FIC: The Lee 7/10
Title: The Lee 7/10
Author: pdragon76
Rating: R (normal sailor mouth shenanigans and zealous whumpery)
Genre: Het
Characters: Sam, Dean, OFC
Spoilers: Set late Season Two, after WIAWSNB. AU for timeline and some minor canon-jiggery.
Disclaimer: It’s Kripke’s world, we’re all just living in it. *snaps fingers, points*
Summary: Wherever you go, there you are.
A/N: This fic was commissioned for Sweet Charity by the very lovely janglyjewels , who wanted “something angsty that involves Sam and his powers”. Hope this scratches the itch, my dear. Chapters will post as completed. Apologies in advance to any native West Virginians. Beta’d by the feisty, astute
july_july_july and the ever insightful, truly delightful riverbella . Selected snippets hustled and poked and prodded by the brilliant, incessant kimonkey7 . These guys demand that I earn it - and own it - to the best of my debatable ability, every step of the way. Any remaining niggles, wtf’s and humdingers are mine, all mine.
Previous chapter links: Ch1 Ch2 Ch3 Ch4 Ch5 Ch6
Well, I was nearly me, and you were nearly you
The nearly man was nothing
He was never any use
Beaten down by generations
Of generations beaten down
There's nothing I can promise that my conscience will allow.
~ ‘The Nearly Man’, Lightning Seeds
He came toward them, hands clasped behind his back and a wide neighborly smile. Sam might have mistaken him for the security guard his clothes suggested, had it not been for the sigil on the floor and the unmistakable glint of cat's eyes as he passed out of the shadows into the light.
"Hey boys. It's been a while."
Dean's response was succinct. "Sonuvabitch."
Sam flinched away from the discharging weapon in Dean's hands, counted five rounds before the demon swung up a casual arm that sent the gun across the room and Dean clear off his feet. The shells were still chinking off the concrete when the wall stopped his brother’s ungainly slide. Sam heard the air leave his lungs in a rush.
“Now, what kind of a hello is that?” the demon drawled, arms extended in a beseeching fashion as he turned to face Sam. “What? You boys haven’t missed me?” He swung back to look at Dean. “Oh now, wait a minute. I’m bein’ unfair. You boys and your daddy’ve made a career outta missin’ me, haven’t ya?.”
Dean made a base noise, flailed against the juncture of wall and floor like a pinned entomology specimen.
The Yellow-Eyed Demon turned his appraising gaze on Keehan, rubbed his hands together. “And looky here. You boys contracting out?” He toggled his eyebrows, winked conspiratorially. “Business must be good.”
Sam was pretty sure he didn’t need to answer that. He scanned the floor instead, bypassed the fallen .44 and clapped eyes on the shotgun to his left. He dropped to his knees and scrabbled for it, brain firing off an automated call to arms. It was hard to be too surprised when it slid smoothly out of reach before his fingers closed on the barrel.
“Oops,” said the guard.
Sam lurched for the gun again, and it jerked teasingly beyond his scope.
"Oh, come on, Sam. You can do better than that."
Sam bowed his head, let loose a vehement “Fuck!” at the state of play. He abandoned the weapon and rose slowly to his feet.
The demon’s flecked amber eyes roiled and his smile got uglier. “Or, you know, keep playin’ dumb. Your call. At least for now.”
"What the fuck is this shit?" Keehan had clearly decided to split the difference between confusion and outrage. “I didn’t raise that.” He pointed at the guard as though he was an unsolicited package.
Sam was suddenly acutely aware of the depth of his hatred for this guy.
He half-turned, sent a heated recommendation over his shoulder. “Shut up, Keehan.”
"Yeah, take a seat, Spencer." The Yellow-Eyed Demon gave him a smirk and a nod, and Keehan hit the floor on his ass ten feet back, slammed roughly against the wall in the sitting position. “We’ll get to you in a minute.” He tapped the air thoughtfully with a finger while the hunter discovered the relocation was non-negotiable. “Although, technically he’s correct. He didn’t raise me.”
“Then what are you doing here?” Sam shifted as the demon moved, kept the path to Dean obstructed.
“What am I doing here,” the demon repeated ponderously. “You wouldn’t think I needed a reason, would ya? I mean, past the fact you two boys murdered my son and sent my daughter back to Hell…” He tilted a concessionary temple, rubbed at his jaw and grimaced. “Though, I do appreciate whatever poetic thing you were goin’ for there.” A faint smile tugged at his mouth. “And I did get your daddy in the end now, didn’t I?” He turned back to Dean, his face etched with feigned sympathy. “Now that had to hurt. What a short straw you turned out to be.”
Dean had gone still on the floor, and Sam waited for him to hurl something back, but his brother stayed quiet. For a long beat, the demon and Dean held each other’s attention with a terrible intimacy, estranged from the rest of the room.
“I swear to God-” Dean started quietly, his voice shaking, and the Yellow-Eyed Demon whirled away from him with a flash of teeth.
“Ooooh, let’s not drag God into this.” He leaned toward Sam. “I think it’s safe to say it’s a little late for that.”
The guard straightened his bullet-riddled shirt. “But I digress. I wasn’t gonna drop in on ya again before the main event, but you’ve got yourself in the sticky with some questionable company and to be honest?” He sucked in a breath through his teeth, shook his head. “You’ve had clue after clue, and you’re not really rising to the occasion in the ways that I’d hoped. But who knows, maybe you just need another prod."
Dean collapsed up the face of the wall as if the gravity in the room had been violently reversed. He made a strangled sound, clawed ineffectually at the plaster. It wasn’t until his face darkened and the vessels in his neck bloomed like ominous vines that Sam realized what was happening.
He pivoted back towards the demon. "Stop it."
A creeping, wry smile twisted the guard’s features. "Or you'll what? Come on, Sammy! It’s the home stretch, kid. Last leg of the race. Time to pull out the stops.”
Dean groped wildly at his throat, wheezed.
“Let him go!” Sam shouted.
The demon’s brow creased earnestly. “I’m not gonna have to cut him, am I? Turned out a tad messy last time, and Daddy’s a little busy right now to come save the day.”
No cogent thought went into what happened next. It was about as voluntary as the spasm that wracked Dean as he crossed the threshold from choking to choked.
“Stop it!”
Something detonated deep inside him, an explosion of blind panic that sent forth a tsunami of adrenaline too intense to be reined. The point blades on some internal track flicked, and the Yellow Eyed Demon went sailing clean across the room.
Dean fell, smacked to the deck like a sack of potatoes, and Spencer started screaming.
“I knew it!” Keehan sounded like guy lines snapping, things coming apart. “I knew it, you goddamn freak!”
*****************************************************************
His hands wouldn’t work, wouldn’t grip the barrel of the pen or make the words form on the page.
“What are you doing?” Beth’s eyes darted from the darkened road to the paper in Sam’s lap and back again. “What are you writing?”
Sam wasn’t sure you could call it that. The scrawl was barely legible to his own eyes, tremulous and clumsy like a child’s. But it didn’t matter, because it was all useless. Everything he could remember, everything he was committing to the page was the flotsam and jetsam of a half-realized scene; there was nothing complete or whole. His mind kept bouncing back to the blood pooling on tiles, spattered aprons and dead open eyes, and he needed it elsewhere. He needed it on the things that could identify, direct and substantiate. In the end he gave up, fisted one trembling hand on the paper in his lap and the other at his lips.
“Sam, will you please talk to me?”
He was scaring her. He could hear it in her voice. Sam chewed on the short stub of his thumbnail while Beth ate up the miles between them and Dean. He watched the headlights split the inky forest, splash off the trunks and beat back a narrow strip of night along the weaving line of Clear Creek Crossing. His internal wheels were in free spin, axel shot to hell, and he couldn’t slow himself down long enough to see where he might get some traction on the situation, regain control.
Time to pull out the stops.
“It’s okay,” he said. He needed her to believe that almost as much as he wanted it to be true. “Everything’s okay.”
*****************************************************************
Sam didn’t have to say a word. Dean was sprawled on the couch, bathed in the paltry glow of the television, but he glanced up when Sam hit the light on the way through the door.
One look, and he pushed up into a sit, groped for his crutches. “Whoa. What happened?”
Sam opened his mouth, shut it again when a grip of abject despair threatened his composure. Dean was struggling clumsily upright, his urgency outweighing all bodily protest, and his face was already set with well-worn lines of worry. But it was all for nothing. Nothing Dean did was going to make any difference, because it didn’t matter how hard they fought or far they ran or how disappeared they got.
You couldn’t run from your own shadow.
Beth’s fingers closed around his arm, and she tugged him toward the kitchen table. “He collapsed out at the farm. Like, fell right over collapsed.”
Dean’s razor gaze whiplashed between the two of them, and then his face clouded in comprehension.
“You gotta be kidding me,” he said darkly. “Now? This happens now?” He hobbled the distance between them, and Sam held out the crinkled paper in silent response.
Dean took it and his lips pulled back at Sam’s penmanship. His mouth moved as he tried to decipher it, and his head began to shake slowly from side to side.
When he looked back up, his face was pitted with his deepening concern. And Sam must have looked as bad as he felt, because Dean’s jaw got tight and his eyes got hard, and all trace of apprehension left him.
“Alright, sit down.” He shuffled back so Beth and Sam could pass to the kitchen table. “Lemme grab a pen.”
Beth sat Sam down while Dean found a ballpoint and traded out the crutches for his wheelchair. The light in the kitchen wasn’t especially bright, but the reflection off the smooth tabletop was bordering on excruciating. Sam averted his eyes, brought up a hand as visor.
“I’ll get you some aspirin,” Beth decided, squeezing his shoulder.
Dean pointed her down the hall. “Aspirin won’t cut it, grab the stuff next to my bed.”
He glided back to the table, slapped the paper and the pen onto the laminate and lowered his voice in Beth’s absence. “What does she know? What did you tell her?”
“Nothing,” Sam managed, his voice a plough through gravel. “But she was right there.”
“Crap.”
“Uh-huh.” Sam leaned forward and put his head in his hands. He’d almost forgotten how painful the visions were, and it wasn’t just the joy of the meat cleaver headache. He was out of the car, but he still felt motion-sick, like the room was gradually pitching on an axis. The blood throbbed at his temples, and that familiar icy skewer was being its subtle self behind his eyes. In the bathroom down the hall, he was acutely aware of the faucet going on, Beth filling a glass.
“You gonna hurl?” Dean was ever the blunt medic. “Go do it now before you take those pills.”
Sam shook his head carefully, so as not to make a liar of himself.
