Fic: Goodbye Hello 1/3
Title: Goodbye Hello - Chapter One
Rating: PG-13 for cussing and violence
Pairing: Sam, Dean, Cleo (OMC)
Spoiler: Nightshifter
Timeline: shortly after Heart
Wordcount: ~3700 this chapter
A/N: Sequel to Hello Goodbye, where Cleo is introduced. Go read it first! This story was inspired by the inkworld saga from Cornelia Funke. My greatest thanks goes to geminigrl11 as usual. She's a wonderful beta. [sarcasm mode on] Further thanks goes to the english language and the dumb ass guys who invented the comma.[sarcasm mode off] I have no idea how geminigrl11 manages to bear with the crap I write :-D
Summary: "It's not like she missed him. They didn't share an undying love, not even the same interests. But he had somehow touched her without physical contact, leaving behind a piece of her that felt colder without him."
Chapter 1
She wasn't really surprised when she saw him standing on the other side of the road.
Shortly after their paths were divided, she'd seen him pretty often. She saw him in the kitchen of the school cafeteria, stirring the soup. She saw him staring through the window of the house he'd lived in. And she saw him bent over a book in the library, intently sucking in the words. But it never was him.
He had vanished from her life faster than he had wriggled his way in. All that were left were memories.
The years made it clear that she'd never see him again, not really. At first she wished, maybe, his father had just decided to make a road trip and they'd come back later. Yeah, sure. A road trip with a seventeen year old boy, who had a piece of wood sticking in his chest.
No, they were like phantoms, hard to grasp like the hazy memory of a dream. He and his family. Like the freaking Ghostbusters coming to the rescue and driving away with screaming sirens when their work was done - well, minus the sirens.
She'd waited for him to come back. To explain everything. To make sense of the abrupt change in her life. After all a dead witch had tried to kill her. That'd make everyone's view of life turn upside down.
Now, after years of uncertainty and waiting, she decided to forget him. Except that now, of all times, his face decided to pop up, and not only in her memory. Only yesterday, she'd missed the bus and came late for work after she'd seen him going into a laundry shop on the other side of the road. She’d been sure, it wasn't him. It never was. But still...
“Stop staring holes in the air. There's a customer waiting.”
Cleo blinked, her awareness slamming into her like a 250 pound linebacker. The street in front of the copy shop was bustling. Cars honking and people yelling into their mobiles. A group of college students surrounded one of the copy machines, punching buttons at random and scratching their heads. Well, guys, what do you think is the ON-button for?, she thought sarcastically. Students, The future of our country. Boy, are we in trouble.
She shook her head and threw an apologetic glance to her colleague Ruby. “Sorry,” She murmured and turned towards the customer: an old man with a huge stack of letters.
“Tax papers. I need three copies of each... uh, make it four.”
It was going to be a long day.
oOoOo
The long day turned out to be even longer than anticipated. It was way past nine and dark outside when Cleo finally closed the shop and walked the two blocks to her apartment. Nervously, she grabbed the small pepper spray in her right hand and the small bottle of holy water in her left.
Damn the day she had learned about monsters. Wasn't it bad enough to be afraid of an average mugging or assault? But no! Now she imagined a demon in every corner, witches in college and vampires in the drive thru. The whole world seemed to consist of supernatural beings.
And the internet didn't help. Everything she'd learned about the world - the supernatural world - she'd learned via the internet. There was gatesfromhell.com, saltnburn.com and deadbutnot.org. It was amazing, how many hits you'd get when googling witch and attack. Then there was this guy from South Dakota she was in contact with from time to time. He told her about the stuff she didn't find in the net. And most of it was stuff she didn't want to know at all.
Yet she read about it. She collected every piece of information about weird deaths and mysterious vanishings. And the numbers weren't exactly comforting. Fortunately, most of the information was just that: information. No personal experience. Still, it didn't make her feel any safer on this particular evening.
New York was never safe. Neither in the bright light of the day, nor in the dingy darkness of its dodgy night life. And especially not if you were a young woman strolling alone after dark through the less prestigious parts of the city.
She fumbled with her keys, trying to find the lock while looking over her shoulders in case anyone stupid enough jumped her from behind. It wouldn't have been the first time. Maybe she should think about moving on campus?
But against all apprehension, she entered her apartment three minutes later, unharmed and surprisingly hungry.
“You're late,” her roommate yelled from the kitchen, clanking with the dishes and coming into the hallway, a big bowl of popcorn in her hands. “You missed Sex and the City.” Lu announced, munching happily on the sweet snack and dropping pieces of it all over the carpet.
“What a loss?”
“Yeah,” Lu said grinning. “They had sex in the pool.”
