Who: Laura Kinney and Sam Winchester What: Meeting Where: A big ball of twine in Kansas When: After this Warnings/Rating: Thoughts of violence, Laura being bad with people.
It had never occurred to Laura that they might be in different worlds and that Sam might be within a different Door, a different world than her own. Why would it? And within that knowledge was the fact that if he wasn't from her world, he couldn't be working for what remained of the facility and Project X. He also couldn't be part of the X-Men, who thought they knew her and knew all that she could be without letting her discover it for herself. The knowledge gave her a sweet, hot pulse of something that she lacked a name for but still felt all the same, all the way down to her navel.
It was good. Better than the ball of twine that didn't seem great to her, regardless of what the girl on the journals had said. Turning her back to it, she sat down on the stairs that led up to the enclosure for it, her phone on her knee. She didn't know how long it would take for Sam to come through and until she felt her phone buzz with the notification, she watched the families that came up. Usually families, mother, father, children. Sometimes couples, cameras or phones in their hands, but rarely people her age. Nearly all of them gave her a slight berth from her place on the stairs, but they did not stare as the men at the facility had, nor did they look at her as the X-Men had, alternately fearful and like they felt sorry for her.
A little girl in a little pink dress walked past her, belt buckle shoes clicking on the sidewalk and polished, gleaming in the sun before she gave Laura a gap toothed smile. It took her another moment to return the smile with an upwards pull of her lips. Her phone took that moment to vibrate on her knee and she looked away from the pig tailed little girl to her lap. He'd found the door. There was none of the usual primping a girl her age might go through as she stood up, no hair checks, no tugs to the black tank top that exposed her navel, no nervous touches to the black leather wraps that girded her forearms and no turmoiled cutting of the skin above them.
Instead she walked over to the gift shop that she had mentioned earlier to Sam and opened the door for him.
Sam had been to see the yellow ball of twine and he hadn’t been all that impressed either. His younger, more scholarly self had wondered why they let people get their greasy hands all over it and how big of a shirt it would make if somebody started knitting, but that was about it. The school trip had been otherwise uneventful, memorable only as one of the very few times he had been “off the reservation” (i.e. not at a motel or at school) without either his father or Dean watching out for things that might grab him with hoary claws. It was bizarre to Sam that he had to essentially walk out of Kansas into a hotel, watch Ford walk down a hallway, and then quite literally walk out into Kansas again. As a result, he had to squint into the pale Kansas sunlight despite the fact that he was just there, and he didn’t see Laura right away.
Sam himself was much larger than his handwriting implied; his tone on the journals generally left one with the comforting feeling that they’d just talked to someone recently out of college that had a wide sympathy streak, probably medium-sized and generally approachable in a coffeeshop way. The tousled brown hair, the brown backpack, and the washed out jeans fit the picture, but the rest of him didn’t--six foot four inches of muscle and layered fabric, huge hands with gun callouses, and graveyard dirt on his running shoes. To those with better senses he smelled like gun oil, men’s deodorant, lighter fluid, and old books. It was a strange combination, as typically lighter fluid went with cigarettes, and gun oil went with cologne, but Sam was always a collection of strange things, the unification of the Campbell line of haphazard hunters and the Winchester line of settled scholars.
Sam was expecting someone a little older than Laura actually was, a little older and a little taller, simply because she had sounded so dark and so grave. He found her though, because like anything else Sam knew how to research, and he had a general idea of who he was looking for. “Are you Laura?” Sam had small hazel eyes and a very wide, jolly green giant kind of smile.
Before she saw him, Laura could smell him, first as Ford then as Sam. Her head tilted slightly as he came through, all messy hair atop bulky height. She was used to people being taller than her, larger than her, and at a young age she had learned that size accounted for very little unless you knew how to use it. Taller people had an advantage in reach, but her claws made up for that difference. Muscles brought greater strength, but it was the easy way he moved that caught her attention. It was something learned from fighting. And combined with the scent of gun oil on him, it made her wonder.
