SPN Fic (illustrated): Passengers
Title: Passengers
Fandom: Supernatural
Characters: Bobby, Sam, OC
Rating: PG
Warnings: brief allusion to torture
Spoilers: Set in the second half of season 6
Words: 7.904
Summary: When Bobby is called to Japan to help with a hunt, he brings Sam along as the necessary third man - though admittedly, he would have prefered Dean. During an involuntary roadtrip through half the country, he has a lot of time to analyse why that is.
Note: Written for
worldwide_spn, country: Japan.
The road passed on beneath the wheels of the car, the markings rushing past at close to a hundred miles an hour. Hikaru was going far too fast, like the taxi driver he actually was. This was not a taxi, though - this was a giant BMW, so big even Sam could stretch out his legs while sitting in the back. It was a living room on wheels that was still somehow a car and Bobby would have liked it if he had been into this kind of vehicle. As it happened, he wasn’t. To him, this thing hardly even registered as a car.
Dean wouldn’t have liked it either - though Bobby couldn’t deny that he rarely felt so little guilt for letting Sam sleep on a backseat. It was the principle of the thing.
The world outside was reduced to the area illuminated by the headlights. Every now and then a street sign rushed past. Another two hundred miles to Kitakami, and after that several hours to that narrow, barely frequented tunnel somewhere in the province of Aomori. Bobby kept staring out of the window, counting road signs, counting down the miles to their next stop. He wasn’t tired despite the long day that should have ended several hours ago, missed the sound of the engine that was all but swallowed by the inside of this ridiculous car. Behind him, Sam made a small, distressed sound in his sleep and Bobby would have reached back and shaken him out of whatever nightmare was plaguing him, except the car was too big and his fingers wouldn’t even have brushed Sam’s knee.
Besides, Sam needed all the sleep he could get, nightmares or not. He was so tired lately, and Bobby wasn’t sure if not sleeping for a year still played a part in that. The kid had slept for ten days straight after getting his soul back and quite a lot afterwards, dreamless and like a corpse. For a while Bobby had resented him for it - for being able to sleep like a baby after trying to kill his surrogate father with a stake, and he’d resented himself for feeling that way. Then, after Sam had figured out what had happened and apologized, feeling so, so guilty, Bobby had been annoyed with him for feeling responsible for something outside of his control, something someone else had done while Sam had been burning in Hell for being selfless and brave. The old hunter had gotten quite drunk that night, kind of hating himself and not quite reaching the point of drunkenness at which he could figure out what the hell was wrong with him.
Especially since actually he couldn’t find the words to express how glad he was that the boy was back with them and no longer in Hell - and for all he wanted Sam to be affected by what his soulless self did, Bobby was more than happy that he couldn’t remember a damn thing and had, for all appearances, gotten out of this without any lasting effect.
Except for the unnaturally long and deep sleep that knocked him off his feet far too often in the first couple of days. That wore off quickly, though (much too quickly for it to make up for a year without rest) and Sam returned to his normal sleeping patters - which meant far too little sleep and avoiding it whenever he could.
When Bobby first got to know him, Sam was a little boy who didn’t like his bedtime if his big brother was allowed to stay up longer than him. Later, after John started training him for the job, he took to sleep gladly whenever he stayed at Bobby’s for a few days, happy that he had the chance and wouldn’t be kicked out of bed in the middle of the night for a drill or a hunt. Even then he was prone to nightmares, but only the very worst kept him from sleeping.
Later, after Stanford and his dead girlfriend and the revelation that demons had plans for him, each and every of Sam’s nightmares was one of the very worst and he slept only when he had to, seeking refuge in work. In this regard, nothing much had changed. This time, Sam kept himself awake by trying to make up for whatever he did when he wasn’t himself; he tried to save the world from this Mother of All and her children, and maybe he also tried to avoid dreams. Bobby didn’t know what he was dreaming about, but he hoped it were just the same old nightmares of burning lovers and demon blood, because the alternative would actually be worse.
At the rate they were going, they’d be in Kitakami before midnight. Fortunately, there weren’t many other cars around at this time of night and this far north, and the only police they had seen so far, a couple of hours ago, had already been busy giving a lecture to another speeder, so they had no other choice but to let this one keep on speeding.
Bobby didn’t know how much further they’d go, but he kind of doubted that Hikaru would go all through the night. The young Japanese was not a fan of that, and he was not a fan of sleeping in the car, even though this one was about ten times more comfortable than any other Bobby has ever slept in - which just proved that his old friend’s son was a spoiled brat with far more money than a taxi driver and part-time hunter had any right to own.
A spoiled brat who didn’t like anyone else driving his car. This, and his fable for classic rock reminded Bobby of Dean, even if little else did - least of all Hikaru’s love for public baths and hot springs. Or water in general.
Bobby had met the boy only once before, back when his father had been still alive and Hikaru just this little boy hiding behind Yoichi’s back. Unfortunately, Yoichi had never done much to introduce his son to other hunters, so Bobby had been the only one the boy could think of when he stumbled over a job that required three people.
Dean hadn’t been happy about him leaving right in the middle of something big, but then, when were they not in the middle of something big? If it wasn’t the Mother of All Monsters, it was the apocalypse or a demon army or whatever would come next, and since nothing urgent had come up in that matter, Bobby had thought it okay to make the trip.
Dean had been even less happy that he took Sam along, but there was little other choice, since the number of trusted hunters who’d come was extremely limited. If he was perfectly honest, Bobby would have preferred making the trip with Dean at his side, but as it happened, Castiel had dropped in just then, telling them he needed one of his human friends to help him and Balthazar reclaim one of the heavenly weapons that had, for once, not been stolen by Balthazar. And as it happened, he preferred Dean at his side as well.
Neither Sam nor Bobby had liked letting Dean go on that mission his own, but Cas assured them it wasn’t dangerous and if bad came to worse, Bobby knew the angel would stop at nothing to keep Dean safe.
So Dean went with the angels and Sam accompanied Bobby on a trip to Japan. It had been a damn long flight that Bobby had used mostly for sleeping, while Sam had read up on country and culture, had refreshed the few basic Japanese skills he had once been forced to acquire in order to read up on a Japanese monster his dad was hunting while he was a teenager, and moved restlessly in his seat the rest of the time, trying to find a comfortable position for his long legs. He hadn’t touched his food and as far as Bobby could tell hadn’t closed his eyes even for a moment.
Bobby had appreciated that. A screaming nightmare in the middle of economy class would have attracted a lot of unwanted attention.
They had landed on Kansai International Airport because the flight going there was cheapest, then took, again for reasons of keeping the cost manageable, several local trains to Kochi on Shikoku. It had taken them nearly another day through which Sam didn’t sleep. Once in Kochi, they had met Hikaru and found out that while he lived in Kochi, the hunt he needed them for was actually in Aomori-ken, at the very north end of Honshu. They’d also learned that they had to wait another two days before they could leave because Hikaru needed to wait for his vacation to come around.
This whole trip had been lacking in organization from the beginning.
And then it got worse. Hikaru wasn’t in a hurry, wanted to show off his home country, so he had taken the scenic road. Somehow he had managed to make a tour that covered all four of the provinces Shikoku got its name from, including the steep, narrow streets through the forest-covered mountains of Kagawa-ken. He seemed to have forgotten that Bobby had already been in Japan before, and for quite a long time.
But as he had caught a glimpse of Sam taking in the untamed beauty of the scenery with obvious awe, Bobby had realised that in his haste to get this whole thing over and done with, he had forgotten that while he knew Japan pretty well, Sam didn’t.
They had, in the end, taken the route over the Great Naruto Bridge to get back to the main island, despite all the retours making it to Kyoto on the first day. Sam looked like he should drop dead any moment but at the same time he radiated excitement like a little boy who refused to sleep in the car for fear of missing something interesting outside the window. An unexpected wave of fond exasperation had rushed over Bobby when he remembered the little boy Sam had been once, pouring over maps and globes and marking all the places he wanted to go.
Bobby hadn’t thought about that for years. This trip, for the first time in maybe forever, made him wonder if Sam mourned all the journeys he couldn’t make because of his brother’s fear of flying.
(The brothers didn’t separate (anymore), so Sam couldn’t see the world. Dean wasn’t the only one who made sacrifices for his family, but his were so glaringly obvious that it was easy to forget.)
-
In Kyoto they had received a mail from Dean who had successfully made it through his own adventure with the angels, which was the only good thing about the stay there. One thing had not changed with the continent: Their accommodations were still crappy - only now they got crappy youth hostels instead of crappy motel rooms, and that was actually worse.
The name youth hostel was misleading in Japan, as Bobby had discovered on his first trip here, when he was much younger. There was no age limit to staying in them and adults or even old people were not rare. However, even as someone who’d stayed in a lot of dorms, Bobby had never had to share a room with as many as he did in Kyoto this time round.
Despite his giant car, Hikaru was as careful with his finances as any hunter who didn’t get paid for what he did as a main job. In this case he had, in wise precaution, booked them beds in a hostel formerly known as “Kyoto’s Cheapest Inn”.
