Supernatural Fic: Lullaby for a Stormy Night
Title: Lullaby for a Stormy Night
Author: xaara
Rating: R, gen
Timeline: Post-Devil's Trap (spoilers for all of season 1)
Characters: Dean, Jess
Summary: The day they release him, he walks out without looking back.
Warnings: Major character death
Lullaby for a Stormy Night
He wakes to spotlights and chatter and a horrible screechgrindtear as firemen tear through the doors of his car. He wakes coughing up his own blood, his organs loose and slipping inside him. He tries to tell them to look after Dad and Sam first, tries to tell them, but they just look at him with concern and say it’s all right, sir, we need you to stop struggling now, sir, we’re bringing you to a hospital, it’s all right.
No, he thinks.
He tries to tell them this, too, but they can’t hear his mind screaming at them. Only Sam has ever been able to do that.
Days stretch into weeks and when he finally awakens for more than twenty morphine-warped seconds, all they have is news of internal bleeding and open fractures. And death. News of death.
(John Winchester, fatal combination of blood loss and head trauma. Multiple broken bones, fractured skull. Practically crushed. Probably happened even before a passing driver stopped in horror at the blood-spattered scene and dialed for an ambulance. Samuel Winchester. Probably held on a bit longer. Found half-turned behind the wheel, trying to reach the back seat.)
It’s not true, he’s sure. Can’t be. The doctor must be possessed, or manipulating his reality. He hurls the name of God at her in every language he can remember until she sedates him and then his dreams fill with Sam’s lopsided smile and the way his father’s beard scratched after a few days on the hunt. He opens his eyes every morning to the sun and the taste of nights spent in chase, his heart trapped beneath his collarbone, adrenaline jolting through him.
“You’re never going to get better, you keep acting like this,” the doctor says. “All you’re doing is paying a bunch of nurses to traipse in and out, give you the shit food here, and watch you kill yourself.” She waves a hand at her clipboard. “You can stay here until you die, or you can get better and get out. One or the other, and we could sure use the bed.”
He pulls himself together after that, works at rehab until his body aches with the strain. His hair, shorn close to the scalp during his stay in the hospital, refuses to grow back. It prickles at strange, wheat field angles. He’s lost weight, and his clothes sag from his shoulders, at his hips. When it’s cold, he favors his right leg.
The day they release him, he walks out without looking back.
Bobby gives him another flask of holy water, a few more books. Two shotguns, a set of throwing knives, five hundred and eighty-six dollars in cash. Bobby gives him the Colt, returns it with worried eyes but no comment.
The gun fires its last shot between the eyes of a demon sneering at him from the body of the woman who served him a blueberry cobbler and kept his coffee topped off in the diner that morning. Afterwards, he touches her hair. It’s pulled free from her ponytail around her face, strands of curling brown lying limp across her cheekbones like autumn grass. He stands. It’s over.
He knows the gunshot will draw attention, so he runs for his stolen car and vomits efficiently on the ground outside before driving away. Done, he thinks, bile coating his teeth. I’m done with this shit.
He drives until he reaches an overlook point. Stops, sets the parking brake, and fishes out one of his shotguns, checks to see that it’s loaded. Wraps his mouth around the barrel. The moon flows against the blue dusk above the mountains before he closes his eyes. His finger tightens against the tug of the trigger. Seconds later when he hears the screams, he knows he’s arrived in hell.
The screams come closer, though, and the breeze still whispers cool against the back of his neck, so he opens his eyes to the same overlook he’d scanned before closing them, whips around, and fires into the forehead of a golem chasing three winded campers. “Watch where you’re fucking going,” he mutters. They try to thank him. He brushes them off and folds his legs into the driver’s seat of the sedan he’s been cursed to drive.
That was then.
--
19, he writes. Cottonwood, Idaho. Paul & Carla DiStefano. 2 kids, 6 & 8 yrs old. spirit of lady killed by husband before them haunting attic. help from local witch. potion smelled like shit & also blew up. do not seek help from local witches unless prepared to lose eyebrows.
He closes the journal. Moves on to 20.
--
“You know,” Dean tells the owner of the cockroach-infested motel where he’s shacked up, “I could help you with that problem you have in room six. Give me a night and I’ll get rid of it.”
The owner, a balding man in a grease-stained polo shirt, glares at him. “Don’t have a problem,” he grunts.
Dean leans on the counter. “Seems to me,” he says, “that when I’m asleep in a room and all of a sudden shit I haven’t touched starts flying around trying to kill me, then you’ve got yourself a problem.”
The man blanches. “Haven’t had that problem before.”
“Whatever,” Dean says. “I don’t actually give a fuck. Just thought I’d mention that I could get rid of it before it kills someone and you have police crawling all over this place, maybe taking a look at some of what you’ve got stashed in the safe behind the counter.” He’d opened the safe the night before when the manager left to take a piss, noted the tiny bags of white powder stashed in a cashbox near the back.
“Deal with the room,” says the owner. He opens his wallet, extracts two fifty-dollar bills. “Make it quick.”
Dean stares at the money for a moment before pocketing it. “You got it.”
34: Winnett, Montana. Jackson Potter. whirlwind tornado spirit thing in motel rm 6. got rid of it w/ incantation for calm weather, usually used during harvest season. seemed to work. stole towels from room, fluffier than usual. prob make good bandages.
--
The truck could be dark grey, or dark blue, or even black. Dean isn’t sure what to think until he swipes his finger over a patch of grime-covered hood and examines the color beneath. Deep green, a pure, soft color.
“‘65 F-150,” the owner says. He’s leaning against another car, a cigarette dangling, unlit, from between his lips. “Still runs fine, far as I can tell. Hasn’t given me any trouble yet, still got lots of life in her. She’ll be good to you, long’s you’re good to her.”
Dean hands the man a fistful of twenties and nods to him on his way out of the lot.
