Requests and Challenges - Potato Candy: Chapter One
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Title: Potato Candy
Author: girlgotagun
Pairing: Dean/Benny
Prompter: anonymous
Community: spnkink-meme
Prompt: LINK
Rating: NC-17
Chapters: ?
Kinks: a/b/o, alpha!Dean, omega!Benny, hurt/comfort, jealousy, praise, body worship, schmoop, knotting, claiming, biting, heat
Warnings: None
Summary: Most omegas are small, sweet and quiet, almost innocent and vulnerable. It's part of their charm, part of what attracts Alphas, their polar opposites. Then there's Benny: thick, muscular, and more than a little hairy. Benny doesn't have a problem with his body, but it seems like everyone else does, and he can't help but envy the more stereotypical omegas with their large families and doting Alphas. He's pretty much given up on all of that, resigned to the unmated life. Until, that is, a bakery opens up next to his diner and Benny meets the owner, an Alpha named Dean Winchester.
[This story is part of the Intermittent Fill set, meaning that it is expected to be a longer work and has been assigned a day for updates each week. This story’s updates are slotted for Saturdays.]
Chapter One: Sugar and Spice
. sugar .
Benny Lafitte owned a diner in Lawrence, Kansas. He spent long hours slinging burgers and fries, eggs and bacon, and plates of the day’s special for college kids from nearby University of Kansas and families out for a day of shopping. His customers were mostly locals; tourists didn't seem to give his little business a second thought, and that was how Benny liked it. He owned a small house in the outskirts of the city, but most nights he just stayed in the small apartment over his diner. The apartment had a bed, a bathroom, a dresser, a television, and a small kitchenette.
The diner itself was flanked by a head shop on one side, run by a couple of betas named Ash and Chuck, and a small space that used to house a comic book store but had stood empty for a long time now. The street the diner was located on was an eclectic blend of whatever decided to move in and whatever the college students took enough of a liking to to spend their scant money at. The district had no distinct identity, and that's what Benny liked about it.
He didn't like the whole, “This is something, and so everything here must be exactly like this,” idea. But that was no real surprise, considering how Benny himself didn't really ‘fit’. Mostly it didn't bother Benny. But mostly he didn't think about it.
Benny was an omega. He was fine with that; just part of who he always had been. At thirty-two years old, he had been dealing with his heats and his instincts and everything else that came along with being an omega for nearly two decades. It wasn't a problem. A little inconvenient sometimes, like the time two of the kids he employed from the campus had quit as he was riding out his heat and he had to lose business because he couldn't work like that. But mostly, Benny was content.
The problem was, Benny didn't really fit with how most people imagined-or fantasized about-omegas looking. Movies, television, ads, glossy pictures in magazines, they all portrayed omegas as small, svelte men and women; childlike and vulnerable with lithe frames and large eyes. They were supposed to be soft-spoken and sweet-natured. All of that was specifically designed to attract Alphas, their natural opposites and other halves.
Benny, however, was none of those things. He was tall, one of only a few omegas he'd ever known who were over six feet tall-Benny was six-foot-three. He was strong and muscular, with broad shoulders and thick arms and legs. And he was hairy-very hairy. Thick, coarse hair covered his chest, becoming only slightly thinner on his stomach and leading below the waistband of his pants. His legs and arms were likewise covered, and it seemed like no matter how often he shaved, he always had a five o’ clock shadow.
Benny didn't dislike his body, really. Not at all. But it wasn't what Alphas looked for in a mate, and while he was mostly content to stay single, he couldn't help the twinge of jealousy he felt when pack families came into the diner and he saw the more desirable omegas surrounded by children and doted on by their Alphas.
It had been more of a problem when he was younger, when he still held out hope that he would meet some Alpha and fall in love, be mated and bred and loved. But now Benny was thirty-two, his heats were becoming less frequent and less intense, and he still hadn't found an Alpha who seemed interested, still hadn't had a chance for all of that. He figured he had about five to ten years left before he could pass as a beta; out of his mating and breeding years. And that sounded like a lot of time, but Benny wasn't fooling himself; it hadn't happened in the last nearly twenty years, it wasn't likely to happen in the next five.
So maybe Benny wasn't so content after all. But he was resigned, and he would survive.
. sugar .
“Adam!” Benny bellowed, glancing at the plates still sitting on the window between the kitchen and the counter, waiting to be taken to their tables. “Adam!” He was going to have to fire that kid. Never on time. He took the last burger off of the grill, plated it, and rushed to take the plates out to the customers himself.
He dropped off the food, apologizing for the wait as he glanced out the window and spotted Adam rushing inside.
“Hey boss, you know there's something opening up next door?” The kid was talking a mile a minute before Benny could even open his mouth.
“Oh really? You're late.” Benny frowned as Adam tied on an apron from under the counter.
