"What the-" Startled, Dean braced himself and threw a hand out, halting Sam in his place. They could hear it continue on past the boxes, not slowing down.
Whatever it was, it was getting away from them, and that couldn't happen.
Leaping into action, Dean darted towards the wall. He could hear Sam following as he skid to a halt and dashed to the side. Sam's longer strides began to catch up to Dean as they ran along the wall together, and in the distance they could see the shadows shifting as they gave chase to the unknown. It looked like it ran on two legs, but it was impossible to say.
"We're not here to hurt anyone!" Dean called out ahead, hoping to slow them down. If the brothers had been seen with Jacob, things might get… complicated. "Hold on!"
The figure didn't stop, though they did pass through a small beam of light that triumphantly managed to reach the wall through all the boxes and the dusty window all the way across the room. They turned to look over their shoulder, and revealed dark eyes peering back from a pale face. Then, they rounded a corner.
Immediately after, there came a startled voice and the sound of rustling stopped. Even as Sam and Dean closed the distance to the corner, hushed voices started up just out of sight. There was irritation in one voice and plain exasperation in the other as they argued, but the language was most definitely not English.
When the brothers reached the corner, the conversation ended so the two having it could face them. Both were shorter and slimmer than the brothers, and had rounder, more youthful faces to contrast with the angles found in Winchester genetics. Both wore long silk shirts that laced in the front, with matching pants and soft slippers. If not for the intricate patterns stitched in glittering thread, the clothes could almost be mistaken for a doll's pajamas.
Wide, dark eyes stared intently and without fear at Sam and Dean, despite how cornered the pair was. The one they'd chased muttered something in the language from before, though his almost-condescending tone rang clear as day. The other fiddled with the end of one of her long tresses while she looked the brothers up and down. She replied in a gentler tone before taking one polite step forward. She fixed them with a hopeful look before asking a question in that unknown language of theirs.
"Got anything?" Dean hissed at Sam, not taking his eyes off the strange pair they'd stumbled upon.
Sam shook his head, not recognizing the language. "Guess that means I'm doing the talking, doesn't it?" he commented ruefully. Between the two of them, Sam at least had a remedial grasp on other languages, thanks to his studies as a child and his persistence with Jacob once discovering the teenager could speak Greek. More than once he'd managed to corner Jacob while his arm was healing, the few times he made it out of the walls.
Jacob, always eager to earn more trust, had a hard time saying no to Sam's wide-eyed curiosity once the younger brother started to open up to him. Dean would take advantage of the abandoned computer and spend his time on it while Sam learned a new language.
Taking a step forward, Sam did his best to look non-threatening despite how tall he was compared to the others. He held a hand against his chest, his eyes emotional and kind, a contrast to Dean's hard edges. "My name's Sam, and this is Dean. Do you speak English?"
There was a pause, and Sam patiently waited for a reply. When there was none forthcoming, he repeated his question in Latin, stumbling over the unfamiliar phrases. It was easier to follow a chant than it was to ask a question of his own. Silence followed, and once more he spoke. This time, the Greek was slightly more fluid.
The small woman waited politely while Sam cycled through the languages he knew. After it became clear that the third attempt was the last one, she sighed and said something ruefully over her shoulder to her pouting companion. He answered her back, and, though the language was beyond their understanding, the attitude of I told you so was undeniably clear.
The woman nearly rolled her eyes at him, but her face only brightened in a smile while she lightly chastised him. He held up his hands and looked away from her. He, by contrast, did not resist the urge to roll his eyes at whatever she said.
The woman clasped her hands and looked back at Sam. She spoke slowly this time, enunciating clearly but without any air of condescension. She paused to let the words sink in before politely unclasping her hands and waving them dismissively as though telling them they were okayed to leave. With that done, she turned back to her companion and they resumed their discussion from earlier, albeit with far less urgency.
It took a moment for their dismissal to sink into the brothers' heads. "Well, you gave it a shot, at least," Dean said dryly, keeping his voice low out of habit. "I think it's time to try something different."
Sam shot him a look, confused. "What else can we do aside from drag them back to Jacob?" he hissed back.
"Don't you trust me?" Dean asked with a gleam in his eyes. "Lemme see your journal." He held out a hand, clearly expecting Sam to follow through.
"What?! No," Sam protested. "The last time you used it, I got red paint in the middle." Space in the delicate book was a premium, and Sam had lost room for at least a paragraph thanks to the mishap.
Dean huffed in annoyance. "I'm not gonna mess it up! I just need a page. We can try and write out what we're saying, and see if they understand."
Sam's lips thinned, and he drew open his satchel with an excruciating slowness. "If you mess it up more, you're finding me a new one!" he snipped in annoyance as he pulled out the journal and the pencil nib.
