Title: Blindly Walking
Summary: Sam is convinced something strange is happening in Oregon; Dean not so much. A suicide before their eyes convinces Dean that something is going on. From suicide, strange pictures and manipulated perceptions, the Winchesters find themselves doing what they do best.
Promise: I still promise I will keep Sam and Dean in character, provide absolutely no wincest and stay true to Supernatural canon. If I do not you are freely given permission to tell me so in any manner of nasty ways in a review. If I spell more than two or three things wrong, let a piano strike me from the sky. So help me Fan Fiction Gods. Amen.
Reviewers: Thank you to: Julian Read, lilbaby6688, Halcyon Impulsion, BlackasNightColdasDeath7, rascalandremi, kaysea, Perfect.Impluse, Minako Mikoto and hearts-4-stars.
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Saturday, 8:00 PM
"So what do you think it was?"
The question hung heavy in the air as Dean drove the car back the way they had come, heading for the exit they had passed a while ago for La Pine, Oregon. Sam had thrown the question out there simply because he had no answer himself. The growing stillness told him that Dean had no answer, either. Though it didn't surprise him that Dean had no answer, he couldn't help but feel a sort of muted disappointment.
"Well, look," Dean said after a while. His words came across as if he had been thinking about what to say ever since the guy had gone into the river. It was an odd sound to hear coming from his brother's mouth and it made Sam stop just a moment longer to think about what was going on. Not that there was very much for him to consider at the moment.
Dean glanced at Sam and pulled off the winding road to the La Pine exit, heading for the town. Their road now ran perpendicular to the Deschutes and they no longer were constantly reminded of the place they had seen a man vanish. The scenery changed to "industrialized" very quickly and it made both brothers wonder what had happened to the landscape they had been on not so long ago.
Dean pulled into the right lane and headed for a patch of motels and other stores. He favored Sam with another glance and drew breath to speak. "We know something wasn't right. I mean, even if he was a psycho-crazy—"
"—depressed man—" Sam corrected. Dean continued, undaunted, as if Sam hadn't even spoken.
"—he would have shown some reaction to being chased by a couple of guys he almost ran down on the road, right? Or he would have had some kind of reaction at all."
"Right," Sam offered Dean, prodding for more. So far Dean's general thoughts were mirroring his own and he was hoping that Dean might come up with something Sam himself had not already thought.
"And that whole deal with him trying to obliterate my freaking car," Dean continued, "it was like he didn't even know we were there. I don't know how, but he had no idea that we were there. There's no way anyone lucid could drive that insanely on purpose."
"That's what I thought," Sam said. "It was like he wasn't really aware of anything around him. It might explain why he crashed into the tree how he did."
"But there's still a chance he was just a depressed-crazy that wanted to die," Dean said. "He could have been seriously looking for a spectacular car crash to put himself out with and he had to move onto the next best thing when that didn't work out."
"So how do you explain the fact that he got out of the car before it crashed?" Sam probed. If Dean wanted to stick with this theory, he sure as hell was going to have to justify himself first.
"Hell, I don't know, Sam," Dean said vehemently. "I'm just trying to make a point right now."
"Well what is it?"
"We can't just decide there's something going on here because we want to. We've been wrong before." Dean took the time at the stoplight to give Sam a pointed and stern look. "We don't need to risk ourselves or other people for something we don't even know about yet. So let's not run into this like crazies."
"We are crazies," Sam pointed out flatly.
"Well… yeah, okay, but still."
"Still what?"
"I still say we can't decide this is unnatural just because it kinda sorta seems that way," Dean amended very ineffectively.
"We can't decide it's not, either," Sam said. "Just because you want to think it's not something, doesn't mean it isn't. It just means you're stubborn."
"Well, then I guess we can't decide anything at all." Dean decided indefinitely.
"…duh." Sam replied.
Sam's response earned no reply. Dean pulled the car into the parking lot of a motel, not bothering to park particularly straight and turned off the Impala's engine. It sputtered a moment and then quieted down, hoping for a rest after the long days of traveling that it had been through.
Sam looked out the window and stopped thinking about what Dean had said; he looked first at the cracked pavement below the car. The cracks spidered out like fingers of nothingness that were slowly enveloping the pavement and pulling it down. He then looked at the garden that was going to seed and turning into more of a jungle than a garden. Finally he turned his attention to the motel itself. There was not a sign of movement or life anywhere about the motel. No rooms had lights on and the pool looked like it had become a water ecosystem a decade or so ago.
