SPN FIC - Indiana Jones and the Search for the Ruby Chalice
A rainy day in Blue Earth, an attic full of old stuff ...
"You SUCK!" Sam wailed. "Why do YOU always gotta be Indy?"
CHARACTERS: Dean (age 10), Sam (age 6), Mrs. Lundquist (OC - Pastor Jim's housekeeper)
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 3931 words
INDIANA JONES AND THE SEARCH FOR THE RUBY CHALICE
By Carol Davis
"You SUCK!" Sam wailed. "Why do YOU always gotta be Indy?"
"Because I'm older," Dean told him.
"No FAIR! Not my fault I'm littler. I'm TELLIN."
And before Dean could stop him, Sammy had run out of the bedroom and went pounding down the stairs. By the time Dean caught up with him - Dean's legs were longer, and he could have easily outrun Sam, but rolling his eyes and groaning used up some valuable time - Sam was in the kitchen, howling at Mrs. Lundquist.
"He don't play FAIR! Mrs. L! I wanna be Indy and he won't NEVER let me."
For an adult, Mrs. Lundquist was pretty cool. Instead of telling them to knock it the hell off, like Dad would have done, or sitting them down for a "talk" that probably would've had something to do with being kind to others, like Jesus, like Pastor Jim would have done, Mrs. L stopped washing the lunch dishes, dried her hands off on a towel, and stood looking at them with her arms folded across her chest and her butt resting against the edge of the sink.
"I'm the oldest," Dean tried.
"Well, technically, I'm the oldest," Mrs. L said. "So I call dibs."
Sam's mouth dropped open. "You're a lady. You can't be Indy."
"So…what? You figure I should be Marion?"
"Nooooo. Then there'd be kissing."
"Not necessarily."
"Nobody ain't fair around here," Sam scowled, then turned his back on the kitchen and went stomping into the living room, where he flopped down on the floor and seemed to be thinking about crawling under the coffee table. He was muttering things that didn't make sense. For all Dean knew, it was some language Sam had made up so he could confuse people. When he turned see how Mrs. L was reacting, she looked like she was trying not to laugh.
"I told him he could be Sallah," Dean sighed. "Or Belloq. He can be whoever he wants."
"Except Indy."
"The hat doesn't fit him."
Mrs. L reached out and lifted up the brim of the hat Dean was wearing, one he'd pulled out of a box of rummage sale stuff on his and Dad's and Sammy's last visit to Pastor Jim's. It wasn't exactly like Indy's - it was kind of a different color - but it was close enough.
"Doesn't quite fit you, either, sport," she said.
"He doesn't know how to be Indy the right way."
"And what way is that?"
It used to be that Sam would do anything Dean said. Anything at all, pretty much. But after Sam had started first grade, he started arguing with everything. Wanting his turn. They taught him that in school, he said: that everyone had to get their turn.
They were teaching some seriously dumb crap in that school, Dean figured.
"I don't want to be the bad guy," he muttered.
"You want to be the hero."
"Yeah."
"Look at it this way: you can play the hero, or you can be the hero."
"I don't know what you mean."
"Oh, I think you do."
"The hat falls off him, Mrs. L."
She wrapped a t-shirt around the top of Sam's head, tied it in a knot, and set the hat on top of it. It still didn't fit - it was so big it looked seriously dumb - but it didn't come down over Sam's eyes, or fall off.
"I need a gun," Sam said. "Indy shoots the bad guys."
Mrs. L shook her head. "Sorry, Dr. Jones. No firearms for you. You can be treasure-hunting Indy."
"I can?"
"No Nazis in sight."
"We goin' in the Wella the Souls?"
"Bad idea. Full of snakes, remember?"
"I can fight snakes. I can fight a million snakes."
Sam was looking at the basement door. There weren't any snakes down there - the trouble was, there wasn't anything down there, except the washer and dryer, an old ping-pong table with a broken leg, and the hot water heater.
Maybe the whole thing was a dumb idea, Dean thought; it was pouring rain outside, so the only place they'd be able to treasure hunt was their bedroom.
"Got an idea," Mrs. L said.
She led the boys upstairs, to the door at the end of the hall, which Pastor Jim always kept locked.
"The attic?" Sam crowed. "We can go up in the attic?"
They'd never been up in Pastor Jim's attic. Dean had peeked up there once, when Pastor Jim had gone up to find something, and discovered that the stairs leading up there were really steep, and there was no real floor, just rafters. One small area near the top of the stairs had some plywood laid out across it, with a bunch of old cardboard boxes stacked on top of the wood.
"Sam's gonna kill himself up there," Dean said, frowning. "Or break his legs."
Mrs. L shook her head, like she thought Sam breaking every bone in his body was no big deal. She pulled a keyring out of her jeans pocket and unlocked the attic door, opened it and started climbing the stairs.
"We're not supposed to go up there," Dean called after her. "We could get killed."
Maybe she wanted to kill both of them. Him and Sam.
Maybe she was gonna play Belloq, and lure him and Sammy to their deaths.
