SPN FIC - Big Apple (Part 1 of 14)
My vacation doesn't start until tomorrow afternoon, but it's deadly quiet today, which was a good enough reason to start this ball rolling. :)
The plan is: each day for the next 10 days, I'll post whatever I've finished that day, with the goal of finishing up on Saturday, October 10. So yes, it's a WIP, but you'll be getting a chapter every day. That plan worked for Of Course, Not Dear, Tuxedoes Are For Waiters, and with any luck it'll work again. So dig in. Read, and fear not. No dangling, unfinished things happening here. (The Box, of course, is a whole other matter. But anyway.)
The situation: Call this Season 6. The Apocalypse is over, and Our Side has won. The Winchesters, a bit older, a bit wiser, and a little the worse for wear, are back to saving people and hunting things. One of those things, according to a call from Bobby, killed a hunter whose home base was New York City -- a place Dean visited a couple of times during Sam's stint at Stanford and which he isn't at all enthused about visiting again. But a job is a job. And this virtual Season 6 means I can whump 'em any way I like.
CHARACTERS: Dean, Sam, and various OCs
GENRE: Gen
SPOILERS: None
RATING: PG
LENGTH: Remains to be seen; this part is 3208 words
BIG APPLE
By Carol Davis
"We're here," Sam says as the train squeals and lurches to a halt, and damn if he doesn't sound enthusiastic about this whole thing. Dean has to stifle an urge to smack him upside the head, because if there's anything he's not feeling right now, it's enthusiasm.
"Oh, goody," he says, thinking that ought to win the sarcasm award for today, if there is such a thing, and if there's not, he'd like to go find somebody to sponsor one. Because this? This place? He's been here what, three times, maybe, all of them brief, and if he'd been able to get through the rest of his life without ever having to come back, that would've been jim-dandy with him. There are people who want to live here, apparently - people who pay mind-numbing piles of cash to live here, although, okay, it's not cash, they're writing checks or whatever - but even traveling past the place makes him cringe. And he and Sam, they're not traveling past. They're disembarking. They're staying. Until the job's finished or Dean's nervous system gives out, whichever comes first, and his nervous system's already taking a hit from this whole mass-transit thing.
"You could've brought the car," Sam offers as he begins pulling their collection of duffels down from the overhead rack.
"I look stupid to you?"
"People drive here, Dean."
"Not in my baby, they don't. It's like a friggin' demolition derby out there."
"Which you can say with absolute authority because you've spent so much time here observing the traffic."
"I watch the news."
"Uh-huh," Sam says, and drops a heavily-laden duffel onto Dean's lap, smirking at the Ooof that gets out of his brother.
They wait for some of the other passengers to move along the aisle toward the platform-side door: a mom with a kid in a stroller and another, slightly bigger kid with a hand wrapped around the stroller handle, an elderly couple with enough luggage for a trip to the Moon, and half a dozen businessmen and women in suits. Sam raises an eyebrow a couple of times, encouraging Dean to blend into the mix and get off the train, but hell, what's the rush? If they wait for everybody else to go first, they can take their time.
"We need to get off the train, man," Sam says as the crowd begins to thin out.
"I'm goin'," Dean replies, but doesn't move.
"Fine, then. You sit there until you feel motivated, and I'll meet you outside."
With that, and with the patented Sam Winchester Bitchface coming into full and familiar bloom, Sam strides off toward the door, a fully-loaded duffel hanging from each shoulder. He's kind of a juggernaut, armored with their belongings like that, Dean thinks: moving at full steam, Sam could take out old ladies and kids and half a dozen cabs and maybe a hot dog cart or two.
"Dean!" Sam barks over his shoulder.
Yeah.
He doesn't have much choice but to hoist the pair of duffels Sam left him with and trail along toward the door. The train's gonna leave here in another few minutes, headed back to New Jersey, which isn't a place Dean is all that fond of, either, although it's head and shoulders above the nightmare that's lying topside, up a flight of stairs.
I © New York?
Not friggin' likely.
