SPN FIC - Two By Two (Part 4 of 5)
[ One] [ Two] [ Three]
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 2856 words
TWO BY TWO
By Carol Davis
Djinn.
Genie.
Jeannie?
TV sitcoms had formed the backdrop of a lot of his childhood - hell, a lot of his whole life. Provided people for him and Sam to hang out with, when Dad had left them to fend for themselves in a town where they knew no one, and could approach no one for fear of setting off alarm bells that would result in a whole new town, a whole new chapter in the Book of Empty. The people on sitcoms were nice (unless they were the annoying asshole neighbor), and they lived nice lives. Nice, calm, clean and orderly lives, and they solved each of their problems in half an hour.
Occasionally, they were…
Incredibly, amazingly HOT.
"What may I bring you, my master?" she said, and Dean's mind responded with a torrent of incoherent babbling.
No sound came out of his mouth until he managed a garbled "Nuuuuuhhhhh."
"My poor master," she crooned, and reached out to stroke his cheek with a soft, gentle hand. "You look so tired. I will bring your slippers."
She did the thing then, the folded-arm head bob, and vanished, but before he could let out a shriek of protest she was back, holding a pair of bedroom slippers.
"Jeannie?" he sputtered.
"Yes, master?"
When he didn't reply she beamed at him happily, dropped into a crouch and set about unlacing his boots. Being that most of her was underneath the table, all he could see of her was her pink-harem-pantsed backside, her legs, and her feet in their silver spike-heeled shoes.
Occasionally, the people on TV sitcoms were the closest a 14-year-old boy was going to get to a woman who looked like that.
Like this.
He wiggled his toes when the first boot came off. She giggled softly, underneath the table, and took his foot into the palm of her hand.
"Master?" she murmured.
Oh, HELL yes.
One of those fancy rooms upstairs (downstairs?) would work nicely. Hell, the carpet out in the casino would work nicely, although he'd never been much of one for having an audience, even a non-responsive bunch like the crowd out there at the tables and slots. The more the warmth of her hand bled into the sole of his foot, the more he figured the floor in here would work. Or the table. Or just about anyplace.
Then she crawled out from underneath the table.
And she wasn't Jeannie any more.
She was Bela Talbot. Wearing Jeannie's many-shades-of-pink harem outfit, which was all kinds of wrong.
"I offered, once, as I remember," she told him with a small, crooked and very unamused smile. "But I don't recall getting an answer."
She glanced down at herself, frowned and sighed, then returned her attention to Dean. "Really, Dean?" she asked him dryly. "Wildly sexist, wouldn't you say? 'My master'? Really?"
"Nobody invited you," Dean muttered.
"I don't -"
Then she stopped being Bela.
She turned into Carmen.
Lisa Braeden.
Cassie.
She morphed from one woman to another with a speed that made Dean's head spin: became an entire photo album of women he'd encountered at one time or another - regardless of whether or not he'd actually slept with them, or even thought they were worth trying to sleep with - and when bits of the song "All the Girls I've Loved" sprang up in his mind he jammed his eyes shut for fear she was going to morph into Willie Nelson. In harem pants.
He had no idea how many different people she became while his eyes were closed (maybe a hundred, maybe none), and worrying about it made his heart start to break-dance against his ribs. Made him afraid he might not be able to open his eyes for a long, long time.
"Dean," a voice said, and it wasn't female.
That didn't bode well. That didn't bode well at all.
"Yeah?" he said weakly.
"You need somethin', Jumping Bean?"
Something was familiar about that - something he couldn't put a finger on. The voice. That name.
"Who -" he muttered.
He heard the sounds of Nelson the dog being nudged to a place further down the bench, and of someone sitting down opposite him in the booth, the soft squeak of a vinyl seat giving way to weight, the sense of someone occupying space. He cracked one eye, peered out. To his enormous gratitude the person sitting opposite him wasn't wearing Jeannie the genie's clothes. It was a man, dressed in gray coveralls. A mechanic's gray coveralls.
"How you doin' there, Bean?" the man asked.
Something…
He caught a glimpse of Nelson, now sitting up in the corner of the booth, tongue lolling, grinning his doggie grin. The familiarity of that made Dean open his eyes the rest of the way, allowed him to take stock of the newcomer.
There was a patch sewn onto his coveralls, a name in dark blue script. JACK.
"Don't know me, do you?"
Dean hesitated, then shook his head.
"Can't blame you. You were pretty small." The man smiled fondly, and to Dean's momentary bewilderment he had Dad's eyes. Dad's smile.
"Papa Jack," Dean murmured.
"There you go. Bingo."
