The Seventh Coming - 1/1
Title: The Seventh Coming
Rating: R (only for the language), Gen
Characters: Dean, Sam, OMC, OFC
Disclaimer: The characters are sadly not mine. I’m just sticking pins into Winchester dolls for the purposes of general angst. Sorry about the holes!
Word Count: 8,703
A/N: Door 7 in my SPN Advent Calendar
For heyjudeca who patiently did her damnedest to answer a weird barrage of questions about 7-Elevens, bad alcohol, and Florida licensing laws. Cheers, Jude!
Graphics Note: The banner image - Empyrean is taken from Dante’s The Divine Comedy, illustrated by Gustave Dore
Setting: Niceville, FL, December 2005.
Summary: Even demons realize that practice makes perfect
‘Marian apparitions,’ Sam muttered obscurely, hunched over the laptop busy channelling his not so inner research geek.
‘I was slapped by a Marian once,’ Dean happily reminisced as he idly drew bloody symbols on his plate with a recently orphaned French fry.
‘Only once?’ Sam snarked. He continued to ignore his own congealed meal for the more appealing religious curiosity on his screen.
‘Jealous much? Since you asked, it was worth it. Totally,’ Dean said, slouching right down in the purple vinyl booth. That had two advantages; one of which was getting a hemline view of the sole waitress. Nice.
‘Jailbait, Dean. Definitely underage,’ Sam said, not even looking up from his screen.
Either he was using x-ray vision to see through those girly bangs or maybe Sam simply knew him too well. Dean used his second advantage up then and there by hooking his foot around Sam’s chair and tipping it backwards. ‘I don’t want to date her, Sam. I’m simply appreciating what the good Lord gave her,’ he spouted with dubious piety as his brother sputtered up at him from the floor.
Sam, like the ginormous terrier he’d obviously been in his previous life, wouldn’t let go of his juicy topic. ‘Well, the people of Niceville think God has also been blessing one of their 7-Elevens.’
‘No way!’
‘Way. I mean - damn it Dean,’ Sam bitched as he levered all seven feet of himself off the tiles, righted the fallen chair, then ignored it to squeeze onto the padded bench beside his brother.
‘Whoa, personal space, dude!’
Sam just slapped aside the hands Dean was holding up to preserve his precious diner territory. ‘Shut up, Dean. We’re brothers, we don’t have personal space.’
‘Fine, be like that then.’ Dean pouted, only half jokingly, as Sam swivelled the laptop around to produce his bone.
‘There have been six sightings of the Virgin Mary there since 1999. One a year. Every time on Christmas Eve.’
‘Christmas? But that doesn’t make it a miracle, Virginia.’
‘I’m not talking miracles. I think it’s something else.’
‘Delusions? Not usually our gig.’
‘Our kind of something else. Ghosts, or something darker - demons.’
‘Appearing as You Know Who? What would be the point? Besides being funny in a twisted kind of way.’
‘Maybe to trick people; lure them in.’
Dean leaned in a little closer to the computer despite his best intentions. He squinted and pointed his fry at the death notices from the Niceville Mercury that Sam had neatly tiled across the screen. ‘Sam, you didn’t tell me God was providing bodies.’
‘If you get ketchup on my laptop they won’t be the only bodies.’
Dean jiggled the dripping fry menacingly over the keyboard. ‘Oh my God, the keys are bleeding! Do you think it’s a sign?’
Sam kicked him. He had really big, hard, feet. ‘Dean do you think you could focus here for a second?’
‘I’m focusing,’ Dean said, busy reading, as he absentmindedly sent the fry to join its brethren. ‘Every person that saw the apparition died, supposedly accidentally, a week later?’
‘Yep. Seven days exactly. Feel like a holiday road trip now?’
‘On the Road to Niceville?’ Dean was proud that he managed to get that out with only the one snicker. ‘Where the hell is Niceville?’
Sam blinked, but carefully didn’t say anything.
‘Sammy?’
‘Florida,’ Sam grudgingly admitted, not looking at his brother.
‘FLORIDA?’ Fuck. ‘Man, you know weird shit happens to us every time we go there.’
‘Dean, weird shit happens to us everywhere.’
Point to Sam.
‘They have a mullet festival,’ Sam said with a hopeful look.
Damn, but baby brother had brought out the big guns. A hunt and rock music. ‘Well.’ He drew it out. They both knew what the end result would be but there were certain long standing formalities that had to covered before they got there. ‘So, Niceville.’ The Miracle of Niceville. That just sounded wrong. ‘Man. Florida and uh, oh, hell, and you think there is something to this?’
‘Definitely.’
Dean knew when he was beaten but he couldn’t resist one last dig as he reached up to pet Sam’s shaggy head. ‘Good dog.’
~~~
It had been building for the past five hours, and when they crossed out of Alabama into Okaloosa County something in Dean finally cracked and he stopped trying to keep an eye on his brother’s driving with his eyes at half-mast.
‘Just promise me two things, Sammy.’
‘What?’
‘Promise first,’ Dean said.
‘All right. I, Sam Winchester, hereby swear …’
‘Pinky swear,’ Dean said, ignoring the fact that he sounded all of six again.
Sam rolled his eyes, but raised the obligatory extremity off the steering wheel to link with his brother’s. ‘I, Samuel Winchester, do solemnly pinky swear.’
‘That I’m not going to have to dress up in pastels and play golf with retirees no matter who we need to interview.’
‘How about a nice plaid outfit?’ Sam said with true evil.
‘Now you’re just mocking my breath-taking sense of fashion,’ Dean replied with a good imitation of one of his brother’s infamous bitch faces.
‘Mmm,’ Sam murmured, slanting an ironic glance at Dean’s jacket.
Dean deliberately misinterpreted the look and stroked the leather soothingly. ‘Someone’s got to carry on the Winchester sense of style.’ He shook his head mournfully. ‘The Fonz, you ain’t.’
Sam looked like he was considering doing a Thelma and Louise right there and then. Just as well there wasn’t a high enough cliff nearby. ‘Fine,’ he eventually bit out. ‘No Italian or Scottish designs for you then. What else?’
‘That’s it.’
‘You said two things,’ Sam persisted. Naturally he’d elected himself the Winchester family pedant at the age of eight. It was a position he’d held undefeated since then, except for a brief ugly moment when Dean turned thirteen. Luckily his father had snapped him out of it within a week, and the whole world, and eventually Dean, had good reason to be grateful for his actions.
‘Uh, it’s so important you need to promise twice?’ Dean answered. But he knew Sam never let anything go. Best just to give him something, anything, as long as it wasn’t what he was really worried about.
‘Dean?’
‘Uh.’ Thinking. Thinking. Bugger. What the hell? Give him part of it. ‘Swear that if the real me dies here, you take me back to Kansas for the marshmallow toast.’
‘Agreed,’ Sam said much too briskly for Dean’s liking. ‘But do I have to use marshmallows?’
‘Yes. I’ve got it all written down for you in the glove box. Including a list of the emo music you aren’t allowed to listen to without me there to slap you up the head.’
‘That it?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Sure?’
‘Yes!’ Dean slouched back in the passenger seat and pretended to go back to sleep. He really hated Florida.
~~~
‘Spirit check in Aisle Three.’
‘Dean, that’s so not funny.’
‘Yeah, it is.’
‘Not even the first time you said it, Dean.’
‘It’d be funnier if you’d let me be in charge of the microphone,’ Dean muttered sourly.
‘Never going to happen, Dean. You’re the Retail Sales Associate, I’m the Retail Assistant Store Manager.’
‘Assistant!’
‘Dean, that doesn’t mean I assist you, it means you’re the checkout chick.’ He smothered what was definitely a snicker. ‘I mean guy. So, for now I’m your boss.’
Dean did his very best to look that dumb (but still hot) - sometimes yanking his brother’s chain was worth a bit of humiliation. Besides, Sam had been worryingly over-protective since St. Louis. Seeing Dean killed by, well - Dean had obviously scared him even more than it had freaked Dean himself out. Even weeks later and states away, every time Dean turned around he caught Sam damn well hovering; hemming him in with his very Samness, as if proximity alone would be enough to keep another shape-shifter (or anything else for that matter) at bay.
Cunningly, one part of his brain (the one a fifteen-year old Sammy snidely referred to as “Macho Macho Man” after they’d seen “The Three Faces of Eve” at a cheap midnight marathon and Sammy had immediately given what he called “The Many Masks of Dean” insulting nicknames) was happy to go along with the charade, wanting him to beat his chest and roar that he was the eldest. In the end, another part did a better job; telling him to quit before he started stamping his feet and pouting like a girl. Dean stopped lifting his right foot and placed it quietly back down on the floor. ‘Of course you’re the boss this time, Sam. You’re the one who smarmed the Regional Manager with all those nerdy convenience retail industry facts and rolled their slogans around on your tongue like you were eating Butterscotch Delight ice-cream.’
Sam just smiled. ‘Research, Dean. Brains will get you there every time.’
Dean was this close to telling Sam (in detail) exactly what got him there every time before he realised that Niceville’s new Retail Sales Associate with the mostest should be above such things. He did take a moment to continue the interesting mental slideshow though, because - hello? Better than cable!
Sam rudely interrupted his free porn deep thoughts. ‘You’re just mad I told you it would be quicker to apply for the vacant jobs rather than fake our way in as inspectors from the head office in Dallas.’
Dean was man enough to admit to himself that the comment made him sulk, just for a second. He really did enjoy the forgery part of the family business. He was like Michelangelo, only hotter. Okay, so he occasionally got carried away being particularly creative with the IDs, especially Sam’s. But, seriously? Whoever took the time to read those things?
Dean was also Winchester enough to concentrate on the job at hand. ‘It was only faster because the last two of those bodies belonged to staff. No-one wants to work here, even when they offer an under the counter bonus.’
Sam sobered up. ‘The latest manager sensibly went on stress-leave at the beginning of the month, and good old Randy the Regional hasn’t got closer than the gas station across the road since last December. They’ve been staffing this store with casuals for ages, and even they don’t last long. I don’t blame them either. When the company took this location off its website they knew they’d been abandoned.’
‘Yup. Who’s willing to die for $7.50 an hour?’
‘Us?’ Sam asked quietly.
‘Not me! I went back and told Randy we were both taking the bonus,’ Dean said, laughing off the very idea of heroism. ‘So we’re it 24/7. Two overlapping thirteen-hour shifts seven days a week? Of course they’re tossing money at me in a brown envelope!’
Sam gave Dean a stern look (probably remembering the last time someone had tossed money at Dean, but that was a girl in a bar so it didn’t count. Absolutely no way that counted. And that rumour about it being a guy? Not true! Besides it was very, very, smoky in that joint. So, there!), but for once didn’t quibble at the extra money.
