The Unfinished Fic Files #2 - Cat!Sam
There's that bit in "The Benders" where Dean comes out of the bar and looks for Sam and there's just a cat. And I said, "Shit, Sam's turned into a cat!" I should know better. Unfortunately, this suffered from the same problem of not really being sure what I was doing with it, and then my interest petered out and I moved on to something else.
"Meow," Sam Said
Sam turns into a cat.
Sam as a cat was a big, hulking grey tabby with a kink an inch from the end of his tail and faint scars crawling beneath his fur. He had the rolling gait of an alleyway brawler, but his markings were clear and precise and he kept himself tidy and was, Dean had to admit, a very pretty cat.
He was too large and heavy for Dean to carry around much, and definitely too heavy to do anything stupid like ride around on Dean's shoulder, so Sam just followed him, silent cat paws shadowing Dean's booted feet, leaping over the puddles Dean clumped through unheeding. He couldn't open the car door any more, obviously, so Dean just pulled open the driver's side door, and waited the two-point-three seconds it took for Sam to bound in and across to the passenger side. He curled up in a tight ball of grey-and-white and went to sleep in about another two-point-three seconds.
Dean got settled, turned the engine over, and pulled out of the carpark. When he hit the music, Sam's ears went up, and then his head, and when Dean glanced sideways, he was getting a deathglare from feline eyes.
"Hey," he said, "I don't see you driving here, so shut up about the music."
Not so much as a blink. Then Sam yawned, pink cat-mouth and sharp little teeth, and stretched out his forepaws, claws curving out and into the upholstery.
"Fuck you," Dean spat, and turned the music down, making sure it was still loud enough that he couldn't hear Sam's contented purr over the top of it.
"We gotta get you out of this," Dean muttered, as Sam pulled his claws back in and curled up again.
"Mew," Sam said.
Mew meant yes. They'd figured that out the first day.
Dean liked to think he dealt pretty quickly with new ideas. Hey Dean, it isn't a vampire, it's a redcap. OK. Hey Dean, we need to drive three states right now. OK.
Hey Dean, your brother's a cat.
OK.
So twenty minutes after Dean had been jerked - swearing and knife-wielding - out of sleep by Sam-the-cat landing on his leg, he and Sam were establishing that mew meant yes and mrow meant no.
"And hey," Dean said to the grey tabby sitting primly on his bed, tail wrapped around its feet, "we should have a code for, 'that hot chick is totally checking you out'."
Sam's response was to turn around, stick one leg up in the air, and start licking his butt. So they had a code for "Dean, you're an idiot".
This human-animal communication thing was a piece of cake.
Dean had Sam on his lap, forepaws on the table so he could look at Dad's journal too (cats could read? apparently they could when they were really humans) when the waitress came past to take his order.
"Hey," she said, frowning like Dean had been drawing on the table with crayons, "you can't have him in here."
Sam sat back on Dean's lap, looked up at her with big, yellow, slit-pupil eyes, and meowed prettily. Dean watched the waitress melt like ice-cream on a hot day.
"Well," she said, "just keep him off the table. He is house-trained, right?"
"Like you wouldn't believe," Dean told her.
She braced her hand against one corner of the table as she leaned forward to stroke between Sam's ears, then down around under his chin. Sam tilted his head up as she scritched, his eyes squinting closed. Sam purred, the waitress giggled, and Dean realised that maybe the only thing better than mysterious-tough-guy for landing chicks was mysterious-tough-guy-with-cat.
"I'll get him a saucer of milk," she said, and then cooed at Sam, "Hey, would you like that?"
"And I'll have the full breakfast," Dean told her.
She left, and Dean looked down into yellow eyes looking up. "You're shameless," he said.
Sam, still purring, washed his shoulder.
The waitress came back not only with milk, but with a second saucer of fish scraps. Sam the human hated fish, and had done ever since the age of seven, when Dean had stuck two fish-fingers so far up his nose he'd been sneezing breadcrumbs for two days. Sam the cat cleaned the plate in about four mouthfuls, and then spent five minutes licking his whiskers and washing his face, the steady lap-lap of his tongue coming from his chair as Dean ate his breakfast and flicked through the journal.
There was absolutely nothing in Dad's journal about suddenly waking up with four paws and whiskers. They were on their own.
