For Once, Then, Something
Set some weeks after the events of Devil's Trap, call it AU season two. I haven't looked at the spoilers, so don't tell me. Here I'm assuming everyone lived, including the Metallicar, and that John has taken off again. It's not necessary to read 'Unforgivable', but I'm not contradicting myself either.
I am not Romani, I don't know anyone Romani. I've done what research I could, but this is fiction, and the people in this work are fictional. The Romani are real, though, there are Gypsies in the U.S. and if I pique your interest, good. Go and find out for yourself. If I write something particularly offensive to those who know more, please drop me a note.
The title is from the Robert Frost poem; no, you don't have to read it to understand the story. But Robert Frost is just good for your soul, and should be a primer for anyone claiming to be a writer.
Cut and paste the usual disclaimers: yadda yadda yadda.
x x x
Chapter 1 – She's Not There
Dean nearly hit something when he when he emerged from the shower and saw Sam still crouched over the laptop. They were two hundred miles and barely six hours from the end of their last hunt, a bitch pissy Native American dragon he still couldn't remember the name of. Dean's bruises weren't even fully formed yet, let alone healed, and Sam was the one who had taken the thirty foot tumble through the air to loose rocks this time, propelled by the ugly fucker's swinging tail.
And there he was - hunting up another job. Already.
Dean balled and threw the towel he'd been using on his hair at his brother, hitting the laptop closed in the process. Accidentally. "Saved you some hot water."
"Yeah," Sam said, making no connection between words and the sounds that Dean was making. He opened the laptop again, not even grimacing annoyance.
Sammy - all hunter, all the time. It was wrong. Dean had wanted it; now that he had it, he didn't want it anymore. And yes, he was aware of Irony beating him over the head with a stick. Dean was supposed to protect Sam, and that included keeping him safe from the obsession that consumed their father. At least in Dean's mind. This wasn't saving people. This wasn't continuing where he left off. This was 'I'm going to kill that bastard if it's the last thing I do.' No matter who gets left behind in the process.
With Sam it had always been all or nothing. Four fucking years and not a phone call. Jess's death had sent him reeling, no doubt about it, but fuck with his family and Sam would mess you up. Dean could identify. It was just getting hard to live with.
"Sam." Dean called, pitching it like an order. Like one of Dad's orders. "Shower. Sleep. Research in the morning." That penetrated. Sam looked up at him, blinking to make his eyes focus on something farther away than his computer screen. "You stink like ungila spit anyway."
"Unhcegila," Sam corrected him automatically, pronouncing the glottal stop and all. He blinked and shook his head. 'You're right' was there in his expression, and he wrinkled his nose. "And I don't think it was spit that fucker was spraying me with. I had the tail, remember."
Dean didn't have to remember. Been there, done that.
"Look at this though," Sam went on, and turned the laptop towards his brother. Dean closed his eyes and summoned patience, as if by fervent prayer. "Girl missing, twelve years old."
"So?"
"So she's been gone three months, according to classmates and teachers, but the parents are only reporting her missing now."
The prayer wasn't working, and Dean's teeth ground together. He so didn't want to have anything to do with missing, killed or dying kids right now. "Tragic. Not our problem, Sam."
"You should read it. The mother is nearly hysterical."
"I'll read it if you go have a shower." Negotiating with Sam usually worked, had since Sam was able to voice his demands. Sometimes even before that, if Dean could manage to communicate 'carrots first, pudding later' to him - as if fairness went a long way with him, was engraved somewhere in his brain. It did this time, too, and Sam handed the computer to Dean, headed for the bathroom.
Dean looked at the laptop at if it might suddenly come alive and bite him, without reading the article Sam had left onscreen. Sam trusted Dean to read it, judge it, decide if it was worth investigating. If he was determined it was just as likely that Sam would argue and cajole Dean into doing what he wanted anyway, but Sam trusted Dean to at least read the article.
Sam trusted Dean.
