SPN FIC - In the Moment
During our weekend in the Big Apple, saberivojo and I did a lot of gabbing about 6.18 -- about the runaway hotness that is Dean Winchester, and about the possibility of a certain local sheriff spotting him out in Bobby's junkyard. I'm back home now, and I went back and forth about the situation. Should something happen? Should it not happen?
Here's what the Muse and I came up with.
After a minute, Dean Winchester's gaze shifts and You do know you're kind of naked, right? settles into his eyes.
CHARACTERS: Dean, Sheriff Jodie Mills (from Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid and Weekend at Bobby's)
GENRE: Gen (pre-het)
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: 6.18 (for visuals only, not the plot)
LENGTH: 2408 words
IN THE MOMENT
By Carol Davis
It's not that hot, she tries to tell herself; in August there'll be days when a hundred degrees seems like a cold snap, and the forecast for today says it'll only top out at 76, maybe 77, not much above a typical spring day in Sioux Falls. But the sun's turned ON, bright enough that she hasn't taken off her sunglasses all morning, the air's muggy and thick, and the AC in the car will only cough out a thin, warm, vaguely smoky breath that's worse than leaving the thing turned off.
The AC worked fine yesterday, when it was 58 and raining.
But the worst of it? The thing that's done more to foul her disposition, distract her from focusing on her job - she's the sheriff, for God's sake - and kept her watching the clock, counting the minutes until she can go home and strip off everything she's wearing?
Her damn BRA.
Laundry, she thinks. She should have taken the time last night to throw a load in the machine, but she got home late, after spending an hour settling yet another bickering match between the Floyds down the road, and she figured the hell with doing wash, nobody'd notice if she put on the same pair of socks. She's never taken a poll at the station, has never asked anybody, "Hey - you wearing clean underwear?", but she's pretty sure every single person under her command would flunk that test at least once a month. The guys, for sure. And Katey? Katey's got a boyfriend whose place she spends the night at now and then. Comes in to work the next morning with the vaguely guilty look on her face that says she didn't have enough time to shower.
Because she spent it doing something else.
STUPID, frigging…
It chafes. It itches. It didn't fit when she bought it, not really, but it was so damn cute. It almost fit, and she tried to tell herself that was good enough.
It's not.
The warm, muggy weather's let her build up just enough of a sweat that her skin's screaming for fresh air. At least, for relief from the constant pressure from that too-tight band of elastic.
She's got a t-shirt on. A nice, thick, white t-shirt, underneath her uniform blouse.
Nobody would see nipples.
She won't dare walk into the station. Her rack's not big enough that there'll be a serious sag situation going on, but her team's mostly male, and if she walks into the station with the least little bit of a bounce, there'll be some looks. Some grins. A little whispering going on after she's left the room, and maybe while she's still in it. But she's the sheriff, dammit. She doesn't need to report back to the station if she can find a good enough excuse not to.
Three more hours, and she can go home. Strip off everything she's wearing and stand in a nice, cool shower, then pull on shorts and a baggy shirt and curl up with a bowl of popcorn and Dancing With the Stars.
Three more hours.
She can wait.
No she can't.
All she needs is a secluded spot, one where nobody's likely to be watching the car. A minute, that's all it'll take.
There are a lot of homes along this road, and it could be that everyone's at work, or out shopping, or whatever, but one of the rules of life is, when you're sure nobody's watching, somebody always is. She could look for a house where someone's definitely home and ask to use the bathroom - she does that, now and then, when nature says I'm not KIDDING - but that'd mean a conversation, and she's just not in the mood. The only good possibility is the old dirt road that swings around behind Bobby Singer's junkyard, the one he uses to access the cars that are way at the back end of the lot. Back there, the cars are piled up pretty high, and it's only possible to see the road from a couple of spots.
Even if Bobby's home, even if he spots her car turning onto the dirt road, he'll wait a couple of minutes for her to come back out before he bothers to wonder if anything's wrong.
She feels like she's sixteen again, sneaking off in the middle of the night.
There's a spot back there under a tree, secluded and cool. She throws the car into Park, flips open the seat belt. Works her uniform blouse and t-shirt up out of her pants.
Somebody's in Singer's lot.
Somebody…in a cowboy hat. Boots. Long, heavy duster.
Spurs? She thinks, with twin fistfuls of shirt, paused in mid-hoist. Are you kidding me? SPURS?
He's walking away from her, toward the house, his stride long and measured, head down a little, then up, as if he's staring at someone, or something. The skirt of the coat flares out a little as he walks, and there's something about it, something mesmerizing, something confident and strong and so utterly different from everything she's accustomed to looking at during the course of a day, that keeps her attention fixed firmly on him as she continues to lift her shirts up toward her shoulders.