The way Dean looked at it, it was still honest money. Kind of. Or a hell of lot more honest than the credit card scams Sam excelled at, even if he’d only ever admitted that out loud once. He’d been drunk at the time (“Happy 18th!”), and hadn’t ever shown any signs of remembering the incident. Dean, however, was keeping that little scene tucked away (in the form of a old, carefully grafittied, instant Polaroid inside his wallet) for when he really needed a blackmail advantage over his little brother. He’d almost used it after the interview. He’d tried to convince Sam to go back and apply for the still vacant third job (Retail Sales Associate numero not so uno) by posing as his identical twin, and even nerdier, brother. Dean was convinced that a pair of $2 glasses and a limp would have done the trick because Randy was just that desperate. Sam had, regrettably, pulled a major hissy fit for no good reason that Dean could see - two people + three pay cheques + hush money in cash = win-win. Sam stormed out of the regional office building waving his hands in the air and calling on the gods to wreak vengeance on his big brother. Or at least that was what Dean thought he’d been yelling. He was almost positive Sam had been cursing (or praying) in classical Greek but as he’d had a tendency to nap through most of Pastor Jim’s more esoteric lessons he was just taking an educated “know thy brother” guess. He did know that Sam was upset, so he hadn’t even dared mention his other (and way cooler) idea of Sam pretending to be his own identical twin sister.
~~~
By the time he was partway through his fourth shift as a checkout ch … sales associate, Dean had discovered a number of important things. He’d even made a mental list. A very long list (it’s boring in a 7-Eleven at 2am). By 3am it had numbers. By 4 it was a masterpiece of deduction, high-level prioritisation skills, and clear, concise, caffeinated thinking. Sort of.
33. He didn’t have a future as a grocer.
32. Sam had a secret.
31. Slurpees are good for you.
30. Sam knew a lot about working in 7-Elevens.
29. Only nutters see apparitions. Or seeing apparitions turns them nuts. Whatever.
28. You can do all sorts of fun things on the night shift.
27. Cleaning it up is a bitch.
26. Customers trying the same things should be shot.
25. Saints, halos, messages? What’s with that?
24. Apparitions are shy.
23. Donuts are a basic food group.
22. Iced donuts are even better for you.
21. The people who come into the store to pray in the middle of Aisle Three are not there to thank heaven for 7-Eleven.
20. The buttons on the cash register are way too close together. But the CLEAR button is your friend.
19. Religious whackos really are whacked. What the fuck?
18. Sam actually liked working there - he smiled all the time, even at the nutters customers!
17. Sam should smile more. Sam was obviously mentally ill.
16. Customers are never right, but that doesn’t stop them complaining.
15. Big Gulps are BIG. Double Gulps are HUGE!
14. Putting up a sign saying NO B.V.M. GROUPIES! gets you smacked by the Assistant Store Manager.
13. Him calling you a sook after you pout and offering to kiss your sore hand better gets him smacked.
12. Management had no respect for the workers.
11. Apparitions don’t like stakeouts, even when you leave a plate of donuts out in Aisle Three.
10. Apparently, killing the teenager who (deliberately) spilled his drink into the video machine is not good for business.
9. Sometimes Sam was right.
8. Stocking shelves was more boring than digging graves, and more injury prone.
7. Apparitions obviously had the ability to hack into the security monitors and watch the watchers.
6. Sam worried too much. He worried about everybody.
5. The Boggy Bayou Mullet Festival wasn’t in December.
4. The Boggy Bayou Mullet Festival celebrates fish, not cool hairdos or rock music.
3. Sam was evil. Sam must die.
2. He was bored.
1. Apparitions are usually not real. When they are it is bad…
‘DEAN!’
Dean had his gun out before his ears stopped ringing.
Sam was standing in front of the drink fountain looking - pissed? Pained? Peevish? Yeah, peevish, that was it. It wasn’t a good look on Sam. It was a familiar one though.
‘What?’ Dean tucked his weapon back under his jacket before rescuing his latest project.
‘I’ve been watching you on the monitor for the past hour. You’ve done nothing but lean in the one spot, stare into space, and eat ice cream.’
Now was not the time to mention the list. Never might be a good time. ‘I’m multi-tasking,’ Dean said happily. Happy? He could do that, as well as superficial. He’d had all those years after Sam had left … to build barriers; practise hiding the real Dean. In fact, he’d almost convinced himself that he was shallow. It was easier that way. Caring took too much emotion and energy. He shut down the first and preferred to save the latter for killing things. That came with its own high, and was the one thing he was good at. Layers? Depth? Who needed or wanted that? People invented heroes, but who cared what they wanted or needed? Everyone thought they understood ice cream.
‘Slouching and eating?’
‘I’m keeping an eye on the whackos,’ Dean replied, with an irritated gesture at the two homeless people camped out in Aisle Three.
‘Beverley and Sean.’
‘I can’t believe you remember their names.’
‘They’ve been here ever since we started,’ Sam said.
It had only been two days, but it did feel like a lifetime. ‘And the others. They keep coming and going in waves. Any minute now I expect one of them to beg the ceiling to beam them up.’
Sam sighed. ‘They think they’re going to see a miracle. They have faith. And Beverley and Sean seem to have more than their fair share.’
Dean was thinking that what the twosome really wanted was their share of the store’s central heating over the winter, then Sam gave him such a worried, painfully intense, caring look that Dean wondered if this was what an ice cream headache felt like. He took another spoonful to be sure. Mmmm. It wasn’t the cold; it was Sam.
‘Had enough dessert yet, Dean?’
‘This isn’t just dessert, this is Stir Crazy! I’m conducting an important quality control test of our products.’
‘Chocolate chip cookie-dough or Oreo pieces?’
‘I haven’t made up my mind yet,’ Dean answered serenely. Life was full of important decisions … ‘Hey! What do you mean you were watching me?’ Damn it. Now he was hovering electronically. This whole role reversal thing was getting old fast. No way Dean could live with his little brother pulling this concerned shit. ‘Perv!’
‘Takes one, Dean. Boss, remember? It’s part of my job to keep an eye on problem staff.’
Sam had quick reflexes so he didn’t end up testing out a daring new application for Stir Crazy as a shampoo. It did make an interesting pattern on the floor though. Dean squinted at it again. Nope. Still didn’t look like a cute little baby Jesus or his Mom. Pity, he could have easily sold a photo of that on e-Bay.
Every now and then Sam was extremely good at practising restraint. Every now and always that irritated Dean.
‘I’m just going to take the guys some more coffee. Here’s your checklist of evening jobs,’ Sam said as he gave the mess a wide berth before sauntering off to cater to their guests.
Dean knew then that he was allergic to nutters. ‘Keep doing that, and they’re never going to leave,’ Dean muttered angrily to himself as he watched his brother chatting away and smiling. And what was he handing out leaflets of? Their breakfast menus? Shit.
He did more than swear after he read the checklist. Test the air-con and heating units? Order more donuts? OK, that he could do. Restack the cold room? Infrared filters for the security cameras? Mop the floors? Sam was getting off on this whole manager thing. The sooner they knocked this virgin up - oops - off and left Niceville, the better. Either that or point number 3 on his own list needed to be given a higher priority.
~~~
‘You can’t have a ¼ pound hot dog for breakfast, Dean!’
‘I had a blueberry muffin first,’ Dean protested. ‘Besides this is a Big Bite. It would be disloyal of me not to eat it.’
‘I don’t think loyalty to Aunty 7 is your problem, Dean. I think the additives and preservatives in that thing are a bigger worry.’
Sam’s nose was definitely wrinkling. Dean ignored him as usual and considered eating another one. It wasn’t as if it was that good. He just needed food and coffee as fuel to keep him going. They’d both been living on adrenaline since their father had disappeared. Too many miles, and hunts, and not enough sleep or answers. Here, they’d been camping out in the store’s back room since they started work. There hadn’t been any good reason to get a motel room when one of them had to be in the store the whole time. It was easier to trade off crashing in sleeping bags for a few hours during the day while they spent the rest of the time working the store and the case.
There was one benefit to manning a store though, especially one in a small town. Sooner or later almost everyone came in there, if only to pick up a paper, coffee and a donut on the way to work. Sam was right, they didn’t have to pose as reporters or anything else to go and interview people. Everybody was coming to them for a change. Leading up to what most of the locals were calling the Niceville Advent, even the victims’ friends and families had come in. It was as if they were coming back to reassure themselves that it was real. Retelling their relatives’ 7-Eleven miracle as they themselves had heard it. The wind, the cold, a woman’s face - Holy Mother of God - reaching, blessing, disappearing. Forgive me Father … The stories were so powerful, that even years later, their families were still reliving the event, trying to explain away the unknown along with their grief.
Dean thought the stories sucked. Talk about clichés. But hallucinations, religious fervour, or just plain craziness, all those people had heart attacks and died seven days after witnessing their goddamn “miracle.” What puzzled Dean (besides exactly what had killed them - that they were still trying to figure out) was how most of the families seemed at peace with it. Like dying in a so-called “state of grace” made it all right somehow. The Virgin Mary had known they were ill and came to them beforehand, to show them the way home. Yeah, right! Dean wanted to ask them why she didn’t come to all the other “sick” people too, but he didn’t want to hear that crappy “God moves” speech ever again. Talk about meaningless platitudes.
One particular family was definitely relishing their secondhand brush with glory. Didn’t sound like they’d had much to do with their sister for years. But now she was their ticket to local fame. Sam said it probably had a lot to do with guilt. Dean told him they were assholes. They talked more about the “miracle” than their sister. People had died. Whether they saw the Blessed Virgin Mary or something else, they were dead. Some of these people didn’t deserve families. The others seemed to be clinging to the forlorn hope that there was an afterlife. Dean didn’t see how that was supposed to make it easier to bear the loss. “Meant to be” - “God’s grand design.” Dean had started to tell the Sullivans that God should get a better plan, but Sam went and talked over the top of him. Pushy bitch.
~~~
Ducks! That was what they reminded Dean of. Two confused ducklings trailing around after their mother. Dean didn’t know quite how he did it (okay, maybe it was that whole big-eyed sincerity thing), but Sam had managed in a very short space of time to get their two most dedicated weirdos to imprint on him.
It was so amazing that Dean had even rerun some of the security footage back last night to watch the highlights. Sam now had one, or both, of them following him around the store constantly while he waved his arms around, gesturing at the shelves. The one time Dean had gotten close enough to overhear them he’d been giving some sort of mini-lecture on product placement, buffering with inventory, and the importance of catering to local tastes. That was downright spooky. But what was sad was the way those two oddballs were just soaking up the lessons and all that concentrated attention. Dean figured none of them had had anyone care about them in a long time. He swore that they already knew more about running a convenience store than he did, and he was second-in-charge! On a more positive note they weren’t wasting any of their time praying any more. Well, not aloud anyway.
Getting the natives to trust you was one thing; that was an essential of the job that their father taught them around the same time he had them start to lay down salt barriers for him. Becoming involved was something else. Sam kept doing this; creating connections; making friends. Everywhere they went, he freaking nested. Started building a home for himself. Dean hated it. Every time they left a place, Sam hurt, and he had to deal with the fallout. Dean never left anything behind.
