SPN FIC - Cry Just a Little For Me
charis_kalos -- this one's for you. 'Cause I promised: the boys says goodbye to Pastor Jim. (Also, my 500th post. Whee.)
Characters: Sam, Dean, OFC (Mrs. Lundquist)
Pairings: none
Rating: PG, for language
Length: 2598 words
Spoilers: takes place in between Bloodlust and Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things
Disclaimer: Money? Surely you jest.
Title: from Faith Hill's "Cry"
Dean's still sitting in the driver's seat, stone still, like that's all he figured on doing - driving all the way to Blue Earth and then just sitting in the car.
CRY JUST A LITTLE FOR ME
By Carol Davis
It's the car she recognizes, not him. He's sure of that. If he'd climbed out of any other vehicle on earth, she would have thought he was some random stranger stopping by the church for…whatever. To ask for directions, maybe. To sell hymnals, or vinyl siding, or an insurance policy. Given that it's Tuesday, the chances that he's come looking for spiritual enlightenment are kind of slim.
But she knows the car. Takes a long look at the tags - maybe because she can't read them clearly from where she's standing - and by the time he pushes the passenger door shut, she's told herself that she knows him, even though they haven't seen each other in six years and he was someone different then.
She waits, hugging a heavy sweater around herself even though it's August, and muggy, nowhere near cold. She waits, maybe because she doesn't know what to say, and that doesn't change even when he approaches her, boots crunching on the gravel of the parking lot.
"Sam," she offers, and that one word tells him these last four weeks have been every bit as painful for her as they have for him. They stand looking at each other for a minute, cataloguing everything that's different: his added height and weight, and the faint scars from the…
Accident? It was no accident, no matter how many times the hospital personnel called it that. It was no accident. A demon t-boned the Impala with a semi. Meant for all three of them to die. Four, if you count the car.
There's more white in her hair than he remembers, and there are deep furrows in the delicate skin around her eyes as she squints into the sun. She seems worn down, exhausted in a way she never was when he and Dean came here to stay for a few days, or a couple of months, back when they were kids. She was Pastor Jim's housekeeper then, probably kept on doing that until the day he died. She took good care of him. Loved him, Sam figures.
Without looking for permission, or waiting for it, he folds her into his embrace, rests his cheek against the top of her head, feels her shudder. "I'm sorry," he says. "God, I'm so sorry."
Her name is Caroline, or Carolyn, he's pretty sure. He and Dean never called her anything but Mrs. Lundquist, or Mrs. L, but he's pretty sure he remembers adults calling her Caroline.
She and Pastor Jim went to high school together. He called her Scout. Why that was, Sam has no idea.
He wonders if they ever kissed. If they were something more than friends before she married Peter Lundquist.
"He loved you," she says into the front of his shirt. "You and -"
She looks, then, because he was in the passenger seat of the Impala, and the car certainly didn't drive itself here.
Dean's still sitting in the driver's seat, stone still, like that's all he figured on doing - driving all the way to Blue Earth and then just sitting in the car.
Maybe the car did drive itself here, because for the life of him Sam can't remember either one of them saying, "Let's -" or "We need to -" or "We should -" When they got up this morning they weren't here, and now they are, and it doesn't seem to have been anyone's decision.
"He…I thought maybe it was your dad," she says a little too brightly, like someone trying to step into the conversation of a group of people who don't like her. "Then I remembered he gave the car to Dean."
She peers up at him and beams. She sounds like those people on The Twilight Zone saying, "It's a good day. It's a very good day," because if they don't, that little freak of a redheaded kid will wish them into the cornfield.
She sounds like she's standing on empty air, like Wyle E. Coyote, before gravity takes over.
"Who found him?" Sam wants to ask.
It's been a month since Meg killed Pastor Jim.
"I have chicken left from dinner last night," Caroline says. "And noodles. Are you hungry?"
He's not sure he remembers what "hungry" means. He's tired, and has that inflexible feeling that comes from sitting in one position for too long. His brain feels like that fiberfill crap in cheap pillows. He's frayed and empty and scared. Scared for Dean. Scared for himself.
Scared for Dad, because he thinks he knows where Dad is now, and that idea makes him want to scream.
Dead, he thinks. He'll settle for dead. That's bad enough. Unbearable enough.
