It was a rare occasion that rendered Dean Winchester speechless.
After a moment of staring at the girl stupidly, during which she beamed back and the other one hung back a little more reservedly, he exclaimed,
“High school chicks?”
“She’s Lara, I’m Abigail,” said the second one scowling. “For the last time. And we just destroyed the locket, incidentally.”
Sam hurried down the stairs behind Dean, drawn by the voices.
“Hi!” said Lara.
“You -?” Sam looked back at his phone.
“You were looking in the wrong place,” Lara explained. “We got worried when you didn’t call. Well, Abby got worried, so she called me, and then I couldn’t stop thinking about it. So I called the Scotts-“
“ - she impersonated a federal agent-”
“And you know you I was right! People are dumb. I learned that from Supernatural.”
“Did she just insult us?” Dean asked Sam.
“So anyway, the locket was in the employee breakroom. In a safe.”
“We opened that with a tennis ball,” said Abigail.
“And we crushed it, and ganked the ghost! Right?!” Lara looked brightly from Dean to Sam and back again.
“W- that was you guys?” Dean said incredulously.
“That’s what we said,” Abigail gave a Lara look that seemed to convey something about Dean’s intelligence.
“Okay,” Sam blinked. “Well, thanks guys! You really saved our asses.”
“So it worked? The ghost’s gone?”
“Gone,” Sam confirmed. “Now we just got to get these civilians out of here.”
“Wait!” Dean couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Just - Sam! They are civilians!” He
gestured wildly to Lara and Abby. “And they’re kids! You shouldn’t be here,” he addressed them sternly. “This isn’t a game, and it isn’t a story. You could have been killed tonight. Not to mention arrested. You could have thrown your whole lives away.”
Lara blinked and looked suddenly less impressed. “Dude. You sound like my dad.”
“Look Dean just - go see to the cops,” Sam said.
“What the-?”
“Deeean,” Sam made the face.
“We’re not done,” Dean pointed a finger at the kids, suddenly creeped out by how much he felt
like his own dad, and ran back upstairs to find the cops still inside the salt circle. He
instructed them to call their dispatcher, report that the perp had gotten away after a struggle, and fed them an invented physical description of an armed gang. “And say they got the dude on the ground floor, too,” he added as an afterthought.
“We already said it was code green,” said the young guy weakly.
“Well make it code un-green,” Dean glared. Fifteen minutes later, he and Sam were sitting in the front seats of the Impala with the two girls in the back. the shards of the locket had been scattered, some in the tower block parking lot, and the rest in Sam’s pocket ready to be sprinkled out the window at various intervals whilst they drove through town. Dean made to turn the key in the ignition, then stopped and turned around.
“Look,” he said, “Guys. You need to - stop this now. Go home and forget about it. I know it’s awesome when you gank your first ghost. Believe me, I remember. But this life - it ain’t as cool as it looks from the outside.”
“Are you kidding me?” Lara was still bouncing with adrenaline. “This was literally the most important thing we’ve ever done in our lives!”
“Yeah but…” Dean blew out his breath, and looked to Sam for support. Surprisingly, Sam was just looking straight ahead, staying out of the conversation. “Look - I can see how we basicially seem like rock stars.” Sam snorted. “But well - no-one knows who we are, except you guys apparently, and a few other hunters, most of whom don’t exactly like us. Most hunters are kind of dicks, now I think about it. You don’t get paid, you don’t get thanked, you just get beat up a lot and occasionally arrested. Me and Sam here, we didn’t exactly have a choice. But you do. You could go to school, get good jobs, do whatever you wanted.” He recalled, weirdly, the carnival owner saying something very similar to him and Sam just a few months earlier.
“But we’d always know, now,” said Abby quietly.
True enough. Knowledge of what was out there could not be erased.
“We should get you home,” Sam spoke up at last.
“Oh my God,” Lara said. “If my parents woke up, I am literally going to be grounded until I leave for college. With no internet and no phone.”
“See there you are,” said Dean quickly. “Now in the future, just replace the threat of your parents with actual jail time.” He started the car. There was silence from the backseat for a few minutes, then Lara caught his eye in the rearview mirror, frowning.
“So you’re saying…” she said, sounding disappointed: “You don’t actually like hunting? In the books you love it.”
“In the -“ Dean twitched involuntarily at the mention of those damned books. “It ain’t a matter of liking it or not. It’s what we do.”
Silence from the backseat. The girls appeared to be communicating.
“In any case, thank you,” Sam said. “And take care of yourselves. Call us if you - if there’s
any more trouble.”
“Oh,” Lara said. “I guess you’ll be leaving or - whatever.”
“We might stick around a couple of days. Make sure the ghost really gone. And if course if there’s anything we can do to show our appreciation…-”
“Sam!” exclaimed Dean in alarm.
“Oh believe me, there are - woah,” Lara’s eyes widened, “Hold that thought. There is definitely one thing you can do for me. Tomorrow. I mean, today. Later today. Someone give me a pen.”