"Come take a look," she said from somewhere up there.
With his hat firmly in place, Sam squirmed past Dean and headed up the stairs. Dean reached for him to pull him back, but Sam slipped away and kept climbing. When Sam got to the top, he yelled out "WOW!" like he'd walked into the K-Mart toy department at Christmas time or something. "Dean! Hey, Dean!" he called. "You gotta come up here! You gotta come up here now!"
It's an evil death trap, Dean thought.
Dad would end up being kind of pissed, he figured - when he came back from the job and found out that Sam (and maybe Dean, too) had been murdered up in the attic and maybe turned into ghosts. It'd be like some Stephen King story, if Mrs. L (who everybody thought was an extremely cool person) turned out to be a homicidal maniac killer who lured little boys up into the attic and stabbed them to death with a giant butcher knife, or maybe hit them over the head and locked up their bodies in a trunk. Or some old cardboard box.
Nobody would find them until they started to smell bad, like that dead cat under the trailer Dean and Dad and Sam had stayed in for a while last summer.
"DEAN!" Sam shrieked.
Indy wouldn't chicken out, Dean thought. He fought all kinds of stuff: Nazis and crazy natives with poison darts and snakes and the spirits that came up out of the Ark.
Those were some serious dangers, though.
This was an attic.
"DEAN!"
He sighed as he started to climb the stairs. What Sam was all worked up about, he had no idea; even Sam wasn't dumb enough to get excited over half a dozen cardboard boxes and a sheet of plywood. Back when he was a baby, yeah - baby Sam had thought paper cups were something to scream about. But not now.
"I'm comin'," he muttered as he climbed.
It took a minute to climb high enough to see what was up there.
"Whoa," he whispered.
The whole attic had a floor now, big sheets of plywood all nailed safely into place, and there was a railing made of 2x4's built around the top of the staircase, to keep people from falling and killing themselves on the stairs. Pastor Jim had needed to lay down that floor, Dean figured, because the whole attic was full of stuff. Boxes and bags and suitcases and a big black trunk, cardboard boxes and an old dresser, a whole bunch of umbrellas tied together with string, a clothes rack full of clothes. It was a ton of stuff.
"Someone from the church passed away," Mrs. L explained. "Their family emptied out the house, and they gave Pastor all of this to…do whatever he likes with it. We're going to go through it for the rummage sale in the fall, and this was the only place to put it in the meantime."
"It's some dead guy's stuff?" Dean said skeptically.
"Some of it's very old."
"Stuff in the museum is old," Sam said. "The people that used to have it are all dead."
"Very true, Dr. Jones," Mrs. L told him.
"Is there artifacts up here, then?"
"That could well be. Why don't you start searching? But - two rules, okay?" Mrs. L pointed off into a corner. "There are mousetraps near the walls. Stay away from those. And no running. Nobody's chasing you with guns up here."
In other words, this was gonna be a bunch of digging around in old boxes.
"Archaeology," Mrs. L said, as if she knew what Dean was thinking. "You have to find the thing before the bad guys can come take it away from you."
A pit full of snakes was starting to seem like a better idea.
"If we find something good, can we keep it?" Sam asked.
"We'll ask Pastor," Mrs. L replied. "If it's a gigantic stack of cash, probably not."
"There's cash up here?" Dean frowned.
She chuckled at him and reached out to ruffle his hair with her fingers. "You know what? You can be the senior Dr. Jones," she suggested. "Indy's dad? He's got all the best lines."
Then she went back downstairs.
"This is awesome," Sam said. It seemed like he was talking more to himself than to Dean. At least it was in English.
"It's a bunch of old junk."
"Maybe there's a hat for you. Like Indy's dad's hat."
Indy's dad's hat was not cool, Dean thought crossly. It was an old beat-up thing that sat on Indy's dad's head like a bucket. Scowling, he sat cross-legged on the floor near the stairs and watched Sam pull out the drawers of the old dresser.
"This!" Sam said, holding up an item. "Look. This is good."
"For what?"
"It's solid gold."
"It's an ashtray, Sam."
"Gold," Sam insisted.
"Brass."
"What's that?"
"Not gold."
"It could be gold."
"It could be brass."
"How do you know?"
"Uncle Bobby showed me. Brass and bronze and copper. They all look different."
"Is it like silver?"
"It's like BRASS, you dumbass."
Sam's lower lip shot out like it was mounted on a spring. "I can't help it if I don't know," he muttered, shoving the ashtray back into the drawer where he'd found it. "I think you're just like Indy's dad. You're an old grouchy turdhead and you want to wreck everything just 'cause I wanted my own turn. You suck and I hate you. When Dad comes back, I'm gonna tell him he should leave you someplace. Just like that time you went in the bathroom and Dad didn't know so he started to drive away and leave you there."
"You say anything to Dad and I'll clock you one."
"Better NOT."
"You're a whiny crybaby."
"Am NOT."
"GENTLEMEN," Mrs. L said from someplace downstairs.
