SPN FIC - No Room at the Inn
Christmas 1997. With much beer.
Characters: Dean (18), Sam (14), various OCs
Pairings: implied Dean/OFC
Rating: PG, for language (and the beer)
Spoilers: none
Length: 2760 words
Disclaimer: Yada yada yada. Don't own nothin'. Moving on.
Four sixes of beer later, the SUNY kids were singing the Rudolph song with radically revised lyrics. Dean, who had been revising the lyrics of Christmas songs for years, was beerified enough to join in.
No Room at the Inn
By Carol Davis
“I’m sorry, son,” the man said. “We don’t have any rooms left.”
Dean put on his “determined” face and rested an elbow on the counter. “The sign says Vacancy. Right out there” - he nodded toward the parking lot - “in big orange letters.”
The man nodded too, toward the group of kids Dean’s age over in the corner of the lobby. “I just gave them the last three rooms, not five minutes ago. Sorry I didn’t jump right on fixing the sign.” His tone was firm but polite, warning Dean not to make a stink.
What Dean wasn’t saying was that it was Dad who’d spotted the Vacancy sign, right before he dropped them off in the parking lot with instructions to get themselves a room and hole up for the night. He told them he’d try to get back before daybreak but they shouldn’t count on it. Either way, he’d definitely be back before lunchtime tomorrow so they could have Christmas together. Then he drove off into the snow, leaving Sam and Dean with a couple of duffels of clothes, a phony credit card, and twenty bucks for food.
They were pretty much stuck here.
“Got any no-shows?” Dean asked. “Maybe they can’t make it ‘cause of the storm.”
“Rooms’re all full,” the man said. “With real people. I’m sorry. I’ve got nothing to offer you.”
He and Dean stared each other down for a minute, then Dean moved away from the desk. He wasn’t saying anything, but there was a whole loud debate going on in his head - Sam could tell that from the look on his face.
“Son of a bitch,” he muttered when he got close to Sam.
“It’s okay,” Sam offered.
Dean’s eyes widened. “In what sense is it okay? You want to try walking? It’s got to be ten miles back to that town we passed. And it’s like five degrees outside. And snowing. You think you’re freaking Nanook of the North, or what?”
“I just meant, maybe he’d let us sleep here in the lobby or something. Till Dad comes back.”
“Not sleeping in the lobby, Sam.”
Then Dean downshifted from talking into mumbling. Most of his wrath seemed to be directed at the kids in the corner, who were laughing and nudging each other as they went through the big rack of tourist brochures. They all had nice coats on, and their luggage - which was piled up near the front door - was the expensive kind. Not duffel bags.
“Seven of ‘em,” Dean hissed. “They need three rooms? Give me a freakin’ break.”
Muttering again, he dropped into one of the two chairs lined up between the mountain of fancy luggage and the door. Lost for anything else to do, Sam took the other chair and sat scuffing his boots against the carpet.
They’d been sitting there maybe five minutes when one of the kids, a guy with red hair and a lot of freckles, came over and offered them a smile.
“Hey,” he said.
Dean stared at him.
“I heard what you were saying to the manager, there. You’re stuck here, too, huh?” The kid gave Dean another chance to respond. Again, Dean let it go by, so the kid went on, “We were headed home to Deaconsville, in Craig’s van. But the roads…man, they’re hideous. We passed two spinouts and somebody who went right through the guardrail into the ditch. So we decided to hang out here for the night and go the rest of the way in the morning. Same deal for you?”
“Yeah,” Dean muttered.
“You guys here alone? No…parents?”
The kid looked around. Saw no parents. “Just us,” Sam confirmed.
“Look…if you want to crash with us…”
Dean gave the group of kids a long, unhappy look. Glanced at Sam. Then at the pile of luggage. He was wearing the same “This world sucks some serious ass” face that always popped up when he was about to get reamed out by an adult. Although, technically speaking, Dean was an adult and had been for almost a year. He took one more look at Sam, then shifted things around and managed to look approachable. Not friendly, but approachable.
“All we’ve got’s a credit card,” he said. “Can’t really kick in towards the -“
“Don’t worry about it,” the red-haired kid told him.
The kid’s name was Josh. His friends were Rob, Ryan, and Craig, the owner of the van; Steph, Allison, and…Mess.
“Mess?” Sam asked.
“Melissa,” Josh told him. “It’s a long story.”
They were all students at SUNY Buffalo, all of them freshmen except for Craig, who was a sophomore. All pretty much Dean’s age.
Dean had nothing in common with them whatsoever.
The Winchester brothers stood by quietly while Rob and Josh flung open the connecting doors between the rooms. The girls would take the room at one end, they decided, leaving the other two rooms for the guys. Meaning the SUNY Buffalo guys. Four beds, four guys. Then Rob and Craig disappeared for ten minutes and came back pushing a pair of rollaway beds.
“God damn, that manager’s an uncooperative fucker,” Craig announced.
