SPN FIC - Snapshot
tattooeddevil asked for a bit of curtain!fic -- a return to the not-too-distant future!verse I started setting up in Out Behind the Barn. So here we go: the boys have a home, furnished with yard sale finds, with iffy plumbing and the remains of a cash crop out back. It's beat-up, comfortable, a good place to take a stand. Take a breath. But it still needs something. Something very important.
"Can you do it?" he concludes. "I'll pay you."
CHARACTERS: Dean, Sam, OFC
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 1722 words
SNAPSHOT
By Carol Davis
Her name is Hanley, and Dean would not have found her if it hadn't been for that mess in Aimsburg - two dead, another three injured, all of them maimed by a spirit who'd taken offense to being involved in an eighteen-car pileup on the interstate.
She's tiny. Blonde. The word "sprite" would not be out of place.
Her laugh sounds like wind chimes. But it's not that that he's interested in. She sent out signals all afternoon, the ones that say Chase me, and I might let you catch me, but he's not interested in that, either.
Well… not a lot. Not right now.
She's a sketch artist for the local P.D. She spent an hour with the one victim who's still up and walking around, listened to the guy's description of the person he thought he saw, and produced a drawing that made the other two surviving victims gasp in fear. She brought the subject of her sketch alive, and that's a hell of a trick, considering he's been dead for two years.
"That's really good," Dean told her when it was his turn to see the picture.
She grinned like a little kid.
He woke up a couple of hours after he and Sam finished the salt-and-burn. Sat up in bed and thought of home, of the little farmhouse they bought three months ago with the proceeds from the sale of Bobby's property. There'd been no will, and how Jody Mills managed to engineer things so the cash would end up in their hands - that's still a mystery. Parts of it were less than legal, Dean supposes, but Jody won't say. All she'll offer is, "He would have wanted you to have it," and that's probably the truth. It took a good long while, but Bobby's boys have a home now. A little old farmhouse and a barn that used to have a cash crop out back. They're furnishing it one piece at a time, with pieces bought at yard sales.
Surprising, the stuff people put out at yard sales.
If he paces within the confines of the motel room, he'll wake Sam up, and it's too cold outside to pace out there, so he sits there in bed, covers pooled in his lap, fingers worrying the pilled fabric of the blankets. When the sun finally surrenders to rising, and Sam stirs, Dean is already dressed, car keys in hand.
"Gotta do something," he tells his brother. "Okay? Nothing to worry about. Get breakfast. Watch some TV. I'll be back."
"Where -" Sam begins, frowning.
"Gotta ask somebody something. Okay? It won't take long. Really."
He offers a smile, a big, genuine one. Hopes it's genuine, anyway, because he's a whole stew of emotions.
Yes. Hope, mostly.
To his dismay, Hanley isn't working that morning, isn't at the police station, but the town's small enough, and her name unusual enough, that she's easy to find. And thank God, she's an early riser. She answers the door in jeans and a warm sweater, one hand curled around a mug of coffee. Surprise and curiosity fill her eyes as Dean speaks his piece, feet shuffling on the scuffed boards of her front porch, feeling like he's in the eighth grade again and he's come to ask her out.
"Can you do it?" he concludes. "I'll pay you."
"I -"
Maybe she had plans for this morning that didn't include him. Okay, she probably had plans for this morning that didn't include him. Or working. But his eyes well up, and his chin quivers a little, and there's nothing fake about any of that. Of course, he didn't plan on crying, it's just stupid to cry in a situation like this. Pretty girl. And he's asking her to do some work for him. To do a drawing. Not bury his puppy.
He's been around Sam too damn long.
"Sure," she says, and her voice is soft. She swings the door wide and steps aside to let him in.
Coffee.
A seat on a comfortable couch.
He doesn't talk like this to anyone. Doesn't bare his feelings like this, but she says that's the key: letting down your guard. Tapping into something inside, something that remembers what your conscious mind won't let you see. She tells him to close his eyes. To let himself drift back to the last time he saw the snapshot he's talking about, that picture of his parents when they were kids. Recall every detail. It's there inside him, she says.
Of course it is.
