Catch me if I meme -- part 2
Part 2 of the meme commentary for Catch me if I fall for
snazzy_spazzy.
You can find the original fic here.
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7
*peeks out from between fingers.*
Still with me? Good.
*tosses tissue box aside*
Let’s find out what Sam and the kid have been up to in all of this.
Sam gestured toward the aisles of clothes leftover from a post back-to-school sale. “Go to it, kid.”
As far as shopping advice, it was about what his dad had given him at the start of the school year. He huffed and shook his head. He could not believe that he was taking parenting cues from Dad of all people.
I really liked the idea of Sam having to play the parent to this kid. Particularly since he had such a rocky relationship with his dad. I think it’s very telling that when the brothers interact with the civilians while on a case, Sam is captain empathy with the adults, but it’s Dean who interacts with the kids.
He sighed, and attempted to make conversation with the teen.
“So . . . you want to be a hunter?”
“I guess,” Isaac shrugged. “Everyone who hung around Ellen's for long wanted that.”
Sam nodded. “How did you end up at Ellen's?”
“My parents were killed by werewolves,” he said with an edge of bitterness as he checked sizes on the labels of the pants. “The hunter who put them down carted me up to Ellen's and dumped me.”
Kripkie kind of gave up on the roadhouse idea. I personally like the idea of these hunters being a community and actually communicating. Otherwise, where would they be getting their information? And I like the idea of Ellen as this big, tough mama grizzly.
“That couldn't have been easy,” Sam said.
Isaac shrugged and picked out two pair of jeans. Then he moved on to the shirts. His eyes immediately cut over to a shirt with the band logo for Insane Clown Posse. Sam took one look at it, and shuddered.
Sam and Clowns. Comedy gold. Plus, it’s a nice ‘father/son not connecting’ moment. I’m sure John had a ton of those with Sam.
“Not that shirt,” he said firmly. “What the heck is something like that doing in a Wal-Mart anyway?”
Very Dad thing to say.
“You're kidding, right?” Isaac frowned at him.
Sam shook his head. “Nope.”
“You know you're stifling my creativity here.”
My beta, Clarksmuse, wanted to know if I’d been spying on her English class full of teens for this line. Show of hands if you’ve ever heard a teen say it.
“I don't particularly care,” Sam said. The words, the argument. Hell, the whole conversation was word-for-word an argument he'd had with his dad way back when.
“Whatever happened to freedom of speech?” The kid frowned at him.
“Listen kid.” He crossed his arms. “This isn't a democracy. It's a Sam-ocracy. My money says no killer clown t-shirts.”
And Sam is really just John Jr. isn’t he?
The kid rolled his eyes in response, snatched up the next two shirts he came to, and threw them in the cart. Then he looked at Sam with an okay, can we go now? expression.
“Don't you want to try them on?”
“Whatever.” The kid rolled his eyes, picked up the clothes again, and headed toward the dressing room.
Sam frowned. He hadn't known what to expect, hauling a teen ager around. Isaac was - sullen, gangly and always hungry. In short, a teenage boy. Sam wondered if he'd been that moody as a teen. And if so, how had Dad and Dean put up with him?
It really, really was eating him that he sounded like Dad. Worse, it was starting to eat him that he could see that John Winchester had occasionally been right.
Not all the time, but once in a blue moon.
With a mental prayer heavenward, he pulled a marble out of his pocket and sat it on the counter. Then he stared at it in concentration. The marble had been Chloe's suggestion: something smaller than a canister of salt, and more portable that he could practice on while he was on the road.
As he stared at it, he felt something shift in his head, followed by a surge of power unlike anything he'd experienced yet. The marble zinged off the table with the speed of a bullet. It pinged into a wall, and lodged there.
Forshadowing of things to come.
Sam glanced around hastily to see if he'd been seen, and then ducked into a nearby clothing rack. When Isaac came back out, he glanced around in confusion.
“Sam?”
Sam waited until the boy was passing by, and then reached out to grab him and pull him back into the racks.
“Sam?” The kid made a face at him. “What?”
Sam shushed him, and looked around to make sure that no one was nearby. Isaac raised an eyebrow and crossed his arms.
“Let's . . . walk away real casually.”
Isaac nodded, and the two of them moved over to electronics.
“What happened?” the kid asked.
“I don't know,” Sam looked perplexed. He gave Isaac a skeptical look. “What has Ellen told you about me?”
