With this angel of mine no longer there to brighten their petals, the flowers around thine grave have turned to ash
Sam looked at Dean, whose eyes were wide in a mixture of shock and disgusted awe and whose mouth was open behind curled lips. The blonde – actually it was more of a dirty sand – nodded his head a fraction of an inch and moved his eyes back at the object between the brothers. Both of them were sitting in the booth at Harry's Restaurant, leaning toward each other with their elbows on the table and a stiff cloak of air surrounding them.
With an eye roll, Sam was the first to speak. "Dean–"
"Shh, don't make any sudden movements and we should be okay."
"Dean–"
He looked back up at his younger brother. "Sammy, I swear to you I saw it move."
"Then let's throw some holy water at it and get out of here, isn't that what you were pushing for earlier?"
"That was before we ran into rotini bake that doesn't know it shouldn't have a mind of its own."
Sam made a perturbed sound through his nose. "Right."
Dean, at last escaping the spell of a pasta dish that may or may not be alive, leaned back into the plush leather seats of his side of the booth. "Aren't you the one who always says, 'maybe this is our kind of problem?'"
"Yeah, am I, but we're not in a bad 1950's sci-fi movie here, Dean. This is 2005 and The Blob still hasn't happened yet in the real world in case you haven't noticed."
"In our line of work it might yet and you know it."
"This is silly," Sam observed and sat up straight. "We're fighting about bad pasta when something even bigger might be going on, like you being discovered."
"Discovered?–" he grinned, elated "–Really? So you honestly do think Days of Our Lives took my audition seriously? Oh, Sammy, that means so much to me, to know you have faith in me, you have no idea."
Sam groaned. "You really wear on my nerves sometimes, you know that?"
"Just doing my part," Dean replied proudly.
"Okay, so you're trying to send me to an early mental breakdown, fine, but this is neither the time nor the place. What if you're right?"
"About what? That I'm the handsome brother? Well, Sammy, I've known that for a long time now, but thank you for admitting your faults."
"What's gotten into you? The police might come busting through that door at any second and you're sitting there being, being…."
Dean smiled, his antics an effort to mask his unease. "Witty? Never knew I had it in me, did you?"
"To that extent, you actually not making cutsie remarks about naked Sorority pillow fights, no. But that's beside the point. I'm kind of worried, Dean, about Trude speeding off when we left."
"You said it yourself, this is a small town. If she went to the police, they'd have been here by now."
Sam shook his head. "Not unless this is one of those small towns in which there is no police station. If there's an emergency you need to go to the nearest town which has a police force. If that's the case we might still have a few minutes to run back to the car and kick some dust out of here."
For a brief moment Dean thought about divulging some information about what happened with Trude, but then turned the other way. If Sam wasn't going to tell Dean everything then it was only fair that Dean not tell Sam anything and everything. Teach the kid a lesson, why didn't he. "Yeah," he said. "You're probably right. Let's shake some tail before that rotini decides to see what we taste like."
Sliding out of the booth in unison, the brothers Winchester made their way to the entrance of Harry's Restaurant as casually as they could – no one ever suspected Joe Cool of being a once sought after murderer or of having a list of credit scams longer than the distance from Seattle to the former Soviet Union. It worked too, right up to the point of walking right out the main doors and down the concrete front steps.
"I'll be glad not to see the inside of that place again," Dean muttered, squinting against the light of the afternoon sun. He shuddered. "Bleck, I never ate so little in a place so full of food before in my life. Look at me, I'm wasting to skin and bone already! Next McDonald's we see, I'm pulling through the drive-through and ordering one of everything on the menu, and a nice apple pie for you too."
Sam was only half listening to his brother's complaints about what his lack of caloric intake was going to do to his physique (tactics such as this kept him sane on long car rides between hunting action. It was a wonder, the things Dean Winchester could talk about for hours straight, the man loved the sound of his own voice). Instead of diving deep into the conversation, Sam opted to let Dean talk himself out and only tossed in some "uh-huh"s and "yeah"s when an answer was expected of him.
He had been doing this since he was little, tuning his brother out, and so far to Sam's knowledge Dean never caught on to the fact that he'd have better luck talking to his car than to Sam – that Impala would probably say something even more cerebral in response. And like his younger years, when Dean was carrying on about whatever he was carrying on about, Sam would occupy himself with observation or kids' games.
Usually it wasn't anything in particular, something like counting cow passings under country roads or identifying road kill, but at this moment in time on this specific street something shook things up a bit. If Dean wasn't so busy yapping – God, that man could talk a mannequin's ear off – he'd have surely noticed what Sam was fixated on, so intently in fact that he came close to tripping over thin air.
As so happens in very small towns such as Dober, Ohio¹ the residents know all other residents, every fact down to why Mrs. O'Grady chose to have cats on her nightgown instead of Lilacs, her favorite summertime flower even though they give her nasty allergic reactions, and in very small towns no news might be better off than anything else. Because, you see, in very small towns even the best kept secret flies around to every door on the wings of a hummingbird. In no time at all, everyone in town knows you still sleep in footy pajamas. In efficient little towns like Dober news travels even quicker than the hummingbird because residents group together in gossip rings. Fascinating things, gossip rings, where dirty little secrets are swapped as plainly and casually as Grandma's sugar cookie recipe.
