Two fics: Masque of the Red Death and Coal Region
Title: Masque of the Red Death
Rating: PG-13/T
Warnings: A smidge on the fluffy side. Domestic fic.
Author's Notes: Written for the hoodie_time Halloween/Autumn themed h/c comment fic meme, prompt by roque_clasique is too long to quote, but you can find it here
Spoilers: Goes AU at some point during season 5
Summary: Zombies and ghosts and Dali, oh my.
"Dude." Ben looks up when Dean limps his way into the living room, then looks back down at his "uncle" lying prone on the couch. "Mom's going to kill you when she sees you don't have a costume."
Dean rolls his eyes and sinks down into the arm chair, propping his crutches up on the arm and easing his bad leg onto the ottoman. "I dressed up as a homicidal maniac," he says, totally deadpan. "They look just like everybody else."
Ben dips his brush into a jar of grey face paint and snorts. "That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard." The tip of his tongue peeks out from between his lips as he leans in close to edge the eerily realistic bullet hole he's plastered to Sam's forehead. Dean can't see Sam's expression, but it's impossible to miss the way his stomach twitches with barely contained snickers.
Dean rubs his hand across his face and swallows the "oh god, I'm old" pang that rises up when he realizes that Ben's never seen that movie.
Maybe he can talk Lisa into letting him stay home so he can fix that.
"You guys just about ready?" Lisa swings in, hips swaying, light on her feet in a way that Dean hasn't been able to be since his knee was crushed by an angelicly powered rogue piano in the final days of the apocalypse-that-wasn't. Just watching her makes his mouth and his eyes water, and he'd look away except that --
"I cannot believe you're wearing that."
Lisa strikes a pose in the doorway, showing off the tight fitting black suit that somehow does absolutely nothing for her breasts. Her hair is pulled back into a wild, messy ponytail, and she's got some kind of false mustache on, waxed and curled until the tips of it fall in line with the outside edges of her eyes. She's way over done the eyebrow pencil, and when she sees him staring, she raises her chin and stares right back, eyes held wide, wide open. Ben snickers again and steps back, pronouncing Sam "all done", and Sam pushes himself slowly upright, fingering the skin around the very edge of the latex hole.
"Dali," Sam says, like that means a goddamn thing. "Nice."
Lisa grins at him, and Dean feels like he's missed the freaking joke. He scowls.
"The Persistence of Memory?" Lisa says, tilting her head at him. Dean wants to bang his head into a wall. Lisa reaches out and ruffles at his hair. "I'll tell you about it later." She pulls her hand back and looks him over. "Where's your costume?"
Dean groans for, like, the fifty-thousandth time that night, and reaches behind himself to pull out the folded sheet he'd tucked into his pants under his jacket for safe keeping. "I'll put it on when we get there." And now all three of them are staring at him again. He resists the urge to shrink back into the chair. "What?"
Lisa presses her hand to her forehead. "Just tell me that's not one of my good sheets," she says.
Dean wonders how he's supposed to know which ones are her good sheets. It's not one he's ever seen her use on their bed. That has to count for something, right?
"Ghosts," says Ben, voice heavy with adolescent self-importance, "are supposed to be white."
Dean looks at the sheet in his hand, then back at Ben. "Have you ever seen a ghost?"
Ben colors faintly. "No."
"Then shut up." He holds out a hand when Sam gets up off the couch. Sam takes it and pulls Dean to his feet in a single, smooth gesture. Lisa stands at the ready with the crutches, but when Dean reaches for them, she holds them away.
"Nuh-uh," she says. "Let's see it, first."
Dean groans. "Dude, Sid's waiting --"
"Costume, Dean."
Dean sighs, then shakes out the sheet and pulls it over his head. It takes a few moments to get it situated properly. Lisa watches with a skeptical tilt of one heavy eyebrow. Sam has his face turned away too far for Dean to see, but he'd recognize the lift of that shoulder anywhere.
"I'm definitely pretending I'm not related to you," he says.
"Are you sure you don't want me to make you a zombie, like Sam?" Ben calls. Dean turns his head to look at the kid, which turns out to be slightly more of an effort than he'd anticipated, as the sheet doesn't move smoothly with him, and the eye holes end up off center.
"Who the hell ever heard of a zombie on crutches?" he asks. His face goes warm and damp as soon as he speaks. His breath smells like stale smoke and onions. Right. He forgot to cut a mouth hole. That . . . might be a little problematic.
"Yeah," Sam says, lifting the edge of the sheet so Lisa can pass the crutches underneath. "Because everyone knows all about the ghost in red paisley."