It deserved the name, since the stay was pretty cheap. It was cheap because there were only three private rooms and two giant dorms with altogether 24 beds each. And at this time of year, they were all booked out. And Hikaru had not reserved a private room for the three of them.
In fact, he had gotten the extra cheap beds, of which there were only four altogether: In the same giant damn room with all the other beds but lacking a mattress, sheets, blanket or pillow - in other words, they were planks, about as comfortably as a park bench, and only a available to guests who brought their own sleeping bag. On the other hand, all three of them had slept on worse, and the beds were only 1000 yen a night.
Also, every bed had a curtain that offered a minimum of privacy. Of course, that didn’t block the sound: Not the snoring of the man beside Bobby nor the noise made by the group of youths who came back from somewhere at three AM. Also, there was the much less offensive but somehow much more notable sound of Sam’s sleeping bag as he tossed and turned all through the night, and then the sound of typing after he gave up on sleep and started typing on his laptop instead, exchanging mails with his brother. If nothing else, at least the place had free WiFi.
Bobby didn’t get much sleep that night either.
-
Originally, the plan had been to leave around six in the morning, but after their arrival they had discovered that this place was pretty much the only youth hostel in Japan that offered free breakfast, and all of them had learned never to turn down a free mail if it could save them money. So they stayed until eight for coffee and toast with jam, squeezing into the tiny common room around the reception with everyone else on the planet, it seemed. Room and food had been supervised by a tired looking caucasian guy in an apron who probably worked at the place for free accommodation. It was not uncommon in Japanese hostels, but Bobby and the others weren’t quite that desperate yet.
Also, usually the “help staff” had to stay for at least a month.
Before breakfast, while Sam and Bobby had occupied two of the three tiny shower stalls right beside the kitchen and discovered that the water pressure wasn’t meant to handle two people showering at the same time, not even cold, Hikaru has fucked off to a public bath around the corner and returned in a much better mood than his American companions.
That day they had taken then highway going north, and what they had saved on beds and breakfast, they once again paid on road toll. They had moved past Mount Fuji, which Sam could at least see in the distance even if he would probably never climb it, past Tokyo, which Sam would never visit, and didn’t stop until Nagano, where they slept in an internet café. Like most internet cafés it was prepared for people sleeping there, and though their cabin had only had half-walls, and soft light had been burning all the time and there were people walking around or talking quietly all night, it had still been quieter than the hostel in Kyoto. Also, the shower room had been about ten thousand times better.
They had gotten two two-seat cabins, but no matter what direction he stretched out in, Bobby knew it had to be too short for Sam. He had shared one with Hikaru himself, stretching out on the padded fake leather floor and it was almost too short even for him. But Bobby had been dead tired, and the soft music, along with the snoring of some unseen guy nearby, had quickly lulled him to sleep.
They had paid for nine hours because Hikaru had insisted that six wouldn’t suffice for him not to fall asleep behind the wheel the next day. Sam was already done and ready to leave when their alarm woke them after eight hours of sleep, leaving them just enough time to brush their teeth and get out before they had to pay extra.
So far, they had saved a lot of money by accepting a few inconveniences, but Bobby was beginning to feel the strain. It wasn’t the lack of comfort, because he was used to worse - it was the lack of privacy. For days now he was only on his own when he locked himself in the bathroom, and the people who surrounded him were mostly strangers. When he was hunting at home, he was taking motel rooms for himself, or to share with his hunting partners. Here they were never by themselves, and that was inconvenient, even though they had to assume that hardly anyone around them understood English on a level that enabled them to figure out what the hunters were up to.
Well, their plan had upsides and downsides. Most plans did. (Like allowing a good kid to save the world by letting him jump into the deepest pit of Hell.)
Fortunately, they spent a lot of time in the car, and Bobby and Sam knew all there was to know about the case - mostly through Hikaru’s stories, because there wasn’t much material about it, just a couple of articles, mostly from the more obscure newspapers, about people who claimed having seen a ghost in a tunnel in Aomori - and one article about an accident, just three weeks ago. It had been caused by a car that came speeding out of that tunnel far too fast and out of control, managing to crash into the only other car for miles and killing five people.
A survivor would have been nice - not only because it would have been good for the person to have survived but also because they could have asked them what scared the diver so much he sped away in a panic and lost control of his car. But no one survived this one, the names of the other people whose stories were in the papers weren’t mentioned, and instead of doing his research properly, Hikaru thought it would be easier to just go there and see for themselves.
It was hardly the professional approach. Sometimes it really showed that the boy was hunting only as a second job.
So they were driving through Japan, in this giant, air conditioned monster of a car, and why they even bothered to stop anywhere at all was a little beyond Bobby - and Sam as well, if the looks they had exchanged at every stop had been anything to go by. The boy would probably have slept better in the car, and for all his seemingly open personality, Bobby knew that Sam didn’t enjoy being crowded by strangers any more than his brother did. Possibly less. But for some reason Hikaru insisted on stopping every night when he became too tired to go on, so stop they did, because Hikaru was the driver and the driver picked the music.
Figuratively speaking. Literally, Hikaru never put on any music, and it just about drove Bobby nuts.
They’d been going north all day, stopping twice for restroom breaks and once to eat, Hikaru getting them three bowls of ramen while they weren’t looking and then laughing at Sam as he struggled to eat the slobbery noodles with his chopsticks. Bobby was pretty sure the Japanese boy had been waiting for that for days - he had been decidedly disappointed to learn that, having lived off bungers and Chinese take-out all his live, Sam actually knew how to handle chopsticks when it come to solid food.
Not with soup, though. But Sam took it with good humour, so Bobby didn’t feel bad for joining the teasing.
Sam had also seemed ready to fall into his bowl face first. In the end it was the monotonous drive down the highway that finally lulled him to sleep long after dark, and of course just when Bobby was convinced that he was really, properly asleep rather than just dozing, Hikaru left the highway and steered the car onto some parking lot, indicating that they had gone as far as he would this day.
Bobby looked at the building before him and raised his eyebrows. “Don’t you think it’s a little late for a bath? It’s close to midnight. I don’t think they’re still open.”
“They’re open all night. We can sleep here.”
“It’s an onsen!”
“They have food, too. Come on, we have to eat. Bring Sam.”
Bobby didn’t want to bring Sam. He wanted Sam to stay in the car and sleep until morning because if he woke him now, chances were Sam wouldn’t fall asleep again. He could eat on the road, and waking him to take a bath was pretty idiotic, especially considering that Sam would get kicked out there the moment anyone saw his tattoo.
But Hikaru didn’t leave Bobby any time to protest. He had already left the car and was waiting impatiently beside the brightly lit entrance of the building. So Bobby got out with a wary sigh and checked the sign above the door again but it still marked this as a public bath. Finally, he opened the backdoor to wake Sam.
The boy came awake with a start. “Just stopping for the night,” Bobby informed him before Sam could try to throw any punches. “C’mon, Hikaru’s waiting.”
Sam got out, grabbing his bag as he left the car. He, too checked the sign above the door with tired eyes as they walked and figured it out just when Bobby wanted to offer a translation. “An onsen?” he asked, confused. “What are we doing here?”
“Eat first. Have a bath and sleep,” Hikaru cheerfully explained. He seemed pretty excited about this place.
“I can’t go in there,” Sam protested weakly. On his first day in Japan, Hikaru had seen the edge of his tattoo peeking out under his shirt and disappointedly declared that Sam couldn’t use public baths because those sporting tattoos in Japan were often members of the yakuza, which led to tattoos being banned from most onsen. Sam had noted it with slight relief. Bobby knew he wasn’t shy, but he easily felt uncomfortable, and being naked in a bath full of strangers where he stood out as if he’d glow in the dark would have made him very uncomfortable.
Dean would have loved to get his brother into a situation like that. But then, maybe not. Since Sam had returned from Hell, Dean had been ridiculously careful to avoid any situation that might be in any way triggering.
“It’s late.” Hikaru waved away Sam’s concern. “There’ll be no one to see.”
“Yes, because it’s closed,” Bobby tried again. “Boy, I’m not breaking into an onsen!”
But it wasn’t closed. There were a lot of people running around inside, some sitting in a large sitting area watching tv, some sitting on the floor of a canteen around the typical low tables Bobby’s legs hated so much, eating and watching tv as well. Hikaru went over to the reception and much to Bobby’s surprise ordered three beds.
Beside him, Sam frowned. His Japanese was barely enough to get by, so he obviously wasn’t sure he understood that right. “Did he just say ‘bed’?”
He had. As it turned out, this onsen offered beds for travellers to sleep in. It was more expensive than an internet café but still cheaper than a hotel. A young woman led them upstairs and showed them the large room full of stock beds they were to sleep in. Then they were all handed bags with towels and what looked suspiciously like pyjamas. Well, Bobby and Hikaru were handed those. Sam had the employees run around busily, discussing what they should do with the extra tall foreigner and looking for a solution, which left Sam obviously embarrassed.
