SPN FIC - Two By Two (Part 3 of 5)
[ One] [ Two]
The premise:
After a long, disheartening couple of days on the road, Dean went to bed in a motel.
That's not where he woke up.
"Hello?" he called. "Anybody?"
His voice echoed a little, but only a little. The sound of it was enough to make him shudder, and that was just plain wrong. Him, badass Dean Winchester, scared like a little girl of being alone in a…
Okay, say it.
Ain't saying it. Because it's not a haunted house. Come ON.
"SAM!" he bellowed.
And no one answered him.
Five parts, one posted each day, Wednesday through Sunday.
CHARACTERS: Dean, and others to be added as we go along (to say which ones would ruin the surprise)
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG, for language
SPOILERS: Nothing specific, although set now-ish
LENGTH: Remains to be seen; this part is 3392 words
TWO BY TWO
By Carol Davis
The bootprints he left in the saturated sand close to the waterline filled with water the moment he lifted his foot from each one. When he crouched down into the lip of an incoming wave to dip his fingers into the surf, he could feel the heat of the sun on his back.
Real.
Bits of seaweed mixed into the water. Tiny shells lying in the sand.
Too damn real.
He'd been to South Florida, had waded out into the strength of the Atlantic a couple of times, but had never been anywhere like this. If Cas was right, if he was cooking all of this up inside his own head, then what he was looking at came courtesy of the Travel Channel. Of a lot of little bits of time spent drinking and pondering.
Dreaming.
Then there oughta be some…
He saw the shadow fall onto the sand beside him before he heard the voice say, "It's beautiful, isn't it?"
He told himself he knew the voice even before he turned to look, shading his eyes against the sun. When he saw who it was he got up slowly, not so much afraid of spooking her as worried she might produce something that would put another spin on this little adventure - the lamb's blood-covered knife he'd used to take himself out of her world three years ago, for instance.
"Carmen," he said quietly.
She was wearing a bathing suit, not the micro-mini bikini of most of his beach fantasies but something a little more modest, with a skirt of white, gauzy fabric wrapped around her waist. It, and her hair, were fluttering in the breeze. "Remember this place?" she asked. "It's where we were going to spend our honeymoon."
They'd never talked about a honeymoon. Or a wedding, for that matter. "Yeah," he said, just for the sake of saying something.
"So relaxing. Just you and me, enjoying the sun. Going swimming. Maybe…building a sand castle."
"Whatever," Dean said.
"I've missed you, Dean."
"You're not real. None of it was real."
"It was as real as it needed to be."
That was no lie. It - the fantasy the djinn had helped him conjure up - had been full-Technicolor real, even more so than this new-and-improved crazy Cas claimed he was inventing, because it hadn't involved buzzards and rhinos and mega-buffets. Or angels in trenchcoats. If it hadn't taken away from him the two things he'd faithfully structured his life around, it would have been real enough to keep. "You gonna feed me the party line again?" he asked her, and to his dismay it sounded like a complaint rather than a good, solid statement of his beliefs. "How I should stay with you and be happy?"
He considered taking a step away, then didn't. It'd seem like backing down. Like he was giving her more power than she - than that Technicolor daydream - deserved.
"You wanted to stay."
"And how does that balance? All those people dying, measured up against me being able to work in my dad's garage?"
"But they didn't die. In the real world, they were alive."
"That's not -"
Relevant, he was going to say, but "relevant" sounded like Sam. She was right: he'd wanted to stay. Had even confessed that to his brother. He'd wanted to take refuge there, as flawed as the dream might have been. Had wanted to hide there, pretending the world was…what? Kind? "The ones I've saved since then," he muttered.
"You aren't responsible for the whole world, Dean."
"Yeah. I kind of am."
"Because that's what the angels told you? That's a little grand, isn't it? It makes you a member of a pretty exclusive club."
"Not gonna debate this."
She was silent for a minute, looking past his shoulder at the surf rolling in to shore. He could hear it behind him, and at his feet, lapping against the sand.
"Because you think you'll lose?" she said.
He let his hands curl into fists, scraped his nails against the skin of his palms. Yell, swing, or walk away: that was how Dad had taught him, by example, to deal with confrontation. There'd never been a show of Let's talk this out. Never a display of how he ought to deal with something like this in a world that didn't involve hunting. What he'd said to himself that time, about being Dad's blunt instrument? It was kind of true. He was his own freaking blunt instrument, crashing his way through life.