Dean, however, knowing him better, had little faith in the man. Dean wanted to snap the computer shut and lie through his teeth that the case was not their kind of job - a typical tragic incident of an unhappy runaway kid, or abusive but utterly normal parents who beat their baby to death and only complained to the police when the story was about to leak anyway. Then he and Sam could take a week, or a month, and do nothing but drive and eat and play pool and listen to music until they were fresh and fit and something ugly made the mistake of getting in their way.
What the fuck was wrong with having a day off?
It hadn't been like this growing up. John had gone weeks, sometimes months, before tracking down every job. Nobody knew about their kind of stuff because it just didn't happen for real very often. Computers were better now, and the Internet was still expanding exponentially, but Dean felt the difference. Bobby had said something similar. There was a storm coming. And he and Sam were right in the middle of it.
But Sam trusted Dean, and in the end Dean would not betray that. Not for the sake of getting to sleep five minutes faster.
Even though he could barely keep his eyes open.
Girl, Kayla Andersen, 12, missing from Duluth, Minnesota. Her parents reported her missing two days ago, but police and FBI investigations so far could find no trace of her for three months back, in September. She showed up for the first week of school, and then nothing. The school contacted the parents, the parents were unconcerned, and it was dropped.
Dean still didn't see anything that would make it their kind of problem. One thing Dean did trust, though, was Sam's instinct for this sort of thing. Magic psychic powers or whatever, he was not often wrong. Dean couldn't remember when Sam actually had been wrong about this sort of thing - finding them jobs - now that he came to think about it.
The mother though, Patricia Andersen, yeah, she was different. Different from your typical abusive murderous parent, uncle or trusted family friend, that is. Dean could pick them out, knew them almost instantly with an instinct he didn't think about too hard, knew when the shitbags were lying through their crocodile tears and pathetic pleas for help, find my baby, please, on those miserable exploitive news channels.
Patricia Andersen wasn't one of those. The writer for the Duluth Herald had managed to capture something essential about the woman's grief and distress, and it caught at the back of Dean's throat. Whatever had happened to Kayla, Patricia Andersen was not lying about not even knowing her daughter was missing for three months.
"What do you think?" Sam asked, before he was even out of the bathroom.
Dean turned over in bed, pulling the blanket over himself, and hunkered down. "Did you know there's a foot of snow expected in Duluth tomorrow?" Dean could practically hear Sam's grin from the other bed. He thought he'd won.
x x x
Gillette, Wyoming to Duluth, Minnesota was nine hundred miles and two days, following a snowstorm all the way there, because the interstate was an obstacle course of jack-knifed semis and idiots in SUVs who thought four wheel drive meant they could stop faster. "I'm sure he's sick of the sight of us, Dean," Sam said when Dean suggested dropping in on Bobby. But they had to go through South Dakota anyway, and the 'free food, free beds' argument was too essential to ignore.
Bobby appeared to be fully glad to see them both, but surprised. Not a word in ten years and now they were on his doorstep twice in as many months. No demons on their tail this time, Dean assured him, just passing through.
Dean caught Bobby's eye, as Bobby was watching Sam standing by the window, watching the snow falling, fast, oh fast. Bobby's face turned to Dean, full of questions. They sat in the kitchen, a bottle of Jack between them, and Sam's shot glass still untouched on the table.
Dean didn't answer him directly. "Dude," he said instead, to Sam. "She's been gone three months. Tomorrow or the next day, what difference does it make?"
Sam seemed to come back from wherever he'd gone, and looked over his shoulder at him. "You're right." He stepped over the back of the kitchen chair like it was a street curb and sat, loose-limbed, and threw back the shot. Neither Bobby nor Dean mentioned that the grin on his lips would have been a lot more convincing without the clenched shiny focus of his eyes.
Bobby took Dean for twenty dollars at crib, sitting there in the kitchen listening to fifties rock and roll on the AM station, putting Jack to bed. At a penny a point, it took a while. "We should switch to a man's game," Dean groused at one point, when he was fifteen bucks down. "Like poker?"
"Can't play poker with two people, really," Bobby said.