Eventually they came up with a yukata that was only a little bit too small. The three of them went to the bath because Hikaru wouldn’t let Sam get away and they checked carefully if no one else was around before undressing. Fortunately, the service this place offered included a midnight snack and almost everyone not asleep was already downstairs.
Sam was still embarrassed, even with only them around, which was kind of ridiculous and made Hikaru laugh at him. Hikaru was also ridiculously fascinated with Sam’s tattoo and Bobby suspected that the only reason he did not get one himself was that it would deny him access to most onsen.
Still, even Sam managed to relax in the hot water and in the end Bobby had to drag him out before he could fall fully asleep and drown. They bushed their teeth and got their bags to their beds and Sam just kind of collapsed onto his, curled up so he would fit in and was asleep by the time Bobby climbed down from the bed above him.
Naturally, Sam had chosen the time of a free dinner to finally admit defeat. Bobby contemplated waking him but quickly decided against it. The boy hadn’t eaten much all through their trip, but he needed rest more than he needed food.
By the time they got back, Sam hadn’t moved at all. Bobby closed the curtain before the boy’s bed and went to sleep in the comforting knowledge that his kid was finally getting some real sleep.
The next morning Sam was long awake, hanging out in the sitting area downstairs with his laptop because the sleeping room had no power outlets. He looked a lot better than before but there was something haunted in his eyes when he greeted them that told Bobby he would not willingly go to sleep again anytime soon.
-
It was only a few hours later that they pulled off the highway in Aomori-ken to continue their way over back roads that slowed them down with their narrow streets and many curves - though not as much as Bobby would have liked. When it came to the driving skills their lives depended on, Hikaru was pretty full of himself.
Sam in the backseat was at the same time hyper awake, barely able to sit still, and looking exhausted, ready to drop. He wouldn’t, Bobby knew that. His boys both could keep going and going and going if they had to, and the hunt was actually going down this evening, so this was a bad time for nabs.
Sam also barely spoke and barely looked at him. Bobby didn’t know what he had dreamed about, but he suspected it had been something leaking through that wall in his mind. So either Hell or something his soulless self had done that he felt guilty about.
Which he shouldn’t. Intellectually, Bobby knew that, had known it from the start. He’d actually felt a little guilty himself when Sam had apologized for trying to kill him and Bobby had graciously offered his forgiveness. He’d felt guilty because he’d known even then that there was nothing to be forgiven since Sam hadn’t done anything. Sam hadn’t been present; at the time it happened Sam had been in Hell, had probably been strapped to some rack or swung from meat hooks or whatever else there was that Dean never spoke about, and in the one hour that Bobby had been fighting his homicidal shell, Sam had been tortured for weeks or months without any hope for relief. So that was what Bobby should have told him when he apologized, but he hadn’t been able to bring himself to do so - while at the same time it had broken his heart that Sam didn’t expect anything else.
He still didn’t.
It was made worse by the fact that through it all, Bobby was well aware that if he could bring himself to think about it, he would see that he had been angry with Sam because that was easier than being angry with himself. After all, that Sam had had no soul, that he had been suffering in Hell was as partially his fault. Because he had let him go, and it had been easy.
When Sam had presented his plan to save the world, Bobby had hated that plan no less than Dean did, but in the end it was easy to agree for lack of an alternative they never even looked for. Sam handed himself over to eternal goddamn suffering and the last, the very last thing he deserved was being blamed for what happened as a result. And Bobby knew that and continued to ignore it (even now) because he couldn’t quite deal with hating himself right now.
(In his darkest moment just after Sam’s sacrifice and before his shadow had appeared in the salvage yard, Bobby had dared to wonder if he would have protested more, tried harder if it had been Dean they were losing. It had always been harder to let Dean go - or maybe it was just easier to fight for keeping him. Dean waved his problems as giant red flags that had the words “I’m okay, spare me your concern” written on them in everyone’s faces, never quite getting away because everyone fought so damn hard to help him even if he didn’t want them to. Sam just left.)
“There’s no record on anyone ever having died in this tunnel before the first rumours of an evil spirit came up,” Sam suddenly said. It was the first time he’d spoken in hours and of course it was related to the job. One look over his shoulder told Bobby that Sam was sitting with his head buried in old papers. He was missing a lot of spectacular landscape right now and probably knew it, but there was a job to be done and that came first - even if he would never come this way again. “No record of anyone dying during the construction either. Are we sure this is the ghost of someone deceased?”
“I guess we’ll find out,” Hikaru said with his usual lack of concern. “It might have wandered to the tunnel from somewhere else. Though it does seem to be angry about something, so I’d say it must be connected to the place.”
In the rear view mirror Bobby could see that Sam had put down the papers and was finally looking out at the valley below, the mountains at the other side. “It doesn’t have to be evil. The accidents it caused might have been because it startled the drivers, not because it attacked them.”
It was typical of Sam to consider that. He was one of the few hunters willing to look beyond the initial “It’s there so we have to kill it” motion - and he was a damn good boy, always had been. It made Bobby feel extra bad for having been mad at him for no damn reason.
He’d known Sam and Dean for most of their lives, and for all John Winchester had claimed that his youngest had a problem with authority figures, Bobby had never seen any of that, so he’d pretty quickly come to the conclusion that Sam merely had a problem with John. In this he was the exact opposite of his brother for whom John was the only authority figure he accepted.
When Bobby had first met them, Sam was just three or four, cute as a button and so sweet and trusting and happy about every bit of attention Bobby could spare him. Dean, on the other hand, had been difficult. He’d rejected Bobby on principle, didn’t like him near his brother, wouldn’t talk to him and glared darkly all the time. That little Sam had adored Bobby had made him dislike the hunter even more, that much was obvious.
Bobby had had to work hard to win his trust. Dean had opened up slowly, but when he had finally come to like Bobby, it had felt like a victory, and Bobby had treasured the relationship he was building with the little boy all the more for it. It had been nice to finally see him act his age, and every time Bobby had seen Dean interact with someone he didn’t like he had felt pride for having been accepted as family by the kid. Even now he got that notion.
Once he opened up and felt at ease, Dean was pretty easy to like.
So was Sam, but maybe that was part of the problem. Sam had never given Bobby any trouble. He had always been sweet-tempered as long as his father wasn’t around, clever, open-minded and always willing to learn in a way his brother wasn’t. He noticed problems and pointed them out instead of pretending they didn’t exist the way Dean liked to do to this day, but for all those characteristics, it had always been Dean who couldn’t hide his own troubles. Every time there was something brothering him it was obvious in the way he acted. He carried his problems openly but didn’t want to share them, making Bobby work to get through to him and figure out what was wrong, and so Dean always had all the attention, overshadowing his less troublesome brother who for was so damn open that it was easy to overlook he wasn’t exactly open about himself.
While Bobby fought his constant fight for Dean’s love and wellbeing, Sam had quietly existed in the background, his own problems piling up unseen. If they did not concern anyone else he did not show them. If something showed, he would politely deny it in a way that made it hard to press the issue. As things had gotten worse for him back in the day, as he had been crumbling under the pressure of a life he hadn’t wanted, the things he’d seen and done far too often at far too young an age, the conflict between wanting his own life and the obligation to a family who would not accept him for that, Sam had withdrawn more and more from the people around him, including Bobby. But he hadn’t done it fighting, yelling or hissing. It had just happened, quietly, without Bobby even noticing, and by the time he had, the emotional bond between them had grown so thin, Bobby having grown so used to Sam being gone, that he didn’t care enough anymore to reach out to him.
It wasn’t something he was proud of. But things had always been good between them. There had never been a fight, never an obvious rift that could have been fixed. Sam was always there, always pleasant enough not to be noticed.
Even when he was falling apart in his grief after Dean had been ripped to shreds and dragged to Hell before his eyes, Sam had kept his composure. He’d let his determination to find a way to save his brother keep him together, and he had remained polite and collected and caring towards Bobby who’d just lost his surrogate son even as he walked out of his life. And Bobby had let him go. He had his own grief to deal with and if Sam wanted to go there was no stopping him. Bobby had known he would try to make a deal, would do anything to get Dean back and he should have stopped him, should have looked after him the way Dean would have wanted him to, but he hadn’t. He hadn’t even kept track of what the heck the boy was up to.
After Dean had lost Sam last year, Bobby had let him go as well - but then, he knew that Dean had someone to turn to, someone who would take him in and take care of him. Sam hadn’t had anyone, and one thing Bobby had never, ever blamed him for was turning to the demon Ruby when she appeared to be a friend and the only one who would be there for him.
If anything, for this he had blamed himself. Had blamed himself all through the long nights he had listened to the kid scream his way through withdrawal in the panic room because maybe he could have prevented that. Maybe not. Maybe no one could have changed things in the face of Heaven and Hell pushing Sam into that role, but that didn’t matter because no one had tried.
(Bobby had let him drift away to the point where Sam returned from Hell without his soul, without the part that made him who he was, and Bobby didn’t even notice.)
