Fic: Headtrip (1/7)
Spoiler warning: I came up for the idea for this fic long before there were spoiler warnings that Supernatural was going to be doing something similar this season. Just in case, though: If you don't want to be spoiled for a future episode, don't read.
Fic: Headtrip (1/7)
Series: Special Projects
Summary: On their way to Metropolis for Christmas, Dean, Sam and Chloe take a detour though Colorado Springs to investigate a series of mysterious deaths, but Dean is still broken, Chloe looks ready to run and Sam is just worried about holding things togeather.
Author: pen37
Beta: Clarksmuse
Fandoms: Smallville/Supernatural
Characters: Chloe, Sam, Dean
Pairing:Chloe/Dean
Rating: Pg-13.
This is a part of the Special Projects series. You can find the rest of the series here.
Written for the Crossovers100 challenge. Prompt #40 Sight. The table is here.
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7
Robert Frost wrote that home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. I suppose that's true. My dad loved me, even after all the trouble I caused him. Looking back, I guess that was my first real lesson about home: home isn't a place. Home is people.
Chloe's laptop beeped at her in a signal that her battery was almost run-down. The sound pulled her out of her world of work, and back to the reality of the too-tight confines of the Impala's backseat. She quickly saved her work and sat the computer aside. She breathed deeply and stretched to relieve tense muscles.
Just a few short weeks ago, a demon with a mad-on for her boyfriend, Dean Winchester, had possessed him and then bricked her up inside a narrow wall in a sick form of torture. She'd been fighting claustrophobia ever since. And though she was finally well enough to cope with the tight confines of a standard room and mostly ignore the way the walls closed in on her, this was the first time she'd tried to spend any time in the cab of a moving vehicle.
From the front passenger seat, Sam Winchester half-turned to glance inquisitively back at her. Chloe gave him a reassuring smile to show him that she was fine. Yet the moment he turned his back on her, she rolled her window down another half-inch.
She leaned her cheek into the glass, shut her eyes, and listened to the frigid wind roar across the partially-open space, the wet slop of the tires on the rainy pavement and the rush of other cars that crossed their path in the endless night.
Feeling a bit more in control of her own psychosis, she opened her eyes again and stared at the back of Dean's head.
He seemed carved from marble. Quiet and unmoving - save for the occasional course correction of the wheel or the momentary distraction of changing tapes in the radio.
Chloe sighed as she contemplated him. Dean's personal pain was one he chose to shoulder on his own. And while he was more than willing to try and contain her pain and shelter her physically, he was emotionally distant - and hiding it with a smokescreen of false cheer and busywork. He was simply not willing to let anyone else in to ease his own hurt.
As if sensing her attention, he glanced at her through the tilted rear view mirror. She held his eyes momentarily before they cut back to the road ahead, leaving her feeling more lost than ever.
She leaned across the backseat, glad to have the expansive bench to herself, and dug through her laptop case for her backup battery. She switched it with the spent one, then settled back against the door again. The open window next to her ear served a constant reassurance that she was not trapped.
Over the screen of her laptop, she regarded the back of Dean's head again. She reflected that the demon had known just how to hurt him.
Dean had always had a problem with his self-esteem, and while she had been chipping at those issues relentlessly in the time that they'd been together - at times her progress felt more like a mole verses a mountain.
And what the demon had done - using Dean's body to use her, torture her and then engage in depravities that she shuddered to think of - had probably set their progress back to the stone age.
In many ways, she'd gotten off easier, if it could laughably be called that. Her experience had been mental and physical torture. But Dean's had been a pure assault on his psyche, designed to produce the maximum amount of damage. And she wasn't sure if he could ever recover. It didn't really matter if she forgave him. Because apparently, he couldn't forgive himself.
In light of all this, Chloe felt the fear of losing Dean creep into her heart once again. She shook her head against it. She'd long ago sworn to herself that she was through with the self-doubt and the running away. If he was going to leave her then so be it. She was through with pushing people away before they could push first.
It's been a hard truism to realize, she wrote. I've always pushed away the people who care about me. And now that I've finally reached a point in my life that I've let them in, let them care, and learned to care back instead of running - I'm afraid I might lose them.
I know that Dean wouldn't abandon me physically. But he isn't here mentally.
Truth is, I'm scared.
I'm so scared of losing him. And if he goes, Sam follows.
I don't want to lose this family that I've made.
I don't want to lose my home.
I don't want to be alone again.
Chloe shut her eyes, and with great effort, she mastered her tears.
She looked up to see Sam looking back in concern again.
