#and after two nights in a row of being awoken early by a cricket in the house it didn't happen this morning thank goodness

[isfjmel-phleg]

Sending the dreaded YOUR ILLS ARE OVERDUE emails is part of my job but

at some point I wish these grown adults (professors!) would have the responsibility to keep track of their own due dates instead of acting like said dates don't exist until I start bugging them about it. You expect your students to turn things in on time: set an example.

[gutsngrace]

For @ain-t-bovvered​ ‘s #talesofthewinchesters. I had sooo much fun doing this. It’s not from any particular season, though I was drawing heavily on early supernatural vibes. 

Summary: There’s a place, at the crossroads of Nowhere and Everywhere, that the Winchesters are known as a legend. 

There’s a truck stop just off of I-80, a transitory town that is nothing but a gas station, a motel, a diner, and a pair of bathrooms. It’s a kind of purgatory, a meaningless landmark denoting the distance across Nebraska. Fields stretch in every direction for miles, a kind of sea that gives rise to madness. It’s a place you are either sentenced to or flee to when there is nothing left. The nameless little blip is only known as a mild grimace among truckers.

In this little nameless place, there’s an equally nameless diner that knows it will amount to nothing but a hot meal. At the Formica tables and red leather bar stools, truckers trade stories to swear they’re alive as time itself seems to slow and take a seat beside them. Usually it’s little things they talk about, like family, tourist attractions, traffic horror stories. But sometimes, when the hour gets late and even conversations pass by on the highway without bothering to be had, the horror stories are real.

Truckers, unlike most, know that it’s not such a small world. Know that there are too many miles between stops, too many miles of forests and fields and shadows for mankind to know their self proclaimed fish bowl. It’s what hunted things say to sleep at night. No, they’ve seen too much, seen things run alongside them and disappear. They’ve seen too little too, which is almost worse. There’s no reason for the world to be that still, not unless it’s holding its breath.

It’s one of these nights, clinging to the diner’s bar like a life raft in the sea of fields, that a trucker tells the story. There’s a glass of water in his white-knuckled grip that says he’s not drunk, and a haunted look that says he’s not crazy. It’s for these reasons he’s got an audience, tonight.

Bad Moon Rising plays quietly on the jukebox, the tune unnervingly upbeat for what is being told.

The man tells of a truck stop he had the misfortune of touching down in a few years back. Week after week, a truck or two wouldn’t finish it’s trip, left abandoned in the parking lot. The drivers were never contacted about the issue, because they never showed up again. He only learned as much sitting at a diner like the one he sits at now, the wide eyed waitress murmuring under her breath.

Fear had settled cold in his bones when he pushed out of the diner door to retrieve his duffel from his truck. All his senses were on high alert as he walked between the dark, eerie rows of nearly identical semis. It’s the only reason he heard anything at all. Duffel in hand, he heard footsteps behind him, trailing him almost silently. When he turned, it was only one of the usual prostitutes that hung around the stops like a sweet smell, leaning against one of the trucks. He watched as she pulled out a cigarette, lighting it and taking a deep drag away from interested eyes. He couldn’t help but think those eight inch stilettos should have made more noise.

When he turned the corner, another trucker passed him and into the waiting dark. A few seconds later, barely audible, is an inhuman growl, a grunt, then the dragging of limp feet across the asphalt. In that dark parking lot, the world is surreal. It made it easy to turn away and walk fast to his motel room, bolting it shut with a chair propped under the handle for good measure. Not that it would stop whatever made that noise, but perhaps it would let it turn to easier prey.

He slept uneasily, the back of his mind a continuous, wordless alarm going off, screaming of danger. 

Sometime around midnight, he was awoken by the loud grumble of an engine and the sweep of lights through his window. Stumbling to pull the sheer curtains back, he saw something, well, out of place in the little crossroad of Nowhere and Everywhere. 

The night went still as the lights of the car turned off. Nothing moved, not even its occupants. The car was a beast of a machine, an old American muscle car that filled the parking space and then some. The black finish caught the dim, distant light as it crouched in the dark like a massive predator, the growl of its engine silenced as it lurked. The night knew it for what it was; there were no crickets, no wind, no movement. Only the large shape, sitting in the lot like the malevolent shadow in a vague nightmare, the kind of dream that seemed like a bad omen in the morning.

The doors opened, releasing two large men, broad shouldered and tall. It was then he realized that the car wasn’t the predator. It was these men that carried danger in their gait as they walked to the back of the car. There was no swagger, only the steely confidence of two men on a mission that God could not keep them from, all strength in the moonlight like a blade leaving its sheath.

He watched as the men each pulled a gun and a blade from the trunk, breath caught in his throat. A day ago, he would have wondered why they had them. But hiding in his room from whatever stalked the rows of trucks, he knew. These men were something more dangerous than whatever was out there, and he should be thanking his lucky stars they were here for it and not him.

They prowled into the dark, guns raised, and he lost sight of them.

Sometime later, he heard a single gunshot.

Morning came, his sleep oddly restful. Convinced it was a nightmare, he picked up breakfast at the diner. 

A stack of pancakes and a plate of toast with raspberry jam, he’ll never forget. Glancing around the room lazily as he reached for the syrup, he saw him. The trucker that walked past him last night and into that thing’s hunting grounds. As if feeling his eyes on him, the man turned to meet his gaze. His eyes were flat, like a body floating on shallow water. As if he had seen something he should have never seen and would never forget. There was something damning in his eyes as well; he recognized him, too. Recognized the man who let him walk to his death.

But he wasn’t dead. No, just his eyes. Though the two, almost toothlike punctures on his neck said it was a close call.