"Sam..?" Dean looked around automatically, but when he turned around Sam was stretched out full length, and then some, on the couch. Dead to the world.
"What was that about, back there?" Bobby asked, dealing out a new hand.
Dean's head was swimming, but he knew immediately what the other man meant, didn't pretend he didn't. Sam, taut and twisted as a bowstring. Just fucking asking to snap. "That's what you get for really truly pissing my brother off."
"What are you going to do?"
"Follow." What else could he do? "Pick up the pieces afterwards."
x x x
The sky the next morning was pure blue and the sun glare eyes-watering bright off the melting snow. The plows had the roads clear within a couple hours and they made Duluth just after noon.
The home of Patricia and Gene Andersen was large and well-kept, faux brick, with potted cedars lining the curved driveway around the front, pretty with caps of melting snow. Dean pulled the Impala in behind a three year old Mercedes, parked beside a new Volvo. So, Mr. Andersen did well enough for himself, but probably not enough to attract the attention of ordinary kidnap-for-profit thugs. Not that Dean thought for a moment they would get away with anything that easy.
Sam shook his shoulders out, plastered on his best innocent 'you know you like me' face as Dean rang the bell. He gave a little chin-jut head-jerk in Dean's direction, a quick flash of intent eyes as a reminder to his brother. This was work, put your game face on. Save whatever shit you got going on for later.
Dean was still feeling the effects of the accident, and of the confrontation with the Demon that night, Sam knew. His body had healed, but his spirit still bled. Sam could feel it - see it sometimes, in the hesitation, in the almost tentativeness Dean walked around with nowadays. It made Sam ache with things unrelated to his own injuries. He deliberately blotted out the pictures in his head of Dean swimming in his own blood, pooled there on the floor. The lacerations were fading scars now. The pieces the Demon had ripped out of Dean's soul, 'not like you need them', Sam could not touch. Didn't know where to begin.
Sam followed Dean's significant nod, directing his attention across the street. A dark blue sedan, a new model Impala, in fact. Sam thought that was what Dean meant, and he was about to come back with a 'get over yourself' retort - when he noticed the license plate. The first three letters were typically reserved for government issue cars. "Feds?"
Dean shrugged. "Probably."
That was not good news. It wasn't surprising that the FBI was investigating a possible kidnapping, but the Winchesters had a good many reasons not to want to have anything to do with them. Multiple credit card fraud being the least of them.
The girl who answered the door was college-age, blond and blue-eyed, came up to Sam's chin. He faltered, blinked a couple times, and Dean shifted just slightly in front of him, stepping into the gap when Sam couldn't unglue his tongue from the roof of his mouth. He introduced Sam as 'Sammy Hagar'. He didn't even catch what Dean called himself. He hoped like hell it was remotely similar to the names he'd given over the phone. "We have an appointment with your mom."
"Uh, I'm sorry, we're not receiving–"
"It's all right," Sam said. "We know about Kayla. Your mom is expecting us."
Blue eyes turned into shiny saucers, looking up at him, and Sam smiled reassuringly, using it deliberately. Trust us.
"You'd better come in, then," she said, pushing the door wider.
They found Mrs. Andersen in the living room, surrounded by various family, Kayla's aunt and uncle, a couple cousins, a 14 year old brother who looked stunned and shocked. The girl who had answered the door was Kayla's sister, Catherine.
Mrs. Andersen greeted them both with double-handed handshakes, recent tears shiny on her face and a damp Kleenex still clasped in one hand. "Oh, I'm so glad you could come."
"Our pleasure, really." Dean said. Sam hoped he was the only one who could hear the 'who the fuck are all these people' in his voice. "Uh, is there a place we could talk?"
"You don't want the rest of us to hear?" The question came from a woman standing slightly to the edge of the family, neat business suit, short practical heels, early thirties. Dark thick shoulder length hair, dark eyes; Caucasian, but still standing out like a chocolate swirl in the midst of all these strawberry and cream Scandinavians.
"Agent—?" Sam questioned.
