SPN fic: B-Reel, Part 3/4
What on earth are you waiting for?
Part 3/Bump in the Night
--
By the time the matinee was over, the sun was slanting eastward; shadows were dark puddles bleeding at their feet. The afternoon, especially after the tumult of the morning, had turned out great - not only was Dean’s voice back to normal, but Alf had slipped him a big bag of peanut M&Ms in lieu of bunny-flavored popcorn. Leni, improbably, had given him her number. I am on a roll. Not that black-nailed chicks were usually his thing, but - well, if he was truthful, what woman wasn’t his thing? Dean knew their father’s stance on mixing business with pleasure, but Dad wasn’t here, was he?
The candy was all the lunch he was going to get today. Sam had been pretty adamant about hiding from any potential fallout resulting from that fucking French movie, but M&Ms were the staff of life, or one of them, and Dean thought that if this was lunch, he could live with it. At least two of the food groups, far as he was concerned. Not only that, but he’d had a really decent sleep while that weirdo Japanese movie was playing - not many kids had shown up for the matinee and the theater was quiet as a church. No wonder the joint was losing money.
It hadn’t had one decent bloody shoot-em-up, either. He hardly even knew what the movie had been about. Sam had already seen it of course, because it had won an Oscar or something, and he’d yammered away about classic anne-ee-may, and called some dude the ‘Disney of Japan’ like that was a compliment. Dean had only woken up once and that was when a gigantic baby had been trashing a really weird looking sushi restaurant. Or something like that.
“No cold spots, or anything,” Dean said as they looked up and down the street.
Sam snorted. “Yeah? How would you know that, Marty?”
Dean’s brows met and he scrunched up the empty candy bag and looked for someplace to toss it that wouldn’t earn him a sharp remark from Captain Keep-America-Clean. With misgivings, he stuffed it in his pocket next to Leni’s phone number.
“After last night, dude, I needed a sleep, okay?”
They started to walk slowly down the street, Sam darting glances, maybe looking for Laurel’s black pick-up truck. “You end up screwing a soldier’s wife, pretending to be her husband, and you don’t sound sorry, Dean.”
Dean shrugged. “Wonder if I get a free fill-up out of it?” The look Sam gave him made him stop in surprise. “What?”
Shaking his head (probably in wonderment at his big brother’s legendary sexual prowess, Dean reckoned), Sam slowly circled around an overflowing garbage bin as Dean tossed the crumpled bag into it. The next show wasn’t until seven; they had about two hours to kill, if Sam was serious about sitting through another one of these wacky Asian things. After Lucky’s joke - and that’s how Dean was thinking of it, a stupid artsy-fartsy ghost with a sense of fucking humor - Dean was pretty motivated to send Lucky back to the big projection booth in the sky. Do that, then return to the road.
“How come ghosts don’t observe the rules?” Sam asked, seemingly to himself, because Dean sure as hell didn’t want to answer that. “You shake and bake their stupid corpses and they don’t stay dead. At least zombies have the decency to stay dead if you spike them.” Earnest. Man, Dean would give the kid that. “But ghosts. I swear to God, they’re just making up this whole spirit world thing as they go along. Tell me,” and he turned to face Dean and shit, yeah, he was really expecting an answer, “how the hell is Lucky still around? And how the fuck did he pull that stunt, making poor Laurel think that you were her long-lost husband?’
“Well,” Dean didn’t want to disappoint Sam, even though that was the easiest thing in the world to do, like riding a bike, “Maybe he liked Laurel. Was doing her a favor.”
Wrong answer.
Sam blinked in the lowering sun, dry light without a speck of moisture to soften it. “You’re someone’s favor? You?”
“Yeah.” He nodded. “Why not? Coulda done without the outta sync business. But what I can’t figure out is why he picked that movie. I thought he liked it.”
Sam made a little noise that Dean remembered so well from all the years in the backseat, the Snort of You’re So Stupid. “The double-header. We drew him in and then we stuck him with the bad version. We sucker punched him. We stirred the pot, hit the wasp’s nest with a stick.”
“Whoa, Metaphor-Man!”
Sam ran a hand through his hair, which flopped back into his eyes obligingly. “He fought fire with fire. And you pissed him off. You’re no one’s favor.”
He didn’t have to enjoy it quite so much.
They had walked in a big circle and were now back at the Melodrama. Dean opened his hands, forefingers flicking out - what next?
Sam didn’t have time to suggest a what next, because at that moment a paper airplane soared past his ear and hit Dean squarely on the forehead.
“Ow!” Dean yelped, looking around for the offender and coming up empty. He bent down, picked up the airplane. He slowly unfolded it. It was a flyer for the weekend’s schedule. Another airplane appeared out of the thin blue air and hit him on the back of the head this time. Dean crumpled the paper into a ball, stared at Sam.
“Shit,” was all Sam said.
-
For Sam, it was all pretty damn funny at first. The paper airplanes chased his brother down the street, smacking against his running back with enough force to leave bruises, or at least that’s what Dean claimed when they ducked out of range into a forlorn greasy spoon, Dean’s hair askew, small red marks dotting his neck and face. There was a trail of flyers fluttering on the sidewalk outside like dead crane flies after mating season. Trouble was, although Sam was fairly certain this was more of Lucky’s handiwork, he wasn’t too sure how to stop it, or what was going to happen next. The paper airplane bombardment apparently came to an end when Dean entered the diner. Weren’t flying letters from the first Harry Potter movie? And Sam opened his mouth to suggest it, but then thought about what his brother would say at mention of “that fucking weenie of a wizard” and thought better of it.
“I don’t remember paper airplanes in that stupid French movie,” was the foray Dean opened with, sliding into the bench seat and casting about for some coffee and a menu. “They didn’t have paper airplanes in medieval France,” he clarified, in case Sam somehow missed his irritation.
Fat chance. In Sam’s vast experience, Dean never hid his irritation, shoved it forward like a stage mom with a talented tot.
Sam shook his head, glanced over at the next table. A super-sized man and woman sat there, paying them no attention, several large plates of food piled on top of the other - a gaggle of hamburgers, glistening fries and breaded fish filets, several stacks of pancakes so precarious they reminded Sam of something Chinese acrobats would spin on poles. The couple bent over their meal, oblivious to Dean’s rising voice.
Dean was right; there were no paper airplanes in La Retour de Martin Guerre. The thought ticked over in Sam’s brain, niggling.
“Hey!” Dean shouted. “Can we get some service here?” The wait staff must be in the back, on break. Outside, dark was beginning to fall, but softly as it did in the high plateaus. Sam could see the glow of neon in the street beyond the plate glass window, the array of fallen flyers littering the sidewalk outside. “Do I have to get my goddamn coffee myself?” Dean muttered under his breath.
