SPN: "The Other Woman"

[tolakasa]

Title: "The Other Woman"
Category: Supernatural
Rating: T (mild language)
Word Count: 5500
Beta: firesign10 the Magnificent
Summary: Impalaverse, between season 5 and season 6. Lisa knew what to expect from Dean. She wasn't prepared to deal with his car.


Lisa Braeden has never understood all the fuss men make over their cars.

Okay, so it's probably not just men. Undoubtedly, somewhere, there are women who share this particular obsession. Not like a car cares about your plumbing, right? She's just never known a woman to wax quite that...sentimental. Maybe it's because women are always the ones doing all the scut work so that the men have time to play with their cars.

Hey, she's a single mom. She's earned the right to be bitter.

But Dean's obsession with his car has always been a little bit different. It's not just about scrubbing off every speck of dirt and vacuuming the interior religiously and forever tinkering with the engine, although he does all that too. With Dean, it's like he's taking care of-- Not a child; she's seen him with kids. More like.... Something more than a sister, something less than a lover. But family, definitely.

She met the car when she met him, and met his obsession, too; the only time they'd come up for air That Weekend was so Dean could check on his car. That turned into a food run, which led to a makeshift picnic, which wound up with them in the back seat. She hadn't thought much about it, except to think it was weird, but it wasn't like they were getting married. Neither one of them intended this to be anything more than a weekend, which meant little quirks were easily overlooked.

Or so she thought, right up until Ben was eight and she was breaking up with another ass, and she abruptly realized that every boyfriend she'd had since Dean was car-obsessed. Never in precisely the same way, though.

Maybe that was what was missing with all of them. They obsessed over machines. Dean obsessed over family. Just.... Part of his family was an old black car.

Sorry. "The Impala." Or "baby." Never just "the car."

Now that car's all that's left of his family, and it lives in her garage. Despite the grief that's eating him up inside, despite the drinking that he hasn't figured out isn't actually helping him get a handle on that grief, he's just obsessed as he ever was. The car's always spotless, no matter how questionable his hygiene might be.

Those first few weeks, almost every night, she gets out of bed to check on him, just like she checks on Ben when he's sick. Some nights he's still up, staring at late-night TV with a bottle in his hand. Some nights, he's got his nose buried in those old books he's collecting, though the bottle is always close at hand. Some nights he's passed out, on the couch or in a pile of books--once on the floor.

On bad nights, he's already tried to sleep and been dragged back to wakefulness by the nightmares.

On those nights, she doesn't find him in the guest room, or even on the couch. Even the night he was on the floor didn't qualify as a bad night. No, on the really bad nights, he winds up in the car.

The first time, she scoured the house, even thought about waking Ben up to help her search, terrified that Dean had taken it into his head to go back out on the road. Half drunk and half mad with grief, he was so not ready to face the world on his own, not without getting himself killed. Not even the normal world, let alone that freakish place he'd lived all his life.

And then, in an increasing panic, she thought to check the garage to make sure his car was still there, and there he was, asleep in the front seat. Sound asleep, like an exhausted child, not a grown man plagued by nightmares and grief and pain, even though his head leaned against the door at the most uncomfortable angle she'd ever seen and one foot was propped on the dashboard.

Without a doubt, it was the most peaceful she'd ever seen him, and that includes That Weekend.

Even after Dean starts sleeping in her bed, there are still really bad nights. On those nights, after the nightmares wake them both up, he'll wait until he thinks she's asleep again and then ease out of bed, but she knows where he's going. He never says anything about the pillow she puts in there for him, or the blanket that appears when summer heat begins fading into fall chill. And when he finally acquires the truck and tucks the car in the garage under its very own canvas blanket, she silently celebrates by making his favorite dinner, because the garage gives him extra protection from the cold and now she doesn't have to worry about him freezing to death.