He rigs a lid for the truck bed from parts at a nearby junkyard, then slings his duffel and a sleeping bag in before slamming the gate closed. The night stretches clear before him. He drives until he feels the tug of sleep, pulls off the road, and curls in his truck beneath the stars.
42: Mosquero, New Mexico. Jorge & Patti Rodriguez. wish someone’d told me town is named after fucking swarms of mosquitos. would’ve passed. salted & burned body of local man killed by white settlers & buried under Rod. house. hope he doesn’t come back tonight, would have problems explaining return. bought truck.
--
Dean looks out the window of his shoebox room, at the red and orange whorls of light at the bar across the street, and wishes hard for a moment that he could afford to sacrifice his edge to a few shots. Just one night. He can almost feel the burn of the alcohol at the edges of his chest.
His phone rings and he flips it open blindly, still caught up in the activity at the bar. “Hello?”
“Hello? Dean Winchester?”
“Who’s this?” he asks. A click sounds as the caller hangs up. When he glances at the caller ID and doesn’t recognize the number displayed there, he shrugs, leaves the room. Any number of people have his contact information. They want him enough, they’ll call back.
Across the street, he orders a Sprite and scans the crowd until he locates an attractive woman sitting by herself at the bar. “Hey,” he says. She says nothing to warn him off.
He stays for twenty minutes, talking, before bringing her back to his room. Figures his life is enough of a dysfunctional cliché already and so asks, half a grin twisting his mouth, if she wants to see his etchings. She looks at him with eyes set deep beneath twin rings of liner and shadow and asks him if they’re going to fuck already; she wants to be home by two.
--
It’s the first job he’s ever held longer than two weeks. Ten hours a day, Saturdays off, minimum wage and time-and-a-half for all hours over forty. It keeps him in salt and bullets, pays his rent on an efficiency in a shitty part of town.
The neighbors don’t allow their kids near him, but they let him know when the ghosts wander in from the cemetery a block away. Sometimes when he wakes up there’s a quilt folded neatly outside his door or a plate of still-warm cookies or a note of thanks written in broken English. He picks up some Spanish, a little Amharic. He gets along.
Next door, Mihret cooks food so spicy it makes Dean’s eyes water. She watches, dark eyes blank, as he wraps a piece of beef in injera and carries it to his mouth, laughs when he coughs and gulps tea to ease the burn. While Dean eats, Mihret spins tales about Ethiopia, most of which Dean doesn’t believe for more than a few seconds. Her descriptions, half in English, half in smiles and gestures and expressions when she can’t find the words, enthrall him. In return, he tells her ghost stories over her card table while her children peek and squeal from the next room.
When her youngest, Taye, nearly loses his voice to a spirit who collects them before Dean figures out how to break the incantation, she cups a hand to Dean’s cheek. “Not your fault,” she says, but something changes. It’s always like this, eventually. It always ends.
“I want a week,” Dean tells his supervisor, and the other man nods and says take whatever you want. Unpaid, but your job’ll still be here, later.
He fills the tank with gas, pays in frayed tens and a handful of change. He starts driving until he sees the sign for Interstate 80, takes the on ramp.
There’s a country out there. He kind of wants to see it in the daytime.
--
He picks her up at a truck stop.
She stands in the long shadows of evening, her blonde hair draped across her shoulders, wearing a top more handkerchief than shirt, and meets his eyes. He waits. She smirks.
Ten minutes later, he fucks her in a bathroom stall. She tastes like tobacco and lip gloss, like the last desperate week of summer. She curls her fingers through his hair, which is still too short to grab hold of, bites his neck, gasps and throws her head back against the wall and comes hard around him. He follows a minute later, chokes out a hard breath, lets her down.
She rearranges her skewed clothing while he discards the condom, washes his face and hands. Their eyes meet in the mirror.
“I’m Diana,” she says.
He snorts at the irony. “I’m Jack,” he lies.
She grins at him. There’s a smudge of mascara on the bridge of her nose. “No you’re not,” she says. “I felt you coming a week ago.”
He’s not sure what that has to do with his name and doesn’t respond. Silence falls.
Diana reaches forward and touches his shoulder. “Sweetie, you don’t have to lie to me.” Her stomach grumbles and he spares her an inquisitive glance. “You do, however, have to buy me a drink.”
“Let’s try this again,” she says once they’re seated. “I’m Diana.”
He thinks, fuck it, and says, “I’m Dean.”
She shrugs. “I know.”
“If you knew--”
“Why was I asking you? To see if you’d tell me.”
“Oh,” says Dean. He has the feeling he’s not getting something. It’s an in-joke between Diana and herself, and he’s missing the punchline.
“There’s a bunch of us,” Diana says. “We see things. Sometimes we see people. Some of us can control things with our minds. It’s not, as you can probably guess, something that makes us useful to the outside world. We form groups, stick together.”
It hurts more than Dean would’ve expected it to, learning that the psychics and telekinetics have a community, knowing that Sam would have been one of them. He picks up a potato chip and flips it between his fingers before popping it into his mouth. “So, Xavier,” he says with his mouth full, “I give a damn why?”
Diana shrugs and takes a gurgling sip of her drink. “Dunno,” she says. “I just know I saw you about six days ago, coming into the truck stop--nice wheels, by the way--and knew you’d need us for something. It’s not like I can control what I see.”
Dean studies her face and decides he doesn’t care whether or not she’s telling the truth; it’s a good story. He still doesn’t see how he fits in.
“Thing about this vision, it wasn’t just you I saw. It was you, and it cut to this girl. I think we’re somehow all connected or something. Anyway, I figured you might know who she is.” Diana reaches into her back pocket, pulls out a sketch of a woman’s face. There are inconsistencies between what Dean remembers and what he sees before him. He only ever met her once, after all, and he spent most of the introductions staring at a spot below her face. In the drawing, her hair waves in a halo about her head. Lines web outward from the edges of her eyelids. She is older and deeper and her eyes reflect things Dean doesn’t want to know.
And yet she is unmistakably Jess.
