#as a soil girlie i am screaming internally.

[saltyground]

"yeah a lot of it everywhere...sand by the looks of things"

[winchester-ofthe-lord]

Classic Winchester Adventures - Chapter 6

Square Filled: Motel

Rating: gen

Warnings: none

Word Count: 2.7k

Summary:  Sam and Dean have to find out what’s going on in the “Haunted Motel” they discovered in chapter 2

read on ao3       read from the beginning

A/N:  hiya guys, this is chapter 6 for @spnclassicbingo ’s challenge. MASSIVE thanks to @thefandomforme for helping me with this <3 Stay tuned for the next chapters :)

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A couple of days later, the Impala - now (un)fortunately back to black - rolls off of the highway, and onto the narrow forest road leading toward the “Haunted Motel” Dean is already very keen on entering. The building is only a few minutes outside of town, but for whatever reason about half a mile into the woods, accessible only via a bumpy track that doesn’t really benefit Baby’s suspension.

“Who the hell came up with the stupid idea of building a motel here?” Dean complains, wincing when one of Baby’s tires hits a pothole, rattling both the car and the two brothers like children in a washing machine. Dean sighs internally, externally, and most of all, eternally, as he tenderly strokes over his steering wheel, muttering plaintive apologies under his breath.

They reach the parking lot, or rather the slightly more flattened area in front of the bedraggled building, and let their eyes roam the shabby house facade that seems to be crumbling away right before them, the abandoned, rusty-looking swing hanging from the tree in the ‘front yard’, the wall of trees surrounding the parcel of land and the road, and a decayed sign that says ‘Welcome to Coal Creek Motel - Enjoy your stay’. Homey.

Today is the eleventh, meaning that they’ve got two and a half days left to find out what exactly they’re even hunting here, why it’s killing people, and how to annihilate it. Easy as pie.

“Why is it always Friday the thirteenth, anyway?” Sam asks as he opens the Impala’s trunk to grab his and Dean’s guns and knives - they decided to scan the area first, then the, at this time of the day hopefully empty, building, before they’d interrogate the owners and possible previous victims. “I mean, why not… I don’t know, why not Thursday the 25th or something?”

Dean takes the proffered weapons from his brother, shaking his head with a soft huff, “Hell, if I knew.” He tucks the gun into the back of his jeans, the knife into the sheath at his ankle, and locks the car. Checking his flip phone for the time, he also sees his most favorite notification: no service. Awesome. “Okay, Sammy, cell reception is shit out here, so we gotta make sure we’re both back at the car in about-” he checks the time again, because he sometimes has the attention span of a goldfish- “one hour and fifty minutes, before the owners open the motel for the nightly tour. You copy?”

“Yes, sir!” Sam scoffs, grinning smugly while he salutes to his brother.

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Neither of them found anything on their search around the property. No weird symbols, no dead bodies, no creepy altars, no traces of blood, nothing. Which leaves only the house itself to examine.

The brothers accompany a group of seven other people on the tour through the motel. Their guide is a grumpy old man with an unkempt beard, and a generally unkempt outer appearance. But he answers most of the questions some of the overly excited visitors ask him, so he’s at least doing his job.

Unfortunately, even though the tour includes the entire building, nothing Dean and Sam didn’t already know is brought to light. Except for maybe the horrifyingly poorly done getup of the whole “Haunted Motel”. Including faux skeletons and cobwebs (although, looking at the overall condition of the house, the latter ones might actually be real), fake blood stains on the walls and floorboards, eerie paintings and soiled mirrors in the most random places, and a bunch of other stuff that doesn’t bring the Winchesters closer to solving the case.

They let themselves fall behind the group for a moment to share their thoughts, but none of them noticed anything off, or even slightly suspicious, so they decide to come back in the early morning to sift through the house on their own, without that creepy old dude watching their every step.

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“Hey, Dean,” Sam yells from somewhere on the first floor while Dean lets the yellowish beam of his flashlight wander across the walls in the hallway on the second floor. “I think I found something, get your stupid ass down here.”

It takes him almost two minutes to find his way back through the maze structured building until he finds Sam standing right in front of the front door, illuminating the ugly rug splayed on the floor. More precisely, the rug is rolled to the side, revealing dark wood planks underneath it. There’s a faint outline of a symbol...or a sigil maybe? drawn in dark gray paint (it probably used to be black, but over the years it must’ve faded) onto the floor, looking like a big ‘T’ with some sort of swirl above the upper horizontal line, and another swirl on the right next to the vertical line. “A tulpa?” Dean asks, squinting into the blinding beam of his brother’s flashlight pointed at his face.

“Sure looks like it.” The blinding light lowers toward the floor again.

