Disclaimer: I don't own Supernatural, although Isabel belongs to me. So please ask beforehand if you wanna borrow her. Thanks. :)
- - -
One Day
1 - "Dawn"
Isabel had her things packed before she even knew she was leaving.
That morning, she'd woken up from a nightmare. A man with black-filled eyes had flung her across her dorm room with inhuman strength. She'd hit the wall and fallen, broken--slumped on the floor, dead.
And when she'd awakened, she'd jumped out of bed and started flinging things into a duffel bag she dragged out of the closet. She wasn't even sure she was thinking it through, at that point. When she finally did think, her brain dryly stated, 'Sure, I didn't even really want to finish college anyway.'
She'd just go home, back to her parents' house, where the silence would surely kill her before any monster could get to her. Yeah, that'd work. And she was out the door, shrugging into her coat, as she tried to keep hold of her duffel bag with the other hand, and walked down the hallway outside her room, all at the same time.
'Yeah, that'll have to work,' she continued the thought, frantically trying to keep her mind thinking anything because if she stopped for one second, the fear would keep her frozen there. And if she stayed, she was probably going to end up staying for eternity.
Pushing those morbid contemplations out of her mind, she finished putting on the coat and hefted the duffel bag onto her shoulder. She'd only taken the bare necessities, leaving behind her school books, photos, other odds and ends. She didn't have much experience with these precognitive dreams of hers, so she didn't know how much time she had before that... thing showed up.
It was barely getting light outside, and she wished that she had a flashlight, but it was for her peace of mind and not for convenience's sake 'cause she could see all right, but she wished that it wasn't so creepily dim still.
Her quick breathing fogged on the dewey air, and she nearly slipped on the wet concrete, as she made her way through the student parking lot to her car. The Cavalier wasn't the car she'd envisioned having when she first got her driver's license. Her mother had always had one of the simple, dependable vehicles, so Isabel had fantasized about yellow Jeeps and black Nissans.
But when she'd gotten older, she'd realized she just wanted something that wouldn't kick the bucket, with her driving in it in some strange place that she would possibly have to walk out of, with no one walking beside her. Sensibility always seemed to win out with her... that and cowardice.
After unlocking the door of the light-blue car with trembling hands, Isabel then reached back and unlocked the rear door, then opened it and chucked her duffel bag onto the floor mats. She relocked and closed the rear door, then got in, buckled herself up, and started the engine.
Looking in the rear-view mirror and the side mirror before backing out of her parking space, she wondered, 'Okay, Miss Expedient, what about gas money?'
She'd brought all the money she had, but she didn't have a job, so it was just the five-hundred dollars her parents had sent to her last, with a quick note that said, 'From Dad and I. Use it for books or whatever you need. Love, Mom.'
Five-hundred dollars could maybe get her to her parents' if she only stopped for gas and slept in her car. She just wondered if she was capable of starving herself for that long. 'Guess I'll just have to ration my 7/11 snacks.' She gave a scattered, nervous little giggle as she pulled onto the road and started driving away from her future.
She had no other choice, but she couldn't help the bitterness that erupted in her belly and seeped into her chest. Because she knew her mother wasn't going to see it that way, even if she could explain to her about the dream. It would just seem like another excuse to her--another way for Isabel to call it quits.
- - -
It was miles later that Isabel wondered why she'd been so hasty. The few visions that she'd had before were usually vague and rarely came true in the way she thought they would. But she'd had them since she was a teenager, and knew that she shouldn't just take a dream like that lightly.
Besides that, about a year ago, something strange happened. She started to get these headaches--migraines, she decided in retrospect. And after they finally stopped, whenever she touched something old or used, she'd get flashes off of it, like a slide-show of its history or something.
Needless to say, she avoided touching anything she didn't absolutely have to after that. It was a good thing it didn't work on people. Then she could've been like one of those tv-psychics, Madam Isabel. Hah.
And how useful was this stupid gift-curse anyway? 'Oh, I can touch an old shoe and see all the smelly feet that used to wear it!' Yeah, that was great. When she'd bought her Cavalier, she'd forgotten that little rule. It was a slightly used car, and the last owner had picked his nose. She made sure to clean it extra well, just in case the dealership people had missed a booger or two.
As serious as her situation was, Isabel couldn't stifle the hysterical giggle all her morose thoughts had caused. When she didn't stop laughing for a minute or two, she decided she might possibly need to stop and get a snack or something. So she sat up straighter and kept a look-out for a gas station or quickiemart.
When she finally found one, she needed to pee bad enough that she used the restroom, first, before going into the store to find some goodies or refilling the tank. She pulled the car around to the gas pumps after that, turned off the engine, and put back the gas she'd depleted so far. If only it was that easy to recharge herself.
It came out to twenty-odd dollars, and Isabel understood now why her mother had ranted about gas prices so often. When she capped up her gas tank again, she went in to pay, since all she had was cash--not credit to use at the self-pay thingy. She decided to get a drink now and a snack down the road later on. 'Bleh,' she thought, 'Rationing sucks.'
That was when she saw the vintage black car drive up into the gas station. She was instantly hit with a pang of homesickness, reminded of her brother's car. This one was different, more old-fashioned, and yet cooler in a way, she tried to tell herself, and maybe that's why her eyes kept traveling to 9 o'clock, anyway.
And then, as she placed herself in the small line to the cashier's desk, her eyes really became glued to the car, or the two young men who emerged from it. Her brain immediately said, 'Hot!' and her eyes roved up and down, and then she refused the little beggars and forced them front and center. 'Bad, Isabel, bad. Lust is a sin.'
