SPN FIC - Through the Grapevine
Thanks to the always creative
ravenrants for the title and the plot bunny! And by the way...she's written a shiny, spiffy companion piece to this fic: You've Got Mail. Check it out!
It's early March 2006. In St. Louis, the police have announced that a man named Dean Winchester (who is now dead) murdered two women and attempted to murder another. For nine people in Palo Alto, California, this information is...more than they can grasp.
Characters: OCs (except for Luis, who was in the Pilot), with discussions of Sam, Dean, and Jess
Pairings: none
Length: 1773 words
Rating: PG, for language
Spoilers: up through Skin
Disclaimer: Yup. Still enjoying playing with Kripke's toys. No $$$ here.
Through the Grapevine
By Carol Davis
Once upon a time, they were a baker’s dozen.
Now they are nine: Luis, Gina, D-Squared, Stash, Dawn, Kara, Yukiko, Kevin, and Cass. Zach and Becky are gone. Zach graduated last spring; Becky’s taking the semester off, won’t be back until September.
Jess is dead.
And Sam…
“What?”
The word circles the room, a small dirt devil of sound. What? That can’t be right. Are you sure? There’s just no way.
They know it’s so; the news is what brought them here. They hadn’t been together for months before tonight, not since before Christmas. Christmas without Jess and Sam, Zach and Becky. They haven’t had Jess with them since Halloween.
Since before.
That’s the way they think of it: Before.
Kara takes the beer Stash holds out to her and takes a long slug. She squeezes her eyes shut as it goes down. “It’s in the papers,” she says softly. “In the St. Louis papers. And on their websites. Sam’s brother tried to kill Becky.”
“Why?” Gina murmurs.
“I don’t know.”
“He was at Jess’s funeral,” Luis offers.
Yukiko nods agreement. “I saw him there. He didn’t say much. He seemed like he was okay. He stuck pretty close to Sam.”
They’re all silent for a while, listening to the noise from the bar down on the corner. It’s only a hundred feet or so from Yukiko and Kevin’s apartment, and when the windows are open and the rest of the world is quiet, they can hear the conversations of the people hanging around the entrance to smoke. The windows are closed now, but the music fights its way in anyway.
“He killed Emily,” Kara says. “He tied her up and tortured her.”
Cass leans a little bit away from her, as if Kara’s information could taint her.
Dawn took her shoes off when she came in, and she sits looking at her socks, back resting against the front of the couch. “I don’t get it,” she says bitterly. “Why would Sam go - why would he leave here with somebody who’s a murderer? That’s not Sam.”
Kara makes a small, apologetic shrug. “Maybe he didn’t know.”
“How could he not know? It’s his brother.”
They all look to Luis: Dawn and Kara first, then the others, one by one. Luis was with Sam and Jessica last, at the party the night before Halloween. A few hours later Sam left town for the weekend. With his brother. The one who murdered Zach’s girlfriend Emily and tried to murder Becky. Sometime Sunday night Sam came back.
Then Sam and Jess’s apartment burned.
And Jess died.
A few days later, Sam’s brother took him away, and no one has seen Sam since. Except Becky, who answers everyone’s calls and e-mails with brief statements saying she’s all right, she’s taking it easy, she’ll be back in the fall.
She won’t say a word about Sam. Only that she hasn’t seen him for almost a week. Since before his brother tied her up in her parents’ house, intending to kill her the way he did Emily. And she doesn’t say that; she will discuss Sam’s brother with no one.
In a way, what she doesn’t say tells them as much as if she’d gone on for hours. She’s scared, they think.
Yukiko says what the others don’t want to. “Is… Do you think Sam’s alive?”
Luis looks at his beer. Condensation has been dripping off the bottle, making tiny dark spots on his jeans. “He seemed okay to me. Sam’s brother. He stayed with Sam the whole time at the funeral, except when Sam was talking to Jess’s mom. Then he hung back a little. He didn’t really talk to anybody. But there’s nothing wrong with that. He didn’t know anybody.” Frowning, he rubs at the dime-sized wet spots with the ends of his fingers. “Sam said he was kind of a drifter.”
