SPN FIC - Alliance (Part 1 of 2)
Continuing with the Farm!verse (curtain fic).
They took a chance: picking out a home, a place to put down some roots, relax, take a breath. Surely, in a small place like this, out in the middle of pretty-much-nowhere, nobody's going to care very much about two brothers with no backstory. Two brothers with an old black Chevy Impala.
CHARACTERS: Dean, Sam, OCs
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 3376 words (this part)
Part 2 coming tomorrow.
ALLIANCE
By Carol Davis
Funny little town.
"It's got what we need," Sam says, and that's true enough. You have to drive for half an hour to buy a big TV or a new fridge, go to the movies or to school. But there's a service station here, and a decent-sized supermarket. A pharmacy and a clinic. A post office. A bank, a tiny hardware store, a couple of diners, an ice cream stand, a bar called Stony Joe's, Subway and Pizza Hut.
And there's the library.
Only in a one-horse town like this, Dean figures, would the public library be completely unlike any library he's ever seen before. It's a mess, for one thing. No Dewey decimal system. No neat, separate sections for biographies and history and fiction. No little-kid reading room decorated with cutouts of Winnie-the-Pooh and Harry Potter. Stuff's just heaped and stacked and piled, and the books are mixed in with the newspapers and magazines and the DVDs.
Most of it's for sale. The rule is, if you buy something (a paperback Stephen King, say, or an old National Geographic), you can have a cup of coffee and something to eat. If you just want to sit and read, or shoot the breeze with whoever else is there, you have to make a donation to the Book Fund.
"How much?" he asked, the first time he came in.
"Whatever," they told him.
A donation, be it fifty cents or twenty bucks, gets you a big cup of coffee and a slab of cake, or a cookie, or a cupcake.
"Huh," Sam said when Dean relayed the information. He tapped his knee with three fingers for a minute, then elaborated, "They're working around the food-and-beverage laws."
"Yeah?"
"Kind of fishy," Sam said.
But that's neither here nor there.
You cough up a buck, you get coffee and dessert.
Tuesday is pie day, though that's not hard-and-fast. Mostly, what's being served on any particular day depends on who's minding the store. Jen Coughlin's big on marble cake. Dougie Defreest brings brownies, generally overcooked to where they're a little crusty on top. Pat Dawes believes in variety: pineapple upside-down cake one week, Rice Krispies Treats the next.
"You're gonna weigh three hundred pounds," Sam said after Dean's second week of visiting the library every day. "And we're gonna be broke."
He had a point. The money they inherited from Bobby (courtesy of some serious maneuvering by Jody Mills and a lawyer she won't identify) - it's not limitless. They blew through a lot of it buying the farm and a few pieces of decent furniture, and the rest needs to be set aside for taxes, according to Sam.
Taxes, Dean thinks.
Like that's more worthwhile than coffee and pie.
Betty Lynn Dobbs minds the library on Tuesdays. She won some kind of national award for her pies, back in the day, and to Dean's mind it was well deserved. Delicate, flaky crust and a ton of juicy filling - apple, cherry, blueberry. The raspberry's got a nice tang to it, and the banana cream's rich and filling. He looks forward to Tuesdays like he used to look forward to getting laid, which is a fair trade-off, he figures. This town's way too small for one-night stands. If he had a tryst or two with anybody around here, everybody'd know about it the next day. And there'd be no "It's been fun, but I gotta go." Not when he lives here.
The pie's a fair exchange.
Right up until the Tuesday he pulls up in front of the library and Betty Lynn's Yugo isn't parked in its usual spot.
Car trouble, he tells himself. The Yugo's been belching a little smoke lately, has been making a mysterious, if subtle, clanking noise that might have been the forerunner of a breakdown. But she could have hitched a ride from a neighbor. She wouldn't neglect her responsibilities. She's a dedicated woman. She'd get here, even if she had to walk.
He keeps telling himself that right up until he pushes the library door open and finds somebody he's never seen before sitting at the librarian's desk.
"Hi, there!" she says brightly.
There's an open box of store-bought donuts taking up space next to the coffee urn.
"Betty -?" he starts, and can't get any further.
The disappointment's just too huge.
"Down with the flu."
