Fic: Jumping On The Crazy Train 1/3 (Supernatural / Sandman Xover)
Title: Jumping On The Crazy Train
Fandom: Supernatural / Sandman (Neil Gaiman)
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Spoilers for all seasons, but if you've seen at least through Season 4 you should be all right
Summary: It was supposed to be a normal hunt: just a few werewolves kicking up dust in southern Illinois. Instead he had to deal with... well, when Dean figured that out he'd get back to you. One thing was certain, though: this was the last time he let Sam play Captain Save-A-Ho. The absolute last time.
he prayed to no on in particular.'>
“Hey, stop that.”
“Why?”
Dean ran a hand down his face. Who the hell had to tell a chick to stop changing her clothes? And he meant really changing her clothes. Every time he looked at her she was wearing something different. “Because it’s creepy, okay? And we’re trying to keep a low profile.” He reached out and slapped a multi-colored fish out of the air, sending it cartwheeling back into the house. “And these…things… aren’t helping.”
The girl shrugged, and without moving a muscle the fish concentrated into a neat circle that floated around her,flashing bright colors on the walls. “I can keep a low profile.” As she spoke her face sank into itself until her profile was squared off on the side and perfectly flat. “See?”
Dean felt queasy. “Just keep them in the house, deal?”
Her face shifted, blinked back to normal and thank God, because this chick was weird-looking enough without her doing anything else. He pulled out his phone. Sam still hadn’t gotten back to him.
One of the fish nuzzled his fingers, small mouth sucking at a knuckle before dashing back to its school and he fought the very real urge to cry.
This was not in his job description, and he was blaming everything that happened in the last five hours on Sam.
They should have left her where they found her, he had planned on leaving her where they found her, but Sam (bleedingheart, fruitarian, Ghandi-loving Sam) had taken one look at this bag of crazy and decided she needed to come with them. Dean thought she’d be all right on her own. She’d stood up to a pack of werewolves without flinching,and they were about as badass as they come. Sure they’d taken out the majority of them, but when one remembered that hey, there was a little girl around who had a heart just begging to be ripped out and tried to do just that she’d knocked it on the nose and said, “Bad dog.”
Whoever’s father or brother he’d been was now the new owner of a bichon frise.
Dean checked his phone again. “Come on,” he muttered. They’d called Bobby, Rufus, Nico, Jean (and that was the lowest of the low, calling her after the shit he’d pulled), but no one had anything. She’d passed every test he knew, actually gargled with the holy water and snorted the damn salt before going on about the Dead Sea and how springy it was this time of year. Silver was a bust. She’d materialized more silver jewelry than he thought a single person could wear when they made her hold his knife. The piercings in particular made his stomach roil. It must have showed on his face because they hadn’t lasted very long. She still had a chain snaking its way upone ear and five holes in the other, but at least there was actual visible flesh between them now.
To make everything that much more strange and headache inducing he and Sam saw something completely different when they looked at her. Sam saw a little girl, thirteen-fourteen tops, with short brown hair and grey eyes. Sure her clothes changed every now and then, but Sam seemed okay with that. Dean…well… either Hell had messed him up in more interesting ways than he originally thought or she was fucking with him, plain and simple. A part of him refused to believe that it was just him, because he would not imagine a chick looking like this.
First off, she had rainbow hair.Like Rainbow Brite, rainbow. He’d seen women try to dye their hair something similar, but no one ever really got the day-glo colors just right in real life.The other side was cut short and fire-engine red. At the moment it was sticking out like a sideways faux-hawk, which was better than the other side’s insistence on floating around her like she was underwater. Then there was the fishnets. And the mini-skirt (which, all right, she’d been wearing a mini-skirt a second ago and now she was wearing some kind of wet-leather fetish getup and he so didn’t need this shit) and the…the…changing. She was cute, in a what-the-fuck weird way. He’d probably hit on her in a bar if she didn’t have all the crazy. “You remember your name, yet?”
She peeked up at him, smiled, and leaned back on the floor and okay, maybe he was imagining this whole thing because those, right there, hadn’t been there a minute ago and made her exactly the kind of chick he’d hallucinate and hit on in a bar.
