Dean and Crowley's Big Adventure
Well, that's its working title, anyway.
Here, have a bit of something I've been poking at in my "no really, I will write regularly!" sessions:
Two cases of beer. Three pints of ice cream. Fifteen pounds of ground beef. And two of every variety of pie the store sold -- which since it was an actual grocery store, complete with a bakery section, was a lot of pie. Far more than even Dean could eat before it started to go bad, but Dean wasn't just shopping for him and Sam any more. No, now it was him, Sam, Cas, who had apparently leaped right onto some "paleo" shit the moment he turned human -- or possibly just craved the crap out of beef, right now -- and Kevin, who absolutely refused to leave the bunker, and instead spent his time skulking around and glaring.
Two bulk packs of toilet paper. Six packets of beef jerky, one of buffalo jerky. Mostly because Dean couldn't figure out if it was buffalo meat or buffalo flavored. Weren't those thing extinct, or something? A bag of salad, because if he came home with absolutely no greens, Sam would pout at him, and maybe try to kill himself.
That wasn't fair. Sam wasn't really suicidal. If he was, they'd all still be sitting in the bunker, living on sixty year old beans and spam.
One case of spaghettios. Shut up, you had your comfort food, Sam and Dean had theirs. Calcium enriched, in this case, with alphabet noodles, because apparently not even spaghettios could be goddamn simple, any more. Three packs of hamburger buns, because Dean was damned if he was going to let Cas eat the beef straight out of the package again. Not that he expected him to, Famine being long out of the picture, but human Cas was just goddamn weird, and still didn't know the most unexpected things. Like the fact that a proper burger was at least burnt black and crispy on the outside, and topped with bacon and onions.
Six pounds of bacon, and a bag yellow onions.
Three packs of Kraft American cheese singles. One packet of local sliced cheddar, because Kevin's burgers apparently had to be all fancy. At some point, Dean would stop coddling that kid.
Eventually.
Two dozen eggs, free range because Dean didn't need any of that salmonella shit. Five pounds of potatoes. Five beefsteak tomatoes, just coming into season now and delightfully fragrant, though Dean would never say it out loud.
Three tabloid newspapers ("Unexplained meteor shower blamed on Soviet/Alien plot", "Winged man lands in Colombia, Catholic Church nonplussed", and "Best and worst beach bodies! You be the judge!"). And a pack of funions for the road.
"You forgot the bottled water," the woman behind Dean in line commented. She was holding a plastic basket, from what Dean can tell it was entirely filled with pasta. "And the milk."
He half turned, the beach bodies tabloid splayed open over his arm. "Excuse me?"
"Preparing for the end of the world, right?" she asked. Her mouth twisted up just a little at the corner. She wore a sack-like floral dress that some part of Dean's brain identified as being weirdly in, right now, and an enormous, unseasonable knit cap. Her eyeliner was smeared at the corner of her right eye, like she'd been trying not to rub at it too hard. "You're supposed to get toilet paper, bottled water, and milk."
Dean turned away from her again, not bothering to hold back his snort. "Sister, end of the world has come and gone. This is just standard provisions."
If she had anything further to say to that, he wasn't listening. The cashier had started ringing up his purchases, and Dean slapped the tabloid down on the conveyer belt to free his hands up for loading the bags into his cart.
"Did you find everything you needed today, sir?" the cashier, a tired looking black woman with startling blond highlights, asked as she tapped in the code for his tomatoes.
"Nah," Dean said, and when she looked up, offered her a smile. "Couldn't figure out where you kept the spare millions of dollars."
"We'll have to work on that, sir," she said, though Dean could hear the "go fuck yourself" under the words.
She probably heard lines like that at least three times a day. Well. He was off his game.
"Do you need any help with your bags today, sir?" she asked, not looking up from where she was pulling his receipt off the machine. It was as rote as the comments that came from the self-checkout machines on the other end of the store (a chorus of "please place your item in the bagging area" had followed him through the frozen food section), but Dean couldn't help but rear back a little.
"Uh. No."
"You have a good day today, sir," she said, handing him his receipt, and for the first time in the entire transaction, looking him in the eye. Dean was pretty sure he had to be imagining the anger and damning blame her gaze leveled on him. On the other hand, she was working in the service industry.
"Thanks," he said, trying a smile again. "You do the same."
"Mmhm." She looked back down at the conveyor, picking up dumpy flower girl's first box of pasta.
Dean was dismissed. He tried not to take it personally.
