SPN FIC - No Pants Day
etoile_etiolee asked for a silly curse, preferably Dean -- and I've had "No Pants Day" written down in my notebook since bellatemple suggested it back in what, 2008? So here you go: an old lady at the wheel of a '72 Chrysler LeBaron, a ghoul on the loose... and some suddenly missing pants.
CHARACTERS: Dean and Sam
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 2000 words
NO PANTS DAY
By Carol Davis
The cop's sudden double take is Dean's first clue that something's gone a little hinky.
Yeah, sure - the guy's a rookie, maybe 25, 26 years old, and there are probably any number of things he's never seen before, particularly when you remember that they're dealing with a ghoul and not, say, a serial shoplifter, or a domestic situation involving gunshots and flying toasters, or somebody peddling Oxy too close to the neighborhood elementary school.
The shape that first body was in?
Definitely something the kid wasn't introduced to in cop school.
Still, this particular look of surprise?
Weird.
"Dean," Sam hisses from somewhere behind Dean's left shoulder. "Dean, man, what the hell."
By the time Dean's turned around to see what's crawled up his brother's butt this time, the baby-faced cop has gone hustling off toward his black-and-white, head bouncing and rolling like it's about to pop right off his neck.
"That kid strike you as a little twitchy?" Dean asks.
"DUDE," Sam says.
And damn if Sam isn't wearing almost that same funky expression, surprised and puzzled and maybe a little skeeved out. "Have I got guts on me?" Dean mutters. He was pretty careful during his investigation of the body, but still. Stuff leaks out. And spatters. "The hell, man. This shirt was clean when I put it on." Friggin' white shirts, he thinks. They're a dog to keep clean, and if there's corpse goo on this one, after he spent half an hour last night trying to iron the thing…
"Where are your PANTS?" Sam says without moving his lips.
"I - what?"
"Dude. Where are your damn PANTS?"
That's certainly a joke. A prank. Has to be, because of that lame-assed college thing they talked about on the way over here. The thing Dean insisted couldn't possibly be a thing, because it was so high up on the bullshit idiocy scale, it wasn't visible without a telescope. "No Pants Day?" he said to Sam. "Seriously. Somebody invented a thing called No Pants Day? The hell kind of frat-boy horsecrap is that? Does anybody go to college to, you know, learn something?"
"You sound like somebody's grandmother," Sam told him.
The first Friday every May, Sam had said, maybe twenty minutes ago. All over campus, in class, labs, various activities - no pants allowed. A good percentage of the student body at Stanford (and a number of the faculty and staff) had participated, during the years Sam was there, both male and female, most of them wearing fancy boxer shorts, since underwear covering your nether regions - keeping public exhibitionism laws in mind - was most definitely allowed.
"There's a No Pants Subway Ride, too," Sam added. "Worldwide. Every January."
Dean peered at him, sunglasses sliding down his nose. "People just walk around without their friggin' pants on."
"They do."
"You're completely pulling that out of your ass."
"I'm really not."
"Okay, so it is the first Friday in May," Sam says now, keeping his voice low. "But do you really think this is a good time and place to get into the spirit of the thing? Dude. We're in the middle of a case."
Five minutes ago, Dean was wearing the pants portion of his fed suit. Was wearing the whole fed suit.
Now, the pants are gone.
Just… gone.
"Did you -" he sputters. "Did you do something?"
"What could I possibly have done?" Sam groans, sporting a brand-new bitchface he's apparently cooked up for just this occasion. "Dean, man, this really isn't funny. You're gonna mess us up here. That detective's been suspicious of us ever since we got here, and it won't take much to get him on the phone, looking to talk to our supervisor. With Garth off God knows where, where there's apparently not a single whiff of cell phone coverage, if our friend Whitman calls the number on the card you gave him, he's gonna reach exactly nobody."
Dean hears the last half of that as Sam trails him back to the car, then stands (arms clamped across his chest, still wearing his shiny new bitchface) watching Dean fumble around in the trunk until he locates a pair of jeans. They're badly torn and fatally stained, pretty much unwearable, but the rest of their clothing is back at the motel.
Scowling, Dean toes off his dress shoes, grips the jeans at the waist, and steps into them.
