you got some kinda vested interest in this thing. What the hell do you care if she's fooling around? As long as they pay you on time, what difference does it make? It ain't like you're gonna ask her to the prom."
"There's no problem," Sam replied stubbornly.
"Yeah. That's why you've been stewing about it the whole damn day. Give it a rest, Sam. It's none of your business."
"I'm not stewing about anything."
Dean swallowed his mouthful and took another big bite of crème-filled, preservative-laden stuff that was advertised as being chocolate cake. "Oh. Right. I forgot. This emo shit is your natural state of being."
"Could you just -"
"Movie's back on," Dean pointed out.
"You've seen this movie a hundred and fifty times."
"And each time is more awesome than the last."
Sam stared at the TV for a couple of minutes (and no, he absolutely was not sulking) while Dean chuckled at his hundred-and-fifty-first viewing of Porky's II and worked his way through his three-pack of cupcakes.
It wasn't fair, Sam had decided about four hours ago: wasn't fair at all that Peter Hobbs thought his wife was at work while she was wandering around town in that little summer dress, having brunch - or whatever it was - with some random guy. There was no business being conducted there, not with her wearing an outfit like that, with her hair pulled up into a ponytail.
She was out having fun, while her husband was working his ass off to make her happy.
"Dude," Dean said quietly.
Sam turned a little, looked at him, said nothing.
"You got this crazy-ass, chick-flick movie view of 'normal,' man. It's not like that. Yeah, people live in nice houses. But it ain't all sunshine and roses, you know what I mean? People are just people, Sammy."
"You would know," Sam said. "Because you bring them pizza."
Chewing a little more slowly, Dean glanced over toward the kitchen, where Dad and Bobby were talking quietly as they pored through a stack of old books. They'd gone over to see Mert, the old hermit whose life's work seemed to be refusing to tell them what they wanted to hear, but what had come of that visit, Sam had no idea; Dad and Bobby seemed no more and no less bothered than they'd been yesterday, although they were a lot more engrossed in the books than they'd been before. For a minute, Dean seemed inclined to abandon the movie and join the study group in the kitchen - but he hadn't been invited. Neither Dad nor Bobby had said, "Give us a hand, here," and that seemed to bug Dean every bit as much as having seen Larkin Hobbs in town was bugging Sam.
"Why don't you just do it?" Sam told his brother.
"Do what?"
"Go in there. Grab a book and start reading."
Dean snorted at that, spraying half-chewed bits of cupcake onto both his jeans and the couch. "Yeah, right. Being that I love freakin' research so much it keeps me awake at night."
"It's interesting. Can be interesting," Sam amended.
"Which is why you're -"
The lights flickered. Once, then again.
In the kitchen, Dad and Bobby stopped talking.
Then the lights went out.
"What the hell," Dean groused. He was close enough that Sam could half-see, half-sense him pushing buttons on the TV remote as if he thought that would accomplish something. "This couldn't have waited another half an hour?"
"It's not like you don't know how it ends."
"Who cares if I know how it ends? It's a classic. You don't mess with a classic."
They sat there for a couple of minutes, waiting, but the lights didn't come back on. Dean got up from the couch, dropping what was left of the package of cupcakes onto the coffee table, but before he could get anywhere, Dad was there, standing between the couch and the TV, holding a lit flashlight that he passed off to Dean. "Take the car. Go on out to the main road," he instructed. "Head east. Bobby and I are gonna go west. See how far this thing extends."
"Dad," Sam said. "It's a blackout."
Dad pretty much ignored that. "Stay in touch. If you find anything that looks suspicious, don't engage until you let me and Bobby know."
"Yes, sir," Dean agreed.
Dad was gone then, back out into the kitchen where he exchanged a few words with Bobby that were loud enough to overhear, "demon" prominent among them. Neither of them sounded like they were surprised.
"It's a blackout," Sam protested, though it was more a search for some input from Dean than anything else. "They happen."
"Yeah, well, we're making sure," Dean replied, fishing in his jeans pocket for his keys. He seemed to have immediately, and completely, forgotten all about the movie, which he gleefully watched every single time he found it on cable, laughing and snorting and saying "Catch this, Sammy, catch this" as if Sam had never seen it before, in favor of following Dad's instructions.
Hell, Dean would have thrown the TV out the window if Dad had told him to.
It wasn't like they had anything better to do, Sam thought with some resignation as he followed his brother out to the Impala. The town's only movie theater was showing a Merchant-Ivory film (which Dean would not have sat through if the alternative was being eviscerated), and the only other choices for entertainment were mini golf, bowling, and hanging out in some bar, where Sam, courtesy of his fake ID, would be stuck watching Dean play pool or flirt (or both) while he nursed a couple of sodas or maybe a single beer.
He'd bet his whole summer's income, though, that this blackout would prove to be nothing more than a temporary outage due to somebody's car colliding with a utility pole, a stray dry-lightning strike, or a now-deceased squirrel trying to chew through a wire. Demons? he thought as he slid into the Impala's shotgun seat and pulled the door shut with enough of a crash that it made Dean bark in dismay. Not everything's -
"Sometimes it is," Dean said quietly, as if he'd heard Sam's thoughts. "We're just makin' sure."
"Whatever," Sam sighed.
~~~~~~~~~~
He had not breathed this air, the cool, damp, salt-laden air of evening, for a stretch of time so long it didn't bear measuring.
Slowly, deliberately, he shifted the body, made it rise to its feet, then walked it to a place from which he could look at the sea.
He had not anticipated pain.
Weight.
Confusion.
So long, he thought. So very long, confined in that small place, in the darkness, with nothing to do but be.
And contemplate.
He had forgotten what it was like to wear a human body, to be confined in this entirely different way, unable to coast on the rising air, slide through gaps as thin as a sheet of paper, move from one place to another with the speed of a bird.
He closed the body's eyes. Let its lungs fill with another rush of clean salt air.
He had missed this.