*
The party's an unmitigated disaster, just as Dean knew it would be. Oh, everyone loves Lisa's mustache and Sam's bullet hole -- and makes sure to tell Ben that when he and his crew show up to trick-or-treat early on in the evening, though none of them seem to know what to make of Ben's trench coat with wings attached to the back. They even go all head over heels for Sid's outfit, and he shows up in drag. Everyone gives Dean the red paisley ghost a wide berth, though, and Dean's positive it isn't just because he keeps knocking into things and getting his crutches caught on the edges of the sheet. Maryanne and her partner Julia, the resident hip young things of the neighborhood, say they're cool with it, but then he finds out it's because they think he's being ironic, and he has to leave the conversation once they get started on the "societal norms" of Halloween.
What do they know? They're both here in suits and cat ears. What the hell is a "tuxedo cat", anyway?
It isn't long before Dean finds himself out on Tom and Nancy's back porch, sheet pulled all askew so he can get a cigarette to his lips and be properly anti-social. He never should have let Lisa talk him into coming. He should have stayed home and handed out candy. But, no, Lisa swears up and down that he has to get out of the house and hang out with the neighbors, and Tom and Nancy's Halloween party is apparently the neighborhood's social event of the year. Costumes mandatory.
Dean doesn't do costumes. He'd stopped playing dress up the moment he retired the shotgun and holy water.
The door behind him slides open, and he hears footsteps approaching. He doesn't bother turning around -- the steps are far to heavy for either Lisa or Sam, and at the moment, they're the only two people he can handle talking to. Whoever it is doesn't get the sheet-and-smoke hint, though, and steps up to lean against the railing next to him. Something cold, hard, and beer bottle shaped presses against his shoulder through the sheet.
"Thought you might need this."
Sid. Dean's suddenly glad he can't see a goddamn thing right now. Sid makes for one fugly woman.
"Can't," he grunts. "Just had to take some meds." His knee is killing him. Wherever he next sits down is likely to be where he ends up staying for the night.
Sid hisses softly in sympathy. "Sorry, man."
They stand there silently for a few more moments. Dean tries to blow smoke rings, and has no idea how well he might be succeeding.
"So," Sid says finally. "A sheet."
"Shut up."
The door slides open and closed again behind them, sending out a brief blast of loud party chatter and a measure of "Dead Man's Party". "I told him he should have gone as Tiny Tim," Sam says. Sid laughs.
"Yeah," says Dean, turning his head to exhale smoke at Sam as he feels him come up on his other side. "That's because you're a jackass."
"Seriously though," Sid says. "You totally could have owned this."
"You're freaking kidding me." Dean tastes burnt filter and gropes around for something to use as an ashtray. Sam swears and grabs his sheet covered wrist, then plucks the butt from his hand, muttering something about how lucky Dean is he hasn't set himself on fire.
"No," Sid's saying. "I mean, yeah, crutches are hard to work around, but you could have made it work for you. Go as . . . a decorated vet or something."
I am a vet, Dean doesn't say. For a war with no medals. "Or Tiny Tim," he does say.
"Or," Sid continues, "John Watson or Jimmy Vulmer or something."
Dean groans. "Whatever. I would have been That Guy on the Crutches. Just like I am at every other party."
Sam bumps his shoulder into Dean's silently, drawing a faint smile from Dean. Sid sighs and pushes away from the railing.
"No one really sees them any more," he says, and then the door opens and shuts and Dean and Sam are alone.
"Know-it-all," Dean mutters.
"Dude," says Sam. "That guy's like, your best friend."
"Doesn't mean he's not a know-it-all," Dean says.
"No," Sam says. "But he's also right." His hand comes down on Dean's shoulder again, and then he steps away, and Dean's left alone with his cigarettes and bum knee.
*
Ben's conked out in a sugar coma by the time they get home, his trenchcoat pulled half up over his head, his now-battered angel wings making odd shapes out of his blankets. Dean checks in on him, no longer shrouded and feeling more normal than he has the entire day, then shuffles down the hallway to the room he shares with Lisa. She's changed out of her costume, dressed in a camisole and a pair of his old boxers, sitting crosslegged on the bed with the red paisley sheet tucked into her lap. She looks up as he comes in and tilts her face up for a kiss. Her mouth is faintly sticky, and tastes of rum and the glue she used for her mustache. He swings himself carefully into the bed and sinks down, feeling muscles all over his body slowly unravel from their tensed, ready positions. She holds up a corner of the sheet.
"These are totally ruined," she says.
"I kind of figured." Cutting eye holes would do that.