His eyes haven't left the coffee machine and that traitorous white-and-blue box of donuts. Not that he's got anything against donuts, strictly speaking - but it's Tuesday, dammit. It's pie day, not donut day.
"Sorry," says not-Betty. "Short notice. I didn't have time to make anything."
Flu, he thinks. Flu lasts… how long?
The diners have pie, of course, available all day and most of the night - but it's not Betty Lynn's. It wouldn't win a blue ribbon from anybody, even if the competitors were Entenmann's and Table Talk. Besides, neither of the diners offers this peculiar (and, seriously, fascinating) collection of old magazines and battered coffee-table books to ferret through. Two weeks ago he found something called America Takes to the Road, a big, thick book full of color pictures of classic cars, with a six-page spread called "The Family's Got Muscle: Impalas of the Fifties and Sixties." It cost him three bucks, and that included coffee and a big wedge of Betty Lynn's cherry crumble.
He could go home. Work on his baby for a while.
"You're new," not-Betty informs him.
No, he's not. She is.
"Moved here a couple months ago," he mutters, although what he and Sam did wasn't so much moving as stopping.
"Toby's place," she nods.
She's gonna start now, he figures, with the whole "Oh, it's so horrible about Toby" song and dance, complete with a soundtrack of moans and groans and sighs. What happened to Toby Whitmer was kind of grotesque; there's no arguing that. But Dean's dealt with hideous departures from this earthly veil for thirty years now, and in a sense Toby Whitmer's death was just another same old, same old.
Shit, he thinks. Can you point to anybody's death and say, Wow - that was friggin' COOL? They're all bad, in one way or another.
He waits for the customary routine to begin, but what she says is, "I hear you're kind of an eclectic buyer."
He… what??
Like it's anybody's business what he buys.
Pie, dammit. He came here for pie.
He could swing by Betty Lynn's place. Offer to trade some work on the Yugo for any spare baked goods she might happen to have lying around.
"A dictionary. Three Reader's Digest Condensed Books. A VHS copy of Porky's II. Back issues of Better Homes & Gardens."
"It has home repair tips," he says defensively.
He and Sam should have settled somewhere where nobody gives a shit about anybody else. New York City, say. Or some wide spot in the road out in the desert. These people don't have a multi-plex, so they fill up their time turning their neighbors into projects, and he seriously doesn't need that. He's gone his whole life without anybody - much - meddling in his business, and there's no good reason to change that now. Particularly since he and Sam are both still - well, "persons of interest" to any number of law enforcement organizations.
"I gotta -" he begins, turning on one heel.
"Oh, sit down," she chirps, and comes out from behind the desk to usher him over to a table near the stack of fairly recent People magazines. "You've got that look on your face. Just like my dad. 'Mind your business, Merrilee. Give the other guy a damn chance to volunteer. You're a bus driver, not a census taker.'"
She settles him into a chair. Thirty seconds later he's got a mug of coffee and a glazed donut in front of him.
She pats his shoulder, like he's five.
Okay, she's just trying to be friendly. Trying to make him feel welcome. And it's not her fault Betty Lynn got sick.
He could like this, he supposes. People making him part of their circle.
But he and Sam are friggin' wanted.
She lays half a dozen dog-eared magazines on the table, smiling, then busies herself tidying a tilting heap of what looks like old textbooks.
Sam might like to look at those, he thinks.
"You drive a bus?" he frowns.
"Mm-hmm. Part-time."
There's a vibe coming off of her that makes him think of Ellen. Particularly, Ellen when she was in a good mood. Warm. Capable. Kind of a Mama Bear thing. That's kind of awesome, really: women who can tend the home fires, who can serve up hugs and warm bowls of stew, and can kick ass when the situation calls for it.
But… Ellen.
That whole thing was just so damn wrong. Her and Jo, going out like that. It makes him angry, sometimes, that nobody ever questions Ellen laying down her life so Jo wouldn't die alone - but they never stop questioning what he did for Sam. It makes his mind spin. Makes his heart ache, in a way it doesn't for anybody else except his mom.
And Dad. And Sam. Bobby.
Something else slides onto the table: a copy of Curious George Visits the Zoo.
He used to love Curious George.
He reaches out to touch the book, intending to pull it toward him. Why she figured he'd want it, he doesn't know. Maybe she thinks it's cute. Maybe she figures it fits into his "eclectic collection."
