[EP] What a nice surprise

[st_andingtall]

"Eugene Thompson," repeated the Innkeeper, when Sam finally broke down and stopped searching for the wheelchair guy to ask. "One moment, please. Do you need any--"

"No. I have plenty of towels." What the heck was it with the towels, anyway? Sam shifted his weight to his other foot and tried not to screw up his face too much. The guy was just doing his job. Even if that was literally all he could do. "Um, but thanks."

"You're welcome." The Innkeeper did something that was probably smile, but Sam couldn't have described it, or his face for the life of him. "Ah, yes." He tapped a finger against the rounded black monitor screen that was as almost as old as Sam. "Mr. Thompson has checked out."

"Huh?" Sam's felt the surprise overtake his face and he had to work hard to plant his hands at the edge of the counter instead of reaching across to grab the guy by the collar. "I thought you said we couldn't leave."

"That is correct."

"But Flash--"

"Flash Thompson has checked out."

"How does that even make--" Never mind. The lyrics of Hotel California came to him. "So, you're saying he's dead and I should look for his ghost?"

"I have no record of His Ghost."

Sam rubbed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. "Okay, yeah. Thanks."

After he'd stalked away from the front desk, Sam dropped into one of the round red leather booths in the Copper Cafe and pulled out his cell...which was absolutely fucking useless and he still forgot half the time. "Great. The Innkeeper's useless. Flash has 'checked out'. And I can't text anyone to tell them about it."

Oh yeah. Life in the days before instantaneous communication sucked. And blew.

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[st_eampunk]

Molly had finished up her daily exploration of the surrounding area, looking for any way out. She was convinced that since there was a way in, there had to be a way out. No opening was one way. The common denominator just hadn't been found yet.

She was on her way to her room when she felt a wave of frustration. It was almost like white noise to her now with everyone here. Everyone was frustrated, but this was different than the usual that she felt. Maybe because there were fewer people around, or maybe that is was fresh. Was there a new arrival? Her curiosity got the better of her and she followed the feeling from the hotel lobby straight into the Cafe.

It didn't take long to figure out where the emotion was coming from as she saw Sam hunched in a booth glaring at his cell phone. At least she wouldn't kill it, since it seemed to already be dead, so Molly approached.

"Hey. Feel like some company?"

[st_andingtall]

Immediately, Sam tried to reassemble his expression into something more welcoming than a scowl, but when he looked up, he still hadn't made it anywhere close to smiling. Which made the reason pretty obvious when, seeing Molly, he broke into a smile.

"Hey, yeah. Sure. I'm just..." He shrugged and tipped his chin toward his phone. "Wishing I hadn't ever complained about spotty cell service."

[st_eampunk]

"Right? It's a bitch when you forget stuff like that and something brings you crashing back to reality." Molly sympathized even while knowing that likely wasn't the cause of the emotions that she was feeling from him. She slid into the seat opposite Sam.

[st_andingtall]

Dean did it infrequently, but Sam still recognized when he was being humored. Not unkindly, but humored nonetheless. Sam looked up and gave her a sort of rueful smile. "Just got used to being able to reach people without tracking them down, is all. I wanted to tell Dean to stop looking for Flash. Innkeeper says he 'checked out'."

[st_eampunk]

Molly's body tensed and her frustration began to build. At first she wasn't sure if it was a complication of empathizing with Sam's or if it was her own. It was probably a combination of both. "Someone 'checked out'?" She knew that he didn't mean the traditional sense of the word with the hotel.

Before he could respond to her first question, she asked a second. "Did he become one of the ghosts in the hotel?" She knew that there were ghosts in some of the rooms and the thought of being stuck in the hotel literally forever and never seeing her family again, pissed her the hell off. There was a deep desire to tip toe through the Innkeeper's mind to see what actually happened.

[st_makemeastone]

River was curled up in the adjacent booth. Well, okay curled up was a misnomer. She was under the table. There was some curling up required to make that happen.

She had a stack of paper, and was methodically folding bigger squares into smaller squares and gently tearing them part so that she also had a stack of squares about 2 by 2 inches.

And there were left over bits because the paper wasn't square to begin with and there were curls of paper, strips left over laying about and in her lap.

