fic: someone's shadow (1/?)
May. 18th, 2006 11:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
violaceaTitle: Someone's Shadow
Rating: R (language, sexual content)
Pairing: Dean/OFC
Spoilers: Set somewhere between "Skin" and "Shadow".
Disclaimer: If you recognize it from a TV show, it's not mine. If you don't, it probably is.
Note: My entry for the latest![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
occhallenge prompt party. WIP - my brainstorm for my prompt turned into a long, episode-ish plotty thing, with romance & sex, of course. Planned at 10-12 parts.
Summary: Dean and Sam visit a small Illinois town, where one family is haunted by tragedy - and, perhaps, by something a little more tangible.
Four teenagers, an abandoned building, midnight. Jenny knew they all looked like a horror movie cliché. If she was smart, she’d go home. However, smart never did provide a social life, at least not for her. On her recent fifteenth birthday, she’d decided that dumb was the way to go. That sort of dumb attracted two actual, real-life friends. The novelty was enough that she ignored … well, a lot of things, mostly the fact that dumb attracted dumb.
“I’ve passed this place a hundred times,” Lisa whispered, “but I never really thought about it.”
“Nobody thinks about it.” Leslie, Lisa’s older sister (by only ten months, a fact Lisa brought up every time Leslie crowed about her age – which didn’t change the fact that Leslie was the only one old enough to drive) spoke at a normal volume, while she rummaged through her backpack. Finally, she brought out two flashlights; she tossed one to Jenny, and turned on her own. “Okay, ladies, it’s showtime!”
“Shhh! Keep your voice down! What if Dr. Cartwright comes out?” Lisa’s voice was slightly louder, but she looked over her shoulder at the building behind them – the dentist’s office, which had an apartment over it.
“Mrs. Cartwright took him back two weeks ago,” Leslie told her. “If you paid any attention at dinner, you’d have heard that.”
“I’m supposed to pay attention to every piece of gossip Mom brings home?”
“Gotta sift through the dirt to find gold.” Leslie shrugged and pointed her flashlight at the building in front of them. “Like this place. Mom was talking about it a few weeks ago. About your family, Jen.”
Jenny repressed a shudder. She stared at the structure – a small rectangular box, with a door in the middle of the long wall and a broken neon sign over the door. Only the letters “O N FE” remained. The stairs leading up to the door were broken, and the windows were all covered with plastic. “The Silver Moon Café,” she murmured. “It belonged to my grandparents.”
“Has it ever been open?” Lisa asked. “Because I’ve never seen it open.”
“Not since before we were born. Claire told me she barely remembers it.” Jenny wrapped her arms around her waist without thinking. “Nana and Mom were going to reopen it …” She trailed off. Her new friends didn’t know about her mother and grandmother, not everything, and really didn’t seem to care all that much. It was one of the reasons why she hung out with them. Jenny took a deep breath and unwrapped herself. She stood up straighter and looked Leslie in the eye. “My grandfather killed himself here.”
It was the opening Leslie had been looking for. “Mom said that he hung himself.” She sounded callous, but Jenny almost loved her for the matter-of-fact statement. “Some people even say that his ghost haunts the old diner. Apparently, Vince Richards says he’s seen him.”
“Vince Richards is a drunk. He probably sees fairies in the trees, too.”
Leslie glared at her sister. “He’s a functional drunk. He doesn’t say stupid stuff, not usually. Dad just hates him because he tells the truth about Dad’s awful sculptures. But, Mom says he refuses to do the lawn over by here, because this place creeps him out.”
“So, we’re … going ghost hunting? For real?” Lisa looked at her sister, eyes wide.
Leslie’s response was to march towards the door of the diner. Lisa glanced at Jenny. “You sure?” she said softly, and Jenny wasn’t sure whether the hesitation was out of concern for Jenny or just plain fright. Either way, Lisa didn’t wait – she was already moving towards her sister before Jenny finally nodded.
Jenny realized, in that moment, that she almost hoped the diner held the ghosts of the people who died there. She never did get to say goodbye to her mother.
***
Dean had just finished sweeping the kitchen when he heard Sam’s hiss. “Dean! Flashlights at the door!”
“Motherfucker.” He ducked through the doorway, where his brother crouched underneath the ancient cash register. “Who the hell is here? I thought the dentist said that no one had been in here in ages.”
