SPN FIC - There's Just One Thing
A look back at first-season Dean and Sam, courtesy of an unwitting prompt from
dodger_winslow. (Thanks, bud!) Dean's paid a visit to the eye doctor -- and Sam has to deal with the whining.
Characters: Dean and Sam
Pairings: none
Rating: PG, for language
Length: 1934 words
Spoilers: none
Disclaimer: Kripke owns all.
Dean’s face was scrunched into something that would have been hilarious on a Halloween jack-o-lantern. “Stupid evil pupil-dilating brew of death,” he muttered.
There’s Just One Thing
By Carol Davis
Dean’s face was scrunched into something that would have been hilarious on a Halloween jack-o-lantern. “Stupid evil pupil-dilating brew of death,” he muttered.
And he stood there, two steps inside the threshold of Empire Vision.
Stood there, eyes jammed shut, feet planted slightly apart, arms out, as if he were trying to keep his balance on the deck of a boat.
“Dude,” Sam said after a minute.
“What.” It wasn’t a question.
“You coming?”
That made Dean’s face scrunch up even more. Now he looked like the love child of Chucky the killer doll and a shar-pei.
But he didn’t move.
“Don’t you think you’re being a little melodramatic about this?” Sam sighed. “Everything’s fine. There’s no damage to your eyes. Which is the kind of luck we usually don’t have. So could you maybe just come on so we can get out of here?”
Grumbling, Dean swung a hand through the air. When it didn’t collide with anything, he took a small, shuffling step forward.
“Door’s open,” Sam told him.
“You better not -“
“I’m not gonna hit you with the door. Would you -“
An inch at a time, Dean made it into the vestibule between the two sets of double glass doors. Sunlight hit him full in the face then and made him wince. It also stopped him dead in his tracks again, causing the business-suited man who had come up behind him to grunt his displeasure as he shouldered past the Winchesters. Since Dean’s eyes were still resolutely shut, the man turned his pique on Sam, who offered him something that was half an apology and half “What can I tell you? I have to deal with this all the time.” Unimpressed, the man went on out.
“Feel like I’m gonna hurl,” Dean mumbled.
Sam steered his brother out of the path of the inner door and pushed open one of the outer set. “Because you’re stressing yourself out.”
“Am not. Told you: that stuff makes me sick. Always has. Head feels like a punching bag and my stomach’s upside down.”
“Because you’re stressed.”
Dean’s eyes opened just long enough for him to get a solid blast of noontime sunlight. “Bite me, Sam.”
“There’s nothing in the literature about -“
“Do I look like I’m interested in what it says in the damn literature?” Peering through a gap in his eyelids that was narrower than a pencil lead, Dean stomped away from the outer doors and would have collided with a sign that said FIRE LANE NO PARKING if Sam had not seized his arm and redirected him. “Hands!” Dean barked, yanking himself free. “So I’m the exception. Every time they use that stuff on me, it does the same thing. So just…bite me. And keep your damn hands to yourself. Do I look like I changed my name to Debbie?”
Sam smirked at him. “Most women would probably be a lot more stoic about this.” With a shake of his head that was a long way from tolerance, he fished a pair of sunglasses out of his jacket pocket and poked Dean in the chest with them.
Dean accepted them and put them on, then complained, “These aren’t mine.”
“They’re mine. I couldn’t find yours.”
“What do you mean, you couldn’t find ‘em?”
“Which part of ‘I couldn’t find them’ is unclear? I couldn’t find them.”
“They’re in the car.”
“They’re not in the car, Dean.”
A number of people paused to watch the groping-stumbling-shuffling progress Dean made across the store’s parking lot. A couple of them offered a “What’s up with that?” raised eyebrow to Sam, who simply shrugged and let them go on their way. When Dean finally dropped anchor in the middle of the lot, one hand resting on a lamppost for support, Sam went over to join him.
“That’s not our car,” he told his brother.
“What?”
Dean was standing alongside a dark blue Ford Torino with a large stuffed Garfield lying in the back window. Sam said nothing more, so, pouting, Dean squinted through the millimeter-wide gap between his eyelids, took note of the Garfield and mumbled, “Shit.”
