Fanfic - SPN: Plain Gold Band - Ch. 4 - The Sleep
Title: Plain Gold Band [Evil!Sammy Universe]
Author: eboniorchid
Full Header for the Series
Chapter Four: The Sleep
[058.Lethargic]
In the morning there was coffee and Sam and silences that Dean thought about filling but Sam never allowed him access to. Every remotely inquiring or apologetic word out of Dean's mouth was met with "it's got nothing to do with the case" and "it's really none of your business."
He couldn't exactly blame his brother for being pissed off, but the night before hadn't really been easy for either of them and all the sleeplessness and stress made it hard for Dean to keep his emotions from rising loudly to the surface. By the time they'd finished breakfast, he was unusually thankful for the expected quiet of the library. It meant they could pretend the silence was about courtesy and work and not about their inability to communicate, to connect.
Library research didn't cheer them up, though. Reading through the recent newspaper archives and checking annuals as far back as seemed reasonable brought them nothing. There were no suspicious deaths, divorces, or marital violence reported around the time the rash of suicides started, nor did it seem to connect back to any local suicides or other deaths in the past thirty years or so. There wasn't even much mythology around apparent self-inflicted death in general, except some scattered stories about Mayan goddesses, Mediterranean sirens, and Hungarian love songs, all of which seemed rather unlikely in Northern California.
Through their work, they both stayed as quiet as possible and but for the bare necessities of communicating things about the case or passing books or pens, they could've just been two random unconnected people pouring over books at the same table in some library off the beaten path.
Late in the morning, when they were drained, pages of worthless words starting to blur, a pretty redhead slipped Sam a folded up note as she went by and Sam whispered thanks as his lips twitched in half-hidden amused little smile. Dean reached out to tap his pen on the papers Sam was reading, wagging his eyebrow and whispering conspiratorially when Sam looked up. "You gonna call her?" He'd tried to make the comment as light as possible, jokey even, though he wasn't joking, but Sam's stare-blink combination said it didn't go over well.
"She's a librarian, Dean. I asked her about a book that I couldn't find when I was up last time."
Dean's shoulder lifted and his mouth pouted as he wondered why he never got hot librarians when he went to the circulation desk. "Still … doesn't mean she didn't give you her number."
He eyed the unopened note trapped halfway under Sam's fingers, then looked up at his brother again who seemed wholly unmoved by curiosity. "You're not even going to look at it?"
Sam glared for a moment longer before sighing with a small laugh as he handed the paper to Dean without reading it himself. "The only numbers in there belong to the Dewey Decimal system."
Flipping the note open, Dean scanned the contents: RC7 dot zeros, twos, threes and sevens, followed by a separate bunching of other letters with similar strings of digits, MW, SW, LB, DB, so forth and so on with an occasional little "t" tossed in for good measure. He looked at the neat strokes of ink longer than necessary, the alphanumeric mix puzzling him for a reason he couldn't grasp but wanted to.
"Maybe it's a test."
Dean glanced up, surprised and even further confused by Sam's sudden grin. "Maybe what's a test?"
"The note." Sam nodded to indicate the paper in Dean's fingers. "I only asked for one book. That's probably why she set it on its own first. I don't know what the others are, so … she could just be a librarian pointing the way to resources I didn't know to ask for. Or, she could be testing to see if I'm smart enough to either figure out her little code or interested enough to treasure hunt around the whole library and look up all this random junk."
Dean's eyebrows just kept tipping inwards until he could feel a headache creeping in. "Why would she do that?"
He tossed the note back to Sam's side of the table and resisted lifting a hand to rub his temples. He could process some of Sam's words as humor, but something about the situation had drained him all of a sudden, or maybe it wasn't so sudden. Maybe he'd really just been that tired all morning and trying to make sense of a bunch of random numbers reminded his brain that he'd rather be sleeping.
Sam snickered, rising from his seat. "Dude, I'm not serious. But I'm going to check these out. Be back in a bit."
Dean watched his brother stride off into the stacks and groaned under his breath as he turned back to their research. Staring down at a transcript of an interview conducted by a local historian, he found himself nodding off midway through the account of a World War II era widow who met her husband's lover after the war. The fact that after a time of turbulence they became close friends, even buying a house together in their elder years, pushed their story into the rising pile of 'not applicable'.