A couple minutes later, Mess and Josh and Steph disappeared. They came back with a huge sack of sandwiches, a bunch of two-liter bottles of soda, four sixes of beer, two Big Bargain bags of chips, and a package of Chips Ahoy. After the stuff had been spread out on the table and one of the beds in the middle room, Josh beckoned to the Winchesters and told them, “Dig in.”
Dean dug out his wallet and tried to pass Josh the twenty Dad had given him. “No, man,” Josh said. “Forget that. Come on.”
“No, I want to -“
“Dude,” Josh said. “Ease up.”
None of them was legally old enough to be drinking beer. Or buying it, for that matter, so how Mess and Josh and Steph had gotten hold of it was a mystery. Fake IDs, Sam supposed.
So they did have something in common with Dean.
Steph flipped on the TV and they sat watching It’s a Wonderful Life while they ate their sandwiches and drank their sodas and beer.
“You watch the Grinch?” Rob asked no one in particular. “Man, I love the Grinch. I laugh till I piss myself every time I watch that thing.”
“Charlie Brown,” Ryan said. “Gotta watch Charlie Brown.”
“Frosty the Snowman,” Allison said around a mouthful of sandwich. “And Rudolph.”
Sam gulped down some soda. To wet his whistle, sort of. “You know, Rudolph really isn’t a good story for kids.”
Josh raised a brow. “’Splain.”
“Well…the other reindeer treat him like crap because he’s got the red nose. Then Santa picks him to guide the sleigh through the fog, and after that the other reindeer are all, ‘Whoa, Rudolph, you’re awesome.’ I think they’re a bunch of brown-nosers. They only act like they like him because he’s Santa’s, you know, main guy.”
The SUNY kids all looked at each other.
“Damn,” Ryan said. “Kid’s got a point. Never thought of it that way. Excellent perspective, Sam.”
Sam grinned at his brother. Dean, who had heard the Rudolph dissection a hundred times, rolled his eyes and went on eating his roast beef sandwich.
Four sixes of beer later, the SUNY kids were singing the Rudolph song with radically revised lyrics. Dean, who had been revising the lyrics of Christmas songs for years, was beerified enough to join in.
When It’s a Wonderful Life ended, Mess picked up the remote and switched the channel.
And found a cartoon version of Rudolph.
“Holy fuck!” Craig squealed. “All right. Rudolph and the suck-up asshat reindeers. Dude,” he said to Sam. “I like your mind.” More beer had appeared from somewhere, and, wearing a ridiculous grin, Craig passed a bottle over to Sam. “Cheers, man. Drink up.”
Sam slid a hand toward the bottle, then glanced over at Dean.
His brother, who had never yet reached a level of drunkenness at which he could not keep an eye on Sam, pointed his index finger at the ceiling. One, his expression said. You drink more than one, and I’ll kick your ass.
Three could maybe be equivalent to one, Sam thought a while later.
Three could definitely equal one.
It wasn’t like Dean was objecting. Dean was…huh. Somewhere. Somewhere not visible from the bed in the girls’ room where Sam lay sprawled.
He shut his eyes and lay there in a foggy, beery haze, marveling at the way the bed was tilting back and forth. He’d had two and a half beers, really, because they were big bottles. They were big gigantic bottles, and his stomach had told him about half an hour ago that if he kept going, there would be puking involved. And it seemed impolite to heave in somebody else’s room. Particularly girl somebody elses.
“How you doing, Sam?”
Sam peeled his eyes open. Allison was crouched alongside the bed, grinning at him.
She was pretty. Definitely very pretty. But old. Very, very old.
He peered past her and saw things that made him frown. Somebody had strung tinsel garland all over everything. Miles and miles of tinsel garland. There were pictures of Santas and wreaths and Christmas trees on the walls.
“Whuh?” Sam mumbled.
“Come look.”
The floor canted like the deck of a ship when he stood up. That was interesting for the first few seconds, less so when it seemed like there might be puking whether or not he finished off that third big gigantic bottle of beer. Laughing, but not in a mean way, Allison slung an arm around him and led him into the middle room.
There was a big gigantic Christmas tree in there. All decorated and everything.
“Santa?” Sam sputtered, and had no idea where that thought had come from. The SUNY kids all started to laugh, definitely not in a mean way, and he grinned giddily at them, then started to look around for Dean.
No Dean.
Someone else was missing, too. Sam started to count heads, lost track four times, and finally decided that Steph was the no-show.
So…huh.
“Crimmus,” Sam announced.
That made the SUNY kids all laugh again, and Sam was happily soaking in their beery approval when his legs started to fold. Luckily, Allison was still there; she got him relocated a couple of steps and he slumped like a big gigantic beery slug onto one of the beds.
When he opened his eyes the next time, Dean was sitting next to him, eating chips off the washcloth he was using as a plate and sipping from a biggiganticbeer.
“Whereyougo?” Sam muttered.
“Ice machine,” Dean said.
Sam garbled out, “Pantsonfire.”
“Told you one, dude.”
“Nahdriving.” Trying to lift his head made it spin like that kid’s in The Exorcist, only faster, so Sam settled for shifting just his eyes. A little. A very, very little. “’S everybody?”