She checks on him anyway that first bad night after the frosts start, rubbing her bare arms against the garage chill, and smiles when she sees him asleep under the blanket, the pillow stuffed between his head and the door, peaceful--at least for now.

But the relaxation of sleep makes the resemblance she doesn't want to acknowledge all the more marked.

The car makes it harder to get around in the garage--the thing is fairly massive, after all--but she doesn't complain. They both know full well that it could probably withstand the rough treatment of a construction zone, probably way better than the nameless pickup that he's content to leave in the driveway exposed to the elements, but she thinks maybe the Impala just reminds him too much of Sam for him to drive it every day, now that he has a choice. She can understand that. There's parts of town she still can't drive through because she'll see something that reminds her of her dad.

Besides, if she understands correctly--and she's more than willing to admit that she might not, because trying to figure out the inside of Dean Winchester's head is not a task for mere mortals--he's kinda like a turtle, and the Impala is his shell. For Dean, home and the car are the same thing. And that he's gone to the trouble of storing it--which for Dean is as big a step as leasing an apartment--means that this is at least semi-permanent. It gives her hope that, maybe, just maybe, he can make that final transition, that this house can become a real home for him, the way it is for her and Ben.

He spends fewer nights out there as fall becomes winter. She's pretty sure the tarp gets pulled back only once between Halloween and Thanksgiving, and that's when he takes the car out for a "make sure everything's running" trip. He tried to explain the reasoning for that to her, back when the tarp first showed up, but she actually felt her eyes glazing over at the technobabble. She just gave him and Ben her blessing to play with the car while she did something else. Anything else.

That day, two days before Thanksgiving, is when the whispers start.

Living with Dean, who might be out of "the business" but still uses salt for things other than melting ice and seasoning, who's hidden weapons and holy water all over the house and drawn more on the walls and floors than Ben did with his first box of crayons, has made Lisa aware that just because there's no one there, it doesn't mean she didn't actually hear something. But it's easy enough to push it to the back of her mind. After all, the first time she hears them, she's on her way out the door, dragging Dean on his first trip into the madness that is a grocery store during Thanksgiving week. (Later, she's just relieved that they took her car. He hasn't managed to hide weapons in it yet, and if he'd had easy access to one, he might have taken out several little old ladies.)

It's not till Friday, when she's out in the garage looking for the missing box of Christmas lights while Dean and Ben wrestle the tree into the living room, that the whispers solidify into a woman's voice, cold as chrome, that says, "I know your secret."

She whirls around, half expecting to see a real woman standing there, maybe dead but still a woman--but all that's there is an old car, shrouded in the tarp that she's absolutely certain Dean straightens every morning before he leaves, whether it needs it or not. The shadows around it might be thicker than usual--but in the early darkness of a November afternoon, with only one of the garage lights on, she can't be sure.

It's not long before she can hardly go into the garage at all. Neither Ben nor Dean notices anything wrong out there, so if she needs something, she sends one of them. Every time she does laundry, she breathes a silent prayer of thanks that this house has an actual laundry room, rather than having the washer and dryer in the garage like the last place. She can't walk by that be-tarped hulk without her skin tingling like she's standing too close to a lightning strike, the same way it did when that monster came after Ben. The whispers pursue her all over the house, but only in the garage does she see that eerie, threatening shadow--a chrome-and-black shadow that's shaped more like a woman than a car.

It makes Dean's habit of calling the Impala "her" that much more freaky, and now, sometimes, even Lisa catches herself thinking of it as a her. The Other Woman.

It's insane, but she's pretty sure the shadow knows that.

By his birthday, Dean's packed most of those old books away, the nightmares are down to once or twice a month, and he hardly ever leaves their bed after having one, so she doesn't go looking for him when she wakes up and finds him gone. That's the excuse she uses, anyway, because she does not want to be the only person awake in that garage at night.

The problem is, he's not the only one having nightmares anymore.