“Yeah, my Econ lecture ran late.” He picked up the coffee pot and started making the rounds to refill the customers’ mugs even as he continued talking a mile a minute. “You know what it's gonna be? The place next door? There's no sign or anything, just a bunch of guys carrying out the old comic cases and carrying in something with a sneeze guard. So I guess food; I don't know. Bunch of paint, too. This sort of light mocha color.” He had finished refilling coffee and circled back around to put the pot back on the burner, hitting the button to refill it after he dropped a fresh filter bag into the machine. “So what? Have you heard anything?”
Benny sighed. The kid was ten pounds of energy in a five pound bag, and he was never on time, but he couldn't deny he was a good worker. “Adam, please start trying to get here on time, alright?”
Adam nodded, his face serious. “Yeah, boss.” And then he was off again, pulling an order pad out of the pocket of his apron as he headed toward a newly-occupied table. “Maybe it's a Starbucks.”
“It better not be a goddamned Starbucks,” Benny grumbled as he headed back to the kitchen. “I'll rip their throats out with my own teeth before I'll see blood-sucking corporations on this block.”
Adam laughed and then they were both back to work, operating like a perfectly-oiled machine through the rush. Adam had been working for Benny for three years, since he had come to the college as a gangly freshman. Benny swore at least once a week that he was going to fire the kid, but the kid must've gotten under his skin, because here he was, a gangly junior and still employed.
Benny was pretty sure it was because he couldn't get enough words in edgewise to actually fire him. But well, he had had worse workers than Adam, and the kid had outlasted them all. And truth told, Benny liked him alright, and liked having some consistent contact with another person in his life. So Adam would stay employed another day, he supposed.
Benny didn't think about the new place next door until nearly a month later when it opened.
. sugar .
Dean Winchester had grown up in Sioux Falls, North Dakota under the careful watch of his Uncle Bobby since he was four years old and his dad had taken off after the death of his mother. Dean didn't blame the man. It was a well-known and widely-pitied thing, the torment that came when an Alpha lost their mated omega. At least the man had the good sense not to drag his son through the shit swamp, as Bobby said.
Dean himself had never mated. He had worked in Bobby’s shop until he was twenty-three, and then the older Alpha had finally put his foot down, saying that he'd be damned if he would sit and watch Dean waste his life on something other than his great passion. Dean had joked that the only passion he had in life greater than cars was pie.
Before he knew it, Bobby had shipped him off to the International Culinary Center in New York City. Dean had fought it at first, but much to his chagrin it had turned out that Bobby was right. Dean learned to make all sorts of shit, from high-class fare like pâté and escargot (“The garbage parts of food,” Bobby called them when he told him) to good old-fashioned New York strip and New England clam chowder.
But Dean’s favorite classes had been learning to make pastries and confections. If people were happy and in a good mood after a well-prepared meal, it was nothing compared to when the deserts came out. And Dean liked making people feel happy and content; liked taking care of them. Bobby swore it was some sort of Alpha version of nesting, that it meant Dean had gone too long without claiming a mate. But any time Dean thought about settling down, thought about taking on a fragile, delicate omega who would rely on him for their safety and well-being, he thought of his Dad, of what happened to Alphas who failed in that role.
So Dean never had claimed a mate, and at twenty-eight he finished school and started looking for places to open his shop. He had been looking in New York City; Brooklyn or Manhattan or the village. It was actually his friend Charlie, a beta and recent graduate of NYU’s business school, who found the spot in Lawrence. It was the perfect spot, she said. A big enough city and close to a college campus to guarantee a broad customer base, but not so big as to breed the vicious cut-throat environment of New York City. Plus, there was an apartment over the space; a two-bedroom, Charlie said pointedly, so there were no worries about finding a place or commuting time.
The bakery became Dean’s baby and Charlie’s brain-child, and before Dean knew it he had signed the lease and picked a color for the walls, and then two months later he and Charlie were loading up the Impala and setting off on the long trek across country to start the next chapter of their lives.
The crew that Charlie had hired to renovate had done a good job, and Dean felt a little better about the memory of her cheerfully cutting a large check for them from his account. The bakery was warmly-lit, with small tables meant to seat two to four scattered about inside and a row of similar set-ups along the sidewalk outside. It was small but cozy, occupying the corner of the block. On 7th Street it shared a wall with a used bookstore called The Bookworm’s Burrow, and on 4th Avenue it touched a busy-looking place called Benny’s Diner.
“Everything Nice Bakery; on the corner of 4th and 7th,” Charlie had said when she was talking up the place, her hands spread wide in front of her as though to frame the vision, an excited gleam in her eye.
Dean had laughed then, amused at her passion for his dream. Their dream, he guessed; his little place would be Charlie’s first real business venture.
But now, looking at it, he realized that Charlie had been right. Even about the name, which was now displayed on the two picture windows flanking the entrance in delicate frosted etching.
He felt a calm wash over him as he stood on the sidewalk. It seemed right, finally. He finally felt like he was where he was supposed to be.
Continue to Chapter Two