Chapter 6: Dancing in the Dark

I'll shake this world off my shoulders;
Come on, baby, this laugh's on me.
-Bruce Springsteen

"What are you doing?"

Sam looked up.

"Um. Getting some Coke?" he offered, taken aback by the cold horror in Mica's voice.

He had barely registered her movement before the can was slipping through his fingers, leaving them cold and empty. He looked at them, then looked at her. She stood a few feet away, clutching the half-opened pop as if it were a bazooka snatched from the clutches of a madman.

"What?"

You were going to pour that in your glass," she said flatly, as if it explained something.

"Ye-es," he replied, drawing it out into two very confused syllables.

He received the internationally-recognized body language for "the fuck?" in response. He was too confused to do anything but give it right back.

"You were going to cut Kentucky bourbon!"

Sam spent a moment trying to reconcile her words with her tone. He knew she'd just objected to bourbon and Coke, but it sounded like she'd accused him of eating puppies for breakfast.

"Um," he objected eloquently.

"You wanna cut something? Cut Jack. Cut Wild Turkey. Hell, cut this Canadian goat piss," Mica exclaimed wildly, pulling bottles out of the liquor cabinet and setting them on the table with punctual thunks. "For Christ's sake, don't cut Maker's."

Another cabinet banging open, another thunk on the table and his half-full glass was replaced with an empty one. Almost as an afterthought, Mica set the Coke next to it.

Sam expected her to toss back the confiscated bourbon like his brother used to toss back tequila shots, but she sipped it instead, rolling it over her tongue and down her throat like honey.

When she'd finished her brief love affair, she picked up the pile of travelworn papers on the counter by the door.

"I'm going to scan these and send them to Ash," she said, her tone suspicious, as if she suspected him of plotting further offenses to her delicate alcoholic sensibilities while she was upstairs. "If anybody can make sense of your dad's research, he can."

Then she was gone and Sam lowered himself into a chair, shaking his head and laughing softly, incredulously. Sometimes it was all he could do.

He poured an ounce or two of rejected alcohol into his glass and filled the rest with cola. He could still taste the ethanol under the carbonation, but it went down easier and was absorbed quicker.

His stomach warmed, but his thoughts slowed and he pushed the glass away. Talking about the demon had meant talking about his father and he just felt chewed up on the inside. He knew better than to think that whisky could touch that.

He hated Dad for what he had done. Hated him and never wanted to see him again. Loved him and just wanted him back.

Dean had been strangely silent on the subject of their father. He had an opinion about everything else, but when Sam's thoughts drifted to John Winchester, a wall slammed down between the brothers and Dean's spirit became an impenetrable, electric presence, all power and no emotion.

Sam tried not to think about Dad very often.

He started putting bottles away and wondered why nogged eggs were okay but Coke got him a visit from the Bourbon Police. Wondered how much of Mica's performance had been a joke. Just like he had wondered lately how much of Dean's frequent performances had been (still were?) jokes. The world they lived in was so full of the fight it was hard to tell sometimes where the dark humor ended and the madness began.

People like Mica and Dean watched the world through damaged eyes. Their souls were casualties of war. Sometimes a flippant remark was all they had.

"I know what we have to do, where we have to go next," Dean is saying.

Sam feels a chill run down his spine. He wants to be sick but he also wants to know. "Where?"

"Vegas."

And Dean is grinning that silly grin at him and Sam just cannot fucking believe him.

It doesn't hit him until later. Until he realizes that he's been so busy thinking about what an idiot ass his brother is that he hasn't worried over his freaky psychic powers for at least fifty miles.

Sam didn't know how to do it. He had spent too much of his life trying to be normal, trying to fit in. He didn't know if that made him more or less crazy.

By the time Mica reappeared, he had removed himself to the library and was starting on an eighteenth-century Spanish exorcism manual.

Arma virumque cano, said the poet Virgil to begin the secular narrative of a bloody battle...

"I have to go kill something. Wanna come?"

Sam tore his gaze from the book and looked up at Mica, who was standing next to the armchair he'd settled in. His eyes didn't have to travel far. It wasn't that she was short, it was just that he was...

"...a friggin' giant," Dean says, rooting around in his duffel for a shirt that isn't bloodstained. "The bed isn't too short. Your legs are too long, freak."

Sam makes a face and stretches one more time before rolling out of the tiny bed. "No, the bed is too short. And you're just jealous because you stunted your growth drinking a two-liter of Mountain Dew every day for five years."

The memory came to mind sharply, unbidden. It was painful and comforting and Sam was sure it had come from Dean. Dean, whose spirit had so far been confined to the Impala. His breath hitched and he reached out with whatever weird psychic sense it was that allowed him to communicate (however brokenly) with his brother.

The presence was faint, but definitely there. He was still in a humorous mood. Or maybe he was trying to cheer Sam up. Or both. Sam could never tell because it was such a one-way street most of the time: Sam's life was an open book to Dean, but all Sam got from his older brother were the tight, controlled glimpses that Dean managed, with effort, to push through the veil.

It was a lot like it had been when Dean was alive, really.

"You okay?"

Sam blinked, came back to himself. Saw Mica staring at him, wary and reticently concerned.

"Yeah, I'm fine."

"So, you coming?"

Her face was unreadable, her voice businesslike, but there was something (was it his imagination?) that made it feel like a plea.

He's gone, he's gone, and I can't do this without him, I can't...

"I'll drive," Sam said.