The moment he finishes buttoning them, they disappear.
"What the HELL?" he shrieks, unable to stop himself from flailing. "Quit this! Okay? Stop doing this!"
"I'm not doing anything!" Sam objects.
"The hell you're not! Where are my PANTS??"
"I don't know, man. But I swear, I didn't do anything. I wouldn't mess up the job like this. I'm not six years old."
Luckily, no one other than Sam saw the jeans do their impromptu vanishing act. Muttering to himself, Dean slams the trunk lid, scuttles around the side of the car, and scrambles into the driver's seat. "Stay here," he tells Sam. "Keep investigating. I'm going back to the room and get myself some damn pants."
He has to settle for three pairs of briefs, worn in layers, topped with the baggiest pair of boxers he owns.
"Nice look," Sam says when Dean returns, red-faced and twitching, to the victims' apartment building.
"Shut up," Dean replies.
One by one, back at the room, his pants all disappeared. It didn't matter whether they were jeans, or dress slacks, or sweats; if he put them on, they vanished. Even the fluorescent-colored Bermuda shorts Sam had bought him as a joke zapped into the ether.
It was a small mercy - no, hell, it was a mercy of Everest-sized proportions - that whatever was going on gave a nod to Hudson County's exhibitionism is a bad, bad thing statutes and allowed him the comfort of underwear.
Lots and lots of underwear.
Because an inch-thick layer of underpants doesn't coordinate well with a suit coat and tie, he seized one of Sam's newer t-shirts (a bright green thing Sam had picked up for free somewhere) and yanked it on over his own tighter-fitting tee, grateful for the way it hung down to the tops of his thighs. Flip-flops he'd bought to avoid a possible ninth case of athlete's foot from a questionable motel shower completed the ensemble.
"You could have -" Sam says, eyeing the outfit and grimacing. "Maybe you should've stayed in the room."
"People are dying, Sam."
"I can handle this on my own. If I… need to."
"You don't need to. I can fire a gun. I can walk. I can see. I just don't have any friggin' PANTS."
First week of May or not, it gets chilly when the sun goes down.
Detective Whitman's comments over the course of the day have ranged from "The Bureau observes Casual Fridays?" to "You do know there's no point in going undercover when everybody here already knows who you are?" to "Look, man, I don't know what you're trying to prove, but it's supposed to go down close to freezing tonight."
"I'm aware," Dean tells him.
What he wants to say is, Shut the hell up.
Shivering as he and Sam make another circuit of the park behind the apartment building, then of the building itself, looking for ways the ghoul might have chosen to creep inside, he distracts himself a bit by mentally surfing back through the events of the day.
It started off well - marred only slightly by some burnt home fries he was too hungry to return to the kitchen - and he'd had every reason to believe they'd wrap the case up before the next morning, with the ghoul brought to ground and toasted extra-crispy (crispier than the damn home fries, he'd thought), and no more innocent civilians added to the body count.
The day had had a good feel to it. A lucky feel.
Then he'd…
"Shit," he says to Sam.
Sam half-turns, flashlight in hand, and raises an eyebrow.
"It was that old lady in the purple LeBaron."
"The one you cut off in the parking lot?"
"I didn't cut her off. She popped in out of nowhere."
"Really not possible to pop in out of nowhere in a '72 LeBaron, Dean," Sam says with a sigh. "It'd be like popping in in an aircraft carrier. She was right there. Kind of impossible to miss. You were peeling the wrapper off your RingDings, drinking coffee, calling Garth and looking for one of your old cassettes at the same time, and you cut her off."
"Like I'd do that in my CAR."
The eyebrow arches a little higher.
"Witch," Dean says. "That's what it is. Nobody's just a friggin' PERSON any more! Goddamn WITCHES. I'm, what, now, supposed to go the rest of my life without friggin' PANTS? It's cold out here, Sam."
"We could track her down," Sam suggests. "There can't be a lot of purple LeBarons in a town this size."
"Oh, I'll track her down. Trust me, I'll track her down."
Sam falls silent for a moment, hand pressed to his mouth, working at his chin with his thumb. "She didn't have time to drop a hex bag on you. Did she grab something? She did, didn't she? She grabbed your hair."
