The Scent of You Chapter 19, a supernatural fanfic

Disclaimer, Summary, Rating: See Chapter 1.

THE SCENT OF YOU

Chapter 19

…Wagner, Oliver; Wentworth, Chloe…Wirth, Vernon – oh yes, that gardener dude with the aptly named Dr Rosemary Latham…Worth, Verity…Yeager, Tobias; Zhou, Sing Sun; Zungçu, Xelola.

Sam carefully exited the database and blew out a frustrated breath. Of course he hadn't expected any of them to have a red banner headline on their file: POSSESSED, or anything, but at least something that would give him a heads-up…he and Dean could hardly go around muttering 'Christo' and flicking drops of Holy Water onto over fifty people in the hope one of them flinched and started to smoulder.

But everyone was apparently the epitome of ordinary, respectable, hard-working Texas folk. Sam looked at the clock and sighed as he saw it was after half-past-two; his stomach had decided his throat had been cut and if it could would have been staggering about clutching itself and doing a melodramatic death scene of fading away from hunger whilst moaning 'fooooooooooood' piteously.

Forget it…he needed caffeine if nothing else. Stiffly Sam stood up, his backside numb, and shut down the computer, placing the prop books back on the shelf. He headed out of the library towards the college cafeteria, and en route passed the discreetly placed 'health clinic', which was the place where students could deal with issues of sexually transmitted disease and contraception. The mortifying memory of what his actions in the library would have looked like had anyone chanced to look over as he'd tried to wrestle his cell phone from his pocket triggered further recollection of that blasted laundry store. On impulse, Sam went in and obtained some Trojan Ribbed (large – like any guy would ever go and buy small) condoms from a matronly black woman who didn't bat an eyelid. No doubt she'd encountered pretty much everything by this stage. The next time he and Dean 'entertained' the twins, they were going to be armed with the right weaponry as it were.

Smiling anticipatorily and replaying what Kerry had looked like undressed in his head, Sam entered the cafeteria, where his libido was summarily shut down by his annoyed stomach the instant the aroma of freshly-ground coffee beans teased his nostrils. Getting a large latte and a cheese/ham sourdough baguette, Sam took a window seat and practically inhaled the food before sipping the latte more sedately. There were quite a few students with coffees around but most had their noses buried in books and paid him no heed.

Again he turned his attention to what in a 'Hardy Boys' novel would be called 'The Problem of the Useless List'. Not that he'd ever really been into the Hardy Boys even before he found out that Franklin W. Dixon was the pseudonym for a whole series of mediocre middle-aged middle-class white men to churn out 'wholesome' Bible Belt fiction where the dialogue was as stilted as Venice and the writers had clearly pulled a Rip van Winkle at the age of 12 to wake up stodgy and staid at 43 without ever having gone through adolescence. In fact, a few years ago there had been an attempt to jazz the series up when Ilsa, perennial girlfriend of the perennially 17-year-old Joe Hardy had been seemingly blown-up by a car bomb…an image of Jessica pinned to their apartment ceiling suddenly popped into his brain and Sam stopped the painful train of thought.

The staff list had produced nothing of obvious interest. The only mildly noteworthy thing – in a distilled Geek way too – was that Verity, as in Verity Worth, meant 'truth'. There was a miniscule chance that the demon had chosen her because of that name but that would indicate it possessed, however warped and twisted, some bleak appreciation of the ridiculous, and like Dean had said, demons were only interested in death and destruction for the sake of death and destruction; just as they weren't noted for parental warm fuzziness, neither did they normally possess any sense - or even concept – of humour.

True, she also had the same initial, 'V', and surname-spelled-differently as Vernon Wirth, but the list had also had a Susan Samson and Suzanne Sampson, plus a Sara Eliot and a Sarah Elliott….

Sam thought momentarily about his own name…he had only ever been Sammy to one person: Dean. To their father, his teachers, his friends and college buddies, and to Jessica, he'd always been Sam. Unless Jess had really been pissed at him in which case it was Samuel or the full 'Samuel John Winchester'. Jess had been the same – she had only ever been Jessie to her beloved grandmother. Once one of his college buds had called him 'Sammy' and been cut off at the knees for it…only Dean could call him Sammy with impunity.

