Chapter Fourteen

Band Shirts and Jealous Exes, A Backward W vs O Reprise

Dean was pretty sure he might still be drunk. Nope…nuh-unh, scratch that 'might be' bit. More like he definitely still was drunk. It was the only logical explanation for the way he was reacting to waking up and Cal still actually being there. Meaning that for once it wasn't a dream and that, yeah, this time she actually had caught up to him… with Sam's help. Sam had been there the night before, right? Yep. Drunk. He had to be, not be angry about any of it.

Clad in nothing but a t-shirt and a short pair of boxers Cal had set to the task of cleaning and sharpening her favorite knives while he slept. She was a vision of everything he'd dreamed of since leaving. Heaven in one of his old band shirts… except that he didn't recognize the one she was wearing. Hang on a minute. Had she borrowed one of Sam's? No, no that couldn't be it. Too small.

"Cal, what in the hell are you wearing?" No, Dean had not just used the same tone he reserved for Cal's favorite choice of evening wear. And no that most certainly was not jealousy rearing its ugly head, thank you very much. He knew that he was the last person to be able to lay claim on either. Dean was just curious is all. Yeah, that's it. Nothing but a little healthy curiosity.

"Same thing I wear every night." Unfortunately Cal wasn't exactly being all that receptive to his 'curiosity'. The scowl and the 'what's it to you' attitude was not lost on him. And yet he couldn't let well enough alone.

"But, that's a guy's shirt." Good job there Dean, stating the obvious in an obvious sort of way. Captain Obvious strikes again. Well done. "Very good Inspector Cousteau." Okay, the Pink Panther joke was totally uncalled for. Would it have killed her to throw him a bone here? All he wanted was a little information.

"It's not mine." Dean didn't recognize the damned thing and it was driving him crazy. Sure he'd been gone a long time but not so long that she'd need to find herself some new shirts, for God's sake! He knew exactly how she got the shirts she liked to sleep in and it often involved sleeping with a guy, usually without the actual 'sleeping' part.

"Wow! Yet another accurate observation. You're really on a roll there aren't ya Dean? You gonna try three in a row for the grand prize, or are you gonna leave me alone to finish what I'm doing here?" God he'd missed her; sarcasm, sass and all. He was going to go for three, and then some.

"It's not Sam's either." Because on the odd occasion if they were on the road and she was in desperate need of a load of laundry she'd been known to borrow from Sam. This one definitely didn't belong to his brother, which meant she'd gotten it from someone else… somewhere else… possibly after doing something else.

Very suddenly there were images of Cal in some other nameless man's arms. Hangover had absolutely nothing to do with the sudden upheaval he tried to force back down inside himself. Never mind what he'd been up to for the last whole lotta months. What the hell had she been up to exactly?

"Don't look at me like that. I don't wanna have to hit you again." If looks could kill, she wouldn't need that knife that was now gripped tightly in her fist. Of course that just told Dean that she had something to be defensive about, which only fueled the fire.

"Who is he?" And yeah, okay, he'd admit it. That was jealousy plain and simple and it left him wanting to instill the fear of God into whoever the hell had put their hands on his girl. But that was beside the point. Cal was skirting the issue and Dean wanted answers.

"Eh?" She was playing clueless. Not a great way to go considering the mood he suddenly found himself in. "You heard me SheRa. Who is he?" Maybe raising his voice wasn't the best way to go. His head sure didn't appreciate it, not that his mouth cared at all.

"There is no 'he'." Apparently neither did Cal, seeing as her own voice had just gone up an octave or two. No amount of denial was going to make this situation any better and Dean was damned well going to call her on it. "That shirt had to come from somewhere Cal. Last I checked you weren't into chicks so it has to be a 'he'." The accusation was clear, even if he hadn't actually come straight out and said the words. You slept around again Cal. He wasn't an angel in all this or anything, but the thought of Cal doing stuff with someone else just felt all kinds of wrong.