What he could piece together was more a collection of sensations than an actual memory: the smell of gasoline and motor oil (which also, for a short run of years, had meant Daddy); a raspy, hearty laugh; pockets that without fail could produce small, wonderful toys. His grandfather. The grandfather who had died of a sudden heart attack when Dean was barely two.
"Quite a place you cooked up here," Jack said.
"I guess."
"Went to Vegas a couple times myself, back when your grandma was alive. Won a thousand dollars once."
Had he heard that? Heard his grandfather talking to his parents, and stored that information away without even knowing he was doing it? If he had, it was a hell of a thing to remember, and he fought for the rest. Something better.
Remembered hugs.
Remembered seizing a rough, chapped hand and trying to run.
"Never could get you to sit still," Jack said. "You always wanted to show me something. Take me outside to throw a ball, or look at a little snake you found in the grass. Called you Jumping Bean. Jumping Bean Dean. You were a good, sweet kid, but you were never still for a minute."
"I don't know what I'm doing here," Dean told him in a mumble.
"Kinda think you do."
"It's all…kinda nuts."
"Like your life?"
Jack moved a hand, and somehow there were two mugs on the table, coffee for Jack, hot cocoa for Dean. Not very hot, he understood. Just tepid, something a little boy could drink without burning his mouth. He looked down into the mug and saw a swirl of dark granules on the surface of the brownish liquid, chocolate powder that hadn't quite dissolved.
"You wanna tell me a story, Bean?" Jack asked. "I'll listen."
The dark specks swirled and spiraled.
"My life," Dean said, and the words sounded like the creak of an old door. "I don't like my life."
"You go on, then. You tell me."
He wasn't an old man; not terribly old, anyway. He had salt-and-pepper hair, a little heavy on the salt, and deep furrows around his eyes, but looked to be no more than sixty, if that. He looked a lot more grandfatherly, though, than Samuel Campbell had. Looked like he had a deeper well of a heart than Sam Campbell had ever been capable of.
The Sam Campbell who'd pushed his daughter into a life she'd doomed all of them to get out of.
"I don't know what to do," Dean told his grandfather softly. "To win this. They keep telling me it's up to me. I don't want that. What'd I do to end up like that?"
"Nothing," Jack replied.
"I don't know where I'm gonna end up. It's never gonna end, is it?"
Why he was saying that to someone who was basically a stranger, Dean had no idea. He'd never been the type to unburden himself to anyone - to bartenders, like other people did, even when he was half in the bag. Even Sam he never told the whole truth to.
Hell, he never told the whole truth even to himself.
This place was so silent.
No sound from the casino outside; with no door to block the noise, he should have been able to hear conversations, the bells from the slots, the low soup of sound coming from a crowd of people in a confined space. But he could hear none of that, even when he tried.
"I don't know where I am," he said. "And I don't know where I'm going."
Jack reached across the table and rested a hand on Dean's. It was sandpapery and calloused, but in its own way as gentle as Jeannie's had been. The touch made Dean think this man had tucked him into bed more than once. Might have sung him a mangled, tuneless lullaby a time or two. Might have treasured a little boy who was (at that time) the only son of his only son.
"Wish I had answers for you, Bean," Jack said.
"I'm not ever gonna get to rest," Dean whispered. "Am I?"
"I don't know, son. I wish I could tell you."
"If they could just tell me that. If they'd give in and tell me how I'm gonna end up. That's all I want."
"I know."
"I kinda…I hope it's nowhere."
"That's not what I want for you, Bean. Not what any of us ever wanted for you. You know that."
"I guess."
"Not gonna win the debate with a position like that."
Dean touched the mug, considered taking a long, deep swallow of the chocolate simply for the memories it would bring back.
"I don't want this," he stammered. "They keep saying it's all me."
"Some are born great," Jack replied quietly. "Others -"
"I'm not great. I'm not."
"Just Sammy's brother. That it? John's son."
"Don't go. Please don't go," Dean said abruptly, looking Jack hard in the eye, close to giving in to the urge to reach across the table and seize a handful of Jack's gray coveralls, to hang on to him, keep him close by the way Nelson had been for a while now. When he glanced over at Nelson, the dog seemed both to understand that - even seemed to agree, to the point that he might grab hold of Jack with his teeth and help Dean hang on.
They sat that way for a minute, silent, while a little bit of steam rose slowly off of Jack's coffee.
"Your dad's a good man," Jack said finally. "Means well. Always did. He didn't do any of it to punish you, much as it might seem like he did."
"He -"
Jack shook his head. "I don't know the man you do, son. He was just my boy, the only one we had. Half-killed me when he went off to Vietnam. All I could think was, he wasn't coming back. But he did. Came back home, and all that was on his mind was, he was gonna marry that girl. Nineteen years old. Too young for all of that."