"Yes," she replied easily and without a smile to meet his. Laura. The name her mother gave her, not the designation of the facility. "You are Sam," she said with the same easy confidence. The smile was -- strange. She was not used to people smiling like that at her, not even Julian who had smiled at her frequently but just as differently from everyone else. The effect was still the same: the skin between her knuckles itched, ready for the drop of her claws. It wasn't his smile that did it, but the weird flurry of warmth in her belly, the feeling as unknown to her as the word for it. And the unknown was to be met with claws out, adamantium flashing before the spray of blood began.
Not Sam's blood. Her claws remained sheathed as she stepped up beside him. His size did not frighten her, she had seen and trained with larger men and while she still had not returned his smile, her shoulders settled enough to suggest that his smile had the desired outcome. "Are you in school, too?"
Sam was not unused to people greeting him with lack of warmth, if not outright hostility, and he didn’t let it bother him. He deliberately did not think about all the things he’d read that she could do and instead concentrated on her and the good things he thought she could do and be. She was wary and very young, but she was also earnest. She reminded Sam of a lot of the dangerous people he had helped over the years. The smile stayed.
He put one hand out in her direct and waited for her to understand that she was supposed to shake it politely and let go. He was hoping he didn’t end up with any broken bones over it. “It’s nice to meet you, Laura.” His eyes moved over the crowd automatically, but he wasn’t worried. Despite all signs to the contrary, generally Sam felt safe wherever he was. It came from being large and dangerous, and also from having a far more dangerous brother to watch your back.
A short laugh. “No, I haven’t been in school for...” He frowned as he tried and failed to count the years. It depended on your point of view, really... “For a long time.”
Sam wanted her to shake his hand, that's what he meant when he held his hand out to her and left it there, hovering in the air like a falling leaf frozen. It wasn't something that was common amongst the X-Men that she knew or the Avengers that she watched. It was something that doctors in white lab coats did, businessmen, Presidential hopefuls, but no one, not even Steve Rogers, had shaken her hand.
And instead of leaving his hand in the air, Laura reached out and grasped it. The objective was to convey a greeting, impart trust, and establish equality. She made sure not to squeeze until she felt his joints pop, especially as his hand was nearly twice the size of hers, and curled her fingers firmly around the meat of his palm. Handshaking. Green eyes lowered to watch as their hands lifted and went back down. As gestures went, it was a simple one, but it still left a rush of heat up the nape of her neck, and her lips curving upwards ever so faintly.
Unlike him, she didn't know where he had come from and had no chance to research him at all. All she knew was the person he presented himself as. "You smell like books," she informed him as she released his hand and took a half step closer, her nostrils flaring slightly as she inhaled deep. "Old books. And you carry a backpack."
Sam smiled when she took his hand and shook it. He waited for a moment to see if she would squeeze, his face flickering with a trace of trepidation, the one expression that revealed he knew how deadly she was, but a second later, the expression was gone. The smile widened even further. Sam’s palm was huge but his hand was cool and calm. Gun callouses as easy to read as text on a page moved rough against her fingers, and then his arm dropped away. He planted his hands in his front pockets, probably the worst defensive position that a man could possibly take, trapped hands that meant no action if someone struck out at him. It was a single calm indicator of trust in one stroke.
“I work in... a kind of library.” His eyes roved over the clear blue sky as he thought about a way to describe it. “My family owns it.” There was also a gun range, a kitchen, several rooms, a full communication HQ, and a dungeon designed to hold things that went bump in the night. When she mentioned his backpack he hoisted it over his shoulder. “It just seemed like a good idea to come prepared if I was going to be in a different world on my own.” He grinned. “Yours is the second one I’ve been to. It’s really cool, actually.” He tipped his head toward the yarn. “You have a good time seeing the sights?”