It was wrong to let Bev the nutters get so attached like this. They didn’t have anyone else to fall back on after Sam and Dean left. And leaving was what they were going to be doing as soon as this hunt was over. The day after the job was done, Niceville was dust. The very next minute.
Sam’s years in Stanford had only exacerbated his tendency to form bonds wherever he was. He needed to toughen up again and remember the Winchester road rules. If you couldn’t wear it, eat it, or use it as a weapon, you left it behind. Sam had been breaking those rules his entire life. Toys. That damned pet rabbit he’d kept in secret for a whole month in Michigan, right up until it had escaped from his backpack on the drive out of Ann Arbour and almost made Dean piss his pants. Books - they’d ended up being the hardest battle. Dad, driven almost to breaking point, had been forced to compromise on that one; Sammy could take two, non-school, books with him. Dean still wasn’t sure how Sammy had conned him into lugging around two (or three, or four) extras in his bag for years.
Look at them down there, Sam and his extras again. No way was Dean carrying them when they left. Dean watched them huddled together, laughing as they tried to fix a collapsing shelf overburdened with boxes of tacky Christmas ornaments, and just wished Sam would relax that much around him. Get back to the old Sam. His brother. Adjust to leaving with what you came with. No more, no less. No regrets.
‘Sam, a little help up here,’ he called down from the top of the ladder where he was stuck attaching fucking filters to camera lenses.
Sam dashed over, disciples in tow. ‘What’s wrong?’ Six pairs of eyes peered up at him with concern. Dean wasn’t sure he was strong enough to cope with three Sams.
‘Got a crack in this one,’ he lied. ‘Can you pass up another?’ Pass up? Hell, Sam probably could fit the replacement from there by just going a little ballet, and not need the ladder at all.
Beverley and Sean fought over which one got into the carton of filters first. Sean fought dirty and handed one to Sam with a sycophantic smile. Beverley settled for sitting down on the floor, possessively clutching the box.
‘Thanks, guys,’ Dean said as Sam tossed up the unnecessary item. He managed to discretely scratch the original filter with the screwdriver as he made the exchange. Winchesters always covered their tracks.
‘That’s the last one. I’m going to do another sweep with the EM … um … take the temperature readings again. The heating still seems to be out of whack. Do you think you and your buddies can handle the store alone if I have to go outside and check the units on the roof later, Sam?’
Dean could tell by the look on his face that Sam that had gotten the message that he thought more firepower was going to be needed before Marian made her grand entrance the next night. Unfortunately, he’d also picked up on something Dean hadn’t meant to make obvious.
‘Jealous, much?’ Sam leant up (nobody had a right to be that tall) to whisper, before patting Dean consolingly on the leg. ‘It’s okay, we’ll get you a nice GI-Joe to play with later.’
Because he could, he dropped the now damaged filter onto Sam’s head. Sam’s reaction was a classic. Beverley’s not so well-muffled giggles showed she was pretty cool. Dean decided to fill the plate with iced donuts next time. He just had to work out a way that Sean wouldn’t get any.
~~~
‘The readings are getting stronger every hour,’ Dean said the next morning in a now all too rare lull between customers, as he shoved the EMF, perhaps a little too excitedly, in Sam’s face.
‘Could you be more of a instrument dork, Dean?’ Sam asked with a pained sigh. He pushed the battered old Walkman back to a better viewing distance.
‘Only when you stop being a geek, Sam. Look at those fields!’
‘I’m looking,’ Sam said, putting his employee frequency chart aside to concentrate on transferring the EMF information onto the laptop. Like the Excel slut he was, he hummed as he quickly converted the data to a line graph. ‘You’re right. There are increasingly high levels in Aisle Three, and nothing but a bit of residual overflow in the adjacent aisles.’
‘Incoming,’ Dean confirmed.
‘A weak spot,’ Sam said more precisely.
‘Well, something out there is squeezing it hard,’ Dean replied.
‘Ugh, Dean! I could have done without that image right after eating,’ Sam grimaced.
Dean didn’t bother to apologise. Okay, so - gross - but apt. And they were used to icky stuff. Sam was just sometimes such a girl about it all. If you’d never seen it, you wouldn’t believe he could slice and dice an ugly better than any hunter Dean had seen, apart from Dad. He looked at Princess Samantha, still making that screwed up “Eww” face, and decided it was easier all around to rephrase the sentence. ‘All right, something out there is pushing the envelope. Can we slap a patch on before it gets through again or are we going to have to trap it on re-entry and mark it “return it to sender”?’
‘I’ve checked. Not even Bobby, or any of his contacts, knows how to make that kind of dimensional repair. Stop sounding so enthusiastic, Dean. Hopefully this isn’t going to turn into your favourite scene in Ghostbusters.’
‘Like you don’t know the dialogue by heart too.’
Sam sat there coolly pretending he hadn’t spent a large part of his childhood watching Dr Who, Star Trek, and yes, Ghostbusters re-runs with Dean while cleaning their father’s weapons.
‘This is going to get nasty, Dean. We’ve got all these people flooding in here, the closer it gets. By tonight we’re going to have a goddamn queue out into the car park! They’ll all be standing here holding their Bibles, and praying, expecting something miraculous to happen.’
Dean sobered up quickly. He’d been worrying about the bystanders too. Thankfully there had only been one victim on each of the previous occasions. Midnight on Christmas Eve would never be the most popular time to shop, even for those people who did leave everything to the last minute. But yesterday some ass-wipe journalist had run a feel-good holiday piece in the local paper. The carefully timed article had stirred up more than just the neighbours and the victim’s families after someone had emailed the story to the Weekly World News. Now it seemed like half of Florida was trying to get in the doors to get closer to God. This whole “if you staff it they will come” thing had rapidly turned from a blessing into a curse.
Things had gotten so hectic that Dean had been forced to co-opt Beverley to work the cash register while they finalized a plan. She didn’t seem to be having any trouble at all with the size of the keys. Buoyed with that success he’d asked Sean to enforce the banner he’d tacked up over the front door at daybreak.
!!!!!You come in - you buy something!!!!!
You break it - we break you
He wanted him to move their customers along and out, but Sean refused to do anything unless Sam told him to. One quick nod from Sam and Sean, the brown-noser, was officiously patrolling the aisles. Dean hated Sean and momentarily considered posting him in the middle of Aisle Three later. Maybe right next to the Sullivans who he just knew were going to be there front-and-centre looking for their own moment of fame.
‘Any miraculous ideas, Dean?’
‘Nothing you’d let me act on,’ Dean said grumpily. ‘And I suppose there’s a law somewhere that makes it illegal for me to stand in Aisle Three waving a placard that says “We don’t serve no stinking demons?”
‘Not yet,’ Sam answered with a faint shadow of the smile Dean had been aiming for.
Dean decided then to just say what was really on his mind. ‘Sam, if this demon’s partial attempts to come through left people dead, what’s going to happen if it succeeds?’
‘I don’t know. The way it is now, if this many people witness another failure, they’ll be calling this the Niceville Massacre in seven days. If it actually gets through? I don’t even want to imagine what could happen. Whatever it is, we have to stop it. Here and now.’
~~~
‘Sam, if you don’t send them away. I’m going to do it. And believe me, I won’t take the time to sugar-coat it.’ Dean made his voice hard, and meant every word. They’d “accidentally” knocked over a shelf of soda and successfully exploded the liquid over an even greater area than they had planned. It hadn’t taken much convincing to get the current lot of believers out of the store “just so we can have ten minutes to clean up.” All the believers, except Beverley and Sean.
Sam banged his head on the doorway of the back room until Dean stopped him. ‘They just wanted to help. Look, they’re so proud they got it cleaned up so quickly.’
Dean watched their “assistants” standing beaming beside the cash register. ‘You tamed them, you get to set them free in the wild.’
Sam groaned. ‘When did you start watching Animal Planet instead of Oprah?
‘Shut up. You know I’m right. Get them out now, Sam. We’ve only got a few hours left to rig this place to blow, if Plan A doesn’t work.’
‘Why do I always get Plan A?’
‘You’re our designated nerd, and Plan B still needs fine-tuning. We don’t unless we come up with something better between now and midnight. Now stop procrastinating, or I really will do it.’
Dean made himself watch the whole thing. That was harder than he’d thought it would be. Harder on Beverley though (okay, maybe Sean too). It was hardest of all on Sam.
He came up behind his brother, as he shut the door finally. Face to face with Beverley and Sean with more than glass separating them now. Dean reached over Sam’s shoulder and pushed the top bolt in before taping his last sign up, right at Sean’s eye level.
‘Come on, Sam.’ He tugged his brother back from the door.
‘What did you say?’
Say? He hadn’t said anything. Sam had said it all - sorry to do this … hard workers … know you’ll both do well … something to tide you over. Fuck, what could he say? ‘They’ll both be better off away from here.’
‘Not about them, stupid! Your sign.’ Sam looked like he was going to strangle him.
Oh. Dean winced. ‘Uh. Closed for religious reasons. Happy Holidays.’
‘Religious reasons? Happy Holidays?’ Sam sounded like he was going to choke, or worse yet, cry.
Dean panicked. Mad Sam, geek Sam, pissed Sam, he could handle. An unhappy Sam was something he couldn’t bear. ‘I …’ Thank God, there was a stack of alcohol in the cold room. Beer, wine, what? Night Train or Thunderbird, that’s what they needed - something cheap and nasty to wipe this temporarily from Sam’s mind.
Sam bursting into hysterical laughter put that thought immediately out of Dean’s mind. Alcohol wasn’t going to help. Time to try something different. He punched Sam on the shoulder. ‘Dude, I can be politically correct. Can’t have any complaints going back to headquarters about our lack of cross-cultural awareness, can we? Happy holidays is a nice, non-offensive greeting.’ He waved at the staff bulletin board behind the counter. ‘Didn’t you read the memo?’
Sam’s laughter as Dean gently steered him away from Beverley and Sean was as close to genuine as he could hope for.
~~~
By the time night fell, Dean had taped Christmas wrapping paper (he’d used the store’s only roll of brown paper up on his banner) up over all the windows. He’d left Sam desperately doing some last minute research on the phone with Bobby. Best idea all around to have him do that, and leave Dean to cover up the faces of the crowd now sitting on the ground outside patiently holding candles and torches aloft. Dean had made himself give Beverley and Sean (but not those Sullivan bastards) a friendly, but somewhat distant nod as he finished blocking them out. He didn’t think his hastily scrawled Soon under new management! was going to make them feel better. He really hoped he’d be able to contain the explosion just to the inside of the store. He didn’t need anything else on his conscience at this stage. At the rate he was going he was definitely not going to be on Santa’s nice list.
He turned around to find Sam right behind him, staring through the scary festive collage as if he knew precisely how crowded the car park was. Shit. Dean tried a few names out in his head first. Zinfandel? Pinot Grig - what? He gave up and went for something slightly easier. Dean nodded towards the cold room and did his damndest to sound like a snooty waiter. ‘Would Ma’am prefer a Napa Valley merlot while we wait?’ Heh.
Sam just gave him the strangest look.