"Don't do this, okay?" he muttered.
Instead of answering him she walked out into the surf, leaving footprints a lot smaller than his own. She stopped when the water was just above her ankles, leaving her skirt enough room to blow without getting wet.
"Ask yourself what you want, Dean," she said without turning toward him, and he could barely hear her over the sound of the wind and the water.
He didn't answer her.
He walked back to the stairs.
~~~~~~~~~~
They walked down another hallway, he and Cas and the dog, this one offering a door only every fifty feet or so.
"You're not going to look inside?" Cas asked after they'd passed the fourth or fifth one.
Dean ignored him and kept walking.
"You're not curious."
"No," Dean said. "I'm not curious."
But Castiel, true to form, hadn't meant that as a suggestion. True to form, he wanted what he wanted when he wanted it. To Dean's annoyance the angel stopped walking. It didn't surprise him much when the dog stopped too.
"So, what?" Dean complained from several steps further on down the hall. "You're gonna gang up on me now?"
"We simply thought you might be curious."
"We?"
"Yes."
"You and the dog."
"Yes."
"Because the two of you did the Vulcan mind meld? Jesus, Cas. First you tell me this is all me, and now you're after me to check out what's behind Door Number Three. It ain't a game show. If you want to know what's in there, open the damn door yourself. Or have the dog do it. I don't much care."
Cas glanced down, as if he honestly wanted the dog to weigh in with an opinion.
All the dog did was grin at him.
This could go two possible ways, Dean figured. He could either open the door now, or he could keep walking down the hall while Cas and the dog stood where they were, watching him from behind, until he became pissed off enough to come storming back. Which was much the same way Sam tended to operate.
The worst of it was, that ploy always worked.
Announcing his disgust with a nice long series of guttural noises (about the same sounds he would have made if he'd been crapping out a rocking chair, he figured, although they had nowhere near the effect on Castiel that they would have on Sam, because Cas simply stood there poker-faced, while the dog went on grinning), Dean reversed course and stomped up to the door. Doors, more accurately, because there was a pair of them, side by side, meant to be opened together.
"Could be locked," he groused.
"Possibly."
Ain't gonna win, he thought. He never won this particular game. Winning it once would have been a nice change of pace.
He grasped a knob in each hand, turned them simultaneously, and shoved the doors open.
Behind him, Castiel said bemusedly, "Hmm."
It was a friggin' casino.
With people.
How many, he couldn't figure out, because the place seemed to have no end to it. It stretched on as far as he could see, both directly ahead and to either side, and was crowded with slot machines and gaming tables of every possible variety. The ceiling was fairly low, just high enough for a series of crystal chandeliers to be a reasonable distance above the patrons' heads, which gave it a sort of cozy feeling in spite of its stretching To infinity AND BEYOND!, Dean thought crossly.
"Buzz Lightyear?" Castiel questioned.
"So now you're inside my head, inside my head? Get outta my friggin' head! And how do you know who Buzz Lightyear is?"
"I am aware of popular culture."
"Kill me," Dean muttered. "Just -"
Apparently more curious than either of his two-legged companions, the dog strolled into the casino and on down the wide center aisle. He didn't seem to be aiming for anything - or anyone - in particular, just padded silently along, glancing now and then to either side as if to make sure he wasn't missing anything interesting.
"I believe he assumes we will follow," Cas pointed out.
"Or we could wait, and he'll come back."
"He may not."
"It's my head. I say he's comin' back."
Cas was pensively quiet for a moment, then asked, "Do you have conversations like this with your brother?"
"What? No."
"No?"
"Isn't that what I said?"
He didn't give Cas a chance to answer. Couldn't give him a chance to answer. If this is my head, I couldn't be surrounded by naked babes feeding me pizza? I couldn't have a friggin' IMAX theater showing all the Star Wars movies? I couldn't have a Jacuzzi tub and a beer bong and people leaving me the fuck ALONE? "What the shit is this?" he said over his shoulder, uninterested in the reaction it might get from the people he was stomping past, and growing even more annoyed when none of them had any reaction at all. "If this is my head, this is FUCKED UP."