"Leahy." Her eyes widened, but then narrowed almost immediately. She knew that what appeared to be psychic could – did – come from detailed observation and quick analysis. "Special Agent Angela Leahy." Her estimation and suspicion of them had just trebled.
That was a mistake, Sam thought. His mistake. They could have got through this by pretending, appearing ridiculous and dismissible. Now Agent Leahy could easily consider them a threat. Or worse, even as suspects. They did not need the FBI checking them out.
"I'm quite willing to do it here," Sam went on smoothly. "I just thought Mrs. Andersen might like a little privacy."
"What do I have to do?"
"Nothing. Just talk to me." Smile. Reassure. Duck head, not too tall, not too threatening.
"Mrs. Andersen," Agent Leahy warned. "This is exactly the sort of thing I was saying before. They come out of the woodwork to prey upon you when you are at your most vulnerable."
"I'm not interested in your money, Mrs. Andersen. I won't accept it." Sam felt Dean stir beside him. "We just want to help find Kayla."
"Tricia," Mr. Andersen said, cutting through the rest of them. It carried such a weight of authority and warning, warmth and exhaustion, that it made Sam turn to look at him, along with everyone else. Do you want to do this? It was for his wife and his wife alone.
"What could it hurt just to talk to them?" Patricia Andersen said, looking up at Sam.
x x x
Dean escaped upstairs, with the excuse that they needed to find an object for Sam to concentrate on, something that would link him to the girl.
"In here," Catherine said, directing him to the right door. When he'd walked right by it without noticing. "You sure you're psychic?" she asked, leaning up against the door with her arms crossed.
"Not me. My brother."
She tilted her head at him. "Your brother? You said his name was Hagar. Sammy Hagar. I remember it was the same as the singer, right?"
"Right." Okay, shit. This was weird. Dean rubbed his hands together, feeling his fingers start to itch. He didn't forget their false ID's, and he didn't spill the truth at the first random question. And calling his brother psychic, although that was the cover they were working, felt like telling the truth. Which felt like being stripped naked. Like this did.
"Sammy Hagar, mas tequila," Dean muttered, agreeing. Focus, dammit. They didn't have room for Dean to be off his game. "My half brother. Different last names."
She nodded, as if that was all right. Perfectly normal. Not as if anyone would have any reason to lie to her.
The little girl's bedroom looked exactly like a little girl's bedroom. Stuffed animals, frills and sequins, too many clothes and not all of them put away neatly. There were traces of fingerprint dust everywhere, no doubt left behind by the police and FBI. One entire wall was covered in some boy's picture that Dean didn't recognize, taken from various magazines. There were cloying fantasy images of fairies and unicorns on the other walls.
"What…" he started, and didn't even know what he was asking. "What was – is – Kayla like?"
Catherine's mouth twitched at the rephrased question, looked down and up again. She didn't actually look all that much like Jessica - just blonde, pretty and blue-eyed. She had none of spunk and spirit Dean had noticed even in the few moments he'd spoken to Sam's girlfriend. Before everything. Catherine looked beaten and haunted, shocked by pain she didn't understand. Nothing this bad had ever happened to her before.
"She's my little sister," she shrugged. Or imitated a shrug. It looked more like a flinch. "Annoying, you know? We didn't have much in common."
Dean walked slowly around the room. There was something. Something in the room was off, not him. Something he should be seeing, but didn't. Couldn't.
He wondered if she noticed the slip into past tense. Catherine's words did not cover the pain and guilt she felt at her little sister's disappearance. 'We weren't that close' was a defense mechanism he'd met before, like you could shut down grief before it even got started. If you didn't love someone, then it didn't hurt so much when they left.
The window was three stories up, with virtually no sill. The brickwork outside gave easy grip to some of the crawlers he knew, but none of them were much good at bypassing the electronic security every window was wired with.
"How could that happen?"
"What?" Dean came back, not having heard what else the girl said.