Both eyebrows scooted up her face at his admission that he worked in a library. "You do not look like a kind of librarian." The callouses on his hands were more indicative of guns than novels and he smelled of guns too. What kind of librarian needed to carry a gun? Or carried one with enough frequency that gun oil clung to their skin the way that it clung to Sam's? She gave him a look that broadcasted how much she believed him and stilled on the middle of the sidewalk.
"It is not interesting." Laura much preferred those things which made her heart thump in her chest, like roller coasters that made people vomit and scream. She liked to race in the woods, dance, the thing called clubbing that Megan had introduced her to, but the ball of yarn, touted and lauded on her brochure, was not interesting to her at all. Perhaps if she had been a cat, she would have liked it more. Or, like she had told Gwen S. on the journals, if it had been on fire that would have garnered her interest. As it was, twine wrapped around twine wrapped around yet more twine, it only served to baffle her as to why it was such an attraction. "I have only seen this sight. Are the others better?"
Sam’s mouth curved downward, but there was so much amusement in his bright hazel eyes that it could only be a smile despite its malformed shape. “I think I’m flattered I don’t look like a librarian. It’s just the word I used, though, you’re right. It’s not official or anything. I just do a lot of research.” Sam thought about it, and he had the sneaking suspicion that eighty percent of the librarians he knew would probably be offended he used the title. He stopped when she stopped and gave her a curious look. “I said I wouldn’t hurt you. I’m not here to research you either. I’m just visiting.” He tried to communicate how earnest he was, shrugging deeper into the backpack.
He laughed when she spoke disparagingly of the bunch of yarn. “No. None of them are any better, because it’s Kansas. There’s nothing here to see, really. Just a lot of sky. Some nice people, I’m sure. Suburbs. Cattle. Factories.” His laugh settled into a smile. He was serious, heart slow and even, breathing unconcerned. “I wish I could say better. There’s a good burger place around the way, though.” Sam shrugged. “Well. Good for Kansas.” Frown. “At least in my world...”
There were ways to tell if someone was lying. Her head cocked slowly to the side as he continued to talk and then she promptly informed him, "There are four ways to tell if someone is lying. Facial expressions, body language, verbal responses, and interrogation. Unskilled liars have many tells and torture is an ineffective technique for determining the truth as the subject will often tell you what they think you want to hear in order to stop the pain. It is better to analyze those things which someone cannot control, such as heart rate, breathing, perspiration, and if possible, their scent. You are not lying when you say you are not here to research me, nor when you call yourself a researcher."
She started walking again, hands loose at her sides and the corners of her lips threatening to turn up with his laughter. No one she knew had such an easy laugh, but she decided that she liked it. It was good. "We will see if your burger place is here." Laura was starting to get hungry and she liked the idea of having something to eat other than whatever she could pick up from convenience stores on the bus out here. Perhaps they would have peppers.
Sam lost his smile pretty quick when she started talking about interrogation. He turned his head and watched her face. She looked young, pretty, the sort of disturbing calm that Sam had previously equated with drug states. Sam frowned, visibly concerned but also, somewhat belatedly, understanding where all that was coming from--he too had been to dark places against his will, and he still thought dark things that he would never think if he’d never been to them. It was a sobering train of thought, and Sam dropped his hands from his backpack and let them hang at his sides.
After a moment he turned in the direction of the burger place, a diner that had no actual name and no apparent owner, just a greasy sign and large windows. A sun-bleached plaster burger rotated on a pole a few feet from the entrance. “Look, I respect that you’ve got your ways of telling secrets, but secrets are sort of my life, and I don’t want you to freak out when you learn I’ve got my ways of keeping them if I want to.”
Secrets. Laura understood secrets. Understood that she had precious few of them because everyone thought that they knew her and that the one she most wanted to keep -- where she had sent her aunt and cousin, would be the last one she ever gave up. She understood what it meant too, when Sam's smile fell and the lines appeared in his forehead. At the facility it meant -- Kimura. It was the same displeasure that Emma Frost had worn when Laura had been at the school.