Sam shushed him. “I guess we’ll see,” he whispered, pointing to the door, which was slowly and silently opening.
“That sucks,” a female voice drifted inside. “Haunted places should have creaky doors. It’s in the rule book!” Dean rolled his eyes at Sam and inched up to see the new arrival. The girl in the doorway, a tall, thin girl with close-cropped blonde hair, swept a large Maglite over the diner. Dean dropped back to the floor before the beam hit the counter in front of him. “It’s not even that dirty or anything.” The girl sounded disappointed.
Another girl’s voice answered her. “They were cleaning it up to reopen it.”
“Who was?” A third girl.
“My grandmother.”
Dean and Sam looked at each other. Sam mouthed the words “Dyer family”, and Dean nodded. The articles they’d managed to dig up on the Silver Moon Café told stories of seemingly random tragedies visited on one particular family. “Could just be bad luck,” Dean had said, sitting on the hood of the car outside of the library while Sam rummaged around in the back seat. Sam’s response had been to pull their father’s journal out and wave it in the air. “If it was bad luck, would Rogersville, Illinois have been marked on his map with the name ‘Dyer’?” Dean could only shrug and verbally hope that southern Illinois had better radio stations than Wyoming.
“Why didn’t they?” the first girl asked.
“Dumbass,” someone else – the third girl, Dean thought – hissed. “Her grandmother DIED.”
“Oh. Sorry.” The first girl didn’t sound very sorry.
“It’s okay,” the second girl – the Dyer girl – said. “So, what do you think we’re looking for in here?”
“I don’t know,” the first girl admitted.
“What do ghosts do, anyway?” the third girl asked.
A lot of shit you don’t want to see, Dean told her silently. He looked at Sam again, but his brother just shrugged. Dean scowled into the darkness. They had to get these kids out of the diner. Yeah, the ghost they were looking for was probably around somewhere, but if these kids thought they had any idea of what to expect … Dean shifted and felt the gun in his back pocket, loaded with rock salt. For a brief moment, he considered simply standing up and pointing the gun at the kids, but he also didn’t relish the idea of spending the night in jail if the kids squealed. Possibly more, if the cops were any good at their jobs – Rogersville was far too close to St. Louis for Dean’s comfort, even if there was a dead guy in the ground wearing his face. Besides, places like this, one of those kids could be armed just as well as they were. Better to be smart, try subtle …
Dean looked at Sam, who simply looked back at him blankly. So much for smart and subtle.
The teenagers continued to ramble around the diner. “If I was a ghost, where would I hide?” one girl – Dean could no longer figure out which was which – wondered.
“Ghosts don’t hide,” another said. “They just appear, wherever they want.” A few moments of silence, then the same voice spoke again. “This is boring.” This voice was strident. “I thought there’d be more here.”
“Like what?”
“I dunno, creepy stuff. This is just … a restaurant. Bleh. If I wanted to be in a plain old restaurant, I would have stayed at Friday’s after we closed up.”
“The kitchen.” This was the voice Dean could identify – the Dyer girl.
“What?” someone asked.
“The kitchen. That’s … if there’s anything, it’ll probably be there.”
“Why?” the strident girl wanted to know.
“Because that’s where my grandfather … died.”
“Really?” Strident Girl suddenly sounded pleased. “Do you know the story?”
“Leslie!” the other girl hissed.
The Dyer girl ignored the interruption. “I heard Nana talk about it once. He stayed late to close up one night. He never came home, and she got worried. She came here at first light, though, because she figured he fell asleep while counting money or something. The doors were locked, and the front of the house – the tables – was all clean and nice and empty. So, she thought he’d gone somewhere else, maybe he’d decided to play poker with Dr. Cartwright or something. She was going to go check, but she figured she might as well start brewing the coffee as long as she was there. She walked back to the kitchen, and … he was hanging from the pipes over the stove. Dead.”
All were silent for a moment. Then, the unidentified girl – “I’m sorry, Jenny.”
“It’s okay. I never knew him.”
“Still.”
Another pause, and then Leslie spoke again. “So, the kitchen. Let’s go.”
“Leslie, I don’t know …” the other girl protested.