Sam hesitated, and then looked at Dean. "Is it even still operating?"
"Yes," Dean said as if it was the most obvious thing ever. The gestured to a neon Open sign that was flickering in the window of a building marked 'A min stra ion'.
"Aminstraion," Sam read as Dean went over to the building to secure them a room. "Great. We're staying high class as always. Four out of five roaches recommend this place." He stretched his legs and watched for Dean to come back out of the 'Aminstraion' building.
Dean leaned over the dusty counter and then stopped and brushed off the dust bunnies that had instantly formed across his chest. He decided not to lean on the counter anymore and simply stood in front of it.
"Good evening," he said to catch the attention of the old and possibly decaying man behind the desk. While he had wanted to get his attention, Dean had not intended to startle the man as he did. The man jumped, obviously surprised to see someone standing in the office, and knocked a large number of things off the dusty, grimy desk.
"Hello," he wheezed, coughing and blowing dust in Dean's face with his breath. As he moved his joints cracked and the floorboards beneath him creaked. "Gas station's down the road if you take a right."
"I'm not looking for a gas station," Dean said. He opened his mouth to say something more, but the old wheezy man cut in.
"Are you lost?"
"No," Dean said, once again beating dust from his person. He was beginning to see that combating the dust was futile. "I'd like to get a room for myself and my partner for a few days. Do you have anything open?"
"In this motel?" The man asked.
"Yeah. Do you have a room?"
The old man wheezed in a fashion that Dean thought was a laugh, but he wasn't completely sure. "Do we have a room?" He repeated, laugh-wheezing harder. "We always have a room." The old man slowly got himself up from his chair and shuffled through a drawer for a minute before pulling out an old, rusty brass key. "Always a room, never a guest." He handed the key over to Dean and reached for something else across the desk.
"We've got no air conditioning, no room service, no housekeeping," the guy started rattling off as he wrote out a receipt. "No security, no pool house, no sauna," he continued, tearing the receipt off of the pad and handing the paper to Dean to sign. After pausing to think of a name to make up, Dean signed the receipt made of carbon paper that had to be at least twenty years old.
The man drew a slow breath, "no transportation services, no refrigerators and no electricity." He didn't make to draw another breath, so Dean assumed him to be finished.
"Do you have flushing toilets?" He asked hesitantly almost afraid of the answer.
"Sometimes." The old man answered.
That answer was even worse.
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"Alright, c'mon Sammy," Dean said, throwing open Sam's door and half pulling him from the Impala. Sam didn't seem to share his enthusiasm at having procured a motel room for them. "We've got a room."
Sam tried to work up an excited facial expression and only managed to look slightly nauseous.
"You should be impressed with how I manage to always find us places to stay," Dean said with a hint of offense in his voice. "After all, if I didn't find us places to stay, we'd be stuck living in the Impala."
"And we so wouldn't want that," Sam said with as much sarcasm as he could muster. "It might be dirty in the Impala."
"Dude, just shut up," Dean said. He stuck the old brass key into the door and turned it sharply. Absolutely nothing happened. Dean tried to pull the key back out of the lock to try again but it wouldn't budge at all. He tried again to turn the key and still there was no movement.
"Great place," Sam said thoughtfully. In his pensiveness, he looked up at the eaves of the roof above the door to their room which were dripping brown sludge to the ground below. Sam made a face at the sludge and turned his attention back to Dean trying to open the door. He looked back in time to see Dean break the doorknob right off the door completely in one, violent jerk.
"Dean!" Sam said.
"Oh, good," Dean said, looking pleased with himself suddenly and not sharing Sam's shock whatsoever. "Now I don't have to worry about losing the pesky key to this damn place. It's like having one of those card things instead; Stress-free."
"No, it's like having a door you can't lock and a brother who's an idiot," Sam corrected as the two of them made their way into the place they would now call home for some time.
The inside of the motel room was worse than the outside could have possibly described. The place had very obviously been put together with materials bought at their cheapest prices. The flooring had run out two thirds of the way through and the red Berber carpet turned to blue linoleum. The walls were covered in yellow and green striped wallpaper and the lights were old, dusty chandeliers.
"Nice," Dean said, nodding and pressing his lips together in a thoughtful manner.
"If 'nice' means ugly as hell." Sam said.
"Who's to say it doesn't?" Dean asked, sitting down on one of the two beds. A cloud of dust and God only knew what else plumed out from the bedding and the mattress. Dean sneezed and Sam laughed a little. "'Nice means' dirty and dusty and pretty damn fugly," Dean modified.