That got a reaction only out of the dog, who sat down in the center of the aisle facing Dean and cocked his head in what looked like dismay.
"What?" Dean barked. "You gonna tell me I owe money to the friggin' swear jar? You're not my damn grandmother. Get outta my face."
Not until Dean finally surrendered to following him did the dog continue his progress through the casino, wagging his tail in cheerful celebration each time a cacophony of bells signaled someone's win at the slots. They'd gone what seemed like three or four miles when the dog caught sight of something that interested him, trotted merrily over to it, circled around and sat down. "What?" Dean asked him, to which the dog responded with a head-tossing Woof.
"Dude," Dean sighed. "I don't speak Dog. Try -"
But when he turned to look, Castiel wasn't there.
He had to move closer to see what the dog had located, expecting it to be a stick, or a Frisbee, or a tennis ball. None of those things had any business being in a casino, but then neither did the dog. Nelson encouraged him with a couple of soft Woofs, then shifted to one side so Dean could see what he'd been standing guard over.
A quarter.
"Seriously?" Dean said.
Nelson began a head-bobbing dance around the coin that left no doubt as to what he intended Dean to do - or Step One of it, anyway. Frowning, Dean reached down and picked up the quarter, then asked the dog, "You gonna pick out a machine, now?"
The machine said DIAMOND JACKPOT in big, flashing letters.
"If I win, you gonna piss on the rug?" Dean asked.
He might have considered pissing on the carpet himself if he won - except that anything won in Fantasyland wasn't going to be negotiable in the Big Wide Apocalypse outside, and that kind of cold kiss from reality could do a number on the nervous anticipation he'd always felt when he asked a one-armed bandit to dance.
Of course, if he won on the outside, the IRS would want to chat.
And as far as they knew, Dean Winchester was dead.
Twice.
Impatient in a way that would have put Sam to shame, the dog began to circle around the machine, tail flailing back and forth, making little sounds that Dean figured were the doggie equivalent of Do it, do it, come on, do it.
What the hell. It wasn't like seeing a billion quarters pour out of the thing wouldn't be at least a little bit of fun.
"I'm gonna win this, right?" he asked Nelson.
The dog danced and woofed and circled and pranced. Like a puppy, Dean thought. Like there was bacon involved. With a small, almost unconscious smile he stepped up to the machine, faked Nelson out a couple of times with the quarter, then dropped it in the slot and pressed the big, backlit button that, years ago, had replaced the arm on machines like this. The rollers with their little pictures of fruit dutifully wheeled around and Dean felt his breath catch, just a little, as if he could actually get something out of this. Something he could carry out the door and drop onto one of the beds in that room at the Sunburst Motel.
Instead of a matching trio of fruit, he got three bars that said JACKPOT. But no bells went off, and no quarters dropped out of the front of the machine.
"The HELL," he complained.
All that came out was a small rectangle of paper.
Which was a cheat, he thought - a serious, noiseless, funless cheat. And he would have left the paper there in the slot and walked away if it hadn't been for Nelson's continued explosions of doggie glee. All the paper said was WINNER, which to Dean's mind was not only useless but hilariously wrong, but the dog kept up his dancing as if it said something entirely different.
Dancing kinda the way Sammy had done, a lot of years ago.
Suddenly weary - and definitely enough so that he couldn't muster any reason not to - he followed the dog deeper into the casino, where an array of bright lights seemed to indicate a display of some sort. They had to make a couple of turns, go past craps tables and blackjack and roulette and about eighty thousand more slots, and the dog seemed to know exactly where he was going.
To the big flashing neon sign that said
!!!!!WINNER!!!!!
Beneath it, on a revolving turntable brightly lit from underneath, glittering the reflection of the crystal chandeliers and the lights on the slots and the warm glow from the turntable itself, was a black '67 Impala.
His black '67 Impala.
But she was showroom new, a condition in which he'd never seen her. Even Dad had never seen her that way; she'd been six years old when he bought her off the used-car lot in Lawrence. Not in the best of shape even then.
"Baby," Dean breathed as he moved up to the turntable and stretched out a hand to touch her gleaming ebony skin. "Look how gorgeous you are."