“Here.” Beth was back, squatting beside him and tugging his wrist away from his face. He took the glass of water, and she dropped a pill into his hand. “If that doesn’t help, nothing’s going to.” She straightened, crossed her arms. “Now which one of you guys is going to tell me what’s going on.”
Sam studied the floor between his sneakers, and Dean doodled on the page in front of him. When it became clear that neither of them intended on answering, she hazarded a guess.
“Was that a flashback or something?”
Dean sniffed. “Or something, yeah. Sam, whatever else you got, we need to get it down.”
Sam straightened, placed the glass on the table. “I know.” He angled a careful squint Beth’s way. “I’ll explain everything, but we need a couple of minutes here.”
“No,” she said curtly. “I’m staying. You’re going to explain everything, right? So I’ll wait.”
Dean tilted back his face and appealed to the ceiling as though her very existence exhausted him. He sighed large. “Fine. Stay. Sam?”
Sam let it spill, everything he could remember. He worked his way through the sharp blasts of concentrated detail until his recall got sluggish. He had a fair bit of clarity on the guy in the baseball cap, but not a lot on his facial features beyond the graying beard. Granted, it hadn’t helped that he’d been face-planted at a table in a spreading pool of his own blood.
Dean interrupted with Bobby’s name on his lips but Sam shut him down before he got it out.
“No. It wasn’t Bobby.”
Dean slumped in relief. “You sure?”
Sam shook his head dismissively. “It wasn’t him. This guy was…” he pouted, held out his arms to indicate the man’s hulking frame, “…bigger.”
“Good.” Dean added the information to the page.
After that, the sharpness tapered off, left Sam with a bunch of heavy blurred Rorschachs that slowed his tongue and defied description. When he risked a glance at Beth she was blinking down at Dean’s notes, and he could tell by the expression on her face she couldn’t see what kind of explanation was going to make sense. Some of the detail had been fairly…graphic, and Sam figured they’d be lucky if she didn’t bolt before he had a chance to explain - even luckier if she didn’t hightail it after. But apparently, her curiosity was sufficiently piqued to stall her flight. She kept her mouth shut and waited.
Dean took the opportunity to review what they had, and when Sam stayed silent, he started to fine-tune.
"What’s this ‘yellow rays’? What does that mean? Is that sun? Are you inside or out?"
"No, inside. Inside, I think."
"Inside where?" Dean shot back, and it sounded like a stupid question, because if Sam knew he would have said already. But this was how interrogation worked. When you hit a wall, you circled and struck from a different angle. Altered the context, but kept your question the same. It was a matter of finding the right leverage point with the end of the crowbar, and Sam knew what his brother was doing, knew it sometimes worked.
He dropped his elbows to his knees and dipped his chin. He squeezed his eyes shut and groped for specifics in the lingering still-frames, but beyond what he’d already relayed his mind was shut fast like a clam. He made a frustrated noise, shook his head. “Yeah, no. I dunno. I can’t see it.”
When he blinked his eyes open, Beth’s sneakers had moved into his line of sight. The distraction of her fingers tucking a lock of wayward hair behind his ear stalled him, and Sam didn’t know if it was relief or guilt that made him want to vomit at the undeserved intimacy of the gesture.
“Maybe you need to give him a minute,” she suggested, and Sam could hear she was less than impressed with Dean’s beside manner.
“He's fine." Dean's assertion drowned out Sam's own.
“He can't think.”
"Yeah, well, unfortunately, he has to, so…” Dean threw down his pen, brought his hand to his face and squeezed the bridge of his nose. "Can we save the Dr. Quinn till I’ve got this stuff down?"
"Your brother just had a seizure." Beth was clearly disgusted, but Dean's smile was both unapologetic and condescending.
"Yeah, that wasn't a seizure. And trust me, sweetheart, he's still gonna feel like crap when we're done. You can knock yourself out playing doctors and nurses then."
"Dean," Sam reprimanded wearily.
"The longer we do this,” Dean’s gaze lingered coldly on Beth before he dropped his eyes to Sam, "the less you're gonna remember. And trust me, when the pill kicks in, that shit is not gonna boost your recall."
"I’m trying.”
Dean was right. The vision was already blurring and receding into the fog of his mind like a departing dream, and they didn't have nearly enough detail. The inside of his head was still clanging like the rehearsal hall for a badly trained band, and Beth was still fussing in his periphery, her concern as blatant and obtrusive as a fourth person. "It was definitely a diner. There were tables, long counter. Bunch of chrome and wood."
“Yeah, I got all that.” Dean’s pen tapped impatiently on the page.
“There was a jukebox," Sam remembered out of the blue. "There was a song."
"You recognize it?"
"I don't know."
"Tune? Can you hum it?"
Sam hesitated, then launched into a self-conscious attempt. A few bars in, Dean rolled his eyes in exasperation.
"Never mind. I forgot you're tone deaf."
"Something about someone leaving somebody, or something?" Sam expounded vaguely, squinting, and Dean raised his eyebrows at his notebook as he wrote it down.
"Well, that’s helpful. Anything else?"
Sam shook his head, defeated. “I don’t think so.”
"Menu? Poster? Sign on the door?"
Sam's brow furrowed and he shook his head a second time. "If there was, I can't see it."
Dean was quiet while he reviewed the page again. "I dunno, Sammy, this could be anywhere."
“I know.” Sam glanced up into Beth's face, and saw her patience was being tested far beyond her usual tolerance. He stabbed at the back of his teeth with his tongue, sighed. “Okay. Dean, can you give us a minute?"
Dean loitered, reluctant, and Sam understood his hesitancy. There was every possibility Beth was about to freak out, run to Gwen and the police and God knew who else. If she was smart, she’d be out the door before he finished speaking, and Sam knew she wasn’t a dumb woman. But the damage was done. She'd seen and heard enough. Left to draw her own conclusions, Beth was almost guaranteed to do more damage to their current situation. That being said, he had to admit, involuntary detention in a mental institution was sure sounding kinda cosy at this point. Not to mention warranted.
"Dean, I have to. Please.”
His brother slapped a hand on the arched wheel of his chair, jerked roughly back from the table, and whirled for the hallway. “Keep it simple,” he said as he left.
Beth watched him depart with a frown, then turned to Sam, eyebrows raised. "So?”
“You should probably sit down."
Beth didn’t move, defiant in the face of her as yet unidentified dread. "I'll stand, thanks."
Sam took Dean’s advice, kept it simple. He told her about the headaches and the visions, how they sometimes helped to save someone’s life, and how they sometimes didn’t. He was judicious about the details he shared, kept out the stuff about demons and the part he might play in whatever plans they had. He justified the omission on the grounds that she needed to be able to sleep at night, and Sam wanted to be able to live with himself when he and Dean blew town. And at the end of the day, it still wasn’t a lie. They really didn't know how it was possible, or why it was happening to him. Just that it did, and if they moved fast enough, the information was sometimes useful.
"This hasn't happened in a really long time," he added in closing. “I honestly thought it might have stopped for good. I hoped.”
Beth had been absolutely silent while he spoke, the increasing lift of her eyebrows the only indicator Sam’d had to work with. But now she was blinking, looking around the room expectantly.
“You alright?” Sam prompted, when she didn’t say anything. He started to rise to his feet.
“Hang on.” She stopped him with a lifted finger, and Sam obediently sat back down. “I’m just waiting for Ashton Kutcher to leap out. I thought he only ‘Punk’d’ celebrities, but this is far too elaborate for Candid Camera.”
Sam leaned forward, elbows resting on his knees, and rubbed his hands together absently while he waited for her to realize this was no joke.
“You’re shitting me, right?”
Sam shook his head reluctantly. “No.”
Beth dialed it up, just about shouted. “You have got to be fucking shitting me. Do I look like an idiot to you?”
Sam grimaced, got to his feet. “No,” he said emphatically. “I don’t think you’re an idiot. I know how crazy this sounds-”
“Ha! You do, do you?” Beth looked around for her backpack, headed for where it sat beside the door. “Because I don’t think you know how crazy you sound. Being the crazy person, I don’t think you’re in any position to be assessing the level of crazy.” She yanked her keys out of the backpack. “Because of the crazy,” she added, and reached for the door handle.
“Beth, you know what you saw on that trail. Two days ago you would have said I was outta my mind for telling you ghosts were real.” Sam started toward her. It gave her pause for a long beat, hand on the door and her back to him, and Sam could almost hear the argument playing out in her head.
If you’re smart, you’ll leave.
He hated this enough when it was someone he hadn’t come to care about - the moment of reveal, the fear and distrust that people lashed out with when their frameworks were crumbling before their eyes. He hated being that messenger, delivering people out of the comfort of their daily lives. Hated that he, especially, might deserve every ounce of the suspicion and anger they served back.
“I want you to stay away from me,” Beth told him.
Sam blinked. “Okay.”
She pulled the door closed behind her as she left.
Sam ran both hands through his hair. “Fuck!”
He paced for a moment, then remembered he couldn’t let her go. Not yet. “Shit.” He jammed his fingers into his pocket, fished out his cell.
“She rabbit?” Dean called from down the hall.
“Yes.” Sam snatched up the pen and paper from the table, headed for the door. “I’ll be back in a sec.”
“Let her go, Sammy.”
“I am. I will. Just…hang on.”
When Beth saw him coming down the porch stairs, she got to work frantically winding up her window. Sam had to stick his arm in to stop it closing. Beth shrieked at the intrusion and kept hauling on the crank handle until the glass trapped him there, pinched his forearm to the frame.
“Ow. Beth, calm down. I just need to give you two numbers.”
She wrenched the keys out of the ignition and jabbed at his trapped hand with the sharpest of the metal prongs. “Get. Out.”
“I can’t. You have my arm pinned.” He pulled on it, but it was jammed fast. On the other side of the glass, the assault on his hand was turning brutal. “Jesus. Ow. Will you quit stabbing me a second?”
Beth dropped the keys into her lap and devoted both hands to the crank handle. The mechanism squeaked and the top of the window bit further into his arm. Sam bent so she could see his face through the glass.
“Okay, that’s actually starting to hurt.”
“Good.” Beth renewed her efforts on the handle, and Sam thumped the roof of the car and bit the corner of his lip.
“Christ, will you cut that out?”
There was a sharp snapping sound, and Beth let out a yelp as the entire handle came loose in her grip. The window dropped down an inch, and there was a short helter-skelter of cogs failing to catch. It ended with a ping! and then the whole pane of glass dropped down inside the door with a crash.
Beth froze, caught on open ground, with nothing between her and Sam. She made a frantic noise and tossed the broken handle aside, scrabbled for the keys in her lap.