Dean and Sam exchanged another look. The path to the kitchen would take the kids directly past them. Definitely time to get rid of them. Or get out. Dean looked over Sam’s shoulder, at a plastic-covered window on the other side of the diner. He inclined his head, and Sam turned. When Sam looked back at him, Dean shrugged. What the hell else could they do? Unless the brainiac had any better ideas … which, no, not if the speed with which Sam began to move towards the window on his hands and knees was any indication.
Luckily for them, the kids continued to waffle. “Are you guys gonna be pussies?” Leslie wondered. “I thought we were here to find ghosts!”
“You’re being way unfair to Jenny,” the other girl said. “I mean, her grandfather, come on!”
“It’s okay, Lisa,” Jenny said. “Like I said, I didn’t know him. I’ve never been here, even.”
“See, Lis, you’re just a scaredy-cat.”
“I am not!” Lisa protested. “It’s just that … this place is kinda creepy. What if there is something here?”
“That’s what we came for, isn’t it?” Leslie said.
Dean rolled his eyes at the exchange as Sam pushed the plastic on the window aside slowly. It made a soft crackling noise. The two hit the ground when they heard Lisa ask, “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?” Jenny asked.
“I heard something.”
“You’re a pussy,” Leslie told her again. “Come on, let’s go see the kitchen.”
By the time Dean pushed himself off the floor, Sam had disappeared through the window – without making any noise. Dean made a mental note to ask how the hell he managed that. Was this more of his psychic hoodoo bullshit? Because, if so, at least it had some sort of practical use. Dean, however, could not move plastic with his mind, and he could see shadows moving towards the gap in the counter next to the cash register. All he could do was duck underneath the counter, curl up into the smallest ball possible, and pray.
Quickly, the shadows became large, dark human forms – first the shorthaired girl, trailed quickly by a rounder girl with longer hair. They kept their flashlights trained on the kitchen door in front of them, for which Dean was grateful. Finally, another girl, childishly short, brought up the rear. She stopped next to the cash register, and quickly scanned the restaurant around her. Dean held his breath. She looked in his direction, but didn't seem to register his presence. "Hi, Mom," she murmured, just loud enough for Dean to hear.
Then, she was in the kitchen, and Dean wasted no time in scrambling out of the window. Sam was waiting, flat against the wall next to the window. "Thanks for joining me," Sam whispered.
"Fuck you. Not all of us are David Copperfield."
That earned Dean the gesture he expected, and they hurried toward the Impala – parked at the back of the building – without further comment. And, Dean thought, if the kids heard the motor start, well, they were looking for a scare, weren't they?
***
The red numbers on the microwave read “3:24” when Claire finally set her purse down in the kitchen. The first floor of the house was pitch black, but when she looked at the doorway to the basement, she saw a faint glow under the door and heard the unmistakable sounds of Buffy the Vampire Slayer coming from below her. She sighed. It was Friday night, so she couldn’t fault her cousin for staying up late, but over the past year, a night this late usually meant Jenny had another nightmare.
Claire took a moment to nuke a mug of water in the microwave, and grabbed an herbal tea bag out of the cabinet next to the stove. She’d finally moved the tea supplies to this cabinet last month, from their former home next to the refrigerator. Such a small thing, she knew, but changing the kitchen’s layout meant that her grandmother was truly never coming back. Claire sighed, and blamed the small lurch in her chest on a long night of work.
Her grandmother’s kitchen – still not Claire’s, not even after a year of owning the house – was fully, beautifully modernized, perfect for a woman who had raised cooking to an art form. If Claire closed her eyes, she could still see Nana and Aunt Holly standing side by side; Holly, small and round, with a long brown ponytail swinging down her back, would wield the knife after Nana’s stroke, and Nana would mix whatever ingredients she was using with an ease that belied the state of her health. Nana had only been 67 when she died, too young, still straight-backed and elegant.
Holly had been a carefree 40. She lived for her mother, her gardening, and the teenaged girl downstairs, never in that order.
The microwave beeped its finish, and Claire threw the tea bag into the mug and headed downstairs. The house’s modernity took a break for the stairs – Nana never did bother to get them fixed. That was okay, because after a quarter century of navigation, Claire knew exactly where she needed to hug the wall in order to avoid splinters in her bare feet. When she reached the bottom of the stairs, the twenty-first century caught up to her again, shiny hardwood floors and throw rugs leading to a cozy den in the corner. Claire found Jenny curled up in the papasan chair, staring at Sarah Michelle Gellar and David Boreanaz with a remote aimed towards them threateningly. “Second season?” Claire guessed.