The windows were rolled down so, once he'd climbed up onto the platform, he could peer inside. Her upholstery was brand-new and spotless, her seat cushions plump, unmarked by the weight of years and miles and Sam's ginormous ass, her carpeting fresh and, when he popped the passenger door open and reached down to touch it, as soft as a baby's diaper.
And she had that new-car smell.
Dean sucked it deep into his lungs, knowing it was nothing but a soup of chemicals, nothing that was good to inhale at all.
But…it was awesome.
It took a moment to convince himself that yes, he should circle around to the driver's door and slide into the driver's seat, sit behind a wheel that no one had touched - at least, no one other than the guys on the assembly line - and think about New, about being reborn, about starting all over again, without scars or stains or regrets. When he glanced to his right, where the passenger door still stood open, Nelson was sitting on the platform, tongue lolling (dripping, thank goodness, onto the platform and not into the car), eyes dancing, asking permission to jump on in.
"Don't," Dean said softly.
The dog accepted that amiably and lay down on the platform, almost out of sight.
They remained that way - Dean, the dog, and the car - for a long, long while.
~~~~~~~~~~
He found Castiel silently observing a game of high-stakes poker, the players of which didn't even look up when Dean approached the table.
"You won?" Cas said.
"What, is there a newsletter?"
Standing there, watching the angel watch the game, brought up a question that Dean pondered for a minute before voicing it. "If this is all in my head, how come you can wander off and do things without my being there?"
"I have no idea."
"You don't."
Cas raised a brow at that, then returned to spectating.
"You know what all this is about, don't you?" Dean persisted.
"It's a dream. Your dream, specifically. I thought we were agreed on that."
Dean took a long look around, taking in the crowd, the tables, the lights, the soft, deep green of the carpet.
"I think you're feeding me a line of bullshit," he said finally.
"I am not."
"Are too."
"And why would I do that?"
"I got no idea why any of you guys do anything," Dean replied. "If it suits your purpose, or, hell, if it just amuses you, you seem to do whatever you damn well please."
"We are on the same side, Dean."
"And the specifics of that seem to be open to interpretation."
Castiel didn't stand up, didn't even shift his weight as if he intended to stand up, but there seemed to be more of him all of a sudden; he seemed to be wildly more substantial, carry a lot more weight than Jimmy Novak ever had. It was an effect that made Dean think of wrath and smiting, which was probably exactly what Castiel had had in mind.
It was Cas's don't fuck with me trick. Dean had seen it before.
"You should eat," Castiel said, and pointed. "Over there. It says Restaurant."
"Not particularly hungry."
"You should eat," the angel repeated.
There was a newsletter, Dean decided, being issued from somewhere other than inside his head, and Cas had had a copy special-delivered to him. Whatever the news of the day had been, it wasn't good.
Something nudged his leg. Nelson, looking unexpectedly somber.
"You hungry, boy?" Dean asked him.
"Take him with you," Castiel said. "I'll come get you when you're through."
That was more than enough of a dismissal, since Dean could find no good reason to stand here and let Cas go on not telling him anything. Which was curious, in a way, because Cas had shown up in this place claiming he couldn't find either of the Winchesters, that neither could Bobby, and their being missing was a problem in about a dozen different ways.
"So you're okay now with my being MIA," Dean said.
Rather than wait for a reply - which, judging by the set of Cas's shoulders, would have been just another dismissal - he looked around for the sign Cas had mentioned, located it some distance across the casino, and set off in that direction with his hands stuck in his pockets and the dog trotting dutifully alongside. When they reached the place, fronted by a wide archway without doors, there was no hostess on duty, no one to tell him he couldn't bring a dog inside, so he and Nelson walked on in, both of them taking note of the display case of cakes and pies near the cash register.
"No chocolate," Dean reminded the dog.
It was a good-sized place, with twenty-odd tables that would each seat four arranged in the center of the room, and booths for four or six around the perimeter. No one was sitting at any of them, at least not that Dean could see from the entrance. Wondering how he was going to get some food without anyone around to bring it to him, he strolled further into the room, picked out a likely-looking booth and took a seat on one of the benches. After a nod of permission from Dean the dog climbed carefully up onto the other bench and lay down, facing out into the room.
They'd been sitting there for a couple of minutes when someone approached the booth.
When he saw who it was, Dean was - not for the first time in this crazy place - struck completely speechless.
