As always, thanks to Kerri.
Sarah did everything quietly on Monday morning.
She showered, she got dressed, she wrote a note for Sam, and she patted Keates's head. Everything was a whisper, a shadow, a gentle shift, padding down the hallway with her shoes in hand so the stiletto heels wouldn't click against the hardwood floors. She didn't want to wake him. She didn't want to face him, now that she'd had a whole night to process what he'd said to her.
"And then… I don't know. The light distracted him, distracted Lucifer, and I noticed this… this little toy soldier. I'd stuck it in the ashtray when I was a little kid, like really little, and I just… I remembered. And I don't know how I did it; I still don't know how I did it… I just kind of shoved him back. And I let go of Dean, and I promised him that it was okay. And then Michael was there, and he said something, and I just… I looked at Dean again, and he was still there, still there with me, and so I jumped. For him. Michael grabbed me on the way down, but I jumped."
That had been the apocalypse. The fucking apocalypse, and it had been stopped by the guy who was sleeping in her guest room. How did that even happen? In what universe did shit like this happen?
She beeped her car open and slid into her driver's seat, but she didn't start the engine.
"And so I jumped."
Who was he, who was this guy, and what had he done with the guy who had taken her out to dinner and smiled with big dimples and kissed her hard before he'd gone?
She was in over her head. She was in so fucking far over her head – the closest she'd ever come to dealing with a suicidal person was watching a special episode of Saved by the Bell, for God's sake.
And what was even going to happen next? Sam wasn't going to be happy holing up in her guest room and fixing up her house forever; eventually he was going to demand to leave. He couldn't stay. And God knew she couldn't hold him. Eventually, he was going to decide he wanted to find Dean. And then what?
If she let him go without being sure that he would keep himself safe, was she a bad person?
On the other hand, there was definitely a thing called "unlawful imprisonment." It was a class E felony. She knew these things. She had dated a lawyer once.
And didn't she owe it to the boy with the big dimples and the hard kiss to make sure that the man with the shattered eyes and the broken heart stayed safe? Sam Winchester had saved her life when she was twenty-four and coming to terms with the fact that she didn't actually know anything about what was real and what wasn't. She had lost a little bit of certainty. He had crashed back into her life after he'd lost everything.
She should balance that a little.
Sarah glanced at the watch on her wrist and startled; she was going to be late, and then her father would glare at her and make some snide remark. Honestly, she was too old to be working for her dad, but what was she going to do about it? She owed it to her mom to stay at the gallery; her parents had started it together with the money that her grandmother had left her dad – her mother had been in it for the art, and her father had been in it for the money, and between the two of them, they had kept the business extremely successful. With her mom gone, Sarah felt like she was the only person in the gallery actually protecting what art meant.
She backed out of her driveway, careful to edge her car around the Impala still parked at her curb. She should look into moving it to the garage, she mused – her across-the-street neighbor, Mrs. McLanahan, was always looking for some excuse to nose into Sarah's personal life, and the fewer people who asked questions about Sam, the better.
"Shoot," she muttered as she wound her way through the town towards the freeway. She'd forgotten coffee. Normally this wouldn't be that big of a deal, but she had been up all night thinking about how the goddamn world had almost ended a couple of times, only to be stopped by a man in her guest room awaiting his own death, and she needed some fucking caffeine. Right before the freeway onramp, she pulled into the little shopping center and headed for the Starbucks. There was a drive-through window on a coffee shop a little ways back down the road, but sometimes you just needed overly-processed cheesecake-coffee with twelve pounds of whipped cream on top.
So it was unorthodox. "Sue me," she muttered as she pushed the door open.
She was running late enough that the usual morning crowd had more or less thinned out, and she ordered her peppermint mocha, something about the arch of her eyebrow daring the barista to say "Oh but it's May; are you sure you want that?" and once she had paid, she wandered off to stand before the window and stare absently out at the street.
She wouldn't be surprised if Sam was gone when she got home that night. It's not like she'd taken any great pains to hide the keys to his car – they were in his sock drawer. The first place she'd thought of, and probably the first place anyone with half a mind would look.
