Walking to Albuquerque

It’s the little things that trip you up in this job. I guess that was true in any job. Doctor, lawyer, donut maker. I’d once wanted to be a lawyer. I still would’ve dealt with soulless monsters, but I would’ve gotten paid a lot more. And Dean said I didn’t have a sense of humor. Or maybe he just didn’t get for my sense of humor….

Anyway, like I was saying, it’s the little things. You’re being chased by a pack of Black Dogs and it only takes one wayward gopher hole to have your brother half carrying you into the ER for eighty-five stitches and the first of a series of unnecessary rabies shots. It’s an exorcism gone wrong because that same brother never bothered to memorize the ritual and when the pages are blown away in a demonic wind, he’s left gaping with a dog-ate-my-homework look. It’s….hell, it’s a thousand things, but this time it was one very specific thing. Two things actually.

One pissed off witch and Dean’s smart-ass mouth.

We were in Santa Fe. Ellen had passed the job onto us when the witch called the Roadhouse. Or Roadhouse 2, built defiantly on the smoking remains of the demon destroyed first one. That was Ellen. She never gave an inch. Never gave in. Dean thought she had balls of steel, Bobby thought she was crazy. I thought Bobby was probably a little closer to the mark. She’d lost everything except Jo and she kept going. But if she’d lost Jo too…I looked up at the stars, blew out a plume of icy breath and kept walking. As the cartoons say, I had a right turn to make at Albuquerque and it was still forty miles away. So think about the witch instead. It was a whole lot better than the alternative.

She was a witch witch. Not the earth/goddess worshipping wiccan who was more likely to give you rosemary to bast your chicken in than cast a spell. This one was all about charms and potions and from the tickle I got at the back of my neck when I shook her hand, she was the real deal. She reminded me of Missouri. She was small and withered where Missouri was plump and full of sass, but she had the genuineness about her. Missouri was a psychic, not a witch, but I’d gotten the same tingle around her.

This one, Madame Serafina, was all business. She had a poltergeist, a nasty one, and witch or not, she apparently thought it was too nasty for her. “Or her brittle bones,” Dean had said in an aside. “Come on, Miss Fina. We wouldn’t want you to break a hip or anything.” He’d ushered her towards the door. “Why don’t you run down to the drugstore and stock up on some calcium. We’ll probably be done by the time you get back.”

Okay, maybe it isn’t one little thing. Maybe it’s a chain of little things to mess up your world. That was the first.

It was a poltergeist. It was nasty, far too nasty for a little old lady, and by the time we were through, I had a cut on my jaw, a bruise over my ribs where I’d been slammed against the wall, and a limp. Dean…Dean ended up buried under seven feet tall shelves that had once been full of glass bottles.

And he wasn’t moving.

“Dean!” I got my hands under the wood…God, it was solid and heavy…and heaved upward. “Dean! Jesus, Dean, can you hear me?” One year for my life. In my eyes, it wasn’t much of a deal. Two months for my life, that was nothing, damn it. Nothing. “Dean!”

There was a groan, the sound of delicate glass crunching under hands and knees and a grunted, “Goddamn, what big bad wolf blew our house down?” He crawled into view, wet, annoyed, and smelling like roses. I don’t mean he came out of this smelling like a rose, although that’s an annoying habit my big brother has. Flash that grin, waggle those eyebrows and he can get out of pretty much any trouble that doesn’t involve the FBI. No, this time I meant it. He really smelled like roses. It was so overpowering my eyes watered at first then the scent faded almost instantly to nothingness.

“Aw, you crying for me, Princess? That’s sweet.” He staggered up and brushed at himself. The glass was so delicate it turned to dust rather than cutting him. He grinned and spread his arms wide. “Now, was that so hard?”

I scowled and let the shelves fall back to the ground. “Yeah, it was a piece of cake. My favorite part is when it threw me at you and you ducked.” Which had led to a Sam shaped dent in the wall behind the cash register.

He grinned wider. “I could’ve played pro ball. Quarterback.” He picked up one vase that had managed to escape destruction and hefted it back. “Go long, Sam. Go long.”