Laura did not want the same from Sam; she wanted him to smile again. "I will not freak out," she said. Her gaze followed his to the diner with no visible name. Most of the places she had been to were titled John's or Zippy's or some other possessive form of a name, but there was no sign here, not even a tattered has-been of what had once been new and shiny. "I do not want your secrets," she said very quietly and forced herself to look at him again. She could voice what she wanted, like people did. "If you do not want to give them. But I do not want to be lied to either." And then after a moment's hesitation, she added, "Sam."
Sam felt that her use of his name was some serious concession, and even if he didn’t know exactly how or why, he accepted it and was grateful. He had absolutely no idea what she was thinking, because reading a few general lines didn’t make up for the lack of knowledge of the world behind the colored panels, and Sam was the type of man that liked to judge things for himself.
“I can’t promise, but I’ll try. Not very many people would believe my secrets even if I did want to tell them. I usually don’t. It’s easier just to...” a breath in, a breath out, “deal with now. You know.” It wasn’t a question. He examined his expression in the smudged panes of the door to the diner, and found nothing there except old familiar features. Sam had never been especially fond of his appearance, too busy mending the broken gears in his head. His face was what it was. He looked away and then stepped back to open the door for her, propping his foot along one corner as he waited. “You’re not a vegetarian, are you?”
In the facility, she had always been X-23 or animal. They weren't names, they were things. Its. Devoid of humanity and of gender. She was never a 'she', things never belonged to 'her', because animals did not own. Animals were owned. And then her mother gave her a name and she ceased to be just a thing. It was like Pinocchio receiving his flesh and blood body; now she had a flesh and blood name. The name of a real girl. None of this she could explain to Sam though, her thoughts locked behind her tongue as they usually were.
"I know," she confirmed, pausing for only a second when he propped the door open for her with his foot. She had seen that sometimes, but never had anyone do it for her, and that oddly curious warmth settled in her stomach as she stepped past him and into the diner. The air conditioner rattled away in the corner, pumping out barely cooled air, and while it was mostly clean (she could smell the bleach) there was that sheen of grease that coated some of the lights. Jukebox in the opposite corner, not playing any music, but the lights were on inside. "No, I eat everything," she said quietly as her gaze moved over the place. "Are you?" There were a few customers sitting at the long bar with their backs turned to her.
"Go ahead and sit wherever!" Came a friendly voice from behind the same bar. An older woman. Forties, maybe fifties. Smiling. Hair bleached blond and in frazzled curls around her face. She took another slow step inside before Sam ran into her back and then decided on 'wherever'. It wasn't the bar up at the front, but three booths down from the rattling AC, the red seats cracked and worn from a thousand bodies that had previously sat on them. Laura took the far side, back to the AC and facing the door.
Sam had been in countless diners all over the United States, and there was something reassuring about the smell of congealing french fries and air conditioning. He was accustomed to being with someone he trusted, and therefore made no attempt to pick up the guard position facing the door; he simply assumed that one of them would, and the other would watch the rest of the room. The casual slide of his eyes around the room, the thoughtless readiness for anything to be out of the ordinary, and then the acceptance that nothing was, or at least nothing was yet. Sam waved at the waitress, letting his backpack slide off his shoulder. He settled onto his side of the booth, folding up his knees and fitting in with makeshift, if practiced, grace.
Sam gave Laura a bright we’re-going-to-eat smile that he’d learned from his brother. “I’m not, I don’t think I’d be allowed the Winchester name if I didn’t eat meat every now and then,” Sam said, conversationally. He looked around the diner for signs of a special, then plucked a menu from a holder on the table. He disappeared behind it. “So what are you going to do now? Keep going with the roadtrip thing?”
Sam was enjoying the company; the Bunker was dead quiet with no Dean these days, and he had yet to corner his brother into something like same-place same-time. He’d been watching the papers, the headlines, and his search bot results, but there hadn’t been anything to hunt in a hundred mile radius, either. The only thing to show up was Kevin, and Kevin was both hidden and pretty sane. Sam was waiting for something... he wasn’t sure what.