Sam tapped his fingers against the table, ignoring the attitude. “The airplanes went for you. You were the one lip-synching worse than a boy band, and Laurel, well, she didn’t mistake me for anyone.”
Dean grinned, waggled his brows, a night of hot sex apparently outweighing the very real ramifications of getting in the cross hairs of a ghost.
“Lucky’s after you, Dean. He’s taking it personally.”
Dean’s attention was on the non-existent waitress. “Personally? You don’t get to take shit personally when you’re dead.”
Oh, yeah, there’s a good argument, Dean. “Listen, the salt and burn didn’t work. The hex bags didn’t work. Maybe we need to talk to him.”
Dean pulled a face. “You don’t talk to ghosts. The stupid morbid motherfuckers usually don’t even know they’re dead. There’s no reasoning with them.”
“So? Your suggestion would be?”
Dean’s attention wasn’t on Sam. “Shit, those people got fed, where the hell is…” and Dean got to his feet, apparently about to march into the kitchen.
Sam turned back to the table across the room, where the couple were now completely hunched over the table, flushed faces almost making contact with the table, low grunts audible above the clank of dishes as they slid against each other. “Goddamn,” Sam breathed, astonished and fearful. Paper birds, not airplanes, which meant…
Dean, oblivious to the couple other than to the fact that they had food and he did not, was almost to the swinging doors separating the dining room from the kitchen. Sam took a breath, preparing to shout his brother’s name.
That’s when he heard the first oink.
He turned, he’d only taken his eyes off the couple for a second, but in that time, they had transformed into two enormous pigs and they slid out of the booth into the aisle and Dean was immobile by the door, his eyes round.
Dean wouldn’t know. He’d slept through most of Spirited Away. The pigs would be somewhat nonsensical, Sam supposed, jumping out of the way as the sow and the boar careened past him, bumping into banquettes and knocking tables from their moorings. China crashed to the floor. “Dean!” Sam shouted, but it was too late, the lights had come on outside, and they were stuck inside a Lucky’s idea of a Japanese ghost story. Sam watched as Dean pivoted in his stance, watched the pigs run for the door, smashing through the glass, glittering like…like…and though it had just been a movie, this was a dangerous place, they were where they weren’t supposed to be after dark.
Too bad Lucky doesn’t understand that Winchesters are always where they’re not supposed to be after dark. A god-awful pride surged in him and he watched as Dean’s lips tightened, pissed off, not angry and Sam understood that they really were a breed apart.
“Get to the car!” Dean shouted, just as a wall of water sloshed from under the door to the kitchen and Sam was pretty sure a river spirit big as a house was going to be coming out next, a pissed off apparition dredged from the slimy bottom of a dead body of water, but Dean hadn’t seen the movie, and so he wouldn’t know. I’ll wake him up next time, Sam thought.
Wake him up - next time - and there was only one place where they would be…not precisely safe, but where things changed, where one movie stopped and the next one started.
Sam rushed toward his brother, the door groaning at its hinges as something huge lunged behind it. The whole diner smelled of river rot and compost. He got two hands on Dean, one on either shoulder, pulling him away from the door. “Not the car,” Sam said into his ear. “The Melodrama. Otherwise we’re going to be fighting something way bigger than pigs.”
Not that Sam minded fighting a river monster, it’s just that it was without point. Lucky was controlling this, evidently, this jaunt in indy film wonderland, and getting fucked up by a Japanese bathhouse spirit wouldn’t do either of them a bit of good.
Sam dragged a reluctant Dean past the pig-fashioned opening in the plate glass window, let him go so he could open the door, hoped the paper airplanes wouldn’t come after them - Dean - again. The streets outside were deserted, the lamps lit and the whole of Buttonwillow was like a…an abandoned movie set. Sam’s footsteps echoed weirdly, more so because they were…solo. Damn. He turned around, but the street was empty. No Dean.
Retracing his steps, he saw Dean, still inside the diner, standing in front of what had to be a giant slug, slurping its way across the floor, expanding and contracting, gray as vomit, speckled with junk - a broken shopping cart, a mangled bike. As Sam watched, the slug’s body shook like Jell-o and an arm-like protuberance extended toward a transfixed Dean, showering the wet floor between them with gold coins.
“Dean!” Sam shouted, but his brother didn’t turn and Sam wracked his brain for plot points. You forget your name, you forget who you are, and you never return. So he threw an arm around Dean’s shoulders from behind, drew Dean to his chest, dragged him back a few steps. No way to kill this thing. It wasn’t precisely evil, either. Just…polluted. Dean was rigid in Sam’s arms, and Sam whispered, “Dean. Winchester. Like you’d forget that, asshole.”
One second, then Dean stirred, and threw off Sam’s arm in one movement. He whirled, no confusion in his eyes. “What the fuck, Sam. Outta here - “ and he didn’t have to say where they were going, because Sam knew that Dean was pissed now, and no matter how wacky this stupid ghost was, Sam didn’t envy its spectral ass, not one bit.
-
Of course, the river slug followed them all the way to the Melodrama, lurching from side to side of the empty streets, knocking over lampposts and fire hydrants, scattering gold coins everywhere, beseeching them to come back with voices borrowed from whatever people it had ingested, Dean reckoned. He ignored it, whispering to himself over and over: Dean Winchester, Dean Winchester, Dean - I can’t believe you fell for that - Winchester. Dad would have his ass if he knew, but one good thing about Sam: he wasn’t a snitch. Sam would rather stick it to Dad than stick it to Dean and for that, Dean was grateful.
If Dad found out that Dean had forgotten his name when faced by a river spirit - not just a plain old river spirit, but one conjured up by a fucking theater ghost, well. Dean wasn’t going to hear the end of it anytime soon.
Dean wasn’t too worried about any damage to property the giant slug was inflicting on the borough of Buttonwillow - he suspected that the town, like Laurel, would soon forget about any of these ghostly illusions. It galled him, but Sam was right: Lucky, for better of for worse, was after him now. Buddy fucking Bourne should pay them a whopping bonus for this job.
Leni looked up expectantly as Dean and Sam rushed in, Dean’s clothes stinking like something had died in them, and wasn’t that just a version of his usual graveyard cologne? Everyone looked to the door like Jesus was going to enter, but nothing happened. “Told you,” Sam said quietly.
“Did not.”
Sam’s lips twitched and he gave a little shrug. “Guessed it?”
“Totally,” Dean agreed. “All movies stop at the Melodrama.” He turned with a smile. The lobby was empty. Alf stood at the velvet rope by the theater’s double doors, mute surprise on his long face. “Okay, kids. Seen Lucky tonight yet?”