You know, minus the crazy.
“I remember your name,” she answered, legs scissoring in the air. “But you forgot it. Everyone forgets. The minute you get out of the NeverWhere you forget.” She dug her head into the floorboards so she could look at him. “Why do you forget?”
She looked so sad, asking him that; like he’d torn her heart out and fed it to some feral animal while she watched and cried, so he muttered something about charging his phone and darted into the other room.
Please just let her find something shiny to chase so she’ll vanish and I never have to think about tonight again, he prayed to no one in particular. His more pointed prayers to Cas had gone unanswered, and right now he was hoping for anyone to take him up. There was still multicolored flashing going on in the other room, so he doubted anyone was listening.
The sound of Led Zepplin’s “Heartbreaker”was so loud that he almost dropped his phone. He picked up. “Please, tell meyou-“
“What the fuck, Winchester?”
“Well, hello to you too,” he drawled.
Metal banged against metal in the background.“Seriously, I’m not in the mood for your shit.”
“Okay.” There was more banging. Jean must have been tormenting a pack of dogs. It was the only excuse for being that loud this late at night. “Did you get my message?”
“Yeah, I did.” There was a crash loud enough to make him take the phone away from his ear. “And I reiterate: What the fuck?”
“So you didn’t find anything?”
“Didn’t- you sent me a picture of your dick, you asshole! What was I supposed to find? Unless you wanted me to search for crabs?”
“What?” He flicked through his phone. There it was, a picture of a maniacally smiling chick with rainbow hair and mismatched eyes: one emerald green and the other cobalt blue. “I sent you a pic of this… thing Sam and I picked up.”
“Here, I’ll retext you.”
Dean waited, and Jean was going to break her phone if she kept typing that hard. He could hear the keys clacking. His phone beeped. “See, I told you, crazy-“ Only it wasn’t his crazy chick. It was his junk. There was the strawberry colored birthmark just below his hipbone and how the fuck did that happen?
He looked into the other room.Crazy was standing on her head, looking far too Zen for someone in that position. “Cute,” he muttered. “Real cute.”
He spent the next ten minutes apologizing to Jean and describing Crazy in as much detail as he could,emphasizing that she was most likely some kind of entity that drove people batshit insane.
When Jean clicked off he ran a hand over his mouth. He hated not knowing what he was dealing with. She could be anything,and with her ability to do just about whatever she wanted, the horrible flavor of anything. But so long as she wasn’t slicing and dicing the local color he couldn’t justify putting a bullet through her head. There was no guarantee it would work if he did.
“You should relax more. You’re all grumpy.”
“Yeah, well…” he stopped, because he caught a look at himself in the broken pieces of a mirror and oh hell no, he was not walking around wearing a rainbow stripped shirt and matching pants. “Listen,kid. I’m only saying this once. Don’t mess with my stuff.”
And that was the wrong thing to say, because she’d looked at him then, really looked at him with those mismatched eyes and Dean knew, he knew, that he’d just declared war in some kind of language only crazy people and possible gods could understand.
Sam was not freaking out. Maybe he was freaking out a little, but that was because their resident angel had come within a mile (exactly a mile, he now knew) of the abandoned house they were squatting in and declared he could come no closer. One second he was riding next to Sam in the Impala, the next he was standing on the side of the road looking as confused as Sam felt. To make it worse, he couldn’t even say why.They had both decided - meaning Cas had decided and Sam couldn’t really argue -to remain where they were until he could better assess the situation.
“There is a presence,” the angel said,peering into the distance like he could see what was causing the problem. “It is not malignant, merely…unfocused. It impedes my ability to go further.”
“Another angel? A god?” Sam wasn’t going to start pulling his hair. He wasn’t. “You’ve got to sense something,” he pushed when the angel didn’t respond.
Castiel cocked his head to the side and opened his mouth. A blue and gold glowing fish exited, swam around in the air in front of him, kissed his nose with a particularly loud “Smack”, and darted straight up into the sky.
The angel followed it with his eyes. “Interesting.”