Before he can say anything, before he can ask what her motivation is, the library's half-glass front door comes flying open and a guy in a brown shirt and matching shorts comes blustering in, arms full of packages. "Merr!" he says, like he's just found King Midas's Tomb after two or three centuries' worth of looking. "Nobody home over at your house. Didn't want to leave these there, out on the steps. You wanna sign for 'em?"
Six - no, seven packages, all kinds of shapes and sizes.
She signs. Gives the UPS guy a donut. As the guy (Pete McFee, according to his embroidered nametag) chews, looks around, scratches the back of his neck, offers a nod and a grin to Dean, she stacks her packages on the librarian's desk, off to the side, where they won't easily be knocked over. A couple of them seem heavy; the others don't.
"You buy a lot of stuff off eBay?" Dean asks.
"You got it," she says brightly.
Knick-knacks, he figures. Hummel figurines, or little dolls.
"Nuts," Pete says. "Forgot one, out in the truck. You want to run out there with me and grab it?"
He's gulping the last chunk of his donut as he and not-Betty leave the library. From where Dean's sitting, he can see them for a couple of seconds through the window alongside the door - can see the UPS guy glance back.
At him.
Frowning.
Okay. This ain't good.
Dean has to get up from the table and take up a position near what amounts to the library's DVD Department to get a better look - to watch not-Betty and Pete walk around the Impala, furtively checking out the backseat, the license plate, the jacket Dean left slung over the passenger seat back. They move on to the UPS truck, where Pete does indeed pull another package out of the back, then they stand close together, talking, their expressions serious, maybe a little worried.
When not-Betty (Merrilee, he thinks; she said her name was Merrilee) comes back inside, he drops two quarters on the librarian's desk and walks out, leaving the copy of Curious George Visits the Zoo behind, lying face down on the table.
~~~~~~~~
"This was your idea," Sam says. "This whole thing. This was all you."
"The hell it was."
"And now you want to leave."
"I don't want to leave. Hell, what I want to do is grab a beer and go sit out on the porch and read a magazine."
"Then do that."
"They made us, Sam."
Sam leans against the kitchen table, palms flat against the chipped gray Formica. The groan he lets out sounds like it came up from about half a mile underground. "We talked about this. We talked about the possibility that someone was gonna -"
"So - what? You want to sit here and wait for the Feds to show up? Don't know about you, Sam, but I'd kind of like not to spend the rest of my life in federal prison. Or being extradited to someplace with the death penalty. That whole thing about humane methods of execution? It's a crock of shit."
"We'd probably get resurrected again," Sam says. "You know that."
The soft click of toenails against hardwood signals the approach of the dog the two of them inherited from Toby Whitmer, a five-year-old Golden who's accepted them more fully than they've ever been accepted by anybody, ever. Whether that amounts to a betrayal of Toby, who brought her here as a puppy and was her only master until his death a few months ago, is maybe something she had to work out along the way. Whatever her decision was, she asks for nothing.
Food, yeah, and a bowl of water. But it's crossed Dean's mind that even if they didn't feed her, she wouldn't hold it against them.
He sits on the floor. Rests his back against the fridge. The dog follows suit and lays her head on his thigh.
"What do you want to do?" Sam asks after a minute. "Seriously."
They could go. Take the dog and go.
Dean has wondered, more than once, if the agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation are seriously stupid. If the general public honestly gives a rat's ass about the Winchesters, honestly wants to see them captured and punished. The friggin' country's full of criminals on the run, full of rapists and murders and child molesters, terrorists and white supremacists and embezzlers and God knows what the hell all else. Yeah, that America's Most Wanted thing manages to nab people at a pretty steady rate, but for every one they lock down, there's fifty more running around doing their thing.
After the shifter situation in St. Louis, his picture was all over the news, and nobody caught him. Nobody seemed to want to catch him. For the most part, nobody paid attention to him at all.
Henriksen did, of course.
But really, nobody else.
The Leviathans dressed up as him and Sam murdered a couple dozen people, but all he and Sam had to do was say, "That wasn't us," and people bought it.
So they figured they'd be okay here.
That they could be here maybe half the time, in between hunts, and nobody'd have a problem with it. That they could shop, and buy gas, and take in the little Main Street Bazaar that happens the first Friday of every month, and nobody'd be calling 911.