And if he did leave, where would he go? He'd probably just keep driving, like he'd been when she and Keates had found him, and he'd eventually go over the edge of some cliff somewhere, and he'd find the peace he thought he was looking for.
Sarah shivered.
Was she obligated to stop him? Didn't he have the right to decide what to do about his own life? And for God's sake, hadn't he done enough for this stupid planet?
The question stopped her. She didn't know. She really didn't know. She had absolutely no frame of reference to help her understand the stories that he'd told her. Jesus, he'd seen Dean die a hundred times in one day. How was she supposed to wrap her head around that? How was she supposed to even begin to understand it?
Yesterday, she'd had a feeling of wading into a lake, with the water too murky for her to see where she was going or how deep she was. Now, she felt the water level slip up over her eyes.
She wanted to help Sam, she did, but… but, God, she was useless. He had been to hell. He had killed parts of himself in order to return to life, only to lose his mind as a result. What was she supposed to do, make him tea and pat him on the back? Was that supposed to be fucking useful?
"Ma'am?" someone said, and Sarah jumped before turning around to find the barista eyeing her expectantly. "Your mocha. Have a nice day."
"Oh – thank you." Sarah took the cup, fit the sleeve around it, and strode out the door. Get it together, she scolded herself. You have a lot to figure out right now, and it'd help if you knew what you were doing with your own life before you figured out what to do with his.
She paid hardly any attention to the road as she drove. In a perfect world, she mused, Sam would finish his degree at Columbia or some shit, and he'd settle down, and start his life over. But if she'd learned anything during the course of the previous day, it was that the world was literally the opposite of perfect. There was no perfect.
Maybe there was no God.
Whoa. Sarah shook herself and her fingers curled tighter around the steering wheel. Where the hell had that come from?
All right. That was it. Too much. This was too much for her. She couldn't be responsible for Sam. This was too far above her pay grade. She squared her shoulders and guided her car down the offramp. She'd just… she'd just get to her office and think about setting up Sam with a place to go next, but she couldn't keep doing this. It wasn't something she was equipped to handle.
It took exactly two minutes to get from the offramp to the gallery, and during that time Sarah glanced at a clock for the first time all morning. "Oh goddamn," she muttered. 9:37. The gallery opened at 9. Her father expected her at her desk by 8:30 at the very latest.
After completing the most haphazard parking job of her life, she grabbed her coffee and rushed across the parking lot to the side door of the gallery in the hope of avoiding her father, her heels clicking rapidly on the asphalt. Her bag almost slipped off her shoulder as she rummaged through it for her keys, and a few drops of coffee slopped out of the cup and onto her hand as she wrestled the door open. She glanced around the hallway, wary, like her dad might be hiding behind one of the ostentatious lamp fixtures that no client was ever gonna see, or as if he'd pop out from behind the potted ficus plant.
Ficus is a stupid word.
Hitching her bag higher, she crept down the hallway, silently cursing the fact that her office was at the opposite end. There hadn't been too many cars in the parking lot – maybe no clients had even come through yet, and she knew she didn't have any showing scheduled–
"Sarah! Good of you to join us!"
She forced the flinch to not show in her face before slowly pivoting to face her father. "Hi, Dad. Sorry I'm late."
"Hmm." He surveyed her, and Sarah fought the urge to reach up and smooth her hair. "Well, I'm pleased that you at least had time to stop for coffee."
There wasn't really a defense that Sarah could give for that one, so she stayed silent. Michael Blake strolled down the hallway towards her, his hands in the pockets of his neatly pressed suit. Sarah had never seen the man wear a wrinkled article of clothing in his life, not even on the day her mother had died. During her science fiction phase when she'd been fourteen, she'd read The Stepford Wives and gone running to her mom almost in tears because "Daddy reminds me of these ladies." Her mother had laughed, and rumpled her hair, and taken her to the library to check out a book that she'd heard a friend's son had enjoyed, even if the son was a few years younger than Sarah. She'd devoured the book, though, and all of its sequels, and her tattered set of Harry Potter books still occupied a place of pride on her bookshelves at home.
Her father came to a halt in front of her and frowned. "You look distracted."
