Might have uploaded this a long time ago except I kept on searching for a suitable title replacement which never came, alas. This will have to do.

Winchester centric.

Tangling

May 8, 2014

Dean sat with one leg dangling off the motel bed as he munched on whatever kind of sandwich Sam had picked up for him. Around a mouthful of food, he finally broke the weighty silence by saying, "Okay, so I don't understand these ghosts at all."

Sam, eyes glued to the computer screen as he continued his fruitless research, began to shake his head as he responded, "Me either."

"I mean…" Dean stopped short of taking another bite and waved his food around as he continued. "I mean, where do they all come from? I've heard of towns with more than one ghost, sure, but that doesn't happen very often."

Sam made a noise of agreement without wasting his concentration on finding words. Dean understood him just fine and didn't really even need a response to continue along on his train of thought.

"And this is just ridiculous!" Dean fumed. "You have the list by you, what did people say, there were what, like, ten ghosts that more than one person we randomly found off the street mentioned?"

Sam's eyes flickered down to a paper on the table next to him even though he already knew the answer to his brother's question. "Thirteen."

"Thirteen!" Dean exclaimed with a scoff. "Of course. It would be. Lucky, lucky thirteen. So this city is haunted by thirteen separate ghosts."

"At least," Sam interjected.

"Right. At least thirteen different ghosts," Dean amended as he ate some more of his sandwich to let the enormity of the number really sink in. "How are they all here? Some kind of supernatural hot spot? That we've… never heard of before?" Saying it aloud made it seem even more ridiculous than when it was in his head. But then again, there was no way they should have been oblivious to something this huge for so long and it was one of the more tame theories that had crossed his mind over the past several hours.

"I don't know," Sam said.

"From what you've been able to tell, none of these ghosts are tied to the people. Or the town," Dean ruminated as he adjusted his position to grab a napkin off the nightstand. "I mean, there haven't been any deaths from ghosts attacks. Which is just crazy, by the way. I mean, that's bizarre enough without adding all this other weirdness into the mix. And you haven't found any deaths suspicious enough to act as an anchoring point for any of these ghosts to have been started! Right?" he suddenly questioned. "Nothing new pop up?"

Sam took in a deep breath. "Not in the last…" he looked at the bottom corner of his screen, "thirty-four minutes."

Dean sighed in exasperation. "You've checked the suicides, too, right?"

"Yes."

"And looked for real old stuff like battlegrounds?

"Yes."

"Or Indian cemeteries?" he persisted.

"Yes, Dean," Sam replied tersely, annoyed that his brother thought he had been slacking off on his job. "I've checked everything we always check and a whole lot more." He paused to close his eyes and run his hands through his shaggy brown hair for a moment. "I don't think I've done this much research since we ran into that Eidolon in Pennsylvania. And that was because we'd never run into one before and had no idea what we were dealing with because Dad hadn't ever seen one either! But this is just…"

Dean broke into a grin. "Heheh. Got your Stanford educated brain stumped, huh?"

Sam glared at him over the screen. "Doesn't sound like you're doing any better. You don't even have any theories; you're just complaining."

"Well, yeah, but I didn't go to college to study researching."

"It was pre-law, Dean," Sam corrected in clipped tones.

"Yeah, yeah, whatever," Dean waved a hand and returned to the rest of his sandwich and the previous conversation. "And nobody seems to be especially haunted here, either. Any one person is as likely to get attacked as the next. It makes no sense."

"I know."

"And dude," Dean exclaimed as he suddenly sat up, "these ghosts fly! And they're not bound to a house or a person or a thing so we don't even know where to start looking for remains. None of this makes sense."

"Yep."

"We haven't ever seen anything like this before." Dean crumpled his sandwich wrapper and lobbed it at the garbage can against the far wall. "And that's saying something."

"It's like a new brand of ghost," Sam murmured.

"We need more information," Dean concluded.

"I know," Sam ground out from between clenched teeth.

Dean recognized the tone, but was so fed up with not knowing what was going on that he only-half-playfully pouted, "So hurry up with the researching, why don't you?"

"Dude," Sam exclaimed, throwing his hands in the air, "all I have been doing is researching and it's not getting me anywhere! My eyes are starting to cross and I still don't know a single helpful thing about the ghosts here." He sighed sharply and pushed his chair away from the table and looked his brother square in the eye. "We need more information."

"More information, Sammy?" Dean questioned with a canted head. "Look at the notebook! If anything, we have too much information. Every single person we talked to gave us information and they all told us something different. You ready to interview every single citizen of Amity Park and plow through the transcripts to find similarities and patterns? Yeah, no, I didn't think so."

"Then let's talk to someone who actually knows about what's happening here."

"Oh no!" Dean held out a finger as warning as he figured out what his brother was suggesting. "I am not going to talk to the Fentons again. Not doing that; that is a bridge too far. Those people are freaking weird, Sam. They wear jumpsuits in their house." He paused for full effect. "Jumpsuits. In their house. Spandex," he nodded with a grimace as he spelled it out again in case Sam had missed it the first three times, "spaaaaaaaaandex."

The younger Winchester rolled his eyes. "I wasn't thinking about the parents. What about the daughter?"

"What, Jazz?" Dean asked, surprised.

"Yeah," Sam replied. "She seemed like a smart kid. Level headed. Brain like an encyclopedia. I bet she knows enough about what her parents' research that she would be really helpful and not nearly as exasperating."

"Yeah," Dean agreed hesitantly. "But she also looked smart enough to look through our cover story."

Sam snorted. "Nobody sees through your cons, Dean."

"You mean, no one has been smart or cynical enough to look closely at our signatures yet, Mr. Han Solo."

"What?" Sam smiled. "Star Wars is a classic. And it's not like it's any worse than your collection of musicians."

"Okay, okay," Dean placated with hands up. "So maybe we don't pick the most inconspicuous names on all of our IDs, but still…"

"Well if you're scared of her getting the drop on you," Sam pointed out with what was trying to be a rakish grin, "you can always charm your way out of the situation. That's your specialty, isn't it?"

"Nope," Dean said quickly, surprising his brother into quirking an eyebrow at him. Seeing the look, Dean explained, "Not flirting with Jazz. Not with Danny around."

"Dude," Sam fumbled for words, because when had Dean ever not flirted with a girl because of someone else's opinions? "Are you… scared of a fourteen year old?"

Dean pointed at him with an emphatic finger as he formulated his defence. "You didn't see the looks he was giving me!"

Sam stared at him in disbelief.

"Hey," Dean said with hands raised in front of him. "I'm not going to tangle with a protective little brother." He smiled as he pushed off the bed and crossed the room, punching Sam on the shoulder as he passed. "You gotta give me at least some credit; I'm actually a lot smarter than most of the things we go up against and I know better than that."

Not so much action in this one BECAUSE I MISS THIS KIND OF INTERACTION OKAY. Before it got messed up with all sorts of contentious plot points. *pines after seasons 2 and 3*

There's actually a still from one of the episodes floating around on tumblr with Sam holding out a fake badge signed Secret Agent "Han Solo," so yes, that's a thing. X'D