memento vivere - supernatural & criminal minds

chapter 8

Chapter 8
Road Trip

Hey Jude, don’t make it bad. Take a sad song and make it better.

Jude laughed as the first lines of ‘Hey Jude’ floated through the Impala’s radio. “You had that ready to go, huh?”

Dean winked, reaching his arm around the seat and pulling out of her apartment’s garage. “Just for you.”

“I didn’t know that was your kind of music.”

“It’s not,” he assured her, sounding almost offended. “I bought the cassette on the way down here. I also bought lunch, there’s a bag in the back.” Jude pulled the plastic bag from behind the bench and set it on her lap, pulling out two styrofoam containers. She took out the one marked with a J and opened it to find a club sandwich and french fries - how Dean still remembered her diner order after ten years was beyond her.

Jude passed him his food and they ate in silence for a while - Dean’s ability to eat a burger one-handed while driving was genuinely impressive - until she realized he was humming along. “Not your kind of music?”

“Shut up.” He switched out the Beatles for a Metallica cassette and lowered the volume. “Alright, we’ve got two days of driving and ten years to catch up on. Who’s first?”

She held out her fist. “Rock, paper, scissors?” Jude remembered that Dean always chose scissors and doomed him to go first. She tapped out the beat to ‘Master of Puppets’ on the leather seat while he gave her a rundown of his decade. After the Wessons and Winchesters parted ways, Dean and his family continued traveling as usual. As the boys got older, John let them go on more hunts with him. Dean adjusted perfectly but it became clear that Sam wanted a different life, meaning he and John clashed all the time. Sam left to go to college two years ago, just like Bobby told Jude, and Dean had hardly heard from him since.

Dean’s story got them as far as Kentucky. They stopped at around two in the morning to book rooms in a nice hotel for the night, which Jude insisted on paying for because she didn’t feel like sleeping in a crumbling motel with a family of cockroaches. They left just after sunrise and spent the drive through most of Missouri in a groggy silence, both of them clutching cups of coffee.

Jude’s turn to tell her part came when they stopped in Kansas for lunch. Over trays of barbeque, she tried her best to lay out the last ten years. She showed Dean her anti-possession tattoo, talked about her classes at Penn State, and threw a pickle slice at him when he called her a nerd for minoring in religious studies. But most of her time was spent on Elliot. Dean said he’d felt awful when they found out about her father’s death - they’d gotten a call from Bobby - but John hadn’t allowed him to reach out. As difficult as it was to talk about her father’s passing, Jude found some solace in the fact that Sam and Dean had been grieving with her hundreds of miles away.

After about four hours of sleep in a little motel in Utah, they started the final stretch to Stanford. As they drove through small towns decorated with jack-o-lanterns and ghost garlands, Jude rambled about her team to pass the time. Talking about them aloud made her realize how much Morgan reminded her of Dean, or how many little habits Spencer had that made her think of Sam.

“I know I shouldn’t ask this,” Jude posed after their third game of ‘I Spy,’ “but how’d you get through security to pick me up at the office?”

Dean laughed, leaning forward to tap the glovebox. “You’re right, you shouldn’t have asked.” Jude opened it and audibly groaned when she found a stash of fake IDs. Each of them had Dean, John, and Sam’s real faces, but their names had been replaced with the monikers of rock stars. Elliot used to use cons on hunts as well, but he’d never used fake IDs to get information.