Damn Gordon, Sam thought, careful to keep the anger off his face in case Dean wasn't as deeply asleep as he seemed. Dean didn't react well to Sam getting emotional these days, and Dean was already so infuriated with Gordon that he didn't need Sam's anxiety ramping up his own. Especially now. God, especially now. Sam cleaned up the mess and cranked the heat up an extra notch. Then, jaw set, he walked over and quietly shook the girl awake.
She stretched like a cat and smiled contentedly up at him. "Hi, Sam."
"Hi," he said automatically, his lips starting to twitch into a smile of their own despite his growing annoyance with the whole damned situation. Shaking his head at the ridiculousness of the response, he said, "We need to talk."
"Okay." She sat up, the blanket falling to her waist and once more baring everything there was to bare. "What do you want to talk about?"
Gritting his teeth, Sam reached for the Led Zeppelin t-shirt dangling off the edge of his bed and handed it to her. "Put this on," he said softly. "And try not to wake Dean."
She nodded, gave him another beatific smile and then slipped her legs out from under the covers and stood by the side of the bed. This girl really had no sense of modesty whatsoever. Either that or being completely naked was just completely normal for her. Nudist maybe? Sam contemplated the options as he dug in his and Dean's go-bags for something remotely plausible for her to wear on the bottom. He settled on a pair of his sweats. They were longer than Dean's, which made them way, way too long for Baby, but they were also a little narrower in the waist and had a nice tight drawstring. When he turned back to hand them to her, he found the girl with her head stuck partially through one of the t-shirts armholes and her arms tangled in the remains of the shirt. She was turning in slow circles, like a cat chasing its own tail as she tried, without notable success, to disentangle herself. Sam had to give her one thing though. She was being quiet, as requested. Oh brother.
"Here, let me," Sam said in disgusted tones. He dropped the sweats at her feet. Then, grabbing ahold of one of her arms at the elbow, he managed to pull it free from the shirt and yanked the whole thing off over her head. She yelped and wobbled in place for a second, but she didn't complain at the relatively rough treatment. Instead she just blew at the hair that had fallen into her face, brushed tentatively at it and then frowned when it fell right back into eyes. She stared at the locks, cross-eyed and Sam groaned. If this innocent act was an act, it was a darn good one… which just made her all the more dangerous. "Put your arms up and hold still," Sam ordered. Baby did as he'd asked, and Sam carefully worked her hands into the sleeves of the t-shirt and then pulled the whole thing down over head. He didn't stop until the hem of the shirt was, thankfully, past her hips. He bent down to retrieve the sweats and when he stood back up he found her running her hands curiously down the from the shirt.
"It's soft," she said, smiling up at Sam through the curtain of hair that had fallen into her face.
"Uh, yeah. I guess." Sam held out the sweats. "Here, put these on."
Baby took them by one pant leg and looked at them in clear puzzlement. "How?"
"How?"
"That's what I said," Baby retorted. "How do I put them on? And why is it them? There only seems to be one piece of clothing."
"Actually," Sam replied, taking the sweats back and kneeling down in front of her again, "I think the plural pronoun is a holdover from the days when pants always used to be two pieces." Sam scrunched the sweats up on the sides so that Baby could just step into them. "Put your foot through here," he directed. Then he had her do the same with the other foot. "Now pull that part up to your waist and hold it there for a minute." Baby complied, hiking the waist all the way up to her breasts, and Sam started rolling up the cuffs. There was a good twelve-to-fifteen inches of extra fabric bunched up around her ankles and dragging on the floor. "You see the legs of pants weren't actually attached to each other back when people first started wearing them. Instead, they attached to a belt that you wore around your waist, and – "
"Dean was right," Baby said with a laugh. "You know an awful lot about very odd things. I can't imagine knowing so much." She brushed the hair out of her face again, this time succeeding in making it stay behind her ears for the moment.
Sam felt an unexpected surge of irritation with her, with his brother and with everyone who had ever made a crack about him being the smart one in the family. People knew stuff. Ordinary people knew stuff. He wasn't that strange, he was just surrounded by people who only cared about very limited fields of knowledge. Even the Impala thought that he s– damn it! He was not talking to the car. He was not. It was just crazy. Lips pursed in annoyance, Sam stood up and started rolling down the waist band of the sweats after first pulling the draw string as tight as it would go. A pair of thick winter socks completed the outfit. By the time Sam was finished, Baby was covered, albeit lumpily, and he was fed up with his own racing thoughts, doubts, suppositions and general lack of meaningful information. Why did life have to be so complicated?
Sam scowled, pointed meaningfully at a chair, and Baby hastily sat down in it. He pulled the other chair around the table so that he was sitting directly in front of her, their knees touching. She wouldn't be able to leave her chair unless he moved or she literally climbed over him. He was highly aware of the weight of his gun against the small of his back and even more aware of Dean's solid presence behind him in the room. His brother was snoring lightly, a fact which Sam found both reassuring and vaguely irritating. That he also found that irritation reassuring was an emotion too complex and bizarre to examine at length. God, he wanted a simpler life. A life without Hell, demons, ghosts, contracts or magically transforming cars.
"So, how did you know about the anticoagulant?" Sam demanded.
"I heard John and Daniel talking about it," Baby answered without hesitation.
"You mean Daniel Elkins?" Sam asked.
"Yeah. It was years and years ago, back when you could still stretch out on the backseat."
"You heard them talking?"
"Um hm. John was driving, and Daniel was flipping through that book of his. He told your father that he thought vampires had an anticoagulant in their saliva. John said he was nuts and that vampires were extinct anyway so it didn't really matter."
"They're not extinct," Sam corrected automatically.
"Oh, I know that now, but John was very sure back then."
Sam frowned thoughtfully. "It doesn't make sense though. Vampires sometimes keep victims alive for days or even weeks, feeding on them slowly. An anticoagulant would make that impossible."
"That's what your father said, too. But Daniel said that he thinks they can control it. I don't really know how it works, just what they said." She shrugged then leaned sideways and gazed past Sam at Dean's sleeping form. "He is going to be okay, isn't he?"
"He's going to fine. I told you."
"I know, Sam. It's just… I've been so worried about him ever since you died." Her eyes filled with tears. "It was so awful. You were so cold and still and Dean just cried and cried and cried."