last01standing (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
last01standing) wrote2008-12-17 11:06 pm
last01standing) wrote2008-12-17 11:06 pm
Entry tags:
SPN/DA crossover--World Behind Windows [8/11, gen, Logan, Dean]
Title: World Behind Windows
Rating: PG-13ish
Disclaimer: I can lay no claims on DA, SPN or Life on Mars
SPOILERS: DA pilot, SPN through season four, plot premise taken from Life on Mars (UK)
Summary: Logan gets shot. That’s when things get strange.
Notes:For those of you who know LoM, it might be of interest that Logan is Sam Tyler, Dean is Gene Hunt, Bobby is Hyde, Lillith is the Test Card Girl and Sam Winchester’s disappearance has something to do with this whole mess.
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11
World Behind Windows
Eight
“A deal?” Logan stammers. He feels stone cold sober now. The clock on the nightstand reads 6:32, a mere four hours after Joe Turner had deposited him in the motel. The sun is yet to rise. “You can get me home?”
“I can get you anything you like,” the demon says, approaching him slowly. “If you want to go home, I can get you home. All I require is a simple fee.”
Alarm bells are ringing in Logan’s mind. Isn’t that what Turner was talking about last night? Something about deals gone wrong and people drunk on power. But there’s also the disembodied voice of the future saying he has suffered a decrease in brain function and then nothing since then. Not a peep from a radio. None of the doctors from the television discussing his case. Just 2009 and Joe Turner who told him he’d been in a mental institution for six months.
Logan Michaels in a mental institution. It can’t be true though it sound like a better reason for his predicament then transportation from the future or a wild unbelievably real coma dream.
“So,” the demon says, his eyes flashing red. “What will it be, Cale—or is it Michaels? Do you stay here in this life or do you go home with only a nominal fee?”
“My name is not Michaels,” Logan says and he believes it. He believes it with the kind of desperation only those with lingering doubts have. “My name is not Michaels and this isn’t real. How could you possibly get me back home if none of this is real?”
“If none of this is real,” the demon says. “Then what’s the harm in trying?”
“What do you want from me?”
“Not a big price to pay,” the demon said, voice dripping with honey. “Especially considering it’s something you’ve already lost. I want you off my trail for good. I want you off the hunt.”
“I never wanted to be on the hunt,” Logan says. His brain is full of facts about the hunt about demons and monsters and things his worst nightmares hadn’t been able to conjure up. He’s missing other things, important things. Like how old his Uncle Jonas was or what his mom bought him for his last Christmas with her. “I just want to go back. What do you want from me?”
The man smiles. He is not a frightening man. He is bald and pink-cheeked with blue eyes that flashed red. Logan is terrified though he knows he shouldn’t be. The man sets a cold hand on his arm. “Why, my dear boy, I want an assurance. Like I said, nothing you haven’t already lost. Bullet to the spinal cortex only has one end result.”
“What?” Logan says faintly. The phantom pain in his back is screaming suddenly but everything below that is dead to the world. He sways on his feet unable to find his balance point.
The demon catches him before he falls, whispering his fork-tongued lies into Logan’s ears. “Wouldn’t be so bad, now would it? It’s going to happen if I take it or not. Logan Michaels in his wheelchair in the institution—or is it Logan Cale sent back from the future? Either way I can take you home. All I ask is your legs. Do we have a deal Logan Cale? It’s not much to give considering they’re gone already.”
Logan closes his eyes and thinks of the accident. The shootout. The thing that brought him here. How many shots had been fired? He knows he’d been hit but he isn’t sure where. All he had been aware of was his grip on the girl in his arms, the feel of hot blood slicking the pavement and the blinding white of the cloudy sky. Then he woke up and it was 2009.
It is 2009.
It is still 2009 even though 2009 happened ten years ago.
“What’s it going to be, Logan?” the demon asks. “Back to the real world? Do we have a deal?”
