strangetrip | Check-In November 15

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Check-In November 15

Next week was Thanksgiving, and Caroline's preparations were well under way. She had a list of food, all of the bartenders were working on drinks. There would be entertainment - the new guy, Coby, had said something about performing and she'd heard that he'd played on his balcony over the weekend.

Since it was one of the usual days for check-ins, Caroline had decided to take the opportunity of waiting for arrivals to decorate the lobby. As with every other holiday, the inn had a huge storage room full of decorations, all labeled and packed away for the right season.

Gourds had arrived in the last delivery, so now the pink of the lobby was complimented by the orange and yellows of pumpkins and squash. A cornucopia spilled fake fruit onto the front desk, where the staff kept coming by and rotating one apple a few degrees, as though it would look more real that way. They had lapel pins on, she'd noticed. Well, who said non-real people didn't deserve a little holiday cheer too?

Caroline perched on a ladder and fastened a streamer into the high corner of the roof, and watched the door.

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"I know where your room is," Sam told her. He'd checked out the key when he had a chance. "107, Fox and Hound. It's a few doors down from mine." And River's. Oh gods. He was going to have to explain that sooner rather than later. But later enough to get to her room.

"C'mon. We're in Building 1. It's across the parking lot."

Mary felt a little more comforted that her room was on the same level as Sam's and she nodded, following him. "How long have you been stuck here at this Inn?"

"Since Christmas last year," he answered automatically. "It's November 15, here. So it'll be a year soon."

He rubbed the bridge of his nose while he thought about it and decided better to tell her now than have her find out from someone else. At least the part about Dean. Henry was more complicated.

"Dean was here, too. We got here the same day, but he came from a while before me." Before she could ask, he added, "He disappeared a few months ago. That happens sometimes. We don't know why."

"Dean..." His name came off softly on her lips and she gave a nod in understanding. She wondered what kind of man Dean had turned out to be - he was such an attentive older brother. "I'm glad you were here with your brother when you first got here." How she wished she could have been there too.

Sam suppressed the same stab of resentment he'd always gotten when Dad fawned over Dean. It wasn't that he didn't get how great Dean was. He'd just wanted to be seen for who he was, which wasn't the same as Dean. He'd told himself thousands of times that it would be different with his mother, and told himself just as many that it wouldn't, because she'd have known from the beginning what had been done to him.

"Yeah," he said as he opened the door to Building 1. "Me too." Which wasn't a lie. He had been. It was just... "But it was complicated." It always was with them.

"Complicated?" She looked at Sam with an air of interest as she looked along the wall for number that matched the key.

"Complicated," Sam repeated in a way that said 'don't dig too deep'. She was his mother, but they didn't know each other at all. And Dean's issues with being alive instead of dead weren't the place to start.

"There's a lot you need to know before I can even try to explain."

Mary didn't like the sound of that as they came upon her room. She opened it and paused. "This is.. interesting decor." Her eyes didn't know where to land first.

"This one's not bad. You should see some of the others."

Sam didn't know whether he should come in or not, since he hadn't been invited. She probably assumed he would come in, but he couldn't assume she wanted him to.

He sighed and resisted running his hand over his face. "Let me show you how the keycards work, real quick," he said instead of anything more personal. They didn't have keycards in 1983, right?

Mary nodded while trying to picture what could be worse than this and failing to really grasp it. "This card looks a little different from the ones I saw back home. They usually have bumps on them." Mary turned the key over in her hand. She assumed it was mechanical in nature rather than digital.

"These have magnetic strips. They're cheaper to produce. Sometimes they stop working," he explained and gestured for her to insert it into the card reader. "If that happens, just go down to the desk and tell Daryl. He'll recode it or just give you a fresh one."

He knew it was kind of dumb that he was meeting his mom for the first time ever and obsessing about stupid things like key cards, but he didn't think he could just jump right into so, you died, and dad raised us like warriors to find the thing that killed you, and oh by the way, he told Dean to kill me if I turned into a monster.

Mary gave another nod and went further into the room. She might have just been sucked into a weird place and found out she was dead, but she had grown up a hunter and could tell something was bothering Sam. She had no idea what or how bad or even if Sam was always like this - she had just met him of course - but there was something.

She sat and gestured for him to sit too. "Okay. I can figure out the hotel stuff later. Right now I want to know more about what happened after." A pause. "After I died."

