SPN FIC - Sugar Rush
Dark night. Cramped little car. The boys are on stakeout, and they're starving.
But Dean's got a solution.
CHARACTERS: Sam and Dean
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 2000 words
Obligingly, Dean hauls open the driver's door, flips the seat back forward, and - with an entire chorus of grunts and groans - stuffs his booty into the back seat. It's only then, when the bag's been squashed and bent and shoved to the point that it's a miracle it hasn't burst, that Sam understands beyond a shadow of a doubt what's inside.
SUGAR RUSH
By Carol Davis
Sam Winchester is twenty-eight years old. Twenty-eight years, nine months and twenty-three days, to be precise, and in all that time he's seen a lot of things that could be classified as This is not gonna go well.
This right here?
This would be one of those things.
His brother, staggering back to the car with his arms wrapped around a big clear-plastic trash bag that's jammed full of…something.
"Jackpot!" Dean crows, the moment he knows he's close enough to the car that Sam can't help but hear him.
Breath oozes out of Sam in a soft huuuuuhhhhhh.
Only his brother would think of a sackful of trash as a "jackpot."
"Dude," Sam groans as the giant bundle of…whatever that is…lands on the hood of the car. The alley's pretty dark; the only light source is a battered fixture above a door some thirty feet away, a single bulb from the look of it, and one that's likely to be coated with grease and grime. For most of the evening, the darkness hasn't presented a problem - in fact, it's a good thing, because they're on stakeout. They don't want to be noticed.
But the darkness makes it impossible to identify what in the hell Dean hauled down the alley.
"This makes no sense to me," Dean says cheerfully, admiring his giant bag of trash the way other people would a nice painting, or a flower garden.
Or a kid.
You make no sense to me, Sam thinks. What he says is, "Eh?"
"That people throw out perfectly good stuff."
"You should get back in the car."
"I'm comin'."
"Like…now. Before somebody sees you."
Obligingly, Dean hauls open the driver's door, flips the seat back forward, and - with an entire chorus of grunts and groans - stuffs his booty into the back seat. It's only then, when the bag's been squashed and bent and shoved to the point that it's a miracle it hasn't burst, that Sam understands beyond a shadow of a doubt what's inside.
"Donuts," Dean beams.
Judging by the size - and the straining-at-the-seams condition - of the bag, about a thousand of them.
"Dude," Sam says again. It's all he can think to say.
"You said you were hungry."
"I said I wished we'd had dinner. I really didn't mean…this."
Dean shrugs that off without much ado and settles down into the driver's seat. He pulls the door gently shut and closes it almost silently, his single concession this evening to the fact that they really need not to be noticed.
The entire car now reeks of donuts.
The back seat is freaking full of donuts.
Dean offers his brother a huge, gleeful smile. Kid on Christmas doesn't really describe it; nor does cat that ate the canary. Dean, Sam has understood since he was about ten years old, merits an entire category all his own. Undaunted by the lack of maneuvering room that the small car allows him, he shifts himself around bit by bit, until he's kneeling on the driver's seat, hanging into the back so he can open the bag and root through his prize.
"What kind you like?" he asks.
Sam would really like not to look. He would like not to smell donuts. He would like a steak, medium well, with a baked potato, some vegetables, a beer. He would like to stretch out on an actual bed and watch a little TV before drifting off into eight solid hours of undisturbed sleep, followed by a nice hot shower in a place that does not threaten a two-week battle with athlete's foot.
But Sam has known his brother for twenty-eight years, nine months, and twenty-three days.
He knows better than to turn down Dean's donuts.
"Bear claw," he sighs, and like a magician pulling a slightly squashed rabbit out of a hat, Dean produces the requested item.
"They throw these out, man," comes along with the donut.
"Unbelievable."
"I know. I mean…these are perfectly good."
When Dean once again settles into the driver's seat, both sleeves of his jacket are white with powdered sugar. He's got half a dozen donuts in his hands. The fact that he has no place to put them other than his lap doesn't concern him for as much as a second; with the tip of his tongue protruding from the corner of his mouth, he carefully stacks them on his thighs. The arrangement is in order of preference, Sam guesses, although whether Dean's favorites are on top, or he's put them on the bottom, saving the best for last, isn't apparent.