Dean took them both with an appropriate reverence to satisfy Sam, then inched his way towards the two strange people. He wanted to avoid startling them, if that was possible. Sam followed a hair behind, focusing more on the words they said. Anything he could remember could pay off, especially if these two were related to the other strange happenings in the building. He itched to take the book back from Dean and write down what he could, but held himself back.
When he was closer, Dean held the pencil nib to the page. "You don't understand me and the feeling's mutual, but how 'bout pictures? We're not leaving until we figure out what's going on."
The man glanced over at Dean and opened his mouth as if he was going to scold him, but the woman's hand was over his mouth in a flash as she shushed him. She inched towards Dean again, her eyes scanning over the book curiously. Since he had it on a blank page, there wasn't much to observe before she looked up at Dean with almost a proud smile.
She sent her companion her own apparent I told you so before turning away from him to face Dean this time. Even the guy rolled his eyes but couldn't resist stepping forward to watch. He shot a question to Dean, but the woman shushed him again while they waited for Dean to make his next move.
"Okay, here goes," Dean muttered to himself, severely wishing he had better skills with drawing. Though he could inscribe protection symbols with the best of them, he didn't have any actual talent when it came to people.
There was a sense of the entire case riding on his shoulders as he started to draw, talking all the while out of habit despite the fact that they didn't understand each other. It helped him gather his thoughts on the case at the same time.
"There was a man, here. He owned a business, see?" Dean had no idea how much was making it through as he drew an attempt at the building, and a man next to it. "He's the one that bought all the items around, and he'd resell them…" A tiny scribble of some random items next to the man followed, and then Dean gestured at the boxes that rose up over their heads, like a brown cliff, doing his best to equate the boxes to the squiggles.
Sam scoffed from behind him. Dean shot him a glare, and a clear I'd like to see you do better! look in his eyes.
"He, uh… the guy got killed…" Dean drew an 'X' over the outline of the guy, and jabbed at the building. "We think the building might be haunted by a spirit…" Trailing off, he squiggled something that looked closer to a ghost that goes "BOO!" in kids books than a vengeful spirit, and sent them a hopeful look. "We were hoping you might have seen something? Or heard something happen?"
The pair stared at the resulting drawing thoughtfully, mulling over the sequence of the drawings. Dean's explanation didn't do them much good, but his efforts at least seemed to get him somewhere. Eventually, the guy half-shrugged and said something to the girl.
She waved a hand dismissively at him before pointing to the stick figure with the X through it, prattling something off in their language. Then, her finger swiped along the page to point at the picture of the building and she raised her eyebrows expectantly at Dean before remembering that he didn't follow whatever she might have asked him to confirm. She tapped the page and said something else to the other, almost smugly.
He pinched the bridge of his nose and pointed exasperatedly at the picture of the ghost that Dean had drawn, arguing something about it. The woman replied, smiling and finally looked back up at Dean. She said something, and then, with a careful motion of her pale hand, pinched the corner of the paper to turn to the next page.
She touched her first two fingertips to the paper, and began her own explanation. The faintest glow of orange trailed away from her touch in spiraling patterns, etching a scorched drawing without the use of the pencil stub Dean held. Intricate designs flowered forth from her fingertips as the small woman worked to convey their purpose there.
A tremor shook the floor.
"Hey, guys?" echoed overhead as Jacob returned to the room, and the woman flinched back from Dean in shock. She said something very frantically even as the guy grabbed her hand. She pointed at the unfinished drawing before he dragged her back towards the corner.
Then, their appearance seemed to shift for a moment, in a subtle but quick way, and the two small strangers slipped between the boxes nearby that formed the corner, effortlessly squeezing between them and out of sight as they fled the sound of Jacob's voice.
"W-wait!" Dean sputtered. Sam found himself having to dive to catch his journal when Dean tossed it and the pencil lead back at him, crashing to the ground in a pile.
It didn't matter how fast Dean ran. When he reached the boxes they'd vanished behind, he ran into a wall. The wall of the boxes. As it turned out, the path the other people had used was less than half Dean's width, even if he turned sideways.
Sam trailed a finger over the marks in his journal, eyes wide at the ash that coated his finger. The girl hadn't burned through the page, leaving behind an unfinished drawing that was seared into the book like she'd used a burning ember to write with.
"Dammit!" Dean shouted, punching the cardboard boxes in frustration.
That finally caught Sam's attention, and despite everything else, he had to smirk at the way Dean had been foiled. "Too much pudge to fit through there, sparky?"
Dean narrowed his eyes. "I'd like to see you fit through there," he snipped back. "I'm not the only one that put on some weight the last few months." He took a step back. "Besides, I don't think either of us would have a chance of fitting no matter how much we ate." He tried sticking an arm through, and only made it up to his elbow.
Sam sighed. "Let's regroup with Jacob. Maybe he had better luck."
"He better," Dean fumed as he stomped by Sam and his journal. "We were getting close, I could feel it!"
Sam gave the strange drawing etched into his journal one last look before he followed his brother down the pathway, musing about how odd their lives had become. Here they were, leaving safety to meet up with a human who'd just scared off other people their size.