Sam sat. It wasn't the same as Dad telling him to sit or to do anything. He didn't feel like he needed to make the point that he was his own person. His only reluctance was what to say and where to start.

He opened a beer and offered it to her, the opened another for himself. "After... Dean says Dad was never the same after. He became obsessed with finding what killed you." It was an old story for him, full of old pain, but it would be new for her. He didn't want to pile it on if she wasn't ready. "He became a hunter and he raised us like hunters."

The expression on Mary's face fell at the news of what happened after she died. There was regret and worry mixed in with disappointment. It took her a moment to find her voice and as she tried to find it, she turned the beer around in her hand. "I never wanted you boys to be hunters." Her voice was soft and a bit defeated. "I wanted you both to grow up happy and not having to worry about monsters in the shadows."

"If it was just the monsters in the shadows, Dad might've let it go. But he found out..." What you did was so bald. Not even he had enough anger to throw it in her face like that. Not when she was so sad already. "About Azazel and the deal you made. Then there was a monster in the family." Not that that was much better. But she'd asked and he didn't know how not to tell his mother the truth.

The sadness started in her eyes and then spread down to her lips and for a moment Mary looked away from Sam to the beer in her hands. Her eyes closed as she gathered herself her and took a deep breath while her right hand's middle finger idly played with her wedding ring. When she looked up, the sadness was still there, but she had steeled herself a bit. "I never meant to hurt you, Sam. Or our family."

"Yeah, well." That sounded so much like Dean, Sam nearly bit his tongue to cut it off. He'd been angry for a long time, but it was hard to sustain with her sitting her. "You weren't the only one. Dad traded his life for Dean's. Then Dean traded his life for mine." He frowned. This wasn't the way to do it. But there wasn't a better one.

"Dad told him to kill me if I ever turned."

Her brow furrowed at the mention of so many trades. She tried to picture what that could mean for everyone but the dread inside her began to fester and she pushed it away telling herself she was over-reacting. "But you didn't, right? You're all safe?" It was almost a plea more than a quesiton

Immediately, Sam regretted how quickly he'd thrown it all at her. His anger was no excuse for a lack of compassion.

He reached over and took her hand, like he would if she were Caroline or Bo or a victim of something Supernatural before he shook his head. "Dad's gone." The other pieces would have to wait.

Mary's expression fell as she looked down at her hand to the wedding ring she had on. She thought about the day John proposed. Then the words of their vows. She took a steadying breath. "How?" She looked back up to Sam.

Maybe he could spare her the details at least, since she'd imagine worse than it had been...for Dad anyway. "Dean was in the hospital. Dad traded his life for Dean's."

She closed her eyes for a moment and then gave a single nod. It seemed almost fitting she would give her life for Sam and John for Dean's. There was a pit in her stomach that she would have to mourn after, but she pushed it down for now.

Her eyes opened again. "And you boys... You're both okay now?"

"I don't know if I'd say either of us are okay," Sam answered honestly, but without the bite of anger from before. "I'm not sure we ever have been. Dean thinks his life's worthless. I'm a freak. But we're alive and we were together. That's something."

A deep line pressed against her lips as she tried to stem the various emotions from forming on her face. There was a slight hesitation for a moment as she struggled with something, her body tensing a bit, before she gave into her urge and reached out to touch Sam lightly. She wanted to apologize again. She wanted to fix things. But she was dead. She looked at him with sad eyes that still held this soft desire to protect and make better.

Sam didn't shake her off, but he sat in silence for a long few minutes, struggling with his own emotions. He'd never extended that much courtesy to Dad, but Dad had been alive and a thorn in his side for all the years the woman in front of him had been dead.

The end result was that Sam kept his tone even and the accusations out of his eyes when he said, "I want to tell you it's fine. It's not your fault. Because you're... you, and I've missed you for my entire life. But I can't. Dad didn't realize it, but he blamed me for what happened to you. And then he figured out what Azazel did to me, and he told Dean he'd have to kill me if I turned. Dean raised me. He should never have had to shoulder that responsibility. And I wasn't even born when I got screwed over."

He lifted his head to meet her gaze. "I'm still mad. I'm probably going to be mad for a long time. But--" Now he gave her a lopsided, self-knowing half-smile. "I'm used to that." And now that she was here--which he still couldn't totally believe, since she really wasn't that much older than him--he would get over it. She was his mother and she needed him.

Check-In November 15

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