"Some sort of curse, or spell," Dean ticked off on his fingers. "Or an attack by a ferocious were-kitty."
Sam yawned in his face in a gust of fish-breath.
"Yeah," Dean said, "I didn't think that was very likely either."
They retraced their steps from yesterday - the bookstore, the girl's house, the library. Dean asked a couple questions and surreptitiously checked the EMF meter while Sam stalked around, tail in the air, sniffing at things and occasionally rubbing against them. But sooner or later, every place they revisited, he'd come back, draped his tail against Dean's knee, and mrow loudly.
"Yeah," Dean said the first time, "I haven't finished yet."
But Sam just mrowed again, and Dean supposed if you added up an animal's natural weird-shit-o-meter and his brother's freaky sixth sense, you got a whole lot of obsolete equipment.
They did the graveyard as a last resort, but still, nothing. Dean started reading random headstones, hoping that maybe one might say, "liked cats," because at least that might be a lead. Nothing, of course, and he got distracted from it anyway by the sight of Sam slinking along, muscles bunched, belly to the grass. He moved like mercury flowing, and stopped in utter stillness. It was so unlike Sam that it took Dean a moment to figure out what he was doing, which was, of course, hunting.
"Hey," Dean called, and ten feet away a small bird took off from a headstone, fluttering towards the trees. Sam sat up and glared back at Dean.
"What?" Dean said. "You can't be hungry again, we just ate. You really want a mouthful of feathers?"
And then he realised he was Talking To A Cat.
"Aw, Jesus Christ." Dean turned, heading for the car. "C'mon, Sammy," he called over his shoulder, and a moment later a furry smudge of grey bobbed into the bottom of his peripheral vision. Dean thought maybe he could get a collar for Sam. Put a bell on it, to keep track of him. Stop him hunting wildlife.
Maybe get a tag. Property of Dean Winchester.
When he laughed, pulling the Impala out onto the road, Sam stopped washing in the passenger seat and gave him a look.
Just a look. Really, it was kinda impossible to tell if Sam was curious, angry, surprised. So that hadn't really changed. It had always been easy to gauge the rough outline of Sam's mood, and impossible to figure the details. Before, he'd always been willing to explain, in excrutiating and long-winded detail.
Now, he couldn't talk.
They spent the evening doing internet research. Dean ran through a slew of old-faithful supernatural and mythology sites, then some dodgier candidates, and finally just tried searches, which turned up some Japanese porn sites that Dean really could have lived without knowing about. There were also a couple of amusing sites --
"Hey Sammy, think you could fit in a jar?"
Mrow.
-- but nothing actually useful.
Sam went to sleep curled up in a ball on his own remade-by-housekeeping bed. When Dean woke up at three, he was curled around some obstruction in the sheets. His palm found fur and warmth, and Sam gave a muffled, sleep mrrp.
Dean didn't quite remember going back to sleep, but he woke up in the morning to the gentle pat-pat-pat of a paw on his nose. When he jerked his head back and forced his eyes open, there were whiskers far too close to his face.
"Motherfucker," Dean pronounced, pushing away and scrubbing a hand over his face.
Mrow, Sam said.
"Yeah, well," Dean allowed, pushing the covers off. "You could've done it with the claws out, I suppose."
Mew.
-----
And since I'm being thorough... This ended up being too long and rambly for the overall tone of the piece, but I never threw it out because I loved it too much.
Dean had woken up when something landed on his thigh. He jolted upright with a yelp and the knife in his hand to find a big tabby cat crouching on his bed, fur up and eyes all pupil as they stared at him. It yowled at him, and Dean said, "The fuck? How did a cat get in here?"
The cat meowed, long and strident, and Dean put the knife down on the bedside table, glancing across at Sam's empty, disarrayed bed. "Sam?" he called, but actually, there wasn't any noise from the bathroom, and the door was open.
The cat yowled at him again, pacing across the bed as Dean climbed out, its tail lashing. Dean peered around the doorframe, and nope, no Sam in the bathroom. So he must have gone out to get coffee.
Except that when Dean turned back to the main room, Sam's jeans and his jacket were all still neatly draped across the chair where he'd left them the night before, the anal-retentive neat-freak, with his shoes sitting under it. Dean doubted he'd go to get coffee shoeless, let alone pantsless.