A fish just flew out of his mouth, kissed him, and all he had to say was interesting. Sam dug into his coat and pulled out a bottle of Excedrine.
“Okay, listen," Dean started as calmly as he could. "I’m sorry about telling you not to touch my stuff. Very, very, sorry. Just don’t do anything crazy.” He looked at the fish, and he swore they were glaring at him. "Crazier."
Crazy girl wasn’t paying attention to him.She was staring out the window, her fish looking the same direction she was. “No peeking,” she said, wiggling her eyebrows.
Dean darted to the window and looked outside. Just the same overgrown hedge that was there when they pulled up. “You see something?”
“Barnabas is getting dinner. Last century he had to go all the way to China, but now he only has to go to 53rd.”
Great, she’d renamed Sam. Though he had to admit, it fit him in a stupid way. “Sam’s checking to see if he can find anything on you, kiddo,” Dean filled in.
The fish around her popped like bubbles, leaving behind the scent of roses and grapefruit. “No one knows about us, except Danny,and he can’t tell.”
Danny. Dean texted it to Sam. “Hey, you got a last-“ he looked up and dropped his phone.
He was so killing his brother when he got back.
There should have been a square, empty living room around him; the bay windows broken out so long ago that the shards were ground to powder before either Winchester was born. The window was still there, only it looked to be about fifty feet away. The worn wood floor had changed to marble tile and floating lazily in the middle of a steaming swimming pool, complete with Grecian statues spouting blue water, was the chick. She looked at him, wiggled her fingers, and slid off the most scarily accurate blow-up nautilus Dean had ever seen.
“Marco!”
Warm water splashed on his legs and he looked down. Instead of his jeans and boots he was wearing a pair of long, rainbow-hued swim trunks and flip-flops.
Next
________________________________________
Author's Note: Thank you for taking the time to read!
The version of Delirium Dean sees is jumping back and forth between This one and This one.
In the context of this story 'Neverwhen' is the place where souls come from. It has nothing to do with Neil Gaiman's "NeverWhere". Strange truth, I just thought it sounded cool and didn't know about the show until I started doing research for the next chapter.
Fandom: Supernatural / Sandman (Neil Gaiman)
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Spoilers for all seasons, but if you've seen at least through Season 4 you should be all right
Summary: It was supposed to be a normal hunt: just a few werewolves kicking up dust in southern Illinois. Instead he had to deal with... well, when Dean figured that out he'd get back to you. One thing was certain, though: this was the last time he let Sam play Captain Save-A-Ho. The absolute last time.
he prayed to no on in particular.'>
“Hey, stop that.”
“Why?”
Dean ran a hand down his face. Who the hell had to tell a chick to stop changing her clothes? And he meant really changing her clothes. Every time he looked at her she was wearing something different. “Because it’s creepy, okay? And we’re trying to keep a low profile.” He reached out and slapped a multi-colored fish out of the air, sending it cartwheeling back into the house. “And these…things… aren’t helping.”
The girl shrugged, and without moving a muscle the fish concentrated into a neat circle that floated around her,flashing bright colors on the walls. “I can keep a low profile.” As she spoke her face sank into itself until her profile was squared off on the side and perfectly flat. “See?”
Dean felt queasy. “Just keep them in the house, deal?”
Her face shifted, blinked back to normal and thank God, because this chick was weird-looking enough without her doing anything else. He pulled out his phone. Sam still hadn’t gotten back to him.
One of the fish nuzzled his fingers, small mouth sucking at a knuckle before dashing back to its school and he fought the very real urge to cry.
This was not in his job description, and he was blaming everything that happened in the last five hours on Sam.
They should have left her where they found her, he had planned on leaving her where they found her, but Sam (bleedingheart, fruitarian, Ghandi-loving Sam) had taken one look at this bag of crazy and decided she needed to come with them. Dean thought she’d be all right on her own. She’d stood up to a pack of werewolves without flinching,and they were about as badass as they come. Sure they’d taken out the majority of them, but when one remembered that hey, there was a little girl around who had a heart just begging to be ripped out and tried to do just that she’d knocked it on the nose and said, “Bad dog.”