Logan opens his mouth, ready to say yes, ready to try anything that gets him back to a world where things make sense but something won’t let him actually say the words. Maybe it has something to do with the way the demon’s eyes glint red in the sun’s slow rise or maybe it is Dean Winchester who despite everything is Logan’s friend. But Logan Michaels and the mental institution looms over in his head and post-Pulse Seattle needs Eyes Only almost as much as he needs confirmation of his sanity.
“LOGAN!” someone screams from the doorway. The demon turns around and Logan can see past him to Dean Winchester standing in the doorway, knife in one hand, posed to attack.
“Winchester,” the demon says, standing up and stepping toward him. “Dean Winchester. I could give you your brother back just the way he was if you—“
The knife finds its way the demons chest and then Winchester rips the blade upward. Logan watches open mouthed as the corpse, flickering slightly as if it had been electrocuted, topples gracelessly to the floor, blood spreading slowly out on the carpet.
“Holy shit,” Logan mutters. “Holy shit!”
Winchester wipes the blade on the his shirt leaving a thick red smear against the whites shirt. “What the hell?” Logan hisses. “You just killed a guy, Dean! You just killed a guy.”
“I just killed a demon,” Dean says. “And I just saved your sorry ass. What the hell kind of deal was it angling at? Logan, you can’t go making deals with demons. It’s the kind of thing that comes back to bite you in the ass. Take it from someone with experience. Not much is worth an eternity in hell.”
Logan can’t take his eyes off the body, blood seeping out of its mouth. The scene flickers a second and it’s not a demon dead on the carpet but rather himself, Logan Cale, staring straight at the sky as his blood leaked onto the pavement.
“Get up,” Dean hisses. “Get your stuff. We’ve got to get out of here.”
“You killed a guy,” Logan repeats. He wants to go home. This isn’t normal. This shouldn’t be this run of the mill. A dead body is something to be avenged not tossed aside. It shouldn’t feel like there is a war going on.
“We can debate the morals later when we’re two states away but in case you haven’t noticed there’s a corpse in here. We’ve got to skip town.”
There is a knock at the doorframe. The door that is yawning wide open. Dean turns around drawing a gun from his waistband. “Who the hell are you?”
Logan recognizes the figure. The thick build that looks a good deal less fuzzy in the light of day. “Joe Turner,” the man says. “I’m a friend of Logan’s.”
“He’s a hunter,” Logan says, the title thick and strange on his lips. “Met him last night. After the same thing we are.”
“All signs say it’s coming here,” Turner says. “I’ve been tracking it.”
“Sorry, Turner,” Dean says. “Beat you to this one. It’s dead.”
Turner steps carefully into the room, surveying the body. “How do you kill a demon? Best I can ever come up with is an exorcism.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Dean snaps, hauling Logan to his feet. “What matters is it’s not coming back.”
“You should get out of here,” Turner says, eyes settled on Logan.
“Read my mind,” Dean growls.
“Get out of here,” Turner says. “I can take care of the body.”
“Take care of the body?” Logan sputters. “There was a person in there. He doesn’t deserved to get tossed in some unmarked grave!”
Dean slung his bag over his shoulder and maneuvered Logan out the door. “Sorry about him, dude,” he says passing Turner. “Guy’s barely past a civilian.”
“Don’t have to tell me that much. Michaels there seems like a barrel of laughs.”
Dean hesitates just a second at the door staring at Logan. Logan braces himself for the fallout but Dean doesn’t say a word to him, just grumbles a gruff thanks to Turner and sets about putting the town in their rearview mirror. He doesn’t say a word until they cross the state line. Logan fidgets in his seat, straining for a sign from the other world, something to ground him let him know he’s not insane. He doesn’t get it.
“Who the hell is Michaels?” Dean asks.
Logan swallows and contemplates the lie. He’s tired of lying. Tired of pretending this is the world he knows. So he swallows and settles on the truth. “I don’t know,” he says. “Turner acted like he knew me when I’ve never seen him before in my life. He thought my name was Logan Michaels.”
“Is your name Logan Michaels?” Dean ventures.
“No!” Logan says with more force then he intended. “It’s Cale. Logan Cale. Same as it has been my whole life.”
“All right then,” Dean says.
