SPN FIC - Lost Boys and Golden Girls (7.03)
"So -- you gonna come clean about this, or what?"
CHARACTERS: Dean (19) and Sam (15), mentions of John
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: 7.03
LENGTH: 1888 words
LOST BOYS AND GOLDEN GIRLS
By Carol Davis
"So - you gonna come clean about this, or what?"
Sam scowled across the diner booth's narrow gray table at his brother, who seemed completely unconcerned by everything that had happened during the past few hours.
Also, remarkably energetic.
The other side of the coin from Dad, pretty much.
The only decent part of this whole situation, Sam figured, was that Dad had collapsed onto the couch in front of the TV about thirty seconds after they'd all gotten back to the motel room. He'd said barely a dozen words - and none of those were shouted - since he and Dean had come barreling into Amy's house.
Well. Maybe not "barreling," exactly, but not tiptoeing, either.
Maybe it'd been kind of a letdown for Dad that he couldn't gank anything, after a week-long hunt that had involved a lot of skulking around and very little sleep. Maybe Dad was disappointed that somebody else had already done the ganking for him.
Whatever the explanation was, Dad had said nothing at all when Dean and Sam left the room in favor of the marginally more pleasant surroundings of the diner down the road.
"You want me to be a hunter, or not?" Sam said in answer to Dean's question, shaping the words around his mouthful of Boston cream pie. "You had me reading stuff until my eyes were ready to fall out of my head. I knew what we were looking for. I had the chance to kill it, so I did. And don't start telling me I was outgunned. She wasn't any bigger than I am." After he'd swallowed, he added over a sigh, "By much."
"They're strong, Sammy. Monsters. You know that. Even the small ones."
"I was careful."
Which wasn't exactly true. He'd put his knife away. Let down his guard.
And he hadn't ganked Amy's mother. Amy had.
Dean shoveled in a huge mouthful of his blueberry pie and chewed it for a minute, then gulped it down and reached for his glass of milk. "Last I talked to you, you were at the library. So…how'd you get from the library to that bitch's house?"
Sam's cheek twitched. If he'd met anyone in his life who could honestly be called a bitch, it was Amy's mother.
"She -" he said, then stopped.
Dean raised an eyebrow.
"She hit on me," Sam blurted out.
Dean's eyes widened. There was enough milk left in his mouth that when he coughed, it sprayed across the table. "She who?" he sputtered. "She what, now?"
"Hit," Sam said.
"On you."
"Why is that incredible?"
"Because she was what, like forty? And you -"
"Are you gonna tell me that whole thing with Janie Hilfigger's mother didn't happen? She was forty. She was at least forty."
"Dude."
Should've just gone to bed, Sam thought, though that would've been difficult, with Dad sitting there staring at the TV and Dean showing no sign of settling down for the night. This whole thing is just one big…
"So you went home with her, figuring you and she were gonna -"
"It's not that incredible, Dean," Sam barked.
"Wouldn't be," Dean conceded, "if it was me we were talking about. But it's not me, it's you. And you wouldn't just go home with somebody like that, figuring you were gonna get some. Come on, Sammy," he said, head cocked a little to the side, his voice gone soft. "That's not you. You're the one who always wants it to be like some chick movie. Everything in soft focus. A lotta hand-holding and meaningful looks."
Nothing in his expression said I know you're lying to me, but it might as well have.
"Maybe I just wanted to get it over with, so you'd get off my back," Sam muttered at the remains of his Boston cream pie.
Dean spent a long while staring out the window, into the pools of light in the parking lot. He didn't seem to be looking for anything, or at anything, in particular. His car, maybe. There'd been more than one occasion when Sam had asked him, "What are you looking at?" and he'd replied, "At my baby," when that didn't seem to be the truth at all.
"You gotta take what you can get, Sammy," he said finally.
"What? Ten minutes with some waitress in the back of the car?"
Dean shook his head. He was still holding his fork, and he turned it over in his fingers a couple of times. "Anything else - people just end up getting hurt. You gotta know that going in. There's no point to it."
"This life sucks."
Strangely, Dean didn't disagree. "So you went home with - where'd you find her, anyway? She didn't look like a librarian."
"She was…reading the magazines."
Up went the eyebrow again. "And you said to me, 'How do you talk to girls?' in that kinda panicky, puppy-dog voice because she gave up on a month-old Newsweek in favor of you? That's not how it works, Sam. That's never how it works."
"Maybe this time it did."
"Sam," Dean said.
It was late enough at night that few people were in the diner, and the waitresses were tired enough that they weren't circulating very much, weren't trolling past the booths offering coffee refills or a second slice of pie. Their own waitress had left their check when she brought their desserts, apparently uninterested in boosting her tip.