“You want to get some lunch?” Sam asked.
“Why? So you can laugh at me some more while I try to eat without looking?”
“I’m not laughing at you.”
“Need to go someplace dark until this freaking stuff wears off. Told you that.”
“Even with the glasses?”
“Not sitting in some restaurant with sunglasses on like goddamn Stevie Wonder.”
“Fine. I’ll get take-out. Wait in the car - there’s a place across the street. I’ll be right back.” Dean didn’t move. Sam told him indulgently, “Do a one-eighty. The car’s about ten steps away from you.”
Sam waited until Dean had located the Impala, fumblingly unlocked the door, and crawled into the passenger seat; then he trotted across the street. He returned about fifteen minutes later to find Dean leaning against the inside of the closed car door, head canted awkwardly to the side, arms folded across his chest. He didn’t move when Sam got into the car and placed a pair of white paper bags of food on the seat between them.
“You awake?” Sam asked.
“Thought you left.”
“Left? Why would I leave?”
“You were gone long enough to slaughter the damn cow yourself.”
“There was a line. It’s lunchtime. You want to eat here, or go back to the motel?”
Dean was silent for a moment, then murmured, “Whatever.”
Something in his tone, and in the way he was huddled against the door, made Sam’s chest ache. There was honestly no reason for Dean to be acting the way he was; true, he was the world’s worst patient, and had a far higher tolerance for gaping gut wounds and broken legs than he did for minor inconveniences. Hangovers. A cold.
Missing sunglasses.
But this…
They could have come out of last night a lot worse than they had: some bruises - Sam had a whopper on his right hip that was almost black - a few cuts and scrapes. If things had gone even slightly differently, one or both of them might not have walked out of that house. As it was, the only worrisome result of the night had been the flashes of light Dean saw when he closed his eyes.
The spirit, who’d lost an eye before he shuffled off this mortal coil, had seemed determined to share the experience with Dean. He - it - had gone after Dean with a vengeance. Stirred up a whirlwind that spewed dirt into Dean’s face. Rapped Dean’s head against the woodwork a couple of times.
True to form, Dean refused a trip to the ER. He’d washed the dust and dirt out of his eyes with a garden hose at the house, and again in the shower at the motel. Only under duress did he admit the existence of the flashing light to Sam, and only after two hours’ worth of continuous harassment did he surrender to being dragged to the doctor on duty at Empire Vision.
They’d been off-roading, Sam told the man. Apparently, that was a common explanation; the doctor finished his exam, gave Dean a bottle of eye drops and the good news that nothing was damaged, instructed him to come back if the flashing lights persisted, and sent him on his way.
None of which really explained Dean’s mood.
“Dude,” Sam said. “Give.”
“Give what?” Dean said to the car door.
“Why are you acting like this?”
“Not acting like nothin’.”
Sam sat in silence for a moment, then said, “Keys.” When Dean passed them over, he started the car and drove the two miles back to the motel.
Dean sat at the small table in their room and ate his lunch with Sam’s sunglasses still firmly in place. As soon as he finished, he gathered up the trash, crushed all the papers into the cup that had contained his cola, and pushed the cup into the middle of the table. Then he went into the bathroom and closed the door.
Twenty minutes later he was still in there.
He came out when Sam complained and settled himself on the bed he’d picked out last night, back propped against a nest of pillows. The TV remote lay on the night table, well within reach, but he didn’t turn on the set, simply sat behind the sunglasses with his arms folded and his eyes closed. Rather than argue with all of that, Sam pulled his laptop out of its case, set it up on the table, and began prowling websites for items of interest. After a while, the sun moved far enough across the sky to drop the room into deep shadow.
Through the dark lenses of the sunglasses, Dean would be able to see almost nothing.
That seemed to be what he wanted to see.
“Wouldn’t be much freakin’ use to anybody,” he said softly.
“What?” Sam asked.
“If the freakin’ thing blinded me. What the hell good is a blind hunter? Be nothin’ but a liability.”
“It didn’t happen.”
“Could have.”
“Yeah, but it didn’t.”
