Fic: Three Postcards Written in Castle Rock, Washington
Title: Three Postcards Written in Castle Rock, Washington
Words: 1,593
Genre: gen, friendship, pre-slash.
Rating: PG
Characters: Chuck, Dean, Cas, Balthazar
Spoilers: General up to and including season six.
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Summary: Some someones are looking out for Sam and Dean. And some someone is looking out for Cas too.
A/N: This is installment 3 of the In-between series. To be honest I was a little bit unhappy with the last one after re-reading it. It felt sorta flat. I tried to be more careful with this one. Anyway, it isn't completely necessary that you read the other two, but the themes of this follow from the others and there are little things that will make more sense with context. Still, I will judge no one. But just in case:
1 - "" Farmington, New Hampshire
2 - "" Oneida, Kentucky
Like all the other people in the world with nowhere to go, he's waiting at a bus stop. It's an old bus stop. The schedule stapled to the telephone pole is sun-bleached and torn, missing a large chunk of one corner. The old steel bench is rusting and the Plexiglas that shelters it is scratched and blanketed with old photos of missing pets and children. The bus no longer stops here. There is another stop, a few miles further North-closer to Interstate 5, that Castle Rock put up years ago. But he waits here.
He's a little bit early.
A curtain of chilly mist is raining down. He's dry, thanks to the Plexiglas, sitting on the little steel bench between a poster for a local production of Hair that is playing on the weekend of November 5th three and a half years ago, and an informational poster for an animal shelter that closed down when the economic plight of America made funding scarce. He throws his leg over his knee and turns his head left and right to gaze down the narrow street.
It's an empty street in Castle Rock, Washington. There's nobody looking. There's nobody to look.
The guy scratches his nose with his sleeve and reaches into his pocket. He pulls three postcards out and traps two of them under his thigh for the time being. He takes the pen from behind his ear, leans his wrists against the poster of the animal shelter, and pins the other postcard flat with his fingertips. He holds the pen like a scale and weighs the empty card with a frown.
The future is balancing on the tip of the pen and the present is a counterweight on the other end. The writer is biting back the past behind his teeth. But because nobody is looking, nobody notices the cut he painstakingly makes in the fabric of time. It might look like the heat mirage at the end of an asphalt road that goes nowhere. Because nobody is looking, nobody sees the refolding of small moments that are never remembered because they are hidden between important moments. It could look like the distorted reflection of the sky in busted up seashells. Because nobody is looking, nobody witnesses the tiny revisions he makes in three individual histories. It probably just looks like a tired man in his thirties sitting at a bus stop, writing on a postcard. Probably. But since no one is looking, no one will ever know.
There's a construction crew on Interstate 5 North, doing some patchwork repairs on the damage caused by the cold weather and all this rain. A detour sign at exit 43 takes travelers around the construction site by Bond Rd, Powell Rd, and Dougherty Dr.
A bus driver (named Kendra, but even her boss can't remember that and calls her Karen every afternoon) eases into the exit lane for Bond Rd. She scrubs her bangs out of her eyes and pushes her glasses up. She hates the cold and the rain, but she likes driving in it because the bus is warm and dry, and filled with the sounds of shifting and murmuring people. Kendra exits onto Bond Rd and switches on the headlights.
A lonely man spells out words with tiny seconds crammed into them as the streetlamps on Powell Rd begin to flicker on.
Five hours, forty-one minutes and twelve seconds.
There's a cracked mirror on the ceiling that catches the glow from the alarm clock on the nightstand. There isn't enough light for anything else to be reflected. To the right of the alarm clock, sunken into a lumpy mattress, Sam Winchester is dead in sleep. He's on his back, breathing gently. His hands are folded across his chest. Sam is the sort that won't move all night. That wakes up in the space of three blinks and can roll out of bed without pausing. He learned to sleep like that while Dean was dead in hell. Dean is not asleep yet but he's getting there. His pillow is folded in half between his arms and under his head. His eyes, that can't see anything more than the mirror sees, are drifting wearily over the space in the darkness where he knows his brother is lying.