“Awesome.” Cleo peeled out of her clothes and sat down on the couch. The T.V. was showing some ads about monthly female problem solvers when a serious looking woman with too much hairspray and too little clothes to cover her up properly started rattling on about the latest news.
Blah, blah, war in the Middle East; blah, blah Bush campaign against poverty and... half of the amount of popcorn in her mouth tumbled out again and she grabbed blindly for the remote to boost the sound.
“... pictures of the responsible. Dean Winchester is momentarily on the run. The police released sketches of the suspect and calls for help. If you've seen...”
The rest of the words were drowned by the rush of blood in her ears and the annoyed voice of her friend.
“What the hell? Have you gone deaf? Turn down the volume!” Cleo pressed the mute button. She didn't need the detailed description. The sketch told everything she needed to know. He looked older, a little bit more harsh, but it was unmistakably Sam's brother.
oOoOo
The grainy picture ended up pinned against the wall above her desktop, framed by newspaper articles, maps of the NY sewer system and a few postcards from her parents’ trip to Honolulu last Christmas.
She glanced at it everyday, wishing it to start talking. Of course, it never did. And neither did the television. He seemed to have vanished from earth as well as from the media. She was pretty sure he had done nothing to deserve the negative press, not the man she’d met that night. Still, there were times when she had doubts. Doubts about Sam and his questionable lifestyle, his family and anything that had to do with monsters or demons. She'd never told anyone about it. Not even her mother. Especially because her father seemed to have forgotten or at least dispelled this fateful night seven years ago.
Sometimes, when she had still lived with her parents, she had gone into the cellar, staring at the outlines of the large stain on the cement floor, which had never really disappeared.
Nowadays, a visit to her parents wasn't regular anyway. Christmas and Thanksgiving, sometimes her birthday. It wasn't like she didn't love her parents. She adored them... though she still wished she was a single child. She'd gotten to the realisation her sisters were weird hybrids between gnomes and chaos demons. That would explain their ignorant tendencies to mess things up.
Apropos family, she'd have to call them again. Easter was coming closer and she'd have to think about a good excuse not to come home this time. In a week, her essay about semantics was due. That'd make a good one.
With a loud clang, the keys fell from her hands, just when she was about to close the door to her apartment. She was late for her lecture, as usual, and she swore under her breath while reaching down to pick up the keys.
Taking three steps at a time she ran down the stairs, her backpack held against her stomach since she hadn't time to put it on her back yet.
The bus stop was already in sight when she saw the vehicle. Arms waving and voice yelling she arrived on time, though the driver was looking slightly pissed... nothing new, there, either.
“Thanks,” she said with a friendly smile and stumbled along the aisle. With a sigh, she let herself fall onto the dirty seat, pulling her backpack against her chest. That was close. Trying to calm down, she held her breath and blew it out slowly. But the process was stuck in the middle when she saw a face in the middle of the crowd. A face as familiar as the lines of her own face. His hair was obscuring most of it but this time, Cleo was sure. Staring back at her through the crowd kinda gave him away.
The wrinkly face of an old woman threw her an irritated glance and Cleo realized she was standing, her hands pressed against the cold and greasy window. She couldn't move though she was barely resisting the urge to yell “Stop the bus!”
“Are you well, hun?” The old lady asked and Cleo fell back in her seat, missing the energy to stay upright. “You're looking like you've seen a ghost.”
“You've no idea,” Cleo mumbled, her heart beating an erratic tact that had nothing to do with the sprint to the bus.
oOoOo
Lectures were held in a foreign language this day. The words bounced back from Cleo's brain like her father's bees and flowers speech from sixth grade. Ten minutes after she had arrived for her first lecture, she realized it was the wrong one. She skipped it and sat down on a bench in front of Stevenson Hall, holding a book in her arm to pretend reading. But her eyes never met the words. Watching the people go by, none of them was Sam. No face in the crowd, no face behind closed windows. And again she started to think she had imagined all of it. Just like she had a hundred times before.
Why, though? That was another question. It's not like she missed him. They didn't share an undying love, not even the same interests. But he had somehow touched her without physical contact, leaving behind a piece of her that felt colder without him. It was the moment of perception, a change of her life that she'd shared with him. Nothing had ever been the same. Like waking up to a new life with nothing to hold on except for this one face. Like the little blonde doll in a little girl’s life making moving to another town bearable. New friends came and went, new situations and new places. But wherever Cleo was, his innocent face accompanied her. His simple I'm sorry. As if he wanted to excuse the horror in the world. As if it was his fault.
“Hey, secret keeper.”
She blinked and the day suddenly seemed brighter, the sun harsher.
“You gotta work today?”
Brandon, a guy from her study group, stood in front of her, waving his fingers inches from of her nose.
“Stop that!” She ordered. “You stink.”