Jesus, but it'd been a long time since he'd been out in the world. How long had it even been since the angels started falling? It seemed like years, holed up in the Men of Letters bunker, watching the map in the front room light up while he tried to get Sam back on his feet. Cas had found them maybe a week in. Falling from Heaven had killed his cell phone, and without angel mojo, he'd had to take the slow train to the bunker from where he'd landed. At least another week after that before Sam was up and about again, and Dean decided he could be sure Kevin wasn't secretly plotting their demise.
And, well. Much as he loved Sam and Cas and even had started to care about Kevin as more than an asset and a case file, if he hadn't gotten the hell out of that bunker, he was going to go stir crazy and off them all himself.
The transition from the air conditioning to the humid summer air made Dean gasp. It wasn't hot -- was a startlingly mild summer temperature-wise, actually, just moist -- and he wondered if that was on him, too. If the falling angels had kicked up a shit-ton of dust and debris or somehow altered the atmosphere, or if they were just due for a balmy season after years of scorchers. Driving a black car was a lot nicer when it wasn't griddle-hot all the time, at least, though it had rained enough by now that everything seemed perpetually soggy. At least he seemed to have managed to pick a dry spell for his grocery excursion. If this kept up, he was pretty sure he'd have to start fording rivers to get around town. Dean looked up at the sky as he finished loading the bags into the trunk -- clear enough to spot a few stars, the moon bright, cheerful, and lacking the halo that indicated cloud cover -- then looked down again, his hand braced on the trunk lid as he took stock of everything he'd loaded up on.
He was forgetting something. Not just at the grocery store, either. The feeling had been nagging at him for awhile now. There was something he was missing.
He shook it off and shut the trunk with a satisfying clap of the latch -- then froze as his windpipe suddenly closed down.
"Hello there, Squirrel."
Ah. There it was.
Dean opened his mouth to say something scathing, but, well. Choking here. He reached up to his throat instinctively and turned his head. Crowley stood next to him, outwardly calm as you please, his suit still ragged, his mouth and posture serene.
His eyes, on the other hand, were promising a slow, creative murder.
"Got your attention now?" Crowley asked, the side of his mouth quirking up a fraction. His shoulders twitched, and the pressure on Dean's throat vanished. Dean sucked in a lungful of air and glared.
"You know," he said. "I was just thinking we were forgetting something."
Something in Crowley seemed to snap and he was suddenly up in Dean's face, mouth twisted open in a silent scream of rage. Dean couldn't help but flinch back, but held his ground as Crowley backed off again, spinning in place letting out a low growl. He reached back to his belt where he kept Ruby's knife -- and couldn't find it.
Holy crap, what the hell happened to the knife?
"Looking for this?" Crowley asked, back to cool and calm all over again, holding the knife up by the tip. "You're off your game, Dean. Spent too much time hiding away, lately, trying to pretend all your little mistakes away."
Dean snorted, bravado firmly in place. "What, you mean like letting you live?"
"Exactly!" Crowley flung the knife, managing to embed it in a crack in the asphalt. Dean blinked, impressed. "You and your brother get me nine-tenths of the way to cured and then you leave it off!" He was up in Dean's space again, face going bright red. "You stick me with these . . . feelings, this empathy for you sniveling, slimey sacks of blood and putrid pus and then you let me live? You turned me into a goddamn Buffy the Vampire Slayer character, mate!"
It took Dean a moment to parse the reference, then he tilted his head, not bothering to keep the smile from his face. "You mean Sammy managed to give the King of Hell a conscience. Yeah. Super sorry about that, buddy. We'll be sure to put a condolence card in the mail."
"Ah ah," Crowley said, spinning on his heel, and Dean recognized the way he dragged his old persona up over his rage, now. "Afraid not. You see, you also let Abbadon go free. I've been . . . usurped." He looked back over his shoulder at Dean, his lips twitching up at the visible corner. "But never fear. You're going to help me get back my crown."
Dean snorted. "Dude, you are barking up the wrong --" and his throat clamped down again.
He was getting kinda sick of that.
"You'll help me," Crowley said. "You see, funny thing about that cure of yours. When I do this," he flicked his wrist, and the teenager gathering shopping carts from the parking lot dropped with a grunt, his neck snapped. "I feel really bad -- but not enough to stop."