"They were my grandmother's," she says, and he flinches, the movement sending a shock of pain up and down his bad leg. She sets the sheet aside and stretches out along side him, careful of his leg. She puts her palm in the middle of his chest and they stay there a moment, Dean staring at the ceiling, waiting for yet another lecture about how he's avoiding making peace with his injury, about how he won't let himself relax and have fun, about how hard she's trying to make him feel at home, here. Then she pushes herself up on her elbow and kisses him again. "I hated them," she says.
Dean barks out a laugh, and she covers his mouth with hers one more time.
"Next year," she says, "I'm making you dress up as Austin Powers."
Dean groans. "Only if you wear go-go boots. And nothing else."
She smiles. "Go-go boots, definitely. We'll talk about the rest."
Well, Dean supposes. A year can be a long time. Maybe by then he'll finally be used to this, this apple pie life. Maybe by then, this house and this neighborhood will finally start to feel like home.
Lisa pats him on the chest one more time, then burrows down under the covers, her face tucked into the crook of his neck. He brings his arm up to run his fingers along her shoulder, and she lets out a contented sigh.
"Rest up," she says. "Tomorrow we have to start Christmas shopping."
Son of a bitch.
He's so never getting used to all this.
- end -
Title: Coal Region
Rating: PG-13/T
Warnings: A boat load of f-bombs, references to alcohol consumption and possibly drug abuse
Author's Notes: Written for the hoodie_time Halloween/Autumn themed h/c comment fic meme, prompt by lies_unfurl is too long to quote, but you can find it here
Spoilers: Pre-series, so just for general knowledge of the show's premise
Summary: Ten years after his mother's death, Dean gets lost in the woods.
The woods smelled of wood smoke, roasting meat, and apples. The cold air made it sharper, tangier almost. Dean would follow his nose, but he was no bloodhound, and the smell was everywhere, like he was standing right on top of the stove.
And wouldn't that be nice. It'd be warm, at least, and whomever was doing the cooking could tell him where the fuck he was.
"Well, if it ain't Jimmy Dean. Still too good to hang with us, Jimmy Dean?"
"Fuck off, Tully."
"Your loss, asshole."
And it was, wasn't it, because Dean just had to turn off the road and into the woods, just to get away from that fucking pusher and his high and mighty friends. "Nothing else to do in this town," and yeah, maybe, but that didn't mean it was a good idea to get trashed behind the wheel. If the inevitable high speed crash didn't kill him, his dad would.
Dad loomed over the table, hand grasping for the next bottle, and yeah, Dean got it. Ten years and Dad just needed his alone time with Jose for the day.
Dean got it, alright, but that didn't mean he wanted to fucking see it, see his fucking hero get wasted and cry his goddamn eyes out like he did every year. He'd be useless for the next two days at least, when all his kids wanted was to get the fuck out of this dead mining town, get out of Pennsylvania and on the road to Anywhere Else But Here.
There weren't even beer cans nestled into the dead leaves, anymore, and if anything told Dean he'd wandered too far from civilization, it was that. He pulled his flannel tighter around his body and tucked his arms into his pits. The cold punched right through the cloth, seeped down through his skin until it lodged into his joints. He should have brought a jacket, but he wasn't going to be out here this long. He'd just needed a breather, and anyway, the afternoon had been warm enough.
Fucking stupid. Like Dean didn't know how fast it got cold around here, how quick the sun dropped behind the mountains. They'd been here a month, and yeah, that was a month too damn long, but it was long enough for Dean to know better. There was no excuse for this kind of carelessness, and if Dean ever made it out of the woods, his dad would be sure to remind him of that.
Just as soon as he found his way out of the bottle.
"Why can't we just go? Dad's back. We should be leaving."
"We just need to wait a little longer, Sam. Okay? We'll go in a couple of days."
Sam hufffed and threw his book across the room. He flipped over and stuffed his face into the pillow like he was two years old instead of ten. "They don't even have a real library here."
Because a lack of reading material was just what was wrong with this place. Dean snorted to himself, winced, then wiped his nose on his hand. The snot seemed to freeze across his knuckle, and his chapped nostrils burned. He shivered and stumbled on, smacking his shoulder into one of the skinny-ass trees crowding in around him.
Maybe it was, just a little. Sam had been reading the same damn book for two weeks, some hippie crap about a kid running away from home to live in the wilderness, carving himself a fucking house by setting fire to a tree. Because that fucking made sense. It was just the sort of book bound to give Sam "ideas", maybe not about living off the land -- the kid liked his hot showers and new books too much to ever go that route -- but about leaving, ditching Dean and Dad to live on his own.