Alf shook his head. “The second show’s just started, Paprika. It’s trippy, by Satoshi Kon and Madhouse Films. You can watch for awhile,” and he jerked a thumb towards the red vinyl-covered door, “see what you think.”
Leni leaned against the counter. “Not as though there’s a goddamn soul in there with that fucking music.”
Alf actually looked crestfallen. “They just don’t understand J-Pop in this town.”
J-Pop notwithstanding, Dean suspected that they weren’t going to nab Lucky hanging out in the seats anytime soon, not unless J-Pop was actually a euphemism for Jennifer Lopez and some actor Dean didn’t care to find out about. No way was he going to tell Sam any of that, because Sam was nodding his head and had probably taken a fucking third-year course in whatever J-Pop was.
Into the darkened theater, synthesized music filling the darkened reaches, and at first Dean didn’t pay too much attention to what was happening on screen because he was looking for a ghost in the seats. Pretty soon, though, he looked up and was reminded that although it had been a full ten years since he’d dropped his last hit of acid, some things were just meant to be seen stoned. This was one of them.
Trippy was an understatement. All kinds of weird shit, including a chick tied down with a big-ass tentacle whipping round her, no shit, into her, like, like…and Dean didn’t know precisely what squirmed in him then, but it wasn’t entirely unpleasant, whatever it was, even though a part of his brain told him that it was gross. He tilted his head, trying to make sense of it.
By that time, he’d left Sam to scour the theater, hunt under seats, and check the chalk-inscribed Solomon Circle used to hold ghosts to one place while you dispersed them with Latin. Sam had been a little fussy about reinstalling the hex bags, ones that he’d made with proper natron instead of heartburn medication.
A familiar tight burn crept up from Dean’s groin like a hot flush, and he tried looking away from the screen, but it was like a train wreck. Damn. He’d always thought of himself as a bit of an adventurer when it came to sex, but this? This was tapping into something a little less…known. Hell, no danger of falling asleep with this one. He shifted in his seat, trying to get more settled.
Finally, just at the point that the superchick character had entered the last dreamy sequence and robots were rampaging through a destroyed city, Sam dropped into the seat beside Dean.
“Shhh,” Dean cautioned, glancing at Sam and seeing the surprise there. ‘Surprise’ wasn’t good; surprise meant questions. “I’m watching the movie.” Which was even worse. It was handing Sam a cartridge full of bullets. Sam’s eyebrows shot up and he slouched down into the lame padding with a big grin pulling dimples to either side. Dean ignored his brother’s glee.
“Pretty good, eh?” Sam said.
“You seen this shit before?”
And of course Sam had, Dean hardly had to ask. By the time the lights came up and the impossibly catchy pop song escorted the credits, Dean knew that Sam would be yammering on about Dean’s newfound fascination with foreign language cartoons for days, if not weeks. Years.
There were three people in the theater and as they stood up, the nearest man to them, middle-aged, paunchy, stretched and looked behind them with a grin. “Almost as good as his earlier work, don’t you think?”
Dean was so not getting into this conversation, dissecting the merits of something that was better left to pharmaceuticals and Dan Savage. Enough that he’d been…stirred by the damn thing. Especially that one scene. Damn. He kept seated, wasn’t going to stand for a minute or two.
But Sam was nodding, “Better, some say,” and then changed pace. “This theater seem cold to you?”
“Are you talking about Lucky?” The guy looked a damn film prof from some eastern liberal-arts college.
Sam squared a look to Dean, then nodded. “Yeah, I guess I am. How…”
The older man grinned behind his graying beard, glasses sliding down his nose before he pushed them up with a butter-slick hand. “Oh, Lucky. Everyone who liked film around here knew Lucky and Ana. Too bad what happened to them.” He shook his head, looked genuinely saddened. “Sure gave us film buffs a lift, having Lucky here.”
First of all, the guy called movies ‘work’ and now he’d used the word ‘buff’ and that was about all Dean was going to take. “So, why’s Lucky so pissed? Why’s he not resting peacefully in the sweet hereafter?”
The other man squinted at Dean, then grinned in recognition, like Dean had just told a good one. “Ha! Atom Egoyan. Great stuff!”
Dean slowly came to his feet.
Sam started to get animated. “Ah, no. Not The Sweet Hereafter.” He gestured helplessly. “But, you know. The actual sweet hereafter.”
It didn’t take a genius to figure out that Dean wasn’t a film buff interested in the work. “Ah, well. Yes. Lucky wasn’t a happy man, obviously. Killed himself. Right up there,” and pointed to the balcony. He looked back down, jostled the cloth across his shoulders with a half-hearted shrug, like suicide was beyond anyone’s understanding, which maybe it was. “Ana broke his heart, went off with another man. Lucky wasn’t exactly…” and searched for a word to describe him.
“Stable,” Dean supplied, annoyed. “We heard.” He turned to Sam, hoping that the giant river slugs and paper planes had subsided outside the relative sanctuary of the Melodrama. “C’mon, let’s go.”
“You aren’t staying for the second feature?” the man called after them.
Dean turned. “There’s a late show?” Despite being bombarded by movie-flyer projectiles, Dean hadn’t retained that there was a late feature, let alone what it was.
The man nodded, eyes gleaming. “The Host.”
Sam shifted beside him. “The Host?” Shoulder down, shielding his words from Lucky’s film buff friend. “Man, Dean, if Lucky’s going to play hard and fast with movie monsters, we could be in trouble with this one.”
Dean’s knowledge of horror was pretty damn vast, but he was coming up short. “Is it, like, with that vampire slayer chick?”
Sam shook his head. “Nah. This is Korean, pollutants create this big river monster in the sewage system that eats people.”
Dean grinned. “Didn’t we just do that? In the diner? I think we’re safe tonight, Sam. Lucky’s already taken his swipe at us. Go sit with Professor Spielberg there and see what he’s got to say about Lucky. Maybe he’ll remember something that we can use.”
“Dean,” Sam whispered. He looked appalled. “You don’t talk during a movie.”
Years apart didn’t mean he couldn’t still stare Sam down, or up as the case might be, given how damn tall the kid was. When Sam looked away, dimples cratering his face in annoyance now, not humor, Dean tried conciliation. “Alf’s still got more to spill. I’ll go talk to him, you work over the prof.” Divide and conquer, simplest strategy in the book and one that Dean knew their father had employed with military precision.
He briefly watched Sam’s darkened silhouette amble toward the film prof and then Dean turned, knowing that he was more interested in talking to Leni than Alf and that Alf would be the one with more information. Mixing business with pleasure, don’t do it. Dad might as well be sitting on his shoulder like a cartoon angel, though Dean couldn’t quite see his dad with wings. Pitchfork, maybe. Wings and a pitchfork. But cartoons, Dad, you shoulda seen this one.