Yes.
Yes, he had missed it.
~~~~~~~~~~
"See if you can get anything on the radio," Dean said.
"You're gonna turn this into a joyride? Dad'll love that."
"No, dick-brain - I wanna see if they're saying anything about the blackout. That okay with you?"
Dean drove more slowly than usual, obviously wary of someone - or something - shooting out of the darkness into the path of the Impala, while Sam turned the dial first one direction, then the other, pausing briefly at each station the car radio could pick up clearly. He found only music, ads for everything from tires to TV shows, and one talk radio show where someone was ranting about the upcoming presidential election. There was a lot more static than normal, but the radio had been showing its age for quite a while; Dean had been talking for a couple of weeks now about buying a new one with some of his pizza-delivery earnings.
"You think there's something going on here?" Sam asked as he dialed past a Salute to the Sixties.
"We wouldn't be here if there wasn't."
"Wouldn't it help if we knew what we're looking for?"
"We're looking for where the blackout ends," Dean said testily. "Don't start this shit, Sam. I'm not in the mood for it."
"We're not kids, Dean. We're either hunters, or we're not."
"Thought you were picking 'not'."
"Just because I think there's more to life than living in a bunch of rat-trap motels and eating in diners and buying stuff with stolen credit cards? We could have a life, Dean. We don't need to do this all the time. We could have a home."
Dean, as Sam could have predicted, focused his attention on the road and said nothing.
"Bobby's got a home," Sam pointed out.
"We're not Bobby."
"Pastor Jim's got a home."
"We're not Pastor Jim, either," Dean said sharply. "Could you give it the hell up? Please? It's no gonna change, Sam. We do what we do. We are what we are."
"And that's it for you. End of story."
"Yeah," Dean replied. "Now watch the fuckin' road."
~~~~~~~~~~
Comfortable now with manipulating the body - much as he had manipulated his own body, lost to him centuries ago and largely forgotten - and with a little bit of wry amusement at the way the Peterhuman was shrieking in terror, somewhere alongside inside above below his mind - he walked back to the place he'd been set free. Knelt down and extinguished the small lanterns the Peterhuman had set up to illuminate his work.
Darkness wrapped itself around him then, but not full dark, not like the darkness he'd been trapped in since…
Since that.
Since that band of humans had gathered around him and held him fast with their chanting and their charms and their devil's trap.
Slowly, with something that was like reverence and yet not like it at all, he picked up the heavy, intricately carved box that had been his prison, climbed once again to his - the body's - feet, and began to walk toward the house.
He had been inside less than a minute when he noticed a light.
Two lights. The…headlights. Of a…car.
Someone coming.
~~~~~~~~~~
The lights were still out when Sam and Dean returned to the house, but the place was well-lit with candles and lanterns. They found Dad's truck and Bobby's car parked in the yard, and Dad sitting on the couch in the living room. Bobby was standing nearby, his ever-present trucker cap in hand, scratching his head with a kind of weary resignation.
"You boys see anything?" Bobby asked.
"It was a blackout," Sam told him. "Right? Nothing weird."
The affected area hadn't been very large; maybe a mile square. Outside it, everything was working fine. A brief conversation with a sheriff's deputy parked near one of the town's bigger intersections provided the cause of the outage: as Sam had guessed, a driver coming around an unfamiliar curve at well above the speed limit had collided with a power pole. A repair crew was already on the scene and would have everything restored within a couple of hours.
Judging by their expressions, the mundane reality of the situation had done nothing to convince Dad or Bobby that the four of them were in town for no good reason.
"Coincidence, maybe," Bobby said.
"Nothing going on that we could tell," Dean told him. "Everything's kinda quiet."
Dad looked at each of them in turn, and took a moment to fiddle with something he was holding in his hand. His truck keys, Sam realized.
"Gonna go back out," he said as he got up from the couch. "Take another look around."
The boys and Bobby watched him go. His truck roared to life a few seconds after the kitchen door had closed behind him.
For a moment, Sam thought Bobby was going to sit down with him and Dean - was going to tell them what was happening. Or what he and Dad thought might be happening. Bobby didn't have that "you're just kids" attitude - hadn't for years. With a little prodding, he'd talk to them as if they were adults, which made sense, because Dean was an adult, and Sam nearly so. Sam looked at the man they thought of as an uncle, smiled at him, gave him a look he hoped would convinced Bobby that he was ready, willing and able to help out with this thing - whatever it was.
To his dismay, Bobby simply said, "You boys get some sleep," and walked off into the kitchen.
~~~~~~~~~~
A couple of the letters of recommendation Sam had given to Peter Hobbs mentioned his ability to complete whatever task he'd been assigned - and to do it to the best of his ability, regardless of whether he'd sought it out or the whole thing had been someone else's idea. He was reliable, the letters said.
Reliable.
In this case, that meant finishing the slate pathway from the driveway to the patio. Then going back to the little area where the blackberry bramble had been, and completing a job that someone else - Peter, more than likely - had started last night and had abandoned midstream. There were a couple of holes in the ground, one of them larger than the others, meant to contain the rosebushes he'd picked up at Lowe's, Sam figured. The number and size of the rocks strewn around near the holes seemed to indicate that Peter had gotten tired of digging.
Tired enough to quit, because he'd run into rocks. It made Sam think of the number of graves he'd helped his brother and father unearth. There was no stopping when you were doing something like that, not for any reason at all (except for the imminent arrival of local law enforcement), and particularly not because you'd run into some rocks.
Sighing, Sam reached down and picked one of them up, hefting it like a softball; it was about the same size.
It arced satisfyingly when he hurled it out over the lapping incoming waves of the Atlantic.
"Good arm," Dean said from behind him.
That was enough of a surprise that Sam startled and spun around on one heel. His brother looked as relaxed as a cat in the sun, sunglasses riding halfway down his nose.
"What're you doing here?" Sam frowned.