"Meow," the cat said, now sitting on Dean's bed where the covers had been pushed back, its tail still jerking back and forth.
And how did a cat get in here? The windows didn't open at all and the door was still locked and latched and... "Shit," Dean said, coming forward a couple of steps, leaning down to peer at the cat. "Sam?"
"Meow," the cat said.
"Fuck," Dean said. He sat hard on the end of the bed. "This is fucked up."
"Meow," the cat said, and came forward to sit next to him.
"No, really," Dean said. "This is an achievement, even for us." He reached out a hand, hesitated just short, then poked at the cat with a finger. It was soft, warm, furry, and wavered a little with his poke.
Yellow cat-eyes glared at him, and then it swivelled about, twisting entirely around to lick twice, hard, at the place he'd poked.
"Sam," Dean said, trying it out, and the cat - Sam - meowed, hunkering down beside him. He seemed to sort of droop, and Dean didn't know, did cats even have moods? But he looked dejected. Depressed.
Figured that, even as a cat, Sam could mope.
"Hey," Dean said, laying his hand on Sam's furry back. He was a big cat, but Dean's hand still spanned his back, fingers over fur-covered ribs down his side. "We'll figure this out." Yellow eyes looked up at him, and Dean grinned. "And in the meantime, I get to appreciate the blessed silence because you can't talk. See? there's always a silver lining."
He laughed until Sam's claws sank into his thigh. Then he swore, snatched up the cat body around the middle, heavy hanging from his hands. Dean held him up until they were eye-to-eye, Sam not letting dangling from Dean's grip impede his dignity. "Do not do that again, OK?" Dean said. "Or I'll leave you in a cardboard box on the side of the road."
"Mew," Sam said.
Dean hesitated. "Does that mean yes?"
"Mew," Sam said.
Dean let him down a little, until Sam's back legs could brace against Dean's knee, which looked a little more comfortable. "So what means no?"
Sam blinked his yellow eyes. The pupils were narrowing back towards slits, Dean noticed. "Mrow," Sam said.
Dean grinned. "And just like that, man-animal communication. I rule."
He put Sam down on the mattress, and he stalked off a step or two, glanced back and said, "Mrow," short and cross, then sat down and started washing.
"Meow," Sam Said
Sam turns into a cat.
Sam as a cat was a big, hulking grey tabby with a kink an inch from the end of his tail and faint scars crawling beneath his fur. He had the rolling gait of an alleyway brawler, but his markings were clear and precise and he kept himself tidy and was, Dean had to admit, a very pretty cat.
He was too large and heavy for Dean to carry around much, and definitely too heavy to do anything stupid like ride around on Dean's shoulder, so Sam just followed him, silent cat paws shadowing Dean's booted feet, leaping over the puddles Dean clumped through unheeding. He couldn't open the car door any more, obviously, so Dean just pulled open the driver's side door, and waited the two-point-three seconds it took for Sam to bound in and across to the passenger side. He curled up in a tight ball of grey-and-white and went to sleep in about another two-point-three seconds.
Dean got settled, turned the engine over, and pulled out of the carpark. When he hit the music, Sam's ears went up, and then his head, and when Dean glanced sideways, he was getting a deathglare from feline eyes.
"Hey," he said, "I don't see you driving here, so shut up about the music."
Not so much as a blink. Then Sam yawned, pink cat-mouth and sharp little teeth, and stretched out his forepaws, claws curving out and into the upholstery.
"Fuck you," Dean spat, and turned the music down, making sure it was still loud enough that he couldn't hear Sam's contented purr over the top of it.
"We gotta get you out of this," Dean muttered, as Sam pulled his claws back in and curled up again.
"Mew," Sam said.
Mew meant yes. They'd figured that out the first day.
Dean liked to think he dealt pretty quickly with new ideas. Hey Dean, it isn't a vampire, it's a redcap. OK. Hey Dean, we need to drive three states right now. OK.
Hey Dean, your brother's a cat.
OK.
So twenty minutes after Dean had been jerked - swearing and knife-wielding - out of sleep by Sam-the-cat landing on his leg, he and Sam were establishing that mew meant yes and mrow meant no.