"Three months, how could that happen? She's quiet, you know. Kyle and me, we're older, we've got school, and soccer, and swimming and… Kayla just wanted her books, you know, her friends at school." Catherine stopped, went on. "You don't forget about your little sister for three months. Mom, she…" Catherine swallowed, shook her head. "She hasn't stopped crying for like five days. I can't even look at her anymore." She sounded guilty, but almost defiant. Not really blaming her mother's evident grief, but finding no solace there, no one to take of her.
Sucks to be you, Dean thought. "You might cut her some slack," he offered instead.
"Kayla was everyone's favorite, though. Me 'n Kyle, it's like she was ours, too, you know?"
If she said 'you know' one more time, Dean was going to tie and gag her.
"Mom wanted to have another baby for forever, and then when she couldn't, she got Kayla."
"Kayla was," shook his head, "is adopted?"
Catherine looked at him like he was something found on the bottom of her shoe. She handed Dean a photo from the little girl's desk. It showed all five Andersen family members, four tall, blonde, heavy-boned, fit people with one delicate girl seeming almost half their size; dark chocolate eyes, silky black hair to her waist and coffee with cream skin. "Some psychic, huh?"
That something was niggling at the back of his brain again. Dean stared at the picture, almost willing it to give up its secrets. He'd seen the picture in the news article, a typical school portrait, but here, contrasted directly with her adopted family, she looked almost alien.
Catherine stiffened as the moment stretched too long. "Romani," she said, edged with warning. She'd fought this battle before.
Click, went Dean's brain. "Gypsy?"
"Romani," the sister insisted, bristling with a combination of indignant political correctness and big sister protectiveness. "Or Roma. They don't like 'Gypsy'."
But Dean was moving on. Way ahead. Gypsies. Goddamn. He examined the room again. He still couldn't see it. He stripped off the bedclothes, closing his eyes and feeling through the sheets, under the mattress, ignoring Catherine's shouted 'Hey!' Nothing. He ran his hands over the walls, concentrating while trying to clear his thoughts at the same time. The tweeny boy star ended up scattered all over the floor, but that wall was empty of everything except tape and sticky tac.
He shoved the bed aside, just as Gene Andersen appeared in the doorway. "What the hell are you doing to my daughter's –" He stopped, seeing what Dean did, what they all did. An elaborate hex sigil in red wax in the carpet, mixed with what was probably soot, some magically significant ash. Circles inside of pentagrams inside of circles, obscure symbols and a mishmash of Greek, Hebrew and maybe Hindu letters.
There was something in the center Dean couldn't identify. Something brown and cream, and furry.
He kicked his toe through several of the lines, breaking the spell.
"That's Gigi," Catherine whispered. "Her guinea pig. Oh my god-" and she ran, presumably for the nearest toilet.
Said Gigi was three months dead, though, and didn't even smell anymore. He didn't bother examining the animal, nothing to learn there. And eww. But now the hex was broken he could see a pair of fetish bags tied on either side of the bed, another one at the foot. Shit. It took some kind of real power to make things in clear sight completely invisible. And to make someone disappear from thought and consideration for three months? That took more than the sacrifice of a pet.
"What happened here, in this room?" Dean questioned the father. "Whenever you first realized what had happened to your daughter?"
"I don't know." He looked up from the horror on the carpet, to Dean. A big bluff, competent man, but he was utterly helpless at this. "My wife… we have – had – company coming for Christmas. The cousins were supposed to sleep in here. With Kayla."
"She cleaned," Dean guessed. The mother had disturbed the hex enough, vacuumed up some of the grave dust, whatever, that she had broken the spell. If she'd been thinking about Kayla, the spell would have made her forget and move on - but she'd been moving automatically, busy with tasks, her mind no doubt full of lists of things to do, and it hadn't had a hook to catch her.
It said something that it had taken this long for them to realize Kayla was gone. The more they thought about her, the stronger the spell to forget about her became.
Irony was a sadistic bitch sometimes. And then the screaming started from downstairs.
x x x
'You could do the Patricia Arquette thing,' Dean had said. Joking. Pushing. The joke was on him when Sam agreed, and after conning the contact number out of the newspaper reporter, the family had also agreed.