"I'm fine." She was always fine around him, or at least she had been for the past seven years. He'd snapped at her the one time she'd tried to cry with him about her mother, and since then, she checked her emotions at the door whenever he was in the room.
"Hmm." He nodded, then shifted his weight. "We had a crate of appraisals come in this morning. If you'd been here an hour ago, they would probably be finished already."
She opened her mouth, but before she could mutter her non-apology, a clear and deep voice sounded from behind her father. "It's all right, Mr. Blake, I took care of it while you were with Mrs. Abbotts."
Michael turned and grinned at the man leaning up against the wall a few feet away from them, arms folded.
Sarah somehow managed not to roll her eyes. Her father had hired Daniel Ellis about a year ago, called himself lucky to snag Daniel from some pretentious gallery in the Hamptons. He always showed up to work in three-piece suits, all his ties with their perfect Windsor knots complimented his blue eyes, and he was remarkably efficient at his job.
Oh, and her father had wanted her to date him when he'd first joined the gallery.
"He's a good man, Sarah. And your mother wanted grandchildren. For God's sake, you're almost thirty."
She'd never forgiven her father for that, and by extension she'd never forgiven Daniel himself. "Great," she said quickly, before her father could speak. "Well, I have a consultation at ten, so I'm just going to go prep for it."
"I'd like you to join me for lunch," Michael said before she could walk away. The arch of his eyebrows told her that what he'd actually like was to scold her like a twelve-year-old for being late, and she was impressed with how quickly she came up with a response.
"I think I should have lunch at my desk, Dad. Make up for the lost hour this morning. Daniel," she added, nodding at him before taking quick steps into her office and shutting the door behind her.
"Ugh." She dropped her bag on one of the two chairs in front of her desk, set her coffee down, and draped her coat over the back of her own chair before raising the blinds on her window. She grabbed her coffee up again and gulped the rest of it down in one go, ignoring the way it almost burned the roof of her mouth. As she lowered the cup, the diploma hanging on her wall caught her eye. Barnard College: To all persons be it known that Sarah Blake, having completed the prescribed studies and satisfied the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of the Arts in Art History, has accordingly been admitted to that degree with all the rights, privileges, and immunities thereunto appertaining.
She had wanted Georgetown, but her father had wanted her to be at a school close enough that she could come home on weekends, and it probably didn't help that Barnard was all women. In the end, though, she should be grateful to her dad. Her mom had gotten sick during her junior year, and Sarah had been able to be with her through most of her treatment without falling too far behind in school. Sarah sat down behind her desk and picked up the only framed photo she had displayed: herself and her mother at her college graduation. Even then, if you really looked, you could see the sharper definition in her mom's cheekbones.
After graduation, she'd taken the paid internship she'd gotten with the Met in New York City – it was selective and prestigious and she had a sneaking suspicion that her father had pulled some strings. New York had been great, she'd dated a boy named Courtland, she'd met so many artists, she'd been overdrawn on her bank account twice, and she'd gotten some really cute clothes.
But in January, she'd handed in her notice and gone home. Her mom was getting worse.
Elizabeth Blake held on for six months after that last relapse. Sarah had taken her to the coast, they'd made it a habit of driving through Westchester, they'd spent a few weekends at bed-and-breakfasts in the countryside.
She'd had six months of that. And then it was over, and the funeral was on a Sunday.
Sarah had thought she was prepared to lose her mother, she thought that she had come to terms with what it would mean. She'd been wrong – there was no preparing for it, there was no getting ready.
She had thought that she wanted to die. She had spent a year thinking that, and not doing anything about it, and thinking herself a coward, and hiding herself in a shell. She had cut all contact with her friends, ignored her father like he ignored her, and just stopped thinking.
The fact was, though, that she hadn't wanted to die, not really.
Sam had made her realize that.
Sarah set the picture frame down and stared out the window.
Sam was back at her house right now, probably fixing up her porch, because she needed his help and had asked him to do it. Because that was how Sam worked – even in the one time she'd met him before, he'd encountered an impossible problem, a problem that was really none of his business, one that he was under no obligation to fix, and he and his brother had fixed it anyway. More than that, though, Sam Winchester had taught her something about herself.
