Do not fear, dear friends. I have not abandoned my other Supernatural fic, "Family Matters". I've been down with the flu for the past week and while I was recuperating, this plot idea was born and just simply refused to be pushed aside. So in effort to exorcise the damned thing, I've decided to try and pen it simultaneously. Wish me luck. Hope you don't hate it. BTW, beaucoup brownie points to anyone who knows from whence I derived this story's title. Cheers!
What was ordinarily a three hour drive seemed to last forever that night. Every traffic light was red. Every car I ended up behind seemed to want to go at least five miles per hour below the posted limit. No matter what I did, I just couldn't get there fast enough. Every mile was agony. Every minute, a lifetime. Second only to the death of my parents fifteen years earlier, it was the single worst night of my life.
Ironically, it should have been one of the best. After nearly three weeks of humiliating undercover work at Foxy's, a seedy dive of a strip joint in downtown Chicago, I'd just made the biggest bust of my career when the call came in over the radio. At first I thought it was some kind of joke. My brothers in blue were notorious for their pranks, many of which put Ashton Kutcher to shame on his best day. If only that had been the case.
Six little words brought my whole world to a stand still and nearly sent me to my knees. "Your sister's been in an accident," that's what my captain told me when she pulled me aside after I'd read the scum sucking flesh dealer his rights.
Tugging a navy blue sweatshirt bearing the letters 'CPD' over my head I laughed, "Yeah. Sure, Cap."
It wasn't the grim set of her jaw that convinced me she was telling the truth, but the sadness and sympathy I saw in her eyes. I knew then that this was no joke. This was as horrifying and mind-numbingly real as real could get. A million questions filtered through brain in that moment but none of them as desperate or important as the shakily uttered "Is she alive?" that made its way past my suddenly dry lips.
When I was told she'd been airlifted to Riverview Hospital, panic was my first instinct but I quickly trampled it down and fought back the rising tide of tears. There'd be time enough for all that later. Right now, I needed to get to Indiana.
"Will you be all right to drive yourself?" Captain Pickett asked me softly.
I hastily stepped into a pair of jeans and after nodding my head mechanically, I grabbed my bag and headed for the door. I put pedal to the medal the whole way out of the city, weaving my way through traffic at breakneck speeds, desperate to get to my sister. Given the considerable lack of sleep - I was running on less than five hours' shut eye over the past few days - the hallucination shouldn't have been so surprising but I slammed on the breaks just the same, skidding to a stop on the highway shoulder to stare open-mouthed at the man suddenly occupying my passenger seat.
He turned and looked at me with wide, brilliant blue eyes that sent a shiver of unease down my spine. I gave my head a good, hard shake. It didn't help. He was still there, calmly watching me, head tilted to one side with a single brow raised as if he were confused by my actions. Taking a deep breath, I closed my eyes and counted silently to ten. It was something I always did when I was upset, angry or frightened and usually it helped me gain a better perspective on the situation. Unfortunately, this time it didn't work. I opened my eyes and found myself staring into his - again.
"You must hurry," he said softly. "There isn't much time left."
Deciding the best course of action was to ignore the hallucination altogether, I flipped on my turn signal. "Jesus Christ, L.J.," I muttered to myself as I merged back onto the highway. "You're really starting to lose it, girl."
"You should not take the Lord's name in vain."
I laughed. "Lovely. Even my imagination has taken to giving me lectures on morality. What next?"
When I glanced back at the passenger seat, he was gone. Just like that. Poof. He'd vanished. Great, I thought. Even imaginary men produced by sleep deprivation couldn't be bothered to stick around. Lisa would have a field day with this one. Just the thought of my sister laughing at me and calling me jaded was enough to send my foot through the floorboard of my Mustang as I downshifted and pushed my car closer to redlining than the factory ever intended.
My fingers tightened over the steering wheel until my knuckles turned white and didn't let up until I pulled into the hospital's parking lot like I was pulling into pit row at Daytona. I tore through the emergency room doors, flashing my badge and demanding to see my sister. Rationally, I knew that being transported by med-evac meant she was in all likelihood in surgery or at the very least unable to speak to me, but I was well beyond the point of being rational. I was nearing full on hysteria.
It was all too reminiscent of the night we lost our parents to the carelessness of a drunk driver - the hospital, the odor of disinfectant, the sound of the ventilator. Nausea churned in my belly and I tasted bile at the back of my throat. I couldn't do this. I couldn't lose her too.
Identical twins, we were born a short eight and a half minutes apart, Lisa being the oldest. It was something we joked about often, how she'd taken the roll of big sister so seriously. Then, when Mom and Dad died during our freshman year of high school, she went a little overboard. Aunt Jill and Uncle Peter did their best by us but it was never enough for Lisa. I guess you could say she's a big part of why I became a cop in the first place. I was just that determined to prove to her that I was capable of looking out for myself.
It was an ironic twist of fate that she was the one who ended up pregnant after a one-night stand, or rather in Lisa's case, a one-weekend stand. Having grown up in a devout Catholic household, abortion was never an option, wasn't even thought of for that matter. Barely nineteen and already a mom. God, but she was awesome at it too. Everything came as naturally to her as breathing. She always seemed to know just what to do and say. And her son? Well, he was simply amazing. Ben seemed to worship me right from the start, said he wanted to be a policeman just like his Aunt Lily. While that only lasted until he was six and discovered NASCAR, it was really humbling to have someone so small see you as their hero.
My heart was in my throat when I saw him sitting on the floor with his knees drawn up to his chest, staring straight ahead. The bandage on his brow and the cast on his left wrist answered the question as to whether he'd been with Lisa at the time of the accident. "Oh, Ben," I whispered, my tears finally starting to fall. He must have heard my softly spoken words because the next thing I knew he was in my arms clinging to me for dear life.
Whether it was God's grace or adrenaline that saw me through the next several hours, I'll probably never know. It doesn't really matter. The end result was the same. Just as the sun was rising on that Thursday morning in September, my sister died.