SPN fanfic: Paradise Wherever You Are 2/2
“You have sacrificed much to be here
‘There but for grace…’ as I offer my hand
Welcome home, I bid you welcome, I bid you welcome
Welcome home, from the bottom of my heart…”
Dave Dobbyn - Welcome Home
Dean was woken in the morning by the artificial camera noise of Sam’s cell phone. He rolled over, catching himself on the edge of the bunk before he fell. He glared at Sam, who was grinning delightedly. Dean grumbled out of tradition, but it was nice to see his brother smile, and anyway, he actually felt rested. He was thinking about sleeping there every night.
Sam’s smile disappeared as they went into the kitchen. “Dean,” he said disapprovingly, taking in the sight of the counter, “What happened to the toaster?” Apparently, the time limit on Sam’s period of looking after Dean by obsessively trying to make him happy had run out. That was okay though. To tell the truth it had kind of been creeping Dean out.
“I was teaching Cas to make toast.” Dean pulled a chipped glass out of the cupboard and filled it with water.
“And that involved taking the toaster apart?”
“Relax, Samantha, I’ll fix it,” Dean growled, leaning against the counter and sipping his water. He watched his brother hide a smile behind the fridge door and realised they had just had a totally normal conversation, like actual brothers. He picked up one of the leftover pieces of toast from last night and ate it dry, laughing slightly at the expression on Sam’s face (number 76: I can’t believe you’re going to eat that).
An hour later, Sam was out running and Dean was fixing the toaster. Cas was out of the shower and ‘helping’ him put it back together. It was proving more difficult than taking it apart. “We should investigate the shed today,” he said. At the very least, there was probably a screwdriver in there, which would be very helpful right now.
Sam galloped in, sweaty and breathing hard, as Dean and Cas were hauling a very old lawnmower out of the shed. Dean let out his usual sigh of relief, but realised he hadn’t been as worried as usual. Probably it was a combination of nothing happening to Sam last night and the distraction of the toaster and the lawnmower.
“Dude, you better start going running. Keith Nichol broke his leg. That means you’re definitely playing the whole game on Saturday.”
“Who’s Keith?” Dean asked, checking the lawnmower tank for gas. It was empty.
“Big guy, brown hair. He was the guy showing you what to do. He tripped over his cat last night, got a nasty bump on his head, too.”
“Huh. Sucks to be him,” Dean said, removing the spark plugs from the mower motor. “Feel like going to the gas station?”
The next day, when the mower was back together with a few improvements and Dean was pulling the ripcord to start it, Sam arrived home from his trip to the library with four books about lawnmowers, some sissy book about the wife of a time-traveller which Dean definitely wasn’t going to read when Sam wasn’t looking, and the news that James McDonald had speared his foot while flounder-spearing and wouldn’t be able to play on Saturday.
The day after, while Dean was showing Cas how the oven worked, Sam returned from the supermarket with far too many vegetables and the information that Keith with the broken leg now also had a broken wrist and was looking to get rid of his cat.
At rugby practice on Wednesday, everyone got drenched by freezing rain, and they were four players short, because two of the forwards had been in a car accident the day before, and had a broken rib and a concussion respectively.
Dean was starting to get a bad feeling.
When Tom casually mentioned the next day that he couldn’t hang around during his lunch break because he had to fix the flickering lights in several houses (he was an electrician, Dean remembered), the heavy, sinking feeling worsened.
“Are there flickering lights at Keith’s place?” he asked, dreading the answer.
Tom looked surprised. “Yeah, how did you know?”
Dean mumbled something about Keith seeming to be having a run of bad luck, and nearly walked into the fence in his hurry to leave. Shit. There was no escape.
He made Cas go to the library with him. There was free wireless there that Sam had been using to find recipes. They left a note for Sam to find when he came back from his run. No point in worrying Sam. Sam had made it clear that the trip to New Zealand was for Dean’s benefit, but he was clearly enjoying the peace and quiet. Dean hadn’t seen him glaring at nothing for days. No, he and Cas would make sure it was nothing, and then no more hunting. Ever.