"I called," she says. "After. I…called, because there are things Jim said your father should have, but…all I got was voice mail."
She called Dad's cell phone. Sam heard the messages when he went through all the old voicemails looking for…something. Answers. Absolution. Something. "My dad," he says, and his voice trails off. "He -"
Her mouth forms a little O. "Sam?"
"My dad. He died."
Her fingers dig into his shirt at the small of his back. He can feel her fist there, pressing into a place that aches from sitting too long in the car. He can't see her face, but he can feel her body shift.
She knew. Or suspected. Wanted him to deny it, refute it, tell her she jumped to conclusions on the basis of a voicemail no one responded to.
He'd like to do that. He'd like to wake up from all of this.
But every time he wakes up, the dead are still dead.
He watches her walk across the parking lot, her steps raising tiny puffs of dust from underneath the gravel, and thinks he understands why his father was willing to maintain an uneasy peace with her when he seemed almost eager to piss off nearly everyone else. Life is full of crap you have to buck up and deal with, and she's of sturdy stock. Her shoulders are solid, all of her is solid, and if it came down to it she would have told John Winchester to go fuck himself and the horse he rode in on so she could go back to doing Jim Murphy's laundry.
She walks to the driver's side of the Impala and crouches down, as if that puts her on Dean's level, as if he's still five years old. The window is down because of the heat; the car doesn't have air conditioning, and heat stroke isn't one of the problems Dean's been trying to court. She says something to Dean that Sam can't hear, and rests her hands on the chrome sill of the window.
His brother sits there, silent, unmoving.
Dean, he thinks.
Maybe it was a mistake, coming here. But he still doesn't know who decided to do it.
After a couple of minutes - and it looks like she talked to Dean that whole time - she gets up and walks back to Sam.
"Do you want to see?" she asks.
"Yeah," Sam says.
It's a good twenty minute walk down the road to the cemetery, and by the time they get there, his shirt is pretty much soaked with sweat. He's aware of that, but not in an unhappy way, because it doesn't seem right to bitch about a mundane thing like heat. Not when he's here, alive, mostly unhurt, when he's pretty sure he'll wake up again tomorrow and the tomorrow after that and the only thing that will be wrong will be that the dead will still be dead and that Dean will still be beside him, not saying much, trying to be some version of normal, his pain locked determinedly away somewhere deep inside him, in a place that's dark but definitely not airtight.
Caroline took her sweater off about halfway there and has the sleeves tied together around her waist. She did that in high school, Sam thinks, back when she and Jim Murphy were kids, before Jim Murphy joined the Corps, before he decided to serve a God he always said was benevolent.
Sam believes that, most of the time.
Or tells himself he does.
Jim Murphy is in the ground alongside his parents and a younger brother who died of pneumonia when Jim was fourteen. He's got a stone, a simple piece of granite with a polished front bearing his full name, James Patrick Murphy, and the dates of his birth and death.
He should say something, Sam thinks.
Say…goodbye, maybe. Or thank you.
He settles for standing there quietly, his head bowed, sweat running trails along the back of his neck, down into the collar of his shirt.
"If it had been anywhere else…" she says after a minute.
"What?"
"Downstairs. It was downstairs. Where he kept the…the things."
"Things?" Sam says.
"The weapons."
Her face is composed, pretty much, except for a couple of brushstrokes of something that looks like resignation. "They would have wanted to know who moved the body. If we did that. We could have moved him, but the blood spatter was downstairs. They would have gone through the property with… They would have looked everywhere. It wouldn't have made any difference. So we left him downstairs."
None of that makes any sense. "Mrs. Lundquist…" Sam frowns.
She pulls in a deep breath, like she's getting ready to do a clean-and-jerk. "He tried to barricade himself in. Downstairs, in the room where he kept the weapons. Whatever killed him smashed the door open. We had to leave him there. Let the police in."
Whatever. Not whoever.
"You…knew," Sam offers, squinting at her profile.
Her head moves a little.
If the police found all of it - the weapons, the books of rituals, the talismans, whatever else Jim Murphy kept down beneath the church - then the congregation knows all the gory details by now. Hell, they probably knew weeks ago. The day it happened, Sam figures. It's a small town. He can imagine the things they've been saying about their pastor since then.
"We saved a few things," she says. "He wanted your father to have them."
"He was -" Sam begins, meaning to defend Jim Murphy.
