SPN Fanfic: Laundry Day 3/8
Title:Laundry Day - 3/8
Characters: Sam, Dean
Classification: Humour, multi-part, gen
Rating: PG13? K+? Nothing that couldn't have been televised.
Warnings: None. Smatterings of spoilers for Season 1 episodes up to and including "Nightmare"
Word Count: 2297 words
Disclaimer: The boys and their related world aren't mine. Oh the agony.
Timeline: Set between the Season 1 episodes "Nightmare" and "Benders"
Summary: The Winchester boys do their laundry. Sounds boring, doesn't it... Sam and Dean can only wish it was.
Originally posted May 29, 2006 at fanfiction.net
Laundry Day - Part 3
by CaffieneKitty
- - -
About half an hour later, Sam's phone rang. He shifted his backpack around to retrieve it, but kept walking.
"Hey Dean."
"Hey. I got your list. I take it you talked to Missouri?"
"Kind of."
"What do you mean kind of?"
"I called her, the phone rang once, she picked up, said 'Hi Sam, use this, this and that' and then hung up."
There was a brief gaping pit of silence in the conversation. "...Really?"
"No," Sam grinned, "I found the notes from before and dug up the rest on my own."
"Ass."
"Whatever. Did you get everything?"
"I got what they had, but we're pretty much S. O. L. on the Van Van oil."
"I figured. I looked it up and I don't think we'll need it for this kid's ghost. It's more for heavy duty evil. You've got the rest of it, though?"
"Got it all. Angelica root I got by the pound. But uh... I dunno about some of the rest of this stuff, Sam."
"Like what?"
"St. John's Wort. You figure Mikey's depressed?"
"Historically, St. John's Wort was used to ward off evil and banish ghosts, long before it was used as an anti-depressant."
"Okay, sure..." Shopping bag rustling. "... but what about lavender and vanilla leaf?"
"Both are known to calm spirits on both sides of the fence... Maybe it will help ease him along rather than kick him out."
"What, better ghost-busting through aromatherapy?"
"You wanna do the research next time, Dean?"
"Whatever. So we go back to the laundromat with this stuff, or out to where the kid's buried?"
"The graveyard first. It'll be pretty deserted this time of day. We'll go back and do the dryer after that."
"Alright, I'll be back in ten. Pick you up at the library?"
"Naw, I'm walking. I'm already halfway to the cemetery."
"What?" The sound of the Impala's trunk slamming carried over the cell phone. "Why'd you start walking?"
"It's not that far. I had to leave the library anyway to find a decent wi-fi node, so I thought I'd get a start on locating the grave-site. And I figured you'd be at least another half an hour flirting with the health food store staff."
"Yeah, well," that was the driver's door shutting, "it's kinda hard to get anywhere with environmentalist chicks when they keep staring at my jacket and telling me I'm wearing a dead cow."
Sam smirked. "Yeah, that could be kind of awkward."
"So how do I find this graveyard?"
"It's one and a half miles north of the M-94 on Samuelson road, Pine Grove Cemetery, you probably passed it on your way to the store."
Couldn't miss the Impala's engine starting. "Okay, I'll meet you there."
"Hey Dean?"
"What?"
"While you were out shopping, did you remember to buy yourself some new underwear?"
Click.
Sam stowed his phone and re-settled his backpack, grinning. He'd learned years ago that it was usually safer to taunt Dean from well out of arm's reach. Sam almost felt cheerful for a moment.
The walk in the bright spring day was helping everything but the persistent nagging feeling that had made Sam re-check all the papers in the county. It still felt like there was something wrong. Well, not wrong, just something more than what he'd found. Walking hadn't brought any new theories to him based on what data he'd been able to find at the public library. Without further contacts in the area to get at archived police records of the incident, the info available at the library was all they had to go on. He certainly wasn't about to use the ID and badge number for Detective McCreedy again so soon after using it to identify the license plate of Jim Miller. And right now he was trying very hard not to think about what had happened at the Miller's. Later. Preferably much later.
What was missing though? Sam ran over the facts available at the library. The kid had been left unattended, got into a dryer and died by accident. The laundromat had paid for the funeral. The owners, Clive and Nancy Bernoit, sold the laundromat very shortly afterward.