Because there was no snapshot. He was there, in the spring of 1973, standing in the alley alongside Jay Bird's Diner, watching his parents hold hands across a beat-up Formica table, watching them beam at each other. Watching them love each other. Things went all to shit not long after that, but in that moment, everything was good. They had milkshakes, he remembers. Chocolate for Dad, strawberry for Mom. Dad was wearing a dark gray jacket, blue plaid shirt. Mom, a white western-style shirt with short sleeves.
When Mom stepped away from the table - to use the bathroom, Dean thought, until she popped up behind him in the alley and demanded to know what he was doing - Dad reached into a pocket and pulled out a little red box.
Pulled out the little diamond ring Mom was wearing when she died.
Dean doesn't talk to anyone like this. Doesn't outright sob like this, particularly not with strangers. Maybe Hanley is used to it, given that she works with crime victims, with people who are injured, scared, terrified, people who would rather do anything but remember the face of the person who hurt them. There's no fear here; he's not afraid of anything.
But there's grief.
God, there's just so much grief.
Hanley takes the coffee mug out of his hands, replaces it with a damp cloth he uses to scrub at his face. When he peers at her through his tears there's genuine kindness in her eyes. "Do you want to stop?" she asks softly. "I think I have enough. I can -"
His shoulders twitch.
There's a box of Kleenex on the coffee table in front of his knees. He ferrets a handful out of the box and blows his nose with a ferocity that makes her smile.
He wonders if anyone, anyone ever, has described a damn diner in detail like this. If they've ever described two people in detail like this. He could have gone on without doing this, could have held the image in his mind forever, kept it safe and guarded there - but it's not enough that he can see it any time he likes. Can call it forward any time he feels the need. Things are different now. Home is no longer a car, an endless series of motel rooms. Home is a small white farmhouse with a red barn; it's furniture and iffy plumbing and a gravel driveway. It's a collection of beat-up chairs, well broken in, perfect for watching TV.
It's taking a chance. Taking a stand.
Taking a breath.
Sam wasn't there, that night in Lawrence. He met Mom and Dad later on, when things were prickly.
He never saw this.
How Hanley can work so fast, Dean has no idea. She must be able to tap into something; she must have a gift nobody's bothered to dissect. She does things other than perp sketches - she admitted that yesterday, at the police station, and he can see the evidence of it in her home. Pretty framed landscapes that he thinks are watercolor, portraits of people who must be family and friends. Maybe she sells her work at craft fairs, or at a gallery. Maybe that helps her, giving people joy through her work. Maybe that eases the hurt that must come from listening to people's fear.
What she hands him, after not quite two hours, isn't a photograph.
Certainly, it's not the same as being there. But it's damn close. It's so close, you probably couldn't measure the gap.
Mom and Dad were kids that night in '73. Dad was nineteen, Mom still eighteen. Just kids. In love. He with a war put behind him, she with a family business she didn't want to be a part of, and none of that mattered in the moment Hanley has captured on a big sheet of soft white paper.
"How much?" Dean whispers.
When he turns to look at her, she shakes her head. Gently, she takes the drawing from him, lays it down on the table, and embraces him. Holds him as you would hold a friend, or a member of your family.
We don't do this to get paid, Dad told him once.
But he has to ask. "Are you sure?"
She's sure.
A couple of minutes with a cold washcloth pressed to his face. A big glass of water. The drawing carefully rolled and placed in a cardboard tube to protect it. Another hug. Phone numbers exchanged, although what either one of them will do with the information, he isn't sure, and suspects she isn't, either.
"Thank you," he says at the door. "Thank you."
Sam greets him with another frown when he returns to the motel room, bearing the cardboard tube and a huge sack of take-out Chinese. He stopped at the office long enough to offer a few bucks in exchange for staying this long past checkout and got no objection, given that he and Sam are practically the only guests. So they can take their time - but he figures they won't take much of it. Long enough to eat lunch.
Then home.
"Where'd you go?" Sam asks, but it's purely curious. Mostly curious.
"Got us something," Dean replies, setting aside the bag of fragrant, greasy food so he can wipe his hands on his jeans, make sure there's nothing on his fingers to stain what's inside that cardboard tube. He smooths out the covers on the bed he barely slept in, then gently slides the paper out of the tube and lays it out flat, on top of a scratchy, pilly yellow blanket.
Sam goes on frowning for a moment.