It's like watching a movie.
It's like watching PORN.
That's why, she'll think later on - that's why she keeps lifting her shirts, right on up over her head, leaving herself sitting there in the driver's seat of an official sheriff's department vehicle in nothing but that too-tight bra and the bottom half of her uniform. That's why she strips herself half-naked out behind Bobby Singer's junkyard, knowing that there's another human being no more than thirty feet away.
A human being who spins on one heel and points a gun at her.
It'll seem funny to her, later on, that he's at least twice as startled as she is.
It takes a good long while (at least it seems that way; time has begun to feel as soupy and stagnant as the air) for a lazy grin to begin to creep across his lips, for him to tip his head in a little bit of a nod, and to say amiably, "Howdy, ma'am."
Like he's play-acting.
The air's warm and close. If it were only a couple of degrees cooler, she might remember she's sitting there in her bra.
Instead, her right cheek twitches.
All the other times she's seen him, he's been wearing what's more or less his (and Bobby's, and Sam's) uniform: jeans, old stretched-out t-shirt, plaid flannel button-down. Nothing that's at all unusual for this town, this part of the country. Any part of the country, really. She's seen flashes of things in his movements, the way he handles his car, the self-assurance in the way he carries himself - or tries to - that make him sexy as hell. Maybe he's seen a little bit of that in her, too, but they've never done anything about it, nothing more than a glimmer of acknowledgment that's like an unspoken Okay.
She's the sheriff, after all.
And he's…
He was practicing his quick draw.
In that outfit. In a long, heavy duster, standing out in the sun on a day so thick and humid it's had her wondering if a freak blizzard is at all possible.
If this is possible, a blizzard certainly is.
After a minute, Dean Winchester's gaze shifts and You do know you're kind of naked, right? settles into his eyes.
He didn't leer - not for more than a second, anyway - and that's refreshing, after the nonsense she either hears or overhears almost every day. She works with men, after all, and while she wouldn't put up with anything that crosses the line into harassment territory, they do have to be what they are. She's the daughter of a man, the sister of three more, was the wife of another, and she's surrounded by them all day, every day. She allows them what comes naturally, because it would be a waste of effort not to.
Still, it's an unexpected pleasure when Dean Winchester admires.
Right up until she realizes that she's sitting in the driver's seat of an official sheriff's department vehicle in her bra.
"I -" she stammers. "SHIT."
She's been driving these cars for ten years. Had the soul of a cop long before that, thanks to her dad and two of her brothers, thanks to the atmosphere that filled their home and the thousands of movies and TV shows she sat through so she could pick apart out of Hollywood storytelling what was useful and what was not. She knew long before someone spoke the words that she's good at reading people, at understanding their intentions, at instinctively knowing a lie for a lie, a half-truth for something just as good as a lie.
The man who approaches her car, the skirt of his too-heavy coat floating around his legs, is worried that something's gone wrong.
He allowed himself a moment of admiring, but that's over.
He stops walking a couple of steps from the car, lowers his gun and crouches a little so he can continue to see her face.
"You good?" he asks.
Bra's still too damn tight. What she'd absolutely love, right now, is to finish what she was doing: take the damn thing off.
He probably wouldn't mind that, a whole lot.
"I -"
He glances over his shoulder, in the direction of the house, and she can tell what's going through his mind, whether he should summon Bobby or whether the last thing she needs right now is another man trying to figure out why she's sitting in this car in her underwear. A few months back, Bobby Singer told her what had really happened to his wife, that she'd been possessed, that she was a breath away from killing him before he shut himself off from his heart just long enough to kill her and has wished a thousand times since then that he'd let her succeed - and if that's true, if there are things that can possess you, maybe that's what Dean thinks is happening.
Maybe he just thinks she's drunk.
"Hot," she mutters.
He raises an eyebrow.
"I was -"
He averts his eyes again. Smiles again, the kind that says I got a handle on this, and if you don't, I got you covered.
"Could you -"
He stands upright and turns his back to the car. If there were anybody else in Bobby Singer's junkyard, he'd be blocking their view of her.
She considers her options for a moment.
It's been more than a year since her family died. Since a man gave her anything more than a quick embrace, a good night kiss. It's still too soon for anything more. That's what she's told herself these past few months.
Someday, there will be more.
Someday could be right now.
