No Black Altars
Tag to Faith, some dialogue written by Sera Gamble and Raelle Tucker
By Swellison
Dean Winchester followed his younger but taller brother through the doorway, closing their motel room door behind him. They had left Nebraska mid-morning and reached Rapid City by nightfall, after an almost full day of driving. Dean had driven the second stretch, so Sam had checked them into the South Dakota roadside motel. He'd also copped the bed closer to the door, Dean discovered as he spotted Sam's suitcase on top of the nearer red, white and blue bedspread in the Americana-themed motel room. He glanced towards the "kitchenette" - an upper and lower cupboard with an outmoded push button microwave on its countertop and a cramped dining room table with four straight back chairs, located to the left of the door - where Sam was unloading and rearranging their meager food supply. "Sam--"
Sam deposited a box of crackers on the counter and turned to face him. "Humor me, will ya?" he asked, giving a quarter nod in emphasis, a silent "Dean, please" that Dean had been caving into since childhood. "Just for tonight."
And the two nights they'd spent in Nebraska, Dean thought wearily, remembering his brother had insisted that Dean take the more protected, window side bed there, too. He really didn't want to think about Nebraska, though. "All right." Dean crossed the room and plunked his own suitcase on top of the bed next to the window. "Tomorrow, we swap beds."
"Yeah. Back to business as usual, and we can start investigating the Creek Bottom Creep."
"What self-respecting ghost would let itself be called by that name, anyway?" Dean asked, still puzzled by the locals' name for the monster in their midst. He unzipped his suitcase and began transferring his clothes to the dresser along the far wall. His father had taught him from an early age that your base of operations was your comfort zone, and the more settled and lived-in it was, the better. Besides, an always-packed suitcase made the motel staff uneasy, a well lived-in room allayed their fears of guests sneaking off into the night leaving unpaid bills behind them.
"Dunno. Maybe they thought by disparaging the ghost with a moronic name, they would make it less menacing."
"Or more pissed." Dean recalled Sam reading aloud some of the havoc wrought by the Creek Bottom Creep from the laptop during their drive.
"As you've said before, who knows what ghosts think?" Sam abandoned the topic of work. "Are you hungry? You only had a chocolate shake on the road. I can fix you" - he glanced at the assorted boxed and canned items on the counter - "something for dinner."
"No, I'm good."
"Or we could order a pizza?"
"I'm not hungry."
Sam opened his mouth to speak, but Dean shushed him. "Drop it. I'll have an extra large bowl of Wheaties tomorrow morning, okay?"
"Okay." Sam turned around, leaning against the bottom half of the cupboard. "You want to" - Dean slammed the drawer shut on his last pair of jeans and glared at his brother. He so did not want to talk about Roy LeGrange, or Nebraska, or any of it.
Sam's last words surprised him. "--play cards?"
Dean blinked. It was Monday night and there was crap-all on television. A cable movie didn't sound the least bit appealing, either. "Okay."
Sam grinned. "I'll get the cribbage board." In three steps, he'd reached the bed, rummaged in his suitcase and extracted the cribbage board and a deck of cards. He sat down at the table, removed the cards from their package and began to shuffle. The Winchester boys excelled at card games. John had started them out with kid's games like war, PIG, and Crazy Eights, as an easy, cheap and mostly quiet way to keep them amused. They had graduated to hearts, spades, cribbage and fifty-seven different varieties of poker. Dean honed his poker playing skills on Sam, who hated to lose at anything. This led to some intense poker rounds between them. During one game, Sam had tried to psych Dean out with a kid's picture deck instead of a standard deck of cards, the same deck of The Incredibles-themed cards that he currently shuffled. Dean had won most of the rounds and considered the cards lucky, letting it slip that he'd watched and enjoyed the Disney cartoon movie. Sam figured Dean could empathize with Bob Parr, the marginalized superhero who only wanted to do the right thing and save the world, but he had wisely kept his thoughts to himself.
Dean sat across the table from Sam and the cribbage game began. At first, Dean was tense, expecting Sam to ply him with unwanted conversation, but Sam's comments only concerned the game.
"Seven." Dean put the first card down, a seven of hearts with a picture of Dash where the pattern of seven hearts would be on a normal card.
"Fifteen for two," Sam's eight of clubs showed Violet in spider-tiptoeing mode. He moved his peg up two holes on the 29-shaped cribbage board.
"Twenty-four for three." Dean's nine of spades showed Helen with one elongated arm reaching for the spade under the nine. Sam grunted while Dean pegged his points for the run.