The duffels aren't all that heavy - he and Sam distributed the weight pretty evenly when they packed them - but it amuses (and distracts) him to pretend they are, and when they've reached the top of the stairs and threaded their way out to the main concourse Dean stops and casts his brother a look of woe that would have been appropriate if he'd been carrying the Impala. He grunted periodically coming up the stairs; Sam glanced back at him the first time and ignored him after that, and now, knowing he's going to garner sympathy from exactly nobody, he lowers the two duffels to the floor and looks wistfully around the concourse.
Then he frowns. And shudders.
"What?" Sam sighs.
"Dude. Are we still underground? How the hell far underground were we?"
"I don't know, man. Another flight? I don't know."
Feeling progressively more creeped out, Dean scans the ceiling and the walls and finds no indication of daylight. The longer he stands here, the more it seems like the place is closing in around him. He's never been particularly claustrophobic - doing certain parts of the job would have put him in the nut farm a long time ago if he had been - but this place is enough to send him running screaming down the street.
If he could figure out where the hell the street is.
"We were above ground all through Jersey," he sputters at Sam. "How the hell did we get to be a thousand feet below the friggin' surface between there and here?"
Sam sighs and rolls his eyes, then sets his share of the duffels down on the well-worn tiled floor at Dean's feet and says firmly, "Wait there." He doesn't give Dean a chance to protest before he strides off into the crowd. Dean watches him go, something that's not difficult to accomplish, given that Sam is taller than most of the eighty million people wandering around the concourse, but even though he's got Sam in his sights the whole time, he can't resist adding to his own reassurance by mentally cataloguing the stuff in the duffels. There's enough firepower in there to land both him and Sam in a federal lockup for their rest of their lives, no questions asked - but New Jersey Transit, in its infinite wisdom, doesn't screen passengers. Doesn't check luggage. Doesn't even check ID, even though the fine print on the back of the tickets says they do.
The corner of his mouth quirks into a grin. Maybe something about that looks appealing, because a couple of the people shuffling past smile at him.
He slides a boot sideways, nudges it up against one of the duffels.
It's comforting, all that firepower.
"What?" Sam asks when he comes back.
"Nothing."
"You're standing there grinning like you're fourteen years old and you're gonna get laid tonight. What?"
"Nothing. Just…nothing."
Sam doesn't press the matter. Instead, he extends a hand. And a warm, fragrant treat partially wrapped in a square of waxed paper.
"Big pretzel," Dean chortles.
"I swear, man," Sam sighs as Dean bites into the warm bread. "You're not fourteen, you're five. And you're as easy to distract as a stray dog."
"And I'm cute. Don't forget 'cute'."
"Not the word I'd use," Sam says.
~~~~~~~~~~
Somebody died here in the Big Apple, a couple of weeks back. The sight of an NYPD uniform, then another, then a third, as he and Sam make their way out of Penn Station prompts Dean into thinking that the case probably isn't anywhere near the front burner as far as legitimate law enforcement is concerned. There's a file on it, yeah, but dollars to donuts it's buried on somebody's desk, underneath a dozen other files that don't look all that much different.
He used to carry around a lot of disdain for cops, and he's not entirely sure where it came from. Sure, Dad stayed clear of the law most of the time, but once in a while he'd pick one, and work along with him or her. There's some good eggs in local law, Dean's learned over the years. Some rotten ones, too, but most of 'em are just trying to do the job.
That's a bitchin' long flight of stairs. And there's a couple more uniforms up at the top.
"Something going on here?" Dean frowns at Sam.
"No idea."
"There's a lot of uniforms here, man."
"Homeland Security," Sam guesses as they climb. "It's the busiest train station in the country. One of the busiest, anyway."
The look on Sam's face says clearly, Please don't make any jokes about blowing the place up. Let's just get out of here.
"Yeah," Dean says.
There's fresh air, and daylight, up at the top of that crazy-long flight of stairs - but everything's relative. The air's heavy with car exhaust and a bouquet of other shit he'd really rather not think about, and the daylight's in short supply. He cranes his head back and peers up for a moment, just to convince himself that the sky's really up there, even though it's not blue, it's pale and hazy and for the life of him he can't tell where the sun actually is.
"Cab?" Sam asks. "Or are we gonna walk?"
"How far is it?"
"Like, twenty blocks?"
People die here all the time, Dean thinks. Every day, more than likely. The guy who died eleven days ago isn't even a blip on the meter. Hell, nobody would even have known he was dead except for neighbors complaining about the smell.