There was no way guys like that were anything but trouble, she tried to tell herself, and besides, they were probably gay--two guys road-tripping together and all... yeah, gay, that was it. Off limits. Yep.
And then the door's bell chimed, and her traitorous gaze darted toward the sound. Oh. My. Tall. Tall and awesome. Tall, awesome, and giving her a wink. 'I imagined that, right?' she barely managed to think, seeing as she had no breath left, and she'd suddenly become a cave-woman. Her face flamed whatever shade it turned when she was embarrassed, and she decided to ignore whatever that look had been.
She hobbled up to the counter after the guy in front of her left, and muttered to the cashier something about "... this... blue car... outside... yeah."
The woman gave her a sympathetic smile, or maybe Isabel was just imagining it, and quickly rung up the charges. Isabel found her hands trembling, when she fumblingly took her change and receipt then turned to go. She saw the handsome man rummaging through the unhealthy food snacks, and wished him a spare-tire, around his middle, out of annoyance that she couldn't do the same.
'He doesn't really look like the kind of guy who can get a spare tire, though,' her stupid observant side taunted her. He looked more like the type that did manual labor so much they needed the extra calories.
As she crossed to her car, out in the parking lot, trying to will away her red face, she saw the other young man filling up the gas tank of that sexy car. And her brain practically died.
Taller, cuter, moody, moody eyes. That was all she registered before she couldn't look any longer for fear her eyes would burn and catch fire to her own brains. But as she tried to figure out which way to take to get to her car, which was still parked near the gas tank, behind the strangers' metallic beast, a wicked idea took hold of her food and sleep-deprived brain.
She walked by the car's front, and as she was passing along its side, she traced the fingers of her left hand along the metal. And her mind stopped. 'Oh, big, freakin' mistake,' was her last thought before a flood of images washed all coherent cogitation out of her head.
The last one floored her, literally--a huge diesel truck slamming against the side of this poor baby, and its passengers inside, three men, two of them familiar--the one in the backseat that had winked at her, and the moody one in the driver's seat, and the last, an older man, sitting shotgun. All three of them had been looking mighty roughed up even before the diesel truck hit them, but afterward...?
"Ooouuuuch." Her nose hurt, and she had the vague sensation that she should still be standing upright, but instead, she was lying here on the concrete, the energy-drink bottle rolling away from the fingertips of her right hand...
"Miss? Miss?" Someone was asking her, and they came into view a moment later--the moody, fluffy-haired guy. "Are you all right?" he questioned, as he knelt beside her and reached for her shoulder, with an uncertain frown.
"I'm..." Isabel started to say "fine" and then realized her nose was bleeding, when she saw the puddle on the concrete, as she lifted her aching head. "I'm bleeding," she said, idiotically, trying to lift her fingers to her nose.
The guy actually smiled a little, irritating her already frazzled mood. "It's not funny," she whined. "It hurts!"
"Sammy, what'd you go and do?" a voice came from above them, and Isabel wished that she'd been knocked unconscious because of the mortification she was about to experience.
"Whoa," the flirt said, "You do understand what 'hitting on a girl' means, dontcha?"
The moody-one narrowed his eyes. "Yes, Dean, I do--she fell on her nose."
The flirtatious-one gave his friend an amused look. 'Oh, God,' she thought, 'This can't get any worse.' And then it did--
"I saw you touching the Impala, earlier," "Sammy" stated, almost flatly, "Just before you fell. If you had your hand on the car, why'd you lose your balance anyway?"
Suspicious, wasn't he? "I-I-I," she stuttered, darting her gaze back and forth between the two men. "I need to go." She got up, swaying a little, and edged backward when Sammy rose also. He was so gosh-darned tall.
"Sam?" Dean questioned, his voice suddenly very dark and serious. Was that sort of temperament-fluctuation even possible outside of Japanese anime?
And then Isabel made the mistake of fumbling behind herself for balance. And the car "spoke" to her again:
She saw the boys riding down a dark road, a frightened woman in the backseat. A voice spoke from the static-y radio, 'She's mine... she's... mine.'
"Oh, holy crap," Isabel muttered, yanking her hands away from the vehicle. "Spooky--! Where--? What sort of job do you guys have?" she finally managed to splutter.
The two men, who'd drawn shoulder to shoulder while she'd been "seeing things," gave each other a quick glance, then as if by mutual consent, the taller one asked, "Did you have a vision?"
"A-A vision?" she returned, wondering how it was possible they could have guessed. And then she remembered the flashes from the car. "I should go," she said, lifting her hand to her nose, trying to dab away some of the blood.
"Well, at least let us take a look at that..." Sam requested. She glared at him.
A second ago, they were laughing at her. Now they suddenly thought it was serious? She dabbed again. For all she knew, they could both be a couple of creepy serial killers on the run from the FBI, or something, and digging up bones while they were at it, and lighting fire to them, too. She should call the cops, or something, but on second thought, she was too wussy, and she didn't have time for this craziness anyway.
"I don't-- I can't," she said, voice going all high and squeaky, as if it wasn't high enough already without the pure adrenaline added. "I'm... running away...You guys could be-- I mean--" Flustered beyond reason, she kept alternately tucking her unruly hair behind her ears and touching her nose. "You're strangers, and-- The last thing I need to do is get in more trouble!"
Apparently, they dealt with hysterical females a lot in their line of work because Sam just pursed his expressive lips, and Dean raised an eyebrow. Isabel seethed, then did her best to walk in the direction of her car--her safe, boring, non-supernatural car. That was about the same time Sam said, clearly, "I have visions too."