“What?”
“I believe you,” Dean says. “You’d have to be pretty stupid to lie about something like that.”
Logan wants to say something else. Wants to ask how someone who just killed a man can be so quick to trust. Wants to tell him a thousand other things about his life back home and the Pulse and Eyes Only but he can’t make himself say it. No matter how real this world feels, Dean’s a figment of his imagination. If he lets his guard down here, if he starts believing in the illusion, he’s going to fade away in 2019. He hasn’t heard a word since the doctor whispered about decreasing brain activity and he can’t help but think that this might be it. The more he lets himself fall, the second he starts believing this world is real, he’s gone.
“Decrease in brain activity,” a voice says from the back seat, an eerie mockery of the doctor’s words. Logan spins in his seat to see the girl sitting in the back seat with her blood red dress and an eerie smile. “Your heart isn’t going to beat forever. Round and round and round you go. When it stops how will you know?”
“It’s not going to stop,” Logan says. “I’m not going to die.”
“How do you know it hasn’t already stopped forever?” the girl retorts. “I’ll get to keep my new toy.”
“You’re not real,” Logan says turning back to face the road. He can still see her face in the rearview mirror, twisting into a sneer. Beside him, Dean sat silent, bobbing his head to music Logan can no longer hear.
“This is all a fairy tale,” the girl mocks. “Sleeping beauty but no one’s there. She’d kiss you awake but she doesn’t care. Can I tell you a secret, Logan?” the girl leans in close to him lips inches away from his ears. “There is a way out.”
“Why would I trust you?”
“This world is make believe,” the girl says. “That world is make believe. You have to make a choice. Stay or go. If you’re in one place you can’t be in both. Eenie meanie miney mo. Which world’s real you’d like to know.”
“How do I get back?” Logan hisses. His fingers are itching to seize the demon child by the throat but untold terror holds him back. “Tell me!”
“Take a chance and take a plunge,” the girl says. “The best part about falling is —”
Logan wakes up. The impala is cruising along at eighty miles an hour. He thinks of the red-eyed demon and his offer to bring him home. He wishes had the chance to make that deal. It would have been worth the price. He needs to get out of here. He needs to get out of this broken world and back into his broken world.
“You all right?” Dean asks from the driver’s seat.
“Yeah,” Logan says.
“Another one of those dreams,” Dean hedges feeling him out.
Logan closes his eyes. “Yes. Another one of those dreams.”
“You want to talk about it?”
He does want to talk about it but he doesn’t know how to start. He closes his eyes and tries to summon the fantastic tale to his lips. Thinks of words he could use to explain the pulse, Eyes Only and a bullet wound that knocked him back ten years.
The phone rings. The car swerves slight as Dean reaches over to pick it up. He glances at Logan for the barest of a second, turns off the radio and switches the phone to speaker. “Hello,” Dean says.
“Stanford,” a deep voice says.
“Sammy?” Dean asks. “Sammy is that you?”
“Stanford,” Sam says again. “See you there.”
“Sam!” Dean calls. “Sam don’t you dare hang—“ The dial tone blares. Dean curses. “Son of a bitch,” he says signaling for the next exit.
“We’re not that far,” Logan says, “maybe we can make it before.”
“We need to stop him,” Dean says, punching the accelerator. “I need to save him.”
Logan needs to save him too because at this moment, saving Sam Winchester’s the only clue he’s got left to saving himself.
***
The closer they get to Stanford, the more on edge Logan feels. There is something familiar about this whole thing. About this place. There is a cold in his stomach he hasn’t felt since seeing his mother’s ghost. Dean watches him out of the corner of his eyes, worried about him but more worried about Sam.
Stanford isn’t on fire when they get there and the normal hustle and bustle of campus life tells them both that there has not been a campus tragedy. They spend the afternoon asking around for any sign of supernatural activity but by nightfall, it’s more then clear they aren’t going to find it.
“I don’t get it,” Dean says. “There’s nothing here.”
“Maybe nothing’s happened,” Logan says. “Maybe we got here first.”