"And hey," Dean said to the grey tabby sitting primly on his bed, tail wrapped around its feet, "we should have a code for, 'that hot chick is totally checking you out'."
Sam's response was to turn around, stick one leg up in the air, and start licking his butt. So they had a code for "Dean, you're an idiot".
This human-animal communication thing was a piece of cake.
Dean had Sam on his lap, forepaws on the table so he could look at Dad's journal too (cats could read? apparently they could when they were really humans) when the waitress came past to take his order.
"Hey," she said, frowning like Dean had been drawing on the table with crayons, "you can't have him in here."
Sam sat back on Dean's lap, looked up at her with big, yellow, slit-pupil eyes, and meowed prettily. Dean watched the waitress melt like ice-cream on a hot day.
"Well," she said, "just keep him off the table. He is house-trained, right?"
"Like you wouldn't believe," Dean told her.
She braced her hand against one corner of the table as she leaned forward to stroke between Sam's ears, then down around under his chin. Sam tilted his head up as she scritched, his eyes squinting closed. Sam purred, the waitress giggled, and Dean realised that maybe the only thing better than mysterious-tough-guy for landing chicks was mysterious-tough-guy-with-cat.
"I'll get him a saucer of milk," she said, and then cooed at Sam, "Hey, would you like that?"
"And I'll have the full breakfast," Dean told her.
She left, and Dean looked down into yellow eyes looking up. "You're shameless," he said.
Sam, still purring, washed his shoulder.
The waitress came back not only with milk, but with a second saucer of fish scraps. Sam the human hated fish, and had done ever since the age of seven, when Dean had stuck two fish-fingers so far up his nose he'd been sneezing breadcrumbs for two days. Sam the cat cleaned the plate in about four mouthfuls, and then spent five minutes licking his whiskers and washing his face, the steady lap-lap of his tongue coming from his chair as Dean ate his breakfast and flicked through the journal.
There was absolutely nothing in Dad's journal about suddenly waking up with four paws and whiskers. They were on their own.
"Some sort of curse, or spell," Dean ticked off on his fingers. "Or an attack by a ferocious were-kitty."
Sam yawned in his face in a gust of fish-breath.
"Yeah," Dean said, "I didn't think that was very likely either."
They retraced their steps from yesterday - the bookstore, the girl's house, the library. Dean asked a couple questions and surreptitiously checked the EMF meter while Sam stalked around, tail in the air, sniffing at things and occasionally rubbing against them. But sooner or later, every place they revisited, he'd come back, draped his tail against Dean's knee, and mrow loudly.
"Yeah," Dean said the first time, "I haven't finished yet."
But Sam just mrowed again, and Dean supposed if you added up an animal's natural weird-shit-o-meter and his brother's freaky sixth sense, you got a whole lot of obsolete equipment.
They did the graveyard as a last resort, but still, nothing. Dean started reading random headstones, hoping that maybe one might say, "liked cats," because at least that might be a lead. Nothing, of course, and he got distracted from it anyway by the sight of Sam slinking along, muscles bunched, belly to the grass. He moved like mercury flowing, and stopped in utter stillness. It was so unlike Sam that it took Dean a moment to figure out what he was doing, which was, of course, hunting.
"Hey," Dean called, and ten feet away a small bird took off from a headstone, fluttering towards the trees. Sam sat up and glared back at Dean.
"What?" Dean said. "You can't be hungry again, we just ate. You really want a mouthful of feathers?"
And then he realised he was Talking To A Cat.
"Aw, Jesus Christ." Dean turned, heading for the car. "C'mon, Sammy," he called over his shoulder, and a moment later a furry smudge of grey bobbed into the bottom of his peripheral vision. Dean thought maybe he could get a collar for Sam. Put a bell on it, to keep track of him. Stop him hunting wildlife.
Maybe get a tag. Property of Dean Winchester.
When he laughed, pulling the Impala out onto the road, Sam stopped washing in the passenger seat and gave him a look.
Just a look. Really, it was kinda impossible to tell if Sam was curious, angry, surprised. So that hadn't really changed. It had always been easy to gauge the rough outline of Sam's mood, and impossible to figure the details. Before, he'd always been willing to explain, in excrutiating and long-winded detail.
Now, he couldn't talk.