The library was very small, really more like a large cupboard filled with books. Okay, that was an exaggeration, but it was smaller than the living room in the house they were renting. There was an issues desk at one end and a desk for people with laptops to use at the other. In between were a low table with children’s puzzles on it and several sets of shelves filled with books. Dean sat at the desk and opened the laptop, while Cas peered at the local history section. The librarian read a book and pretended not to be watching them.
The fire siren went off as Dean was pulling up an article about a recent suicide in the area that could have resulted in a vengeful spirit. He felt his heart clench and slammed the laptop shut a little too hard. What was the point in saving the world all the time if it didn’t fix anything? He jerked his head towards the door and Cas closed the book he was reading, following him to the door.
The alarm went off as they tried to leave, barely audible over the wailing of the fire siren. Dean realised Cas was still holding a pile of books. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry that Cas didn’t know about getting books out of libraries.
“I found something,” said Cas, as they headed home with photocopies of important pages.
“Yeah?” Dean hadn’t found anything. The last recorded murder in the town had been a wife-beating forty-five years ago, and the only other suspicious deaths had been a few suicides over the years. None of the victims had any connection to Keith Nichol or any of the other people who had had accidents. Anyway, vengeful spirits didn’t usually announce themselves with a series of non-lethal accidents. This was more like a minor curse. But minor curses always escalated.
“Tapu,” Cas said.
“What-poo?”
“Tapu. An object, person, or place is Tapu if they are sacred for some reason. It is forbidden to disturb or disrespect the Tapu object, and if Tapu is not adhered to, there are unfortunate consequences for the one who broke the rules.”
“Such as?” Dean knew what was coming.
“The one who broke Tapu loses the protection of the Gods, and will be plagued by extreme bad luck, often followed by demonic possession, attack by the supernatural, or death.”
“But if Keith is the one who broke this Tapu, then why are the others having accidents?”
“It can spread through family groups, areas of land, or tribes.”
“Or teams?”
“It seems likely.”
“And how do we fix this? Salt and burn?”
“We must find the object and say a prayer to the Maori Gods over it.”
“Oh. Good thing you speak every language ever spoken in the heavens or on earth, then.”
They walked past a moving truck pulled up to a large house. Two men were carting a new-looking flat-screen television to the truck. A large red sticker was slapped to the side of it. REPOSSESSED. A man in his late thirties that Dean vaguely recognised from rugby practice was following them, protesting: “But I paid for this! All of it! Something’s gone wrong at the bank!”
It was spreading. They needed to find the object before the bad luck hit them (maybe it already had).
Dean’s good humour of a few days ago was rapidly departing.
It got worse when they arrived home and found Sam at the kitchen table with a pile of books. So much for protecting Sam from this.
Sam covered the books guiltily when Dean and Cas walked in, but not before Dean caught a glance of his notes. Sam had come to pretty much the same conclusion as them. Well, Cas, if he was being honest.
“I see we have come to the same conclusion,” said Cas, breaking the awkward silence.
“That there’s a case here?” Sam moved his arms off his research. “I’m sorry, man,” he said to Dean, with big, apologetic eyes.
“What have you got?” Dean asked, sitting down across from him.
“Well, there’s a state called ‘Tapu’…” Sam began.
“Yeah, we got that.”
“Well, I think it has to do with the bush behind the rugby grounds. I was thinking about it, and all the people who’ve had accidents so far were with me when we went walking in the bush after the rugby muster. But I can’t find any reason the area would be sacred.”
Dean pulled Cas’s photocopied pages over to him, scanning them quickly. “So things are usually Tapu if they provide some kind of valuable natural resource, or if someone died there, right? Especially if it was someone of high status in a Maori tribe? So maybe just by walking through, you guys disrespected it.”
Sam shook his head. “They tore down half of that forest fifty years ago to build the rugby grounds. If destroying the forest was going to anger the Gods enough to withdraw their protection, it would have happened then. Trust me, I read up on it.” He slipped a photocopied newspaper clipping across to Dean. It described the blessing of the ground before building started on the clubrooms, and stated that the building had gone up quickly and unusually smoothly.
