fic: The Sign of False-Tongued Prophets
Fandom: SPN, Dean/Sam AU
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Nope.
Notes: This is kind of a bonus feature for Vocation-verse - by no means necessary reading, and it'll seem like a lot of rehashing if you've read Our Lady - but it's what was already inside my head when I went ahead and re-started the second part, so, have at her.
Also see: Vocation and Our Lady of Lies and Wide Rivers and Mercy and Forbearance.
“Hey Sammy,” Dean called from the bed, “You ever hear the one about the two priests standing at the urinals?”
“No.” Sam poked his head out the bathroom door, speaking around his toothbrush and levelling a look. “An' I don't wanna.”
“One priest looks at the other priest's dick,” Dean continued, tossing an orange up in the air and catching it.
From the bathroom, over the the rush of tap water: “Seriously, shut up.”
“And it has a nicotine patch on it, so the first priest says, 'Pardon me, Father, but aren't you supposed to wear those things on your arm?'”
Sam came out of the bathroom, hair wet and face scrubbed, stretching an undershirt over his shoulders. “Please - Dean - if I hear the punchline to that joke I swear I will lose it.”
“C'mon. It's hilarious.” Dean sat up on the bed, tossed the orange across the room.
Sam caught it, inspected it, tossed it back. Continued buttoning up his blacks. “Yeah, like dead baby jokes are hilarious. Seriously. Just give up on your stand-up career already.”
Dean raised an apologetic hand, “You're right, you're right. It's not funny. I bring shame to the calling.”
Sam didn't roll his eyes, but they certainly twitched upwards as he grabbed his duffel. The motel door banged shut on his words: “I'll be in the car.”
Immediately, Dean launched himself across the room to pry the door open. Sam paused halfway across the wet parking lot to look back, then bolted for the car, and Dean called, loud and quick so his brother heard every word: “So the other priest says: 'It works, 'cause ever since I started wearing this thing I'm down to two butts a day!'”
--
The ride into town was mostly silent, because Sam had insisted on driving and vetoed Dean's entire Guns n'Roses collection. Dean moped in the passenger seat, and Sam listened to him moping and watched the wet, green Wisconsin landscape filter by.
Early October, four months on the road since they'd left their little parish in Blue Earth, and here they were, a three hour drive from Pastor Jim and everything they'd grown up with, everything holy and familiar. Sam tried not to dwell on how easily within reach it was.
Out of habit, Sam counted the churches on the main drag into town, but only found two tucked in between the restaurants and the water parks and the upside-down-White-House theme park.
Dean said, “You could call him,” as he unfolded the brochure they'd picked up at the motel. WISCONSIN DELLS: it proclaimed. Water Park Capital of the World!
Sam didn't want to hear it. “Do you want to stop for breakfast?” He asked, even as they saw the diner with a life-sized statue of Elvis standing at the door. He turned the Impala in, and Dean didn't argue.
At the table, Dean fiddled with the wreck of a ketchup bottle. “So how'd you hear about this lake monster, again?” He arched his eyebrows, made a serious face.
“River monster,” Sam corrected, snagging the brochure and dragging it over so he could examine it. One side was a cheerful green map with bold listings of various tourist attractions - the Torture Museum, the Tommy Bartlett Exploratory, the Ghost Out-Post - all of which were listed as closed October through April. “I got a call from Deacon Thomas in Madison, says he heard some stories.”
“Great,” said Dean, “that's good and specific.”
According to the pamphlet, they'd been lucky to find food at all. The single server working the place took her sweet time getting to them, even though the only other patron on a was an old man in orange suspenders and a grubby ball cap.
“Coffee?” asked the kid, even as she was pouring it.
“Yeah, woah there, that's good,” said Dean. “I'll have the special. And can you throw in an extra cinnamon bun? I got a long day of not much ahead of me.”
Sam shot a look across the table. “Me too.”
“You too not much or you too the special?” said the server, lifting a hand to scratch around her lip piercing. “Or you too an extra cinnamon bun?”
“Me too the special.” Sam snapped.
“Alright,” the kid lifted her eyebrows as she made an imperious note on her pad, “I'll be right back with your toast, Fathers,”
Dean smirked across the table, and Sam let out an annoyed, embarrassed breath. “Look. Let's just split up, alright? You head over to the museum. See if you can find anything in the local lore and legends. Thomas said something about drownings, teeth marks, so, you know. Poke around.”
“Drownings. Teeth marks.” Dean shook his head and leaned back in his seat, “I got an idea. How about we let this be for a couple months, and come back in July when everyone's in bikinis? Count up bite marks and hickeys then, alright?”
“What? No.” Sam raised his hands, dropped them back onto the table. “No, Dean. Come on. Why do you have to act like this is some kind of joke? I have this lead, I want to follow it. If I questioned you during one of your hunts-”
The smile that had been playing around Dean's mouth faded abruptly. “Tell you the truth, I hope you would question me, if I had us running around on ifs and maybes like this.”
Sam's mouth pressed into a tight line. “Deacon Thomas said,” he repeated, then stopped. It almost wasn't worth the effort.
Dean shook his head and accepted the toast from the server. “You wanna put my order in a box or something? I need it to go.” He stood up, jacket in hand. “You take the car, call me if you find out anything useful about your lake monster.”
Sam took a stab at the toast and watched out the window as Dean started off down the street in the grey drizzle. He felt like an asshole. Lying. He'd never lied before in his life, and he was bad at it, and Dean was right to be angry. Sam was pretty damn mad himself. Fucking lake monster.
The kid came back with the coffee carafe, a smirk on her face. “Pardon me, Father, but you need something to warm you up after that cold shoulder?”
Sam gave the kid another look. Younger than him, definitely, all dirty hair and ironic flannel. Big wide mouth and prominent teeth and bright eyes behind the glasses. Sam took a breath, waved his hand to accept the coffee. “You ever see a woman around here, kinda tall, well-dressed. Early forties?”
“What, you mean a local? 'Cause buddy, up till last month there were ten thousand tourists up here every day. I betcha a good, what, half of them were women. Or female. At least.”
“Thanks, no. I mean, she's here now. Or recently. She's striking, you know what I mean?” Sam squinted, tried to describe the woman he'd seen - drinking coffee, reading the newspaper, thrashing in the black river - by effort of sheer gesticulation. “Like a professional, a lawyer, maybe.”
“Well, if you're in the market for a divorce,” here the kid paused and sent a meaningful glance down the street in the direction Dean had gone. “Bess Wilcox has an office over on Broadway Street. She's kinda along those lines. Business suit stripper, or what have you.”
Sam nodded his thanks, sipped his coffee, tried not to grimace at the analogy. Some people saw the collar and just had to push, flaunting immorality like a designer handbag.
“She's pretty good, too.” The kid had one last thing to say, cocked her head like a snot and wiped her hands on her apron. “My mom used her and got the houseboat and the sea-doos.” She gave Sam a ridiculous open-mouth wink and vanished into the back.