Dean looked around a little, then lifted his gray t-shirted shoulders in a lazy but expressive shrug. "It's my day off. Thought maybe you could use some help. With the pruning."
"I'm not pruning. I'm laying slate."
"Still? You were doin' that yesterday. What's the deal? You pick 'em up, you lay 'em down. What's that take, like an hour?"
"You don't just 'lay them down,' Dean."
"Then, pray, explain."
"You want me to explain."
"You will anyway."
Sam huffed out a breath and shoved a hand through his hair, pushing it back off his forehead. "You have to level them. And make sure they're settled. So somebody walking along here doesn't step on a wobbly piece and go flying on their ass. There's a way to do it."
"So now you're a…sidewalk layer."
"It takes a lot longer than an hour to do it right."
"Okay," Dean said.
"Could you not do that?"
"What am I doing?"
"You're looking at me like you're humoring me. Like this is the craziest line of bullshit you've ever heard in your life."
"They payin' you by the hour? That it?"
"No, Dean, they're not paying me by the hour. This is the right way to do this."
"Sammy, Sammy, Sammy."
The way he was acting wasn't condescending, exactly - but it tipped enough in that direction to bug the hell out of Sam. "If Dad was telling you to do this," he snapped, "you'd be crawling around on the ground with a level. You'd be moving the sand with a fucking teaspoon if Dad told you that was the way to do it."
Dean was silent for a moment. Then he snapped back, "If that was the right way to do it, you bet your ass I would."
"Because Dad said so."
"No, Sam. Because it's the right way to do it."
"Which is what I said. There's a right way to do it."
"It's a freaking sidewalk, Sam."
"Which makes it less important than driving around in the dark for an hour, looking for nothing?"
"It wasn't nothing."
"It was nothing. It's always gonna be nothing."
Dean was breathing hard as he stepped back, away from his brother. For a moment he seemed to be headed toward the Impala, a glimpse of which Sam could see through the patchy barrier of the plant life separating the two of them from the driveway. Then he stopped, facing away from Sam, hands clenched, the muscles of his back shifting underneath the sweaty gray t-shirt.
If this had been a different conversation, he might have been working up to demanding, "You take that back."
Instead, he said, so quietly Sam almost didn't catch it, "Why you gotta be like that?"
A few years ago, Sam had had a conversation with a teacher, a kind, thoughtful man who'd suggested that Sam might have options other than going into the family business. Of course, the man had had no idea what the family business really was ("We're mechanics," Sam had told him), but he'd been earnest in his conviction that Sam should do what felt right. Should pursue the path he chose for himself, not one that had been laid out for him before he was old enough to walk.
Here, now, Sam wondered if anyone had made that same suggestion to Dean. Had ever told Dean that his life was his own, to shape as he saw fit.
"I'm sorry," Sam said.
Dean didn't turn, but one of his hands loosened up a little. "I brought you some lunch," he muttered.
"That's - thank you."
"It's just sandwiches."
"Subs?"
"Yeah."
"Mixed Italian?"
"Yeah."
"I like Mixed Italian."
Dean's shoulders lifted slightly. "Made 'em myself."
"Yeah?"
"They're in the car. Maybe -" Dean sighed heavily. "Maybe we oughta eat 'em before they go bad. Heat like this, they won't keep."
"I could eat."
Dean turned, finally, and offered Sam a smile that seemed to say a lot more things than Sam could figure out.
"I'm sorry," Sam said again.
"What the hell," Dean said mildly. "I don't take it seriously."
The hell you don't, Sam thought.
The work did go a lot faster with two of them tackling it. Dean refused to get down on the ground with the level, but he was perfectly willing - or said he was, at least - to fuss with the sand underlying the slate until each piece of stone passed muster. To Sam's bemusement, Dean's eyeballing technique worked just as well as the level.
"Dude," Dean said archly. "You doubted me?"
They'd each eaten one of the huge sandwiches Dean had prepared before tackling the slate path. When they'd finished laying the stone, they split another sandwich, topping that off with a can of soda apiece and a couple of the chocolate chip cookies Dub Wilson offered as the pizza shop's only dessert, all of which added up to an impressive quantity of food - and produced a lot of weirdly musical belching.
"Wait, wait," Dean grinned as Sam settled into a seat on the ground. "Got one. Listen to this."
What he let rip reverberated for several seconds.
"That was pretty disgusting," Sam told him.
"Like you could do better."
Sam gave it his best shot, until trying to force up some of the churning contents of his stomach threatening to turn from belching to puking.
"Girl," Dean scoffed.
Sam didn't argue the point, and they sat quietly side by side for a while, the breeze off the ocean ruffling their hair and relieving some of the growing heat of the day. Dean polished off the last of the cookies, then crumpled up the neck of the bag he'd used as a container for the waxed-paper sandwich wrappers and the empty soda cans.
"They got a trash can?" he asked Sam.
"Next to the garage."
"They got a bathroom?"
"Yeah…"
"Awesome."
"In the house," Sam said.
"Dude. Nature calls."
"So, go in the bushes."
"Not taking a dump in the shrubs, Sam. You tellin' me they don't trust you to use the bathroom?"
Honestly, it was a question that had never come up. Peter Hobbs had never volunteered the use of anything inside the house, and Sam had never asked; when the need arose, he'd chosen a secluded spot, out of sight of both the road and the house. "I don't have a key," he told his brother.
"Not a problem."
And before Sam could say anything more, Dean had scrambled to his feet and trotted off toward the house. It took Sam a few seconds to get up; by the time he caught up with Dean, Dean had his hand on the knob of the side door, which looked to lead into a mudroom off of the kitchen. In Dean's other hand was a set of lockpicks Dad had given him as a birthday gift.
Only in our family, Sam thought with some horror, and blurted out, "Dean!"
Without Dean's having done anything at all, other than to turn the knob, the door popped open. "See?" he said. "Door's open. They figured on you using the can."
"The door - why would they -?"