This was the man who had fallen into her life exactly when she could have needed him most. This was the man who had accidentally taken her into a state of extreme danger – life-threatening danger – and saved her. But that wasn't it – if it hadn't have been for him, if it hadn't have been for him almost getting her killed, she wouldn't have realized just how much she wanted to live.
So she did owe him.
She took a deep breath and followed the thought around the corner. She owed him, but that wasn't it. Sam Winchester deserved to live. He deserved to live, and he deserved to be happy, and he deserved to have his eyes light up again.
Sarah wanted to be a part of that process.
And it wasn't claiming responsibility for him, necessarily – he had come into her life once, and he had simultaneously put her in danger and helped save her, in more ways than one. That hadn't been him claiming responsibility for her. But he had helped. She wanted to help.
The office phone on her desk beeped, and she jumped before swiveling her chair around to face the front of her desk. She pressed the button for the intercom to connect to Trish, the woman who worked the gallery's front desk. "Yes, Trish?"
"Mr. and Mrs. Barker are here for their consultation," Trish told her, and Sarah asked her to send them back as she quickly straightened up her desk and pulled the client file. She would get back to Sam soon enough. For now, she had a job to at least pretend to do.
She wound up sneaking out of the office early that day, once she was sure that her father would be in meetings with art dealers for the rest of the afternoon. She was almost speeding on the way home, her pulse thrumming just under her skin. She was ready to help, in any way that she needed to.
But what if… what if Sam didn't want her help? What if he'd decided to move on – not just move on, but move on? What if he had decided for certain that he just didn't want to keep living anymore?
She wasn't qualified to help him through that. Oh God, she was freaking herself out.
Breathe.
Sarah honestly had no idea what to expect when she guided her car back into her own driveway, but the Impala was still sitting at her curb, so that was something. Her steps were slow and hesitant as she made her way to the front door, and as she inserted her key into the lock, she didn't hear the sound of Keates's paws pounding down the hall to meet her. She didn't know what to make of that.
Sarah didn't know what she expected when she slowly made her way into the living room, but the sight of Sam on her sofa, laptop open and Keates at his feet, wasn't it. "Sam?" she said, and when he looked up at her, the intent set of his jaw softened a little, and he gave her half a smile. She exhaled the breath she hadn't known she'd been holding as she fished around for something to say. "Did you… get that porch step done?"
"I did, yeah," he nodded, distractedly glancing back at the laptop screen. "Listen, I'm gonna need my car keys back."
Sarah felt the blood drain from her face. Oh God, no, please – she stammered something about we can work something out, but he cut her off with wide eyes that reminded her of Keates as a puppy as he shook his head. "What? Oh, God, no, not for that," he reassured her, then invited her to sit beside him.
She approached him slowly, kicking off her shoes and curling to take up as little space as possible, like he was a frightened animal she didn't want to startle. "So what's up?" she asked slowly.
He rushed through an explanation of something about a cabin in Montana, like there was a part inside him that was on fire, and she had to stop him to make sure she was hearing him right. He looked startled when she said we.
"You don't have to come with me."
She snorted, feeling herself relax a little so that she was sitting cross-legged, rather than wrapping her arms around her legs. "Like I'm gonna let you go alone. Come on," she encouraged, "how much a drive is it going to be?"
It felt like Sam was sizing her up as he answered, and she squared her shoulders and jutted her chin out in response. "Sarah, you have a life here," he reminded her. "A job. Look, you – you've opened up your home for me in a way I have no right to expect." She shook her head, prepared to interrupt, but he talked over her. "You kept me alive for two days. And I'm grateful," he assured her, "but I can't take up any more space in your life."
She frowned; at no point in the last few days had she felt like he was taking up space in her life. It had been… unexpected, to say the least, but out of all the things that she'd felt in relation to him, inconvenienced had not been one of them. She nudged him with her foot. "Sam, come on. I'm sure we've had this conversation before." She stared at him, wondering if he was remembering what she was remembering. "Look, I'm not saying that I'm not scared, because I am scared as hell… but I'm not going to run and hide either." She made sure he was looking her in the eye as she continued. "I can handle this. I want to handle this. I'm in, whatever it takes."