"I'm gonna -"
Behind Sam, there's a long, high row of shrubbery running along the edge of the property. Thick stuff, kind of messy, not well-tended. Great to hide in, if you're a pervert, or a rapist.
Or a ghoul.
It's standing there, half-hidden by the foliage, gaping at Dean.
SHIT, Dean thinks. Everybody's a goddamn critic.
More quickly than he would have thought was possible, he and Sam are on the infernal thing, tackling it to the ground.
It's remarkably easy to kill.
So, Dean thinks as they haul the thing's remains back to the Impala inside a big canvas bag - not a tough job, even though they have to go the long way around, to avoid being noticed by Detective Whitman & Company - the day's gone pretty well, burnt-black home fries completely aside.
And, of course, his lack of pants.
"Garth is gonna laugh until he pees himself," Sam announces gleefully when they're five or six miles from the apartment house, heading north, away from civilization. "I figured we'd be chasing that son of a bitch the whole rest of the week. Possibly end up with some broken bones, a few lacerations. Maybe a concussion. You know - the usual. Instead, you stunned the thing into complete inaction by showing up in fifteen layers of underpants."
Dean lets that go by for a moment, then mutters, "Three. All right, four."
"It's our new secret weapon."
"You do realize I'm going to wait until you're asleep."
"Purple LeBaron, man."
They travel another few miles in silence, well out of town, to an area desolate enough that they can burn the ghoul's remains without being noticed.
"You know," Dean says as they tote the thing into a clearing. "It could maybe wait a little while. Tracking that old bitch down."
"It could?"
"Yeah. There's -"
Sam's known him too damn long. "You don't mean using this as part of the job. You mean that little blonde waitress," he says. "At the High Spot? Jeannie, right?"
Too damn long, Dean thinks. There's no point in denying anything.
"Yeah," he shrugs. "It's been a hell of a long time, you know? Since I've had the chance to work my charms on a cute little member of the feminine sex. I figure something like this - the ladies love a good magic trick."
"Only you, man," Sam says as they stack twigs and brush around the body. "Only you could find any way at all to turn disappearing pants into a good thing."
"It's like Dad used to say, Sammy. You work with what you got."
Sam studies him for a moment in the glow of their maglights.
They're both laughing as they watch the ghoul burn.
* * * * *
CHARACTERS: Dean and Sam
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 2000 words
NO PANTS DAY
By Carol Davis
The cop's sudden double take is Dean's first clue that something's gone a little hinky.
Yeah, sure - the guy's a rookie, maybe 25, 26 years old, and there are probably any number of things he's never seen before, particularly when you remember that they're dealing with a ghoul and not, say, a serial shoplifter, or a domestic situation involving gunshots and flying toasters, or somebody peddling Oxy too close to the neighborhood elementary school.
The shape that first body was in?
Definitely something the kid wasn't introduced to in cop school.
Still, this particular look of surprise?
Weird.
"Dean," Sam hisses from somewhere behind Dean's left shoulder. "Dean, man, what the hell."
By the time Dean's turned around to see what's crawled up his brother's butt this time, the baby-faced cop has gone hustling off toward his black-and-white, head bouncing and rolling like it's about to pop right off his neck.
"That kid strike you as a little twitchy?" Dean asks.
"DUDE," Sam says.
And damn if Sam isn't wearing almost that same funky expression, surprised and puzzled and maybe a little skeeved out. "Have I got guts on me?" Dean mutters. He was pretty careful during his investigation of the body, but still. Stuff leaks out. And spatters. "The hell, man. This shirt was clean when I put it on." Friggin' white shirts, he thinks. They're a dog to keep clean, and if there's corpse goo on this one, after he spent half an hour last night trying to iron the thing…
"Where are your PANTS?" Sam says without moving his lips.
"I - what?"
"Dude. Where are your damn PANTS?"
That's certainly a joke. A prank. Has to be, because of that lame-assed college thing they talked about on the way over here. The thing Dean insisted couldn't possibly be a thing, because it was so high up on the bullshit idiocy scale, it wasn't visible without a telescope. "No Pants Day?" he said to Sam. "Seriously. Somebody invented a thing called No Pants Day? The hell kind of frat-boy horsecrap is that? Does anybody go to college to, you know, learn something?"