The smile was back. Her lips curled slightly, just the very corners in response. Winchester. That was what the W stood for. She wondered about looking him up later, if she would find out the things in his life that he didn't want to tell her, but she said nothing of those desires as they sat. "Do you have a large family?" While he looked over the people, she looked over the place, the bits of hung memorabilia on the walls, reminiscent of a time when she hadn't been born yet. They were gazed at, catalogued, and when she was done, her gaze shifted back to Sam.
"Yes. I have talked to a girl who goes to school in New York. That is where I will go." Kitty had told her she better hurry up though, because the year was about to end and she wanted to be there before everyone left. "I do not want to go back to the school I was at before." Perhaps if Charles Xavier was there, if there were no longer people there that thought they knew how to fix her, she might have gone back.
She might stop on her way through anyway, just to see who was there now. Though the girl she had spoken to, Gwen S, thought she was from far in the future. She might not know anyone there now, but she would never know until she was there. Under the table, she pulled her legs up and under her, her feet sliding beneath her thighs.
“No.” Sam didn’t smile when he talked about his family. He seemed not to be especially grim, but he did not smile. “No, just me and my brother.” He left it there, the words like the men, alone and simple. It was Sam and Dean vs. the world, and it was clearly obvious when Sam talked about it. The companionship was one he appreciated, because there had been many times, long times, when they had been apart. Dean couldn’t understand how those times had changed Sam, and Sam, being generally warm-hearted by nature, wasn’t keen on explaining it.
The waitress interrupted these relatively dark thoughts, and Sam ordered a club sandwich with salad and an extra order of fruit on the side.
When she said school, Sam brightened. Sam thought that school was the place for pretty much anyone that had the means and opportunity, and to his eyes Laura was young and could do with a good bit of normalization. She needed to hang around with normal kids, learn to keep her temper, figure out what was real and normal. Just then it hit him that Kara should do that too. Two superheroes, learning to be normal. He grinned.
“You should do what you want to. But school is a good idea. You can make friends and figure out who you are.” You could tell that was exactly what Sam had done. He practically beamed. School.
There were some nuances to communication that Laura missed, but the difference between Sam not smiling and smiling was clear. She did not ask more about his family, nor anything about his brother because the lack of smile where there had been one previously was a clear indication. Sam's secrets. She was not interrogating him.
As soon as Sam was done ordering, she ordered a burger -- the largest one they had -- with everything that could possibly go on one, though she traded fries for a salad. She had eaten many fries while at the school and unless they were spiced, she did not want to eat any more.
The smile was back. "I was at school before. They only wanted to fix me." She had liked school though, liked learning, but she knew that she needed to be around other people her own age, learn from them something that couldn't be taught in a classroom and read out of a book. "Did it teach you that? Who you are?" The question was quietly asked, oddly earnest for such a casual place.
Sam thought about that for a little while. He was on his second refill of ice water, staring out the window and the slow trickle of slack-socked travelers as he considered. Eventually, he said, “Lots of things do. My father said that school doesn’t tell you anything about life. It doesn’t keep you safe when something wants to hurt you. But I think... I think school gives you a lot of perspective: yours and other people’s. If it’s a good school, it does. And from there you figure out who... what... you aren’t. Or what you think you aren’t.”
Sam left his hand on the table, long arm spread out along an entire corner of the table without effort. He thought about John, about that fight when Sam had told his father he’d been accepted into Stanford. He couldn’t remember exactly what he’d said, but he’d been angry, and then it had been... a whole new world out there, books, papers, lecture halls. Before Dean had called. He twitched a few times, his hand rocking it back and forth onto his thumb and then along the opposite edge of his palm. Then he blinked. “Sorry. That ended up being confusing.”