They took a break just after five, so Sam could make dinner. Dean wasn’t hungry, but he was going to eat anyway, to make Sam’s day a little better. He went outside, to catch Tom on his way home from work.
Tom looked less calm than usual and smelled strongly of smoke. “Keith Nichol’s house burnt down,” he told Dean, “They don’t know why yet.”
“Is he okay?” Dean didn’t hold out much hope. It seemed they never got there in time, now.
“He breathed some smoke in, but I got him out. His cat’s missing though.”
Dean tried really hard to focus on the live person instead of the dead cat.
It wasn’t until the middle of the night as he was lying awake in the top bunk that the thought occurred to him. “Seriously, Dean, the worst thing that happened was somebody pissing on a tree,” Sam’s voice said in his head. Dean sat up. He’d bet any money you like that the person who pissed on that tree was Keith Nichol.
Dean got up before dawn the next day. He was poring through one of Sam’s local history books, writing occasional notes when his brother and Cas came in.
“Did you sleep, Dean?” Sam asked with concern in his voice.
“Yes,” Dean lied, pushing the book toward his brother. “Look.” He pointed to a passage detailing the discovery of the remains of Maori food stores near the shoreline. They dated back several hundred years and appeared to have been abandoned while nearly full, a highly unusual occurrence.
“So there were Maori here a few hundred years ago?” Sam prompted him to continue.
“There are still Maori here,” Cas said, carefully placing a plate with two pieces of toast on it in front of Dean. He’d even spread it with peanut butter, and was looking anxiously at Dean, so he ate it despite his roiling stomach. Cas looked pleased. “Two thirds of the rugby team is Maori.”
“Yeah, there were Maori here, but they left in a hurry, and there’s no written history at all, and no real oral history of the area, so I’m thinking maybe something made them leave.”
“It’s possible that their chief died or was killed in battle, and they were forced from the area. The ground on which a person of high status dies becomes Tapu,” Cas finished, not taking his eyes off Dean.
“So you think he died in that forest and someone stepped on the ground where he was buried?” Sam took a bite of cereal.
“Well, specifically, I’m thinking he’s buried under the tree Keith pissed on,” Dean said.
There were clearly gaps in the theory - how likely was it that a grave site in a patch of forest so near a town had been completely undisturbed for hundreds of years? - but it was the best they could muster. There was no lore suggesting that Tapu couldn’t be broken more than once, though, so maybe it hadn’t always been undisturbed. They made a plan to go in and perform the blessing that night. It seemed to be a simple matter of reciting a prayer (it was supposed to be said by a Maori priest, but they didn’t think a Maori priest would respond well to some random Americans rocking up and telling them what to do) over the sacred object or area, as well as the person who broke the Tapu. They decided to do the tree first, and go visit Keith in the hospital an hour away the next day.
They were going to have to do things a little differently than at home. The loss of protection from the supernatural meant they were absolutely guaranteed to encounter a vengeful spirit, but they had none of their usual tools.
“We need to fix up some salt guns,” Dean suggested.
“Where are we gonna get guns from, Dean? This is New Zealand; even the police don’t carry guns. I read an article about the police in Hamilton chasing someone. They had to fly in ‘the taser’ from Auckland.”
“Rob a farmer?”
“We don’t have a car, Dean. Anyway, we have nothing to adapt them with.”
“There’s an old iron anchor and chain in the shed. Rusty as… something really rusty, and really friggin’ heavy, but we can use it.”
“They don’t have road salt at the store, because it doesn’t get cold enough for snow here, but we can probably buy a couple of kilograms of table salt if we buy out the whole store,” Sam said.
Damn, that would barely make a line, let alone a circle.
Cas spoke up. “There is a large body of salty water immediately over the hill.” Sometimes Cas liked to remind Dean and Sam that they were idiots.