Whoever’s father or brother he’d been was now the new owner of a bichon frise.
Dean checked his phone again. “Come on,” he muttered. They’d called Bobby, Rufus, Nico, Jean (and that was the lowest of the low, calling her after the shit he’d pulled), but no one had anything. She’d passed every test he knew, actually gargled with the holy water and snorted the damn salt before going on about the Dead Sea and how springy it was this time of year. Silver was a bust. She’d materialized more silver jewelry than he thought a single person could wear when they made her hold his knife. The piercings in particular made his stomach roil. It must have showed on his face because they hadn’t lasted very long. She still had a chain snaking its way upone ear and five holes in the other, but at least there was actual visible flesh between them now.
To make everything that much more strange and headache inducing he and Sam saw something completely different when they looked at her. Sam saw a little girl, thirteen-fourteen tops, with short brown hair and grey eyes. Sure her clothes changed every now and then, but Sam seemed okay with that. Dean…well… either Hell had messed him up in more interesting ways than he originally thought or she was fucking with him, plain and simple. A part of him refused to believe that it was just him, because he would not imagine a chick looking like this.
First off, she had rainbow hair.Like Rainbow Brite, rainbow. He’d seen women try to dye their hair something similar, but no one ever really got the day-glo colors just right in real life.The other side was cut short and fire-engine red. At the moment it was sticking out like a sideways faux-hawk, which was better than the other side’s insistence on floating around her like she was underwater. Then there was the fishnets. And the mini-skirt (which, all right, she’d been wearing a mini-skirt a second ago and now she was wearing some kind of wet-leather fetish getup and he so didn’t need this shit) and the…the…changing. She was cute, in a what-the-fuck weird way. He’d probably hit on her in a bar if she didn’t have all the crazy. “You remember your name, yet?”
She peeked up at him, smiled, and leaned back on the floor and okay, maybe he was imagining this whole thing because those, right there, hadn’t been there a minute ago and made her exactly the kind of chick he’d hallucinate and hit on in a bar.
You know, minus the crazy.
“I remember your name,” she answered, legs scissoring in the air. “But you forgot it. Everyone forgets. The minute you get out of the NeverWhere you forget.” She dug her head into the floorboards so she could look at him. “Why do you forget?”
She looked so sad, asking him that; like he’d torn her heart out and fed it to some feral animal while she watched and cried, so he muttered something about charging his phone and darted into the other room.
Please just let her find something shiny to chase so she’ll vanish and I never have to think about tonight again, he prayed to no one in particular. His more pointed prayers to Cas had gone unanswered, and right now he was hoping for anyone to take him up. There was still multicolored flashing going on in the other room, so he doubted anyone was listening.
The sound of Led Zepplin’s “Heartbreaker”was so loud that he almost dropped his phone. He picked up. “Please, tell meyou-“
“What the fuck, Winchester?”
“Well, hello to you too,” he drawled.
Metal banged against metal in the background.“Seriously, I’m not in the mood for your shit.”
“Okay.” There was more banging. Jean must have been tormenting a pack of dogs. It was the only excuse for being that loud this late at night. “Did you get my message?”
“Yeah, I did.” There was a crash loud enough to make him take the phone away from his ear. “And I reiterate: What the fuck?”
“So you didn’t find anything?”
“Didn’t- you sent me a picture of your dick, you asshole! What was I supposed to find? Unless you wanted me to search for crabs?”
“What?” He flicked through his phone. There it was, a picture of a maniacally smiling chick with rainbow hair and mismatched eyes: one emerald green and the other cobalt blue. “I sent you a pic of this… thing Sam and I picked up.”
“Here, I’ll retext you.”
Dean waited, and Jean was going to break her phone if she kept typing that hard. He could hear the keys clacking. His phone beeped. “See, I told you, crazy-“ Only it wasn’t his crazy chick. It was his junk. There was the strawberry colored birthmark just below his hipbone and how the fuck did that happen?
He looked into the other room.Crazy was standing on her head, looking far too Zen for someone in that position. “Cute,” he muttered. “Real cute.”
