Birthday fic for hils!
This is a birthday present for hils, from her Everlasting Birthday Challenge prompt asking for:
AU in which Sam and Dean are Indiana Jones style archaeologists and Cas owns a museum but insists on tagging along on one of their adventures
Here it is, bb! Happy birthday, and I hope you like it!
Title: Treasure Hunters
Fandom: Supernatural
Genre: Goofy action/adventure Indiana Jones pastiche
Pairing: a little implied Dean/Castiel
Rating: PG
Warnings: a little bad language, WWII-era setting
Word Count: ~1400
Notes: Far too many to go here (it's a short fic but it's full of stuff). Footnotes at the end to explain references.
Summary: See above. Sorry it isn't longer! Consider this a snippet taken from the middle of one of the many adventures of Professor Castiel, expert in ancient languages, and the treasure-hunting Winchester brothers.
For a nerdy little guy with a bowtie, Cas is stronger than he looks.
Which is good, because Cas's tweed-clothed arm is the only thing holding Dean above a bottomless abyss.
"I swear to God, if you let go--"
"As tempting as it is, Dean, I'm trying my best not to." Cas doesn't even sound ruffled, even as his face gradually turns red from effort. He looks ruffled though -- bowtie askew, waistcoat open and jacket ripped, glasses sliding dangerously down his nose, his hair sticking up crazily and his face dark with a mixture of dirt and soot. He looks oddly more handsome than when he's all buttoned-up and combed-down in the dust-free corridors of his beloved museum. Being scruffy suits him.
Not that Dean has much time to admire, since he's busy dangling off a cliff and all.
"Sam! You promised you could speak this language!"
"I can!" comes the indignant yell from somewhere behind Cas, muffled through the booby-trapped rock wall that had slammed down and separated Sam from Dean and Cas and the stone altar with its disintegrating floor. "This is some weird dialect. I'm working on it!"
"You know," Cas says conversationally, "this would probably be easier if you gave me your other hand."
Dean looks down at his hand, which is clenching the tiny squat tentacled idol just as hard as his other hand is locked on Cas's wrist. "No way."
Somehow, even flat on his stomach on the edge of a bottomless abyss holding up a hundred and eighty pounds of treasure hunter -- ahem, "archaeologist" -- Cas manages to roll his eyes. "Even at the brink of death, you cannot stop graverobbing."
"We have to have this argument again, right now?" Dean says in exasperation. "It's not graverobbing, it's the fact that if the floor collapsed when I picked up the idol, what do you think is going to happen if I drop the damn thing?"
Cas tilts his head, his wire-rimmed glasses sliding another dangerous inch down his nose. "A fair point."
"Thank you." Dean is starting to be very aware of exaclty how much he hurts. He can still feel the bruises from the beating he got from Colonel Scheisskopf's goons, and the cut on his head from the fall from the jeep is still bleeding. His current situation isn't exactly comfortable either; his arm feels like it's being pulled out of its socket, while his other hand is slowly getting hotter in a way that feels very ominous.
"Uh, Cas?" Dean almost thinks the idol is getting visibly redder. "What is this thing again?"
Cas gives him a look -- his familiar, "I'm a real scientist, you are a thief" look -- but answers patiently. "It's the Dalp of Anacrab. It is said to grant its holder great powers over men and animals. And it summons a monster."
"That would explain why those Nazi assholes want it," Dean says darkly. "Wait, a monster?"
There's a low noise from outside the temple cavern. It sounds suspiciously like a roar.
"According to legend," Cas confirms.
"Saaaaaam!" Dean yells.
"Almost there! I just need to work out which lever to pull!" Theoretically one of the levers will lift up the rock wall, allowing Sam to bring his gigantic biceps over to help Cas rescue Dean from certain death. The levers are helpfully located on Sam's side of the wall and are unhelpfully labeled in riddles written in the mysterious dead language Sam swears he speaks. Any other day Dean would be content to watch Sam and Cas tease out every shred of meaning from every half-blurred symbol, but right now Dean's got bigger things on his mind than academic rigor and he's two seconds from yelling at Sam to just pick one.
"Almost, I just have to...Cas! Does 'kharsa' mean 'release' or 'destroy'?"
Dean gapes. "You have got to be kidding me."
"Shut up, Dean!"
"I don't want to be killed by a translation error!"
"Is it spelled with a cheit or a khaf?" Cas asks, eyes closed in concentration.