They - he - thought maybe, finally, they could have a place to rest.
"I can't do this, Sammy," he says softly, more to the dog than to his brother. "I can't keep doing this."
When he finally looks up, Sam doesn't look like he wants to say anything.
"I just wanted a piece of pie," Dean murmurs.
"Yeah," Sam says. "I know."
~~~~~~~~
Neither of them gets any sleep. They sit in the living room, Sam on the couch with the dog, Dean in the plaid recliner they picked up at a yard sale out on the county road, listening for the crunch of tires on the gravel driveway.
Looking for headlights.
Expecting the door to be battered open.
None of that happens.
In a way, the nothing that happens is worse. Neither one of them's ever been a big fan of waiting for the other shoe to drop.
They should go, Dean thinks. They should pack the car and go. Rufus's cabin is still an option; as far as they know, nobody's appropriated it in the few months since they were last out there. It's secluded enough that they can hunker down there and stay under the radar while they figure out what to do next. And with any luck, the dog won't object.
"Maybe we should call Jody," Sam suggests.
All the paperwork for the farm says Johnson. Tom and Mike Johnson. Thanks to the late Frank Devereaux, they've got full sets of ID for those identities. Birth certificates, driver's licenses, social security cards. Thanks in equal measure to Frank and to Jody Mills (and her mysterious lawyer friend), they've got a bank account in town. They're on the grid, and yet they're not.
It should have worked.
Maybe Frank was right. Maybe it's the car that messes things up.
"Screw this," Dean says, a little after four in the morning. "I'm gonna go find out what's going on."
"We could call -"
"We're not gonna mix Jody up in this. She can still have a friggin' life. We tie her up with us, she's gonna lose everything."
Sam's expression tightens a little.
It never works, does it? Their trying not to involve other people.
"We're a goddamn curse," Dean barks. "Everything we touch turns to shit."
He's gonna get up, he thinks. Get up out of the chair, grab his jacket, and go… do something. Turn this thing around. Go on the offensive. Dad sure as hell wouldn't sit here with his thumb up his ass, waiting for something to happen. Neither would Bobby, or Rufus, or Ellen, or Jo. Hell, none of the hunters he's ever met would just sit and wait.
Garth, maybe.
Richie. Richie from Brooklyn. He'd sit and wait, and expect whatever came looking for him to give him a blow job before it killed him. Asshole, Dean thinks.
The sun's come up enough to fill the living room with pale light when the dog climbs down off the couch and tips her head toward the front door.
Out?
"The Feds wouldn't have taken this long," Sam says.
So they can… what? Assume they're safe?
Shaking his head, Dean struggles to his feet and follows the dog to the door. He hesitates for a moment, his hand on the knob, looking through the small twin panes of glass set into the top third of the door. No one's out there. There's nothing in the driveway but the Impala and a spill of bright sunlight that makes the gravel glitter like something valuable.
They knew they wouldn't be safe here. Not really.
But they decided to take a chance. Let themselves breathe for a while, hoping the while would last.
A year.
A few years.
His body's as tired as if he's carried a load of cement blocks halfway across the state. He could not feel any more worn out than this, he thinks, if he were a hundred years old. Just keep moving, he thinks. That's what Dad always did. Just keep moving.
The dog nudges in close to him as he opens the door. Once it's fully open, she patters out onto the porch, turns, and offers him a tentative doggy grin of encouragement, as if to say See? Everything's fine! There are squirrels to chase!
"Go on," he murmurs. "Do your thing."
Turned loose, she bounds on ahead, down the steps and across the driveway to the grassy patch between the south end of the house and the barn. Dean remains on the porch, arms folded across his chest, watching her dance across the grass, then bend to sniff, searching for signs of prey.
When she moves a little farther afield, he turns to walk to the end of the porch.
Lying on the seat of the rocking chair, the beat-up wood-and-wicker contraption that was Toby Whitmer's favorite place to drink beer, eat roast beef and cheese sandwiches and play his guitar and sing off-key, his favorite place from which to contemplate the world, right up until the world belched out something that shredded most of his internal organs and tore off his head, is a bright yellow copy of Curious George Visits the Zoo.
For a moment, Dean's mind spews nothing but gibberish.