Part 4…
The premise:
After a long, disheartening couple of days on the road, Dean went to bed in a motel.
That's not where he woke up.
"Hello?" he called. "Anybody?"
His voice echoed a little, but only a little. The sound of it was enough to make him shudder, and that was just plain wrong. Him, badass Dean Winchester, scared like a little girl of being alone in a…
Okay, say it.
Ain't saying it. Because it's not a haunted house. Come ON.
"SAM!" he bellowed.
And no one answered him.
Five parts, one posted each day, Wednesday through Sunday.
CHARACTERS: Dean, and others to be added as we go along (to say which ones would ruin the surprise)
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG, for language
SPOILERS: Nothing specific, although set now-ish
LENGTH: Remains to be seen; this part is 3392 words
TWO BY TWO
By Carol Davis
The bootprints he left in the saturated sand close to the waterline filled with water the moment he lifted his foot from each one. When he crouched down into the lip of an incoming wave to dip his fingers into the surf, he could feel the heat of the sun on his back.
Real.
Bits of seaweed mixed into the water. Tiny shells lying in the sand.
Too damn real.
He'd been to South Florida, had waded out into the strength of the Atlantic a couple of times, but had never been anywhere like this. If Cas was right, if he was cooking all of this up inside his own head, then what he was looking at came courtesy of the Travel Channel. Of a lot of little bits of time spent drinking and pondering.
Dreaming.
Then there oughta be some…
He saw the shadow fall onto the sand beside him before he heard the voice say, "It's beautiful, isn't it?"
He told himself he knew the voice even before he turned to look, shading his eyes against the sun. When he saw who it was he got up slowly, not so much afraid of spooking her as worried she might produce something that would put another spin on this little adventure - the lamb's blood-covered knife he'd used to take himself out of her world three years ago, for instance.
"Carmen," he said quietly.
She was wearing a bathing suit, not the micro-mini bikini of most of his beach fantasies but something a little more modest, with a skirt of white, gauzy fabric wrapped around her waist. It, and her hair, were fluttering in the breeze. "Remember this place?" she asked. "It's where we were going to spend our honeymoon."
They'd never talked about a honeymoon. Or a wedding, for that matter. "Yeah," he said, just for the sake of saying something.
"So relaxing. Just you and me, enjoying the sun. Going swimming. Maybe…building a sand castle."
"Whatever," Dean said.
"I've missed you, Dean."
"You're not real. None of it was real."
"It was as real as it needed to be."
That was no lie. It - the fantasy the djinn had helped him conjure up - had been full-Technicolor real, even more so than this new-and-improved crazy Cas claimed he was inventing, because it hadn't involved buzzards and rhinos and mega-buffets. Or angels in trenchcoats. If it hadn't taken away from him the two things he'd faithfully structured his life around, it would have been real enough to keep. "You gonna feed me the party line again?" he asked her, and to his dismay it sounded like a complaint rather than a good, solid statement of his beliefs. "How I should stay with you and be happy?"
He considered taking a step away, then didn't. It'd seem like backing down. Like he was giving her more power than she - than that Technicolor daydream - deserved.
"You wanted to stay."
"And how does that balance? All those people dying, measured up against me being able to work in my dad's garage?"
"But they didn't die. In the real world, they were alive."
"That's not -"
Relevant, he was going to say, but "relevant" sounded like Sam. She was right: he'd wanted to stay. Had even confessed that to his brother. He'd wanted to take refuge there, as flawed as the dream might have been. Had wanted to hide there, pretending the world was…what? Kind? "The ones I've saved since then," he muttered.
"You aren't responsible for the whole world, Dean."
"Yeah. I kind of am."
"Because that's what the angels told you? That's a little grand, isn't it? It makes you a member of a pretty exclusive club."
"Not gonna debate this."
She was silent for a minute, looking past his shoulder at the surf rolling in to shore. He could hear it behind him, and at his feet, lapping against the sand.
"Because you think you'll lose?" she said.
He let his hands curl into fists, scraped his nails against the skin of his palms. Yell, swing, or walk away: that was how Dad had taught him, by example, to deal with confrontation. There'd never been a show of Let's talk this out. Never a display of how he ought to deal with something like this in a world that didn't involve hunting. What he'd said to himself that time, about being Dad's blunt instrument? It was kind of true. He was his own freaking blunt instrument, crashing his way through life.