"I hate you," Sam whispered. "You suck."
He didn't mean Mrs. L, of course. Mrs. L was Sam's go-to woman, every minute they were at Pastor Jim's.
Dean sighed. That was about all he could do, most days; he would have much preferred to haul off and knock Sam right on his stupid butt, but all that generally accomplished was to start Sam screaming and howling like somebody had cut off his arms. Shouldn't have to sit here with him, Dean thought. Should be able to go outside and go where I want. Ride a bike or something. Go to the movies or the comics store.
But I gotta freakin' BABYSIT.
He'd broached the subject with Dad, a couple of times. Suggested that Mrs. L could keep an eye on Sam.
"Not her job," Dad said.
Not mine either.
For a while, Sam went through the dresser drawers without saying anything, either in English or in his dumb baby-language. He pulled out a few items for closer examination, but ended up tucking each one back in where he'd found it. He was looking for toys, Dean supposed, though it should have occurred to him that maybe somebody old enough to die wouldn't have any toys.
Above their heads, the pouring rain hammered against the roof. The sound was constant enough that it began to make Dean sleepy, made his eyes begin to drift shut.
"How come he's gotta go away all the time?" Sam muttered.
"What?"
"Dad."
"I told you. He's working."
"Other people's dads, they work in the day and come home at night. How come Dad can't do that?"
"Because."
"He should get a regular job."
"He can't. He does special work. He works mostly at night. I told you."
Sam's hands were both buried in one of the dresser drawers. He didn't pull them out when he half-turned and said to Dean, almost without moving his lips, "When you get big and you gotta work, are you gonna go away?"
It wasn't mean.
It wasn't I want you to go far away and not come back.
Sam seemed kind of sad, the way he generally did when they had to move and leave a bunch of stuff behind - after he'd finished with all the complaining and whining and stomping his feet that always came first.
"I don't know," Dean said.
"You don't gotta do what Dad does. You could get a job at McDonald's or something."
"Like I'd want to do that in a million years."
"It's a good job," Sam said firmly. "You could give people food. And besides, my friend Davey, his brother works at McDonald's and he said they can eat for free. That would be good, if you could eat for free. You could get free fries and stuff."
"And you smell like grease."
"I don't care if you smell like grease."
"Girls do."
"We don't got any girls," Sam said, as if he thought Dean was so stupid he hadn't noticed. "If we're here, you can take a shower before Mrs. L comes over."
"I'm not gonna work in McDonald's, Sam."
Sam made a point of circling around behind the dresser, where he disappeared from sight amongst all the cardboard boxes. A moment later Dean could hear (and see, a little bit) one of the boxes sliding across the plywood floor.
"Don't make a mess," Dean said.
Whoever this old person had been, he thought, they certainly had a lot of stuff. And maybe this wasn't even all of it. There wasn't any furniture here, except for the dresser and a chair. Maybe they'd had a car, and that certainly wasn't up here.
That made him think of all the old, wrecked cars at Uncle Bobby's.
If this old person had had a ton of stuff, Uncle Bobby had about ten tons.
Over behind the dresser, Sammy started humming to himself, another thing he liked to do (besides talking in his not-English baby language) when he was p.o.'ed about something. It sounded like he was moving things around, maybe taking them out of the box and piling them up on the floor. Bunch of old junk, Dean thought.
"I'm eleven," he said. "I'm not goin' anywhere."
Sam didn't answer him.
"Don't be a jerk about this, Sam."
Nothing.
After a while, for lack of anything better to do (since he couldn't drive, and it was pouring outside, and Pastor Jim had a really cheap kind of cable on his TV that didn't show anything good in the afternoon), Dean crab-walked over to one of the boxes, pulled it up close to him, and opened the flaps. It didn't hold anything interesting, just a bunch of Reader's Digest Condensed Books, a big world atlas, and some National Geographics, so he pushed it away and chose another one.
"Hey, Sam," he said as he peered down into it.
There was a big glass jar of marbles, wrapped in an old sweater so it wouldn't break. All colors, some regular-sized, some jumbos, some cat's eye and some fancy.
"Hey, doofus," he said, because Sam still hadn't answered him.
He got up from the floor carefully, with the jar held tight to his chest, and walked around behind the old dresser. Sam was sitting on the floor back there, with some old clothes and some other junk in his lap.
"I don't like you," Sam said without looking up. "I don't even know if you're here."
"Okay, I'll tell Pastor Jim you don't want these."
Sam glanced up.
He did a lousy job of pretending he wasn't interested. He went back to poking around in his box of stuff, but his lips had disappeared inside his mouth.
"You want 'em, or not?" Dean asked.
"No."
"Liar."
"Go away."
"Suit yourself."
Rather than bother taunting Sam, Dean went back to his original spot and sat down, gently placing the glass jar in a spot where the light would shine right onto it. It was a little dusty, so Dean took the sweater that had been wrapped around it and polished it clean. A few of the marbles looked pretty old, he noticed as he wiped. He'd seen some antique ones before, at a yard sale in some town he and Sammy and Dad had stayed in. When he'd picked one up, the man who owned them explained that they'd belonged to his grandfather, when his grandfather was a little boy.