"I know."
"All of it?"
"He left a letter."
"And you believe…"
"I want to believe it wasn't for nothing, Sam," she tells him.
She looks up at him, has to crane her neck to do it. She was Jim Murphy's friend for more than thirty years. The unwavering way she looks at Sam tells him who made the arrangements for the funeral, the burial, the flowers in the simple vases on either side of the stone. Her family would have been at her side - whether they wanted to be, or not, though he thinks probably they did - even if no one else was.
"It was a demon," Sam says. He feels like he owes her that.
"I see."
"She was after my father."
Her lip quirks a little. "She?"
Meg, he thinks. He thought she was a hitchhiker, a pretty girl on her way to California. The pretty girl, the sweet little blonde who battered down a door inside Jim Murphy's church so she could slit his throat, is long gone now. The authorities took her body out of Bobby Singer's house in South Dakota and sent it home to her parents. The demon's in Hell.
None of that changes a thing. The dead are still dead.
"Do you need anything?" Sam asks.
Again, Caroline Lundquist's lip quirks, and she smudges at her face with the back of her hand.
He's trying to figure out what to do next when something catches his eye, and he turns to look. It's Dean, coming toward them as if he's simply taking a walk.
Dean didn't want to come here, not to Blue Earth, and definitely not to this graveyard. Neither of them did.
But somehow, they both got here.
Dean stops walking a few paces from the grave and frowns at it, then lets his face go carefully blank. He wore Dad's leather jacket most of the way to Blue Earth, even though the car was like the inside of a kiln. He never flushed, never seemed too warm. He doesn't have it on now, so he must have left it behind, inside the Impala.
Sam knows better than to think Dean left Dad behind anywhere.
Dean looks at the slab of granite, the simple rectangle of stone that holds nothing of their friend except his name. He's paying his respects.
Sort of.
Sam lifts an eyebrow, asks his brother a dozen questions without saying anything.
"He left things. For both of you," Caroline says.
That's something new; nobody's ever bequeathed them anything before. They've got some of Dad's stuff, but that was more a leaving-behind than a gift. If the police took all of Jim's weapons, then maybe it's books he left them. Not research stuff, like Bobby's house is jammed to the rafters with; just normal books. Sam spent a lot of time as a kid prowling through Jim's library, such as it was. Twain, Jack London, Dickens, Elmore Leonard. Dean mocked him for every minute of it.
Maybe Jim left Dean some books to mock Dean. That would be like Jim.
"Will you stay?" Caroline asks.
Sam looks at his brother, at the quiet composure of his brother's face. Dean's been digging a hole for himself for a month now, a lot more than six feet deep. He'll crawl up out of it now and then, for a minute, like Punxsutawney Phil, but it doesn't take much to send him back down there. He's as leery of sunlight as the groundhog. Sunlight's too raw for him, too real, too unforgiving.
Sam decided on the way here where he wants to go next. In the pocket of his jeans he's got one of Dad's left-behinds: his dogtags from the Corps.
Sam wants to give them away, and he knows who he wants to give them to.
What he doesn't know is how he's going to broach that to Dean.
No one's answered Caroline's question, any more than anyone answered her voicemails. She doesn't seem to be upset about that, or impatient, or annoyed. Not even resigned. Whatever the answer is, whatever happens next, she'll buck up and deal with it.
Dean's dealing with it, too. Says he is, anyway.
"I think we need to go," Sam replies.
Caroline nods, and steps away from the grave. "Come by the house before you go. I'll give you some sandwiches for the road. Cold drinks."
Neither one of the Winchesters pays much attention to her walking away.
They might as well be strangers, Sam thinks.
"You okay?" he asks, after Dean's been staring at the gravestone for a while.
Dean shrugs, a twitch of one shoulder.
"Maybe we should go."
"Go where?" Dean says, without much inflection, as if he couldn't care less about the answer. As if he thinks there isn't really an answer.
Sam could suggest it now. Tell him.
I want to see Mom.
But all he says is, "We need gas."
Dean peers at him in the unforgiving August sunlight. The furrows around his eyes are deeper than Caroline's. Maybe his pain is no deeper than hers; either way, he's holding on to every grain of it like it's gold dust. Like it's of some worth, in the long run.
"Yeah," Dean says, and turns to walk back to the car.
~~~~~~~~~~