Ford knows Sam is a (sonofagun) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-02-26 22:42:00 |
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Entry tags: | plot: switch, river tam, sam winchester |
Who: Sam Winchester and River Tam
What: A chat about... stuff. Two people being nice to each other. Adorbs. Lots of meta.
Where: Passages, SPN door.
When: Early on in the switch.
Warnings/Rating: None.
The door was open. Cheap paint, flaking wood, light and hollow on old hinges. A key with a pea-green plastic tag chipped by time swung from the misshapen doorknob that banged repeatedly against the dusty wall at the full extent of its semicircle swing. Two men spoke to each other through the door, displaced by time and space.
Sam folded his long legs against his chest, holding his breath in his mouth so that he didn’t disturb the detailed chalk circle he was making with the white bit held in his right hand, while his left held open a tome of instructions that he kept glancing at for instructions. It didn’t take him long, and he rose up to his feet to look at the circle and the one drawn on the old carpet of the motel room framed in the door. “So just throw the herbs on that sigil there, okay?” he said, to what appeared to be no one at all. Balancing the book and the chalk, he put out one running shoe and easily stepped over the circle, the threshold, and what was beyond.
Ford was now catching his balance in the shadow of the old motel, holding book and chalk. He was much shorter than Sam, even compact by comparison, and the tight crop of dark hair and eyes of vivid blue excluded him as anything DNA might have produced in Winchester lineage. His shoulders were bare and a thin white t-shirt made him look like a brawl waiting to happen. Unlike Sam, he didn’t speak aloud, but he mouthed words with his mouth as he put the chalk in the indentation of the pages and traded book for a ziploc baggie full of foul-smelling green leaves. He placed some cautiously, and then worked his way over the threshold one more time.
Some sound in the hallway broke Sam's concentration, and he looked keenly up from his work, shifting so he could stare through the doorway at the length of the hallway. He kept his silence, watching.
The girl was young. She was older than she looked, but she was young. She was a red dress, a shift of a thing, no sleeves and a hem that flecked and swayed against her knees as she walked. She was long hair, dark and brown and well down her back. She was no makeup, and she was no particular attempt at beauty, though she was certainly old enough for such things and certainly exotic enough to manage it. She was bare feet, and she was a dancer's step, and she hummed to herself as she wandered the pathways of the hotel. She had a book in her hand, one that was earmarked and written upon, a tourist's guide to lost Vegas with inaccuracies scratched down and corrected with the blue Bic that was tucked between the National Atomic Testing museum and the National History museum. She had dark brown eyes that saw too much, that were too mature. There was, notably, no insanity in the flecks of brown and errant defiant hazel. There was oddness, though, strangeness, but that had always been there. It went hand-in-hand with intelligence, with precociousness. It made people uncomfortable, but it was not madness.
She did not fear the hallways. These halls weren't dark really, not compared to some of the places that existed inside her own mind. Even the far off scent of salt and distant herbs didn't frighten her. There was only one thing to fear, and that was man. And even if this place was young, a baby in comparison to her worlds, there were still people here. And people would evolve into what she knew them to be eventually.
But there were sparks of wonder too. Of seeing clearly for the first time in years, and she didn't need to call for Simon to walk her through this maze. The walls were made of plaster and paper with old glue beneath, and the sconces were electric, though they flickered in a way that was meant to bring to mind older things. The carpet smelled of mold and mildew, spores and growth, and she had curled up on the ground one level up and just smelled and listened. Underfoot, movement could be heard everywhere, and she had since taken to pressing her ears against doors, wanting to hear what breathed within.
There weren't many mysteries in the world, but this place defied physics and explanation, and she found it wonderful.
She jumped off the bottom step of the stairs, and she looked up at the same time the man did. He was tall and broad, and she thought she could see lines around his eyes from this distance. She couldn't hear him in her head, and she realized (or she had realized, already) that it was like missing fingers. She couldn't touch the way she had grown accustomed to. The empathy was still there, that feeling that guided her actions and made her know things people didn't say, but it wasn't the same as hearing, as knowing. It was a little like blindness, and she both relished the silence and mourned the loss of the noise.
She didn't slow her step as she approached him and his circle, though her expression was bright curiosity as she peered to look in the open doorway.
