lt_indigo

lt_indigo

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Ellie was surprisingly cheerful when they picked her up from Stull, and in the midst of her grumble about idiot archangels with no sense of what things are like for the wingless, she flourished a burgundy passport and informed them she was now there legally, as far as the immigration service was concerned, and she would be able to fly home on a plane if the mood took her.

“They might get a bit suspicious about your baggage,” Sam pointed out, gesturing to the relatively tiny knapsack on the seat beside her.

“One step at a time,” she said blithely. “That’s the plan for next time she’s here. Because I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but it’d be nice to wear my own clothes. Or my own boots at least.”

Dean could understand that, because he hated new boots too and often kept his long past their sell-by date because they were so comfortable, and wore them in the field while he tried to break in new ones in their downtime. It was one thing he never skimped on – footwear was important in their line of work, simply because they spent so long on their feet. Even his FBI shoes were lovely and soft these days, kept shiny only through a lot of TLC. So no, Dean didn’t think that Ellie was being ungrateful in any way. Gabriel was, but then Gabriel was still a dick, even taking the whole passport thing into consideration.

Ellie stashed the passport carefully in her bag and leaned over the back of the front seat. Normally, it was something Dean hated, but a glance over at Ellie showed that she was just staring out of the windshield, transfixed by the landscape.

“It’s very flat, isn’t it?” she said after a minute or so of watching Kansas whiz by. “And big. And straight.”

“Well, yeah,” Dean replied, confused. “It’s the mid-west.”

She gave an amused little snort. “It’s weird to me. The UK is just loads of ranges of hills and mountains connected together. I think Kansas is bigger than the entire country.”

That didn’t seem right: Great Britain had ruled half the world, America included, at one time. It couldn’t be that small, could it?

As it turned out, courtesy of Wikipedia and Sam’s omnipresent internet signal, Kansas was actually slightly smaller than the UK, by about ten thousand square miles, but even so, that was kind of mind-blowing. Even though he had been there himself, in another lifetime now, he hadn’t really grasped the scale of the place, or the lack thereof. It seemed unfeasible that so much had come from one miniscule little group of islands. It just didn’t add up in Dean’s head.

Sam’s phone kept the pair of them occupied for hours, because he kept finding out random pieces of information (mostly about monsters) and pumping Ellie for information about them. Dean tuned most of it out as completely unnecessary, but there were a few things that did catch his attention. The fact that Dracula had been real was one, and that Whitby was a major tourist trap for vampires seeking out a link to their most famous brother, to the extent that there was actually a couple of hunters stationed there permanently. Yes, the Pendle witches existed, and still poked their heads above ground occasionally. Boggarts and redcaps and all those other Harry Potter creatures that appeared in Prisoner of Azkaban? Sure, although not always as JK Rowling envisaged them. Treacle mines? Oh, definitely – treacle comes from somewhere, right? And boggarts feed on treacle just as much as fear. (Dean felt like he was missing a joke here, because Ellie definitely sounded like she was highly amused.) Wiki says they’re a myth? It says boggarts are too, doesn’t it? (Dean snorted at this, given that most of their lives revolved around things that Wikipedia said were myths.) Oh, haggis? They’re delicious, but it takes two of you to catch them you know – one to chase it and one to come around the mountain the other way and scoop it up – and the left-legged ones taste better than the right-legged ones. Oh, that’s which pair of legs is longer – they live in the mountains so they have one pair of legs longer than the other, you know. For stability, to help them run around the steep slopes of their habitat. And occasionally a left-legged haggis will mate with a right-legged haggis, and they produce a great haggis. No-one knows what they taste like, because they’re so damn hard to catch.

Sam called bullshit on that one too when he found a recipe for haggis and pulled a face. Ellie laughed and admitted it was a story the Scots told tourists and little kids.

They ended up on history after that, but it turned out that Ellie wasn’t much of a history buff, not beyond the supernatural. She knew what she had picked up in school, but hadn’t exactly gotten much of a chance to explore anything beyond that. Kind of like Sam and Dean – they knew their lore and a couple of dead languages, but nothing that normal people would consider to be ‘real’ history. Ellie ended up telling Sam to talk to Gabriel, try and persuade her to take him on a trip sometime, so he could explore his roots.

