SPN FIC - Bay (Part 3 of 12)
Part 1 is here.
Part 2 is here.
A mysterious message, bearing a single word: BAY. It could be a cry for help, or it could be a trap. Armed with a little information from Bobby, Sam and Dean travel to a tiny town in the New Mexico desert and find themselves surrounded by angry hunters, oddball locals, and an elusive creature that's been slaughtering humans since before The West Was Won.
BTW: Don't let the "AU" put you off. We're simply fast-forwarding a bit, past deals and destinies and demon blood, to a time when the brothers are ... brothers. Saving people, hunting things. The family business.
CHARACTERS: Dean, Sam, Bobby, various OCs
TIMELINE: July 2011, AU after mid-Season 5
RATING: PG
GENRE: Gen
SPOILERS: Nothing after mid-Season 5
LENGTH: Remains to be seen; this part is 4069 words
My guest stars (and wow, when it's fic, they work really cheap):
(Alfre Woodard, Dule Hill, and Gail O'Grady)
BAY
By Carol Davis
Three
"How you doing, angel?" Monica asked brightly, and the word made Dean grimace. She meant nothing by it, he was sure - he was pretty sure - but still, it was a button-pusher. Not to mention that the guy standing just inside the doorway wasn't someone he would have picked out of a lineup as a hunter. The hell, Bobby, he thought, and put his fork down.
The new arrival returned Monica's embrace as if it was an everyday occurrence, and brushed a kiss against her cheek.
Then he looked at Sam and Dean.
"What's going on?" he asked, and it wasn't idle conversation, not considering the frown that came with it.
"You're…Bay?" Dean said.
"Yeah. I'm Fielding Bay."
So not a hunter.
African-American, in his early thirties. Not very tall, trim in a way that said his preferred form of exercise was the treadmill. Dean would have guessed walking, but nobody put in much long-distance walking in New Mexico in the summertime. Beyond that, he didn't look…beat up. No visible scars or wounds. Pale yellow polo shirt that looked new, pressed khakis, clean white sneakers. When Dean glanced past Fielding Bay out into the parking lot he spotted the man's transportation: a champagne-colored convertible of very recent vintage. Top up, of course, so Bay could run the AC.
"Your mom in the car?" Silvio asked.
Bay shook his head. "She's home. I didn't want to bother her with this until I found out what's going on."
"What is going on?"
"Don't know. Bobby Singer called me. Asked me to meet him here."
"No sign of him." Silvio nodded at Sam and Dean. "Just these two. They're Winchester's boys."
Bay's frown deepened. "John Winchester? You're Sam and Dean Winchester? I thought -"
"We got more lives than a cat?" Dean said. "Yeah, that's us. This is us. Live and in the flesh. But we're still trying to figure out who you people are."
"Why don't you ask Bobby?"
"Believe me, we plan to."
With no more of a prompt than that, Bay fished a phone out of his pants pocket and dialed a number. It seemed to do nothing more than ring at the other end, because after a minute he turned the phone off and dropped it back into his pocket. "I'm missing work for this," he told Dean, his frown never wavering. "How about you tell me what you know."
"Kinda bossy, aren't you?"
"Look -" Bay said, then cut himself off. "Nobody's trying to pick a fight here. All I know is, I got a call late last night asking me to come down here in the morning. So I'm here. And I don't have a clue why."
"'Cause you follow directions well?"
"Dean," Sam said, and got up from the table. When he was on his feet he beckoned to Dean and led him outside, moving far enough away from the door that the people inside wouldn't be able to hear him.
"Is it me?" Dean asked him. "A little full disclosure's too much to ask?"
"Bobby's probably got a reason."
"He's treating us like kids."
"Then he's treating this Bay guy the same way. He hasn't told anybody anything - he just said to meet him here."
Sam's mild expression didn't allow for Dean to grow any more annoyed than he already was. Which wasn't to say the annoyance he'd already built up was going to go away quietly; it wasn't until he'd paced back and forth for a couple of minutes that he surrendered to what Sam was saying. "I can't help it," he said then. "My whole life, I get the drill: go in prepared. And I'm not prepared. I got no clue who these people are."
"Just people."