--
Sam found the office on Broadway Street pretty easily, on the second floor above a gift shop. When asked, the receptionist said Ms. Wilcox wasn't accepting new clients, currently, but that Mr. Reynolds offered free consultations for divorces and motor vehicle accidents, which she pronounced MVAs. Sam frowned, unzipped his jacket a bit and said he wasn't exactly in the market, but could he possibly have a moment of Ms. Wilcox's time? And the receptionist, who looked like maybe she'd used the employee discount a few times herself, took another look at his collar, blushed a bit, and confided that Ms. Wilcox was on a personal leave for the next week at least. Sam nodded, tucked away a business card and retreated back to the street.
The first two times - Wyoming two days after they'd left Blue Earth, and then again in August in New Mexico - he'd outright ignored the dreams, or visions, or whatever. Chalked the first one up to some bad chicken-fried steak, and shaken off the second until he saw a newspaper article with the burned man's face and testimonies from his grieving children.
Sam knew what Pastor Jim would say: Consider the possibilities, and then a variation on Proceed with caution. Proceed with caution, when the devil had you on his list of playthings? Sam knew damn well where the visions were coming from, regardless of the technicalities of who and why. And it scared the shit out of him.
Even right now, he didn't have a lot of options. Turning his jacket collar up against the seeping drizzle, Sam hunched his shoulders and strolled further up the block. Out of a half dozen gift shops, the only one open was the one with the pharmacy in the back. Two blocks later he found a coffee shop that seemed to be the social hub of the town, given that there were all of six people inside. Sam went in, and sat with another drip coffee at the bar at the window.
He took out the business card again and looked at it: black copperplate on ivory card stock: Bess Wilcox-Carver, Barrister and Solicitor. There was a cell number listed at the bottom, and Sam dialled it, paused, put away his phone. He had nothing to tell her besides Hey, you think you might die in the next few days? FYI: watch out! The entire situation was ludicrous. Sam stared out at the wet street, grinding his teeth and trying to figure out what he could possibly say to Dean to get him to stay an extra day. He needed an extra day just to get to this woman, see if she was the one. He got out his phone again, started dialling her number.
“So I'm running all over town in the rain, and you're sitting here sipping tea?” Dean slid in beside him, jacket dark and sodden, hair dripping. The glance he sent sidelong betrayed a mood that spilt over annoyance and into bitterness.
Sam had shoved away the business card. “I was talking to the locals,” he lied.
Dean cast a sideways glance at the other customers, most of whom were sitting quietly with newspapers. “Oh yeah? You learn anything?”
Sam had nothing. He found he couldn't lift his eyes from the sidewalk outside. “No, not much.”
“Awesome.” Dean reached over and took a swallow of Sam's coffee. “Well. I got some old native stories: great snake carves the riverbed, lesser snakes flee at his approach. There's some rapids called Witches Gulch a little ways north of here, some rumours around that. And I went to the library, made a list of all the drownings this summer - two. More a boating accident than drownings, though. And no teeth marks. So. Piece that together, Ms. Marple. Or maybe call your friend Deacon Tom, ask him what the hell he's doing wasting our time.”
Dean was being generous, blaming the Deacon. It was a gesture, as angry as he was, and Sam recognized it and felt a clench of despair in his gut. He made his voice work: “Maybe the papers didn't cover it, didn't want to scare off the tourists. Or lose their credibility. We should check downriver at Portage, see what they got. Or get into the sheriff's office, go through the coroner reports.”
Dean rolled his eyes and sucked in an acidic retort. He wrapped cold, chapped hands around the coffee mug and said instead, “Sam. I don't know why you're so stuck on this, but I ain't running around on this until you give me one good reason to. Just tell me why it's so important to you, and I'll shut up and get this done, alright? Just let me in on the secret.”
Sam had to look away from Dean's raised eyebrows. The eyes so ready to believe and forgive him his deceptions. The demon told me so was something he'd never tell his brother. It made him crazy, it made him tainted and corrupt. It made him one of the things they were hunting. Worst of all, it drove an irrevocable wedge between them that no brotherhood - God or blood - could bridge. So Sam, pushing around a packet of sweetener, said nothing.
Dean matched the silence. Took a long swallow of Sam's coffee. Then Sam heard him push back his stool. “I guess I'll go find us another motel room then,” he muttered, and left, the shared mug abandoned between them.
Sam watched him go, feeling like a jackass, on fire with a shame he hadn't felt since childhood. Since before the certainty of his calling had settled around his shoulders like a warm mantle to protect him from the kind of problems relationships and people led to.
As soon as his brother was out of sight, Sam left the cafe and pulled out the business card again. He had to know, he had to figure this out and fix things, get them back to some semblance of normal.
He got her voicemail, a brusque message requesting relevant details and a contact number. His message sounded a little less prosaic: “Ms. Wilcox, hi. My name's Sam Winchester, I'm - a priest. Travelling through. Listen: I need to talk to you, to meet with you. I might have some information that you should hear. And maybe just - stay away from the river. If you could. You don't even have to call me back, but please just - no swimming, alright? I'll explain, if you let me, if you call.” He left his number, and jabbed the end button on his phone so savagely that the plastic gave a little squeak of protest. Ludicrous, damn right. If stalking strange women and lying to his brother wasn't crazy, he didn't know what was.
The chances of a lawyer returning a phone call like that were next to nil, and the chances of Dean getting over the lake monster thing without some sort of explanation was about thirty times worse than that. At a loss, Sam turned in the only direction that held any comfort, and took the Impala back to one of the churches he'd seen on the way in. It wasn't Catholic, but there were benches and a cross, and that was all he really needed. He spent the afternoon in prayer, casting his net wide for guidance. He stopped to exchange pleasantries with the minister on the way out, but got an understandably distant response. When he re-emerged onto the street, the sky was darkening and the rain had eased to an unpleasant, dripping mugginess.
The hotel room Dean had found wasn't far off. He provided directions readily enough when Sam called, but he didn't elaborate on the price or the doe-eyed girl at the front desk who greeted Sam by name when he walked in. In fact, he didn't even acknowledge Sam's entrance, just flicked off the television, and stepped outside to the patio. The door closed behind him.
The suite was actually ridiculously nice. Nicer than anything they'd stayed in before, probably in their entire lives. High ceilings, thick carpet. Frowning, Sam slid off his shoes and walked around, poking through the piles of receipts, garbage and coins Dean had emptied out of his pockets. There wasn't anything that gave away a price.
He poked his head out the French doors to the patio. The light was fading to deeper shadows, and through the trees he could see the sky-coloured glint of the river running past. Sam felt guilty for interrupting, knowing how Dean's own faith worked, and tried to withdraw. But Dean cocked his head. “Yeah?”
“Uh, Dean, how are we paying for this?”
Dean's look could've melted down a bank vault. “With good looks and charm. So make sure you're nice to Amanda down there, alright?”
“Sorry,” Sam retracted immediately, scrambled. “I mean, it's nice. It's really awesome. I mean, did you see that bathtub?”
“Yep,” said Dean, popping a jelly bean into his mouth.
