SPN Fic: Pitter-Patter
Title: Pitter-Patter
Characters: OFC, Dean, Sam
Genre: Gen
Rating: PG
Word-count: 964
Spoilers: Set in the murky unknown post-7.23. No specific spoilers, though.
Summary: Written for this anonymous prompt at mad_server's lovely S7 Finale Meme of Dean H/C Goodness: Dean lost his shoes halfway through his time in Purgatory. He made it out and now he's leaving footprints down the hall.
The tiny gray letters on her purple wristwatch read 2:37. Two and a half hours, and she can go home.
The tag on the collar of her uniform’s sticking up again, itchy against the back of her neck. For the seventeenth time today, she reaches back to shove it down, cold fingers against hot, sticky skin. Kneading the taut, throbbing muscle in her left shoulder, she thinks longingly of the boxes of heat packs she saw this morning in the drugstore, magic white patches that suck your pain away, or something. She could do with a little magic right now.
Like she’s got the money to throw away on scraps of fancy paper towel. She’ll go home tonight, get Jake heat up some water and soak a washcloth to wrap around her neck; let him make his own dinner for once (seven’s old enough to use a microwave). It won’t help, of course, and she’ll go to bed with a cold, soggy collar and the fire still running up and down her neck.
She shakes her head. No point in worrying about tonight when she’s still got over two hours of cleaning other people’s bodily fluids off of beds and walls and bathroom surfaces. Tonight will take care of itself, but the piss that some gentleman’s so kindly managed to spray across the entire bathroom floor is another matter.
She sighs, and picks up the mop.
Ten minutes later, Mr. Poor Aim’s room is reasonably safe for humans again - at least, it doesn’t smell like a horse on dialysis, and that’s the main thing. Her scavenger hunt turns up eighteen beer cans scattered around the room - today’s record, she thinks. Pulling the door firmly shut and checking her watch again (only two hours now, two hours and she can go home to Chef Boyardee and the Boy Wonder of Not-Doing-the-Dishes), she turns around to face the other side of the hall.
156 seems quiet - no immediate stench of alcohol, for one thing, and she doesn’t see any furniture that’s clearly been vandalized. The lights are off, and only one of the beds seems to have been slept in. A conservative businessman somewhat low on funds, she guesses, and steps into the room in relief, looking forward to an easy job for once.
She switches on the lights, and sees them.
Trailing around the edge of the beds, from the doorway straight into the bathroom (she can see them from here turning suddenly bright, rusty smears against off-white ceramic). Some are messy or partial, just shapeless blots on the carpet, but others show up clear and in full - each toe distinct above the sweep of the arch to the heel. They look like painted footprints in a children’s shoe store, but from the size she can tell it was a man’s feet that made them. The prints are deep brown against the green carpet, but she doesn't need to get down and check to know it's not mud she's looking at.
It’s July, deep-South muggy, and she’s been sweltering in her uniform all day. She shivers anyway.
Swallowing down the nausea as she slowly recognizes the sharp, heavy odor that didn’t register at first, she follows the tracks into the bathroom, steeling herself for the worst. It’s better than she’d expected - brown smears on the tile (though there are indications someone’s tried to wipe the worst of it up), streaking the closed lid of the toilet, bunched into Kleenexes that nestle like hideous baby birds around the sink (peeking into the trash can, she sees it’s packed to the brim with more of the same). She drags back the shower curtain, and sure enough, there’s a ring of rust around the edge of the bath.
Whatever happened here, she really, really doesn’t want to know.
::: ::: ::: ::: :::
“Dean.”
He isn’t sure if the response is a word, or just pain. The paper towel’s already sodden under his fingers, brilliant and hot with his brother’s blood; he tosses it at the trash can and rips another off of the roll.
“Talk to me, man. What happened?” Dean’s eyebrows jerk together as Sam presses the rough paper up against the swimming mess of his sole; he tips his head back to blink the sweat out of his eyes and laugh, breathless and harsh.
“Lost my shoes.”
“And you just - ” Sam swallows rage, feeling sick. “Just went on without them? When’d you lose them? How?”
And Dean’s eyes freeze over, green and still in the pale, burning wreck of his face.
"I don’t remember,” is all he says.
::: ::: ::: ::: :::
The blood washes away easily under warm water and Clorox. She rinses the red-tinged mixture from her rubber gloves and watches it swirl down the sink, grimacing at the smell.
Out in the chilly main room, she strips the beds (dark bloodspots at the end of the messy one). Wipes down the windows (salt, of all things, spilled across the sill). She doesn’t bother vacuuming; the carpet’s done for.
Really, she just wants to get the hell out of there. Tucking the tag nervously back into her shirt, she glances quickly around the room. Except for the mute track of blood still printed across the floor, there’s no sign of anything out of the ordinary.
That’s the way she’d like to keep it. Stepping out into the hall, she looks down at her watch: 4:05. Time to forget any of this ever happened. She pulls door 156 firmly shut and walks away quickly, shedding the memory on the floor behind her as she goes.
She only has fifty-five minutes left, and they’re not worth wasting on blood and mysteries.