Maybe the person who had died had collected these when he was little.
Like Sammy's age, for instance.
And if Sammy took them and kept them until he was real old - they'd be like ancient treasure.
Something Indy might be interested in.
Over behind the dresser, Sam started talking. English this time, not his goofy baby language, but it was still weird, because it sounded like he was talking to somebody. After a minute he realized Sam was reciting the dialogue from Raiders, as if he was Indy and there was a bunch of people sitting there with him.
You little freak, Dean thought, and sighed.
Mrs. L came back up after a while. "Find anything good?" she asked, and before Dean could answer her, she spotted the jar of marbles and crouched down beside it. "Hey, these are nice," she said, lifting the jar so she could take a closer look. "Good one."
"Are they expensive?" Dean asked.
"Don't know."
It didn't much matter, Dean thought. Dad wouldn't let them lug something like that around, something that could get broken so easily. They could switch the marbles into something that wouldn't break, like a bag, or a box, but it'd end up getting left behind someplace.
Everything ended up getting left behind someplace.
Mrs. L noticed the look on his face. She did that a lot. "Got some cookies left downstairs," she said.
"I'm not hungry."
"Disappointed?"
"It's just a bunch of old stuff."
"Well, that's true. But did you know, the man this all belonged to fought in World War One? Somewhere in here are things he brought back from Europe. His family kept some of it, but they said there's more. Some fancy coins, and some postcards, and I think some war souvenirs."
Old junk, Dean thought.
She reached over and rested her hand on the back of his neck. Rubbed it a little bit. "Your dad'll be back soon, I'm sure. Tomorrow, maybe the day after. And Pastor said he'll be back after dinner. Maybe we can talk him into a matinee of The Last Crusade over the weekend. You think? It's still playing over at the mall."
"Whatever," Dean murmured.
"We'll ask Jim when he gets back. He's a soft touch for Indy, you know."
She was smiling as she got up and walked around behind the dresser to find Sam. "Hey, Dr. Jones," she said.
"Mine," Sam said softly, but stubbornly, from back there.
"Look at that," Mrs. L replied. "You found the ruby chalice."
"The what?"
"Dean," she said. "Come look."
He stalled just long enough to show Sam that he wasn't in any big rush to get over there. When he got there, Sam had his hands wrapped around something Dean could barely see. He had to squash in beside Mrs. L to get a better look.
It was an old cranberry-colored glass with a stem on it, thicker than the stems on the wine glasses Pastor Jim had in the breakfront downstairs. The base was gold, as was the rim of the cup, and there were gold designs on the sides.
"The ruby chalice," Mrs. L said. "It's been missing for hundreds of years."
Dean raised an eyebrow at her.
"It belonged to King Louis the First of France," she went on. "He used it to make a toast at every special occasion. Birthdays. Weddings. Anniversaries. Each time his troops won a battle. His servants would pour his special wine into this very glass, and he would drink from it. But one day, when he was going to celebrate the wedding of his daughter to the King of Spain, he realized his beautiful ruby chalice was missing. His enemies had stolen it from the palace, and it was never seen again. Until this very day, when the celebrated Dr. Henry Jones, Jr. unearthed it from among a group of less important artifacts and brought it to light once again."
You are so full of crap, Dean thought.
"Bravo, Dr. Jones," Mrs. L said to Sam.
Sam gave his brother a look that said You're gonna have to pry this out of my cold, dead hands.
Then he stuck his tongue out.
"Remarkable!" Mrs. L cheered, and for a moment Dean thought she meant Sam's stupid tongue. "In the same dig, Dr. Jones's father, the celebrated Dr. Henry Walton Jones, Sr., located the missing Gemstones of Pharaoh Totohep, last seen during a raid on the Cairo Museum during the closing days of World War One. Gentlemen, we should notify the press. And the Smithsonian Museum. This calls for cookies and milk."
She went on cheering as she made her way down the steep stairs to Pastor Jim's upstairs hallway.
"It's a dumb old glass," Sam mumbled after she was gone.
"Gold," Dean said.
"It's not. It's like paint or something."
Dean sat down in the narrow space between Sam and the pile of boxes. To his surprise, Sam let him take the glass into his hands to look at it.
The attic wasn't that cold, but Sammy felt really warm, pressed up against Dean's right side.
"You can probably drink your milk out of it," Dean suggested. "Dad'll probably make us leave it here, but you can use it when we come back."
Sam's head drooped a little, as if he'd lost the energy he needed to hold it up.
"Gonna lose your hat," Dean told him.
Sam peered at him from underneath the brim. This time just his lower lip was gone, held captive between his teeth.
"I'm not going anywhere," Dean said. "I promise."
For a minute, Sam sat there silently, his hands still wrapped gently around the old glass cup. Then he set it down on the plywood floor between his legs, reached up and lifted the hat off his head, and passed it to Dean.