Sam lingered on the threshold, practically hanging from the door frame in his indecision. Dean had taken the rocking chair, but there was a chaise with a decent-sized cushion waiting, and eventually he stepped forward and sat down. Stared through the trees in silence. The last of the day's rain fell in unsteady patches beyond the eaves, and the air was cool enough to warrant a blanket or two.
Sam hated the silence, but he was just as afraid that Dean would ask another pertinent question about the lake monster, force him to tack on another lie to his growing repertoire. It killed him to spend their time like this - these past days, this evening. Even an hour was too much, but he couldn't think of anything he could say that wouldn't make it worse. Drive home his infidelity. Prudence dictated: lie, lie. For Dean's sake, for his.
“I'm feeling pretty guilty, Sammy,” Dean said, and his discomfort was evident in his voice. Sometimes, this happened. Sometimes he confessed, and Sam was the only one who could hear it.
“Me too,” It hurt, with that huge deception lying unvoiced between them, but Sam didn't have it in him to stop it.
“Since we left - have you noticed how different it is, out here? I put this on every morning.” He raised his hand to touch his throat. “I don't much miss the rest.”
“Not even Mass?” Sam asked, mostly joking and Dean interrupted.
“The incense, the cups, the dresses, you know, Sam, it's all so much-” he cut himself off, threw a jellybean far enough that they didn't hear if it landed in mulch or water.
“Crap?” suggested Sam.
“Yeah. You pray, maybe you don't need to. Don't need to tell Pastor Jim all your shameful secrets to do good in the world, huh?”
How protestant of you, Sam wanted to say. But then, Sam had never had secrets. His confessions: he hadn't understood Aquinas' excellence of docility in prudence to its full entirety. Nor could he reconcile magnificence of purpose against pride of action. Perhaps he should meditate further, the Rector would murmur, or Pastor Jim would snort gently against the screen and tell Sam to go write a paper, if he was that concerned. He'd never been able to guess whether Dean was fully honest in his confessions. All Sam could say was, “I guess not.”
Dean lowered his head, eyes glinting faintly in the remains of the light. “Are we doing good here, Sammy?”
“Yes.” Sam answered, unflinching. Dean was doing good, or trying to, always - despite the beer and the occasional cursing. And that was the most truthful thing Sam could remind him of.
Without looking at his brother's face again, he went inside and stretched out on one of the beds. He turned the TV on to a low buzz, just loud enough to drown out his thoughts, and passed out immediately.
--
He awoke in pitch black to the incessant insect thrum of his vibrating phone. He couldn't tell the time, or even where he was, really, and stumbled out into the hallway even as he answered the call.
“Yeah?”
“Father Sam Winchester?” came a woman's voice, distant and small.
“Yeah. Who's this?” he rubbed the heel of his palm into his eyes, trying to make his vision clarify in the too-bright light of the hall.
“Bess Wilcox. You left a message. I know its late, I'm sorry. I need help, I'm-” she paused, there was static, like a huge wind, or the rush of water running over and under her words. She sounded impatient, not frightened. “I need your guidance, Father. Can you come, please?”
“Of course,” Sam shook the rest of the sleep out of his head, his voice ringed with the deliberation and calmness that Pastor Jim always managed. “Where should - where are you?”
“I have a house over Witch's Gulch. Take a cab, I'll cover it. Alright?”
Sam took her address, memorizing it and the description - cedar shingles, back in under the trees, a silver BMW in the driveway. He wrote a note for Dean that said, Took the car. Have a lead, will call. Sam.
Her house was the kind that architects build to hang off cliffs like timber-and-glass swallows' nests. Sam found it easily, at the dark end of a cul-de-sac with a scattered handful of neighbours. It was lit up like a wedding cake. He knocked on the door, looking in the huge windows to the yellow glow of empty rooms.
It was her. She came to the door dressed exactly as he'd seen her - a sharp-collared blazer and bare feet. Her hair was a mess, damp and tangled and scraped away from her face, which was sharp and smooth. A small grey dog was yapping around her ankles as she reached for the deadbolt, and she scooped him up in one arm, cracked wide the door.
“Father, thank you for coming. I'm Bess. Obviously.” She seemed to depend on the obvious, shook Sam's hand like he was a colleague, like she refused to admit any hint of oddity about this. She backed off to give him room as he eyed the hardwood floors and pried off his shoes. “Can I take your coat? Or just leave it on the bench there. I thought we'd talk in the kitchen? Come this way.”
She was shorter than him, but everyone was. She possessed the rooted, straight-backed grace of a poplar tree, and she carried the acquiescent dog like a briefcase around the corner and down some steps. Sam followed, feeling timid and childlike in his sock feet. He'd heard water on the phone. Wind. What had that been?
She pulled at her hair self-consciously and pointed him to perch at a massive concrete slab, turned to pull down some teacups from a cupboard. She stood across from him, like a judge presiding over a court room. “I set the water to boil.” She informed him, looking him straight in the eye, like she was looking for some sort of approval for the act.
“Thank you,” Sam tried a smile.
“You are very welcome.” She waved a rough hand at the massive kitchen. “I don't do much else in here past that, so I thought I'd make the token effort.” She took a breath. “This is very weird for me. I want you to know that - I'm not a Catholic, I think my paternal grandparents were Presbyterian. Or Lutheran. We didn't do church, as a kid.”
Sam nodded, “I understand.”
“You do?” While she'd been talking, she'd pulled out about a half dozen unopened tea tins out of another cupboard, and had found some reading glasses to put on in order to inspect the labels. She looked over their frames at him.
“I - was raised in a seminary in St. Louis since I was eight years old. So actually, no. I don't understand.” Sam let out an embarrassed laugh at being caught in his platitude.
Bess laughed with him, but it sounded high, strained. “Alright. Good. Honesty. Me too.” She leaned forward onto her elbows, rubbed her fingers into her temples and looked up again. “I've been having... dark thoughts, Father. Is it- can I confess those to you?”
“Of course. Yes, definitely.”
“Do I have to-” she made some sort of vague circle gesture over her torso.
“No. Bess, let's um, let's just talk.”
She took another breath. “Alright, alright. Well - when I called you, I was down at the boathouse. A good hundred feet down the cliff, it's connected by some stairs that are exposed to the river, and in this weather - well. I was down there, outside. I don't know what I was trying to do - but. This afternoon I was just thinking, you know. I'm in the middle of finalizing my own divorce with Dave, and I was thinking about how, right before we got married-”
The water boiled, and she looked at the kettle like it was a shrieking monkey in her house, not an appliance, so Sam came around the counter to pour the tea for her. She cleared her throat.
“It was about twenty years ago, and I was having a baby - out of wedlock, obviously - and it was Dave's, and it was stillborn. I carried him almost full term, and we were going to have the wedding a year after, on his birthday in May.”
“I'm sorry,” murmured Sam, and she placed a hand around the cup he offered her, raised it to her lips.
“No, it's not something I think about very often.” She snorted, “But tonight - I was down there, and I think I would've thrown myself into the river, easy. Just for that. I heard him crying for me. In the water. And I heard- well. ”
Sam saw that she was angry, the shaking was fury, not sadness. “Why didn't you?” he asked.