"Oh," Dean says then, and reaches inside his jacket. "I got milk."
When they were kids, Dean was adept at stuff like this - swiping snacks from convenience stores and supermarkets, strolling out the front door, his jacket fully loaded with goodies. Obviously, he hasn't lost his touch. He's practically whistling as he hands a carton of milk off to Sam, then produces two more that he lines up at the front of his donut brigade.
"This was…in the garbage?" Sam asks.
"Well, yeah. But it's sealed."
"Dean. It was in the garbage."
That produces a momentary frown.
"Come on, man," Sam sighs.
They came here in pursuit of a shapeshifter - a particularly bloodthirsty one. The bastard's cut a wide swath through town the past couple of weeks, to the point that Agents Smith and Johnson were a welcome arrival. Three days' worth of consultation with the local cops, the coroner, a series of witnesses, and a reporter named Haverman brought them to this alley. If they've guessed right - and it feels right, Sam thinks, it really, solidly feels right - the shifter's going to pass through this alley sometime before dawn, on his way back to his lair.
They need to be alert.
The silver's ready: guns loaded with silver bullets. Silver knives at hand.
They need to get that son of a bitch tonight.
But it's dark in this alley. Dark, and hot, and damp, and amazingly boring. They can't turn on the radio. Even talking is a risk, because they've got the car windows rolled down, so they won't miss a footstep or a rattle or a scrape.
The half dozen donuts are gone in what seems like the blink of an eye.
The second half dozen don't last much longer.
"You're gonna make yourself sick," Sam warns, and Dean responds with a companionable, "Bite me."
After a while, Dean begins to emit a low hum, like an idling air conditioner.
"Seriously, dude," Sam says. "If you blow chunks, I am tossing you out of this car."
When he glances over, there's just enough light to see Dean's right hand jiggling against his right thigh.
"Dean," Sam says. "You're vibrating."
At the best of times, Dean has a noticeable inability to sit still. Tonight, they've been trapped in a hot, confining car with nothing to distract them for almost three hours. Even with music, Dean would have been fidgety after about twenty minutes. He would have resorted to word games. Knock-knock jokes. Recalling the plot lines of a thousand movies Sam's never seen, and has no intention of seeing. More than likely, he would eventually have started to sing.
That's never a good thing.
Tonight, Dean eats.
After a while, Sam is truly terrified of the amount Dean is eating. Three dozen donuts? Four?
That can't be right, he thinks. No one - even someone with Dean's cast-iron stomach and deathless love of junk food - could sit behind the wheel of a practically trashed ten-year-old Honda and eat four dozen donuts.
A trill finds its way up out of Dean's throat, muffled by half-chewed donut and wildly off-key.
There was Hell, Sam thinks. And then there is this.
And then…
He's there. The shifter, up at the far end of the alley. He's come out the back door of one of the buildings and he's making his way toward the fence that separates the alley from the parking lot of a tire store.
"Go!" Sam hisses.
Donuts go flying, and with a remarkable lack of accompanying creaks and protests from the old car, Sam and Dean slip out into the alley. The shifter's got something in his hands (not donuts, Sam prays), something that distracts him enough that the Winchesters are less than a dozen yards from him when he turns and spots them. There's only a sliver of moon, half-hidden by cloud cover, and just that single light fixture, but Sam's pretty sure the shifter's not armed, that there's no gun in his hands; at the very least, he's not holding one in such a way that it would be easy to aim and fire.
"Hey!" Dean shrieks. "Got you, you son of a bitch!"
Yeah. Because in the movies, that always goes so well.
They take off running - mostly because they've got no choice but to take off running, now that the shifter's on full alert, and only a few steps from that fence. They're still some distance away as the shifter makes a neat little jump up onto the chain link and climbs it like a monkey clambering up a tree. They reach the fence a few seconds later, and Dean crashes into it full-tilt, like he hadn't realized it was there. "Shit!" he bleats as he re-orients himself, grasping at handholds and hauling himself up, losing hold, regaining it and finally hurling himself over.
He doesn't exactly stick the landing.