“Nothing,” the kid said, while tucking his hands in his pants nonchalantly.
Sam had known Dean for too long to believe the false-innocent front. He pinned Isaac with a look.
And here come the parenting skills again. Sam would really make a good dad.
“Okay, okay.” The kid threw his hands up in exasperation. “I may have overheard Ellen talking to Jo about you.”
“Talking about what?” Sam narrowed his eyes.
“About what happened a couple years back with all the demons getting out of hell. And about how you have special powers.”
The way he said that. The way his eyes cut down. Dean wasn't the only one who was decent at reading people. Sam wasn't that great at poker - but he would bet money that Isaac knew something about special powers.
“You know someone else like that?” Sam asked.
Isaac shrugged, and looked anywhere but at Sam.
Sam shook his head. He knew from his own experience not to push. Dad always pushed, and they'd never resolved anything. “Come on, kid. Let's get out of here.”
They paid for his things, and walked toward the exit.
“Um,” Isaac stopped suddenly and nodded to the restroom. “I gotta go.”
Sam looked at Isaac shrewdly, and remembered what it had been like to be sixteen and perpetually broke. “Empty your pockets, first.”
The show does such a good job of showing how the boys are always one step away from poverty. It’s the little things: Dean’s jeans worn through to holes, the way he eats everything like he’ll never have another meal, the way they sometimes squat in old houses and abandoned buildings, the roach motels with the cheap polyester blankets. There are times I want to hug them and go ‘oh boys.’
The kid sighed. “Aw, man.” He turned his pockets inside out, and produced two bags of M&M's and a set of ear buds for an MP3 player. Sam sat the items on a shelf where a clerk could return them to their proper place, and motioned for the kid to go to the restroom.
And the random thing about that was that the kid didn’t have an MP3 player. So why was he stealing ear buds? Sometimes kids do weird things for no reason. So adding that put another touch of reality into the fic.
“What, no lecture?” Isaac asked incredulously.
Sam thought about that - and about how he'd just paid for the kid’s things with money that Dean had hustled from playing poker and decided that he was the last person who should be giving lessons in morality.
“Just - hurry.”
Sam leaned against the wall, and tapped his foot impatiently. In less than half a minute, Isaac came back - with a troubled look on his face.
“That was fast,” Sam said.
“Sam?” Isaac shifted nervously. “That amulet of Dean's. Are those pretty common?”
Sam shook his head. “As far as I know, it's one of a kind.”
I wrote this before A Very Supernatural Christmas. This line has more meaning now, because Sam would know.
“Then if you found one just kinda . . . laying around a Wal-Mart bathroom?”
“What?” Sam turned to pin Isaac with an incredulous stare.
Isaac winced, and handed Dean's amulet over to Sam.
As Sam looked at the horned-headed brass amulet that lay cradled in his hands, only one thought crossed his mind. Oh shit!
Pretty much a universal reaction.
***
And now we’re back to Chloe and the wall. I did ridiculous amounts of research for this. And then I wrote all the scenes with Chloe at once. Then I went back and wrote all the scenes with possessed!Dean. Then the stuff with Sam and Isaac. I normally write everything in order. But the scenes with Chloe were clearest in my head.
Chloe awoke to inky blackness, and instantly knew that she hadn't been having a horrible nightmare.
She realized that she'd hyperventilated herself right into unconsciousness. Which was probably a mercy, because it kept her from being aware of her situation for so long. But now, tied up, bricked in and completely plunged into inky darkness, there was no escaping the reality of her situation. It wasn’t just a nightmare. Which made it infinitely worse.
She opened her eyes - and realized that there was not much difference between having her eyes opened or closed. She felt - constricted. Bound up.
Which was exactly what she was. Bound up with her hands hanging limply at her shoulders.
Her mind wanted to shut down again. To retreat far away from her body and not return - the way her mother's had.
That particular thought helped to ram home how bad her mental state is. Because for her to see Moira’s state of mind as a place of safety compared to enduring what she’s going through . . . yeah. Not good.
But as much as she wanted to, she couldn't will herself into catatonia. And although she'd been practicing meditating with Sam, she had to be relaxed before she could enter a meditative trance. And she was anything but relaxed.
Okay, Sullivan. Think. You can't get out of this situation if your brain shuts down.
