Michael Barrett (notthatmichael) wrote in wariscoming, @ 2011-07-22 17:33:00 |
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Entry tags: | jo harvelle-shurley, michael barrett |
Who: Michael Barrett and Jo Harvelle-Shurley.
What: Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope…
When: Early evening, July 22nd.
Where: The Roadhouse.
Warnings: Probably shouldn’t be any.
Michael had always wondered what it would be like to be in the Star Wars movies. Of course, in his mental reenactments, he was always Han Solo or Luke Skywalker, or occasionally Lando. Regardless, he was always the one joining up with the underdog cause to make a difference. He was always the hero. Now he felt like he was living out his own little Star Wars, but instead of being Luke or Han or Lando or even Obi-Wan, he was becoming really familiar with how Princess Leia must have felt circa A New Hope. Before all this, Michael thought he knew what desperation was. The last few years hadn’t exactly been free of it. Constantly searching for real information about the supernatural using only a couple mythology textbooks from Ebay, the internet, and every horror movie he could get his hands on wasn’t exactly short on desperation. Michael may not have known much about the wider world of the supernatural, but he was pretty sure the internet was about 99% bullshit and the horror movies were only slightly less so. The mythology textbooks might be more accurate, but he really had no way of knowing which bits were true and which were just confused legend. Once upon a time, Michael thought that was desperation.
Now he knew better.
What he thought was desperation before was in reality just annoyance. This was desperation, this fool’s errand that probably wasn’t going to end well for anyone. He’d been on the road for two and a half months tracking two guys who made a living hiding from trackers with a hell of a lot more resources and manpower than he had. All he had were a few statements from an old card that was maxed out and probably forgotten years ago. In the two months since he’d grabbed his go-bag and headed out, he’d been up and down the country, seeing a cavalcade of bars, motels, gas stations, and minimarts. No one could tell him anything, mostly because no one remembered guys that matched Sam and Dean’s description, and occasionally because they did remember and weren’t talking. He’d followed every lead he could, run each and every one of them into the ground, and none of them had turned up anything. Two and a half months of his life gone, chasing leads that never turned up results. In the beginning he’d had hope. Maybe it was stupid of him, but despite all the very real obstacles he would face in finding the two brothers, he’d had hope. Every charge on those statements were fresh and new, unexplored and full of promise, and Michael just knew he would find them somehow. He had to. They were the only real hope his family had.
Two and a half months later, Michael Barrett had only learned one thing: That hope was a haven for idiots. For the last few weeks, he’d just been going through the motions on autopilot, using the same rehearsed lines to question bartenders, gas station attendants, and hotel clerks about “two guys, one a giant and the other only a little shorter, with a badass Chevy Impala”. No one ever knew who he was talking about, or if they did they didn’t know where they were, or they just shut down and didn’t give Michael anything. These days all he had was the notion that after this last lead, some place called Harvelle’s Roadhouse, turned up nothing, he’d have to go back to Fitchburg empty handed and try to figure out what supernatural nasty was plaguing his family on his own. He knew what that meant, too. It meant his family was going to die and there was nothing he could do to stop it. All he had left was this one last place. This one last place that wasn’t even in the same place as it was when Sam and Dean had passed through, and probably had entirely different staff who had never even met them. Harvelle’s Roadhouse was literally the last hope he had.
Somehow he thought it was darkly funny that in his Star Wars reenactment, Obi-Wan Kenobi was a bar. That certainly spoke volumes about his life, of late.
Harvelle’s Roadhouse, the closest thing to hope Michael had left, didn’t look like much. Oh, it wasn’t some dingy hole-in-the-wall, but it didn’t particularly stand out from any other blue collar bar, either. That wasn’t a bad thing, as far as Michael was concerned. He’d been to a few of the more artsy bars and the atmosphere there was just crap. It was too smug in there, sort of like he imagined San Francisco or Paris to be. The blue collar places, by and large, were much better about the atmosphere. Sure, there were crappy regular bars out there, but even the crappiest of them didn’t make you feel like you were beneath them just for not knowing what some imported microbrew from Berlin was.
Parking wasn’t much of a problem. Michael had been out in the summer heat enough the past few months that it was no longer bothering him the way it did some people, so pulling his ’72 Plymouth Road Runner into a spot a little farther back wasn’t a problem for him. He didn’t immediately flick off the ignition and get out once he pulled in, though. He didn’t actually know what kind of place this Roadhouse was. The only weapons he had were in the go-bag, and more than once on this little road trip of his, he’d wound up caught in the middle of a bar fight without them. Admittedly, two hunting knives, one bigass bowie knife, and a shotgun – thank you irresponsible gun control regulations – weren’t going to help him much in a fist fight, but they could certainly help him stay out of one. He hesitated a minute longer in thought before killing the ignition, hopping out of the car, and going to his trunk. He was back there only long enough to slip the bowie knife into a sheath and then strap the sheath tightly to his shoulder, underneath the worn red track jacket he’d been wearing for the entirety of the two and a half month trip. Other than that he went pretty light on the clothes, with a pair of red chucks, some denim shorts that hung below the knee in typical male-short style, and a white sleeveless undershirt. With the heat, it was too damn hot to wear anything else. The only jewelry he wore was a little skull ring on his right ring finger, a studded leather bracer on his left forearm, and an amulet on a chain around his neck. The ring and the bracer were largely for show, but the amulet wasn’t, or at least wasn’t supposed to be. He’d ordered it off some new age website; supposedly the design was pulled right out of The Keys of Solomon the King. According to the listing on the website, the design was meant to ward off evil energies. Whether it was legit or not, Michael wasn’t sure, but he wore it anyway. He did, however, have the good sense to tuck it under his shirt before heading into his last hope.
There wasn’t somebody at the door checking IDs, which was good. Michael did have a fake one, and a damn fine one at that, but somehow it would have felt wrong scamming the people that were really and truly his last hope of protecting his family. He had no moral compunctions about scamming normally, especially considering he’d had to do it every day since the Shtriga, but in this case it just wouldn’t have sat well. The inside of Harvelle’s Roadhouse was pretty much what he’d expected. People, some tables, music, your standard set-up. There might have been a few details he overlooked, but he’d been to literally hundreds of places similar to this one in the last two and a half months. Glossing over the unimportant details was what kept him sane. What he did pay attention to were the staff at the bar. He quickly zeroed in on a cute girl serving up drinks and headed up her way, choosing an empty stool near where she was and waiting as if he was going to order a drink. Normally he would, and flash the fake ID to get it, but once again he was oddly reticent about scamming the last possible chance he had of finding Sam and Dean.