Dean stops breathing.
--
When he returns to himself, he’s outside the food court, staring down at the highway.
Diana stands beside him. She takes another sip of her diet Coke, her face impassive. “I take it you know her?”
His world has frayed a little at the edges. One strong tug and it will begin to unravel, yarn pulling zigzagged until all that’s left is a ratty end. She tugs. He wants to kill her. He knows this, recognizes it from a time he has stowed under not to be revisited in the back of his mind. This pure need to waste the fucker, to hell with the cost and the consequences, because this is personal.
“Come back in.” Diana looks up at him, meets his gaze with a nonchalance that infuriates him further. “You’re starting to attract attention.”
The muscles of his forearm flex against his knife harness. He could shake the knife free, jam it through one of her eye sockets, slash it across her throat, slide it between her ribs. Easy as lying. She would be dead within minutes.
“That,” says Dean, pointing at the sketch, “was my brother’s girlfriend.”
“Why the was?” Diana asks.
“Because she’s dead.” Dean knows this, knows it because he saw the headstone and knows it because he killed the demon that killed her. It’s over. It’s done. This life, you don’t get second chances.
“Killed?”
“Yeah.”
The pause stretches until Dean becomes hyper-aware of the ambient sounds, the swish of traffic, the footsteps behind him, Diana’s breathing.
“I’m sorry,” she says at last.
Dean bites down on a laugh, his stomach clenching. “Try again.”
“You know what to do, then?” Diana’s looking at him, her eyes dark with the coming night.
“Maybe,” says Dean. He has no fucking clue what to do.
They walk to his truck in silence. “You have my number,” she says. “I called you a few weeks ago. You get in trouble, call.”
Figures. “Don’t wait up,” he says.
“If you need to talk. Or whatever. Need a new gun, a knife, more salt. Give us a ring.” For the first time that evening, she strikes him as sincere. He appreciates it. He’s not going to call.
--
Palo Alto looks the same. It’s still full of kids wearing Stanford hoodies and jeans artfully ripped at the knees, along the thighs. They all look vaguely caffeinated and pissed off, like they’re trying to cultivate the creases between their drawn eyebrows.
Dean never quite understood what Sam saw in this place. When the clerk at the Cardinal Hotel asks him whether he wants a queen or two doubles, he has to catch himself. Force of habit. He remembers, though, gets the queen, throws his bag on the bed and folds the shutters back.
I’m here, he thinks. Your turn.
--
Leaving the doors and windows unsalted is making him nervous. It becomes worth it, though, when he wakes to see Jess standing at the foot of his bed the day after he checks in. He half-expected her to be wearing a nightgown, but instead she’s wrapped in a black sweater and slacks, her hair bound into a severe bun at the nape of her neck. Her hands keep moving as if of their own accord; the rest of her body stays perfectly, terribly still.
This was Sam’s girl, he thinks. The light slanting through the windows harmonizes with her skin. Her body curves, as thin and taut as a violin string.
“Hey,” he says.
She stares at him, and disappears.
Oh yeah. That went well.
--
By the end of the third morning, they’ve established a pattern.
Jess appears, Dean masters the gut-wrenching memories of his brother he experiences every time he sees her and voices a greeting, Jess disappears, Dean gets up and eats something from the coffeeshop across the street and waits for the day to be over.
On the morning of the fourth day, Dean doesn’t bother with the hello. “I’m tired of this,” he says. “If all you’re going to do is appear and disappear, I have other things to do.”
For the first time, her expression changes. Just a flicker of a thing, like the twist of a magician’s fingers.
“He talked about you, sometimes,” she says. And she’s gone.
--
Five days, and Dean wakes up to the smell of coffee brewing in the bathroom. He thinks he might be starting to understand why Sam loved this girl.
“What’s up?” he asks when he climbs out of bed and pours himself a mug of the steaming liquid. He offers one to her, but she shakes her head. He’s not sure whether ghosts can eat; he’s never asked.
“Why am I still here?” She’s not looking at him, and once more she stands rigid, her hands trembling.
“Hell if I know.”
She turns her head, just slightly, just enough to meet his gaze. “I want to go home,” she says. “Why won’t they let me go home?” There’s a twinge of fear in her voice. Dean remembers a woman in a tattered white dress and the sound of water sluicing down wooden stairs.
Suddenly, she’s inches from him. He yelps and drops his coffee, which spreads in a brown starburst across the carpet. He should feel her breath when she speaks, but the air between them remains undisturbed. “They won’t let me stay,” she says. “You. Make them let me stay. Please.”
He blinks and she’s at the windows. Her hair floats free of the bun to surround her head. He blinks again and she’s gone.
Something drips on the bedspread. Dean frowns and peers at it, runs fingers across the cloth until they encounter a tiny patch of viscous fluid. Red. Blood. He knows what he’ll see when he looks up, and he knows it’s not real, but it’s there just the same, a woman staring at him from the ceiling, her eyebrows twisted in an elegant portrayal of pain. She’s not anyone he recognizes. He thinks that he should recognize her, that it’s somehow his responsibility.
As if in response, the woman shifts and he meets his mother’s eyes. She smiles. “Dean,” she says, “what on earth did you do to your hair?” The stucco surrounding her bursts into flame.
Not happening, he thinks, not happening not happening not happening. He squeezes his eyes shut, crouches by the bed and bows his head until he feels a flash of heat on the back of his neck. A burn, a caress, and it’s gone.
He just makes it to the bathroom before he throws up.
--
“Fuck you,” he says even before opening his eyes the next day. He’s had fifteen minutes of sleep, none of it restful, and is not in the mood for Jess’s mind games.
“I’ll leave,” says Jess.
He doesn’t respond, just curls up more tightly beneath his blankets and ignores her.
“Sam says you have surprisingly nice handwriting for a guy who skipped half of fifth grade and slept through the other half.”