Sam took it in and drew all the conclusions he needed in a glance. The book told him that she was either new to Las Vegas or pretending to be. Its dog-eared quality and the small detail of the pen breaking the spine told him the former was more likely, and therefore as a tourist she was enjoying the experience. Her presence in the hotel implied that she was a resident of one of the doors, like him, and judging from what had been written in the journal by the other residents, the phenomenon that Sam and Ford were experiencing was widespread. There were still a lot of possibilities, but there was nothing about her to raise Sam’s suspicions. Ford was simply curious.
Sam lowered the book. “Oh. Hello.” He glanced down at the sigil on the floor and gave her a faintly edgy smile that suggested he was well aware how this might look to some people. “I know it looks weird, but it’s nothing bad,” he said, in an attempt to forestall such a suggestion. He was a large man, but the weak chin and soft face allowed the earnest general good will to come through in otherwise small hazel eyes. “We were just trying to figure out what happened.”
"印 章," she said. "Sigil. Derived from the latin sigillum, meaning seal." She looked down at the unbroken circle of salt, and she peered into the open door again. "I can't talk to March that way. We talk in here," she said, a finger to her temple. Normally, she kept all her thoughts away from the man who shared her mind, but she hadn't expected March to do the same now that he was the one with the damaged amygdala. Being crazy took practice, and she knew March didn't have any. But even with March's sanity trembling in the back of her mind, it was nothing compared to how things normally were with her. It was manageable with things missing, even if she felt blind. She stared at him for a while, the brown gaze unflinching, as if she could glean something new from watching him stand there. And she did glean things, as unlikely as it was, but she'd always been empathic, even bore the Academy and their promises that had fallen and smashed like glasses on the hard floor.
Her toes dug into the mildewy carpet, and she gave him a quick little nod, brown hair tumbling over her shoulder. "Things that look weird aren't always bad. Sometimes the most normal looking things are the worst things," she said, refraining from statistics and looking up at him. She thought the weak chin and the soft face were good things, biological gifts to balance out width and height that could be otherwise intimidating. "You're Sam."
Sam paused as Ford said a soft word about March, and the hunter used it as a kind of recommendation of character. Ford said he shouldn’t, but he did anyway. His eyebrows quirked and he said, “Mandarin?” It wasn’t a question meant for an answer, just him thinking aloud, and it was obvious that Ford didn’t have any knowledge of Chinese, or of March speaking it. Sam knew his Chinese from Korean, thanks to various spells and spooks, but that was about the extent of his knowledge.
“Ford and I can think at each other too. It’s faster for both of us.” Both Sam and Ford thought fairly quickly, though Sam was the better educated, and Ford was resistant to speaking out loud in every circumstance. “Something this complicated, sometimes it’s easier to talk it out for me, though.” Renewing his grip on the spine of the book and adjusting into stability onto the flat of his palm, Sam moved forward a little closer. “Yeah, I’m Sam. Do I know you?” She looked a little familiar, but he was almost certain he’d never met her before.
"是," she replied to his question about Mandarin. It sound like shi, and it also sounded second nature, as thoughtless as English to the strange girl in the dress. Closer, it was obvious she wasn't actually a girl, though she was thin and lithe with a dancer's body. But she was older than she'd seemed from far away, and her eyes went wide and attentive when he mentioned Ford and how the thinking thing worked between them. "That's because he stutters," she said, plain and day, and maybe politeness dictated that she not say things like that, but she had always been too outspoken.
She rounded the circle carefully, bare toes on the edge, but the kind of inherent poise that didn't allow even one grain of salt to get displaced. She was taking note of the sigil, going through her memory to figure out what his goal was in creating the circle. "You don't know me, but March knows you," she explained, touching a finger to her temple again. "There was a version of you before, and March had him here," she explained. "He knows Ford too," she added, though she knew it was unnecessary, but words tended to make people more comfortable than silences. A second later, she began reciting information about the sigil, the demon it was associated with, and the properties of the herbs. "How's your brother?" she asked at the tail end, almost without pause.
Sam looked uncomfortable. He couldn’t feel Ford’s embarrassment, but there was a silence in his mind that Ford wasn’t quick to fill. Sam didn’t say anything either, it felt better just to pretend it hadn’t been said. It wasn’t that it was untrue, but Sam didn’t know Ford well enough to really understand what exactly pushing that button would do. He slid around the question by nodding vaguely. “I don’t know, it could be. We don’t really know each other that well.” Sam’s voice strengthened. “But he has been helping me try to figure out what happened.”