They're not really nightmares, not like his are, just dreams that leave her shaken and wanting to be held, like the dreams she had after that thing attacked Ben, like the ones she had after her dad died. They're not even bad dreams, usually. For the most part, they're normal.

Unless Dean's in one. And then--no matter where, no matter how, no matter what they're doing in the dream--there's always a woman lurking in the background, a woman who's not a woman, who can't possibly be a woman, a woman with eyes that glow like headlights, skin as smooth and black as painted metal, hair and nails metallic silver, all shrouded in shadows.

No, that woman's not human, and Lisa knows it from the first time she sees her in an otherwise normal dreamscape. But when dream-Lisa points her out to dream-Dean and he turns around, all he sees is the car. Only Lisa sees the woman, sees the brightly-lit glare of a demented guardian angel who would be very happy to rip the throat out of anybody who so much as looks at Dean the wrong way. Lisa knows, without asking, that this is the shadow she sees in the garage, the owner of the voice that whispers to her, the something that makes Dean call the car baby and sweetheart and mean it as much as he does when he calls Lisa that.

And inevitably, sometime during the dream, no matter what the dream-plot, that--that thing turns to her, with those high-beam eyes and a knowing, threatening smile that gleams like polished chrome, and says, "I know your secret."

She doesn't wake up screaming at those words, but she wakes up nevertheless, heart pounding, gasping for air.

She makes it to February before she finally forces herself to ask, on an evening when Ben's at a friend's house and it's just the two of them in the kitchen--and the thing in the garage. "Dean, your car--" She hesitates, painfully aware of the sudden fear in his eyes, because that car means more to him than she does and deep down, he's afraid that she might just be enough of a sadistic bitch to make him choose between them, but finally charges on. "Could it be haunted? Can cars be haunted?"

Dean's quiet a moment, the way he always is when she or Ben bring up That Stuff, and he answers her seriously, the way he always does when That Stuff comes up. "They can be, sure, just about anything can, but no, she's not haunted." Before she can say anything, he adds, "She's alive."

Her reaction is automatic. "Dean, I'm serious."

"So am I," he says, and it's the voice he uses to talk about his mom and his dad and Sam. He never kids in that voice. "Ca-- She's something called a pure spirit. A soul, pretty much, just like mine or yours, except that she was never in a flesh-and-blood body. Just went straight into the chassis somehow. We found out after Dad died, when she started-- Well, she was pissed off at Sam for wrecking her." He smiles, the sweet little smile she's mentally labeled the memory-smile--when he's remembering something happy and isn't even aware, really, that he's smiling. She loves that smile, wishes she saw it more often. "And then we got into trouble and thought it would be safer if we had another car, something less obvious, and she followed us and--um--beat up our new car."

Car-on-car violence. How very reassuring. "Does she-- I mean--" God, this is not going well. "Does she talk to you?"

Dean gives her an odd look. "She's a car," he says, as if that explains everything, as if he's said it before. "She doesn't have a voice."

Ha.

"Why?" he asks, and before she can come up with a decent excuse, he's assembled the puzzle. "You're hearing something."

And Marge Radke thinks he's an idiot just because he's pretty. "Probably just my imagination."

The look he gives her now is pure skepticism. He doesn't buy that any more than she does. That's the excuse all the people he's saved use, after all. The one all her old neighbors used. They were just imagining that their kids turned into monsters. Something in the water, maybe even a terrorist plot. "C'mon," he says, and drags her into the garage.

She doesn't kick or scream, though for a moment, she considers it. Problem is, she's not sure it would stop him. There's no way that Dean's going to let the two--er--women in his life go unreconciled.

He pulls the tarp off, gives the Impala the once-over--and then looks at her, and sees. "Fucking hell, Lisa-- What is it?"

"You don't feel that?" she asks, rubbing her arms like it'll actually stop the damn tingling. The place is crawling with--with something, energy maybe, and it's all radiating from that damn car. With the tarp off, it's even stronger. Her teeth feel like there's tinfoil stuck between her molars, and it takes everything she has to stay here, to not run back into the house, and she only manages that because he's standing right here with her and she knows that Dean won't let anything, even his beloved car, hurt her.