Jenny shook her head. “Third. After Angel comes back from hell. These scenes get kinda annoying after a while.”
“Yeah, I guess. But this is the Faith season, right? That’s always a good time.” Claire stretched out on the couch across from Jenny, as Jenny fast forwarded through a scene. “Can’t sleep?”
Jenny glanced sideways. “Nah, I just got home a little late, couldn’t wind down.”
“How late?”
“I was home before you, isn’t that all you care about?”
At the sharp tone, Claire took a long breath – five count in, five count out. “Yeah, pretty much. Where’d you go tonight?”
“Out. With Leslie and Lisa,” she supplied after a pause.
“Did you have a good time?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
Xander and Cordelia came on the screen, and Jenny turned all her attention back to the television. Claire sipped her tea and, as usual, second-guessed herself – what was she doing, raising a teenager barely ten years younger than she was? Holly would have grounded Jenny for being out past eleven. Nana would have asked more questions about Leslie and Lisa Birkemeier, would have known everything Jenny liked about them in a twenty minute conversation. Claire’s mother … well, Natalie barely knew Jenny, so Claire couldn’t say what Mom would do with her, but she remembered having screaming matches with her, not too many years before, about boys and cars and sneaking back into the house after midnight. None of them, she knew, would be sitting on a couch watching Jenny swoon over Nicholas Brendon at 3:30 in the morning. Would any kind of parental figure?
The scene ended, and Jenny began fast forwarding through another scene with Buffy. “Did you go out after work?” Claire couldn’t judge the tone – did she sound sullen? Or just tired?
“The bar doesn’t close until 2:00 nowadays,” she reminded Jenny. “I didn’t finish cleaning up until 3:00.”
“Oh. Right.” Another pause. “Do you ever go out any more?”
Claire shrugged. “Work keeps me busy.”
On the television screen, the Scooby gang plotted, and Claire ran a hand over her face. Exhaustion crept in with the last of the tea – 6:00pm to 3:00am on her feet, serving drinks at the Roadhouse Grill, and several hours before that spent fixing a broken faucet in the bathroom, the upstairs one that Nana meant to remodel this spring. “I’m exhausted,” she announced, but Jenny didn’t respond. “You got anything going tomorrow?”
Jenny shrugged. “Nope.”
“Okay, then … just turn off the lights when you’re done, okay?”
“Okay.”
Claire stood up and walked towards the stairs, but stopped when she heard Jenny’s voice again, soft amidst the dialogue from the television. “Claire?”
“Yeah?”
Jenny turned around; her round face lit by the television, in a strange, almost sickly glow. Her hair hung loosely around her face, but it was her eyes that made her look so much like Holly, deep-set and bright and blue. Her expression, however, was unreadable. “Do you … believe in ghosts?”
Claire furrowed her eyebrows at the unexpected question. “I don’t know,” she answered slowly. “Probably. I’ve seen some weird things, so I don’t necessarily rule them out, anyway. Why?”
Jenny stared at her a long moment, and Claire thought she might be on the verge of saying something, but then the 15-year-old shook her head. “Nothing. Just curious. Good night, Claire.”
“Good night, Jen.”
Ghosts. Claire smiled sadly as she put her mug into the sink and turned out the kitchen lights. She didn’t know what her cousin meant, but she saw two ghosts every time she walked into the kitchen. Ghosts owned this house, belonged there, belonged with Jenny. Not her. No matter what she did, she’d never be Nana and Holly.
A year and a half ago, at this time of morning, Claire would have left work and found no shortage of company. She would probably have watched the sun rise with a bottle of vodka and a group of people whose names she now barely remembered. People who obviously didn’t remember her name, either, as she couldn’t remember the last time the ringing phone produced someone other than a coworker or someone from Jenny’s school. A year and a half ago, when the phone in the kitchen rang, the person on the other end cheerfully asked for Nana, or Holly. People came and went from the kitchen, from the living room, from the backyard.
Ghosts. Of course Claire believed in ghosts. They were the only company she had, these days.