"Don't do this, okay?" he muttered.
Instead of answering him she walked out into the surf, leaving footprints a lot smaller than his own. She stopped when the water was just above her ankles, leaving her skirt enough room to blow without getting wet.
"Ask yourself what you want, Dean," she said without turning toward him, and he could barely hear her over the sound of the wind and the water.
He didn't answer her.
He walked back to the stairs.
~~~~~~~~~~
They walked down another hallway, he and Cas and the dog, this one offering a door only every fifty feet or so.
"You're not going to look inside?" Cas asked after they'd passed the fourth or fifth one.
Dean ignored him and kept walking.
"You're not curious."
"No," Dean said. "I'm not curious."
But Castiel, true to form, hadn't meant that as a suggestion. True to form, he wanted what he wanted when he wanted it. To Dean's annoyance the angel stopped walking. It didn't surprise him much when the dog stopped too.
"So, what?" Dean complained from several steps further on down the hall. "You're gonna gang up on me now?"
"We simply thought you might be curious."
"We?"
"Yes."
"You and the dog."
"Yes."
"Because the two of you did the Vulcan mind meld? Jesus, Cas. First you tell me this is all me, and now you're after me to check out what's behind Door Number Three. It ain't a game show. If you want to know what's in there, open the damn door yourself. Or have the dog do it. I don't much care."
Cas glanced down, as if he honestly wanted the dog to weigh in with an opinion.
All the dog did was grin at him.
This could go two possible ways, Dean figured. He could either open the door now, or he could keep walking down the hall while Cas and the dog stood where they were, watching him from behind, until he became pissed off enough to come storming back. Which was much the same way Sam tended to operate.
The worst of it was, that ploy always worked.
Announcing his disgust with a nice long series of guttural noises (about the same sounds he would have made if he'd been crapping out a rocking chair, he figured, although they had nowhere near the effect on Castiel that they would have on Sam, because Cas simply stood there poker-faced, while the dog went on grinning), Dean reversed course and stomped up to the door. Doors, more accurately, because there was a pair of them, side by side, meant to be opened together.
"Could be locked," he groused.
"Possibly."
Ain't gonna win, he thought. He never won this particular game. Winning it once would have been a nice change of pace.
He grasped a knob in each hand, turned them simultaneously, and shoved the doors open.
Behind him, Castiel said bemusedly, "Hmm."
It was a friggin' casino.
With people.
How many, he couldn't figure out, because the place seemed to have no end to it. It stretched on as far as he could see, both directly ahead and to either side, and was crowded with slot machines and gaming tables of every possible variety. The ceiling was fairly low, just high enough for a series of crystal chandeliers to be a reasonable distance above the patrons' heads, which gave it a sort of cozy feeling in spite of its stretching To infinity AND BEYOND!, Dean thought crossly.
"Buzz Lightyear?" Castiel questioned.
"So now you're inside my head, inside my head? Get outta my friggin' head! And how do you know who Buzz Lightyear is?"
"I am aware of popular culture."
"Kill me," Dean muttered. "Just -"
Apparently more curious than either of his two-legged companions, the dog strolled into the casino and on down the wide center aisle. He didn't seem to be aiming for anything - or anyone - in particular, just padded silently along, glancing now and then to either side as if to make sure he wasn't missing anything interesting.
"I believe he assumes we will follow," Cas pointed out.
"Or we could wait, and he'll come back."
"He may not."
"It's my head. I say he's comin' back."
Cas was pensively quiet for a moment, then asked, "Do you have conversations like this with your brother?"
"What? No."
"No?"
"Isn't that what I said?"
He didn't give Cas a chance to answer. Couldn't give him a chance to answer. If this is my head, I couldn't be surrounded by naked babes feeding me pizza? I couldn't have a friggin' IMAX theater showing all the Star Wars movies? I couldn't have a Jacuzzi tub and a beer bong and people leaving me the fuck ALONE? "What the shit is this?" he said over his shoulder, uninterested in the reaction it might get from the people he was stomping past, and growing even more annoyed when none of them had any reaction at all. "If this is my head, this is FUCKED UP."
