Chapter 4
At five-thirty in the morning, the kitchen was clean, quiet and peaceful, a pale dawn light filtering through the café curtains at the windows, the room smelling deliciously of freshly brewed coffee, and I sat at the small table, staring absently at the lists of numbers and organisations and job titles under the row of wall phones, feeling unaccountably relaxed, despite getting practically no sleep at all.
That feeling lasted all of fifteen minutes, then there was a distinctive scrape in the hall and Dean walked into the dining room.
From the extremely fast glance I got before realising who it was, he hadn't slept much better than I had. I'd like to be able to say that I threw out a casual, yet sharply funny one-liner at him, or some pithy, scathing remark that would have set the scales straight but unfortunately I can't. I seemed to have lost that ability completely and I sat in uncomfortable silence, my eyes glued to the wall under the phones now as he walked past me to the coffee pot, listening to the sounds of a cup being taken down, filled and the clunk of the pot put back on the burner.
For a few minutes, the kitchen was absolutely silent bar the soft hissing of the pot. Then there footsteps. I picked up my cup and stared down into it as if it held all the secrets of the universe, hoping the footsteps would keep going and I'd have the room back to myself again.
No such luck.
The chair opposite was pulled out, and there was another clunk as a cup hit the table.
"You sleep okay?" Dean asked, his voice quieter than I think I'd ever heard it.
"Fine," I muttered into the depths of the cup.
"Good…uh…um…good," he said and fell silent.
In the movies, or even on TV, awkwardness disappears after a few minutes, just lasting long enough to make the audience squirm, you know. In real life it goes on forever. And it sucks the oxygen right out of the air as it hangs around, heavy, suffocating, causing pins and needles because you can't move an inch and the position you found yourself frozen in was not all that comfortable to start off with.
"I guess…I…uh," he said after an eternity of that oxygen-sucking awkwardness. "You know…I…"
Since I couldn't even guess at what might have been the purpose of stringing that particular collection of words together, I remained silent, staring into the near-black liquid that barely covered the bottom of the cup.
"Uh…I'm…," he continued after a few more moments of air-removing discomfort. "I guess I…wasn't…you know…"
This, I suddenly realised with a burst of horrified clarity that shocked me into looking up, was an attempt at an apology. He was staring at the table top intensely, maybe hoping it would catch fire and save us both the ignominy of strangulation, the light from the window half-shadowing his face, his knuckles white around the handle of the cup in front of him.
"Right," I said, finding my voice and at least one word in the oxygen-less room. "Yep," I added, inanely pleased to have been able find another.
I got up hurriedly, taking my cup to the sink before he could attempt any more. An apology was worse than the rage, I found to my surprise. At first, I couldn't think why, then I realised that six years of watching Dean dance around apologies, stutter and become inarticulate to an extreme degree, had created an aversion to seeing him attempt any more.
He cleared his throat and I nodded frantically, dropping my cup in the sink and spinning around. He was frowning, his gaze dropping back to the table the second I'd turned.
"Well, I'd better –"
"I just…"
"You two are up early," Sam said, coming into the dining room, t-shirt on inside-out and hair sticking out to the side.
"Sam!"
Yeah, that was my over-the-top response. It burst out of me in a pitch much higher than my usual speaking voice and was so filled with relief and…well, more relief, that it sounded a bit like I'd just seen the messiah.
"Coffee?" I asked, not waiting for an answer, turning back to the counter and grabbing another cup and filling it.
Honestly, I don't know what possessed me. I'd thought, back in the real world, that I knew these two guys pretty well, pretty damned well actually. But being really here, it was all different. Sure, it didn't help that I'd turned up bearing bad news, having no place to go but in their pockets, no means of supporting myself, especially in Sioux Falls, but still I'd thought I'd be…I don't know…cooler? About it all?
I put the cup in front of the taller of the Winchesters, and hovered at the end of the table.
"I thought of something," I blurted out as Sam took a sip of the hot coffee. "Balthazar."
Dean leaned back in his chair, his expression morphing from discomfort to a bitter-looking smirk.
"What about him?"