Sam held up his cell and the paper. “I’m not trying to stop you. You wanna go, that’s fine. I just need you to have these numbers.” He slapped the paper on the top of her car and started to transcribe the digits. Beneath him, the car sputtered and the engine turned over.
“Damn it, Beth, just wait!”
He scrawled out the second number, ripped the section from the page, and thrust it in the window.
“I’m sorry, but I told you I’d make sure you weren’t alone. These people are good people, and they know what they’re talking about. If you need help, they can get it to you. But if you fuck around with these numbers, the people on the other end of them will fillet me. So if you use them, you better make sure you have a reason.”
Beth made no move to take the paper. She dropped the car into gear, and Sam had to toss the numbers into her lap so he wouldn’t be left standing with them beside the empty parking space.
“I’m sorry,” he said again, and then she was gone, tires spitting gravel on the curve into the trees.
Dean was waiting when he came back into the cabin. “She’s gonna call the cops.”
Sam shook his head. “No. She’s not gonna do that.” He punched in Ellen’s number, paused. “Get on your cell, call Bobby and tell him he’s gonna get a call. Tell him not to lie to her, but she can’t know about the demons.”
Dean’s face pinched. “You gave her Bobby’s number?”
Sam nodded. “Ellen’s, too.”
“What the fuck? Are you calling Ellen? You can’t call Ellen, man. Keehan’s still MIA, and she thinks we’re in Vermont.”
“Yeah, well, I think we’re gonna have to come clean. We might need Ash to track down this diner.”
Dean raked a hand down his face. “Crap. This is not good. And I don’t just mean for us. I think we should leave Ellen out of this. Her name gets tangled up with us and Keehan, she’s gonna have a world of trouble on her doorstep.”
Sam lost his temper. “Dean, this is all coming to a head. That son of a bitch told us it was all coming to a head. Keehan and his vigilante buddies are gonna be the least of her troubles if we don’t figure out what the fuck is going on with these visions and that yellow-eyed prick.”
Sam’s outburst bounced off Dean like he hadn’t raised the volume at all. “I’m just sayin’-”
“Well, don’t. Can you please just get on the phone to Bobby before Beth does.”
“Dude, if she’s calling anyone, it’s the cops. Possibly the nuthouse.”
Sam took a deep breath, exhaled sharply. He needed to get himself under control - couldn’t afford to be anything other than calm. He punched the call button, brought the phone to his ear. “No, she won’t.”
“How do you know?”
“Because one, she’s about the nosiest person I’ve ever met, and two, she slept with me. She’s gonna call Bobby and Ellen and cross-reference. She doesn’t want me to be lying.”
Dean’s face crumpled in disgusted disbelief. “Because she slept with you? Why, because you’re that good?” His face blanked suddenly. “Don’t answer that.”
Sam hooked the phone between his shoulder and his ear, folded his arms while he waited for Ellen to pick up. “Because nobody likes to be wrong, Dean.”
*****************************************************************
There were over a thousand food-related businesses in the Raleigh County area, and when Sam widened the pool to encompass the rest of West Virginia, the figure blew out to two hundred and sixty thousand. Sam stared at the bullet points Dean had scrawled on the legal pad and tried to think of a way to narrow the search criteria, but nothing was sufficiently concrete to refine an electronic scout. He threw the pad on to the coffee table beside the laptop and collapsed back against the couch cushions, squeezed shut his eyes and willed himself to remember something more useful than decor. He had a terrible, terrible feeling they weren't even looking in the right state.
“This is useless. We’re definitely gonna need Ash.”
Dean stamped the carpet with his crutches and pulled himself out of the armchair with a wince. “Well, I dunno about you, but I’m not exactly looking forward to that visit. We lied to Ellen, so neither of us are gonna have testicles when she’s through…”
Sam looked at his watch. “I thought she might have called by now.”
“Beth or Ellen?”
Sam’s eyebrows hiked up. “I dunno. Both. Either.”
Dean checked his phone. “Nothin’ from Bobby.” He shook his head. “I know she’s got you by the balls, man, but that chick makes me nervous. We end up with cops at the door at 2 a.m., I’m gonna be dancin’ the I-told-you-so all the way to the clink. We should really think about takin’ off. Like tonight.”
“She’s not gonna call the cops.” Maybe Sam should have been nervous, but he wasn’t. They spent so much of their lives anticipating the ways in which people might obstruct them - both intentionally and incidentally - it felt odd and simple and hopeful, to extend a faith and trust it would be upheld. Like a calculated risk he ached to take, closing the catch on an untested safety line. “God, I wish I could remember something useful.”
Dean shrugged as far as the crutches allowed. “Win some, you lose some. Nothing we can do about it right now. What were you doin’ out at the La Butte place, anyway?”
“I was looking for something to connect La Butte to Pierres. Wendy’s friend, Natasha, she said Henry was having an affair.”
“She thought or he was?”
“She said she confronted him.”
“And?”
“And he denied it. Beth found Wendy La Butte’s journal. I figured we check the entries for around the time Marie disappeared, maybe we can see if Henry met her.”
Dean rocked his weight from one foot to the other, hopped it back to his right in a hurry when his left leg clearly objected. “So, what? He has an affair back in Canton, the La Buttes move, she shows up in town, he kills her?”
Sam pouted. “I dunno, it seems the likeliest scenario. I think he might have dumped the body on that trail.”
“Okay, so where’s this journal?”
Sam frowned, blinked at the coffee table, and then closed his eyes and sighed. “Crap.”
“Beth’s car?”
“Yeah.”
“Nice.” Dean gave him a thin smile. “We are not exactly outstanding in our field tonight.”
“Nope.” Sam shook his head wearily against the couch headrest. “We are very much indoors.”
Dean gazed vacantly in the direction of the kitchen, his plaster cast knocking distractedly against the frame of his left crutch. He screwed up his nose, shook his head. “Sammy, we should blow this case, man. Fuck it. We gotta leave.”
“Dean, this ghost has a history of violence. It’s only a matter of time before someone else gets hurt. Killed, even.”
“They’ve all got a history of violence, dumbass,” Dean snapped. “Right around the country, all day long, the undead are fucking people’s shit up, Sam. We get to the ones we can.”
“And we’re right here.” Sam motioned enthusiastically to the carpet near his feet. “We can get to this one.”
“You’re having visions, and when you have visions, sulfur starts showin’ up.” Dean’s face brooked no argument. “We need to leave.”
Sam crossed his palms on his forehead in frustration. “Dean, I think you need to start entertaining the possibility that no one’s coming after us.”
“No one’s-” Dean snorted a laugh, like Sam might have gone insane. “Are you kidding me? Were you not with me in Evansville? I thought you were with me. In the basement. With the fuckin’ Yellow-Eyed-Demon.”
Sam closed his eyes, spaced the words with care. “He wasn’t there to kill us, Dean. If he’d wanted either of us dead, we’d be on the floor of that basement right now with-” he caught his lips in his teeth, shut himself up. He proceeded slowly. “He was there to make sure I got out alive. He’s waiting.”
The concept shut Dean’s mouth with an audible clack. He stared blankly, and Sam let the pregnant pause play to its natural conclusion, equally reluctant to explore the idea further.
Car tires crackled in the drive, drew both their attention to the door.
Dean made his I-told-you-so face, lips pressed together. “Well, here comes the cavalry.”
Sam moved to the window. “Let me handle it.”
Dean wiggled his crutches. “Yeah, well, your plan better involve somethin’ other than leggin’ it.”
Sam moved the curtain aside, and the porch light caught the metallic blue of the coupe’s front quarter panel as Beth swung in behind the Impala. When she killed the headlights, Sam could see she was alone. He’d have smiled, if he thought there was anything to be pleased about other than the fact she was back.
“It’s Beth,” he said, crossing to the door. He punched a finger back at Dean. “She’s gonna be upset. Be nice. Don’t be a dick.”
*****************************************************************
"I'm having a psychotic break of some kind," Beth decided, as she sank into the chair opposite Sam. She nodded, as if the general absurdity was slowly falling into place under the umbrella of this assumption. She looked up, eyes wide. "This is because of California. I've heard about this kind of thing happening. I'm probably in a hospital room right now, chewing on a hat." Her brow knitted as she gnawed on her thumbnail, and then she looked up earnestly. “But your friend Bobby is very nice.”
“Yeah, he is.” Sam nodded, in full agreement. “He’s a solid guy. And you’re not…” he frowned at the euphemism, “…chewing on a hat. You’re perfectly sane. The situation’s a little nuts, but you’re okay.”
Beth nodded vaguely. She stared at a space near Sam's collar for a long time. "Maybe you guys are chewing the hat. Somebody here has definitely flipped their lid. We can't all be sane and still having this conversation, right?" When Sam didn't answer, Beth shifted her gaze up to meet his. "Right?"
"We’re not crazy.” Sam had spent the better part of the last year and a half wishing he was, but these days he was more or less resigned to his relative sanity. He wasn’t going to wake up in a relieved sweat in any asylum, and he’d found ways to be okay with that. Most days.
“I’m supposed to tell you to call Ellen.” She looked at Dean. “She said you boys were as bad as your daddy, and then she swore a lot. She’s not very happy with you.”
Sam and Dean exchanged remorseful, God-fearing looks.
“No,” Dean conceded quietly, eyes on the table. “I can’t imagine she is.”
“She was worried,” Beth told Dean. “She asked a lot of questions about your accident, where the fractures were, how bad.” She grimaced. “She’s going to break both your damn legs. Also, she wanted to know if a man named Spencer was with you.”
That name coming out of Beth’s mouth was like a sledgehammer to the gut. The wholesale stupidity of thinking he could have kept any of this from bleeding between them was suddenly as clear and apparent as any elephant in a room.
“Who’s Spencer?” Beth was asking.
Dean cleared his throat, rubbed at his mouth.
Sam didn’t know what to tell her. He threw Dean a trapped, beseeching look and his brother sniffed, took the reins.
“He’s another hunter. We ran into him in Evansville on the way here.”
“Where is he now?”
Dean took a deep breath, let it out slowly through his teeth. “Apparently, he’s missing.”
“And you guys were the last to see him?”
Dean pouted noncommittally. “It’s a dangerous job. Shit happens.”
“And you lied to Ellen about where you were after.”
Sam closed his eyes, rubbed at his temple. God, the way that sounded; the way the truth sounded.
“That was just a precaution,” Dean said abruptly, and Sam was glad because he didn’t think he could lie to her directly. “Had nothin’ to do with it. We had a misunderstanding at a bank a while back, and the police’d like to talk to us about it but they’re not gonna like our explanation. So, we get stuck someplace like this, it’s just better if no one knows where we are. Because of the warrant.”
“Oh my God, you robbed a bank?”
