Twenty-Five: A Whisper
It doesn't take much to pique his curiosity, so it's no surprise that the constant elephant dreams are practically an engraved invitation to his need to investigate. He feels it under his skin, burning in his the tips of his fingers. It's so very like the itch to write that she awakened in him when they first met; only instead of getting words out he needs to get them in…
Peggy saw his hunted look at breakfast, and her smile was a balm for a short while. She begged the Impala's keys from Dean – because there's not much room in her Honda for Sam's long legs – and sent him on his way after Dean had pulled out a bunch of stuff from the trunk.
Sam's academic nose takes him to a second hand library near the university. He avoids the students he sees, feeling uncomfortably apart from them. The reminder of what he once was, how he was once so similar to them for a time, makes him hunch his shoulders and walk a little faster.
He's mourned Jess, he's moved on, but that doesn't stop him missing her, wishing what had happened to her were just a nightmare he could wake from. The memory of her tugs at him, touches his temples and his face, watches him with sad blue eyes.
Sam escapes into the dim, warm reaches of the old bookshop, and breathes a sigh of relief.
His ghosts leave him here. This is his territory. This is every quiet corner he's ever found filled with old paper in elderly books, dust that outdates both and second hand knowledge that will sooth the itch that creeps and claws at the tips of his fingers.
This is where he'll find his answers.
Two hours later he's found no less than sixteen books that make reference to a white elephant.
In Buddhist tradition, Buddha's mother dreamt of a white elephant presenting her with a lotus before she gave birth. In Southeast Asia, to be given a white elephant by the ruling monarch was a great blessing…until it became a great curse; white elephants were protected by sacred law and the money needed to keep them would eventually break their keepers. The whole thing started a modern idiom for something so valuable that it cannot be given away, but can only bring eventual ruin to its possessor.
None of this, of course, helps Sam. Or answers his questions.
Why the hell would he be dreaming of a white elephant? One that talks to him in a graveyard for fuck's sake. And for that matter, when did his dreams get all symbolic? Before, it was just glimpses of an inescapable future…now its big pale pachyderms in a boneyard.
Sam slumps back against the wooden shelving, listening to the traffic outside the shop and rubbing one restless thumb over the elephant bead on his wrist.
Elephant bead.
Peggy.
A blessing and a curse…
Dread pools in Sam's gut.
What does it mean…?
AN: Poor Sam's getting understandably frustrated. As are you guys, I imagine…