He spent the next ten minutes apologizing to Jean and describing Crazy in as much detail as he could,emphasizing that she was most likely some kind of entity that drove people batshit insane.
When Jean clicked off he ran a hand over his mouth. He hated not knowing what he was dealing with. She could be anything,and with her ability to do just about whatever she wanted, the horrible flavor of anything. But so long as she wasn’t slicing and dicing the local color he couldn’t justify putting a bullet through her head. There was no guarantee it would work if he did.
“You should relax more. You’re all grumpy.”
“Yeah, well…” he stopped, because he caught a look at himself in the broken pieces of a mirror and oh hell no, he was not walking around wearing a rainbow stripped shirt and matching pants. “Listen,kid. I’m only saying this once. Don’t mess with my stuff.”
And that was the wrong thing to say, because she’d looked at him then, really looked at him with those mismatched eyes and Dean knew, he knew, that he’d just declared war in some kind of language only crazy people and possible gods could understand.
Sam was not freaking out. Maybe he was freaking out a little, but that was because their resident angel had come within a mile (exactly a mile, he now knew) of the abandoned house they were squatting in and declared he could come no closer. One second he was riding next to Sam in the Impala, the next he was standing on the side of the road looking as confused as Sam felt. To make it worse, he couldn’t even say why.They had both decided - meaning Cas had decided and Sam couldn’t really argue -to remain where they were until he could better assess the situation.
“There is a presence,” the angel said,peering into the distance like he could see what was causing the problem. “It is not malignant, merely…unfocused. It impedes my ability to go further.”
“Another angel? A god?” Sam wasn’t going to start pulling his hair. He wasn’t. “You’ve got to sense something,” he pushed when the angel didn’t respond.
Castiel cocked his head to the side and opened his mouth. A blue and gold glowing fish exited, swam around in the air in front of him, kissed his nose with a particularly loud “Smack”, and darted straight up into the sky.
The angel followed it with his eyes. “Interesting.”
A fish just flew out of his mouth, kissed him, and all he had to say was interesting. Sam dug into his coat and pulled out a bottle of Excedrine.
“Okay, listen," Dean started as calmly as he could. "I’m sorry about telling you not to touch my stuff. Very, very, sorry. Just don’t do anything crazy.” He looked at the fish, and he swore they were glaring at him. "Crazier."
Crazy girl wasn’t paying attention to him.She was staring out the window, her fish looking the same direction she was. “No peeking,” she said, wiggling her eyebrows.
Dean darted to the window and looked outside. Just the same overgrown hedge that was there when they pulled up. “You see something?”
“Barnabas is getting dinner. Last century he had to go all the way to China, but now he only has to go to 53rd.”
Great, she’d renamed Sam. Though he had to admit, it fit him in a stupid way. “Sam’s checking to see if he can find anything on you, kiddo,” Dean filled in.
The fish around her popped like bubbles, leaving behind the scent of roses and grapefruit. “No one knows about us, except Danny,and he can’t tell.”
Danny. Dean texted it to Sam. “Hey, you got a last-“ he looked up and dropped his phone.
He was so killing his brother when he got back.
There should have been a square, empty living room around him; the bay windows broken out so long ago that the shards were ground to powder before either Winchester was born. The window was still there, only it looked to be about fifty feet away. The worn wood floor had changed to marble tile and floating lazily in the middle of a steaming swimming pool, complete with Grecian statues spouting blue water, was the chick. She looked at him, wiggled her fingers, and slid off the most scarily accurate blow-up nautilus Dean had ever seen.
“Marco!”
Warm water splashed on his legs and he looked down. Instead of his jeans and boots he was wearing a pair of long, rainbow-hued swim trunks and flip-flops.
Next
________________________________________
Author's Note: Thank you for taking the time to read!
The version of Delirium Dean sees is jumping back and forth between This one and This one.
In the context of this story 'Neverwhen' is the place where souls come from. It has nothing to do with Neil Gaiman's "NeverWhere". Strange truth, I just thought it sounded cool and didn't know about the show until I started doing research for the next chapter.