With Sam sputtering nervously behind him, Dean trucked on into the mudroom, took a quick look around, and pointed to an open doorway, where a toilet and sink were visible. "Been answering the call out in the woods all this time, huh?" he chided Sam. "Can's right here, dude. And the door was open."
"Nobody said," Sam mumbled.
"Nobody said," Dean echoed mockingly, then closed himself inside the washroom long enough to take care of business. When he came back out, Sam was still standing where Dean had left him, scowling at his own stupidity. "Jesus, dude," Dean sighed.
"I never -"
"Smartest kid in the class, huh?"
"Nobody ever said."
Shaking his head in dismay, Dean went back to surveying the mudroom. Nothing in it was honestly worth stealing: a long bench with a row of boots and sneakers and flip-flops underneath, a pegged rack holding a couple of jackets, an empty caddy that seemed intended to hold umbrellas. Opposite the door to the outside was the door to the kitchen, the upper half of which was six-paned glass. Clearly enjoying himself, Dean stepped up to the door and peered through the glass. "Niiiiiice," he crooned appreciatively.
"Let's just go," Sam said.
"In a minute. I'm admiring the décor."
"Dean."
"Lighten up, princess. You said nobody's home. I'm just -"
And Dean stopped abruptly. "What?" Sam asked worriedly.
"They have a fight or something?"
"Why?"
"'Cause -"
Sam pressed in beside his brother to look through the glass. What he saw inside the kitchen made his eyes open wider: the contents of the open refrigerator dumped and spilled and strewn across the floor, the remains of several broken dishes, an enormous puddle of water, and what looked alarmingly (and all too familiarly) like blood.
"Shit," Sam squeaked.
"Looks like somebody broke in," Dean mused.
"You mean somebody other than us?"
His face tight with concentration, Dean grasped the knob and turned it. That door too was unlocked, and Dean pushed it open slowly and steadily, aiming not to make any noise. He paid no attention to whether or not Sam seemed to want to follow, just put a finger to his lips, then beckoned for Sam to stay behind him.
"We oughta -" Sam hissed.
Dean crouched down just long enough to slide into his hand the knife he kept hidden in his boot. The scowl he was wearing said he was sorry he hadn't brought a gun, but he seemed disinclined to go out to the Impala to get one.
"Dean," Sam insisted. "We need to call the police."
"The hell we do."
"If somebody broke in here -"
"They could be long gone by the time the cops get here. Just follow my lead."
Venturing further into the house was a stupid idea. It was probably one of the ten stupidest ideas either one of them could have come up with, if they'd taken the time to make a list.
Sam hesitated only long enough to pluck a carving knife out of the wooden block near the Hobbses' stove, then fell silently into step behind his brother.
The mess of food and broken dishes trailed a little ways into the dining room, then stopped; beyond that point, the Hobbses' home was neat and orderly, aside from a heap of books and magazines stacked in front of a bookcase. None of the furnishings looked terribly expensive - for all that Sam knew about that sort of thing - and didn't seem to offer much incentive for a break-in. The flat-panel TV in the living room was too massive to be carried out by one person, and didn't look like it had been disturbed. Silent and alert, the Winchesters moved through the house, taking turns peeking around corners and into closets, both of them ready to defend both themselves and the Hobbses' home.
Or…Sam was ready to defend the Hobbses' home. Dean looked as if he was eager to kick some ass for its own sake.
They found nothing unusual until they reached the foot of the staircase leading to the second floor. There, very much out of place on the immaculate hardwood floor, was a single bloody heel print.
"Upstairs," Dean mouthed, and gestured.
This was nothing out of the ordinary, Sam told himself as he crept up the stairs, careful to settle his weight on the treads in a way that wouldn't prompt them to creak. Dean, arm's length ahead, moved as lightly and silently as a cat, knife at the ready. They'd both done this many times before: moved through someone's house in pursuit of something dangerous, something that in most cases had already killed and wouldn't hesitate to kill again. It was almost second nature, this kind of reconnaissance - and, unlike a number of other occasions Sam would just as soon not remember, this time they had the benefit of daylight.
Nothing lurked inside the first two rooms they investigated, a guest room and what Sam guessed to be Larkin's home office. They moved from there to the last two rooms on the second floor, another office (Peter's, judging by the furnishings), and, at the far end of the hallway, the Hobbses' master bedroom. Dean was still in the doorway of Peter's office when Sam turned and looked, with a little nervous chagrin, into the Hobbses' bedroom.
In the center of the room, maybe fifteen feet away from him, there was a pile of…something…on the braided rug.
Something…wet.
A big, unidentifiable pile of something…wet.
Sam's brain went Bzuhhhh…whahhhh? He had to stare at the mess, really stare at it, to force his mind to identify it.
"Holy FUCK," Dean shrilled behind him.
Inside out, Sam thought. It's all…inside out.
Inside out, pink and red and white and glistening in the summer sunlight.
If he'd seen this…thing he was looking at out in the woods, he would have said it was an animal - what was left of an animal - torn apart by some predator.
Some frenzied kind of a predator.
Rabid, maybe.
It could have been the remains of an animal, but it wasn't, not up here in the Hobbses' bedroom.
That thing, that mess of pink and white and red?
Had been human.
Had been…
"Ohhhh my God," Sam moaned.
The strength drained out of him then, all at once, the plug gone out of his drain. He went down in a tangle of too-long legs onto the Hobbses' gleaming, carefully restored hardwood floor and puked his Mixed Italian sub all over his jeans.
Chapter 4…
Summer 2000. John, the boys, and Bobby are in a small Connecticut coastal town investigating signs of demon activity. Or John and Bobby are, at least. Dean's delivering pizza (with a side order of Dean) and Sam has taken a job doing yard work for a young couple with a big, rambling house on a bluff overlooking the ocean. A nice way to spend the summer, right? Um ... not so much. The nice young couple has their secrets, and some digging for a rose garden unearths something that was long-buried for a very good reason.