“Tell that to McDoofus. Got the smelly onion shift this week.” The young man grumbled and put his hands in the pockets of his jeans. Next to him stood Phil, a young man with the near bald head of a fifty-year-old. The hair must have vanished making place for the huge amount of wisdom in his head. Calculating PI to the 248th digit just wasn't natural. And he'd only stopped, because no book or computer could validate his numeration. It was quite the conversation piece at parties.
“Who did you piss off this time?”
“No one,” Brandon said a little bit too hasty and rolled his eyes. “Well, the idiot asked for it.”
“Yeah, you keep saying so.” Grabbing her backpack and the unread book, Cleo stood up.
“So, do you?”
“Do I what?” Her clock told her it was nearly one pm She had a little more than an hour before her syntax lecture. Time to get a salad, start the stupid essay and maybe restock her holy water in the small chapel between Hollow Oak and the university administration bureaus. Geez, when had she started putting that in her day schedule?
“Work.”
“Oh... uh no.”
“Great! Study group at five in the library.”
He winked and, with a grimace, sniffled on his fingers. “Gotta go, wash my hands with turpentine.”
A small laugh escaped her lips but it felt stiff and awkward. Like a heartburn after too much ice cream. One last time, she did a 360 degree sweep and made her way towards the canteen. Maybe she was becoming paranoid.
Or just lonely and insane. Which was pretty much the same, anyway.
oOoOo
The library, though quiet and sober and kinda awe-inspiring, gave Cleo the creeps. Bookcases covered the walls, taking away the slim chance to see daylight in the everlasting twilight. Buzzing light bulbs sent yellow flickers into the reading areas. More bookcases were arranged to create narrow corridors and niches. Sometimes she felt like entering a place where no man has gone before. Dust danced in the air, filling her lungs. Taking drinks into the library was forbidden, but most of the students did it anyway. Otherwise there would have many explainable deaths within these halls caused by spontaneous asthma attacks.
Somehow, the silence in a library always differed from any kind of silence Cleo had encountered. It was filled with the murmur of students and the soundless whisper of the books, as if the written words had developed an unseen existence and read themselves to each other.
Still, the hollow sound of her soles was loud when she entered the main hall, leading to the numerous sections. There was Myths and Sagas, The Middle Age or the department for foreign languages. Without hesitation, she crossed the area aiming towards Linguistics. Lu was already flirting shamelessly with Brandon. All the Sex in the City episodes weren't good for her.
Without greeting, Cleo slumped on a creaking and anatomically lethal chair. “Where's PI?”
“Feeding his freaky head with stuff,” Brandon answered and Lu giggled, as if he'd just cracked the joke of the day.
“What are we studying?”
The two shrugged their shoulders and returned to the state of staring in each other’s eyes. So, no actual learning for them.
“Oookay.” Did she sound pissed? No? “I'll go. Do something productive. Like drowning my disgust with a soda.”
“Yeah you do that. Sounds nice.”
They probably didn't even realize it when she left them alone again.
She found PI between the aisles Ecopsychology and Evolutionary Psychology and for a fleeting moment he looked like Sam. Sam without hair and a couple decades older. But his stance was the same. His bald head bent over a gigantic book that he had to hold with both hands. The world around seemed to fade away, as if he wanted to drown between the pages. No wonder he was a genius with the attitude of a man who found a cure for cancer.
“Hey,” she greeted him and he actually jumped. His eyes were unfocused when he looked up and his skin sweaty. He bit his upper lip and Cleo smiled amusedly. “What's wrong? You're not reading Playboy, are you?”
He grimaced and closed the book. “No.” He put the book back with more force than necessary and she got a glimpse of the title The Mind is a Motor by a Dr. Roman K. Winter.
“So, you wanna change your study subject?”
“What?” His face expressed utter horror and slowly but surely, Cleo started to believe he HAD been reading Playboy.
“What's so interesting?”
She took the book and out of the corner of her eyes she saw PI trying to grab it. But she already had it clapped open and stared at the pages.
“Well, that's new.”
They were empty.
The paper sparkled white and clean, like it had never been touched before. Or looked at. Or printed on.
“They are empty.” Stating the obvious, she turned towards PI, who looked like he was having a heart attack. “PI? You okay?”
There was a loud crack and she ducked automatically. Little lights rained down on her like glowing snowflakes and she looked up at the lamp, which had exploded. Must have been a power burst or something.
“Is everyone okay?” Someone yelled from behind the bookcases and Cleo was about to reply with a witty answer when the floor started shaking beneath her feet. Blindly searching for support, she groped for the wooden shelves and heaved herself up.
Her eyes started adjusting and she saw PI, his whole body pressed against the wall behind him.