The fingers of Dean’s right hand worked at the nubby surface of the bedspread. He was slumped against the pillows in a way that said defeat more than exhaustion.
“Dean, man, you’re fine,” Sam said.
Dean looked at him through the filter of the dark lenses, then lowered his head again.
There wasn’t much Sam could offer him. The life they led, the path Dean had chosen to follow, didn’t include many options for someone at less than full strength.
Not to mention that predators loved wounded prey.
“Get some sleep,” Sam suggested. “I could use a couple hours myself. We were up most of the night.”
“Yeah,” Dean mumbled.
Nodding, Sam shut down the laptop and stretched out on the other bed. The room was quiet except for the muffled hum of traffic out on the main road, and warm enough to make him drowsy.
“I wouldn’t leave you, man,” he said. “If something happened. We’d figure it out together.”
Dean didn’t answer right away. His fingers had stopped moving, but he held a small fold of the bedspread between his thumb and index finger.
“Wouldn’t want to get like that, Sammy,” he said finally, quietly.
“Neither would I.”
“You could do something. There’s…you know. There’s blind lawyers.”
“Hmm.”
A car door slammed out in the parking lot. A minute later, water began to run through the pipes: someone had flushed the toilet in the room next door.
“Wish Dad’d turn up,” Dean whispered.
The weight in it made Sam turn away, onto his side, facing the door.
The TV in the room next door came on. The volume was low enough, and the wall in between just thick enough, to make the words of whoever was speaking unclear.
“We’ll find him,” Sam offered.
Someone laughed on the TV. That came through loud and clear.
“Need a backup plan,” Dean said. “’Case I get fucked up.”
Sam let that lie for a moment, then suggested, “Piano lessons?”
Dean huffed out a small breath. A scuffing noise suggested to Sam that he was sliding his foot back and forth across the bedspread. “Sammy?”
“Hmm.”
“Wouldn’t be worth crap on my own.”
Sam rolled over to look at his brother, who had taken off the sunglasses and was holding them in the palm of his hand. Dean’s eyes were still at half-mast, but his brow had unfurrowed a little. “Yeah, you would,” Sam said.
“Tried it. It’s -“
“Over,” Sam told him.
dodger_winslow. (Thanks, bud!) Dean's paid a visit to the eye doctor -- and Sam has to deal with the whining.
Characters: Dean and Sam
Pairings: none
Rating: PG, for language
Length: 1934 words
Spoilers: none
Disclaimer: Kripke owns all.
Dean’s face was scrunched into something that would have been hilarious on a Halloween jack-o-lantern. “Stupid evil pupil-dilating brew of death,” he muttered.
There’s Just One Thing
By Carol Davis
Dean’s face was scrunched into something that would have been hilarious on a Halloween jack-o-lantern. “Stupid evil pupil-dilating brew of death,” he muttered.
And he stood there, two steps inside the threshold of Empire Vision.
Stood there, eyes jammed shut, feet planted slightly apart, arms out, as if he were trying to keep his balance on the deck of a boat.
“Dude,” Sam said after a minute.
“What.” It wasn’t a question.
“You coming?”
That made Dean’s face scrunch up even more. Now he looked like the love child of Chucky the killer doll and a shar-pei.
But he didn’t move.
“Don’t you think you’re being a little melodramatic about this?” Sam sighed. “Everything’s fine. There’s no damage to your eyes. Which is the kind of luck we usually don’t have. So could you maybe just come on so we can get out of here?”
Grumbling, Dean swung a hand through the air. When it didn’t collide with anything, he took a small, shuffling step forward.
“Door’s open,” Sam told him.
“You better not -“
“I’m not gonna hit you with the door. Would you -“
An inch at a time, Dean made it into the vestibule between the two sets of double glass doors. Sunlight hit him full in the face then and made him wince. It also stopped him dead in his tracks again, causing the business-suited man who had come up behind him to grunt his displeasure as he shouldered past the Winchesters. Since Dean’s eyes were still resolutely shut, the man turned his pique on Sam, who offered him something that was half an apology and half “What can I tell you? I have to deal with this all the time.” Unimpressed, the man went on out.
“Feel like I’m gonna hurl,” Dean mumbled.