I gave him the long of my middle finger and limped out of the shop. I all but heard him roll his eyes as he followed me. Miss Serafina was waiting for us outside, arms folded, toe tapping and black eyes slitted. “I asked for you boys to take care of a simple polter for me. I didn’t say nothing about wrecking my shop.”

Dean moved up beside me. “Hey, hey, who dropped a house on your mood? We got it out for you, didn’t we? These things don’t go easy. In other words, Endora, so not our fault.”

The conversation went downhill from there. I felt bad about her shop, but Dean was right. We weren’t ghostbusters. We didn’t charge for our work. We did it for free and we didn’t have the spare cash to reimburse her for damages incurred in the process of getting pummeled by a gleefully violent poltergeist.

“Fine. Fine.” She held up her hands and then washed them in the air. “I expect I’ll be seeing you in a day or so. I’ll have the bill ready for then.”

“Keep dreaming, Sabrina,” Dean snorted and started across the street to where we’d parked the car. I gave her a slightly apologetic look but followed him. He really was right…this time at least. At the Impala he ran his hand through his hair and shook his head. Pink glitter flew as the last of the glass disappeared. “Disco effect. Gah,” he shuddered. I snorted myself and slid into the passenger seat with a wince. The driver’s door popped open and Dean climbed in behind the wheel, the smugness of poltergeist ass-kicking fading. “You okay, Sammy?” He looked me up and down then reached across to dig in the glove compartment for the Tylenol, popped two in my hand and handed me a bottle of long flat Coke from the back. “I figured if you could Hulk the shelves off of me, you were all right, but….” And he looked at me, really looked as the last of his adrenaline faded away. “You’re bleeding.” He swallowed hard. You bled a lot in this job. Dean knew it, was used to it, but he’d never liked seeing my blood. And then I’d died, stabbed in the back. The very first time he saw my blood again after that, he vomited. The times following that one usually had him quiet for hours.

But just a little cut like this? I touched it, then pulled the sleeve of my shirt over the heel of my hand and scrubbed it off. Something small tended to have him swing the opposite direction from quiet, had him exploding with anger. Goddamnit, Sam, I won’t always be here to watch out…. He’d shut up before the rest had come bursting out. Didn’t matter. We both knew how it ended.

“Jesus Christ,” he said this time forcefully as he reached over to rub off a smear I’d missed, “it was a simple polter. You have to be more careful. You have to be….” The words trailed off as he looked at the small smear of blood on his thumb. “You have to be….” He shook his head as he had when shaking the glass free. “Hey.” His eyes cleared and he smiled, changing the subject instantly. “How about we get a beer? I think a beer would be great. We can just hang out, shoot the breeze.”

I thought about it. Thought about the next job waiting and thought about how many times I’d had lately to just hang out with my brother. These days he was more into picking up waitresses. Yeah, okay. That’s like saying these days Godzilla was into stepping on buildings, but with the clock ticking Dean had really ramped up the building stomping so to speak. He may was well have been the waitress whisperer. Five or six in every city, two to three every night. If he wanted to have a beer with me, just be brothers…not hunters, I would like that--a lot, although I still had the vision of Godzilla sitting on a mountain in Japan just happily having a beer. “Ok—ay,” I said dubiously and chased the painkillers down. I shouldn’t be complaining about his prowling anyway. It gave me time to research a way to get him out of his damned deal. Last time he’d caught me, he’d almost thrown my computer out the hotel window.

And so we found a little pub a few blocks over and drank beer and talked. Not about anything in particular…just sports and how I’d liked Standford. I couldn’t believe it. He actually asked about college. What I’d done, who I hung out with. I ended up telling him the story about my first roommate Snuffles. It was actually James Anthony Van III, but James had a perpetual allergy post nasal drip. He snuffled 24/7. The loudest thing you could imagine. I finally moved out when I caught myself one night standing in the dark with a pillow in my hands hovering it over his face as I calculated my chances of the coroner not noticing any signs of petechial hemorrhage in the eyes.