“PI?” Carefully she approached, afraid to startle him. But he didn't acknowledge her at all. With a painful sound he sank down on his knees and held his head between his arms like he wanted to keep it from falling off. “PI, what's wrong?”
“I...” He growled. “I can't...”
“What? What's wrong?” She was close enough to touch him and so she did, but was yanked away by an unseen force. Her back collided painfully against the corner of a bookshelf and she slid down on the floor in a heap. The movement woke bad memories and she rolled away as soon as she found her equilibrium and got back on her feet, ready to run if there was something to run from.
While the floor kept quaking, PI was still kneeling and the bookshelves started to sway dangerously. First one, then more. Books skidded from their inherent spots and crashed on the ground, their pages ripping and rustling. Panicked voices echoed from somewhere in outside this section and Cleo was alarmed by the fact that the phenomenon wasn't restricted to the close vicinity.
An earthquake, perhaps.
PI screamed, his eyes wide open and with such pain in his voice. Cleo’s blood ran cold.
Maybe not an earthquake, after all.
“Cleo! PI? Where are you guys?”
She identified Brandon's voice and it was followed by a ridiculously girlish shriek which only could have been Lu.
“We're here!” She answered without taking her eyes of PI. His scream had stopped but his mouth was still open, like the sound from was cut off.
“We gotta get outta here!”
Brandon had reached them, yelling over the racket going on. She wanted to tell him to run, to save his own life, but it sounded a little bit too melodramatic.
The world around her still tilted and tumbled and flipped fucking somersaults like they were olives in a martini. Shaken, not stirred. There was a shattering boom behind her and she realized the first shelf had fallen victim to the shaking floor. Like dominos, the other ones followed swiftly, creating a hell of noise and screams and explosions.
And then...
“Hell, Sam! There's a party and we weren't invited.”
Her head spun so fast, she swore she could hear a popping noise in her neck. Was it possible to sever one's head by turning it really, really fast?
“Sam?”
No one could have possibly heard her breathless whisper but the man himself, who caught her eyes and took them captive, the moment burning in Cleo’s mind as indelibly as a tattoo. Everything was squeezed into this one millisecond. His face, the curve of his lips, the hair that was falling in his eyes like he still wanted to hide behind them.
“Sam! It'd be nice of to join our little rescue, man.” Dean stepped into Cleo’s field of vision, his arms stretched out in front of him and a shiny black gun in his hand. It would have looked more intimidating if he hadn't swayed like a drunken sailor in sync with the shelf behind him.
“Dean,” Sam intervened, throwing his brother an unhappy look. “Aiming your gun at him won't help the matter.”
Dean rolled his eyes. “Call it insurance.”
Now it was Sam's turn to roll his eyes, but he let it go and stumbled closer to Cleo. Without saying a word, she nodded, telling him that she was okay and he turned towards PI, his hands stretched out in a non-threatening gesture.
“Phil?” PI was visibly shaking. His arms still protectively wrapped around his head he blinked confusedly.
“Go away!”
“It's okay, Phil. We want to help you.” Sam's soothing voice cut through the ongoing hubbub like honey in bitter tea and Cleo was sure the shaking lessened a bit.
“You... you can't!” PI yelled.
“We can.” Slowly, carefully, Sam inched closer, step by step. Since he was positioned directly between PI and Cleo now, she had to lean to the side to look at the scene.
“Lasst mich verdammt noch mal in Ruhe!” PI screamed and Dean looked at his brother.
“Please, WHAT?”
“I think he told us to leave him alone.” Sam answered and mentally Cleo congratulated his guess. PI had taken a few lessons of German last semester. But why would he speak German? Now of all times?
“Okay, okay. We will. But only if you calm down. Understood?”
PI curled even more and started to whimper when the air seemed to grow heavy with anticipation. Like the fresh air before a storm was coming. Everything grew quiet and the dancing bookshelves lay quiet in their crumpled chaos. At least until the shelf boards shot out of their mounts and started to sail around the hall. Remaining books that hadn't found their way to the floor yet, fell down and covered the ground around Cleo with a layer of paper and ink while the boards whizzed around like fucking bludgers.
“Down!” Sam yelled and he ran towards her, taking her with him when he let himself fall. He was lying half on top on her and his arm covered her head, keeping it safe from the ravaging pieces of wood. Time seemed to stretch into eternity and finally it was Sam, who scuffed her lightly on her shoulder.
“You okay?” he asked and she sat up.
A blurry puddle of white from a torch brightened the darkness around her and somewhere a light was switched on. Voices yelled, asking if someone was hurt.
“Why is it...” Cleo asked. “... that whenever we meet, there seems to be flying wood involved?”
He didn't laugh, didn't grin. He didn't even look at her.
His concentration was on the place, where PI had stood and now there was nothing. Dean, the gun still trained on the empty place, spoke first.