That got a reaction only out of the dog, who sat down in the center of the aisle facing Dean and cocked his head in what looked like dismay.
"What?" Dean barked. "You gonna tell me I owe money to the friggin' swear jar? You're not my damn grandmother. Get outta my face."
Not until Dean finally surrendered to following him did the dog continue his progress through the casino, wagging his tail in cheerful celebration each time a cacophony of bells signaled someone's win at the slots. They'd gone what seemed like three or four miles when the dog caught sight of something that interested him, trotted merrily over to it, circled around and sat down. "What?" Dean asked him, to which the dog responded with a head-tossing Woof.
"Dude," Dean sighed. "I don't speak Dog. Try -"
But when he turned to look, Castiel wasn't there.
He had to move closer to see what the dog had located, expecting it to be a stick, or a Frisbee, or a tennis ball. None of those things had any business being in a casino, but then neither did the dog. Nelson encouraged him with a couple of soft Woofs, then shifted to one side so Dean could see what he'd been standing guard over.
A quarter.
"Seriously?" Dean said.
Nelson began a head-bobbing dance around the coin that left no doubt as to what he intended Dean to do - or Step One of it, anyway. Frowning, Dean reached down and picked up the quarter, then asked the dog, "You gonna pick out a machine, now?"
The machine said DIAMOND JACKPOT in big, flashing letters.
"If I win, you gonna piss on the rug?" Dean asked.
He might have considered pissing on the carpet himself if he won - except that anything won in Fantasyland wasn't going to be negotiable in the Big Wide Apocalypse outside, and that kind of cold kiss from reality could do a number on the nervous anticipation he'd always felt when he asked a one-armed bandit to dance.
Of course, if he won on the outside, the IRS would want to chat.
And as far as they knew, Dean Winchester was dead.
Twice.
Impatient in a way that would have put Sam to shame, the dog began to circle around the machine, tail flailing back and forth, making little sounds that Dean figured were the doggie equivalent of Do it, do it, come on, do it.
What the hell. It wasn't like seeing a billion quarters pour out of the thing wouldn't be at least a little bit of fun.
"I'm gonna win this, right?" he asked Nelson.
The dog danced and woofed and circled and pranced. Like a puppy, Dean thought. Like there was bacon involved. With a small, almost unconscious smile he stepped up to the machine, faked Nelson out a couple of times with the quarter, then dropped it in the slot and pressed the big, backlit button that, years ago, had replaced the arm on machines like this. The rollers with their little pictures of fruit dutifully wheeled around and Dean felt his breath catch, just a little, as if he could actually get something out of this. Something he could carry out the door and drop onto one of the beds in that room at the Sunburst Motel.
Instead of a matching trio of fruit, he got three bars that said JACKPOT. But no bells went off, and no quarters dropped out of the front of the machine.
"The HELL," he complained.
All that came out was a small rectangle of paper.
Which was a cheat, he thought - a serious, noiseless, funless cheat. And he would have left the paper there in the slot and walked away if it hadn't been for Nelson's continued explosions of doggie glee. All the paper said was WINNER, which to Dean's mind was not only useless but hilariously wrong, but the dog kept up his dancing as if it said something entirely different.
Dancing kinda the way Sammy had done, a lot of years ago.
Suddenly weary - and definitely enough so that he couldn't muster any reason not to - he followed the dog deeper into the casino, where an array of bright lights seemed to indicate a display of some sort. They had to make a couple of turns, go past craps tables and blackjack and roulette and about eighty thousand more slots, and the dog seemed to know exactly where he was going.
To the big flashing neon sign that said
!!!!!WINNER!!!!!
Beneath it, on a revolving turntable brightly lit from underneath, glittering the reflection of the crystal chandeliers and the lights on the slots and the warm glow from the turntable itself, was a black '67 Impala.
His black '67 Impala.
But she was showroom new, a condition in which he'd never seen her. Even Dad had never seen her that way; she'd been six years old when he bought her off the used-car lot in Lawrence. Not in the best of shape even then.
"Baby," Dean breathed as he moved up to the turntable and stretched out a hand to touch her gleaming ebony skin. "Look how gorgeous you are."