Sam kept studying her, and she held his gaze, exhaling hard when she saw the smile just barely begin to light up his face. "Yeah?" he asked.
Sarah almost laughed. "Yeah. Now let me order a pizza so we can plan this road trip." She stood and patted his shoulder before Keates followed her into the kitchen so she could find the landline and the number of the local pizza joint. Keates followed her out, and without Sam noticing, she slipped her cell phone out of her pocket and texted her father.
Can't make it in tomorrow, and probably not for the rest of the week either. Personal emergency. I'm sure Daniel can handle anything that needs handling.
She felt a certain sense of smug satisfaction as she powered off her phone and tossed it onto the counter before grabbing the landline to order the pizza before grabbing a couple of beers from the fridge.
"So, Montana?" she asked as she stepped back into the living room and passed him a bottle. "You had… what, a safehouse there?"
"Not us," he corrected, and she noticed that he was still referring to himself as half of himself and Dean. "An older hunter. Rufus. Died about a year ago." A shadow passed across his face, and Sarah bit back the urge to ask how he had died. "But it's a good place, hidden. It kept us safe. Bobby did a pretty good job of making sure he had copies of everything in his library, and we moved pretty much all of them there." He twisted the cap off his beer and raised the bottle to her. "There's got to be something there that'll get me closer to figuring out where Dean is."
"Okay." Sarah nodded and took a sip of her own beer. "So. What's the best route?"
"Almost due east," Sam replied as Keates hopped up on the couch and curled up between them. Sarah didn't have the heart to scold him down as she usually would have done. "It's about twenty-four hundred miles, which Dean and I could do in a little less than a day and a half–"
"What? Wait, really?"
Sam grinned. "Don't worry; I know you'll want to actually stop for the night instead of just switching off drivers like we'd do. If we start really early tomorrow, like really early, we can make it to Minneapolis tomorrow night and find a Holiday Inn or whatever."
"Sounds good," she told him, ignoring the little voice in the back of her head that asked how early. "So that has us getting to the cabin, what," she quickly did the math in her head, "late Wednesday?"
Sam nodded. "Does that sound okay?"
"Perfect," she assured him. "How long do you think I should pack for?"
He frowned. "I don't… I don't really have a concept of that – we kind of lived out of the car, we didn't really have a home base." If he noticed how her face twinged in sympathy, he didn't comment. "Um… I guess about a week? We'll stop at a Laundromat if we need to."
"So we should be on the road by… what, five?" she checked, and he nodded. "Okay. Um, I will do laundry now – do you need anything washed?" he said he didn't, and she just raised an eyebrow before going on. "And I'll run to the bank and get some cash–"
"Sarah, I'll cover the expenses." His lips twitched. "I mean… you shouldn't be spending money on my quest."
"I'm ignoring you. Anyway, I'll make sure that we have some blankets to lay out for Keates, and ask a neighbor to keep an eye on the house for me…" she was mostly talking to herself at that point, and she jumped a little when the doorbell rang. She quickly went and paid for the pizza, probably tipping more than she usually would because she was so distracted, and brought it back into the living room. She had to bite her lip, hard, to stop from grinning big at the sight of Sam voluntarily picking up a slice and eating it. "Is there anything else I should take care of?"
He hesitated, then said slowly, "This is gonna sound strange, but bring a business suit. Something in dark colors, if you have it."
She raised an eyebrow. "Why?"
"In case we have to impersonate FBI agents. I'll make up a badge for you."
Her jaw dropped. "Are you serious?"
He nodded, watching her warily. "Sarah, do you think we can get our usual job done by impersonating art dealers?"
Sarah closed her mouth, then opened it, then closed it again before she answered, "I guess not."
"You okay with this?" he asked her, worry creeping into his voice.
"I'm fine," she reassured him, smiling. "Really. I mean… it's an adventure. I don't get many of those."
After a moment, he grinned back at her. They planned the finer points of the route (or he did, while she watched and munched on her own slice of pizza) before she got up to start a load of laundry and begin packing. Her stomach kept turning over in nerves, but she wasn't… she wasn't scared, she decided. She hadn't been lying when she said she didn't get adventures. She was helping Sam, she was maybe even doing something that would mean more in a bigger context that she didn't really understand, and she was going to be someone other than Sarah Blake, family-employed art dealer, if only for a week or so.