The last town, he'd had something about kids in a museum. Dean wanted to know why authors thought it was a good fucking idea to write kids books about running away from home.
Dean gave the trees around him a hard look. Like any of these bitches was even remotely thick enough to build a house in. And anyway, he'd left his lighter at home. He pulled out his knife and hacked an X into the trunk next to him, then stumbled on a little further. It was too dark to really see the markings, but he had the suspicion he'd been going around in circles, and he was well and truly fucked if he tried to navigate his way through the woods without some sort of damn landmark to guide him.
Something yowled farther up the mountain -- a fox or a mountain lion. Sounded just human enough to make him flinch, just wrong enough to make him shudder. He slid slowly down the trunk of the next tree he ran into, pulling his knees up to his chest and bending his head over them. Walking around wasn't keeping him warm enough, and it was probably just getting him more lost. He'd have to bunker down where he was, and hope the night wasn't so cold that he couldn't make it until morning.
Dean fucking hated the woods.
He wasn't sure how long he sat there before he heard something trundling through the leaves towards him, a steady *thrunksh thrunksh* punctuated by an occasional crack of a fallen branch. Too large for a fox, even probably a mountain lion. Dean tried to remember if there were bears in Pennsylvania, wasn't sure if he'd ever actually known.
With his luck, it was a wendigo, or maybe fucking Bigfoot. Except Bigfoot didn't exist, and any wendigo in the area would have been snacking on the locals well before Dean had managed to get his fool ass lost.
It figured, then. Dean was going to get eaten by a fucking bear. He pressed himself back tighter against the tree, trying to compress his shivering limbs into the smallest form possible. Maybe the bear would think he was a rock.
"Dean!"
Fuck, the bear knew his name.
"Dean, goddammit, this isn't funny!"
No, it really fucking wasn't. Dean scrabbled at the leaves, thinking for a moment that he could pull them over himself like a blanket. His hands wrapped around a decent sized stick, and he pulled that to him instead, trying to remember what you were supposed to do if a bear attacked. He thought maybe he was meant to hit it in the nose, but that might've been sharks.
The footsteps drew closer, and the shouting louder, until the sounds seemed to press in against him in dark. Dean pushed himself carefully into a crouch, branch clutched in cold, aching fingers. He was probably going to die, which was so fucking stupid it wasn't funny, but he'd be damned if he didn't take the bear out with him.
A shape, huge and hulking and way too thick to be a wendigo, pulled itself away from the dark lines of the trees. It blinded him as its light swept past where he was crouching, and he grit his teeth and leaped.
It was probably a good thing he was so fucking cold. Dad was pretty drunk, and if he'd landed his blow, he couldn't be sure his father wouldn't shoot him dead before either of them had a chance to work out what the hell was going on. Instead, Dean found himself whacking at empty air before Dad's warm arms wrapped around his torso, lifting him bodily from the ground.
"Dammit to hell, Dean."
Dean froze, taken as much off guard by the waft of tequila passing by his nose as he was by the sudden warmth of his father's leather jacketed grip. He tensed, his mind taking a few moments to catch up with events, then sagged, relief deflating him like an old balloon.
"Dad."
"Christ, Dean." Dad set him down and spun him, then pulled him back in, pressing Dean's face into his shoulder. "You're a freaking icicle."
Dean tried to think of a witty response to that, but his voice had latched onto "Dad," and wouldn't be letting it go any time soon. His father didn't seem to mind, just held him close against his body, rubbing his hands over Dean's back and arms until Dean felt raw and tingly.
"Too good to wear a goddamn jacket, are you, Dean?"
Dean shrugged, his face still stuffed into his father's shirt, where it was warm and quiet and safe, if a little fragrant. "Thought you were a bear."
Dad laughed, then spun him again, steering his uneasy steps over fallen logs and leaf-covered rocks until they reached the road, from which it was a long, curse-filled fifty yards to the old farmhouse they'd picked out to call home. Sam waited at the doorway to catch Dean's stumble up the steps and steer him towards the bathroom, and what little hot water the ancient boiler in the basement managed to pump out. "You're an idiot," he said.
Dean couldn't think of a comeback, so he just said "Face," then added a few "fuck"s for good measure.
When he made it back out of the shower, feeling a ten times warmer and a million times more with it, Dad was waiting for him, sitting at the table with a giant glass of water and a bottle of aspirin. Dean winced and braced himself, but all Dad did was look him over and shake his head.
"We're leaving tomorrow," he said, and Dean resisted the urge to pump his fist into the air. "Heading up north. It's about time I got you boys some wilderness training."
Mother fucking goddamn son of a bitch.
