fic: Abroad (2/3)
Abroad 2/3
Summary: Dean goes to Hell. Wackiness ensues. Ch. 2: Dean visits the fair. IN HELL.
Warnings: Gore, language, OC (yipe!), stupidity.
Note: When this thing passed “crack” it was STILL ACCELERATING.
Part 1
_______________________________________________________________
Abroad (2/3)
Stuff happens around me. I don’t know why. Maybe because I’m so handsome and Fortune hates a good-looking man.
--Garret, P.I.
“So,” the ticket vendor said in bored tones, “One adult and one damnèd soul?”
“Hey!” Gabby protested loudly, “I’m not a soul.”
“He means me, you moron,” Dean said wearily.
“Adult?” she squealed, and if anything seemed more upset about that than about the soul thing.
“Aren’t you technically like five hundred years old?”
“Only technically!” she snapped, “Only technically! But my innocence keeps me young!”
Dean met the vendor’s eyes and gave a little half-smile and a shrug. The skinny demon looked sympathetic.
“Punishment detail,” Dean explained, gesturing at the tiny hand clinging to his own. He’d washed them for the occasion, at least, though he hadn’t changed out of his spattered jeans and t-shirt.
“You’re gonna miss your quooottaaa,” Gabby sang, and he whapped her over the head with his free hand.
“I know. So just let me buy the adult ticket so we can get a move on.”
“Fine,” the five-hundred-year-old tiny person snapped, yanking her hand back and crossing her arms. “But I want cotton candy!”
“Whatever.” He slapped a wad of hell banknotes down-inflation here was terrible-shoved Gabby’s ticket at her, pocketed his own, and stomped through the fair’s gates. Gabby trotted after him, latching onto his leg quickly, looking around with eyes like saucers.
“Gabby, put those things back in your pocket right now and use your own eyes, before you run into something and squash them all over yourself.”
She jerked the two orbs she’d brought along away from her face, and scowled at him.
“I like your eyes, Dean. They’re so much prettier.”
“Yeah yeah, I got pretty freakin’ eyes. I’ve heard it all before.”
She stuck her tongue out at him, but shoved the eyes into a pocket. Demon pockets tended to hold a lot of items that technically should not fit, so Dean didn’t give it a second thought. The fact that Gabby was wearing a My Little Pony t-shirt and ribbons in her hair was currently making him a lot more unsettled.
“So, um,” he licked his lips, “Did Alastair tie those ribbons for you?”
“What, you mean before or after he flayed the skin off my face for interrupting you?”
“Um,” he paused, “after, I guess.”
“Yeah. And then he said he had the best idea of how to punish you. Way better than boring old torture.”
“So the bastinado isn’t considered a torture device anymore? Why didn’t I get that memo?”
She rolled her eyes. “You’re still a soul, Dean, c’mon.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
It had been to Dean’s everlasting horror that Alastair pressed a wad of money into one hand and Gabby’s dinky, grubby mitt into the other, and sent them both off. To the fair. Because Gabby didn’t get punished anywhere to the degree that Dean did. Oh no. Dean got saddled with babysitting the little freak, missing his quota (and absorbing the extra punishment that would bring), and nothing to look forward to the whole day except chasing after the little idiot and possibly eating his entire body weight in cotton candy. And Gabby would probably throw up on him, just because she could.
“I wanna go on the teacups!”
“No!”
“What, you’re too good for vomit now?”
“You vomit burning acid! Also I’m allergic to having my spine snapped in half by centrifugal forces!”
“Sissy.”
“Just…pick something else, okay?”
She pouted, as usual, but finally settled on the merry-go-round, of all things, though probably just because it was close and the lines weren’t too long. Dean refused to go anywhere near the thing, mostly because he felt that chimeras and manticores and winged griffins with poles rammed through their spines might be slightly testy and inclined to take it out on whatever soul was nearest. Dean just didn’t really want to spend the rest of the day with bleeding chunks ripped out of his abdomen-he felt instinctively that would just make things unpleasant. He waved when Gabby went spinning by, though.