Okay, he’s awake. Without thinking, he reaches for her, wraps his fingers around her arm. It’s cold, like a flagpole on a winter day, so cold his fingers nearly cramp.
Shaking free gently, she says, “It’s harder to transfer heat between planes. Usually I just leave it behind.”
“What do you mean Sam says?” he asks, chafing the feeling back into his fingertips. “You talk to Sam?”
She shrugs. “Maybe. I don’t know. I’m not sure. Maybe he said that before.”
A human girl would have a confused frown on her face, some body language that telegraphed something happened but I can’t explain it. Jess has neither. Dean’s not even sure whether she’s a ghost. He tries to think of something to ask her, something only Sam would know, and comes up with, “Why did he die?”
--
“Something about a demon and a truck,” she says on the morning of the seventh day. “Something about a demon and a truck and it was night.” Her eyes roll up, as if she’s staring at the light fixture on the ceiling, and the digital clock sitting next to Dean’s bed begins to flicker on and off. She begins to recite, “Sam was driving. You were in the backseat, and your Dad was in the front, and it was dark and Sam had your blood on his hands and face from pulling you into the car, his father’s from binding his leg. He wasn’t paying attention to the intersection but it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. He kept looking in the rearview mirror because every time the car turned a little you made a tiny noise that told him you were still alive but otherwise he didn’t know, wasn’t sure. It went black, and you woke up in a hospital alone.”
Dean stares at her. His chest feels like it might fracture if he inhales too deeply. “Sam told you that?” he asks, his voice cracking, ripping along the seams.
“I think so,” Jess says. “I don’t know. They never let me stay.”
He’s busy tossing the blankets onto the mattress, giving his hands something to do. When she strobes and appears in front of him, sitting on the bed, he starts. “Come with me,” she says, “come with me, come on, let’s go.” She reaches a hand to touch his cheek and rests it there for a few seconds before she pulls him in, hard, for a kiss.
Her lips are cool, but not cold, not dead. He settles into the kiss out of habit, then realizes what’s going on and pushes her away, stumbles back until he encounters the edge of the dresser. The room feels too small, the cheerful patterning oppressive, the light from between the shutter slats searing.
“What are you doing?” he chokes.
Jess stares at him. Expressionless, and he wants nothing more than to shake her until she gives him a straight answer. “I just want to go home,” she says.
--
They drive, hundreds of miles without talking, only static to keep them company. Dean tried to put in a tape at first, but every time Jess moved, the music exploded into a screeching cacophony, so he gave up and instead hummed to himself, drumming his fingertips quietly on the steering wheel. They pause for gas and Cheetos and Coke--breakfast of champions, here--and then keep driving, just keep on driving.
Jess starts to sing a hundred miles outside of Denver, twenty hours into their drive. She has a pretty voice, low, untrained. It reminds Dean of those fucking terrible chocolate bottles with alcohol inside, sweetness and the rough slide of liquor along the back of his throat. “The water is wide,” she sings. “I cannot get o’er. And neither have I wings to fly. Give me a boat that can carry two, and I shall row my love and I.”
She’s not making a point, Dean tells himself. She’s just singing.
“I want to go home,” Jess says, for the hundredth time. It’s practically the only thing she’s said over the course of the last day. He remembers driving away from Lawrence that first time, Sammy screaming in the backseat, Dad gripping the wheel so hard his capillaries washed white. The smells of gun oil and metal shavings and leather. Outside, the trees a blur, the beginning of childhood on I-70. He’d curled up next to his brother, whispered it’s okay, Sammy, it’s okay, it’s okay, and wished hard for his mother.
They stop for the night and end up sleeping in the truck, pulled off onto a gravel turnaround. The next morning, Dean’s still not sure where he’s headed.
He knows when he gets there.
--
They’re ten minutes north of Fulton, intersection of route 54 and an unnamed country road. If Dean squints, he can almost see the headlights the truck coming at them, hear the protesting metal of his car, the splash as the windows blew fountains of safety glass onto the road. When he gets out of his truck and walks a few steps back into the shrubbery by the side of the road, his boots crunch over a piece of his headlight still lying in the grass.
He swallows and turns back to Jess.
“This is where it ended,” he says. Home.
She doesn’t respond. She’s staring into the distance, where dark clouds are bunching against the horizon. Her hands rest against her stomach. “We would have had beautiful children,” she says.
“Yeah.” Dean joins her, staring out across the asphalt, watching as the white boundary lines merge into one and disappear. He hesitates, then says, “He sent you, didn’t he?”
Jess nods. She’s become steadily more human as she’s stayed with him; her face now betrays her. “He can’t leave,” she says. “He wanted.... He didn’t want you to think--”
“I know,” Dean says. He can’t bring himself to look at her. “It’s not fair to you.”
A second, and she’s in front of him, her smile the gentle one in the picture Sam never showed him, the one he kept tucked beneath the credit card slot in his wallet. “I understand, though. If you want, I can, you know.”
And Dean wants it. He wants Sam to keep sending her as much as he’s ever wanted anything in his life. Along the road to the north, the storm that’s been following them all day condenses, consolidates, begins to rain.
He takes a deep breath. “Go home,” he says in a rush. “Do it. Whatever the magic words are, I release you, you’re free.”
The smile on her face grows, becomes a grin. She ruffles his hair and places a quick kiss on his cheek. “He wants you to be happy,” she whispers. “He suggests you take Diana up on her offer. And there’s a poltergeist in Auxvasse, just in case you need something to do.”
“Okay,” Dean says. He’s not sure what else to say, so he looks down, scuffs one toe against the road. Thinks of something, snaps his head back up, “Hey, Jess--”
She’s gone.
--
“Hi, this is Diana’s cell. Leave a message.”
He almost hangs up without saying anything, but instead clears his throat. “Diana. It’s Dean. I, uh, well. I’m going to be in Auxvasse for a couple days. I think I’ll call back. Let me know if you want, need. Whatever.”
A bolt of lightning arcs between the clouds, above the trees. Dean holds his breath and counts the seconds until the thunder.