“What the hell?”
TBC
Next Chapter
Rating: PG-13 for cussing and violence
Pairing: Sam, Dean, Cleo (OMC)
Spoiler: Nightshifter
Timeline: shortly after Heart
Wordcount: ~3700 this chapter
A/N: Sequel to Hello Goodbye, where Cleo is introduced. Go read it first! This story was inspired by the inkworld saga from Cornelia Funke. My greatest thanks goes to geminigrl11 as usual. She's a wonderful beta. [sarcasm mode on] Further thanks goes to the english language and the dumb ass guys who invented the comma.[sarcasm mode off] I have no idea how geminigrl11 manages to bear with the crap I write :-D
Summary: "It's not like she missed him. They didn't share an undying love, not even the same interests. But he had somehow touched her without physical contact, leaving behind a piece of her that felt colder without him."
Chapter 1
She wasn't really surprised when she saw him standing on the other side of the road.
Shortly after their paths were divided, she'd seen him pretty often. She saw him in the kitchen of the school cafeteria, stirring the soup. She saw him staring through the window of the house he'd lived in. And she saw him bent over a book in the library, intently sucking in the words. But it never was him.
He had vanished from her life faster than he had wriggled his way in. All that were left were memories.
The years made it clear that she'd never see him again, not really. At first she wished, maybe, his father had just decided to make a road trip and they'd come back later. Yeah, sure. A road trip with a seventeen year old boy, who had a piece of wood sticking in his chest.
No, they were like phantoms, hard to grasp like the hazy memory of a dream. He and his family. Like the freaking Ghostbusters coming to the rescue and driving away with screaming sirens when their work was done - well, minus the sirens.
She'd waited for him to come back. To explain everything. To make sense of the abrupt change in her life. After all a dead witch had tried to kill her. That'd make everyone's view of life turn upside down.
Now, after years of uncertainty and waiting, she decided to forget him. Except that now, of all times, his face decided to pop up, and not only in her memory. Only yesterday, she'd missed the bus and came late for work after she'd seen him going into a laundry shop on the other side of the road. She’d been sure, it wasn't him. It never was. But still...
“Stop staring holes in the air. There's a customer waiting.”
Cleo blinked, her awareness slamming into her like a 250 pound linebacker. The street in front of the copy shop was bustling. Cars honking and people yelling into their mobiles. A group of college students surrounded one of the copy machines, punching buttons at random and scratching their heads. Well, guys, what do you think is the ON-button for?, she thought sarcastically. Students, The future of our country. Boy, are we in trouble.
She shook her head and threw an apologetic glance to her colleague Ruby. “Sorry,” She murmured and turned towards the customer: an old man with a huge stack of letters.
“Tax papers. I need three copies of each... uh, make it four.”
It was going to be a long day.
oOoOo
The long day turned out to be even longer than anticipated. It was way past nine and dark outside when Cleo finally closed the shop and walked the two blocks to her apartment. Nervously, she grabbed the small pepper spray in her right hand and the small bottle of holy water in her left.
Damn the day she had learned about monsters. Wasn't it bad enough to be afraid of an average mugging or assault? But no! Now she imagined a demon in every corner, witches in college and vampires in the drive thru. The whole world seemed to consist of supernatural beings.
And the internet didn't help. Everything she'd learned about the world - the supernatural world - she'd learned via the internet. There was gatesfromhell.com, saltnburn.com and deadbutnot.org. It was amazing, how many hits you'd get when googling witch and attack. Then there was this guy from South Dakota she was in contact with from time to time. He told her about the stuff she didn't find in the net. And most of it was stuff she didn't want to know at all.
Yet she read about it. She collected every piece of information about weird deaths and mysterious vanishings. And the numbers weren't exactly comforting. Fortunately, most of the information was just that: information. No personal experience. Still, it didn't make her feel any safer on this particular evening.
New York was never safe. Neither in the bright light of the day, nor in the dingy darkness of its dodgy night life. And especially not if you were a young woman strolling alone after dark through the less prestigious parts of the city.
She fumbled with her keys, trying to find the lock while looking over her shoulders in case anyone stupid enough jumped her from behind. It wouldn't have been the first time. Maybe she should think about moving on campus?
But against all apprehension, she entered her apartment three minutes later, unharmed and surprisingly hungry.
“You're late,” her roommate yelled from the kitchen, clanking with the dishes and coming into the hallway, a big bowl of popcorn in her hands. “You missed Sex and the City.” Lu announced, munching happily on the sweet snack and dropping pieces of it all over the carpet.
“What a loss?”
“Yeah,” Lu said grinning. “They had sex in the pool.”
“Awesome.” Cleo peeled out of her clothes and sat down on the couch. The T.V. was showing some ads about monthly female problem solvers when a serious looking woman with too much hairspray and too little clothes to cover her up properly started rattling on about the latest news.