Alf was scanning the lobby anxiously, but that might just have been his normal routine, an amped up geek keen on getting more people turned on to Asian movies. Dean didn’t really want to think about getting turned on to Asian movies, or maybe he did, but he was working, wasn’t he? So he leaned against the tall stand holding movie flyers, eyed them suspiciously before deciding that they weren’t going to hurt him, and opened with what he thought was a fairly safe topic.
“So, what was the flick?”
Alf stared at him, took tickets from a bunch of teenagers obviously stoned, waved them through. “The movie? Tonight?”
Dean waved his hand around dismissively. “I know tonight’s. Japanese toilet monster.”
“Korean,” Alf corrected him, but paled under the glare.
Dean let it sit for a minute, watched as Alf uneasily took more tickets. Midnight monster movies in Buttonwillow seemed to be the best thing going. In Dean’s experience, people liked monsters when they were twenty feet tall and 2-dimensional. “I meant, what was the movie Lucky was watching when he died?”
“Well, his favorite one,” like Dean was an idiot.
“Okay, I’m only making small talk,” and he caught Leni’s eye from across the lobby and she cracked a smile and that was enough for Dean. He didn’t even bother nodding to Alf, he pushed off from the wall with one hand, the other in his pocket, hand around her phone number, which he wouldn’t need, not when she was right there. Two kids cut in front of him, anxious for popcorn, blocking his way and Dean heard Alf’s quavering voice behind him.
“Lust for Life,” the ticket taker called out, almost embarrassed, Dean thought.
He turned to Alf with a grin. “That’s me. Iggy Pop incarnate,” and kept walking, past the counter, winked at Leni, time enough after the movie, Dean reckoned. He wanted to check the balcony now, see if Lucky was up there, make sure that the reconstituted hex bags Sam had replaced were doing their thing.
Doing their thing a little too well, were maybe keeping Lucky completely out rather than allowing him to get trapped. Glancing down from the balcony into the audience as a surprisingly realistic monster charged up out of a river and chomped down on some fleeing tourists, Dean saw that Sam was sitting silently next to the film prof, probably having been shushed. Sam responded to shushing, Dean knew. Lightweight. Well, Dean would just have to see about the hex bags himself. He went to the cardinal points of the theater, where Sam had smacked careful holes in the plaster and jammed his bags in. Dean gathered all four, returned to the lobby and dropped them behind the popcorn counter. He flirted with Leni for a little bit, and wangled an invitation for a drink after she got off. Alf stood miserably across the lobby.
Dean was able to catch the last few minutes of the movie, liked the flaming arrow bit - shit, he should use the one of those things more often, it looked damn cool, way cooler than a crossbow - and felt improbably saddened as the credits rolled. Without fail, he always sided with the misunderstood monster. Catching Sam’s stand and sudden questing eye, he waved him over.
“So, what did Roger Ebert say?” The film prof brushed by them, glaring at Sam as he exited the theater.
“Well,” Sam said, and Dean could tell he was pissed, like those times when they’d cut town and Sam still had library books in the back of the Impala, “he doesn’t like to be interrupted when he’s watching a movie. Thinks it’s rude.”
They walked back out into the lobby and Dean made a bee-line for the counter. “Hey Leni, I’ll be a minute or two. Want to give Sam back his medicine bundles?” and he flicked a finger to where the hex bags sat next to the butter-flavored topping dispenser.
“Dean,” Sam said as Leni passed them to him, “You shouldn’t move these. They’re protection. This theater’s the only safe place we’ve got.”
“Well, yeah,” Dean said, walking toward the sign that said ‘Gents’ beneath a black and white headshot of Humphrey Bogart. Lauren Bacall graced the opposite door. He pushed open the door; the bathroom was empty and their voices echoed a little against the tile. “We kinda need to see Lucky so that we can get Lucky.”
Sam didn’t laugh along with Dean’s joke. Dean sighed, went into a stall, kept up a running monologue, which he knew Sam hated. Sam liked privacy in the bathroom and naturally assumed, Dean knew, that everyone else did too.
“I think that we missed something in the grave, maybe,” Dean continued, dropping drawers and sitting down. This might take a while. He could make it take a while, because having a conversation in the bathroom was actually a place where things got said. Like in the car, it was easier sometimes when you didn’t look at each other. You could say what was on your mind, like how he imagined things were in a confessional booth. Dean wiped the smile off his face, even though he knew Sam wouldn’t be able to see it.
“You think?” came Sam’s terse reply. “Obviously, we’re missing something. He’s being held back here for a reason. We find the reason, he’ll disappear.”
“Well, we know why he died and how he died.” Working backward to move forward; that was the nature of this damn business. No answer from over the wall, though. “Sam?”
“Are you going out with Leni tonight? Because I think it’s going to piss Alf off, and we really need their cooperation.”
“You telling me not to mix business with pleasure?”
A short laugh, surprise maybe. “Well, it wouldn’t be the first time your dick messed things up for us.”
“Hey!” was the only comeback, mostly because Sam had a damn point and Dean already had their father as a needler of conscience.
Silence, then: “I mean, I don’t care, it’s none of my business.” But he sounded sad or wistful or something, maybe thinking of Jessica, Dean reckoned. Shit.
“Where do you think the girlfriend is? The ex?” Easier to push Sam sideways than to shove him back.
“What girlfriend?” Sam asked.
“Ana?”
But that last word came out on a rising inflection, because something had just curled round his thigh, something both soft and hard, unyielding and flexible and needy as a giraffe’s tongue stripping a thorny acacia tree of its leaves.
He was too surprised to say anything, at first.
Startled, Dean looked down, but by then another - what the fuck? - another tentacle had emerged from the toilet beneath him, insinuated itself around his other thigh. He made to get his knife, slipped down the side of his desert boot, and another coil wrapped itself around his wrist, slowly pulled his arm up and away even as a fourth tendril quested silently out the bowl, curling around his waist, another emerged dripping, but wasn’t going above the belt, wherever his belt was in this sudden tangle of flesh and silky moist rope and - whoa!
He opened his mouth, took air into his breathless lungs, ready to call out.
Then one tentacle whipped up around his neck, into his mouth, so fast and calm and sure Dean didn’t know if he should be appalled or flattered. Or something else altogether. I should do something. But frankly, he wasn’t in the most defensible of positions, not in any definition of the word.
Maybe I shouldn’t have moved the hex bags, he thought, somewhat belatedly.