Sam winced. “God, no. No. There was a job in a bank. The police shot someone and Dean got the blame. It was all a big mistake.”
“Oh, Jesus.” Beth covered her face with her hands.
“It’s no big deal,” Dean deflected with a shrug. “Nature of the job. We rub up against the cops a lot. Lucky for us, they’re usually as stupid as they look.”
Beth’s responses didn’t vary much from there on in. “Oh, Jesus,” she said, over and over and over again.
*****************************************************************
Dean took the La Butte journal to bed, said he’d try and cover some entries before he went to sleep. Sam stopped by en route to the shower, found him paying the pages the sort of bloodshot, affected eye service that didn’t bode well for retention. For the first time since he’d left the hospital, Sam didn’t need to ask if Dean had remembered his meds.
“Are you actually absorbing any of that?” he asked, indicating the book.
Dean’s chin slid toward Sam but his eyes stayed on the page. “‘On Saturday, I’ll go to the market and see about the other seeds.’” he recited a little drunkenly. “‘Henry has his heart set on the apples from back home, but I’m leaning toward something new. I don’t know why. We’ll just end up discussing it in circles until I grow too tired to care which trees we plant.’” Dean turned the page, blinked his eyes wide at the next entry. “Yeah, this guy sounds like a real sonuvabitch.”
Sam thought about Natasha Susanibar.
You think we don’t know, but we know.
“Well, keep looking. There has to be something in there about Pierres. She couldn’t have been completely clueless.”
“People believe what they wanna believe,” Dean mumbled.
Sam nodded. “Yeah, that doesn’t mean they don’t know better.” He rapped his knuckles on the doorframe. “You good? I’m gonna take a shower and hit the hay.”
“I’m good.” Dean shifted, palmed his side. “Little sore. I dunno why, but my ribs are fuckin’ killin’ me.”
“Uh, yeah, you might recall you broke two of them, and then this morning you were playing house movers on your crutches. With your broken pelvis. Without any painkillers. Which makes you incredibly stupid.”
Dean didn’t really have any argument to contest that, so he nodded irritably instead. “Yeah, yeah. Thanks for the play by play. We get this ghost, we can leave, right?”
“I think we might need to head back to Ellen’s, yeah. See Ash.”
Dean blew out an epic sigh. “Oh, my God. We agree. Finally.” His hand fumbled on the nightstand for his cell. He flipped it open and held it up.
“What are you doing?”
“Recording the moment.” Dean snapped a shot, grinned childishly.
“You’re a jerk.”
“Uh huh.” Dean frowned at the picture. He waggled two fingers, beckoned Sam closer. “Come ‘ere.”
Sam stepped inside the room. “What?”
Dean dragged a fingertip on his own cheek. “That looks worse. You land on your face again?”
Sam raised a self-conscious hand to the bruise, prodded the tender flesh experimentally. “I dunno. I guess.”
Dean slapped his phone shut, returned it to the bedside table. “Quit doin’ that. Stick an arm out or somethin’ next time.”
Sam dipped his chin on a soft laugh. “Sure. My bad.”
“Get some sleep.” Dean took up the journal again, motioned vaguely to the hall and, presumably, Beth. “And I mean some actual sleep.”
“I will.”
In the bathroom, he slipped out of his clothes and set about the delicate science of maintaining a comfortable water temperature. After a brief but colorful discussion with the faucet, he settled for a see-saw between scorching assault and the plumbing’s tepid indifference.
Rivergrove. He remembered now. The last vision had been from Rivergrove, where he’d been infected by the virus and lived to keep that tale squarely between Dean and himself. But that had been months ago now. Long enough for him to have convinced himself they might have stopped for good.
You’ve had clue after clue.
When he shut off the pipes, the bathroom was steamed and foggy, and he was more or less clean. He passed a towel over his chest and gazed at the crack in the mirror until his skin goose-pimpled from his inactivity in the cooling air.
Maybe you just need another prod.
Beth was in his bedroom. She was sitting cross-legged against the headboard, her fingers twirling absently in the hair at her temple. Her eyes were large and unseeing, and she was trapped deep in thought. Sam had given her plenty to think about, and he was vaguely surprised she hadn’t changed her mind and bolted again while he was getting cleaned up.
He had no idea what drastic or subtle alterations this new information had exacted on their relationship. And he was very, very tired. He pulled up halfway across the room and did a double-take back towards the door, thinking he should probably be wearing more than a towel. But all his clothes were in this room, so he faltered and turned back, stood stranded and gripping a handful of the plush flannel at his hip. He rubbed the back of his neck with his free hand.
“I can take the couch, if you…” He trailed off, not certain how that sentence should finish, and not at all sure he wanted to know.
Beth’s fingers stopped in her hair and she looked up. “This is your bed, Sam.”
He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, didn’t say anything.
“Do you want me to sleep on the couch?” Beth asked.
There was a right way and a wrong way to answer that, and Sam wanted to get it right. He wanted to answer whatever way would keep him in the lee of her gaze, where he was just some guy she’d met at the hospital and not some time bomb that might have her name on it.
“You should know we’re going to be leaving very soon. Probably tomorrow.”
Beth’s teeth gripped at the corner of her lip, and she nodded down at the bedspread. He thought for a moment she might cry, but she didn’t.
“I think I knew that,” she said. “What about La Butte?”
“We’ll finish the job. Dean’s going through the journal. I don’t think it’ll take more than twenty-four hours. Then we’ll leave.”
“What about Dean?”
“He’s been in worse shape and sucked it up. We’ll make it work.”
“God,” Beth said at the ceiling, as though she was finally getting a grip on the true nature of their lives, and Sam was desperately sorry she had ever caught a glimpse.
“I need you to know, I never intended you to get caught up in any of this. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”
“I believe you.”
“I just…” Sam stopped on the crest of a violent flood of emotion. He was far too naked and fried to be having this conversation, but he wasn’t sure they’d get a chance again and he needed to get it out. “You are so funny, and kind, and smart, and beautiful.” He was going to cry, and that might have been embarrassing if he was in any frame of mind to give a shit. The next came out a little savagely on the brink of his tears. “And this job is so hard, and you weren’t. Being with you is easy, and it feels good, and that is so far removed from anything I’ve had in my life lately.” He swiped at his face in frustration, took a quivering breath, and tried to pull himself together.
Beth hands were over her mouth, her eyes liquid and shining.
“It was selfish and wrong of me to put you in middle of this, and I’m sorry. I am so sorry for doing this to you, and for leaving like this. But I am not sorry I met you. Maybe I should be, but I can’t be sorry about that.”
She uncurled off the bed and crossed to him, wiping her cheeks where her own tears had spilled.
“I’m not sorry I met you either.” She came onto her toes and pressed her lips against his, a chaste closed-mouth kiss that tasted of resignation and forgiveness. She pulled back far enough to look him in the eye. “I wish you could stick around long enough to see how wrong you are about me.” She kissed him again, sent her tongue along the length of his pursed mouth.
Her fingers tracked up the nape of his neck into his hair, and Sam caved. He gave in to the desperate urge to wrap an arm around her waist and pull her close, bury himself in the warmth of her. Let her questing fingers work his hand loose of the towel at his hip.
He pressed her between cool sheets and heated skin - took his time and got his mouth on every part of her, marked her back with his teeth. When she came he caught the sound against his lips. Hushed her with his tongue.
“I’m sorry.” He kissed her fiercely, thrust against her. “I am so sorry.”
Beth shut him up with a hand against his mouth. “Stop saying that.”
He sucked at her fingers, took them between his lips. Watched her face while he slowed his rhythm and savored the hot wet heat of her along his dick. He catalogued every sweat-stuck strand of hair on her brow, every nuance of her features while he rocked himself slowly to the brink, and Beth grew impatient beneath him. She arched up, chased her hips against his.
“Come on,” she coaxed, and Sam tumbled off the thin ledge of his restraint. He stuttered against her, slammed deep, and came with a groan.
*****************************************************************
Whenever he dreamed of Ava, she was always alive. She was restored safe and sound to her house in Peoria, and Sam couldn’t let her find her fiancé like that. He ran a desperate race through the chameleon halls of her house, and he could never remember behind which door he lay. Couldn’t ever steer her clear.
Somehow, she always got ahead of him. He woke sweaty, breathless and physically spent, mind jangling with her lingering screams.
*****************************************************************
“Maybe you should have a cat scan.” Beth mumbled, when Sam returned from the bathroom and slipped back between the sheets.
He patted the quandary of her tangled locks. “You have sex hair.”
“Yes, I just had sex,” she pointed out blandly, knocking his hand away. “I’m serious. About the scan.”
Sam huffed a laugh. “You think I have a brain tumor?”
“Don’t laugh. There might be a perfectly logical explanation. If a doctor could find out what it is, they might be able to do something about it. Stop it, even.”
“Yeah, I don’t think any doctor’s gonna get rid of this.”
“It might not even be a tumor. It might just be a lesion or something. I don’t know. I know what’s happening to you isn’t normal. Outside of B-grade Travolta movies, anyway.”
“Whatever it is, I don’t think a cat scan’s gonna pick it up.” He pressed himself to the radiator of her side, and she squirmed away from his chilled skin.
“Get away from me. You’re cold.”
“Uh huh.” He burrowed closer, rested his lips against her shoulder. “Hey, what did you mean before, when you said you wished I could stay long enough to find out how wrong I was?”
Beth sniffed sleepily. “You were talking about me like I’m this amazing, nice person. And I’m not. Nobody’s perfect. You get down to brass tacks, everyone’s going to Hell for something.”
Sam scratched at his eyebrow. “I didn’t say you were perfect. You’re also kinda nosey. And you’re rude in the morning. And really fucking abrupt when you’re in a hurry.”
Beth sat up like a shot and punched him in the arm. “Shut up!”
“And prone to fits of violence,” Sam added, grabbing her wrist before she could land a second hit. She twisted in his grip and he snagged her other wrist, held her easily at bay. “Lay down. Before I hurt you and then you cry.”
“Fine.” Beth flopped back to the mattress and Sam released her, laughing. He lifted his arm so she could press against him, and she lay her head on his shoulder and closed her eyes.
“So, spill. What are you going to Hell for?” Sam asked.
Beth blew out a weary breath against his collarbone. “Me? I’m going to Hell for California.”
“Oh, California’s your fault? Then yeah, you should totally go to Hell. Especially for Oakland.”
Beth chuckled. “No. What I did in California. Why I’m back home.”
Sam frowned, his interest piqued. “And what could you possibly have done that was so bad?”
Beth turned her lidded, sated gaze toward his and smiled sadly. “I can’t ever say. That’s the bit of Hell I have to live with, silly.”