Dean gives him a look that is hard and hopeful all at once. “I never beat him here. He’s been gone for months and never once have I made it here first. There’s something wrong. Something’s going to happen and he wants me here.”
“Fine,” Logan says. He closes his eyes. “After the town he’s going to want it to be splashy, right?”
“God, I hope not,” Dean mutters, casting his eyes upward.
That odd feeling in his stomach is back, the tickle of gut instinct that tells him this is all rotten. Something’s going to go wall. “What about this?” Logan says, indicating a sign on the wall. There’s a basketball game tonight. If I’m going splashy, this is my scene.”
“I dunno,” Dean says, “Sammy never much liked sports. Any plays going on? Jazz concerts? Something artsy. Sounds like Sam. The sports scene seems more like you then Sam.”
“I used to be a sports reporter,” Logan says. “How’d you guess?”
“Rich guys and their baseball,” Dean says, shaking his head.
“No.” Logan is watching the stream of students flocking toward Maples Pavilion, the basketball arena, almost all of them wearing red. Some with painted faces, others touting signs. “No, I was really more of a basketball guy. Covered the Yale team back at—“
He trails off when he sees it. No—when he sees him. When he sees the twenty-year-old Logan Cale with a notebook and a Yale t-shirt strolling in the direction of the Pavilion. Logan knows this is impossible. He can’t be in two places at once. It isn’t possible.
But the sight cannot be denied. It’s like looking in a mirror. The younger Logan is tall and confident. His hair is shorter then Logan’s own, streaked with blond from ample time spent out in the sun. He is clean shaven and clean-cut and full of promise. It is February 7th 2009 and Stanford is playing Yale. Logan had made the trip on a whim, eager to get away for the weekend. To visit a few friends and knock out a story on the team all in one go. He stares after the younger man, mouth hanging open.
And beside him, he sees Dean tensing up and knows he saw it too.
______________________________________________________
Two more chapters and an epilogue to go. My goal is to finish before Christmas but this may be overly ambitious...
*It should also be noted that Stanford and Yale do on occasion face off in basketball. However the game mentioned is completely fictional. Stanford does not play on the February 7th. Though it would have been completely awesome if it had been true.
| 9 |
Rating: PG-13ish
Disclaimer: I can lay no claims on DA, SPN or Life on Mars
SPOILERS: DA pilot, SPN through season four, plot premise taken from Life on Mars (UK)
Summary: Logan gets shot. That’s when things get strange.
Notes:For those of you who know LoM, it might be of interest that Logan is Sam Tyler, Dean is Gene Hunt, Bobby is Hyde, Lillith is the Test Card Girl and Sam Winchester’s disappearance has something to do with this whole mess.
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11
Eight
“A deal?” Logan stammers. He feels stone cold sober now. The clock on the nightstand reads 6:32, a mere four hours after Joe Turner had deposited him in the motel. The sun is yet to rise. “You can get me home?”
“I can get you anything you like,” the demon says, approaching him slowly. “If you want to go home, I can get you home. All I require is a simple fee.”
Alarm bells are ringing in Logan’s mind. Isn’t that what Turner was talking about last night? Something about deals gone wrong and people drunk on power. But there’s also the disembodied voice of the future saying he has suffered a decrease in brain function and then nothing since then. Not a peep from a radio. None of the doctors from the television discussing his case. Just 2009 and Joe Turner who told him he’d been in a mental institution for six months.
Logan Michaels in a mental institution. It can’t be true though it sound like a better reason for his predicament then transportation from the future or a wild unbelievably real coma dream.
“So,” the demon says, his eyes flashing red. “What will it be, Cale—or is it Michaels? Do you stay here in this life or do you go home with only a nominal fee?”
“My name is not Michaels,” Logan says and he believes it. He believes it with the kind of desperation only those with lingering doubts have. “My name is not Michaels and this isn’t real. How could you possibly get me back home if none of this is real?”
“If none of this is real,” the demon says. “Then what’s the harm in trying?”
“What do you want from me?”