Memories of a rabbit's foot, a curse, a lost shoe and knees that didn't heal for more than a week come churning back as Sam hauls ass after the shifter. Somehow, Dean is ten paces ahead of him, eating up ground like he's going for Olympic gold, his gun hand pumping up and down.
They're through the lot of the tire store, across a thankfully empty street, down another alley, through a huge and surprisingly hilly park, and my GOD, Sam thinks, it's like chasing a damn cheetah, a cheetah in pursuit of an antelope, one of them fleeing certain death and the other salivating over a life-saving meal. Normally, Sam runs while Dean sprawls on his bed eating Funyuns and watching TV; he's used to running, is pretty decent at it, could maybe even hold his own in a hundred-meter. But this? This is torture. This is unending, pounding torture.
They would have shot the son of a bitch, but there are missing people to worry about. Two women and a little boy.
He's got them stashed somewhere.
Pain rockets through Sam's side. Both his shins are screaming, and he's pretty sure he pulled something going over the fence.
Can't… he thinks.
Once in a while, his brother does something remarkable.
This is one of those times.
Somehow, Dean piles on an extra burst of speed, like he's the freaking Six Million Dollar Man, and, arms and legs churning, he tears across the distance between himself and the shifter. The last bit of it, he's actually airborne, he's actually goddamn FLYING, and he hits the shifter square in the back, taking him down in a tackle that - if he were a professional football player - would have sportscasters peeing themselves in awe.
When Sam reaches them, Dean's got the shifter pinned to the ground, thanks to a silver knife driven through the monster's left forearm and into the earth.
That's got to hurt.
It can't hurt any more than the E-above-high-C screaming that's taking place in Sam's side.
He wheezes for a minute, bracing a hand against the tormented spot in the vague hope that it'll help.
He'd like very much to sit down. Or fall down. Or upchuck whatever's left of that bearclaw and the carton of milk that hit its sell-by date the day before yesterday.
Dean, sitting (apparently comfortably) in the middle of the shifter's back, still liberally coated with powdered sugar, grins up at him and gives him a thumbs-up.
"That's -" Sam wheezes. "How -"
"Donuts" is Dean's only explanation.
* * * * *
But Dean's got a solution.
CHARACTERS: Sam and Dean
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 2000 words
Obligingly, Dean hauls open the driver's door, flips the seat back forward, and - with an entire chorus of grunts and groans - stuffs his booty into the back seat. It's only then, when the bag's been squashed and bent and shoved to the point that it's a miracle it hasn't burst, that Sam understands beyond a shadow of a doubt what's inside.
SUGAR RUSH
By Carol Davis
Sam Winchester is twenty-eight years old. Twenty-eight years, nine months and twenty-three days, to be precise, and in all that time he's seen a lot of things that could be classified as This is not gonna go well.
This right here?
This would be one of those things.
His brother, staggering back to the car with his arms wrapped around a big clear-plastic trash bag that's jammed full of…something.
"Jackpot!" Dean crows, the moment he knows he's close enough to the car that Sam can't help but hear him.
Breath oozes out of Sam in a soft huuuuuhhhhhh.
Only his brother would think of a sackful of trash as a "jackpot."
"Dude," Sam groans as the giant bundle of…whatever that is…lands on the hood of the car. The alley's pretty dark; the only light source is a battered fixture above a door some thirty feet away, a single bulb from the look of it, and one that's likely to be coated with grease and grime. For most of the evening, the darkness hasn't presented a problem - in fact, it's a good thing, because they're on stakeout. They don't want to be noticed.
But the darkness makes it impossible to identify what in the hell Dean hauled down the alley.
"This makes no sense to me," Dean says cheerfully, admiring his giant bag of trash the way other people would a nice painting, or a flower garden.
Or a kid.
You make no sense to me, Sam thinks. What he says is, "Eh?"
"That people throw out perfectly good stuff."
"You should get back in the car."
"I'm comin'."
"Like…now. Before somebody sees you."
Obligingly, Dean hauls open the driver's door, flips the seat back forward, and - with an entire chorus of grunts and groans - stuffs his booty into the back seat. It's only then, when the bag's been squashed and bent and shoved to the point that it's a miracle it hasn't burst, that Sam understands beyond a shadow of a doubt what's inside.