He looks from the car to her, and back again, and finally shrugs. "Maybe it's a chick thing," he says finally. "You're the first woman who's spent any real time around her since Mom. And she wasn't acting up back then."

"A chick thing?" she repeats, distracted just enough for her teeth to stop clenching, and punches him in the arm. He grins at her, completely unrepentant--and why should he be, since he probably used that phrasing just to make her relax? "How the hell do you tell if a car's a girl, anyway?"

That stumps him for a moment. "No idea," he finally admits. "Just always seemed to fit. Cas told me once that most souls are pretty neutral if they're not in an actual body, but some...." He shrugs eloquently.

Cas. The angel. The only person he tries to avoid mentioning more than Sam. There are going to be nightmares tonight, courtesy of all the wounds she's tearing open. Maybe bad enough to drive him back out here for the first time in months.

As if the thought summons it, the whispering immediately starts again, angry this time, and then there she is behind him, all shadows and glimmers, that inhuman face suddenly fierce. Because this time, the nightmares won't just be part of Dean's grief. They'll be because Lisa sparked them, and as far as the car is concerned, that makes her a threat. The whispering is an assault, the energy ramps up, she can feel the damn fillings in her teeth vibrating--

"Shut up!" she screams at it.

"Lisa?" She shakes her head, unable to answer for the whispers scratching at her ears, at the inside of her head. The woman hasn't stepped past Dean, not yet, but Lisa knows as soon as he's gone, as soon as he's out of the way, as soon as there's absolutely no chance that Dean can get caught in the backlash--

Dean looks from her to the car again, helplessly this time, like he's in over his head--and then he barks "Baby! Stop it!"

To her surprise, it works. The whispers trail away, the shadow shrinks and disappears, and if she's not mistaken, she hears a whimper. Probably because Dean is actually glaring at the car, and to the best of her knowledge, Dean has never once shown it any temper. Her. Whatever. "Lis, I'm sorry--" His arms slide around her. "I'll talk to her, okay? Make her stop this."

He thinks he's the one in charge. It's kind of adorable, his confidence in that misconception.

He sets her up on the couch just like she's sick, tucking her in with chocolate, booze, and her favorite movie, and then she hears the Impala's engine roar to life and drive away. The car may have a soul and Dean may be okay with that, but apparently he's not so okay with it that he'll try to have a conversation with her in front of witnesses.

She can't help but wonder, more than a little grumpily, if the car ever shows up in his dreams as anything but the car.

After that day, the shadows and the whispers ease off, but they don't stop, not entirely, and every dream that has Dean in it still has the car-woman lurking in his vicinity. There's a sharper edge to them as winter starts to melt into spring, a sense that the car really does see her as a threat now, but is too scared of Dean to actually do anything about it.

Anything that he'll know was it, anyway. Lisa's never been so glad to have her own vehicle in her life. And she never walks down the driveway while the garage is open. Not anymore.

Now that he knows something's going on, Dean has figured out why she's always asking him to get things out of the garage for her--which means that sometimes he anticipates what she needs and gets it before she can ask. However, it also means that he's worried, and a worried Dean Winchester is even more of a handful than a self-destructive, drunken, grieving Dean Winchester. He fucking hovers. For the first time in her life, she wishes Ben would develop a problem at school, so that Dean can indulge his super-protective nature on somebody who's not her. She actually thinks about bribing Ben to create a problem, but she can't figure out a make-believe problem that Dean wouldn't figure out in five minutes flat.

She doesn't even look for the St. Patrick's or Easter decorations. They can stay in the damn garage.