"Uh, khaf."
"Samekh or shin?"
"Goddamit Cas!" Dean yells.
"It was screwing up the spelling that got us into this mess, Dean!" Cas yells back.
"It's samekh. Is it me or is the floor shaking?"
The floor is definitely shaking. Dean can feel it through Cas's hand. Cas is oblivious, his eyes unfocused as he drags some other esoteric piece of knowledge out of his gigantic nerd brain. Sometimes Dean bemoans the fact that now he has to babysit another geek along with his brother, but sometimes he wants to send a prayer of thanks to the Angel of Librarians.
"Release," Cas pronounces.
"Are you sure? Because if this is wrong we are so--"
"Fuck!" Dean's hand starts to slip. Cas tries to tighten his grip, but it's hot and their hands are sweaty and Dean's sliding away. "Sammy! I can't hold on!"
"The lever's stuck, it won't move!" Sam's voice is higher pitched, panicked now.
"Then break it!" Dean's never heard Cas sound like that. Not even when he's the one hanging by a thread. "Hang on, Dean. I'll try to--"
Cas lets go with his other hand, which has been maintaining a death grip on a solidly stationary decorative pillar, and grabs for the trailing edge of Dean's leather jacket, before sliding into his sleeve to get both hands on his wrist. Dean stops sliding away from Cas, but now Cas is unanchored.
Now they're both sliding.
"Sam!"
"I got it!" Sam yells triumphantly. There's a crack and loud rumble Dean can feel in his teeth as the wall finally opens and then suddenly Sam's big stupid grinning face is hanging over the edge. "Give me your hand!"
"Wait, I'm gonna throw you this thing--"
Sam's always known what was in Dean's head, sometimes before Dean does. He's up and waiting, before Dean finishes speaking. "Ready!"
In one movement, Dean hefts the Dalp and hurls it up on to the cliff. The momentum starts him and Cas sliding even faster over the edge.
Then Sam's there, grabbing Dean's now-free hand and hauling with all his strength.
That's all they need. One minute Dean is dangling over a precipice, the next he's lying next to Cas on the rock floor, enjoying the feel of the ground beneath him. Sam's concerned face appears upside-down in his vision and Dean grins.
"Took you long enough."
"Next time I'll let you do the delicate translating and I can fall off the cliff."
"I think you might be too heavy for me to catch, Sam," Cas points out seriously. "And Dean doesn't speak Dalish."
Sam shakes his head and holds out a hand to help Cas up. Once on his feet, Cas starts futilely patting the dirt off his tweed suit, raising clouds of dust and making absolutely no difference to his disheveled appearance.
Dean waggles his hand, which Sam ignores, but Cas politely takes it and helps him up. To say thanks, Dean reaches out and slides Cas's glasses back up into place. Cas watches him carefully through the grimy lenses, blue eyes as intense as ever in the dim torchlight.
"You okay, Professor?" Dean asks, just to be sure.
"Of course, Dean," Cas replies. He doesn't ask if Dean's okay, he never does -- he just looks at him, checks him over with his eyes because he knows Dean lies like a dog when he's hurt. Whatever Cas sees must satisfy him, because he's looking into Dean's eyes again and there's a hint of a smile curving his lips. Dean smiles back and finds himself with a strange desire to fix Cas's bowtie for him. Or you know, take it off altogether.
"Uh, guys I hate to interrupt, but--" Sam is interrupted himself by a loud roar, closer now, and the sound of yelling in German outside the cavern.
Cas cocks his head and looks intrigued. "The legends say the creature controlled by the Dalp is unspeakably grotesque in appearance and a vicious predator."
Dean can feel the grin building on his face. He leans down and snatches up both the thankfully-undamaged Dalp of Anacrab and his battered fedora, which narrowly escaped following Dean off the cliff. He settles the hat on his head and tilts it to a suitably rakish angle.
"Let's go fight a monster."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
NOTES:
References! Obvious debt owed to the Indiana Jones movies and to the pulp movies/novels that inspired them. The Dalp of Anacrab is the MacGuffin from a fantastic genre pastiche called The Lost Skeleton Returns Again. Colonel Scheisskopf is the shithead senior officer in Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (though I turned him into a German).
Dalish is the language spoken by the Dalemen in The Hobbit. It's written in the Hebrew alphabet because I didn't feel like making up names for letters, but the word "kharsa" itself is meaningless (AFAIK).