He moved back in a quick flurry of movement as the waitress returned with plates. The salad was a little wilted, but everything that had been on the grill was thick and juicy, sending up savory torrents of steam. The waitress received a brief smile of thanks and then Sam sat forward once again to put his full attention on his food. “I’m overthinking it. Just go and live a little for yourself. I get the feeling you didn’t get to do much of that.”
Laura studied him, silent as he was. "You were remembering something." She said, not a question, but a flat statement of fact. "It was not confusing." But she needed to know who she was, not who she wasn't. She knew who she didn't want to be anymore, what things she no longer wanted to do. That was easy though, finding out who she was, what things she wanted to be and do, that was hard.
Where Sam gave a nod, Laura gave a quiet, "Thank you," before she reached for the tabasco sauce. The burger was nearly as big as her head, especially with all the toppings she had requested on it, yet she took off the top bun to add a very liberal dousing of tabasco to the top. "I have not lived a little, I have lived a lot." But none of it had been for her, it had always been for someone else. First the facility, then the X-Men, but for herself? Even in this, she was going to school because other people thought she should.
Replacing the bun, she took a bite and let out a small, quiet noise of contentment. The burger was juicy, the lettuce and onions fresh, and the tabasco sauce added that little bit of a kick that made it that much better. Unlike most people her age, she waited until she was done chewing before speaking. "I do not know what I would go to school for." There were no degrees in assassination and Laura didn't want to continue killing. She did like languages though. Biology and chemistry were equally interesting to her, but she didn't know if she wanted to pursue a degree in either one of those things. "What did you attend school for?"
Whatever she might say, Sam didn’t think Laura had actually lived all that much. To Sam, life was a positive thing, something green worth cultivating. It was, to be trite but true, a home and a hearth. It meant caring about things and doing good, simple things that made you happy and made your life worth something. Sam respected Dean’s experience not with guns and blood, but with people, even if those people no longer remembered how much Sam’s brother had cared for them. He saw Dean decorating his room in the Bunker and he thought of that as life--not the job. In Laura he saw the same sort of confusion, the blurring between experience and living life.
He thought all this between one bite and the next, and decided not to say it aloud. Instead he focused on his food, picking up a piece of relatively green cantaloupe and snapping it in half with two fingers from either hand, idly taking a few bites here and there before turning his attention to the main dish.
“Me? Pre-law. Your usual general 101’s and then a big test for a law school that never happened.” He gave her a small, rueful smile, a regret that had since healed into scar tissue. “You can go take some classes just to try it out. See if any subjects catch your attention. Even if you don’t like the schooling you can meet people there. If you really hate it, you can always leave.” His smile widened into a faint flash of teeth before he picked up his fork.
Laura had never had a home, nor a hearth. There had been the cell that housed her until she escaped and then there had been her shared room at Xavier's school, but both places she had left behind. She didn't count the dingy apartment that Zebra Daddy had her in, nor all the places she had lived between those two. They were the closest thing she had to a home and neither of them was quite it. A facsimile of life.
She took another bite of her burger, a kaleidoscope of flavors and tastes in her mouth. That was something she had learned after being at the school -- the more flavors something had, the more she liked it. And as she watched him snap his melon in half, she thought of avocados. Avocados might be good on a hamburger. Or -- other things. She'd have to find out later.
Licking at the corner of her mouth after she was done chewing, she considered him for a moment. Most of the lawyers she knew always wore a suit, button down shirt, slacks, not shoes with dirt on them. They didn't smell like old books, but expensive cologne that made her want to sneeze and very few of them ever smelled like gun oil. "How did you know you wanted to become a lawyer?" She enjoyed learning, but it was the rules that got her into trouble. Not yelling at people. Not talking about torture and blackmail in the middle of class -- these were the things that had let to her suspension the one and only time she'd attended a regular high school.
“I didn’t,” Sam admitted, literally finishing a quarter of his club sandwich in two bites. “It just ended up being what I was good at. And...” He lifted one big shoulder under all that plaid. “It appealed to me. All those rules. All that black and white.” He adopted a serious tone that was close to one of his first professors, and he tapped the table with the blade of one palm to illustrate. Once, twice. “‘It happened this way here so this is how we do it now.’ I like that. It’s clean. Makes sense.” Sam smiled, the rueful one because he knew that life wasn’t like that. There was never black and white, and nothing ever made sense. Most of all, nothing was ever, ever clean.