Then he says, "Oh."
And says it again. A murmur. And his expression shifts, becomes something very much like awe.
"Oh."
"Yeah," Dean says, and smiles.
* * * * *
"Can you do it?" he concludes. "I'll pay you."
CHARACTERS: Dean, Sam, OFC
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 1722 words
SNAPSHOT
By Carol Davis
Her name is Hanley, and Dean would not have found her if it hadn't been for that mess in Aimsburg - two dead, another three injured, all of them maimed by a spirit who'd taken offense to being involved in an eighteen-car pileup on the interstate.
She's tiny. Blonde. The word "sprite" would not be out of place.
Her laugh sounds like wind chimes. But it's not that that he's interested in. She sent out signals all afternoon, the ones that say Chase me, and I might let you catch me, but he's not interested in that, either.
Well… not a lot. Not right now.
She's a sketch artist for the local P.D. She spent an hour with the one victim who's still up and walking around, listened to the guy's description of the person he thought he saw, and produced a drawing that made the other two surviving victims gasp in fear. She brought the subject of her sketch alive, and that's a hell of a trick, considering he's been dead for two years.
"That's really good," Dean told her when it was his turn to see the picture.
She grinned like a little kid.
He woke up a couple of hours after he and Sam finished the salt-and-burn. Sat up in bed and thought of home, of the little farmhouse they bought three months ago with the proceeds from the sale of Bobby's property. There'd been no will, and how Jody Mills managed to engineer things so the cash would end up in their hands - that's still a mystery. Parts of it were less than legal, Dean supposes, but Jody won't say. All she'll offer is, "He would have wanted you to have it," and that's probably the truth. It took a good long while, but Bobby's boys have a home now. A little old farmhouse and a barn that used to have a cash crop out back. They're furnishing it one piece at a time, with pieces bought at yard sales.
Surprising, the stuff people put out at yard sales.
If he paces within the confines of the motel room, he'll wake Sam up, and it's too cold outside to pace out there, so he sits there in bed, covers pooled in his lap, fingers worrying the pilled fabric of the blankets. When the sun finally surrenders to rising, and Sam stirs, Dean is already dressed, car keys in hand.
"Gotta do something," he tells his brother. "Okay? Nothing to worry about. Get breakfast. Watch some TV. I'll be back."
"Where -" Sam begins, frowning.
"Gotta ask somebody something. Okay? It won't take long. Really."
He offers a smile, a big, genuine one. Hopes it's genuine, anyway, because he's a whole stew of emotions.
Yes. Hope, mostly.
To his dismay, Hanley isn't working that morning, isn't at the police station, but the town's small enough, and her name unusual enough, that she's easy to find. And thank God, she's an early riser. She answers the door in jeans and a warm sweater, one hand curled around a mug of coffee. Surprise and curiosity fill her eyes as Dean speaks his piece, feet shuffling on the scuffed boards of her front porch, feeling like he's in the eighth grade again and he's come to ask her out.
"Can you do it?" he concludes. "I'll pay you."
"I -"
Maybe she had plans for this morning that didn't include him. Okay, she probably had plans for this morning that didn't include him. Or working. But his eyes well up, and his chin quivers a little, and there's nothing fake about any of that. Of course, he didn't plan on crying, it's just stupid to cry in a situation like this. Pretty girl. And he's asking her to do some work for him. To do a drawing. Not bury his puppy.
He's been around Sam too damn long.
"Sure," she says, and her voice is soft. She swings the door wide and steps aside to let him in.
Coffee.
A seat on a comfortable couch.
He doesn't talk like this to anyone. Doesn't bare his feelings like this, but she says that's the key: letting down your guard. Tapping into something inside, something that remembers what your conscious mind won't let you see. She tells him to close his eyes. To let himself drift back to the last time he saw the snapshot he's talking about, that picture of his parents when they were kids. Recall every detail. It's there inside him, she says.
Of course it is.
Because there was no snapshot. He was there, in the spring of 1973, standing in the alley alongside Jay Bird's Diner, watching his parents hold hands across a beat-up Formica table, watching them beam at each other. Watching them love each other. Things went all to shit not long after that, but in that moment, everything was good. They had milkshakes, he remembers. Chocolate for Dad, strawberry for Mom. Dad was wearing a dark gray jacket, blue plaid shirt. Mom, a white western-style shirt with short sleeves.
