Chapter Text
It’s not even his dog. It’s some random stray that follows Sam home to his shitty apartment that he’s pretty sure he’s not even allowed to have animals in to begin with. The thing is dirty and it smells and it’s all skin and bones and he has no idea why, but he lets it follow him up the crumbling steps and in through his door. It’s a pretty big dog, but it’s docile when he herds it into the bathroom and into his shower. It doesn’t do anything but wag it’s little half-tail slightly when Sam lifts it gently into the tub and turns on the water. He briefly thinks about what Dean would say if he knew Sam just brought a random dog home—to be fair, he didn’t so much bring it home as it just followed him for 5 blocks, only blinking sadly when he tried to shoo it away.
Sam should probably call a pound or something but before anything else happens, the thing needs a bath. Or like, twelve of them—it reeks so bad. When he uses one of his big water bottles to dump warm bathwater over the dog’s back, it’s almost black as it goes down the drain. The dog just wiggles and sighs like Sam rubbing the grime from its coat is the best thing that ever happened to it.
It takes close to an hour and half a bottle of Sam’s shampoo before the water is running clear and he can’t smell anything but soap and wet dog. He’s discovered that the stray is a boy and that he’s been neutered. The dog watches Sam carefully when he goes to get a towel from the clothes hamper next to the sink and of course chooses to shake right before Sam can get back with it. The whole bathroom is dripping when he’s done.
Sam glares and the dog just wags his little half-tail again. Now that it’s clean, the stray looks a little better. Sam thinks it might be part boxer with maybe a little Saint Bernard mixed in. Its nose has that pushed in quality but his hair isn’t really hair, it’s more on the fur side, poofy in the spots where the skin seems to be healthier. The dog’s head is dark and the rest of him switches from brindle spots to white to tan. He’s basically a hodge-podge of all different colors. Sam wipes the dog down the best he can and he notices that the stray’s tail seems to be slightly balding where it ends and he realizes that something must have taken off part of it’s tail while it was on the street. He vaguely remembers when he was a kid and one of Aunt Ellen’s cats getting it’s tail crushed by a rocking chair and the end of it falling off. He wonders if the same thing happened to his stray.
The stray. Not his stray. He’s not keeping this dog.
He’s not.
When he walks out of the bathroom, the dog lopes along behind him like it’s been in his apartment for years. Sam’s place isn’t big, it’s one bedroom, a bathroom, and a kitchen/living room divided by a weird little breakfast bar thing. He’s got a crummy second-hand couch in front of an ancient TV that’s sitting on a coffee table with mismatched legs. It’s not much, but it functions. Most of the time.
Sam crosses into the kitchen and the dog stops right at the edge of the breakfast bar, where the carpet changes to linoleum. It sits and stares while Sam moves around, cocking its head when the refrigerator door opens. Sam can hear it’s nub-tail swishing on the carpet whenever he looks at the stray. He doesn’t have any dog food, but he assumes that this dog’s been eating trash for however long so it won’t mind wolfing down some lo mien from a couple days ago. He dumps it into a bowl and briefly wonders if he should heat it up. He cocks and eyebrow at the dog. The dog sneezes.
Cold it is then.
The lo mien is gone in under 20 seconds and the bowl of water Sam sets next to it is mostly all over the floor but the dog looks happy as it flops to the ground. In fact, his jowls are pulled back in a way that makes him almost look like he’s smiling.
“You’re weird,” Sam says without thinking. The dog’s tail thumps on the ground.
Sam is so not keeping this dog.
---
He leaves the dog by the couch on a piled up old blanket he pulled from the closet in his room. He considers for a moment, locking the dog in the bathroom but when he laid the blanket on the floor, it wagged it’s stubby tail again, turned two circles, and settled onto the wool plaid like he’d been doing it his whole life. Sam’s bathroom is tiny anyway and it would be cruel to lock the stray in there.
He falls asleep surprisingly fast considering he’s doing one of the dumbest things he’s ever done in his life by bringing a unknown animal into his home. When he wakes up in the morning, it’s to quiet whining outside his door. It stops when he rolls out of the bed, the mattress springs squeaking softly. Sam swings the door open to see the dog sit and swipe it’s tail along the floor a few times. He checks his watch to see that it’s only barely 7:00am, which is pushing it for him on a weekend.
“Early riser?” he says to no one in particular, because he’s definitely not getting attached and talking to the thing. The dog does the weird smiling thing again and nudges his nose into Sam’s leg.
Sam rubs the sleep from his eyes while he turns on his coffee pot. The water bowl next to the breakfast bar is empty so he scoops it up from the ground and fills it. The dog drinks noisily and Sam searches the fridge for something dog-suitable—which, is pretty much anything, honestly.