It was one of those nights, Sam thought.
One of those incredibly shitty nights.
He sat with his head propped on his fist for a while. When he spoke, he was talking into his fingers.
"It wasn't her," he mumbled. "There was - somebody."
Dean mulled that over for a moment, then asked, "Pretty?"
"Yeah."
"Where is she now?"
"I don't know. Gone."
Dean's gaze shifted to the ceiling, somewhere behind Sam's head. He put his fork down after a minute and began to slide his nearly-empty glass back and forth across the table. "Gonna be here another day or two," he said on the fourth or fifth slide. "Don't think Dad's got anything lined up. And we'll have to make sure there was only the one of those things."
There wasn't, Sam thought.
But she's gone now.
"You saw her at the library, right?" Dean went on, his tone still mild, and gently encouraging. He was warming to the subject, the way he always did when the subject was the possibility of hooking Sam up with someone. "We could tell Dad you spotted another book that might be worth swiping. Need to take another look at it."
Sam shook his head.
"You wouldn't have to…you know. Just talk to her. If she's there. Kinda break yourself into the whole talking thing."
"Which would accomplish what, exactly?"
Dean gave his fork a nudge with the tip of his finger. "I don't know, Sam," he sighed. "I got no friggin' idea."
Sam sucked in a long breath, then, almost as a single, enormous word, told his brother, "I thought I could. This girl. She was pretty and she seemed nice and I thought maybe I could, but she said 'No' and she left, and this woman started looking at me and I thought, I just want to get this over with so Dean will leave me the hell alone, so I went home with her and I thought we were gonna - but what she wanted was to eat me, and not that way. Not the way you think. Okay? But I'm a hunter, I'm just like you and Dad. You trained me and when she started to - she had these claw things or something - when she started to change, I got my knife and I killed her. Okay? Is that enough? Will you leave me alone now?"
Not gonna cry.
Not gonna freaking CRY.
Half a minute ticked by, during most of which Sam sucked in big gulps of air like it was cold water.
"Uncle Bobby got fooled by a succubus once," Dean said quietly.
"I - what?"
"Ask him. Says he felt like six kinds of an ass. Says he knew better. You gotta watch yourself."
"So you think this is funny."
There was an odd smile on Dean's face as he slid out of the booth and fished his wallet out of his pocket. He counted out enough to cover the bill, with a couple of dollars extra, laid it on the table on top of the bill, then beckoned to Sam. "Let's get the hell out of here," he said.
"I don't want to go back to the room."
"Then we'll drive," Dean replied. "Got m' baby and a full tank of gas. It's a nice night. Dad'll fall asleep in front of the TV, if he hasn't already. We've got a while."
They were halfway to the car when Dean stopped suddenly, car keys jingling in the palm of his hand, and looked around the parking lot, at the little collection of vehicles parked there, at the lampposts, back toward the bright lights of the diner. He seemed a little defeated for a moment, standing there in the dark, tossing his keys into the air, catching them neatly when they came back down.
"What?" Sam asked him.
"Just get in the car," Dean said. "Let's just drive."
"To where?"
For a moment - for one very long moment - Sam thought his brother was going to say, "Away." That they'd get into the car and drive away from the motel where Dad might or might not be sleeping in front of the TV, headed for no place in particular.
Just away.
The moment passed, though, in a way that was almost like the turning of a calendar page.
With a small smile on his face, Dean reached out and clapped Sam on the shoulder. He let his hand lie there briefly, then took it back.
"You did good," he said. "I still can't figure out why the hell -" He cut himself off and chuckled, a single, short snort of air that seemed to carry more amusement in it than disbelief. "Me and Dad beat the bushes for a whole week, and you find the thing in the freakin' library."
"Maybe I'm just that good," Sam told him.
Once more, Dean's eyebrow slid toward his hairline. "You wish," he said, and gave Sam a clip on the side of the head.
Sam still had no idea where Dean intended to take them as they settled into their seats in the car. Maybe a few miles down the road; maybe to an open spot where they could play the radio and look up at the stars.
Maybe back to the motel room, and Dad.
Either was fine, he thought. It'd been a long day.
Dean stuck the key in the ignition and turned it, grinning in satisfaction when the engine rumbled to life. He sat there listening to it for a minute, as if the sound was as good as anything that might come out of the radio.
Then he turned to Sam and said quietly, "You'll find her, Sammy. Some girl who's gonna hold your hand. You'll find her."
He didn't seem to expect an answer, and Sam didn't give him one.