"Yeah, right."
"We're one up on them," Sam said. "We know about the board."
~~~~~
"We're gonna have a séance?" Bay said skeptically when Sam laid the board and its planchette down on one of the picnic tables.
"Already had one," Dean told him. "Three nights running."
Bay ran a hand over his neatly cropped hair and turned away from the table, shut off in a way Dean was all too familiar with. Monica reached out to pat his arm, a gesture he accepted with a nod, then folded his arms over his chest. He seemed to have figured out what Sam and Dean intended to do - or maybe, what had already happened - and it wasn't anything that appealed to him.
It was very much not anything that appealed to him.
"Bobby couldn't just leave this alone?" he muttered, and Monica ran a hand up and down his arm.
There for him, Dean thought. Like a sister. Or a mom.
"Maybe we oughta just wait for Bobby," he said to Sam.
"No," Bay said sharply. "We're all here, and you're dragging that thing around. Tell me what you came here to say."
Dean had to wait a moment for Bay to turn around. Then he stepped up close to the table, pressed the tip of his index finger to the planchette and pushed it around the board. "Last three nights," he told Bay. "All by itself. Three letters, over and over: B-A-Y. When we told Bobby about it, he said to come here."
Bay stood staring at the board for a minute.
Then tears began to stream down his face, glistening in the light.
Monica reached for him again, obviously intending to embrace him, but he slipped away from her and stumbled through the back door. Monica flinched when it slammed shut behind him. A moment later everyone in the restaurant could hear Bay sobbing.
"Didn't mean to -" Dean murmured, shaking his head.
"His daddy," Silvio said quietly, mirroring Bay's pose of a minute ago, arms folded tightly across his chest. "Disappeared down near Ruidoso 'bout nine years ago. Been some stories now and then - people thought they saw him, up in the hills. Went up there myself, looking for him. Your daddy, and Bobby, they did the same. We had people combing those hills for months. But if he was up there, he turned himself invisible."
He glanced down at the board. Seemed to be keeping his hands trapped so he wouldn't touch it. "There's a lot of empty in New Mexico. We held onto some hope. The boy held onto some hope. But Leona, she's been saying 'no' for a long time. And there's only just so long you can believe a thing."
"Leona?" Sam asked.
"Field's mother."
"This doesn't mean anything," Sam protested, waving at the board. "It's just - it could be a message from anybody."
"Amelia Earhart," Dean said. "Maybe she's trying to say where she went down."
"She went down in the middle of the Pacific, Dean."
"So kill me. I'm tryin' to be helpful."
"Bobby seemed to think the time was significant," Sam told Silvio. "Two seventeen in the morning, all three times."
"February seventeenth," Silvio replied.
"That's when he went missing?"
"It is."
There was a lot of moping going on in that room, Dean figured - and outside, in that crazy field of garden gnomes. A little too much moping for his taste, particularly since it was all built on a tiny fragment of a message. "Look," he said firmly. "I got no idea how many spirits are up there, in that big radio room in the sky. Could be a couple. Could be half a billion. But I think you people are jumping to conclusions. Nothing says it's his father who's been messing with us in the middle of the night. Maybe it's Amelia Earhart. Maybe it's John friggin' Belushi. Maybe it's anybody. We need to get more information. Okay? Can we do that?"
"You're a lot like your father," Silvio said.
"Yeah, well," Dean replied. "Sometimes that's a good thing."
"No," Bay blurted when they approached him with their suggestion, Silvio taking the lead and Monica lingering behind, in the doorway of Tacos Burgers. "You leave my mom out of this. You leave her the hell out of this unless you're sure."
"She finds out you're keeping things from her," Silvio told him, "she's gonna eat your liver with some frijoles."
"Just leave her out of it. She doesn't -" Bay scrubbed the back of his hand against his dripping nose. "She's been through enough."
"She's not some wilting little flower, mi'jo."
"It's been nine years. We don't need this."
"Maybe you do. Okay? Let's go see your mama."
This time it was Silvio who reached out, who offered the gesture of comfort to Bay. How long they'd known each other, Dean had no idea, but watching them, he was sure that if Bay had stepped forward, expecting Silvio to embrace him, he wouldn't have been disappointed, that the big man would have held him like a child and let him cry.