She lifted an eyebrow and gave him a look that sent a quill between his ribs. “Because there isn't any baby crying in the river, obviously. I wasn't about to throw myself in just because I was hearing things.”
“That's - that's good to hear.”
“Exactly. I'm not crazy. Or not that crazy.” She sipped her tea. Grimaced. “Although if you hadn't called - maybe I wouldn't have felt so mistrustful. So will you tell me? Why you called? Because, honestly, I need some answers. This-” she waved a shaky hand and looked down at the counter, “This is just so unlike me. It is the worst midlife crisis ever.” She looked at him again, “Although you're probably the right age for an affair.”
Sam blurted out a too-loud laugh and ducked his head. He couldn't make eye contact as he said it, even though she'd stated her facts like a prepared brief. “Two days ago I had a dream: I saw you sitting at that table over there -” he leaned to point out a breakfast nook, off to the side, “reading a newspaper, feeding bacon to your dog and drinking your coffee. I also saw you in the river at night. You were drowning.”
Bess was silent for a long time. She shifted her weight and looked over his shoulder out the window for a while. Sam, feeling guilty and weird, tried to take a step away, give her the space she needed to decide that he was not a very crafty burglar-slash-rapist. But she reached a hand out and touched his arm at the elbow, halting him. “So you tracked me down and called me?”
“I saw Wisconsin Dells on the newspaper, and said 'well-dressed woman' to the kid at the Elvis Lives Diner and she gave me your name.”
“Oh, the Sellers kid. Yeah, I did good work for her mother.” She smiled faintly, and then seemed to summon something of herself that made her straighten and meet his eyes. “I don't know what to tell you, Father. I guess you saved my life.”
“Uh, it's okay. Really.” Sam ducked his head, smiled away from her, feeling oddly pleased by her earnestness.
“So let me offer you a bed, at least. You came all the way up here -” she was turning away, probably making for the linen closet.
“No, it's alright - I have a room,” Sam didn't know why he didn't mention Dean. The omission felt strange, like its own silent sentence: with my brother Dean, who flirted with Amanda at the front desk for it.
“That's fine. I'll write your room off to the practice. I have to get some use out of sharing office space with that skullfuck Reynolds, and it's a long drive back to town.” Bess had moved off from the kitchen, down some more steps and around another corner. The entire house was built like a staircase, dripping down the gulch.
Sam, reluctant, stepped down to follow her, turned a few corners, found her pulling back the cream coverlets of what was evidently the guest bed. She tucked down a corner with a neat curve of her hand, stepped back from the bed, smiling with something like sympathy in her eyes. It wasn't sympathy. If Sam had ever had a mother, he would've recognized the gestures, the conflicting peace and sorrow in the lines around her eyes.
“Grab a few winks, anyways, Sam. There's a shower through the door. I'll buy you some waffles in the morning, alright?” She passed him on her way to the door. Stood on her toes as she paused, smiled up at him, left a kiss on his shoulder, which was all she could reach.
Sam looked at the bed and thought of Dean alone in the motel room, the note he'd left, but peeled off his socks and slacks and shirt - set his collar on the nightstand - and crawled into the cool cotton.
--
He jerked awake again in a second - or maybe longer - the lights were still on. He blinked, sat up sweaty in his undershirt, confused by the heaviness of the duvet, the taupe walls and the lack of a tv in the room. Wasn't this a motel? Where was Jim? Dean?
He got out of bed, didn't stop for his pants, opened the door she'd closed behind her and went upstairs, into the kitchen. The gas range was on, something was burning in a fry pan and she was hanging by the neck from the exposed rafters. Thrashing and wheezing. Her eyes bugged out of her head. The white bathrobe she was wearing had fallen open and the flesh of legs and belly and breasts flashed in the orange glow cast off the rangetop.
Sam was tall enough - thank Lord in Heaven he was tall enough - to grab her at the thighs, lift her up until her clawing hands could pull at the knot enough to loosen it. She'd hung herself with the tie from her bathrobe, and it dropped slack like a dead snake when he lowered her.
She coughed and sobbed, the welts at her throat partly from the noose, partly from her nails. Sam closed her robe about her and kept her in his arms and stroked her hair.
Eventually, the sun rose. The view from the kitchen over the gulch was absolutely spiritual. And Sam's phone rang, he could hear it in his jacket pocket at the front door. “That's my brother,” he told Bess, who had made more tea, sat at the concrete counter, ignoring it with one hand at her neck.
“You should get it, he's probably worried,” she said, like she knew Dean already.
“Yeah,” said Sam, but didn't go to answer. As much as he wanted to, he need a few more minutes. “What was it?” he asked, gentle.
“It was my baby.” Bess almost smiled, “He hates me, he wants me dead. He said so - over and over and over, until I woke up, came down here to -” she looked around, over to the now-cold fry pan. “To make waffles, but instead-”
“Instead,” Sam agreed, and leaned in closer across the counter. He knew what this was now: if he hadn't heard it himself he'd seen it. He knew what it was, but was unable to explain it. “Alright, Bess, you know you can't listen to it, right? It's the voice of the devil, tempting you.”
She shook her head, tearful but resolute. “No, Father. I know. I know it's my baby.”
“Do you know what will happen to your soul if you kill yourself?” Sam put a hand on her arm to console even as he berated, “Eternal torment. Damnation. You can't let it trick you. You can't believe what it says.”
“I know,” she nodded, her voice was tiny. “I know I shouldn't - I won't. But I am telling you, that voice is the voice of my son. Whatever he wants for me, death, damnation - it's my baby, not the devil, that wants it.”
Sam couldn't argue with her, didn't try. This was not the ghost of a stillborn infant. This was something else, something very familiar. “We'll find out why this is happening to you, alright? I will find your son. You'll be fine. Can we call someone to come-” he didn't want to say it, “-watch you?”
Bess rubbed at her face, let out a fortifying sigh. “Yeah, my niece is around. Although she'll go ahead and tell her mother if I start slicing veins, and then I'll never hear the end of it.”
“You need to tell her to watch you. Sleep in the same room, probably. Everything.”
“Maybe,” Bess kept her eyes on the counter.
Sam's phone was ringing again, and finally he left her shoulder to go answer it. The display showed twelve missed calls. Dean's voice was hard. “Where are you?”
“At a house over Witch's Gulch,” said Sam. “I got a call.”
“Yeah, and you didn't feel the need to answer mine?”
“I'm sorry.” Sam lowered his voice, turned further into the foyer, knowing she could still hear. “You were right about the river thing. I'm really sorry.”
The silence on the other end was just a blip of shock at the bold apology before Dean started tearing him up, Sam knew. Quickly he put in: “I'll be by the hotel in a bit, I just need to finish up. Then you can yell at me all you like.”
“Are we leaving town?” Dean asked, rage momentarily swallowed.
“Yeah.” Sam said, and he decided to tell one more lie, just for posterity, knowing he'd get his way eventually with Dean anyways. He always did. “Pick a dot on the map, and we'll go.”