They were looking in different directions when Dean shifted the car into gear.
* * * * *
CHARACTERS: Dean (19) and Sam (15), mentions of John
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: 7.03
LENGTH: 1888 words
LOST BOYS AND GOLDEN GIRLS
By Carol Davis
"So - you gonna come clean about this, or what?"
Sam scowled across the diner booth's narrow gray table at his brother, who seemed completely unconcerned by everything that had happened during the past few hours.
Also, remarkably energetic.
The other side of the coin from Dad, pretty much.
The only decent part of this whole situation, Sam figured, was that Dad had collapsed onto the couch in front of the TV about thirty seconds after they'd all gotten back to the motel room. He'd said barely a dozen words - and none of those were shouted - since he and Dean had come barreling into Amy's house.
Well. Maybe not "barreling," exactly, but not tiptoeing, either.
Maybe it'd been kind of a letdown for Dad that he couldn't gank anything, after a week-long hunt that had involved a lot of skulking around and very little sleep. Maybe Dad was disappointed that somebody else had already done the ganking for him.
Whatever the explanation was, Dad had said nothing at all when Dean and Sam left the room in favor of the marginally more pleasant surroundings of the diner down the road.
"You want me to be a hunter, or not?" Sam said in answer to Dean's question, shaping the words around his mouthful of Boston cream pie. "You had me reading stuff until my eyes were ready to fall out of my head. I knew what we were looking for. I had the chance to kill it, so I did. And don't start telling me I was outgunned. She wasn't any bigger than I am." After he'd swallowed, he added over a sigh, "By much."
"They're strong, Sammy. Monsters. You know that. Even the small ones."
"I was careful."
Which wasn't exactly true. He'd put his knife away. Let down his guard.
And he hadn't ganked Amy's mother. Amy had.
Dean shoveled in a huge mouthful of his blueberry pie and chewed it for a minute, then gulped it down and reached for his glass of milk. "Last I talked to you, you were at the library. So…how'd you get from the library to that bitch's house?"
Sam's cheek twitched. If he'd met anyone in his life who could honestly be called a bitch, it was Amy's mother.
"She -" he said, then stopped.
Dean raised an eyebrow.
"She hit on me," Sam blurted out.
Dean's eyes widened. There was enough milk left in his mouth that when he coughed, it sprayed across the table. "She who?" he sputtered. "She what, now?"
"Hit," Sam said.
"On you."
"Why is that incredible?"
"Because she was what, like forty? And you -"
"Are you gonna tell me that whole thing with Janie Hilfigger's mother didn't happen? She was forty. She was at least forty."
"Dude."
Should've just gone to bed, Sam thought, though that would've been difficult, with Dad sitting there staring at the TV and Dean showing no sign of settling down for the night. This whole thing is just one big…
"So you went home with her, figuring you and she were gonna -"
"It's not that incredible, Dean," Sam barked.
"Wouldn't be," Dean conceded, "if it was me we were talking about. But it's not me, it's you. And you wouldn't just go home with somebody like that, figuring you were gonna get some. Come on, Sammy," he said, head cocked a little to the side, his voice gone soft. "That's not you. You're the one who always wants it to be like some chick movie. Everything in soft focus. A lotta hand-holding and meaningful looks."
Nothing in his expression said I know you're lying to me, but it might as well have.
"Maybe I just wanted to get it over with, so you'd get off my back," Sam muttered at the remains of his Boston cream pie.
Dean spent a long while staring out the window, into the pools of light in the parking lot. He didn't seem to be looking for anything, or at anything, in particular. His car, maybe. There'd been more than one occasion when Sam had asked him, "What are you looking at?" and he'd replied, "At my baby," when that didn't seem to be the truth at all.
"You gotta take what you can get, Sammy," he said finally.
"What? Ten minutes with some waitress in the back of the car?"
Dean shook his head. He was still holding his fork, and he turned it over in his fingers a couple of times. "Anything else - people just end up getting hurt. You gotta know that going in. There's no point to it."
"This life sucks."
Strangely, Dean didn't disagree. "So you went home with - where'd you find her, anyway? She didn't look like a librarian."
"She was…reading the magazines."
Up went the eyebrow again. "And you said to me, 'How do you talk to girls?' in that kinda panicky, puppy-dog voice because she gave up on a month-old Newsweek in favor of you? That's not how it works, Sam. That's never how it works."
"Maybe this time it did."
"Sam," Dean said.
It was late enough at night that few people were in the diner, and the waitresses were tired enough that they weren't circulating very much, weren't trolling past the booths offering coffee refills or a second slice of pie. Their own waitress had left their check when she brought their desserts, apparently uninterested in boosting her tip.