Ch 8
Author: pdragon76
Rating: R (normal sailor mouth shenanigans and zealous whumpery)
Genre: Het
Characters: Sam, Dean, OFC
Spoilers: Set late Season Two, after WIAWSNB. AU for timeline and some minor canon-jiggery.
Disclaimer: It’s Kripke’s world, we’re all just living in it. *snaps fingers, points*
Summary: Wherever you go, there you are.
A/N: This fic was commissioned for Sweet Charity by the very lovely janglyjewels , who wanted “something angsty that involves Sam and his powers”. Hope this scratches the itch, my dear. Chapters will post as completed. Apologies in advance to any native West Virginians. Beta’d by the feisty, astute
july_july_july and the ever insightful, truly delightful riverbella . Selected snippets hustled and poked and prodded by the brilliant, incessant kimonkey7 . These guys demand that I earn it - and own it - to the best of my debatable ability, every step of the way. Any remaining niggles, wtf’s and humdingers are mine, all mine.
Previous chapter links: Ch1 Ch2 Ch3 Ch4 Ch5 Ch6
Well, I was nearly me, and you were nearly you
The nearly man was nothing
He was never any use
Beaten down by generations
Of generations beaten down
There's nothing I can promise that my conscience will allow.
~ ‘The Nearly Man’, Lightning Seeds
He came toward them, hands clasped behind his back and a wide neighborly smile. Sam might have mistaken him for the security guard his clothes suggested, had it not been for the sigil on the floor and the unmistakable glint of cat's eyes as he passed out of the shadows into the light.
"Hey boys. It's been a while."
Dean's response was succinct. "Sonuvabitch."
Sam flinched away from the discharging weapon in Dean's hands, counted five rounds before the demon swung up a casual arm that sent the gun across the room and Dean clear off his feet. The shells were still chinking off the concrete when the wall stopped his brother’s ungainly slide. Sam heard the air leave his lungs in a rush.
“Now, what kind of a hello is that?” the demon drawled, arms extended in a beseeching fashion as he turned to face Sam. “What? You boys haven’t missed me?” He swung back to look at Dean. “Oh now, wait a minute. I’m bein’ unfair. You boys and your daddy’ve made a career outta missin’ me, haven’t ya?.”
Dean made a base noise, flailed against the juncture of wall and floor like a pinned entomology specimen.
The Yellow-Eyed Demon turned his appraising gaze on Keehan, rubbed his hands together. “And looky here. You boys contracting out?” He toggled his eyebrows, winked conspiratorially. “Business must be good.”
Sam was pretty sure he didn’t need to answer that. He scanned the floor instead, bypassed the fallen .44 and clapped eyes on the shotgun to his left. He dropped to his knees and scrabbled for it, brain firing off an automated call to arms. It was hard to be too surprised when it slid smoothly out of reach before his fingers closed on the barrel.
“Oops,” said the guard.
Sam lurched for the gun again, and it jerked teasingly beyond his scope.
"Oh, come on, Sam. You can do better than that."
Sam bowed his head, let loose a vehement “Fuck!” at the state of play. He abandoned the weapon and rose slowly to his feet.
The demon’s flecked amber eyes roiled and his smile got uglier. “Or, you know, keep playin’ dumb. Your call. At least for now.”
"What the fuck is this shit?" Keehan had clearly decided to split the difference between confusion and outrage. “I didn’t raise that.” He pointed at the guard as though he was an unsolicited package.
Sam was suddenly acutely aware of the depth of his hatred for this guy.
He half-turned, sent a heated recommendation over his shoulder. “Shut up, Keehan.”
"Yeah, take a seat, Spencer." The Yellow-Eyed Demon gave him a smirk and a nod, and Keehan hit the floor on his ass ten feet back, slammed roughly against the wall in the sitting position. “We’ll get to you in a minute.” He tapped the air thoughtfully with a finger while the hunter discovered the relocation was non-negotiable. “Although, technically he’s correct. He didn’t raise me.”
“Then what are you doing here?” Sam shifted as the demon moved, kept the path to Dean obstructed.
“What am I doing here,” the demon repeated ponderously. “You wouldn’t think I needed a reason, would ya? I mean, past the fact you two boys murdered my son and sent my daughter back to Hell…” He tilted a concessionary temple, rubbed at his jaw and grimaced. “Though, I do appreciate whatever poetic thing you were goin’ for there.” A faint smile tugged at his mouth. “And I did get your daddy in the end now, didn’t I?” He turned back to Dean, his face etched with feigned sympathy. “Now that had to hurt. What a short straw you turned out to be.”
Dean had gone still on the floor, and Sam waited for him to hurl something back, but his brother stayed quiet. For a long beat, the demon and Dean held each other’s attention with a terrible intimacy, estranged from the rest of the room.
“I swear to God-” Dean started quietly, his voice shaking, and the Yellow-Eyed Demon whirled away from him with a flash of teeth.
“Ooooh, let’s not drag God into this.” He leaned toward Sam. “I think it’s safe to say it’s a little late for that.”
The guard straightened his bullet-riddled shirt. “But I digress. I wasn’t gonna drop in on ya again before the main event, but you’ve got yourself in the sticky with some questionable company and to be honest?” He sucked in a breath through his teeth, shook his head. “You’ve had clue after clue, and you’re not really rising to the occasion in the ways that I’d hoped. But who knows, maybe you just need another prod."
Dean collapsed up the face of the wall as if the gravity in the room had been violently reversed. He made a strangled sound, clawed ineffectually at the plaster. It wasn’t until his face darkened and the vessels in his neck bloomed like ominous vines that Sam realized what was happening.
He pivoted back towards the demon. "Stop it."
A creeping, wry smile twisted the guard’s features. "Or you'll what? Come on, Sammy! It’s the home stretch, kid. Last leg of the race. Time to pull out the stops.”
Dean groped wildly at his throat, wheezed.
“Let him go!” Sam shouted.
The demon’s brow creased earnestly. “I’m not gonna have to cut him, am I? Turned out a tad messy last time, and Daddy’s a little busy right now to come save the day.”
No cogent thought went into what happened next. It was about as voluntary as the spasm that wracked Dean as he crossed the threshold from choking to choked.
“Stop it!”
Something detonated deep inside him, an explosion of blind panic that sent forth a tsunami of adrenaline too intense to be reined. The point blades on some internal track flicked, and the Yellow Eyed Demon went sailing clean across the room.
Dean fell, smacked to the deck like a sack of potatoes, and Spencer started screaming.
“I knew it!” Keehan sounded like guy lines snapping, things coming apart. “I knew it, you goddamn freak!”
*****************************************************************
His hands wouldn’t work, wouldn’t grip the barrel of the pen or make the words form on the page.
“What are you doing?” Beth’s eyes darted from the darkened road to the paper in Sam’s lap and back again. “What are you writing?”
Sam wasn’t sure you could call it that. The scrawl was barely legible to his own eyes, tremulous and clumsy like a child’s. But it didn’t matter, because it was all useless. Everything he could remember, everything he was committing to the page was the flotsam and jetsam of a half-realized scene; there was nothing complete or whole. His mind kept bouncing back to the blood pooling on tiles, spattered aprons and dead open eyes, and he needed it elsewhere. He needed it on the things that could identify, direct and substantiate. In the end he gave up, fisted one trembling hand on the paper in his lap and the other at his lips.
“Sam, will you please talk to me?”
He was scaring her. He could hear it in her voice. Sam chewed on the short stub of his thumbnail while Beth ate up the miles between them and Dean. He watched the headlights split the inky forest, splash off the trunks and beat back a narrow strip of night along the weaving line of Clear Creek Crossing. His internal wheels were in free spin, axel shot to hell, and he couldn’t slow himself down long enough to see where he might get some traction on the situation, regain control.
Time to pull out the stops.
“It’s okay,” he said. He needed her to believe that almost as much as he wanted it to be true. “Everything’s okay.”
*****************************************************************
Sam didn’t have to say a word. Dean was sprawled on the couch, bathed in the paltry glow of the television, but he glanced up when Sam hit the light on the way through the door.
One look, and he pushed up into a sit, groped for his crutches. “Whoa. What happened?”
Sam opened his mouth, shut it again when a grip of abject despair threatened his composure. Dean was struggling clumsily upright, his urgency outweighing all bodily protest, and his face was already set with well-worn lines of worry. But it was all for nothing. Nothing Dean did was going to make any difference, because it didn’t matter how hard they fought or far they ran or how disappeared they got.
You couldn’t run from your own shadow.
Beth’s fingers closed around his arm, and she tugged him toward the kitchen table. “He collapsed out at the farm. Like, fell right over collapsed.”
Dean’s razor gaze whiplashed between the two of them, and then his face clouded in comprehension.
“You gotta be kidding me,” he said darkly. “Now? This happens now?” He hobbled the distance between them, and Sam held out the crinkled paper in silent response.
Dean took it and his lips pulled back at Sam’s penmanship. His mouth moved as he tried to decipher it, and his head began to shake slowly from side to side.
When he looked back up, his face was pitted with his deepening concern. And Sam must have looked as bad as he felt, because Dean’s jaw got tight and his eyes got hard, and all trace of apprehension left him.
“Alright, sit down.” He shuffled back so Beth and Sam could pass to the kitchen table. “Lemme grab a pen.”
Beth sat Sam down while Dean found a ballpoint and traded out the crutches for his wheelchair. The light in the kitchen wasn’t especially bright, but the reflection off the smooth tabletop was bordering on excruciating. Sam averted his eyes, brought up a hand as visor.
“I’ll get you some aspirin,” Beth decided, squeezing his shoulder.
Dean pointed her down the hall. “Aspirin won’t cut it, grab the stuff next to my bed.”
He glided back to the table, slapped the paper and the pen onto the laminate and lowered his voice in Beth’s absence. “What does she know? What did you tell her?”
“Nothing,” Sam managed, his voice a plough through gravel. “But she was right there.”
“Crap.”
“Uh-huh.” Sam leaned forward and put his head in his hands. He’d almost forgotten how painful the visions were, and it wasn’t just the joy of the meat cleaver headache. He was out of the car, but he still felt motion-sick, like the room was gradually pitching on an axis. The blood throbbed at his temples, and that familiar icy skewer was being its subtle self behind his eyes. In the bathroom down the hall, he was acutely aware of the faucet going on, Beth filling a glass.
“You gonna hurl?” Dean was ever the blunt medic. “Go do it now before you take those pills.”
Sam shook his head carefully, so as not to make a liar of himself.