Author: xaara
Rating: R, gen
Timeline: Post-Devil's Trap (spoilers for all of season 1)
Characters: Dean, Jess
Summary: The day they release him, he walks out without looking back.
Warnings: Major character death
Lullaby for a Stormy Night
He wakes to spotlights and chatter and a horrible screechgrindtear as firemen tear through the doors of his car. He wakes coughing up his own blood, his organs loose and slipping inside him. He tries to tell them to look after Dad and Sam first, tries to tell them, but they just look at him with concern and say it’s all right, sir, we need you to stop struggling now, sir, we’re bringing you to a hospital, it’s all right.
No, he thinks.
He tries to tell them this, too, but they can’t hear his mind screaming at them. Only Sam has ever been able to do that.
Days stretch into weeks and when he finally awakens for more than twenty morphine-warped seconds, all they have is news of internal bleeding and open fractures. And death. News of death.
(John Winchester, fatal combination of blood loss and head trauma. Multiple broken bones, fractured skull. Practically crushed. Probably happened even before a passing driver stopped in horror at the blood-spattered scene and dialed for an ambulance. Samuel Winchester. Probably held on a bit longer. Found half-turned behind the wheel, trying to reach the back seat.)
It’s not true, he’s sure. Can’t be. The doctor must be possessed, or manipulating his reality. He hurls the name of God at her in every language he can remember until she sedates him and then his dreams fill with Sam’s lopsided smile and the way his father’s beard scratched after a few days on the hunt. He opens his eyes every morning to the sun and the taste of nights spent in chase, his heart trapped beneath his collarbone, adrenaline jolting through him.
“You’re never going to get better, you keep acting like this,” the doctor says. “All you’re doing is paying a bunch of nurses to traipse in and out, give you the shit food here, and watch you kill yourself.” She waves a hand at her clipboard. “You can stay here until you die, or you can get better and get out. One or the other, and we could sure use the bed.”
He pulls himself together after that, works at rehab until his body aches with the strain. His hair, shorn close to the scalp during his stay in the hospital, refuses to grow back. It prickles at strange, wheat field angles. He’s lost weight, and his clothes sag from his shoulders, at his hips. When it’s cold, he favors his right leg.
The day they release him, he walks out without looking back.
Bobby gives him another flask of holy water, a few more books. Two shotguns, a set of throwing knives, five hundred and eighty-six dollars in cash. Bobby gives him the Colt, returns it with worried eyes but no comment.
The gun fires its last shot between the eyes of a demon sneering at him from the body of the woman who served him a blueberry cobbler and kept his coffee topped off in the diner that morning. Afterwards, he touches her hair. It’s pulled free from her ponytail around her face, strands of curling brown lying limp across her cheekbones like autumn grass. He stands. It’s over.
He knows the gunshot will draw attention, so he runs for his stolen car and vomits efficiently on the ground outside before driving away. Done, he thinks, bile coating his teeth. I’m done with this shit.
He drives until he reaches an overlook point. Stops, sets the parking brake, and fishes out one of his shotguns, checks to see that it’s loaded. Wraps his mouth around the barrel. The moon flows against the blue dusk above the mountains before he closes his eyes. His finger tightens against the tug of the trigger. Seconds later when he hears the screams, he knows he’s arrived in hell.
The screams come closer, though, and the breeze still whispers cool against the back of his neck, so he opens his eyes to the same overlook he’d scanned before closing them, whips around, and fires into the forehead of a golem chasing three winded campers. “Watch where you’re fucking going,” he mutters. They try to thank him. He brushes them off and folds his legs into the driver’s seat of the sedan he’s been cursed to drive.
That was then.
--
19, he writes. Cottonwood, Idaho. Paul & Carla DiStefano. 2 kids, 6 & 8 yrs old. spirit of lady killed by husband before them haunting attic. help from local witch. potion smelled like shit & also blew up. do not seek help from local witches unless prepared to lose eyebrows.
He closes the journal. Moves on to 20.
--
“You know,” Dean tells the owner of the cockroach-infested motel where he’s shacked up, “I could help you with that problem you have in room six. Give me a night and I’ll get rid of it.”
The owner, a balding man in a grease-stained polo shirt, glares at him. “Don’t have a problem,” he grunts.
Dean leans on the counter. “Seems to me,” he says, “that when I’m asleep in a room and all of a sudden shit I haven’t touched starts flying around trying to kill me, then you’ve got yourself a problem.”
The man blanches. “Haven’t had that problem before.”
“Whatever,” Dean says. “I don’t actually give a fuck. Just thought I’d mention that I could get rid of it before it kills someone and you have police crawling all over this place, maybe taking a look at some of what you’ve got stashed in the safe behind the counter.” He’d opened the safe the night before when the manager left to take a piss, noted the tiny bags of white powder stashed in a cashbox near the back.
“Deal with the room,” says the owner. He opens his wallet, extracts two fifty-dollar bills. “Make it quick.”
Dean stares at the money for a moment before pocketing it. “You got it.”
34: Winnett, Montana. Jackson Potter. whirlwind tornado spirit thing in motel rm 6. got rid of it w/ incantation for calm weather, usually used during harvest season. seemed to work. stole towels from room, fluffier than usual. prob make good bandages.
--
The truck could be dark grey, or dark blue, or even black. Dean isn’t sure what to think until he swipes his finger over a patch of grime-covered hood and examines the color beneath. Deep green, a pure, soft color.
“‘65 F-150,” the owner says. He’s leaning against another car, a cigarette dangling, unlit, from between his lips. “Still runs fine, far as I can tell. Hasn’t given me any trouble yet, still got lots of life in her. She’ll be good to you, long’s you’re good to her.”
Dean hands the man a fistful of twenties and nods to him on his way out of the lot.
He rigs a lid for the truck bed from parts at a nearby junkyard, then slings his duffel and a sleeping bag in before slamming the gate closed. The night stretches clear before him. He drives until he feels the tug of sleep, pulls off the road, and curls in his truck beneath the stars.