Yeah, the smell. High summer in New York.
He finished his pretzel down in the concourse. It was a jewel among pretzels going down, a genuine gift from the gods, but now it's lying in his stomach like a big yeasty cannonball.
"We can walk," he tells Sam.
He'll do anything, just to move.
~~~~~~~~~~
They have keys. The owner, the resident, the apartment-dweller, the nutball who coughs up a huge chunk of change every month for the privilege of living in this giant Petri dish of a city, FedEx'ed the keys to Bobby. The guy's up in Canada right now, where, presumably, there's air and sunlight and walking from Point A to Point B isn't an exercise in teeth-grinding, patience-hammering frustration.
"It ever seem like that to you?" he ponders as Sam jiggles the key in the lock.
"Not a mind-reader, Dean."
"Like Bobby knows everybody on the friggin' planet."
"I guess."
There's two separate locks, and one of them (according to the letter that came with the keys) is a two-hander, requiring simultaneous jiggling and lifting and a twist of the knob. Dean considers observing that it's all in the wrist, but Sam lost most of his passion for being here during that obstacle-course-like trek up Seventh Avenue, and it's a pretty safe guess that anything Dean says that approaches a quip might result in his being bounced off a wall. Discretion is the better part of a lot of things, he thinks as Sam jiggles and jerks and mutters and finally steps back from the door and sputters, "God DAMN it."
The look on his face warns Dean not to say anything at all.
Slowly, cautiously, like Sam would actually bite him if he moved too abruptly, Dean moves into the position Sam vacated and works some gentle magic with the lock. He learned to do that as a kid, thanks to a guy he and Dad and Sam took refuge with during a hurricane that took out the only road they could have used to leave. He doesn't remember much about the guy, not any more, but what he taught is more important than who he was.
Locks and women, he thinks. It's all in the moves.
He doesn't turn when the lock surrenders, doesn't let Sam see the satisfaction on his face.
The satisfaction doesn't last long, anyway. It's a thing of the past about two seconds after the door's swung fully open.
It's curiosity more than anything else that moves him inside, into this apartment that's been loaned to them for as long as the job takes, whether that's two days or two weeks or two months. With Sam relocating duffels behind him he takes half a dozen steps into the apartment, head cocked a little to one side.
Sam's known him for 27 years. When he turns, finally, and makes a face, Sam knows exactly what he means, actual mind-reading ability entirely unnecessary.
"Yeah," Sam muses. "It's a little on the small side."
"A little?"
The apartment, for which Bobby's friend undoubtedly shells out - every thirty days - an amount of money that would feed an entire Third World village for a year, is one room. One long, narrow room at the far end of which is a single window that's maybe three feet square. Dean stands staring down the length of the room for a minute, then, as if he's a fledgling unfolding its wings, extends both arms. His fingertips don't touch the opposing walls, but it's not much of a miss, maybe six or eight inches on either side.
"I'm gonna kick his ass," he says to Sam.
"It's free," Sam sighs.
Maybe it'll look bigger with the lights turned on, Dean thinks. He fumbles past Sam for the switch on the wall beside the door and flips it, but if anything, the shadows cast by the ceiling fixture make the place look even more Lilliputian. There's a bed placed crossways down at the far end, a collection of shallow plastic storage boxes visible underneath and a tiny desk positioned alongside to serve dual duty as a night table. The kitchen is a narrow collection of sink, stove, fridge, all of them downsized as if they were built to fit here. Seating is limited to the bed and one chair.
"So…what?" Dean winces. "One of us gets the bed and the other one sleeps in the tub?"
Sam puts down the duffel that's dangling from his right hand and reaches out to push open the bathroom door. One glimpse in there kills whatever might have been left of his interest in being here. "There's no tub," he says, and grins in a way that makes him look demented.
"What the hell, man."
Dean's got his phone in his hand, using his thumb to scroll down through the list of numbers and glaring at Bobby's name as if that would send some indication of his wrath out through the ether to South Dakota, when he hears his name being called from somewhere out in the hall.
"Who knows we're here?" Sam hisses.
"Uh…nobody?"
"Dean? You home?" the voice chirps.