Then it allows him to bleat, "SAM!"
Part 2…
They took a chance: picking out a home, a place to put down some roots, relax, take a breath. Surely, in a small place like this, out in the middle of pretty-much-nowhere, nobody's going to care very much about two brothers with no backstory. Two brothers with an old black Chevy Impala.
CHARACTERS: Dean, Sam, OCs
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 3376 words (this part)
Part 2 coming tomorrow.
ALLIANCE
By Carol Davis
Funny little town.
"It's got what we need," Sam says, and that's true enough. You have to drive for half an hour to buy a big TV or a new fridge, go to the movies or to school. But there's a service station here, and a decent-sized supermarket. A pharmacy and a clinic. A post office. A bank, a tiny hardware store, a couple of diners, an ice cream stand, a bar called Stony Joe's, Subway and Pizza Hut.
And there's the library.
Only in a one-horse town like this, Dean figures, would the public library be completely unlike any library he's ever seen before. It's a mess, for one thing. No Dewey decimal system. No neat, separate sections for biographies and history and fiction. No little-kid reading room decorated with cutouts of Winnie-the-Pooh and Harry Potter. Stuff's just heaped and stacked and piled, and the books are mixed in with the newspapers and magazines and the DVDs.
Most of it's for sale. The rule is, if you buy something (a paperback Stephen King, say, or an old National Geographic), you can have a cup of coffee and something to eat. If you just want to sit and read, or shoot the breeze with whoever else is there, you have to make a donation to the Book Fund.
"How much?" he asked, the first time he came in.
"Whatever," they told him.
A donation, be it fifty cents or twenty bucks, gets you a big cup of coffee and a slab of cake, or a cookie, or a cupcake.
"Huh," Sam said when Dean relayed the information. He tapped his knee with three fingers for a minute, then elaborated, "They're working around the food-and-beverage laws."
"Yeah?"
"Kind of fishy," Sam said.
But that's neither here nor there.
You cough up a buck, you get coffee and dessert.
Tuesday is pie day, though that's not hard-and-fast. Mostly, what's being served on any particular day depends on who's minding the store. Jen Coughlin's big on marble cake. Dougie Defreest brings brownies, generally overcooked to where they're a little crusty on top. Pat Dawes believes in variety: pineapple upside-down cake one week, Rice Krispies Treats the next.
"You're gonna weigh three hundred pounds," Sam said after Dean's second week of visiting the library every day. "And we're gonna be broke."
He had a point. The money they inherited from Bobby (courtesy of some serious maneuvering by Jody Mills and a lawyer she won't identify) - it's not limitless. They blew through a lot of it buying the farm and a few pieces of decent furniture, and the rest needs to be set aside for taxes, according to Sam.
Taxes, Dean thinks.
Like that's more worthwhile than coffee and pie.
Betty Lynn Dobbs minds the library on Tuesdays. She won some kind of national award for her pies, back in the day, and to Dean's mind it was well deserved. Delicate, flaky crust and a ton of juicy filling - apple, cherry, blueberry. The raspberry's got a nice tang to it, and the banana cream's rich and filling. He looks forward to Tuesdays like he used to look forward to getting laid, which is a fair trade-off, he figures. This town's way too small for one-night stands. If he had a tryst or two with anybody around here, everybody'd know about it the next day. And there'd be no "It's been fun, but I gotta go." Not when he lives here.
The pie's a fair exchange.
Right up until the Tuesday he pulls up in front of the library and Betty Lynn's Yugo isn't parked in its usual spot.
Car trouble, he tells himself. The Yugo's been belching a little smoke lately, has been making a mysterious, if subtle, clanking noise that might have been the forerunner of a breakdown. But she could have hitched a ride from a neighbor. She wouldn't neglect her responsibilities. She's a dedicated woman. She'd get here, even if she had to walk.
He keeps telling himself that right up until he pushes the library door open and finds somebody he's never seen before sitting at the librarian's desk.
"Hi, there!" she says brightly.
There's an open box of store-bought donuts taking up space next to the coffee urn.
"Betty -?" he starts, and can't get any further.
The disappointment's just too huge.
"Down with the flu."
His eyes haven't left the coffee machine and that traitorous white-and-blue box of donuts. Not that he's got anything against donuts, strictly speaking - but it's Tuesday, dammit. It's pie day, not donut day.