CHARACTERS: Sam (age 17), Dean (age 21), John, Bobby, various OCs
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG for language and some pondering about sexin'
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: Remains to be seen; Prologue and 6 parts (this part is 4726 words)
THE BOX
By Carol Davis
"You know what your problem is?" Dean said during a commercial break, around a mouthful of Hostess cupcake. "You act like you got some kinda vested interest in this thing. What the hell do you care if she's fooling around? As long as they pay you on time, what difference does it make? It ain't like you're gonna ask her to the prom."
"There's no problem," Sam replied stubbornly.
"Yeah. That's why you've been stewing about it the whole damn day. Give it a rest, Sam. It's none of your business."
"I'm not stewing about anything."
Dean swallowed his mouthful and took another big bite of crème-filled, preservative-laden stuff that was advertised as being chocolate cake. "Oh. Right. I forgot. This emo shit is your natural state of being."
"Could you just -"
"Movie's back on," Dean pointed out.
"You've seen this movie a hundred and fifty times."
"And each time is more awesome than the last."
Sam stared at the TV for a couple of minutes (and no, he absolutely was not sulking) while Dean chuckled at his hundred-and-fifty-first viewing of Porky's II and worked his way through his three-pack of cupcakes.
It wasn't fair, Sam had decided about four hours ago: wasn't fair at all that Peter Hobbs thought his wife was at work while she was wandering around town in that little summer dress, having brunch - or whatever it was - with some random guy. There was no business being conducted there, not with her wearing an outfit like that, with her hair pulled up into a ponytail.
She was out having fun, while her husband was working his ass off to make her happy.
"Dude," Dean said quietly.
Sam turned a little, looked at him, said nothing.
"You got this crazy-ass, chick-flick movie view of 'normal,' man. It's not like that. Yeah, people live in nice houses. But it ain't all sunshine and roses, you know what I mean? People are just people, Sammy."
"You would know," Sam said. "Because you bring them pizza."
Chewing a little more slowly, Dean glanced over toward the kitchen, where Dad and Bobby were talking quietly as they pored through a stack of old books. They'd gone over to see Mert, the old hermit whose life's work seemed to be refusing to tell them what they wanted to hear, but what had come of that visit, Sam had no idea; Dad and Bobby seemed no more and no less bothered than they'd been yesterday, although they were a lot more engrossed in the books than they'd been before. For a minute, Dean seemed inclined to abandon the movie and join the study group in the kitchen - but he hadn't been invited. Neither Dad nor Bobby had said, "Give us a hand, here," and that seemed to bug Dean every bit as much as having seen Larkin Hobbs in town was bugging Sam.
"Why don't you just do it?" Sam told his brother.
"Do what?"
"Go in there. Grab a book and start reading."
Dean snorted at that, spraying half-chewed bits of cupcake onto both his jeans and the couch. "Yeah, right. Being that I love freakin' research so much it keeps me awake at night."
"It's interesting. Can be interesting," Sam amended.
"Which is why you're -"
The lights flickered. Once, then again.
In the kitchen, Dad and Bobby stopped talking.
Then the lights went out.
"What the hell," Dean groused. He was close enough that Sam could half-see, half-sense him pushing buttons on the TV remote as if he thought that would accomplish something. "This couldn't have waited another half an hour?"
"It's not like you don't know how it ends."
"Who cares if I know how it ends? It's a classic. You don't mess with a classic."
They sat there for a couple of minutes, waiting, but the lights didn't come back on. Dean got up from the couch, dropping what was left of the package of cupcakes onto the coffee table, but before he could get anywhere, Dad was there, standing between the couch and the TV, holding a lit flashlight that he passed off to Dean. "Take the car. Go on out to the main road," he instructed. "Head east. Bobby and I are gonna go west. See how far this thing extends."
"Dad," Sam said. "It's a blackout."
Dad pretty much ignored that. "Stay in touch. If you find anything that looks suspicious, don't engage until you let me and Bobby know."
"Yes, sir," Dean agreed.
Dad was gone then, back out into the kitchen where he exchanged a few words with Bobby that were loud enough to overhear, "demon" prominent among them. Neither of them sounded like they were surprised.
"It's a blackout," Sam protested, though it was more a search for some input from Dean than anything else. "They happen."
"Yeah, well, we're making sure," Dean replied, fishing in his jeans pocket for his keys. He seemed to have immediately, and completely, forgotten all about the movie, which he gleefully watched every single time he found it on cable, laughing and snorting and saying "Catch this, Sammy, catch this" as if Sam had never seen it before, in favor of following Dad's instructions.
Hell, Dean would have thrown the TV out the window if Dad had told him to.
It wasn't like they had anything better to do, Sam thought with some resignation as he followed his brother out to the Impala. The town's only movie theater was showing a Merchant-Ivory film (which Dean would not have sat through if the alternative was being eviscerated), and the only other choices for entertainment were mini golf, bowling, and hanging out in some bar, where Sam, courtesy of his fake ID, would be stuck watching Dean play pool or flirt (or both) while he nursed a couple of sodas or maybe a single beer.
He'd bet his whole summer's income, though, that this blackout would prove to be nothing more than a temporary outage due to somebody's car colliding with a utility pole, a stray dry-lightning strike, or a now-deceased squirrel trying to chew through a wire. Demons? he thought as he slid into the Impala's shotgun seat and pulled the door shut with enough of a crash that it made Dean bark in dismay. Not everything's -
"Sometimes it is," Dean said quietly, as if he'd heard Sam's thoughts. "We're just makin' sure."
"Whatever," Sam sighed.
~~~~~~~~~~
He had not breathed this air, the cool, damp, salt-laden air of evening, for a stretch of time so long it didn't bear measuring.
Slowly, deliberately, he shifted the body, made it rise to its feet, then walked it to a place from which he could look at the sea.
He had not anticipated pain.
Weight.