Blah, blah, war in the Middle East; blah, blah Bush campaign against poverty and... half of the amount of popcorn in her mouth tumbled out again and she grabbed blindly for the remote to boost the sound.
“... pictures of the responsible. Dean Winchester is momentarily on the run. The police released sketches of the suspect and calls for help. If you've seen...”
The rest of the words were drowned by the rush of blood in her ears and the annoyed voice of her friend.
“What the hell? Have you gone deaf? Turn down the volume!” Cleo pressed the mute button. She didn't need the detailed description. The sketch told everything she needed to know. He looked older, a little bit more harsh, but it was unmistakably Sam's brother.
oOoOo
The grainy picture ended up pinned against the wall above her desktop, framed by newspaper articles, maps of the NY sewer system and a few postcards from her parents’ trip to Honolulu last Christmas.
She glanced at it everyday, wishing it to start talking. Of course, it never did. And neither did the television. He seemed to have vanished from earth as well as from the media. She was pretty sure he had done nothing to deserve the negative press, not the man she’d met that night. Still, there were times when she had doubts. Doubts about Sam and his questionable lifestyle, his family and anything that had to do with monsters or demons. She'd never told anyone about it. Not even her mother. Especially because her father seemed to have forgotten or at least dispelled this fateful night seven years ago.
Sometimes, when she had still lived with her parents, she had gone into the cellar, staring at the outlines of the large stain on the cement floor, which had never really disappeared.
Nowadays, a visit to her parents wasn't regular anyway. Christmas and Thanksgiving, sometimes her birthday. It wasn't like she didn't love her parents. She adored them... though she still wished she was a single child. She'd gotten to the realisation her sisters were weird hybrids between gnomes and chaos demons. That would explain their ignorant tendencies to mess things up.
Apropos family, she'd have to call them again. Easter was coming closer and she'd have to think about a good excuse not to come home this time. In a week, her essay about semantics was due. That'd make a good one.
With a loud clang, the keys fell from her hands, just when she was about to close the door to her apartment. She was late for her lecture, as usual, and she swore under her breath while reaching down to pick up the keys.
Taking three steps at a time she ran down the stairs, her backpack held against her stomach since she hadn't time to put it on her back yet.
The bus stop was already in sight when she saw the vehicle. Arms waving and voice yelling she arrived on time, though the driver was looking slightly pissed... nothing new, there, either.
“Thanks,” she said with a friendly smile and stumbled along the aisle. With a sigh, she let herself fall onto the dirty seat, pulling her backpack against her chest. That was close. Trying to calm down, she held her breath and blew it out slowly. But the process was stuck in the middle when she saw a face in the middle of the crowd. A face as familiar as the lines of her own face. His hair was obscuring most of it but this time, Cleo was sure. Staring back at her through the crowd kinda gave him away.
The wrinkly face of an old woman threw her an irritated glance and Cleo realized she was standing, her hands pressed against the cold and greasy window. She couldn't move though she was barely resisting the urge to yell “Stop the bus!”
“Are you well, hun?” The old lady asked and Cleo fell back in her seat, missing the energy to stay upright. “You're looking like you've seen a ghost.”
“You've no idea,” Cleo mumbled, her heart beating an erratic tact that had nothing to do with the sprint to the bus.
oOoOo
Lectures were held in a foreign language this day. The words bounced back from Cleo's brain like her father's bees and flowers speech from sixth grade. Ten minutes after she had arrived for her first lecture, she realized it was the wrong one. She skipped it and sat down on a bench in front of Stevenson Hall, holding a book in her arm to pretend reading. But her eyes never met the words. Watching the people go by, none of them was Sam. No face in the crowd, no face behind closed windows. And again she started to think she had imagined all of it. Just like she had a hundred times before.
Why, though? That was another question. It's not like she missed him. They didn't share an undying love, not even the same interests. But he had somehow touched her without physical contact, leaving behind a piece of her that felt colder without him. It was the moment of perception, a change of her life that she'd shared with him. Nothing had ever been the same. Like waking up to a new life with nothing to hold on except for this one face. Like the little blonde doll in a little girl’s life making moving to another town bearable. New friends came and went, new situations and new places. But wherever Cleo was, his innocent face accompanied her. His simple I'm sorry. As if he wanted to excuse the horror in the world. As if it was his fault.
“Hey, secret keeper.”
She blinked and the day suddenly seemed brighter, the sun harsher.
“You gotta work today?”
Brandon, a guy from her study group, stood in front of her, waving his fingers inches from of her nose.
“Stop that!” She ordered. “You stink.”