Sam was staring directly into the heart of one such gossip ring as he all but silenced the infernal low grade buzzing his brother was producing. If he knew anything at all about the anthropology of small towns, which he did, Sam would bet the devil his head that in that gossip ring Trude and Jo's speedy trip was or was being mentioned.
"I do my time in the gym, you know, I like to look the best I can, but how am I suppose to do that – look my best – when my stomach thinks my throat is cut? Now, I know I'm no wrestler or baseball catcher I'll admit, but I've got a little muscle going on and right now my guns are wasting away from that low quality meal I ate. I can't be a top notch 10 when all my muscle's gone away, can I?"
"Eh."
"I didn't think so. And looking at you, Sammy, God. You're a bean stalk – worse, what a bean stalk hopes to be when it grows up. It looks like a stiff breeze'll blow you over and that lunch didn't help you at all. I know I'm the handsome one, but I'm comfortable enough with my masculinity to say that you aren't all that bad-looking. You're a geek, a nerd, but you've got that geeky charm about you if you know what I mean. The dark features, chicks go insane for dark features, and the fact that you have absolutely no problem in the height department doesn't hold you back at all. In fact, if your hair wasn't so…ick you could be an apprenticing Casanova."
Even if Sam had been paying attention, Dean jumped right back into speaking so soon that he wouldn't have been able to defend his signature hair cut.
"But don't get me wrong, Sammy, you'd never be a playboy because I know you don't ever want to be one. You aren't like that and, if you took the time to look at the way some girls stare at you, a lot of them respect that. See, you're the kind of guy they could see themselves settling down with – scary concept – and they go a little crazy. You know, their eyes get all shiny with their fuzzy thoughts of raising a puppy with you and everything…. Sammy?"
Hallelujah, he had finally noticed that Sam had stopped walking somewhere between playboy and respect.
"Sammy?" Dean said again, turning around in a semi-circle to see his brother standing in the middle of the street focusing quite powerfully on the group of women gathered at the stop sign a few feet away. "Come on, Sammy, you know I didn't mean to offend you."
"Oh, I know," he replied simply but not before walking rather empoweringly into the gossip ring in front of Mel's Comics, Sport Cards and Collectibles².
Dean, only slightly stunned at his brother's forthcoming behavior, followed Sam on close ties.
"Hello, ladies," Sam said cheerfully.
They all said hi, then went right back to their conversation.
"That McFarland girl's always been a strange child," an older woman in an Indians cap explained. "Since I've known her she's never not had that frightened expression in her eye, like she's constantly seeing something we can't. Talks to herself, too, and thinks we don't notice."
"I'm looking for a hardware store. My brother's car needs a new spark plug," Sam lied.
"Turn around, go down three blocks and turn left at Raddish. Pots of flowers hanging in front of the windows, can't miss it, but watch your head going in," another woman answered, thirty-ish with her brown hair pulled up in a bun. "Carl used to think something was wrong with her, what with her parents working all the time and all and not giving her the proper amount of attention, and he was even more convinced when they died like that. Poor thing, had to see them gutted alive when she was seven and look at her now, death magnet ever since. Now Herb's gone she's hardly got anyone left."
Sam, memorizing every word, every pause for breath and smallest flinch made, nodded. "Three blocks that way, left at Raddish? Okay, all right, thank you."
"You're welcome, sweetheart," came from the bun lady. But "You'd think Trude's doing this herself, wouldn't you? What with how it's always her who calls the police" and a laugh came from a low-pitched woman's voice as Sam was walking away.
He and Dean exchanged glances as they began sauntering in the direction of the hardware store, with that spark plug story being forced to walk all the way around the block to the car.
When they were far enough away from the gossip ring to speak normally, Dean shot another expression at Sam. "You think we might be going on a hunting trip, don't you?"
"I think so. It's worth a look, anyway. It might just be horrible black luck, but with the way she acted over there it would be prudent of us to check it out."
"There's something I need to tell you, Sammy, about when you were leaving. I was goggling at the car, that's why I wasn't walking with you at first, and something was reflecting in the paint. Some kind of figure that shouldn't have been there and when I looked at Trude, I felt like gravity suddenly wasn't in the equation anymore. There was humming too. I don't know what tune it was or who was doing it, but I realize it was humming now. It stopped when she looked away from me, at something behind me, and she looked positively terrified. She must've took off home or something when we were going into that place with the evil pasta dish."
So much for teaching Sam a lesson, but it might be important to the case that quite possibly was developing and it was stupid, not to mention life threatening, to not bring up relavent factual information.
"We'll find out soon enough. Small towns don't have many roads, we'll be able to see the lights of the police cruisers somewhat easily."
¹ please note that I didn't take the time to hunt around the study for the Atlas and pulled a random town-ishy sounding name from the sky.
² all businesses are taken from the actual places from Port Washington, Wisconsin, USA. So Goosey's (Gallery) really is a bakery, Harry's really is a restaurant, and Mel's is an actual comics and sport card place. Just doing my roll in boosting tourism.