And she was going to help Sam. That mattered. That was definitely something that mattered.
When Sarah went to bed that night, it wasn't yet 8:30, but her alarm was set for 4 a.m., so it was just as well. Her life was changing, she thought as Keates curled up at the end of her bed and radiated warmth into her blanket-covered feet. She'd have never been able to expect anything even remotely like this.
Well, she thought wryly as she rolled over and punched her pillow, she had asked Sam to come back and see her sometime.
"Five in the morning isn't a time," Sarah mumbled as she wrapped the second breakfast burrito up in foil. It was a quick recipe she'd figured out during that one semester of college where she'd had eight AM class and no time for lunch afterwards: eggs, bacon, cheddar, onions, salt, pepper, mushrooms. "It's an emotion. A negative emotion." Keates barked a few times until she relented and slipped him a strip of bacon. Sam huffed a sound that was almost a laugh.
"Yeah, that sounds about right." As Sarah watched, he grabbed a gun – a fucking gun, oh God, she'd forgotten about those – and loaded it before slipping it into the waistband of his jeans at the small of his back. His eyes were lit up in a way that they hadn't been since he'd almost hit her dog, and a part of her was glad to see it. A bigger part was preoccupied with the thought of being in the car with his loaded gun.
"Do you need that to drive?" she asked before she could stop herself.
"What? The gun?" He didn't look angry at the question, and she was glad about that, but the corners of his eyes did tighten with what she now recognized as sadness. "Once Dean and I were driving, and a cop pulled us over for a busted taillight."
"Yeah?" That happened to everyone. She eyed him, waiting for him to continue.
Sam shrugged. "Wasn't a cop. Or I guess it was a cop's body, but a demon was possessing him. We almost died."
Sarah's mouth fell open. "Oh my God."
"Yeah." Sam paused, then turned to fully face her, eyes serious now. "Sarah, are you sure you want in on this? I'm not… being around me tends to get dangerous."
"I told you I'm in," she said, raising her chin and daring him to continue. She'd realized something last night, and she was going to hold herself to that, come hell or high water.
He studied her for another moment, and then nodded. "Okay then. Let's go?"
"Yep." Sarah grabbed the duffel bag she'd left by the front door and stepped outside, Sam and Keates at her heels. She double-locked the door behind them, glancing one last time at the windows, before she followed Sam down the empty driveway to the Impala; they'd moved her car into the garage last night. Sam held out a hand, an expectant eyebrow arched up on his face, and she bit down a giggle before reaching into the pocket of her hoodie and tossing him the keys. He grabbed them out of the air with a muttered word of thanks before unlocking the front and back passenger's side doors. She let Keates into the back as he loaded the bags into the trunk, and then he was sliding into the driver's seat beside her. She handed him one of the wrapped burritos and balanced the thermos of coffee on the bench seat between them as Sam started the engine. The car purred to life, and for a moment Sarah thought she saw a smile flicker across his face.
But then it was gone, and his jaw was set with determination, and they were pulling away from the curb. Sarah watched her house disappear in the rearview mirror as Keates curled up on the backseat to go back to sleep, having had done with the two of them making him get up so early. As they pulled out onto the main road, Sarah made herself stop looking back and asked, "You got any music in this thing?"
Sam hesitated for a moment, then replied, so quietly that she almost missed it over the roar of the engine, "There should be a box of cassette tapes in the glove compartment."
Sarah popped the little door open, and sure enough, a taped-up shoebox full of tapes slid out into her hand. "Blue Oyster Cult?" she muttered, flipping through them. "Nirvana? This is… this is all stuff that my dad mocked my uncle for liking."
"Uh huh," Sam muttered, then said, "if you see a Motorhead one, go ahead and put it on."
"Sure." Sarah opened the case and slid the tape into the player, and unwrapped her burrito as the opening chords sounded. She watched Sam out of the corner of her eye; the music wasn't making him relax any, and it wasn't doing much for her. But then, she suspected that he wasn't playing it for either of them.
And maybe that was okay.
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