AU in which Sam and Dean are Indiana Jones style archaeologists and Cas owns a museum but insists on tagging along on one of their adventures
Here it is, bb! Happy birthday, and I hope you like it!
Title: Treasure Hunters
Fandom: Supernatural
Genre: Goofy action/adventure Indiana Jones pastiche
Pairing: a little implied Dean/Castiel
Rating: PG
Warnings: a little bad language, WWII-era setting
Word Count: ~1400
Notes: Far too many to go here (it's a short fic but it's full of stuff). Footnotes at the end to explain references.
Summary: See above. Sorry it isn't longer! Consider this a snippet taken from the middle of one of the many adventures of Professor Castiel, expert in ancient languages, and the treasure-hunting Winchester brothers.
For a nerdy little guy with a bowtie, Cas is stronger than he looks.
Which is good, because Cas's tweed-clothed arm is the only thing holding Dean above a bottomless abyss.
"I swear to God, if you let go--"
"As tempting as it is, Dean, I'm trying my best not to." Cas doesn't even sound ruffled, even as his face gradually turns red from effort. He looks ruffled though -- bowtie askew, waistcoat open and jacket ripped, glasses sliding dangerously down his nose, his hair sticking up crazily and his face dark with a mixture of dirt and soot. He looks oddly more handsome than when he's all buttoned-up and combed-down in the dust-free corridors of his beloved museum. Being scruffy suits him.
Not that Dean has much time to admire, since he's busy dangling off a cliff and all.
"Sam! You promised you could speak this language!"
"I can!" comes the indignant yell from somewhere behind Cas, muffled through the booby-trapped rock wall that had slammed down and separated Sam from Dean and Cas and the stone altar with its disintegrating floor. "This is some weird dialect. I'm working on it!"
"You know," Cas says conversationally, "this would probably be easier if you gave me your other hand."
Dean looks down at his hand, which is clenching the tiny squat tentacled idol just as hard as his other hand is locked on Cas's wrist. "No way."
Somehow, even flat on his stomach on the edge of a bottomless abyss holding up a hundred and eighty pounds of treasure hunter -- ahem, "archaeologist" -- Cas manages to roll his eyes. "Even at the brink of death, you cannot stop graverobbing."
"We have to have this argument again, right now?" Dean says in exasperation. "It's not graverobbing, it's the fact that if the floor collapsed when I picked up the idol, what do you think is going to happen if I drop the damn thing?"
Cas tilts his head, his wire-rimmed glasses sliding another dangerous inch down his nose. "A fair point."
"Thank you." Dean is starting to be very aware of exaclty how much he hurts. He can still feel the bruises from the beating he got from Colonel Scheisskopf's goons, and the cut on his head from the fall from the jeep is still bleeding. His current situation isn't exactly comfortable either; his arm feels like it's being pulled out of its socket, while his other hand is slowly getting hotter in a way that feels very ominous.
"Uh, Cas?" Dean almost thinks the idol is getting visibly redder. "What is this thing again?"
Cas gives him a look -- his familiar, "I'm a real scientist, you are a thief" look -- but answers patiently. "It's the Dalp of Anacrab. It is said to grant its holder great powers over men and animals. And it summons a monster."
"That would explain why those Nazi assholes want it," Dean says darkly. "Wait, a monster?"
There's a low noise from outside the temple cavern. It sounds suspiciously like a roar.
"According to legend," Cas confirms.
"Saaaaaam!" Dean yells.
"Almost there! I just need to work out which lever to pull!" Theoretically one of the levers will lift up the rock wall, allowing Sam to bring his gigantic biceps over to help Cas rescue Dean from certain death. The levers are helpfully located on Sam's side of the wall and are unhelpfully labeled in riddles written in the mysterious dead language Sam swears he speaks. Any other day Dean would be content to watch Sam and Cas tease out every shred of meaning from every half-blurred symbol, but right now Dean's got bigger things on his mind than academic rigor and he's two seconds from yelling at Sam to just pick one.
"Almost, I just have to...Cas! Does 'kharsa' mean 'release' or 'destroy'?"
Dean gapes. "You have got to be kidding me."
"Shut up, Dean!"
"I don't want to be killed by a translation error!"
"Is it spelled with a cheit or a khaf?" Cas asks, eyes closed in concentration.
"Uh, khaf."