This is a man who admires women. Sometimes, when Bobby Singer's had too much to drink - and sometimes when he hasn't - he talks about his boys, about Sam and Dean Winchester. She hasn't been privy to a whole lot of it, but she's heard enough. The man who's standing a couple of steps from her car, according to someone who regards him as a son, is sometimes too needy. Too rash, too impulsive. Sometimes, he demands attention right now, and yet doesn't believe he deserves it. He's a man who puts others first.
He's a man who's thrown himself into the fire (someday, she will find out how literally Bobby Singer meant those words) to protect someone else.
This is a good man.
And Jodie Mills thinks, as she sits in the muggy warmth of her department-issued car with her shirts in her lap, that she would like nothing more than for that man to climb into the back seat with her so she can understand that she is still alive. That she is something more than The Sheriff; more than a woman who lives in a house full of ghosts.
That could happen, right now. Right here.
If she beckons, she thinks, he will not refuse her.
But she's looking at his back. He's just far enough away from the car that she can see him, head to heel: see the slight slump in his shoulders, the weariness that surrounds him now that the spell that his play-acting cast has been broken. She has no idea why he's dressed like that, though it's certainly got nothing to do with a Halloween party (not in May), nothing to do with community theater. He had a reason for dressing like that, a reason that no longer exists, but he was trying to hold on to the glamour of it.
Trying to hold on to being Clint Eastwood for just a little bit longer.
This is a good man, she thinks.
And she is not what he needs right now.
She pulls her shirts back on, grimacing at the feel of too much clothing, of being way too confined, in this mid-spring heat, in the small space between the steering wheel and the seat back. The part of her that remembers being fifteen, remembers spring heat like this, the back seats of other cars, and the strong, urgent embrace of boys who were doing what came naturally and could oh so easily coax her into doing it too - that part of her grieves for the opportunity that's being lost, for the connection that's not going to happen.
But she can admire, for a moment.
The strong shoulders, the curve of his neck. The easy grip he has on the gun he still hasn't put away.
After she's tucked the t-shirt and the uniform blouse back into place, after she's settled back into the comfortable rut in the seat cushion, she reaches through the open window and says quietly, "You can turn around now."
He's not close enough to touch, so she rests her arm on the windowsill.
"Sure you're okay?" he asks.
She smiles. Can see enough of herself in the sideview mirror to know it wouldn't convince anyone of anything.
It could happen.
But she knows people, and so does he.
"Sure," she replies.
Then she shifts the car back into gear and drives away.
It only takes a few seconds, and a turn around the edge of Bobby Singer's property, to remove Dean Winchester from her sight.
* * * * *
Here's what the Muse and I came up with.
After a minute, Dean Winchester's gaze shifts and You do know you're kind of naked, right? settles into his eyes.
CHARACTERS: Dean, Sheriff Jodie Mills (from Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid and Weekend at Bobby's)
GENRE: Gen (pre-het)
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: 6.18 (for visuals only, not the plot)
LENGTH: 2408 words
IN THE MOMENT
By Carol Davis
It's not that hot, she tries to tell herself; in August there'll be days when a hundred degrees seems like a cold snap, and the forecast for today says it'll only top out at 76, maybe 77, not much above a typical spring day in Sioux Falls. But the sun's turned ON, bright enough that she hasn't taken off her sunglasses all morning, the air's muggy and thick, and the AC in the car will only cough out a thin, warm, vaguely smoky breath that's worse than leaving the thing turned off.
The AC worked fine yesterday, when it was 58 and raining.
But the worst of it? The thing that's done more to foul her disposition, distract her from focusing on her job - she's the sheriff, for God's sake - and kept her watching the clock, counting the minutes until she can go home and strip off everything she's wearing?
Her damn BRA.
Laundry, she thinks. She should have taken the time last night to throw a load in the machine, but she got home late, after spending an hour settling yet another bickering match between the Floyds down the road, and she figured the hell with doing wash, nobody'd notice if she put on the same pair of socks. She's never taken a poll at the station, has never asked anybody, "Hey - you wearing clean underwear?", but she's pretty sure every single person under her command would flunk that test at least once a month. The guys, for sure. And Katey? Katey's got a boyfriend whose place she spends the night at now and then. Comes in to work the next morning with the vaguely guilty look on her face that says she didn't have enough time to shower.
Because she spent it doing something else.
STUPID, frigging…
It chafes. It itches. It didn't fit when she bought it, not really, but it was so damn cute. It almost fit, and she tried to tell herself that was good enough.
It's not.
The warm, muggy weather's let her build up just enough of a sweat that her skin's screaming for fresh air. At least, for relief from the constant pressure from that too-tight band of elastic.
She's got a t-shirt on. A nice, thick, white t-shirt, underneath her uniform blouse.