Dean's nostrils flared, his knees starting to buckle as the pressure on his throat held constant. He clawed at his throat even as his eyes scanned the lot, looking for anyone else Crowley might pick for a victim. An old man easing himself out of his car in a handicapped space. The girl in the baggy floral dress had dropped her reusable canvas bag full of pasta to rush to the dead teenager's side. A couple figures around the corner of the store, just out of the range of the streetlights, probably engaging in a little pot dealing. The cashier, just coming out the door on a break, pulling her phone from her pocket, her shoulders sagging.
"Place is fairly hopping, isn't it?" Crowley said. "For this time of night, at least. I look at all these people, and I can't help but think of their families and friends, all the folks who'll miss them when they go. And then --" Another flick of his hand. The old man by the car pitched forward to sprawl across the diagonal white lines that edged his parking space. "It's like cigarettes, really. Cruelty's a hell of a drug. But then, I'm sure you remember that, at least a little."
Dean made a grab for Crowley, arm swinging wildly while his other continued to clutch his throat. Crowley stepped almost casually out of his reach.
"Who should we do next, then? How about the little hoodlums over there? They're breaking the law, you know. It'd be like a public service." He raised his hand again, but stopped when Dean managed to latch onto Crowley's wrist. "What's that?" He blinked, looking actually surprised, then sheepish. "Ah, yes." He cleared his throat, and the pressure on Dean's eased, allowing him to heave in a breath. "Sorry about that."
"I'm going to kill you," Dean hissed.
Crowley's brow rose slightly, then he nodded. "That'd suit me almost as well," he said. He started for the Impala's passenger door. Dean stared after him, still on his knees. Ruby's knife still stuck out of the pavement, maybe ten feet from his position. Dean moved to lunge for it -- and found himself choking again.
"Well?" Crowley asked, hand on the Impala's passenger door. "Are you coming?"
Yeah. This wasn't going to end well.
*
Other highlights in my quest to conquer my writer's block: Sam'n'Dean v. the Dance Show Poltergeist, with special guest star Charlie, which is pretty super fluffy; a handful of snippets of other bits of SPN ephemera (not the right word at all but I loooove it); a disturbingly autobiographical start to a novel about a young woman who is either haunted by a ghost she thought she made up, or is going insane; bits of scenes from my homoromantic, asexual YA horror adventure novel; several memoirial pieces about my life at day camp as a preteen, among other things; and the start of a melancholy modern fairy tale about a woman going on a quest into her childhood hideaway to rescue her younger self.
What'd be really great is if I could focus on anything.
Here, have a bit of something I've been poking at in my "no really, I will write regularly!" sessions:
Two cases of beer. Three pints of ice cream. Fifteen pounds of ground beef. And two of every variety of pie the store sold -- which since it was an actual grocery store, complete with a bakery section, was a lot of pie. Far more than even Dean could eat before it started to go bad, but Dean wasn't just shopping for him and Sam any more. No, now it was him, Sam, Cas, who had apparently leaped right onto some "paleo" shit the moment he turned human -- or possibly just craved the crap out of beef, right now -- and Kevin, who absolutely refused to leave the bunker, and instead spent his time skulking around and glaring.
Two bulk packs of toilet paper. Six packets of beef jerky, one of buffalo jerky. Mostly because Dean couldn't figure out if it was buffalo meat or buffalo flavored. Weren't those thing extinct, or something? A bag of salad, because if he came home with absolutely no greens, Sam would pout at him, and maybe try to kill himself.
That wasn't fair. Sam wasn't really suicidal. If he was, they'd all still be sitting in the bunker, living on sixty year old beans and spam.
One case of spaghettios. Shut up, you had your comfort food, Sam and Dean had theirs. Calcium enriched, in this case, with alphabet noodles, because apparently not even spaghettios could be goddamn simple, any more. Three packs of hamburger buns, because Dean was damned if he was going to let Cas eat the beef straight out of the package again. Not that he expected him to, Famine being long out of the picture, but human Cas was just goddamn weird, and still didn't know the most unexpected things. Like the fact that a proper burger was at least burnt black and crispy on the outside, and topped with bacon and onions.
Six pounds of bacon, and a bag yellow onions.
Three packs of Kraft American cheese singles. One packet of local sliced cheddar, because Kevin's burgers apparently had to be all fancy. At some point, Dean would stop coddling that kid.
Eventually.
Two dozen eggs, free range because Dean didn't need any of that salmonella shit. Five pounds of potatoes. Five beefsteak tomatoes, just coming into season now and delightfully fragrant, though Dean would never say it out loud.
Three tabloid newspapers ("Unexplained meteor shower blamed on Soviet/Alien plot", "Winged man lands in Colombia, Catholic Church nonplussed", and "Best and worst beach bodies! You be the judge!"). And a pack of funions for the road.