“Here.” Beth was back, squatting beside him and tugging his wrist away from his face. He took the glass of water, and she dropped a pill into his hand. “If that doesn’t help, nothing’s going to.” She straightened, crossed her arms. “Now which one of you guys is going to tell me what’s going on.”
Sam studied the floor between his sneakers, and Dean doodled on the page in front of him. When it became clear that neither of them intended on answering, she hazarded a guess.
“Was that a flashback or something?”
Dean sniffed. “Or something, yeah. Sam, whatever else you got, we need to get it down.”
Sam straightened, placed the glass on the table. “I know.” He angled a careful squint Beth’s way. “I’ll explain everything, but we need a couple of minutes here.”
“No,” she said curtly. “I’m staying. You’re going to explain everything, right? So I’ll wait.”
Dean tilted back his face and appealed to the ceiling as though her very existence exhausted him. He sighed large. “Fine. Stay. Sam?”
Sam let it spill, everything he could remember. He worked his way through the sharp blasts of concentrated detail until his recall got sluggish. He had a fair bit of clarity on the guy in the baseball cap, but not a lot on his facial features beyond the graying beard. Granted, it hadn’t helped that he’d been face-planted at a table in a spreading pool of his own blood.
Dean interrupted with Bobby’s name on his lips but Sam shut him down before he got it out.
“No. It wasn’t Bobby.”
Dean slumped in relief. “You sure?”
Sam shook his head dismissively. “It wasn’t him. This guy was…” he pouted, held out his arms to indicate the man’s hulking frame, “…bigger.”
“Good.” Dean added the information to the page.
After that, the sharpness tapered off, left Sam with a bunch of heavy blurred Rorschachs that slowed his tongue and defied description. When he risked a glance at Beth she was blinking down at Dean’s notes, and he could tell by the expression on her face she couldn’t see what kind of explanation was going to make sense. Some of the detail had been fairly…graphic, and Sam figured they’d be lucky if she didn’t bolt before he had a chance to explain - even luckier if she didn’t hightail it after. But apparently, her curiosity was sufficiently piqued to stall her flight. She kept her mouth shut and waited.
Dean took the opportunity to review what they had, and when Sam stayed silent, he started to fine-tune.
"What’s this ‘yellow rays’? What does that mean? Is that sun? Are you inside or out?"
"No, inside. Inside, I think."
"Inside where?" Dean shot back, and it sounded like a stupid question, because if Sam knew he would have said already. But this was how interrogation worked. When you hit a wall, you circled and struck from a different angle. Altered the context, but kept your question the same. It was a matter of finding the right leverage point with the end of the crowbar, and Sam knew what his brother was doing, knew it sometimes worked.
He dropped his elbows to his knees and dipped his chin. He squeezed his eyes shut and groped for specifics in the lingering still-frames, but beyond what he’d already relayed his mind was shut fast like a clam. He made a frustrated noise, shook his head. “Yeah, no. I dunno. I can’t see it.”
When he blinked his eyes open, Beth’s sneakers had moved into his line of sight. The distraction of her fingers tucking a lock of wayward hair behind his ear stalled him, and Sam didn’t know if it was relief or guilt that made him want to vomit at the undeserved intimacy of the gesture.
“Maybe you need to give him a minute,” she suggested, and Sam could hear she was less than impressed with Dean’s beside manner.
“He's fine." Dean's assertion drowned out Sam's own.
“He can't think.”
"Yeah, well, unfortunately, he has to, so…” Dean threw down his pen, brought his hand to his face and squeezed the bridge of his nose. "Can we save the Dr. Quinn till I’ve got this stuff down?"
"Your brother just had a seizure." Beth was clearly disgusted, but Dean's smile was both unapologetic and condescending.
"Yeah, that wasn't a seizure. And trust me, sweetheart, he's still gonna feel like crap when we're done. You can knock yourself out playing doctors and nurses then."
"Dean," Sam reprimanded wearily.
"The longer we do this,” Dean’s gaze lingered coldly on Beth before he dropped his eyes to Sam, "the less you're gonna remember. And trust me, when the pill kicks in, that shit is not gonna boost your recall."
"I’m trying.”
Dean was right. The vision was already blurring and receding into the fog of his mind like a departing dream, and they didn't have nearly enough detail. The inside of his head was still clanging like the rehearsal hall for a badly trained band, and Beth was still fussing in his periphery, her concern as blatant and obtrusive as a fourth person. "It was definitely a diner. There were tables, long counter. Bunch of chrome and wood."
“Yeah, I got all that.” Dean’s pen tapped impatiently on the page.
“There was a jukebox," Sam remembered out of the blue. "There was a song."
"You recognize it?"
"I don't know."
"Tune? Can you hum it?"
Sam hesitated, then launched into a self-conscious attempt. A few bars in, Dean rolled his eyes in exasperation.
"Never mind. I forgot you're tone deaf."
"Something about someone leaving somebody, or something?" Sam expounded vaguely, squinting, and Dean raised his eyebrows at his notebook as he wrote it down.
"Well, that’s helpful. Anything else?"
Sam shook his head, defeated. “I don’t think so.”
"Menu? Poster? Sign on the door?"
Sam's brow furrowed and he shook his head a second time. "If there was, I can't see it."
Dean was quiet while he reviewed the page again. "I dunno, Sammy, this could be anywhere."
“I know.” Sam glanced up into Beth's face, and saw her patience was being tested far beyond her usual tolerance. He stabbed at the back of his teeth with his tongue, sighed. “Okay. Dean, can you give us a minute?"
Dean loitered, reluctant, and Sam understood his hesitancy. There was every possibility Beth was about to freak out, run to Gwen and the police and God knew who else. If she was smart, she’d be out the door before he finished speaking, and Sam knew she wasn’t a dumb woman. But the damage was done. She'd seen and heard enough. Left to draw her own conclusions, Beth was almost guaranteed to do more damage to their current situation. That being said, he had to admit, involuntary detention in a mental institution was sure sounding kinda cosy at this point. Not to mention warranted.
"Dean, I have to. Please.”
His brother slapped a hand on the arched wheel of his chair, jerked roughly back from the table, and whirled for the hallway. “Keep it simple,” he said as he left.
Beth watched him depart with a frown, then turned to Sam, eyebrows raised. "So?”
“You should probably sit down."
Beth didn’t move, defiant in the face of her as yet unidentified dread. "I'll stand, thanks."
Sam took Dean’s advice, kept it simple. He told her about the headaches and the visions, how they sometimes helped to save someone’s life, and how they sometimes didn’t. He was judicious about the details he shared, kept out the stuff about demons and the part he might play in whatever plans they had. He justified the omission on the grounds that she needed to be able to sleep at night, and Sam wanted to be able to live with himself when he and Dean blew town. And at the end of the day, it still wasn’t a lie. They really didn't know how it was possible, or why it was happening to him. Just that it did, and if they moved fast enough, the information was sometimes useful.
"This hasn't happened in a really long time," he added in closing. “I honestly thought it might have stopped for good. I hoped.”
Beth had been absolutely silent while he spoke, the increasing lift of her eyebrows the only indicator Sam’d had to work with. But now she was blinking, looking around the room expectantly.
“You alright?” Sam prompted, when she didn’t say anything. He started to rise to his feet.
“Hang on.” She stopped him with a lifted finger, and Sam obediently sat back down. “I’m just waiting for Ashton Kutcher to leap out. I thought he only ‘Punk’d’ celebrities, but this is far too elaborate for Candid Camera.”
Sam leaned forward, elbows resting on his knees, and rubbed his hands together absently while he waited for her to realize this was no joke.
“You’re shitting me, right?”
Sam shook his head reluctantly. “No.”
Beth dialed it up, just about shouted. “You have got to be fucking shitting me. Do I look like an idiot to you?”
Sam grimaced, got to his feet. “No,” he said emphatically. “I don’t think you’re an idiot. I know how crazy this sounds-”
“Ha! You do, do you?” Beth looked around for her backpack, headed for where it sat beside the door. “Because I don’t think you know how crazy you sound. Being the crazy person, I don’t think you’re in any position to be assessing the level of crazy.” She yanked her keys out of the backpack. “Because of the crazy,” she added, and reached for the door handle.
“Beth, you know what you saw on that trail. Two days ago you would have said I was outta my mind for telling you ghosts were real.” Sam started toward her. It gave her pause for a long beat, hand on the door and her back to him, and Sam could almost hear the argument playing out in her head.
If you’re smart, you’ll leave.
He hated this enough when it was someone he hadn’t come to care about - the moment of reveal, the fear and distrust that people lashed out with when their frameworks were crumbling before their eyes. He hated being that messenger, delivering people out of the comfort of their daily lives. Hated that he, especially, might deserve every ounce of the suspicion and anger they served back.
“I want you to stay away from me,” Beth told him.
Sam blinked. “Okay.”
She pulled the door closed behind her as she left.
Sam ran both hands through his hair. “Fuck!”
He paced for a moment, then remembered he couldn’t let her go. Not yet. “Shit.” He jammed his fingers into his pocket, fished out his cell.
“She rabbit?” Dean called from down the hall.
“Yes.” Sam snatched up the pen and paper from the table, headed for the door. “I’ll be back in a sec.”
“Let her go, Sammy.”
“I am. I will. Just…hang on.”
When Beth saw him coming down the porch stairs, she got to work frantically winding up her window. Sam had to stick his arm in to stop it closing. Beth shrieked at the intrusion and kept hauling on the crank handle until the glass trapped him there, pinched his forearm to the frame.
“Ow. Beth, calm down. I just need to give you two numbers.”
She wrenched the keys out of the ignition and jabbed at his trapped hand with the sharpest of the metal prongs. “Get. Out.”
“I can’t. You have my arm pinned.” He pulled on it, but it was jammed fast. On the other side of the glass, the assault on his hand was turning brutal. “Jesus. Ow. Will you quit stabbing me a second?”
Beth dropped the keys into her lap and devoted both hands to the crank handle. The mechanism squeaked and the top of the window bit further into his arm. Sam bent so she could see his face through the glass.
“Okay, that’s actually starting to hurt.”
“Good.” Beth renewed her efforts on the handle, and Sam thumped the roof of the car and bit the corner of his lip.
“Christ, will you cut that out?”
There was a sharp snapping sound, and Beth let out a yelp as the entire handle came loose in her grip. The window dropped down an inch, and there was a short helter-skelter of cogs failing to catch. It ended with a ping! and then the whole pane of glass dropped down inside the door with a crash.
Beth froze, caught on open ground, with nothing between her and Sam. She made a frantic noise and tossed the broken handle aside, scrabbled for the keys in her lap.
Sam held up his cell and the paper. “I’m not trying to stop you. You wanna go, that’s fine. I just need you to have these numbers.” He slapped the paper on the top of her car and started to transcribe the digits. Beneath him, the car sputtered and the engine turned over.