A second later, its owner is there in the doorway, barely visible behind Sam until she clambers around him to stand, hands on hips, puzzling at the two of them as if they're the most interesting thing to happen in this building in the last couple of centuries. For all Dean knows, maybe they are.
"Hi?" he ventures.
Why she's not scared, or worried, or at least a little bit standoffish, is a mystery. Maybe she's just dense, Dean thinks when she proposes, "You're not Dean."
"Yeah," he says. "I kind of am."
"You're not the Dean who lives here."
"Yeah, well, thank God for that."
She snorts as if that's funny, and completely without invitation plucks a glass from the tiny cupboard above the tiny stove and runs herself a glass of water. "So he's off on location somewhere? Is that it? And you guys are subletting?" She sips the water in between chunks of that and gestures with the glass in between sips, so flamboyantly that the remaining water splashes up over the lip of the glass onto her clothing and down onto the rug.
"Sort of," Sam says, prompting her to peer up at him.
And up, and up, because guessing she's five feet tall is…well, a stretch. "Wow," she observes. "Are you guys actors, too?"
"No," Dean replies, at the same time Sam says, "Yes."
She beams at that, in a little-kid kind of way, the kind that's a burst of sunshine. It fits her, Dean thinks: fits this little person with the bouncy mop of reddish curls and the freckled little nose and the red Keds sneakers he never sees on anybody who's gotten past the second grade. "I'm Ginger," she says, and that fits, too.
"You an -" he begins.
And yes, it fits, fits with the flaky, patience-testing oddball-ness of the entire day as well as with her chipper, chirpy enthusiasm and the fact that the top of her head comes about-mid-bicep on Sam, when she replies happily, "I'm a Munchkin."
"Okay, then," is all Dean can think to say.
"Not a real one. Onstage. You know. In Wicked." Before the Winchesters can do much more than exchange raised eyebrows over the rusty-curled landscape of her little Munchkin head, she's got her arms folded like she's about to pull one of those I Dream of Jeannie reality-farts. "You guys," she says, suddenly exasperated. "What was he thinking? Does he know you're, like, tall?"
"We've never met him," Sam replies.
"Seriously. Look at you two. I sure hope you like cuddling."
"We're brothers."
"Oh. Oh." She considers them both, with the same neck-craning move Dean used to find the sky a while ago. "That's. Jeez."
Off she goes then, her little sneakered feet pattering along the scuffed wood floor of the hallway. Her apartment is only a couple of doors down, apparently, because they can hear her thumping and bumping and grunting until she comes pattering back, her arms wrapped around what looks like a deflated inflatable life raft. "Here," she gasps, shoving the lumpy armload at Dean. "It's not, you know, a Serta Perfect Sleeper or anything. But if you pile it up with a bunch of blankets, it's not too bad. You know how it works, right? Plug the thing in the wall."
She beams up at him and pats the mountain of blue plastic that separates them. "Hope you get settled in okay. I have to go to work. See ya."
For somebody that small, she fills up a lot of space, a fact that becomes apparent after she's gone.
"Plug the thing in the wall?" Dean frowns.
"I think it's an inflatable bed."
"Dude. Where the hell are we gonna put an inflatable - is that what this is?"
"I think so."
"This isn't gonna be like Friends, is it? Where people just wander in here all the time? Unless one of 'em's Jennifer Aniston, because I could work with that."
Sam considers that for a moment, then nods agreement. "We should check out the place. Deal with this stuff later."
"Work the job."
"Yeah."
"Would've had more room to move around if we slept in the car."
"Yeah," Sam sighs.
"Gonna kick Bobby's ass. Did he know about this? Gonna pick him up, dust him off, then kick his ass again. Friggin' Barbie Dream House is bigger than this shoebox. I'll tell you, Sam," Dean says over his double armload of crumpled blue plastic, "you can say all you want about seedy motels and life on the road and never staying anyplace for longer than a couple weeks at a time. You make me choose between that and this" - he jerks his head from side to side - "and the Roach Motels are gonna win every time. This city is like some freaky overpopulation experiment. Nobody with sense picks this. Who the hell picks this?"
Sam says mildly, "YMMV, I guess."
"What?"
"Your mileage may vary."
Dean responds to that by dropping the deflated whatever-it-is into a heap on the floor. "Let's get the hell out of here. Work the job, gank the thing, so we can hit the damn road."