He was pretty sick of local histories and the building headache wasn't helping. Sam's mythology research, though, might at least have pictures of something non-raisin like and Dean reached for it, pulling over the open book and the notebook beside it. He noted that mythology studies were in fact slightly more interesting, that nymphs as depicted by pervy old painters were hot, and that Sam was an obsessive doodler, dozens of weird stars eating up all the margin space on his paper. But then the only thing he noted, or didn't, was the relative softness of worn parchment under his head as he fell asleep.
There was a sharp rapping somewhere near his forehead, a thuddy sound that made him blink but still decide against wakefulness.
"If your drool ruined my notes, you can be for damned sure that you'll be in here by yourself tomorrow figuring it all out again."
Dean grunted, a pseudo-agreement mixed in with some kind of 'quit your whining' sentiment. The tapping didn't stop, though, until his hand landed on his brother's, pen flattened, and he slowly pulled himself up to sitting again.
"What do you want?" Dean's voice was raspy and guttural like he'd slept for hours instead of- … He checked his watch, blurry eyed. … Instead of an hour? He lifted a fist to rub his eyes then looked again. No, Sam had really been gone an hour.
Sam chuckled, propping up one of his finds, some book about jazz. "See?"
Dean's eyebrows rose and then crashed back down again. "See what, Sam? You taking up the sax?"
Pulling the book wide and flipping through the pages, Sam found what he was looking for and propped it back up again, flashing the page title "Gloomy Sunday" at Dean. "See? Same song."
Even being slightly more rested wasn't helping him pull the info together. "English, Sammy. Plain old American, please."
Sam rolled his eyes and shoved the book in Dean's face, pointing at the original composer's name, one Rezső Seress, which Dean was pretty sure he'd mangle if pronunciation was necessary. "It's the Hungarian suicide song in translation. It's been a popular jazz song since the 1930's and everyone says the English translations mucked things up a bit, one even flat out changed the basic meaning of the song, but … it's possible that it's still potent in English. Well, if it ever had the ability to make people kill themselves in its original Hungarian at least."
Tilting his head back and forth some, Dean pursed his lips, kind of liking the sound of a simple open-and-shut, don't-kill-people-with-your-magic-music kind of case. "Is there any evidence on the books that it really worked? I mean … I don't remember hearing about death-causing melodies from Dad or Bobby, but … Kismet is the only real connection beyond messing around with married folks, so … maybe."
He shrugged, but he couldn't help but think that 'maybe' might really be a 'probably' and they could put the bad vibes of this town in the rearview mirror and redo the start of things in the next state over.
"We were going to head there anyway tonight, right?" Sam shut the book and snatched his notepad back, scribbling down the information. "So, now we just know to ask if 'Gloomy Sunday' is part of their usual set and try to figure out how to get them to take it off the playlist."
"And even if it's not that, we can still do a sweep of the place, make sure there's nothing else supernaturally out of whack or whatever."
"Right." Sam nodded as he put his pen down and started packing his stuff back into his satchel.
"Are we leaving already?" Not that Dean especially wanted to stay, but the club probably wasn't even open yet.
"I am. I have a lunch meeting, remember?" Sam made it sound all professional, as if he'd need to suit up and organize the files in his briefcase or something, as if they weren't meeting over greasy French fries to talk about- … Well, probably just to catch up or something.
"Oh. Right. A lunch meeting." He meant the emphasis to be about the supposed business nature of the meeting, but with his voice still a little rough from sleep it came out sounding sleazy, like Sam would be engaging in a whole different kind of business. He saw Sam's jaw do a rolling crack and tried not to let out the longsuffering sigh on the tip of his tongue.
"Not all of us want to fuck everything we see … and Mel deserves more respect than your constant fucking droolfest, so keep your tongue in your mouth." Sam snatched up his bag as he stood. "And you wonder why I don't want you to meet my friends." Then he was off, huffing his way to the door and away.
Dean grumbled, mostly at himself for messing things up again. Then he stacked up their books and tossed his bag over his shoulder, deciding that a nap back at the motel would do everyone some good.