It killed him, Dean thought and couldn't find a way to say.
"Killed a lot of things," Jack replied, as if he'd heard it. "Her and him both. God knows what would have happened if he'd picked somebody different. But maybe he thought he was gonna rescue her. He was big on that. Rescuing things. People. I suppose he figured she needed him in a way other girls didn't. And that he was the only one for the job." Then he fell silent again, long enough to take a couple of sips of his coffee. "Forgive him, Dean," he said when he put the mug back down. "That whole while, he loved you with all his heart."
"He -"
It was all Dean could manage to say.
"He did wrong by you. I know. Love tears people up in funny ways, son. Blew your dad right the hell off the tracks, and he never could get back on."
"He could have given us a life."
"He did, son," Jack said. "He did that. Up to you what you do with it."
~~~~~~~~~~
Castiel came into the restaurant after a while, his pace so slow that the hem of his trenchcoat, which sometimes flapped around his legs like its own peculiar kind of wings, didn't stir. His face had gone back to being impassive, as if none of this was anything out of the ordinary. As if Cas had simply walked in off the street.
"I didn't eat," Dean told him, head wearily propped in his hands. "Whatever you've got to say about that, save it."
Cas accepted that without objection, considered the booth for a moment, then sat in the place Jack Winchester had vacated. The dog settled companionably beside him, and it made Dean think, "An angel, a dog, and a jackass walk into a bar…"
The angel and the dog both raised an eyebrow at him.
"You can stop that any time now," Dean said.
"We should move on," Castiel told him.
"To where, and for what? Kinda like it here. It's quiet."
That didn't prompt a reply, and for a minute Dean was grateful. Then, slowly, a little bit puzzled.
"Yes," Cas said finally.
"Yes, what?"
"It's quiet."
"And…that's a good thing?"
"Better than a number of other options."
For the last twenty minutes or so, Dean had been shredding the little paper packets of sugar he'd taken out of the chrome dish at the wall end of the table. The tabletop was littered with sugar and tiny scraps of white paper. Not very much sugar; the dog had pressed his tongue to a lot of it and smacked his lips as he rolled his tongue back into his mouth.
"You said I might not be able to wake up," Dean said. "Why?"
"You might be injured."
"Kinda thinking I'm not."
"Oh," Castiel said, and glanced over at the dog. "Why is that?"
"I think I'd remember. What I remember is, I drove. Drove the friggin' car until I stopped being able to feel my ass. Saw a motel right near the road and we stopped. Last thing I know, Sam was washing his hands in the bathroom. If I got hurt, I kinda think I'd remember. What I remember is Mobile, Alabama. I remember a motel room with colors that hurt my eyes, and Sam running the water in the bathroom."
"I see."
"So what should we move on to?"
"The way out."
"Out of what? Where am I, Cas?"
"I don't know."
"Well, you know what?" Dean said, and slid sideways out of the booth. A glance down confirmed that he was again wearing his boots; when Jeannie had disappeared, so had the bedroom slippers. Just as well, he thought. "I kinda think you're full of shit. I think you know exactly where I am, and how I got there."
He gave Castiel a chance to respond, and when the angel said nothing, Dean turned his back on him and walked out of the restaurant.
He expected to return to the casino, but the arched entryway, as if it were a portal straight out of Star Trek, sent him outside, to the deck of a ship. A big one, he noticed as he spun around, searching for his bearings and his sea legs at the same time, because the deck beneath his feet was doing an easy but noticeable roll in first one direction, then another. At the seaward edge of the deck, a three-tiered railing provided a safe barrier. There were double doors behind him now, of some fancy kind of wood, with a porthole in each. To his left was a long row of padded chaise lounges, to his right a narrow flight of steps leading up to the next deck.
Beyond the three-tiered railing lay the ocean.
Huge. Gray. Empty.
By the time Castiel and the dog came out through the double doors, he knew where he was. Or where his head thought he was, at least, courtesy of an old-style, donut-shaped life preserver hanging on a hook near the doors.
"That's funny," he said to Cas.
"What is?"
"Titanic," he said, and nodded at the life preserver, labeled in simple black lettering. "I think that's funny. That's kinda funny, right? The fancy rooms, the old bathtub. I'm on the friggin' Titanic, because I watched a couple minutes of the movie the other night, so I could see the part with Kate Winslet's tits. What do you think - you figure I'll run into Kate Winslet around here someplace? 'Cause that'd work. I wouldn't object to that. The woman's got some exceptionally fine tits."
"I don't know, Dean. It's -"
"My head. Yeah. I got that. You want to tell me where I actually am?"
To his dismay, Castiel didn't answer him - because the angel, and the dog, had vanished.
The conclusion…