Sam then for some reason meandered back onto Harry Potter, and this time picked dragons. At that point, Ellie scoffed and said they were a myth. Dean jumped in at that point and said he had met two, but they shouldn’t worry too much about the flamey little douches – they were locked away. Sam seemed kind of disappointed that he had missed meeting such an iconic monster, the big nerd.

Dean had to admit, it was kind of nice to have some chatter in the car for a change; Dad had raised him and Sam to be quiet in the back, and they had always kind of continued on like that after Dad left them. Their silences were generally comfortable, but this friendly talk was comfortable too, and it passed the time: they were in Omaha, Nebraska, before they knew it, and a good time to stop for lunch (where Ellie disappointingly sat on the fence in the great food divide and ordered a burger and side salad).

.oOo.

They rocked up at Bobby’s late in the afternoon, with groceries. Bobby raised his eyebrows at the bags they carried into the house in kind of the same way he did when a monster did something he didn’t expect. If Dean was a cynic, he might think that Bobby genuinely didn’t expect them to pick up the food even though they had promised to and even though Dean was fairly crap at that kind of thing, Sammy was all conscientious about it.

He hugged Sam briefly and gave him a swift pat on the back. “You did good, boy.”

Sam, the giant girl, shuffled his feet awkwardly. “Good to see you too, Bobby. How’s the legs?”

“Still walking, ain’t I?”

He turned from Sam and gave Ellie a long, hard stare before turning to Dean.

“Fourteen vamps, huh?”

“Yep.”

“Were they sleeping?”

“Not for long.”

“So, what is she then?”

“Gabriel’s vessel,” Sam jumped in. “He… uh, she?”

“She,” Ellie confirmed. “Confusing as hell, isn’t it?”

“Ain’t Gabriel dead?” Bobby asked. “Didn’t you two idjits tell me he got iced by Lucifer a couple months back?”

“Trickster,” Ellie said with a wry smile. “She came out of it badly though – she hasn’t been able to do anything except sleep until last week. Hi, I’m Ellie Van Helsing. You must be Bobby. Sam and Dean have told me a lot about you on the trip down here. May I use your bathroom, please? These guys don’t seem to believe in urination.”

Bobby pointed her in the general direction of the bathroom and rounded back on Sam and Dean the second she was through the door.

“Hey, we kept the stories clean,” Dean said with a smile, holding his hands up.

Bobby eyeballed him. “And what’s your story? Why am I hearing about you time travelling from Sam?”

Ah. He had been wondering when they would get around to that. He shrugged, grabbed some beers from the fridge and flopped onto the sofa before starting out on the story once again, giving essentially the same version of the story he had given to the angels back in Lawrence. Ellie came back before he had even got to describing Sam’s Hell-wall, let alone what had happened to Sam when it got torn down. She took the beer he nudged over to her and sat, silently, on the floor between him and Sam.

Bobby looked completely incredulous when Dean got to God’s intervention.

“God?”

“Uh huh.”

“The big guy? Deadbeat, never-showed-his-face-for-the-damn-Apocalypse God?”

“Looks like Chuck,” Dean said. He knew it was incongruous, but it beat finding other ways of saying ‘yes’. Because he knew what Bobby was thinking: he had thought those exact things himself, as it was happening.

“He tossed me back here, said I would be able to change stuff. So here I am, changing stuff. Cas is upstairs with Gabi, sorting out the crap up there. Sam’s here and not still stuck downstairs in the Cage. It’s all good.”

Bobby looked deeply sceptical. “When is everything ever ‘all good’?”

“Right now,” Dean said. “Crap’s over. We just got our regular messed-up lives to go back to now.”