"You summoned Balthazar," I said, looking at Sam. "Not long ago, right?"
He grimaced a little, keeping his eyes on his cup. I didn't want to bring up memories of his being soulless and all that, but it couldn't be helped.
"Mmmm," he murmured noncommittally into his cup.
"Well, I'm pretty sure that even though he's Cas' friend, he won't let Cas open Purgatory."
"Pretty sure?" Sam looked up at me doubtfully.
"It's in the scripts, you…um…summon him for something else," I hedged around the exact details of that. "And he confronts Cas himself."
"Huh," Dean said, swallowing the rest of his coffee as he looked at his brother.
Sam bent his head and I saw him remembering the outline, his mouth tightening a little as he realised why I'd been circumspect about the details.
"In any case, if you summon him here now, explain what Cas is doing, he might help – with the Titanic and with getting you to the past to the kill the phoenix."
"Might."
I felt my shoulders slump as I heard my sparkling plan gain some weight of reality. "Well, nothing's a sure thing, is it?"
"No," Sam said, shooting a measured look at his brother. "It might work and it's the only plan anyone's come up with."
~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~
The big shed wasn't far from the house, and had once been a barn. Sam finished the circle and took the bowl of ingredients from Dean, setting it in the circle and lighting a match. He tossed it in and the ground-up powder of herbs and crystals and bone burst into flame.
The angel, tall and thin, appeared on other side of the circle. "Do I look like a man-servant to you? No?" He looked from one to the other. "No? Then quit ringing for me, please."
"This is important, Balthazar," Dean said, his stare impassive.
Balthazar shook his head at him. "I was drinking '75 Dom out of a soprano's navel when you called. That was important."
He seemed to resign himself to the fact that he was no longer doing that, and put down the bottle he was holding, looking from Dean to Sam, then past him to Bobby. His eyebrows rose a fraction of an inch as he caught sight of me.
"Still here? You must have a very wide masochistic streak."
"Crowley's alive," Sam said bluntly. "And he and Cas have made a deal."
The angel laughed. "Angels don't make deals."
"Yeah, well, Cas did," Dean said bitterly. "Half-and-half in the souls of Purgatory."
He got him with that and we could all see it. Balthazar's face twitched, as he registered the implications, smoothing out again into an expression of polite enquiry.
"Yes, he mentioned that," he said, his gaze just shifting past Dean. "So?"
"So, we need your help to stop him," Sam said tightly. "Starting with the Titanic."
"The Titanic? Horrible film," Balthazar said, shuddering slightly. "Really what passes for entertainment these days –"
"You stop it from sinking to get extra souls for Cas' war effort," Bobby cut him off sharply. "And it's gonna cause all manner of crap when you do."
"Where are you getting your information?" The angel looked at him curiously. Bobby didn't miss the narrowing of Balthazar's attention on him.
"We got our sources," Dean said. "You can't save that ship."
"To put those teeny-tiny hardworking minds at rest, I haven't the slightest intention of saving the Titanic," he said, with a flourishing hand wave. "Despite the fact that if I did, I would be spared the agony of having to listen to that damned song –"
"Cas will ask you to do it," Bobby growled at him. "You gotta come up with a reason not to."
"And we need an angel-assisted ride," Dean added, leaning up against the wall. "To 1861."
"Oh, so now I'm being asked to join the Hardy Boys?" Balthazar asked him archly. "I don't think so. What, exactly, is in this for me?"
There was nothing that Bobby, Sam or Dean could offer the angel, I knew. Nothing they had that he wanted. Angels don't make deals, I thought with an internal sniff. Like heck they don't. They just didn't usually because no one had anything to offer them.
"If Cas and Crowley open Purgatory, a lot worse will come out than just the souls of the monsters," I blurted out involuntarily.
Four pairs of eyes turned to me.
The reference to Season 7 had been scribbled on the back of an envelope in my folder and shoved into one of the pockets. The whole point, the show-runner had told us all at a meeting at the beginning of Season 6, of the dangers of opening Purgatory was going to kick-start the next season, and that was why the story had been geared toward allowing it to happen.