The thought that perhaps, with so little, he could have prevented the apocalypse, had never been one Bobby liked to face, especially if he continued down that line. If Lucifer had never been freed, they would never have had to lock him in again. Sam would never have gone to Hell. He would never have run around as a soulless bastard and he wouldn’t be sitting there now, looking at Japan through bloodshot eyes, with memories of centuries of torture kept away by a thin and fragile wall that just can’t last for long.
Perhaps this was the reason why Bobby had such a hard time accepting the kid back in his life: he knew sooner or later he was going to lose him again, and that might just break him, if he let it.
There was no doubt at all that it would break Dean.
“We’re there,” Hikaru suddenly said, pulling Bobby out of his increasingly dark thoughts. They had just entered a village that couldn’t have more than a few hundred inhabitants. The road going through it was framed by buildings only for a short stretch and continued downwards, toward a mountain in which Bobby could in the fading daylight make out the mouth of a tunnel as a gaping dark hole.
Hikaru pulled the car to the side of the road and they all got out, stretching their limps, taking in the sight. After all the time in the air-conditioned car, the hot summer air hit them like a physical blow.
They got their stuff from the trunk: iron cowboars, bags of salt. One shotgun loaded with rock salt that they hoped they wouldn’t have to use because Hikaru was worried about his car and no one liked to have a shotgun fired in such an enclosed space. While Sam put the bag with their equipment onto the backseat a young man approached them, aiming for Hikaru.
“What did he say?” Sam asked quietly when the man shuffled off again.
“He warned us not to drive through the tunnel with only three people in the car,” Bobby translated. “Told us to take another route or pay one of the villagers to accompany us, because if one seat remains free, something gets inside. Hikaru told him we’d know what we’re doing.”
Sam sighed warily. “I hope he’s right.”
-
With not quite four kilometres length the tunnel was somewhat on the short side in comparison to some of the others they had passed on their way here. Bobby could imagine that it was still a long way to go if one suddenly found out that there was one more person in the car than there should be.
Due to the remote place and its reputation they had the whole thing for themselves, which made things a lot easier. They drove into the dark, Hikaru facing the street and the others facing the empty seat beside Sam.
The ghost dutifully flickered into existence about a kilometre into the dark. They had turned on the light inside the car, but even if it had been pitch black they would have noticed the sudden drop in temperature.
A person in a plain, old-fashioned dress was suddenly sitting beside Sam. Long, dark hair obscuring her face until she lifted her head and revealed the features of a middle aged woman. Hikaru turned around despite himself, trying to see the thing that had gotten into his precious car, and Bobby growled at him to watch where he was going the exact same moment the woman pointed ahead and said, “Ki wo tsukete!”
Not a vengeful spirit, then, although, if she wanted to warn drivers to drive carefully, she was approaching the problem in entirely the wrong way.
Fortunately, Hikaru had expected her appearance and didn’t panic like the other drivers had. He kept driving steadily and the woman kept staring ahead in tense concentration, never noting the two foreigners who were holding salt and iron clenched in their fists, ready to get rid of her the moment she showed any aggressive tendencies. A thin line of blood started to tickle from her hairline and down the side of her face, but apart from that nothing changed until close to the end of the tunnel. They could already see the light when the woman suddenly told them to go slow.
So Hikaru took his foot off the accelerator and rolled out of the tunnel almost at walking pace. Bobby expected the woman to disappear the moment they got back into daylight, but she remained sitting there tensely as they rolled towards a sharp turn not far behind the tunnel’s exit.
Suddenly, Bobby understood. He knew why they hadn’t found anyone dying inside the tunnel before it became haunted and he understood why the ghost only appeared in cars going from west to east, never in the opposite direction.
They turned the corner safely and the woman smiled. She looked around, finally noticed Sam beside her and stared.
Sam stared back. “Uhm,” he said. “Ano… arigatô.”
She blinked. Then her eyes suddenly widened and she reached out her hand to touch Sam’s chest. Bobby had already grabbed a fistful of salt and was ready to throw it at her, but she didn’t attack, just touch, and Sam didn’t seem hurt, or scared - until suddenly, for no apparently reason, he flinched, and she flinched back as well as if something had passed between them. As if something had burned her.
“Jigoku…” she whispered with tears in her eyes and flickered away.
-
Two minutes later, Hikaru pulled the car to the side of the road down in the valley and cut off the engine.
“What the heck was that?” Sam asked. He hadn’t understood what the ghost had said, Bobby was sure of that, but his voice was trembling as if she had scared him, hurt him after all. She hadn’t meant to, Bobby knew (just knew with the certainty of someone who had fought many a ghost, good and evil), but he now wished he had thrown the salt when she first made to touch his boy.
Yet he pretended not to notice how shaken Sam was, said “Beats me” and opened the door to get out into the cooling night air. “Do you think that was it? She’s gone now?” he asked, eager to get the conversation away from her final comment.
“I don’t know.” Sam shook his head, all too willing to accept the distraction. “It’s rarely this simple. But now we know where she died we can at least find out who she was and burn her body.”
They would do that, or have Hikaru do it at the very least, if they had to return to the States before they could finish the job. She wasn’t an evil spirit but she was doing harm, if unintentionally so, and had to be stopped.
There was a river ground through the valley just a few yards from the street, and in the shine of the headlights Bobby could see a path leading down to it; rough stone steps half overgrown by the wilderness that dominated this valley. In the dark little lights were beginning to glow - more and more as Bobby kept looking. Hundreds and thousands, their light pulsating in waves that seemed to travel all through the valley, following the river.
“I wonder what she meant in the end,” Hikaru mused, turning to Sam. “She touched you and said ‘Hell’.”
Sam flinched, and so did Bobby. “She’s a ghost,” the old hunter growled. “Who the heck knows why they do anything?” He was glaring at Hikaru but Hikaru wasn’t looking at him and didn’t get the message. Bobby felt like punching him. He suddenly understood why Dean was so damn protective of his brother and the stupid, so very breakable wall that kept him with them. He knew that a ghost reacting to the damage Hell had done to Sam’s soul probably wouldn’t break it, but anything could wear it down and Bobby just wanted to keep everything away from the boy as long as he could.
He also understood why Dean had been so against Sam going to Japan. It had noting to do with the Mother of All or anything else that might come up in the States. It was because Dean wasn’t with them, because Dean didn’t trust anyone, not even Bobby, to protect his brother like he did. It was because no one knew when Sam would break; it might be here, now, and Dean wouldn’t be there.
Now the thought had been thought, it was obvious that Dean fear this more than anything else. All of a sudden Bobby felt like he had been handed something incredibly precious and fragile and just wanted to hand it back before he could break it.
Hikaru would have to deal with burning the woman’s corpse on his own, Bobby decided right that moment. He was taking Sam back home to his brother as soon as possible.
(And it didn’t matter, in the end, if he had a favourite or which one he liked best. They came as a unit. Dean wouldn’t be the Dean he knew without Sam. Sam wouldn’t be Sam without Dean. They were his boys. It was that simple.)
“Are we leaving at once? Or can we stay a few minutes?” Sam suddenly asked. He had turned his attention to the darkness around them and was walking towards the steps leading down without waiting for a reply. Bobby exchanged a look with Hikaru who shrugged, and followed him down. Behind him, he heard the faint sound of a lighter as his Japanese friend lit a cigarette.
The moment Bobby had reached the narrow path right beside the river, Hikaru turned off the lights of the car, taking away all light but the moon and the fireflies dancing around them.
Sam was sanding beside the slowly moving stream, watching the lights reflected on the water, growing weaker and stronger like the beating of a giant heart. Just when Bobby came to stand beside him, he reached up and plucked of them out of the air, carefully cradling it in his open palm. It was too dark to read the expression on his face. After a minute, he threw the little bug up in the air and it flew off, never missing a beat of their slow, shining pulse.
Bobby tried to say something. Ask Sam if he was alright, comment on the scenery, anything. In the end he said nothing, just stood there in the dark, and suddenly he was simply glad that he could be here, in Japan, watching the fireflies with Sam. Things had happened. More things would happen. But that was then and this was now. They might not have many moments left but they had this one.
It was a gift. And right here, right now Bobby would take it for that, and let it be enough.
February 26, 2012
A lot of this is based on my own expereinces in Japan. I've lived among fireflies in Sugane, crossed the Naruto Bridge, worked at the youth hostel in Kyoto, slept in several internet cafés including one in Nagano, slept in that onsen in Kitakami. I've never actually been to Aomori-ken except driving through it while hitchhiking to the city of Aomori so my friend and I could cross over to Hokkaido.
I read the story about the haunted tunnel somewhere and also heard it during our trip. I don't know where that tunnel is supposed to be, so I moved it to Aomori-ken because one of the guys who took us along told us that it was the most haunted area of Japan. No idea if that's actually true.
Hikaru exists. In a way. There is a guy who likes onsen and comes from Kochi. That's as far as it goes. He knew I wrote stories and wanted me to create a character with his name. Hikaru drove us to places a lot so I made him a taxi driver by profession.
For the picture I chose a very simple manga-style for obvious reasons.
Somehow, this story turned into meta on Sam and Bobby with a very thin disguise for a plot.