“What does that mean?” Stash asks.
“Like, he doesn’t have a job.”
“What’d they go to St. Louis for? Is that where he lives? The brother.”
“Dean.”
“It’s like one of those freaking Lifetime movies. He’s jealous of everybody Sam’s friends with, so he kills them one by one.”
Gina winces. “That’s seriously not funny.”
“Am I trying to be funny?”
“Sam said he was a drifter, not a psycho.”
“Maybe Sam didn’t know.”
“How do you not know your own brother?”
D-Squared, whose name to everyone outside this room is Dave, crawls across the floor and snags the bowl of chips. It’s gone pretty much untouched since Kevin put it out. Nobody’s in the mood for food. They’re not really even in the mood to drink. That’ll come later, after they’ve laid this all out for each other to examine.
Later, there’ll be drinking. To make this fade for a while.
There’s so much they don’t want to say, as if turning the thought into sound makes it more real, more vicious.
One piece at a time, it comes out.
“Did Sam kill Jess?” Yukiko asks in a small voice.
Noise erupts, bounces off the walls like a handball.
“No,” Luis insists. “There’s no fucking way. He loved Jess. He loved her.”
“People do things.”
Luis turns his head away, stares at the empty doorway that leads to the bedroom and bathroom. Seconds tick by on the little brass clock on Yukiko and Kevin’s end table before he manages to force out, “Not Sam. How could you - Christ.”
“He got mad,” Gina says. “I’ve seen him get mad. Haven’t you? He had a temper.”
“Could you stop saying ‘had’?”
“I’m just saying.”
Furious, Luis gets up off the couch and retreats to the kitchen. It’s not much of a hiding place; it’s more of a kitchenette, a corner of the living room boxed out by cabinets and a countertop. The rest of them can see him as well as if he hadn’t moved. With his back to them he stands gripping the beer bottle, its label slippery with condensation.
“I’m gonna go,” he says, addressing the refrigerator.
“He stopped talking to all of us,” Kevin says. “He was e-mailing, a little bit, and then he just stopped. His cell number doesn’t work any more. The last time I heard from him, he sounded okay, like he was dealing with losing Jess. Like he wanted to know what everybody was doing and figured he might get back here sooner or later, so he could finish up and graduate. Then, just…nothing. And it’s at the same time that his freak of a brother went after Becky.” Before anyone can respond to that, he goes on, “Jess dies. Emily dies, and Zach gets blamed. Then Becky almost dies. Tell me that doesn’t sound like somebody’s going after Sam’s friends.”
They look at each other with no answers to share.
“He didn’t look like a psycho,” Gina mumbles. She doesn’t say whether she means Sam, or his brother.
“Where is he?” Cass asks. “If his brother is dead, where’s Sam?”
“With his dad,” Stash suggests.
“He said his dad was a drunk.”
“It’s still his dad. Maybe they needed…you know. If the brother murdered people, and now he’s dead, maybe they needed to -“ He shrugs. “Be there. For each other. I didn’t talk to anybody for a while when my sister got sick. Sometimes you need to be alone.”
Cass shakes her head. “I wish he’d just tell us if he’s okay.”
“He will. When he gets ready.”
Gina goes into the kitchen and runs herself a glass of water. It’s such a small space that she can’t help but stand close to Luis. He looks at her steadily for a moment, then closes his eyes and leans back against the fridge.
He and Sam were roommates before Sam moved in with Jess. They slept a few feet from each other almost every night for eight months. You’d get to know somebody in a situation like that, he thinks. Really know them.
He remembers the first time he said to Sam, “So, you got brothers and sisters?”
Sam looked away. Stared out the window for a while before he said quietly, “Yeah. I have a brother.”
