Chapter 15 : Rat Bastard

by

     I was surprised the two of them hadn't come knocking down my motel door when I told them I wasn't feeling good. It was the same excuse I used the morning they tried to wake me up to torch the scarecrow, but seeing as how they were only a few rooms down from me, I guess they figured they would know if I tried to skip out on them again. They were an odd sort, the two of them. It was like they took turns checking up on me. Every hour on the hour, one of them was coming to get something out of the car, which was coincidentally parked next to my bike in front of my room.

     I was supposed to meet them at the diner across the street, but after Roy's little episode, the only thing I wanted was to be left alone, not that my mind ever allowed it. I couldn't even sit through my favorite movie, and I found myself curled up in my bed, researching faith healers and their abilities through the night.

     If Le Grange had seen something, I wanted to know what it was and how he did it. There had to be something out there, and I had spent nearly every bill in my wallet printing out the stack of research on my bed. The look on the night manager's face still made me chuckle, but it faded through the night as I scoured through it all.

     There was nothing here, at least nothing I could piece together. I was just damn sure that none of this had absolutely anything to do with the almighty himself. If that were the case, he probably would have taken me out himself years ago.

     Sam knocked on my door a little afternoon. He must have been doing the same thing all night because he looked worse than Dean did when he was dying. He was still a walking giant, but he wasn't as intimidating in his plain white tee and jeans.

     "Can I come in?"

     I stepped back away from the doorway and waved my hand into the room. His laptop was tucked tightly under his bulging arm, and he gave me a half-smile as he walked past me, setting it down on the small table in the corner.

     "Is everything okay?" I asked him, trying to push the awkwardness from the air. I pulled up the hood of my jacket and tightened the ties, hoping it would cover the marks on my neck, and shut the door slowly behind him. 

     We had never officially met, and it was the first time I had actually talked to him one on one. The voicemail he had left me was the first thing he ever really said to me, and my text response left little to be discussed, but seeing as how he didn't take too kindly to my presence the first time,- I wasn't expecting him to fold like an open book and tell me about his night.

     He didn't respond at first. He picked through the papers on my bed, and for a moment, I thought he looked impressed. I held the pot of fresh coffee up to him, and from the look on his face, I half expected him to grab the pot and chug it down, but he shook his head as he finally spoke. "So you did know?"

    "Know what?"

    "About Le Grange."

    He held up a page I had printed out and scoffed at it as his head shook. I stepped forward, taking it out of his hand, and looked it over. It was nothing we didn't already know about faith healers. He picked up my journal and skimmed over the page titled , and I quickly snatched it out of his hands. "Please don't touch my stuff."

     It wasn't like he could read it. My chicken scratch was something to be desired, but the only thing he would get out of it was Le Grange's back story. How he woke up one day stone blind and found out that he had cancer that mysteriously disappeared just days before he found his gift.

     "You knew that something was going on here." He was vague, but his voice was stern. "You knew that somebody had to die to save Dean's life."

     I shook my head at him.

     "Sam, I have no idea what the hell you're talking about." I defended myself as he retreated to his computer.

     He went on about Dean's doctor's appointment this morning. He was healed. A hundred percent healthy, unlike Marshall Hall. The twenty-seven-year-old gym rat that dropped dead at the same time that Dean had been healed. Heart attack. Sam had gone to look into it after the appointment, and apparently, how and why he died was still not apparent, but the clock at the gym had stopped at the exact moment that Let Grange placed his hand on Dean's head.

     "I'll admit that yes, I knew something was going on here, but I had no idea that people were dying. Your dad was the one that told me where -"

     "What?" He asked as a wave of instant anger took over him, and the more I thought about it, the angrier I became myself.

     "That rat bastard," I muttered, ignoring the sudden scowl on Sam's face.

     I ran my fingers over my face and grabbed my research from the bed, spreading it across the floor. The answer was here somewhere, and I quickly got to work. Crossing and matching information until I had something that resembled an answer.

     "What are you doing?" He asked, his voice becoming agitated. I didn't mean to ignore the first five times he asked me, but nothing in the world was relevant when I was focused. Voices weren't heard. People were ignored. Quite honestly, if I was in the middle of a breakthrough, I wasn't even sure a gun to the head would have snapped me out of it, but I knew Sam might be able to help.