"You can have a turn now," he said.
* * * * *
"You SUCK!" Sam wailed. "Why do YOU always gotta be Indy?"
CHARACTERS: Dean (age 10), Sam (age 6), Mrs. Lundquist (OC - Pastor Jim's housekeeper)
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 3931 words
INDIANA JONES AND THE SEARCH FOR THE RUBY CHALICE
By Carol Davis
"You SUCK!" Sam wailed. "Why do YOU always gotta be Indy?"
"Because I'm older," Dean told him.
"No FAIR! Not my fault I'm littler. I'm TELLIN."
And before Dean could stop him, Sammy had run out of the bedroom and went pounding down the stairs. By the time Dean caught up with him - Dean's legs were longer, and he could have easily outrun Sam, but rolling his eyes and groaning used up some valuable time - Sam was in the kitchen, howling at Mrs. Lundquist.
"He don't play FAIR! Mrs. L! I wanna be Indy and he won't NEVER let me."
For an adult, Mrs. Lundquist was pretty cool. Instead of telling them to knock it the hell off, like Dad would have done, or sitting them down for a "talk" that probably would've had something to do with being kind to others, like Jesus, like Pastor Jim would have done, Mrs. L stopped washing the lunch dishes, dried her hands off on a towel, and stood looking at them with her arms folded across her chest and her butt resting against the edge of the sink.
"I'm the oldest," Dean tried.
"Well, technically, I'm the oldest," Mrs. L said. "So I call dibs."
Sam's mouth dropped open. "You're a lady. You can't be Indy."
"So…what? You figure I should be Marion?"
"Nooooo. Then there'd be kissing."
"Not necessarily."
"Nobody ain't fair around here," Sam scowled, then turned his back on the kitchen and went stomping into the living room, where he flopped down on the floor and seemed to be thinking about crawling under the coffee table. He was muttering things that didn't make sense. For all Dean knew, it was some language Sam had made up so he could confuse people. When he turned see how Mrs. L was reacting, she looked like she was trying not to laugh.
"I told him he could be Sallah," Dean sighed. "Or Belloq. He can be whoever he wants."
"Except Indy."
"The hat doesn't fit him."
Mrs. L reached out and lifted up the brim of the hat Dean was wearing, one he'd pulled out of a box of rummage sale stuff on his and Dad's and Sammy's last visit to Pastor Jim's. It wasn't exactly like Indy's - it was kind of a different color - but it was close enough.
"Doesn't quite fit you, either, sport," she said.
"He doesn't know how to be Indy the right way."
"And what way is that?"
It used to be that Sam would do anything Dean said. Anything at all, pretty much. But after Sam had started first grade, he started arguing with everything. Wanting his turn. They taught him that in school, he said: that everyone had to get their turn.
They were teaching some seriously dumb crap in that school, Dean figured.
"I don't want to be the bad guy," he muttered.
"You want to be the hero."
"Yeah."
"Look at it this way: you can play the hero, or you can be the hero."
"I don't know what you mean."
"Oh, I think you do."
"The hat falls off him, Mrs. L."
She wrapped a t-shirt around the top of Sam's head, tied it in a knot, and set the hat on top of it. It still didn't fit - it was so big it looked seriously dumb - but it didn't come down over Sam's eyes, or fall off.
"I need a gun," Sam said. "Indy shoots the bad guys."
Mrs. L shook her head. "Sorry, Dr. Jones. No firearms for you. You can be treasure-hunting Indy."
"I can?"
"No Nazis in sight."
"We goin' in the Wella the Souls?"
"Bad idea. Full of snakes, remember?"
"I can fight snakes. I can fight a million snakes."
Sam was looking at the basement door. There weren't any snakes down there - the trouble was, there wasn't anything down there, except the washer and dryer, an old ping-pong table with a broken leg, and the hot water heater.
Maybe the whole thing was a dumb idea, Dean thought; it was pouring rain outside, so the only place they'd be able to treasure hunt was their bedroom.
"Got an idea," Mrs. L said.
She led the boys upstairs, to the door at the end of the hall, which Pastor Jim always kept locked.
"The attic?" Sam crowed. "We can go up in the attic?"
They'd never been up in Pastor Jim's attic. Dean had peeked up there once, when Pastor Jim had gone up to find something, and discovered that the stairs leading up there were really steep, and there was no real floor, just rafters. One small area near the top of the stairs had some plywood laid out across it, with a bunch of old cardboard boxes stacked on top of the wood.
"Sam's gonna kill himself up there," Dean said, frowning. "Or break his legs."
Mrs. L shook her head, like she thought Sam breaking every bone in his body was no big deal. She pulled a keyring out of her jeans pocket and unlocked the attic door, opened it and started climbing the stairs.
"We're not supposed to go up there," Dean called after her. "We could get killed."
Maybe she wanted to kill both of them. Him and Sam.
Maybe she was gonna play Belloq, and lure him and Sammy to their deaths.
"Come take a look," she said from somewhere up there.
