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: No canon no story. I shudder when people make our dear Winchester brothers do things they would never (and should never) do. I promise not to do that. I also promise to be kind to the English language and use it correctly to the best of my abilities.
Reviewers: Thank you to: hearts-4-stars, Minako Mikoto and BlackScream16.
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I will not be here for a week, so the story will not be updated until next Sunday or Monday when I am back and have internet access again.
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After some quick deductions and some not-so-quick snooping in the phonebook, Dean was able to ascertain the address of "Robinson" who turned out to be a married couple that lived literally five blocks down the road from the store that had the 1 hr photo capabilities. The photo techs hadn't been joking when they said it was someone right down the street.
It was very quickly decided that they could not just wait for another suicide to happen, and without much further discussion, the Winchester brothers were en route to the Robinson home to do, well, something.
Sam and Dean made their way to this home slowly as they could bare, pretending to be lost every block or so, in order to make sure they wouldn't look suspicious as they slowed in front of houses and looked closely at various things around them. Sam was agitated, Dean could tell. Sam's leg was bouncing annoyingly and he was drumming his fingers on the dashboard as he leaned forward and read the house numbers and names on the mailboxes. Dean didn't want to let Sam speak about why he was agitated yet, because he was focusing on finding good places to be hidden.
Sam, however, wanted to let all the agitated feelings and words come out right now and he decided that Dean no longer needed to concentrate on anything else.
"Dean, we have to tell them about this. We can't just let another person die because we didn't tell them about this picture!" Sam's voice sounded passionate and urgent. Dean could see that Sam was on the verge of having an outbreak of words and feelings and Dean didn't want that right now.
"I know, Sam. I'm with you." He said amiably.
"Then why aren't we going to tell them?" Sam burst out, his voice raising a half octave as he got more frustrated and confused. "Take this car right over to their driveway and get out and tell them." Sam demanded. Dean took no heed of his brother's words, as one might expect, and continued as he was before.
"Sam, just how would you explain to them what's going on, hmm?" Dean let the car roll to a stop so he could look directly at Sam as he acted out a hypothetic scene. "It'd be like: 'Oh hi, we think this haunted picture might make you kill yourself.'" Dean took this opportunity to shoot Sam a rarely deserved, 'you are a moron' look. Sam didn't really appreciate the look.
"God," he said, hitting the steering wheel for emphasis of his point as the Impala traveled down the street. "Think about it, Sam. Just pull your head from the clouds and look at the facts this time around. No one is going to believe 'Sam the grocery boy' and 'Ken the barista'."
"So we're just going to let him die?" Sam asked disbelievingly, his frustration not assuaged, simply guided in another direction. This wasn't what Dean had hoped to achieve.
"No," Dean said irritatingly calmly. "Even better." He tossed Sam a hat and coat from somewhere in the recesses of the back seat of the Impala. "We're going to spy on him instead."
"How is that better?"
"Because it just is," Dean said defensively, reaching for his own had to wear. "Now, we're going to—" Dean's words disappeared into nothingness as a gunshot broke through his train of thought and ideas of being secret agents. Neither of them moved a moment, their muscles tense and their minds alert. Dean was ready to roar the Impala back into life and get the hell out of the area.
"Don't tell me it just happened again." Dean finally managed to say, shaking his head and trying to look inside the house from where he was sitting. "God, don't tell me we're too late again." He spat out the word "again" as if it burned his tongue. He even hit the steering wheel of the car.
Sam and Dean got out of the car in unison after another slight hesitation and bolted for the front door, no longer trying to come up with a cover story for their presence. Their cover had been made for them in the form of a gunshot. Now they were just there to play the confused bystanders.
A knock on the front door produced no results. The same could be said for ringing the doorbell repeatedly and furiously. So Sam reached forward and opened the front door. The two of them flooded in through the door and began to fan apart to look around.
It hardly took any time at all to figure out what had happened. Dean and Sam hadn't even gotten a dozen paces apart from each other before their eyes landed on the truth. In the front room lay a man who had just shot himself in the head. Dean flinched away from the gore and Sam's expression darkened immediately.
"Call 911!" Dean said, grappling with his coat pockets to find his cell phone. He didn't realize that his phone was still sitting in the car parked out in front of the house.
"He's already dead," Sam said darkly. Something was changing about Sam's face, but he wasn't sharing quite yet. Dean didn't want to know what thoughts were going on in Sam's head. He just wanted them to go away.
"Sam!" Dean said somewhat loudly. "We can't just—"
"Think about it, Dean," Sam told him dryly, looking at his brother. "There's no way this thing, whatever it is, would even give him a chance of living. We just need to get the hell out of here before someone catches us." Sam led his brother out of the house. Dean cast the home a back glance trying to believe Sam and alleviate his growing feelings of guilt.