"Samekh or shin?"
"Goddamit Cas!" Dean yells.
"It was screwing up the spelling that got us into this mess, Dean!" Cas yells back.
"It's samekh. Is it me or is the floor shaking?"
The floor is definitely shaking. Dean can feel it through Cas's hand. Cas is oblivious, his eyes unfocused as he drags some other esoteric piece of knowledge out of his gigantic nerd brain. Sometimes Dean bemoans the fact that now he has to babysit another geek along with his brother, but sometimes he wants to send a prayer of thanks to the Angel of Librarians.
"Release," Cas pronounces.
"Are you sure? Because if this is wrong we are so--"
"Fuck!" Dean's hand starts to slip. Cas tries to tighten his grip, but it's hot and their hands are sweaty and Dean's sliding away. "Sammy! I can't hold on!"
"The lever's stuck, it won't move!" Sam's voice is higher pitched, panicked now.
"Then break it!" Dean's never heard Cas sound like that. Not even when he's the one hanging by a thread. "Hang on, Dean. I'll try to--"
Cas lets go with his other hand, which has been maintaining a death grip on a solidly stationary decorative pillar, and grabs for the trailing edge of Dean's leather jacket, before sliding into his sleeve to get both hands on his wrist. Dean stops sliding away from Cas, but now Cas is unanchored.
Now they're both sliding.
"Sam!"
"I got it!" Sam yells triumphantly. There's a crack and loud rumble Dean can feel in his teeth as the wall finally opens and then suddenly Sam's big stupid grinning face is hanging over the edge. "Give me your hand!"
"Wait, I'm gonna throw you this thing--"
Sam's always known what was in Dean's head, sometimes before Dean does. He's up and waiting, before Dean finishes speaking. "Ready!"
In one movement, Dean hefts the Dalp and hurls it up on to the cliff. The momentum starts him and Cas sliding even faster over the edge.
Then Sam's there, grabbing Dean's now-free hand and hauling with all his strength.
That's all they need. One minute Dean is dangling over a precipice, the next he's lying next to Cas on the rock floor, enjoying the feel of the ground beneath him. Sam's concerned face appears upside-down in his vision and Dean grins.
"Took you long enough."
"Next time I'll let you do the delicate translating and I can fall off the cliff."
"I think you might be too heavy for me to catch, Sam," Cas points out seriously. "And Dean doesn't speak Dalish."
Sam shakes his head and holds out a hand to help Cas up. Once on his feet, Cas starts futilely patting the dirt off his tweed suit, raising clouds of dust and making absolutely no difference to his disheveled appearance.
Dean waggles his hand, which Sam ignores, but Cas politely takes it and helps him up. To say thanks, Dean reaches out and slides Cas's glasses back up into place. Cas watches him carefully through the grimy lenses, blue eyes as intense as ever in the dim torchlight.
"You okay, Professor?" Dean asks, just to be sure.
"Of course, Dean," Cas replies. He doesn't ask if Dean's okay, he never does -- he just looks at him, checks him over with his eyes because he knows Dean lies like a dog when he's hurt. Whatever Cas sees must satisfy him, because he's looking into Dean's eyes again and there's a hint of a smile curving his lips. Dean smiles back and finds himself with a strange desire to fix Cas's bowtie for him. Or you know, take it off altogether.
"Uh, guys I hate to interrupt, but--" Sam is interrupted himself by a loud roar, closer now, and the sound of yelling in German outside the cavern.
Cas cocks his head and looks intrigued. "The legends say the creature controlled by the Dalp is unspeakably grotesque in appearance and a vicious predator."
Dean can feel the grin building on his face. He leans down and snatches up both the thankfully-undamaged Dalp of Anacrab and his battered fedora, which narrowly escaped following Dean off the cliff. He settles the hat on his head and tilts it to a suitably rakish angle.
"Let's go fight a monster."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
NOTES:
References! Obvious debt owed to the Indiana Jones movies and to the pulp movies/novels that inspired them. The Dalp of Anacrab is the MacGuffin from a fantastic genre pastiche called The Lost Skeleton Returns Again. Colonel Scheisskopf is the shithead senior officer in Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (though I turned him into a German).
Dalish is the language spoken by the Dalemen in The Hobbit. It's written in the Hebrew alphabet because I didn't feel like making up names for letters, but the word "kharsa" itself is meaningless (AFAIK).