“Dean! Dean! Lookit meeeeee!” And she waved and grinned wildly, razor teeth flashing in the light, and Dean laughed.
“I wanna go on, I wanna go on,” she gasped breathlessly when she’d spun around enough times that the chimera she’d been riding had finally stopped trying to bite her foot off and gone back to looking bored, “I wanna I wanna-ooh! Ooh! Dean look!” and she grabbed his hand in an iron grip and yanked him down a random causeway, past milling demons and colored tents and the sorts of rides that would have given living Dean nightmares for years.
“What-Gabby where’re we-"
She hauled him past sword-swallowers and special fancy fair tortures with flashy knives and rare poisons, and wouldn’t even let him dawdle a little to watch. Pulled up short at a booth with skulls and ribcages hung up on the velvety wall. It took Dean a minute to realize what he was looking at.
“Win one for me Dean, pleeaaaase?”
He looked down at the rifles, then up at the stacked milk bottles-milk bottles? Really? And said, “It’s been pretty long since I fired a gun, Gabs…”
“You can do it! You can do it better than anyone else here, you’re still a soul, you’ve still got alllll your memories!”
It was true, of course. Mostly.
“We have skulls at home,” he told her skeptically.
“Don’t wanna skull,” she grinned. “Skulls are so totally last millenium.”
He cocked his head at the prizes.
“A ribcage? What the hell are you gonna do with a ribcage?”
At the snort from the demon running the booth he looked down and realized that Gabby’s grin had grown wider.
“…you’re going to wear it, aren’t you.”
It wasn’t really a question.
“Please Dean? For me?” And she latched onto his arm and threw him the Bambi-eyes, which was really kind of awful, and Dean rolled his own apparently pretty, pretty eyes and picked up the rifle.
“Does it fire anything I should know about?” he asked, and the stall-demon shrugged. The milk bottles exploded on impact, glass shards flying everywhere, and Dean swore and dropped the gun.
“Dammit!”
But Gabby was squealing and ignoring him, grabbing her bony prize and planting it on her head-spinal cord trailing down her back-as Dean spat curses and picked glass shards out of his neck and face.
“This is all your fault,” he told her, and yanked his hand away when she tried to grab it. She pouted briefly, then was off and running again, and Dean swore a bit more before taking off after her, trailing shards of glass like glitter.
She hauled him down to watch the drummers, which were actually pretty good even if the drums were made of soul-flesh, and still technically attached to the bodies and therefore difficult to hear over the screaming, and then past the exotic dancers (which were very exotic indeed) where the air was full of sticky sweetness and he found himself dawdling, again, though this time torture wasn’t so much on his mind. Gabby finally got him moving by grabbing the skin and muscle just above his knee and squeezing, and he yelped and let her prod him past the collage of stalls.
“Gladiators,” she said firmly, and Dean sighed.
So they went and saw the gladiators, which were actually kind of awesome (if more than a little ridiculous in their chain-mail panties and offensively taut pectorals), and he let Gabby drag him to the Pit of Eternal Flame, the Pit of Eternal Darkness, and the Pit of Eternal Reality TV. The only one she got upset about him pretending to toss her into was the last one, and Dean figured that just went to show…something, though he didn’t know what. They stopped by the Well of Souls (the fifteenth Well of Souls Dean’d seen in the last seven years, but whatever) and Gabby tossed a coin in and watched the shadows thrash around blindly for far longer than he considered healthy. She hauled him down to the meat market and they watched a genuine demonstration of animal butchering techniques that ran the gamut from the pedestrian--hell-pigs and hell-cows-to the bizarre, in this case some kind of tentacled pineapple/bear thing that flailed mightily and sprayed the entire crowd with blood and slime and citrus.
