Yep, this is Day of the Dead fic. No, it's not set in Mexico, I'm not that pathetic. It's kinda close, though. *shifty eyes* I couldn't resist including my grandad's hometown in the story, though, so sorry. Also, 'Melditos metiches' means something like 'damned nosy people'.
Title: And That Ashen Taste on My Mouth
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2035
Author Notes: The Day of the Dead has always been one of my favorite holidays, and seeing how much the tradition fits with the canon, and the importance of this day in the series, I just couldn't not write this.
They’re entering San Antonio when Sam finally learns the date for the first time after weeks of Dean carefully stepping in front of faded diner calendars and clipping the newspaper’s date away and messing with the laptop so it says it’s Christmas, 1977, and then it only makes sense for them being practically half a country away when he realizes it’s November the second.
---
It’s not like he hadn’t known, because having to sort through demons, and stupid kids dressed as demons, kind of gives Halloween away, and after that, it’s just two days until his half birthday, but a part of his brain had just blocked the idea away, had kept him safe in October, when people don’t go up in flames, pinned to ceilings.
A guy in the radio says the date along with the hour, and Dean changes stations mid way through two thousand and---, sets his jaw and gives Sam a fast, concerned look.
Sam just sighs, closes his eyes, and curses at himself silently for having dared to forget.
---
They’re after the ghost of a small child, nothing urgent and nothing tough, and Sam figures he should’ve realized what Dean was doing before, with such a hunt that feels more like killing time than anything.
They drive around, ask some questions, but the dead kid doesn’t have a violent M.O. and not that many sightings, and by noon they’re still empty handed. They’re only going through the steps methodically, though, half-heartedly. The weather’s oddly warm for November, and kids are playing on the street everywhere, sitting on the sidewalks, staining their faces with all the candy they got in Halloween. It reminds Sam of all those Halloweens he spent shooting at real monsters instead of asking for trick or treat. The one Halloween he had wore a costume had backfired horribly. He had been a pretty much half-naked pharaoh (to Dean’s great amusement, who had fallen off the bed laughing when he had first seen him), because his father wouldn’t allow him to disguise himself as something that they could easily be hunting the next week, and a horde of possessed cats had taken a liking to him. He still had some of the scratches’ scars.
Dean has been giving him this tight-lipped expression all day long, as if not knowing what to do with him, treating him like’s about to break, and Sam knows that he should probably open up about everything that’s eating at him, especially since he was the one that bitched about it (as Dean had liked to call it) after Dad’s death, but Jess had been a different life of his, the only thing he had never had had to share.
Winchester men carry their guilt alone, even when they shouldn’t have to.
The owner of the coffee shop they stop at to steal a wireless signal is blonde and blue-eyed and is as Mexican as Sam and Dean are, but there’s still a little Death Shrine by the window, in sharp contrast with the Halloween decorations that no one’s bothered to take down yet. Then again, this is the kind of place that looks like it must be moss green on St. Patrick’s Day, blue and red on Independence Day and hell; sport little India flags on some sort of unpronounceable holiday, so it’s alright. Someone must have dropped some coffee on it, because the purple is getting washed away from the crepe paper, dripping into one of the candles with the Sacred Heart painted on the wax. The flame sizzles with every drop. Sam glares at it for a minute straight, not blinking, until Dean says Dude, and doesn’t say You look like an idiot, although Sam can hear it anyway.
A second after he turns away, the flame goes out.
“The food’s going to rot if you leave it out all night,” Dean says to the coffee shop owner, pointing at the odd bread that looks as if it had sugary bones on top of it, and she just smiles and waves it away. She’s been winking at Dean for the last half hour, and ignoring Sam steadily for even longer.
“That’s the point, I think. I mean, I don’t know for sure, but a friend of a friend’s from some god forsaken town called Tonila or something, and he says that the spirits of the dead are supposed to come during the night and steal the flavor away from the food. Isn’t it creepy?”
Dean smirks at her, but Sam can tell he doesn’t mean it.
After all, they, more than anyone, know that there’s always a grain of truth hidden in every legend.
---
They go in their own ways to research, and by late afternoon, when Sam’s eyes are already closing on their own from having his nose buried in dusty books for hours and not learning much from being thinking of golden hair and the taste of cookies in his mouth, he catches a bus to the local cemetery, to find the grave and make the whole thing easier once they go there by night.
There’s a market near the graveyard, filled to the brim with people buying Cempazúchil flowers for their loved one’s graves.