Samuel was actually an ancient Hebrew name meaning 'asked of God' and there were a couple of Bible books named after him. Dad's names were John Thomas; John, the most consistently popular boy's name ever, meant 'God's gracious gift', which even with the new understanding Sam had reached with their dad since Chicago was a bit too hard to swallow. Likewise Dean's first names were Dean Thomas; Dean meant 'one from the valley', and Thomas was an Aramaic word literally translated as 'twin', but which nowadays carried the highly appropriate meaning of 'devoted brother'.

None of which helps me to narrow the list to anything useful, Sam acknowledged as he placed his sandwich wrapper and cup in the trashcan on the way out to get a cab.

Although…a faint recollection nagged at the back of his mind as he walked across the campus grounds. All names had meaning, such as New York originally being New Amsterdam; a place called Twin Peaks was not situated on a plateau, nor a town called Pine Valley in a desert.

Personal names were the same. Nowadays because of an increasingly secular culture a lot of people gave their kids names that were merely 'pretty', like Madonna or Brittany or Tiffany or Brett and so forth, but at one time times were given because they had a significance above and beyond the immediate – like his own middle name was John, after their father, and Dean's was Thomas, also after Dad. Dad's mother's maiden name had been Dean, and mom's mother's maiden name had been Samuels.

In most cultures today, especially religious ones, names were still given that carried 'deeper' meaning, such Sikh men who were always named 'Singh' and Sikh women who were always named 'Kaur'. Muslims also included 'al-' prefixes and their names were often derivatives of Allah or Mohammed, like Christians often gave their children Saints or Apostles' names.

But names also have power…Sam turned headed back towards the library as he tried to remember as much as he could. Almost every culture had myths and legends about the mystical power inherent in knowing the 'True Name' of something. In some cultures, names were changed after significant rites of passage. The Comanche Indians for instance, had child-names and 'man-names', so a boy known as 'Loud Voice' as a child might be known as 'Plunging Eagle' as a man.

The Biblical patriarch Abraham, the central figure of Judaism, Islam and Christianity, had been born as Abram; his wife had originally been Sarai not Sarah. Their names had been changed by God when he promised them a biological child of their own despite both being in their nineties at the time: enter Isaac, whose son Jacob had also been known as Israel, the founder of the Jewish nation by virtue of twelve sons and even more daughters via his four wives. Allowing someone to change your name or amend it into a nickname showed that they had a certain level of control over you, like Sam permitted Dean alone to call him Sammy; only if it were Dean would Sam tolerate and respond to the diminutive.

Changing someone's name was demonstration of influence and power over them, like God had changed Abram to Abraham and Jacob to Israel. But it could also be done with malign intent; back in 18th and 19th Century Europe the forerunners of the Nazis had insisted that Jewish families change their family names from such as 'ben Jacob' to surnames like Gelbwässer, an artificial construct that translated literally as 'yellow water', a euphemism for urine.

Such racism caused a lot of problems today for genealogists, since when the Jews had finally got fed up enough to immigrate to the USA they had been packed off from Europe and arrived at Ellis Island under 'Gelbwässer' et al. As one family history buff at Stanford had lamented, they obediently trooped ashore and signed the immigration officials' books as 'Gelbwäßer' and the second after they were passed through Ellis Island they dropped the surname they had never used except when forced and gone back to their real surname…which might not have been 'officially' recorded for years.

Flashing his most charming, 'oh aren't I just so cute with my winsome forgetfulness' smile at the librarian as he went past, Sam went to the Etymology section and eyed the books warily. Pulling out a 'Book of Babies' Names' and studying it with a frown was the sort of thing that led to some well-meaning but wet-behind-the-ears college counsellor sidling up to him asking if he wanted to 'talk' and encouraging him and his girlfriend to 'make an appointment'.

One of Sam's buddies had been in that situation at Stanford when looking for suitable names for his unexpected nephew (everyone having expected a girl) and at the time Sam had hidden and peeked through the stacks with the other guys, sniggering as their buddy made increasingly desperate attempts to extricate himself from the counsellor who merely smiled condescendingly at his increasingly insistent denials of imminent paternity while clearly considering him to be in denial.