"It's MY shirt Dean. Now quit with the caveman act and leave me the hell alone already." Right down in the depths of her big baby blues, behind that scalding hot anger, was a note of pleading. Please, you're the one that gave up. Just let it go. Like it hurt to have to listen to him get upset at her for moving on. He was being an ass. They both knew he'd done exactly what he was accusing her of. But the way he saw it, she was as guilty of giving up as he was. Yeah, suddenly everything was crystal clear in his mind. She was Cal 'don't back down' O'Sulivan after all, and yet she'd decided to sit down to eat barbecue with Bobby and just let him leave. No further ado than that initial freak out. Then she'd gone out and 'got the t-shirt' as they say, probably in all kind of ways. Ways Dean didn't want to think about. Ways Dean couldn't help but imagine. Ways that would haunt his dreams with no less dedication than Cal had all this time. Who the hell did that shirt belong to? Dean was going to kill the guy just for looking at her, never mind anything else they might have done.

"From the size of that thing I'm thinking he couldn't've been very big. What? Was the guy some sort of midget or something? Is that why you're not saying anything?" Poking fun at one of her conquests felt a whole lot better than thinking of her and some random guy (not him) doing… stuff. He so wasn't going any farther with that thought, either. He'd lost enough of his mind already.

"Oh right. Nice. This jealous moment coming from the man who was picking up the flavor of the week when I caught up with him last night." Just like that the pleading disappeared, pushed brutally aside by righteous anger. Now who was jealous? Well, he felt a whole lot better about burying memories of her in other women now that he knew she'd been just as blasé about it as he'd hoped she would be. She wasn't the only one capable of doing righteous.

"Never mind what I was doing last night. That's not what's important here. Who the hell is he Cal? I want a name." It was going to take a little more than some redirection trick to get this dog to drop his bone.

"Shut up Dean, just shut the hell up. You're safer that way until you sober up." She was done. Voice flat and defeated, she was just done with everything Winchester related. Not that Dean cared.

"Who. Is. He?" Insistent just wasn't the word.

"None of your business." Damned if Cal had been blessed with just about as much stubborn as Dean ever had. Not that it mattered.

"The hell it's not!" Was he yelling? When had he started yelling? Never mind. It felt good after all those months, so he was going with it. Blame it on having gone too long without having an outlet.

"The hell it is! What I do or do not do with my time stopped being your business when you chose to assert that chauvinist testosterone of yours by breaking things off between us. You're the one who took off for parts unknown without a trace. You're the one who made it real clear that I wasn't going to be a part of your life anymore. So you know what? You don't like it, too freaking bad. Shut up and get your drunken ass back to bed so you can sleep this garbage off. I've had enough of you to last me a lifetime."

Ouch. Well, in for a penny, right? He never had been one to listen and do as he was told, especially not from She-Ra.

She jumped when his calloused fingertips pulled the neck of her shirt out just enough to show the tag. There was something to be said about the element of surprise. That lovely shade of pink to her cheeks when he caught her off guard, for one. And what had he discovered from that tag? The punk she'd thrown in with didn't let his mother sew name tags into his clothes. Oh yeah, and he was smaller than Dean. Interesting. He'd have to think that one over later, when he sobered up. For now he couldn't resist jabbing at Cal some more.

"A medium huh? Whoever the punk is, he's a little guy. Smaller than I thought. You probably picked the Midget Man because he's easier to boss around, huh?" Ooh, pretentious much? Good one Winchester.

"Yeah, the dude reminded me of you." And ten points to Cal on the comeback. Not that he was keeping score or anything. Incidentally? Wow! That hurt way more than it should have. Still, there was a way to turn it around. When you're tossed a bunch of lemons…

"Must've been a handsome devil then." Yup, that was lemonade alright.

"Not really." Ouch.

"One night stand then?" It was said sympathetically in a way that implied she'd had her heart broken. Well now, he wanted to patronize did he?

"Whatever floats your boat, Dean." She'd gone cold, as if even just investing in their usual banter was more than she was willing to put into knowing him. That stopped him cold, didn't it? Did she actually like this mystery shirt donator? He was standing in the middle of the room, frozen to the spot with an ugly sneer on his face contemplating the possibility that some other guy might have caught Cal's eye. His eyes had gone wide and round, his mouth working open and closed in momentary shock. The full weight of what he'd done in leaving only then truly hitting him.