With his hat firmly in place, Sam squirmed past Dean and headed up the stairs. Dean reached for him to pull him back, but Sam slipped away and kept climbing. When Sam got to the top, he yelled out "WOW!" like he'd walked into the K-Mart toy department at Christmas time or something. "Dean! Hey, Dean!" he called. "You gotta come up here! You gotta come up here now!"
It's an evil death trap, Dean thought.
Dad would end up being kind of pissed, he figured - when he came back from the job and found out that Sam (and maybe Dean, too) had been murdered up in the attic and maybe turned into ghosts. It'd be like some Stephen King story, if Mrs. L (who everybody thought was an extremely cool person) turned out to be a homicidal maniac killer who lured little boys up into the attic and stabbed them to death with a giant butcher knife, or maybe hit them over the head and locked up their bodies in a trunk. Or some old cardboard box.
Nobody would find them until they started to smell bad, like that dead cat under the trailer Dean and Dad and Sam had stayed in for a while last summer.
"DEAN!" Sam shrieked.
Indy wouldn't chicken out, Dean thought. He fought all kinds of stuff: Nazis and crazy natives with poison darts and snakes and the spirits that came up out of the Ark.
Those were some serious dangers, though.
This was an attic.
"DEAN!"
He sighed as he started to climb the stairs. What Sam was all worked up about, he had no idea; even Sam wasn't dumb enough to get excited over half a dozen cardboard boxes and a sheet of plywood. Back when he was a baby, yeah - baby Sam had thought paper cups were something to scream about. But not now.
"I'm comin'," he muttered as he climbed.
It took a minute to climb high enough to see what was up there.
"Whoa," he whispered.
The whole attic had a floor now, big sheets of plywood all nailed safely into place, and there was a railing made of 2x4's built around the top of the staircase, to keep people from falling and killing themselves on the stairs. Pastor Jim had needed to lay down that floor, Dean figured, because the whole attic was full of stuff. Boxes and bags and suitcases and a big black trunk, cardboard boxes and an old dresser, a whole bunch of umbrellas tied together with string, a clothes rack full of clothes. It was a ton of stuff.
"Someone from the church passed away," Mrs. L explained. "Their family emptied out the house, and they gave Pastor all of this to…do whatever he likes with it. We're going to go through it for the rummage sale in the fall, and this was the only place to put it in the meantime."
"It's some dead guy's stuff?" Dean said skeptically.
"Some of it's very old."
"Stuff in the museum is old," Sam said. "The people that used to have it are all dead."
"Very true, Dr. Jones," Mrs. L told him.
"Is there artifacts up here, then?"
"That could well be. Why don't you start searching? But - two rules, okay?" Mrs. L pointed off into a corner. "There are mousetraps near the walls. Stay away from those. And no running. Nobody's chasing you with guns up here."
In other words, this was gonna be a bunch of digging around in old boxes.
"Archaeology," Mrs. L said, as if she knew what Dean was thinking. "You have to find the thing before the bad guys can come take it away from you."
A pit full of snakes was starting to seem like a better idea.
"If we find something good, can we keep it?" Sam asked.
"We'll ask Pastor," Mrs. L replied. "If it's a gigantic stack of cash, probably not."
"There's cash up here?" Dean frowned.
She chuckled at him and reached out to ruffle his hair with her fingers. "You know what? You can be the senior Dr. Jones," she suggested. "Indy's dad? He's got all the best lines."
Then she went back downstairs.
"This is awesome," Sam said. It seemed like he was talking more to himself than to Dean. At least it was in English.
"It's a bunch of old junk."
"Maybe there's a hat for you. Like Indy's dad's hat."
Indy's dad's hat was not cool, Dean thought crossly. It was an old beat-up thing that sat on Indy's dad's head like a bucket. Scowling, he sat cross-legged on the floor near the stairs and watched Sam pull out the drawers of the old dresser.
"This!" Sam said, holding up an item. "Look. This is good."
"For what?"
"It's solid gold."
"It's an ashtray, Sam."
"Gold," Sam insisted.
"Brass."
"What's that?"
"Not gold."
"It could be gold."
"It could be brass."
"How do you know?"
"Uncle Bobby showed me. Brass and bronze and copper. They all look different."
"Is it like silver?"
"It's like BRASS, you dumbass."
Sam's lower lip shot out like it was mounted on a spring. "I can't help it if I don't know," he muttered, shoving the ashtray back into the drawer where he'd found it. "I think you're just like Indy's dad. You're an old grouchy turdhead and you want to wreck everything just 'cause I wanted my own turn. You suck and I hate you. When Dad comes back, I'm gonna tell him he should leave you someplace. Just like that time you went in the bathroom and Dad didn't know so he started to drive away and leave you there."
"You say anything to Dad and I'll clock you one."
"Better NOT."
"You're a whiny crybaby."
"Am NOT."
"GENTLEMEN," Mrs. L said from someplace downstairs.
"I hate you," Sam whispered. "You suck."