“Well, they all can’t be Quincys,” Dean said as he laughed into his beer. “You should’ve gone for it.” Then he looked up at the waitress who was checking to see if we were ready for another round. Her top was low cut and she was spilling out of it like a Himalayan avalanche. “Excuse me,” Dean drawled. “But your enormous boobs are in the way. I can’t see Sammy here.”

I froze, beer half way to my mouth…the oh shit stuck somewhere down around my tonsils.

Dean was ignoring waitresses. Dean was ignoring boo…er…breasts. Dean was smiling at me, bright and blinding, eyes on me and only me. He had his head cocked to one side in a way he thought made him look rakish and boyish. Wild and harmless at the same time. I’d seen him practice that very same look in the bathroom mirror when he was in junior high. And holy crap….was that his hand on my knee?

The oh shit bubbled a little higher. He’d smelled like roses when he’d crawled out from under that bookshelf. And what kind of charms would smell like roses and be the essence of pink glitter? Why had Madame Serafina had been so sure we’d be back?

“Oh shit,” I said, this time for real. “I have to…ah…go…you know…and research.” I put my beer bottle down carefully. “The next job. Lots of research. Tons.” I bolted out of the booth.

Correction: I almost bolted out of the booth. Dean’s leg raised and his boot hit beside me, blocking my way. “What’s your hurry, Sammy? That job’s in Albuquerque. Days away. Let’s have some fun first.” He leaned towards me, eyes bright and predatory. The women might’ve said flattering. I said predatory.

I vaulted his leg like a gazelle cut off from the herd, got out a strangled ‘see you later’ and headed at a full run for Madame Serafina’s. My ankle complained. The rest of me which had a much bigger complaint behind it calling out, “Sammy, come on. Where you going?” ignored it and ran faster.

The ohshitohshitohshit was in my brain this time and it wasn’t going anywhere.

“Five thousand dollars?” I demanded.

“The ingredients for love spells are expensive.” She swept the glass into a pan and dumped it in the garbage can. “And you and your rude brother took out my entire supply. Not to be mentioning the dent in my wall.” She glared at me. If Dean had been here, he would’ve throttled her. No. If Dean were here, I didn’t want to even know what he’d be doing. “Do you take credit card?” I asked meekly.

“The kind you hunters hand out like candy. No, sir. I don’t be wanting your fake money, your fraud. I want the real thing, right here.” She smacked one hand in the palm of the other.

“But I don’t have five thousand in cash just laying around,” I said desperately.

Her eyes brightened and her lips curled slyly. “Trust me, boy. I think you’ll be finding some.”

When I got back to the hotel I was thinking of what we had to sell worth that much money. The guns would bring in some, but that would involve dark alleys, possible law enforcement, and people getting shot with a gun I sold some murderer. It wasn’t worth it. Then I saw the new license plate on the Impala. Sam and Dean Forever was spray-painted into two joined red hearts.

All right. Maybe it was worth it.

I opened the door to our room cautiously, but it was yanked out of my hand as Dean beamed at me. “Dude, where you been? I made you something. Two things actually. Come on. Come on.” He grabbed my arm and pulled me in the door then slammed it behind me. Forget the sound of a cell door slamming behind you, this was the sound of true doom.

“First: check it out.” He spread his arms to show off his new T-shirt. It was red, like the license plate, and also like the license plate read ‘Sam and Dean Forever.’ The only difference was it now had our picture on it. It was my high school graduation picture. We had our arms over each other’s shoulders grinning while Dean gave me bunny ears behind my graduation cap. “Pretty cool, huh?” He looked down at it, lost in the very coolness of it. Then his head popped up and he grabbed a pile of red cloth off the nearest bed. “Here’s yours.” I looked at the cloth dripping from my hand in sheer horror. “Try it on. We can go out and show them off.” He waggled his eyebrows. “Well, later. Much, much later.”

As with any terror that sucked the movement out of your legs and the stiffness from your spine, I tried to stall. “You said…two things?” I croaked.