Sam and Dean soon had what few worldly possessions they owned set about the room. Dean's phone, as always, slept on the nightstand next to his head. Ever since that one time he had always hoped to be woken by the sound of his phone ringing by his head. Always since that one time it never had. It did nothing to diminish the seed of hope that he felt waiting in his heart every night he went to bed.
"We should get some shut-eye," Dean told Sam, who was eyeing his bed warily.
"What if this place really has bed bugs that can bite?" Sam mused, peeking under the blankets on his bed for safety's sake.
"Just let me know if I have to chase the monsters under your bed," Dean said.
"Sure, Dean. Whatever."
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"So we're just going to go knockin' on her door and ask to talk with her about her boyfriend that just committed suicide yesterday," Sam repeated. He was currently staring at his brother in utter disbelief.
"You got anything better?" Dean demanded turning to look at Sam as they sat a block and a half away from the house their mystery man's girlfriend was living in. Dean seemed quite set on going through with his plan as he had already decided it.
"Uh, yeah," Sam said. "Absolutely anything besides that is better."
"Unless we're going to talk to people, I see no freaking way that we're going to be able to figure out if this is weird or not." Dean pulled his key from the ignition and got out of the car. "So are you coming, or are you gonna let me fly this one solo?"
"How stupid do you think I am?" Sam replied, reluctantly getting out of the car, too. "But I still say this is the stupidest idea ever."
"I'm sure you won't feel that way for too long," Dean told him genially, patting him on the arm.
"Yeah, because you'll think of something dumber and I'll have no choice but to award it first place." Sam decided.
"Just shut up and let me do the talking," Dean told Sam. "Between the two of us, we both know I'm the better one for that."
"Yeah, if you're looking for a night on the town," Sam retorted. He and Dean made it to the front porch of the house. "You have got to be the most tactless person I know, and I happen to know a lot of people. We're going to let me talk."
Dean reached out and rang the blue and red doorbell. Sam was giving Dean an "eat your tongue and shut up" look. Dean didn't seem to take any notice of it.
"Like hell I am," Dean said. "If you think your dam—" The door knob turned and the door swung open and Dean switched gears mid-sentence. "—Hello." He said, trying to find the proper amount of a smile to put on his face. He hoped he had chosen the right amount. Drawing in breath, he once again found himself standing with his mouth open and not the one speaking.
"Oh," she said, looking at them. At first she seemed kind of confused and Dean took the moment she gave them as she tried to place their faces to look her over. Though she hadn't been crying recently, it was apparent that she was not having a very good day and probably wasn't done with the crying just yet. She had a look about her that Dean recognized only too well. "You two… you were the ones that called, right?"
"Yeah, we saw—" Dean stopped and switched his sentence after a powerful glower from his brother. "—we're really sorry." He said. A glance at Sam this time told him that this was a much more acceptable route to take the conversation down.
"Yeah, well…" the girl trailed off, still standing in the doorway and looking at them. It was extremely evident that she had nowhere to take the sentence and was talking for talking's sake.
"Listen, I know it's a sore spot," Sam said, putting on his best, "Gosh, I'm so sorry" face. "And I know this is hard, but after what we saw…" He trailed off and let her fill in the blanks with whatever she felt like.
A sigh escaped her lips and she shook her head as if to clear it. "Oh, I see." She brushed hair from her face and looked over their faces one more time. Each brother tried his hardest to look harmlessly curious. After another silence she said, "Of course. Here, come in," she said, stepping back and opening her doorway for them. Dean looked at Sam. Both of them silently exchanged a look that communicated surprise at her consent. They kept this thought to themselves.
For a few moments, each brother let his eyes wander about the room. It was a very cold room in how it was decorated. Black, white and steel-metal colors were everywhere with the occasional splash of "modern art" on the walls and floor. Glass end tables sat next to the chairs and couches. There was not a place in the room that emanated warmth and happiness. Dean had no idea how she could stand to live here.
Sam set to work talking with her and trying to establish some manner of rapport while Dean let his eyes wander around the living room more, this time looking at the smaller things that were lying around. Everywhere he looked there were pictures of this girl and her boyfriend. Happy pictures by the lake, happy pictures on the beach, happy pictures any damn where you pleased. This didn't exactly scream suicide-case to him.