Awesome. Just. Awesome. Tulpa means they can’t kill anything, and have to convince possibly hundreds of people, if not more, that there’s nothing going on here. Easy. As. Pie.

Which also means that they can’t do anything at the moment.

“Let’s get back to our motel and get some shut-eye. I’m so fucking tired, man,” Dean says and kicks at the rug, causing it to roll unceremoniously back over the painted planks. He opens the door and waits for Sam to walk past him before he follows suit.

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After sleeping until late morning - they came back from their self-guided, private motel tour around 4:30 am after all - they spend several hours reading stories about people’s experiences in the “Haunted Motel”.

“Holy shit,” Sam curses at his laptop sitting on the desk in front of him, “there’s someone who ran away from about 500 giant tarantulas that were scattered across the entire house.” He taps viciously on the touchpad of his laptop to scroll to the next entry. “And then there was a guy who said he, quote, ‘was torn apart by giant cockroaches with wolf heads’. Damn, that shit sounds terrible.”

These stories go on for quite a while, and Dean isn’t so sure if they’re really dealing with a tulpa in this building, or if they’re entirely on the wrong track here. “Isn’t a tulpa like, a bunch of people believing in the same shit?”

Sam nods his affirmation. “Yeah, a tulpa is created when many people are concentrating on the same thing while looking at the Tibetan Spirit Sigil we saw on the floor in front of the door. Once created, the tulpa takes on a life of its own and doesn’t need people to believe in it anymore. But Dean, I’m not that sure anymore if it’s really a tulpa going nuts in that motel.”

“Yep, just my thought,” Dean says, leaning forward to scrub his hands over his face. “I mean, first off, the sigil is under that ugly ass rug, so people aren’t really likely to see it, right? And every single person is seeing something different? Shouldn’t most people at least see the same thing? That doesn’t make any sense.” Heaving an exasperated sigh, he sinks back into his chair, closing his eyes, trying to sort through the given information.

Sam shuts his laptop with a soft click, and sighs almost as loud as Dean did mere seconds ago. “I don’t know, man. But I think you’re right.” He sighs once more, running a hand through his girly hair. “But if it’s not a tulpa, what else could it be? We only have like, one more day to find out what it is and how we can kill it, Dean.”

His brother is right. And this year, Friday the 13th only happens twice, so they have to kill whatever it is now, or they won’t get another chance for a rather long time.

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“No no no no no no no. Fuck. No. Nope. Nu-uh. Big. Fucking. HELL NO,” Dean repeats over and over again, a little under his, but mostly out of breath, as he’s running down the hallway on the second floor of the motel. Why he’s running? Oh, just the blonde woman in a white nightdress, looking suspiciously similar to his mom, chasing after him while screaming bloody murder.

Oh. And she’s on fire. Literally.

All of a sudden, she appears right in front of him, causing Dean to come to an abrupt halt, almost face planting into the wall to his right in his attempt to change the direction of his stampede.

“Where are you going, Dean?” his not-mother asks in a malicious snarl. “Don’t you love your mommy?”

Dean jerks his head around to look for another escape. “Not real,” he mumbles under his breath. “Not real, not real, not real, not real.”

The blonde, burning woman reappears right in front of Dean once again as he tries to make his way downstairs where he suspects his brother. Just that now he watches his mother’s face slowly melting off her bones, revealing charred flesh that starts to turn into a new shape.

It’s black and gooey for a few seconds, but little by little, the charred shape merges into a new face.

“Dean, why on earth is my car pink? What have you done?!” the slightly contorted replica of his father asks in an accusing tone. What the fuck, John isn’t even dead. This fucking tulpa is obviously on crack. Besides, the car was pink. It’s black again. Thankyouverymuch.

“SAAAAAAAAAAAAAAM,” Dean shrieks into the hallway.

Mary-John-now-flaming-Vampire-Hellhound dissolves into thin air, only to re-materialize behind Dean, growling threateningly at him, and drooling hissing acid on the creaking floorboards. Where the fucking hell is his idiot brother?

The day before, while Sam was busy doing research on the origin story of the tulpa, Dean was equally busy chatting with Nancy the witch via text messages on his flip phone. She may have mutilated his car for a day, but she was also pretty darn hot, and Dean’s never been one to miss out on an opportunity to do some horizontal tango. During all his, what could easily be called, sexting, he pretty much blanked out the Samsquatch and his findings, so Dean doesn’t actually have any idea what’s really going on in that “Haunted Motel” after all.

He vaguely remembers Sam telling him something about Harry Potter fans staying at the motel in 2000, the year after The Prisoner of Azkaban was published, and something about Boggarts. Dean thinks that Sam mentioned the fans “summoning” the Tulpa-Boggart more or less by accident, when they talked about how interesting and frightening the idea of the physical manifestation of one’s worst nightmares would be - while standing right over the giant tulpa sigil in the entrance area.