He didn't mean Mrs. L, of course. Mrs. L was Sam's go-to woman, every minute they were at Pastor Jim's.
Dean sighed. That was about all he could do, most days; he would have much preferred to haul off and knock Sam right on his stupid butt, but all that generally accomplished was to start Sam screaming and howling like somebody had cut off his arms. Shouldn't have to sit here with him, Dean thought. Should be able to go outside and go where I want. Ride a bike or something. Go to the movies or the comics store.
But I gotta freakin' BABYSIT.
He'd broached the subject with Dad, a couple of times. Suggested that Mrs. L could keep an eye on Sam.
"Not her job," Dad said.
Not mine either.
For a while, Sam went through the dresser drawers without saying anything, either in English or in his dumb baby-language. He pulled out a few items for closer examination, but ended up tucking each one back in where he'd found it. He was looking for toys, Dean supposed, though it should have occurred to him that maybe somebody old enough to die wouldn't have any toys.
Above their heads, the pouring rain hammered against the roof. The sound was constant enough that it began to make Dean sleepy, made his eyes begin to drift shut.
"How come he's gotta go away all the time?" Sam muttered.
"What?"
"Dad."
"I told you. He's working."
"Other people's dads, they work in the day and come home at night. How come Dad can't do that?"
"Because."
"He should get a regular job."
"He can't. He does special work. He works mostly at night. I told you."
Sam's hands were both buried in one of the dresser drawers. He didn't pull them out when he half-turned and said to Dean, almost without moving his lips, "When you get big and you gotta work, are you gonna go away?"
It wasn't mean.
It wasn't I want you to go far away and not come back.
Sam seemed kind of sad, the way he generally did when they had to move and leave a bunch of stuff behind - after he'd finished with all the complaining and whining and stomping his feet that always came first.
"I don't know," Dean said.
"You don't gotta do what Dad does. You could get a job at McDonald's or something."
"Like I'd want to do that in a million years."
"It's a good job," Sam said firmly. "You could give people food. And besides, my friend Davey, his brother works at McDonald's and he said they can eat for free. That would be good, if you could eat for free. You could get free fries and stuff."
"And you smell like grease."
"I don't care if you smell like grease."
"Girls do."
"We don't got any girls," Sam said, as if he thought Dean was so stupid he hadn't noticed. "If we're here, you can take a shower before Mrs. L comes over."
"I'm not gonna work in McDonald's, Sam."
Sam made a point of circling around behind the dresser, where he disappeared from sight amongst all the cardboard boxes. A moment later Dean could hear (and see, a little bit) one of the boxes sliding across the plywood floor.
"Don't make a mess," Dean said.
Whoever this old person had been, he thought, they certainly had a lot of stuff. And maybe this wasn't even all of it. There wasn't any furniture here, except for the dresser and a chair. Maybe they'd had a car, and that certainly wasn't up here.
That made him think of all the old, wrecked cars at Uncle Bobby's.
If this old person had had a ton of stuff, Uncle Bobby had about ten tons.
Over behind the dresser, Sammy started humming to himself, another thing he liked to do (besides talking in his not-English baby language) when he was p.o.'ed about something. It sounded like he was moving things around, maybe taking them out of the box and piling them up on the floor. Bunch of old junk, Dean thought.
"I'm eleven," he said. "I'm not goin' anywhere."
Sam didn't answer him.
"Don't be a jerk about this, Sam."
Nothing.
After a while, for lack of anything better to do (since he couldn't drive, and it was pouring outside, and Pastor Jim had a really cheap kind of cable on his TV that didn't show anything good in the afternoon), Dean crab-walked over to one of the boxes, pulled it up close to him, and opened the flaps. It didn't hold anything interesting, just a bunch of Reader's Digest Condensed Books, a big world atlas, and some National Geographics, so he pushed it away and chose another one.
"Hey, Sam," he said as he peered down into it.
There was a big glass jar of marbles, wrapped in an old sweater so it wouldn't break. All colors, some regular-sized, some jumbos, some cat's eye and some fancy.
"Hey, doofus," he said, because Sam still hadn't answered him.
He got up from the floor carefully, with the jar held tight to his chest, and walked around behind the old dresser. Sam was sitting on the floor back there, with some old clothes and some other junk in his lap.
"I don't like you," Sam said without looking up. "I don't even know if you're here."
"Okay, I'll tell Pastor Jim you don't want these."
Sam glanced up.
He did a lousy job of pretending he wasn't interested. He went back to poking around in his box of stuff, but his lips had disappeared inside his mouth.
"You want 'em, or not?" Dean asked.
"No."
"Liar."
"Go away."
"Suit yourself."
Rather than bother taunting Sam, Dean went back to his original spot and sat down, gently placing the glass jar in a spot where the light would shine right onto it. It was a little dusty, so Dean took the sweater that had been wrapped around it and polished it clean. A few of the marbles looked pretty old, he noticed as he wiped. He'd seen some antique ones before, at a yard sale in some town he and Sammy and Dad had stayed in. When he'd picked one up, the man who owned them explained that they'd belonged to his grandfather, when his grandfather was a little boy.