"I hate him already Cal. I really do." Words spoken in a voice so low that even he barely heard them.

The smile she produced was neither sweet nor welcoming. She was mad and boy, it showed.

"Good." If he'd been a mind reader then maybe he'd have heard just how badly she wanted him to realize just what it was he'd walked out on. Then he could have explained the reasons behind his decision to leave: that Cal deserved better than what he had to offer. That same old melancholic song started playing itself out again. As much as he hated to admit it, She-Ra had made a good point about going back to sleep until he sobered up. It was easier for him to keep his mouth shut when he was unconscious. She was better off not knowing what he was feeling. Ugh, god! What was it about the woman that had him thinking about feelings! He'd managed to repress them all so well this far.

So, deciding to err on the side of caution Dean went back to bed. He wasn't proud of it by any means but, yes, he really did stomp back towards the bed. With a muttered "Keep it down over there, some people are trying to sleep off a bender" he threw himself at the lumpy mattress like a ten year old girl throwing a tantrum. A few minutes of grumbling and pillow thumping later he had the covers pulled up over his head and was snoring away, blissfully oblivious to the death glares Cal kept sending his way.

Still it was better than waking up alone and feeling like he wanted to shoot the damned pillow next to him just for having the gall not to be her.

Cal had been expecting a lot of things to happen when Sam finally decided to move in on Dean. The current situation wasn't one of them. Sam just wasn't the type to bugger off in the middle of the night. At least she hadn't thought he was, until now. Yet here she was, alone with Dean who was drunk, disorderly and obnoxious even in sleep.

At first she'd thought that maybe he'd gone out to the car or was sitting outside the door. Maybe he'd just wanted to be alone with his thoughts while she and Dean slept or something like that. But he hadn't and wasn't. She'd called over to the office to see if maybe he'd taken another room. There was always the possibility that he'd wanted to give her and his brother some space to try and work things out. Not bloody likely! It was the sort of thing Sam did for people so the possibility was sound. The room they were currently in was the only one that had been rented out for the night, though, so that wasn't it either.

They'd made arrangements with Bobby to pick up her Mustang at the bar six hours drive away, so that couldn't have been it either. "Where the hell are you Sam?" Was the message she'd left about eighty times since she'd realized he was gone. The old Cal would've tied Dean down somewhere and gone looking for his brother, intent on dragging him back. This was the new, calmer Cal though. So instead of freaking out she took some deep breaths and pulled out her collection of knives and started in on the honing, the polishing and regular maintenance that had been neglected these past weeks chasing after Dean. It had almost worked too.

Then the man of the hour had joined the land of the living again and flushed any self control she might've had right down the crapper. Thank you Dean Winchester, destroyer of sanity. The whole conversation (if you could even call it that) had left Cal more than a little shell shocked. Why the hell did he care what she was wearing or where she got it from? All that harping and carrying on about a Wal-Mart t-shirt and not once did he mention the Impala and her shattered window. How drunk was he anyway?

Incidentally, watching a grown man behave like a ten year old girl throwing a tantrum? Not as entertaining as you might think. It was actually sort of sad. Then again, maybe that was the anger talking. By the time Sam waltzed through the door again the next morning Cal had thought herself around in circles so that she wondered if maybe she owed Dean an apology. She'd made it halfway to Dean's bed when the sound of the key sliding noisily home into the cheap padlock stopped her in her tracks.

"You've got some friggin' nerve Sam, waltzing back in here thinking some coffee and donuts are going to fix things when you left me alone with this inebriated asshole all night. And would it have killed you to leave a note or answer a voice mail? All this time I thought that one was the hypocrite." She waved a hand behind her vaguely in the direction of Dean's sleeping form. "Guess I was wrong."

Sam heaved a deep, exhausted sigh as he set the coffee down on the rickety old table where Cal's knives had been laid out not that long before. "What happened?" The implication being that with those two it was inevitable; there would always be something. Cal wasn't sure whether to continue the rant or take offense. In the end she went a different way entirely.

