"Grabbing A Shark By The Tail"
Title: Grabbing a Shark By The Tail
Author: kellifer_fic
Rating: PG
Category: SPN/GG (Sam/Rory)
Word Count: 3,225
Spoilers: None
Disclaimer: Don't own, don't sue, no offense, no money.
Her editor, Brutus, is looking at her with a raised eyebrow.
“You’re kidding, right?”
She watches him shuffle through the batch of notes, photographs and files that she’d dropped on his desk for a moment before he looks back up.
“This isn’t political in the slightest,” he says and now he sounds suspicious, like maybe it’s all a joke and he’s just waiting on the punch line.
“I know that-”
“I mean, this is so far outside what you normally do that… I appreciate the research you’ve done but maybe we should give this one to Drake-”
“No!” Rory puts a hand to her mouth, knowing that she’s probably blushing. She didn’t mean to actually yell but she’d seen it in Brutus’ face. He was already reassigning her story to someone else in his mind.
“No?”
“It’s something, right? You’re interested.”
Brutus makes a non-committal noise but Rory knows that that is high enthusiasm. He’s also looking mildly impressed at the way she’s put everything together and she can see it. He’s relenting. She had seen the way her mother could steamroller anyone into submission and she’d never thought she had the knack but Rory is starting to wonder if it’s just something that develops over time.
She’s starting to get it.
“Yes, Rory, I’d definitely say you have… something.” Brutus looks up again and he’s definitely amused. A good sign. He could’ve decided to just dismiss her, take her notes and hand them over and she would’ve watched her story be killed by someone that just wouldn’t do it justice.
Give it the care it needed.
She knew this story, had been researching for months now and it was a teetering house of cards, ready to topple at any moment if not urged along with kit gloves. It could be something great but it needed her.
“I still think this is a little… out there for you. What made you start putting this together?”
Rory had a number of pat answers prepared for just that very question but they dry up now, right when she needs them. Mostly because Brutus has flipped open one of the police files she’s gotten a hold of and there is a photo on the top. It’s a mug shot and the guy is staring at the camera looking nothing more than pissed, like it’s all a big inconvenience that he’s just trying to get through.
He’s young, shaggy haired and bares a striking resemblance to someone she used to know and that’s why she dug a little deeper, got interested herself. The story behind the picture though, that’s what caught her imagination and she knew, without a shadow of a doubt that this was her story, the one she’d been made to tell.
“I don’t know,” she answers but something in her face must tell Brutus what he needs to hear because he nods.
000
Sam and Dean Winchester.
Rory reads while in the back of the cab that’s taking her to the rental car place. She has bits and pieces of their lives laid out for her in black and white but what she wonders about are the gaps, the spaces in between. There is a lot to their story that isn’t recorded. Born in Lawrence, Kansas. Mother died in a house fire when both boys were under five. Father ex-military.
A lot of information that doesn’t really say anything about them
They were currently wanted in connection with a whole list of crimes, Dean on the FBI’s most wanted list and Sam probably set to end up on there before too long. She had a lot of notes that referred to them flippantly as Bonnie and Clyde and knows there is an entire task force with the soul purpose of tracking them down.
Everything seems pretty cut and dried on the surface but what doesn’t make sense, what snagged her attention in the first place was the witness interviews. Everyone who had ever actually met both men swore black and blue that they’d been saved in some way.
The cab driver turns around in his seat and tells her they’ve arrived. Rory thanks him and leaves the cab.
000
People flat-out refuse to talk to her at first.
Eyes shutter and mouths close when she gets around to telling them what she wants. She starts to get the feeling that people want to protect the Winchesters and this only makes her want to push harder, dig deeper.
Andrea Barr tries to evade her just like everyone else at first but Rory digs in, tries to call up the inner Lorelai to get what she wants. When it’s clear she’s not going anywhere until Andrea talks to her, she relents. She tries to tell Rory that she already ran through everything that happened with the FBI but Rory can tell by the way Andrea’s eyes slide away that she’s holding something back.
“My son wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for them,” she finally blurts and Rory remains silent, sensing a story that’s been just wanting to be told.
There always is.
What Andrea tells her is fantastic, a horror story that Rory shouldn’t believe, but does. She gets the feeling that there’s still more Andrea is holding back, but she also knows that what she’s not saying is more personal than anything and so Rory lets it go.