“Dammit Dean!” Gabby snarled, pawing at him as he smeared the mess into her hair (the ribcage-hat had disappeared into a pocket at some point), and grinned at her distress. “Alastair tied these ribbons!”
So he made it up to her with a piggyback ride and she only dug her nails into his scalp a tiny bit, and they wandered back toward the drummers and wove their way around bon-odori dancers and faceless musicians and Dean paused at the weird dancing…monkey…thing, and there was a shout and a crash and Gabby drummed her fists against his skull and jerked his head around to stare at the flash of gold and roar of flame coming up the street.
Of course in Hell the dragon dance was done with a real dragon.
They scurried out of the way, pressing back into the crowd as cheers went up and the eight-story serpent stomped and wove its way down the street, spewing fire and kicking over kiosks and sending demons spinning and bouncing like dropped marbles. Dean clutched at Gabby’s hands on his skull and laughed and dodged with everyone else, ducking low when a gout of flame nearly singed his scalp and scurrying to the side when the booth behind them exploded. Unfortunately that meant he wasn’t paying close attention to holding onto his small charge and it was only the sound of her shriek and the sudden lightness on his shoulders that alerted him to the fact that the dragon had snatched her up in its jaws. Her tiny legs kicked as she disappeared upward, screaming her lungs out. Metaphorically speaking. Actually her lungs were still in her body. Probably.
“Gabby! You get back down here this instant! Gabby!” But it was already too late, and with two short snaps the dragon gobbled her up, the only lingering evidence of her existence the itch in Dean’s scalp where she’d drawn blood. He scowled at the giant lizard, but it was already halfway down the road and there wasn’t much he could do that would have any sort of impact on a monster that size. Crap.
Then he brightened. Gabby was gone, which meant if he hurried he’d have…at least a good half-hour before she turned up again depending on how quickly she managed to claw her way out of the belly of the beast. Those scales had looked pretty metallic, which might give him anywhere up to forty-five minutes…
He glanced around quickly, then darted out of the wrecked concourse, and a few quick queries and greased palms later he was strolling past the whore pits, grinning a little grin.
Gabby would be absolutely livid when she found out.
She didn’t actually turn up for almost an hour, by which time Dean was halfway through getting his face and…other parts of his anatomy painted. The fact that he was a soul didn’t seem to bother the girl-things too much; and fortunately he didn’t have to deal with anyone looking like Lamashtu or, worse, Stheno, who he’d seen once, and afterward spent the better part of the day vomiting, while Alastair laughed and laughed. They weren’t as pretty as the whores at the Profane Cathedral, of course, or as well-care-for, but they had nice teeth and long fingers (sometimes more than the standard ten) and demons and humans had an awful lot in common, after all, so Dean was generally enjoying himself. Until his pants thwapped him across the face and the nearest female-ish body let out a little squeal of indignation.
“Put your damn pants on, you ho,” snarled a voice he recognized all too well. Dean sighed. His face was only half done, but after all he figured he could understand where Gabby was coming from. The inside of a dragon, for one thing, if the acidic blood dripping off of her and eating through the ground around her feet was anything to go by.
“Thought you’d be here like, twenty minutes ago,” he told her as he hopped into his pants, and she snorted.
“You owe me tooth-rotting things for ditching me like that,” she told him, taking his hand with a proprietary air, tossing a victorious glare at the scowling demonesses around them. “So sorry, ladies.”
“You look like a five-year-old and you’re old enough to be my great-great- great- great- great- great grandmother, y’know,” he muttered as he trailed in her wake, casting longing glances backward and risking a surreptitious wave, “I don’t know why you always get so upset when I wanna have a little fun.”
“It’s my job to keep you out of trouble,” she said cheerfully.
“Out? I get into more trouble when you’re around and you know it!”
“It’s just the little kind of trouble, though,” she told him with a sweet, terrifying smile, “You’d totally never survive without me.”
Dean shuddered.
_____________________________
To be concluded. Next: Bela!