A quick check of the library's phone book had told him that if the former owners of the laundromat or the family of Michael Hussman still lived in the area, they had unlisted numbers. No Bernoits or Hussmans at all. It wouldn't surprise him if the Hussmans had an unlisted number, they had only been identified as 'does not wish their name to be published' in the story on their boy's death. Kind of odd, but people did all kinds of odd things in a state of fresh and sudden grief. Take the Winchester family history for one example.
The article in the paper had been a staff-written piece, and the paper itself had stopped publishing in the early nineties. There was no reporter to track down and query for even the vaguest unpublished snippets. For an article on the death of a child, it was small and inobtrusive.
The difference between the dates of Michael's death and the publication of the article declaring it to be an accident were only a few days. Not a long time for an investigation to have taken place, but if events were clear, it might have only taken that long. The laundromat's covering the funeral expenses and the subsequent sale of the business may have indicated an out of court settlement of some kind.
Without more data, there was no way to tell. But he still had the same feeling that something was missing.
What's missing, Sam thought, is a point to get a grip on and pull.
The breeze off Lake Superior stirred the leaves on trees lining the road. Sam kept walking towards the graveyard.
- - -
"Is it just me, or is this plan exceptionally half-assed?" Dean said, methodically chopping angelica root.
They had arrived at the graveyard within minutes of each other, and Dean had parked next to a concrete bench by the front gate. There weren't any houses near the graveyard, but the car would block the view of any passers-by as the Winchesters assembled their concoction.
Sam glanced up from prying apart gel caps of St. John's Wort and pouring the powder over the dried lavender, vanilla leaves, and other flora in a dented and scorched metal bowl. "It probably just seems like that because it's not the way we usually operate. No shovels, no salt and the only thing we're burning is a bunch of plants."
"Maybe. How much of this stuff do we need anyways?"
Sam looked over at the mound of chopped root. "That should be enough."
"Should be?" said Dean as Sam scooped up the moist root bits and added them to the bowl. "Do you mean like 'go play chicken with the killer racist truck' should be? 'Coz I still owe you an ass-kicking for that one."
"Hey, it worked, didn't it?"
Dean grumbled and bagged the rest of the root, stowing it in the trunk, then started cleaning off his knife.
Sam rested the bowl on the cement bench and began grinding the contents together with the broken ball joint from an '82 Corolla that served remarkably well as a pestle. "Besides, this is an entirely different situation. It's a non-violent ghost, it's broad daylight, and..." Sam trailed off, frowning slightly.
"...and what?"
"And we've got research done. It's not a last second desperation plan." Sam looked up from the grinding bowl at Dean. "It'll be fine."
"Why am I not convinced by your ringing endorsement?"
"What are you worried about? This ghost doesn't hurt anyone. And like you said, it wants help." Sam frowned into the mushed up mess of herbs and roots. The combination of smells was mildly nauseating. Sort of a piney, flowery, musky and rotten cheesy odour with a hint of vanilla that just made things worse. "This stuff should work."
"Should?"
"It'll work."
Dean leaned over and peered into the bowl, wrinkling his nose at the smell. "It's a little clumpy," he observed. "That wet root stuff's gonna smoke like a hot damn."
"It's a good thing there's no one around then." Sam poked around the mush with the ball joint end. "We need to save about half of this to do the dryer."
"People will probly notice the smoke from that, Sam. The laundromat's in the middle of town, and open for business."
"I don't think we need to set it on fire there, just run some in the dryer for a while." He poked at the mush again. "It'll have to be inside something though, or it will catch fire if it oozes down into the dryer vents."
Dean looked around. "Something like what?"
"I dunno, maybe a cloth bag of some sort?"
"Got it. Hand over the mush." Dean opened the back door of the Impala and snagged a neatly folded pair of socks from one of the duffel bags with the slightest hint of a smirk. He peeled one of the pair off and tossed the other one back on top of the bag as Sam passed him the bowl.
"Hey, wait-"
"What? A sock's a cloth bag, kinda." Dean scooped a generous glob of mush into the sock with the pestle.