After they talk, Andrea takes her out to the lake behind her house and they both stand on the dock. “How can you stay here after what happened?” Rory asks. Her little tape recorder is switched off and she’s asking for herself, mostly. The woman beside her seems settled in a way that Rory’s never known and in a small way envies.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of anymore,” Andrea says with something wistful and faraway in her eyes.
000
A girl named Kat meets her in a café a week later and smiles as she describes a haunted Asylum and how her and her now ex-boyfriend nearly came to a sticky end. She tells her story with gentle humor and Rory finds herself liking the girl immensely.
“I see what they write about those guys in the paper. I just can’t believe it,” Kat says when they’re leaving. Rory picks up the cheque and Kat lets her with a grin.
“I know what you mean,” Rory agrees.
000
Weeks, cities and small towns, witnesses.
All flash by with Rory only sure of one thing.
She knows less about the Winchester brothers than when she started.
000
Rory watches the taped broadcast over and over again. The bank heist that went wrong and landed Dean Winchester as lead headline across the country and three people dead. Rory watches the aged security guard pushed out the bank’s front doors with a shotgun snugged into his back. Dean Winchester looks up, sees the cameras and there is a single moment of… panic.
Rory at first confuses the expression with fear, but after watching over and over again, she sees something else. The same kind of blind panic that she’s seen when people have realised they are in way over their heads and there’s too much at stake. A kind of how did I get here moment just before the freefall.
That one simple expression doesn’t gel with the Dean Winchester that has been cobbled together by news reports and police files.
She can’t see the calculated, cold sociopath that is cutting a bloody swathe across the country. Instead she sees a man blindsided, pushed into circumstance he wasn’t quite prepared for. She knows she might be guilty of starting to romanticise the Winchesters, but her gut and dozens of otherwise smart, sane people, are telling her that there is something else at play here.
Rory looks around the small motel room she’s holed up in. She’s just outside Lawrence where everything started. She’s planning on taking a tour through the town the next day and she’s preparing for it. Notes and pictures are tacked all over the walls, more spread over the floor and the other bed in the room.
Rory can’t sleep that night at all.
000
Rory is sitting in a booth in a small diner when someone slides in beside her.
Rory startles with a yelp and the pen she was using goes flying across the table, caught by a hand that drifts into her field of vision, attached to someone who has settled into the other side of the four-seater.
“Didn’t mean to scare you,” a voice says by her ear, honey-smooth and with a twang to it. Rory brings her eyes up and around, knowing already who she is going to see.
Dean Winchester is sitting next to her, Sam Winchester opposite. Sam ducks his head and pushes her pen back across the table so it comes to rest by her legal pad. She automatically goes to put her arms down on the pad in some vain attempt to hide what she was writing but Dean moves faster, snagging the pad out from under her elbow and flipping it up in front of his face.
Dean doesn’t say anything else, just makes a considering noise as he peruses the twenty or so pages of notes she’s taken that morning, train of thought stuff that she knows would be hard to decipher by anyone that isn’t her. She looks across at Sam who is watching Dean with a kind of patient consternation and it reminds her so strongly and sharply of Paris Gellar that Rory lets a small, hysterical sounding laugh escape.
Both men turn their attention to her, eyebrows raised.
“Sorry,” she says, although she doesn’t know why she’s apologising. She’s not sure exactly what’s going on and why she hasn’t screamed for help yet either. Curiosity is keeping her frozen in place, lips closed firmly. A waitress glances her way and Rory knows she should signal or something but Dean seems to sense just where her thoughts have turned and he moves so his body blocks her from the rest of the diner.
“Hi,” Dean says brightly and Rory blinks at him.
“Hel-lo,” she says slowly, hands fanning on the tabletop. I’m about to die she thinks, why the hell am I so calm?
“So, we have a bit of a problem,” Dean continues and he sounds so maddeningly amiable that Rory wants to laugh again. She knows she’s about to either be warned off or perhaps disappear altogether. She can see it now.
That Rory. Such a nice girl. How odd to have disappeared off the face of the earth like that.