He stopped off at a rundown stripmall to snag a five dollar pizza, ignoring an overheard conversation about forest fires still burning from the night before. The name Tyre Road made him pause, though, as he slipped cash into the clerks hand, but he just shook his head on his way out the door, thinking it would just be their luck to have to leave the motel due to fire or smoke. He'd just have to hope the crazy California weather wouldn't help the fires get in the way of the job.
As he left, he thought he was headed for the motel but found himself driving downtown. The diner was up ahead on the right and he knew he shouldn't be there, knew Sam would have a fit if he saw the car, but … he couldn't help peering up at the windows as he drove by, slower than necessary, trying to see past the midday glare making mirrors of the glass. He sighed when he didn't see Sam and sped his way back to the motel, trying to ignore the heavy out-of-place feeling in his stomach as if a boulder had grown there. Putting food in around the boulder proved more difficult than he'd anticipated, though, and he quickly set the pizza aside, lulling himself to sleep with talk show prattle at low volume.
The creak of the door, a long while later, made Dean shift in his sleep, fingers slipping under his pillow to wrap around the handle of his knife. The click of the lock and the shift of cloth moving around a body made his breathing quiet as he silently groped for consciousness. He heard a bag drop near his bed and fought with himself to keep breathing evenly. Something was wrong, but he couldn't tell exactly what without opening his eyes and giving away the element of surprise. The fingers in his hair, though, were entirely too much.
Rollgrabpullpoint and Sam's arm was held down, a knife at the side of his throat. Dean had been swift and he knew it, but it wouldn't've happened that way if Sam had put up even a hint of resistance and Dean wasn't sure exactly what that meant. "Sam?"
"Dean …" Sam's eyes glimmered darkly, his lips tilted into a smirk that was coated with amusement as much as anger. It made Dean pull back, something more fear-like than he'd care to admit shuddering its way through his system. He let Sam straighten up to his full height again as he remained sitting, sheepish, on the bed.
"Sorry, you uh- …"
"Set off your spidey sense?" That disturbing mix of malice and delight was set deeply into Sam's face as if it had been carved there and Dean found his eyes looking everywhere but at his brother as he spoke.
"I- … You know I try to sleep light and- …"
"Shut up. I don't care. If I did, though, I wouldn't want to listen to you make up excuses instead of just saying the truth." Sam shrugged and moved to lean a shoulder against the wall, watching Dean work to not squirm under his gaze. "Which is that as tough as you talk, I freak you the fuck out and somehow you think that if you say it out loud as little as possible, it'll lessen that jittery feeling, but … it doesn't actually help anything, does it?"
"Sam- …" Sam quirked his eyebrow and Dean turned away, feeling like his mind was an open show. "You just … startled me and- …"
"Shut up. Seriously. I really, really don't care." He took in a quick breath. "Besides, I have news."
"About what?"
"The latest victim, Jim Rukus, a fifty-something rocker in town. He downed a whole bottle of meds then sat down in an alley to sleep himself to an early grave. And he did it only two blocks south of Kismet last night." Dean opened his mouth, but Sam held up a halting hand. "And before you ask, yes, he was fucking around with a married somebody … a couple of married somebodies actually. He was a local celebrity of sorts and rumor has it that he's been banging the mayor's husband … or the mayor herself … or maybe both … as well as various government staffers and/or their spouses … depending on who you ask. I think marriage-based threesomes might mess up our pattern, though, so I'm inclined to think that's not what got him killed, but … maybe."
Dean just blinked for a moment, but the huff of awed air wouldn't be contained and he shook his head. "Wow. That's- …" He wanted to say something like 'awesome', but he wasn't sure Sam would appreciate his enthusiasm, despite Sam's own current smirk. "Okay. Well. Right." He coughed and nodded, eyebrows lifting but not too much.
Sam chuckled. "You're, of course, thinking something like, 'what a way to go' or 'he must've been one pretty cool dude' or 'fuck, maybe we should stick around and see if any high-heeled officials need some extra consoling'. It's okay. I know you think with your dick, but that's fine because I'm pretty sure that between me and, well, me, we've got this case in the bag."
It looked like their hunch might pan out this time and Dean was glad about that, but Sam's smugness left his skin itchy like it was being crawled on by bugs too tiny to see.
The afternoon could not pass quickly enough.