Forget the wrath of Dad. Sam was going to kill him for this one.
- end -
Rating: PG-13/T
Warnings: A smidge on the fluffy side. Domestic fic.
Author's Notes: Written for the hoodie_time Halloween/Autumn themed h/c comment fic meme, prompt by roque_clasique is too long to quote, but you can find it here
Spoilers: Goes AU at some point during season 5
Summary: Zombies and ghosts and Dali, oh my.
"Dude." Ben looks up when Dean limps his way into the living room, then looks back down at his "uncle" lying prone on the couch. "Mom's going to kill you when she sees you don't have a costume."
Dean rolls his eyes and sinks down into the arm chair, propping his crutches up on the arm and easing his bad leg onto the ottoman. "I dressed up as a homicidal maniac," he says, totally deadpan. "They look just like everybody else."
Ben dips his brush into a jar of grey face paint and snorts. "That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard." The tip of his tongue peeks out from between his lips as he leans in close to edge the eerily realistic bullet hole he's plastered to Sam's forehead. Dean can't see Sam's expression, but it's impossible to miss the way his stomach twitches with barely contained snickers.
Dean rubs his hand across his face and swallows the "oh god, I'm old" pang that rises up when he realizes that Ben's never seen that movie.
Maybe he can talk Lisa into letting him stay home so he can fix that.
"You guys just about ready?" Lisa swings in, hips swaying, light on her feet in a way that Dean hasn't been able to be since his knee was crushed by an angelicly powered rogue piano in the final days of the apocalypse-that-wasn't. Just watching her makes his mouth and his eyes water, and he'd look away except that --
"I cannot believe you're wearing that."
Lisa strikes a pose in the doorway, showing off the tight fitting black suit that somehow does absolutely nothing for her breasts. Her hair is pulled back into a wild, messy ponytail, and she's got some kind of false mustache on, waxed and curled until the tips of it fall in line with the outside edges of her eyes. She's way over done the eyebrow pencil, and when she sees him staring, she raises her chin and stares right back, eyes held wide, wide open. Ben snickers again and steps back, pronouncing Sam "all done", and Sam pushes himself slowly upright, fingering the skin around the very edge of the latex hole.
"Dali," Sam says, like that means a goddamn thing. "Nice."
Lisa grins at him, and Dean feels like he's missed the freaking joke. He scowls.
"The Persistence of Memory?" Lisa says, tilting her head at him. Dean wants to bang his head into a wall. Lisa reaches out and ruffles at his hair. "I'll tell you about it later." She pulls her hand back and looks him over. "Where's your costume?"
Dean groans for, like, the fifty-thousandth time that night, and reaches behind himself to pull out the folded sheet he'd tucked into his pants under his jacket for safe keeping. "I'll put it on when we get there." And now all three of them are staring at him again. He resists the urge to shrink back into the chair. "What?"
Lisa presses her hand to her forehead. "Just tell me that's not one of my good sheets," she says.
Dean wonders how he's supposed to know which ones are her good sheets. It's not one he's ever seen her use on their bed. That has to count for something, right?
"Ghosts," says Ben, voice heavy with adolescent self-importance, "are supposed to be white."
Dean looks at the sheet in his hand, then back at Ben. "Have you ever seen a ghost?"
Ben colors faintly. "No."
"Then shut up." He holds out a hand when Sam gets up off the couch. Sam takes it and pulls Dean to his feet in a single, smooth gesture. Lisa stands at the ready with the crutches, but when Dean reaches for them, she holds them away.
"Nuh-uh," she says. "Let's see it, first."
Dean groans. "Dude, Sid's waiting --"
"Costume, Dean."
Dean sighs, then shakes out the sheet and pulls it over his head. It takes a few moments to get it situated properly. Lisa watches with a skeptical tilt of one heavy eyebrow. Sam has his face turned away too far for Dean to see, but he'd recognize the lift of that shoulder anywhere.
"I'm definitely pretending I'm not related to you," he says.
"Are you sure you don't want me to make you a zombie, like Sam?" Ben calls. Dean turns his head to look at the kid, which turns out to be slightly more of an effort than he'd anticipated, as the sheet doesn't move smoothly with him, and the eye holes end up off center.
"Who the hell ever heard of a zombie on crutches?" he asks. His face goes warm and damp as soon as he speaks. His breath smells like stale smoke and onions. Right. He forgot to cut a mouth hole. That . . . might be a little problematic.
"Yeah," Sam says, lifting the edge of the sheet so Lisa can pass the crutches underneath. "Because everyone knows all about the ghost in red paisley."