She’ll be a mystery. There’ll be stories written about her and this thought, above all others, breaks her paralysis. Rory jumps as if goosed before fixing Dean with her best Lorelai glare. Her Great Grandmother had it, her mother had it and dammit all if she isn’t going to use it. Dean blinks and curls backward a little and it’s just the reaction she wants.
“You can’t just show up here,” she says and hopes that her voice doesn’t sound as shrill as she thinks it does. “If you think you can frighten me into dropping my story then you’ve obviously never met a Gilmore.”
Dean puts his hands up, pats the air a few times. He’s looking comically surprised and Rory catches a smirk out of the corner of her eye that is gone by the time she actually looks at Sam. “And you,” she says and Sam’s eyebrows climb. “Don’t think you can just sit there and… loom.”
Sam’s eyebrows climb further still even though Rory would’ve thought it impossible. Seeing him now, alive and in the flesh, she wonders how she ever thought he looked like Dean Forrester. There are definite similarities but the man sitting opposite her as lived rough and it shows in his eyes and the way he holds himself. He doesn’t have any softness to his face and he’s somehow more there, his very presence doing something interesting to her insides.
“I’m leaving now,” Rory says, snatching her notebook out of Dean’s grasp and he’s stunned just enough to let her. “If you try and stop me I will scream my lungs out and you can get a second go at those mugshots.”
Dean seems to hesitate for a moment but an almost imperceptible nod from Sam has him sliding back out of the booth and her way. Rory makes a show of carefully packing her belongings in her shoulder bag and taking a final sip of her coffee before she scoots out and around, not looking back.
Once she reaches her rental car, parked a block down and over, Rory holds onto the car door for a full minute just breathing. She drops her keys twice before she can get them seated in the lock properly and then has to sit behind the wheel for another ten minutes before she’s stopped shaking long enough to trust herself to drive.
“Holy cow,” she breathes and then laughs, all the way back to her motel.
000
“Hey kid, anything exciting happening?”
Rory would never in a million years admit that all she wants is her mother when she gets back to her motel but she calls anyway, only after allowing herself a few good solid hours of work and a shower. Lorelai’s voice is enough to soothe her jangled nerves and she lets her talk about nothing and everything, lying down with the phone cradled between her ear and the motel pillow. She makes acknowledging noises every now and again as she’s told about the latest exploits of Suki’s kids, Lane’s twins and what Luke has done to Taylor to turn him purple.
She knows her mother senses that something is amiss but also doesn’t press because she’s wonderful like that. When Rory finally hangs up and hears a gentle tap at her door, she almost hits redial and demands that Lorelai come and get her.
There’s a curling iron by her bed and Rory hefts it before moving to the door. It may just be the night manager checking in on her but she doubts it. Rory cracks open the door and isn’t particularly surprised to see Sam Winchester standing on the other side, hunched and with his hands in his pockets.
“So, are you here to make sure you ran me out of town?” Rory asks, voice going up an octave at the end of her sentence which betrays her nerves. Her heart feels like it’s going a mile a minute and she wonders vaguely what a stroke feels like because she’s pretty sure she’s having one.
“Not exactly. Mind if I come in for a minute?”
Sam is disarming but Rory’s lived with him and Dean in a way for months now and she’s been able to piece together a kind of picture of the two of them. Sam is the mediator with a sweet face and an aw shucks demeanour and she can imagine him talking his way into even the most hostile environments. She steps back and waves him in, knowing that doing anything else at this point would be pretty useless and if she’s careful, she might just get an interview.
Sam, as he passes her, quirks a brow at her weapon of choice and Rory grimaces and tosses the curling iron onto the table by the door. Sam takes a few minutes to circuit the room, glancing at her notes, touching a few here and there and looking thoughtful. “You’re pretty good at this,” he says and while Rory’s not exactly sure what he means, he doesn’t give her a chance to ask.
“Look, I just wanted to apologise for this morning,” Sam says, turning around and spreading his hands. “If you feel like we were threatening you-”
“You were threatening me,” Rory interrupts and Sam pulls a face and then rubs a hand over the back of his neck.
“Okay, maybe. We’re just not really sure how to deal with… you,” Sam admits.
“Sure,” Rory says, nodding. “I mean I get that, I do. Just… approaching me probably wasn’t the smartest thing to do.”
“Yeah, I know,” Sam says. “It was all we could think of.”
“Just makes me think that I’m getting close to something really interesting and that I’m on the right track.”