Sam doesn't even try to disagree.
Part 2...
The plan is: each day for the next 10 days, I'll post whatever I've finished that day, with the goal of finishing up on Saturday, October 10. So yes, it's a WIP, but you'll be getting a chapter every day. That plan worked for Of Course, Not Dear, Tuxedoes Are For Waiters, and with any luck it'll work again. So dig in. Read, and fear not. No dangling, unfinished things happening here. (The Box, of course, is a whole other matter. But anyway.)
The situation: Call this Season 6. The Apocalypse is over, and Our Side has won. The Winchesters, a bit older, a bit wiser, and a little the worse for wear, are back to saving people and hunting things. One of those things, according to a call from Bobby, killed a hunter whose home base was New York City -- a place Dean visited a couple of times during Sam's stint at Stanford and which he isn't at all enthused about visiting again. But a job is a job. And this virtual Season 6 means I can whump 'em any way I like.
CHARACTERS: Dean, Sam, and various OCs
GENRE: Gen
SPOILERS: None
RATING: PG
LENGTH: Remains to be seen; this part is 3208 words
BIG APPLE
By Carol Davis
"We're here," Sam says as the train squeals and lurches to a halt, and damn if he doesn't sound enthusiastic about this whole thing. Dean has to stifle an urge to smack him upside the head, because if there's anything he's not feeling right now, it's enthusiasm.
"Oh, goody," he says, thinking that ought to win the sarcasm award for today, if there is such a thing, and if there's not, he'd like to go find somebody to sponsor one. Because this? This place? He's been here what, three times, maybe, all of them brief, and if he'd been able to get through the rest of his life without ever having to come back, that would've been jim-dandy with him. There are people who want to live here, apparently - people who pay mind-numbing piles of cash to live here, although, okay, it's not cash, they're writing checks or whatever - but even traveling past the place makes him cringe. And he and Sam, they're not traveling past. They're disembarking. They're staying. Until the job's finished or Dean's nervous system gives out, whichever comes first, and his nervous system's already taking a hit from this whole mass-transit thing.
"You could've brought the car," Sam offers as he begins pulling their collection of duffels down from the overhead rack.
"I look stupid to you?"
"People drive here, Dean."
"Not in my baby, they don't. It's like a friggin' demolition derby out there."
"Which you can say with absolute authority because you've spent so much time here observing the traffic."
"I watch the news."
"Uh-huh," Sam says, and drops a heavily-laden duffel onto Dean's lap, smirking at the Ooof that gets out of his brother.
They wait for some of the other passengers to move along the aisle toward the platform-side door: a mom with a kid in a stroller and another, slightly bigger kid with a hand wrapped around the stroller handle, an elderly couple with enough luggage for a trip to the Moon, and half a dozen businessmen and women in suits. Sam raises an eyebrow a couple of times, encouraging Dean to blend into the mix and get off the train, but hell, what's the rush? If they wait for everybody else to go first, they can take their time.
"We need to get off the train, man," Sam says as the crowd begins to thin out.
"I'm goin'," Dean replies, but doesn't move.
"Fine, then. You sit there until you feel motivated, and I'll meet you outside."
With that, and with the patented Sam Winchester Bitchface coming into full and familiar bloom, Sam strides off toward the door, a fully-loaded duffel hanging from each shoulder. He's kind of a juggernaut, armored with their belongings like that, Dean thinks: moving at full steam, Sam could take out old ladies and kids and half a dozen cabs and maybe a hot dog cart or two.
"Dean!" Sam barks over his shoulder.
Yeah.
He doesn't have much choice but to hoist the pair of duffels Sam left him with and trail along toward the door. The train's gonna leave here in another few minutes, headed back to New Jersey, which isn't a place Dean is all that fond of, either, although it's head and shoulders above the nightmare that's lying topside, up a flight of stairs.
I © New York?
Not friggin' likely.
The duffels aren't all that heavy - he and Sam distributed the weight pretty evenly when they packed them - but it amuses (and distracts) him to pretend they are, and when they've reached the top of the stairs and threaded their way out to the main concourse Dean stops and casts his brother a look of woe that would have been appropriate if he'd been carrying the Impala. He grunted periodically coming up the stairs; Sam glanced back at him the first time and ignored him after that, and now, knowing he's going to garner sympathy from exactly nobody, he lowers the two duffels to the floor and looks wistfully around the concourse.