"I was going to tell you," I mumbled at the floor. "I thought it might be redundant if we could stop Purgatory from opening."
"Who are you again?" Balthazar asked me, taking a step closer.
"No one," Dean snapped. "What happens when he opens the doorway to Purgatory?"
"He would have to take control of the souls," Balthazar said, the words coming out slowly. "Subsume them, into himself."
"And?" Sam asked.
"And there's a fifty-fifty chance that it would destroy his vessel and possibly half of the planet we're standing on."
"Great odds," Bobby grumbled. "You gonna help?"
"Put my neck on the chopping block on your say-so?" The angel scoffed at him, but his reservations were still visible in the way his eyes slid away.
"Cas had gone darkside and you know it," Dean told him, his voice low and harsh. "I thought he was your friend."
"I thought so too," Balthazar said. He vanished, and the space where he'd been made a whooshing sound as the air rushed in to fill it.
"Sonofabitch!"
Sam ignored that and looked at Bobby. "Think he'll help?"
Bobby shrugged. "Fifty-fifty."
Dean looked at me. "What's coming out of Purgatory when Cas opens the door?"
Bobby and Sam turned around to look at me as well.
"We had a meeting about the storyline at the beginning of this season," I said, thrusting my hands into the pockets of my jacket as the need to fidget started to get overwhelming. "Sera said she wanted a season that built up to a new threat for the next one, and that the cliff-hanger would be Cas succeeding in opening Purgatory. She said that Purgatory would also contain monsters that couldn't be killed at all, from the bible."
"What kind of monsters?" Sam asked me, his brow furrowing up.
"Leviathan, she said."
"What?" Bobby said, pushing his hand under the edge of his cap.
"Look, in my world, none of this works the way it does here," I said, waving my hand helplessly at him. "Purgatory is a way-station to either Heaven or Hell, in the Christian mythology, Leviathan was the first beast God made but it doesn't say what happened to it…this stuff, this lore that is in this world, it's not the same."
"We better hit the books." Bobby looked from me to Sam, then Dean. "Figure out what the hell this means."
Dean's face was stony. "You got anymore information we should know about in that folder of –"
~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~
I woke up suddenly, disoriented and alone and stark naked in a big bed, sunshine flooding into the room through a big picture window and the sound of running water somewhere close. Looking around, I realised that I didn't recognise the place at all.
A burst of whistling, some kind of tune, came from the closed door to one side of the room, and that galvanised me into action, tugging at the sheet and swinging my feet over the edge. I wrapped the sheet around me and stood up.
It was a bedroom, small, the bed taking up most of the space, a built-in along the opposite wall and a couple of night-stands to either side. On one there was a photo frame and I leaned toward it, mouth dropping open as I stared at the two people in the photo, just as a voice came through what I presumed was the bathroom door.
"Hey, could you grab me a clean towel?"
Sam's voice. Sam in the photo. Arm wrapped around my shoulder. Both of us smiling broadly at the camera.
Impossible.
"Terry?"
I stood next to the bed, staring around the room, then crossed to the built-in and pulled back on the sliding doors, almost losing the sheet at the same time.
Clothing.
On the left, Sam's, by the look of the sizes. On the right, mine, I guessed, peering at the mix of shirts, blouses, skirts, dresses and pants.
Oh god.
Oh my god.
"Ter? Clean towel?" The bathroom door opened and steam poured out past the tall man standing there. "Hey, you okay?"
He started out, dripping water over the carpet and I realised that in another moment I was going to get a much more intimate picture of Sam Winchester than I really wanted.
"Yep, cloud-gathering. Fine. Ah, a bit tired. What did you want?" I babbled at him, turning around and fixing my attention on the folds of sheet that were gathered up in front of me.
"A towel," he said, spotting one on the shelves in the built-in. "You sure you're okay?"
I sneaked a look and let out my breath as I saw the towel go around his hips. "Yeah, um…"
There wasn't anything I could say to explain how it felt to be in the middle of a conversation with him, Bobby and his brother in Bobby's shed one minute, which I remembered distinctly, and then wake up in a small apartment that I was apparently sharing with him, the next.