Prologue - One - Two - Three - Four - Five - Six - Seven - Eight - Epilogue
Author: eboniorchid
Full Header for the Series
Chapter Four: The Sleep
[058.Lethargic]
In the morning there was coffee and Sam and silences that Dean thought about filling but Sam never allowed him access to. Every remotely inquiring or apologetic word out of Dean's mouth was met with "it's got nothing to do with the case" and "it's really none of your business."
He couldn't exactly blame his brother for being pissed off, but the night before hadn't really been easy for either of them and all the sleeplessness and stress made it hard for Dean to keep his emotions from rising loudly to the surface. By the time they'd finished breakfast, he was unusually thankful for the expected quiet of the library. It meant they could pretend the silence was about courtesy and work and not about their inability to communicate, to connect.
Library research didn't cheer them up, though. Reading through the recent newspaper archives and checking annuals as far back as seemed reasonable brought them nothing. There were no suspicious deaths, divorces, or marital violence reported around the time the rash of suicides started, nor did it seem to connect back to any local suicides or other deaths in the past thirty years or so. There wasn't even much mythology around apparent self-inflicted death in general, except some scattered stories about Mayan goddesses, Mediterranean sirens, and Hungarian love songs, all of which seemed rather unlikely in Northern California.
Through their work, they both stayed as quiet as possible and but for the bare necessities of communicating things about the case or passing books or pens, they could've just been two random unconnected people pouring over books at the same table in some library off the beaten path.
Late in the morning, when they were drained, pages of worthless words starting to blur, a pretty redhead slipped Sam a folded up note as she went by and Sam whispered thanks as his lips twitched in half-hidden amused little smile. Dean reached out to tap his pen on the papers Sam was reading, wagging his eyebrow and whispering conspiratorially when Sam looked up. "You gonna call her?" He'd tried to make the comment as light as possible, jokey even, though he wasn't joking, but Sam's stare-blink combination said it didn't go over well.
"She's a librarian, Dean. I asked her about a book that I couldn't find when I was up last time."
Dean's shoulder lifted and his mouth pouted as he wondered why he never got hot librarians when he went to the circulation desk. "Still … doesn't mean she didn't give you her number."
He eyed the unopened note trapped halfway under Sam's fingers, then looked up at his brother again who seemed wholly unmoved by curiosity. "You're not even going to look at it?"
Sam glared for a moment longer before sighing with a small laugh as he handed the paper to Dean without reading it himself. "The only numbers in there belong to the Dewey Decimal system."
Flipping the note open, Dean scanned the contents: RC7 dot zeros, twos, threes and sevens, followed by a separate bunching of other letters with similar strings of digits, MW, SW, LB, DB, so forth and so on with an occasional little "t" tossed in for good measure. He looked at the neat strokes of ink longer than necessary, the alphanumeric mix puzzling him for a reason he couldn't grasp but wanted to.
"Maybe it's a test."
Dean glanced up, surprised and even further confused by Sam's sudden grin. "Maybe what's a test?"
"The note." Sam nodded to indicate the paper in Dean's fingers. "I only asked for one book. That's probably why she set it on its own first. I don't know what the others are, so … she could just be a librarian pointing the way to resources I didn't know to ask for. Or, she could be testing to see if I'm smart enough to either figure out her little code or interested enough to treasure hunt around the whole library and look up all this random junk."
Dean's eyebrows just kept tipping inwards until he could feel a headache creeping in. "Why would she do that?"
He tossed the note back to Sam's side of the table and resisted lifting a hand to rub his temples. He could process some of Sam's words as humor, but something about the situation had drained him all of a sudden, or maybe it wasn't so sudden. Maybe he'd really just been that tired all morning and trying to make sense of a bunch of random numbers reminded his brain that he'd rather be sleeping.
Sam snickered, rising from his seat. "Dude, I'm not serious. But I'm going to check these out. Be back in a bit."
Dean watched his brother stride off into the stacks and groaned under his breath as he turned back to their research. Staring down at a transcript of an interview conducted by a local historian, he found himself nodding off midway through the account of a World War II era widow who met her husband's lover after the war. The fact that after a time of turbulence they became close friends, even buying a house together in their elder years, pushed their story into the rising pile of 'not applicable'.