Fandom: Supernatural
Characters: Bobby, Sam, OC
Rating: PG
Warnings: brief allusion to torture
Spoilers: Set in the second half of season 6
Words: 7.904
Summary: When Bobby is called to Japan to help with a hunt, he brings Sam along as the necessary third man - though admittedly, he would have prefered Dean. During an involuntary roadtrip through half the country, he has a lot of time to analyse why that is.
Note: Written for
worldwide_spn, country: Japan.
The road passed on beneath the wheels of the car, the markings rushing past at close to a hundred miles an hour. Hikaru was going far too fast, like the taxi driver he actually was. This was not a taxi, though - this was a giant BMW, so big even Sam could stretch out his legs while sitting in the back. It was a living room on wheels that was still somehow a car and Bobby would have liked it if he had been into this kind of vehicle. As it happened, he wasn’t. To him, this thing hardly even registered as a car.
Dean wouldn’t have liked it either - though Bobby couldn’t deny that he rarely felt so little guilt for letting Sam sleep on a backseat. It was the principle of the thing.
The world outside was reduced to the area illuminated by the headlights. Every now and then a street sign rushed past. Another two hundred miles to Kitakami, and after that several hours to that narrow, barely frequented tunnel somewhere in the province of Aomori. Bobby kept staring out of the window, counting road signs, counting down the miles to their next stop. He wasn’t tired despite the long day that should have ended several hours ago, missed the sound of the engine that was all but swallowed by the inside of this ridiculous car. Behind him, Sam made a small, distressed sound in his sleep and Bobby would have reached back and shaken him out of whatever nightmare was plaguing him, except the car was too big and his fingers wouldn’t even have brushed Sam’s knee.
Besides, Sam needed all the sleep he could get, nightmares or not. He was so tired lately, and Bobby wasn’t sure if not sleeping for a year still played a part in that. The kid had slept for ten days straight after getting his soul back and quite a lot afterwards, dreamless and like a corpse. For a while Bobby had resented him for it - for being able to sleep like a baby after trying to kill his surrogate father with a stake, and he’d resented himself for feeling that way. Then, after Sam had figured out what had happened and apologized, feeling so, so guilty, Bobby had been annoyed with him for feeling responsible for something outside of his control, something someone else had done while Sam had been burning in Hell for being selfless and brave. The old hunter had gotten quite drunk that night, kind of hating himself and not quite reaching the point of drunkenness at which he could figure out what the hell was wrong with him.
Especially since actually he couldn’t find the words to express how glad he was that the boy was back with them and no longer in Hell - and for all he wanted Sam to be affected by what his soulless self did, Bobby was more than happy that he couldn’t remember a damn thing and had, for all appearances, gotten out of this without any lasting effect.
Except for the unnaturally long and deep sleep that knocked him off his feet far too often in the first couple of days. That wore off quickly, though (much too quickly for it to make up for a year without rest) and Sam returned to his normal sleeping patters - which meant far too little sleep and avoiding it whenever he could.
When Bobby first got to know him, Sam was a little boy who didn’t like his bedtime if his big brother was allowed to stay up longer than him. Later, after John started training him for the job, he took to sleep gladly whenever he stayed at Bobby’s for a few days, happy that he had the chance and wouldn’t be kicked out of bed in the middle of the night for a drill or a hunt. Even then he was prone to nightmares, but only the very worst kept him from sleeping.
Later, after Stanford and his dead girlfriend and the revelation that demons had plans for him, each and every of Sam’s nightmares was one of the very worst and he slept only when he had to, seeking refuge in work. In this regard, nothing much had changed. This time, Sam kept himself awake by trying to make up for whatever he did when he wasn’t himself; he tried to save the world from this Mother of All and her children, and maybe he also tried to avoid dreams. Bobby didn’t know what he was dreaming about, but he hoped it were just the same old nightmares of burning lovers and demon blood, because the alternative would actually be worse.
At the rate they were going, they’d be in Kitakami before midnight. Fortunately, there weren’t many other cars around at this time of night and this far north, and the only police they had seen so far, a couple of hours ago, had already been busy giving a lecture to another speeder, so they had no other choice but to let this one keep on speeding.
Bobby didn’t know how much further they’d go, but he kind of doubted that Hikaru would go all through the night. The young Japanese was not a fan of that, and he was not a fan of sleeping in the car, even though this one was about ten times more comfortable than any other Bobby has ever slept in - which just proved that his old friend’s son was a spoiled brat with far more money than a taxi driver and part-time hunter had any right to own.
A spoiled brat who didn’t like anyone else driving his car. This, and his fable for classic rock reminded Bobby of Dean, even if little else did - least of all Hikaru’s love for public baths and hot springs. Or water in general.
Bobby had met the boy only once before, back when his father had been still alive and Hikaru just this little boy hiding behind Yoichi’s back. Unfortunately, Yoichi had never done much to introduce his son to other hunters, so Bobby had been the only one the boy could think of when he stumbled over a job that required three people.
Dean hadn’t been happy about him leaving right in the middle of something big, but then, when were they not in the middle of something big? If it wasn’t the Mother of All Monsters, it was the apocalypse or a demon army or whatever would come next, and since nothing urgent had come up in that matter, Bobby had thought it okay to make the trip.
Dean had been even less happy that he took Sam along, but there was little other choice, since the number of trusted hunters who’d come was extremely limited. If he was perfectly honest, Bobby would have preferred making the trip with Dean at his side, but as it happened, Castiel had dropped in just then, telling them he needed one of his human friends to help him and Balthazar reclaim one of the heavenly weapons that had, for once, not been stolen by Balthazar. And as it happened, he preferred Dean at his side as well.
Neither Sam nor Bobby had liked letting Dean go on that mission his own, but Cas assured them it wasn’t dangerous and if bad came to worse, Bobby knew the angel would stop at nothing to keep Dean safe.
So Dean went with the angels and Sam accompanied Bobby on a trip to Japan. It had been a damn long flight that Bobby had used mostly for sleeping, while Sam had read up on country and culture, had refreshed the few basic Japanese skills he had once been forced to acquire in order to read up on a Japanese monster his dad was hunting while he was a teenager, and moved restlessly in his seat the rest of the time, trying to find a comfortable position for his long legs. He hadn’t touched his food and as far as Bobby could tell hadn’t closed his eyes even for a moment.
Bobby had appreciated that. A screaming nightmare in the middle of economy class would have attracted a lot of unwanted attention.
They had landed on Kansai International Airport because the flight going there was cheapest, then took, again for reasons of keeping the cost manageable, several local trains to Kochi on Shikoku. It had taken them nearly another day through which Sam didn’t sleep. Once in Kochi, they had met Hikaru and found out that while he lived in Kochi, the hunt he needed them for was actually in Aomori-ken, at the very north end of Honshu. They’d also learned that they had to wait another two days before they could leave because Hikaru needed to wait for his vacation to come around.
This whole trip had been lacking in organization from the beginning.
And then it got worse. Hikaru wasn’t in a hurry, wanted to show off his home country, so he had taken the scenic road. Somehow he had managed to make a tour that covered all four of the provinces Shikoku got its name from, including the steep, narrow streets through the forest-covered mountains of Kagawa-ken. He seemed to have forgotten that Bobby had already been in Japan before, and for quite a long time.
But as he had caught a glimpse of Sam taking in the untamed beauty of the scenery with obvious awe, Bobby had realised that in his haste to get this whole thing over and done with, he had forgotten that while he knew Japan pretty well, Sam didn’t.
They had, in the end, taken the route over the Great Naruto Bridge to get back to the main island, despite all the retours making it to Kyoto on the first day. Sam looked like he should drop dead any moment but at the same time he radiated excitement like a little boy who refused to sleep in the car for fear of missing something interesting outside the window. An unexpected wave of fond exasperation had rushed over Bobby when he remembered the little boy Sam had been once, pouring over maps and globes and marking all the places he wanted to go.
Bobby hadn’t thought about that for years. This trip, for the first time in maybe forever, made him wonder if Sam mourned all the journeys he couldn’t make because of his brother’s fear of flying.
(The brothers didn’t separate (anymore), so Sam couldn’t see the world. Dean wasn’t the only one who made sacrifices for his family, but his were so glaringly obvious that it was easy to forget.)
-
In Kyoto they had received a mail from Dean who had successfully made it through his own adventure with the angels, which was the only good thing about the stay there. One thing had not changed with the continent: Their accommodations were still crappy - only now they got crappy youth hostels instead of crappy motel rooms, and that was actually worse.
The name youth hostel was misleading in Japan, as Bobby had discovered on his first trip here, when he was much younger. There was no age limit to staying in them and adults or even old people were not rare. However, even as someone who’d stayed in a lot of dorms, Bobby had never had to share a room with as many as he did in Kyoto this time round.
Despite his giant car, Hikaru was as careful with his finances as any hunter who didn’t get paid for what he did as a main job. In this case he had, in wise precaution, booked them beds in a hostel formerly known as “Kyoto’s Cheapest Inn”.