Sam lets himself get lost in the crowd, hands in his pockets and enjoying the silence. He feels a tug on his sleeve, and turns to see a long-haired woman smile at him, her eyes as white with cataracts as the color of her hair. “Here,” she says, and hands him a little sugar skull with sequin eyes and a purple smile, the word Jessica painted with blue dough on its forehead.
Sam frowns once he reads the inscription, but the woman only smiles again and tugs him down to cross him, as a blessing, and kiss him on the forehead.
And then she lets him go, turns around and disappears among the crowd, as if she had never been there on the first place. If it wasn’t for the little candy skull, melting around the edges from the warmth of Sam’s hand, he’d wonder if it had been real.
---
When he meets up with Dean, he’s nibbling on a piece of a skull, the Mary in pink still untouched.
---
Dean doesn’t say anything when Sam leaves a vanilla doughnut on the little table besides his bed, next to the still uneaten sugar skull with his dead girlfriend’s name written on it.
He knows Dean would never say, but Sam had seen him stare at the muffins their father had liked so much while in the grocery store where Sam had bought the doughnut and proclaimed it Jess’ favorite.
When he closes the motel door, ready for a hunt, he wonders at the stupid shit people will do to keep the dead alive in their memories.
---
It only takes them two minutes after they enter the cemetery to know they won’t get any work done that night. It’s almost as crowded as the market had been earlier that day, the ground covered in orange flowers that look almost like oddly-colored carnations, and people laughing and joking next to the graves.
It’s just surreal, the hundreds of candles lighting up the graveyard as families gather around their dead loved ones and set up shrines, much more elaborated ones that the little one at the coffee shop.
“Jesus, this is just crazy,” Dean says, and Sam has to agree. He watches Dean frown as some kids playing tag run next to them, two or three words of Spanish amongst their enthusiastic yells.
“So I’m guessing the whole grave-digging, bone-burning thing is off now, right?”
Dean scoffs. “Well, unless you wanna explain to an angry mob that you need the boy’s skull to coat it in candy, yeah, genius, I’d say it’s off.”
Sam just rolls his eyes, and starts looking for an empty grave to sit on and keep watch.
They have to switch graves halfway through the night, having had to escape the dead guy’s confused family with a Oh, yes, Manuel was such a good friend. They end up sitting on the grave of Lena Robbinson, October 10, 1946 to June 15, 1998; sharing peanut M&Ms and counting how many strange shit happens in the graves close to them.
They’re up to number 26 of the list of Fucking Weird Stuff, a guy sobbing as he pours tequila over a tomb, when they see the first ghost. She’s almost corporeal, but the occasional flickering gives her away. She’s all dolled up, hair in a high knot, as if she had died while having the time of her life, and she’s young, sixteen, tops.
Dean’s the one that spots her first, but Sam’s the first to figure out she’s dead, and he casually says that it speaks a lot of Dean’s perverted ways as they walk over to find the girl. Dean, predictably, just tells him to shut up. The girl’s just hovering there, arranging her hair to look like a faded picture of herself, set high on the little altar against a gravestone.
Sam’s playing with the salt in his pockets as they approach, but the girl must hear when Dean uncaps the bottle of holy water next to him, because she turns towards them, blows them a kiss, and disappears into thin air before then can reach her.
The girl’s mom sits next to the grave twenty minutes later, going from confused to upset at their questions and Yes, of course I can feel her here tonight, it’s the Day of the Dead, after all, isn’t it wonderful?” she says in accented English, and then, No, of course my little girl isn’t dangerous, what are you playing at?
Hell hath no fury like a mother scorned, so they leave shortly, as the woman calls them “Malditos metiches,” and Dean wonders aloud whether she had cursed them.
They go back to old Lena’s grave, wave at everyone that says hi good naturally and nod and smile whenever old ladies address them in Spanish (which happens disturbingly often). At some point, a gray-haired woman says something that apparently, required more than a nod for an answer, because she laughs at them, mockingly, pointing them out to the group of elderly people behind them. They both laugh too, although forcefully, because it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what idiotas means.
They see another five ghosts, all of them smiling as they try to reach the offers left there for them, laughing from jokes told by their living relatives sitting by their graves.
It’s confusing as hell, and weird as fuck, but apparently, the spirits do come back home to the earth on the Day of the Dead, and they come back to party, so Sam and Dean can’t exactly go and ruin their fun by going into a cremating extravaganza.