Their cover, such as it was, was the product of one line in one article describing the Andersen family as desperate to follow any and all possible ways to find their daughter. The article had sneered at the family's efforts, obviously implying that they protested too much. Trial by insinuation, conviction by public opinion.
"I'm not wearing some funky hat or looking in a crystal ball," Dean complained later. Tell me this doesn't freak you out. Yeah, right. Sam promised him no costumes, no wacky characters or accents. They would go in, ask a few questions, see what they could see and if he had to, Sam would be the one to do the 'reading'. Patricia Arquette, not Zorba the Magnificent. It was far from the worst cover story they'd ever had.
Dean had never once asked if Sam thought he could actually do the Patricia Arquette thing.
"So how does this work?" Patricia Andersen asked.
Sam's quick grin came and went. He had asked for a cup of coffee, more to give Mrs. Andersen something to do than anything, and she had led him into the kitchen. And away from all the relatives.
Fuck if he knew how it worked. He sat at the dining room table, surrounded by the evidence of busy happy family with kids; schedules and calendars tacked to the fridge door, loose notes, a whole row of keys. Someone was a real artist, and the drawings lay everywhere, held pride of place on the computer table.
The kitchen was as generous and as unconsciously affluent as the rest of the house, as the rest of the family. It wasn't even the real dining table, Sam guessed, just the breakfast nook. He remembered Jess informing him of that, a small confused smile on her face that he didn't know such a thing. There was likely a much more formal dining room, one hardly ever used except for Christmas and Thanksgiving.
Jess's family had been like this one, large, generous, and even wealthier. They had accepted him as one of them without even an initial period of wariness and evaluation, as if it had never occurred to them not to trust. It occurred to him to wonder how they had dealt with her death, after the initial shock had worn off. He didn't regret not keeping in touch with them, that was too painful to contemplate, but… he wondered.
"Mr. Hagar?"
"Just Sam, please." He accepted the coffee gratefully. The counters were loaded with food, no doubt dropped off by well-meaning but confused friends. "How are you doing?"
Mrs. Andersen swayed, clutched at the countertop at the question. Sam reached out, ready to catch her, when she pulled herself together. "Oh God. How can – I can't think, I can't sleep, I can't do anything. It just goes around and around in my head, you know? How could I have forgotten my daughter? What kind of person does that?"
"I don't think this is your fault, Mrs. Andersen."
She sat kitty-corner to him at the table, turning her own cup around in her hands. She looked at it, but didn't even taste it. "They all think I'm crazy. Talking to a psychic."
Sam grinned and shifted, his discomfort unfeigned.
"What do you think it is?" she asked.
Sam bit at his lip, hearing the what, and not the who. "I don't know. Yet. I'm trying to find out."
"Why? Why are you here?" Her hand fluttered around a bit, not knowing quite what to do with itself. "I mean, you said you didn't want money… I don't understand why you would come all this way…"
"Just helping people is our reward."
Her eyes cleared and saw him. Saw through that lie, perhaps. "Agent Leahy said —"
"What?"
"That you would try to worm out information from me, and then tell it back me as if you could read minds. It's all a trick."
Sam sighed. Lying to this woman wasn't going to work. Despite her own emotional storm, or perhaps because of it, she could see through his bullshit like a radar beacon. "I don't know what you know, or what you believe, Mrs. Andersen, but I can see things. Sometimes. I…" He ran out of words, not knowing what would convince her.
"Kayla used to, I mean…" She shrugged, folded in on herself.
"Tell me."
"She told me to get a tire fixed, once, on the minivan we had before the Volvo. I didn't. Too busy, I guess. That day, it blew. That day. I swear. No one else believes that story."
"Anything else?"
"We learned the hard way not to play cards with her." Sam nodded, encouraging. He didn't know what was going to be significant, but at least she was talking now. "I had no idea what was going on, so I started reading. Looking things up on the internet. You have to understand we don't … have that sort of thing, in our genetic family. We are such meat and potatoes people, but I'm her mother now, and it was there, right in front of us. I don't understand it, but, if you say you can see things," she placed her hand lightly over his, "then I can believe that."