It deserved the name, since the stay was pretty cheap. It was cheap because there were only three private rooms and two giant dorms with altogether 24 beds each. And at this time of year, they were all booked out. And Hikaru had not reserved a private room for the three of them.
In fact, he had gotten the extra cheap beds, of which there were only four altogether: In the same giant damn room with all the other beds but lacking a mattress, sheets, blanket or pillow - in other words, they were planks, about as comfortably as a park bench, and only a available to guests who brought their own sleeping bag. On the other hand, all three of them had slept on worse, and the beds were only 1000 yen a night.
Also, every bed had a curtain that offered a minimum of privacy. Of course, that didn’t block the sound: Not the snoring of the man beside Bobby nor the noise made by the group of youths who came back from somewhere at three AM. Also, there was the much less offensive but somehow much more notable sound of Sam’s sleeping bag as he tossed and turned all through the night, and then the sound of typing after he gave up on sleep and started typing on his laptop instead, exchanging mails with his brother. If nothing else, at least the place had free WiFi.
Bobby didn’t get much sleep that night either.
-
Originally, the plan had been to leave around six in the morning, but after their arrival they had discovered that this place was pretty much the only youth hostel in Japan that offered free breakfast, and all of them had learned never to turn down a free mail if it could save them money. So they stayed until eight for coffee and toast with jam, squeezing into the tiny common room around the reception with everyone else on the planet, it seemed. Room and food had been supervised by a tired looking caucasian guy in an apron who probably worked at the place for free accommodation. It was not uncommon in Japanese hostels, but Bobby and the others weren’t quite that desperate yet.
Also, usually the “help staff” had to stay for at least a month.
Before breakfast, while Sam and Bobby had occupied two of the three tiny shower stalls right beside the kitchen and discovered that the water pressure wasn’t meant to handle two people showering at the same time, not even cold, Hikaru has fucked off to a public bath around the corner and returned in a much better mood than his American companions.
That day they had taken then highway going north, and what they had saved on beds and breakfast, they once again paid on road toll. They had moved past Mount Fuji, which Sam could at least see in the distance even if he would probably never climb it, past Tokyo, which Sam would never visit, and didn’t stop until Nagano, where they slept in an internet café. Like most internet cafés it was prepared for people sleeping there, and though their cabin had only had half-walls, and soft light had been burning all the time and there were people walking around or talking quietly all night, it had still been quieter than the hostel in Kyoto. Also, the shower room had been about ten thousand times better.
They had gotten two two-seat cabins, but no matter what direction he stretched out in, Bobby knew it had to be too short for Sam. He had shared one with Hikaru himself, stretching out on the padded fake leather floor and it was almost too short even for him. But Bobby had been dead tired, and the soft music, along with the snoring of some unseen guy nearby, had quickly lulled him to sleep.
They had paid for nine hours because Hikaru had insisted that six wouldn’t suffice for him not to fall asleep behind the wheel the next day. Sam was already done and ready to leave when their alarm woke them after eight hours of sleep, leaving them just enough time to brush their teeth and get out before they had to pay extra.
So far, they had saved a lot of money by accepting a few inconveniences, but Bobby was beginning to feel the strain. It wasn’t the lack of comfort, because he was used to worse - it was the lack of privacy. For days now he was only on his own when he locked himself in the bathroom, and the people who surrounded him were mostly strangers. When he was hunting at home, he was taking motel rooms for himself, or to share with his hunting partners. Here they were never by themselves, and that was inconvenient, even though they had to assume that hardly anyone around them understood English on a level that enabled them to figure out what the hunters were up to.
Well, their plan had upsides and downsides. Most plans did. (Like allowing a good kid to save the world by letting him jump into the deepest pit of Hell.)
Fortunately, they spent a lot of time in the car, and Bobby and Sam knew all there was to know about the case - mostly through Hikaru’s stories, because there wasn’t much material about it, just a couple of articles, mostly from the more obscure newspapers, about people who claimed having seen a ghost in a tunnel in Aomori - and one article about an accident, just three weeks ago. It had been caused by a car that came speeding out of that tunnel far too fast and out of control, managing to crash into the only other car for miles and killing five people.
A survivor would have been nice - not only because it would have been good for the person to have survived but also because they could have asked them what scared the diver so much he sped away in a panic and lost control of his car. But no one survived this one, the names of the other people whose stories were in the papers weren’t mentioned, and instead of doing his research properly, Hikaru thought it would be easier to just go there and see for themselves.
It was hardly the professional approach. Sometimes it really showed that the boy was hunting only as a second job.
So they were driving through Japan, in this giant, air conditioned monster of a car, and why they even bothered to stop anywhere at all was a little beyond Bobby - and Sam as well, if the looks they had exchanged at every stop had been anything to go by. The boy would probably have slept better in the car, and for all his seemingly open personality, Bobby knew that Sam didn’t enjoy being crowded by strangers any more than his brother did. Possibly less. But for some reason Hikaru insisted on stopping every night when he became too tired to go on, so stop they did, because Hikaru was the driver and the driver picked the music.
Figuratively speaking. Literally, Hikaru never put on any music, and it just about drove Bobby nuts.
They’d been going north all day, stopping twice for restroom breaks and once to eat, Hikaru getting them three bowls of ramen while they weren’t looking and then laughing at Sam as he struggled to eat the slobbery noodles with his chopsticks. Bobby was pretty sure the Japanese boy had been waiting for that for days - he had been decidedly disappointed to learn that, having lived off bungers and Chinese take-out all his live, Sam actually knew how to handle chopsticks when it come to solid food.
Not with soup, though. But Sam took it with good humour, so Bobby didn’t feel bad for joining the teasing.
Sam had also seemed ready to fall into his bowl face first. In the end it was the monotonous drive down the highway that finally lulled him to sleep long after dark, and of course just when Bobby was convinced that he was really, properly asleep rather than just dozing, Hikaru left the highway and steered the car onto some parking lot, indicating that they had gone as far as he would this day.
Bobby looked at the building before him and raised his eyebrows. “Don’t you think it’s a little late for a bath? It’s close to midnight. I don’t think they’re still open.”
“They’re open all night. We can sleep here.”
“It’s an onsen!”
“They have food, too. Come on, we have to eat. Bring Sam.”
Bobby didn’t want to bring Sam. He wanted Sam to stay in the car and sleep until morning because if he woke him now, chances were Sam wouldn’t fall asleep again. He could eat on the road, and waking him to take a bath was pretty idiotic, especially considering that Sam would get kicked out there the moment anyone saw his tattoo.
But Hikaru didn’t leave Bobby any time to protest. He had already left the car and was waiting impatiently beside the brightly lit entrance of the building. So Bobby got out with a wary sigh and checked the sign above the door again but it still marked this as a public bath. Finally, he opened the backdoor to wake Sam.
The boy came awake with a start. “Just stopping for the night,” Bobby informed him before Sam could try to throw any punches. “C’mon, Hikaru’s waiting.”
Sam got out, grabbing his bag as he left the car. He, too checked the sign above the door with tired eyes as they walked and figured it out just when Bobby wanted to offer a translation. “An onsen?” he asked, confused. “What are we doing here?”
“Eat first. Have a bath and sleep,” Hikaru cheerfully explained. He seemed pretty excited about this place.
“I can’t go in there,” Sam protested weakly. On his first day in Japan, Hikaru had seen the edge of his tattoo peeking out under his shirt and disappointedly declared that Sam couldn’t use public baths because those sporting tattoos in Japan were often members of the yakuza, which led to tattoos being banned from most onsen. Sam had noted it with slight relief. Bobby knew he wasn’t shy, but he easily felt uncomfortable, and being naked in a bath full of strangers where he stood out as if he’d glow in the dark would have made him very uncomfortable.
Dean would have loved to get his brother into a situation like that. But then, maybe not. Since Sam had returned from Hell, Dean had been ridiculously careful to avoid any situation that might be in any way triggering.
“It’s late.” Hikaru waved away Sam’s concern. “There’ll be no one to see.”
“Yes, because it’s closed,” Bobby tried again. “Boy, I’m not breaking into an onsen!”
But it wasn’t closed. There were a lot of people running around inside, some sitting in a large sitting area watching tv, some sitting on the floor of a canteen around the typical low tables Bobby’s legs hated so much, eating and watching tv as well. Hikaru went over to the reception and much to Bobby’s surprise ordered three beds.
Beside him, Sam frowned. His Japanese was barely enough to get by, so he obviously wasn’t sure he understood that right. “Did he just say ‘bed’?”
He had. As it turned out, this onsen offered beds for travellers to sleep in. It was more expensive than an internet café but still cheaper than a hotel. A young woman led them upstairs and showed them the large room full of stock beds they were to sleep in. Then they were all handed bags with towels and what looked suspiciously like pyjamas. Well, Bobby and Hikaru were handed those. Sam had the employees run around busily, discussing what they should do with the extra tall foreigner and looking for a solution, which left Sam obviously embarrassed.