So they let them be, and the ghosts, for once, let the Winchesters alone as well, and nothing burns down that night but the blessed candles that leave wax trails on the gravestones.
---
They decide that the dead kid they’d been hunting isn’t really dangerous, and besides, all of the sightings had been around the first days of November, which has pretty much explained itself, so they pack up the next day, heading for some other state where English is still the official language.
Sam stares for three hours at the vanilla doughnut he had brought from the motel as an afterthought, looking innocent enough on top of a napkin, set in front of him on the Impala’s dashboard.
Close to Odessa, Dean finally snaps. “Do you want me to eat it for you already, Sammy? I promise, it ain’t going to bite you.”
Sam grunts. Dean sighs and turns up the volume. Half an hour later, Sam finally takes a bite. He takes his time to taste it. It isn’t sweet at all. Id doesn’t taste much like anything, actually, except for a subtle something under the dough.
“So?” Asks Dean, patience running out.
“It tastes like that cheap lip gloss I got Jess on our fourth date,” Sam says, and against all odds, he smiles.
Title: And That Ashen Taste on My Mouth
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2035
Author Notes: The Day of the Dead has always been one of my favorite holidays, and seeing how much the tradition fits with the canon, and the importance of this day in the series, I just couldn't not write this.
They’re entering San Antonio when Sam finally learns the date for the first time after weeks of Dean carefully stepping in front of faded diner calendars and clipping the newspaper’s date away and messing with the laptop so it says it’s Christmas, 1977, and then it only makes sense for them being practically half a country away when he realizes it’s November the second.
---
It’s not like he hadn’t known, because having to sort through demons, and stupid kids dressed as demons, kind of gives Halloween away, and after that, it’s just two days until his half birthday, but a part of his brain had just blocked the idea away, had kept him safe in October, when people don’t go up in flames, pinned to ceilings.
A guy in the radio says the date along with the hour, and Dean changes stations mid way through two thousand and---, sets his jaw and gives Sam a fast, concerned look.
Sam just sighs, closes his eyes, and curses at himself silently for having dared to forget.
---
They’re after the ghost of a small child, nothing urgent and nothing tough, and Sam figures he should’ve realized what Dean was doing before, with such a hunt that feels more like killing time than anything.
They drive around, ask some questions, but the dead kid doesn’t have a violent M.O. and not that many sightings, and by noon they’re still empty handed. They’re only going through the steps methodically, though, half-heartedly. The weather’s oddly warm for November, and kids are playing on the street everywhere, sitting on the sidewalks, staining their faces with all the candy they got in Halloween. It reminds Sam of all those Halloweens he spent shooting at real monsters instead of asking for trick or treat. The one Halloween he had wore a costume had backfired horribly. He had been a pretty much half-naked pharaoh (to Dean’s great amusement, who had fallen off the bed laughing when he had first seen him), because his father wouldn’t allow him to disguise himself as something that they could easily be hunting the next week, and a horde of possessed cats had taken a liking to him. He still had some of the scratches’ scars.
Dean has been giving him this tight-lipped expression all day long, as if not knowing what to do with him, treating him like’s about to break, and Sam knows that he should probably open up about everything that’s eating at him, especially since he was the one that bitched about it (as Dean had liked to call it) after Dad’s death, but Jess had been a different life of his, the only thing he had never had had to share.
Winchester men carry their guilt alone, even when they shouldn’t have to.
The owner of the coffee shop they stop at to steal a wireless signal is blonde and blue-eyed and is as Mexican as Sam and Dean are, but there’s still a little Death Shrine by the window, in sharp contrast with the Halloween decorations that no one’s bothered to take down yet. Then again, this is the kind of place that looks like it must be moss green on St. Patrick’s Day, blue and red on Independence Day and hell; sport little India flags on some sort of unpronounceable holiday, so it’s alright. Someone must have dropped some coffee on it, because the purple is getting washed away from the crepe paper, dripping into one of the candles with the Sacred Heart painted on the wax. The flame sizzles with every drop. Sam glares at it for a minute straight, not blinking, until Dean says Dude, and doesn’t say You look like an idiot, although Sam can hear it anyway.
A second after he turns away, the flame goes out.
“The food’s going to rot if you leave it out all night,” Dean says to the coffee shop owner, pointing at the odd bread that looks as if it had sugary bones on top of it, and she just smiles and waves it away. She’s been winking at Dean for the last half hour, and ignoring Sam steadily for even longer.