***
Feedback, naturally, loved and appreciated. The format and planned length of this is intimidating me a little, so I'm not above begging for opinions. ;)
Rating: R (language, sexual content)
Pairing: Dean/OFC
Spoilers: Set somewhere between "Skin" and "Shadow".
Disclaimer: If you recognize it from a TV show, it's not mine. If you don't, it probably is.
Note: My entry for the latest
occhallenge prompt party. WIP - my brainstorm for my prompt turned into a long, episode-ish plotty thing, with romance & sex, of course. Planned at 10-12 parts.Summary: Dean and Sam visit a small Illinois town, where one family is haunted by tragedy - and, perhaps, by something a little more tangible.
Four teenagers, an abandoned building, midnight. Jenny knew they all looked like a horror movie cliché. If she was smart, she’d go home. However, smart never did provide a social life, at least not for her. On her recent fifteenth birthday, she’d decided that dumb was the way to go. That sort of dumb attracted two actual, real-life friends. The novelty was enough that she ignored … well, a lot of things, mostly the fact that dumb attracted dumb.
“I’ve passed this place a hundred times,” Lisa whispered, “but I never really thought about it.”
“Nobody thinks about it.” Leslie, Lisa’s older sister (by only ten months, a fact Lisa brought up every time Leslie crowed about her age – which didn’t change the fact that Leslie was the only one old enough to drive) spoke at a normal volume, while she rummaged through her backpack. Finally, she brought out two flashlights; she tossed one to Jenny, and turned on her own. “Okay, ladies, it’s showtime!”
“Shhh! Keep your voice down! What if Dr. Cartwright comes out?” Lisa’s voice was slightly louder, but she looked over her shoulder at the building behind them – the dentist’s office, which had an apartment over it.
“Mrs. Cartwright took him back two weeks ago,” Leslie told her. “If you paid any attention at dinner, you’d have heard that.”
“I’m supposed to pay attention to every piece of gossip Mom brings home?”
“Gotta sift through the dirt to find gold.” Leslie shrugged and pointed her flashlight at the building in front of them. “Like this place. Mom was talking about it a few weeks ago. About your family, Jen.”
Jenny repressed a shudder. She stared at the structure – a small rectangular box, with a door in the middle of the long wall and a broken neon sign over the door. Only the letters “O N FE” remained. The stairs leading up to the door were broken, and the windows were all covered with plastic. “The Silver Moon Café,” she murmured. “It belonged to my grandparents.”
“Has it ever been open?” Lisa asked. “Because I’ve never seen it open.”
“Not since before we were born. Claire told me she barely remembers it.” Jenny wrapped her arms around her waist without thinking. “Nana and Mom were going to reopen it …” She trailed off. Her new friends didn’t know about her mother and grandmother, not everything, and really didn’t seem to care all that much. It was one of the reasons why she hung out with them. Jenny took a deep breath and unwrapped herself. She stood up straighter and looked Leslie in the eye. “My grandfather killed himself here.”
It was the opening Leslie had been looking for. “Mom said that he hung himself.” She sounded callous, but Jenny almost loved her for the matter-of-fact statement. “Some people even say that his ghost haunts the old diner. Apparently, Vince Richards says he’s seen him.”
“Vince Richards is a drunk. He probably sees fairies in the trees, too.”
Leslie glared at her sister. “He’s a functional drunk. He doesn’t say stupid stuff, not usually. Dad just hates him because he tells the truth about Dad’s awful sculptures. But, Mom says he refuses to do the lawn over by here, because this place creeps him out.”
“So, we’re … going ghost hunting? For real?” Lisa looked at her sister, eyes wide.
Leslie’s response was to march towards the door of the diner. Lisa glanced at Jenny. “You sure?” she said softly, and Jenny wasn’t sure whether the hesitation was out of concern for Jenny or just plain fright. Either way, Lisa didn’t wait – she was already moving towards her sister before Jenny finally nodded.
Jenny realized, in that moment, that she almost hoped the diner held the ghosts of the people who died there. She never did get to say goodbye to her mother.
***
Dean had just finished sweeping the kitchen when he heard Sam’s hiss. “Dean! Flashlights at the door!”
“Motherfucker.” He ducked through the doorway, where his brother crouched underneath the ancient cash register. “Who the hell is here? I thought the dentist said that no one had been in here in ages.”