Eventually they came up with a yukata that was only a little bit too small. The three of them went to the bath because Hikaru wouldn’t let Sam get away and they checked carefully if no one else was around before undressing. Fortunately, the service this place offered included a midnight snack and almost everyone not asleep was already downstairs.
Sam was still embarrassed, even with only them around, which was kind of ridiculous and made Hikaru laugh at him. Hikaru was also ridiculously fascinated with Sam’s tattoo and Bobby suspected that the only reason he did not get one himself was that it would deny him access to most onsen.
Still, even Sam managed to relax in the hot water and in the end Bobby had to drag him out before he could fall fully asleep and drown. They bushed their teeth and got their bags to their beds and Sam just kind of collapsed onto his, curled up so he would fit in and was asleep by the time Bobby climbed down from the bed above him.
Naturally, Sam had chosen the time of a free dinner to finally admit defeat. Bobby contemplated waking him but quickly decided against it. The boy hadn’t eaten much all through their trip, but he needed rest more than he needed food.
By the time they got back, Sam hadn’t moved at all. Bobby closed the curtain before the boy’s bed and went to sleep in the comforting knowledge that his kid was finally getting some real sleep.
The next morning Sam was long awake, hanging out in the sitting area downstairs with his laptop because the sleeping room had no power outlets. He looked a lot better than before but there was something haunted in his eyes when he greeted them that told Bobby he would not willingly go to sleep again anytime soon.
-
It was only a few hours later that they pulled off the highway in Aomori-ken to continue their way over back roads that slowed them down with their narrow streets and many curves - though not as much as Bobby would have liked. When it came to the driving skills their lives depended on, Hikaru was pretty full of himself.
Sam in the backseat was at the same time hyper awake, barely able to sit still, and looking exhausted, ready to drop. He wouldn’t, Bobby knew that. His boys both could keep going and going and going if they had to, and the hunt was actually going down this evening, so this was a bad time for nabs.
Sam also barely spoke and barely looked at him. Bobby didn’t know what he had dreamed about, but he suspected it had been something leaking through that wall in his mind. So either Hell or something his soulless self had done that he felt guilty about.
Which he shouldn’t. Intellectually, Bobby knew that, had known it from the start. He’d actually felt a little guilty himself when Sam had apologized for trying to kill him and Bobby had graciously offered his forgiveness. He’d felt guilty because he’d known even then that there was nothing to be forgiven since Sam hadn’t done anything. Sam hadn’t been present; at the time it happened Sam had been in Hell, had probably been strapped to some rack or swung from meat hooks or whatever else there was that Dean never spoke about, and in the one hour that Bobby had been fighting his homicidal shell, Sam had been tortured for weeks or months without any hope for relief. So that was what Bobby should have told him when he apologized, but he hadn’t been able to bring himself to do so - while at the same time it had broken his heart that Sam didn’t expect anything else.
He still didn’t.
It was made worse by the fact that through it all, Bobby was well aware that if he could bring himself to think about it, he would see that he had been angry with Sam because that was easier than being angry with himself. After all, that Sam had had no soul, that he had been suffering in Hell was as partially his fault. Because he had let him go, and it had been easy.
When Sam had presented his plan to save the world, Bobby had hated that plan no less than Dean did, but in the end it was easy to agree for lack of an alternative they never even looked for. Sam handed himself over to eternal goddamn suffering and the last, the very last thing he deserved was being blamed for what happened as a result. And Bobby knew that and continued to ignore it (even now) because he couldn’t quite deal with hating himself right now.
(In his darkest moment just after Sam’s sacrifice and before his shadow had appeared in the salvage yard, Bobby had dared to wonder if he would have protested more, tried harder if it had been Dean they were losing. It had always been harder to let Dean go - or maybe it was just easier to fight for keeping him. Dean waved his problems as giant red flags that had the words “I’m okay, spare me your concern” written on them in everyone’s faces, never quite getting away because everyone fought so damn hard to help him even if he didn’t want them to. Sam just left.)
“There’s no record on anyone ever having died in this tunnel before the first rumours of an evil spirit came up,” Sam suddenly said. It was the first time he’d spoken in hours and of course it was related to the job. One look over his shoulder told Bobby that Sam was sitting with his head buried in old papers. He was missing a lot of spectacular landscape right now and probably knew it, but there was a job to be done and that came first - even if he would never come this way again. “No record of anyone dying during the construction either. Are we sure this is the ghost of someone deceased?”
“I guess we’ll find out,” Hikaru said with his usual lack of concern. “It might have wandered to the tunnel from somewhere else. Though it does seem to be angry about something, so I’d say it must be connected to the place.”
In the rear view mirror Bobby could see that Sam had put down the papers and was finally looking out at the valley below, the mountains at the other side. “It doesn’t have to be evil. The accidents it caused might have been because it startled the drivers, not because it attacked them.”
It was typical of Sam to consider that. He was one of the few hunters willing to look beyond the initial “It’s there so we have to kill it” motion - and he was a damn good boy, always had been. It made Bobby feel extra bad for having been mad at him for no damn reason.
He’d known Sam and Dean for most of their lives, and for all John Winchester had claimed that his youngest had a problem with authority figures, Bobby had never seen any of that, so he’d pretty quickly come to the conclusion that Sam merely had a problem with John. In this he was the exact opposite of his brother for whom John was the only authority figure he accepted.
When Bobby had first met them, Sam was just three or four, cute as a button and so sweet and trusting and happy about every bit of attention Bobby could spare him. Dean, on the other hand, had been difficult. He’d rejected Bobby on principle, didn’t like him near his brother, wouldn’t talk to him and glared darkly all the time. That little Sam had adored Bobby had made him dislike the hunter even more, that much was obvious.
Bobby had had to work hard to win his trust. Dean had opened up slowly, but when he had finally come to like Bobby, it had felt like a victory, and Bobby had treasured the relationship he was building with the little boy all the more for it. It had been nice to finally see him act his age, and every time Bobby had seen Dean interact with someone he didn’t like he had felt pride for having been accepted as family by the kid. Even now he got that notion.
Once he opened up and felt at ease, Dean was pretty easy to like.
So was Sam, but maybe that was part of the problem. Sam had never given Bobby any trouble. He had always been sweet-tempered as long as his father wasn’t around, clever, open-minded and always willing to learn in a way his brother wasn’t. He noticed problems and pointed them out instead of pretending they didn’t exist the way Dean liked to do to this day, but for all those characteristics, it had always been Dean who couldn’t hide his own troubles. Every time there was something brothering him it was obvious in the way he acted. He carried his problems openly but didn’t want to share them, making Bobby work to get through to him and figure out what was wrong, and so Dean always had all the attention, overshadowing his less troublesome brother who for was so damn open that it was easy to overlook he wasn’t exactly open about himself.
While Bobby fought his constant fight for Dean’s love and wellbeing, Sam had quietly existed in the background, his own problems piling up unseen. If they did not concern anyone else he did not show them. If something showed, he would politely deny it in a way that made it hard to press the issue. As things had gotten worse for him back in the day, as he had been crumbling under the pressure of a life he hadn’t wanted, the things he’d seen and done far too often at far too young an age, the conflict between wanting his own life and the obligation to a family who would not accept him for that, Sam had withdrawn more and more from the people around him, including Bobby. But he hadn’t done it fighting, yelling or hissing. It had just happened, quietly, without Bobby even noticing, and by the time he had, the emotional bond between them had grown so thin, Bobby having grown so used to Sam being gone, that he didn’t care enough anymore to reach out to him.
It wasn’t something he was proud of. But things had always been good between them. There had never been a fight, never an obvious rift that could have been fixed. Sam was always there, always pleasant enough not to be noticed.
Even when he was falling apart in his grief after Dean had been ripped to shreds and dragged to Hell before his eyes, Sam had kept his composure. He’d let his determination to find a way to save his brother keep him together, and he had remained polite and collected and caring towards Bobby who’d just lost his surrogate son even as he walked out of his life. And Bobby had let him go. He had his own grief to deal with and if Sam wanted to go there was no stopping him. Bobby had known he would try to make a deal, would do anything to get Dean back and he should have stopped him, should have looked after him the way Dean would have wanted him to, but he hadn’t. He hadn’t even kept track of what the heck the boy was up to.
After Dean had lost Sam last year, Bobby had let him go as well - but then, he knew that Dean had someone to turn to, someone who would take him in and take care of him. Sam hadn’t had anyone, and one thing Bobby had never, ever blamed him for was turning to the demon Ruby when she appeared to be a friend and the only one who would be there for him.
If anything, for this he had blamed himself. Had blamed himself all through the long nights he had listened to the kid scream his way through withdrawal in the panic room because maybe he could have prevented that. Maybe not. Maybe no one could have changed things in the face of Heaven and Hell pushing Sam into that role, but that didn’t matter because no one had tried.
(Bobby had let him drift away to the point where Sam returned from Hell without his soul, without the part that made him who he was, and Bobby didn’t even notice.)