Sam rolled forward and shifted his weight to a different foot. “Oh, right. Yes. March.” More awkwardness. It was like having some stranger telling you they knew your ex-girlfriend from college intimately and therefore knew all about you. Ford didn’t say a word. Sam blinked, taken aback. “My brother? Dean? I... haven’t seen him yet. after this mess.” He took a slight step forward, eyes searching, listening to Ford’s short question and relaying it quickly. “What happened to March and the...” Cough. “The other me?”
"I made you uncomfortable," she said knowingly, but without apology. "It always happens. Don't feel bad." Even before the Academy, people hadn't known what to make of her. She'd learned to stop correcting everyone by the age of ten. She'd learned to stop telling people what she inferred from their posture by thirteen. She'd learned to keep a lot to herself before she started the Master's program at that age. But she was out of practice. "I make Simon uncomfortable too, but he's used to it. You're not," she said, walking back around to the open door and peering into the empty space. "Simon's my brother," she filled in, her smile brightening to something like sunshine. She had to fight to keep from telling all the ways in which Simon was brilliant, but she managed it.
"He wanted to make up," she said of the Dean that March's Sam had known, "but March's Sam was stubborn. " Using the number of lines on his face, the length of his hair, and the bowing of his shoulders as markers, she assumed he was three years and 4 months younger than than this Sam. Roughly. His final question was met with a pause for inference of what he really meant. "It doesn't mean you'll go too. I did the math on the journals, and there's a 36.89 percent chance of switchover, but it seems to decrease steeply after the first switch," she explained, her attempt at reassurance. "March decided to ride a horse and to not be a criminal anymore, and then I came, and you left." She pointed to the sigil then. "That won't work here."
Sam’s eyebrows ticked up, but he didn’t say anything right away. He had a thick forehead and not much in the way of eyebrows, so he usually had a little bit of time to consider his questions before the person he was talking to really caught on to the expression. He didn’t deny that she made him uncomfortable, but he’d been through far worse and he didn’t have much of a problem with it. Hunters were an odd lot and nine out of ten of them made him uncomfortable on a regular basis. He was used to it. “My brother and I don’t believe in odds. We kick ass against the odds too often.” He flashed her a micro-smile and then looked down to indicate the circle of the sigil. “Ordinarily, no. My theory was that perhaps the force that divides the two places reversed, in which case the sigil would try to complete itself if we said the incantation correctly, but to be honest, I’m kind of grasping at straws. I’ve eliminated most of the likely theories.”
Sam balanced for a second on the heels of his running shoes and then he said, would-be casual, “March was a criminal?” Ford said, privately, Got to be the most unlikely criminal ever. Sam decided not to venture a response to that either, as in his experience the unlikeliest of people ended up being both heroes and villains. Things like that couldn’t be predicted. A hard lesson courtesy of Lucifer.
"Odds allow for the possibility of success, and your world is balanced in your favor. It might not seem like it to you, but it is. Here, things don't work like that through the doors. My world is skewed in our favor too. Statistically, we win more often than we should," she said quietly, her tone nothing scholarly, nothing knowledgeable. It would be easy to discount her intelligence, hidden among all that strangeness as it was. "Magic doesn't exist here. No odds are going to change that," she said, giving up her peering through the door and crouching in front of the salt circle instead. Her bare toes touched the edge of white, and she glanced into the room from this new vantage point. "If you go in there, he'll be there," she said, and it was obviously the precursor to something else, even if it took time to get there. "The magic will work in there. But today, there isn't any magic here." That wasn't to say it might not work some day; just not right then.
His face wasn't as easy for her to read as others, but there were signs of things. She let him keep his casual pretense as she straightened, and she watched him with a curious tilt of her head while he said nothing and thought of everything. "You're a criminal too," was all she said in reply. Legally, he was. Legally, March was. "I am too." Being on the run from the Alliance counted, and she just refrained from telling him that, normally, she was much more lethal than he could ever be with his guns and salt.