He pulls a leftover container of curry chicken from the shelf but thinks better of it and grabs a box of brown rice instead. Indian food probably doesn’t sit any better with a dog’s digestive system than a human’s. “We gotta get you some real dog food before you get high cholesterol from all this take out,” Sam mutters. No, gotta get him somewhere where there’s real dog food.
Damnit, he’s not keeping the freaking dog.
The rice ends up all over the floor with the way the stray pushes his nose into the bowl. Sam wants to be annoyed, but the dog does a pretty good job of cleaning it all up afterward. He seems to spend a lot of time licking the leftover rice grains from the recesses of his jowls. Sam pulls out his laptop and looks up animal shelters nearby. One of them is a state-run thing that makes Sam nervous for whatever reason. Probably some random documentary he watched on Netlfix one night he couldn’t sleep. There’s another one called Tall Tails that boasts being a ‘rehabilitation and retirement center for animals of all species’.
Sam takes down the address.
---
Unfortunately, there’s a leash law in this city so Sam has to either improvise a leash and collar of his own, buy a set, or just hope the stray follows him the way it did into his apartment. The last option, while appealing because maybe the dog will just take off and Sam won’t have to worry about it anymore, is the least likely and Sam doesn’t have anything even close to leash-like, so he runs down the street to the Korean market where he thinks he remembers seeing a pet aisle. He plucks the cheapest set from the display and grunts an answer when friendly Mrs. Niang asks him what kind of dog he got.
Surprisingly, the dog doesn’t seem to give a shit about having a collar put on and just wriggles happily when Sam touches him, adding more evidence to Sam’s hypothesis that he wasn’t always a stray. Someone must have loved him very much and he must have loved them too.
He’s further convinced when he clips the leash on to make the few block’s journey and the dog stays at his side, like it’s been walking on leashes it’s entire life. They stop once on the way and Sam’s glad he remembered to grab an old plastic bag from the kitchen closet when the stray relieves himself on what’s probably the only bit of grass in Sam’s neighborhood. He tosses the bag into the nearest trashcan and they continue on their way to Tall Tails. The dog is ridiculously well behaved, like he knows where Sam is taking him and is trying to prove what a good pet he’d make instead. He even sits at every street crossing and nudges Sam when the walk signal goes on as if to say ‘How could you want to get rid of me? Look how smart I am!’
Nice try, doggie. Not buying it.
He starts to wonder how an animal shelter can exist in a city when the dog’s ears perk up. Soon, even Sam’s human ears can make out the sound of dogs barking and they turn the corner to see a squat building sitting next to what was probably once a vacant lot. It’s fences in now and seems to be the source of all the noise. There’s a sign on the building in swirly, colorful font that read Tall Tails and Sam snorts at the cartoon of Paul Bunion’s big blue ox. When he pushes open the door, however, the dog seems hesitant for the first time since this little adventure began.
“Don’t wuss out on me now, “ Sam chides, tugging on the leash.
“It’s the smells,” a voice says from inside. “Takes some getting used to.” Sam peers into the room and sees a small man behind the counter. He’s leaning across the space with a gentle smile and Sam tries his best to ignore the way the curve of his lips and the light in his honey-brown eyes send butterflies through his gut. He’s always liked brown eyes. “Give it a moment. Maybe some encouragement?”
Sam sighs and reaches out to give the dog a cursory pat on the head. It seems to break the spell because the half-nub tail twitches and they enter the shelter. “Good boy,” Sam says without thinking. The dog practically shakes with excitement; its long tongue lolling out of its mouth while it grins up at him.
“See? Not so bad,” the man says, practically dancing his way out from behind the counter. “He’s a beautiful boy. What’s his name?”
Sam sighs. “I don’t know.”
“Umm…what?”
“Not my dog,” he grunts out. “He followed me home.”
The man frowns. “Oh.”
“Yeah. I didn’t know what to do with him,” Sam explains. “He smelled something awful so I cleaned him up and looked you up.”
“I see.” The man squats in front of the dog that strangely takes a step back and behind Sam’s leg. “It’s okay, buddy. Not gonna hurt you.” The dog’s eyes flick up to Sam as he takes another step back. The man looks up at Sam from his position near the floor and he has to ignore the rush of heat it send through him to have the shelter employee nearly on his knees. Sam really needs to get laid some time this century.
“You’re sure he just followed you home?”
“Huh?” Sam shakes himself from his thoughts.
The guy looks doubtful. “I mean we get a lot of people who come in with drop offs because they don’t want the responsibility of a dog in the city.“
“He’s not my dog,” Sam says. “I’m not dropping him off—well I mean I am, but what I’m trying to say is that he wasn’t mine to begin with—I just, I’m not abandoning him! I don’t have time for a dog and my apartment isn’t—“
The guy holds up his hands. “Okay, calm down there kiddo.”