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Nope.
Notes: This is kind of a bonus feature for Vocation-verse - by no means necessary reading, and it'll seem like a lot of rehashing if you've read Our Lady - but it's what was already inside my head when I went ahead and re-started the second part, so, have at her.
Also see: Vocation and Our Lady of Lies and Wide Rivers and Mercy and Forbearance.
“Hey Sammy,” Dean called from the bed, “You ever hear the one about the two priests standing at the urinals?”
“No.” Sam poked his head out the bathroom door, speaking around his toothbrush and levelling a look. “An' I don't wanna.”
“One priest looks at the other priest's dick,” Dean continued, tossing an orange up in the air and catching it.
From the bathroom, over the the rush of tap water: “Seriously, shut up.”
“And it has a nicotine patch on it, so the first priest says, 'Pardon me, Father, but aren't you supposed to wear those things on your arm?'”
Sam came out of the bathroom, hair wet and face scrubbed, stretching an undershirt over his shoulders. “Please - Dean - if I hear the punchline to that joke I swear I will lose it.”
“C'mon. It's hilarious.” Dean sat up on the bed, tossed the orange across the room.
Sam caught it, inspected it, tossed it back. Continued buttoning up his blacks. “Yeah, like dead baby jokes are hilarious. Seriously. Just give up on your stand-up career already.”
Dean raised an apologetic hand, “You're right, you're right. It's not funny. I bring shame to the calling.”
Sam didn't roll his eyes, but they certainly twitched upwards as he grabbed his duffel. The motel door banged shut on his words: “I'll be in the car.”
Immediately, Dean launched himself across the room to pry the door open. Sam paused halfway across the wet parking lot to look back, then bolted for the car, and Dean called, loud and quick so his brother heard every word: “So the other priest says: 'It works, 'cause ever since I started wearing this thing I'm down to two butts a day!'”
--
The ride into town was mostly silent, because Sam had insisted on driving and vetoed Dean's entire Guns n'Roses collection. Dean moped in the passenger seat, and Sam listened to him moping and watched the wet, green Wisconsin landscape filter by.
Early October, four months on the road since they'd left their little parish in Blue Earth, and here they were, a three hour drive from Pastor Jim and everything they'd grown up with, everything holy and familiar. Sam tried not to dwell on how easily within reach it was.
Out of habit, Sam counted the churches on the main drag into town, but only found two tucked in between the restaurants and the water parks and the upside-down-White-House theme park.
Dean said, “You could call him,” as he unfolded the brochure they'd picked up at the motel. WISCONSIN DELLS: it proclaimed. Water Park Capital of the World!
Sam didn't want to hear it. “Do you want to stop for breakfast?” He asked, even as they saw the diner with a life-sized statue of Elvis standing at the door. He turned the Impala in, and Dean didn't argue.
At the table, Dean fiddled with the wreck of a ketchup bottle. “So how'd you hear about this lake monster, again?” He arched his eyebrows, made a serious face.
“River monster,” Sam corrected, snagging the brochure and dragging it over so he could examine it. One side was a cheerful green map with bold listings of various tourist attractions - the Torture Museum, the Tommy Bartlett Exploratory, the Ghost Out-Post - all of which were listed as closed October through April. “I got a call from Deacon Thomas in Madison, says he heard some stories.”
“Great,” said Dean, “that's good and specific.”
According to the pamphlet, they'd been lucky to find food at all. The single server working the place took her sweet time getting to them, even though the only other patron on a was an old man in orange suspenders and a grubby ball cap.
“Coffee?” asked the kid, even as she was pouring it.
“Yeah, woah there, that's good,” said Dean. “I'll have the special. And can you throw in an extra cinnamon bun? I got a long day of not much ahead of me.”
Sam shot a look across the table. “Me too.”
“You too not much or you too the special?” said the server, lifting a hand to scratch around her lip piercing. “Or you too an extra cinnamon bun?”
“Me too the special.” Sam snapped.
“Alright,” the kid lifted her eyebrows as she made an imperious note on her pad, “I'll be right back with your toast, Fathers,”
Dean smirked across the table, and Sam let out an annoyed, embarrassed breath. “Look. Let's just split up, alright? You head over to the museum. See if you can find anything in the local lore and legends. Thomas said something about drownings, teeth marks, so, you know. Poke around.”
“Drownings. Teeth marks.” Dean shook his head and leaned back in his seat, “I got an idea. How about we let this be for a couple months, and come back in July when everyone's in bikinis? Count up bite marks and hickeys then, alright?”
“What? No.” Sam raised his hands, dropped them back onto the table. “No, Dean. Come on. Why do you have to act like this is some kind of joke? I have this lead, I want to follow it. If I questioned you during one of your hunts-”
The smile that had been playing around Dean's mouth faded abruptly. “Tell you the truth, I hope you would question me, if I had us running around on ifs and maybes like this.”
Sam's mouth pressed into a tight line. “Deacon Thomas said,” he repeated, then stopped. It almost wasn't worth the effort.
Dean shook his head and accepted the toast from the server. “You wanna put my order in a box or something? I need it to go.” He stood up, jacket in hand. “You take the car, call me if you find out anything useful about your lake monster.”
Sam took a stab at the toast and watched out the window as Dean started off down the street in the grey drizzle. He felt like an asshole. Lying. He'd never lied before in his life, and he was bad at it, and Dean was right to be angry. Sam was pretty damn mad himself. Fucking lake monster.
The kid came back with the coffee carafe, a smirk on her face. “Pardon me, Father, but you need something to warm you up after that cold shoulder?”
Sam gave the kid another look. Younger than him, definitely, all dirty hair and ironic flannel. Big wide mouth and prominent teeth and bright eyes behind the glasses. Sam took a breath, waved his hand to accept the coffee. “You ever see a woman around here, kinda tall, well-dressed. Early forties?”
“What, you mean a local? 'Cause buddy, up till last month there were ten thousand tourists up here every day. I betcha a good, what, half of them were women. Or female. At least.”
“Thanks, no. I mean, she's here now. Or recently. She's striking, you know what I mean?” Sam squinted, tried to describe the woman he'd seen - drinking coffee, reading the newspaper, thrashing in the black river - by effort of sheer gesticulation. “Like a professional, a lawyer, maybe.”
“Well, if you're in the market for a divorce,” here the kid paused and sent a meaningful glance down the street in the direction Dean had gone. “Bess Wilcox has an office over on Broadway Street. She's kinda along those lines. Business suit stripper, or what have you.”
Sam nodded his thanks, sipped his coffee, tried not to grimace at the analogy. Some people saw the collar and just had to push, flaunting immorality like a designer handbag.
“She's pretty good, too.” The kid had one last thing to say, cocked her head like a snot and wiped her hands on her apron. “My mom used her and got the houseboat and the sea-doos.” She gave Sam a ridiculous open-mouth wink and vanished into the back.