“That’s the point, I think. I mean, I don’t know for sure, but a friend of a friend’s from some god forsaken town called Tonila or something, and he says that the spirits of the dead are supposed to come during the night and steal the flavor away from the food. Isn’t it creepy?”
Dean smirks at her, but Sam can tell he doesn’t mean it.
After all, they, more than anyone, know that there’s always a grain of truth hidden in every legend.
---
They go in their own ways to research, and by late afternoon, when Sam’s eyes are already closing on their own from having his nose buried in dusty books for hours and not learning much from being thinking of golden hair and the taste of cookies in his mouth, he catches a bus to the local cemetery, to find the grave and make the whole thing easier once they go there by night.
There’s a market near the graveyard, filled to the brim with people buying Cempazúchil flowers for their loved one’s graves.
Sam lets himself get lost in the crowd, hands in his pockets and enjoying the silence. He feels a tug on his sleeve, and turns to see a long-haired woman smile at him, her eyes as white with cataracts as the color of her hair. “Here,” she says, and hands him a little sugar skull with sequin eyes and a purple smile, the word Jessica painted with blue dough on its forehead.
Sam frowns once he reads the inscription, but the woman only smiles again and tugs him down to cross him, as a blessing, and kiss him on the forehead.
And then she lets him go, turns around and disappears among the crowd, as if she had never been there on the first place. If it wasn’t for the little candy skull, melting around the edges from the warmth of Sam’s hand, he’d wonder if it had been real.
---
When he meets up with Dean, he’s nibbling on a piece of a skull, the Mary in pink still untouched.
---
Dean doesn’t say anything when Sam leaves a vanilla doughnut on the little table besides his bed, next to the still uneaten sugar skull with his dead girlfriend’s name written on it.
He knows Dean would never say, but Sam had seen him stare at the muffins their father had liked so much while in the grocery store where Sam had bought the doughnut and proclaimed it Jess’ favorite.
When he closes the motel door, ready for a hunt, he wonders at the stupid shit people will do to keep the dead alive in their memories.
---
It only takes them two minutes after they enter the cemetery to know they won’t get any work done that night. It’s almost as crowded as the market had been earlier that day, the ground covered in orange flowers that look almost like oddly-colored carnations, and people laughing and joking next to the graves.
It’s just surreal, the hundreds of candles lighting up the graveyard as families gather around their dead loved ones and set up shrines, much more elaborated ones that the little one at the coffee shop.
“Jesus, this is just crazy,” Dean says, and Sam has to agree. He watches Dean frown as some kids playing tag run next to them, two or three words of Spanish amongst their enthusiastic yells.
“So I’m guessing the whole grave-digging, bone-burning thing is off now, right?”
Dean scoffs. “Well, unless you wanna explain to an angry mob that you need the boy’s skull to coat it in candy, yeah, genius, I’d say it’s off.”
Sam just rolls his eyes, and starts looking for an empty grave to sit on and keep watch.
They have to switch graves halfway through the night, having had to escape the dead guy’s confused family with a Oh, yes, Manuel was such a good friend. They end up sitting on the grave of Lena Robbinson, October 10, 1946 to June 15, 1998; sharing peanut M&Ms and counting how many strange shit happens in the graves close to them.
They’re up to number 26 of the list of Fucking Weird Stuff, a guy sobbing as he pours tequila over a tomb, when they see the first ghost. She’s almost corporeal, but the occasional flickering gives her away. She’s all dolled up, hair in a high knot, as if she had died while having the time of her life, and she’s young, sixteen, tops.
Dean’s the one that spots her first, but Sam’s the first to figure out she’s dead, and he casually says that it speaks a lot of Dean’s perverted ways as they walk over to find the girl. Dean, predictably, just tells him to shut up. The girl’s just hovering there, arranging her hair to look like a faded picture of herself, set high on the little altar against a gravestone.
Sam’s playing with the salt in his pockets as they approach, but the girl must hear when Dean uncaps the bottle of holy water next to him, because she turns towards them, blows them a kiss, and disappears into thin air before then can reach her.
The girl’s mom sits next to the grave twenty minutes later, going from confused to upset at their questions and Yes, of course I can feel her here tonight, it’s the Day of the Dead, after all, isn’t it wonderful?” she says in accented English, and then, No, of course my little girl isn’t dangerous, what are you playing at?
Hell hath no fury like a mother scorned, so they leave shortly, as the woman calls them “Malditos metiches,” and Dean wonders aloud whether she had cursed them.