--
I know you want to know what happens next…go on! Here’s the fourth (and final!) part…
Part 3/Bump in the Night
--
By the time the matinee was over, the sun was slanting eastward; shadows were dark puddles bleeding at their feet. The afternoon, especially after the tumult of the morning, had turned out great - not only was Dean’s voice back to normal, but Alf had slipped him a big bag of peanut M&Ms in lieu of bunny-flavored popcorn. Leni, improbably, had given him her number. I am on a roll. Not that black-nailed chicks were usually his thing, but - well, if he was truthful, what woman wasn’t his thing? Dean knew their father’s stance on mixing business with pleasure, but Dad wasn’t here, was he?
The candy was all the lunch he was going to get today. Sam had been pretty adamant about hiding from any potential fallout resulting from that fucking French movie, but M&Ms were the staff of life, or one of them, and Dean thought that if this was lunch, he could live with it. At least two of the food groups, far as he was concerned. Not only that, but he’d had a really decent sleep while that weirdo Japanese movie was playing - not many kids had shown up for the matinee and the theater was quiet as a church. No wonder the joint was losing money.
It hadn’t had one decent bloody shoot-em-up, either. He hardly even knew what the movie had been about. Sam had already seen it of course, because it had won an Oscar or something, and he’d yammered away about classic anne-ee-may, and called some dude the ‘Disney of Japan’ like that was a compliment. Dean had only woken up once and that was when a gigantic baby had been trashing a really weird looking sushi restaurant. Or something like that.
“No cold spots, or anything,” Dean said as they looked up and down the street.
Sam snorted. “Yeah? How would you know that, Marty?”
Dean’s brows met and he scrunched up the empty candy bag and looked for someplace to toss it that wouldn’t earn him a sharp remark from Captain Keep-America-Clean. With misgivings, he stuffed it in his pocket next to Leni’s phone number.
“After last night, dude, I needed a sleep, okay?”
They started to walk slowly down the street, Sam darting glances, maybe looking for Laurel’s black pick-up truck. “You end up screwing a soldier’s wife, pretending to be her husband, and you don’t sound sorry, Dean.”
Dean shrugged. “Wonder if I get a free fill-up out of it?” The look Sam gave him made him stop in surprise. “What?”
Shaking his head (probably in wonderment at his big brother’s legendary sexual prowess, Dean reckoned), Sam slowly circled around an overflowing garbage bin as Dean tossed the crumpled bag into it. The next show wasn’t until seven; they had about two hours to kill, if Sam was serious about sitting through another one of these wacky Asian things. After Lucky’s joke - and that’s how Dean was thinking of it, a stupid artsy-fartsy ghost with a sense of fucking humor - Dean was pretty motivated to send Lucky back to the big projection booth in the sky. Do that, then return to the road.
“How come ghosts don’t observe the rules?” Sam asked, seemingly to himself, because Dean sure as hell didn’t want to answer that. “You shake and bake their stupid corpses and they don’t stay dead. At least zombies have the decency to stay dead if you spike them.” Earnest. Man, Dean would give the kid that. “But ghosts. I swear to God, they’re just making up this whole spirit world thing as they go along. Tell me,” and he turned to face Dean and shit, yeah, he was really expecting an answer, “how the hell is Lucky still around? And how the fuck did he pull that stunt, making poor Laurel think that you were her long-lost husband?’
“Well,” Dean didn’t want to disappoint Sam, even though that was the easiest thing in the world to do, like riding a bike, “Maybe he liked Laurel. Was doing her a favor.”
Wrong answer.
Sam blinked in the lowering sun, dry light without a speck of moisture to soften it. “You’re someone’s favor? You?”
“Yeah.” He nodded. “Why not? Coulda done without the outta sync business. But what I can’t figure out is why he picked that movie. I thought he liked it.”
Sam made a little noise that Dean remembered so well from all the years in the backseat, the Snort of You’re So Stupid. “The double-header. We drew him in and then we stuck him with the bad version. We sucker punched him. We stirred the pot, hit the wasp’s nest with a stick.”
“Whoa, Metaphor-Man!”
Sam ran a hand through his hair, which flopped back into his eyes obligingly. “He fought fire with fire. And you pissed him off. You’re no one’s favor.”
He didn’t have to enjoy it quite so much.
They had walked in a big circle and were now back at the Melodrama. Dean opened his hands, forefingers flicking out - what next?
Sam didn’t have time to suggest a what next, because at that moment a paper airplane soared past his ear and hit Dean squarely on the forehead.
“Ow!” Dean yelped, looking around for the offender and coming up empty. He bent down, picked up the airplane. He slowly unfolded it. It was a flyer for the weekend’s schedule. Another airplane appeared out of the thin blue air and hit him on the back of the head this time. Dean crumpled the paper into a ball, stared at Sam.
“Shit,” was all Sam said.
-
For Sam, it was all pretty damn funny at first. The paper airplanes chased his brother down the street, smacking against his running back with enough force to leave bruises, or at least that’s what Dean claimed when they ducked out of range into a forlorn greasy spoon, Dean’s hair askew, small red marks dotting his neck and face. There was a trail of flyers fluttering on the sidewalk outside like dead crane flies after mating season. Trouble was, although Sam was fairly certain this was more of Lucky’s handiwork, he wasn’t too sure how to stop it, or what was going to happen next. The paper airplane bombardment apparently came to an end when Dean entered the diner. Weren’t flying letters from the first Harry Potter movie? And Sam opened his mouth to suggest it, but then thought about what his brother would say at mention of “that fucking weenie of a wizard” and thought better of it.
“I don’t remember paper airplanes in that stupid French movie,” was the foray Dean opened with, sliding into the bench seat and casting about for some coffee and a menu. “They didn’t have paper airplanes in medieval France,” he clarified, in case Sam somehow missed his irritation.
Fat chance. In Sam’s vast experience, Dean never hid his irritation, shoved it forward like a stage mom with a talented tot.
Sam shook his head, glanced over at the next table. A super-sized man and woman sat there, paying them no attention, several large plates of food piled on top of the other - a gaggle of hamburgers, glistening fries and breaded fish filets, several stacks of pancakes so precarious they reminded Sam of something Chinese acrobats would spin on poles. The couple bent over their meal, oblivious to Dean’s rising voice.
Dean was right; there were no paper airplanes in La Retour de Martin Guerre. The thought ticked over in Sam’s brain, niggling.
“Hey!” Dean shouted. “Can we get some service here?” The wait staff must be in the back, on break. Outside, dark was beginning to fall, but softly as it did in the high plateaus. Sam could see the glow of neon in the street beyond the plate glass window, the array of fallen flyers littering the sidewalk outside. “Do I have to get my goddamn coffee myself?” Dean muttered under his breath.