She thought longingly of the LED on the keychain in her pocket - and realized that even if her arms were free, she wouldn’t be able to work one down to get it. The thought set her mind to racing - renewing the panic that she instinctively felt in confined spaces.
If she couldn’t touch the walls, she could pretend in the dark that she had limitless space around her. Could fool her brain into believing this. But stuffed into the alcove the way she was, there was no way she could fool herself into thinking she was anything but a prisoner - entombed in a wall to die a slow, wasting death.
With a low, despairing moan, she moved the only things she could - her head and legs. She thrashed her head back violently and was rewarded when it connected with the brick behind her. Stars exploded behind her eyes, and an ache started at the point of impact and spread throughout her head - to the point that it even left a deep ache in the back of her sinus cavity.
She felt the remains of her last meal force their way back up her throat. With nowhere else to go she emptied her stomach down the front of her shirt, and coughed on the last of it. With a bitter frown, she swallowed the taste. Now, she was glad that she’d been shot in the throat, rather than gagged.
I worried for a little bit that I’d gotten too realistic here. Again, Clarksmuse had to hold my hand through this.
The demon that had possessed Dean wanted her alive. It must have anticipated - with glee - that she was going to throw up at some point. The thought was as bitter as the bile that rose from her stomach. She wiped her chin in disgust with the hand that hung limply at her right shoulder.
Already, her hands tingled with a pins and needles feeling that meant that they were going to sleep. Soon the numbness would set in, and then she wouldn't be able to move them at all.
I slept on my arm wrong a few mornings before writing this, and it was the weirdest feeling. I didn’t even have pins and needles. My arm just flopped there, kind of dead. And I couldn’t keep from playing with it, because I could bend it like a mechanical thing, but it was jerky. Not at all the way an arm moves naturally. I suppose my having my arm lying there dead was in my head when I came up with that.
She leaned her head back more gently this time, and tried to hold the tears back. If what the demon said was true - then her body was going to need every drop of water she could conserve. She couldn’t afford to cry.
***
Sam and Isaac searched the bathroom and quickly found Dean's ring, bracelet, and the anti-possession charm that Bobby had given him. Judging by the way they were scattered around the bathroom, something had managed to get the jump on him.
I think I mentioned in my last post that Kripke’s chest tattoos are a (hot) good idea. I’ve always written Dean with an aversion to ink, simply because he didn’t like the idea of having permanent identifying marks. But now that the show has gone there, given that I’m writing a demon war, I may have the boys ink up at some point in the future.
Isaac looked from the jewelry to Sam, a concerned look on his face. “That's bad? Right?”
Sam felt a bolt of fear go through him. What the hell could get the jump on Dean? He was Dean. The guy who slept with a bowie knife under his pillow. Mr. Cautious himself.
Oh Sam, you’re such a Dean!girl.
Whatever it was, Dean put up a hell of a fight. His ring was across the room, in the corner. The bracelet was broken, with beads scattered under the sink. Most likely torn apart in a struggle.
Most telling however, was Bobby's charm. The old hunter had given each of them one after they'd evicted Meg from Sam's body the first time. It was a symbolic way of changing the locks. Dean's was laying in a urinal. As if deliberately thrown there.
Sam picked it out with a paper towel, and rinsed it off as Isaac gathered up the beads and the ring.
Then he headed out the door, and into the parking lot.
“Sam?” What's going on?” Isaac trailed him into the lot.
Sam sought out the Impala's parking space - only to find the spot taken up by a blue Toyota pickup truck.
“Where's the car?” Isaac turned a circle, as if he thought Dean was playing some kind of sick joke on them, and had just moved the Impala a couple of rows over.
Sam knelt in the asphalt, and scanned the area for clues. He paused as his eyes fell on a dark puddle by the front bumper of the pickup. With a sinking feeling, he dragged his fingers through it, and came up with a sickeningly familiar substance.
Blood. The thought made him feel like there was ice water in his veins.
“Is that?” Isaac whispered.
Sam nodded.
“What happened?”
Sam frowned in annoyance. He'd never met anyone so full of questions. “No idea.” He stood, and scanned the parking lot for more clues.
A security camera - perched high on a lamppost - caught his eye.
“But I think I can find out.”
I got a lot of satisfaction out of the way Sam got all scary in Mystery Spot. Manly because here, with Dean and Chloe’s life on the line, Sam turns into an uber hunter. I so called that!