In eight months, Sam said maybe ten sentences to Luis about Dean. Dean never visited, never called, never sent anything in the mail. Sam didn’t want him to. Said Dean wasn’t part of the life he wanted. It didn’t take a genius to figure out Sam didn’t mean that.
The guy who stood next to Sam at Jessica’s funeral was no freak. Twitchy, maybe; ill-at-ease, but who the hell isn’t, at a funeral. He didn’t know any of the people who were crying over Jess. Just Sam. And he kept looking at Sam like this was some nightmare he’d woken up in the middle of. When the service was over and people started to walk away, he laid a hand on Sam’s back and said something to him, something quiet and definitely non-freak-like.
So what is all this, Luis wonders. The murders, the heaps of clothes and jewelry and shoes the cops found - in the sewer, for God’s sake.
Sam’s brother lived in the sewer?
Not that guy, Luis thinks. Not the guy who stood by Sam at the funeral. Something’s seriously fucked up with this whole thing, but he’ll be damned if he can figure out what it is.
Or where Sam is.
Sam’s Stanford e-mail account is closed. Calling his cell number gets a recording that says the number’s no longer in service.
Two days ago Luis sent an e-mail to an address he and Jess set up as a joke to tease Sam. It was a long shot, but since the news starting drifting in from St. Louis, he’s tried turning over every stone he can think of.
Two hours ago, before he came over to Yukiko and Kevin’s, he checked his e-mail. There was a message from that address, the joke one, with nothing in the “re” line.
There was no text, either.
What that means, Luis doesn’t have a damn clue.
“You okay?” Gina asks softly. When Luis shrugs, she slides her arms around his waist and rests her head on his chest. Her body hitches once, like she’s trying very hard not to cry.
Over her shoulder he can see the rest of them, sitting numb and silent in the living room. D‑Squared’s got the yellow plastic bowl of chips in his lap. They’re all holding a drink of some kind: beer, soda.
Last year, last spring, they were a baker’s dozen.
Who knows where they’ll be next spring.
ravenrants for the title and the plot bunny! And by the way...she's written a shiny, spiffy companion piece to this fic: You've Got Mail. Check it out!
It's early March 2006. In St. Louis, the police have announced that a man named Dean Winchester (who is now dead) murdered two women and attempted to murder another. For nine people in Palo Alto, California, this information is...more than they can grasp.
Characters: OCs (except for Luis, who was in the Pilot), with discussions of Sam, Dean, and Jess
Pairings: none
Length: 1773 words
Rating: PG, for language
Spoilers: up through Skin
Disclaimer: Yup. Still enjoying playing with Kripke's toys. No $$$ here.
Through the Grapevine
By Carol Davis
Once upon a time, they were a baker’s dozen.
Now they are nine: Luis, Gina, D-Squared, Stash, Dawn, Kara, Yukiko, Kevin, and Cass. Zach and Becky are gone. Zach graduated last spring; Becky’s taking the semester off, won’t be back until September.
Jess is dead.
And Sam…
“What?”
The word circles the room, a small dirt devil of sound. What? That can’t be right. Are you sure? There’s just no way.
They know it’s so; the news is what brought them here. They hadn’t been together for months before tonight, not since before Christmas. Christmas without Jess and Sam, Zach and Becky. They haven’t had Jess with them since Halloween.
Since before.
That’s the way they think of it: Before.
Kara takes the beer Stash holds out to her and takes a long slug. She squeezes her eyes shut as it goes down. “It’s in the papers,” she says softly. “In the St. Louis papers. And on their websites. Sam’s brother tried to kill Becky.”
“Why?” Gina murmurs.
“I don’t know.”
“He was at Jess’s funeral,” Luis offers.
Yukiko nods agreement. “I saw him there. He didn’t say much. He seemed like he was okay. He stuck pretty close to Sam.”