Sam gave a short little laugh. “No, I believe it. Statistically I should have been permanently dead a long time ago. Probably a few times over.” At times felt like he was waging war against the statistics. It was hard to like someone who wielded them so casually, but he expected she got that a lot. Sam was a con-man by necessity, not nature, and if he was a good con-man it was because he was generally telling the truth, in the very deepest sense. Maybe the name he was saying didn’t match his, but he always managed a likely purpose that would (in theory) go along with federal agent “Smith” or whomever. He gave her an odd look again. “Magic does work here. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be standing here, and this door would open to a room in this building, and not... other places.” Sam noticed that this girl had a very logical mind, and he didn’t assume she was only her appearance. All the Winchesters were smarter than they looked. Sam himself looked like he should have been possessed with more ego than he had. If she had said how lethal she was, he would have smiled (and probably disbelieved it) but he wouldn’t have argued with her. Sam could be logical too.
"That magic isn't here," River said, pointing at the hallway floor. "It's there." She pointed a long, graceful arm, her pointer finger outstretched, at the open doorway. "It's just poured over, but only with people, not with things," she explained. She pointed down at the floor. "That's a thing, and we're normal here. This is the non-magical world, and we were all made normal and non-magical in order to be here," she explained, and maybe that was easier for her to see, since she was so different from who she normally was. "In there, I'm different," she added, and she took a step toward the door. She gave him a look over her shoulder, a question, and an offer to prove it for him. "My different went to March, but you don't have the same kind of different that I do, not since the demon blood."
Sam’s face cleared of everything but grave consideration. He tipped slightly sideways to lean his shoulder against the doorframe, which was cheap and peeling much like Sam’s door itself. “Did March tell you that?” he asked. It was not a casual question, but it wasn’t an angry one either. He was just curious, and Sam went curious because he wanted to know what was privileged knowledge and what was common. The doorframe and connecting wall creaked under his weight, and he barely noticed. “Or do you just know a lot of magic without being able to do any?” He caught the edge of her profile and remembered who she was, just like that. He’d seen a couple episodes of the show on old motel televisions, but he’d never been able to finish a one. He knew enough to get away with. “Because you’re normal here too?”
"I know everything he knows," she said of March, because she did, and because she didn't see the point of hiding it. It would have made him more comfortable not to know that, of course, but that was the whole reasons she made people uncomfortable before the Academy. Even her father had found her off putting, but Simon had never felt that way. It was the main reason she was still standing there, talking to Sam and his circle of chalk; because she understood what it was to love a sibling more than anything else in the world. "I'm not sure I was ever all normal, but I'm mostly normal," she said honestly, without understanding his comprehension, or the cause behind it. Again, that realization that she was like a blind bird trying to fly filled her, and she took the final steps to the open doorway, standing at the precipice. She wasn't worried about March in the otherside world; she was worried about the otherside world if March was there.
Sam nodded slowly at this idea of pooled information. He asked Ford if it was the same way with him, and Ford said no, it wasn’t, and thank God too. Sam agreed with the sentiment. He had his own problems without having to deal with Ford’s too, and Ford felt just the same. Sam was now more consciously aware of what he was dealing with in the girl standing in front of him, and he was not cautious but simply more understanding than he had been before. The logic and statistics made more sense when she had more of them than people who understood her. Naturally empathetic in his own way, Sam pushed his weight from the walls and settled it on his feet. “You can go in,” he said, reassuringly, thinking her hesitation some kind of concern. “Ford will come in too, to keep an eye on... things.” He smiled at her and stepped through the semicircle again, not smudging a single line.
She smiled at the idea of Ford, who she only knew from the memories in March's mind, keeping an eye on anything. But maybe if he had Sam's skills, he'd manage it. There always existed the possibility that Ford wouldn't be able to manage it. at all. She didn't know as much about Dean as she did about Sam, but she didn't think he would be as forgiving if March killed people without meaning to. Normally, she could keep her thoughts from March, and she could keep herself from taking him over, but she wasn't sure what she would be able to do under these circumstances. "It would be foolhardy," she said, but she was obviously still considering it. She looked back at him. "Can I come when it's me and not him?" she asked, though her tone said she still hadn't made the decision. She touched the tip of her toes to the door's frame, then she dragged them along the line between carpet and room.
He had been expecting her to go through without an additional pause, and his weight was off. Sam balanced awkwardly on the sigil, trying to prevent himself from stepping on any of the lines. His long arms windmilled a little in the air. While Sam was a better than average fighter because he knew how to leverage his weight and his reach, he wasn’t an acrobat or a fairy princess, and there was six feet and four inches to deal with. “You can come if I’m with you. As long as nothing dangerous is going on.” There was something dangerous going on pretty much always. “Just stay in the room here and we should be okay.” Sam looked over her head at the grim little room beyond. “I think.”
