SPN FIC - Historical Significance
It's just a simple case -- a haunted house, a salt-and-burn -- in a place they've been before. But even the simplest of hunts can bring back memories: of being alone together, a nightmare, and the ghost of Grover Cleveland.
"You remember, don't you?" Dean asked around a burger the size of a football.
"I have to," Sam told him. "You've made it your life's mission to make sure I never forget."
CHARACTERS: Sam and Dean
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 1443 words
HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE
By Carol Davis
"You remember, don't you?" Dean asked around a burger the size of a football.
"I have to," Sam told him. "You've made it your life's mission to make sure I never forget."
Dean fell silent for a minute - at least, comparatively silent; the people sitting at the other end of the little tavern's patio could undoubtedly hear his chewing and gulping and smacking as well as Sam could. Dean swallowed his mouthful of burger, set the remains of the sandwich down on his plate and scooped up half a dozen fries, all the while maintaining a soft, off-key hum that attested to the quality of his lunch.
"You gotta admit," he went on, swirling his fries through a puddle of ketchup, "it's mighty friggin' entertaining."
"Not to me, it's not."
"Sammy. You name me one other kid who ever woke up screaming in the night, claiming he was being haunted by - by -"
Sam let out a sigh.
"By -"
Sam raised an eyebrow.
"By that guy named after a damn Muppet."
"That's the best you can come up with."
"You know who I mean."
"Yes, Dean. I know who you mean. I was there. Grover Cleveland. Twenty-second and twenty-fourth President of the United States."
"See? You knew who I meant."
"Because I paid attention in school."
"Oh, for crying out loud. Like it matters. You were, what? Twelve years old? Sitting there in bed carrying on like a girl, saying Grover friggin' Cleveland was after you. With" - and Dean beamed so ridiculously, there might as well have been canary feathers drifting out of his mouth instead of a blend of ketchup and mayo - "Abe Lincoln. And -"
"Both Roosevelts," Sam sighed.
"And?"
"Martin Van Buren."
"See? See? How is that not funny? How is that ever not funny? Martin Van Buren?"
"I was ten," Sam sputtered. "It was the summer after we - after I read Dad's journal. And we were what, ten blocks from the State Capitol, one of the most haunted buildings in the whole state. Lincoln's body laid there in state for two days, and the other guys were all governors here. Those men walked these streets, Dean. They were real."
"More real than the stuff we were hunting?"
"Displacement," Sam said.
"What?"
"I was ten years old, and I'd found out all of a sudden that there were monsters out there in the dark - a lot of them. I couldn't be freaked out by the things Dad was hunting. It was too much for me to handle. So I was scared of dead presidents."
"And that's better?"
There was something about that particular night that Dean hadn't seen fit to mention: the fact that he'd soothed Sam back to sleep with a promise to stay awake all night, guarding him from whatever might find its way into the room. And Dean had been true to his word. When Sam struggled awake the next morning, Dean was sitting on his bed, fully dressed, reading a comic book.
But of course, that part of it wasn't funny.
"It was better at the time," Sam said.
Across the street, casting a shadow onto the tavern's "al fresco dining" section, the Winchesters, and their lunch, was a three-story brick house currently owned by a family named Granger. A small brass plate near the front door marked its date of construction: 1874, a time when people had traveled these streets on foot, or by horse and buggy; when women wore enormous hoop skirts and corsets and prim little bonnets, and men sported full beards and stovepipe hats; when most families' chief sources of entertainment were conversation, simple card games, and singing around the piano while someone played an old hymn.
The house was haunted, according to the Grangers - and likely not by any of the former presidents who had occupied Sam's dreams.
"You know what's remarkable to me?" Sam asked his brother.
"That that Wonder Woman pilot went into the dumper?"
"No, jackass. That there's been something here, in this place - a settlement, a town, a city - for five whole centuries. Think about it, man. All that history. All the people who've come and gone through this place."
He fully expected Dean to offer another quip. Hell, it wouldn't have surprised him if Dean had decided to paint the table with ketchup, or stick French fries up his nose. Instead, Dean became quietly pensive, looking past the other diners at the row of old houses across the narrow street. Sam was pretty sure he wasn't thinking about women in hoop skirts, or men in stovepipe hats riding horses down the hill; he would have made a joke about that.
It didn't take much of a leap of imagination to guess what Dean was thinking about.
"Simple salt and burn, man," Sam said quietly. "We figure out who it is that's been whispering in the walls, we torch 'em, and we're out of here."
"Yeah," Dean murmured, still staring across the street.
The last time they'd been here, they'd simply been along for the ride, left to occupy themselves in yet another seedy motel room while Dad tracked down the cause of a couple of mysterious deaths.
They'd had nothing to assure them that Dad wouldn't end up being the next victim.
TV, card games, magazines, burgers and fries and the entire spectrum of Hostess snack cakes. They should have been bored out of their minds - and for most of the four days they'd spent here in town, they were. But Sam remembered all too well waking up pale and trembling, slick with sweat.