Sam probably couldn't seem any of this, but the ripping of paper was audible periodically, as was River muttering quietly to herself.

"Four by five. Twenty. Fifty. One, two, three... I keep losing count."

[st_andingtall]

River's was another voice he'd come to recognize quickly, mostly because it had a sort of sing-song quality to it. And occasionally was a little childlike. Of course, no one else said the stuff she did, and that helped too.

He shifted in the booth to look for her, then frowned, brows furrowing, when he didn't see her. Since he could still here her, he lifted himself enough to look over the booth and still didn't see her. "River?" he called quietly as he got up from his own seat and went over to look in the only likely place. Looking at her upside down and smiling quixotically at her, he asked, "What are you counting?"

[st_makemeastone]

She looked up, blinked and brandished a small square of paper.

"Squares." She wrinkled her nose, "I keep losing count."

There was a bit of a paper mess around her despite ho precise the squares themselves were.

[st_andingtall]

Probably he should be more weirded out about her counting squares of paper than he was, but Sam just accepted it. It didn't mean he wasn't curious.

He pulled a pen from his jacket pocket and offered it to her. "You can write numbers on them to keep track. What do you need to count them for?"

[st_raighttovampire]

Caroline still wasn't sure about Sam. He was undeniably hot but he was also, she was sure, a hunter. Still, he'd just solved a mystery. From her table where she habitually put herself (near the door between it and the coffee), she listened to the conversation at the desk and when Sam had sat down, launched herself out of her chair and over to his booth.

"Did I hear that right? The guy with the wheelchair checked out?"

[st_andingtall]

"Checked out or was checked out. He's gone anyway," Sam agreed with a nod to Caroline.

Something about her still didn't quite track for him. Way too wary for your average girl her age, even one raised to know about stuff like witchcraft. If she was a hunter, maybe, but she didn't have the anger and chip on her shoulder most of the hunters seemed to.

Her jerked his thumb back over his shoulder toward the Innkeeper, since he still couldn't remember the guy's name. "Says it wasn't Flash's choice."

[st_raighttovampire]

Caroline took a seat without asking, her face tense with thought. "So there's a way out of here but you can't choose it? What the hell kind of hotel is that? Did he die? Is that how he got out?"

This wasn't the Other Side. That was gone. Torn apart by the Travelers. So they weren't dead, at least. Well, most of them weren't dead. She was dead, but in a different way.

[st_andingtall]

"Not as far as I know." His brows furrowed over a scowl of frustration. "The Innkeeper either doesn't know or won't tell us. I looked for him everywhere, so I think I'd have seen if there were bloodstains or anything...unless the hotel cleaned them up already."

Sam's scowl deepened at that. "Great. We live in a self-cleaning prison. So there's no way to know if anyone murders anyone else."

[st_arkcrowblack]

"Checked out?" The words were barely more than a whisper, but fervent in a way Snow White hadn't been in weeks... months, if she really thought about it. Her black eyes were bright with something too fierce to properly be called hope, but about the only thing that could stop her from her important missions of (hopefully simultaneously) avoiding people and finding food, it was a sign of some hope of getting the fuck out of here.

And Sam wasn't so bad, she supposed.

[st_andingtall]

"Hey, Snow," Sam answered before he even looked up. He'd learned to recognize her voice by the second or third day, because she used it so infrequently. It made him listen more closely when she spoke.

Like now, even before he the hope in her eyes (desperation?), he could hear it. He made his voice as gentle as he knew how without talking down to her and said, "Yeah. He's gone. But I don't think he decided to leave. I think he just disappeared, same as how we got here."

[st_arkcrowblack]

For the briefest moment she had dared to believe that she might at least leave and go somewhere else, even if it didn't mean going back to Gotham. But of course, that had been too much.

Gotham in a way had been cruel to her in that regard. She'd learned something about how to hope, and now that was backfiring.

Snow wilted so gradually that even she could hardly tell between one moment and the next when exactly the light died out. "Oh."

[st_andingtall]

"Yeah."

One look and Sam's heart went out to her. He moved over in the booth to make room for her. Even though he didn't really expect her to sit, he hoped she would.