"Maybe it's nothing," Silvio said. "But maybe these boys brought you some answers. Let's go find out."
"We need to let it go," Bay insisted. "I let it go."
"That's not what you been telling me the last few minutes."
"I'm telling you now."
"If it's him - you don't want to take a chance on that? You don't want to hear what he has to say?"
"What could he possibly say?"
"I love you?" Silvio suggested.
Bay turned away from him and looked out across the ugly, dry landscape, out across a lot of miles of nothing.
"Field," Silvio said.
"All right." There was still a lot of reluctance in Bay's voice, but his posture had loosened a little. "We'll go see my mother. But if she gets upset about this, I'm going to blame it all on you."
"I've tackled worse," Silvio told him.
~~~~~
There were some homes nearby - some of them trailers, some of them actual stationary structures. The two houses that had originally been the town of Bingham were long gone, but a handful of people lived within a few minutes' drive.
Leona Bay wasn't one of them.
They formed a caravan of two: Sam and Dean in the Impala following Fielding Bay in his fancy convertible, with Monica and Silvio (who seemed to have no transportation of their own) riding in Bay's back seat. They set off from Tacos Burgers heading east, and Dean knew enough about the territory to have grabbed the sugar cookies off Monica's plate of desserts, just in case.
"In case what?" Sam asked him.
"In case this takes a while."
It did.
Almost an hour and a half after they left Bingham, Fielding flipped on his directional signal and pulled off onto a wide stretch of beaten-down dirt it would have been a stretch of imagination to call a road. They followed that for half a mile or so, then Fielding made another turn onto a narrower stretch of dirt, and finally brought his car to a stop in what seemed to be a driveway, a few yards outside a well-weathered picket fence.
Part of the driveway lay on the other side of a gateway in the fence, and two vehicles were parked there: a dusty Chevy Suburban, and a much older car Dean immediately recognized as being one of Bobby Singer's resuscitated junkers.
"I'm gonna kick his ass," Dean said as he and Sam got out of the Impala. "What's he doing out here? He said meet him -"
Leona Bay's home wasn't a trailer; it was a house whose style Dean remembered hearing described as Victorian, all peaks and gables and fancy woodwork, painted in desert colors, pale green and an orangey sort of pink. It had been built close enough to the foothills of New Mexico's southern mountains to stand in the shade of several old trees, which made it look cool and welcoming, in spite of the fact that all its curtains had been drawn against the sun, allowing not a single glimpse of what was inside.
The front door wasn't locked. Fielding turned the knob and pushed it open, and went inside without a word. Silvio and Monica followed.
"It could be anybody," Dean said to his brother. "The spirit."
"Yeah. It could."
He'd delivered bad news before. Had told people their loved ones weren't coming back. He'd done it a little less than tactfully sometimes, and had berated himself afterwards for not having the finesse for that kind of thing that Sam did. Dad hadn't been any good at it either; he could manage to muster a little softness of tone, a little sympathy, but when it got in the way of his finishing up the job, he'd always dumped sympathy in favor of moving on. In favor of not allowing himself to sit there and think about Mom, Dean figured, which was understandable, but didn't make him anybody's top pick for making the "I need to tell you something" speech.
"You coming?" Sam said.
"You figure Bobby told her already? About the message?"
"I don't know."
"Gotta be why he came here, instead of out to Bingham. So he could break the news. That's gotta be it."
"Maybe."
"She's got a nice house, huh?"
"You're stalling," Sam said.
"Got some cookies. And some beer in the cooler. I could sit out here a while in the shade and have a beer and eat cookies. You wanna do that?"
"You're stalling," Sam said again.
"So kill me. I haven't slept in three days. I don't wanna go in there and watch that lady cry."
"Neither do I."
Dean shuffled his feet in the dirt and peered up at the weathervane at the topmost peak of the roof, shielding his eyes against the sun with a bladed hand. Then he considered the trees, the bird feeder hanging from an shepherd's crook, and the unblemished lines of Fielding Bay's champagne-colored convertible.
"This job sucks," he said finally. "There are large portions of this job that suck moose tit. Are you aware of that?"