Sam shushed him. “I guess we’ll see,” he whispered, pointing to the door, which was slowly and silently opening.
“That sucks,” a female voice drifted inside. “Haunted places should have creaky doors. It’s in the rule book!” Dean rolled his eyes at Sam and inched up to see the new arrival. The girl in the doorway, a tall, thin girl with close-cropped blonde hair, swept a large Maglite over the diner. Dean dropped back to the floor before the beam hit the counter in front of him. “It’s not even that dirty or anything.” The girl sounded disappointed.
Another girl’s voice answered her. “They were cleaning it up to reopen it.”
“Who was?” A third girl.
“My grandmother.”
Dean and Sam looked at each other. Sam mouthed the words “Dyer family”, and Dean nodded. The articles they’d managed to dig up on the Silver Moon Café told stories of seemingly random tragedies visited on one particular family. “Could just be bad luck,” Dean had said, sitting on the hood of the car outside of the library while Sam rummaged around in the back seat. Sam’s response had been to pull their father’s journal out and wave it in the air. “If it was bad luck, would Rogersville, Illinois have been marked on his map with the name ‘Dyer’?” Dean could only shrug and verbally hope that southern Illinois had better radio stations than Wyoming.
“Why didn’t they?” the first girl asked.
“Dumbass,” someone else – the third girl, Dean thought – hissed. “Her grandmother DIED.”
“Oh. Sorry.” The first girl didn’t sound very sorry.
“It’s okay,” the second girl – the Dyer girl – said. “So, what do you think we’re looking for in here?”
“I don’t know,” the first girl admitted.
“What do ghosts do, anyway?” the third girl asked.
A lot of shit you don’t want to see, Dean told her silently. He looked at Sam again, but his brother just shrugged. Dean scowled into the darkness. They had to get these kids out of the diner. Yeah, the ghost they were looking for was probably around somewhere, but if these kids thought they had any idea of what to expect … Dean shifted and felt the gun in his back pocket, loaded with rock salt. For a brief moment, he considered simply standing up and pointing the gun at the kids, but he also didn’t relish the idea of spending the night in jail if the kids squealed. Possibly more, if the cops were any good at their jobs – Rogersville was far too close to St. Louis for Dean’s comfort, even if there was a dead guy in the ground wearing his face. Besides, places like this, one of those kids could be armed just as well as they were. Better to be smart, try subtle …
Dean looked at Sam, who simply looked back at him blankly. So much for smart and subtle.
The teenagers continued to ramble around the diner. “If I was a ghost, where would I hide?” one girl – Dean could no longer figure out which was which – wondered.
“Ghosts don’t hide,” another said. “They just appear, wherever they want.” A few moments of silence, then the same voice spoke again. “This is boring.” This voice was strident. “I thought there’d be more here.”
“Like what?”
“I dunno, creepy stuff. This is just … a restaurant. Bleh. If I wanted to be in a plain old restaurant, I would have stayed at Friday’s after we closed up.”
“The kitchen.” This was the voice Dean could identify – the Dyer girl.
“What?” someone asked.
“The kitchen. That’s … if there’s anything, it’ll probably be there.”
“Why?” the strident girl wanted to know.
“Because that’s where my grandfather … died.”
“Really?” Strident Girl suddenly sounded pleased. “Do you know the story?”
“Leslie!” the other girl hissed.
The Dyer girl ignored the interruption. “I heard Nana talk about it once. He stayed late to close up one night. He never came home, and she got worried. She came here at first light, though, because she figured he fell asleep while counting money or something. The doors were locked, and the front of the house – the tables – was all clean and nice and empty. So, she thought he’d gone somewhere else, maybe he’d decided to play poker with Dr. Cartwright or something. She was going to go check, but she figured she might as well start brewing the coffee as long as she was there. She walked back to the kitchen, and … he was hanging from the pipes over the stove. Dead.”
All were silent for a moment. Then, the unidentified girl – “I’m sorry, Jenny.”
“It’s okay. I never knew him.”
“Still.”
Another pause, and then Leslie spoke again. “So, the kitchen. Let’s go.”
“Leslie, I don’t know …” the other girl protested.