He was pretty sick of local histories and the building headache wasn't helping. Sam's mythology research, though, might at least have pictures of something non-raisin like and Dean reached for it, pulling over the open book and the notebook beside it. He noted that mythology studies were in fact slightly more interesting, that nymphs as depicted by pervy old painters were hot, and that Sam was an obsessive doodler, dozens of weird stars eating up all the margin space on his paper. But then the only thing he noted, or didn't, was the relative softness of worn parchment under his head as he fell asleep.
There was a sharp rapping somewhere near his forehead, a thuddy sound that made him blink but still decide against wakefulness.
"If your drool ruined my notes, you can be for damned sure that you'll be in here by yourself tomorrow figuring it all out again."
Dean grunted, a pseudo-agreement mixed in with some kind of 'quit your whining' sentiment. The tapping didn't stop, though, until his hand landed on his brother's, pen flattened, and he slowly pulled himself up to sitting again.
"What do you want?" Dean's voice was raspy and guttural like he'd slept for hours instead of- … He checked his watch, blurry eyed. … Instead of an hour? He lifted a fist to rub his eyes then looked again. No, Sam had really been gone an hour.
Sam chuckled, propping up one of his finds, some book about jazz. "See?"
Dean's eyebrows rose and then crashed back down again. "See what, Sam? You taking up the sax?"
Pulling the book wide and flipping through the pages, Sam found what he was looking for and propped it back up again, flashing the page title "Gloomy Sunday" at Dean. "See? Same song."
Even being slightly more rested wasn't helping him pull the info together. "English, Sammy. Plain old American, please."
Sam rolled his eyes and shoved the book in Dean's face, pointing at the original composer's name, one Rezső Seress, which Dean was pretty sure he'd mangle if pronunciation was necessary. "It's the Hungarian suicide song in translation. It's been a popular jazz song since the 1930's and everyone says the English translations mucked things up a bit, one even flat out changed the basic meaning of the song, but … it's possible that it's still potent in English. Well, if it ever had the ability to make people kill themselves in its original Hungarian at least."
Tilting his head back and forth some, Dean pursed his lips, kind of liking the sound of a simple open-and-shut, don't-kill-people-with-your-magic-music kind of case. "Is there any evidence on the books that it really worked? I mean … I don't remember hearing about death-causing melodies from Dad or Bobby, but … Kismet is the only real connection beyond messing around with married folks, so … maybe."
He shrugged, but he couldn't help but think that 'maybe' might really be a 'probably' and they could put the bad vibes of this town in the rearview mirror and redo the start of things in the next state over.
"We were going to head there anyway tonight, right?" Sam shut the book and snatched his notepad back, scribbling down the information. "So, now we just know to ask if 'Gloomy Sunday' is part of their usual set and try to figure out how to get them to take it off the playlist."
"And even if it's not that, we can still do a sweep of the place, make sure there's nothing else supernaturally out of whack or whatever."
"Right." Sam nodded as he put his pen down and started packing his stuff back into his satchel.
"Are we leaving already?" Not that Dean especially wanted to stay, but the club probably wasn't even open yet.
"I am. I have a lunch meeting, remember?" Sam made it sound all professional, as if he'd need to suit up and organize the files in his briefcase or something, as if they weren't meeting over greasy French fries to talk about- … Well, probably just to catch up or something.
"Oh. Right. A lunch meeting." He meant the emphasis to be about the supposed business nature of the meeting, but with his voice still a little rough from sleep it came out sounding sleazy, like Sam would be engaging in a whole different kind of business. He saw Sam's jaw do a rolling crack and tried not to let out the longsuffering sigh on the tip of his tongue.
"Not all of us want to fuck everything we see … and Mel deserves more respect than your constant fucking droolfest, so keep your tongue in your mouth." Sam snatched up his bag as he stood. "And you wonder why I don't want you to meet my friends." Then he was off, huffing his way to the door and away.
Dean grumbled, mostly at himself for messing things up again. Then he stacked up their books and tossed his bag over his shoulder, deciding that a nap back at the motel would do everyone some good.