They’re all silent for a while, listening to the noise from the bar down on the corner. It’s only a hundred feet or so from Yukiko and Kevin’s apartment, and when the windows are open and the rest of the world is quiet, they can hear the conversations of the people hanging around the entrance to smoke. The windows are closed now, but the music fights its way in anyway.
“He killed Emily,” Kara says. “He tied her up and tortured her.”
Cass leans a little bit away from her, as if Kara’s information could taint her.
Dawn took her shoes off when she came in, and she sits looking at her socks, back resting against the front of the couch. “I don’t get it,” she says bitterly. “Why would Sam go - why would he leave here with somebody who’s a murderer? That’s not Sam.”
Kara makes a small, apologetic shrug. “Maybe he didn’t know.”
“How could he not know? It’s his brother.”
They all look to Luis: Dawn and Kara first, then the others, one by one. Luis was with Sam and Jessica last, at the party the night before Halloween. A few hours later Sam left town for the weekend. With his brother. The one who murdered Zach’s girlfriend Emily and tried to murder Becky. Sometime Sunday night Sam came back.
Then Sam and Jess’s apartment burned.
And Jess died.
A few days later, Sam’s brother took him away, and no one has seen Sam since. Except Becky, who answers everyone’s calls and e-mails with brief statements saying she’s all right, she’s taking it easy, she’ll be back in the fall.
She won’t say a word about Sam. Only that she hasn’t seen him for almost a week. Since before his brother tied her up in her parents’ house, intending to kill her the way he did Emily. And she doesn’t say that; she will discuss Sam’s brother with no one.
In a way, what she doesn’t say tells them as much as if she’d gone on for hours. She’s scared, they think.
Yukiko says what the others don’t want to. “Is… Do you think Sam’s alive?”
Luis looks at his beer. Condensation has been dripping off the bottle, making tiny dark spots on his jeans. “He seemed okay to me. Sam’s brother. He stayed with Sam the whole time at the funeral, except when Sam was talking to Jess’s mom. Then he hung back a little. He didn’t really talk to anybody. But there’s nothing wrong with that. He didn’t know anybody.” Frowning, he rubs at the dime-sized wet spots with the ends of his fingers. “Sam said he was kind of a drifter.”
“What does that mean?” Stash asks.
“Like, he doesn’t have a job.”
“What’d they go to St. Louis for? Is that where he lives? The brother.”
“Dean.”
“It’s like one of those freaking Lifetime movies. He’s jealous of everybody Sam’s friends with, so he kills them one by one.”
Gina winces. “That’s seriously not funny.”
“Am I trying to be funny?”
“Sam said he was a drifter, not a psycho.”
“Maybe Sam didn’t know.”
“How do you not know your own brother?”
D-Squared, whose name to everyone outside this room is Dave, crawls across the floor and snags the bowl of chips. It’s gone pretty much untouched since Kevin put it out. Nobody’s in the mood for food. They’re not really even in the mood to drink. That’ll come later, after they’ve laid this all out for each other to examine.
Later, there’ll be drinking. To make this fade for a while.
There’s so much they don’t want to say, as if turning the thought into sound makes it more real, more vicious.
One piece at a time, it comes out.
“Did Sam kill Jess?” Yukiko asks in a small voice.
Noise erupts, bounces off the walls like a handball.
“No,” Luis insists. “There’s no fucking way. He loved Jess. He loved her.”
“People do things.”
Luis turns his head away, stares at the empty doorway that leads to the bedroom and bathroom. Seconds tick by on the little brass clock on Yukiko and Kevin’s end table before he manages to force out, “Not Sam. How could you - Christ.”
“He got mad,” Gina says. “I’ve seen him get mad. Haven’t you? He had a temper.”
“Could you stop saying ‘had’?”
“I’m just saying.”
Furious, Luis gets up off the couch and retreats to the kitchen. It’s not much of a hiding place; it’s more of a kitchenette, a corner of the living room boxed out by cabinets and a countertop. The rest of them can see him as well as if he hadn’t moved. With his back to them he stands gripping the beer bottle, its label slippery with condensation.