Sam tapped his fingers against the table, ignoring the attitude. “The airplanes went for you. You were the one lip-synching worse than a boy band, and Laurel, well, she didn’t mistake me for anyone.”
Dean grinned, waggled his brows, a night of hot sex apparently outweighing the very real ramifications of getting in the cross hairs of a ghost.
“Lucky’s after you, Dean. He’s taking it personally.”
Dean’s attention was on the non-existent waitress. “Personally? You don’t get to take shit personally when you’re dead.”
Oh, yeah, there’s a good argument, Dean. “Listen, the salt and burn didn’t work. The hex bags didn’t work. Maybe we need to talk to him.”
Dean pulled a face. “You don’t talk to ghosts. The stupid morbid motherfuckers usually don’t even know they’re dead. There’s no reasoning with them.”
“So? Your suggestion would be?”
Dean’s attention wasn’t on Sam. “Shit, those people got fed, where the hell is…” and Dean got to his feet, apparently about to march into the kitchen.
Sam turned back to the table across the room, where the couple were now completely hunched over the table, flushed faces almost making contact with the table, low grunts audible above the clank of dishes as they slid against each other. “Goddamn,” Sam breathed, astonished and fearful. Paper birds, not airplanes, which meant…
Dean, oblivious to the couple other than to the fact that they had food and he did not, was almost to the swinging doors separating the dining room from the kitchen. Sam took a breath, preparing to shout his brother’s name.
That’s when he heard the first oink.
He turned, he’d only taken his eyes off the couple for a second, but in that time, they had transformed into two enormous pigs and they slid out of the booth into the aisle and Dean was immobile by the door, his eyes round.
Dean wouldn’t know. He’d slept through most of Spirited Away. The pigs would be somewhat nonsensical, Sam supposed, jumping out of the way as the sow and the boar careened past him, bumping into banquettes and knocking tables from their moorings. China crashed to the floor. “Dean!” Sam shouted, but it was too late, the lights had come on outside, and they were stuck inside a Lucky’s idea of a Japanese ghost story. Sam watched as Dean pivoted in his stance, watched the pigs run for the door, smashing through the glass, glittering like…like…and though it had just been a movie, this was a dangerous place, they were where they weren’t supposed to be after dark.
Too bad Lucky doesn’t understand that Winchesters are always where they’re not supposed to be after dark. A god-awful pride surged in him and he watched as Dean’s lips tightened, pissed off, not angry and Sam understood that they really were a breed apart.
“Get to the car!” Dean shouted, just as a wall of water sloshed from under the door to the kitchen and Sam was pretty sure a river spirit big as a house was going to be coming out next, a pissed off apparition dredged from the slimy bottom of a dead body of water, but Dean hadn’t seen the movie, and so he wouldn’t know. I’ll wake him up next time, Sam thought.
Wake him up - next time - and there was only one place where they would be…not precisely safe, but where things changed, where one movie stopped and the next one started.
Sam rushed toward his brother, the door groaning at its hinges as something huge lunged behind it. The whole diner smelled of river rot and compost. He got two hands on Dean, one on either shoulder, pulling him away from the door. “Not the car,” Sam said into his ear. “The Melodrama. Otherwise we’re going to be fighting something way bigger than pigs.”
Not that Sam minded fighting a river monster, it’s just that it was without point. Lucky was controlling this, evidently, this jaunt in indy film wonderland, and getting fucked up by a Japanese bathhouse spirit wouldn’t do either of them a bit of good.
Sam dragged a reluctant Dean past the pig-fashioned opening in the plate glass window, let him go so he could open the door, hoped the paper airplanes wouldn’t come after them - Dean - again. The streets outside were deserted, the lamps lit and the whole of Buttonwillow was like a…an abandoned movie set. Sam’s footsteps echoed weirdly, more so because they were…solo. Damn. He turned around, but the street was empty. No Dean.
Retracing his steps, he saw Dean, still inside the diner, standing in front of what had to be a giant slug, slurping its way across the floor, expanding and contracting, gray as vomit, speckled with junk - a broken shopping cart, a mangled bike. As Sam watched, the slug’s body shook like Jell-o and an arm-like protuberance extended toward a transfixed Dean, showering the wet floor between them with gold coins.
“Dean!” Sam shouted, but his brother didn’t turn and Sam wracked his brain for plot points. You forget your name, you forget who you are, and you never return. So he threw an arm around Dean’s shoulders from behind, drew Dean to his chest, dragged him back a few steps. No way to kill this thing. It wasn’t precisely evil, either. Just…polluted. Dean was rigid in Sam’s arms, and Sam whispered, “Dean. Winchester. Like you’d forget that, asshole.”
One second, then Dean stirred, and threw off Sam’s arm in one movement. He whirled, no confusion in his eyes. “What the fuck, Sam. Outta here - “ and he didn’t have to say where they were going, because Sam knew that Dean was pissed now, and no matter how wacky this stupid ghost was, Sam didn’t envy its spectral ass, not one bit.
-
Of course, the river slug followed them all the way to the Melodrama, lurching from side to side of the empty streets, knocking over lampposts and fire hydrants, scattering gold coins everywhere, beseeching them to come back with voices borrowed from whatever people it had ingested, Dean reckoned. He ignored it, whispering to himself over and over: Dean Winchester, Dean Winchester, Dean - I can’t believe you fell for that - Winchester. Dad would have his ass if he knew, but one good thing about Sam: he wasn’t a snitch. Sam would rather stick it to Dad than stick it to Dean and for that, Dean was grateful.
If Dad found out that Dean had forgotten his name when faced by a river spirit - not just a plain old river spirit, but one conjured up by a fucking theater ghost, well. Dean wasn’t going to hear the end of it anytime soon.
Dean wasn’t too worried about any damage to property the giant slug was inflicting on the borough of Buttonwillow - he suspected that the town, like Laurel, would soon forget about any of these ghostly illusions. It galled him, but Sam was right: Lucky, for better of for worse, was after him now. Buddy fucking Bourne should pay them a whopping bonus for this job.
Leni looked up expectantly as Dean and Sam rushed in, Dean’s clothes stinking like something had died in them, and wasn’t that just a version of his usual graveyard cologne? Everyone looked to the door like Jesus was going to enter, but nothing happened. “Told you,” Sam said quietly.
“Did not.”
Sam’s lips twitched and he gave a little shrug. “Guessed it?”
“Totally,” Dean agreed. “All movies stop at the Melodrama.” He turned with a smile. The lobby was empty. Alf stood at the velvet rope by the theater’s double doors, mute surprise on his long face. “Okay, kids. Seen Lucky tonight yet?”