--
Sam found the office on Broadway Street pretty easily, on the second floor above a gift shop. When asked, the receptionist said Ms. Wilcox wasn't accepting new clients, currently, but that Mr. Reynolds offered free consultations for divorces and motor vehicle accidents, which she pronounced MVAs. Sam frowned, unzipped his jacket a bit and said he wasn't exactly in the market, but could he possibly have a moment of Ms. Wilcox's time? And the receptionist, who looked like maybe she'd used the employee discount a few times herself, took another look at his collar, blushed a bit, and confided that Ms. Wilcox was on a personal leave for the next week at least. Sam nodded, tucked away a business card and retreated back to the street.
The first two times - Wyoming two days after they'd left Blue Earth, and then again in August in New Mexico - he'd outright ignored the dreams, or visions, or whatever. Chalked the first one up to some bad chicken-fried steak, and shaken off the second until he saw a newspaper article with the burned man's face and testimonies from his grieving children.
Sam knew what Pastor Jim would say: Consider the possibilities, and then a variation on Proceed with caution. Proceed with caution, when the devil had you on his list of playthings? Sam knew damn well where the visions were coming from, regardless of the technicalities of who and why. And it scared the shit out of him.
Even right now, he didn't have a lot of options. Turning his jacket collar up against the seeping drizzle, Sam hunched his shoulders and strolled further up the block. Out of a half dozen gift shops, the only one open was the one with the pharmacy in the back. Two blocks later he found a coffee shop that seemed to be the social hub of the town, given that there were all of six people inside. Sam went in, and sat with another drip coffee at the bar at the window.
He took out the business card again and looked at it: black copperplate on ivory card stock: Bess Wilcox-Carver, Barrister and Solicitor. There was a cell number listed at the bottom, and Sam dialled it, paused, put away his phone. He had nothing to tell her besides Hey, you think you might die in the next few days? FYI: watch out! The entire situation was ludicrous. Sam stared out at the wet street, grinding his teeth and trying to figure out what he could possibly say to Dean to get him to stay an extra day. He needed an extra day just to get to this woman, see if she was the one. He got out his phone again, started dialling her number.
“So I'm running all over town in the rain, and you're sitting here sipping tea?” Dean slid in beside him, jacket dark and sodden, hair dripping. The glance he sent sidelong betrayed a mood that spilt over annoyance and into bitterness.
Sam had shoved away the business card. “I was talking to the locals,” he lied.
Dean cast a sideways glance at the other customers, most of whom were sitting quietly with newspapers. “Oh yeah? You learn anything?”
Sam had nothing. He found he couldn't lift his eyes from the sidewalk outside. “No, not much.”
“Awesome.” Dean reached over and took a swallow of Sam's coffee. “Well. I got some old native stories: great snake carves the riverbed, lesser snakes flee at his approach. There's some rapids called Witches Gulch a little ways north of here, some rumours around that. And I went to the library, made a list of all the drownings this summer - two. More a boating accident than drownings, though. And no teeth marks. So. Piece that together, Ms. Marple. Or maybe call your friend Deacon Tom, ask him what the hell he's doing wasting our time.”
Dean was being generous, blaming the Deacon. It was a gesture, as angry as he was, and Sam recognized it and felt a clench of despair in his gut. He made his voice work: “Maybe the papers didn't cover it, didn't want to scare off the tourists. Or lose their credibility. We should check downriver at Portage, see what they got. Or get into the sheriff's office, go through the coroner reports.”
Dean rolled his eyes and sucked in an acidic retort. He wrapped cold, chapped hands around the coffee mug and said instead, “Sam. I don't know why you're so stuck on this, but I ain't running around on this until you give me one good reason to. Just tell me why it's so important to you, and I'll shut up and get this done, alright? Just let me in on the secret.”
Sam had to look away from Dean's raised eyebrows. The eyes so ready to believe and forgive him his deceptions. The demon told me so was something he'd never tell his brother. It made him crazy, it made him tainted and corrupt. It made him one of the things they were hunting. Worst of all, it drove an irrevocable wedge between them that no brotherhood - God or blood - could bridge. So Sam, pushing around a packet of sweetener, said nothing.
Dean matched the silence. Took a long swallow of Sam's coffee. Then Sam heard him push back his stool. “I guess I'll go find us another motel room then,” he muttered, and left, the shared mug abandoned between them.
Sam watched him go, feeling like a jackass, on fire with a shame he hadn't felt since childhood. Since before the certainty of his calling had settled around his shoulders like a warm mantle to protect him from the kind of problems relationships and people led to.
As soon as his brother was out of sight, Sam left the cafe and pulled out the business card again. He had to know, he had to figure this out and fix things, get them back to some semblance of normal.
He got her voicemail, a brusque message requesting relevant details and a contact number. His message sounded a little less prosaic: “Ms. Wilcox, hi. My name's Sam Winchester, I'm - a priest. Travelling through. Listen: I need to talk to you, to meet with you. I might have some information that you should hear. And maybe just - stay away from the river. If you could. You don't even have to call me back, but please just - no swimming, alright? I'll explain, if you let me, if you call.” He left his number, and jabbed the end button on his phone so savagely that the plastic gave a little squeak of protest. Ludicrous, damn right. If stalking strange women and lying to his brother wasn't crazy, he didn't know what was.
The chances of a lawyer returning a phone call like that were next to nil, and the chances of Dean getting over the lake monster thing without some sort of explanation was about thirty times worse than that. At a loss, Sam turned in the only direction that held any comfort, and took the Impala back to one of the churches he'd seen on the way in. It wasn't Catholic, but there were benches and a cross, and that was all he really needed. He spent the afternoon in prayer, casting his net wide for guidance. He stopped to exchange pleasantries with the minister on the way out, but got an understandably distant response. When he re-emerged onto the street, the sky was darkening and the rain had eased to an unpleasant, dripping mugginess.
The hotel room Dean had found wasn't far off. He provided directions readily enough when Sam called, but he didn't elaborate on the price or the doe-eyed girl at the front desk who greeted Sam by name when he walked in. In fact, he didn't even acknowledge Sam's entrance, just flicked off the television, and stepped outside to the patio. The door closed behind him.
The suite was actually ridiculously nice. Nicer than anything they'd stayed in before, probably in their entire lives. High ceilings, thick carpet. Frowning, Sam slid off his shoes and walked around, poking through the piles of receipts, garbage and coins Dean had emptied out of his pockets. There wasn't anything that gave away a price.
He poked his head out the French doors to the patio. The light was fading to deeper shadows, and through the trees he could see the sky-coloured glint of the river running past. Sam felt guilty for interrupting, knowing how Dean's own faith worked, and tried to withdraw. But Dean cocked his head. “Yeah?”
“Uh, Dean, how are we paying for this?”
Dean's look could've melted down a bank vault. “With good looks and charm. So make sure you're nice to Amanda down there, alright?”
“Sorry,” Sam retracted immediately, scrambled. “I mean, it's nice. It's really awesome. I mean, did you see that bathtub?”
“Yep,” said Dean, popping a jelly bean into his mouth.