Confusion.
So long, he thought. So very long, confined in that small place, in the darkness, with nothing to do but be.
And contemplate.
He had forgotten what it was like to wear a human body, to be confined in this entirely different way, unable to coast on the rising air, slide through gaps as thin as a sheet of paper, move from one place to another with the speed of a bird.
He closed the body's eyes. Let its lungs fill with another rush of clean salt air.
He had missed this.
Yes.
Yes, he had missed it.
~~~~~~~~~~
"See if you can get anything on the radio," Dean said.
"You're gonna turn this into a joyride? Dad'll love that."
"No, dick-brain - I wanna see if they're saying anything about the blackout. That okay with you?"
Dean drove more slowly than usual, obviously wary of someone - or something - shooting out of the darkness into the path of the Impala, while Sam turned the dial first one direction, then the other, pausing briefly at each station the car radio could pick up clearly. He found only music, ads for everything from tires to TV shows, and one talk radio show where someone was ranting about the upcoming presidential election. There was a lot more static than normal, but the radio had been showing its age for quite a while; Dean had been talking for a couple of weeks now about buying a new one with some of his pizza-delivery earnings.
"You think there's something going on here?" Sam asked as he dialed past a Salute to the Sixties.
"We wouldn't be here if there wasn't."
"Wouldn't it help if we knew what we're looking for?"
"We're looking for where the blackout ends," Dean said testily. "Don't start this shit, Sam. I'm not in the mood for it."
"We're not kids, Dean. We're either hunters, or we're not."
"Thought you were picking 'not'."
"Just because I think there's more to life than living in a bunch of rat-trap motels and eating in diners and buying stuff with stolen credit cards? We could have a life, Dean. We don't need to do this all the time. We could have a home."
Dean, as Sam could have predicted, focused his attention on the road and said nothing.
"Bobby's got a home," Sam pointed out.
"We're not Bobby."
"Pastor Jim's got a home."
"We're not Pastor Jim, either," Dean said sharply. "Could you give it the hell up? Please? It's no gonna change, Sam. We do what we do. We are what we are."
"And that's it for you. End of story."
"Yeah," Dean replied. "Now watch the fuckin' road."
~~~~~~~~~~
Comfortable now with manipulating the body - much as he had manipulated his own body, lost to him centuries ago and largely forgotten - and with a little bit of wry amusement at the way the Peterhuman was shrieking in terror, somewhere alongside inside above below his mind - he walked back to the place he'd been set free. Knelt down and extinguished the small lanterns the Peterhuman had set up to illuminate his work.
Darkness wrapped itself around him then, but not full dark, not like the darkness he'd been trapped in since…
Since that.
Since that band of humans had gathered around him and held him fast with their chanting and their charms and their devil's trap.
Slowly, with something that was like reverence and yet not like it at all, he picked up the heavy, intricately carved box that had been his prison, climbed once again to his - the body's - feet, and began to walk toward the house.
He had been inside less than a minute when he noticed a light.
Two lights. The…headlights. Of a…car.
Someone coming.
~~~~~~~~~~
The lights were still out when Sam and Dean returned to the house, but the place was well-lit with candles and lanterns. They found Dad's truck and Bobby's car parked in the yard, and Dad sitting on the couch in the living room. Bobby was standing nearby, his ever-present trucker cap in hand, scratching his head with a kind of weary resignation.
"You boys see anything?" Bobby asked.
"It was a blackout," Sam told him. "Right? Nothing weird."
The affected area hadn't been very large; maybe a mile square. Outside it, everything was working fine. A brief conversation with a sheriff's deputy parked near one of the town's bigger intersections provided the cause of the outage: as Sam had guessed, a driver coming around an unfamiliar curve at well above the speed limit had collided with a power pole. A repair crew was already on the scene and would have everything restored within a couple of hours.
Judging by their expressions, the mundane reality of the situation had done nothing to convince Dad or Bobby that the four of them were in town for no good reason.
"Coincidence, maybe," Bobby said.
"Nothing going on that we could tell," Dean told him. "Everything's kinda quiet."
Dad looked at each of them in turn, and took a moment to fiddle with something he was holding in his hand. His truck keys, Sam realized.
"Gonna go back out," he said as he got up from the couch. "Take another look around."
The boys and Bobby watched him go. His truck roared to life a few seconds after the kitchen door had closed behind him.
For a moment, Sam thought Bobby was going to sit down with him and Dean - was going to tell them what was happening. Or what he and Dad thought might be happening. Bobby didn't have that "you're just kids" attitude - hadn't for years. With a little prodding, he'd talk to them as if they were adults, which made sense, because Dean was an adult, and Sam nearly so. Sam looked at the man they thought of as an uncle, smiled at him, gave him a look he hoped would convinced Bobby that he was ready, willing and able to help out with this thing - whatever it was.
To his dismay, Bobby simply said, "You boys get some sleep," and walked off into the kitchen.
~~~~~~~~~~
A couple of the letters of recommendation Sam had given to Peter Hobbs mentioned his ability to complete whatever task he'd been assigned - and to do it to the best of his ability, regardless of whether he'd sought it out or the whole thing had been someone else's idea. He was reliable, the letters said.
Reliable.
In this case, that meant finishing the slate pathway from the driveway to the patio. Then going back to the little area where the blackberry bramble had been, and completing a job that someone else - Peter, more than likely - had started last night and had abandoned midstream. There were a couple of holes in the ground, one of them larger than the others, meant to contain the rosebushes he'd picked up at Lowe's, Sam figured. The number and size of the rocks strewn around near the holes seemed to indicate that Peter had gotten tired of digging.
Tired enough to quit, because he'd run into rocks. It made Sam think of the number of graves he'd helped his brother and father unearth. There was no stopping when you were doing something like that, not for any reason at all (except for the imminent arrival of local law enforcement), and particularly not because you'd run into some rocks.