He also remembered that he hadn't been the only one who was scared.
"Remember?" he prompted his brother. "When Dad finished the job, he took us down to the Capitol, and we spent the whole afternoon roaming around. He claimed he wanted to find out if there were any real spirits there. And you got in trouble with that security guard for hanging over the edge of a balcony."
Shouldn't do that, he thought. Remind him of Dad. He won't eat any more of his lunch. He'll be in a funk all day.
But when he looked over at Dean, there was a small but very genuine smile taking shape on his brother's lips.
"Those were some good times, huh, Sammy?" Dean asked.
Everything's relative, Sam thought, but he said, "Yeah. They were."
"When we're done with this, you wanna take a swing through the Capitol? Check some EMF? Piss off some security guards?"
"I think they're tougher now. After 9/11."
Dean snickered softly, then said with some discomfort, "Whispering in the walls. Remember that time we found those two rat-eating freakazoid twins living in that old house, and we thought it was a regular old haunting? I could go my whole life without running into anything like that again."
"You and me both."
"How many people you figure have lived there, over the years?"
"In a century and a half? A lot. But it should be easy enough to find out who they were. I'll hit the county clerk's office after we take a good look around. It's only a few blocks away."
"You remember that?"
"I looked it up. But yeah, I kind of remember. Down the hill."
"Across from the Capitol."
Sam nodded.
"You be sure to say hi to Martin and Grover if you see 'em."
"You're not ever gonna give me any peace about that, are you?" Sam asked.
"Doubtful," Dean told him.
They finished eating their meals without much in the way of comment; instead, they watched other diners come and go, watched people walking and driving past the tavern. The only thing that seemed to hold Dean's interest for more than a moment was a teenage girl carrying - and teasing - a small, fluffy white dog.
"Life kinda goes on, doesn't it?" Dean said after a while.
"Yeah. It does."
"Seems like a good thing."
On the way here, Dean had complained about the need to abandon his quest for Dick Roman in order to handle a simple salt-and-burn. They ought to have "assistants - you know. Interns, something like that" to deal with jobs like this, he'd announced. But now that they were here, contemplating a job located across the street from an unlimited supply of bacon cheeseburgers, he was more mellow than Sam had seen him act in weeks.
Frowning a little, yes…but mellow. Calm.
Maybe that was worth being teased about an eighteen-year-old dream.
"Hey," Sam said quietly, and when Dean turned to look at him, one raised eyebrow asking for elaboration, Sam told him, "Glad you're here, man."
"Yeah," Dean replied. "Ditto."
"You remember, don't you?" Dean asked around a burger the size of a football.
"I have to," Sam told him. "You've made it your life's mission to make sure I never forget."
CHARACTERS: Sam and Dean
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 1443 words
HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE
By Carol Davis
"You remember, don't you?" Dean asked around a burger the size of a football.
"I have to," Sam told him. "You've made it your life's mission to make sure I never forget."
Dean fell silent for a minute - at least, comparatively silent; the people sitting at the other end of the little tavern's patio could undoubtedly hear his chewing and gulping and smacking as well as Sam could. Dean swallowed his mouthful of burger, set the remains of the sandwich down on his plate and scooped up half a dozen fries, all the while maintaining a soft, off-key hum that attested to the quality of his lunch.
"You gotta admit," he went on, swirling his fries through a puddle of ketchup, "it's mighty friggin' entertaining."
"Not to me, it's not."
"Sammy. You name me one other kid who ever woke up screaming in the night, claiming he was being haunted by - by -"
Sam let out a sigh.
"By -"
Sam raised an eyebrow.
"By that guy named after a damn Muppet."
"That's the best you can come up with."
"You know who I mean."
"Yes, Dean. I know who you mean. I was there. Grover Cleveland. Twenty-second and twenty-fourth President of the United States."
"See? You knew who I meant."
"Because I paid attention in school."
"Oh, for crying out loud. Like it matters. You were, what? Twelve years old? Sitting there in bed carrying on like a girl, saying Grover friggin' Cleveland was after you. With" - and Dean beamed so ridiculously, there might as well have been canary feathers drifting out of his mouth instead of a blend of ketchup and mayo - "Abe Lincoln. And -"
"Both Roosevelts," Sam sighed.
"And?"
"Martin Van Buren."
"See? See? How is that not funny? How is that ever not funny? Martin Van Buren?"
"I was ten," Sam sputtered. "It was the summer after we - after I read Dad's journal. And we were what, ten blocks from the State Capitol, one of the most haunted buildings in the whole state. Lincoln's body laid there in state for two days, and the other guys were all governors here. Those men walked these streets, Dean. They were real."
"More real than the stuff we were hunting?"
"Displacement," Sam said.
"What?"
"I was ten years old, and I'd found out all of a sudden that there were monsters out there in the dark - a lot of them. I couldn't be freaked out by the things Dad was hunting. It was too much for me to handle. So I was scared of dead presidents."