“Oh… right,” Sam says.
As they’ve been talking they’ve been moving closer together, enough that Rory could touch Sam if she wanted and that’s what she does. She watches her hand come up and move across with a kind of detached fascination as if she doesn’t have any control over it and when it comes to rest on Sam’s bicep, she feels about as surprised as he looks. A tremor goes through the muscle just under her fingertips.
“I have the worst luck,” Sam huffs and Rory has no idea what that means but his hands are cupping her face, tilting her head up and she goes with it. He hovers for a moment just close enough to her that his breath tickles across her lips and Rory closes the gap, bringing their mouths together.
What on earth are you doing? something yelps inside her, sounding like the horrified voice of her grandmother, but one of Sam’s hands has skirted down to her hip, thumb skimming just under his t-shirt. That voice shuts the hell right up, overridden by something baser that she hardly ever lets out.
“I’m going to wake up in the morning and all my notes and work will be gone,” Rory groans between fervent kisses as Sam walks her backwards towards the bed. She’s not this girl, never been this girl.
Except when she is.
000
Rory wakes up at four in the morning and she’s alone.
She sits up and scrubs a hand over her face. There’s a cup of coffee sitting on the bedside table, still steaming hot and Rory smiles, reaching for it. She leans over and turns the bedside lamp on to chase away the gloom and is surprised to see her notes and clippings still scattered around the room, seemingly undisturbed.
When she gets up though, Rory finds that there has been a little rearranging done and some of her pages have more notes scrawled across them in a looping, masculine hand. A couple of the clippings have been crossed out in red with Not Us written across them and some clippings she’s never seen before have been added.
When Rory circles back to the bed, she finds a page from her legal pad that would have been propped against the coffee cup but fell flat when she picked it up. Rory unfolds it and reads.
Rory,
Sorry to take off but Dean is going to kill me. I was only supposed to be here long enough to talk you out of writing your story but I gotta be honest, I read some of your notes and I like the tale you’re telling.
On your laptop is a list of people you might want to talk to and also a list of people we would really rather you didn’t.
Hope you understand.
My brother is a good guy, one of the best and I think maybe you get that.
Good luck,
Sam W.
Author: kellifer_fic
Rating: PG
Category: SPN/GG (Sam/Rory)
Word Count: 3,225
Spoilers: None
Disclaimer: Don't own, don't sue, no offense, no money.
Her editor, Brutus, is looking at her with a raised eyebrow.
“You’re kidding, right?”
She watches him shuffle through the batch of notes, photographs and files that she’d dropped on his desk for a moment before he looks back up.
“This isn’t political in the slightest,” he says and now he sounds suspicious, like maybe it’s all a joke and he’s just waiting on the punch line.
“I know that-”
“I mean, this is so far outside what you normally do that… I appreciate the research you’ve done but maybe we should give this one to Drake-”
“No!” Rory puts a hand to her mouth, knowing that she’s probably blushing. She didn’t mean to actually yell but she’d seen it in Brutus’ face. He was already reassigning her story to someone else in his mind.
“No?”
“It’s something, right? You’re interested.”
Brutus makes a non-committal noise but Rory knows that that is high enthusiasm. He’s also looking mildly impressed at the way she’s put everything together and she can see it. He’s relenting. She had seen the way her mother could steamroller anyone into submission and she’d never thought she had the knack but Rory is starting to wonder if it’s just something that develops over time.
She’s starting to get it.
“Yes, Rory, I’d definitely say you have… something.” Brutus looks up again and he’s definitely amused. A good sign. He could’ve decided to just dismiss her, take her notes and hand them over and she would’ve watched her story be killed by someone that just wouldn’t do it justice.
Give it the care it needed.
She knew this story, had been researching for months now and it was a teetering house of cards, ready to topple at any moment if not urged along with kit gloves. It could be something great but it needed her.
“I still think this is a little… out there for you. What made you start putting this together?”
Rory had a number of pat answers prepared for just that very question but they dry up now, right when she needs them. Mostly because Brutus has flipped open one of the police files she’s gotten a hold of and there is a photo on the top. It’s a mug shot and the guy is staring at the camera looking nothing more than pissed, like it’s all a big inconvenience that he’s just trying to get through.
