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He aches. His head, his knuckles, and most of all, the spot at his ribs where the bastard got a mean hit in. Shouldn't have, porky backwoods hillbilly with no experience and even less finesse, but after six beers and half a bottle of Jack, Dean hadn’t exactly been on top of his game.
Speaking of, he should probably find a place to stop for the night. Dean always maintains that he's a better driver when he's shit-faced than most people are when they're sober, but it's pitch-dark, rain coming down in torrents so he's got to squint out of the windshield to see anything. Even so, everything's sorta blurry; whether that's due to the weather or his alcohol level, he's not sure.
The way his day's been up to this point, he wouldn't be surprised if fate decides now would be a good time to prove him wrong and make him wrap the car around a tree. Better not risk that. Only problem is, he hasn't seen any road signs in forever, didn't pay attention to the last one he did see, and the map lies discarded on the passenger seat.
In short, he has no idea where he is. Fantastic. If he turns on the spot and drives back the way he came, he might find his way back to Athens, but that's the last thing he wants to do right now. Fuck that town, fuck the job, and fuck Dad. As soon as the corpse had been burned – messy affair, he'd been dead for barely a few months before he started to stir shit up – Dad bellowed directions for another solo gig at Dean and took right off.
Not like that's any news, though. Dean always thought that Sam's prissy teenage self had made it more difficult to keep their messed-up little family in check, but turns out he's what held them together. On his own, Dean doesn't seem to be enough of a reason for Dad to hang around. The longest they've stayed in the same place together since Sam booked it for Stanford was ten days. Every chance he gets, Dad has them split up and work separate cases.
So yeah, par for the course. Doesn't make it any easier.
Dean keeps blinking out of the window in hopes of running into a place-name sign or at least an ad for a motel along the road. Hell, he'd content himself with a parking space, something made of concrete that doesn't have him afraid of floating away on a river of mud while he's asleep.
That's when he sees her. She stands by the side of the road, only visible in the dark because of the bright, almost neon red of her dress. It acts like a beacon, or a stop sign, distinguishes her from the woods and the road as clearly as a life vest at sea.
He slows down the car before he has the time to consciously decide whether or not he wants to stop. Chances are, she wouldn't even want his help, drunk driver in the middle of nowhere, yeah, surely that's what girls get taught to avoid at all cost. But when he lets the Impala roll to stand a little off the road, near her but not so close that he'd risk miscalculating the distance with his clouded mind and accidentally hit her, she walks towards him.
Dean rolls down the window, and rain lashes into the car and at this face; it's windier than he'd thought. He considers shouting, although he's not quite sure what, but decides that she'll probably feel safer if he doesn't prompt her, if he gives her the last choice on whether she wants to bail or talk to him after all.
So he waits while she makes her way through the slick, rain-soaked patch of sod by the road. Soon she's close enough that he can make out her face, the shy and almost a little embarrassed smile. She's talking, but the rain's too loud, swallows the words, and it gives him the same strange feeling he always has when he watches TV on mute, like one of his senses is dulled, momentarily out of business. He gestures that he can't hear anything, can't understand, and points at the rain.
That's when she laughs. She stops for it, stands there in the middle of the heavy rain, wet to skin in her flimsy, thin dress, and throws her head back. It only lasts a few seconds, then she collects herself, smile now stronger, and runs the last few steps she needs to be in earshot.
“I said, the rain's so loud that I almost didn't hear you approaching until it was too late,” she yells as she closes the distance. Once she reaches the car, she leans down and looks at him through the window with one hand on the metal to support herself, maybe to keep from slipping on the ground. She uses the other hand to push streaks of wet hair out of her face.
Too late for what, Dean wants to ask, but he instantly feels stupid. She needs a ride, of course. What else would she be waiting for, out here in a full-on storm?
He does his best to smile at her reassuringly, hide his intoxicated state. “I'm gonna drive until I hit a town or a motel, I can drop you off there, if you wanna ride?”
She cocks her head. “Looking for anything special, or do you just want to get off the road? Because, it's still quite a drive to the next hick town big enough to support a motel, but I know of an abandoned farm house not far from here. Ten minutes, a little off the road. We could get a fire going, wait out the bad weather, get going again in the morning.”
Dean blinks away the raindrops that cling to his eyelashes, peers past her into the rain, then back at her face. She's a few years younger than him, maybe Sam's age or not even that. Her smile his honest and open, although Dean's the first one to point out that you can't always trust an expression like that. He tries to determine whether she's making a move on him or just innocently suggesting a solution to the problem at hand, and finds he doesn't care. It's not like he never hooked up with someone his brother's age or below, but that's not the kind of instinct she's triggered. More than to get into her pants, he wants to protect her, get her to safety. She looks so lost and out of place out in the weather at night, like she doesn't belong, should be anywhere else than here.