Bobby was too cynical to buy it. Dean knew that Bobby was doing the math with his story and finding the parts where things didn’t add up; the parts where he hadn’t wanted to say how Sam’s wall had broken, or how the Leviathans had escaped from Purgatory. He also knew that Bobby and Sam were both intelligent enough to calculate the missing values eventually, but that was a while off. Bobby was going to question the math on two hunters plus fourteen vamps sometime soon too, because that just wasn’t right in anyone’s books. That should equal dead hunters, not dead vamps. They were going to have to find out about Ellie’s mojo, and he wasn’t sure why Ellie was being so cagey about it with Sam when she was so open with him. It was weird.

“Your messed-up life where you’re dating an angel?” Bobby said instead of anything else.

“I guess you could call it dating,” Dean allowed. He took a sip of his beer, thinking that one over. Maybe he should actually take Cas out sometime, have a proper date? Would Cas appreciate that?

“Or are you just friends with benefits?”

Sam sniggered, the traitor.

“Dammit, no. Me and Cas, we’re… I don’t even know what we are, but it ain’t that.”

“Aww, sweet.” Bobby cooed sarcastically. Dean knew Bobby was pleased under that layer of sarcasm. Hunters just didn’t get normal lives – Bobby and Karen had proved that disastrously during the Apocalypse – but Cas would never be looking for normal anyway. Hell, he probably didn’t even know what ‘normal’ was.

“All I know is that you guys need to work out between you who wins the fifty. I’m gonna sort my laundry while you argue about that.”

Ellie set her beer down. “Can you show me?”

“Machine’s back downstairs,” Bobby put in. “Got sick of falling over the damn thing.”

Dean laughed, because that was awesome to hear. That was great news. The machine had only been moved from the basement because Bobby couldn’t get down there in his chair, and even if he was on good enough terms with his neighbours to ask for help, he was too proud to actually do so. Sam and Dean had moved the machine almost as soon as Bobby got out of the hospital, just before they left to try and track down Lucifer.

“Come on, kid.”

.oOo.

That first night was quiet enough: Bobby cooked while the three of them did their laundry and cleared some of the crap from the spare room so that Ellie at least had somewhere to sleep. They even found sheets and made all the beds, including Sam and Dean’s ones. They had kind of given up on their beds a long time ago for some reason, and Dean couldn’t fathom why. Sure, they creaked a bit and the mattresses were a bit on the lumpy side, but they were better than the floor, or the elderly sofa downstairs.

Once he got in, he realised why he had stopped using the bed as a teenager: both he and Sam were too tall for the twin beds. Dean could curl a little and fit, but Sam was just far too enormous, which served him right for growing so much. He opted to take the couch after all, leaving Dean in their childhood bedroom on his own. And after a long day’s drive followed by a lot of chores and lifting and carrying, he was exhausted and soon fell asleep.

The next day was chore-laden too: the Impala needed some TLC to make sure she was in prime condition, and Bobby had a couple of cars he was working on that he could use the help with. Sam was put to work on fixing some roof shingles that had slipped over the last year or so and even with his legs back, Bobby was too old to be doing that sort of thing. Ellie made herself useful by continuing to clear the spare room she was sleeping in, then moving on to the kitchen. Bobby did tend to just about look after himself, but no-one would ever accuse him of being clean. It was an occupational hazard of being a mechanic, and Bobby just didn’t bother too much about cleanliness now that Karen was gone again.

She knocked up some toast and eggs for their lunch (she did the eggs weirdly, but they came out okay), and by the time they were thinking about supper, Dean wandered in to find an apple pie cooling on the counter.

“I like cooking,” she said with a shrug, up to her elbows in sudsy dish water. “I just never get a chance to do it.”

Dean knew how that felt – he had discovered, during his year of playing at being domestic, that he liked cooking too, and he was kind of good at it. Better than Ellie, as it turned out, since the pie crust was a bit on the tough side. She’d over-worked the dough. But it was still edible, and the filling was all kinds of awesome (and exactly like Missouri’s, he couldn’t help but notice).

Bobby made them all wash up after they had eaten, and growled at them when Dean started flicking Sam with his tea towel. It was so worth it, because Sam had jumped about a foot in the air with a girly yelp and had landed with a wounded, betrayed expression, like a big, giant girl.

Good food, great company, and teasing Sam in the comfort of their own home? Yeah, life was good right now.

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