* * *
“They buy it?” Dean asked Sam as Sam pressed the disconnect on his cellphone.
“Totally.” Sam dropped his cell on the motel bed and then flopped down, narrowly missing it. Naturally they’d had no sleep at all that night, and now the motel curtains were drawn against the late morning sun.
“Dude I can’t believe you offered to thank them,” Dean bitched. “They’re in high school.”
“Not everyone interprets thanks the same way you do Dean,” Sam mumbled into his pillow. “Go to sleep.”
“And also, I could have used some back up there. In the car. You were practically encouraging them to get into hunting.”
Sam signed, resigned that he wasn’t going to get any sleep until Dean had said his piece. “I wasn’t encouraging them to do anything.”
“Well you weren’t helping me out. You’re the one whose meant to be so gung-ho for normality and the picket fence and shit. You could have said something.”
“Look, they know now,” Sam reasoned. “Hell, everyone we’ve ever helped on a case knows. They can’t forget that knowledge, and they can’t run away from it.” Dean was nowhere near cruel enough to say ‘you did’. “They just have to decide what to do with it now.”
“But I feel like we left them believing that hunting is fun.”
“It is fun. Sometimes. Also miserable, gruelling and dangerous as hell, which is pretty obvious. They’re not stupid. Do you really see Abby or Lara just picking up a machete and heading off on the scent of a nest of vampires now?”
“Have to find a machete small enough first,” Dean grumbled, and headed for the bathroom to shower.
* * *
Lara, sit down for a minute.” Mom and Dad were at the kitchen table with a bunch of papers and their cell phones set down front of them, but for once they weren’t looking at them. They were looking at Lara, vaguely troubled and perhaps just a little embarrassed.
“Yes?” Lara stopped halfway through the glass of orange juice she was pouring and sat, the picture of wide-eyed innocence.
“We got a call from your school today,” Dad said. “The girl you took home and looked after decided to tell her teacher about the bullying, and how you and Abby skipped school to take care of her. Lara why didn’t you tell us?”
“Oh, well she swore us to silence,” Lara shrugged. “She knew any adult would tell the school, and then the bullies would beat her up even worse. But yeah, that’s why weren’t in on Monday.”
“Well,” Mom’s mouth was set in an awkward line. “We’re still not exactly happy about you skipping. But at least it was with good reason.”
“Yeah well,” Lara smiled.
“So on that score I guess you’re un-grounded,” Mom and Dad shared a look. “Just - in future, you come to an adult with something that serious, okay?”
“Okay,” Lara somehow turned her snort into a cough.
“There’s something else,” Dad went on. Lara blinked in surprise. They had worked out the story of the bullied kid with Sam and instructed him to call her home, figuring he’d pull off ‘concerned teacher’ more convincingly than Dean. What else could there be?
“Your English teacher - Mr. Hunter?” - Lara squeaked down her giggle - “He wanted to say he was very impressed with you. He said your knowledge of Gothic fiction, literary archetypes and - meta-textuality? - is extremely sophisticated. He commended all the reading you’ve been doing in your spare time.” Now Dad looked completely mystified.
“Well I do read a lot,” said Lara, trying to keep the beam off her face.
“I guess there was more to those comic books than we thought,” said Dad, and Lara burst out laughing.
* * *
“Well I guess that’s that,” Abby said. They were standing in the parking lot of the diner where they’d first met Sam and Dean, and the Impala’s tail lights were disappearing into the early dusk.
“Oh I don’t know,” Lara said wistfully. “They might be back.”
“They were pretty awesome, weren’t they?”
“They really were.”
“You know who else was awesome, though?” and they said in unison:
“We were.”
“We so totally were!” Abby exclaimed. “Lara, we ganked a ghost!”
“So what does this mean?” Lara asked the sky. “Are we gonna like, become hunters now? I mean, Abby. Ghosts are real.”
“Yeah but,” Abby said. “They can’t be that common, can they? I mean, otherwise everybody would know about them.”
“I guess,” said Lara doubtfully.
“But at least we’ll know who to call if we ever meet one we can’t deal with,” Abby grinned.
“In any case, it’s not like we have to decide the whole rest of our lives right this minute.”
“That’s true.”
“We still have to graduate.”
“And then we have to go on a road trip and meet Carver Edlund.”
“Right.”
“A ghost-hunting road trip?”
“It could be,” Abby acknowledged. “I still don’t want to get killed, though. Maybe a ghost-tracking road trip with recourse to various professional hunters as needed.”
“It’s no wonder I keep you around, bitch,” Lara slung an arm around Abby’s shoulders. You’re pretty smart.”
“You ain’t so bad yourself jerk,” said Abby, and they turned to go.
The End.
A/N: That’s the last long fic from me for a while - I have a journal article to get into its final form by the end of July and I can typically only work on one writing project in addition to research and teaching. However, my Big Bang just needs a bit of dusting up and will be revealed in due course over the summer :).