Right now, Sam knew he too would not find any humour in such a situation. Dad had given him the 'get a girl pregnant and I'll kill you speech' during one of their fights. Dean had given him the more forceful, 'get a girl pregnant and I will beat you to a bloody pulp and chop off your dick with a blunt knife'. But beyond that, Jessica had been an eminently sensible young woman who knew her own mind and therefore had taken the precaution of having periodic contraceptive injections to free her from the worry of remembering to take pills or if the condom they used just to be on the safe side happened to split. Just like Dean had firmly stated that the mother of his rug-rats would be Mrs Dean Winchester before she was 'mommy-Sammy-ate-my-Lucky-Charms', so too Sam and Jess had been determined they would be Mr & Mrs Winchester before they were Mom & Dad…

And now there was his newly acquired fear, the one that lurked in his hindbrain, of what if he passed his so-called 'gifts' to a child? He knew how hereditary traits worked. Had mom been killed because she had the same gifts or would have passed even more powerful abilities to a third child? Had Max Miller's mother been killed for the same reason? Look at what Max Miller had turned into because his father Jim Miller had been unable to cope with the paranormal reality of his wife's death and had turned to alcohol and lashing out at his son instead of the tragedy bringing them together.

For all his dislike sometimes of John Winchester's 'Marine boot camp crap', Sam acknowledged that their father's military background had enabled him to deal with the reality of what had happened to his wife in a way that Jim Miller, without that foundation and experience, had been unable to do. But even so, it had been a close run battle that the tequila had sometimes nearly won. Dean had swung the balance – Dean had been the rock in a storm-tossed sea that had given John something to cling to, the rock that had sheltered a helpless baby Sam from everything including a father incapable of being a father for some time.

Sam knew that Dean had been trying to break the tension with his trademark flippancy when he made that crack about Sam's greatest advantage over Max Miller being the existence of himself – a brother - but the stark truth was that Dean had been absolutely right. The world owed Dean big time, because he alone was the saving grace that prevented America from currently being prowled by Max Miller Mark II, a psychic psychotic.

Plucking out a suitably scholarly looking tome, Sam flicked through it, not even entirely sure what he was looking for. He found 'Dean', and 'Samuel' and 'Verity'... 'Vernon' meant 'strongly growing or flourishing'…something caught his eye and he turned the page back...

'Wirth', from the Teutonic Wirt, meaning 'The Master'.

Vernon Wirth…'strongly growing, flourishing master'; a nicely egotistical combination, especially with 'Vernon' being linked to horticulture. UNT Amarillo Head Gardener, Vernon Worth; good old Vern', short and chubby and completely free to roam all over the campus unchallenged and probably unnoticed.

Replacing the book, Sam had to force himself not to pelt out of the library like his pants were on fire, and fortuitously there was a cab dropping someone off as he tried to run to the sidewalk without looking like he was. Jumping in, he waved a wad of notes at the guy and promised him the lot regardless of how much less the charge actually was if he got him to the Lake Meredith Hotel as fast as he could.

If there was one thing Americans excelled at, it was their understanding the potential of the free market economy, and Sam was tumbled back in his seat as…Luis…super-glued his foot to the gas pedal at the same time as performing an illegal U-turn.

Traffic was still dense from that morning, but fairly free flowing and the cab managed to get Sam back to the hotel a whisker before the rush hour build-up; Sam ungrudgingly gave 'Luis' all the money, aware that the man's drive back into Amarillo at rush hour was going to be slow and tedious, and waved him off. Slightly conscious of the box of condoms in his jacket pocket, Sam hurried up to their room, half-hoping that Dean hadn't come back from his afternoon stroll so he could hide the box and just strategically place a couple in his wallet, but no such luck.

When Sam was little, he'd enjoyed jigsaws, and Dean, discovering that they kept his baby brother silently occupied – and out of his hair – for hours on end, had encouraged the pastime. Dean used to spread the pieces out on a flat surface and Sam would peer lengthily at each individual piece before looking at the picture on the box.

Now the same thing happened. He took in that the pile of papers and a familiar looking test-tube were still on Dean's bed as a piece. Another part of his brain registered Dean, still wearing his leather coat and boots as if he'd been about to go out, looking into the bathroom; another piece of the jigsaw was the gun dangling from Dean's hand, and another was the strangely blank non-expression on Dean's face, like he was sleepwalking, but without moving. Each individual piece hung there for a moment before being placed together by his brain to make the composite whole.