“Okay,” he says and nods toward the passenger seat, “Get in and show me the way.”
She claps her hands – a gesture so childlike that even the tiny voice in his brain that might've still shouted at him to try and seize the moment dies down – and does as she's told. “There'll be a country road that forks off to the right in a few minutes. Not entirely sure where we are right now, but I'll tell you when.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
They drive in silence until she points out the country road by tapping at his shoulder. It's not easy to keep the car on track after that, the road's as muddy as everything else out here, but he doesn't have to drive far. A minute or two later, he passes a broken-down gate, and soon he sees the house. Bigger than he thought, older, and not quite so ramshackle, but it looks abandoned alright.
He can't see that much because of the weather, but there's an old tractor that looks to be from the sixties or seventies in front, the shutters hang off the windows in half or at an angle, and the path that leads to the main door is overgrown with weeds.
He parks the car in front, not trusting the shed next to the house to hold out in the wind. Hardly the first storm that thing's seen, he knows, but this is his baby; if there's any chance that tonight will be when the old construction gives, he won't leave the Impala in there to be buried underneath.
The girl waits until he's out of the car before she gets out herself, runs after him to the door. She doesn't say anything when he picks the lock, just stands there shifting from foot to foot impatiently.
He lets her through the door first, closes it behind himself and leans on the wall as she reaches for an oil lamp that stands on a table in the middle of the room; former dining room table, he guesses. She looks around, finds a half-open cupboard and fishes out a couple of matches, lights the fuse of the lamp. Once that's done, she slumps down on the floor and carelessly wrings the water out of her long, blond hair. It's not like there's much she could ruin; the room is still carpeted, but it's dirty and gritty and the few other pieces of furniture that have been left here are old and dusty.
The fact that she behaves as if this is all familiar to her, throws him for a moment, but he dismisses it. He has no idea who she is, maybe she sought shelter here before. She could be a runaway, or from the area and has stayed here with friends for shits and giggles. Teenagers spending a night in houses like this for a dare is half the reason why ghosts have as high a headcount as they do.
Then and there, it occurs to him that they haven't introduced themselves yet, so he asks for her name, partly out of real interest, partly to break the silence. She makes a face, eyes him appraisingly, as if she's just now taking in the bruises on is face and the smell of alcohol and old adrenaline that must still come off him in waves. They didn't have much of an opportunity to get a good look at the other until now.
Nevertheless, the verdict seems to fall in his favor. “I'm Tori,” she answers and raises her eyebrows at him.
“Dean,” he says, too lazy to come up with a lie. He's not under the impression that she's going to ask for any details about who he is and why he's here, so what do names really matter? No smalltalk in the car, no further inquiries about where he was headed or what he'd been up to, and it's a strategy he's familiar with; avoid questions in order to keep the other person from asking you any. She doesn't seem too eager on disclosing more detailed information about herself, maybe wouldn't even have offered her name if he hadn't asked, and neither of them can be sure whether the other's lying anyway.
Companions in fate for a night, that's all they are.
He yawns, suddenly dog-tired now that his body has had a chance to slow down a little, looks around the room for a spot to lie down.
Tori nods towards a door at the right side of the room. “There are several rooms with beds upstairs. At least they were still here the last time.”
So she was here before. Dean tips his head to express his thanks and starts for the door she gestured at. Halfway through the room, he stops, turns to her. “You stayin' down here?”
“Nah, I'll find myself a place to sleep later. Want to dry up a bit first,” she says and gives him an exhausted but honest smile.
The meager heat of the oil lamp won't help much with that, but Dean decides it's not his place to point that out to her. If she wants to stay downstairs, so be it. He heads upstairs, faceplants onto the first bed he finds and drifts off almost immediately.
***
When Dean wakes the next morning, it's already bright daylight outside. The storm's over, the torrential rain from last night replaced by sunshine and chirping birds. He rubs his eyes and sits up, groans when the change in altitude makes pain explode in his head and floods his mouth with bile. Hangover. Figures.
He closes his eyes, takes a breath, and pushes himself off the bed. He didn't pay attention to them last night, but there are four more rooms up here, two of them furnished with at least one bed; all of them are empty.
Dean shrugs – maybe Tori's awake already, or she never made it up here and fell asleep on the floor in the main room – and climbs slowly down the stairs. His head throbs with each step, but he manages them without giving in to his rumbling stomach's desire to empty itself.
No one's to be seen in the main room either. He calls Tori's name, but doesn't get an answer. The lamp is back by the door where it stood when they came, the matches are cleared away. Dean checks the other rooms down here, calls for her a few more times, but doesn't think much off it when that still doesn't produce a response.