“Not a big price to pay,” the demon said, voice dripping with honey. “Especially considering it’s something you’ve already lost. I want you off my trail for good. I want you off the hunt.”
“I never wanted to be on the hunt,” Logan says. His brain is full of facts about the hunt about demons and monsters and things his worst nightmares hadn’t been able to conjure up. He’s missing other things, important things. Like how old his Uncle Jonas was or what his mom bought him for his last Christmas with her. “I just want to go back. What do you want from me?”
The man smiles. He is not a frightening man. He is bald and pink-cheeked with blue eyes that flashed red. Logan is terrified though he knows he shouldn’t be. The man sets a cold hand on his arm. “Why, my dear boy, I want an assurance. Like I said, nothing you haven’t already lost. Bullet to the spinal cortex only has one end result.”
“What?” Logan says faintly. The phantom pain in his back is screaming suddenly but everything below that is dead to the world. He sways on his feet unable to find his balance point.
The demon catches him before he falls, whispering his fork-tongued lies into Logan’s ears. “Wouldn’t be so bad, now would it? It’s going to happen if I take it or not. Logan Michaels in his wheelchair in the institution—or is it Logan Cale sent back from the future? Either way I can take you home. All I ask is your legs. Do we have a deal Logan Cale? It’s not much to give considering they’re gone already.”
Logan closes his eyes and thinks of the accident. The shootout. The thing that brought him here. How many shots had been fired? He knows he’d been hit but he isn’t sure where. All he had been aware of was his grip on the girl in his arms, the feel of hot blood slicking the pavement and the blinding white of the cloudy sky. Then he woke up and it was 2009.
It is 2009.
It is still 2009 even though 2009 happened ten years ago.
“What’s it going to be, Logan?” the demon asks. “Back to the real world? Do we have a deal?”
Logan opens his mouth, ready to say yes, ready to try anything that gets him back to a world where things make sense but something won’t let him actually say the words. Maybe it has something to do with the way the demon’s eyes glint red in the sun’s slow rise or maybe it is Dean Winchester who despite everything is Logan’s friend. But Logan Michaels and the mental institution looms over in his head and post-Pulse Seattle needs Eyes Only almost as much as he needs confirmation of his sanity.
“LOGAN!” someone screams from the doorway. The demon turns around and Logan can see past him to Dean Winchester standing in the doorway, knife in one hand, posed to attack.
“Winchester,” the demon says, standing up and stepping toward him. “Dean Winchester. I could give you your brother back just the way he was if you—“
The knife finds its way the demons chest and then Winchester rips the blade upward. Logan watches open mouthed as the corpse, flickering slightly as if it had been electrocuted, topples gracelessly to the floor, blood spreading slowly out on the carpet.
“Holy shit,” Logan mutters. “Holy shit!”
Winchester wipes the blade on the his shirt leaving a thick red smear against the whites shirt. “What the hell?” Logan hisses. “You just killed a guy, Dean! You just killed a guy.”
“I just killed a demon,” Dean says. “And I just saved your sorry ass. What the hell kind of deal was it angling at? Logan, you can’t go making deals with demons. It’s the kind of thing that comes back to bite you in the ass. Take it from someone with experience. Not much is worth an eternity in hell.”
Logan can’t take his eyes off the body, blood seeping out of its mouth. The scene flickers a second and it’s not a demon dead on the carpet but rather himself, Logan Cale, staring straight at the sky as his blood leaked onto the pavement.
“Get up,” Dean hisses. “Get your stuff. We’ve got to get out of here.”
“You killed a guy,” Logan repeats. He wants to go home. This isn’t normal. This shouldn’t be this run of the mill. A dead body is something to be avenged not tossed aside. It shouldn’t feel like there is a war going on.
“We can debate the morals later when we’re two states away but in case you haven’t noticed there’s a corpse in here. We’ve got to skip town.”
There is a knock at the doorframe. The door that is yawning wide open. Dean turns around drawing a gun from his waistband. “Who the hell are you?”
Logan recognizes the figure. The thick build that looks a good deal less fuzzy in the light of day. “Joe Turner,” the man says. “I’m a friend of Logan’s.”