Sam's heart hammered in his chest, for reasons he couldn't easily identify. I believe you. I believe in you.
Mrs. Andersen went on for some minutes, telling rambling stories about Kayla, revealing details of happy family life, and the challenges of having an adopted child, especially one so distinctly ethnic in a predominantly white-on-white culture. They often thought about moving somewhere more diverse, where a dark-skinned child might have an easier time, but Kayla didn't seem to notice most of the time. She had plenty of friends at school who seemed to take no notice of her differences. She got good at telling people who she was, where she came from - that she wasn't Indian, or Mexican, or Native American, but Romani, what used to be called Gypsy. "That's what she would say. 'What used to be called Gypsy.'"
"You taught her that."
She blinked at him a couple times. "Yeah, I guess I did."
"You did a good job with her."
She laughed and sobbed at the same time, and clutched at her throat. "Young man, if you ever —"
Sam didn't wait for her to finish, as if he could guess but didn't want to hear what she was going to say. Impulse drove him, or call it intuition, but that was too – "Give me your hand."
He didn't know how this worked. Missouri could read people like they were an open book, but even she admitted she couldn't pull things out of the air. That was more or less what Sam was trying to do. He knew his… gift, ability, whatever, was different from Missouri's, as nearly every psychic was different from each other. She read minds and sensed spirits, but she didn't suffer from clairvoyant nightmares or have visions of murdering psychos. Or at least she'd never given them any intimation of it.
But he'd found the house in Salvation. He didn't know how that had worked either. He'd had twenty addresses to check out, and the visions had pulled him to the right one, this house, this family, in time that they could save that family. He could see things. Mrs. Andersen believed in him. All he had to do was believe in himself.
He didn't reach out directly for Kayla. He didn't know where she was. He reached out to her mother, sitting so open in front of him. Even ordinary mothers and daughters connected in ways Sam could only imagine. Sam had seen it between Jess and her mother, the way they spoke the same language, not so much finishing each other's sentences as not even needing to even talk, just knowing.
The vision hit him like a sledgehammer, flash-blinding his eyes from the inside out, metal on metal screeching to deafen his brain. He gasped, and controlled his scream of pain into a whimpering whine. He could hear Mrs. Andersen calling his name, could feel her hands on him, shaking, touching, knew she called in panic for help, someone please, help, oh jesus, oh jesus.
He could do nothing about it. He couldn't breathe, he couldn't move, every muscle in his body clenched like a fist, he hunched over himself there in the chair. Seconds stretched into minutes, into years.
Then it let him go, and he collapsed, tumbling off the chair like his strings had been cut, only to fall into his brother's arms. "Dean?"
"Sam! Sammy, dammit."
Oh, that had been a bad one. That note in his brother's voice was reserved for – "You scared the shit out of us. What the fuck did you do?" – death defying moments. And such.
"I didn't do —" he started, but then couldn't finish. He had done it, hadn't he.
He struggled up from his position on the floor, noting the whole congregation was now crowded into the kitchen, watching him. Including Agent Leahy, who held up a cell phone to her ear as she came in to the kitchen.
"Ambulance is on the way." She stumbled to a halt, watching Sam climb to his feet, shake Dean off. "Maybe you shouldn't get up so fast. You weren't breathing for more than a minute."
"I'm fine," Sam said. "Cancel the ambulance. I'm fine." He felt like he'd been hit by a truck. Yes, thinking about it, remembering too recent history, that's pretty much exactly what it felt like. Hopefully the effects of this wouldn't permanently scar, at least.
"What did you see?"
Everyone was watching him, waiting for his magic performance. He didn't want an audience, didn't want them to see how inadequate he was even as he was exposing himself as the freak he'd always feared. But Mrs. Andersen was waiting too. And he had seen something.