“How far gone are you?”
Sam listened. Yeah, okay, there were voices in the other rooms.
“Crimmus,” he said after a while.
“What?”
“Murcrimmus.”
“Jesus, dude. Merry Christmas to you, too.”
Eyes closed was a good thing. Not ideal, because the bed went on spinning and tilting like a fishing trawler in rough seas whether he was looking at it or not. But the absence of bright light was a plus. Darkness, even tilting, spinning darkness, was soothing. He lay there listening to Dean crunch chips while he watched…something on TV. Something in which people were laughing.
The bed shifted again, but this time it was a real shift, not a beery one.
“He okay?” a girl said softly. Steph, Sam decided.
“Yeah.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t have let him -“
“Nah. It’s okay.”
The bed shifted again. Then Dean and Steph started making kissing noises. Then they must have decided they needed more ice, because the bed tilted way over to one side and the warm thing that was Dean stopped being close by.
People singing woke him up.
Somebody sat down next to him, but it wasn’t Dean. A tiny peek told him it was Josh. “So, Sam,” Josh said. “Got any thoughts on any other Christmas folklore?”
“Missatoe,” Sam mumbled. “Keeps away evil spirits.”
“No shit. Really?”
“Huhnuh.”
“Where’d you learn that?”
“Dunno. Somebody.” The singing went on and seemed to get louder. His head started to feel like it was carved out of wood. All wood. No brains. No sinuses. Little mechanical eyeballs that hurt when he moved them. “Book,” he told Josh.
“You a big reader?”
“Guessso.”
“How’s your stomach?”
“Bad,” Sam said.
That spurred a round of giggling from whoever else was in the room. Sighing, Sam managed to locate his arms and carefully pushed himself up. Craig was stretched out on the other bed, and Mess was sitting on the floor by the tree. “Got it out of the lobby,” she told Sam, probably because he was frowning.
“No presents,” Sam observed.
“You want a present? Okay, then.”
Before he could respond one way or the other, she’d gotten up off the floor and grabbed something off the table, then sat down beside him on the bed. She was dangling something over his head when she kissed him.
A real one, right on the mouth.
“Merry Christmas, Sam,” she said cheerfully.
“Whoa,” Sam said.
When he woke up the next time, Dean was sleeping beside him. They were both still dressed, lying on top of the covers, but somebody - Dean? - had draped the bedspread from one of the other beds over them.
He could hear voices, very soft. The TV, in one of the other rooms.
And snoring. There was lots of snoring.
His head only protested a little when he shifted around so he could see the Christmas tree in the big mirror over the dresser. The SUNY kids had left the tree lights on, and Sam’s bleary vision created a halo around each bulb.
“Dean?” he whispered.
It took a second. “Huh,” Dean murmured.
“Somebody kissed me.”
“Yeah?”
“Mess. She kissed me on the mouth.”
“How was it?”
“Pretty good.”
“’S good.”
“Dean? Did you really go get ice?”
“Nah.” A smirk went along with that, tiny and sly.
“How was it?”
“Pretty good.”
“Dean?”
“Yuh, Sam.”
“We should get up early. And go wait in the lobby, so Dad can find us. So he doesn’t ask at the desk and there’s nobody by the right name staying here. He’ll get -“
“Mad?”
“Worried.”
“He’ll find us. Always finds us.” Dean was silent for a moment. “Yeah. Get up early.”
“It’s quarter to six.”
“Not this early, Sam.”
That was a good thing, because the bed started to sway again. So…good. Dean could decide when they should get up.
He woke up in the lobby with a blanket wrapped tightly around him and his pounding head resting on one of their duffels. It was light out, but in a gray sort of way; moving his head the smallest little bit let him see through the glass lobby doors that the snow had stopped falling but the sky was the kind of color that offered more snow later on.
The Christmas tree was back in its rightful place near the registration desk, although tilted crazily to one side.
Dean wasn’t there.
Sam frowned. And as if that was a magic trick, Dean was there, crouching down beside him. “Time to hit the road, dude,” Dean said.
“Dad here?”
“Yup.”
“’S everybody else?”
“On the road to Deaconsville.”
He let Dean lever him up into a sit, then held Dean off for a minute so his head could stop spinning. Getting to his feet took an interesting amount of effort.
“You gonna make it?” Dean asked bemusedly.
“Uh.”
“Glad you’re sure.”
Sam stood wobbling while Dean picked up the bags, then carefully aimed himself at the double glass doors. They were halfway there when he paused and peered curiously at his brother. “You’re bad,” he said decidedly, if still slightly beerily.
“I’m bad?” Dean scoffed. “What’s going on with you, with the making out with college chicks?”
“Heh,” Sam said softly.
Chuckling, Dean pushed one of the doors open and held it in place so Sam could get through with a minimum of stumbling. When they were clear of the doors, Dean reached over and gave Sam a thump on the back.
“You dog,” he said with a snort. “Merry Christmas, dude.”
“Yeah,” Sam said. “That too.”