Sam cleaned his plate with absent-minded intensity, paying little attention to what he was actually doing and consuming everything that got in reach, when he finished he looked mildly surprised and visibly relaxed. He no longer paid such rapt attention to the people moving outside the window, not unless they paused to look in. The bag at his side stayed loose and untouched. He had coffee and waited for her to finish before digging out cash in dirty twenties.
“So do you have any other friends you want to visit?” he asked innocently, more hopeful than confident.
The black and white that he mentioned was something that she liked the sound of, but she knew life was not like that. Black and white was horribly muddled, convoluted and twisted to make up existence as she knew it. The good people did bad things and the bad people did good things; they were not always one or the other. Laura did not think she would like being a lawyer at all, which didn't help as much as anyone would think. Not knowing was not as good as knowing.
She watched as he began to fish out money and frowned. "I have money." Not that she kept the full sum of it on her person, but she had a twenty stuffed into her boots and another into her front right pocket, easily within reach. If she needed more than that, for anything, there was the shiny bright check card in her back pocket, the numbers still silver bright with lack of use.
The twenty in her front pants pocket was pulled out first, still folded up into quarters and body warm as she dropped it onto the table. The hope in his tone caught her attention again, gaze shifting from folded up green to meet his eyes. Why did he hope? "I have not seen any of them on the journals," she said slowly, gauging his reaction to her quiet words.
Sam figured that Laura could use as many friends as possible, friends that both would protect her and make her feel good about moral decisions. He knew from experience that going it solo, with only yourself in your head, was not the way to change behavior, or grow accustomed to doing something you weren’t used to doing. It wasn’t that he thought Laura was in the habit of killing, it was just... he didn’t want her to get that way. “Oh. Well, they might turn up,” he told her, completely seriously, as a ridiculous amount of people seemed to come and go without warning.
Sam used a big handi to gently nudge her twenty back toward her, as he left enough to cover them both and the tip. “Keep it for your trip, never know when you’re going to need it.” Sam wasn’t exactly rolling in money, and he usually acquired what he needed with illegal pool games that sometimes got him into fist fights--or the old tried and true credit card fraud. Now that he thought of it, these twenties probably had a serial number that matched another two twenties somewhere out there in this world, but it was a drop in the bucket, when you came down to it. He still felt a little bad. Deep down.
Sam worked his way out of the booth without waiting for an answer, and it was another practiced movement that had a fair amount of wiggling involved so he didn’t bang into table or chair. The world generally wasn’t made for people of Sam’s height, and he’d learned to maneuver around it.
"I will watch," she said, all solemn promise. Laura wanted to see Logan, Remy, Jubilee, Kiden, Sooraya, the scant handful of people that she could call friends. She didn't want to see Megan or Debbie on the journals, it would be too easy for Kimura to find them if they were also there and she wanted their safety. That was more important than seeing them both again.
She glanced down at the money that he insisted she keep, her fingers resting on the edge of the table for a few seconds before she reached out and crumbled it into her fist. Laura would keep her money, like Sam said. It was unceremoniously shoved back into her front pocket and left there.
Her way out of the booth was less practiced, less maneuvering needed with her smaller frame, but far less experience had with moving out of booths. It was not required of her while she was in the program. There was no eating out, no booths like this, cracked and worn, the leather smooth beneath the weight of a thousand bodies. Her legs unfolded as she came out, the decision already made that she liked places like this, where she wasn't only a killer.
Slipping past Sam, she walked out of the diner that had no name. Where to go now? New York was east and she was no stranger to walking. "Do you have to stay in Kansas here too?"