She shook her head, watching with a strange and discomfiting smile as he balanced and windmilled. "When I'm me, and when you're you," she said, and it wasn't that she didn't trust Ford. But she didn't trust March. She knew what it was to be in her own head, and she wasn't sure Ford would make it out alive, even with Sam in his head. She began to step back from the salt, a ballerina's tiny steps, too jerky to be lovely, and yet managing loveliness all the same. She stopped after a few of these diminutive steps, and she regarded him with those curious brown eyes, the ones that were too wide for her face and that made her cheeks look chubbier than they were, as if they still clung defiantly to their baby fat. "Does he want to see him?" she asked, and it was impossible to tell from her features what answer would be the good one, the right one.
Sam rotated his hips without settling his feet again and turned to face one side before he stepped back out into the hallway to make room for her graceful exit from the threshold. He wasn’t annoyed or upset by her change of mind, just a little bemused. Placing one finger along the inside of the book, he kept his place and let it flop closed and dangle by his side. It was an old, motheaten thing, smelling of ancient glue and charred paper. Your typical grimoire. “Okay. Invitation is open, but I need to be here. That way I can tell you if there’s something dangerous going on.”
Sam looked supremely awkward and rubbed at the back of his neck. His hand had a long way to go to get from his thigh to his head, and the move was almost in slow motion before he replied. “Well, yeah, I think so. They made a date, right?” Mental note to work on some boundaries with Ford before either of them started doing any dating. Not that Sam thought he was likely to be dating for the next decade, at least.
"I don't need you to tell me anything when I'm me," she assured him, an entertained little smile on her lips that said she thought it was amusing that he thought he would need to. "I'm blind now, but I'm normally not," she said, and then she shook her head, a cascade of brown and her own lyrical laugh accompanying the dance of dark hair. "I'm sorry. I think I've gotten used to not thinking before I speak." Which was, perhaps, the understatement of the century.
She didn't think it was meant to be a date between Ford and March, but she left it alone. It was like Kaylee and Simon, and while she was trying to understand those things, it was harder than it had been once. She'd had crushes, but there was so much time between then and now; even sanity couldn't make it something she understood without the feelings associated with it washing over her mind. "I think they're meeting," she said noncommittally, reminding herself that Sam might not have the same insights into Ford's mind that she had into March's.
Sam thought that her certainty that she would know and understand everything when she was not in the door could be a serious problem. She might be supergirl (he was pretty sure that was her in that movie, he’d been healing from some supernatural mauling at the time and cable was unpredictable in hotel rooms) but he or Dean would still feel obligated to save her from whatever she decided was her problem. Sam decided not to tell Dean about this little conversation unless it became absolutely necessary.
Sam and Ford together gazed down at her. Ford was used to looking up at people--he was the opposite of a tall man--but he and Sam were both of a sensitive nature. Sam was better at reading people than Ford was (ten times better, as he had nothing to concern himself about his own approach) but both men paid attention when most people couldn’t be bothered to try. “Okay,” Sam said, trying not to look bothered and generally failing, since he felt bad for Ford, “meeting, then. They were going to meet.” Sam tipped his head a little and said, in a tone extremely inviting of confidence, “You think they shouldn’t?”
She smiled at the tone he used. She didn't need any abilities to recognize the fact that he was trying to sound like someone trustworthy. She assumed that suited him in his work, which she knew was as tangled up in lies as the Captain's was. She smiled more, because anything that reminded her of Malcolm Reynolds was good. "Ask me again when I can tell what's in Ford's head," she said, which was in no way creepy (really). She knew there were complications, but they weren't hers to tell. And, for the first time in a very long time, she could actually keep secrets. It wouldn't be the case the next time they met, and she didn't need to be a psychic to know that.
She gave his circle one last look. "Leave that and go see your brother. Vacations never last, and this one isn't any different. There's nothing for you to fight here." It was as sage as she would get at the moment, and her attention was already back on the tour book in her hand. She pulled that Bic pen out from between the pages, and she tucked the end into the corner of her mouth as she considered. "The pinball museum or the world's biggest trampoline?" she asked.