"But that's my sock!"
"I get pink underwear, you get a sock full of ghost repellent. Po-tay-to, Po-tah-to. Quit bitching." He loaded another mush glob into the sock and tied a knot in it at the ankle. "Smells better than your feet any day."
Dean's grin forcibly reminded Sam that it was only usually safe to taunt Dean from out of arm's reach. Not always, usually. Sam sighed. "Let's go."
- - -
The grave took a few minutes to find, but they eventually found it all the way in the back near the fence separating the graveyard from its eponymous pine grove. "In the cheap seats," as one of dad's hunter friends put it once. The markers were all set flush with the ground, and the grass was tidy, but the area had a neglected air to it that no amount of lawn mowing and edging would cover. Michael's marker was plain and only had the boy's name and dates of birth and death.
They set up a little trivet of stones scrounged from under the fence line. Dean had surprised Sam when he'd pulled out a tiny sampler bottle of 151 proof rum to use for an accelerant to get the mush in the bowl burning. Dean had shrugged enigmatically, saying only that it would probably work better and burn cleaner than lighter fluid.
As predicted, there had been a lot of smoke, but the breeze dissipated it quickly into a funky smelling haze. Once the fire was out, Sam stirred the ashes and distributed them over the grave area.
"Think that'll do it?" said Dean when they returned to the Impala.
"Maybe, yeah. A quick trip back to the laundromat and that should be that."
Dean got in the driver's side and rolled down the window before closing the door. "So how come you're still all shoulds and maybes?"
Sam ducked into the Impala, wrinkling his nose and trying not to step on the 100 percent recycled paper bag from the health food store that now contained his muck-filled sock. "It just feels we're missing something."
"Like what?"
Sam rolled down his window. "I don't know exactly."
"Well that's useful." Dean started the car and the tape deck came on with a screeching guitar solo at sub-conversational level. "So the smoke show down at the grave was for nothing?"
"No, no," Sam frowned, "With what Missouri gave us in Lawrence and the research I did, this stuff should work. Based on what we know about Michael and the way he died, and assuming... It's just we don't know a whole lot."
"So you're saying now the whole dryer thing might not have been an accident?"
"No. Not exactly. I'm saying, with what it said in the paper and what he wrote on your t-shirt, it probably was accidental. I just have this feeling there's something more to it. That we're missing something."
"Oh yeah, based on what?"
"Just this feeling."
Sam realized he'd probably left himself wide open for another 'Haley Joel/Patricia Arquette' crack and braced himself, because after Max, he really didn't feel like talking about the whole psychic thing. Or even thinking about it. Sam looked out the window and waited for the inevitable. Three telephone poles passed but the snarky comment was not made. Sam frowned and looked over at Dean.
Dean was humming to the music, tapping the steering wheel, paying an inordinate amount of attention to a singularly boring stretch of road, and wearing a faint version of the 'this doesn't freak me out' face that Sam caught looking his way every so often.
There was the oddest sensation of a conversational vacuum where a smart-ass remark would have gone. Sam looked down at the paper bag by his feet and rolled over their conversations since Max, noting other vacuums. There was no crack about 'The Psychic Hotline' after Sam's joke about having called Missouri. Dean hadn't even accused Sam of using telekinesis to mess with his laundry this morning, though that explained the look Sam had gotten. The last time Dean had mentioned anything was the quip about going to Vegas. 'Psychic-Sammy', apparently, had been dropped off Dean's smart-ass remark topic list like a ten-ton penny. At least for now. Sam wasn't sure if it was because Dean was freaked about it, or because Dean knew Sam was freaked about it, but in either case, Sam really didn't want to think about it for a long while anyways, so it suited him fine.
"What the hell-?" said Dean as they turned the corner onto the main street. Sam looked up.
A small crowd of people with laundry baskets and bundles in various states of disarray was exiting the laundromat. Not exiting so much as stampeding. A stream of soapy water ran out the door along with the customers, and the windows were darkened except for the occasional actinic flash.
Dean looked over at Sam. "Ya know Sammy? I think we might have missed something."