Dean and Sam exchanged another look. The path to the kitchen would take the kids directly past them. Definitely time to get rid of them. Or get out. Dean looked over Sam’s shoulder, at a plastic-covered window on the other side of the diner. He inclined his head, and Sam turned. When Sam looked back at him, Dean shrugged. What the hell else could they do? Unless the brainiac had any better ideas … which, no, not if the speed with which Sam began to move towards the window on his hands and knees was any indication.
Luckily for them, the kids continued to waffle. “Are you guys gonna be pussies?” Leslie wondered. “I thought we were here to find ghosts!”
“You’re being way unfair to Jenny,” the other girl said. “I mean, her grandfather, come on!”
“It’s okay, Lisa,” Jenny said. “Like I said, I didn’t know him. I’ve never been here, even.”
“See, Lis, you’re just a scaredy-cat.”
“I am not!” Lisa protested. “It’s just that … this place is kinda creepy. What if there is something here?”
“That’s what we came for, isn’t it?” Leslie said.
Dean rolled his eyes at the exchange as Sam pushed the plastic on the window aside slowly. It made a soft crackling noise. The two hit the ground when they heard Lisa ask, “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?” Jenny asked.
“I heard something.”
“You’re a pussy,” Leslie told her again. “Come on, let’s go see the kitchen.”
By the time Dean pushed himself off the floor, Sam had disappeared through the window – without making any noise. Dean made a mental note to ask how the hell he managed that. Was this more of his psychic hoodoo bullshit? Because, if so, at least it had some sort of practical use. Dean, however, could not move plastic with his mind, and he could see shadows moving towards the gap in the counter next to the cash register. All he could do was duck underneath the counter, curl up into the smallest ball possible, and pray.
Quickly, the shadows became large, dark human forms – first the shorthaired girl, trailed quickly by a rounder girl with longer hair. They kept their flashlights trained on the kitchen door in front of them, for which Dean was grateful. Finally, another girl, childishly short, brought up the rear. She stopped next to the cash register, and quickly scanned the restaurant around her. Dean held his breath. She looked in his direction, but didn't seem to register his presence. "Hi, Mom," she murmured, just loud enough for Dean to hear.
Then, she was in the kitchen, and Dean wasted no time in scrambling out of the window. Sam was waiting, flat against the wall next to the window. "Thanks for joining me," Sam whispered.
"Fuck you. Not all of us are David Copperfield."
That earned Dean the gesture he expected, and they hurried toward the Impala – parked at the back of the building – without further comment. And, Dean thought, if the kids heard the motor start, well, they were looking for a scare, weren't they?
***
The red numbers on the microwave read “3:24” when Claire finally set her purse down in the kitchen. The first floor of the house was pitch black, but when she looked at the doorway to the basement, she saw a faint glow under the door and heard the unmistakable sounds of Buffy the Vampire Slayer coming from below her. She sighed. It was Friday night, so she couldn’t fault her cousin for staying up late, but over the past year, a night this late usually meant Jenny had another nightmare.
Claire took a moment to nuke a mug of water in the microwave, and grabbed an herbal tea bag out of the cabinet next to the stove. She’d finally moved the tea supplies to this cabinet last month, from their former home next to the refrigerator. Such a small thing, she knew, but changing the kitchen’s layout meant that her grandmother was truly never coming back. Claire sighed, and blamed the small lurch in her chest on a long night of work.
Her grandmother’s kitchen – still not Claire’s, not even after a year of owning the house – was fully, beautifully modernized, perfect for a woman who had raised cooking to an art form. If Claire closed her eyes, she could still see Nana and Aunt Holly standing side by side; Holly, small and round, with a long brown ponytail swinging down her back, would wield the knife after Nana’s stroke, and Nana would mix whatever ingredients she was using with an ease that belied the state of her health. Nana had only been 67 when she died, too young, still straight-backed and elegant.
Holly had been a carefree 40. She lived for her mother, her gardening, and the teenaged girl downstairs, never in that order.
The microwave beeped its finish, and Claire threw the tea bag into the mug and headed downstairs. The house’s modernity took a break for the stairs – Nana never did bother to get them fixed. That was okay, because after a quarter century of navigation, Claire knew exactly where she needed to hug the wall in order to avoid splinters in her bare feet. When she reached the bottom of the stairs, the twenty-first century caught up to her again, shiny hardwood floors and throw rugs leading to a cozy den in the corner. Claire found Jenny curled up in the papasan chair, staring at Sarah Michelle Gellar and David Boreanaz with a remote aimed towards them threateningly. “Second season?” Claire guessed.