"You forgot the bottled water," the woman behind Dean in line commented. She was holding a plastic basket, from what Dean can tell it was entirely filled with pasta. "And the milk."
He half turned, the beach bodies tabloid splayed open over his arm. "Excuse me?"
"Preparing for the end of the world, right?" she asked. Her mouth twisted up just a little at the corner. She wore a sack-like floral dress that some part of Dean's brain identified as being weirdly in, right now, and an enormous, unseasonable knit cap. Her eyeliner was smeared at the corner of her right eye, like she'd been trying not to rub at it too hard. "You're supposed to get toilet paper, bottled water, and milk."
Dean turned away from her again, not bothering to hold back his snort. "Sister, end of the world has come and gone. This is just standard provisions."
If she had anything further to say to that, he wasn't listening. The cashier had started ringing up his purchases, and Dean slapped the tabloid down on the conveyer belt to free his hands up for loading the bags into his cart.
"Did you find everything you needed today, sir?" the cashier, a tired looking black woman with startling blond highlights, asked as she tapped in the code for his tomatoes.
"Nah," Dean said, and when she looked up, offered her a smile. "Couldn't figure out where you kept the spare millions of dollars."
"We'll have to work on that, sir," she said, though Dean could hear the "go fuck yourself" under the words.
She probably heard lines like that at least three times a day. Well. He was off his game.
"Do you need any help with your bags today, sir?" she asked, not looking up from where she was pulling his receipt off the machine. It was as rote as the comments that came from the self-checkout machines on the other end of the store (a chorus of "please place your item in the bagging area" had followed him through the frozen food section), but Dean couldn't help but rear back a little.
"Uh. No."
"You have a good day today, sir," she said, handing him his receipt, and for the first time in the entire transaction, looking him in the eye. Dean was pretty sure he had to be imagining the anger and damning blame her gaze leveled on him. On the other hand, she was working in the service industry.
"Thanks," he said, trying a smile again. "You do the same."
"Mmhm." She looked back down at the conveyor, picking up dumpy flower girl's first box of pasta.
Dean was dismissed. He tried not to take it personally.
Jesus, but it'd been a long time since he'd been out in the world. How long had it even been since the angels started falling? It seemed like years, holed up in the Men of Letters bunker, watching the map in the front room light up while he tried to get Sam back on his feet. Cas had found them maybe a week in. Falling from Heaven had killed his cell phone, and without angel mojo, he'd had to take the slow train to the bunker from where he'd landed. At least another week after that before Sam was up and about again, and Dean decided he could be sure Kevin wasn't secretly plotting their demise.
And, well. Much as he loved Sam and Cas and even had started to care about Kevin as more than an asset and a case file, if he hadn't gotten the hell out of that bunker, he was going to go stir crazy and off them all himself.
The transition from the air conditioning to the humid summer air made Dean gasp. It wasn't hot -- was a startlingly mild summer temperature-wise, actually, just moist -- and he wondered if that was on him, too. If the falling angels had kicked up a shit-ton of dust and debris or somehow altered the atmosphere, or if they were just due for a balmy season after years of scorchers. Driving a black car was a lot nicer when it wasn't griddle-hot all the time, at least, though it had rained enough by now that everything seemed perpetually soggy. At least he seemed to have managed to pick a dry spell for his grocery excursion. If this kept up, he was pretty sure he'd have to start fording rivers to get around town. Dean looked up at the sky as he finished loading the bags into the trunk -- clear enough to spot a few stars, the moon bright, cheerful, and lacking the halo that indicated cloud cover -- then looked down again, his hand braced on the trunk lid as he took stock of everything he'd loaded up on.
He was forgetting something. Not just at the grocery store, either. The feeling had been nagging at him for awhile now. There was something he was missing.
He shook it off and shut the trunk with a satisfying clap of the latch -- then froze as his windpipe suddenly closed down.
"Hello there, Squirrel."
Ah. There it was.
Dean opened his mouth to say something scathing, but, well. Choking here. He reached up to his throat instinctively and turned his head. Crowley stood next to him, outwardly calm as you please, his suit still ragged, his mouth and posture serene.
His eyes, on the other hand, were promising a slow, creative murder.
"Got your attention now?" Crowley asked, the side of his mouth quirking up a fraction. His shoulders twitched, and the pressure on Dean's throat vanished. Dean sucked in a lungful of air and glared.
"You know," he said. "I was just thinking we were forgetting something."