"You sound like somebody's grandmother," Sam told him.
The first Friday every May, Sam had said, maybe twenty minutes ago. All over campus, in class, labs, various activities - no pants allowed. A good percentage of the student body at Stanford (and a number of the faculty and staff) had participated, during the years Sam was there, both male and female, most of them wearing fancy boxer shorts, since underwear covering your nether regions - keeping public exhibitionism laws in mind - was most definitely allowed.
"There's a No Pants Subway Ride, too," Sam added. "Worldwide. Every January."
Dean peered at him, sunglasses sliding down his nose. "People just walk around without their friggin' pants on."
"They do."
"You're completely pulling that out of your ass."
"I'm really not."
"Okay, so it is the first Friday in May," Sam says now, keeping his voice low. "But do you really think this is a good time and place to get into the spirit of the thing? Dude. We're in the middle of a case."
Five minutes ago, Dean was wearing the pants portion of his fed suit. Was wearing the whole fed suit.
Now, the pants are gone.
Just… gone.
"Did you -" he sputters. "Did you do something?"
"What could I possibly have done?" Sam groans, sporting a brand-new bitchface he's apparently cooked up for just this occasion. "Dean, man, this really isn't funny. You're gonna mess us up here. That detective's been suspicious of us ever since we got here, and it won't take much to get him on the phone, looking to talk to our supervisor. With Garth off God knows where, where there's apparently not a single whiff of cell phone coverage, if our friend Whitman calls the number on the card you gave him, he's gonna reach exactly nobody."
Dean hears the last half of that as Sam trails him back to the car, then stands (arms clamped across his chest, still wearing his shiny new bitchface) watching Dean fumble around in the trunk until he locates a pair of jeans. They're badly torn and fatally stained, pretty much unwearable, but the rest of their clothing is back at the motel.
Scowling, Dean toes off his dress shoes, grips the jeans at the waist, and steps into them.
The moment he finishes buttoning them, they disappear.
"What the HELL?" he shrieks, unable to stop himself from flailing. "Quit this! Okay? Stop doing this!"
"I'm not doing anything!" Sam objects.
"The hell you're not! Where are my PANTS??"
"I don't know, man. But I swear, I didn't do anything. I wouldn't mess up the job like this. I'm not six years old."
Luckily, no one other than Sam saw the jeans do their impromptu vanishing act. Muttering to himself, Dean slams the trunk lid, scuttles around the side of the car, and scrambles into the driver's seat. "Stay here," he tells Sam. "Keep investigating. I'm going back to the room and get myself some damn pants."
He has to settle for three pairs of briefs, worn in layers, topped with the baggiest pair of boxers he owns.
"Nice look," Sam says when Dean returns, red-faced and twitching, to the victims' apartment building.
"Shut up," Dean replies.
One by one, back at the room, his pants all disappeared. It didn't matter whether they were jeans, or dress slacks, or sweats; if he put them on, they vanished. Even the fluorescent-colored Bermuda shorts Sam had bought him as a joke zapped into the ether.
It was a small mercy - no, hell, it was a mercy of Everest-sized proportions - that whatever was going on gave a nod to Hudson County's exhibitionism is a bad, bad thing statutes and allowed him the comfort of underwear.
Lots and lots of underwear.
Because an inch-thick layer of underpants doesn't coordinate well with a suit coat and tie, he seized one of Sam's newer t-shirts (a bright green thing Sam had picked up for free somewhere) and yanked it on over his own tighter-fitting tee, grateful for the way it hung down to the tops of his thighs. Flip-flops he'd bought to avoid a possible ninth case of athlete's foot from a questionable motel shower completed the ensemble.
"You could have -" Sam says, eyeing the outfit and grimacing. "Maybe you should've stayed in the room."
"People are dying, Sam."
"I can handle this on my own. If I… need to."
"You don't need to. I can fire a gun. I can walk. I can see. I just don't have any friggin' PANTS."
First week of May or not, it gets chilly when the sun goes down.
Detective Whitman's comments over the course of the day have ranged from "The Bureau observes Casual Fridays?" to "You do know there's no point in going undercover when everybody here already knows who you are?" to "Look, man, I don't know what you're trying to prove, but it's supposed to go down close to freezing tonight."