Nobody would see nipples.
She won't dare walk into the station. Her rack's not big enough that there'll be a serious sag situation going on, but her team's mostly male, and if she walks into the station with the least little bit of a bounce, there'll be some looks. Some grins. A little whispering going on after she's left the room, and maybe while she's still in it. But she's the sheriff, dammit. She doesn't need to report back to the station if she can find a good enough excuse not to.
Three more hours, and she can go home. Strip off everything she's wearing and stand in a nice, cool shower, then pull on shorts and a baggy shirt and curl up with a bowl of popcorn and Dancing With the Stars.
Three more hours.
She can wait.
No she can't.
All she needs is a secluded spot, one where nobody's likely to be watching the car. A minute, that's all it'll take.
There are a lot of homes along this road, and it could be that everyone's at work, or out shopping, or whatever, but one of the rules of life is, when you're sure nobody's watching, somebody always is. She could look for a house where someone's definitely home and ask to use the bathroom - she does that, now and then, when nature says I'm not KIDDING - but that'd mean a conversation, and she's just not in the mood. The only good possibility is the old dirt road that swings around behind Bobby Singer's junkyard, the one he uses to access the cars that are way at the back end of the lot. Back there, the cars are piled up pretty high, and it's only possible to see the road from a couple of spots.
Even if Bobby's home, even if he spots her car turning onto the dirt road, he'll wait a couple of minutes for her to come back out before he bothers to wonder if anything's wrong.
She feels like she's sixteen again, sneaking off in the middle of the night.
There's a spot back there under a tree, secluded and cool. She throws the car into Park, flips open the seat belt. Works her uniform blouse and t-shirt up out of her pants.
Somebody's in Singer's lot.
Somebody…in a cowboy hat. Boots. Long, heavy duster.
Spurs? She thinks, with twin fistfuls of shirt, paused in mid-hoist. Are you kidding me? SPURS?
He's walking away from her, toward the house, his stride long and measured, head down a little, then up, as if he's staring at someone, or something. The skirt of the coat flares out a little as he walks, and there's something about it, something mesmerizing, something confident and strong and so utterly different from everything she's accustomed to looking at during the course of a day, that keeps her attention fixed firmly on him as she continues to lift her shirts up toward her shoulders.
It's like watching a movie.
It's like watching PORN.
That's why, she'll think later on - that's why she keeps lifting her shirts, right on up over her head, leaving herself sitting there in the driver's seat of an official sheriff's department vehicle in nothing but that too-tight bra and the bottom half of her uniform. That's why she strips herself half-naked out behind Bobby Singer's junkyard, knowing that there's another human being no more than thirty feet away.
A human being who spins on one heel and points a gun at her.
It'll seem funny to her, later on, that he's at least twice as startled as she is.
It takes a good long while (at least it seems that way; time has begun to feel as soupy and stagnant as the air) for a lazy grin to begin to creep across his lips, for him to tip his head in a little bit of a nod, and to say amiably, "Howdy, ma'am."
Like he's play-acting.
The air's warm and close. If it were only a couple of degrees cooler, she might remember she's sitting there in her bra.
Instead, her right cheek twitches.
All the other times she's seen him, he's been wearing what's more or less his (and Bobby's, and Sam's) uniform: jeans, old stretched-out t-shirt, plaid flannel button-down. Nothing that's at all unusual for this town, this part of the country. Any part of the country, really. She's seen flashes of things in his movements, the way he handles his car, the self-assurance in the way he carries himself - or tries to - that make him sexy as hell. Maybe he's seen a little bit of that in her, too, but they've never done anything about it, nothing more than a glimmer of acknowledgment that's like an unspoken Okay.
She's the sheriff, after all.
And he's…
He was practicing his quick draw.
In that outfit. In a long, heavy duster, standing out in the sun on a day so thick and humid it's had her wondering if a freak blizzard is at all possible.
If this is possible, a blizzard certainly is.
After a minute, Dean Winchester's gaze shifts and You do know you're kind of naked, right? settles into his eyes.
He didn't leer - not for more than a second, anyway - and that's refreshing, after the nonsense she either hears or overhears almost every day. She works with men, after all, and while she wouldn't put up with anything that crosses the line into harassment territory, they do have to be what they are. She's the daughter of a man, the sister of three more, was the wife of another, and she's surrounded by them all day, every day. She allows them what comes naturally, because it would be a waste of effort not to.
Still, it's an unexpected pleasure when Dean Winchester admires.
Right up until she realizes that she's sitting in the driver's seat of an official sheriff's department vehicle in her bra.