"Give me the keys," Sam said incisively.
"What?" Was Dean's immediate and intelligent response.
"Give me the keys," Sam repeated, holding out his hand this time. Dean would have argued if it hadn't been for the fiery look that had come over Sam. He hesitated a moment, trying to weigh the pros and cons of letting his brother drive, and slowly handed over the keys.
Sam roared down the road and pulled in through three parking spots in front of the grocery store. Dean stayed in the car as Sam disappeared into the store, obviously on a mission. Dean basically twiddled his thumbs and whistled to himself while he waited for Sam to return. Dean was working hard to not consider what Sam was doing and, more importantly, what he was planning. Dean soon spotted his brother's angry figure storming back to the Impala and tried to not look bored.
Sam tossed a bag onto Dean's lap and the contents clattered around as Dean worked to not drop them everywhere. As Sam backed out way too quickly and started heading back to their lovely room back at the motel, Dean peered inside the bag at the contents.
"Disposable cameras?" Dean asked as he pulled out almost a dozen disposable cameras with different film and exposure times. He didn't even spare the receipt a glance to see how much money these had cost them.
"Yes." Sam said, peeling around the corner and making Dean hold onto the edge of the dashboard to not feel like he was going to fly out the window.
"Why?" Dean asked, looking sideways at Sam and wanting him to not give the answer Dean was sure he would give.
"I'm going to get this d-mn picture to come to me," Sam said, "because I'm tired of sitting around and waiting for it to come to someone else. I am not going to laze around and let one more person die because we don't have the balls to do something about it."
"No way, Sam," Dean said immediately, grabbing for the dash again as Sam sped through a yellow light and headed toward their motel. "I'm not gonna let you go and hunt this thing down. Look at what it's already done."
"That's why we have to stop it." Sam explained as he drove too fast for the speed limit. Dean twisted in his seat to make sure that there were no cops or troopers to pull them over for speeding.
"You think that dying is going to help?" Dean demanded. Sam's stubbornness was beginning to piss him off like it usually always did. Some things they would never see eye-to-eye on. Dying, apparently, was one of them.
"I'm not going to die," Sam said without much conviction in his voice.
"You have no way of knowing that," Dean said. "And I am not going to let you do this."
"Then what are we going to do?"
"I don't know. Something else, that's what." Dean decided intelligently. He slapped the dashboard for emphasis as he spoke. "There's no freaking way I'm going to let you put your life on the line for something we don't even understand. We don't even know what causes this. We don't know how to stop it. And we don't know what's going to happen next."
"And there's no way I'm going to let one more person die." Sam added to Dean's list. "No one else can die next."
"What if it's you that dies next?" Dean demanded, the emphasis of the sentence on the word "you". "Then what am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to fix everything if you're dead? I sure as hell don't want to cart a corpse of a brother around the country with me."
Dean was answered with silence, which was quickly becoming the method of choice. Sam had managed to make it to the motel while not using his turn signal once during the entire drive. He pulled the Impala into a parking space and shut off the car before he turned to pay Dean any more attention.
"Dean," he said after the silence that had ensued. "Look, man,"
"No, don't 'look, man' me!" Dean said indignantly.
"I know you hate not knowing things," Sam said, "but we can't use that as an excuse anymore. And I can't let fear be my excuse for letting someone else's nearest and dearest disappear from this earth. You have to understand that."
Dean replied with a steely silence which basically told Sam that he was very, very, very reluctantly acquiescing and mostly because he knew he wouldn't be able to convince Sam otherwise. Sam took this as permission and he and Dean went back to their room with a dozen or so cameras in a plastic bag.
Immediately, Sam started ripping open the packaging of the first camera and began snapping random pictures of things around the room. After a moment, Dean slowly began helping him. It was obvious that the entire plan was weighing heavily on Dean's mind, but Sam didn't have time to be comforting right now. He was working on getting whatever this was to come for him next and to do so he had to have a full camera.
On the fifth roll of film Dean finally said, "You need to be careful." His words came across in an offhand fashion, but Sam could see through that façade of Dean's.
"I know," Sam assured him, "I will."
They spent the rest of the time in silence, snapping pictures of everything they could think of around the room. After the cameras were used up, Sam placed them in random places all around the room as if they had been set down and forgotten.
"What if nothing happens with these cameras?" Dean asked. "And we're wrong and something else happens?"
"It has to," Sam said.
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Sam rolled over on his bed early two mornings later and said quietly, "Dean." The only response he got was a muffled moan and the sound of bed sheets rustling. "Dean, wake up,"
"What, Sam?" Dean finally asked with fully formed words.