“I’m gonna go,” he says, addressing the refrigerator.
“He stopped talking to all of us,” Kevin says. “He was e-mailing, a little bit, and then he just stopped. His cell number doesn’t work any more. The last time I heard from him, he sounded okay, like he was dealing with losing Jess. Like he wanted to know what everybody was doing and figured he might get back here sooner or later, so he could finish up and graduate. Then, just…nothing. And it’s at the same time that his freak of a brother went after Becky.” Before anyone can respond to that, he goes on, “Jess dies. Emily dies, and Zach gets blamed. Then Becky almost dies. Tell me that doesn’t sound like somebody’s going after Sam’s friends.”
They look at each other with no answers to share.
“He didn’t look like a psycho,” Gina mumbles. She doesn’t say whether she means Sam, or his brother.
“Where is he?” Cass asks. “If his brother is dead, where’s Sam?”
“With his dad,” Stash suggests.
“He said his dad was a drunk.”
“It’s still his dad. Maybe they needed…you know. If the brother murdered people, and now he’s dead, maybe they needed to -“ He shrugs. “Be there. For each other. I didn’t talk to anybody for a while when my sister got sick. Sometimes you need to be alone.”
Cass shakes her head. “I wish he’d just tell us if he’s okay.”
“He will. When he gets ready.”
Gina goes into the kitchen and runs herself a glass of water. It’s such a small space that she can’t help but stand close to Luis. He looks at her steadily for a moment, then closes his eyes and leans back against the fridge.
He and Sam were roommates before Sam moved in with Jess. They slept a few feet from each other almost every night for eight months. You’d get to know somebody in a situation like that, he thinks. Really know them.
He remembers the first time he said to Sam, “So, you got brothers and sisters?”
Sam looked away. Stared out the window for a while before he said quietly, “Yeah. I have a brother.”
In eight months, Sam said maybe ten sentences to Luis about Dean. Dean never visited, never called, never sent anything in the mail. Sam didn’t want him to. Said Dean wasn’t part of the life he wanted. It didn’t take a genius to figure out Sam didn’t mean that.
The guy who stood next to Sam at Jessica’s funeral was no freak. Twitchy, maybe; ill-at-ease, but who the hell isn’t, at a funeral. He didn’t know any of the people who were crying over Jess. Just Sam. And he kept looking at Sam like this was some nightmare he’d woken up in the middle of. When the service was over and people started to walk away, he laid a hand on Sam’s back and said something to him, something quiet and definitely non-freak-like.
So what is all this, Luis wonders. The murders, the heaps of clothes and jewelry and shoes the cops found - in the sewer, for God’s sake.
Sam’s brother lived in the sewer?
Not that guy, Luis thinks. Not the guy who stood by Sam at the funeral. Something’s seriously fucked up with this whole thing, but he’ll be damned if he can figure out what it is.
Or where Sam is.
Sam’s Stanford e-mail account is closed. Calling his cell number gets a recording that says the number’s no longer in service.
Two days ago Luis sent an e-mail to an address he and Jess set up as a joke to tease Sam. It was a long shot, but since the news starting drifting in from St. Louis, he’s tried turning over every stone he can think of.
Two hours ago, before he came over to Yukiko and Kevin’s, he checked his e-mail. There was a message from that address, the joke one, with nothing in the “re” line.
There was no text, either.
What that means, Luis doesn’t have a damn clue.
“You okay?” Gina asks softly. When Luis shrugs, she slides her arms around his waist and rests her head on his chest. Her body hitches once, like she’s trying very hard not to cry.
Over her shoulder he can see the rest of them, sitting numb and silent in the living room. D‑Squared’s got the yellow plastic bowl of chips in his lap. They’re all holding a drink of some kind: beer, soda.
Last year, last spring, they were a baker’s dozen.
Who knows where they’ll be next spring.