"Sorry," says not-Betty. "Short notice. I didn't have time to make anything."
Flu, he thinks. Flu lasts… how long?
The diners have pie, of course, available all day and most of the night - but it's not Betty Lynn's. It wouldn't win a blue ribbon from anybody, even if the competitors were Entenmann's and Table Talk. Besides, neither of the diners offers this peculiar (and, seriously, fascinating) collection of old magazines and battered coffee-table books to ferret through. Two weeks ago he found something called America Takes to the Road, a big, thick book full of color pictures of classic cars, with a six-page spread called "The Family's Got Muscle: Impalas of the Fifties and Sixties." It cost him three bucks, and that included coffee and a big wedge of Betty Lynn's cherry crumble.
He could go home. Work on his baby for a while.
"You're new," not-Betty informs him.
No, he's not. She is.
"Moved here a couple months ago," he mutters, although what he and Sam did wasn't so much moving as stopping.
"Toby's place," she nods.
She's gonna start now, he figures, with the whole "Oh, it's so horrible about Toby" song and dance, complete with a soundtrack of moans and groans and sighs. What happened to Toby Whitmer was kind of grotesque; there's no arguing that. But Dean's dealt with hideous departures from this earthly veil for thirty years now, and in a sense Toby Whitmer's death was just another same old, same old.
Shit, he thinks. Can you point to anybody's death and say, Wow - that was friggin' COOL? They're all bad, in one way or another.
He waits for the customary routine to begin, but what she says is, "I hear you're kind of an eclectic buyer."
He… what??
Like it's anybody's business what he buys.
Pie, dammit. He came here for pie.
He could swing by Betty Lynn's place. Offer to trade some work on the Yugo for any spare baked goods she might happen to have lying around.
"A dictionary. Three Reader's Digest Condensed Books. A VHS copy of Porky's II. Back issues of Better Homes & Gardens."
"It has home repair tips," he says defensively.
He and Sam should have settled somewhere where nobody gives a shit about anybody else. New York City, say. Or some wide spot in the road out in the desert. These people don't have a multi-plex, so they fill up their time turning their neighbors into projects, and he seriously doesn't need that. He's gone his whole life without anybody - much - meddling in his business, and there's no good reason to change that now. Particularly since he and Sam are both still - well, "persons of interest" to any number of law enforcement organizations.
"I gotta -" he begins, turning on one heel.
"Oh, sit down," she chirps, and comes out from behind the desk to usher him over to a table near the stack of fairly recent People magazines. "You've got that look on your face. Just like my dad. 'Mind your business, Merrilee. Give the other guy a damn chance to volunteer. You're a bus driver, not a census taker.'"
She settles him into a chair. Thirty seconds later he's got a mug of coffee and a glazed donut in front of him.
She pats his shoulder, like he's five.
Okay, she's just trying to be friendly. Trying to make him feel welcome. And it's not her fault Betty Lynn got sick.
He could like this, he supposes. People making him part of their circle.
But he and Sam are friggin' wanted.
She lays half a dozen dog-eared magazines on the table, smiling, then busies herself tidying a tilting heap of what looks like old textbooks.
Sam might like to look at those, he thinks.
"You drive a bus?" he frowns.
"Mm-hmm. Part-time."
There's a vibe coming off of her that makes him think of Ellen. Particularly, Ellen when she was in a good mood. Warm. Capable. Kind of a Mama Bear thing. That's kind of awesome, really: women who can tend the home fires, who can serve up hugs and warm bowls of stew, and can kick ass when the situation calls for it.
But… Ellen.
That whole thing was just so damn wrong. Her and Jo, going out like that. It makes him angry, sometimes, that nobody ever questions Ellen laying down her life so Jo wouldn't die alone - but they never stop questioning what he did for Sam. It makes his mind spin. Makes his heart ache, in a way it doesn't for anybody else except his mom.
And Dad. And Sam. Bobby.
Something else slides onto the table: a copy of Curious George Visits the Zoo.
He used to love Curious George.
He reaches out to touch the book, intending to pull it toward him. Why she figured he'd want it, he doesn't know. Maybe she thinks it's cute. Maybe she figures it fits into his "eclectic collection."