That night they entered the patch of bush behind the rugby grounds a little before midnight. A cold drizzle was slowly soaking through Dean’s layers. He leaned slightly forward to accommodate the weight of the tank of salt water in the weed-spraying backpack he was wearing, and aimed his flashlight into the trees. The light bounced off the rain, making everything blurred and surreal. Under the trees, the darkness beyond the beams of the flashlights was total, the canopy shutting out the faint light of the cloud-dulled moon. A wet fern frond dragged against Dean’s neck and he shuddered.
“Are you sure you can find the tree again?” Dean asked breathlessly (Sam was right, he needed to go running), as they clambered up a steep bank.
“It’s not far now,” Sam grabbed a branch to hold himself upright as his foot slipped in the wet leaf litter. The heavy iron chain he was carrying was weighing him down.
Something rustled to their left. Dean tensed. A small owl flew directly over his head.
“That’s a Morepork,” said Sam, “They’re native to New Zealand and have a distinctive call.”
Sam’s torch flickered. Dean’s heart gave a jump. They took another few steps.
“That’s it,” Sam whispered, aiming the beam of his flashlight down a slope. The tree was large, with rough bark and drooping, narrow leaves that were almost like needles.
“Cas, you’re up,” Dean whispered. Cas was armed with a tank of water the same as Dean’s, and an fluent Maori (turns out being a gazillion years old is useful), although he wasn’t totally sure the Maori gods would want to be appeased by someone who until recently, had been solidly in the employment of a God who had very nearly wiped them out with the arrival of Europeans in the country.
Cas strode down the bank, followed closely by Dean and Sam.
Sam’s torch flickered once more, and went out. Dean’s followed soon after, not even bothering to flicker before it died. Cas’s went a step further and flew out of his hand, thudding heavily against a tree and falling, extinguished, to the ground. Suddenly, Dean couldn’t see his brother or Cas anymore. A sudden chill froze the rain on his face. The hairs on his arms stood on end. His heart raced. He pumped the lever on his backpack, raising the pressure in preparation to send a jet of salty water directly into the heart of the apparition that was about to appear. He remembered this feeling. Anticipation.
Cas’s voice rose out of the darkness beside him, growling unfamiliar words. “Te wheriko, te tapu e…”
The air buzzed with electricity, and a figure appeared before them, translucent and blurred by the rain, shining in its own light. The chill intensified. Frost burned Dean’s skin. He gripped the nozzle of his sprayer, ready if the spirit moved.
The spirit wore a cloak of feathers, and the spiral patterns of a moko decorated its face. It held a heavy club, made out of something that looked like it might have been stone. An expression of fury was on its face, half hidden by the wound that had caved the side of its head in.
The karakia flowed from Cas’s mouth, but he couldn’t finish it in time. The spirit disappeared and reappeared immediately in front of Sam, swinging his incorporeal club. Sam flew hard into a tree and Dean swung around, aiming his hose at the spirit and letting fly a stream of salt water that sent the spirit flickering out of existence. He allowed himself a quick smirk of satisfaction, before it was doused by a heavy spray of cold water across his back. He turned to see Cas a few metres away, frantically pumping the lever on his tank to rebuild the pressure. Cas never paused in his flow of words, but he held up two fingers. Crap.
They fought through the undergrowth towards the tree. It didn’t take long for the spirits to manifest once more, and this time they teamed up on Cas, trying to prevent him calling back the protection of the Gods. Dean took out the Chief in his feathered cloak with another spray of salt water, but not before he’d flung Cas to the ground. A second spirit, this one thinner and wearing only a reed skirt raised his club over Cas, but then Sam was there, flinging his chain around the ghost, wrapping it around a tree, and anchoring it heavily in the ground. The spirit flashed angrily and rattled the rusty chain, but couldn’t escape.
They ran toward the tree, slipping and sliding in the mud. Dean gave Cas a hand up, and Cas continued his prayer smoothly from where he’d faltered as the spirit threw him to the ground. The spirit of the chief reappeared behind Dean, raising his club. Dean flung himself forward and found himself tumbling down the slope, dragged by the weight of the backpack.