Then he frowns. And shudders.
"What?" Sam sighs.
"Dude. Are we still underground? How the hell far underground were we?"
"I don't know, man. Another flight? I don't know."
Feeling progressively more creeped out, Dean scans the ceiling and the walls and finds no indication of daylight. The longer he stands here, the more it seems like the place is closing in around him. He's never been particularly claustrophobic - doing certain parts of the job would have put him in the nut farm a long time ago if he had been - but this place is enough to send him running screaming down the street.
If he could figure out where the hell the street is.
"We were above ground all through Jersey," he sputters at Sam. "How the hell did we get to be a thousand feet below the friggin' surface between there and here?"
Sam sighs and rolls his eyes, then sets his share of the duffels down on the well-worn tiled floor at Dean's feet and says firmly, "Wait there." He doesn't give Dean a chance to protest before he strides off into the crowd. Dean watches him go, something that's not difficult to accomplish, given that Sam is taller than most of the eighty million people wandering around the concourse, but even though he's got Sam in his sights the whole time, he can't resist adding to his own reassurance by mentally cataloguing the stuff in the duffels. There's enough firepower in there to land both him and Sam in a federal lockup for their rest of their lives, no questions asked - but New Jersey Transit, in its infinite wisdom, doesn't screen passengers. Doesn't check luggage. Doesn't even check ID, even though the fine print on the back of the tickets says they do.
The corner of his mouth quirks into a grin. Maybe something about that looks appealing, because a couple of the people shuffling past smile at him.
He slides a boot sideways, nudges it up against one of the duffels.
It's comforting, all that firepower.
"What?" Sam asks when he comes back.
"Nothing."
"You're standing there grinning like you're fourteen years old and you're gonna get laid tonight. What?"
"Nothing. Just…nothing."
Sam doesn't press the matter. Instead, he extends a hand. And a warm, fragrant treat partially wrapped in a square of waxed paper.
"Big pretzel," Dean chortles.
"I swear, man," Sam sighs as Dean bites into the warm bread. "You're not fourteen, you're five. And you're as easy to distract as a stray dog."
"And I'm cute. Don't forget 'cute'."
"Not the word I'd use," Sam says.
~~~~~~~~~~
Somebody died here in the Big Apple, a couple of weeks back. The sight of an NYPD uniform, then another, then a third, as he and Sam make their way out of Penn Station prompts Dean into thinking that the case probably isn't anywhere near the front burner as far as legitimate law enforcement is concerned. There's a file on it, yeah, but dollars to donuts it's buried on somebody's desk, underneath a dozen other files that don't look all that much different.
He used to carry around a lot of disdain for cops, and he's not entirely sure where it came from. Sure, Dad stayed clear of the law most of the time, but once in a while he'd pick one, and work along with him or her. There's some good eggs in local law, Dean's learned over the years. Some rotten ones, too, but most of 'em are just trying to do the job.
That's a bitchin' long flight of stairs. And there's a couple more uniforms up at the top.
"Something going on here?" Dean frowns at Sam.
"No idea."
"There's a lot of uniforms here, man."
"Homeland Security," Sam guesses as they climb. "It's the busiest train station in the country. One of the busiest, anyway."
The look on Sam's face says clearly, Please don't make any jokes about blowing the place up. Let's just get out of here.
"Yeah," Dean says.
There's fresh air, and daylight, up at the top of that crazy-long flight of stairs - but everything's relative. The air's heavy with car exhaust and a bouquet of other shit he'd really rather not think about, and the daylight's in short supply. He cranes his head back and peers up for a moment, just to convince himself that the sky's really up there, even though it's not blue, it's pale and hazy and for the life of him he can't tell where the sun actually is.
"Cab?" Sam asks. "Or are we gonna walk?"
"How far is it?"
"Like, twenty blocks?"
People die here all the time, Dean thinks. Every day, more than likely. The guy who died eleven days ago isn't even a blip on the meter. Hell, nobody would even have known he was dead except for neighbors complaining about the smell.
Yeah, the smell. High summer in New York.