"First you tell me where you've been. I'm assuming it was pretty damned important?" She'd let him have the chance to say his piece. It was only fair. Not that he deserved fair after foisting Dean on her without so much as asking, but whatever. Sam scrubbed a hand over his face, stopping momentarily at his temples to push as if to squeeze the tension out through his eyes if it were even physically possible. "Yeah, it was important." Walking over to Dean's bed he slid a hand under the pillow and pulled out the knife that was always there while his brother slept. Then he handcuffed Dean's right hand to the nearest bedpost. "Grab your coffee and come outside for a minute. We've got to talk." And he stalked out the door without even waiting to see if she'd follow. Why do I get the feeling that the crap's about to hit the fan again? Gee, I don't know Cal. Probably because it always does.

What could a girl do but scoop up her own coffee from the table and follow him out?

"We've got a problem." Were the first words out of Sam's mouth. Oh great, exactly the words a girl wants to hear first thing in the morning when she hasn't slept in days. "You mean, other than your obnoxiously jealous brother sleeping off a drunken bender in there?" Being a smartass was a pretty satisfying way of dealing with it.

"Yeah, bigger than Dean. Bigger than Dean's standing on the America's Most Wanted list. It's got to do with this John Wayne, Malcolm Mackenzie guy." Oh. Now she wasn't so sure she wanted to know. "Ash called last night." Oh, so that's where he'd gone off to. "So far he's traced this same guy all the way back to Scotland." Okay, so he was Scottish. Not such a big deal, right? Sure, she was having a bit of a hard time picturing the snakeskin cowboy look paired up with a kilt. Still, she was thinking they'd dodged a bullet until Sam dropped the real bomb. "Farthest back we can find him is Inverness, 1348 where he apparently died of the Black Plague and then supposedly came back to life again a couple of days later." Um… "I'm sorry, what? Are you actually telling me that we might very well have been collaborating with something we might have to hunt down later?"

And there was the million dollar question, right there. What was Malcolm Mackenzie, John Wayne the faux-Duke, and why did he want to help them? "I'll tell you one thing. What with the Caveman in there drunk as a skunk and freaking out about the shirt I wear to bed and your American feds on our asses I am not liking the odds that this mystery guy is actually on our side." Sam's 'me neither' didn't have to be spoken to be understood. What the hell were they going to do now?

"She-Ra!" Dean's hoarse cry came from the other side of the door. "Turn the volume down on the smell of that coffee would ya? Trying not to puke my way through a hangover here." Oh, fantastic! Here we go again. "Serves you right, bozo. At least if you're throwing up I won't have to listen to you being an ass."

Cal waved off Sam's quizzical look in favor of rolling her eyes skyward and begging for the patience to deal with that man until he sobered up properly. "What the hell happened while I was gone?" "Not much. Your brother accused me of sleeping with a midget. Then he had a meltdown any self respecting ten year old girl would be proud of when I refused to tell him where the shirt I was wearing came from." Sam just stared, mouth slightly agape, as he tried to figure out what she was talking about. "What? Why?" "I dunno, you ask him. I've done my time."

"She-Ra! Why the hell am I handcuffed to the damned bed?" Yeah, Dean sure was at the top of his game. "You did it, you clean it up. I've done my part." Cal was bone tired. So without looking back she walked over to the driver's side of her mustang. "Where are you going?" Sam sounded worried. Like maybe he thought she would take off on him like Dean had. She just popped the trunk and pulled out a blanket and a pillow. "I'm going to get some shut eye. Fair warning? I am not going back in there until you've talked some sense into that idiot brother of yours. Got it?"

She didn't wait for an answer. Why would she? Cal didn't require an answer when she gave an order. Sam waited while she clambered into the back seat and beat the lumpy pillow into some semblance of submission. It was entirely possible she was imagining a certain pig-headed Winchester's face in its place while she did. When Sam was sure she'd made herself comfortable and wasn't going to just run off, he turned back toward the motel room door. It was time to deal with the other half of their problems.