He stopped off at a rundown stripmall to snag a five dollar pizza, ignoring an overheard conversation about forest fires still burning from the night before. The name Tyre Road made him pause, though, as he slipped cash into the clerks hand, but he just shook his head on his way out the door, thinking it would just be their luck to have to leave the motel due to fire or smoke. He'd just have to hope the crazy California weather wouldn't help the fires get in the way of the job.
As he left, he thought he was headed for the motel but found himself driving downtown. The diner was up ahead on the right and he knew he shouldn't be there, knew Sam would have a fit if he saw the car, but … he couldn't help peering up at the windows as he drove by, slower than necessary, trying to see past the midday glare making mirrors of the glass. He sighed when he didn't see Sam and sped his way back to the motel, trying to ignore the heavy out-of-place feeling in his stomach as if a boulder had grown there. Putting food in around the boulder proved more difficult than he'd anticipated, though, and he quickly set the pizza aside, lulling himself to sleep with talk show prattle at low volume.
The creak of the door, a long while later, made Dean shift in his sleep, fingers slipping under his pillow to wrap around the handle of his knife. The click of the lock and the shift of cloth moving around a body made his breathing quiet as he silently groped for consciousness. He heard a bag drop near his bed and fought with himself to keep breathing evenly. Something was wrong, but he couldn't tell exactly what without opening his eyes and giving away the element of surprise. The fingers in his hair, though, were entirely too much.
Rollgrabpullpoint and Sam's arm was held down, a knife at the side of his throat. Dean had been swift and he knew it, but it wouldn't've happened that way if Sam had put up even a hint of resistance and Dean wasn't sure exactly what that meant. "Sam?"
"Dean …" Sam's eyes glimmered darkly, his lips tilted into a smirk that was coated with amusement as much as anger. It made Dean pull back, something more fear-like than he'd care to admit shuddering its way through his system. He let Sam straighten up to his full height again as he remained sitting, sheepish, on the bed.
"Sorry, you uh- …"
"Set off your spidey sense?" That disturbing mix of malice and delight was set deeply into Sam's face as if it had been carved there and Dean found his eyes looking everywhere but at his brother as he spoke.
"I- … You know I try to sleep light and- …"
"Shut up. I don't care. If I did, though, I wouldn't want to listen to you make up excuses instead of just saying the truth." Sam shrugged and moved to lean a shoulder against the wall, watching Dean work to not squirm under his gaze. "Which is that as tough as you talk, I freak you the fuck out and somehow you think that if you say it out loud as little as possible, it'll lessen that jittery feeling, but … it doesn't actually help anything, does it?"
"Sam- …" Sam quirked his eyebrow and Dean turned away, feeling like his mind was an open show. "You just … startled me and- …"
"Shut up. Seriously. I really, really don't care." He took in a quick breath. "Besides, I have news."
"About what?"
"The latest victim, Jim Rukus, a fifty-something rocker in town. He downed a whole bottle of meds then sat down in an alley to sleep himself to an early grave. And he did it only two blocks south of Kismet last night." Dean opened his mouth, but Sam held up a halting hand. "And before you ask, yes, he was fucking around with a married somebody … a couple of married somebodies actually. He was a local celebrity of sorts and rumor has it that he's been banging the mayor's husband … or the mayor herself … or maybe both … as well as various government staffers and/or their spouses … depending on who you ask. I think marriage-based threesomes might mess up our pattern, though, so I'm inclined to think that's not what got him killed, but … maybe."
Dean just blinked for a moment, but the huff of awed air wouldn't be contained and he shook his head. "Wow. That's- …" He wanted to say something like 'awesome', but he wasn't sure Sam would appreciate his enthusiasm, despite Sam's own current smirk. "Okay. Well. Right." He coughed and nodded, eyebrows lifting but not too much.
Sam chuckled. "You're, of course, thinking something like, 'what a way to go' or 'he must've been one pretty cool dude' or 'fuck, maybe we should stick around and see if any high-heeled officials need some extra consoling'. It's okay. I know you think with your dick, but that's fine because I'm pretty sure that between me and, well, me, we've got this case in the bag."
It looked like their hunch might pan out this time and Dean was glad about that, but Sam's smugness left his skin itchy like it was being crawled on by bugs too tiny to see.
The afternoon could not pass quickly enough.
Prologue - One - Two - Three - Four - Five - Six - Seven - Eight - Epilogue