Sam lingered on the threshold, practically hanging from the door frame in his indecision. Dean had taken the rocking chair, but there was a chaise with a decent-sized cushion waiting, and eventually he stepped forward and sat down. Stared through the trees in silence. The last of the day's rain fell in unsteady patches beyond the eaves, and the air was cool enough to warrant a blanket or two.
Sam hated the silence, but he was just as afraid that Dean would ask another pertinent question about the lake monster, force him to tack on another lie to his growing repertoire. It killed him to spend their time like this - these past days, this evening. Even an hour was too much, but he couldn't think of anything he could say that wouldn't make it worse. Drive home his infidelity. Prudence dictated: lie, lie. For Dean's sake, for his.
“I'm feeling pretty guilty, Sammy,” Dean said, and his discomfort was evident in his voice. Sometimes, this happened. Sometimes he confessed, and Sam was the only one who could hear it.
“Me too,” It hurt, with that huge deception lying unvoiced between them, but Sam didn't have it in him to stop it.
“Since we left - have you noticed how different it is, out here? I put this on every morning.” He raised his hand to touch his throat. “I don't much miss the rest.”
“Not even Mass?” Sam asked, mostly joking and Dean interrupted.
“The incense, the cups, the dresses, you know, Sam, it's all so much-” he cut himself off, threw a jellybean far enough that they didn't hear if it landed in mulch or water.
“Crap?” suggested Sam.
“Yeah. You pray, maybe you don't need to. Don't need to tell Pastor Jim all your shameful secrets to do good in the world, huh?”
How protestant of you, Sam wanted to say. But then, Sam had never had secrets. His confessions: he hadn't understood Aquinas' excellence of docility in prudence to its full entirety. Nor could he reconcile magnificence of purpose against pride of action. Perhaps he should meditate further, the Rector would murmur, or Pastor Jim would snort gently against the screen and tell Sam to go write a paper, if he was that concerned. He'd never been able to guess whether Dean was fully honest in his confessions. All Sam could say was, “I guess not.”
Dean lowered his head, eyes glinting faintly in the remains of the light. “Are we doing good here, Sammy?”
“Yes.” Sam answered, unflinching. Dean was doing good, or trying to, always - despite the beer and the occasional cursing. And that was the most truthful thing Sam could remind him of.
Without looking at his brother's face again, he went inside and stretched out on one of the beds. He turned the TV on to a low buzz, just loud enough to drown out his thoughts, and passed out immediately.
--
He awoke in pitch black to the incessant insect thrum of his vibrating phone. He couldn't tell the time, or even where he was, really, and stumbled out into the hallway even as he answered the call.
“Yeah?”
“Father Sam Winchester?” came a woman's voice, distant and small.
“Yeah. Who's this?” he rubbed the heel of his palm into his eyes, trying to make his vision clarify in the too-bright light of the hall.
“Bess Wilcox. You left a message. I know its late, I'm sorry. I need help, I'm-” she paused, there was static, like a huge wind, or the rush of water running over and under her words. She sounded impatient, not frightened. “I need your guidance, Father. Can you come, please?”
“Of course,” Sam shook the rest of the sleep out of his head, his voice ringed with the deliberation and calmness that Pastor Jim always managed. “Where should - where are you?”
“I have a house over Witch's Gulch. Take a cab, I'll cover it. Alright?”
Sam took her address, memorizing it and the description - cedar shingles, back in under the trees, a silver BMW in the driveway. He wrote a note for Dean that said, Took the car. Have a lead, will call. Sam.
Her house was the kind that architects build to hang off cliffs like timber-and-glass swallows' nests. Sam found it easily, at the dark end of a cul-de-sac with a scattered handful of neighbours. It was lit up like a wedding cake. He knocked on the door, looking in the huge windows to the yellow glow of empty rooms.
It was her. She came to the door dressed exactly as he'd seen her - a sharp-collared blazer and bare feet. Her hair was a mess, damp and tangled and scraped away from her face, which was sharp and smooth. A small grey dog was yapping around her ankles as she reached for the deadbolt, and she scooped him up in one arm, cracked wide the door.
“Father, thank you for coming. I'm Bess. Obviously.” She seemed to depend on the obvious, shook Sam's hand like he was a colleague, like she refused to admit any hint of oddity about this. She backed off to give him room as he eyed the hardwood floors and pried off his shoes. “Can I take your coat? Or just leave it on the bench there. I thought we'd talk in the kitchen? Come this way.”
She was shorter than him, but everyone was. She possessed the rooted, straight-backed grace of a poplar tree, and she carried the acquiescent dog like a briefcase around the corner and down some steps. Sam followed, feeling timid and childlike in his sock feet. He'd heard water on the phone. Wind. What had that been?
She pulled at her hair self-consciously and pointed him to perch at a massive concrete slab, turned to pull down some teacups from a cupboard. She stood across from him, like a judge presiding over a court room. “I set the water to boil.” She informed him, looking him straight in the eye, like she was looking for some sort of approval for the act.
“Thank you,” Sam tried a smile.
“You are very welcome.” She waved a rough hand at the massive kitchen. “I don't do much else in here past that, so I thought I'd make the token effort.” She took a breath. “This is very weird for me. I want you to know that - I'm not a Catholic, I think my paternal grandparents were Presbyterian. Or Lutheran. We didn't do church, as a kid.”
Sam nodded, “I understand.”
“You do?” While she'd been talking, she'd pulled out about a half dozen unopened tea tins out of another cupboard, and had found some reading glasses to put on in order to inspect the labels. She looked over their frames at him.
“I - was raised in a seminary in St. Louis since I was eight years old. So actually, no. I don't understand.” Sam let out an embarrassed laugh at being caught in his platitude.
Bess laughed with him, but it sounded high, strained. “Alright. Good. Honesty. Me too.” She leaned forward onto her elbows, rubbed her fingers into her temples and looked up again. “I've been having... dark thoughts, Father. Is it- can I confess those to you?”
“Of course. Yes, definitely.”
“Do I have to-” she made some sort of vague circle gesture over her torso.
“No. Bess, let's um, let's just talk.”
She took another breath. “Alright, alright. Well - when I called you, I was down at the boathouse. A good hundred feet down the cliff, it's connected by some stairs that are exposed to the river, and in this weather - well. I was down there, outside. I don't know what I was trying to do - but. This afternoon I was just thinking, you know. I'm in the middle of finalizing my own divorce with Dave, and I was thinking about how, right before we got married-”
The water boiled, and she looked at the kettle like it was a shrieking monkey in her house, not an appliance, so Sam came around the counter to pour the tea for her. She cleared her throat.
“It was about twenty years ago, and I was having a baby - out of wedlock, obviously - and it was Dave's, and it was stillborn. I carried him almost full term, and we were going to have the wedding a year after, on his birthday in May.”
“I'm sorry,” murmured Sam, and she placed a hand around the cup he offered her, raised it to her lips.
“No, it's not something I think about very often.” She snorted, “But tonight - I was down there, and I think I would've thrown myself into the river, easy. Just for that. I heard him crying for me. In the water. And I heard- well. ”
Sam saw that she was angry, the shaking was fury, not sadness. “Why didn't you?” he asked.