“He’s a hunter,” Logan says, the title thick and strange on his lips. “Met him last night. After the same thing we are.”
“All signs say it’s coming here,” Turner says. “I’ve been tracking it.”
“Sorry, Turner,” Dean says. “Beat you to this one. It’s dead.”
Turner steps carefully into the room, surveying the body. “How do you kill a demon? Best I can ever come up with is an exorcism.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Dean snaps, hauling Logan to his feet. “What matters is it’s not coming back.”
“You should get out of here,” Turner says, eyes settled on Logan.
“Read my mind,” Dean growls.
“Get out of here,” Turner says. “I can take care of the body.”
“Take care of the body?” Logan sputters. “There was a person in there. He doesn’t deserved to get tossed in some unmarked grave!”
Dean slung his bag over his shoulder and maneuvered Logan out the door. “Sorry about him, dude,” he says passing Turner. “Guy’s barely past a civilian.”
“Don’t have to tell me that much. Michaels there seems like a barrel of laughs.”
Dean hesitates just a second at the door staring at Logan. Logan braces himself for the fallout but Dean doesn’t say a word to him, just grumbles a gruff thanks to Turner and sets about putting the town in their rearview mirror. He doesn’t say a word until they cross the state line. Logan fidgets in his seat, straining for a sign from the other world, something to ground him let him know he’s not insane. He doesn’t get it.
“Who the hell is Michaels?” Dean asks.
Logan swallows and contemplates the lie. He’s tired of lying. Tired of pretending this is the world he knows. So he swallows and settles on the truth. “I don’t know,” he says. “Turner acted like he knew me when I’ve never seen him before in my life. He thought my name was Logan Michaels.”
“Is your name Logan Michaels?” Dean ventures.
“No!” Logan says with more force then he intended. “It’s Cale. Logan Cale. Same as it has been my whole life.”
“All right then,” Dean says.
“What?”
“I believe you,” Dean says. “You’d have to be pretty stupid to lie about something like that.”
Logan wants to say something else. Wants to ask how someone who just killed a man can be so quick to trust. Wants to tell him a thousand other things about his life back home and the Pulse and Eyes Only but he can’t make himself say it. No matter how real this world feels, Dean’s a figment of his imagination. If he lets his guard down here, if he starts believing in the illusion, he’s going to fade away in 2019. He hasn’t heard a word since the doctor whispered about decreasing brain activity and he can’t help but think that this might be it. The more he lets himself fall, the second he starts believing this world is real, he’s gone.
“Decrease in brain activity,” a voice says from the back seat, an eerie mockery of the doctor’s words. Logan spins in his seat to see the girl sitting in the back seat with her blood red dress and an eerie smile. “Your heart isn’t going to beat forever. Round and round and round you go. When it stops how will you know?”
“It’s not going to stop,” Logan says. “I’m not going to die.”
“How do you know it hasn’t already stopped forever?” the girl retorts. “I’ll get to keep my new toy.”
“You’re not real,” Logan says turning back to face the road. He can still see her face in the rearview mirror, twisting into a sneer. Beside him, Dean sat silent, bobbing his head to music Logan can no longer hear.
“This is all a fairy tale,” the girl mocks. “Sleeping beauty but no one’s there. She’d kiss you awake but she doesn’t care. Can I tell you a secret, Logan?” the girl leans in close to him lips inches away from his ears. “There is a way out.”
“Why would I trust you?”
“This world is make believe,” the girl says. “That world is make believe. You have to make a choice. Stay or go. If you’re in one place you can’t be in both. Eenie meanie miney mo. Which world’s real you’d like to know.”
“How do I get back?” Logan hisses. His fingers are itching to seize the demon child by the throat but untold terror holds him back. “Tell me!”
“Take a chance and take a plunge,” the girl says. “The best part about falling is —”
Logan wakes up. The impala is cruising along at eighty miles an hour. He thinks of the red-eyed demon and his offer to bring him home. He wishes had the chance to make that deal. It would have been worth the price. He needs to get out of here. He needs to get out of this broken world and back into his broken world.