Balthazar.
I don't know why it took so long to figure that out, but I'm gonna blame the shock for now. The angel had saved the boat. There wasn't another explanation.
It didn't explain how Sam seemed comfortable getting dressed in front of me, clearly without a memory of what'd happened, and how I did remember the switch. Because I wasn't from here, I wondered?
I opened the bedroom door and walked into a slightly larger living room, big glass doors opening onto a small balcony on one side, another door on the other side of the room, possibly a kitchen.
There was a knock at the third door I could see, set smack into the middle of the interior wall and I hitched my sheet up and went over to it.
Dean stood there, a slow, knowing smirk lifting one cheek higher than the other.
"Morning, sunshine," he drawled, walking into the room past me. "Do I want to know why you were still in bed?"
"Balthazar unsank the Titanic," I muttered, not exactly to him.
"What?"
"He's changed everything," I added, swinging around to look at the room more closely, ignoring Sam's brother.
As living rooms go, it was fairly ordinary. There were a number of bookshelves along one wall, filled with books that I suspected were not on the Times best-seller list, and a couple of large, framed prints hanging in between them. An impressionist painting by Monet, a rather nice Turner seascape and a blocky Moulin Rouge poster in three colour screen. A very long sofa – for overnight guests, I wondered at the back of my mind – and two big, overstuffed armchairs provided seating, surrounding a low table and facing a low cabinet with a TV and entertainment appliances covering the top.
I walked over to the glass sliding doors and opened one, a fresh salty-smelling breeze pouring in and billowing up the sheer fabric curtains to either side. The balcony was tiny, with a fake wrought-iron balustrade surrounding it. It overlooked several streets, and more distantly, a wooded shoreline and the glint of blue water.
"Where are we?"
"What?" Dean asked again, a faint note of alarm in his voice this time.
"Hey."
I was vaguely aware that the bedroom door had opened and closed.
"Hey," Dean said. "What's wrong with Terry?"
I turned around. "Nothing's wrong with me," I told him, feverishly trying to think of some way to explain to them what'd happened. "Balthazar wasn't supposed to save the ship, we're in a different timeline now, it's all changed – including this," I said, waving my arm around the room. "Sam and I are not together, that's…it's…ridiculous."
Sam's expression twitched and Dean shot a look at him. "I don't think she meant –"
"I did mean it," I cut in, taking a step forward and having to stop as the sheet snagged on something behind me. I twisted around, yanking at it. "And I'm not trying to be mean, Sam, for some reason you two remember this timeline instead of the real one," I continued, getting a bit louder as the sheet refused to budge. I pulled hard and it ripped, and I gathered the back of it up in a hurry, looking back at them. "Is Ellen married to Bobby?"
"Four years now," Sam said, frowning at me. "You know that."
"I didn't know how long, actually," I said. "Look, this isn't real, this isn't the right timeline for our lives – your lives – anyone's lives."
"What the hell are you talking about?" Dean asked me, stepping back as I swept past him and the bulk of the sheet behind me took the vase and papers from the low table on the way.
God! How was I going to prove any of this to them? The past, their past, had been wiped out with a new life. The folder. The folder had proof.
I turned for the bedroom, and nearly ran back in there, slamming the door behind me. From outside, I could barely hear their voices, rumbling through the wood.
"Be just a sec!" I yelled out, dropping the sheet on the floor and searching through the drawers of the closet, throwing underwear and a shirt and a pair of jeans onto the bed as I looked for the folder.
It was there, wrapped in long shawl and tucked at the back of the bottom drawer. I pulled it out and unwrapped it, flipping it open as I snagged the panties and dragged them on.
None of it made sense.
I was halfway through fastening the pale pink bra, when I realised that none of the draft scripts I was looking at matched up with the ones I'd brought to this world with me. Werewolves and the Loch Ness monster, a transdimensional doorway to another universe, these weren't the story ideas.
New timeline, new life, new scripts.
"Balthazar!"
It was a forlorn hope that the angel might answer but I didn't have anything left to try.