Then one night, she wakes up from another car-haunted dream, and as she snuggles closer to Dean, it occurs to her that maybe she's been going about this all wrong. If this was a flesh-and-blood woman trying to come between them, she wouldn't stand back and let herself be intimidated like this, ever. She'd march right up to the bitch and let her have it. If the bitch in question was somebody Dean cared about, she'd do it politely, but she'd still stand her ground. She's had to do it before, with a particularly bitchy sister who thought Lisa wasn't good enough for her baby brother. It turned out that the baby brother wasn't good enough for her, but that was a whole other kettle of fish.

It takes a few days to get up her courage, and even then, she waits until Dean's at work to go down to the garage to confront--

You know, confrontations work a lot better when The Other Woman has an actual damned name.

Dean calls her baby, more than anything else. Is that the car's name? Probably as close as she or the car is going to get. Lisa has friends who name their cars, but they use actual names, not endearments.

And really, knowing that he addresses the car the same way he addresses her when they're--

Okay, that's not a place she needs to be going right now.

She tugs on the tarp until it slithers to the floor under its own weight and she's standing in the garage facing down an Impala. This may be the single stupidest thing she's done in her life.

Well, second stupidest.

"You don't scare me," she tells it, as matter-of-factly as she can manage. She just has to keep telling herself that it's a car. Even a car with a soul is bound to be limited. "And you're a guest in my garage, so you better start beha--"

"I know your secret," the voice says.

No. Not this time. She is not going to run. "What secret?" she demands, and proceeds to lie through her teeth. "I don't have any secrets."

The air around her shivers in silver-and-black laughter. "You think I can't tell? As much of their blood has been spilled in me, you think I didn't recognize the taste of Winchester in your boy's blood?"

Fear leaves a trail of ice down her spine. She knows exactly what the car's talking about. Dean was doing something to the engine and showing whatever-it-was to Ben, and Ben sliced his finger on a sharp edge. Nothing terrible, just enough to bleed; Ben had done worse to himself with his homework. Right before Thanksgiving. One of those car-maintenance days where the boys bond and she just backs off and lets them.

Holy hell. The car didn't come after her because she was a threat to Dean. It was Ben. Ben's existence. The car figured out what no other person has, ever.

"Tell him."

"No." Reality hasn't been all that solid for years now--there's an ensouled car in her garage, the man she's living with is a retired ghost hunter who's literally seen Hell, the things that go bump in the night are real--but on this, she knows exactly where she stands, and nothing's budging her. If Dean ever decides to stay, it will be his decision. She's not doing a damned thing that will make him feel trapped here. She'll tell him if he ever decides to make this permanent. He's only been here a year. With Dean's issues, it'll take at least five. "And keep your damn voice down," she snarls at the car, and walks--walks--away.

She's not sure, but she thinks the whispers sound impressed. And maybe even a little bit approving.

The dreams are different after that. The woman's still there, but she's not looming threateningly, and sometimes there are dreams where she appears without Dean and the two of them sit and talk like any other in-laws. Lisa doesn't remember all of it when she wakes, not consciously, but sometimes she'll make a comment, and Dean will look at her in surprise and remark that he didn't remember telling her about that.

Those little surprises actually make him open up some more.

She's starting to understand him better, though. Nobody alive knows Dean better than that car. She's not sure anybody, dead or alive, knows him better than the car. Not his dad, maybe not even Sam. She wonders if Dean realizes that, has ever stopped to think of the potential downside of a sentient car. And it occurs to her that the car might just be as protective of Ben as it is of Dean, which doesn't mean a lot now, but if they can make this work a few more years.... She'd feel a lot better about Ben learning to drive in a car that can take over if he starts driving stupid.

The Impala shares her assessment, although if what she says in the dreams is any indication, Dean managed to get in plenty of trouble even with the car looking out for him. Part of that was just Dean, of course, but part of it was the car being scared of what Dean's dad would do to her if he figured out her--ah--uniqueness. Apparently Dean's dad had a peculiar kind of blind spot. Once he was gone, the Impala could be herself.