He’s young, shaggy haired and bares a striking resemblance to someone she used to know and that’s why she dug a little deeper, got interested herself. The story behind the picture though, that’s what caught her imagination and she knew, without a shadow of a doubt that this was her story, the one she’d been made to tell.
“I don’t know,” she answers but something in her face must tell Brutus what he needs to hear because he nods.
000
Sam and Dean Winchester.
Rory reads while in the back of the cab that’s taking her to the rental car place. She has bits and pieces of their lives laid out for her in black and white but what she wonders about are the gaps, the spaces in between. There is a lot to their story that isn’t recorded. Born in Lawrence, Kansas. Mother died in a house fire when both boys were under five. Father ex-military.
A lot of information that doesn’t really say anything about them
They were currently wanted in connection with a whole list of crimes, Dean on the FBI’s most wanted list and Sam probably set to end up on there before too long. She had a lot of notes that referred to them flippantly as Bonnie and Clyde and knows there is an entire task force with the soul purpose of tracking them down.
Everything seems pretty cut and dried on the surface but what doesn’t make sense, what snagged her attention in the first place was the witness interviews. Everyone who had ever actually met both men swore black and blue that they’d been saved in some way.
The cab driver turns around in his seat and tells her they’ve arrived. Rory thanks him and leaves the cab.
000
People flat-out refuse to talk to her at first.
Eyes shutter and mouths close when she gets around to telling them what she wants. She starts to get the feeling that people want to protect the Winchesters and this only makes her want to push harder, dig deeper.
Andrea Barr tries to evade her just like everyone else at first but Rory digs in, tries to call up the inner Lorelai to get what she wants. When it’s clear she’s not going anywhere until Andrea talks to her, she relents. She tries to tell Rory that she already ran through everything that happened with the FBI but Rory can tell by the way Andrea’s eyes slide away that she’s holding something back.
“My son wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for them,” she finally blurts and Rory remains silent, sensing a story that’s been just wanting to be told.
There always is.
What Andrea tells her is fantastic, a horror story that Rory shouldn’t believe, but does. She gets the feeling that there’s still more Andrea is holding back, but she also knows that what she’s not saying is more personal than anything and so Rory lets it go.
After they talk, Andrea takes her out to the lake behind her house and they both stand on the dock. “How can you stay here after what happened?” Rory asks. Her little tape recorder is switched off and she’s asking for herself, mostly. The woman beside her seems settled in a way that Rory’s never known and in a small way envies.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of anymore,” Andrea says with something wistful and faraway in her eyes.
000
A girl named Kat meets her in a café a week later and smiles as she describes a haunted Asylum and how her and her now ex-boyfriend nearly came to a sticky end. She tells her story with gentle humor and Rory finds herself liking the girl immensely.
“I see what they write about those guys in the paper. I just can’t believe it,” Kat says when they’re leaving. Rory picks up the cheque and Kat lets her with a grin.
“I know what you mean,” Rory agrees.
000
Weeks, cities and small towns, witnesses.
All flash by with Rory only sure of one thing.
She knows less about the Winchester brothers than when she started.
000
Rory watches the taped broadcast over and over again. The bank heist that went wrong and landed Dean Winchester as lead headline across the country and three people dead. Rory watches the aged security guard pushed out the bank’s front doors with a shotgun snugged into his back. Dean Winchester looks up, sees the cameras and there is a single moment of… panic.
Rory at first confuses the expression with fear, but after watching over and over again, she sees something else. The same kind of blind panic that she’s seen when people have realised they are in way over their heads and there’s too much at stake. A kind of how did I get here moment just before the freefall.
That one simple expression doesn’t gel with the Dean Winchester that has been cobbled together by news reports and police files.
She can’t see the calculated, cold sociopath that is cutting a bloody swathe across the country. Instead she sees a man blindsided, pushed into circumstance he wasn’t quite prepared for. She knows she might be guilty of starting to romanticise the Winchesters, but her gut and dozens of otherwise smart, sane people, are telling her that there is something else at play here.
Rory looks around the small motel room she’s holed up in. She’s just outside Lawrence where everything started. She’s planning on taking a tour through the town the next day and she’s preparing for it. Notes and pictures are tacked all over the walls, more spread over the floor and the other bed in the room.
Rory can’t sleep that night at all.