The windows were rolled down so, once he'd climbed up onto the platform, he could peer inside. Her upholstery was brand-new and spotless, her seat cushions plump, unmarked by the weight of years and miles and Sam's ginormous ass, her carpeting fresh and, when he popped the passenger door open and reached down to touch it, as soft as a baby's diaper.
And she had that new-car smell.
Dean sucked it deep into his lungs, knowing it was nothing but a soup of chemicals, nothing that was good to inhale at all.
But…it was awesome.
It took a moment to convince himself that yes, he should circle around to the driver's door and slide into the driver's seat, sit behind a wheel that no one had touched - at least, no one other than the guys on the assembly line - and think about New, about being reborn, about starting all over again, without scars or stains or regrets. When he glanced to his right, where the passenger door still stood open, Nelson was sitting on the platform, tongue lolling (dripping, thank goodness, onto the platform and not into the car), eyes dancing, asking permission to jump on in.
"Don't," Dean said softly.
The dog accepted that amiably and lay down on the platform, almost out of sight.
They remained that way - Dean, the dog, and the car - for a long, long while.
~~~~~~~~~~
He found Castiel silently observing a game of high-stakes poker, the players of which didn't even look up when Dean approached the table.
"You won?" Cas said.
"What, is there a newsletter?"
Standing there, watching the angel watch the game, brought up a question that Dean pondered for a minute before voicing it. "If this is all in my head, how come you can wander off and do things without my being there?"
"I have no idea."
"You don't."
Cas raised a brow at that, then returned to spectating.
"You know what all this is about, don't you?" Dean persisted.
"It's a dream. Your dream, specifically. I thought we were agreed on that."
Dean took a long look around, taking in the crowd, the tables, the lights, the soft, deep green of the carpet.
"I think you're feeding me a line of bullshit," he said finally.
"I am not."
"Are too."
"And why would I do that?"
"I got no idea why any of you guys do anything," Dean replied. "If it suits your purpose, or, hell, if it just amuses you, you seem to do whatever you damn well please."
"We are on the same side, Dean."
"And the specifics of that seem to be open to interpretation."
Castiel didn't stand up, didn't even shift his weight as if he intended to stand up, but there seemed to be more of him all of a sudden; he seemed to be wildly more substantial, carry a lot more weight than Jimmy Novak ever had. It was an effect that made Dean think of wrath and smiting, which was probably exactly what Castiel had had in mind.
It was Cas's don't fuck with me trick. Dean had seen it before.
"You should eat," Castiel said, and pointed. "Over there. It says Restaurant."
"Not particularly hungry."
"You should eat," the angel repeated.
There was a newsletter, Dean decided, being issued from somewhere other than inside his head, and Cas had had a copy special-delivered to him. Whatever the news of the day had been, it wasn't good.
Something nudged his leg. Nelson, looking unexpectedly somber.
"You hungry, boy?" Dean asked him.
"Take him with you," Castiel said. "I'll come get you when you're through."
That was more than enough of a dismissal, since Dean could find no good reason to stand here and let Cas go on not telling him anything. Which was curious, in a way, because Cas had shown up in this place claiming he couldn't find either of the Winchesters, that neither could Bobby, and their being missing was a problem in about a dozen different ways.
"So you're okay now with my being MIA," Dean said.
Rather than wait for a reply - which, judging by the set of Cas's shoulders, would have been just another dismissal - he looked around for the sign Cas had mentioned, located it some distance across the casino, and set off in that direction with his hands stuck in his pockets and the dog trotting dutifully alongside. When they reached the place, fronted by a wide archway without doors, there was no hostess on duty, no one to tell him he couldn't bring a dog inside, so he and Nelson walked on in, both of them taking note of the display case of cakes and pies near the cash register.
"No chocolate," Dean reminded the dog.
It was a good-sized place, with twenty-odd tables that would each seat four arranged in the center of the room, and booths for four or six around the perimeter. No one was sitting at any of them, at least not that Dean could see from the entrance. Wondering how he was going to get some food without anyone around to bring it to him, he strolled further into the room, picked out a likely-looking booth and took a seat on one of the benches. After a nod of permission from Dean the dog climbed carefully up onto the other bench and lay down, facing out into the room.
They'd been sitting there for a couple of minutes when someone approached the booth.
When he saw who it was, Dean was - not for the first time in this crazy place - struck completely speechless.
Part 4…