"I don't—" he swallowed, dry-mouthed, "I don't know what it means. I only saw fragments." Agent Leahy snorted, and walked away. "Everything was little. Miniature." He'd been smaller, too, but that made sense if he was seeing out of Kayla's eyes. He didn't remember what it was like to be barely four feet tall, though he must have passed through that stage to get where he was.
"What things, objects, did you see?" Dean's voice cut through. "Specifically." Focus, idiot. This is work. Work it. Don't let the image fade.
"A sink. Taps. A chair. A window." His hands tried to imitate their size, but between him and Kayla there was no reference and they just waved in the air.
"Anything outside the window?"
"No." He ran his tongue around the back of his teeth, feeling the tang and bitterness of blood there, and he wondered if he'd bit his tongue or cheek. Now he felt sick. God, he had to get out of here. "Dean," was all he said.
"Okay, we're going."
"Wait, wait," Mrs. Andersen cried, "Where is she? Is she still alive?"
"She alive," Sam said, certain. "She's okay. She's not hurt. She's … confused." It wasn't the best word, but it was the closest he had at this moment.
"Oh thank God. Thank you, Sam, oh God, thank you."
Gene Andersen held his wife back from actually collapsing on top of Sam, just as Dean pulled him back, away, towards the door.
They met Agent Leahy on the way out, her cell again at her ear. "Late sixties, I guess, black, Kansas plates…"
"'67 Impala," you ignorant bitch, Dean supplied. "KAZ 2Y5"
The federal agent repeated the information into the phone, then snapped it shut, not taking her eyes off of them, and directly blocking their path out the door.
"That was quite the performance, I'll give you that. Where'd you learn the breath trick?"
"Fuck you," Dean said, all subtlety gone.
"That child is ninety-nine percent certainly dead, and you leading these people on for whatever sick pleasure you get out of it—"
"Does it look like we're having such a good time!" Dean shouted. Sam swayed, trying to get away from the noise. Dean grabbed him by the collar, fisted, as if afraid he was going to fall over. "Get the fuck out of my way."
"I'd like you two to come back to my office. If you have actual information to offer that would help this case, I'm sure you wouldn't mind sharing it. I know I'd love to hear it."
"Fuck you."
She stared at them both coldly. "That's not going to happen."
"Agent Leahy," Gene Andersen said, behind them. "These two are guests in my home. We asked them here. Unless they've committed some crime you can arrest them for I'm asking you to respect that. You as much as accused me of raping and killing my daughter not twelve hours ago. Until the FBI comes up with a better theory than that I'm going to believe that my daughter is still alive. These boys are welcome back anytime. You'll get no complaint against them from me, or any of us." With that he shook Sam's hand, pressing something into it, significantly, don't show her. "Thank you, young man. From all of us."
Agent Leahy glanced between them, choosing between risks and rewards, then backed down, stepped away from the door.
"You might want to look at this, instead," Dean said, tossing the FBI woman a cloth bag, tied with string. "If you actually care about solving the case."
x x x
An hour later, and God knew how many miles south of Duluth, Sam stretched and shifted in his seat, cracked the stiffness out of his neck.
"Better?" his brother asked, glancing at him and away.
"Yeah." Even though the pain in his head was down to random spikes, he still wanted to stop pretty soon. The Patricia Arquette thing was fucking exhausting. According to the road signs they were thirty miles out of Minneapolis. Any closer and the motel rates started climbing steeply.
"What was that you gave her?" he asked.
Dean told him about the hex and the fetish bags. The way they seemed to work to make people forget, stop thinking about Kayla, so that she could just disappear.
"Why?"
"Don't know." Gonna find out.
"Gypsies?"
"Romanies."
"You think someone Romani took her?" Sam rubbed absently at his cheek, feeling the sore spot on the inside with his tongue. "Aside from the cliché, Dean, Gypsies taking children is just… racist."
"I don't think the Gypsies took her. I think they took her back."
x
x
x
…tbc...
A/N BigPink and elanurel are my betas, and how much does that rock? If you liked this, thank them, too. If you didn't, blame me.
But, you know, let me know…