“Oh yeah.” The grin turned self-deprecating and he sheepishly shoved his hands in his jean pockets. “I know it’s a little soon, but….I made you a mixed tape.”

That’s when I locked myself in the bathroom.

A mixed tape?

A mixed tape?

God help me. God. Buddha. Allah. Anybody.

A mixed tape was Dean’s version of an engagement ring. Oh God. Who…what…Bobby. I’d call Bobby. He’d bailed us out of trouble more times than Dad ever had. I fumbled for my cell phone as Dean started knocking on the bathroom door. “Sammy, don’t be this way. You’ll love it, I swear. It has all the power ballads on it. Love Hurts. Don’t Fear the Reaper. Well, okay, that’s a little gloomy, but it’s a love song too. I even put some Air Supply on it. I know you like the wimpy music. It’s before your time, but it’s wimpy as it comes. Oh, and Barry White. Gotta have the Barry White. Nothing’ll get you down and dirty hot than good old Barry….”

I turned on the water to drown him out and dialed Bobby’s number. “Bobby?” I said in relief when he answered. “It’s Sam. I need money. I’m in trouble. Big trouble.”

By the time I finished the story Bobby’s sandpaper laugh was so hoarse I was afraid he’d have an aneurysm before I saw a dime of the five thousand. “Bobby,” I hissed. “It’s not funny.” I opened the bathroom door a crack to see Dean on one of the beds. He was stretched out wearing nothing but a pair of white boxers with red hearts and a whipped cream heart on his chest. He took the Redi-whipp canister and shook it.

“Don’t make me start without you, Sammy,” he said, filling his mouth with whipped cream and giving a goofy foamy grin. Jesus. How did he ever get laid? Much less by twins?

I slammed the door and locked it again. Sitting on the edge of the bathtub, I rocked back and forth like I hadn’t done since I’d first seen the monster that really had been in my closet. “Bobby!”

“Sam,” he choked out. “What makes you think I have five thousand dollars? And what makes you think I’d give it to you if I did?”

“Because I’ll lead his boxer whipped cream wearing ass self all the way to your junkyard. Do you want that image burned on your retinas forever because I think I already lost a good chunk of my brain to it,” I snapped.

“Okay, okay,” he snorted. “I’ll wire the money tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow? What do you mean tomorrow?” I demanded as Barry White’s voice began to croon from the bedroom.

“I’ll be too busy calling every hunter I know tonight and spreading the word.” With a last chuckle, he hung up.

I spent the night trying to sleep in the bathtub. I stuffed toilet paper in my ears but it didn’t really help with the Barry White or Dean bellowing Sammy at the door like Stan Kowalski. “Sammy! Sammy, I love you! Sammmmmmy!” Finally when my watch read seven AM, I carefully, quietly opened the door. Dean was sprawled on a bed, still in the boxers, but with his Sam and Dean T-shirt back on, whipped cream in his hair, and a giant stuffed rabbit cradled in one arm. I guessed that was another present for later. The after present. Seriously, how did he ever get any? Would you tell me? Two empty champagne bottles were on the floor too and that was the reason I was able to sneak out…and take a camera pic without being heard.

Two and a half hours later I was back at the room where Dean was just sitting up and moaning from a bubble hangover. The worst. But he looked up when he heard me. “Sammy, you’re back? Where’s your shirt I got for you? Ah, the hell with shirts. We don’t need no steenking shirts.” He grinned and stood. “Here.” He reached out with grasping hands. “Let me help you take yours….”

I sprayed him in the face with what looked like a small perfume bottle. He sputtered. I sprayed him again. He wiped his face. “What…?” I swept his legs out from under him and when he hit the ugly carpet hard on his back, I pinned him there with a knee in his stomach and emptied the entire bottle in his face. It took ten squirts. I enjoyed every one of them.

Arms flailing, he wiped at his face, glared in molten fury at me, eyes narrowed to slits, and said, “Dude, what the fuck? I mean seriously…what the fuck? You are just cruising for a bruising or a holy water enema? Asshole or possessed? Speak up or forever hold your peace.”