- - -
(Part 2) (INDEX) (Part 4)
Characters: Sam, Dean
Classification: Humour, multi-part, gen
Rating: PG13? K+? Nothing that couldn't have been televised.
Warnings: None. Smatterings of spoilers for Season 1 episodes up to and including "Nightmare"
Word Count: 2297 words
Disclaimer: The boys and their related world aren't mine. Oh the agony.
Timeline: Set between the Season 1 episodes "Nightmare" and "Benders"
Summary: The Winchester boys do their laundry. Sounds boring, doesn't it... Sam and Dean can only wish it was.
Originally posted May 29, 2006 at fanfiction.net
Laundry Day - Part 3
by CaffieneKitty
- - -
About half an hour later, Sam's phone rang. He shifted his backpack around to retrieve it, but kept walking.
"Hey Dean."
"Hey. I got your list. I take it you talked to Missouri?"
"Kind of."
"What do you mean kind of?"
"I called her, the phone rang once, she picked up, said 'Hi Sam, use this, this and that' and then hung up."
There was a brief gaping pit of silence in the conversation. "...Really?"
"No," Sam grinned, "I found the notes from before and dug up the rest on my own."
"Ass."
"Whatever. Did you get everything?"
"I got what they had, but we're pretty much S. O. L. on the Van Van oil."
"I figured. I looked it up and I don't think we'll need it for this kid's ghost. It's more for heavy duty evil. You've got the rest of it, though?"
"Got it all. Angelica root I got by the pound. But uh... I dunno about some of the rest of this stuff, Sam."
"Like what?"
"St. John's Wort. You figure Mikey's depressed?"
"Historically, St. John's Wort was used to ward off evil and banish ghosts, long before it was used as an anti-depressant."
"Okay, sure..." Shopping bag rustling. "... but what about lavender and vanilla leaf?"
"Both are known to calm spirits on both sides of the fence... Maybe it will help ease him along rather than kick him out."
"What, better ghost-busting through aromatherapy?"
"You wanna do the research next time, Dean?"
"Whatever. So we go back to the laundromat with this stuff, or out to where the kid's buried?"
"The graveyard first. It'll be pretty deserted this time of day. We'll go back and do the dryer after that."
"Alright, I'll be back in ten. Pick you up at the library?"
"Naw, I'm walking. I'm already halfway to the cemetery."
"What?" The sound of the Impala's trunk slamming carried over the cell phone. "Why'd you start walking?"
"It's not that far. I had to leave the library anyway to find a decent wi-fi node, so I thought I'd get a start on locating the grave-site. And I figured you'd be at least another half an hour flirting with the health food store staff."
"Yeah, well," that was the driver's door shutting, "it's kinda hard to get anywhere with environmentalist chicks when they keep staring at my jacket and telling me I'm wearing a dead cow."
Sam smirked. "Yeah, that could be kind of awkward."
"So how do I find this graveyard?"
"It's one and a half miles north of the M-94 on Samuelson road, Pine Grove Cemetery, you probably passed it on your way to the store."
Couldn't miss the Impala's engine starting. "Okay, I'll meet you there."
"Hey Dean?"
"What?"
"While you were out shopping, did you remember to buy yourself some new underwear?"
Click.
Sam stowed his phone and re-settled his backpack, grinning. He'd learned years ago that it was usually safer to taunt Dean from well out of arm's reach. Sam almost felt cheerful for a moment.
The walk in the bright spring day was helping everything but the persistent nagging feeling that had made Sam re-check all the papers in the county. It still felt like there was something wrong. Well, not wrong, just something more than what he'd found. Walking hadn't brought any new theories to him based on what data he'd been able to find at the public library. Without further contacts in the area to get at archived police records of the incident, the info available at the library was all they had to go on. He certainly wasn't about to use the ID and badge number for Detective McCreedy again so soon after using it to identify the license plate of Jim Miller. And right now he was trying very hard not to think about what had happened at the Miller's. Later. Preferably much later.
What was missing though? Sam ran over the facts available at the library. The kid had been left unattended, got into a dryer and died by accident. The laundromat had paid for the funeral. The owners, Clive and Nancy Bernoit, sold the laundromat very shortly afterward.