Outside the cardboard labyrinth, Jacob crouched down to the floor near where he'd left Sam and Dean. He thought he might hear Dean's frustrated voice somewhere in the maze, but he didn't dare risk trying to shift boxes to find out what had him so riled. One little nudge from him could send things toppling, or worse, it could catch a small and vulnerable hunter between two cliffs.
"I checked all the stuff right in the front hall," he continued, waiting for them to emerge. "Thought I'd see if you wanted to scope the other little office before getting past that police tape."
Jacob wouldn't admit it, but moving too far out of earshot of them while a murderous ghost could be around made him nervous. He didn't want to leave the brothers where they could get into trouble without him knowing right away; last time that happened, Dean and an innocent little nearly drowned. Jacob had taken on responsibility when he helped them get away from the motel where there lives had been forever altered.
"That's just great," Dean griped as he finally crossed the threshold of the boxes, storming out into the light. "Because we found two people hiding back behind the boxes and were at least making progress talking with them until you startled them off!" He crossed his arms with a defiant stance, aggravated that all his work with the pictionary attempt was for naught.
Sam jogged out from the boxes, one hand still clutched to his journal and the other holding his satchel against his side so it didn't get in his way. "Dean, chill!" he called, slightly out of breath. "I don't know how much we were going to get out of them, anyway."
"We don't know that, Sam!" Dean stubbornly argued. "Language barriers or not, the journal was working."
Jacob frowned in confusion and leaned closer to them. It gave him a better view of Dean's consternation, and Jacob pursed his lips. He hadn't thought it very likely that there would be other small folk hiding out in a place like this. He never even considered that he'd have scared them off by walking into the room, and he could have cost them all a valuable lead.
"Dude, I'm sorry," he said sincerely. He braced one hand on the floor while he watched. Dean looked ready to break out into a full-on lecture, and Jacob was ready for that to happen; it wouldn't be the first time. Dean's drive to finish a hunt was probably the strongest out of all three of them.
"I didn't even think ... well, shit. Uh. You said language barrier? Didja make any progress at all? What did it sound like they were speaking?" he asked, hoping to salvage some of the situation after royally messing it up.
Sam put a hand on Dean's shoulder to help calm him down. "We're not completely sure," Sam admitted. "I tried Latin and Greek, like you taught me, but it didn't work any better than English. Dean had an idea to try pictures, and they paid attention."
Shifting, he opened the book back up to the scorched image that was half-branded. "They got about halfway done before you came in," Sam said regretfully, holding it up so Jacob and Dean could both see. The other people had left so abruptly that Dean hadn't even had a chance to look at the image himself. "I tried listening to what they were saying. I caught a few words, but it isn't much." His memory for languages had paid off multiple times that day, and Sam slowly repeated what he'd heard while listening to Dean work and when they'd first found the strange couple. He gave careful attention to the enunciation, speaking as clearly as he could.
Jacob's eyes narrowed and his mouth moved to form the syllables after Sam did. He didn't understand them any more than Sam or Dean did, but they were familiar enough to ring a bell. "I think ... that just sounds a little like Mandarin," he determined, focusing on the brothers to see what they thought of it.
Jacob had been friends with Chase Lisong, a Chinese immigrant, for ten years. He'd spent many nights over at Chase's house, hearing loud conversations between his friend and his parents or sister, all in rapid Mandarin Chinese. Jacob only learned a few words out of the many, and many of them were insults, but he'd heard enough for the general form of the words to be familiar.
"I'd say we should get Chase to translate for us, but if they ran from me, they'd run from him, too."
Dean scowled. "That's what happens when you're big enough to cause earthquakes," he complained loudly, his frustration with the case slipping into his voice. "We can't even have one good conv-"
"Oh, shit," Sam blurted out, cutting Dean off mid-sentence. His eyes had gone wide.
His tirade ground to a halt, Dean stared at Sam in confusion. "What?"
"I know how we can get Chase to talk to them," Sam replied, staring right back at Dean.
When nothing more was forthcoming, Dean frowned. "Care to share with the rest of the class, Sammy?" he prodded, covering up his impatience.
Sam shook his head to clear his mind, then glanced up at Jacob to include him in the conversation. "The same way we talked to them," he said slowly.
"By talking to them face to face. At our size."
A/N:
Beware the ides of March!
We're halfway through the month and buried under so much snow
Next: March 22nd, 2023 at 9PM
Adding in this author's note for all my followers here, and will keep it on all chapters going forward:
If the worst happens and fanfiction shuts down, you can find all my stories on both archive of our own and deviantart, posted under the nightmares06 account. You can also find our story tumblr, which contains a ton of information and answers that are only posted on that site, along with artwork for the stories and future plans we have. That can be found under the brothersapart tumblr account. I can't put links in chapters, but googling "Brothersapart tumblr" should bring it right up!