I rolled to one side, sat down hard, and dropped my head in my hands. “Oh, thank God.” I heard him sit up and silence. Then….

“What the fuck am I wearing?” Apparently the memories were coming back fast and furious, because he was ripping off the shirt as if it made of acid, pulling on jeans and rushing outside to remove the license plate that dare desecrate his baby.

By the time he came back, I finally was beginning to see the humor of the situation…once out of immediate danger of the patented Dean Winchester seduction extravaganza. I looked up from packing and raised my eyebrows. “A mixed tape, huh? Wow. I just didn’t know you felt that way about me, Dean. I’m choked up.”

“Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.” He looked at the red shirt I was wearing and added grimly, “I can burn it in a trashcan out back or on your body. Your choice.”

I gave him the shirt with a carefully swallowed grin and finished dressing. We were on the road in fifteen minutes and after I’d said we owed Bobby five thousand dollars, Dean wasn’t much for conversation. “So, bunnies and champagne. Is that how you usually….”

“Shut up,” he growled dangerously. “Or I will put you out right here. Swear to God. We aren’t going to talk about this again. Ever. It never happened. You got that? It was a bad dream. A hallucination. Toad licking gone really wrong. Whatever, but we are never ever talking about it again.”

“Mmmm.” I grinned and then sobered. “You know,” I fiddled with the radio dials and shrugged a little, “it wouldn’t be so bad if you wanted to talk to me once in a while. Not about hunting, but just talk to me about school and old girlfriends and shit--without trying to get into my pants.”

He was stuck on that one. One half of him pissed over the pants thing, one half a little shamed, I thought. “I’m…hell, Sammy. Sam,” he corrected hastily. It might be a few weeks before he was comfortable with Sammy again. “I’m not much of a talker on your level. I’m not smart like you, book smart. Besides hunting, cars, porn, and metal, I’m not sure I’d have anything to say you’d really want to listen to.”

“Well, I do. And if you don’t want to do the talking, just try listening to me instead. You got to hear all about the great Snufflupagus.”

“True.” He grinned. “You really should’ve smothered his ass.”

I smiled back. “Good. I’m glad that’s settled. How about some music?” Then I slid the mixed tape into the deck. Barry White had just ended and I Touch Myself had come up. “Damn, Dean, you are the romantic.”

Which is how I found myself walking to Albuquerque. Forty miles was a long way, but I wasn’t too worried. He’d be back to pick me up in twenty minutes or so. He was my brother…through thick and thin, life and death, love charms and whipped cream. I grinned. Twenty minutes. That was just enough time to send the picture of Dean in his shirt, boxers, and fluffy bunny to every single person and hunter I knew.

I whistled as I walked, the gravel crunching under my shoes. My foot hit a piece of plastic and I stooped to pick it up. It was the mixed tape. Dean must’ve tossed it out the window. I grinned and shoved it in my pocket, humming I touch myself. I want you to touch me….mmm…I want you above me.

There was pink glitter on hands from the tape and I wiped it on my jeans. It didn’t come off easily and I kept swiping at it as I continued to press the send button on my phone with my other hand. It was fun bringing my big brother down a peg or two in the romantic field as much bragging as he did. Of all the brothers in the world, I got Dean. Willing to do any damn thing to save my life. Sell his soul even. But he was also smug, lazy (unless it was weapon duty), perpetually horny, and had the worst taste in food and entertainment. God, the porn. He could watch porn 24/7. I looked up to see familiar headlights coming down the other lane. Right on time. I absentmindedly wiped my hand across my mouth, the glitter mostly gone, as I yawned and folded the phone shut with my other hand. Hmmm. Smelled like roses out here. In the desert. Strange. The Impala pulled up with the window rolled down for Dean to shout, “Go on. Get in, you jackass.”

Yeah, Dean could be a pain in the ass.

Definitely smelling roses, I ducked my head and smiled at him soulfully through my longish bangs as I climbed into the car. “Um…hey,” I said shyly.

Funny how I’d never noticed what a nice ass it was.

The End