     "Your dad told me to save Dean and then end it," I explained to him. "I didn't understand what he was talking about. I thought there might have just been somewhere nearby, but this is what he meant."

      I waved my hands over the papers and watched as Sam crouched down next to me, wide-eyed and horrified. "He wanted you to end Roy."

      "I figured there was a catch, but Sam, I didn't think he was crazy enough to let somebody die."

    Sam leaned into his hands, running them over his face, and he sighed as the door swung open. Dean stood there staring at us. A small grocery bag in one hand and a tray of coffees in the other. His face lit up with a quizzical smile, and a part of me wanted to tell him to savor the amusement of the situation because once he realized why I was crawling around the floor like a lunatic, he wouldn't be so amused.

     "I got lunch." Dean finally said as he walked into the room slowly.

     He ignored my incessant mumbling and stepped around me, not bothering to say excuse me. He set the food down on the small counter, and I groaned as the two of them stood in silence before retreating to the fridge and cracking a beer.

     "It's not even one o'clock?" Dean said, his voice full of judgment. I glared at him, staring at the coffees he had brought in and cracked two more beers open, and slid them across the small counter towards the boys.

     The bundle of nerves that he was, Sam took his without hesitation and put half of it down before I even took more than a sip of mine. My mind was all over the place trying to arrange the pages as I remembered them,

     Dean chuckled as he set the bag down on the counter. He pulled the take-out boxes out and set them on the counter, pulling one of the burgers towards himself. I was confused for a moment. Almost angry at the fact that there was a salad sitting in front of me, but he picked it up and laughed at the look on my face as he handed it to his brother.

     "Thank you," I muttered as j bit into my burger, swishing it down with a sip of my beer, ignoring his judgemental. "You can look at me like that all you want, but I can guarantee you're going to wish you would have drunk yours before we tell what happened."

     Dean set his burger down and stared between the two of us. There was no way I wanted to be anywhere near him when Sam explained this to him, but with my keys on the other side of Dean, I wasn't going anywhere.

     And I was right, but so was Roy. He was devastated. Angry. Betrayed. Even though Sam had told him over and over that neither of us knew, it still didn't hide the look of disgust on his face.

     I never thought Dean was the kind of guy that cared about casualties, but after they had stopped shouting, his gaze narrowed in on me, and I shrunk into myself.

     "You knew this was going to happen, didn't you?"

     "Do you really think I would have brought you all the way out here if I knew somebody was going to die?"

     "Yeah, I do." He snapped. "You said yourself that Dad promised to leave you alone if you helped me."

     "So, I would trade your life for somebody else's when there were children in that room?" He opened his mouth to speak, but I cut him off again. "You may think I'm a terrible person, and that may be true, but I don't play with death."

     He opened his mouth to talk back, but I waved my hand at him as my words repeated in my head.

    "Andi-"

     "Shut up, Dean." I turned away from them quickly and dropped to my knees in front of the papers. "I got it."

     "What are you talking about?"

     "There's only one thing in the world that can give and take life like Roy has been," I explained, ripping through the papers in search of one.

     It was far too easy, and I wasn't sure why I hadn't thought of it before. No mortal or witch could trade a life for a life as easily as Roy had made it seem. I knew there was a bigger picture, and a smile spread across my face as I found the one I was looking for.

     I handed it to Sam, but Dean was quick to rip it out of his hands. He stared down at the skeleton in confusion, but he bounced his head around processing the information as his brother stood to join him.

     "A reaper?" Sam asked, his voice full of surprise. 

     Dean followed. "You really think blind boy Roy can control a reaper?"

     I shook my head. "If you have any other theories, I'd love to hear them."

     Sam shook his head at his brother before sitting back down in front of his computer. "No, that makes complete sense."

    "In what world does that makes sense?"

    Sam looked up at him. "Our world Dean."

    Sam typed away at his computer, mumbling something about a cross he had seen at the church tent, and I leaned back against the counter, devouring my burger.

     "That's it." Sam pointed at the screen. I leaned up next to Dean to get a closer look, and he slowly turned his head towards me, an aggravated look on his face.

     "What?"

     For a second, I expected him to tell me not to touch him, but instead, he moved to the side, making room for the two of us as Sam explained everything.