“Tell that to McDoofus. Got the smelly onion shift this week.” The young man grumbled and put his hands in the pockets of his jeans. Next to him stood Phil, a young man with the near bald head of a fifty-year-old. The hair must have vanished making place for the huge amount of wisdom in his head. Calculating PI to the 248th digit just wasn't natural. And he'd only stopped, because no book or computer could validate his numeration. It was quite the conversation piece at parties.
“Who did you piss off this time?”
“No one,” Brandon said a little bit too hasty and rolled his eyes. “Well, the idiot asked for it.”
“Yeah, you keep saying so.” Grabbing her backpack and the unread book, Cleo stood up.
“So, do you?”
“Do I what?” Her clock told her it was nearly one pm She had a little more than an hour before her syntax lecture. Time to get a salad, start the stupid essay and maybe restock her holy water in the small chapel between Hollow Oak and the university administration bureaus. Geez, when had she started putting that in her day schedule?
“Work.”
“Oh... uh no.”
“Great! Study group at five in the library.”
He winked and, with a grimace, sniffled on his fingers. “Gotta go, wash my hands with turpentine.”
A small laugh escaped her lips but it felt stiff and awkward. Like a heartburn after too much ice cream. One last time, she did a 360 degree sweep and made her way towards the canteen. Maybe she was becoming paranoid.
Or just lonely and insane. Which was pretty much the same, anyway.
oOoOo
The library, though quiet and sober and kinda awe-inspiring, gave Cleo the creeps. Bookcases covered the walls, taking away the slim chance to see daylight in the everlasting twilight. Buzzing light bulbs sent yellow flickers into the reading areas. More bookcases were arranged to create narrow corridors and niches. Sometimes she felt like entering a place where no man has gone before. Dust danced in the air, filling her lungs. Taking drinks into the library was forbidden, but most of the students did it anyway. Otherwise there would have many explainable deaths within these halls caused by spontaneous asthma attacks.
Somehow, the silence in a library always differed from any kind of silence Cleo had encountered. It was filled with the murmur of students and the soundless whisper of the books, as if the written words had developed an unseen existence and read themselves to each other.
Still, the hollow sound of her soles was loud when she entered the main hall, leading to the numerous sections. There was Myths and Sagas, The Middle Age or the department for foreign languages. Without hesitation, she crossed the area aiming towards Linguistics. Lu was already flirting shamelessly with Brandon. All the Sex in the City episodes weren't good for her.
Without greeting, Cleo slumped on a creaking and anatomically lethal chair. “Where's PI?”
“Feeding his freaky head with stuff,” Brandon answered and Lu giggled, as if he'd just cracked the joke of the day.
“What are we studying?”
The two shrugged their shoulders and returned to the state of staring in each other’s eyes. So, no actual learning for them.
“Oookay.” Did she sound pissed? No? “I'll go. Do something productive. Like drowning my disgust with a soda.”
“Yeah you do that. Sounds nice.”
They probably didn't even realize it when she left them alone again.
She found PI between the aisles Ecopsychology and Evolutionary Psychology and for a fleeting moment he looked like Sam. Sam without hair and a couple decades older. But his stance was the same. His bald head bent over a gigantic book that he had to hold with both hands. The world around seemed to fade away, as if he wanted to drown between the pages. No wonder he was a genius with the attitude of a man who found a cure for cancer.
“Hey,” she greeted him and he actually jumped. His eyes were unfocused when he looked up and his skin sweaty. He bit his upper lip and Cleo smiled amusedly. “What's wrong? You're not reading Playboy, are you?”
He grimaced and closed the book. “No.” He put the book back with more force than necessary and she got a glimpse of the title The Mind is a Motor by a Dr. Roman K. Winter.
“So, you wanna change your study subject?”
“What?” His face expressed utter horror and slowly but surely, Cleo started to believe he HAD been reading Playboy.
“What's so interesting?”
She took the book and out of the corner of her eyes she saw PI trying to grab it. But she already had it clapped open and stared at the pages.
“Well, that's new.”
They were empty.
The paper sparkled white and clean, like it had never been touched before. Or looked at. Or printed on.
“They are empty.” Stating the obvious, she turned towards PI, who looked like he was having a heart attack. “PI? You okay?”
There was a loud crack and she ducked automatically. Little lights rained down on her like glowing snowflakes and she looked up at the lamp, which had exploded. Must have been a power burst or something.
“Is everyone okay?” Someone yelled from behind the bookcases and Cleo was about to reply with a witty answer when the floor started shaking beneath her feet. Blindly searching for support, she groped for the wooden shelves and heaved herself up.
Her eyes started adjusting and she saw PI, his whole body pressed against the wall behind him.
“PI?” Carefully she approached, afraid to startle him. But he didn't acknowledge her at all. With a painful sound he sank down on his knees and held his head between his arms like he wanted to keep it from falling off. “PI, what's wrong?”