They didn't owe each other anything. She didn't have to wait for him to wake up, had every right to take off on her own while he was still asleep.
Outside, he has to squint against the morning sun, so bright it hurts his eyes. He winces at the sight of his car, covered up to the rear in thick, quickly hardening mud. As he gets in, he mutters an apology, vows that the first thing he'll do when he hits a town is find a car wash and clean her up.
The country road leading towards the house is still a pain to get through, but on the main road, there's almost no trace of last night's storm. A few branches snapped off by the wind, and muddy patches along the road, but that's it.
He picks the direction he gave up on last night in favor of cooping up with Tori, drives slow and keeps an eye out for her, although he doesn't count on seeing her. He doesn't even know if this is the way she was headed or not, she might have gone in the opposite direction.
Only a few minutes later, traffic thickens. Dean sees police lights in the distance, a blinking sign that beckons drivers to slow down to 30 mph because of an accident. There are more police cars around as well as officers on foot, and Dean veers off the road a little to ask one of them what happened.
The officer adjusts his belt; he's young, looks shaken by what he's seen. “Accident. Big one. Truck driver lost control of his vehicle in the storm last night, took three other cars with him. Looks pretty ugly.”
“Still cleaning up, I guess?”
“Yeah,” the officer says. “Gonna be a while. If I were you, I'd turn and drive back into town, find myself a place to have a coffee or something. Beats lining up out here.”
Back into town is still exactly where Dean doesn't want to go, but he says his thanks for the good advice anyway and is about to get onto the road again when he thinks of something else. Long shot, but hey, maybe he'll be lucky. “Oh, one more thing?”
“Ask away.”
“I met a girl last night, out here. She, uh. Showed me a place to wait out the storm and hit the road this morning before I was able to thank her. Maybe you've seen her? Late teens, red dress?”
The officer turns ashen. “About seventeen, pretty, long blond hair and a short, red dress?”
Dean nods. “That's her, yeah. So you saw her?”
“No, and chances are you didn't either. Not really. It's one of those urban legends around here. Girl like that died in a car crash in the seventies, and sometimes she appears to save drivers from the same fate on stormy summer nights.” There's some mumbling on the guy's walky-talky, and he takes it out of his belt, gives some affirmation. “Look, I gotta run. Do as I told you, drive back to town, have that coffee, and be glad you weren't out here last night, hm?”
“Yeah,” says Dean, and turns the car around to drive back to Athens after all, but not to get a coffee. He still knows his way around the local library from the footwork he did for the case, and the girl at the desk remembers his face, smiles at him sweetly when he asks for records from the seventies.
It takes him awhile to find something, vague information and a whole decade of clippings to go through, but eventually, he finds it.
Local girl killed in tragic accident, the headline says, and below it Tori Parker, 17, was on her way back home from Calhoun when she collided with a truck whose driver had lost control for reasons yet unknown. There's a picture too, and damnit, yeah, that's her alright.
He reads the whole article, but there's little more to go on. They wax lyrically about how good a student she was, cheerleader, too, and on her way to a scholarship for an Ivy League college. The way she died would've been enough to make her a restless spirit. He keeps clicking, finds a short follow-up article from about half a year later which states that the driver had fallen asleep at the wheel and that her parents were so heartbroken because of the death of their youngest child that they separated and gave up their farm.
Well, that explains why she knew her way around the place.
He considers taking it on as a case, going after her and putting her to rest, but... She's not doing any harm. In fact, as he understands it, she's saving people, most likely saved him. Dean's the first to keep anything in regards to monsters, creatures and spirits strictly black-and-white, no shades of gray or wondering how much humanity is left in any evil thing, but even in his book that's nothing she needs to be destroyed for.
But he looks up the information on where she's buried anyway, and picks the address of the nearest flower shop out of the phone book. There, he asks for a small bouquet of irises, white and without any additional props.
Tori's grave is simple, looks like it hasn't been tended to in years, and he wonders if her parents are still alive. He stands in front of the headstone, with her name engraved on it and beloved daughter, all in cursive letters, and all of a sudden he feels awkward. Here he is, standing in front of a grave, about to give a ghost his thanks for saving his life. There are several kinds of weird, a lot of them he's used to, but this is something else.
With a cough, he takes a step forward and carefully places the flowers on top of the stone. “I don't really know what to say, uhm. Thanks, I guess? And I hope you'll find rest eventually. If that's what you want. If not... Just don't become malevolent after all and make me come back to roast your ass, because I wouldn't like that. Yeah.”
With that, he steps off the grave, turns, and gets the hell out of Athens.