“Damn it, Beth, just wait!”
He scrawled out the second number, ripped the section from the page, and thrust it in the window.
“I’m sorry, but I told you I’d make sure you weren’t alone. These people are good people, and they know what they’re talking about. If you need help, they can get it to you. But if you fuck around with these numbers, the people on the other end of them will fillet me. So if you use them, you better make sure you have a reason.”
Beth made no move to take the paper. She dropped the car into gear, and Sam had to toss the numbers into her lap so he wouldn’t be left standing with them beside the empty parking space.
“I’m sorry,” he said again, and then she was gone, tires spitting gravel on the curve into the trees.
Dean was waiting when he came back into the cabin. “She’s gonna call the cops.”
Sam shook his head. “No. She’s not gonna do that.” He punched in Ellen’s number, paused. “Get on your cell, call Bobby and tell him he’s gonna get a call. Tell him not to lie to her, but she can’t know about the demons.”
Dean’s face pinched. “You gave her Bobby’s number?”
Sam nodded. “Ellen’s, too.”
“What the fuck? Are you calling Ellen? You can’t call Ellen, man. Keehan’s still MIA, and she thinks we’re in Vermont.”
“Yeah, well, I think we’re gonna have to come clean. We might need Ash to track down this diner.”
Dean raked a hand down his face. “Crap. This is not good. And I don’t just mean for us. I think we should leave Ellen out of this. Her name gets tangled up with us and Keehan, she’s gonna have a world of trouble on her doorstep.”
Sam lost his temper. “Dean, this is all coming to a head. That son of a bitch told us it was all coming to a head. Keehan and his vigilante buddies are gonna be the least of her troubles if we don’t figure out what the fuck is going on with these visions and that yellow-eyed prick.”
Sam’s outburst bounced off Dean like he hadn’t raised the volume at all. “I’m just sayin’-”
“Well, don’t. Can you please just get on the phone to Bobby before Beth does.”
“Dude, if she’s calling anyone, it’s the cops. Possibly the nuthouse.”
Sam took a deep breath, exhaled sharply. He needed to get himself under control - couldn’t afford to be anything other than calm. He punched the call button, brought the phone to his ear. “No, she won’t.”
“How do you know?”
“Because one, she’s about the nosiest person I’ve ever met, and two, she slept with me. She’s gonna call Bobby and Ellen and cross-reference. She doesn’t want me to be lying.”
Dean’s face crumpled in disgusted disbelief. “Because she slept with you? Why, because you’re that good?” His face blanked suddenly. “Don’t answer that.”
Sam hooked the phone between his shoulder and his ear, folded his arms while he waited for Ellen to pick up. “Because nobody likes to be wrong, Dean.”
*****************************************************************
There were over a thousand food-related businesses in the Raleigh County area, and when Sam widened the pool to encompass the rest of West Virginia, the figure blew out to two hundred and sixty thousand. Sam stared at the bullet points Dean had scrawled on the legal pad and tried to think of a way to narrow the search criteria, but nothing was sufficiently concrete to refine an electronic scout. He threw the pad on to the coffee table beside the laptop and collapsed back against the couch cushions, squeezed shut his eyes and willed himself to remember something more useful than decor. He had a terrible, terrible feeling they weren't even looking in the right state.
“This is useless. We’re definitely gonna need Ash.”
Dean stamped the carpet with his crutches and pulled himself out of the armchair with a wince. “Well, I dunno about you, but I’m not exactly looking forward to that visit. We lied to Ellen, so neither of us are gonna have testicles when she’s through…”
Sam looked at his watch. “I thought she might have called by now.”
“Beth or Ellen?”
Sam’s eyebrows hiked up. “I dunno. Both. Either.”
Dean checked his phone. “Nothin’ from Bobby.” He shook his head. “I know she’s got you by the balls, man, but that chick makes me nervous. We end up with cops at the door at 2 a.m., I’m gonna be dancin’ the I-told-you-so all the way to the clink. We should really think about takin’ off. Like tonight.”
“She’s not gonna call the cops.” Maybe Sam should have been nervous, but he wasn’t. They spent so much of their lives anticipating the ways in which people might obstruct them - both intentionally and incidentally - it felt odd and simple and hopeful, to extend a faith and trust it would be upheld. Like a calculated risk he ached to take, closing the catch on an untested safety line. “God, I wish I could remember something useful.”
Dean shrugged as far as the crutches allowed. “Win some, you lose some. Nothing we can do about it right now. What were you doin’ out at the La Butte place, anyway?”
“I was looking for something to connect La Butte to Pierres. Wendy’s friend, Natasha, she said Henry was having an affair.”
“She thought or he was?”
“She said she confronted him.”
“And?”
“And he denied it. Beth found Wendy La Butte’s journal. I figured we check the entries for around the time Marie disappeared, maybe we can see if Henry met her.”
Dean rocked his weight from one foot to the other, hopped it back to his right in a hurry when his left leg clearly objected. “So, what? He has an affair back in Canton, the La Buttes move, she shows up in town, he kills her?”
Sam pouted. “I dunno, it seems the likeliest scenario. I think he might have dumped the body on that trail.”
“Okay, so where’s this journal?”
Sam frowned, blinked at the coffee table, and then closed his eyes and sighed. “Crap.”
“Beth’s car?”
“Yeah.”
“Nice.” Dean gave him a thin smile. “We are not exactly outstanding in our field tonight.”
“Nope.” Sam shook his head wearily against the couch headrest. “We are very much indoors.”
Dean gazed vacantly in the direction of the kitchen, his plaster cast knocking distractedly against the frame of his left crutch. He screwed up his nose, shook his head. “Sammy, we should blow this case, man. Fuck it. We gotta leave.”
“Dean, this ghost has a history of violence. It’s only a matter of time before someone else gets hurt. Killed, even.”
“They’ve all got a history of violence, dumbass,” Dean snapped. “Right around the country, all day long, the undead are fucking people’s shit up, Sam. We get to the ones we can.”
“And we’re right here.” Sam motioned enthusiastically to the carpet near his feet. “We can get to this one.”
“You’re having visions, and when you have visions, sulfur starts showin’ up.” Dean’s face brooked no argument. “We need to leave.”
Sam crossed his palms on his forehead in frustration. “Dean, I think you need to start entertaining the possibility that no one’s coming after us.”
“No one’s-” Dean snorted a laugh, like Sam might have gone insane. “Are you kidding me? Were you not with me in Evansville? I thought you were with me. In the basement. With the fuckin’ Yellow-Eyed-Demon.”
Sam closed his eyes, spaced the words with care. “He wasn’t there to kill us, Dean. If he’d wanted either of us dead, we’d be on the floor of that basement right now with-” he caught his lips in his teeth, shut himself up. He proceeded slowly. “He was there to make sure I got out alive. He’s waiting.”
The concept shut Dean’s mouth with an audible clack. He stared blankly, and Sam let the pregnant pause play to its natural conclusion, equally reluctant to explore the idea further.
Car tires crackled in the drive, drew both their attention to the door.
Dean made his I-told-you-so face, lips pressed together. “Well, here comes the cavalry.”
Sam moved to the window. “Let me handle it.”
Dean wiggled his crutches. “Yeah, well, your plan better involve somethin’ other than leggin’ it.”
Sam moved the curtain aside, and the porch light caught the metallic blue of the coupe’s front quarter panel as Beth swung in behind the Impala. When she killed the headlights, Sam could see she was alone. He’d have smiled, if he thought there was anything to be pleased about other than the fact she was back.
“It’s Beth,” he said, crossing to the door. He punched a finger back at Dean. “She’s gonna be upset. Be nice. Don’t be a dick.”
*****************************************************************
"I'm having a psychotic break of some kind," Beth decided, as she sank into the chair opposite Sam. She nodded, as if the general absurdity was slowly falling into place under the umbrella of this assumption. She looked up, eyes wide. "This is because of California. I've heard about this kind of thing happening. I'm probably in a hospital room right now, chewing on a hat." Her brow knitted as she gnawed on her thumbnail, and then she looked up earnestly. “But your friend Bobby is very nice.”
“Yeah, he is.” Sam nodded, in full agreement. “He’s a solid guy. And you’re not…” he frowned at the euphemism, “…chewing on a hat. You’re perfectly sane. The situation’s a little nuts, but you’re okay.”
Beth nodded vaguely. She stared at a space near Sam's collar for a long time. "Maybe you guys are chewing the hat. Somebody here has definitely flipped their lid. We can't all be sane and still having this conversation, right?" When Sam didn't answer, Beth shifted her gaze up to meet his. "Right?"
"We’re not crazy.” Sam had spent the better part of the last year and a half wishing he was, but these days he was more or less resigned to his relative sanity. He wasn’t going to wake up in a relieved sweat in any asylum, and he’d found ways to be okay with that. Most days.
“I’m supposed to tell you to call Ellen.” She looked at Dean. “She said you boys were as bad as your daddy, and then she swore a lot. She’s not very happy with you.”
Sam and Dean exchanged remorseful, God-fearing looks.
“No,” Dean conceded quietly, eyes on the table. “I can’t imagine she is.”
“She was worried,” Beth told Dean. “She asked a lot of questions about your accident, where the fractures were, how bad.” She grimaced. “She’s going to break both your damn legs. Also, she wanted to know if a man named Spencer was with you.”
That name coming out of Beth’s mouth was like a sledgehammer to the gut. The wholesale stupidity of thinking he could have kept any of this from bleeding between them was suddenly as clear and apparent as any elephant in a room.
“Who’s Spencer?” Beth was asking.
Dean cleared his throat, rubbed at his mouth.
Sam didn’t know what to tell her. He threw Dean a trapped, beseeching look and his brother sniffed, took the reins.
“He’s another hunter. We ran into him in Evansville on the way here.”
“Where is he now?”
Dean took a deep breath, let it out slowly through his teeth. “Apparently, he’s missing.”
“And you guys were the last to see him?”
Dean pouted noncommittally. “It’s a dangerous job. Shit happens.”
“And you lied to Ellen about where you were after.”
Sam closed his eyes, rubbed at his temple. God, the way that sounded; the way the truth sounded.
“That was just a precaution,” Dean said abruptly, and Sam was glad because he didn’t think he could lie to her directly. “Had nothin’ to do with it. We had a misunderstanding at a bank a while back, and the police’d like to talk to us about it but they’re not gonna like our explanation. So, we get stuck someplace like this, it’s just better if no one knows where we are. Because of the warrant.”
“Oh my God, you robbed a bank?”
