Cat paws
They drove in silence. Out of the town, on the thruway, through Pennsylvania. Dean didn’t complain. No matter what he’d said out load, the fact was, he had no energy to rob a pharmacy. He wasn’t even sure he could stand up long enough to rob a gas station. He’d gotten quite a few beatings over the years, but he’s never felt so shattered before. And fucking helpless. He’s never felt so helpless in his entire fucking life. Not even when dad was killed.
He studied Seth’s profile for a while. The kid seemed to have checked out again. His mouth and chin were still smeared with blood but at least his hands on the steering wheel were steady and he didn’t look like he was gonna freak out any time soon. That was a good thing because Dean might have offered to drive, but that had been a lie too. Just sitting and not moving fucking hurt. Breathing hurt. He should be calling Bobby right now but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. How much had Bobby hid from Dean? Enough to make him angry. Enough to blame him for Rufus’s death.
And Rufus might have been there to pressure Dean to take Seth back home, but Rufus would’ve never harmed a hair on either of their heads. Because it was Rufus. Dean had gotten his first driving lesson in the man’s beat up old Cadillac when he was twelve. Rufus had said that John didn’t want him banging up the Impala his first time behind the wheel, but that had been a lie. John was just too goddamned busy for something so unimportant like teaching his kid to drive. And Dean had always known this. But he loved the man a little bit for that white lie.
Rufus was dead. Rufus who always had the best fucking scotch stashed away and never hesitated to share, who was the only one to find Dean’s jokes funny, who took him along on his first vampire hunt. Rufus who squeezed his shoulder afterwards and told him he’d done a good job. A tiny little sentence Dean had never gotten from John. Not once.
His eyelids were starting to burn. He closed his eyes and leaned his head back carefully, the whole right side of his body screaming at the movement. He didn’t want to know who the other hunter was. He had enough to mourn without knowing.
“Dean?”
“Yah.”
“Is that half a bottle of whiskey still in the car?”
“Under your seat.”
He could hear Seth searching for it, the clang of glass against the underside of the car seat. That was actually a pretty damn good idea. There wasn’t much either one of them could do now, but they could get drunk.
Seth’s voice was hoarse. He’d been screaming. Towards the end, when the beams of the cabin had began cracking, when the entire foundation started to shake, Seth had started screaming. And Dean had been sure that whatever the fuck was happening would kill him. Blood had already started pouring out of his nose, down his mouth. Dean had wanted to scream with him.
At that moment, for all Dean knew, Seth could have been right. He could be just like the demon. A strange, human offshoot, some kind of a demon mutation, or something infinitely worse. But the entire time it was happening, Dean was only afraid of one thing. That Seth would be dead by the end of it.
He heard the bottle cap unscrewing, the liquid sloshing forward, Seth’s throat working. He stretched his left hand out for the bottle without opening his eyes. If he could manage to keep his head, neck, and his entire right ride completely immobile, the pain would actually be bearable. Drinking would hurt, but it’s a price he was willing to pay.
“You’re not supposed to be drinking and taking the pills,” Seth said, but he handed the bottle over anyway.
And Dean was right, drinking did fucking hurt. The cheap whiskey burned his throat and he fought a cough, even that slight movement of his ribs causing an orchestra of pain. He passed the bottle back to Seth.
When Seth got off route 79 and took 68 instead, Dean asked no questions. It didn’t really matter where they were going. They passed the bottle back and forth until it was empty; Dean could’ve been drinking water for all the difference it made. He was starting to consider attempting to rob a pharmacy anyway when Seth left 68 for 19, which could be considered a highway only in the loosest definition of the term, no matter what the little sign claimed.
“Where are we going?”
He supposed that it shouldn’t be too surprising if the kid had another hiding place stashed away.
“I’m not sure,” Seth said,
“I’ll tell you when we get there.”
--
Lizard brain had its benefits. Tunnel vision. The ability to deal with one thing at a time without worrying about the rest. Everything else might be bubbling under the surface, threatening to make Seth into a quivering bundle of terrified nerves, but right now, it was stashed away. Unimportant. There was a hierarchy to his madness. So.
He knew route 19 was more likely to have an assortment of tiny little towns. He was looking for a specific kind. Around fifteen hundred permanent residents. Because anything under that wouldn’t be enough for what he had in mind. Anything over two thousand would have a police department large enough to be problematic. He thanked the stupidity of town signs that announced how many residents it contained. And then he thanked God or whoever was listening for Harmony, Pennsylvania. Because it was fucking perfect.
The cute little signs promising an animal hospital in just a few miles were the only sign of life. An occasional farm flashed through the trees, too removed from the main road to matter.
“I’m gonna need your gun.”
Dean hesitated,
“An animal hospital? You’re gonna rob an animal hospital?”
“They have everything we need. Everything from bandages to pain pills. In a town this size? There’s probably no emergency button, no guard, no obstacles whatsoever. Did you see the police department?”
“Yeah. About twenty minutes back where we came from.”