A quick check of the library's phone book had told him that if the former owners of the laundromat or the family of Michael Hussman still lived in the area, they had unlisted numbers. No Bernoits or Hussmans at all. It wouldn't surprise him if the Hussmans had an unlisted number, they had only been identified as 'does not wish their name to be published' in the story on their boy's death. Kind of odd, but people did all kinds of odd things in a state of fresh and sudden grief. Take the Winchester family history for one example.
The article in the paper had been a staff-written piece, and the paper itself had stopped publishing in the early nineties. There was no reporter to track down and query for even the vaguest unpublished snippets. For an article on the death of a child, it was small and inobtrusive.
The difference between the dates of Michael's death and the publication of the article declaring it to be an accident were only a few days. Not a long time for an investigation to have taken place, but if events were clear, it might have only taken that long. The laundromat's covering the funeral expenses and the subsequent sale of the business may have indicated an out of court settlement of some kind.
Without more data, there was no way to tell. But he still had the same feeling that something was missing.
What's missing, Sam thought, is a point to get a grip on and pull.
The breeze off Lake Superior stirred the leaves on trees lining the road. Sam kept walking towards the graveyard.
- - -
"Is it just me, or is this plan exceptionally half-assed?" Dean said, methodically chopping angelica root.
They had arrived at the graveyard within minutes of each other, and Dean had parked next to a concrete bench by the front gate. There weren't any houses near the graveyard, but the car would block the view of any passers-by as the Winchesters assembled their concoction.
Sam glanced up from prying apart gel caps of St. John's Wort and pouring the powder over the dried lavender, vanilla leaves, and other flora in a dented and scorched metal bowl. "It probably just seems like that because it's not the way we usually operate. No shovels, no salt and the only thing we're burning is a bunch of plants."
"Maybe. How much of this stuff do we need anyways?"
Sam looked over at the mound of chopped root. "That should be enough."
"Should be?" said Dean as Sam scooped up the moist root bits and added them to the bowl. "Do you mean like 'go play chicken with the killer racist truck' should be? 'Coz I still owe you an ass-kicking for that one."
"Hey, it worked, didn't it?"
Dean grumbled and bagged the rest of the root, stowing it in the trunk, then started cleaning off his knife.
Sam rested the bowl on the cement bench and began grinding the contents together with the broken ball joint from an '82 Corolla that served remarkably well as a pestle. "Besides, this is an entirely different situation. It's a non-violent ghost, it's broad daylight, and..." Sam trailed off, frowning slightly.
"...and what?"
"And we've got research done. It's not a last second desperation plan." Sam looked up from the grinding bowl at Dean. "It'll be fine."
"Why am I not convinced by your ringing endorsement?"
"What are you worried about? This ghost doesn't hurt anyone. And like you said, it wants help." Sam frowned into the mushed up mess of herbs and roots. The combination of smells was mildly nauseating. Sort of a piney, flowery, musky and rotten cheesy odour with a hint of vanilla that just made things worse. "This stuff should work."
"Should?"
"It'll work."
Dean leaned over and peered into the bowl, wrinkling his nose at the smell. "It's a little clumpy," he observed. "That wet root stuff's gonna smoke like a hot damn."
"It's a good thing there's no one around then." Sam poked around the mush with the ball joint end. "We need to save about half of this to do the dryer."
"People will probly notice the smoke from that, Sam. The laundromat's in the middle of town, and open for business."
"I don't think we need to set it on fire there, just run some in the dryer for a while." He poked at the mush again. "It'll have to be inside something though, or it will catch fire if it oozes down into the dryer vents."
Dean looked around. "Something like what?"
"I dunno, maybe a cloth bag of some sort?"
"Got it. Hand over the mush." Dean opened the back door of the Impala and snagged a neatly folded pair of socks from one of the duffel bags with the slightest hint of a smirk. He peeled one of the pair off and tossed the other one back on top of the bag as Sam passed him the bowl.
"Hey, wait-"
"What? A sock's a cloth bag, kinda." Dean scooped a generous glob of mush into the sock with the pestle.