Beer? ‘My apologies for the mistake, Sir. The lighting in here leaves a lot to be desired. A Stella or Chelada perhaps?’
Sam sighed. Possibly he was tired?
‘I’ll just take you to your regular table, Sir, and have one of the staff bring you our Last Supper menu.’
Sam wasn’t too tired to punch him. Okay, maybe he deserved that. Pastor Jim would have slugged him too.
As they sat cross-legged on their sleeping bags eating hot dogs and crisps Dean had one question that had been bothering him ever since they’d started this job. He didn’t see why he should hold off now. ‘Research. You told me it was research.’
‘The demon?’ Sam asked, obviously more than a little bewildered over the unexpected change in conversation from cars to research.
‘When we got here; you said that research was how you knew all about 7-Elevens. But you knew everything. The sort of things you can’t find out from books or computers.’
Sam finished off his meal very deliberately while Dean, for once, played with his own food in frustrated silence.
‘Did you know that California has more 7-Eleven stores than any other state? Palo Alto …’
Shit. He’d been expecting it to be about Stanford. Just not as ready to hear it as he thought.
‘… It’s how I met Jess.’
But not expecting that. Ever. Sam had barely been able to talk about Jess since the fire.
‘She was working her way through school doing the swing shift.’
Dean would have sworn on a stack of exorcism rituals that she was a rich kid. He’d only met her that once, but she’d had that easy self-confidence that often came with inherited wealth. Maybe that poise had come from the certainty that she was loved. From Sam.
He could see Sam starting to close down again. Keep him talking. Keep it light. ‘So you went in to get a soda and came out with a girlfriend? Fast work, Sammy!’
‘I went it to get a job,’ Sam said.
What? ‘But you got a scholarship!’ Dean protested.
‘That covered tuition and basic text-books, Dean. Not housing, and certainly not food.’
Dean had a lot of weapons lined up in the room. He just wasn’t sure which one to smash first. After Sam had left him the only thing Dean had held onto was the thought that he had that full-ride. That everything was set up for him. That he wouldn’t need to struggle, have to worry about anything other than studying. He’d been wrong. And Sam had been out there dealing with life, all on his own. Without Dean.
Sam reached over and put his hand on Dean’s tightly clenched fist. ‘It’s okay, Dean. I managed. You taught me that. So, I had a few lean times, slept in some rat-holes, and I did a few things to survive at the beginning that I’d rather not remember; but I was there, living my life, and I got a job - well, two jobs, and I met Jess, and I was happy, Dean.’
Dean held onto Sam’s hand hard (but just for a minute), and deliberately didn’t think about any of those other things. That was something they were going to have to deal with some other time. For now, this was enough.
~~~
‘Are you all set, Dean?’
‘Not really,’ Dean panted, twisting his spanner tight as he made a few final inspired alterations to the CO2 tanks in the store room. ‘Give me five,’ he yelled as he dashed out into the store to complete idea number seven on his Kill Marian list. ‘Hip bone’s connected to the Coke bone,’ he sang, out-of breath and completely off-key as he squatted down to attach one end of a non-standard (and possibly illegal) high-pressure hose to a tap that had better be made in the U.S.A. and built to stand what he had planned.
Sam stuck his now partially frizzled head around the corner. ‘I’ve put bypasses on all the other power sources. We turn off the main, flip the router, I pull the switch remotely and all the power in the building goes through your baby. Your idea better work, Dean.’
‘Hope it works better than your electrical skills,’ Dean muttered.
Sam, who should have known better after what had happened in the past three hours, stuck his tongue out at Dean before disappearing again.
‘Go ahead, stick that into a socket, and we’ll do anther test, shall we?’ Dean joked. ‘And after you recover can you run through those exorcism rituals one more time?’
‘I can still hear you, Dean. We’ve been through them twenty times already. Besides, you know as well as I do that it may only hold the demon for a few minutes,’ Sam replied.
‘I only need one for this bitch,’ Dean said, crossing a few more mental fingers as he did a few more laps with the duct-tape around the join.
The fluro over Aisle Three chose then to announce whose side it was on.
‘Show time, Sammy,’ Dean whispered, sliding back into the room to check the monitors. Yup. Getting up that ladder had been worth it. The filters were doing the job nicely. Smack bang in the middle of the aisle, and right on target (and Dean had measured it twice) something was beginning to pulse. Marian was now getting close enough to be seen rather than the currents that had registered on the EMF.
‘Eyes and lights … Good work,’ he finished, his eyes already shut as he heard Sam flip the first switch. ‘Hello darkness, my old …’
‘Dean, if the demon doesn’t get you, I will,’ Sam promised while handing him another gun in the darkness.
‘It’s Christmas, Sam, you can have whatever your little heart desires.’ With that lie, Dean eased back through the doorway followed closely by his brother.
‘Now that’s festive,’ Dean said after they had carefully felt their way around the end of Aisle Two. The phenomena had quickly become strong enough to be seen without the aid of filters. Much too quickly. ‘Do you get the feeling Marian thinks this is going to be seventh time lucky?’ he asked dryly.
‘I think he/it/or she is packing a lot more power this time,’ Sam replied in a worried tone.
Huh. So much for Sam’s earlier bright idea that it was using the power of the witnesses as a bridge to cross over - her attempts draining them of all life in the days that followed. Not that Dean didn’t think that Sam might still be partly right. But it looked like she was hedging her bets and plugging into the grid on both sides.
Dean kept his gun aimed squarely in the middle of the - hell- a sparkly blob. It looked more like a tiny aurora continually folding in on itself than anything else. ‘It’s kind of pretty, but it doesn’t look anything like a face, let alone something you’d pray to.’
‘Don’t piss it off, Dean,’ Sam advised.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Dean replied casually as their rainbow connection immediately tripled in size and began to take on distinct, if distorted, features. ‘I think she might like me.’
He flicked off the safety as he advanced forward a few steps. ‘How are you doing, sweetheart? Anything I can get for you? Gingerbread? A Super Double Gulp Eggnog?’
He held his ground when the “face” turned towards him. Okay, not so pretty any longer. Not feminine, and definitely not human. How the hell had anyone thought this was holy? ‘So, Marian, is it? I’m Dean. The frizz-head,’ he gestured over his shoulder, ‘is Sammy. Now that we’ve been formally introduced, I have to tell you, you don’t look anything like a Marian to me. Mind you, it is dark, so I may not be seeing you in the best light. What do you think, Sam?’
Sam, as usual, didn’t waste any time flirting. ‘Exorcizamus te, omnis immundus spiritus, omnis satanica potestas, omnis incursio infernalis adversarii …’
‘Doesn’t look like Sam thinks you’re his type either,’ Dean said, shaking his head sadly as his brother continued the exorcism. ‘And usually we have the exact opposite taste in girls. But in this case, I have to agree with him.’ He punctuated his point with a salt-round between Marian’s “eyes”, but as expected that just got him an irritated growl. All of Marian’s attention was centred on Sam whose words seemed to be fixing her in space for now.
Unfortunately a knocking on the door proved that the gunshot had got someone else’s attention. A lot of someone elses. Damn it. For the past few hours Dean had been too busy to think about their audience outside. ‘Come back on December 26th. We’ll be having a sale!’ He yelled out. He just knew that was Sean knocking. The sound had a certain ingratiating, but persistent, quality that was typical of his nemesis. They were all too damned close.
Sam almost missed a beat in his recitation, before taking a quick breath and continuing firmly on. ‘ … supra firmam petram, et portas inferi adversus eam nunquam esse prevalituras edixit …’
Good boy, Sammy. But Dean could tell by the way Marian was beginning to pulse, if somewhat erratically, again, that it wouldn’t be long before she got another energy surge and broke free.
Time to add Plan A to Plan B and see what happened. Dean really didn’t want to have to go to Plan C, even if it shut Sean up permanently.
Dean fired a few more rounds at Marian because he really didn’t like her. ‘Now, Sam!’ he yelled reaching over to grab the hose he’d passed through a gap in the shelves earlier.
Sam gave a good yank on the nylon cord he had hanging over his left shoulder. ‘Imperat tibi excelsa Dei Gemitrix Virgo Maria!’
‘Yeah! What he said, you big fake!’ Dean bellowed, turning the valve on and letting an explosive gush of blessed corrosive brown liquid shoot straight into and through a screaming but rapidly dissolving Marian.
‘Huh.’ Dean said in a surprised tone a few minutes later. He hadn’t thought his plan would actually work. ‘So, now we know - demons do go better with Coke!’
~~~
‘We saved the world in time for Christmas, Dean. Santa would be so proud. Could you be a little more perky about it?’
Dean considered it. On a positive note Marian was dead and the tear (or whatever it was) seemed to have sealed up immediately after - power overload perhaps? Sam, and Beverley, and everyone else was safe. Unfortunately the Sullivans, and Sean were still alive (and still banging on the door), and as far as he knew they’d only saved Florida, so …
‘No, don’t answer. I don’t want to know what you’re thinking, Dean.’ Sam said quickly.
Dean decided there and then to be more dependable. He was the eldest after all. He was going to need a new list. He had to remove all his carefully placed explosives. Then they still had to get out of the store without becoming either the new vandals or miracles of Niceville. He also knew Sam would insist on them doing something to help Beverley and Sean (damn him). They could undoubtedly produce enough faked references to get the pair a job in the 7-Eleven store of their choice, as long as it wasn’t in Florida. And after that they’d be free to get the hell out of this state, for good! He wondered if Sam would think any less of him if he just suggested they forget everything and make a run for it. Now.
Sam apparently could read him like one of his damned heavy books, and offered his conscience a temporary respite from all that responsibility. ‘Concentrate on this instead; we’re still alive, and it’s our first Christmas together in years.’
Dean grinned; when you put it like that. Sam was in desperate need of some serious down-time to de-stress and lighten up. Dean knew the perfect combination of ingredients for that. He looked around the shambles of the 7-Eleven. ‘We do have access to an entire store full of goodies, a back door, and an awesome car. Let’s go get a room, and party!’
~~~
The rest of the night was a blur in which only a few oddities stood out from the festive chaos. The sickly sweet taste of Thunderbird dancing down his throat; the cat-scratch of Cheetos (original flavour, of course) being crunched into oblivion between his body and the mattress; the smell of ink; and the surreal sound of Sam - giggling.
~~~
Dean woke up in the motel the following afternoon with the kind of hangover that made sticking an icepick into your brain seem like a viable alternative, and very little memory of the night before. As Winchester Christmases went, he decided, it must have been a pretty good one.
That opinion changed as soon as he staggered into the bathroom and caught sight of himself in the mirror. Around then he had another revelation - yelling while you are still smashed is never a good idea. Did you know that noise can actually vibrate right through your skull?
By the time he started waving a certain indelible black Sharpie accusingly at his equally fragile brother he knew that a lingering death was much too painless a fate for Sam.