When Mom stepped away from the table - to use the bathroom, Dean thought, until she popped up behind him in the alley and demanded to know what he was doing - Dad reached into a pocket and pulled out a little red box.
Pulled out the little diamond ring Mom was wearing when she died.
Dean doesn't talk to anyone like this. Doesn't outright sob like this, particularly not with strangers. Maybe Hanley is used to it, given that she works with crime victims, with people who are injured, scared, terrified, people who would rather do anything but remember the face of the person who hurt them. There's no fear here; he's not afraid of anything.
But there's grief.
God, there's just so much grief.
Hanley takes the coffee mug out of his hands, replaces it with a damp cloth he uses to scrub at his face. When he peers at her through his tears there's genuine kindness in her eyes. "Do you want to stop?" she asks softly. "I think I have enough. I can -"
His shoulders twitch.
There's a box of Kleenex on the coffee table in front of his knees. He ferrets a handful out of the box and blows his nose with a ferocity that makes her smile.
He wonders if anyone, anyone ever, has described a damn diner in detail like this. If they've ever described two people in detail like this. He could have gone on without doing this, could have held the image in his mind forever, kept it safe and guarded there - but it's not enough that he can see it any time he likes. Can call it forward any time he feels the need. Things are different now. Home is no longer a car, an endless series of motel rooms. Home is a small white farmhouse with a red barn; it's furniture and iffy plumbing and a gravel driveway. It's a collection of beat-up chairs, well broken in, perfect for watching TV.
It's taking a chance. Taking a stand.
Taking a breath.
Sam wasn't there, that night in Lawrence. He met Mom and Dad later on, when things were prickly.
He never saw this.
How Hanley can work so fast, Dean has no idea. She must be able to tap into something; she must have a gift nobody's bothered to dissect. She does things other than perp sketches - she admitted that yesterday, at the police station, and he can see the evidence of it in her home. Pretty framed landscapes that he thinks are watercolor, portraits of people who must be family and friends. Maybe she sells her work at craft fairs, or at a gallery. Maybe that helps her, giving people joy through her work. Maybe that eases the hurt that must come from listening to people's fear.
What she hands him, after not quite two hours, isn't a photograph.
Certainly, it's not the same as being there. But it's damn close. It's so close, you probably couldn't measure the gap.
Mom and Dad were kids that night in '73. Dad was nineteen, Mom still eighteen. Just kids. In love. He with a war put behind him, she with a family business she didn't want to be a part of, and none of that mattered in the moment Hanley has captured on a big sheet of soft white paper.
"How much?" Dean whispers.
When he turns to look at her, she shakes her head. Gently, she takes the drawing from him, lays it down on the table, and embraces him. Holds him as you would hold a friend, or a member of your family.
We don't do this to get paid, Dad told him once.
But he has to ask. "Are you sure?"
She's sure.
A couple of minutes with a cold washcloth pressed to his face. A big glass of water. The drawing carefully rolled and placed in a cardboard tube to protect it. Another hug. Phone numbers exchanged, although what either one of them will do with the information, he isn't sure, and suspects she isn't, either.
"Thank you," he says at the door. "Thank you."
Sam greets him with another frown when he returns to the motel room, bearing the cardboard tube and a huge sack of take-out Chinese. He stopped at the office long enough to offer a few bucks in exchange for staying this long past checkout and got no objection, given that he and Sam are practically the only guests. So they can take their time - but he figures they won't take much of it. Long enough to eat lunch.
Then home.
"Where'd you go?" Sam asks, but it's purely curious. Mostly curious.
"Got us something," Dean replies, setting aside the bag of fragrant, greasy food so he can wipe his hands on his jeans, make sure there's nothing on his fingers to stain what's inside that cardboard tube. He smooths out the covers on the bed he barely slept in, then gently slides the paper out of the tube and lays it out flat, on top of a scratchy, pilly yellow blanket.
Sam goes on frowning for a moment.
Then he says, "Oh."
And says it again. A murmur. And his expression shifts, becomes something very much like awe.
"Oh."
"Yeah," Dean says, and smiles.
* * * * *