"But that's my sock!"
"I get pink underwear, you get a sock full of ghost repellent. Po-tay-to, Po-tah-to. Quit bitching." He loaded another mush glob into the sock and tied a knot in it at the ankle. "Smells better than your feet any day."
Dean's grin forcibly reminded Sam that it was only usually safe to taunt Dean from out of arm's reach. Not always, usually. Sam sighed. "Let's go."
- - -
The grave took a few minutes to find, but they eventually found it all the way in the back near the fence separating the graveyard from its eponymous pine grove. "In the cheap seats," as one of dad's hunter friends put it once. The markers were all set flush with the ground, and the grass was tidy, but the area had a neglected air to it that no amount of lawn mowing and edging would cover. Michael's marker was plain and only had the boy's name and dates of birth and death.
They set up a little trivet of stones scrounged from under the fence line. Dean had surprised Sam when he'd pulled out a tiny sampler bottle of 151 proof rum to use for an accelerant to get the mush in the bowl burning. Dean had shrugged enigmatically, saying only that it would probably work better and burn cleaner than lighter fluid.
As predicted, there had been a lot of smoke, but the breeze dissipated it quickly into a funky smelling haze. Once the fire was out, Sam stirred the ashes and distributed them over the grave area.
"Think that'll do it?" said Dean when they returned to the Impala.
"Maybe, yeah. A quick trip back to the laundromat and that should be that."
Dean got in the driver's side and rolled down the window before closing the door. "So how come you're still all shoulds and maybes?"
Sam ducked into the Impala, wrinkling his nose and trying not to step on the 100 percent recycled paper bag from the health food store that now contained his muck-filled sock. "It just feels we're missing something."
"Like what?"
Sam rolled down his window. "I don't know exactly."
"Well that's useful." Dean started the car and the tape deck came on with a screeching guitar solo at sub-conversational level. "So the smoke show down at the grave was for nothing?"
"No, no," Sam frowned, "With what Missouri gave us in Lawrence and the research I did, this stuff should work. Based on what we know about Michael and the way he died, and assuming... It's just we don't know a whole lot."
"So you're saying now the whole dryer thing might not have been an accident?"
"No. Not exactly. I'm saying, with what it said in the paper and what he wrote on your t-shirt, it probably was accidental. I just have this feeling there's something more to it. That we're missing something."
"Oh yeah, based on what?"
"Just this feeling."
Sam realized he'd probably left himself wide open for another 'Haley Joel/Patricia Arquette' crack and braced himself, because after Max, he really didn't feel like talking about the whole psychic thing. Or even thinking about it. Sam looked out the window and waited for the inevitable. Three telephone poles passed but the snarky comment was not made. Sam frowned and looked over at Dean.
Dean was humming to the music, tapping the steering wheel, paying an inordinate amount of attention to a singularly boring stretch of road, and wearing a faint version of the 'this doesn't freak me out' face that Sam caught looking his way every so often.
There was the oddest sensation of a conversational vacuum where a smart-ass remark would have gone. Sam looked down at the paper bag by his feet and rolled over their conversations since Max, noting other vacuums. There was no crack about 'The Psychic Hotline' after Sam's joke about having called Missouri. Dean hadn't even accused Sam of using telekinesis to mess with his laundry this morning, though that explained the look Sam had gotten. The last time Dean had mentioned anything was the quip about going to Vegas. 'Psychic-Sammy', apparently, had been dropped off Dean's smart-ass remark topic list like a ten-ton penny. At least for now. Sam wasn't sure if it was because Dean was freaked about it, or because Dean knew Sam was freaked about it, but in either case, Sam really didn't want to think about it for a long while anyways, so it suited him fine.
"What the hell-?" said Dean as they turned the corner onto the main street. Sam looked up.
A small crowd of people with laundry baskets and bundles in various states of disarray was exiting the laundromat. Not exiting so much as stampeding. A stream of soapy water ran out the door along with the customers, and the windows were darkened except for the occasional actinic flash.
Dean looked over at Sam. "Ya know Sammy? I think we might have missed something."
- - -
(Part 2) (INDEX) (Part 4)