Something in Crowley seemed to snap and he was suddenly up in Dean's face, mouth twisted open in a silent scream of rage. Dean couldn't help but flinch back, but held his ground as Crowley backed off again, spinning in place letting out a low growl. He reached back to his belt where he kept Ruby's knife -- and couldn't find it.
Holy crap, what the hell happened to the knife?
"Looking for this?" Crowley asked, back to cool and calm all over again, holding the knife up by the tip. "You're off your game, Dean. Spent too much time hiding away, lately, trying to pretend all your little mistakes away."
Dean snorted, bravado firmly in place. "What, you mean like letting you live?"
"Exactly!" Crowley flung the knife, managing to embed it in a crack in the asphalt. Dean blinked, impressed. "You and your brother get me nine-tenths of the way to cured and then you leave it off!" He was up in Dean's space again, face going bright red. "You stick me with these . . . feelings, this empathy for you sniveling, slimey sacks of blood and putrid pus and then you let me live? You turned me into a goddamn Buffy the Vampire Slayer character, mate!"
It took Dean a moment to parse the reference, then he tilted his head, not bothering to keep the smile from his face. "You mean Sammy managed to give the King of Hell a conscience. Yeah. Super sorry about that, buddy. We'll be sure to put a condolence card in the mail."
"Ah ah," Crowley said, spinning on his heel, and Dean recognized the way he dragged his old persona up over his rage, now. "Afraid not. You see, you also let Abbadon go free. I've been . . . usurped." He looked back over his shoulder at Dean, his lips twitching up at the visible corner. "But never fear. You're going to help me get back my crown."
Dean snorted. "Dude, you are barking up the wrong --" and his throat clamped down again.
He was getting kinda sick of that.
"You'll help me," Crowley said. "You see, funny thing about that cure of yours. When I do this," he flicked his wrist, and the teenager gathering shopping carts from the parking lot dropped with a grunt, his neck snapped. "I feel really bad -- but not enough to stop."
Dean's nostrils flared, his knees starting to buckle as the pressure on his throat held constant. He clawed at his throat even as his eyes scanned the lot, looking for anyone else Crowley might pick for a victim. An old man easing himself out of his car in a handicapped space. The girl in the baggy floral dress had dropped her reusable canvas bag full of pasta to rush to the dead teenager's side. A couple figures around the corner of the store, just out of the range of the streetlights, probably engaging in a little pot dealing. The cashier, just coming out the door on a break, pulling her phone from her pocket, her shoulders sagging.
"Place is fairly hopping, isn't it?" Crowley said. "For this time of night, at least. I look at all these people, and I can't help but think of their families and friends, all the folks who'll miss them when they go. And then --" Another flick of his hand. The old man by the car pitched forward to sprawl across the diagonal white lines that edged his parking space. "It's like cigarettes, really. Cruelty's a hell of a drug. But then, I'm sure you remember that, at least a little."
Dean made a grab for Crowley, arm swinging wildly while his other continued to clutch his throat. Crowley stepped almost casually out of his reach.
"Who should we do next, then? How about the little hoodlums over there? They're breaking the law, you know. It'd be like a public service." He raised his hand again, but stopped when Dean managed to latch onto Crowley's wrist. "What's that?" He blinked, looking actually surprised, then sheepish. "Ah, yes." He cleared his throat, and the pressure on Dean's eased, allowing him to heave in a breath. "Sorry about that."
"I'm going to kill you," Dean hissed.
Crowley's brow rose slightly, then he nodded. "That'd suit me almost as well," he said. He started for the Impala's passenger door. Dean stared after him, still on his knees. Ruby's knife still stuck out of the pavement, maybe ten feet from his position. Dean moved to lunge for it -- and found himself choking again.
"Well?" Crowley asked, hand on the Impala's passenger door. "Are you coming?"
Yeah. This wasn't going to end well.
*
Other highlights in my quest to conquer my writer's block: Sam'n'Dean v. the Dance Show Poltergeist, with special guest star Charlie, which is pretty super fluffy; a handful of snippets of other bits of SPN ephemera (not the right word at all but I loooove it); a disturbingly autobiographical start to a novel about a young woman who is either haunted by a ghost she thought she made up, or is going insane; bits of scenes from my homoromantic, asexual YA horror adventure novel; several memoirial pieces about my life at day camp as a preteen, among other things; and the start of a melancholy modern fairy tale about a woman going on a quest into her childhood hideaway to rescue her younger self.
What'd be really great is if I could focus on anything.