"Donuts," Dean beams.
Judging by the size - and the straining-at-the-seams condition - of the bag, about a thousand of them.
"Dude," Sam says again. It's all he can think to say.
"You said you were hungry."
"I said I wished we'd had dinner. I really didn't mean…this."
Dean shrugs that off without much ado and settles down into the driver's seat. He pulls the door gently shut and closes it almost silently, his single concession this evening to the fact that they really need not to be noticed.
The entire car now reeks of donuts.
The back seat is freaking full of donuts.
Dean offers his brother a huge, gleeful smile. Kid on Christmas doesn't really describe it; nor does cat that ate the canary. Dean, Sam has understood since he was about ten years old, merits an entire category all his own. Undaunted by the lack of maneuvering room that the small car allows him, he shifts himself around bit by bit, until he's kneeling on the driver's seat, hanging into the back so he can open the bag and root through his prize.
"What kind you like?" he asks.
Sam would really like not to look. He would like not to smell donuts. He would like a steak, medium well, with a baked potato, some vegetables, a beer. He would like to stretch out on an actual bed and watch a little TV before drifting off into eight solid hours of undisturbed sleep, followed by a nice hot shower in a place that does not threaten a two-week battle with athlete's foot.
But Sam has known his brother for twenty-eight years, nine months, and twenty-three days.
He knows better than to turn down Dean's donuts.
"Bear claw," he sighs, and like a magician pulling a slightly squashed rabbit out of a hat, Dean produces the requested item.
"They throw these out, man," comes along with the donut.
"Unbelievable."
"I know. I mean…these are perfectly good."
When Dean once again settles into the driver's seat, both sleeves of his jacket are white with powdered sugar. He's got half a dozen donuts in his hands. The fact that he has no place to put them other than his lap doesn't concern him for as much as a second; with the tip of his tongue protruding from the corner of his mouth, he carefully stacks them on his thighs. The arrangement is in order of preference, Sam guesses, although whether Dean's favorites are on top, or he's put them on the bottom, saving the best for last, isn't apparent.
"Oh," Dean says then, and reaches inside his jacket. "I got milk."
When they were kids, Dean was adept at stuff like this - swiping snacks from convenience stores and supermarkets, strolling out the front door, his jacket fully loaded with goodies. Obviously, he hasn't lost his touch. He's practically whistling as he hands a carton of milk off to Sam, then produces two more that he lines up at the front of his donut brigade.
"This was…in the garbage?" Sam asks.
"Well, yeah. But it's sealed."
"Dean. It was in the garbage."
That produces a momentary frown.
"Come on, man," Sam sighs.
They came here in pursuit of a shapeshifter - a particularly bloodthirsty one. The bastard's cut a wide swath through town the past couple of weeks, to the point that Agents Smith and Johnson were a welcome arrival. Three days' worth of consultation with the local cops, the coroner, a series of witnesses, and a reporter named Haverman brought them to this alley. If they've guessed right - and it feels right, Sam thinks, it really, solidly feels right - the shifter's going to pass through this alley sometime before dawn, on his way back to his lair.
They need to be alert.
The silver's ready: guns loaded with silver bullets. Silver knives at hand.
They need to get that son of a bitch tonight.
But it's dark in this alley. Dark, and hot, and damp, and amazingly boring. They can't turn on the radio. Even talking is a risk, because they've got the car windows rolled down, so they won't miss a footstep or a rattle or a scrape.
The half dozen donuts are gone in what seems like the blink of an eye.
The second half dozen don't last much longer.
"You're gonna make yourself sick," Sam warns, and Dean responds with a companionable, "Bite me."
After a while, Dean begins to emit a low hum, like an idling air conditioner.
"Seriously, dude," Sam says. "If you blow chunks, I am tossing you out of this car."
When he glances over, there's just enough light to see Dean's right hand jiggling against his right thigh.
"Dean," Sam says. "You're vibrating."
At the best of times, Dean has a noticeable inability to sit still. Tonight, they've been trapped in a hot, confining car with nothing to distract them for almost three hours. Even with music, Dean would have been fidgety after about twenty minutes. He would have resorted to word games. Knock-knock jokes. Recalling the plot lines of a thousand movies Sam's never seen, and has no intention of seeing. More than likely, he would eventually have started to sing.