Before he can say anything, before he can ask what her motivation is, the library's half-glass front door comes flying open and a guy in a brown shirt and matching shorts comes blustering in, arms full of packages. "Merr!" he says, like he's just found King Midas's Tomb after two or three centuries' worth of looking. "Nobody home over at your house. Didn't want to leave these there, out on the steps. You wanna sign for 'em?"
Six - no, seven packages, all kinds of shapes and sizes.
She signs. Gives the UPS guy a donut. As the guy (Pete McFee, according to his embroidered nametag) chews, looks around, scratches the back of his neck, offers a nod and a grin to Dean, she stacks her packages on the librarian's desk, off to the side, where they won't easily be knocked over. A couple of them seem heavy; the others don't.
"You buy a lot of stuff off eBay?" Dean asks.
"You got it," she says brightly.
Knick-knacks, he figures. Hummel figurines, or little dolls.
"Nuts," Pete says. "Forgot one, out in the truck. You want to run out there with me and grab it?"
He's gulping the last chunk of his donut as he and not-Betty leave the library. From where Dean's sitting, he can see them for a couple of seconds through the window alongside the door - can see the UPS guy glance back.
At him.
Frowning.
Okay. This ain't good.
Dean has to get up from the table and take up a position near what amounts to the library's DVD Department to get a better look - to watch not-Betty and Pete walk around the Impala, furtively checking out the backseat, the license plate, the jacket Dean left slung over the passenger seat back. They move on to the UPS truck, where Pete does indeed pull another package out of the back, then they stand close together, talking, their expressions serious, maybe a little worried.
When not-Betty (Merrilee, he thinks; she said her name was Merrilee) comes back inside, he drops two quarters on the librarian's desk and walks out, leaving the copy of Curious George Visits the Zoo behind, lying face down on the table.
~~~~~~~~
"This was your idea," Sam says. "This whole thing. This was all you."
"The hell it was."
"And now you want to leave."
"I don't want to leave. Hell, what I want to do is grab a beer and go sit out on the porch and read a magazine."
"Then do that."
"They made us, Sam."
Sam leans against the kitchen table, palms flat against the chipped gray Formica. The groan he lets out sounds like it came up from about half a mile underground. "We talked about this. We talked about the possibility that someone was gonna -"
"So - what? You want to sit here and wait for the Feds to show up? Don't know about you, Sam, but I'd kind of like not to spend the rest of my life in federal prison. Or being extradited to someplace with the death penalty. That whole thing about humane methods of execution? It's a crock of shit."
"We'd probably get resurrected again," Sam says. "You know that."
The soft click of toenails against hardwood signals the approach of the dog the two of them inherited from Toby Whitmer, a five-year-old Golden who's accepted them more fully than they've ever been accepted by anybody, ever. Whether that amounts to a betrayal of Toby, who brought her here as a puppy and was her only master until his death a few months ago, is maybe something she had to work out along the way. Whatever her decision was, she asks for nothing.
Food, yeah, and a bowl of water. But it's crossed Dean's mind that even if they didn't feed her, she wouldn't hold it against them.
He sits on the floor. Rests his back against the fridge. The dog follows suit and lays her head on his thigh.
"What do you want to do?" Sam asks after a minute. "Seriously."
They could go. Take the dog and go.
Dean has wondered, more than once, if the agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation are seriously stupid. If the general public honestly gives a rat's ass about the Winchesters, honestly wants to see them captured and punished. The friggin' country's full of criminals on the run, full of rapists and murders and child molesters, terrorists and white supremacists and embezzlers and God knows what the hell all else. Yeah, that America's Most Wanted thing manages to nab people at a pretty steady rate, but for every one they lock down, there's fifty more running around doing their thing.
After the shifter situation in St. Louis, his picture was all over the news, and nobody caught him. Nobody seemed to want to catch him. For the most part, nobody paid attention to him at all.
Henriksen did, of course.
But really, nobody else.
The Leviathans dressed up as him and Sam murdered a couple dozen people, but all he and Sam had to do was say, "That wasn't us," and people bought it.
So they figured they'd be okay here.
That they could be here maybe half the time, in between hunts, and nobody'd have a problem with it. That they could shop, and buy gas, and take in the little Main Street Bazaar that happens the first Friday of every month, and nobody'd be calling 911.