“My name is Sam,” Sam grumbles. “Don’t call me ‘kiddo’.”
“Apologizes, tiger,” the man says, and there’s a glint in his eye that reminds Sam a little bit of Dean. He throws his best bitch face at the guy. “I’m Gabriel, by the way.”
“I didn’t want to take him to the state pound because—I don’t know, there’s like rumors and stuff. I found you on Google,” Sam says, his annoyance coming through in the way he wraps the end of the leash around his hand.
Gabriel crosses back to the other side of the counter and the dog relaxes next to Sam’s leg. “I’m not saying the rumors are true, but some of those rumors are true,” he says flippantly, opening up a notebook in front of him. “Where’d you find him?”
Sam sighs. “He started following me around Avenue C. I live on A.” The dog nudges Sam’s leg with his nose and he reaches down absentmindedly to stroke its ears.
“He seems quite smitten with you,” Gabriel notes.
“I don’t know why,” Sam mutters. “I don’t really come off as nurturing.”
“Maybe he thinks he found a kindred spirit,” the other man muses. “Dogs do that sometimes. It’s not always the person who picks the dog you know.”
“I can’t have—“
“Yeah, no dogs in the apartment,” Gabriel says with a wave of his hand. “I’m assuming there weren’t any tags on him when he decided to become your shadow?” Sam just glares at the man who shrugs and makes a note of it in his notebook. “Anything else?”
“What’s going to happen to him?” The question seems to surprise the both of them, Sam didn’t mean to ask.
“I have a deal with the local news station and some of the papers. He was obviously a stray so they’ll run his picture and his last known location and hopefully someone was missing him,” Gabriel rattles off, like he probably has a hundred times. “Otherwise, he’ll become a part of our pack until someone wants to adopt him. Sadly, he’s a pretty big dog and he’s older so his chances of getting picked are lower.” He sounds sad, like he doesn’t think it’s fair. It probably isn’t, but when parents let their kids drag them into a getting a dog, everyone wants puppies even though they could get a pre-trained, sweetheart of a dog from a shelter.
“Oh.”
Gabriel seems to snap from his mood. “We have plenty of space here. Well, not plenty, but enough. We’ll do temperament tests and figure out how he is with other dogs and cats and the like.”
“Do you have a lot of employees that work here?” Sam asks. The place seems empty.
“Hmm?”
He fiddles with the leash in his hand. “You keep saying ‘we’. Are there a lot of other people who work here?”
“Counting volunteers, part-time, and full-time employees?” Gabriel asks.
Sam nods.
Gabriel pauses. “One,” he laughs. “It’s actually just me at the moment.”
Sam’s eyebrows do their best to rise into his hair. “How many animals are here?”
The man thinks it over. He looks like he’s mentally adding in his head. “Six dogs, five cats, two hamsters, a parrot, and a couple rabbits. The parrot is technically mine, but she comes to work with me.”
Sam whistles. “Damn.”
“They keep me busy,” Gabriel grins.
Sam’s fingers find the dog’s ears again. “How do you pay for it all?”
The man shrugs. “Some donations, a grant or two. Also my father was filthy rich and I got a stupid amount of money when the old bastard died.” He says it casually, but Sam thinks there might be more to that story. The room is quiet except for the gentle tapping of the dog’s tail on the floor.
Sam finally speaks. “Is there a way—“
“I can let you know what happens to him?” Gabriel finishes.
“Yeah, I guess.”
The man fishes a business card from the other side of the counter and scribbles something on it. “Sure. This is my card and that’s my cell number. You can give me a call or shoot me a text any time.”
Sam’s fingers brush the other man’s when Gabriel hands over the card. “Uh, thanks. I guess.”
“You want a minute to say goodbye?”
Sam shrugs and then nods. “Yeah, okay.” Gabriel ducks from the room quietly while Sam kneels to the ground. The dog wiggles happily into his space. “Look, I don’t know why you followed me home, but I can’t keep you, okay? You’re going to stay here with the other dogs and real dog food and a place to run around,” he explains, even though he’s talking to a dog and it probably doesn’t mean anything to the dog. Maybe it does though, because the stray whines and pushes his face into Sam’s chest. “I can’t,” he whispers. “We’re not kindred spirit or whatever. You’re just a lost dog and I can’t keep you.” The dog moves closer and sets his paws on Sam’s thighs, levering himself up so their faces are even. He leans forward and licks a stripe up Sam’s face. “Stop it. You’re making this hard. I don’t even want you. I’d be the worst owner,” Sam says, scratching the dog on the neck. “I can’t even take care of myself.”
With that, he pushes away, stands and walks out of the shelter. He doesn’t look back to see the dog’s face in the window of the door.