“You all right?” Dean asks from the driver’s seat.
“Yeah,” Logan says.
“Another one of those dreams,” Dean hedges feeling him out.
Logan closes his eyes. “Yes. Another one of those dreams.”
“You want to talk about it?”
He does want to talk about it but he doesn’t know how to start. He closes his eyes and tries to summon the fantastic tale to his lips. Thinks of words he could use to explain the pulse, Eyes Only and a bullet wound that knocked him back ten years.
The phone rings. The car swerves slight as Dean reaches over to pick it up. He glances at Logan for the barest of a second, turns off the radio and switches the phone to speaker. “Hello,” Dean says.
“Stanford,” a deep voice says.
“Sammy?” Dean asks. “Sammy is that you?”
“Stanford,” Sam says again. “See you there.”
“Sam!” Dean calls. “Sam don’t you dare hang—“ The dial tone blares. Dean curses. “Son of a bitch,” he says signaling for the next exit.
“We’re not that far,” Logan says, “maybe we can make it before.”
“We need to stop him,” Dean says, punching the accelerator. “I need to save him.”
Logan needs to save him too because at this moment, saving Sam Winchester’s the only clue he’s got left to saving himself.
The closer they get to Stanford, the more on edge Logan feels. There is something familiar about this whole thing. About this place. There is a cold in his stomach he hasn’t felt since seeing his mother’s ghost. Dean watches him out of the corner of his eyes, worried about him but more worried about Sam.
Stanford isn’t on fire when they get there and the normal hustle and bustle of campus life tells them both that there has not been a campus tragedy. They spend the afternoon asking around for any sign of supernatural activity but by nightfall, it’s more then clear they aren’t going to find it.
“I don’t get it,” Dean says. “There’s nothing here.”
“Maybe nothing’s happened,” Logan says. “Maybe we got here first.”
Dean gives him a look that is hard and hopeful all at once. “I never beat him here. He’s been gone for months and never once have I made it here first. There’s something wrong. Something’s going to happen and he wants me here.”
“Fine,” Logan says. He closes his eyes. “After the town he’s going to want it to be splashy, right?”
“God, I hope not,” Dean mutters, casting his eyes upward.
That odd feeling in his stomach is back, the tickle of gut instinct that tells him this is all rotten. Something’s going to go wall. “What about this?” Logan says, indicating a sign on the wall. There’s a basketball game tonight. If I’m going splashy, this is my scene.”
“I dunno,” Dean says, “Sammy never much liked sports. Any plays going on? Jazz concerts? Something artsy. Sounds like Sam. The sports scene seems more like you then Sam.”
“I used to be a sports reporter,” Logan says. “How’d you guess?”
“Rich guys and their baseball,” Dean says, shaking his head.
“No.” Logan is watching the stream of students flocking toward Maples Pavilion, the basketball arena, almost all of them wearing red. Some with painted faces, others touting signs. “No, I was really more of a basketball guy. Covered the Yale team back at—“
He trails off when he sees it. No—when he sees him. When he sees the twenty-year-old Logan Cale with a notebook and a Yale t-shirt strolling in the direction of the Pavilion. Logan knows this is impossible. He can’t be in two places at once. It isn’t possible.
But the sight cannot be denied. It’s like looking in a mirror. The younger Logan is tall and confident. His hair is shorter then Logan’s own, streaked with blond from ample time spent out in the sun. He is clean shaven and clean-cut and full of promise. It is February 7th 2009 and Stanford is playing Yale. Logan had made the trip on a whim, eager to get away for the weekend. To visit a few friends and knock out a story on the team all in one go. He stares after the younger man, mouth hanging open.
And beside him, he sees Dean tensing up and knows he saw it too.
Two more chapters and an epilogue to go. My goal is to finish before Christmas but this may be overly ambitious...
*It should also be noted that Stanford and Yale do on occasion face off in basketball. However the game mentioned is completely fictional. Stanford does not play on the February 7th. Though it would have been completely awesome if it had been true.
| 9 |