"I -" she stammers. "SHIT."
She's been driving these cars for ten years. Had the soul of a cop long before that, thanks to her dad and two of her brothers, thanks to the atmosphere that filled their home and the thousands of movies and TV shows she sat through so she could pick apart out of Hollywood storytelling what was useful and what was not. She knew long before someone spoke the words that she's good at reading people, at understanding their intentions, at instinctively knowing a lie for a lie, a half-truth for something just as good as a lie.
The man who approaches her car, the skirt of his too-heavy coat floating around his legs, is worried that something's gone wrong.
He allowed himself a moment of admiring, but that's over.
He stops walking a couple of steps from the car, lowers his gun and crouches a little so he can continue to see her face.
"You good?" he asks.
Bra's still too damn tight. What she'd absolutely love, right now, is to finish what she was doing: take the damn thing off.
He probably wouldn't mind that, a whole lot.
"I -"
He glances over his shoulder, in the direction of the house, and she can tell what's going through his mind, whether he should summon Bobby or whether the last thing she needs right now is another man trying to figure out why she's sitting in this car in her underwear. A few months back, Bobby Singer told her what had really happened to his wife, that she'd been possessed, that she was a breath away from killing him before he shut himself off from his heart just long enough to kill her and has wished a thousand times since then that he'd let her succeed - and if that's true, if there are things that can possess you, maybe that's what Dean thinks is happening.
Maybe he just thinks she's drunk.
"Hot," she mutters.
He raises an eyebrow.
"I was -"
He averts his eyes again. Smiles again, the kind that says I got a handle on this, and if you don't, I got you covered.
"Could you -"
He stands upright and turns his back to the car. If there were anybody else in Bobby Singer's junkyard, he'd be blocking their view of her.
She considers her options for a moment.
It's been more than a year since her family died. Since a man gave her anything more than a quick embrace, a good night kiss. It's still too soon for anything more. That's what she's told herself these past few months.
Someday, there will be more.
Someday could be right now.
This is a man who admires women. Sometimes, when Bobby Singer's had too much to drink - and sometimes when he hasn't - he talks about his boys, about Sam and Dean Winchester. She hasn't been privy to a whole lot of it, but she's heard enough. The man who's standing a couple of steps from her car, according to someone who regards him as a son, is sometimes too needy. Too rash, too impulsive. Sometimes, he demands attention right now, and yet doesn't believe he deserves it. He's a man who puts others first.
He's a man who's thrown himself into the fire (someday, she will find out how literally Bobby Singer meant those words) to protect someone else.
This is a good man.
And Jodie Mills thinks, as she sits in the muggy warmth of her department-issued car with her shirts in her lap, that she would like nothing more than for that man to climb into the back seat with her so she can understand that she is still alive. That she is something more than The Sheriff; more than a woman who lives in a house full of ghosts.
That could happen, right now. Right here.
If she beckons, she thinks, he will not refuse her.
But she's looking at his back. He's just far enough away from the car that she can see him, head to heel: see the slight slump in his shoulders, the weariness that surrounds him now that the spell that his play-acting cast has been broken. She has no idea why he's dressed like that, though it's certainly got nothing to do with a Halloween party (not in May), nothing to do with community theater. He had a reason for dressing like that, a reason that no longer exists, but he was trying to hold on to the glamour of it.
Trying to hold on to being Clint Eastwood for just a little bit longer.
This is a good man, she thinks.
And she is not what he needs right now.
She pulls her shirts back on, grimacing at the feel of too much clothing, of being way too confined, in this mid-spring heat, in the small space between the steering wheel and the seat back. The part of her that remembers being fifteen, remembers spring heat like this, the back seats of other cars, and the strong, urgent embrace of boys who were doing what came naturally and could oh so easily coax her into doing it too - that part of her grieves for the opportunity that's being lost, for the connection that's not going to happen.
But she can admire, for a moment.
The strong shoulders, the curve of his neck. The easy grip he has on the gun he still hasn't put away.
After she's tucked the t-shirt and the uniform blouse back into place, after she's settled back into the comfortable rut in the seat cushion, she reaches through the open window and says quietly, "You can turn around now."
He's not close enough to touch, so she rests her arm on the windowsill.
"Sure you're okay?" he asks.
She smiles. Can see enough of herself in the sideview mirror to know it wouldn't convince anyone of anything.
It could happen.
But she knows people, and so does he.
"Sure," she replies.
Then she shifts the car back into gear and drives away.
It only takes a few seconds, and a turn around the edge of Bobby Singer's property, to remove Dean Winchester from her sight.
* * * * *