The Scent of You Chapter 11, a supernatural fanfic

Disclaimer, Summary, Rating: See Chapter 1.

THE SCENT OF YOU

Chapter 11

Peeking through the door, Sam sagged in relief when the lecturer frowned at his computer screen momentarily but with an exasperated pursing of lips simply closed down the file and turned it off.

Dean switched off the moment he heard the man use the words 'low-resolution' and 'genetic' and 'cross-re-combining' in the first sentence. There had to be a way out of here before he was driven to attempt hari-kari with one of these pencils.

He glanced up and saw the ventilation duct cover above the top shelf on the rear wall, and thumped Sam in the back, pointing at it as he whispered, "Get us out of here."

Sam looked and smiled, then leaned in close to Dean and whispered into his ear, "'Only if you say: It's really lucky you're taller than me, Sam.'"

There was a dangerous silence and then the sharp point of a large hunting knife was pressed lightly against the septum under the tip of Sam's nose. "I will hurt you," Dean admirably managed to hiss a sentence containing no "s".

Knowing when to stop pulling the tiger's tail, Sam contented himself with smirking at his brother as he used the small steps to reach the vent, but it had four screws in each corner rather than just being slotted in. Dean tapped his lower leg and held up another knife to him, not the hunting knife from the back of his waistband but a thin, assassin's stiletto with a delicate but razor-sharp tip. Thank-you, Dean's paranoia; it was just enough, if he was careful, to be able to unscrew the duct cover and prop it to one side. Stepping down, he boosted Dean up to the vent first, and then pulled himself up, going in backwards so he could pull the cover over the opening. He couldn't screw it back into place, but was able to wedge it so reasonably well it was possible nobody would notice the missing screws for years.

Turning around in a space that confined took some contorting for someone of his height and he heard Dean snicker up ahead. Dean began to crawl on his hands and knees along the shaft until he reached an intersection and Sam told him to go right.

Dean looked back over his shoulder, "Dude, don't tell me even you were geek enough to memorise the layout of the ventilation system?"

"It's an educated guess," snapped Sam, "the campuses may change but most colleges these days have a standard architectural infrastructure."

"Meaning?"

"If that's the same here, we should be able to get to the Horticulture Quad again, and there's a side exit to the parking lot there without us having to walk through the main college building. Besides, what better way to get round the university without having to worry about being seen?" Sam pointed out.

Dean carried on moving, shaking his head. "Is there any reason that isn't sad, pathetic and totally nerdy as to why you know the standard layout of college campuses ventilation systems?"

"Yeah, saving my butt," Sam replied, "speaking of which, if I were you I'd start working out a little more at the gym, bro', cause yours is starting to sag."

Dean paused and kicked back blindly with his leg but Sam had been waiting for the manoeuvre and was well back. Deciding to save his retribution for a more appropriate time, Dean pressed, "What'd'yah mean, saving your butt?"

"Well, these two Stanford jocks wanted the genius-freak Freshman to do their term paper for them. When I refused I explained that they were Neanderthal troglodytes who could make their greatest contribution the future benefit of humanity by having vasectomies…and then I ran like hell."

"And do your other hobbies include punching starving grizzlies and sticking your head in the mouths of hungry lions?" Dean demanded.

"I hid out in a ventilation duct," Sam explained, ignoring the heated comment, "in fact I had to spend the next two weeks using the vent system to get around the campus. Fortunately they were seniors and my first term was their last."

"I swear you need a keeper." Dean muttered under his breath, "How did you survive without me for four years?"

I honestly don't know, bro', and I never intend trying to again…and now I'll start acting like a grown up instead of a sulking adolescent and make sure I've got your back as much as you've always protected mine. Aloud, Sam said, "Go left up ahead."

Crawling on your hands and knees quickly became tedious unless you were about eight months old, and Sam realised ruefully that Dean would be insufferable if they exited the ventilation system only to find themselves somewhere really bad – like the refectory as the cynosure of all eyes – rather than the Horticulture Quad. Come on, Amarillo, don't let me down…

But then his nose picked up a smell – make that smells…honeysuckle; sweet pea; lemon-grass; tea roses…thank you, Lord.

Dean stopped and examined the grid directly ahead on what was their 'floor' and the corridor ceiling, unlike the vent covers situated on walls, the ceiling covers were just slotted into the gaps, not screwed into place. Flattening himself down, Dean cranked his head this way and that as he did his best to check that there was nobody about who was going to get the surprise of their lives by virtue of a visitation from above. Pushing out the cover, Dean winced as it hit the corridor linoleum, and flipped himself down through the opening to land on the floor, catching Sam's backpack as he copied the move. Picking the vent cover up, Dean balanced it in his hands as Sam cupped his own hands and boosted Dean up precariously so the older man could quickly re-insert the cover into the hole as best he could.

They walked with feigned nonchalance as quickly as they dared through the Horticulture & Arboriculture Department, where it was clear some serious botanical science was going on. Saplings, bushes, shrubs, flowers, plants and so forth abounded like it was a rainforest and everything had tags and labels and fancy temperature regulators or thermometers in the soil or some such. Visually the classrooms were stunning but within a few minutes the overpowering confusion of heady scents made your nose itch and gave you a headache across your eyes.