A/N: Want to know exactly what Sam did to Dean? secret-seer will reveal all behind Door 14 (but you'll have to wait till the 14th! Sorry) in my SPN Advent Calendar where you can find further Christmas stories and graphics
Rating: R (only for the language), Gen
Characters: Dean, Sam, OMC, OFC
Disclaimer: The characters are sadly not mine. I’m just sticking pins into Winchester dolls for the purposes of general angst. Sorry about the holes!
Word Count: 8,703
A/N: Door 7 in my SPN Advent Calendar
For heyjudeca who patiently did her damnedest to answer a weird barrage of questions about 7-Elevens, bad alcohol, and Florida licensing laws. Cheers, Jude!
Graphics Note: The banner image - Empyrean is taken from Dante’s The Divine Comedy, illustrated by Gustave Dore
Setting: Niceville, FL, December 2005.
Summary: Even demons realize that practice makes perfect
‘Marian apparitions,’ Sam muttered obscurely, hunched over the laptop busy channelling his not so inner research geek.
‘I was slapped by a Marian once,’ Dean happily reminisced as he idly drew bloody symbols on his plate with a recently orphaned French fry.
‘Only once?’ Sam snarked. He continued to ignore his own congealed meal for the more appealing religious curiosity on his screen.
‘Jealous much? Since you asked, it was worth it. Totally,’ Dean said, slouching right down in the purple vinyl booth. That had two advantages; one of which was getting a hemline view of the sole waitress. Nice.
‘Jailbait, Dean. Definitely underage,’ Sam said, not even looking up from his screen.
Either he was using x-ray vision to see through those girly bangs or maybe Sam simply knew him too well. Dean used his second advantage up then and there by hooking his foot around Sam’s chair and tipping it backwards. ‘I don’t want to date her, Sam. I’m simply appreciating what the good Lord gave her,’ he spouted with dubious piety as his brother sputtered up at him from the floor.
Sam, like the ginormous terrier he’d obviously been in his previous life, wouldn’t let go of his juicy topic. ‘Well, the people of Niceville think God has also been blessing one of their 7-Elevens.’
‘No way!’
‘Way. I mean - damn it Dean,’ Sam bitched as he levered all seven feet of himself off the tiles, righted the fallen chair, then ignored it to squeeze onto the padded bench beside his brother.
‘Whoa, personal space, dude!’
Sam just slapped aside the hands Dean was holding up to preserve his precious diner territory. ‘Shut up, Dean. We’re brothers, we don’t have personal space.’
‘Fine, be like that then.’ Dean pouted, only half jokingly, as Sam swivelled the laptop around to produce his bone.
‘There have been six sightings of the Virgin Mary there since 1999. One a year. Every time on Christmas Eve.’
‘Christmas? But that doesn’t make it a miracle, Virginia.’
‘I’m not talking miracles. I think it’s something else.’
‘Delusions? Not usually our gig.’
‘Our kind of something else. Ghosts, or something darker - demons.’
‘Appearing as You Know Who? What would be the point? Besides being funny in a twisted kind of way.’
‘Maybe to trick people; lure them in.’
Dean leaned in a little closer to the computer despite his best intentions. He squinted and pointed his fry at the death notices from the Niceville Mercury that Sam had neatly tiled across the screen. ‘Sam, you didn’t tell me God was providing bodies.’
‘If you get ketchup on my laptop they won’t be the only bodies.’
Dean jiggled the dripping fry menacingly over the keyboard. ‘Oh my God, the keys are bleeding! Do you think it’s a sign?’
Sam kicked him. He had really big, hard, feet. ‘Dean do you think you could focus here for a second?’
‘I’m focusing,’ Dean said, busy reading, as he absentmindedly sent the fry to join its brethren. ‘Every person that saw the apparition died, supposedly accidentally, a week later?’
‘Yep. Seven days exactly. Feel like a holiday road trip now?’
‘On the Road to Niceville?’ Dean was proud that he managed to get that out with only the one snicker. ‘Where the hell is Niceville?’
Sam blinked, but carefully didn’t say anything.
‘Sammy?’
‘Florida,’ Sam grudgingly admitted, not looking at his brother.
‘FLORIDA?’ Fuck. ‘Man, you know weird shit happens to us every time we go there.’
‘Dean, weird shit happens to us everywhere.’
Point to Sam.
‘They have a mullet festival,’ Sam said with a hopeful look.
Damn, but baby brother had brought out the big guns. A hunt and rock music. ‘Well.’ He drew it out. They both knew what the end result would be but there were certain long standing formalities that had to covered before they got there. ‘So, Niceville.’ The Miracle of Niceville. That just sounded wrong. ‘Man. Florida and uh, oh, hell, and you think there is something to this?’
‘Definitely.’
Dean knew when he was beaten but he couldn’t resist one last dig as he reached up to pet Sam’s shaggy head. ‘Good dog.’
~~~
It had been building for the past five hours, and when they crossed out of Alabama into Okaloosa County something in Dean finally cracked and he stopped trying to keep an eye on his brother’s driving with his eyes at half-mast.
‘Just promise me two things, Sammy.’
‘What?’
‘Promise first,’ Dean said.
‘All right. I, Sam Winchester, hereby swear …’
‘Pinky swear,’ Dean said, ignoring the fact that he sounded all of six again.
Sam rolled his eyes, but raised the obligatory extremity off the steering wheel to link with his brother’s. ‘I, Samuel Winchester, do solemnly pinky swear.’
‘That I’m not going to have to dress up in pastels and play golf with retirees no matter who we need to interview.’
‘How about a nice plaid outfit?’ Sam said with true evil.
‘Now you’re just mocking my breath-taking sense of fashion,’ Dean replied with a good imitation of one of his brother’s infamous bitch faces.
‘Mmm,’ Sam murmured, slanting an ironic glance at Dean’s jacket.
Dean deliberately misinterpreted the look and stroked the leather soothingly. ‘Someone’s got to carry on the Winchester sense of style.’ He shook his head mournfully. ‘The Fonz, you ain’t.’
Sam looked like he was considering doing a Thelma and Louise right there and then. Just as well there wasn’t a high enough cliff nearby. ‘Fine,’ he eventually bit out. ‘No Italian or Scottish designs for you then. What else?’
‘That’s it.’
‘You said two things,’ Sam persisted. Naturally he’d elected himself the Winchester family pedant at the age of eight. It was a position he’d held undefeated since then, except for a brief ugly moment when Dean turned thirteen. Luckily his father had snapped him out of it within a week, and the whole world, and eventually Dean, had good reason to be grateful for his actions.
‘Uh, it’s so important you need to promise twice?’ Dean answered. But he knew Sam never let anything go. Best just to give him something, anything, as long as it wasn’t what he was really worried about.
‘Dean?’
‘Uh.’ Thinking. Thinking. Bugger. What the hell? Give him part of it. ‘Swear that if the real me dies here, you take me back to Kansas for the marshmallow toast.’
‘Agreed,’ Sam said much too briskly for Dean’s liking. ‘But do I have to use marshmallows?’
‘Yes. I’ve got it all written down for you in the glove box. Including a list of the emo music you aren’t allowed to listen to without me there to slap you up the head.’
‘That it?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Sure?’
‘Yes!’ Dean slouched back in the passenger seat and pretended to go back to sleep. He really hated Florida.
~~~
‘Spirit check in Aisle Three.’
‘Dean, that’s so not funny.’
‘Yeah, it is.’
‘Not even the first time you said it, Dean.’
‘It’d be funnier if you’d let me be in charge of the microphone,’ Dean muttered sourly.
‘Never going to happen, Dean. You’re the Retail Sales Associate, I’m the Retail Assistant Store Manager.’
‘Assistant!’
‘Dean, that doesn’t mean I assist you, it means you’re the checkout chick.’ He smothered what was definitely a snicker. ‘I mean guy. So, for now I’m your boss.’
Dean did his very best to look that dumb (but still hot) - sometimes yanking his brother’s chain was worth a bit of humiliation. Besides, Sam had been worryingly over-protective since St. Louis. Seeing Dean killed by, well - Dean had obviously scared him even more than it had freaked Dean himself out. Even weeks later and states away, every time Dean turned around he caught Sam damn well hovering; hemming him in with his very Samness, as if proximity alone would be enough to keep another shape-shifter (or anything else for that matter) at bay.
Cunningly, one part of his brain (the one a fifteen-year old Sammy snidely referred to as “Macho Macho Man” after they’d seen “The Three Faces of Eve” at a cheap midnight marathon and Sammy had immediately given what he called “The Many Masks of Dean” insulting nicknames) was happy to go along with the charade, wanting him to beat his chest and roar that he was the eldest. In the end, another part did a better job; telling him to quit before he started stamping his feet and pouting like a girl. Dean stopped lifting his right foot and placed it quietly back down on the floor. ‘Of course you’re the boss this time, Sam. You’re the one who smarmed the Regional Manager with all those nerdy convenience retail industry facts and rolled their slogans around on your tongue like you were eating Butterscotch Delight ice-cream.’
Sam just smiled. ‘Research, Dean. Brains will get you there every time.’
Dean was this close to telling Sam (in detail) exactly what got him there every time before he realised that Niceville’s new Retail Sales Associate with the mostest should be above such things. He did take a moment to continue the interesting mental slideshow though, because - hello? Better than cable!
Sam rudely interrupted his free porn deep thoughts. ‘You’re just mad I told you it would be quicker to apply for the vacant jobs rather than fake our way in as inspectors from the head office in Dallas.’
Dean was man enough to admit to himself that the comment made him sulk, just for a second. He really did enjoy the forgery part of the family business. He was like Michelangelo, only hotter. Okay, so he occasionally got carried away being particularly creative with the IDs, especially Sam’s. But, seriously? Whoever took the time to read those things?
Dean was also Winchester enough to concentrate on the job at hand. ‘It was only faster because the last two of those bodies belonged to staff. No-one wants to work here, even when they offer an under the counter bonus.’
Sam sobered up. ‘The latest manager sensibly went on stress-leave at the beginning of the month, and good old Randy the Regional hasn’t got closer than the gas station across the road since last December. They’ve been staffing this store with casuals for ages, and even they don’t last long. I don’t blame them either. When the company took this location off its website they knew they’d been abandoned.’
‘Yup. Who’s willing to die for $7.50 an hour?’
‘Us?’ Sam asked quietly.
‘Not me! I went back and told Randy we were both taking the bonus,’ Dean said, laughing off the very idea of heroism. ‘So we’re it 24/7. Two overlapping thirteen-hour shifts seven days a week? Of course they’re tossing money at me in a brown envelope!’
Sam gave Dean a stern look (probably remembering the last time someone had tossed money at Dean, but that was a girl in a bar so it didn’t count. Absolutely no way that counted. And that rumour about it being a guy? Not true! Besides it was very, very, smoky in that joint. So, there!), but for once didn’t quibble at the extra money.