She lifted an eyebrow and gave him a look that sent a quill between his ribs. “Because there isn't any baby crying in the river, obviously. I wasn't about to throw myself in just because I was hearing things.”
“That's - that's good to hear.”
“Exactly. I'm not crazy. Or not that crazy.” She sipped her tea. Grimaced. “Although if you hadn't called - maybe I wouldn't have felt so mistrustful. So will you tell me? Why you called? Because, honestly, I need some answers. This-” she waved a shaky hand and looked down at the counter, “This is just so unlike me. It is the worst midlife crisis ever.” She looked at him again, “Although you're probably the right age for an affair.”
Sam blurted out a too-loud laugh and ducked his head. He couldn't make eye contact as he said it, even though she'd stated her facts like a prepared brief. “Two days ago I had a dream: I saw you sitting at that table over there -” he leaned to point out a breakfast nook, off to the side, “reading a newspaper, feeding bacon to your dog and drinking your coffee. I also saw you in the river at night. You were drowning.”
Bess was silent for a long time. She shifted her weight and looked over his shoulder out the window for a while. Sam, feeling guilty and weird, tried to take a step away, give her the space she needed to decide that he was not a very crafty burglar-slash-rapist. But she reached a hand out and touched his arm at the elbow, halting him. “So you tracked me down and called me?”
“I saw Wisconsin Dells on the newspaper, and said 'well-dressed woman' to the kid at the Elvis Lives Diner and she gave me your name.”
“Oh, the Sellers kid. Yeah, I did good work for her mother.” She smiled faintly, and then seemed to summon something of herself that made her straighten and meet his eyes. “I don't know what to tell you, Father. I guess you saved my life.”
“Uh, it's okay. Really.” Sam ducked his head, smiled away from her, feeling oddly pleased by her earnestness.
“So let me offer you a bed, at least. You came all the way up here -” she was turning away, probably making for the linen closet.
“No, it's alright - I have a room,” Sam didn't know why he didn't mention Dean. The omission felt strange, like its own silent sentence: with my brother Dean, who flirted with Amanda at the front desk for it.
“That's fine. I'll write your room off to the practice. I have to get some use out of sharing office space with that skullfuck Reynolds, and it's a long drive back to town.” Bess had moved off from the kitchen, down some more steps and around another corner. The entire house was built like a staircase, dripping down the gulch.
Sam, reluctant, stepped down to follow her, turned a few corners, found her pulling back the cream coverlets of what was evidently the guest bed. She tucked down a corner with a neat curve of her hand, stepped back from the bed, smiling with something like sympathy in her eyes. It wasn't sympathy. If Sam had ever had a mother, he would've recognized the gestures, the conflicting peace and sorrow in the lines around her eyes.
“Grab a few winks, anyways, Sam. There's a shower through the door. I'll buy you some waffles in the morning, alright?” She passed him on her way to the door. Stood on her toes as she paused, smiled up at him, left a kiss on his shoulder, which was all she could reach.
Sam looked at the bed and thought of Dean alone in the motel room, the note he'd left, but peeled off his socks and slacks and shirt - set his collar on the nightstand - and crawled into the cool cotton.
--
He jerked awake again in a second - or maybe longer - the lights were still on. He blinked, sat up sweaty in his undershirt, confused by the heaviness of the duvet, the taupe walls and the lack of a tv in the room. Wasn't this a motel? Where was Jim? Dean?
He got out of bed, didn't stop for his pants, opened the door she'd closed behind her and went upstairs, into the kitchen. The gas range was on, something was burning in a fry pan and she was hanging by the neck from the exposed rafters. Thrashing and wheezing. Her eyes bugged out of her head. The white bathrobe she was wearing had fallen open and the flesh of legs and belly and breasts flashed in the orange glow cast off the rangetop.
Sam was tall enough - thank Lord in Heaven he was tall enough - to grab her at the thighs, lift her up until her clawing hands could pull at the knot enough to loosen it. She'd hung herself with the tie from her bathrobe, and it dropped slack like a dead snake when he lowered her.
She coughed and sobbed, the welts at her throat partly from the noose, partly from her nails. Sam closed her robe about her and kept her in his arms and stroked her hair.
Eventually, the sun rose. The view from the kitchen over the gulch was absolutely spiritual. And Sam's phone rang, he could hear it in his jacket pocket at the front door. “That's my brother,” he told Bess, who had made more tea, sat at the concrete counter, ignoring it with one hand at her neck.
“You should get it, he's probably worried,” she said, like she knew Dean already.
“Yeah,” said Sam, but didn't go to answer. As much as he wanted to, he need a few more minutes. “What was it?” he asked, gentle.
“It was my baby.” Bess almost smiled, “He hates me, he wants me dead. He said so - over and over and over, until I woke up, came down here to -” she looked around, over to the now-cold fry pan. “To make waffles, but instead-”
“Instead,” Sam agreed, and leaned in closer across the counter. He knew what this was now: if he hadn't heard it himself he'd seen it. He knew what it was, but was unable to explain it. “Alright, Bess, you know you can't listen to it, right? It's the voice of the devil, tempting you.”
She shook her head, tearful but resolute. “No, Father. I know. I know it's my baby.”
“Do you know what will happen to your soul if you kill yourself?” Sam put a hand on her arm to console even as he berated, “Eternal torment. Damnation. You can't let it trick you. You can't believe what it says.”
“I know,” she nodded, her voice was tiny. “I know I shouldn't - I won't. But I am telling you, that voice is the voice of my son. Whatever he wants for me, death, damnation - it's my baby, not the devil, that wants it.”
Sam couldn't argue with her, didn't try. This was not the ghost of a stillborn infant. This was something else, something very familiar. “We'll find out why this is happening to you, alright? I will find your son. You'll be fine. Can we call someone to come-” he didn't want to say it, “-watch you?”
Bess rubbed at her face, let out a fortifying sigh. “Yeah, my niece is around. Although she'll go ahead and tell her mother if I start slicing veins, and then I'll never hear the end of it.”
“You need to tell her to watch you. Sleep in the same room, probably. Everything.”
“Maybe,” Bess kept her eyes on the counter.
Sam's phone was ringing again, and finally he left her shoulder to go answer it. The display showed twelve missed calls. Dean's voice was hard. “Where are you?”
“At a house over Witch's Gulch,” said Sam. “I got a call.”
“Yeah, and you didn't feel the need to answer mine?”
“I'm sorry.” Sam lowered his voice, turned further into the foyer, knowing she could still hear. “You were right about the river thing. I'm really sorry.”
The silence on the other end was just a blip of shock at the bold apology before Dean started tearing him up, Sam knew. Quickly he put in: “I'll be by the hotel in a bit, I just need to finish up. Then you can yell at me all you like.”
“Are we leaving town?” Dean asked, rage momentarily swallowed.
“Yeah.” Sam said, and he decided to tell one more lie, just for posterity, knowing he'd get his way eventually with Dean anyways. He always did. “Pick a dot on the map, and we'll go.”