He came to rest against the enormous tree they were there to bless, bruised and scratched from the rocks and seedlings he’d slid over on his journey downhill. The frigid air suddenly got much, much colder.
“Oh crap,” he heard Sam say, over the drone of Cas repeating the prayer, his voice steady and sure. They’d somehow managed to reach the tree not long after him.
Dean lifted his head, struggling to right himself. The plastic of his salt water tank had cracked when he smashed into the tree, and water was leaking out onto the roots of the tree, soaking into the ground beneath. Okay, that was okay. Some of the articles had suggested splashing the object or person with water. Maybe it would help. Dean’s breath came back, and the haze of white light that formed a circle around them resolved itself into figures. Spirits. Lots of them. Twenty at least, surrounding them on all sides. Dean twisted out of his backpack and grabbed the mercifully unbroken back of salt that had been attached to the base, ripping it open and starting to pour a thin line around them.
The spirits closed in. Cas sent a jet of water at one and it disappeared, only for the spot to be filled by another spirit.
Sam flung a water balloon filled with salt into the mass of spirits. It burst on a tree and sent the spirits around it scattering, but they could all see they couldn’t hold them off for long.
The tree they were under began to move, its drooping leaves slashing hard and fast through the air. One whipped Dean across the face. It was sharp and spiky, and he knew he was going to have a cut along his cheekbone the next day. Assuming they made it to tomorrow.
A heavy branch creaked above Sam and Dean dived on him, shoving him out of the way just as the branch fell.
When he and Sam had clambered to their feet, Dean gave up on the salt line. He and Sam stood on either side of Cas, flinging out handfuls of salt as Cas shouted the final few words of the prayer.
Dean threw his last handful of salt and braced himself as the spirits sped up their descent. Cas let out a final shout and sprayed the last of his water directly onto the tree, while Sam threw his last salt.
And then… nothing. The spirits were there and then they weren’t. The tree stopped moving. All that remained was the constant drip of the rain, now feeling positively warm on their freezing skin. A bright, yellow light appeared beside Sam. His flashlight, still turned on, dangled on a clip from his backpack. Sometimes, Dean’s little brother was awesomely smart.
“So that’s it?” Sam asked.
“Yes,” said Cas, voice hoarse from all the shouting.
“I was kind of expecting it to be more dramatic than that.”
“Well, I for one am glad it wasn’t,” Dean said, “We should go before we freeze to death.”
But he had to admit he’d kind of missed the excitement. And next case, he was making sure they got to burn something.
“It’s easy to forget what you learned
Waiting for the thrill to return
Feeling your desire burn
And drawn to the flame…”
Crowded House - Distant Sun
Sam clapped his brother on the back as Dean stood up, muddy but triumphant, having just scored the team’s first try of the game. He picked the ball up just as the rest of the team arrived for high fives and back patting. Okay, so maybe they were still fifteen points behind with less than three minutes to play, but winning wasn’t the point. The point was to have fun. And the best bit for Sam was that Dean was smiling, and it wasn’t that scary forced grin that made him look like a crazy person. Dean was coming back to him.
They were still a couple of players short; although the accidents had stopped after the night they’d been on their expedition into the bush. The day after, they had gone to visit Keith at his brother’s place (he’d been released from the hospital that morning), and met a priest on his way out. As it turned out, they didn’t have to perform the blessing on him, because someone else had taken the initiative. Lucky, really. Keith thought it was weird enough that they were visiting him at all, let alone praying over him in Maori and dousing him in salt water.
Sam had noticed a change in Dean after the hunt. He seemed more alive, and Sam knew that despite Dean’s desire to escape the life and the pain that it caused, hunting was something that made him Dean, and he would always find his way back to it. They all would.
But from now on, it wouldn’t be everything. It was time to find a balance, and that started with finishing their vacation without looking for more hunts. They’d stay for the rest of the winter and then head home before the hoards of summer tourists arrived. After that? Well, Sam wasn’t making any plans until then.
Beside him, Dean showed Cas how to fist-bump.
The end.