The thought that perhaps, with so little, he could have prevented the apocalypse, had never been one Bobby liked to face, especially if he continued down that line. If Lucifer had never been freed, they would never have had to lock him in again. Sam would never have gone to Hell. He would never have run around as a soulless bastard and he wouldn’t be sitting there now, looking at Japan through bloodshot eyes, with memories of centuries of torture kept away by a thin and fragile wall that just can’t last for long.
Perhaps this was the reason why Bobby had such a hard time accepting the kid back in his life: he knew sooner or later he was going to lose him again, and that might just break him, if he let it.
There was no doubt at all that it would break Dean.
“We’re there,” Hikaru suddenly said, pulling Bobby out of his increasingly dark thoughts. They had just entered a village that couldn’t have more than a few hundred inhabitants. The road going through it was framed by buildings only for a short stretch and continued downwards, toward a mountain in which Bobby could in the fading daylight make out the mouth of a tunnel as a gaping dark hole.
Hikaru pulled the car to the side of the road and they all got out, stretching their limps, taking in the sight. After all the time in the air-conditioned car, the hot summer air hit them like a physical blow.
They got their stuff from the trunk: iron cowboars, bags of salt. One shotgun loaded with rock salt that they hoped they wouldn’t have to use because Hikaru was worried about his car and no one liked to have a shotgun fired in such an enclosed space. While Sam put the bag with their equipment onto the backseat a young man approached them, aiming for Hikaru.
“What did he say?” Sam asked quietly when the man shuffled off again.
“He warned us not to drive through the tunnel with only three people in the car,” Bobby translated. “Told us to take another route or pay one of the villagers to accompany us, because if one seat remains free, something gets inside. Hikaru told him we’d know what we’re doing.”
Sam sighed warily. “I hope he’s right.”
-
With not quite four kilometres length the tunnel was somewhat on the short side in comparison to some of the others they had passed on their way here. Bobby could imagine that it was still a long way to go if one suddenly found out that there was one more person in the car than there should be.
Due to the remote place and its reputation they had the whole thing for themselves, which made things a lot easier. They drove into the dark, Hikaru facing the street and the others facing the empty seat beside Sam.
The ghost dutifully flickered into existence about a kilometre into the dark. They had turned on the light inside the car, but even if it had been pitch black they would have noticed the sudden drop in temperature.
A person in a plain, old-fashioned dress was suddenly sitting beside Sam. Long, dark hair obscuring her face until she lifted her head and revealed the features of a middle aged woman. Hikaru turned around despite himself, trying to see the thing that had gotten into his precious car, and Bobby growled at him to watch where he was going the exact same moment the woman pointed ahead and said, “Ki wo tsukete!”
Not a vengeful spirit, then, although, if she wanted to warn drivers to drive carefully, she was approaching the problem in entirely the wrong way.
Fortunately, Hikaru had expected her appearance and didn’t panic like the other drivers had. He kept driving steadily and the woman kept staring ahead in tense concentration, never noting the two foreigners who were holding salt and iron clenched in their fists, ready to get rid of her the moment she showed any aggressive tendencies. A thin line of blood started to tickle from her hairline and down the side of her face, but apart from that nothing changed until close to the end of the tunnel. They could already see the light when the woman suddenly told them to go slow.
So Hikaru took his foot off the accelerator and rolled out of the tunnel almost at walking pace. Bobby expected the woman to disappear the moment they got back into daylight, but she remained sitting there tensely as they rolled towards a sharp turn not far behind the tunnel’s exit.
Suddenly, Bobby understood. He knew why they hadn’t found anyone dying inside the tunnel before it became haunted and he understood why the ghost only appeared in cars going from west to east, never in the opposite direction.
They turned the corner safely and the woman smiled. She looked around, finally noticed Sam beside her and stared.
Sam stared back. “Uhm,” he said. “Ano… arigatô.”
She blinked. Then her eyes suddenly widened and she reached out her hand to touch Sam’s chest. Bobby had already grabbed a fistful of salt and was ready to throw it at her, but she didn’t attack, just touch, and Sam didn’t seem hurt, or scared - until suddenly, for no apparently reason, he flinched, and she flinched back as well as if something had passed between them. As if something had burned her.
“Jigoku…” she whispered with tears in her eyes and flickered away.
-
Two minutes later, Hikaru pulled the car to the side of the road down in the valley and cut off the engine.
“What the heck was that?” Sam asked. He hadn’t understood what the ghost had said, Bobby was sure of that, but his voice was trembling as if she had scared him, hurt him after all. She hadn’t meant to, Bobby knew (just knew with the certainty of someone who had fought many a ghost, good and evil), but he now wished he had thrown the salt when she first made to touch his boy.
Yet he pretended not to notice how shaken Sam was, said “Beats me” and opened the door to get out into the cooling night air. “Do you think that was it? She’s gone now?” he asked, eager to get the conversation away from her final comment.
“I don’t know.” Sam shook his head, all too willing to accept the distraction. “It’s rarely this simple. But now we know where she died we can at least find out who she was and burn her body.”
They would do that, or have Hikaru do it at the very least, if they had to return to the States before they could finish the job. She wasn’t an evil spirit but she was doing harm, if unintentionally so, and had to be stopped.
There was a river ground through the valley just a few yards from the street, and in the shine of the headlights Bobby could see a path leading down to it; rough stone steps half overgrown by the wilderness that dominated this valley. In the dark little lights were beginning to glow - more and more as Bobby kept looking. Hundreds and thousands, their light pulsating in waves that seemed to travel all through the valley, following the river.
“I wonder what she meant in the end,” Hikaru mused, turning to Sam. “She touched you and said ‘Hell’.”
Sam flinched, and so did Bobby. “She’s a ghost,” the old hunter growled. “Who the heck knows why they do anything?” He was glaring at Hikaru but Hikaru wasn’t looking at him and didn’t get the message. Bobby felt like punching him. He suddenly understood why Dean was so damn protective of his brother and the stupid, so very breakable wall that kept him with them. He knew that a ghost reacting to the damage Hell had done to Sam’s soul probably wouldn’t break it, but anything could wear it down and Bobby just wanted to keep everything away from the boy as long as he could.
He also understood why Dean had been so against Sam going to Japan. It had noting to do with the Mother of All or anything else that might come up in the States. It was because Dean wasn’t with them, because Dean didn’t trust anyone, not even Bobby, to protect his brother like he did. It was because no one knew when Sam would break; it might be here, now, and Dean wouldn’t be there.
Now the thought had been thought, it was obvious that Dean fear this more than anything else. All of a sudden Bobby felt like he had been handed something incredibly precious and fragile and just wanted to hand it back before he could break it.
Hikaru would have to deal with burning the woman’s corpse on his own, Bobby decided right that moment. He was taking Sam back home to his brother as soon as possible.
(And it didn’t matter, in the end, if he had a favourite or which one he liked best. They came as a unit. Dean wouldn’t be the Dean he knew without Sam. Sam wouldn’t be Sam without Dean. They were his boys. It was that simple.)
“Are we leaving at once? Or can we stay a few minutes?” Sam suddenly asked. He had turned his attention to the darkness around them and was walking towards the steps leading down without waiting for a reply. Bobby exchanged a look with Hikaru who shrugged, and followed him down. Behind him, he heard the faint sound of a lighter as his Japanese friend lit a cigarette.
The moment Bobby had reached the narrow path right beside the river, Hikaru turned off the lights of the car, taking away all light but the moon and the fireflies dancing around them.
Sam was sanding beside the slowly moving stream, watching the lights reflected on the water, growing weaker and stronger like the beating of a giant heart. Just when Bobby came to stand beside him, he reached up and plucked of them out of the air, carefully cradling it in his open palm. It was too dark to read the expression on his face. After a minute, he threw the little bug up in the air and it flew off, never missing a beat of their slow, shining pulse.
Bobby tried to say something. Ask Sam if he was alright, comment on the scenery, anything. In the end he said nothing, just stood there in the dark, and suddenly he was simply glad that he could be here, in Japan, watching the fireflies with Sam. Things had happened. More things would happen. But that was then and this was now. They might not have many moments left but they had this one.
It was a gift. And right here, right now Bobby would take it for that, and let it be enough.
February 26, 2012
A lot of this is based on my own expereinces in Japan. I've lived among fireflies in Sugane, crossed the Naruto Bridge, worked at the youth hostel in Kyoto, slept in several internet cafés including one in Nagano, slept in that onsen in Kitakami. I've never actually been to Aomori-ken except driving through it while hitchhiking to the city of Aomori so my friend and I could cross over to Hokkaido.
I read the story about the haunted tunnel somewhere and also heard it during our trip. I don't know where that tunnel is supposed to be, so I moved it to Aomori-ken because one of the guys who took us along told us that it was the most haunted area of Japan. No idea if that's actually true.
Hikaru exists. In a way. There is a guy who likes onsen and comes from Kochi. That's as far as it goes. He knew I wrote stories and wanted me to create a character with his name. Hikaru drove us to places a lot so I made him a taxi driver by profession.
For the picture I chose a very simple manga-style for obvious reasons.
Somehow, this story turned into meta on Sam and Bobby with a very thin disguise for a plot.