000
Rory is sitting in a booth in a small diner when someone slides in beside her.
Rory startles with a yelp and the pen she was using goes flying across the table, caught by a hand that drifts into her field of vision, attached to someone who has settled into the other side of the four-seater.
“Didn’t mean to scare you,” a voice says by her ear, honey-smooth and with a twang to it. Rory brings her eyes up and around, knowing already who she is going to see.
Dean Winchester is sitting next to her, Sam Winchester opposite. Sam ducks his head and pushes her pen back across the table so it comes to rest by her legal pad. She automatically goes to put her arms down on the pad in some vain attempt to hide what she was writing but Dean moves faster, snagging the pad out from under her elbow and flipping it up in front of his face.
Dean doesn’t say anything else, just makes a considering noise as he peruses the twenty or so pages of notes she’s taken that morning, train of thought stuff that she knows would be hard to decipher by anyone that isn’t her. She looks across at Sam who is watching Dean with a kind of patient consternation and it reminds her so strongly and sharply of Paris Gellar that Rory lets a small, hysterical sounding laugh escape.
Both men turn their attention to her, eyebrows raised.
“Sorry,” she says, although she doesn’t know why she’s apologising. She’s not sure exactly what’s going on and why she hasn’t screamed for help yet either. Curiosity is keeping her frozen in place, lips closed firmly. A waitress glances her way and Rory knows she should signal or something but Dean seems to sense just where her thoughts have turned and he moves so his body blocks her from the rest of the diner.
“Hi,” Dean says brightly and Rory blinks at him.
“Hel-lo,” she says slowly, hands fanning on the tabletop. I’m about to die she thinks, why the hell am I so calm?
“So, we have a bit of a problem,” Dean continues and he sounds so maddeningly amiable that Rory wants to laugh again. She knows she’s about to either be warned off or perhaps disappear altogether. She can see it now.
That Rory. Such a nice girl. How odd to have disappeared off the face of the earth like that.
She’ll be a mystery. There’ll be stories written about her and this thought, above all others, breaks her paralysis. Rory jumps as if goosed before fixing Dean with her best Lorelai glare. Her Great Grandmother had it, her mother had it and dammit all if she isn’t going to use it. Dean blinks and curls backward a little and it’s just the reaction she wants.
“You can’t just show up here,” she says and hopes that her voice doesn’t sound as shrill as she thinks it does. “If you think you can frighten me into dropping my story then you’ve obviously never met a Gilmore.”
Dean puts his hands up, pats the air a few times. He’s looking comically surprised and Rory catches a smirk out of the corner of her eye that is gone by the time she actually looks at Sam. “And you,” she says and Sam’s eyebrows climb. “Don’t think you can just sit there and… loom.”
Sam’s eyebrows climb further still even though Rory would’ve thought it impossible. Seeing him now, alive and in the flesh, she wonders how she ever thought he looked like Dean Forrester. There are definite similarities but the man sitting opposite her as lived rough and it shows in his eyes and the way he holds himself. He doesn’t have any softness to his face and he’s somehow more there, his very presence doing something interesting to her insides.
“I’m leaving now,” Rory says, snatching her notebook out of Dean’s grasp and he’s stunned just enough to let her. “If you try and stop me I will scream my lungs out and you can get a second go at those mugshots.”
Dean seems to hesitate for a moment but an almost imperceptible nod from Sam has him sliding back out of the booth and her way. Rory makes a show of carefully packing her belongings in her shoulder bag and taking a final sip of her coffee before she scoots out and around, not looking back.
Once she reaches her rental car, parked a block down and over, Rory holds onto the car door for a full minute just breathing. She drops her keys twice before she can get them seated in the lock properly and then has to sit behind the wheel for another ten minutes before she’s stopped shaking long enough to trust herself to drive.
“Holy cow,” she breathes and then laughs, all the way back to her motel.
000
“Hey kid, anything exciting happening?”
Rory would never in a million years admit that all she wants is her mother when she gets back to her motel but she calls anyway, only after allowing herself a few good solid hours of work and a shower. Lorelai’s voice is enough to soothe her jangled nerves and she lets her talk about nothing and everything, lying down with the phone cradled between her ear and the motel pillow. She makes acknowledging noises every now and again as she’s told about the latest exploits of Suki’s kids, Lane’s twins and what Luke has done to Taylor to turn him purple.