He finished his pretzel down in the concourse. It was a jewel among pretzels going down, a genuine gift from the gods, but now it's lying in his stomach like a big yeasty cannonball.
"We can walk," he tells Sam.
He'll do anything, just to move.
~~~~~~~~~~
They have keys. The owner, the resident, the apartment-dweller, the nutball who coughs up a huge chunk of change every month for the privilege of living in this giant Petri dish of a city, FedEx'ed the keys to Bobby. The guy's up in Canada right now, where, presumably, there's air and sunlight and walking from Point A to Point B isn't an exercise in teeth-grinding, patience-hammering frustration.
"It ever seem like that to you?" he ponders as Sam jiggles the key in the lock.
"Not a mind-reader, Dean."
"Like Bobby knows everybody on the friggin' planet."
"I guess."
There's two separate locks, and one of them (according to the letter that came with the keys) is a two-hander, requiring simultaneous jiggling and lifting and a twist of the knob. Dean considers observing that it's all in the wrist, but Sam lost most of his passion for being here during that obstacle-course-like trek up Seventh Avenue, and it's a pretty safe guess that anything Dean says that approaches a quip might result in his being bounced off a wall. Discretion is the better part of a lot of things, he thinks as Sam jiggles and jerks and mutters and finally steps back from the door and sputters, "God DAMN it."
The look on his face warns Dean not to say anything at all.
Slowly, cautiously, like Sam would actually bite him if he moved too abruptly, Dean moves into the position Sam vacated and works some gentle magic with the lock. He learned to do that as a kid, thanks to a guy he and Dad and Sam took refuge with during a hurricane that took out the only road they could have used to leave. He doesn't remember much about the guy, not any more, but what he taught is more important than who he was.
Locks and women, he thinks. It's all in the moves.
He doesn't turn when the lock surrenders, doesn't let Sam see the satisfaction on his face.
The satisfaction doesn't last long, anyway. It's a thing of the past about two seconds after the door's swung fully open.
It's curiosity more than anything else that moves him inside, into this apartment that's been loaned to them for as long as the job takes, whether that's two days or two weeks or two months. With Sam relocating duffels behind him he takes half a dozen steps into the apartment, head cocked a little to one side.
Sam's known him for 27 years. When he turns, finally, and makes a face, Sam knows exactly what he means, actual mind-reading ability entirely unnecessary.
"Yeah," Sam muses. "It's a little on the small side."
"A little?"
The apartment, for which Bobby's friend undoubtedly shells out - every thirty days - an amount of money that would feed an entire Third World village for a year, is one room. One long, narrow room at the far end of which is a single window that's maybe three feet square. Dean stands staring down the length of the room for a minute, then, as if he's a fledgling unfolding its wings, extends both arms. His fingertips don't touch the opposing walls, but it's not much of a miss, maybe six or eight inches on either side.
"I'm gonna kick his ass," he says to Sam.
"It's free," Sam sighs.
Maybe it'll look bigger with the lights turned on, Dean thinks. He fumbles past Sam for the switch on the wall beside the door and flips it, but if anything, the shadows cast by the ceiling fixture make the place look even more Lilliputian. There's a bed placed crossways down at the far end, a collection of shallow plastic storage boxes visible underneath and a tiny desk positioned alongside to serve dual duty as a night table. The kitchen is a narrow collection of sink, stove, fridge, all of them downsized as if they were built to fit here. Seating is limited to the bed and one chair.
"So…what?" Dean winces. "One of us gets the bed and the other one sleeps in the tub?"
Sam puts down the duffel that's dangling from his right hand and reaches out to push open the bathroom door. One glimpse in there kills whatever might have been left of his interest in being here. "There's no tub," he says, and grins in a way that makes him look demented.
"What the hell, man."
Dean's got his phone in his hand, using his thumb to scroll down through the list of numbers and glaring at Bobby's name as if that would send some indication of his wrath out through the ether to South Dakota, when he hears his name being called from somewhere out in the hall.
"Who knows we're here?" Sam hisses.
"Uh…nobody?"
"Dean? You home?" the voice chirps.
A second later, its owner is there in the doorway, barely visible behind Sam until she clambers around him to stand, hands on hips, puzzling at the two of them as if they're the most interesting thing to happen in this building in the last couple of centuries. For all Dean knows, maybe they are.