*
The party's an unmitigated disaster, just as Dean knew it would be. Oh, everyone loves Lisa's mustache and Sam's bullet hole -- and makes sure to tell Ben that when he and his crew show up to trick-or-treat early on in the evening, though none of them seem to know what to make of Ben's trench coat with wings attached to the back. They even go all head over heels for Sid's outfit, and he shows up in drag. Everyone gives Dean the red paisley ghost a wide berth, though, and Dean's positive it isn't just because he keeps knocking into things and getting his crutches caught on the edges of the sheet. Maryanne and her partner Julia, the resident hip young things of the neighborhood, say they're cool with it, but then he finds out it's because they think he's being ironic, and he has to leave the conversation once they get started on the "societal norms" of Halloween.
What do they know? They're both here in suits and cat ears. What the hell is a "tuxedo cat", anyway?
It isn't long before Dean finds himself out on Tom and Nancy's back porch, sheet pulled all askew so he can get a cigarette to his lips and be properly anti-social. He never should have let Lisa talk him into coming. He should have stayed home and handed out candy. But, no, Lisa swears up and down that he has to get out of the house and hang out with the neighbors, and Tom and Nancy's Halloween party is apparently the neighborhood's social event of the year. Costumes mandatory.
Dean doesn't do costumes. He'd stopped playing dress up the moment he retired the shotgun and holy water.
The door behind him slides open, and he hears footsteps approaching. He doesn't bother turning around -- the steps are far to heavy for either Lisa or Sam, and at the moment, they're the only two people he can handle talking to. Whoever it is doesn't get the sheet-and-smoke hint, though, and steps up to lean against the railing next to him. Something cold, hard, and beer bottle shaped presses against his shoulder through the sheet.
"Thought you might need this."
Sid. Dean's suddenly glad he can't see a goddamn thing right now. Sid makes for one fugly woman.
"Can't," he grunts. "Just had to take some meds." His knee is killing him. Wherever he next sits down is likely to be where he ends up staying for the night.
Sid hisses softly in sympathy. "Sorry, man."
They stand there silently for a few more moments. Dean tries to blow smoke rings, and has no idea how well he might be succeeding.
"So," Sid says finally. "A sheet."
"Shut up."
The door slides open and closed again behind them, sending out a brief blast of loud party chatter and a measure of "Dead Man's Party". "I told him he should have gone as Tiny Tim," Sam says. Sid laughs.
"Yeah," says Dean, turning his head to exhale smoke at Sam as he feels him come up on his other side. "That's because you're a jackass."
"Seriously though," Sid says. "You totally could have owned this."
"You're freaking kidding me." Dean tastes burnt filter and gropes around for something to use as an ashtray. Sam swears and grabs his sheet covered wrist, then plucks the butt from his hand, muttering something about how lucky Dean is he hasn't set himself on fire.
"No," Sid's saying. "I mean, yeah, crutches are hard to work around, but you could have made it work for you. Go as . . . a decorated vet or something."
I am a vet, Dean doesn't say. For a war with no medals. "Or Tiny Tim," he does say.
"Or," Sid continues, "John Watson or Jimmy Vulmer or something."
Dean groans. "Whatever. I would have been That Guy on the Crutches. Just like I am at every other party."
Sam bumps his shoulder into Dean's silently, drawing a faint smile from Dean. Sid sighs and pushes away from the railing.
"No one really sees them any more," he says, and then the door opens and shuts and Dean and Sam are alone.
"Know-it-all," Dean mutters.
"Dude," says Sam. "That guy's like, your best friend."
"Doesn't mean he's not a know-it-all," Dean says.
"No," Sam says. "But he's also right." His hand comes down on Dean's shoulder again, and then he steps away, and Dean's left alone with his cigarettes and bum knee.
*
Ben's conked out in a sugar coma by the time they get home, his trenchcoat pulled half up over his head, his now-battered angel wings making odd shapes out of his blankets. Dean checks in on him, no longer shrouded and feeling more normal than he has the entire day, then shuffles down the hallway to the room he shares with Lisa. She's changed out of her costume, dressed in a camisole and a pair of his old boxers, sitting crosslegged on the bed with the red paisley sheet tucked into her lap. She looks up as he comes in and tilts her face up for a kiss. Her mouth is faintly sticky, and tastes of rum and the glue she used for her mustache. He swings himself carefully into the bed and sinks down, feeling muscles all over his body slowly unravel from their tensed, ready positions. She holds up a corner of the sheet.
"These are totally ruined," she says.
"I kind of figured." Cutting eye holes would do that.