"Thirty-one for five." Sam placed another seven, the seven of clubs down and pegged his five points.
"Huh. Four," Dean's four of hearts showed the villain, but Sam couldn't peg a fifteen off of a four.
The game continued with the lead seesawing back and forth. Sam rose from the table to get a snack while Dean counted his crib and started shuffling for the next hand. Sam returned with a bowl of trail mix, which he set to his left, in the center of the table. By the start of the second game, Dean was also nibbling on handfuls of trail mix, as Sam had intended. They whiled away almost three hours, simply playing cribbage. Sam counted his current hand. "Fifteen two, four, six a pair is eight and the right Jack is nine- that puts me over the finish line, again."
Dean glanced at his fourteen-point hand, which didn't count, since Sam had just won the game. Just for the heck of it, he turned over the cards in his equally useless crib: six more points. "Figures."
"Ready for round seven?" Sam picked up the cards and started shuffling the deck.
"No, I've had enough cribbage for now."
"You wanna watch TV? It's too early for the creature feature, but there must be something watchable on." Sam and Dean had quickly learned that even the bottom-rung motels they sometimes frequented had free cable television going for them.
"No. Think I'll make it an early night." Dean rose from his chair, and grabbed a pair of pajama bottoms from the dresser. He headed for the bathroom. Sam placed the Incredibles playing cards back in their packaging and returned the cards and cribbage board to his suitcase. He collected the laptop and had it up and running on the table by the time Dean finished in the bathroom.
Dean walked by Sam, seeing the functioning laptop. "What'cha doing?"
"Figured I'd surf for a bit, see if I can find any more info on our Creek Bottom Creep."
"Don't work too hard, Sammy. There's plenty of time for that tomorrow."
"I won't. G'night."
"Night," Dean slipped under the patriotic coverlet of the bed closer to the window. Moonlight streamed in through the cheap matchstick shades and flimsy red, white and blue curtains, but he easily tuned the light out. Dean had acquired the military knack of falling asleep in a wide variety of less-than-ideal circumstances, and was soon fast asleep. Eventually, he began to dream and his subconscious revisited the events of the past few days…
* * * * *
Dean lay on the hospital bed, his head and upper torso raised by the adjustable bed frame for easy television watching. He stared listlessly at the fabric softener commercial now onscreen. When Oprah lets you down, that's got to tell you something, he thought. A tall, bald African-American man dressed in a white lab coat entered the room and Dean dragged his gaze from the television to the doorway with an effort.
"Mr. Berkowitz?" The stethoscope around the man's neck and the clipboard he held on one hand screamed "doctor", but he had kind eyes and a genuine smile as he approached Dean's bed. "I'm Dr. Manning, your cardiologist. How are you feeling?"
"Like crap," Dean said honestly. "Everything makes me tired and my chest aches like a sonovabitch." He sighed, not used to the croaking quality of his voice, or the fact that even talking was wearing. "And you're about to tell me why, aren't you?"
"Do you remember what happened?"
Dean chose his words carefully. "I was electrocuted." That much would be obvious to any medical personnel who had examined him.
"Yes." Dr. Manning frowned slightly, "Your brother was a little vague on the details, but the results are indisputable. When you got electrocuted, the electricity caused you to have an M.I., a myocardial infarction. Do you know what that means?"
"Not exactly."
"It's a heart attack. A heart attack causes permanent damage to the heart, some of the person's heart muscle dies. In your case, the attack was massive and the damage is quite extensive. I'm sorry."
Dean looked into the doctor's eyes and wasn't surprised by what he saw there. "Give it to me straight, Doc. What's the bottom line?"
"The bottom line is your situation isn't going to improve, Mr. Berkowitz, it'll only deteriorate. You're a good candidate for a heart transplant, but - the average wait for a transplant is at least seven months, and you don't have that much time." He took a breath and broke the news before Dean had to ask. "You have two weeks, a month at the outside, before your heart gives out completely. I'm very sorry but, beyond making you comfortable, there's nothing else we can do for you. I wish there was."
"By 'making you comfortable', you mean drugs."
"Drug therapy is standard treatment for patients who've had an M.I. Right now, you're on digitoxin, a diuretic and an ACE inhibitor, and I'll be starting you on a beta blocker in a few days. None of these is specifically for pain, though. You said everything makes you tired, earlier. That's a direct result of the heart attack: overwhelming, bone-grinding fatigue. You're young and you were in good physical shape. That isn't the case now, and the more you push yourself, the less time you'll have. Do you understand what I'm saying here?"