That's never a good thing.
Tonight, Dean eats.
After a while, Sam is truly terrified of the amount Dean is eating. Three dozen donuts? Four?
That can't be right, he thinks. No one - even someone with Dean's cast-iron stomach and deathless love of junk food - could sit behind the wheel of a practically trashed ten-year-old Honda and eat four dozen donuts.
A trill finds its way up out of Dean's throat, muffled by half-chewed donut and wildly off-key.
There was Hell, Sam thinks. And then there is this.
And then…
He's there. The shifter, up at the far end of the alley. He's come out the back door of one of the buildings and he's making his way toward the fence that separates the alley from the parking lot of a tire store.
"Go!" Sam hisses.
Donuts go flying, and with a remarkable lack of accompanying creaks and protests from the old car, Sam and Dean slip out into the alley. The shifter's got something in his hands (not donuts, Sam prays), something that distracts him enough that the Winchesters are less than a dozen yards from him when he turns and spots them. There's only a sliver of moon, half-hidden by cloud cover, and just that single light fixture, but Sam's pretty sure the shifter's not armed, that there's no gun in his hands; at the very least, he's not holding one in such a way that it would be easy to aim and fire.
"Hey!" Dean shrieks. "Got you, you son of a bitch!"
Yeah. Because in the movies, that always goes so well.
They take off running - mostly because they've got no choice but to take off running, now that the shifter's on full alert, and only a few steps from that fence. They're still some distance away as the shifter makes a neat little jump up onto the chain link and climbs it like a monkey clambering up a tree. They reach the fence a few seconds later, and Dean crashes into it full-tilt, like he hadn't realized it was there. "Shit!" he bleats as he re-orients himself, grasping at handholds and hauling himself up, losing hold, regaining it and finally hurling himself over.
He doesn't exactly stick the landing.
Memories of a rabbit's foot, a curse, a lost shoe and knees that didn't heal for more than a week come churning back as Sam hauls ass after the shifter. Somehow, Dean is ten paces ahead of him, eating up ground like he's going for Olympic gold, his gun hand pumping up and down.
They're through the lot of the tire store, across a thankfully empty street, down another alley, through a huge and surprisingly hilly park, and my GOD, Sam thinks, it's like chasing a damn cheetah, a cheetah in pursuit of an antelope, one of them fleeing certain death and the other salivating over a life-saving meal. Normally, Sam runs while Dean sprawls on his bed eating Funyuns and watching TV; he's used to running, is pretty decent at it, could maybe even hold his own in a hundred-meter. But this? This is torture. This is unending, pounding torture.
They would have shot the son of a bitch, but there are missing people to worry about. Two women and a little boy.
He's got them stashed somewhere.
Pain rockets through Sam's side. Both his shins are screaming, and he's pretty sure he pulled something going over the fence.
Can't… he thinks.
Once in a while, his brother does something remarkable.
This is one of those times.
Somehow, Dean piles on an extra burst of speed, like he's the freaking Six Million Dollar Man, and, arms and legs churning, he tears across the distance between himself and the shifter. The last bit of it, he's actually airborne, he's actually goddamn FLYING, and he hits the shifter square in the back, taking him down in a tackle that - if he were a professional football player - would have sportscasters peeing themselves in awe.
When Sam reaches them, Dean's got the shifter pinned to the ground, thanks to a silver knife driven through the monster's left forearm and into the earth.
That's got to hurt.
It can't hurt any more than the E-above-high-C screaming that's taking place in Sam's side.
He wheezes for a minute, bracing a hand against the tormented spot in the vague hope that it'll help.
He'd like very much to sit down. Or fall down. Or upchuck whatever's left of that bearclaw and the carton of milk that hit its sell-by date the day before yesterday.
Dean, sitting (apparently comfortably) in the middle of the shifter's back, still liberally coated with powdered sugar, grins up at him and gives him a thumbs-up.
"That's -" Sam wheezes. "How -"
"Donuts" is Dean's only explanation.
* * * * *