Sam didn't immediately answer. He tried to think of how to phrase all of the thoughts that were going through his mind. There was no way Dean was remotely awake enough to handle the amount of things Sam felt like saying, so he settled for,
"Let's go get the film developed today."
"It's four AM, Sam."
Dean rolled over and went back to sleep and Sam stayed up, eyes wandering and thoughts reeling. It hadn't been until now that he realized the gravity of what he was about to do. Slowly a clenching feeling began to take hold in his stomach and Sam realized he was nervous.
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Sam and Dean now sat on the floor in their room with twelve packets of photos fully developed and stacked in front of them, unopened. Neither of them made the first move and they both just looked at the photos that were sitting in front of them.
"This is it," Sam said, reaching out finally and taking the packet of pictures that lay on the top of the pile. Dean didn't reach for a packet himself. Sam tore the top of the packet open and began looking through the 24 photos that were sitting in front of his face.
Turning through them, Sam noted their contents. The drapes. The carpet. Dean's nose. His own foot. The bed post. The entire packet had nothing that even remotely resembled the eerie red photo he had stolen from the photo place earlier this week. Sam set down the stack of photos and looked at Dean.
"Anything?" Dean asked. His tone was hard to identify, but Sam thought it sounded hopeful. For what outcome, Sam couldn't say.
"No." He said, his own tone sounding flat.
"Try again," Dean said, handing Sam another packet of photos. Sam looked through this packet, too. His luck was much the same. While there were a lovely selection of random photos that were of anything present in the room, there was nothing that was misplaced or strange and certainly nothing supernatural.
Soon Sam and Dean fell into a rhythm. Dean would hand Sam a packet of photos and then sit on pins and needles waiting for Sam's verdict. Sam would flip through the pictures, paying less and less attention to what was in the pictures and focusing more on the color than anything else. He would then look and Dean and they would both share a look that was unreadable as yet another packet had been empty and they would repeat the process all over again.
"Tenth package, here we come," Dean said, once more handing Sam a package of pictures. He wasn't missing the fact that each packet of photos he handed to Sam could ultimately mean Sam's demise.
Sam flipped through each of the photos as he had. He paused on one.
"What?" Dean asked jumpily. "What is it?"
"Is my forehead really that big, or did you take a picture at a strange angle?" Sam asked. He could see simultaneous relief and annoyance flicker across Dean's face before his expression returned to unreadable.
Slowly the time passed by and there was not a single picture in any packet that they had not gone over twice if not more. Sam finally gave in and sat against the bed, staring at the mess they had made over the floor and the $200 they had spent recently.
"There's nothing." Sam said.
"I know," Dean informed him.
"Not a damn thing," Sam continued, staring at the mass of photos sprinkled across the floor. "We just wasted a huge amount of money on pictures of the carpet and your nose." Sam sighed and lay back on the carpet, staring at the ceiling.
"So what now?" Dean asked, following suit.
"I have no idea," Sam said. He let his neck relax and his gaze fell to the left. He stared at the dusty and dark space beneath his bed and pondered why no one had cleaned under the bed before. As he did so, his eyes fell on an object that was underneath the bed. He rolled over and reached under to see what it was.
"What's that?" Dean asked. He was getting annoyed with being the one to ask all the questions and call none of the shots.
Sam pulled the object out and looked at it in the light. Then, after a moment, he said, "It's… a camera."
"You're fucking with me," Dean said. "Please tell me you're not serious."
"I'm serious, Dean," Sam said, tossing the camera to Dean so he could verify its authenticity."
Dean said nothing and looked at the camera with a very mixed expression on his face. He didn't even have to ask Sam what he wanted to do with the camera. That answer was very evident. Dean reached in his pocket and pulled out his keys. "I'll be back in an hour."
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Dean walked into the motel room with a single packet of pictures in his hand. Sam jumped up to meet him and both of them looked at the packet before them. This time it took a long time before anyone touched the packet again.
Slowly, Sam opened the flap on the top of the packet. He took out the pictures and left them in a pile in front of himself. "Wouldn't it be great if there was nothing in here, too?"
"Great wouldn't begin to cover it," was Dean's reply.
Sam pulled off the top picture. Underneath was a photo of someone Sam didn't recognize, but it was not "the picture", either. Dean shifted uncomfortably as Sam slowly made the pile dwindle in front of them.
Sam lifted off a picture of a kitten and felt his breath catch in his throat because there was a picture of him and Dean on the camera. The picture looked like one taken from a candid position, but Sam couldn't say where. He let Dean look and feel properly scared before he took the picture off the pile and exposed the next one.
"Well, I'll be damned," Dean said.
Staring back up at them was the red picture they had been seeking.