"Hi?" he ventures.
Why she's not scared, or worried, or at least a little bit standoffish, is a mystery. Maybe she's just dense, Dean thinks when she proposes, "You're not Dean."
"Yeah," he says. "I kind of am."
"You're not the Dean who lives here."
"Yeah, well, thank God for that."
She snorts as if that's funny, and completely without invitation plucks a glass from the tiny cupboard above the tiny stove and runs herself a glass of water. "So he's off on location somewhere? Is that it? And you guys are subletting?" She sips the water in between chunks of that and gestures with the glass in between sips, so flamboyantly that the remaining water splashes up over the lip of the glass onto her clothing and down onto the rug.
"Sort of," Sam says, prompting her to peer up at him.
And up, and up, because guessing she's five feet tall is…well, a stretch. "Wow," she observes. "Are you guys actors, too?"
"No," Dean replies, at the same time Sam says, "Yes."
She beams at that, in a little-kid kind of way, the kind that's a burst of sunshine. It fits her, Dean thinks: fits this little person with the bouncy mop of reddish curls and the freckled little nose and the red Keds sneakers he never sees on anybody who's gotten past the second grade. "I'm Ginger," she says, and that fits, too.
"You an -" he begins.
And yes, it fits, fits with the flaky, patience-testing oddball-ness of the entire day as well as with her chipper, chirpy enthusiasm and the fact that the top of her head comes about-mid-bicep on Sam, when she replies happily, "I'm a Munchkin."
"Okay, then," is all Dean can think to say.
"Not a real one. Onstage. You know. In Wicked." Before the Winchesters can do much more than exchange raised eyebrows over the rusty-curled landscape of her little Munchkin head, she's got her arms folded like she's about to pull one of those I Dream of Jeannie reality-farts. "You guys," she says, suddenly exasperated. "What was he thinking? Does he know you're, like, tall?"
"We've never met him," Sam replies.
"Seriously. Look at you two. I sure hope you like cuddling."
"We're brothers."
"Oh. Oh." She considers them both, with the same neck-craning move Dean used to find the sky a while ago. "That's. Jeez."
Off she goes then, her little sneakered feet pattering along the scuffed wood floor of the hallway. Her apartment is only a couple of doors down, apparently, because they can hear her thumping and bumping and grunting until she comes pattering back, her arms wrapped around what looks like a deflated inflatable life raft. "Here," she gasps, shoving the lumpy armload at Dean. "It's not, you know, a Serta Perfect Sleeper or anything. But if you pile it up with a bunch of blankets, it's not too bad. You know how it works, right? Plug the thing in the wall."
She beams up at him and pats the mountain of blue plastic that separates them. "Hope you get settled in okay. I have to go to work. See ya."
For somebody that small, she fills up a lot of space, a fact that becomes apparent after she's gone.
"Plug the thing in the wall?" Dean frowns.
"I think it's an inflatable bed."
"Dude. Where the hell are we gonna put an inflatable - is that what this is?"
"I think so."
"This isn't gonna be like Friends, is it? Where people just wander in here all the time? Unless one of 'em's Jennifer Aniston, because I could work with that."
Sam considers that for a moment, then nods agreement. "We should check out the place. Deal with this stuff later."
"Work the job."
"Yeah."
"Would've had more room to move around if we slept in the car."
"Yeah," Sam sighs.
"Gonna kick Bobby's ass. Did he know about this? Gonna pick him up, dust him off, then kick his ass again. Friggin' Barbie Dream House is bigger than this shoebox. I'll tell you, Sam," Dean says over his double armload of crumpled blue plastic, "you can say all you want about seedy motels and life on the road and never staying anyplace for longer than a couple weeks at a time. You make me choose between that and this" - he jerks his head from side to side - "and the Roach Motels are gonna win every time. This city is like some freaky overpopulation experiment. Nobody with sense picks this. Who the hell picks this?"
Sam says mildly, "YMMV, I guess."
"What?"
"Your mileage may vary."
Dean responds to that by dropping the deflated whatever-it-is into a heap on the floor. "Let's get the hell out of here. Work the job, gank the thing, so we can hit the damn road."
Sam doesn't even try to disagree.
Part 2...