They're both actually kind of hopeful these days, and Lisa thinks the car might actually want Dean to settle down as much as she does. And he is settling in, finally becoming part of the real world; he's packed away all those old books, he drinks less, and he can talk about Sam without sparking nightmares.

And then the bottom falls out.

Sam is alive.

At first, she's grateful, knowing that his reappearance saved them all from something that wanted vengeance on Dean--but after getting dragged out of her own house to South Dakota, and then being forced to move to fucking Michigan, she's less grateful and more annoyed. And Sam--

Lisa splurges on professional movers for the first time in her life just to make sure Dean has no reason to rope Sam into helping.

Dean's yo-yoing between overjoyed to have his brother back and pissed that Sam's been back all this time without telling him, so he doesn't see it. Doesn't see the dead in Sam's eyes. Doesn't see how, when she tries to thank Sam for intervening, he acts like her gratitude is an imposition. Even the car knows something's wrong. The Impala's grumpy worry thickens the air in the house like some kind of fog.

Then Dean's overprotectiveness kicks in, like this is a prison instead of a house. She's actually kind of grateful when Sam calls needing help, even as she tells Dean to get his ass out of the house and go help his brother before she shoots him.

Oh, she still resents the hell out of Sam, don't get her wrong. It's just that if Dean stays here hovering, she's going to take all the violence she's been envisioning for Sam out on Dean, and then the car will get pissed, and Ben will get pissed, and then there will just be a whole mess, and probably another move, and she hasn't even found all the towels yet.

He takes the pickup, an unspoken promise to her that this is a one-time deal. If he was going back out there for good, he'd take the Impala.

He doesn't even know he's lying to himself.

Dean calls that night to let her know everything's okay. She knows he's lying, at least partially, but she also knows he needs to keep his mind in the game, so she lets it slide. She doesn't even ask about the wailing baby she hears, although she does wonder if being back on the road has already damaged his brain to the point that he's forgotten that she, of all people, can tell the difference between the scream of a real live baby and one on a TV. It takes everything she has not to tell him to check the kid's diaper, because she remembers well what that particular key of ear-splitting means.

She falls asleep keenly aware of the empty space next to her, her fingers brushing the knife that lives under his pillow. Once, that knife scared her. Now, she finds it comforting.

Lisa half expects what happens in her dreams.

"You were good for him," the other woman says softly, and there's sadness in those bright eyes. "Never doubt that."

Were. Not are. "Not good enough," Lisa replies. In dreams, she can say these words, words she hasn't dared say aloud, what she hasn't wanted to admit since Sam so rudely decided to emerge from his grave--what Dean hasn't brought himself to admit yet. Dean may visit, may even sleep here, but he's never really going to come back. As soon as Sam reappeared, the Impala became home again. He's trying to hide it behind the pickup, but soon that turtle's going to retreat back to its shell permanently.

She doesn't wish Sam dead, but that's for Dean's sake, not for his. She's always, always going to hate him for this.

She doesn't come out of the dream suddenly, the way she usually does. No, her eyes simply open and she finds herself staring at the new ceiling overhead. Resignation, loss, and hurt, but no terror.

She's still not going to tell him. Even if he knew, it wouldn't be enough to keep him here. Physically, maybe, but it would be solely out of guilt and that overblown sense of responsibility, the one that makes him blame himself for everything from his mother's murder to Ben's hangnails. His heart would be forever out there, on the road, and if anything happened to Sam, it would destroy him.

She slips out of bed and walks through the still-unfamiliar house to the garage. The tarp still shrouds the Impala. Not for much longer. They both know that.

Lisa pushes the tarp up from the driver's side door, opens it. The blanket is neatly folded, the pillow on top of it, patiently waiting for Dean's next bad night. She picks them up and holds them tightly against her heart, like she held Ben when he was little. They smell like Dean.

"You take care of him," she says softly, and walks away.

Behind her, the door closes, all by itself, and the tarp slides back over it without a whisper.