Maybe the person who had died had collected these when he was little.
Like Sammy's age, for instance.
And if Sammy took them and kept them until he was real old - they'd be like ancient treasure.
Something Indy might be interested in.
Over behind the dresser, Sam started talking. English this time, not his goofy baby language, but it was still weird, because it sounded like he was talking to somebody. After a minute he realized Sam was reciting the dialogue from Raiders, as if he was Indy and there was a bunch of people sitting there with him.
You little freak, Dean thought, and sighed.
Mrs. L came back up after a while. "Find anything good?" she asked, and before Dean could answer her, she spotted the jar of marbles and crouched down beside it. "Hey, these are nice," she said, lifting the jar so she could take a closer look. "Good one."
"Are they expensive?" Dean asked.
"Don't know."
It didn't much matter, Dean thought. Dad wouldn't let them lug something like that around, something that could get broken so easily. They could switch the marbles into something that wouldn't break, like a bag, or a box, but it'd end up getting left behind someplace.
Everything ended up getting left behind someplace.
Mrs. L noticed the look on his face. She did that a lot. "Got some cookies left downstairs," she said.
"I'm not hungry."
"Disappointed?"
"It's just a bunch of old stuff."
"Well, that's true. But did you know, the man this all belonged to fought in World War One? Somewhere in here are things he brought back from Europe. His family kept some of it, but they said there's more. Some fancy coins, and some postcards, and I think some war souvenirs."
Old junk, Dean thought.
She reached over and rested her hand on the back of his neck. Rubbed it a little bit. "Your dad'll be back soon, I'm sure. Tomorrow, maybe the day after. And Pastor said he'll be back after dinner. Maybe we can talk him into a matinee of The Last Crusade over the weekend. You think? It's still playing over at the mall."
"Whatever," Dean murmured.
"We'll ask Jim when he gets back. He's a soft touch for Indy, you know."
She was smiling as she got up and walked around behind the dresser to find Sam. "Hey, Dr. Jones," she said.
"Mine," Sam said softly, but stubbornly, from back there.
"Look at that," Mrs. L replied. "You found the ruby chalice."
"The what?"
"Dean," she said. "Come look."
He stalled just long enough to show Sam that he wasn't in any big rush to get over there. When he got there, Sam had his hands wrapped around something Dean could barely see. He had to squash in beside Mrs. L to get a better look.
It was an old cranberry-colored glass with a stem on it, thicker than the stems on the wine glasses Pastor Jim had in the breakfront downstairs. The base was gold, as was the rim of the cup, and there were gold designs on the sides.
"The ruby chalice," Mrs. L said. "It's been missing for hundreds of years."
Dean raised an eyebrow at her.
"It belonged to King Louis the First of France," she went on. "He used it to make a toast at every special occasion. Birthdays. Weddings. Anniversaries. Each time his troops won a battle. His servants would pour his special wine into this very glass, and he would drink from it. But one day, when he was going to celebrate the wedding of his daughter to the King of Spain, he realized his beautiful ruby chalice was missing. His enemies had stolen it from the palace, and it was never seen again. Until this very day, when the celebrated Dr. Henry Jones, Jr. unearthed it from among a group of less important artifacts and brought it to light once again."
You are so full of crap, Dean thought.
"Bravo, Dr. Jones," Mrs. L said to Sam.
Sam gave his brother a look that said You're gonna have to pry this out of my cold, dead hands.
Then he stuck his tongue out.
"Remarkable!" Mrs. L cheered, and for a moment Dean thought she meant Sam's stupid tongue. "In the same dig, Dr. Jones's father, the celebrated Dr. Henry Walton Jones, Sr., located the missing Gemstones of Pharaoh Totohep, last seen during a raid on the Cairo Museum during the closing days of World War One. Gentlemen, we should notify the press. And the Smithsonian Museum. This calls for cookies and milk."
She went on cheering as she made her way down the steep stairs to Pastor Jim's upstairs hallway.
"It's a dumb old glass," Sam mumbled after she was gone.
"Gold," Dean said.
"It's not. It's like paint or something."
Dean sat down in the narrow space between Sam and the pile of boxes. To his surprise, Sam let him take the glass into his hands to look at it.
The attic wasn't that cold, but Sammy felt really warm, pressed up against Dean's right side.
"You can probably drink your milk out of it," Dean suggested. "Dad'll probably make us leave it here, but you can use it when we come back."
Sam's head drooped a little, as if he'd lost the energy he needed to hold it up.
"Gonna lose your hat," Dean told him.
Sam peered at him from underneath the brim. This time just his lower lip was gone, held captive between his teeth.
"I'm not going anywhere," Dean said. "I promise."
For a minute, Sam sat there silently, his hands still wrapped gently around the old glass cup. Then he set it down on the plywood floor between his legs, reached up and lifted the hat off his head, and passed it to Dean.
"You can have a turn now," he said.
* * * * *