Alf shook his head. “The second show’s just started, Paprika. It’s trippy, by Satoshi Kon and Madhouse Films. You can watch for awhile,” and he jerked a thumb towards the red vinyl-covered door, “see what you think.”
Leni leaned against the counter. “Not as though there’s a goddamn soul in there with that fucking music.”
Alf actually looked crestfallen. “They just don’t understand J-Pop in this town.”
J-Pop notwithstanding, Dean suspected that they weren’t going to nab Lucky hanging out in the seats anytime soon, not unless J-Pop was actually a euphemism for Jennifer Lopez and some actor Dean didn’t care to find out about. No way was he going to tell Sam any of that, because Sam was nodding his head and had probably taken a fucking third-year course in whatever J-Pop was.
Into the darkened theater, synthesized music filling the darkened reaches, and at first Dean didn’t pay too much attention to what was happening on screen because he was looking for a ghost in the seats. Pretty soon, though, he looked up and was reminded that although it had been a full ten years since he’d dropped his last hit of acid, some things were just meant to be seen stoned. This was one of them.
Trippy was an understatement. All kinds of weird shit, including a chick tied down with a big-ass tentacle whipping round her, no shit, into her, like, like…and Dean didn’t know precisely what squirmed in him then, but it wasn’t entirely unpleasant, whatever it was, even though a part of his brain told him that it was gross. He tilted his head, trying to make sense of it.
By that time, he’d left Sam to scour the theater, hunt under seats, and check the chalk-inscribed Solomon Circle used to hold ghosts to one place while you dispersed them with Latin. Sam had been a little fussy about reinstalling the hex bags, ones that he’d made with proper natron instead of heartburn medication.
A familiar tight burn crept up from Dean’s groin like a hot flush, and he tried looking away from the screen, but it was like a train wreck. Damn. He’d always thought of himself as a bit of an adventurer when it came to sex, but this? This was tapping into something a little less…known. Hell, no danger of falling asleep with this one. He shifted in his seat, trying to get more settled.
Finally, just at the point that the superchick character had entered the last dreamy sequence and robots were rampaging through a destroyed city, Sam dropped into the seat beside Dean.
“Shhh,” Dean cautioned, glancing at Sam and seeing the surprise there. ‘Surprise’ wasn’t good; surprise meant questions. “I’m watching the movie.” Which was even worse. It was handing Sam a cartridge full of bullets. Sam’s eyebrows shot up and he slouched down into the lame padding with a big grin pulling dimples to either side. Dean ignored his brother’s glee.
“Pretty good, eh?” Sam said.
“You seen this shit before?”
And of course Sam had, Dean hardly had to ask. By the time the lights came up and the impossibly catchy pop song escorted the credits, Dean knew that Sam would be yammering on about Dean’s newfound fascination with foreign language cartoons for days, if not weeks. Years.
There were three people in the theater and as they stood up, the nearest man to them, middle-aged, paunchy, stretched and looked behind them with a grin. “Almost as good as his earlier work, don’t you think?”
Dean was so not getting into this conversation, dissecting the merits of something that was better left to pharmaceuticals and Dan Savage. Enough that he’d been…stirred by the damn thing. Especially that one scene. Damn. He kept seated, wasn’t going to stand for a minute or two.
But Sam was nodding, “Better, some say,” and then changed pace. “This theater seem cold to you?”
“Are you talking about Lucky?” The guy looked a damn film prof from some eastern liberal-arts college.
Sam squared a look to Dean, then nodded. “Yeah, I guess I am. How…”
The older man grinned behind his graying beard, glasses sliding down his nose before he pushed them up with a butter-slick hand. “Oh, Lucky. Everyone who liked film around here knew Lucky and Ana. Too bad what happened to them.” He shook his head, looked genuinely saddened. “Sure gave us film buffs a lift, having Lucky here.”
First of all, the guy called movies ‘work’ and now he’d used the word ‘buff’ and that was about all Dean was going to take. “So, why’s Lucky so pissed? Why’s he not resting peacefully in the sweet hereafter?”
The other man squinted at Dean, then grinned in recognition, like Dean had just told a good one. “Ha! Atom Egoyan. Great stuff!”
Dean slowly came to his feet.
Sam started to get animated. “Ah, no. Not The Sweet Hereafter.” He gestured helplessly. “But, you know. The actual sweet hereafter.”
It didn’t take a genius to figure out that Dean wasn’t a film buff interested in the work. “Ah, well. Yes. Lucky wasn’t a happy man, obviously. Killed himself. Right up there,” and pointed to the balcony. He looked back down, jostled the cloth across his shoulders with a half-hearted shrug, like suicide was beyond anyone’s understanding, which maybe it was. “Ana broke his heart, went off with another man. Lucky wasn’t exactly…” and searched for a word to describe him.
“Stable,” Dean supplied, annoyed. “We heard.” He turned to Sam, hoping that the giant river slugs and paper planes had subsided outside the relative sanctuary of the Melodrama. “C’mon, let’s go.”
“You aren’t staying for the second feature?” the man called after them.
Dean turned. “There’s a late show?” Despite being bombarded by movie-flyer projectiles, Dean hadn’t retained that there was a late feature, let alone what it was.
The man nodded, eyes gleaming. “The Host.”
Sam shifted beside him. “The Host?” Shoulder down, shielding his words from Lucky’s film buff friend. “Man, Dean, if Lucky’s going to play hard and fast with movie monsters, we could be in trouble with this one.”
Dean’s knowledge of horror was pretty damn vast, but he was coming up short. “Is it, like, with that vampire slayer chick?”
Sam shook his head. “Nah. This is Korean, pollutants create this big river monster in the sewage system that eats people.”
Dean grinned. “Didn’t we just do that? In the diner? I think we’re safe tonight, Sam. Lucky’s already taken his swipe at us. Go sit with Professor Spielberg there and see what he’s got to say about Lucky. Maybe he’ll remember something that we can use.”
“Dean,” Sam whispered. He looked appalled. “You don’t talk during a movie.”
Years apart didn’t mean he couldn’t still stare Sam down, or up as the case might be, given how damn tall the kid was. When Sam looked away, dimples cratering his face in annoyance now, not humor, Dean tried conciliation. “Alf’s still got more to spill. I’ll go talk to him, you work over the prof.” Divide and conquer, simplest strategy in the book and one that Dean knew their father had employed with military precision.
He briefly watched Sam’s darkened silhouette amble toward the film prof and then Dean turned, knowing that he was more interested in talking to Leni than Alf and that Alf would be the one with more information. Mixing business with pleasure, don’t do it. Dad might as well be sitting on his shoulder like a cartoon angel, though Dean couldn’t quite see his dad with wings. Pitchfork, maybe. Wings and a pitchfork. But cartoons, Dad, you shoulda seen this one.