For a second it felt as if some invisible nanny had grabbed Sam like a naughty boy and dunked him wholly into a cold bath, and then the hand with which Dean was holding his Glock-17 twitched.

Sam had no memory getting from the door to in front of his brother, grasping Dean's shoulders. "Dean!"

Dean's face was utterly devoid of emotion, his eyes flat and dull. Dean's eyes were never dull. His pupils were surrounded by a small starburst of amber-brown that merged into a two-colour band of aquamarine and hazel-leaf green, flecked with emerald and black jade, protected by a narrow circumference of antique gold. When Dean was angry, his eyes were onyx stones in his face; when happy or amused, they were almost sparkling emeralds; when aroused they were glowing topaz and heavy-lidded; when he was thoughtful or abstracted they were like peppermint leaves sheened with bronze and flecked with chocolate bits. When they looked at Sam, even though his voice was often sarcastic, Dean's eyes were the green of fresh, spring meadow grass in their warm affection. Now his eyes looked like they had been painted on by someone with little time or care, who had had no colours left except for mud brown.

"No…oh no…Dean, please…come on!" Sam pleaded.

There was no reaction; Dean continued to look into the bathroom as if it held the answer to life, the universe and everything.

His preternatural abilities stirred in Sam and for some reason made him look up. In the very corner of the room, where he would be hidden from view when anyone opened the door and walked in, stood Vernon Wirth; entirely and innocuously human, except for his glowing ruby-red eyes.

Inchoate rage surged through Sam as the creature smirked with malicious glee, but despairing knowledge kept him still. Twelve feet separated him from Wirth; he had no idea as to what specific entity Wirth was, and so the monster could possibly kill him the instant he took a single step, or worse, kill Dean before Sam could reach him. Even with telekinesis, he could scramble for no weapon and deal a death blow fast enough, assuming that bullets or cold steel would work anyway.

Dean's hand moved, bringing the gun slowly up towards his own head, and Sam grabbed his wrist in a grip that should have left deep bruises, but it was as if Sam's own arm had suddenly become as insubstantial as a feather, for Dean's arm continued its jerky, inexorable rise completely unaffected by Sam's attempts to push his arm away and down.

Deep down, Sam knew he was sobbing as he whispered and yelled and begged and commanded Dean to come back, to snap out of it, to stop; for years he had sparred with his brother, and sometimes their fights had turned from verbal to physical blows, but he had never calculatedly struck Dean.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry…" he wept, even as he raised his hand and slapped Dean across the face with a loud crack!, unable even in this extremity to curl his fist and strike with more hurtful knuckles of bone than the open hand of his palm.

But there was not a flicker, as if the blow were as inconsequential and ineffective as his trying to force down Dean's arm; and the gun was now pointing directly at Dean's own skull.

He could not watch his brother die and he could not live if his brother did not.

Sam stepped forward, embracing Dean in a tight hug, feeling Dean's breath against his neck as Dean's face pressed against his throat, pressing his lips to the hair of Dean's scalp and closing his eyes; the shot would kill them both, but maybe not, maybe some miracle would spend its force by the time it had torn through Sam's brain and it would only bruise and bounce off Dean's skull.

It was all he could do, so he held on tight as he could and told Dean how he was the bestest big brother in the world and how much Sam loved him and that he was sorry for what he had said in Chicago and hurt Dean so much and how he would never, never leave Dean ever again for anything and how very, very much Sam loved his big brother more than anything

And the bang of a gunshot echoed in the room…

Concluded in Epilogue…

Note: for all those who like their endings to be all that rubbish existential/philosophical ambiguous stuff, like for e.g., Se7en, Twelve Monkeys, the final episode of Quantum Leap (don't get me started), you should stop reading now.

Note: I have received nearly a hundred reviews of this story; though I have been unable to personally reply to every one, I would just like to express how encouraging and positive they have been, as this has been an extremely difficult story to write.

The book is Dead on Target by 'Franklin W. Dixon', published 1987, and is the first in the updated Hardy Boys' Casefiles series. The books have also received a second 'update' – Undercover Brothers - in the 1990s and there are now the "original" books, the "Casefiles" and "Undercover Brothers" series, as well as several crossovers, etc.