She knows her mother senses that something is amiss but also doesn’t press because she’s wonderful like that. When Rory finally hangs up and hears a gentle tap at her door, she almost hits redial and demands that Lorelai come and get her.
There’s a curling iron by her bed and Rory hefts it before moving to the door. It may just be the night manager checking in on her but she doubts it. Rory cracks open the door and isn’t particularly surprised to see Sam Winchester standing on the other side, hunched and with his hands in his pockets.
“So, are you here to make sure you ran me out of town?” Rory asks, voice going up an octave at the end of her sentence which betrays her nerves. Her heart feels like it’s going a mile a minute and she wonders vaguely what a stroke feels like because she’s pretty sure she’s having one.
“Not exactly. Mind if I come in for a minute?”
Sam is disarming but Rory’s lived with him and Dean in a way for months now and she’s been able to piece together a kind of picture of the two of them. Sam is the mediator with a sweet face and an aw shucks demeanour and she can imagine him talking his way into even the most hostile environments. She steps back and waves him in, knowing that doing anything else at this point would be pretty useless and if she’s careful, she might just get an interview.
Sam, as he passes her, quirks a brow at her weapon of choice and Rory grimaces and tosses the curling iron onto the table by the door. Sam takes a few minutes to circuit the room, glancing at her notes, touching a few here and there and looking thoughtful. “You’re pretty good at this,” he says and while Rory’s not exactly sure what he means, he doesn’t give her a chance to ask.
“Look, I just wanted to apologise for this morning,” Sam says, turning around and spreading his hands. “If you feel like we were threatening you-”
“You were threatening me,” Rory interrupts and Sam pulls a face and then rubs a hand over the back of his neck.
“Okay, maybe. We’re just not really sure how to deal with… you,” Sam admits.
“Sure,” Rory says, nodding. “I mean I get that, I do. Just… approaching me probably wasn’t the smartest thing to do.”
“Yeah, I know,” Sam says. “It was all we could think of.”
“Just makes me think that I’m getting close to something really interesting and that I’m on the right track.”
“Oh… right,” Sam says.
As they’ve been talking they’ve been moving closer together, enough that Rory could touch Sam if she wanted and that’s what she does. She watches her hand come up and move across with a kind of detached fascination as if she doesn’t have any control over it and when it comes to rest on Sam’s bicep, she feels about as surprised as he looks. A tremor goes through the muscle just under her fingertips.
“I have the worst luck,” Sam huffs and Rory has no idea what that means but his hands are cupping her face, tilting her head up and she goes with it. He hovers for a moment just close enough to her that his breath tickles across her lips and Rory closes the gap, bringing their mouths together.
What on earth are you doing? something yelps inside her, sounding like the horrified voice of her grandmother, but one of Sam’s hands has skirted down to her hip, thumb skimming just under his t-shirt. That voice shuts the hell right up, overridden by something baser that she hardly ever lets out.
“I’m going to wake up in the morning and all my notes and work will be gone,” Rory groans between fervent kisses as Sam walks her backwards towards the bed. She’s not this girl, never been this girl.
Except when she is.
000
Rory wakes up at four in the morning and she’s alone.
She sits up and scrubs a hand over her face. There’s a cup of coffee sitting on the bedside table, still steaming hot and Rory smiles, reaching for it. She leans over and turns the bedside lamp on to chase away the gloom and is surprised to see her notes and clippings still scattered around the room, seemingly undisturbed.
When she gets up though, Rory finds that there has been a little rearranging done and some of her pages have more notes scrawled across them in a looping, masculine hand. A couple of the clippings have been crossed out in red with Not Us written across them and some clippings she’s never seen before have been added.
When Rory circles back to the bed, she finds a page from her legal pad that would have been propped against the coffee cup but fell flat when she picked it up. Rory unfolds it and reads.
Rory,
Sorry to take off but Dean is going to kill me. I was only supposed to be here long enough to talk you out of writing your story but I gotta be honest, I read some of your notes and I like the tale you’re telling.
On your laptop is a list of people you might want to talk to and also a list of people we would really rather you didn’t.
Hope you understand.
My brother is a good guy, one of the best and I think maybe you get that.
Good luck,
Sam W.