"…really would like to help you get to the bottom of this," Dean heard Sam say. He decided he should probably tune in at some point and hear some of the BS his brother was feeding to the girl. "But we can't do that if you don't agree. We don't want to do anything you won't agree to."
"But there's nothing to get to the bottom of," she pointed out, letting out a stream of air as she paused. "He just… ran himself off a cliff and died. It doesn't get very much simpler than that, you know."
"I know," Sam told her, nodding, "but you," he glanced at Dean before he said, "and we," Dean nodded, "don't think it was just some wanton suicide. You've said yourself that he had no reason to have done what he did. And we know things were a little on the strange side yesterday. If we can offer our services to you and try to give you some closure, we'll feel like we've done our job."
There was a pregnant pause where she looked over her shoulder to a picture on the glass side table. Dean couldn't even begin to fathom why she would keep all these things around her that reminded her of her boyfriend until he thought of how long it took Sam to give up everything that reminded him of Jessica. He determined that it was a slow process.
"I dunno," she said slowly and Sam could see that she was still trying to decide. "I mean, we can see how it goes, but I can't make you any promises."
"Of course," Sam said, reaching over and patting her hand gently. "I know," he said with this really strange tone that seemed to ooze with compassion. Dean was suddenly glad he had let Sam take over with the touchy-feely crap. "We will back off as soon as you say so. It's all in your control. We just feel connected now because of how things happened, y'know?"
"I guess," she conceded. It seemed that his demurely compassionate tone was doing more for her than his words were.
"So let's start this properly, shall we?" Sam asked, trying to sound just slightly more jovial. He held out a hand to her. "I'm Sam Johnson," he told her smoothly. Dean used all his willpower not to roll his eyes at the last name. She took his hand and shook it. After a brief handshake he directed her attention to Dean. "And this is my brother, Dean Johnson," he said.
"Nice to meet you, both of you," she said. "I'm Karen Whitney." She looked at them a minute after they exchanged all their handshakes and "nice to meet you"s. When they made no move to speak, she continued with, "And so what is it, exactly, that you said you did?"
"We didn't," Sam said.
"But you said, 'we'll feel like we've done our job' earlier," she told him.
"Oh," said Dean, his voice oozing with an air of forgetfulness to cover the half-lies that were to follow. "We're private investigators of a sort," Dean offered. "We deal mostly with… grief counseling and helping people piece together the reasoning behind unexpected deaths and suicides. So this is sort of right up our alley."
"Really; so you do this sort of thing a lot," she said. She crossed her legs and looked at each of them in turn. She was listening to them now with a sort of hunger that Sam knew they would not be able to satiate. "So you tell me. What do you think is going on?"
"Uh, well we—see we—" Dean was sputtering and Sam decided it was his turn to talk again.
"It's hard to say. We've only gotten a small, small piece of the whole story. I'd rather not give you any false truths until we can feel more confident in what it is that we tell you."
"Ah," she said. She didn't seem completely convinced, but she didn't seem to be shutting down, either. Sam allowed himself and internal sigh of relief. "So where in Oregon do you operate from? Obviously not in La Pine; I'd know. Are you from the Portland area?"
"We're not from around here," Sam told her. "This is a little out of our way; we just seemed to end up here in the right place at the right time."
"We're from Colorado," Dean added.
"Where in Colorado?" She asked. Her questions were not digging; she just seemed keen to avoid talking about her boyfriend for as long as possible. Sam and Dean could tell and they granted her this wish.
"Albany," Dean said.
"Albany?" She repeated. "I thought that was in New York…?" Dean had an "oh shit" look all across his face which signaled to Sam that it was, once again, time to clean up his mess.
"It is," Sam said. "But it's also a really, really small town in southern Colorado. It doesn't surprise me you haven't heard of it. It's like, what, six people and a mailbox, right Dean?" Dean nodded. "We're hoping to get a new building in Denver soon." He smiled slightly. "I'm sure that one rings more of a bell."
Sam allowed himself a second inward sigh in relief as he saw a smile grace her features.
He and Dean fell into a routine of asking about general things they really didn't care about. The rapport was the most important part of the meeting—without it they were not going to be able to get anywhere. They slowly learned a large number of things: her boyfriend's name—Derek—his interests, about their relationship. It continued on for quite some time and Dean even pretended to be taking some notes which were really a brainstorm of the fast food he had seen around La Pine so far. After a while, though, the question they had both been dying to know finally came out into the open.
"Has there been anything… strange happening lately?" Sam asked gently, trying his best to make the question fit in with the flow of the rest of the conversation.