"They were my grandmother's," she says, and he flinches, the movement sending a shock of pain up and down his bad leg. She sets the sheet aside and stretches out along side him, careful of his leg. She puts her palm in the middle of his chest and they stay there a moment, Dean staring at the ceiling, waiting for yet another lecture about how he's avoiding making peace with his injury, about how he won't let himself relax and have fun, about how hard she's trying to make him feel at home, here. Then she pushes herself up on her elbow and kisses him again. "I hated them," she says.
Dean barks out a laugh, and she covers his mouth with hers one more time.
"Next year," she says, "I'm making you dress up as Austin Powers."
Dean groans. "Only if you wear go-go boots. And nothing else."
She smiles. "Go-go boots, definitely. We'll talk about the rest."
Well, Dean supposes. A year can be a long time. Maybe by then he'll finally be used to this, this apple pie life. Maybe by then, this house and this neighborhood will finally start to feel like home.
Lisa pats him on the chest one more time, then burrows down under the covers, her face tucked into the crook of his neck. He brings his arm up to run his fingers along her shoulder, and she lets out a contented sigh.
"Rest up," she says. "Tomorrow we have to start Christmas shopping."
Son of a bitch.
He's so never getting used to all this.
- end -
Title: Coal Region
Rating: PG-13/T
Warnings: A boat load of f-bombs, references to alcohol consumption and possibly drug abuse
Author's Notes: Written for the hoodie_time Halloween/Autumn themed h/c comment fic meme, prompt by lies_unfurl is too long to quote, but you can find it here
Spoilers: Pre-series, so just for general knowledge of the show's premise
Summary: Ten years after his mother's death, Dean gets lost in the woods.
The woods smelled of wood smoke, roasting meat, and apples. The cold air made it sharper, tangier almost. Dean would follow his nose, but he was no bloodhound, and the smell was everywhere, like he was standing right on top of the stove.
And wouldn't that be nice. It'd be warm, at least, and whomever was doing the cooking could tell him where the fuck he was.
"Well, if it ain't Jimmy Dean. Still too good to hang with us, Jimmy Dean?"
"Fuck off, Tully."
"Your loss, asshole."
And it was, wasn't it, because Dean just had to turn off the road and into the woods, just to get away from that fucking pusher and his high and mighty friends. "Nothing else to do in this town," and yeah, maybe, but that didn't mean it was a good idea to get trashed behind the wheel. If the inevitable high speed crash didn't kill him, his dad would.
Dad loomed over the table, hand grasping for the next bottle, and yeah, Dean got it. Ten years and Dad just needed his alone time with Jose for the day.
Dean got it, alright, but that didn't mean he wanted to fucking see it, see his fucking hero get wasted and cry his goddamn eyes out like he did every year. He'd be useless for the next two days at least, when all his kids wanted was to get the fuck out of this dead mining town, get out of Pennsylvania and on the road to Anywhere Else But Here.
There weren't even beer cans nestled into the dead leaves, anymore, and if anything told Dean he'd wandered too far from civilization, it was that. He pulled his flannel tighter around his body and tucked his arms into his pits. The cold punched right through the cloth, seeped down through his skin until it lodged into his joints. He should have brought a jacket, but he wasn't going to be out here this long. He'd just needed a breather, and anyway, the afternoon had been warm enough.
Fucking stupid. Like Dean didn't know how fast it got cold around here, how quick the sun dropped behind the mountains. They'd been here a month, and yeah, that was a month too damn long, but it was long enough for Dean to know better. There was no excuse for this kind of carelessness, and if Dean ever made it out of the woods, his dad would be sure to remind him of that.
Just as soon as he found his way out of the bottle.
"Why can't we just go? Dad's back. We should be leaving."
"We just need to wait a little longer, Sam. Okay? We'll go in a couple of days."
Sam hufffed and threw his book across the room. He flipped over and stuffed his face into the pillow like he was two years old instead of ten. "They don't even have a real library here."
Because a lack of reading material was just what was wrong with this place. Dean snorted to himself, winced, then wiped his nose on his hand. The snot seemed to freeze across his knuckle, and his chapped nostrils burned. He shivered and stumbled on, smacking his shoulder into one of the skinny-ass trees crowding in around him.
Maybe it was, just a little. Sam had been reading the same damn book for two weeks, some hippie crap about a kid running away from home to live in the wilderness, carving himself a fucking house by setting fire to a tree. Because that fucking made sense. It was just the sort of book bound to give Sam "ideas", maybe not about living off the land -- the kid liked his hot showers and new books too much to ever go that route -- but about leaving, ditching Dean and Dad to live on his own.
The last town, he'd had something about kids in a museum. Dean wanted to know why authors thought it was a good fucking idea to write kids books about running away from home.