Jenny shook her head. “Third. After Angel comes back from hell. These scenes get kinda annoying after a while.”
“Yeah, I guess. But this is the Faith season, right? That’s always a good time.” Claire stretched out on the couch across from Jenny, as Jenny fast forwarded through a scene. “Can’t sleep?”
Jenny glanced sideways. “Nah, I just got home a little late, couldn’t wind down.”
“How late?”
“I was home before you, isn’t that all you care about?”
At the sharp tone, Claire took a long breath – five count in, five count out. “Yeah, pretty much. Where’d you go tonight?”
“Out. With Leslie and Lisa,” she supplied after a pause.
“Did you have a good time?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
Xander and Cordelia came on the screen, and Jenny turned all her attention back to the television. Claire sipped her tea and, as usual, second-guessed herself – what was she doing, raising a teenager barely ten years younger than she was? Holly would have grounded Jenny for being out past eleven. Nana would have asked more questions about Leslie and Lisa Birkemeier, would have known everything Jenny liked about them in a twenty minute conversation. Claire’s mother … well, Natalie barely knew Jenny, so Claire couldn’t say what Mom would do with her, but she remembered having screaming matches with her, not too many years before, about boys and cars and sneaking back into the house after midnight. None of them, she knew, would be sitting on a couch watching Jenny swoon over Nicholas Brendon at 3:30 in the morning. Would any kind of parental figure?
The scene ended, and Jenny began fast forwarding through another scene with Buffy. “Did you go out after work?” Claire couldn’t judge the tone – did she sound sullen? Or just tired?
“The bar doesn’t close until 2:00 nowadays,” she reminded Jenny. “I didn’t finish cleaning up until 3:00.”
“Oh. Right.” Another pause. “Do you ever go out any more?”
Claire shrugged. “Work keeps me busy.”
On the television screen, the Scooby gang plotted, and Claire ran a hand over her face. Exhaustion crept in with the last of the tea – 6:00pm to 3:00am on her feet, serving drinks at the Roadhouse Grill, and several hours before that spent fixing a broken faucet in the bathroom, the upstairs one that Nana meant to remodel this spring. “I’m exhausted,” she announced, but Jenny didn’t respond. “You got anything going tomorrow?”
Jenny shrugged. “Nope.”
“Okay, then … just turn off the lights when you’re done, okay?”
“Okay.”
Claire stood up and walked towards the stairs, but stopped when she heard Jenny’s voice again, soft amidst the dialogue from the television. “Claire?”
“Yeah?”
Jenny turned around; her round face lit by the television, in a strange, almost sickly glow. Her hair hung loosely around her face, but it was her eyes that made her look so much like Holly, deep-set and bright and blue. Her expression, however, was unreadable. “Do you … believe in ghosts?”
Claire furrowed her eyebrows at the unexpected question. “I don’t know,” she answered slowly. “Probably. I’ve seen some weird things, so I don’t necessarily rule them out, anyway. Why?”
Jenny stared at her a long moment, and Claire thought she might be on the verge of saying something, but then the 15-year-old shook her head. “Nothing. Just curious. Good night, Claire.”
“Good night, Jen.”
Ghosts. Claire smiled sadly as she put her mug into the sink and turned out the kitchen lights. She didn’t know what her cousin meant, but she saw two ghosts every time she walked into the kitchen. Ghosts owned this house, belonged there, belonged with Jenny. Not her. No matter what she did, she’d never be Nana and Holly.
A year and a half ago, at this time of morning, Claire would have left work and found no shortage of company. She would probably have watched the sun rise with a bottle of vodka and a group of people whose names she now barely remembered. People who obviously didn’t remember her name, either, as she couldn’t remember the last time the ringing phone produced someone other than a coworker or someone from Jenny’s school. A year and a half ago, when the phone in the kitchen rang, the person on the other end cheerfully asked for Nana, or Holly. People came and went from the kitchen, from the living room, from the backyard.
Ghosts. Of course Claire believed in ghosts. They were the only company she had, these days.
***
Feedback, naturally, loved and appreciated. The format and planned length of this is intimidating me a little, so I'm not above begging for opinions. ;)