“You okay?”
“Fine,” she frowned in annoyance at herself for letting her own control slip.
“How's the news article coming?” he asked.
Chloe shut down the program, and dragged the file to the trash. “Not like I hoped,” she said flatly.
* * *
Dean found them a cheap motel on the outskirts of Colorado Springs for the night. They'd been deliberately staying away from credit card scams and Chloe's Daily Planet expense account until the demonic AI that had been stalking hunters was completely purged from the Internet.
As a consequence, money was tight and the chance to hustle up funds hadn't presented itself. So the three of them were down to sharing one room.
This actually suited Sam fairly well. Because this way, he could keep an eye on both Chloe and Dean. They were both mentally on the edge, and Sam didn't put it past either one of them to do something monumentally stupid while on a hunt.
In retrospect, Sam realized that he'd been an idiot.
He'd been possessed. He knew, in great detail, how going though something like that would mess with your mind. He'd once been used to kill another hunter by the same Demon that had tortured Dean and Chloe. And he knew the weight of guilt that came with that.
Yet in the aftermath of what had happened, he'd seen Dean and Chloe reaching for one another, and backed off. He'd assumed that they were going to fix each other. Because that's what it looked like they were doing. Taking comfort in one another, finding solace. Sharing pain and turning it into joy.
He couldn't have been further from the truth.
Chloe hadn't been dealing well with the claustrophobia and had been extra dependent on Dean, for a time. But as she overcame that hang-up, Dean seemed to reach the conclusion that he wasn't needed. The conclusion fed his own fears of inadequacy and his tendency toward self-flagellation in the wake of the demon fiasco.
Before Sam realized what was happening, Dean had pulled back into his own shell and covered it with a false happy-go-lucky facade. Like when Dad died all over again.
Consequently, Chloe responded to Dean's emotional retreat by once again rebuilding the walls that they'd worked so hard to tear down over the past months.
Sam wanted to beat his head in frustration on the table of the cheap motel they were staying in. He was terrified that one day he was going to wake up to find that Chloe had slipped into old patterns, and taken off - running away from them before she could get rejected herself.
Sam shut his eyes and sighed in frustration. He hoped Chloe had more faith in his brother, patience and stubbornness than to do that. He felt just like he did back during that awful year when Dean sold his soul: like his family was slipping through his fingers, and he was powerless to stop them.
As soon as they reached the room, Chloe immediately crawled into the bed, and pulled the covers over her head. Dean wasn't far behind. He pulled the blankets back on his side of the bed they shared, and folded his arms around Chloe, as if reassuring himself that she hadn’t hit the point where she would cut out and run and that she was still physically safe.
It would have been sweet - if there wasn't a hint of desperation to it. As if Dean was waiting for her to see through him.
Feeling like a voyeur, Sam turned his back to them, booted up his computer, and started researching their current case.
They'd been on the way to Metropolis to bunker down for the holidays with Chloe's relatives when Perry White called her with a potential story that sounded more like a hunt. Fourteen suicides in one week. All connected to one nightclub: Club Nocturne.
Actually, Sam thought with a wry chuckle. The name makes the place sound more like a Goth bar than anything.
He called up the articles, and spotted immediately why Perry had thought of Chloe for the story. Police were speculating that it was a suicide pact, and for three days they succeeded in shutting down the bar. But closer inspection failed to link the suicide victims in any meaningful way.
It wasn’t a political protest. There wasn’t a cult involved. The victims didn’t know one another, so suicide pact had been ruled out. In fact, they didn’t have a lot in common. They weren’t the same sex, their age ranges varied. Along with their backgrounds. The only thing they shared in common was that they attended the same club.
Not the only thing, Sam hastily corrected himself. All of the victims fit a profile. Just not a standard one. They all pretty much kept to themselves. They weren’t big joiners. They tended to get lost in their work, and they didn’t have a large social network.
If they hadn't been suicides, police would be looking for a serial killer. Of course, the three of them knew that there were many ways to kill someone and make it look like a suicide.
Sam connected with Lexus Nexis and started searching for similar patterns of mass-suicide.
So tomorrow, they were going to go talk to the families of the victims and see if they could find something that the cops had missed. They were going to have to tread carefully. The story had made national news, and reporters were all over it.
The three of them were going to split up and talk to a portion of the families. Chloe was going to use her press credentials, while Sam and Dean were going to use their fake badges. That way, it would be easier to keep from raising a flag that a couple of recently pardoned criminals were poking around an infamous mystery
If they couldn’t find anything then they were headed for Club Nocturne.