"No," she said immediately, shaking her head. "He was completely healthy—in fact, he just had a doctor's appointment about a week ago. He was gearing up for our vacation and I found out a few days ago he was going to propose to me…" she trailed off a moment and the brothers gave her the time to silently mourn this loss.
After a while, Dean said, "we don't mean obvious things." At her quizzical expression he continued with, "anything that doesn't seem normal. Trivial things, even. Was he having nightmares? Hearing voices? Talking about strange things?"
"You think he was schizophrenic?" She asked. Dean was quite surprised that this was the first response that she came to. "I can assure you he was mentally just as healthy and stable as he was physically. I'd know if there was something going on with his head. We were always together."
Dean looked down at his notepad and barely whispered, "That could make a man mental."
"No," Sam said, cutting in over Dean's comment. "We're not suggesting that he was schizophrenic. We're just trying to start jogging your mind, get you thinking. Was there absolutely anything that's happened recently that seems to be strange to you?"
While Dean lost interest in Sam trying to probe information from Karen that she didn't want to share, he reached over and found a Costco 1-hr Photo packet of pictures that was lying on the glass table closest to him. He opened it right on up and the negatives fell out on his lap. Karen stopped what she was saying to Sam and looked at Dean who tried to look properly sheepish.
"Oh, those are from a looong time ago," she said, almost as if she had forgotten about them. "We took in his camera last week and had them Costco develop the pictures from our backpacking trip last year. Right after that trip we had gotten a digital camera, so that roll of film wasn't finished, but we wanted the pictures. We took a whole bunch of random pictures of the two of us to finish it off."
Dean was stuffing the negatives back into their pouch when he saw one single negative slip to the floor. That was weird, because the rest of them were together in bunches of five. Karen found this strange, too.
"Did you rip it?" She asked.
"No, it looks like it was cut." He found the other three negatives that made up all of a strip save for one negative. "Do you have any idea what negative is missing?" Karen shook her head and reached for the packet. As she started looking through the pictures a look of dawning memory came across her face.
"What?" Sam asked.
"There was this one weird picture that came out with the batch." She said. "It was crooked—almost perfectly crooked—and we couldn't recognize anything in the picture. Not like we could match it up, though. The entire picture was made in hues of red." She paused, as if thinking about the picture. "It was a really creepy picture, though."
"What was in the picture?" Dean asked.
"I dunno. It looked like his front room, but he had never had it decorated like that. It looked like it was from, oh, I dunno, the 70s maybe. Just the style of carpet and the couch and stuff. And on the couch there was this sort of foggy figure. I guess you could think it was a ghost, if you believe that sort of stuff." She half-laughed.
Sam felt compelled to do the same. "Do you have another copy of that picture?"
"No," Karen said. "I haven't even thought about it since we got the pictures back. Derek must have thrown it out because of how much it scared me."
"Do you know that he got rid of the picture?" Sam pressed. He knew he had to be careful or she would wonder why he was so interested about this picture.
"Well, no," she said, "but I've been complaining about my nightmares lately and I know they're about that picture. I'd wake up screaming and the nights he wasn't with me I'd call him early in the morning, just so I had someone to talk to."
"It scared you that badly?"
"I had nightmares about it for days until they suddenly just… went away."
"When did they go away?" Dean asked her.
"The night before last," she said. "So…" she paused a moment, "the night before he died. I just didn't have a nightmare and I had for every night before that."
"About the picture?"
"Yes."
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Dean stopped the car as soon as they got around the corner and out of sight of Karen's house. Dean completely turned the car off and massaged his temples for a moment, waiting for Sam to say something first.
"So you think it's this picture?" Sam asked. He was staring out the front window right now, not really focusing his eyes on any object in particular. His head was swimming with far too many thoughts to keep them straight right now.
"What else could it be?" Dean answered. "Honestly."
"There's no way to know," Sam said. "Especially without even having a copy of this picture. We're working with basically nothing, still."
"But we've got a lead." Dean pointed out.
"But we're sitting ducks," Sam argued. "We've got to sit around, waiting and watching, until we can find another suicide that fits the bill and we can find a copy of that picture."
"Then I guess we're gonna wait," Dean said. He flashed Sam and halfway grin. "After all, we've got a great place to stay."
"Oh shut up."
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All Reviewers: Have no fear! I promise to continue writing this story (I'm having too much fun not to) and I promise to do all I can to keep our beloved boys IN character and not in love with each other. Canon rawks. Heh.
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