42: Mosquero, New Mexico. Jorge & Patti Rodriguez. wish someone’d told me town is named after fucking swarms of mosquitos. would’ve passed. salted & burned body of local man killed by white settlers & buried under Rod. house. hope he doesn’t come back tonight, would have problems explaining return. bought truck.
--
Dean looks out the window of his shoebox room, at the red and orange whorls of light at the bar across the street, and wishes hard for a moment that he could afford to sacrifice his edge to a few shots. Just one night. He can almost feel the burn of the alcohol at the edges of his chest.
His phone rings and he flips it open blindly, still caught up in the activity at the bar. “Hello?”
“Hello? Dean Winchester?”
“Who’s this?” he asks. A click sounds as the caller hangs up. When he glances at the caller ID and doesn’t recognize the number displayed there, he shrugs, leaves the room. Any number of people have his contact information. They want him enough, they’ll call back.
Across the street, he orders a Sprite and scans the crowd until he locates an attractive woman sitting by herself at the bar. “Hey,” he says. She says nothing to warn him off.
He stays for twenty minutes, talking, before bringing her back to his room. Figures his life is enough of a dysfunctional cliché already and so asks, half a grin twisting his mouth, if she wants to see his etchings. She looks at him with eyes set deep beneath twin rings of liner and shadow and asks him if they’re going to fuck already; she wants to be home by two.
--
It’s the first job he’s ever held longer than two weeks. Ten hours a day, Saturdays off, minimum wage and time-and-a-half for all hours over forty. It keeps him in salt and bullets, pays his rent on an efficiency in a shitty part of town.
The neighbors don’t allow their kids near him, but they let him know when the ghosts wander in from the cemetery a block away. Sometimes when he wakes up there’s a quilt folded neatly outside his door or a plate of still-warm cookies or a note of thanks written in broken English. He picks up some Spanish, a little Amharic. He gets along.
Next door, Mihret cooks food so spicy it makes Dean’s eyes water. She watches, dark eyes blank, as he wraps a piece of beef in injera and carries it to his mouth, laughs when he coughs and gulps tea to ease the burn. While Dean eats, Mihret spins tales about Ethiopia, most of which Dean doesn’t believe for more than a few seconds. Her descriptions, half in English, half in smiles and gestures and expressions when she can’t find the words, enthrall him. In return, he tells her ghost stories over her card table while her children peek and squeal from the next room.
When her youngest, Taye, nearly loses his voice to a spirit who collects them before Dean figures out how to break the incantation, she cups a hand to Dean’s cheek. “Not your fault,” she says, but something changes. It’s always like this, eventually. It always ends.
“I want a week,” Dean tells his supervisor, and the other man nods and says take whatever you want. Unpaid, but your job’ll still be here, later.
He fills the tank with gas, pays in frayed tens and a handful of change. He starts driving until he sees the sign for Interstate 80, takes the on ramp.
There’s a country out there. He kind of wants to see it in the daytime.
--
He picks her up at a truck stop.
She stands in the long shadows of evening, her blonde hair draped across her shoulders, wearing a top more handkerchief than shirt, and meets his eyes. He waits. She smirks.
Ten minutes later, he fucks her in a bathroom stall. She tastes like tobacco and lip gloss, like the last desperate week of summer. She curls her fingers through his hair, which is still too short to grab hold of, bites his neck, gasps and throws her head back against the wall and comes hard around him. He follows a minute later, chokes out a hard breath, lets her down.
She rearranges her skewed clothing while he discards the condom, washes his face and hands. Their eyes meet in the mirror.
“I’m Diana,” she says.
He snorts at the irony. “I’m Jack,” he lies.
She grins at him. There’s a smudge of mascara on the bridge of her nose. “No you’re not,” she says. “I felt you coming a week ago.”
He’s not sure what that has to do with his name and doesn’t respond. Silence falls.
Diana reaches forward and touches his shoulder. “Sweetie, you don’t have to lie to me.” Her stomach grumbles and he spares her an inquisitive glance. “You do, however, have to buy me a drink.”
“Let’s try this again,” she says once they’re seated. “I’m Diana.”
He thinks, fuck it, and says, “I’m Dean.”
She shrugs. “I know.”
“If you knew--”
“Why was I asking you? To see if you’d tell me.”
“Oh,” says Dean. He has the feeling he’s not getting something. It’s an in-joke between Diana and herself, and he’s missing the punchline.
“There’s a bunch of us,” Diana says. “We see things. Sometimes we see people. Some of us can control things with our minds. It’s not, as you can probably guess, something that makes us useful to the outside world. We form groups, stick together.”
It hurts more than Dean would’ve expected it to, learning that the psychics and telekinetics have a community, knowing that Sam would have been one of them. He picks up a potato chip and flips it between his fingers before popping it into his mouth. “So, Xavier,” he says with his mouth full, “I give a damn why?”
Diana shrugs and takes a gurgling sip of her drink. “Dunno,” she says. “I just know I saw you about six days ago, coming into the truck stop--nice wheels, by the way--and knew you’d need us for something. It’s not like I can control what I see.”
Dean studies her face and decides he doesn’t care whether or not she’s telling the truth; it’s a good story. He still doesn’t see how he fits in.
“Thing about this vision, it wasn’t just you I saw. It was you, and it cut to this girl. I think we’re somehow all connected or something. Anyway, I figured you might know who she is.” Diana reaches into her back pocket, pulls out a sketch of a woman’s face. There are inconsistencies between what Dean remembers and what he sees before him. He only ever met her once, after all, and he spent most of the introductions staring at a spot below her face. In the drawing, her hair waves in a halo about her head. Lines web outward from the edges of her eyelids. She is older and deeper and her eyes reflect things Dean doesn’t want to know.
And yet she is unmistakably Jess.
Dean stops breathing.