"And that's better?"
There was something about that particular night that Dean hadn't seen fit to mention: the fact that he'd soothed Sam back to sleep with a promise to stay awake all night, guarding him from whatever might find its way into the room. And Dean had been true to his word. When Sam struggled awake the next morning, Dean was sitting on his bed, fully dressed, reading a comic book.
But of course, that part of it wasn't funny.
"It was better at the time," Sam said.
Across the street, casting a shadow onto the tavern's "al fresco dining" section, the Winchesters, and their lunch, was a three-story brick house currently owned by a family named Granger. A small brass plate near the front door marked its date of construction: 1874, a time when people had traveled these streets on foot, or by horse and buggy; when women wore enormous hoop skirts and corsets and prim little bonnets, and men sported full beards and stovepipe hats; when most families' chief sources of entertainment were conversation, simple card games, and singing around the piano while someone played an old hymn.
The house was haunted, according to the Grangers - and likely not by any of the former presidents who had occupied Sam's dreams.
"You know what's remarkable to me?" Sam asked his brother.
"That that Wonder Woman pilot went into the dumper?"
"No, jackass. That there's been something here, in this place - a settlement, a town, a city - for five whole centuries. Think about it, man. All that history. All the people who've come and gone through this place."
He fully expected Dean to offer another quip. Hell, it wouldn't have surprised him if Dean had decided to paint the table with ketchup, or stick French fries up his nose. Instead, Dean became quietly pensive, looking past the other diners at the row of old houses across the narrow street. Sam was pretty sure he wasn't thinking about women in hoop skirts, or men in stovepipe hats riding horses down the hill; he would have made a joke about that.
It didn't take much of a leap of imagination to guess what Dean was thinking about.
"Simple salt and burn, man," Sam said quietly. "We figure out who it is that's been whispering in the walls, we torch 'em, and we're out of here."
"Yeah," Dean murmured, still staring across the street.
The last time they'd been here, they'd simply been along for the ride, left to occupy themselves in yet another seedy motel room while Dad tracked down the cause of a couple of mysterious deaths.
They'd had nothing to assure them that Dad wouldn't end up being the next victim.
TV, card games, magazines, burgers and fries and the entire spectrum of Hostess snack cakes. They should have been bored out of their minds - and for most of the four days they'd spent here in town, they were. But Sam remembered all too well waking up pale and trembling, slick with sweat.
He also remembered that he hadn't been the only one who was scared.
"Remember?" he prompted his brother. "When Dad finished the job, he took us down to the Capitol, and we spent the whole afternoon roaming around. He claimed he wanted to find out if there were any real spirits there. And you got in trouble with that security guard for hanging over the edge of a balcony."
Shouldn't do that, he thought. Remind him of Dad. He won't eat any more of his lunch. He'll be in a funk all day.
But when he looked over at Dean, there was a small but very genuine smile taking shape on his brother's lips.
"Those were some good times, huh, Sammy?" Dean asked.
Everything's relative, Sam thought, but he said, "Yeah. They were."
"When we're done with this, you wanna take a swing through the Capitol? Check some EMF? Piss off some security guards?"
"I think they're tougher now. After 9/11."
Dean snickered softly, then said with some discomfort, "Whispering in the walls. Remember that time we found those two rat-eating freakazoid twins living in that old house, and we thought it was a regular old haunting? I could go my whole life without running into anything like that again."
"You and me both."
"How many people you figure have lived there, over the years?"
"In a century and a half? A lot. But it should be easy enough to find out who they were. I'll hit the county clerk's office after we take a good look around. It's only a few blocks away."
"You remember that?"
"I looked it up. But yeah, I kind of remember. Down the hill."
"Across from the Capitol."
Sam nodded.
"You be sure to say hi to Martin and Grover if you see 'em."
"You're not ever gonna give me any peace about that, are you?" Sam asked.
"Doubtful," Dean told him.
They finished eating their meals without much in the way of comment; instead, they watched other diners come and go, watched people walking and driving past the tavern. The only thing that seemed to hold Dean's interest for more than a moment was a teenage girl carrying - and teasing - a small, fluffy white dog.
"Life kinda goes on, doesn't it?" Dean said after a while.
"Yeah. It does."
"Seems like a good thing."
On the way here, Dean had complained about the need to abandon his quest for Dick Roman in order to handle a simple salt-and-burn. They ought to have "assistants - you know. Interns, something like that" to deal with jobs like this, he'd announced. But now that they were here, contemplating a job located across the street from an unlimited supply of bacon cheeseburgers, he was more mellow than Sam had seen him act in weeks.
Frowning a little, yes…but mellow. Calm.
Maybe that was worth being teased about an eighteen-year-old dream.
"Hey," Sam said quietly, and when Dean turned to look at him, one raised eyebrow asking for elaboration, Sam told him, "Glad you're here, man."
"Yeah," Dean replied. "Ditto."