It was one of those nights, Sam thought.
One of those incredibly shitty nights.
He sat with his head propped on his fist for a while. When he spoke, he was talking into his fingers.
"It wasn't her," he mumbled. "There was - somebody."
Dean mulled that over for a moment, then asked, "Pretty?"
"Yeah."
"Where is she now?"
"I don't know. Gone."
Dean's gaze shifted to the ceiling, somewhere behind Sam's head. He put his fork down after a minute and began to slide his nearly-empty glass back and forth across the table. "Gonna be here another day or two," he said on the fourth or fifth slide. "Don't think Dad's got anything lined up. And we'll have to make sure there was only the one of those things."
There wasn't, Sam thought.
But she's gone now.
"You saw her at the library, right?" Dean went on, his tone still mild, and gently encouraging. He was warming to the subject, the way he always did when the subject was the possibility of hooking Sam up with someone. "We could tell Dad you spotted another book that might be worth swiping. Need to take another look at it."
Sam shook his head.
"You wouldn't have to…you know. Just talk to her. If she's there. Kinda break yourself into the whole talking thing."
"Which would accomplish what, exactly?"
Dean gave his fork a nudge with the tip of his finger. "I don't know, Sam," he sighed. "I got no friggin' idea."
Sam sucked in a long breath, then, almost as a single, enormous word, told his brother, "I thought I could. This girl. She was pretty and she seemed nice and I thought maybe I could, but she said 'No' and she left, and this woman started looking at me and I thought, I just want to get this over with so Dean will leave me the hell alone, so I went home with her and I thought we were gonna - but what she wanted was to eat me, and not that way. Not the way you think. Okay? But I'm a hunter, I'm just like you and Dad. You trained me and when she started to - she had these claw things or something - when she started to change, I got my knife and I killed her. Okay? Is that enough? Will you leave me alone now?"
Not gonna cry.
Not gonna freaking CRY.
Half a minute ticked by, during most of which Sam sucked in big gulps of air like it was cold water.
"Uncle Bobby got fooled by a succubus once," Dean said quietly.
"I - what?"
"Ask him. Says he felt like six kinds of an ass. Says he knew better. You gotta watch yourself."
"So you think this is funny."
There was an odd smile on Dean's face as he slid out of the booth and fished his wallet out of his pocket. He counted out enough to cover the bill, with a couple of dollars extra, laid it on the table on top of the bill, then beckoned to Sam. "Let's get the hell out of here," he said.
"I don't want to go back to the room."
"Then we'll drive," Dean replied. "Got m' baby and a full tank of gas. It's a nice night. Dad'll fall asleep in front of the TV, if he hasn't already. We've got a while."
They were halfway to the car when Dean stopped suddenly, car keys jingling in the palm of his hand, and looked around the parking lot, at the little collection of vehicles parked there, at the lampposts, back toward the bright lights of the diner. He seemed a little defeated for a moment, standing there in the dark, tossing his keys into the air, catching them neatly when they came back down.
"What?" Sam asked him.
"Just get in the car," Dean said. "Let's just drive."
"To where?"
For a moment - for one very long moment - Sam thought his brother was going to say, "Away." That they'd get into the car and drive away from the motel where Dad might or might not be sleeping in front of the TV, headed for no place in particular.
Just away.
The moment passed, though, in a way that was almost like the turning of a calendar page.
With a small smile on his face, Dean reached out and clapped Sam on the shoulder. He let his hand lie there briefly, then took it back.
"You did good," he said. "I still can't figure out why the hell -" He cut himself off and chuckled, a single, short snort of air that seemed to carry more amusement in it than disbelief. "Me and Dad beat the bushes for a whole week, and you find the thing in the freakin' library."
"Maybe I'm just that good," Sam told him.
Once more, Dean's eyebrow slid toward his hairline. "You wish," he said, and gave Sam a clip on the side of the head.
Sam still had no idea where Dean intended to take them as they settled into their seats in the car. Maybe a few miles down the road; maybe to an open spot where they could play the radio and look up at the stars.
Maybe back to the motel room, and Dad.
Either was fine, he thought. It'd been a long day.
Dean stuck the key in the ignition and turned it, grinning in satisfaction when the engine rumbled to life. He sat there listening to it for a minute, as if the sound was as good as anything that might come out of the radio.
Then he turned to Sam and said quietly, "You'll find her, Sammy. Some girl who's gonna hold your hand. You'll find her."
He didn't seem to expect an answer, and Sam didn't give him one.
They were looking in different directions when Dean shifted the car into gear.
* * * * *