Sighing, Sam reached down and picked one of them up, hefting it like a softball; it was about the same size.
It arced satisfyingly when he hurled it out over the lapping incoming waves of the Atlantic.
"Good arm," Dean said from behind him.
That was enough of a surprise that Sam startled and spun around on one heel. His brother looked as relaxed as a cat in the sun, sunglasses riding halfway down his nose.
"What're you doing here?" Sam frowned.
Dean looked around a little, then lifted his gray t-shirted shoulders in a lazy but expressive shrug. "It's my day off. Thought maybe you could use some help. With the pruning."
"I'm not pruning. I'm laying slate."
"Still? You were doin' that yesterday. What's the deal? You pick 'em up, you lay 'em down. What's that take, like an hour?"
"You don't just 'lay them down,' Dean."
"Then, pray, explain."
"You want me to explain."
"You will anyway."
Sam huffed out a breath and shoved a hand through his hair, pushing it back off his forehead. "You have to level them. And make sure they're settled. So somebody walking along here doesn't step on a wobbly piece and go flying on their ass. There's a way to do it."
"So now you're a…sidewalk layer."
"It takes a lot longer than an hour to do it right."
"Okay," Dean said.
"Could you not do that?"
"What am I doing?"
"You're looking at me like you're humoring me. Like this is the craziest line of bullshit you've ever heard in your life."
"They payin' you by the hour? That it?"
"No, Dean, they're not paying me by the hour. This is the right way to do this."
"Sammy, Sammy, Sammy."
The way he was acting wasn't condescending, exactly - but it tipped enough in that direction to bug the hell out of Sam. "If Dad was telling you to do this," he snapped, "you'd be crawling around on the ground with a level. You'd be moving the sand with a fucking teaspoon if Dad told you that was the way to do it."
Dean was silent for a moment. Then he snapped back, "If that was the right way to do it, you bet your ass I would."
"Because Dad said so."
"No, Sam. Because it's the right way to do it."
"Which is what I said. There's a right way to do it."
"It's a freaking sidewalk, Sam."
"Which makes it less important than driving around in the dark for an hour, looking for nothing?"
"It wasn't nothing."
"It was nothing. It's always gonna be nothing."
Dean was breathing hard as he stepped back, away from his brother. For a moment he seemed to be headed toward the Impala, a glimpse of which Sam could see through the patchy barrier of the plant life separating the two of them from the driveway. Then he stopped, facing away from Sam, hands clenched, the muscles of his back shifting underneath the sweaty gray t-shirt.
If this had been a different conversation, he might have been working up to demanding, "You take that back."
Instead, he said, so quietly Sam almost didn't catch it, "Why you gotta be like that?"
A few years ago, Sam had had a conversation with a teacher, a kind, thoughtful man who'd suggested that Sam might have options other than going into the family business. Of course, the man had had no idea what the family business really was ("We're mechanics," Sam had told him), but he'd been earnest in his conviction that Sam should do what felt right. Should pursue the path he chose for himself, not one that had been laid out for him before he was old enough to walk.
Here, now, Sam wondered if anyone had made that same suggestion to Dean. Had ever told Dean that his life was his own, to shape as he saw fit.
"I'm sorry," Sam said.
Dean didn't turn, but one of his hands loosened up a little. "I brought you some lunch," he muttered.
"That's - thank you."
"It's just sandwiches."
"Subs?"
"Yeah."
"Mixed Italian?"
"Yeah."
"I like Mixed Italian."
Dean's shoulders lifted slightly. "Made 'em myself."
"Yeah?"
"They're in the car. Maybe -" Dean sighed heavily. "Maybe we oughta eat 'em before they go bad. Heat like this, they won't keep."
"I could eat."
Dean turned, finally, and offered Sam a smile that seemed to say a lot more things than Sam could figure out.
"I'm sorry," Sam said again.
"What the hell," Dean said mildly. "I don't take it seriously."
The hell you don't, Sam thought.
The work did go a lot faster with two of them tackling it. Dean refused to get down on the ground with the level, but he was perfectly willing - or said he was, at least - to fuss with the sand underlying the slate until each piece of stone passed muster. To Sam's bemusement, Dean's eyeballing technique worked just as well as the level.
"Dude," Dean said archly. "You doubted me?"
They'd each eaten one of the huge sandwiches Dean had prepared before tackling the slate path. When they'd finished laying the stone, they split another sandwich, topping that off with a can of soda apiece and a couple of the chocolate chip cookies Dub Wilson offered as the pizza shop's only dessert, all of which added up to an impressive quantity of food - and produced a lot of weirdly musical belching.
"Wait, wait," Dean grinned as Sam settled into a seat on the ground. "Got one. Listen to this."
What he let rip reverberated for several seconds.
"That was pretty disgusting," Sam told him.
"Like you could do better."
Sam gave it his best shot, until trying to force up some of the churning contents of his stomach threatening to turn from belching to puking.
"Girl," Dean scoffed.
Sam didn't argue the point, and they sat quietly side by side for a while, the breeze off the ocean ruffling their hair and relieving some of the growing heat of the day. Dean polished off the last of the cookies, then crumpled up the neck of the bag he'd used as a container for the waxed-paper sandwich wrappers and the empty soda cans.
"They got a trash can?" he asked Sam.
"Next to the garage."
"They got a bathroom?"
"Yeah…"
"Awesome."
"In the house," Sam said.
"Dude. Nature calls."
"So, go in the bushes."
"Not taking a dump in the shrubs, Sam. You tellin' me they don't trust you to use the bathroom?"
Honestly, it was a question that had never come up. Peter Hobbs had never volunteered the use of anything inside the house, and Sam had never asked; when the need arose, he'd chosen a secluded spot, out of sight of both the road and the house. "I don't have a key," he told his brother.
"Not a problem."