The way Dean looked at it, it was still honest money. Kind of. Or a hell of lot more honest than the credit card scams Sam excelled at, even if he’d only ever admitted that out loud once. He’d been drunk at the time (“Happy 18th!”), and hadn’t ever shown any signs of remembering the incident. Dean, however, was keeping that little scene tucked away (in the form of a old, carefully grafittied, instant Polaroid inside his wallet) for when he really needed a blackmail advantage over his little brother. He’d almost used it after the interview. He’d tried to convince Sam to go back and apply for the still vacant third job (Retail Sales Associate numero not so uno) by posing as his identical twin, and even nerdier, brother. Dean was convinced that a pair of $2 glasses and a limp would have done the trick because Randy was just that desperate. Sam had, regrettably, pulled a major hissy fit for no good reason that Dean could see - two people + three pay cheques + hush money in cash = win-win. Sam stormed out of the regional office building waving his hands in the air and calling on the gods to wreak vengeance on his big brother. Or at least that was what Dean thought he’d been yelling. He was almost positive Sam had been cursing (or praying) in classical Greek but as he’d had a tendency to nap through most of Pastor Jim’s more esoteric lessons he was just taking an educated “know thy brother” guess. He did know that Sam was upset, so he hadn’t even dared mention his other (and way cooler) idea of Sam pretending to be his own identical twin sister.
~~~
By the time he was partway through his fourth shift as a checkout ch … sales associate, Dean had discovered a number of important things. He’d even made a mental list. A very long list (it’s boring in a 7-Eleven at 2am). By 3am it had numbers. By 4 it was a masterpiece of deduction, high-level prioritisation skills, and clear, concise, caffeinated thinking. Sort of.
33. He didn’t have a future as a grocer.
32. Sam had a secret.
31. Slurpees are good for you.
30. Sam knew a lot about working in 7-Elevens.
29. Only nutters see apparitions. Or seeing apparitions turns them nuts. Whatever.
28. You can do all sorts of fun things on the night shift.
27. Cleaning it up is a bitch.
26. Customers trying the same things should be shot.
25. Saints, halos, messages? What’s with that?
24. Apparitions are shy.
23. Donuts are a basic food group.
22. Iced donuts are even better for you.
21. The people who come into the store to pray in the middle of Aisle Three are not there to thank heaven for 7-Eleven.
20. The buttons on the cash register are way too close together. But the CLEAR button is your friend.
19. Religious whackos really are whacked. What the fuck?
18. Sam actually liked working there - he smiled all the time, even at the nutters customers!
17. Sam should smile more. Sam was obviously mentally ill.
16. Customers are never right, but that doesn’t stop them complaining.
15. Big Gulps are BIG. Double Gulps are HUGE!
14. Putting up a sign saying NO B.V.M. GROUPIES! gets you smacked by the Assistant Store Manager.
13. Him calling you a sook after you pout and offering to kiss your sore hand better gets him smacked.
12. Management had no respect for the workers.
11. Apparitions don’t like stakeouts, even when you leave a plate of donuts out in Aisle Three.
10. Apparently, killing the teenager who (deliberately) spilled his drink into the video machine is not good for business.
9. Sometimes Sam was right.
8. Stocking shelves was more boring than digging graves, and more injury prone.
7. Apparitions obviously had the ability to hack into the security monitors and watch the watchers.
6. Sam worried too much. He worried about everybody.
5. The Boggy Bayou Mullet Festival wasn’t in December.
4. The Boggy Bayou Mullet Festival celebrates fish, not cool hairdos or rock music.
3. Sam was evil. Sam must die.
2. He was bored.
1. Apparitions are usually not real. When they are it is bad…
‘DEAN!’
Dean had his gun out before his ears stopped ringing.
Sam was standing in front of the drink fountain looking - pissed? Pained? Peevish? Yeah, peevish, that was it. It wasn’t a good look on Sam. It was a familiar one though.
‘What?’ Dean tucked his weapon back under his jacket before rescuing his latest project.
‘I’ve been watching you on the monitor for the past hour. You’ve done nothing but lean in the one spot, stare into space, and eat ice cream.’
Now was not the time to mention the list. Never might be a good time. ‘I’m multi-tasking,’ Dean said happily. Happy? He could do that, as well as superficial. He’d had all those years after Sam had left … to build barriers; practise hiding the real Dean. In fact, he’d almost convinced himself that he was shallow. It was easier that way. Caring took too much emotion and energy. He shut down the first and preferred to save the latter for killing things. That came with its own high, and was the one thing he was good at. Layers? Depth? Who needed or wanted that? People invented heroes, but who cared what they wanted or needed? Everyone thought they understood ice cream.
‘Slouching and eating?’
‘I’m keeping an eye on the whackos,’ Dean replied, with an irritated gesture at the two homeless people camped out in Aisle Three.
‘Beverley and Sean.’
‘I can’t believe you remember their names.’
‘They’ve been here ever since we started,’ Sam said.
It had only been two days, but it did feel like a lifetime. ‘And the others. They keep coming and going in waves. Any minute now I expect one of them to beg the ceiling to beam them up.’
Sam sighed. ‘They think they’re going to see a miracle. They have faith. And Beverley and Sean seem to have more than their fair share.’
Dean was thinking that what the twosome really wanted was their share of the store’s central heating over the winter, then Sam gave him such a worried, painfully intense, caring look that Dean wondered if this was what an ice cream headache felt like. He took another spoonful to be sure. Mmmm. It wasn’t the cold; it was Sam.
‘Had enough dessert yet, Dean?’
‘This isn’t just dessert, this is Stir Crazy! I’m conducting an important quality control test of our products.’
‘Chocolate chip cookie-dough or Oreo pieces?’
‘I haven’t made up my mind yet,’ Dean answered serenely. Life was full of important decisions … ‘Hey! What do you mean you were watching me?’ Damn it. Now he was hovering electronically. This whole role reversal thing was getting old fast. No way Dean could live with his little brother pulling this concerned shit. ‘Perv!’
‘Takes one, Dean. Boss, remember? It’s part of my job to keep an eye on problem staff.’
Sam had quick reflexes so he didn’t end up testing out a daring new application for Stir Crazy as a shampoo. It did make an interesting pattern on the floor though. Dean squinted at it again. Nope. Still didn’t look like a cute little baby Jesus or his Mom. Pity, he could have easily sold a photo of that on e-Bay.
Every now and then Sam was extremely good at practising restraint. Every now and always that irritated Dean.
‘I’m just going to take the guys some more coffee. Here’s your checklist of evening jobs,’ Sam said as he gave the mess a wide berth before sauntering off to cater to their guests.
Dean knew then that he was allergic to nutters. ‘Keep doing that, and they’re never going to leave,’ Dean muttered angrily to himself as he watched his brother chatting away and smiling. And what was he handing out leaflets of? Their breakfast menus? Shit.
He did more than swear after he read the checklist. Test the air-con and heating units? Order more donuts? OK, that he could do. Restack the cold room? Infrared filters for the security cameras? Mop the floors? Sam was getting off on this whole manager thing. The sooner they knocked this virgin up - oops - off and left Niceville, the better. Either that or point number 3 on his own list needed to be given a higher priority.
~~~
‘You can’t have a ¼ pound hot dog for breakfast, Dean!’
‘I had a blueberry muffin first,’ Dean protested. ‘Besides this is a Big Bite. It would be disloyal of me not to eat it.’
‘I don’t think loyalty to Aunty 7 is your problem, Dean. I think the additives and preservatives in that thing are a bigger worry.’
Sam’s nose was definitely wrinkling. Dean ignored him as usual and considered eating another one. It wasn’t as if it was that good. He just needed food and coffee as fuel to keep him going. They’d both been living on adrenaline since their father had disappeared. Too many miles, and hunts, and not enough sleep or answers. Here, they’d been camping out in the store’s back room since they started work. There hadn’t been any good reason to get a motel room when one of them had to be in the store the whole time. It was easier to trade off crashing in sleeping bags for a few hours during the day while they spent the rest of the time working the store and the case.
There was one benefit to manning a store though, especially one in a small town. Sooner or later almost everyone came in there, if only to pick up a paper, coffee and a donut on the way to work. Sam was right, they didn’t have to pose as reporters or anything else to go and interview people. Everybody was coming to them for a change. Leading up to what most of the locals were calling the Niceville Advent, even the victims’ friends and families had come in. It was as if they were coming back to reassure themselves that it was real. Retelling their relatives’ 7-Eleven miracle as they themselves had heard it. The wind, the cold, a woman’s face - Holy Mother of God - reaching, blessing, disappearing. Forgive me Father … The stories were so powerful, that even years later, their families were still reliving the event, trying to explain away the unknown along with their grief.
Dean thought the stories sucked. Talk about clichés. But hallucinations, religious fervour, or just plain craziness, all those people had heart attacks and died seven days after witnessing their goddamn “miracle.” What puzzled Dean (besides exactly what had killed them - that they were still trying to figure out) was how most of the families seemed at peace with it. Like dying in a so-called “state of grace” made it all right somehow. The Virgin Mary had known they were ill and came to them beforehand, to show them the way home. Yeah, right! Dean wanted to ask them why she didn’t come to all the other “sick” people too, but he didn’t want to hear that crappy “God moves” speech ever again. Talk about meaningless platitudes.
One particular family was definitely relishing their secondhand brush with glory. Didn’t sound like they’d had much to do with their sister for years. But now she was their ticket to local fame. Sam said it probably had a lot to do with guilt. Dean told him they were assholes. They talked more about the “miracle” than their sister. People had died. Whether they saw the Blessed Virgin Mary or something else, they were dead. Some of these people didn’t deserve families. The others seemed to be clinging to the forlorn hope that there was an afterlife. Dean didn’t see how that was supposed to make it easier to bear the loss. “Meant to be” - “God’s grand design.” Dean had started to tell the Sullivans that God should get a better plan, but Sam went and talked over the top of him. Pushy bitch.
~~~
Ducks! That was what they reminded Dean of. Two confused ducklings trailing around after their mother. Dean didn’t know quite how he did it (okay, maybe it was that whole big-eyed sincerity thing), but Sam had managed in a very short space of time to get their two most dedicated weirdos to imprint on him.
It was so amazing that Dean had even rerun some of the security footage back last night to watch the highlights. Sam now had one, or both, of them following him around the store constantly while he waved his arms around, gesturing at the shelves. The one time Dean had gotten close enough to overhear them he’d been giving some sort of mini-lecture on product placement, buffering with inventory, and the importance of catering to local tastes. That was downright spooky. But what was sad was the way those two oddballs were just soaking up the lessons and all that concentrated attention. Dean figured none of them had had anyone care about them in a long time. He swore that they already knew more about running a convenience store than he did, and he was second-in-charge! On a more positive note they weren’t wasting any of their time praying any more. Well, not aloud anyway.
Getting the natives to trust you was one thing; that was an essential of the job that their father taught them around the same time he had them start to lay down salt barriers for him. Becoming involved was something else. Sam kept doing this; creating connections; making friends. Everywhere they went, he freaking nested. Started building a home for himself. Dean hated it. Every time they left a place, Sam hurt, and he had to deal with the fallout. Dean never left anything behind.
It was wrong to let Bev the nutters get so attached like this. They didn’t have anyone else to fall back on after Sam and Dean left. And leaving was what they were going to be doing as soon as this hunt was over. The day after the job was done, Niceville was dust. The very next minute.