"I'm aware," Dean tells him.
What he wants to say is, Shut the hell up.
Shivering as he and Sam make another circuit of the park behind the apartment building, then of the building itself, looking for ways the ghoul might have chosen to creep inside, he distracts himself a bit by mentally surfing back through the events of the day.
It started off well - marred only slightly by some burnt home fries he was too hungry to return to the kitchen - and he'd had every reason to believe they'd wrap the case up before the next morning, with the ghoul brought to ground and toasted extra-crispy (crispier than the damn home fries, he'd thought), and no more innocent civilians added to the body count.
The day had had a good feel to it. A lucky feel.
Then he'd…
"Shit," he says to Sam.
Sam half-turns, flashlight in hand, and raises an eyebrow.
"It was that old lady in the purple LeBaron."
"The one you cut off in the parking lot?"
"I didn't cut her off. She popped in out of nowhere."
"Really not possible to pop in out of nowhere in a '72 LeBaron, Dean," Sam says with a sigh. "It'd be like popping in in an aircraft carrier. She was right there. Kind of impossible to miss. You were peeling the wrapper off your RingDings, drinking coffee, calling Garth and looking for one of your old cassettes at the same time, and you cut her off."
"Like I'd do that in my CAR."
The eyebrow arches a little higher.
"Witch," Dean says. "That's what it is. Nobody's just a friggin' PERSON any more! Goddamn WITCHES. I'm, what, now, supposed to go the rest of my life without friggin' PANTS? It's cold out here, Sam."
"We could track her down," Sam suggests. "There can't be a lot of purple LeBarons in a town this size."
"Oh, I'll track her down. Trust me, I'll track her down."
Sam falls silent for a moment, hand pressed to his mouth, working at his chin with his thumb. "She didn't have time to drop a hex bag on you. Did she grab something? She did, didn't she? She grabbed your hair."
"I'm gonna -"
Behind Sam, there's a long, high row of shrubbery running along the edge of the property. Thick stuff, kind of messy, not well-tended. Great to hide in, if you're a pervert, or a rapist.
Or a ghoul.
It's standing there, half-hidden by the foliage, gaping at Dean.
SHIT, Dean thinks. Everybody's a goddamn critic.
More quickly than he would have thought was possible, he and Sam are on the infernal thing, tackling it to the ground.
It's remarkably easy to kill.
So, Dean thinks as they haul the thing's remains back to the Impala inside a big canvas bag - not a tough job, even though they have to go the long way around, to avoid being noticed by Detective Whitman & Company - the day's gone pretty well, burnt-black home fries completely aside.
And, of course, his lack of pants.
"Garth is gonna laugh until he pees himself," Sam announces gleefully when they're five or six miles from the apartment house, heading north, away from civilization. "I figured we'd be chasing that son of a bitch the whole rest of the week. Possibly end up with some broken bones, a few lacerations. Maybe a concussion. You know - the usual. Instead, you stunned the thing into complete inaction by showing up in fifteen layers of underpants."
Dean lets that go by for a moment, then mutters, "Three. All right, four."
"It's our new secret weapon."
"You do realize I'm going to wait until you're asleep."
"Purple LeBaron, man."
They travel another few miles in silence, well out of town, to an area desolate enough that they can burn the ghoul's remains without being noticed.
"You know," Dean says as they tote the thing into a clearing. "It could maybe wait a little while. Tracking that old bitch down."
"It could?"
"Yeah. There's -"
Sam's known him too damn long. "You don't mean using this as part of the job. You mean that little blonde waitress," he says. "At the High Spot? Jeannie, right?"
Too damn long, Dean thinks. There's no point in denying anything.
"Yeah," he shrugs. "It's been a hell of a long time, you know? Since I've had the chance to work my charms on a cute little member of the feminine sex. I figure something like this - the ladies love a good magic trick."
"Only you, man," Sam says as they stack twigs and brush around the body. "Only you could find any way at all to turn disappearing pants into a good thing."
"It's like Dad used to say, Sammy. You work with what you got."
Sam studies him for a moment in the glow of their maglights.
They're both laughing as they watch the ghoul burn.
* * * * *