"I think so."
"Let's get this over with."
"You sure you don't want to eat cookies?"
"Oh, I want to. I want to eat cookies at poolside with a nice cool breeze blowing over me and Heidi Klum givin' me a foot rub. But it don't look like that's an option right now, does it?" Dean reached back into the car to grab the Mystical Talking Board and its planchette, both of which had been baking quietly in the back seat and retained enough heat to make Dean grimace as he tucked the board under his arm. "You walked us halfway to the friggin' moon to look at stick figures carved into some rock," he told Sam. "You were a royal pain in my ass."
"I see to remember you leading the way," Sam said mildly.
"What, I was supposed to let you do it?"
"It was a marked path."
"Yeah, well, you could say that about a lot of things."
Leona Bay wasn't crying; she didn't even look as if she'd been contemplating it. When Dean and Sam entered her house, she was sitting in a big, cushy chair in her comfortably-furnished living room, talking to her son, Bobby Singer, and Monica and Silvio Ramirez about collecting antique silver: teapots and creamers and hairbrushes, dresser trays, flatware, jewelry. Some of it was on display in a glass-fronted cabinet.
"Some of it" included a sleek, leather-handled dagger.
Hunter, Dean thought.
She was no wilting little flower, Silvio had said, and that was on the money. She had a firm set to her shoulders, sturdy hands that looked capable of wielding a gun or a knife or a fireplace poker or whatever it took to get the job done. Her hair was cropped short, not much longer than her son's, and she was dressed in well-broken-in fatigue pants and a t-shirt. Her feet made Dean smile crookedly: rather than the boots he suspected were her everyday footwear, she was wearing a pair of pink flip-flops, and her toenails were polished to match.
"About time," Bobby said when he saw Sam and Dean standing in the foyer. "You two been contemplating your navels out there?"
"That it?" Leona asked, gesturing at the board.
"Yeah," Dean told her. "It's - yeah."
"Put it down."
She indicated the coffee table. She seemed to have expected something being placed there, because a collection of magazines, a box of snack crackers and the TV remote had all been pushed down to one end of the table. Nodding, Dean set the board down in the empty area and laid the planchette on top of it.
"Never put a lot of stock in these myself," she said. Then she looked up at Dean, and at Sam. "I can see him in you."
"Dad?" Dean asked.
"Yes."
"You knew my dad?"
"Patched him up. Fed him. Gave him a bath once."
Her expression was smooth, conversational, as if she'd been talking about the weather. When Dean reacted to what she said, she snorted softly and exchanged a glance with Bobby. She didn't give away whether the bath had actually happened, or whether she was just trying to tweak Dean, but either way, he liked her for it. Couldn't explain why, but he did.
"Sit down," she said, and it was nothing but kind and generous, even though the only available seat left was the floor. Silvio and Monica had taken the couch, Bobby the chair that matched Leona's; Fielding was leaning against the archway between the living room and dining room. With a shrug Dean folded himself into a cross-legged sit near Leona's chair, half expecting her to reach out and pat him on the head. Sam, like Fielding, remained standing.
"I tried it," she explained when they were all settled, again indicating the board. "Tried pretty much everything. We searched high and low. I even talked to the police. Hired a private detective. But he was…gone. Left behind his truck and his duffel and a half-eaten Big Mac. He vanished into thin air, and there's been no sign of him since."
"Easy to disappear out here," Dean said.
"It's easy to disappear anywhere," she told him, and a smile moved her lips for a second. "Your father was good at it. So are you two, from what I hear."
"Was he hunting something, Mrs. Bay?" Sam asked.
"Call me Leona."
She shifted in her chair and spent a while looking at a carved piece hanging over the fireplace mantel, the letters ELLE with the first "E" flipped backward. "My husband's name is Elocution," she explained. "Old, old name, for his great-grandfather, who was a teacher long before that kind of thing went over well. My husband liked the symmetry of it - he was El, and I was Le. He made that" - she nodded at the carving - "the first Christmas we were together."
Then she paused, rubbing her thumb against the knee of her pants.