Sam winced. “God, no. No. There was a job in a bank. The police shot someone and Dean got the blame. It was all a big mistake.”
“Oh, Jesus.” Beth covered her face with her hands.
“It’s no big deal,” Dean deflected with a shrug. “Nature of the job. We rub up against the cops a lot. Lucky for us, they’re usually as stupid as they look.”
Beth’s responses didn’t vary much from there on in. “Oh, Jesus,” she said, over and over and over again.
*****************************************************************
Dean took the La Butte journal to bed, said he’d try and cover some entries before he went to sleep. Sam stopped by en route to the shower, found him paying the pages the sort of bloodshot, affected eye service that didn’t bode well for retention. For the first time since he’d left the hospital, Sam didn’t need to ask if Dean had remembered his meds.
“Are you actually absorbing any of that?” he asked, indicating the book.
Dean’s chin slid toward Sam but his eyes stayed on the page. “‘On Saturday, I’ll go to the market and see about the other seeds.’” he recited a little drunkenly. “‘Henry has his heart set on the apples from back home, but I’m leaning toward something new. I don’t know why. We’ll just end up discussing it in circles until I grow too tired to care which trees we plant.’” Dean turned the page, blinked his eyes wide at the next entry. “Yeah, this guy sounds like a real sonuvabitch.”
Sam thought about Natasha Susanibar.
You think we don’t know, but we know.
“Well, keep looking. There has to be something in there about Pierres. She couldn’t have been completely clueless.”
“People believe what they wanna believe,” Dean mumbled.
Sam nodded. “Yeah, that doesn’t mean they don’t know better.” He rapped his knuckles on the doorframe. “You good? I’m gonna take a shower and hit the hay.”
“I’m good.” Dean shifted, palmed his side. “Little sore. I dunno why, but my ribs are fuckin’ killin’ me.”
“Uh, yeah, you might recall you broke two of them, and then this morning you were playing house movers on your crutches. With your broken pelvis. Without any painkillers. Which makes you incredibly stupid.”
Dean didn’t really have any argument to contest that, so he nodded irritably instead. “Yeah, yeah. Thanks for the play by play. We get this ghost, we can leave, right?”
“I think we might need to head back to Ellen’s, yeah. See Ash.”
Dean blew out an epic sigh. “Oh, my God. We agree. Finally.” His hand fumbled on the nightstand for his cell. He flipped it open and held it up.
“What are you doing?”
“Recording the moment.” Dean snapped a shot, grinned childishly.
“You’re a jerk.”
“Uh huh.” Dean frowned at the picture. He waggled two fingers, beckoned Sam closer. “Come ‘ere.”
Sam stepped inside the room. “What?”
Dean dragged a fingertip on his own cheek. “That looks worse. You land on your face again?”
Sam raised a self-conscious hand to the bruise, prodded the tender flesh experimentally. “I dunno. I guess.”
Dean slapped his phone shut, returned it to the bedside table. “Quit doin’ that. Stick an arm out or somethin’ next time.”
Sam dipped his chin on a soft laugh. “Sure. My bad.”
“Get some sleep.” Dean took up the journal again, motioned vaguely to the hall and, presumably, Beth. “And I mean some actual sleep.”
“I will.”
In the bathroom, he slipped out of his clothes and set about the delicate science of maintaining a comfortable water temperature. After a brief but colorful discussion with the faucet, he settled for a see-saw between scorching assault and the plumbing’s tepid indifference.
Rivergrove. He remembered now. The last vision had been from Rivergrove, where he’d been infected by the virus and lived to keep that tale squarely between Dean and himself. But that had been months ago now. Long enough for him to have convinced himself they might have stopped for good.
You’ve had clue after clue.
When he shut off the pipes, the bathroom was steamed and foggy, and he was more or less clean. He passed a towel over his chest and gazed at the crack in the mirror until his skin goose-pimpled from his inactivity in the cooling air.
Maybe you just need another prod.
Beth was in his bedroom. She was sitting cross-legged against the headboard, her fingers twirling absently in the hair at her temple. Her eyes were large and unseeing, and she was trapped deep in thought. Sam had given her plenty to think about, and he was vaguely surprised she hadn’t changed her mind and bolted again while he was getting cleaned up.
He had no idea what drastic or subtle alterations this new information had exacted on their relationship. And he was very, very tired. He pulled up halfway across the room and did a double-take back towards the door, thinking he should probably be wearing more than a towel. But all his clothes were in this room, so he faltered and turned back, stood stranded and gripping a handful of the plush flannel at his hip. He rubbed the back of his neck with his free hand.
“I can take the couch, if you…” He trailed off, not certain how that sentence should finish, and not at all sure he wanted to know.
Beth’s fingers stopped in her hair and she looked up. “This is your bed, Sam.”
He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, didn’t say anything.
“Do you want me to sleep on the couch?” Beth asked.
There was a right way and a wrong way to answer that, and Sam wanted to get it right. He wanted to answer whatever way would keep him in the lee of her gaze, where he was just some guy she’d met at the hospital and not some time bomb that might have her name on it.
“You should know we’re going to be leaving very soon. Probably tomorrow.”
Beth’s teeth gripped at the corner of her lip, and she nodded down at the bedspread. He thought for a moment she might cry, but she didn’t.
“I think I knew that,” she said. “What about La Butte?”
“We’ll finish the job. Dean’s going through the journal. I don’t think it’ll take more than twenty-four hours. Then we’ll leave.”
“What about Dean?”
“He’s been in worse shape and sucked it up. We’ll make it work.”
“God,” Beth said at the ceiling, as though she was finally getting a grip on the true nature of their lives, and Sam was desperately sorry she had ever caught a glimpse.
“I need you to know, I never intended you to get caught up in any of this. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”
“I believe you.”
“I just…” Sam stopped on the crest of a violent flood of emotion. He was far too naked and fried to be having this conversation, but he wasn’t sure they’d get a chance again and he needed to get it out. “You are so funny, and kind, and smart, and beautiful.” He was going to cry, and that might have been embarrassing if he was in any frame of mind to give a shit. The next came out a little savagely on the brink of his tears. “And this job is so hard, and you weren’t. Being with you is easy, and it feels good, and that is so far removed from anything I’ve had in my life lately.” He swiped at his face in frustration, took a quivering breath, and tried to pull himself together.
Beth hands were over her mouth, her eyes liquid and shining.
“It was selfish and wrong of me to put you in middle of this, and I’m sorry. I am so sorry for doing this to you, and for leaving like this. But I am not sorry I met you. Maybe I should be, but I can’t be sorry about that.”
She uncurled off the bed and crossed to him, wiping her cheeks where her own tears had spilled.
“I’m not sorry I met you either.” She came onto her toes and pressed her lips against his, a chaste closed-mouth kiss that tasted of resignation and forgiveness. She pulled back far enough to look him in the eye. “I wish you could stick around long enough to see how wrong you are about me.” She kissed him again, sent her tongue along the length of his pursed mouth.
Her fingers tracked up the nape of his neck into his hair, and Sam caved. He gave in to the desperate urge to wrap an arm around her waist and pull her close, bury himself in the warmth of her. Let her questing fingers work his hand loose of the towel at his hip.
He pressed her between cool sheets and heated skin - took his time and got his mouth on every part of her, marked her back with his teeth. When she came he caught the sound against his lips. Hushed her with his tongue.
“I’m sorry.” He kissed her fiercely, thrust against her. “I am so sorry.”
Beth shut him up with a hand against his mouth. “Stop saying that.”
He sucked at her fingers, took them between his lips. Watched her face while he slowed his rhythm and savored the hot wet heat of her along his dick. He catalogued every sweat-stuck strand of hair on her brow, every nuance of her features while he rocked himself slowly to the brink, and Beth grew impatient beneath him. She arched up, chased her hips against his.
“Come on,” she coaxed, and Sam tumbled off the thin ledge of his restraint. He stuttered against her, slammed deep, and came with a groan.
*****************************************************************
Whenever he dreamed of Ava, she was always alive. She was restored safe and sound to her house in Peoria, and Sam couldn’t let her find her fiancé like that. He ran a desperate race through the chameleon halls of her house, and he could never remember behind which door he lay. Couldn’t ever steer her clear.
Somehow, she always got ahead of him. He woke sweaty, breathless and physically spent, mind jangling with her lingering screams.
*****************************************************************
“Maybe you should have a cat scan.” Beth mumbled, when Sam returned from the bathroom and slipped back between the sheets.
He patted the quandary of her tangled locks. “You have sex hair.”
“Yes, I just had sex,” she pointed out blandly, knocking his hand away. “I’m serious. About the scan.”
Sam huffed a laugh. “You think I have a brain tumor?”
“Don’t laugh. There might be a perfectly logical explanation. If a doctor could find out what it is, they might be able to do something about it. Stop it, even.”
“Yeah, I don’t think any doctor’s gonna get rid of this.”
“It might not even be a tumor. It might just be a lesion or something. I don’t know. I know what’s happening to you isn’t normal. Outside of B-grade Travolta movies, anyway.”
“Whatever it is, I don’t think a cat scan’s gonna pick it up.” He pressed himself to the radiator of her side, and she squirmed away from his chilled skin.
“Get away from me. You’re cold.”
“Uh huh.” He burrowed closer, rested his lips against her shoulder. “Hey, what did you mean before, when you said you wished I could stay long enough to find out how wrong I was?”
Beth sniffed sleepily. “You were talking about me like I’m this amazing, nice person. And I’m not. Nobody’s perfect. You get down to brass tacks, everyone’s going to Hell for something.”
Sam scratched at his eyebrow. “I didn’t say you were perfect. You’re also kinda nosey. And you’re rude in the morning. And really fucking abrupt when you’re in a hurry.”
Beth sat up like a shot and punched him in the arm. “Shut up!”
“And prone to fits of violence,” Sam added, grabbing her wrist before she could land a second hit. She twisted in his grip and he snagged her other wrist, held her easily at bay. “Lay down. Before I hurt you and then you cry.”
“Fine.” Beth flopped back to the mattress and Sam released her, laughing. He lifted his arm so she could press against him, and she lay her head on his shoulder and closed her eyes.
“So, spill. What are you going to Hell for?” Sam asked.
Beth blew out a weary breath against his collarbone. “Me? I’m going to Hell for California.”
“Oh, California’s your fault? Then yeah, you should totally go to Hell. Especially for Oakland.”
Beth chuckled. “No. What I did in California. Why I’m back home.”
Sam frowned, his interest piqued. “And what could you possibly have done that was so bad?”
Beth turned her lidded, sated gaze toward his and smiled sadly. “I can’t ever say. That’s the bit of Hell I have to live with, silly.”
Ch 8