--
When he returns to himself, he’s outside the food court, staring down at the highway.
Diana stands beside him. She takes another sip of her diet Coke, her face impassive. “I take it you know her?”
His world has frayed a little at the edges. One strong tug and it will begin to unravel, yarn pulling zigzagged until all that’s left is a ratty end. She tugs. He wants to kill her. He knows this, recognizes it from a time he has stowed under not to be revisited in the back of his mind. This pure need to waste the fucker, to hell with the cost and the consequences, because this is personal.
“Come back in.” Diana looks up at him, meets his gaze with a nonchalance that infuriates him further. “You’re starting to attract attention.”
The muscles of his forearm flex against his knife harness. He could shake the knife free, jam it through one of her eye sockets, slash it across her throat, slide it between her ribs. Easy as lying. She would be dead within minutes.
“That,” says Dean, pointing at the sketch, “was my brother’s girlfriend.”
“Why the was?” Diana asks.
“Because she’s dead.” Dean knows this, knows it because he saw the headstone and knows it because he killed the demon that killed her. It’s over. It’s done. This life, you don’t get second chances.
“Killed?”
“Yeah.”
The pause stretches until Dean becomes hyper-aware of the ambient sounds, the swish of traffic, the footsteps behind him, Diana’s breathing.
“I’m sorry,” she says at last.
Dean bites down on a laugh, his stomach clenching. “Try again.”
“You know what to do, then?” Diana’s looking at him, her eyes dark with the coming night.
“Maybe,” says Dean. He has no fucking clue what to do.
They walk to his truck in silence. “You have my number,” she says. “I called you a few weeks ago. You get in trouble, call.”
Figures. “Don’t wait up,” he says.
“If you need to talk. Or whatever. Need a new gun, a knife, more salt. Give us a ring.” For the first time that evening, she strikes him as sincere. He appreciates it. He’s not going to call.
--
Palo Alto looks the same. It’s still full of kids wearing Stanford hoodies and jeans artfully ripped at the knees, along the thighs. They all look vaguely caffeinated and pissed off, like they’re trying to cultivate the creases between their drawn eyebrows.
Dean never quite understood what Sam saw in this place. When the clerk at the Cardinal Hotel asks him whether he wants a queen or two doubles, he has to catch himself. Force of habit. He remembers, though, gets the queen, throws his bag on the bed and folds the shutters back.
I’m here, he thinks. Your turn.
--
Leaving the doors and windows unsalted is making him nervous. It becomes worth it, though, when he wakes to see Jess standing at the foot of his bed the day after he checks in. He half-expected her to be wearing a nightgown, but instead she’s wrapped in a black sweater and slacks, her hair bound into a severe bun at the nape of her neck. Her hands keep moving as if of their own accord; the rest of her body stays perfectly, terribly still.
This was Sam’s girl, he thinks. The light slanting through the windows harmonizes with her skin. Her body curves, as thin and taut as a violin string.
“Hey,” he says.
She stares at him, and disappears.
Oh yeah. That went well.
--
By the end of the third morning, they’ve established a pattern.
Jess appears, Dean masters the gut-wrenching memories of his brother he experiences every time he sees her and voices a greeting, Jess disappears, Dean gets up and eats something from the coffeeshop across the street and waits for the day to be over.
On the morning of the fourth day, Dean doesn’t bother with the hello. “I’m tired of this,” he says. “If all you’re going to do is appear and disappear, I have other things to do.”
For the first time, her expression changes. Just a flicker of a thing, like the twist of a magician’s fingers.
“He talked about you, sometimes,” she says. And she’s gone.
--
Five days, and Dean wakes up to the smell of coffee brewing in the bathroom. He thinks he might be starting to understand why Sam loved this girl.
“What’s up?” he asks when he climbs out of bed and pours himself a mug of the steaming liquid. He offers one to her, but she shakes her head. He’s not sure whether ghosts can eat; he’s never asked.
“Why am I still here?” She’s not looking at him, and once more she stands rigid, her hands trembling.
“Hell if I know.”
She turns her head, just slightly, just enough to meet his gaze. “I want to go home,” she says. “Why won’t they let me go home?” There’s a twinge of fear in her voice. Dean remembers a woman in a tattered white dress and the sound of water sluicing down wooden stairs.
Suddenly, she’s inches from him. He yelps and drops his coffee, which spreads in a brown starburst across the carpet. He should feel her breath when she speaks, but the air between them remains undisturbed. “They won’t let me stay,” she says. “You. Make them let me stay. Please.”
He blinks and she’s at the windows. Her hair floats free of the bun to surround her head. He blinks again and she’s gone.
Something drips on the bedspread. Dean frowns and peers at it, runs fingers across the cloth until they encounter a tiny patch of viscous fluid. Red. Blood. He knows what he’ll see when he looks up, and he knows it’s not real, but it’s there just the same, a woman staring at him from the ceiling, her eyebrows twisted in an elegant portrayal of pain. She’s not anyone he recognizes. He thinks that he should recognize her, that it’s somehow his responsibility.
As if in response, the woman shifts and he meets his mother’s eyes. She smiles. “Dean,” she says, “what on earth did you do to your hair?” The stucco surrounding her bursts into flame.
Not happening, he thinks, not happening not happening not happening. He squeezes his eyes shut, crouches by the bed and bows his head until he feels a flash of heat on the back of his neck. A burn, a caress, and it’s gone.
He just makes it to the bathroom before he throws up.
--
“Fuck you,” he says even before opening his eyes the next day. He’s had fifteen minutes of sleep, none of it restful, and is not in the mood for Jess’s mind games.
“I’ll leave,” says Jess.
He doesn’t respond, just curls up more tightly beneath his blankets and ignores her.
“Sam says you have surprisingly nice handwriting for a guy who skipped half of fifth grade and slept through the other half.”
Okay, he’s awake. Without thinking, he reaches for her, wraps his fingers around her arm. It’s cold, like a flagpole on a winter day, so cold his fingers nearly cramp.