Sam’s years in Stanford had only exacerbated his tendency to form bonds wherever he was. He needed to toughen up again and remember the Winchester road rules. If you couldn’t wear it, eat it, or use it as a weapon, you left it behind. Sam had been breaking those rules his entire life. Toys. That damned pet rabbit he’d kept in secret for a whole month in Michigan, right up until it had escaped from his backpack on the drive out of Ann Arbour and almost made Dean piss his pants. Books - they’d ended up being the hardest battle. Dad, driven almost to breaking point, had been forced to compromise on that one; Sammy could take two, non-school, books with him. Dean still wasn’t sure how Sammy had conned him into lugging around two (or three, or four) extras in his bag for years.
Look at them down there, Sam and his extras again. No way was Dean carrying them when they left. Dean watched them huddled together, laughing as they tried to fix a collapsing shelf overburdened with boxes of tacky Christmas ornaments, and just wished Sam would relax that much around him. Get back to the old Sam. His brother. Adjust to leaving with what you came with. No more, no less. No regrets.
‘Sam, a little help up here,’ he called down from the top of the ladder where he was stuck attaching fucking filters to camera lenses.
Sam dashed over, disciples in tow. ‘What’s wrong?’ Six pairs of eyes peered up at him with concern. Dean wasn’t sure he was strong enough to cope with three Sams.
‘Got a crack in this one,’ he lied. ‘Can you pass up another?’ Pass up? Hell, Sam probably could fit the replacement from there by just going a little ballet, and not need the ladder at all.
Beverley and Sean fought over which one got into the carton of filters first. Sean fought dirty and handed one to Sam with a sycophantic smile. Beverley settled for sitting down on the floor, possessively clutching the box.
‘Thanks, guys,’ Dean said as Sam tossed up the unnecessary item. He managed to discretely scratch the original filter with the screwdriver as he made the exchange. Winchesters always covered their tracks.
‘That’s the last one. I’m going to do another sweep with the EM … um … take the temperature readings again. The heating still seems to be out of whack. Do you think you and your buddies can handle the store alone if I have to go outside and check the units on the roof later, Sam?’
Dean could tell by the look on his face that Sam that had gotten the message that he thought more firepower was going to be needed before Marian made her grand entrance the next night. Unfortunately, he’d also picked up on something Dean hadn’t meant to make obvious.
‘Jealous, much?’ Sam leant up (nobody had a right to be that tall) to whisper, before patting Dean consolingly on the leg. ‘It’s okay, we’ll get you a nice GI-Joe to play with later.’
Because he could, he dropped the now damaged filter onto Sam’s head. Sam’s reaction was a classic. Beverley’s not so well-muffled giggles showed she was pretty cool. Dean decided to fill the plate with iced donuts next time. He just had to work out a way that Sean wouldn’t get any.
~~~
‘The readings are getting stronger every hour,’ Dean said the next morning in a now all too rare lull between customers, as he shoved the EMF, perhaps a little too excitedly, in Sam’s face.
‘Could you be more of a instrument dork, Dean?’ Sam asked with a pained sigh. He pushed the battered old Walkman back to a better viewing distance.
‘Only when you stop being a geek, Sam. Look at those fields!’
‘I’m looking,’ Sam said, putting his employee frequency chart aside to concentrate on transferring the EMF information onto the laptop. Like the Excel slut he was, he hummed as he quickly converted the data to a line graph. ‘You’re right. There are increasingly high levels in Aisle Three, and nothing but a bit of residual overflow in the adjacent aisles.’
‘Incoming,’ Dean confirmed.
‘A weak spot,’ Sam said more precisely.
‘Well, something out there is squeezing it hard,’ Dean replied.
‘Ugh, Dean! I could have done without that image right after eating,’ Sam grimaced.
Dean didn’t bother to apologise. Okay, so - gross - but apt. And they were used to icky stuff. Sam was just sometimes such a girl about it all. If you’d never seen it, you wouldn’t believe he could slice and dice an ugly better than any hunter Dean had seen, apart from Dad. He looked at Princess Samantha, still making that screwed up “Eww” face, and decided it was easier all around to rephrase the sentence. ‘All right, something out there is pushing the envelope. Can we slap a patch on before it gets through again or are we going to have to trap it on re-entry and mark it “return it to sender”?’
‘I’ve checked. Not even Bobby, or any of his contacts, knows how to make that kind of dimensional repair. Stop sounding so enthusiastic, Dean. Hopefully this isn’t going to turn into your favourite scene in Ghostbusters.’
‘Like you don’t know the dialogue by heart too.’
Sam sat there coolly pretending he hadn’t spent a large part of his childhood watching Dr Who, Star Trek, and yes, Ghostbusters re-runs with Dean while cleaning their father’s weapons.
‘This is going to get nasty, Dean. We’ve got all these people flooding in here, the closer it gets. By tonight we’re going to have a goddamn queue out into the car park! They’ll all be standing here holding their Bibles, and praying, expecting something miraculous to happen.’
Dean sobered up quickly. He’d been worrying about the bystanders too. Thankfully there had only been one victim on each of the previous occasions. Midnight on Christmas Eve would never be the most popular time to shop, even for those people who did leave everything to the last minute. But yesterday some ass-wipe journalist had run a feel-good holiday piece in the local paper. The carefully timed article had stirred up more than just the neighbours and the victim’s families after someone had emailed the story to the Weekly World News. Now it seemed like half of Florida was trying to get in the doors to get closer to God. This whole “if you staff it they will come” thing had rapidly turned from a blessing into a curse.
Things had gotten so hectic that Dean had been forced to co-opt Beverley to work the cash register while they finalized a plan. She didn’t seem to be having any trouble at all with the size of the keys. Buoyed with that success he’d asked Sean to enforce the banner he’d tacked up over the front door at daybreak.
!!!!!You come in - you buy something!!!!!
You break it - we break you
He wanted him to move their customers along and out, but Sean refused to do anything unless Sam told him to. One quick nod from Sam and Sean, the brown-noser, was officiously patrolling the aisles. Dean hated Sean and momentarily considered posting him in the middle of Aisle Three later. Maybe right next to the Sullivans who he just knew were going to be there front-and-centre looking for their own moment of fame.
‘Any miraculous ideas, Dean?’
‘Nothing you’d let me act on,’ Dean said grumpily. ‘And I suppose there’s a law somewhere that makes it illegal for me to stand in Aisle Three waving a placard that says “We don’t serve no stinking demons?”
‘Not yet,’ Sam answered with a faint shadow of the smile Dean had been aiming for.
Dean decided then to just say what was really on his mind. ‘Sam, if this demon’s partial attempts to come through left people dead, what’s going to happen if it succeeds?’
‘I don’t know. The way it is now, if this many people witness another failure, they’ll be calling this the Niceville Massacre in seven days. If it actually gets through? I don’t even want to imagine what could happen. Whatever it is, we have to stop it. Here and now.’
~~~
‘Sam, if you don’t send them away. I’m going to do it. And believe me, I won’t take the time to sugar-coat it.’ Dean made his voice hard, and meant every word. They’d “accidentally” knocked over a shelf of soda and successfully exploded the liquid over an even greater area than they had planned. It hadn’t taken much convincing to get the current lot of believers out of the store “just so we can have ten minutes to clean up.” All the believers, except Beverley and Sean.
Sam banged his head on the doorway of the back room until Dean stopped him. ‘They just wanted to help. Look, they’re so proud they got it cleaned up so quickly.’
Dean watched their “assistants” standing beaming beside the cash register. ‘You tamed them, you get to set them free in the wild.’
Sam groaned. ‘When did you start watching Animal Planet instead of Oprah?
‘Shut up. You know I’m right. Get them out now, Sam. We’ve only got a few hours left to rig this place to blow, if Plan A doesn’t work.’
‘Why do I always get Plan A?’
‘You’re our designated nerd, and Plan B still needs fine-tuning. We don’t unless we come up with something better between now and midnight. Now stop procrastinating, or I really will do it.’
Dean made himself watch the whole thing. That was harder than he’d thought it would be. Harder on Beverley though (okay, maybe Sean too). It was hardest of all on Sam.
He came up behind his brother, as he shut the door finally. Face to face with Beverley and Sean with more than glass separating them now. Dean reached over Sam’s shoulder and pushed the top bolt in before taping his last sign up, right at Sean’s eye level.
‘Come on, Sam.’ He tugged his brother back from the door.
‘What did you say?’
Say? He hadn’t said anything. Sam had said it all - sorry to do this … hard workers … know you’ll both do well … something to tide you over. Fuck, what could he say? ‘They’ll both be better off away from here.’
‘Not about them, stupid! Your sign.’ Sam looked like he was going to strangle him.
Oh. Dean winced. ‘Uh. Closed for religious reasons. Happy Holidays.’
‘Religious reasons? Happy Holidays?’ Sam sounded like he was going to choke, or worse yet, cry.
Dean panicked. Mad Sam, geek Sam, pissed Sam, he could handle. An unhappy Sam was something he couldn’t bear. ‘I …’ Thank God, there was a stack of alcohol in the cold room. Beer, wine, what? Night Train or Thunderbird, that’s what they needed - something cheap and nasty to wipe this temporarily from Sam’s mind.
Sam bursting into hysterical laughter put that thought immediately out of Dean’s mind. Alcohol wasn’t going to help. Time to try something different. He punched Sam on the shoulder. ‘Dude, I can be politically correct. Can’t have any complaints going back to headquarters about our lack of cross-cultural awareness, can we? Happy holidays is a nice, non-offensive greeting.’ He waved at the staff bulletin board behind the counter. ‘Didn’t you read the memo?’
Sam’s laughter as Dean gently steered him away from Beverley and Sean was as close to genuine as he could hope for.
~~~
By the time night fell, Dean had taped Christmas wrapping paper (he’d used the store’s only roll of brown paper up on his banner) up over all the windows. He’d left Sam desperately doing some last minute research on the phone with Bobby. Best idea all around to have him do that, and leave Dean to cover up the faces of the crowd now sitting on the ground outside patiently holding candles and torches aloft. Dean had made himself give Beverley and Sean (but not those Sullivan bastards) a friendly, but somewhat distant nod as he finished blocking them out. He didn’t think his hastily scrawled Soon under new management! was going to make them feel better. He really hoped he’d be able to contain the explosion just to the inside of the store. He didn’t need anything else on his conscience at this stage. At the rate he was going he was definitely not going to be on Santa’s nice list.
He turned around to find Sam right behind him, staring through the scary festive collage as if he knew precisely how crowded the car park was. Shit. Dean tried a few names out in his head first. Zinfandel? Pinot Grig - what? He gave up and went for something slightly easier. Dean nodded towards the cold room and did his damndest to sound like a snooty waiter. ‘Would Ma’am prefer a Napa Valley merlot while we wait?’ Heh.
Sam just gave him the strangest look.