They go back to old Lena’s grave, wave at everyone that says hi good naturally and nod and smile whenever old ladies address them in Spanish (which happens disturbingly often). At some point, a gray-haired woman says something that apparently, required more than a nod for an answer, because she laughs at them, mockingly, pointing them out to the group of elderly people behind them. They both laugh too, although forcefully, because it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what idiotas means.
They see another five ghosts, all of them smiling as they try to reach the offers left there for them, laughing from jokes told by their living relatives sitting by their graves.
It’s confusing as hell, and weird as fuck, but apparently, the spirits do come back home to the earth on the Day of the Dead, and they come back to party, so Sam and Dean can’t exactly go and ruin their fun by going into a cremating extravaganza.
So they let them be, and the ghosts, for once, let the Winchesters alone as well, and nothing burns down that night but the blessed candles that leave wax trails on the gravestones.
---
They decide that the dead kid they’d been hunting isn’t really dangerous, and besides, all of the sightings had been around the first days of November, which has pretty much explained itself, so they pack up the next day, heading for some other state where English is still the official language.
Sam stares for three hours at the vanilla doughnut he had brought from the motel as an afterthought, looking innocent enough on top of a napkin, set in front of him on the Impala’s dashboard.
Close to Odessa, Dean finally snaps. “Do you want me to eat it for you already, Sammy? I promise, it ain’t going to bite you.”
Sam grunts. Dean sighs and turns up the volume. Half an hour later, Sam finally takes a bite. He takes his time to taste it. It isn’t sweet at all. Id doesn’t taste much like anything, actually, except for a subtle something under the dough.
“So?” Asks Dean, patience running out.
“It tastes like that cheap lip gloss I got Jess on our fourth date,” Sam says, and against all odds, he smiles.
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Heee. That is so Dean!
I love this so much. The atmosphere of the ghosts just in town for the party and the Boys' inability to deal with their grief in different ways.
“It tastes like that cheap lip gloss I got Jess on our fourth date,” Sam says, and against all odds, he smiles.
Awww! Sammy! *squishes him*
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Aw, that's so very Dean. *cuddles him*
I really like the atmosphere of this and the boys confusion that the spirits come back and aren't evil and the different ways the two of them handle their grief. Really, really lovely, sweetie. ♥
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I like this holiday :-D I may have to celebrate it sometime, lol.
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Thanks, dear. :) And yeah, you should, it's pretty. *g*
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This is just so perfect Dean... being careful and caring with Sam without Sam really being aware he's doing it...
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Dean doesn’t say anything when Sam leaves a vanilla doughnut on the little table besides his bed, next to the still uneaten sugar skull with his dead girlfriend’s name written on it.
Aw. Precioso, así como el resto de la historia. Me encanta el aire melancólico que le has dado.
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Favorite lines:
They’re entering San Antonio when Sam finally learns the date for the first time after weeks of Dean carefully stepping in front of faded diner calendars and clipping the newspaper’s date away and messing with the laptop so it says it’s Christmas, 1977, and then it only makes sense for them being practically half a country away when he realizes it’s November the second.
Such a good big brother. *pets Dean*
He knows Dean would never say, but Sam had seen him stare at the muffins their father had liked so much while in the grocery store where Sam had bought the doughnut and proclaimed it Jess’ favorite.
Oh, boys.
It’s confusing as hell, and weird as fuck, but apparently, the spirits do come back home to the earth on the Day of the Dead, and they come back to party, so Sam and Dean can’t exactly go and ruin their fun by going into a cremating extravaganza.
So they let them be, and the ghosts, for once, let the Winchesters alone as well, and nothing burns down that night but the blessed candles that leave wax trails on the gravestones.
Love, love, love this, from Sam and Dean leaving the ghosts alone, to the ghosts leaving them alone, to that wonderful detail about the wax trails on the gravestones.
“It tastes like that cheap lip gloss I got Jess on our fourth date,” Sam says, and against all odds, he smiles.
Perfect ending. :)
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I do believe that Dean is the greatest big brother in the world, hands down *g*
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But this one's just fantastic. It has a wonderful uncertain atmosphere -- the boys aren't their usual "sure of killing things" self. There's so much grey in it, so much about people and the way they think and act, and why.
And then. The pictures. And all of the stuff about Sam and Jess. ♥ ♥
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I love Sam/Jess, I should probably write more of it XD
Thank youuuuu!
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Lovely story.
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*Hugs you*
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Cheers ~
Erin
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~Erin