“I...” He growled. “I can't...”
“What? What's wrong?” She was close enough to touch him and so she did, but was yanked away by an unseen force. Her back collided painfully against the corner of a bookshelf and she slid down on the floor in a heap. The movement woke bad memories and she rolled away as soon as she found her equilibrium and got back on her feet, ready to run if there was something to run from.
While the floor kept quaking, PI was still kneeling and the bookshelves started to sway dangerously. First one, then more. Books skidded from their inherent spots and crashed on the ground, their pages ripping and rustling. Panicked voices echoed from somewhere in outside this section and Cleo was alarmed by the fact that the phenomenon wasn't restricted to the close vicinity.
An earthquake, perhaps.
PI screamed, his eyes wide open and with such pain in his voice. Cleo’s blood ran cold.
Maybe not an earthquake, after all.
“Cleo! PI? Where are you guys?”
She identified Brandon's voice and it was followed by a ridiculously girlish shriek which only could have been Lu.
“We're here!” She answered without taking her eyes of PI. His scream had stopped but his mouth was still open, like the sound from was cut off.
“We gotta get outta here!”
Brandon had reached them, yelling over the racket going on. She wanted to tell him to run, to save his own life, but it sounded a little bit too melodramatic.
The world around her still tilted and tumbled and flipped fucking somersaults like they were olives in a martini. Shaken, not stirred. There was a shattering boom behind her and she realized the first shelf had fallen victim to the shaking floor. Like dominos, the other ones followed swiftly, creating a hell of noise and screams and explosions.
And then...
“Hell, Sam! There's a party and we weren't invited.”
Her head spun so fast, she swore she could hear a popping noise in her neck. Was it possible to sever one's head by turning it really, really fast?
“Sam?”
No one could have possibly heard her breathless whisper but the man himself, who caught her eyes and took them captive, the moment burning in Cleo’s mind as indelibly as a tattoo. Everything was squeezed into this one millisecond. His face, the curve of his lips, the hair that was falling in his eyes like he still wanted to hide behind them.
“Sam! It'd be nice of to join our little rescue, man.” Dean stepped into Cleo’s field of vision, his arms stretched out in front of him and a shiny black gun in his hand. It would have looked more intimidating if he hadn't swayed like a drunken sailor in sync with the shelf behind him.
“Dean,” Sam intervened, throwing his brother an unhappy look. “Aiming your gun at him won't help the matter.”
Dean rolled his eyes. “Call it insurance.”
Now it was Sam's turn to roll his eyes, but he let it go and stumbled closer to Cleo. Without saying a word, she nodded, telling him that she was okay and he turned towards PI, his hands stretched out in a non-threatening gesture.
“Phil?” PI was visibly shaking. His arms still protectively wrapped around his head he blinked confusedly.
“Go away!”
“It's okay, Phil. We want to help you.” Sam's soothing voice cut through the ongoing hubbub like honey in bitter tea and Cleo was sure the shaking lessened a bit.
“You... you can't!” PI yelled.
“We can.” Slowly, carefully, Sam inched closer, step by step. Since he was positioned directly between PI and Cleo now, she had to lean to the side to look at the scene.
“Lasst mich verdammt noch mal in Ruhe!” PI screamed and Dean looked at his brother.
“Please, WHAT?”
“I think he told us to leave him alone.” Sam answered and mentally Cleo congratulated his guess. PI had taken a few lessons of German last semester. But why would he speak German? Now of all times?
“Okay, okay. We will. But only if you calm down. Understood?”
PI curled even more and started to whimper when the air seemed to grow heavy with anticipation. Like the fresh air before a storm was coming. Everything grew quiet and the dancing bookshelves lay quiet in their crumpled chaos. At least until the shelf boards shot out of their mounts and started to sail around the hall. Remaining books that hadn't found their way to the floor yet, fell down and covered the ground around Cleo with a layer of paper and ink while the boards whizzed around like fucking bludgers.
“Down!” Sam yelled and he ran towards her, taking her with him when he let himself fall. He was lying half on top on her and his arm covered her head, keeping it safe from the ravaging pieces of wood. Time seemed to stretch into eternity and finally it was Sam, who scuffed her lightly on her shoulder.
“You okay?” he asked and she sat up.
A blurry puddle of white from a torch brightened the darkness around her and somewhere a light was switched on. Voices yelled, asking if someone was hurt.
“Why is it...” Cleo asked. “... that whenever we meet, there seems to be flying wood involved?”
He didn't laugh, didn't grin. He didn't even look at her.
His concentration was on the place, where PI had stood and now there was nothing. Dean, the gun still trained on the empty place, spoke first.
“What the hell?”
TBC
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