Sam steered his brother out of the path of the inner door and pushed open one of the outer set. “Because you’re stressing yourself out.”
“Am not. Told you: that stuff makes me sick. Always has. Head feels like a punching bag and my stomach’s upside down.”
“Because you’re stressed.”
Dean’s eyes opened just long enough for him to get a solid blast of noontime sunlight. “Bite me, Sam.”
“There’s nothing in the literature about -“
“Do I look like I’m interested in what it says in the damn literature?” Peering through a gap in his eyelids that was narrower than a pencil lead, Dean stomped away from the outer doors and would have collided with a sign that said FIRE LANE NO PARKING if Sam had not seized his arm and redirected him. “Hands!” Dean barked, yanking himself free. “So I’m the exception. Every time they use that stuff on me, it does the same thing. So just…bite me. And keep your damn hands to yourself. Do I look like I changed my name to Debbie?”
Sam smirked at him. “Most women would probably be a lot more stoic about this.” With a shake of his head that was a long way from tolerance, he fished a pair of sunglasses out of his jacket pocket and poked Dean in the chest with them.
Dean accepted them and put them on, then complained, “These aren’t mine.”
“They’re mine. I couldn’t find yours.”
“What do you mean, you couldn’t find ‘em?”
“Which part of ‘I couldn’t find them’ is unclear? I couldn’t find them.”
“They’re in the car.”
“They’re not in the car, Dean.”
A number of people paused to watch the groping-stumbling-shuffling progress Dean made across the store’s parking lot. A couple of them offered a “What’s up with that?” raised eyebrow to Sam, who simply shrugged and let them go on their way. When Dean finally dropped anchor in the middle of the lot, one hand resting on a lamppost for support, Sam went over to join him.
“That’s not our car,” he told his brother.
“What?”
Dean was standing alongside a dark blue Ford Torino with a large stuffed Garfield lying in the back window. Sam said nothing more, so, pouting, Dean squinted through the millimeter-wide gap between his eyelids, took note of the Garfield and mumbled, “Shit.”
“You want to get some lunch?” Sam asked.
“Why? So you can laugh at me some more while I try to eat without looking?”
“I’m not laughing at you.”
“Need to go someplace dark until this freaking stuff wears off. Told you that.”
“Even with the glasses?”
“Not sitting in some restaurant with sunglasses on like goddamn Stevie Wonder.”
“Fine. I’ll get take-out. Wait in the car - there’s a place across the street. I’ll be right back.” Dean didn’t move. Sam told him indulgently, “Do a one-eighty. The car’s about ten steps away from you.”
Sam waited until Dean had located the Impala, fumblingly unlocked the door, and crawled into the passenger seat; then he trotted across the street. He returned about fifteen minutes later to find Dean leaning against the inside of the closed car door, head canted awkwardly to the side, arms folded across his chest. He didn’t move when Sam got into the car and placed a pair of white paper bags of food on the seat between them.
“You awake?” Sam asked.
“Thought you left.”
“Left? Why would I leave?”
“You were gone long enough to slaughter the damn cow yourself.”
“There was a line. It’s lunchtime. You want to eat here, or go back to the motel?”
Dean was silent for a moment, then murmured, “Whatever.”
Something in his tone, and in the way he was huddled against the door, made Sam’s chest ache. There was honestly no reason for Dean to be acting the way he was; true, he was the world’s worst patient, and had a far higher tolerance for gaping gut wounds and broken legs than he did for minor inconveniences. Hangovers. A cold.
Missing sunglasses.
But this…
They could have come out of last night a lot worse than they had: some bruises - Sam had a whopper on his right hip that was almost black - a few cuts and scrapes. If things had gone even slightly differently, one or both of them might not have walked out of that house. As it was, the only worrisome result of the night had been the flashes of light Dean saw when he closed his eyes.
The spirit, who’d lost an eye before he shuffled off this mortal coil, had seemed determined to share the experience with Dean. He - it - had gone after Dean with a vengeance. Stirred up a whirlwind that spewed dirt into Dean’s face. Rapped Dean’s head against the woodwork a couple of times.