Beer? ‘My apologies for the mistake, Sir. The lighting in here leaves a lot to be desired. A Stella or Chelada perhaps?’
Sam sighed. Possibly he was tired?
‘I’ll just take you to your regular table, Sir, and have one of the staff bring you our Last Supper menu.’
Sam wasn’t too tired to punch him. Okay, maybe he deserved that. Pastor Jim would have slugged him too.
As they sat cross-legged on their sleeping bags eating hot dogs and crisps Dean had one question that had been bothering him ever since they’d started this job. He didn’t see why he should hold off now. ‘Research. You told me it was research.’
‘The demon?’ Sam asked, obviously more than a little bewildered over the unexpected change in conversation from cars to research.
‘When we got here; you said that research was how you knew all about 7-Elevens. But you knew everything. The sort of things you can’t find out from books or computers.’
Sam finished off his meal very deliberately while Dean, for once, played with his own food in frustrated silence.
‘Did you know that California has more 7-Eleven stores than any other state? Palo Alto …’
Shit. He’d been expecting it to be about Stanford. Just not as ready to hear it as he thought.
‘… It’s how I met Jess.’
But not expecting that. Ever. Sam had barely been able to talk about Jess since the fire.
‘She was working her way through school doing the swing shift.’
Dean would have sworn on a stack of exorcism rituals that she was a rich kid. He’d only met her that once, but she’d had that easy self-confidence that often came with inherited wealth. Maybe that poise had come from the certainty that she was loved. From Sam.
He could see Sam starting to close down again. Keep him talking. Keep it light. ‘So you went in to get a soda and came out with a girlfriend? Fast work, Sammy!’
‘I went it to get a job,’ Sam said.
What? ‘But you got a scholarship!’ Dean protested.
‘That covered tuition and basic text-books, Dean. Not housing, and certainly not food.’
Dean had a lot of weapons lined up in the room. He just wasn’t sure which one to smash first. After Sam had left him the only thing Dean had held onto was the thought that he had that full-ride. That everything was set up for him. That he wouldn’t need to struggle, have to worry about anything other than studying. He’d been wrong. And Sam had been out there dealing with life, all on his own. Without Dean.
Sam reached over and put his hand on Dean’s tightly clenched fist. ‘It’s okay, Dean. I managed. You taught me that. So, I had a few lean times, slept in some rat-holes, and I did a few things to survive at the beginning that I’d rather not remember; but I was there, living my life, and I got a job - well, two jobs, and I met Jess, and I was happy, Dean.’
Dean held onto Sam’s hand hard (but just for a minute), and deliberately didn’t think about any of those other things. That was something they were going to have to deal with some other time. For now, this was enough.
~~~
‘Are you all set, Dean?’
‘Not really,’ Dean panted, twisting his spanner tight as he made a few final inspired alterations to the CO2 tanks in the store room. ‘Give me five,’ he yelled as he dashed out into the store to complete idea number seven on his Kill Marian list. ‘Hip bone’s connected to the Coke bone,’ he sang, out-of breath and completely off-key as he squatted down to attach one end of a non-standard (and possibly illegal) high-pressure hose to a tap that had better be made in the U.S.A. and built to stand what he had planned.
Sam stuck his now partially frizzled head around the corner. ‘I’ve put bypasses on all the other power sources. We turn off the main, flip the router, I pull the switch remotely and all the power in the building goes through your baby. Your idea better work, Dean.’
‘Hope it works better than your electrical skills,’ Dean muttered.
Sam, who should have known better after what had happened in the past three hours, stuck his tongue out at Dean before disappearing again.
‘Go ahead, stick that into a socket, and we’ll do anther test, shall we?’ Dean joked. ‘And after you recover can you run through those exorcism rituals one more time?’
‘I can still hear you, Dean. We’ve been through them twenty times already. Besides, you know as well as I do that it may only hold the demon for a few minutes,’ Sam replied.
‘I only need one for this bitch,’ Dean said, crossing a few more mental fingers as he did a few more laps with the duct-tape around the join.
The fluro over Aisle Three chose then to announce whose side it was on.
‘Show time, Sammy,’ Dean whispered, sliding back into the room to check the monitors. Yup. Getting up that ladder had been worth it. The filters were doing the job nicely. Smack bang in the middle of the aisle, and right on target (and Dean had measured it twice) something was beginning to pulse. Marian was now getting close enough to be seen rather than the currents that had registered on the EMF.
‘Eyes and lights … Good work,’ he finished, his eyes already shut as he heard Sam flip the first switch. ‘Hello darkness, my old …’
‘Dean, if the demon doesn’t get you, I will,’ Sam promised while handing him another gun in the darkness.
‘It’s Christmas, Sam, you can have whatever your little heart desires.’ With that lie, Dean eased back through the doorway followed closely by his brother.
‘Now that’s festive,’ Dean said after they had carefully felt their way around the end of Aisle Two. The phenomena had quickly become strong enough to be seen without the aid of filters. Much too quickly. ‘Do you get the feeling Marian thinks this is going to be seventh time lucky?’ he asked dryly.
‘I think he/it/or she is packing a lot more power this time,’ Sam replied in a worried tone.
Huh. So much for Sam’s earlier bright idea that it was using the power of the witnesses as a bridge to cross over - her attempts draining them of all life in the days that followed. Not that Dean didn’t think that Sam might still be partly right. But it looked like she was hedging her bets and plugging into the grid on both sides.
Dean kept his gun aimed squarely in the middle of the - hell- a sparkly blob. It looked more like a tiny aurora continually folding in on itself than anything else. ‘It’s kind of pretty, but it doesn’t look anything like a face, let alone something you’d pray to.’
‘Don’t piss it off, Dean,’ Sam advised.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Dean replied casually as their rainbow connection immediately tripled in size and began to take on distinct, if distorted, features. ‘I think she might like me.’
He flicked off the safety as he advanced forward a few steps. ‘How are you doing, sweetheart? Anything I can get for you? Gingerbread? A Super Double Gulp Eggnog?’
He held his ground when the “face” turned towards him. Okay, not so pretty any longer. Not feminine, and definitely not human. How the hell had anyone thought this was holy? ‘So, Marian, is it? I’m Dean. The frizz-head,’ he gestured over his shoulder, ‘is Sammy. Now that we’ve been formally introduced, I have to tell you, you don’t look anything like a Marian to me. Mind you, it is dark, so I may not be seeing you in the best light. What do you think, Sam?’
Sam, as usual, didn’t waste any time flirting. ‘Exorcizamus te, omnis immundus spiritus, omnis satanica potestas, omnis incursio infernalis adversarii …’
‘Doesn’t look like Sam thinks you’re his type either,’ Dean said, shaking his head sadly as his brother continued the exorcism. ‘And usually we have the exact opposite taste in girls. But in this case, I have to agree with him.’ He punctuated his point with a salt-round between Marian’s “eyes”, but as expected that just got him an irritated growl. All of Marian’s attention was centred on Sam whose words seemed to be fixing her in space for now.
Unfortunately a knocking on the door proved that the gunshot had got someone else’s attention. A lot of someone elses. Damn it. For the past few hours Dean had been too busy to think about their audience outside. ‘Come back on December 26th. We’ll be having a sale!’ He yelled out. He just knew that was Sean knocking. The sound had a certain ingratiating, but persistent, quality that was typical of his nemesis. They were all too damned close.
Sam almost missed a beat in his recitation, before taking a quick breath and continuing firmly on. ‘ … supra firmam petram, et portas inferi adversus eam nunquam esse prevalituras edixit …’
Good boy, Sammy. But Dean could tell by the way Marian was beginning to pulse, if somewhat erratically, again, that it wouldn’t be long before she got another energy surge and broke free.
Time to add Plan A to Plan B and see what happened. Dean really didn’t want to have to go to Plan C, even if it shut Sean up permanently.
Dean fired a few more rounds at Marian because he really didn’t like her. ‘Now, Sam!’ he yelled reaching over to grab the hose he’d passed through a gap in the shelves earlier.
Sam gave a good yank on the nylon cord he had hanging over his left shoulder. ‘Imperat tibi excelsa Dei Gemitrix Virgo Maria!’
‘Yeah! What he said, you big fake!’ Dean bellowed, turning the valve on and letting an explosive gush of blessed corrosive brown liquid shoot straight into and through a screaming but rapidly dissolving Marian.
‘Huh.’ Dean said in a surprised tone a few minutes later. He hadn’t thought his plan would actually work. ‘So, now we know - demons do go better with Coke!’
~~~
‘We saved the world in time for Christmas, Dean. Santa would be so proud. Could you be a little more perky about it?’
Dean considered it. On a positive note Marian was dead and the tear (or whatever it was) seemed to have sealed up immediately after - power overload perhaps? Sam, and Beverley, and everyone else was safe. Unfortunately the Sullivans, and Sean were still alive (and still banging on the door), and as far as he knew they’d only saved Florida, so …
‘No, don’t answer. I don’t want to know what you’re thinking, Dean.’ Sam said quickly.
Dean decided there and then to be more dependable. He was the eldest after all. He was going to need a new list. He had to remove all his carefully placed explosives. Then they still had to get out of the store without becoming either the new vandals or miracles of Niceville. He also knew Sam would insist on them doing something to help Beverley and Sean (damn him). They could undoubtedly produce enough faked references to get the pair a job in the 7-Eleven store of their choice, as long as it wasn’t in Florida. And after that they’d be free to get the hell out of this state, for good! He wondered if Sam would think any less of him if he just suggested they forget everything and make a run for it. Now.
Sam apparently could read him like one of his damned heavy books, and offered his conscience a temporary respite from all that responsibility. ‘Concentrate on this instead; we’re still alive, and it’s our first Christmas together in years.’
Dean grinned; when you put it like that. Sam was in desperate need of some serious down-time to de-stress and lighten up. Dean knew the perfect combination of ingredients for that. He looked around the shambles of the 7-Eleven. ‘We do have access to an entire store full of goodies, a back door, and an awesome car. Let’s go get a room, and party!’
~~~
The rest of the night was a blur in which only a few oddities stood out from the festive chaos. The sickly sweet taste of Thunderbird dancing down his throat; the cat-scratch of Cheetos (original flavour, of course) being crunched into oblivion between his body and the mattress; the smell of ink; and the surreal sound of Sam - giggling.
~~~
Dean woke up in the motel the following afternoon with the kind of hangover that made sticking an icepick into your brain seem like a viable alternative, and very little memory of the night before. As Winchester Christmases went, he decided, it must have been a pretty good one.
That opinion changed as soon as he staggered into the bathroom and caught sight of himself in the mirror. Around then he had another revelation - yelling while you are still smashed is never a good idea. Did you know that noise can actually vibrate right through your skull?
By the time he started waving a certain indelible black Sharpie accusingly at his equally fragile brother he knew that a lingering death was much too painless a fate for Sam.
A/N: Want to know exactly what Sam did to Dean? secret-seer will reveal all behind Door 14 (but you'll have to wait till the 14th! Sorry) in my SPN Advent Calendar where you can find further Christmas stories and graphics