They - he - thought maybe, finally, they could have a place to rest.
"I can't do this, Sammy," he says softly, more to the dog than to his brother. "I can't keep doing this."
When he finally looks up, Sam doesn't look like he wants to say anything.
"I just wanted a piece of pie," Dean murmurs.
"Yeah," Sam says. "I know."
~~~~~~~~
Neither of them gets any sleep. They sit in the living room, Sam on the couch with the dog, Dean in the plaid recliner they picked up at a yard sale out on the county road, listening for the crunch of tires on the gravel driveway.
Looking for headlights.
Expecting the door to be battered open.
None of that happens.
In a way, the nothing that happens is worse. Neither one of them's ever been a big fan of waiting for the other shoe to drop.
They should go, Dean thinks. They should pack the car and go. Rufus's cabin is still an option; as far as they know, nobody's appropriated it in the few months since they were last out there. It's secluded enough that they can hunker down there and stay under the radar while they figure out what to do next. And with any luck, the dog won't object.
"Maybe we should call Jody," Sam suggests.
All the paperwork for the farm says Johnson. Tom and Mike Johnson. Thanks to the late Frank Devereaux, they've got full sets of ID for those identities. Birth certificates, driver's licenses, social security cards. Thanks in equal measure to Frank and to Jody Mills (and her mysterious lawyer friend), they've got a bank account in town. They're on the grid, and yet they're not.
It should have worked.
Maybe Frank was right. Maybe it's the car that messes things up.
"Screw this," Dean says, a little after four in the morning. "I'm gonna go find out what's going on."
"We could call -"
"We're not gonna mix Jody up in this. She can still have a friggin' life. We tie her up with us, she's gonna lose everything."
Sam's expression tightens a little.
It never works, does it? Their trying not to involve other people.
"We're a goddamn curse," Dean barks. "Everything we touch turns to shit."
He's gonna get up, he thinks. Get up out of the chair, grab his jacket, and go… do something. Turn this thing around. Go on the offensive. Dad sure as hell wouldn't sit here with his thumb up his ass, waiting for something to happen. Neither would Bobby, or Rufus, or Ellen, or Jo. Hell, none of the hunters he's ever met would just sit and wait.
Garth, maybe.
Richie. Richie from Brooklyn. He'd sit and wait, and expect whatever came looking for him to give him a blow job before it killed him. Asshole, Dean thinks.
The sun's come up enough to fill the living room with pale light when the dog climbs down off the couch and tips her head toward the front door.
Out?
"The Feds wouldn't have taken this long," Sam says.
So they can… what? Assume they're safe?
Shaking his head, Dean struggles to his feet and follows the dog to the door. He hesitates for a moment, his hand on the knob, looking through the small twin panes of glass set into the top third of the door. No one's out there. There's nothing in the driveway but the Impala and a spill of bright sunlight that makes the gravel glitter like something valuable.
They knew they wouldn't be safe here. Not really.
But they decided to take a chance. Let themselves breathe for a while, hoping the while would last.
A year.
A few years.
His body's as tired as if he's carried a load of cement blocks halfway across the state. He could not feel any more worn out than this, he thinks, if he were a hundred years old. Just keep moving, he thinks. That's what Dad always did. Just keep moving.
The dog nudges in close to him as he opens the door. Once it's fully open, she patters out onto the porch, turns, and offers him a tentative doggy grin of encouragement, as if to say See? Everything's fine! There are squirrels to chase!
"Go on," he murmurs. "Do your thing."
Turned loose, she bounds on ahead, down the steps and across the driveway to the grassy patch between the south end of the house and the barn. Dean remains on the porch, arms folded across his chest, watching her dance across the grass, then bend to sniff, searching for signs of prey.
When she moves a little farther afield, he turns to walk to the end of the porch.
Lying on the seat of the rocking chair, the beat-up wood-and-wicker contraption that was Toby Whitmer's favorite place to drink beer, eat roast beef and cheese sandwiches and play his guitar and sing off-key, his favorite place from which to contemplate the world, right up until the world belched out something that shredded most of his internal organs and tore off his head, is a bright yellow copy of Curious George Visits the Zoo.
For a moment, Dean's mind spews nothing but gibberish.
Then it allows him to bleat, "SAM!"
Part 2…