He must be overthinking it. The man must have had strange birthmarks or had an odd accident, and just felt the trucker staring at him. That’s what he told himself when he climbed up into his truck. But when he pulled the truck out of its spot and towards the endless road, away from this hallucinatory nightmare of a town, he saw it. The car.

In the daylight, it’s cheery. The black and chrome gleam in the morning sun, clearly loved and polished by it’s owner. Now he can see the Chevy insignia, a 1967 Impala. An odd thing, he thought again, for a truck stop.

A week later, out of morbid curiosity, he checked the online obituary for the little podunk town. No more disappearnces, not since that big black Impala roared into the parking lot.

When the trucker finishes his tale, the diner is quiet. The story is a little too close to home, a little too believable. Everyone has seen something, usually an unnameable, fleeting shadow. Sometimes worse. It leaves the thin air unsteady. The story is a comfort and a nightmare; there are two men looking out for them, hunting what goes bump in the night, yes. But there is, for certain, rattling the chains. And so, they are rattled. There’s another world out there, layered on top of the one they know, where men can kill monsters, where the two men are the apex predators of the things that kill people like them.

A month passed by that little piece of nowhere at seventy miles per hour on the freeway. A month before someone goes missing from the little Nebraska truck stop. A month and a half and six more disappearances before, as sure as rain, there’s an approaching growl on the expressway. It announces itself from miles away. By the time the monstrous black Impala pulls into the parking lot, the waitress is waiting for them, waiting to see just what these two men are.

The doors open and slam shut, followed by the sound of bells over the diner door.

“-said they have the best burgers. And dammit, if Death tells me they’ve got good burgers, well, I’m inclined to believe it,” the first says, easy confidence in his bowlegged gait. He’s six foot, at least, and as massive as the trucker said. But he doesn’t seem dangerous, now now, but he’s oddly at ease in the middle of nowhere, steady on their transitory ground.

An impossibly taller one rolls his eyes in the way that only brothers do, following a step behind in deference to the man that has to be his older brother. “He’s also immune to cholesterol, Dean. Unlike you, he’s not in imminent danger of heart disease.”

The first, Dean, slumps onto the bar stool. “Sam, if I die from a burger-induced heart attack, I win,” he says before turning his gaze to the waitress. “I hope the coffee is as hot as you are, because damn, am I thirsty.”

The taller one, Sam, rolls his eyes again and groans this time, but says nothing.

For a long second, the waitress stares. These men are the two beings worse than monsters? The shadow in the corner of a monster’s bedroom?

After a long moment, her cheeks warm as she realizes she’s been staring. “Sorry,” she mumbles, pouring two cups of coffee and sliding them across the laminate.

“Not exactly a problem,” Dean says, only to be elbowed in the ribs by Sam.

“Isn’t it a bit early for that, Dean?” he chastised before turning to the waitress. “Thanks for the coffee.”

On a whim, the waitress offers to take the night shift. Just to see. That, and she’s fairly convinced she won’t be able to sleep tonight. Not when she knew why they were here.

The crowd tapers off to catch some shut eye before another long day of driving. Fight the Good Fight plays on the jukebox, too loud in the empty space. The diner is a vacuum and a speaker, swallowing conversations and amplifying the scrapes of forks and the shifting of feet. Waiting. Everything here is always waiting. The waitress waits, waits for what, she doesn’t know. She’ll know when it happens.

At two twenty-six a.m., it happens. The sound of a gunshot, then another. The bloodcurdling scream of something dying in a way that befits a monster.

Two minutes later, out the window, two hulking, six foot figures prowl out of the dark. They are not quite human now, not the people who walked into the diner. They are something otherwordly, now. And while the waitress recognizes the shape of the, knows it’s Sam and Dean, she doesn’t recognize the shape being dragged behind them in barely held together parts. Whatever it is is tossed in the trunk with the long outlines of shotguns, and the trunk is slammed shut.

Anyone else would call the police. she doesn’t technically know what they’ve killed. But if that trucker was right- and she can feel he was- she doesn’t want to know.

The two men- brothers, she thinks- slap each other well done on the back. It’s a startlingly normal gesture, and just like that, the aura of danger is broken. The engine starts up in a roar, and they’re gone, as quickly as they came.

The disappearances stop.

And so it’s carried across the country, travelling through a web it’s unlikely to leave, left forgotten in the late hours in cracked leather booths at equally forgettable diners. Sam. Dean. An old Impala. A bad omen and a saving grace in one, the rising tide that sweeps the beach smooth, leaving broken shells and bodies in its wake.

Five hundred miles away, the hunters introduce themselves as FBI agents Plant and Bonham to Linda Steininger, the wife of a trucker who is away from home, telling the story of a black Impala under distant fluorescent diner lights.

Her husband has a penchant for telling stories. With a life as monotonous as his, he takes the time to make up a story by the time he returns home. But the Impala parked out front is evidence to his story, this time. But that isn’t the deciding factor. It’s the look in their eyes, something comforting and chilling. It’s intent and ominous, their eyes alone giving away the ticking of the clock in the back of their heads until the next victim. It’s the cold calculation, trying to figure out just what it is they’re hunting. And in the end, it’s the ease. No one asks about dismembered bodies in the house next door like it’s routine. Because they know it’s not some down to earth psychotic. It’s something worse and beyond earth, and that’s what they kill best.

“Thank you for your service,” she says as they turn for the Impala. “I hope you kill the monster that did this.” And if she’s just a little too serious, a little too knowing, well. She’s heard of Sam and Dean, the men that monsters fear. And she’s glad they’re out there.