Shaking free gently, she says, “It’s harder to transfer heat between planes. Usually I just leave it behind.”
“What do you mean Sam says?” he asks, chafing the feeling back into his fingertips. “You talk to Sam?”
She shrugs. “Maybe. I don’t know. I’m not sure. Maybe he said that before.”
A human girl would have a confused frown on her face, some body language that telegraphed something happened but I can’t explain it. Jess has neither. Dean’s not even sure whether she’s a ghost. He tries to think of something to ask her, something only Sam would know, and comes up with, “Why did he die?”
--
“Something about a demon and a truck,” she says on the morning of the seventh day. “Something about a demon and a truck and it was night.” Her eyes roll up, as if she’s staring at the light fixture on the ceiling, and the digital clock sitting next to Dean’s bed begins to flicker on and off. She begins to recite, “Sam was driving. You were in the backseat, and your Dad was in the front, and it was dark and Sam had your blood on his hands and face from pulling you into the car, his father’s from binding his leg. He wasn’t paying attention to the intersection but it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. He kept looking in the rearview mirror because every time the car turned a little you made a tiny noise that told him you were still alive but otherwise he didn’t know, wasn’t sure. It went black, and you woke up in a hospital alone.”
Dean stares at her. His chest feels like it might fracture if he inhales too deeply. “Sam told you that?” he asks, his voice cracking, ripping along the seams.
“I think so,” Jess says. “I don’t know. They never let me stay.”
He’s busy tossing the blankets onto the mattress, giving his hands something to do. When she strobes and appears in front of him, sitting on the bed, he starts. “Come with me,” she says, “come with me, come on, let’s go.” She reaches a hand to touch his cheek and rests it there for a few seconds before she pulls him in, hard, for a kiss.
Her lips are cool, but not cold, not dead. He settles into the kiss out of habit, then realizes what’s going on and pushes her away, stumbles back until he encounters the edge of the dresser. The room feels too small, the cheerful patterning oppressive, the light from between the shutter slats searing.
“What are you doing?” he chokes.
Jess stares at him. Expressionless, and he wants nothing more than to shake her until she gives him a straight answer. “I just want to go home,” she says.
--
They drive, hundreds of miles without talking, only static to keep them company. Dean tried to put in a tape at first, but every time Jess moved, the music exploded into a screeching cacophony, so he gave up and instead hummed to himself, drumming his fingertips quietly on the steering wheel. They pause for gas and Cheetos and Coke--breakfast of champions, here--and then keep driving, just keep on driving.
Jess starts to sing a hundred miles outside of Denver, twenty hours into their drive. She has a pretty voice, low, untrained. It reminds Dean of those fucking terrible chocolate bottles with alcohol inside, sweetness and the rough slide of liquor along the back of his throat. “The water is wide,” she sings. “I cannot get o’er. And neither have I wings to fly. Give me a boat that can carry two, and I shall row my love and I.”
She’s not making a point, Dean tells himself. She’s just singing.
“I want to go home,” Jess says, for the hundredth time. It’s practically the only thing she’s said over the course of the last day. He remembers driving away from Lawrence that first time, Sammy screaming in the backseat, Dad gripping the wheel so hard his capillaries washed white. The smells of gun oil and metal shavings and leather. Outside, the trees a blur, the beginning of childhood on I-70. He’d curled up next to his brother, whispered it’s okay, Sammy, it’s okay, it’s okay, and wished hard for his mother.
They stop for the night and end up sleeping in the truck, pulled off onto a gravel turnaround. The next morning, Dean’s still not sure where he’s headed.
He knows when he gets there.
--
They’re ten minutes north of Fulton, intersection of route 54 and an unnamed country road. If Dean squints, he can almost see the headlights the truck coming at them, hear the protesting metal of his car, the splash as the windows blew fountains of safety glass onto the road. When he gets out of his truck and walks a few steps back into the shrubbery by the side of the road, his boots crunch over a piece of his headlight still lying in the grass.
He swallows and turns back to Jess.
“This is where it ended,” he says. Home.
She doesn’t respond. She’s staring into the distance, where dark clouds are bunching against the horizon. Her hands rest against her stomach. “We would have had beautiful children,” she says.
“Yeah.” Dean joins her, staring out across the asphalt, watching as the white boundary lines merge into one and disappear. He hesitates, then says, “He sent you, didn’t he?”
Jess nods. She’s become steadily more human as she’s stayed with him; her face now betrays her. “He can’t leave,” she says. “He wanted.... He didn’t want you to think--”
“I know,” Dean says. He can’t bring himself to look at her. “It’s not fair to you.”
A second, and she’s in front of him, her smile the gentle one in the picture Sam never showed him, the one he kept tucked beneath the credit card slot in his wallet. “I understand, though. If you want, I can, you know.”
And Dean wants it. He wants Sam to keep sending her as much as he’s ever wanted anything in his life. Along the road to the north, the storm that’s been following them all day condenses, consolidates, begins to rain.
He takes a deep breath. “Go home,” he says in a rush. “Do it. Whatever the magic words are, I release you, you’re free.”
The smile on her face grows, becomes a grin. She ruffles his hair and places a quick kiss on his cheek. “He wants you to be happy,” she whispers. “He suggests you take Diana up on her offer. And there’s a poltergeist in Auxvasse, just in case you need something to do.”
“Okay,” Dean says. He’s not sure what else to say, so he looks down, scuffs one toe against the road. Thinks of something, snaps his head back up, “Hey, Jess--”
She’s gone.
--
“Hi, this is Diana’s cell. Leave a message.”
He almost hangs up without saying anything, but instead clears his throat. “Diana. It’s Dean. I, uh, well. I’m going to be in Auxvasse for a couple days. I think I’ll call back. Let me know if you want, need. Whatever.”
A bolt of lightning arcs between the clouds, above the trees. Dean holds his breath and counts the seconds until the thunder.