Alf was scanning the lobby anxiously, but that might just have been his normal routine, an amped up geek keen on getting more people turned on to Asian movies. Dean didn’t really want to think about getting turned on to Asian movies, or maybe he did, but he was working, wasn’t he? So he leaned against the tall stand holding movie flyers, eyed them suspiciously before deciding that they weren’t going to hurt him, and opened with what he thought was a fairly safe topic.
“So, what was the flick?”
Alf stared at him, took tickets from a bunch of teenagers obviously stoned, waved them through. “The movie? Tonight?”
Dean waved his hand around dismissively. “I know tonight’s. Japanese toilet monster.”
“Korean,” Alf corrected him, but paled under the glare.
Dean let it sit for a minute, watched as Alf uneasily took more tickets. Midnight monster movies in Buttonwillow seemed to be the best thing going. In Dean’s experience, people liked monsters when they were twenty feet tall and 2-dimensional. “I meant, what was the movie Lucky was watching when he died?”
“Well, his favorite one,” like Dean was an idiot.
“Okay, I’m only making small talk,” and he caught Leni’s eye from across the lobby and she cracked a smile and that was enough for Dean. He didn’t even bother nodding to Alf, he pushed off from the wall with one hand, the other in his pocket, hand around her phone number, which he wouldn’t need, not when she was right there. Two kids cut in front of him, anxious for popcorn, blocking his way and Dean heard Alf’s quavering voice behind him.
“Lust for Life,” the ticket taker called out, almost embarrassed, Dean thought.
He turned to Alf with a grin. “That’s me. Iggy Pop incarnate,” and kept walking, past the counter, winked at Leni, time enough after the movie, Dean reckoned. He wanted to check the balcony now, see if Lucky was up there, make sure that the reconstituted hex bags Sam had replaced were doing their thing.
Doing their thing a little too well, were maybe keeping Lucky completely out rather than allowing him to get trapped. Glancing down from the balcony into the audience as a surprisingly realistic monster charged up out of a river and chomped down on some fleeing tourists, Dean saw that Sam was sitting silently next to the film prof, probably having been shushed. Sam responded to shushing, Dean knew. Lightweight. Well, Dean would just have to see about the hex bags himself. He went to the cardinal points of the theater, where Sam had smacked careful holes in the plaster and jammed his bags in. Dean gathered all four, returned to the lobby and dropped them behind the popcorn counter. He flirted with Leni for a little bit, and wangled an invitation for a drink after she got off. Alf stood miserably across the lobby.
Dean was able to catch the last few minutes of the movie, liked the flaming arrow bit - shit, he should use the one of those things more often, it looked damn cool, way cooler than a crossbow - and felt improbably saddened as the credits rolled. Without fail, he always sided with the misunderstood monster. Catching Sam’s stand and sudden questing eye, he waved him over.
“So, what did Roger Ebert say?” The film prof brushed by them, glaring at Sam as he exited the theater.
“Well,” Sam said, and Dean could tell he was pissed, like those times when they’d cut town and Sam still had library books in the back of the Impala, “he doesn’t like to be interrupted when he’s watching a movie. Thinks it’s rude.”
They walked back out into the lobby and Dean made a bee-line for the counter. “Hey Leni, I’ll be a minute or two. Want to give Sam back his medicine bundles?” and he flicked a finger to where the hex bags sat next to the butter-flavored topping dispenser.
“Dean,” Sam said as Leni passed them to him, “You shouldn’t move these. They’re protection. This theater’s the only safe place we’ve got.”
“Well, yeah,” Dean said, walking toward the sign that said ‘Gents’ beneath a black and white headshot of Humphrey Bogart. Lauren Bacall graced the opposite door. He pushed open the door; the bathroom was empty and their voices echoed a little against the tile. “We kinda need to see Lucky so that we can get Lucky.”
Sam didn’t laugh along with Dean’s joke. Dean sighed, went into a stall, kept up a running monologue, which he knew Sam hated. Sam liked privacy in the bathroom and naturally assumed, Dean knew, that everyone else did too.
“I think that we missed something in the grave, maybe,” Dean continued, dropping drawers and sitting down. This might take a while. He could make it take a while, because having a conversation in the bathroom was actually a place where things got said. Like in the car, it was easier sometimes when you didn’t look at each other. You could say what was on your mind, like how he imagined things were in a confessional booth. Dean wiped the smile off his face, even though he knew Sam wouldn’t be able to see it.
“You think?” came Sam’s terse reply. “Obviously, we’re missing something. He’s being held back here for a reason. We find the reason, he’ll disappear.”
“Well, we know why he died and how he died.” Working backward to move forward; that was the nature of this damn business. No answer from over the wall, though. “Sam?”
“Are you going out with Leni tonight? Because I think it’s going to piss Alf off, and we really need their cooperation.”
“You telling me not to mix business with pleasure?”
A short laugh, surprise maybe. “Well, it wouldn’t be the first time your dick messed things up for us.”
“Hey!” was the only comeback, mostly because Sam had a damn point and Dean already had their father as a needler of conscience.
Silence, then: “I mean, I don’t care, it’s none of my business.” But he sounded sad or wistful or something, maybe thinking of Jessica, Dean reckoned. Shit.
“Where do you think the girlfriend is? The ex?” Easier to push Sam sideways than to shove him back.
“What girlfriend?” Sam asked.
“Ana?”
But that last word came out on a rising inflection, because something had just curled round his thigh, something both soft and hard, unyielding and flexible and needy as a giraffe’s tongue stripping a thorny acacia tree of its leaves.
He was too surprised to say anything, at first.
Startled, Dean looked down, but by then another - what the fuck? - another tentacle had emerged from the toilet beneath him, insinuated itself around his other thigh. He made to get his knife, slipped down the side of his desert boot, and another coil wrapped itself around his wrist, slowly pulled his arm up and away even as a fourth tendril quested silently out the bowl, curling around his waist, another emerged dripping, but wasn’t going above the belt, wherever his belt was in this sudden tangle of flesh and silky moist rope and - whoa!
He opened his mouth, took air into his breathless lungs, ready to call out.
Then one tentacle whipped up around his neck, into his mouth, so fast and calm and sure Dean didn’t know if he should be appalled or flattered. Or something else altogether. I should do something. But frankly, he wasn’t in the most defensible of positions, not in any definition of the word.
Maybe I shouldn’t have moved the hex bags, he thought, somewhat belatedly.
--
I know you want to know what happens next…go on! Here’s the fourth (and final!) part…