And before Sam could say anything more, Dean had scrambled to his feet and trotted off toward the house. It took Sam a few seconds to get up; by the time he caught up with Dean, Dean had his hand on the knob of the side door, which looked to lead into a mudroom off of the kitchen. In Dean's other hand was a set of lockpicks Dad had given him as a birthday gift.
Only in our family, Sam thought with some horror, and blurted out, "Dean!"
Without Dean's having done anything at all, other than to turn the knob, the door popped open. "See?" he said. "Door's open. They figured on you using the can."
"The door - why would they -?"
With Sam sputtering nervously behind him, Dean trucked on into the mudroom, took a quick look around, and pointed to an open doorway, where a toilet and sink were visible. "Been answering the call out in the woods all this time, huh?" he chided Sam. "Can's right here, dude. And the door was open."
"Nobody said," Sam mumbled.
"Nobody said," Dean echoed mockingly, then closed himself inside the washroom long enough to take care of business. When he came back out, Sam was still standing where Dean had left him, scowling at his own stupidity. "Jesus, dude," Dean sighed.
"I never -"
"Smartest kid in the class, huh?"
"Nobody ever said."
Shaking his head in dismay, Dean went back to surveying the mudroom. Nothing in it was honestly worth stealing: a long bench with a row of boots and sneakers and flip-flops underneath, a pegged rack holding a couple of jackets, an empty caddy that seemed intended to hold umbrellas. Opposite the door to the outside was the door to the kitchen, the upper half of which was six-paned glass. Clearly enjoying himself, Dean stepped up to the door and peered through the glass. "Niiiiiice," he crooned appreciatively.
"Let's just go," Sam said.
"In a minute. I'm admiring the décor."
"Dean."
"Lighten up, princess. You said nobody's home. I'm just -"
And Dean stopped abruptly. "What?" Sam asked worriedly.
"They have a fight or something?"
"Why?"
"'Cause -"
Sam pressed in beside his brother to look through the glass. What he saw inside the kitchen made his eyes open wider: the contents of the open refrigerator dumped and spilled and strewn across the floor, the remains of several broken dishes, an enormous puddle of water, and what looked alarmingly (and all too familiarly) like blood.
"Shit," Sam squeaked.
"Looks like somebody broke in," Dean mused.
"You mean somebody other than us?"
His face tight with concentration, Dean grasped the knob and turned it. That door too was unlocked, and Dean pushed it open slowly and steadily, aiming not to make any noise. He paid no attention to whether or not Sam seemed to want to follow, just put a finger to his lips, then beckoned for Sam to stay behind him.
"We oughta -" Sam hissed.
Dean crouched down just long enough to slide into his hand the knife he kept hidden in his boot. The scowl he was wearing said he was sorry he hadn't brought a gun, but he seemed disinclined to go out to the Impala to get one.
"Dean," Sam insisted. "We need to call the police."
"The hell we do."
"If somebody broke in here -"
"They could be long gone by the time the cops get here. Just follow my lead."
Venturing further into the house was a stupid idea. It was probably one of the ten stupidest ideas either one of them could have come up with, if they'd taken the time to make a list.
Sam hesitated only long enough to pluck a carving knife out of the wooden block near the Hobbses' stove, then fell silently into step behind his brother.
The mess of food and broken dishes trailed a little ways into the dining room, then stopped; beyond that point, the Hobbses' home was neat and orderly, aside from a heap of books and magazines stacked in front of a bookcase. None of the furnishings looked terribly expensive - for all that Sam knew about that sort of thing - and didn't seem to offer much incentive for a break-in. The flat-panel TV in the living room was too massive to be carried out by one person, and didn't look like it had been disturbed. Silent and alert, the Winchesters moved through the house, taking turns peeking around corners and into closets, both of them ready to defend both themselves and the Hobbses' home.
Or…Sam was ready to defend the Hobbses' home. Dean looked as if he was eager to kick some ass for its own sake.
They found nothing unusual until they reached the foot of the staircase leading to the second floor. There, very much out of place on the immaculate hardwood floor, was a single bloody heel print.
"Upstairs," Dean mouthed, and gestured.
This was nothing out of the ordinary, Sam told himself as he crept up the stairs, careful to settle his weight on the treads in a way that wouldn't prompt them to creak. Dean, arm's length ahead, moved as lightly and silently as a cat, knife at the ready. They'd both done this many times before: moved through someone's house in pursuit of something dangerous, something that in most cases had already killed and wouldn't hesitate to kill again. It was almost second nature, this kind of reconnaissance - and, unlike a number of other occasions Sam would just as soon not remember, this time they had the benefit of daylight.
Nothing lurked inside the first two rooms they investigated, a guest room and what Sam guessed to be Larkin's home office. They moved from there to the last two rooms on the second floor, another office (Peter's, judging by the furnishings), and, at the far end of the hallway, the Hobbses' master bedroom. Dean was still in the doorway of Peter's office when Sam turned and looked, with a little nervous chagrin, into the Hobbses' bedroom.
In the center of the room, maybe fifteen feet away from him, there was a pile of…something…on the braided rug.
Something…wet.
A big, unidentifiable pile of something…wet.
Sam's brain went Bzuhhhh…whahhhh? He had to stare at the mess, really stare at it, to force his mind to identify it.
"Holy FUCK," Dean shrilled behind him.
Inside out, Sam thought. It's all…inside out.
Inside out, pink and red and white and glistening in the summer sunlight.
If he'd seen this…thing he was looking at out in the woods, he would have said it was an animal - what was left of an animal - torn apart by some predator.
Some frenzied kind of a predator.
Rabid, maybe.
It could have been the remains of an animal, but it wasn't, not up here in the Hobbses' bedroom.
That thing, that mess of pink and white and red?
Had been human.
Had been…
"Ohhhh my God," Sam moaned.
The strength drained out of him then, all at once, the plug gone out of his drain. He went down in a tangle of too-long legs onto the Hobbses' gleaming, carefully restored hardwood floor and puked his Mixed Italian sub all over his jeans.
Chapter 4…