“Exactly. By the time someone calls them, by the time they wrap their heads around the fact that someone robbed an animal hospital, we’re gonna be long gone.”
He turned to look at Dean, wondering if he was missing something, if his autopilot had failed him. It had definitely sounded like a good plan in his own head.
Dean turned his head slightly, grimacing in pain. What Seth could see of his collar bone was black and purple, swollen, the crusted blood peeling off the side of his face and neck. He looked like shit and at the same time, he looked so fucking lovely.
“You should’ve been a hunter,” Dean said, the corner of his lip lifting slightly,
“You would’ve made a damn good hunter.”
Seth found himself blushing.
--
The ‘clinic’ had two entrances, both facing the parking lot. Seth parked in front of the far left one and tucked the gun into his pants.
“Do you have another gun handy?”
“Yeah.”
“If someone comes out while I’m inside you might have to... scare them back in.”
“Yeah, I got it.”
Seth took a deep breath and grabbed the door handle, then changed his mind and stretched across the seat instead. Dean’s lips yielded under his, probably more out of surprise than anything else. He tasted like blood and pain and whiskey. When Seth pulled back, Dean was smiling again.
“For good luck?”
“Just in the case I don’t come back.”
Dean’s hand found his and clenched it tightly enough to hurt.
“Careful.”
“Yeah.”
Then he was in the parking lot, moving towards the far right entrance, feeling Dean’s eyes burning the back of his neck. The sky above was a beautiful shade of blue, light and almost transparent, the type of sky that only happens in the early spring. There were small clusters of bushes planted around the entrance, first flowers already budding. Someone had done their spring cleaning and done it with great care, pulling up weeds and trimming the branches. The building itself looked well taken care of, white trim recently repainted, small stickers of cat paws decorating the windows.
It was the stickers that got him. Made him stop at the ramp, less than three feet away from the door.
On the children’s until, back at the hospital, they’d had the same stickers. Cat paws and dog paws and balloons. It made the unit no less depressing, but the kids seemed to like them. How did he get here? How did he go from secretly adding cat paw stickers to the ugly gray of the walls on the children’s unit to the cold steel of a gun pressing into his hip bone, blood dried and crusted on his face, about to point a weapon at people who had done nothing to deserve it? How had he gone from saving people’s lives to robbing an animal clinic for morphine? Animal clinic. He was about to put the fear of God into people who had dedicated their lives to helping puppies and kittens. What the fuck?
Could he really do this?
No. He couldn’t.
He turned around and met Dean’s gaze across the parking lot. And Dean smiled slightly, as if he knew exactly what Seth was thinking. As if he’d expected it. Suddenly Seth was sure that he could walk back to the car, get back in, tell Dean that he couldn’t do it, and Dean would only nod. Would never blame him, never hold it against him, never try and pressure him into doing it anyway. Dean would grind his teeth and wait for something else to come along, never mind the broken forearm and collar bone, never mind the pain.
Dean. The fucking guy who broke a cop’s skull and called it collateral damage. Who severed a vamp’s head with a knife no longer than Seth’s palm. Fucking Dean Winchester, FBI’s most wanted, covered in freckles like some goddamned porn star.
Seth rubbed the flaking blood off his mouth and laughed softly. The world around him had gone insane so many times in the last few days that he would probably end up in a nut house because of it. Even the one thing he could be absolutely sure of, his own fucking body, had betrayed him back at the cabin. Nothing was stable any more, nothing was normal, and he could be sure of absolutely nothing except for one little detail.
He fucking fell in love with the crazy guy.
He pulled out the gun and blew Dean a kiss.
--
The kid was inside for exactly twelve minutes. He came back out with the gun still clutched in one hand and a beige cloth sack in the other. Sprinted across the parking lot, almost fell into the drivers seat, and was peeling away before the car door was closed all the way. He was panting as if he’d ran a mile, his face pale, his fingers clenched around the steering wheel. Dean ground his teeth when the sharp turn out of the parking lot nearly tossed him into Seth’s lap. All the bones on the right side of his body seemed to rearrange themselves in new and interesting positions. And by interesting he meant painful enough to make him whimper.
“Sorry,” Seth said tightly, his foot on the gas jerking the car from zero to sixty in seconds,
“Sorry.”
“It’s fine,” Dean said through clenched teeth,
“Are you ok?”
“Yeah. That was... I don’t wanna do that again. Next time, it’ll have to be a pharmacy.”
“Yeah. Ok. Hopefully there won’t be a next time.”
“Here,” he dug through the sack one handed and came out with a small plastic bottle that looked like it would hold cough syrup.
While Dean turned it around in his hand, trying to figure out what the hell could such a small bottle possibly do to help the orchestra of pain currently winding up to a crescendo, Seth passed him a long, thin syringe with no needle.
“There are milliliter measurements etched into the side of it. It's 20 mg per milliliter so two is all you can have right now. At least until I see how you react to it. Stick the syringe into the bottle, take out two milliliters of fluid and then squirt it down your throat.”