"Through those double doors and along the next corridor," Sam recalled the college map from memory, "There should be another set of double doors out into the parking lot –"

"That area is out of bounds!"

Both stopped in their tracks and turned sharply as two people, a man and a woman, came across the outside lawn towards where they were standing at the junction of the colonnade to the main campus building. The woman, tall, thin and faintly reminiscent of Meryl Streep, had been the speaker; she was dressed in a suit over which she was wearing a white 'lab' coat, while the man was short and plump and dressed in overalls and wearing heavy gardening gauntlet-gloves to which clumps of soil clung.

"Ma'am?" Pasting on his most innocent little-boy-lost expression, Sam made the word a question.

"Those labs are off-limits to anyone not involved in the 1904 Project," she elaborated not unkindly. "I'm afraid you're going to have to walk around."

Dean and Sam didn't need to look at each other to go on high alert.

"You're not growing Triffids or something in there are you?" Dean asked, only half-joking.

She smiled at the small jest, "Maybe next time. We're breeding American Chestnut trees and it has to be an absolutely controlled environment so we can't have people just wandering in and out –"

"The 1904 Project," Sam repeated, "Of course, that was the year the blight first showed up on New York's chestnut trees."

She looked faintly surprised, "Why, yes it is."

"We had a rural upbringing," Dean put in smoothly as he and Sam continued to walk casually, slowly but surely getting themselves closer to the exit every moment, "my dad claimed that when he was really small, there were still a few left."

"There probably were," the woman conceded, "That's the tragedy – and in many ways the crime – of the extinction of the American Chestnut tree. It took decades for the blight to spread across the Continent to the West and South, but back then conservation wasn't even a twinkle in an environmentalist's eye. The U.S. Park Service basically just shrugged their shoulders and watched the species go extinct…" she shook her head, "Four billion trees."

"Billion?" Dean repeated.

"That's a conservative estimate," she told them. "In the 101 years since the blight first hit New York scientists have been trying to breed an American Chestnut resistant to the blight, and for the first time we really think we may have cracked it…"

"So we understand why you're taking all the precautions you can," Sam soothed. "We just got turned around, I'm very sorry."

"Never mind…I'll tell you what, why don't you go out through the fire door. We usually keep it locked up…Mr Wirth, have you got the key?"

"Certainly Dr Latham." Fumbling with his belt loop due to the gardening gloves, Mr Wirth hastily unlocked the staff door and let them through, as Dr Latham waved off their thanks.

As soon as Wirth had closed the door again, they hurried to the Impala as fast as they dared without breaking into a run; it had been a close-run thing and they were lucky Dr Latham had seemed to accept them as just unusually clueless students rather than it occurring to her to wonder why two Amarillo students did not know of the mega-important project going on at the college, regardless of whether they were studying botany or not.

It was late afternoon by the time they arrived back at Lake Meredith, just missing the evening rush hour traffic. Going up to their room, Dean took the test-tube of 'rock' and wrapped it in a towel, placing it at the bottom of his holdall for safe-keeping, while Sam took the elastic band off the file and spread the papers out on the table.

"What are they?" Dean asked, coming over from his bed.

"Research notes, chemical analysis charts, mineral analysis graphs, isotope measurements, breakdown of compound compositions," Sam shuffled through the thick pile as quickly as he could.

"They were trying to work out what the satanic football was," Dean surmised. "Did they?" He peered at the coloured bar charts.

"No…" Sam leaned back in his chair in disappointment. "I'll have to read through these properly but from the looks of it they just ended up with more questions…but whatever the lump is, it's definitely supernatural and evil…look," he plucked a chemical analysis statistical report from the pile and showed Dean the percentages breakdown.

"Sulphur…." Dean read out without surprise, "…carbon, trace elements…Unknown composition…unknown composition…What're they?"

"They took a sample to find out what it was made of and found something that they couldn't match up with any known chemical or mineral compound." Sam pursed his lips.

"Significant, then?"

"I'll say," Sam admitted, unconsciously worrying his lower lip as he picked up another analysis breakdown. "Of the physical sciences, chemistry is actually the easiest because it tends to throw the fewest curve balls, unlike Biology and the beast of them all, Physics. For instance, scientists were able to predict and place as yet-undiscovered elements into the Periodic Table years or even decades before they discovered the element itself because they could extrapolate from what they already had what was likely to be there."

"Animal, vegetable or mineral," Dean said in a mock sing-song voice.

"Pretty much…they were arguing over whether the lump was an ancient rock, maybe a meteorite fragment, or a fossilised prehistoric fern…or calcified animal remains." Sam finished.

"Which doesn't really move us along much further than where we were before," Dean pointed out, standing up and stretching by placing his hands in the small of his back and arching. "My knees are killing me. Let's go down for dinner and come back to this later?"

"Works for me," Sam agreed, tossing the papers back onto the table as even his self-admittedly 'geek' brain couldn't be bothered with the graphs and statistical breakdowns.

Continued in Chapter 12…