"I was just gonna get something to eat. Want anything?"

[st_ableandbar]

Hair still damp from the shower, Lindsey sat in a booth in the cafe, his feet propped up on the opposite seat. There was a beer on the table, condensation forming on the outside of the glass. He was reading a paperback, and every few pages or so, he'd reach for the glass and take a swallow without looking away from the page.

It might've looked to some like he was oblivious to everything around him, but he was more than capable of multitasking in actually desperate circumstances. So he saw when the Winchester guy came in, and he heard what he said. "Somebody checked out?" he asked, still reading but not hiding the curiosity in his voice.

[st_andingtall]

Sam looked up at the sound of a gruff drawl and, after a quick glance around, pinned it to the guy who worked with Snow out in the stables. Not the type you'd usually take for a reader, but neither was Dean and he read everything. Sam got the feeling just from how he didn't look Sam's way, there was more to the guy than met the eye.

"Yeah, guy in the wheelchair. Eugene Thompson."

No better way to find out than to talk to him.

[st_ableandbar]

Lindsey'd seen the guy in the wheelchair, but hadn't had any reason to talk to him. He wondered how long it would've been before he noticed the guy was missing. "That doesn't bode well for Mr. Thompson." Or the rest of them. They remembered Thompson, though, and he wasn't sure they would if this was one of the Senior Partners holding dimensions.

Didn't mean it wasn't someone else's, though.

"You and your brother gonna check it out, then?" They knew something about the world most people were oblivious to, Lindsey was still figuring out what and how much. But the fact Winchester was already asking the innkeeper about Thompson said he wasn't the type to let this sort of thing slide.

[st_andingtall]

Well, he'd paid attention, more than most people. Not that many people seemed to have connected "banish ghosts recreationally" with "professional investigators." He and Dean had agreed it wasn't much use trying to keep it secret. They just kept the goriest parts away from the civilians.

Somehow, he didn't think this guy was one of them.

"I was checking it out. Hit a dead end. I'm taking a break to rethink."

[st_udious]

Henry wasn't exactly an expert of The Faces of Sam, but that certainly didn't seem to be a good one. He wasn't sure if he should be saying anything. After all Sam and Dean did tend to be a unit and there hardly seemed to be any sense in forcing his way into that. Still...

He wasn't close enough to hear Sam muttering to himself though he could tell the young man had spoken. No. No, he couldn't just leave it. If there was something he might be able to do to help, even if that something was to just be an ear, well, he had to offer.

"Do you mind if I ask what's troubling you?" he said once he was close enough to Sam to speak at a reasonable volume without feeling like he was invading the young man's space.

[st_andingtall]

Sam stiffened at the sound of Henry's voice, but he caught the actual words and his shoulders lowered again. His head came up and he met Henry's gaze, eyes bright with curious uncertainty. His mouth quirked wryly. "That's not very Winchester of you."

He did shrug, though, and tip his chin at the other side of the booth, inviting the guy who was way too young to be his grandfather to sit. "Asking about feelings is kind of taboo, unless someone's dying or abut to explode."

[st_udious]

Henry let out a dry chuckle as he sat down. "No, I suppose it isn't." His own father had been much the same way. Henry himself was generally alright with being a little softer when it came to the people he cared about. "I promise I won't tell your brother I have any lick of concern for other people if you don't. Heaven forbid a Winchester have a kind heart and let the world see it," he teased.

He rolled his shoulders, a settling kind of gesture as he considered things. "I just never saw any point in raising someone to think emotion makes him less of a man, but I suppose that hardly matters now and neither of us probably wants to talk about John anyway."

[st_andingtall]

"Yeah, no." Talking about Dad inevitably led to wondering what Dad would've been like if Henry had raised him, and from there, whether Dean could have had a life, what Sam would've done with his. He shrugged instead and pointedly changed the subject.

"It's nothing serious, anyway." At least not the stuff on this side of whatever dimension shift they occupied. So far as he'd figured out. "Just little shit. Having to actually find Dean or page him instead of texting if I want to tell him something. Ghosts that won't stay banished. The hotel staff's obsession with towels and anti-obsession with answers... and not being able to figure this place out so we can go home."