Sam obviously thought nothing more of the money once it was gone, folding up an old cloth wallet that had seen better times and sticking it away into his pocket. He shouldered the backpack in a mannerism exemplified by former students of his generation all over America, a quick tug and a swing through the air that was a product of padded shoulder straps and too many books. He let her go first, holding the door again not because she was small and female, but because she went first, and for no other reason. It was thoughtless, like much of Sam’s actions.
The sunshine was starting to glare as they stepped out into it, the sun working its way down into the endless blue of the Kansas plains. Sam took a deep satisfied breath. It took a lot to keep him well-fed, and the feeling didn’t last long, so he savored it.
His look down in her direction was apologetic. “I should probably stay.” He paused, as if feeling the need to elucidate, but he didn’t. The Bunker was here, and even though it seemed like he was the only one occupying it, there was no way he wasn’t going to take advantage of its presence. Besides. Sam had done his research; the Bunker was at the exact center of America. If he had to drive somewhere, in his mind, there were worse places. People like Sam Winchester were definitely on the no-fly list.
The few times that Laura had ever swung a shoulder over her pack were the few missions she'd had where she needed to play the role of a school girl. Other than that, there had never been any bags, not book bags nor purses, that she carried. Everything that she needed was on her person or kept in whatever room that she was currently calling hers. It made for light, easy travel, but Laura had never known anything else.
She paused on the sidewalk, the wind catching the very ends of her hair and lifting it away from her back. "Do you not want to travel?" She asked, in that quiet solemn way. As much as she liked this diner, this place with its giant ball of twine and fixation with Abraham Lincoln was not her home. Her home was on the streets of New York, in the urban populace where she could get lost and find herself all at the same time. Or it was in the woods and mountains of Colorado, where she could run free, where she was not X-23, or Laura, but a creature of the Earth, free to move about without pity or fear.
Her friends were much the same and she had to try to find them if she could. Staying here in Kansas was not an option for her, even if she had wanted to. She took a slow step closer to him, knowing that this where they had to separate. "We will meet again."
“My brother and I travel around a lot. Just on the ground, you know. But I’d like to see the world. Maybe some day.” He said it with a faintly regretful twist to his lips, a quiet hint that while it was a pleasant dream, it was extremely unlikely. Sam Winchester had been died and resurrected in so many government databases that it was probably practically impossible for him to leave the country. Then, all of a sudden, he brightened. “Actually, with all these doors, maybe there’s somebody’s with a door abroad. Like in London or Paris or Rome or something.” Sam really liked that idea; he grinned. Take a walk, move through a door, do some sight-seeing, come home.
Ford liked the idea too. Always somewhere to run.
Sam smiled at Laura. She was such a serious, grave girl. He tried not to feel sorry for her, but you could tell she’d had a hard time. He was hoping things in this world went okay for her. When she came closer, he took it as a good sign, and gave her an encompassing hug. He squeezed her around the shoulders. “Okay. Have fun on your trip.” He was talking like they’d been friends forever. Sam did that to people.
All her life had been lived in shadows, where she had no name, where men drove her in big Lincoln Towncars to wherever she was supposed to be. It wasn't until she left the facility that she learned how to move around on her own two feet, how to hide, where to get IDs from if she needed them. The fact that the government once went looking for her was of no more concern to her than the color of the sky. She could move beneath their radar if she had to.
The words hung on the tip of her tongue, wanting to know why Sam couldn't now, what stopped him, but then she was crushed up against broad chest and surrounded by warm arms. The few times she'd ever gotten hugs, they had always come from other women, never men. Not Logan, or Scott, or Remy and it took her a frozen, tense moment before she relaxed enough to lightly touch his back, palms flat and directly above his kidneys.
It was a small sign of trust that she didn't warn him off the hugging, that if he was trying to attack her, she would drive her claws into his kidneys, or to the left of T4, where she would hit his aortic artery. It was not an attack and she knew it as soon as he released her. "I will try," she said with that same odd gravity, at odds with how young she appeared to be. "Good-bye, Sam."