True to form, Dean refused a trip to the ER. He’d washed the dust and dirt out of his eyes with a garden hose at the house, and again in the shower at the motel. Only under duress did he admit the existence of the flashing light to Sam, and only after two hours’ worth of continuous harassment did he surrender to being dragged to the doctor on duty at Empire Vision.
They’d been off-roading, Sam told the man. Apparently, that was a common explanation; the doctor finished his exam, gave Dean a bottle of eye drops and the good news that nothing was damaged, instructed him to come back if the flashing lights persisted, and sent him on his way.
None of which really explained Dean’s mood.
“Dude,” Sam said. “Give.”
“Give what?” Dean said to the car door.
“Why are you acting like this?”
“Not acting like nothin’.”
Sam sat in silence for a moment, then said, “Keys.” When Dean passed them over, he started the car and drove the two miles back to the motel.
Dean sat at the small table in their room and ate his lunch with Sam’s sunglasses still firmly in place. As soon as he finished, he gathered up the trash, crushed all the papers into the cup that had contained his cola, and pushed the cup into the middle of the table. Then he went into the bathroom and closed the door.
Twenty minutes later he was still in there.
He came out when Sam complained and settled himself on the bed he’d picked out last night, back propped against a nest of pillows. The TV remote lay on the night table, well within reach, but he didn’t turn on the set, simply sat behind the sunglasses with his arms folded and his eyes closed. Rather than argue with all of that, Sam pulled his laptop out of its case, set it up on the table, and began prowling websites for items of interest. After a while, the sun moved far enough across the sky to drop the room into deep shadow.
Through the dark lenses of the sunglasses, Dean would be able to see almost nothing.
That seemed to be what he wanted to see.
“Wouldn’t be much freakin’ use to anybody,” he said softly.
“What?” Sam asked.
“If the freakin’ thing blinded me. What the hell good is a blind hunter? Be nothin’ but a liability.”
“It didn’t happen.”
“Could have.”
“Yeah, but it didn’t.”
The fingers of Dean’s right hand worked at the nubby surface of the bedspread. He was slumped against the pillows in a way that said defeat more than exhaustion.
“Dean, man, you’re fine,” Sam said.
Dean looked at him through the filter of the dark lenses, then lowered his head again.
There wasn’t much Sam could offer him. The life they led, the path Dean had chosen to follow, didn’t include many options for someone at less than full strength.
Not to mention that predators loved wounded prey.
“Get some sleep,” Sam suggested. “I could use a couple hours myself. We were up most of the night.”
“Yeah,” Dean mumbled.
Nodding, Sam shut down the laptop and stretched out on the other bed. The room was quiet except for the muffled hum of traffic out on the main road, and warm enough to make him drowsy.
“I wouldn’t leave you, man,” he said. “If something happened. We’d figure it out together.”
Dean didn’t answer right away. His fingers had stopped moving, but he held a small fold of the bedspread between his thumb and index finger.
“Wouldn’t want to get like that, Sammy,” he said finally, quietly.
“Neither would I.”
“You could do something. There’s…you know. There’s blind lawyers.”
“Hmm.”
A car door slammed out in the parking lot. A minute later, water began to run through the pipes: someone had flushed the toilet in the room next door.
“Wish Dad’d turn up,” Dean whispered.
The weight in it made Sam turn away, onto his side, facing the door.
The TV in the room next door came on. The volume was low enough, and the wall in between just thick enough, to make the words of whoever was speaking unclear.
“We’ll find him,” Sam offered.
Someone laughed on the TV. That came through loud and clear.
“Need a backup plan,” Dean said. “’Case I get fucked up.”
Sam let that lie for a moment, then suggested, “Piano lessons?”
Dean huffed out a small breath. A scuffing noise suggested to Sam that he was sliding his foot back and forth across the bedspread. “Sammy?”
“Hmm.”
“Wouldn’t be worth crap on my own.”
Sam rolled over to look at his brother, who had taken off the sunglasses and was holding them in the palm of his hand. Dean’s eyes were still at half-mast, but his brow had unfurrowed a little. “Yeah, you would,” Sam said.
“Tried it. It’s -“
“Over,” Sam told him.