"Balthazar!" I hissed a second time.
A quiet rustle of wings made me swing around to see the lanky angel leaning up against the bathroom door-frame.
"You are different, aren't you?" he said, smirking a little. "You remember."
"Yeah, I do," I said, keeping my voice low. "You said you weren't going to sink the ship!"
"Change in plan," he told me, shrugging in a lack of interest. "Cas insisted."
"Atropos is killing off all the descendents," I said. "That's bringing the hunters in."
"Well, tell them not to try and kill her," he said, a little alarmed. "Clothos and Lachesis wouldn't like it and you really don't want them on your tail."
"I don't want any of this!" I said to him in frustration. "Can't you resink it?"
"I could, I suppose, but I won't," he smiled. "I asked Cas about Purgatory. He said he wasn't considering it."
"You didn't believe him."
"No," he admitted unwillingly. "But I can't go into open warfare just yet."
"Rachel knows," I said, remembering Cas' confrontation with her. "Or she's suspicious. There must be others –"
"Terry!" Sam called from outside the room, knocking at the door.
"Just be a minute," I trilled back at him, wincing at the high pitch. "You've got to stop this."
He looked at the rumpled bed. "Such a hardship, is it?"
"It's not real!"
Laughing, he shook his head at me. "If nothing else, my dear, this ought to have convinced that nothing is real."
He disappeared with that disconcerting pop and I turned around, walking to the door and unlocking it.
"Hey, uh, you ready to go?"
"Go where?"
"Bunch of people dying weird deaths over in Pennsylvania," Dean said, waving a hand at the door. "Daylight's wastin', we gotta get on the road."
"We?"
It came out as a squeak and Sam grinned, stepping forward and sweeping an arm around me till I was squashed against him.
"I know what I promised after the last time," he said reassuringly. "Don't worry, new rules apply."
"What?"
"What?" Dean growled at the same time. "This isn't turning into one of those soppy chick-flick road-trips, Sammy."
Sam ignored him and let me go. "Grab a bag, we'll be about a week."
"Maybe you could drop me at Bobby's –?" I thought hard about the possible options.
"Drop you off…?" Dean's nose wrinkled up. "An extra three hundred miles outta our way?"
"Besides, Bobby's still taking Rufus' death pretty hard, he and Ellen need some time alone," Sam added. "Grab a bag."
Turning around, I walked back into the bedroom and hunted around for a bag. There were several at the bottom of the closet, army duffles one of which had my name stencilled on the side. Fabulous, I thought. This was obviously a regular thing. A regular thing which I knew nothing of that was going to bring me down in some totally foreseeable way, like not knowing the routine when they blasted the crap out of something. I was in trouble. So much trouble.
I threw in a weeks' worth of clothing and the folder and zipped it shut, picking it up and following Sam as he lifted his gear bag onto his shoulder. Baltimore, I thought belatedly, as we came out of the block of small apartments onto the street and I recognised the general vicinity. No, Sioux Falls wasn't really on the way to Pennsylvania from here.
I sighed as Dean unlocked the '67 Shelby Mustang and tilted the seat forward so that I could climb into the back seat. Not even the Impala. I know you can't have everything but sheesh, just a few of the little things, right? The Impala is wide and comfy. The Mustang, although only three inches narrower in width, just didn't have the same feel to it. It did, however, have a lot under the hood.
"You wanna clarify some of the stuff you said back there?" Dean asked, his eyes meeting mine in the rearview mirror.
"Not really," I muttered into my chest, ducking his view. It wasn't just the weirdness of living a whole new life. Everything was weird. Sam's fond looks over the back of the seat. Dean's lack of mistrust and abrasive comments. I hate to tell you this, but I almost wished he'd go back to calling me Dorothy.
"Uh…would you believe me if I told you that an angel changed destiny and now we're all living completely different lives to the ones we were living yesterday?"
The brothers exchanged a look, then Sam turned around, his face filled with a disturbing mix of understanding and compassion and pride.
"Is it the hormones, honey?" he asked solicitously, and I tell ya, I nearly died right on the spot.
~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~