They spent the evening doing internet research. Dean ran through a slew of old-faithful supernatural and mythology sites, then some dodgier candidates, and finally just tried searches, which turned up some Japanese porn sites that Dean really could have lived without knowing about. There were also a couple of amusing sites --
"Hey Sammy, think you could fit in a jar?"
Mrow.
-- but nothing actually useful.
Sam went to sleep curled up in a ball on his own remade-by-housekeeping bed. When Dean woke up at three, he was curled around some obstruction in the sheets. His palm found fur and warmth, and Sam gave a muffled, sleep mrrp.
Dean didn't quite remember going back to sleep, but he woke up in the morning to the gentle pat-pat-pat of a paw on his nose. When he jerked his head back and forced his eyes open, there were whiskers far too close to his face.
"Motherfucker," Dean pronounced, pushing away and scrubbing a hand over his face.
Mrow, Sam said.
"Yeah, well," Dean allowed, pushing the covers off. "You could've done it with the claws out, I suppose."
Mew.
-----
And since I'm being thorough... This ended up being too long and rambly for the overall tone of the piece, but I never threw it out because I loved it too much.
Dean had woken up when something landed on his thigh. He jolted upright with a yelp and the knife in his hand to find a big tabby cat crouching on his bed, fur up and eyes all pupil as they stared at him. It yowled at him, and Dean said, "The fuck? How did a cat get in here?"
The cat meowed, long and strident, and Dean put the knife down on the bedside table, glancing across at Sam's empty, disarrayed bed. "Sam?" he called, but actually, there wasn't any noise from the bathroom, and the door was open.
The cat yowled at him again, pacing across the bed as Dean climbed out, its tail lashing. Dean peered around the doorframe, and nope, no Sam in the bathroom. So he must have gone out to get coffee.
Except that when Dean turned back to the main room, Sam's jeans and his jacket were all still neatly draped across the chair where he'd left them the night before, the anal-retentive neat-freak, with his shoes sitting under it. Dean doubted he'd go to get coffee shoeless, let alone pantsless.
"Meow," the cat said, now sitting on Dean's bed where the covers had been pushed back, its tail still jerking back and forth.
And how did a cat get in here? The windows didn't open at all and the door was still locked and latched and... "Shit," Dean said, coming forward a couple of steps, leaning down to peer at the cat. "Sam?"
"Meow," the cat said.
"Fuck," Dean said. He sat hard on the end of the bed. "This is fucked up."
"Meow," the cat said, and came forward to sit next to him.
"No, really," Dean said. "This is an achievement, even for us." He reached out a hand, hesitated just short, then poked at the cat with a finger. It was soft, warm, furry, and wavered a little with his poke.
Yellow cat-eyes glared at him, and then it swivelled about, twisting entirely around to lick twice, hard, at the place he'd poked.
"Sam," Dean said, trying it out, and the cat - Sam - meowed, hunkering down beside him. He seemed to sort of droop, and Dean didn't know, did cats even have moods? But he looked dejected. Depressed.
Figured that, even as a cat, Sam could mope.
"Hey," Dean said, laying his hand on Sam's furry back. He was a big cat, but Dean's hand still spanned his back, fingers over fur-covered ribs down his side. "We'll figure this out." Yellow eyes looked up at him, and Dean grinned. "And in the meantime, I get to appreciate the blessed silence because you can't talk. See? there's always a silver lining."
He laughed until Sam's claws sank into his thigh. Then he swore, snatched up the cat body around the middle, heavy hanging from his hands. Dean held him up until they were eye-to-eye, Sam not letting dangling from Dean's grip impede his dignity. "Do not do that again, OK?" Dean said. "Or I'll leave you in a cardboard box on the side of the road."
"Mew," Sam said.
Dean hesitated. "Does that mean yes?"
"Mew," Sam said.
Dean let him down a little, until Sam's back legs could brace against Dean's knee, which looked a little more comfortable. "So what means no?"
Sam blinked his yellow eyes. The pupils were narrowing back towards slits, Dean noticed. "Mrow," Sam said.
Dean grinned. "And just like that, man-animal communication. I rule."
He put Sam down on the mattress, and he stalked off a step or two, glanced back and said, "Mrow," short and cross, then sat down and started washing.