Dean gave the trees around him a hard look. Like any of these bitches was even remotely thick enough to build a house in. And anyway, he'd left his lighter at home. He pulled out his knife and hacked an X into the trunk next to him, then stumbled on a little further. It was too dark to really see the markings, but he had the suspicion he'd been going around in circles, and he was well and truly fucked if he tried to navigate his way through the woods without some sort of damn landmark to guide him.
Something yowled farther up the mountain -- a fox or a mountain lion. Sounded just human enough to make him flinch, just wrong enough to make him shudder. He slid slowly down the trunk of the next tree he ran into, pulling his knees up to his chest and bending his head over them. Walking around wasn't keeping him warm enough, and it was probably just getting him more lost. He'd have to bunker down where he was, and hope the night wasn't so cold that he couldn't make it until morning.
Dean fucking hated the woods.
He wasn't sure how long he sat there before he heard something trundling through the leaves towards him, a steady *thrunksh thrunksh* punctuated by an occasional crack of a fallen branch. Too large for a fox, even probably a mountain lion. Dean tried to remember if there were bears in Pennsylvania, wasn't sure if he'd ever actually known.
With his luck, it was a wendigo, or maybe fucking Bigfoot. Except Bigfoot didn't exist, and any wendigo in the area would have been snacking on the locals well before Dean had managed to get his fool ass lost.
It figured, then. Dean was going to get eaten by a fucking bear. He pressed himself back tighter against the tree, trying to compress his shivering limbs into the smallest form possible. Maybe the bear would think he was a rock.
"Dean!"
Fuck, the bear knew his name.
"Dean, goddammit, this isn't funny!"
No, it really fucking wasn't. Dean scrabbled at the leaves, thinking for a moment that he could pull them over himself like a blanket. His hands wrapped around a decent sized stick, and he pulled that to him instead, trying to remember what you were supposed to do if a bear attacked. He thought maybe he was meant to hit it in the nose, but that might've been sharks.
The footsteps drew closer, and the shouting louder, until the sounds seemed to press in against him in dark. Dean pushed himself carefully into a crouch, branch clutched in cold, aching fingers. He was probably going to die, which was so fucking stupid it wasn't funny, but he'd be damned if he didn't take the bear out with him.
A shape, huge and hulking and way too thick to be a wendigo, pulled itself away from the dark lines of the trees. It blinded him as its light swept past where he was crouching, and he grit his teeth and leaped.
It was probably a good thing he was so fucking cold. Dad was pretty drunk, and if he'd landed his blow, he couldn't be sure his father wouldn't shoot him dead before either of them had a chance to work out what the hell was going on. Instead, Dean found himself whacking at empty air before Dad's warm arms wrapped around his torso, lifting him bodily from the ground.
"Dammit to hell, Dean."
Dean froze, taken as much off guard by the waft of tequila passing by his nose as he was by the sudden warmth of his father's leather jacketed grip. He tensed, his mind taking a few moments to catch up with events, then sagged, relief deflating him like an old balloon.
"Dad."
"Christ, Dean." Dad set him down and spun him, then pulled him back in, pressing Dean's face into his shoulder. "You're a freaking icicle."
Dean tried to think of a witty response to that, but his voice had latched onto "Dad," and wouldn't be letting it go any time soon. His father didn't seem to mind, just held him close against his body, rubbing his hands over Dean's back and arms until Dean felt raw and tingly.
"Too good to wear a goddamn jacket, are you, Dean?"
Dean shrugged, his face still stuffed into his father's shirt, where it was warm and quiet and safe, if a little fragrant. "Thought you were a bear."
Dad laughed, then spun him again, steering his uneasy steps over fallen logs and leaf-covered rocks until they reached the road, from which it was a long, curse-filled fifty yards to the old farmhouse they'd picked out to call home. Sam waited at the doorway to catch Dean's stumble up the steps and steer him towards the bathroom, and what little hot water the ancient boiler in the basement managed to pump out. "You're an idiot," he said.
Dean couldn't think of a comeback, so he just said "Face," then added a few "fuck"s for good measure.
When he made it back out of the shower, feeling a ten times warmer and a million times more with it, Dad was waiting for him, sitting at the table with a giant glass of water and a bottle of aspirin. Dean winced and braced himself, but all Dad did was look him over and shake his head.
"We're leaving tomorrow," he said, and Dean resisted the urge to pump his fist into the air. "Heading up north. It's about time I got you boys some wilderness training."
Mother fucking goddamn son of a bitch.
Forget the wrath of Dad. Sam was going to kill him for this one.
- end -