It's a moment of in-between.
On the other side of the curtains and the window, the parking lot is empty except for two cars: one black 67 Chevy Impala, and one two door Ford truck that has been repaired so many times the model and year hardly matter because most of the original truck is gone. It's a quiet place. With a quiet wooden sign that says Motel in carved out letters. There are no phosphorescent lights. No streetlamps. No headlights buzzing by. It is a good place for resting.
There are very few places like this in the world. Places where the peace is purely accidental.
Dean's hand closes over the sheet beneath his pillow. He thinks about getting up to grab his knife. Just in case. He can't believe he forgot.
But then he drifts off. He's gone. His breathing evens out and his fingers uncurl. The circulation in his wrist starts cutting off under the weight of his skull.
Dean and Sam Winchester brought their chaos with them.
Sam's chest stutters and a muscle in his neck twitches. His lips pull back from his teeth and his tongue moves in his mouth. He's having a nightmare. The space under his eyelids is red and loud. He's forgetting himself, forgotten. He scrapes desperately against a black wall that keeps him split in two. He wants to be whole again.
There is a new moon outside. And no shadows on the ground.
Dean's hand is almost asleep. It hurts him. His hips are trying to twist against the mattress, his stomach is a coil of tension. He's having a nightmare. His mind is humming with white noise, drowning out and burying all the unresolved bodies in his conscience. His forehead scrunches up and his knees dig into each other. He is restless without his knife.
A beetle scurries to get away from the suddenly troubled gravel of the parking lot.
Somewhere else, (that isn't really a somewhere, but certainly isn't a nowhere) Balthazar turns to his friend Castiel and another moment of in-between begins.
Balthazar says something like: "What do we do now?" as he puts away his blade. But he says it in Enochian, without his voice, so it sounds like raindrops freezing.
Cas says: "We wait," and rolls his heavy shoulders. But he answers in Enochian, without his voice, so it sounds like boulders aging. They leave each other without worry, listening for the waiting to be over. They feel less sad than usual. No one died tonight.
The empty parking lot is interrupted by the sound of sweeping wings. Castiel walks by the Impala, trails his fingers along her hood, and approaches the locked motel door with a 3 painted on the front. He leans against it, crossing his arms over his chest, and looks out into the night with narrowed eyes. He dares the darkness to disturb him. He's focused, watchful for things that don't love the moon. He turns his head slightly and speaks over his shoulder, as if to someone standing on the other side of the door.
"Out," he snarls.
Dean and Sam exhale softly together as the nightmares retreat. Dean's hand liberates itself from beneath his pillow. Sam turns onto his side. The lights of the alarm clock flash and die.
In three more hours Dean's cell will ring. It will be Bobby, and they will have to pack quickly and rush out the door. But it won't be the clock that disrupts them and it won't be Sam shouting his way out of sleep.
Castiel will be gone when they leave the room. He stays until then, his arms folded, gazing out over the slow road and the parking lot, acting like a storm door for storms that can't be seen.
...I'm proud of him, you know.
The pen stops. He's run out of room. A bus pulls up to the side of the road and the double doors squeak open.
The guy stands up. He takes the postcards with him. He runs through the cold, wet rain and hops into the bus, sighing a "whew" of relief when he gets there. He pulls exact change out of his pocket and smiles at the woman with the glasses.
"You're lucky there was construction on five," the woman tells him. "The route changed years ago so the buses don't stop here anymore. I was just taking a detour."
The man deposits his coins.
"Well, thanks for stopping, Kendra." He says without checking her pin.
Kendra smiles. She likes hearing people say her name.
"You're welcome" she says and means it. The doors close and the bus creeps away from the curb and the old bench.
The writer goes to the back of the bus and tucks the postcards into his seat pocket, even though knows he'll forget them when he gets off.
He means to forget them.
He leans his head against the foggy window and thinks it's probably about time he had a shave. The glass is cool and damp, but the bus is warm. He closes his eyes as they bump along onto Dougherty Dr.
Like all the other people in the world with nowhere to go, he's going to do his napping on the bus.