It was not an easy task, doing it one handed, but he did manage to get the fluid into the syringe, about half a teaspoon worth. He squirted it down his throat and nearly gagged.
“Jesus, it tastes like shit.”
“Don’t be a baby.”
“You could’ve warned me.”
“Yeah, but then you wouldn’t have made that face.”
Dean grunted,
“Ok, now what?”
“It should kick in quickly.”
“Yeah, I figured out that much. I mean where do we go from here?”
“Ohio. Easier to hide there,” Seth echoed Dean’s own words back.
Has it only been three days since they had that conversation? Five days since he’d woken up in an ambulance? Five fucking days. It felt like years had gone by.
Seth tossed the bag in the back,
“Their medical tape has little cat paw prints all over it. I can’t wait to use it.”
--
By the time they drove into Litchfield, Ohio, Dean was passed out in the passenger seat, mouth half open and drooling slightly on his jacket. It was still early afternoon and sunny. A beautiful day actually; not a cloud in the sky, birds singing, hello fucking springtime. His mother was probably out in the garden on a day like today. Her first or second outing of the season, depending on what sort of a chaos Seth’s kidnapping had caused in her routines. For someone with a PhD in Psychology, she was surprisingly unaware of her own peculiarities. She took every single weed and broken branch as a personal affront, as if every winter only came around to cause disturbance among her precious flower beds. He missed her. The stupid straw hat she always wore, an assortment of gardening gloves, all in ridiculously cheery colors, the enormous sunglasses that always made her look like a human bumble bee. But he didn’t miss the spring clean up. No sir. He was actually happy to be nowhere near that torture session.
Except that he might never see her again. Even if he turned around and went back home right now, what the fuck was he supposed to say?
‘Hey mom, you know that guy who kidnapped me? Yeah, the crazy guy FBI is looking for. I sort of fell in love with him. And had sex with him all over your friend Melissa’s summer cabin. I also tore the cabin apart with the power of my mind and scared the fuck out of a demon. Afterwards I drove to Harmony Pennsylvania and robbed an animal clinic. For morphine. How’s the spring clean up going?’
He chuckled hysterically, then bit his lip to make it stop. Nope. Not gonna think about that. Not gonna crack up in the middle of Litchfield, Ohio. Gonna stay sane and calm. But the car was too quiet and his tunnel vision was long gone and there was nothing else to focus on.
So he reached over and nudged Dean’s good shoulder,
“We’re here.”
They weren’t of course. ‘Here’ indicated that they’d had a destination in the first place, which they didn’t. But they were somewhere, and even though Seth was still driving down some random road, it was time to stop. Not just because his head threatened to kick into panic mode at any moment but because Dean’s swelling was now bordering on grotesque.
Dean groaned, a sleepy hoarse sound that was way hotter than it should be.
“Where the fuck is ‘here’?”
“Litchfield, Ohio.”
“Litchfield,” Dean straightened up slowly,
“How do you find these damn places I’ve never fucking heard of?”
He seemed to have some difficulty sitting up straight but there was no sign of pain on his face. It looked like Seth was right, two milliliters was a perfect dose.
“Well, I have this dangerous fugitive in the passenger seat so I figured maybe I should stay off the thruway.”
Dean read the sign on the side of the road and snorted,
“This town is part of the Buckeye Local School District’? I’ll bet you hundred bucks that there’s no hotel anywhere near here. We’ll be lucky if there’s a gas station.”
“You don’t have a hundred bucks. And we’re not staying at a hotel.”
“Then where?”
Seth was about to say that he has no fucking idea where they were staying or why they were in Litchfield in the first place, when he noticed the white sign on the side of the road, nearly obscured with weeds.
Property for sale. Thirteen acres.
He put the blinker on.
--
“I know you’ve squatted before.”
“Not in a house that was for sale,” Dean said patiently,
“What if it’s been sold?”
“There would be a little sign that said it was sold.”
“What if someone comes around to show the place tomorrow?”
“I’ll shoot their fucking tires and they can walk the whole thirteen acres back to the main road. I bet we get there first.”
They were still sitting in the car, staring at the house. It turns out Seth had never seen what Dean Winchester looks like when he digs his heels in. It was kind of cute. And it also made him want to smack that stubborn expression off his face. An interesting combination he definitely wanted to examine later.
“I need to do something about your arm. And collar bone. This is why I robbed the fucking clinic, remember?”
“It’s too open. No cover, no trees, no way out but one dirt track.”
“Yes, because having trees and cover worked so well in Snow Shoe.”
Dean blinked at him then grinned, a sort of a sideways smile that made Seth’s stomach flip.
“If I wasn’t hurt right now you’d throttle me.”
“What gave it away?”
“You get this little wrinkle in between your eyebrows when you’re irritated. I like it.”
Seth felt his face heat up,
“We’re staying here.”
“Just today and tonight. We’re moving on tomorrow.”
“Fine.”
Chapter 12 →