"You're not supporting the 'eat, drink and be merry' theory, that's for sure." Dean glanced away from the doctor for a moment, then he met the doctor's sympathetic gaze. "Do me a favor, will you, Doc?"
"Sure."
"Fill my brother in on my condition. And, make sure he understands what you're saying, because he isn't gonna want to hear it - or accept it."
* * * * *
Dean shifted in his second row folding chair, listening as the blind Reverend Roy LeGrange got to the meat of his sermon.
"God rewards the good and He punishes the corrupt," Roy proclaimed. "It is the Lord who does the healing here, Friends. The Lord who guides me in choosing who to heal, by helping me see into people's hearts."
"Amen," the seated crowd of followers spoke with loud conviction.
"Yeah, right into their wallets," Dean muttered to Sam.
"You think so, young man?" Roy questioned from the podium.
"Sorry." Dean had meant that comment for Sam's ears alone.
"No, no, don't be. Just watch what you say around a blind man, we got real sharp ears." Roy joked. "What's your name, son?"
"Dean."
"Dean," Roy repeated, then nodded. He raised his hand and beckoned. "I w-want you to come up here with me." The followers started clapping, realizing that the preacher had found his man.
"Nah, it's okay." Dean declined.
Sam turned in his seat. "What're you doing?"
"Y-you've come here to be healed, haven't you?" Roy questioned, puzzled by his chosen one's reluctance.
"Well, yeah, but, uh, maybe you should just pick someone else."
"I didn't pick you, Dean," Roy explained carefully. "The Lord did."
Sam was more to the point. "Get up there!" he practically ordered.
Dean rose to his feet and carefully navigated the few feet to the slightly raised stage that Roy and his wife Sue Ann occupied. The short flight of three steps leading up to the stage felt like thirty stories to Dean, and he was grateful when Sue Ann met him halfway, placing her arm around his shoulder in silent encouragement. Somehow, he made it up the steps and stood to the right of Roy, who had taken a step away from his podium, closer to Dean.
"You ready?" Roy asked.
"Yeah," Dean took the opportunity to speak quietly with Roy before things went any further. "Look, no disrespect, but - ah, I'm not exactly a believer."
Roy smiled. "You will be, son, you will be." He raised his voice, "Pray with me, friends!"
Roy rubbed his hands together, then raised both hands in the air, his right one groping for Dean. He came into contact with Dean's shoulder, then his hand worked upwards, skimming over Dean's cheek and settling firmly towards the top of his head. "All right, now. All right, now." Roy repeated and Dean's eyelids felt suddenly heavy, too heavy to keep open. His whole body felt weighted and the slight extra downward pressure Roy exerted on his head contributed to Dean's falling to his knees. He collapsed to the stage floor and vaguely heard another "All right, now."
"Dean!" Sam yelled, jumped out of his seat and charged up onto the stage. He knelt by Dean, hands reaching frantically for Dean's jacket. He grabbed the jacket's front in one hand while his other hand reached behind Dean, cushioning his brother's head as Dean's eyes opened. "Say something!"
Dean's eyes widened as he glanced just beyond Roy. Standing next to the preacher was a man with a shadowed face, wearing a black woolen car coat over a black and tan plaid flannel shirt. The coat's wide black collar was turned up around his neck and the man stared uncompromisingly back at Dean, with instantly recognizable eyes. Eyes that knew him from birth…. Then his father shook his head, turned and walked away, his form slowly dissolving into nothingness.
"Dad?!" Dean whispered in disbelief.
* * * * *
Dean jerked awake, searching the room, half-expecting to find his father watching him from the foot of his bed. Nothing. He exhaled softly and let his eyes get accustomed to the moonlit motel room. He heard Sam's even breathing from his left side and rolled his head to see Sam peacefully sleeping in the other bed. Dean relaxed, pleased that his stirrings hadn't awoken his brother. Sam deserved every full night of sleep he could get. Without realizing it, Dean fell back asleep himself, returning to his dreams…
* * * * *
A/N: This is another old story of mine, originally published in Road Trips with My Brother #1by Whatever You Do, Don't Press. Sam and Dean playing cribbage is canon, there's a cribbage board on the table in their motel room in Hell House, in the scene where Dean's sprinkling itching powder in Sam's shorts. (I'm not gonna tell you how many times I watched the ep before I noticed the cribbage board, tho'.)