"We were…apart when he disappeared," she said after a minute. "He'd found someone - a beautiful someone. I saw them together a couple of times. That's what I thought at first, that he'd gone off with her. Decided to leave his old life behind."
"But you changed your mind?" Sam guessed.
"A feeling."
"This other woman," Dean said. "D' you find her?"
"Never. I found people who'd seen them together, but there was no indication of who she was. No name. No sign of where she'd gone."
"But you saw her."
"I did."
"So she's real."
"She was very real."
"Do you want to find him?"
She smiled again, but it didn't last any longer than the first time. "A few years ago I would have said no. Field is the one who wants closure. I don't -" She sighed. "I don't know what I want. I suppose it would help to know where he went. But it's not going to change anything. He'd already decided he didn't want what he had with me."
"You don't know that, honey," Bobby told her.
Fielding crossed the room and crouched alongside his mother's chair. He held one of her hands between both of his own and after a moment he leaned in and kissed it.
"What do you want?" she asked him softly.
"I don't want him dead," Fielding replied. "I don't ever want him dead."
"Alive is better," she said, and Dean looked at the two of them, mother and son, remembering the mother he'd conjured up in the djinn-world, the way she'd cupped his face in her hand, offering comfort in the simplest of gestures.
For a few seconds, he hated Fielding Bay ferociously.
"You leave things behind," Leona said with a strong note of regret in her voice. "You put them in a room somewhere, lock the door, hide the key. You go on with your life and you convince yourself that you're fine, that it's all done with. Then something happens, and you feel as if it was all just yesterday. Or an hour ago. What do I want? I want what I had. When we were a family, living in this house, spending Christmas together. I want back my used-to-be. No matter how well I understand that that won't happen, I want it back. For Field. For me. For my husband."
She wavered, just a little, but she didn't cry. For a minute she sat staring at the spirit board and the little plastic planchette as if she was considering blaming it for messing up whatever uneasy peace she'd managed to reach.
But this, Dean thought: this was a lady who hunted.
"Let's fire that thing up," she said.
They relocated the board to the center of the floor, and the four people who had known Elocution Bay sat around it: his wife, his son, Silvio Ramirez, and Bobby. The four of them clasped hands silently for a minute, then they each rested a couple of fingers on the planchette.
"Be better if you waited 'til two seventeen?" Dean suggested.
"This is his house," Leona said. "His child was born here. If it's him, he'll talk."
Bobby said a few words in Latin; Silvio, a few more in a language that wasn't Latin, might have been Spanish, but not the version Dean had largely slept through in high school. Something old, Dean thought - something that might have been around when the people who spoke it thought the gods rode in chariots of fire.
Through all of it, the planchette sat unmoving in the middle of the board.
The warmth of the house (un-air conditioned, though a ceiling fan stirred the air enough to make it less than suffocating), the dim light, and his three nights' worth of lack of sleep combined to make Dean drowsy. He had to fight to keep his eyes open while a lot of nothing happened in the middle of the room. When he glanced over at Sam, Sam raised an inquisitive eyebrow, asked You good? without saying anything.
He thought about Utah, about the hot tub and the good cable. About his bed in the motel room - comfortable, maybe a little too much so. They could have kept going, he and Sam, could have waited to find something a little more seedy, but he'd wanted to stop. Wanted a comfortable bed within walking distance of a good place to eat.
Wanted to stand in the middle of the sidewalk and look at the red hills and the deep green of the trees and the vivid blue sky.
He opened his eyes when he heard the familiar sound of the planchette scraping across the surface of the board.
Bobby's expression was blank, and Silvio's. Leona was holding her breath, lips pressed together, trembling so minutely it almost wasn't visible. Across from her, her son (so, so not a hunter) looked as if he wanted to scramble away from the damn thing, to run, to climb back into his fancy air-conditioned car and drive it somewhere, anywhere, as long as it was away.
Dean had to lean in a little to see the planchette's choices.
Y. O. U.
He looked across the room at Sam, now sitting on the couch, hands pressed flat against his knees, brow furrowed.
D.
I.
E.
A second ticked by, then another.
Then the planchette jerked itself away from the grasp of the four people sitting around the board, went vertical for a moment, and slammed itself into the center of Fielding Bay's chest.
Part 4…