There was also a good reason why it’s always Friday the 13th, maybe it was because one of the fans was thinking about Jason with his ugly hockey mask. But maybe Dean got that wrong. He wasn’t really paying that much attention, to be honest.

Sam seemed to know and have a plan, so that was enough for the older Winchester.

This plan included an attempt at “exorcising” the Tulpa-Boggart by performing some kind of spiritual cleansing Sam found in one of his books. Or on the internet? Whatever. The important thing is that he did have a plan including the destruction of… something. They’d hoped that by destroying this something, the Boggart would vanish.

It did not.

“Dean?”

Breathing a relieved sigh at the sight of his brother ascending the stairs from the first floor, Dean takes a step toward him. “Took you long enough, asshat. We really need to get outta here. This thing is driving me ins- WHAT THE HELL?!” His relief quickly fades away into nothingness when his brother’s head, rather unexpectedly, bursts into a thousand pieces, painting the walls around the staircase in blood splatters.

Worst fucking nightmare.

Dean scrubs viciously at his eyes, trying to scratch the disturbing image from his retinas, while stumbling forward, and rushing down the stairs. Please let Sam be here somewhere.

“Sammy?” Dean tries carefully, peeking around the corner and into the room where he hopes to find his brother.

Two strong hands clasp at the lapels of his jacket and press him against the wall. “Dean? Please tell me it’s you.”

“‘Course it’s me, you dipshit,” Dean grunts into his brothers face, squirming slightly in his attempt to free himself from the persistent grip. “Now get your giant Sasquatch hands off of me. We need to get the fuck out of here.”

Finally, Sam lets go of Dean’s jacket with a nod, takes a step back from Dean, and briefly skims the room with an unnerved expression. It’s been quite a long time since Dean’s seen his brother that panicked. If it wasn’t for fear of his own life, he actually might find it hilarious.

“What does it look like for you?” Dean asks as he leans around another corner to make sure the entrance area is empty, holding his fist up as a sign for Sam to stay behind.

He hears a grumbled, defeated sigh before Sam answers, “Clowns. Yours?”

“Mom.” This time it’s Dean who exhales a shaky sigh. Only a couple more steps until they reach the front door. “And then Dad lecturing me on defiling his car with the pink velvet shit.”

Sam stops next to him, furrowing his brows in a judgemental expression. “Really Dean, that’s your worst nightmare?” Dean’s eye-roll is basically a full body move. He yanks at the door handle, and says, “Well, now it certainly is.”

They step out onto the front porch, down the stairs and toward the Impala where they take a couple of minutes to catch their breath, and process their respective nightmares. Leaning against the side of the car in the middle of the night in front of an eerie building somewhere in the woods is definitely not one of Dean’s favorite things to do.

“What the hell are we supposed to do now, huh?” Dean pinches the bridge of his nose for the hundredth time tonight before refocusing on his brother. “I mean, technically, there’s not really much we can do. We can’t kill it. We can’t stop people from coming to this fucking motel. We can’t find these damn Harry Potter fans and make them, I dunno, unthink the Boggart out of existence. We can’t do shit, man.”

For once, his smart-alecky brother doesn’t have a witty remark. All he manages to do is a somewhat forlorn shrug, letting his arms go limp by his sides, exhaling wearily.

“Okay, then,” Dean says and pushes himself away from the car, swatting his thighs once, “let’s burn that shit down.”

“What? No, we can’t do that, Dean!”

“Why not?”

“Uhm, because it’s wrong? And what if they just rebuild it?”

Dean rolls his eyes again. “Then we’ll come back and burn that down, too.”

There’s a minute of pregnant silence until Sam speaks again. “You know what? You’re right. Let’s burn it down. The building’s empty now, so at least nobody will get hurt. And it’s not like they’re making a fortune with that shit house anyway.”

So they do exactly that. They each take a gas can from the Impala’s trunk, and spread the highly flammable content around and inside the house, soaking the already rotting wood of the first floor and the porch - neither of them dares to go upstairs in fear of another nightmarish encounter, but well, if the first floor burns down, so will the rest of the house, right?

While Dean is already back at the car, getting it ready to head off by driving it toward the narrow path leading back to the highway, Sam spreads a trail of gasoline from the front door of the motel down the stairs of the porch and several yards away from the building, until he’s next to the car.

“Would you do the honors?” Sam asks his brother, holding out his favorite Zippo with a knowing smirk. As much as the two of them enjoy solving cases, actually killing the monsters they’re hunting, and leaving haunted places...not haunted anymore - it’s also fucking amazing to destroy things. Besides, watching a house burn down does have something oddly meditative.

And the truth is, not everything can be saved.

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