______________________________
Q&A
Q: Why are there Bon festival dancers in a Judeo-Christian Hell?
A: Because I like them. And if you want a more technically appropriate answer, because there are many societies with a Christian contingent, which also maintain their own traditions-including those of Japan and China. So although Bon is a Buddhist holiday, and the dragon dance similarly non-Christian, I think there would be enough souls with a background in these cultures that something like that could easily turn up.
If you accept the rest of it, anyway. People being physically tortured in Hell? Sure why not.
Q: Is the ribcage-hat thing a reference?
A: Yes. Yes it is.
part 3
Summary: Dean goes to Hell. Wackiness ensues. Ch. 2: Dean visits the fair. IN HELL.
Warnings: Gore, language, OC (yipe!), stupidity.
Note: When this thing passed “crack” it was STILL ACCELERATING.
Part 1
_______________________________________________________________
Abroad (2/3)
Stuff happens around me. I don’t know why. Maybe because I’m so handsome and Fortune hates a good-looking man.
--Garret, P.I.
“So,” the ticket vendor said in bored tones, “One adult and one damnèd soul?”
“Hey!” Gabby protested loudly, “I’m not a soul.”
“He means me, you moron,” Dean said wearily.
“Adult?” she squealed, and if anything seemed more upset about that than about the soul thing.
“Aren’t you technically like five hundred years old?”
“Only technically!” she snapped, “Only technically! But my innocence keeps me young!”
Dean met the vendor’s eyes and gave a little half-smile and a shrug. The skinny demon looked sympathetic.
“Punishment detail,” Dean explained, gesturing at the tiny hand clinging to his own. He’d washed them for the occasion, at least, though he hadn’t changed out of his spattered jeans and t-shirt.
“You’re gonna miss your quooottaaa,” Gabby sang, and he whapped her over the head with his free hand.
“I know. So just let me buy the adult ticket so we can get a move on.”
“Fine,” the five-hundred-year-old tiny person snapped, yanking her hand back and crossing her arms. “But I want cotton candy!”
“Whatever.” He slapped a wad of hell banknotes down-inflation here was terrible-shoved Gabby’s ticket at her, pocketed his own, and stomped through the fair’s gates. Gabby trotted after him, latching onto his leg quickly, looking around with eyes like saucers.
“Gabby, put those things back in your pocket right now and use your own eyes, before you run into something and squash them all over yourself.”
She jerked the two orbs she’d brought along away from her face, and scowled at him.
“I like your eyes, Dean. They’re so much prettier.”
“Yeah yeah, I got pretty freakin’ eyes. I’ve heard it all before.”
She stuck her tongue out at him, but shoved the eyes into a pocket. Demon pockets tended to hold a lot of items that technically should not fit, so Dean didn’t give it a second thought. The fact that Gabby was wearing a My Little Pony t-shirt and ribbons in her hair was currently making him a lot more unsettled.
“So, um,” he licked his lips, “Did Alastair tie those ribbons for you?”
“What, you mean before or after he flayed the skin off my face for interrupting you?”
“Um,” he paused, “after, I guess.”
“Yeah. And then he said he had the best idea of how to punish you. Way better than boring old torture.”
“So the bastinado isn’t considered a torture device anymore? Why didn’t I get that memo?”
She rolled her eyes. “You’re still a soul, Dean, c’mon.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
It had been to Dean’s everlasting horror that Alastair pressed a wad of money into one hand and Gabby’s dinky, grubby mitt into the other, and sent them both off. To the fair. Because Gabby didn’t get punished anywhere to the degree that Dean did. Oh no. Dean got saddled with babysitting the little freak, missing his quota (and absorbing the extra punishment that would bring), and nothing to look forward to the whole day except chasing after the little idiot and possibly eating his entire body weight in cotton candy. And Gabby would probably throw up on him, just because she could.
“I wanna go on the teacups!”
“No!”
“What, you’re too good for vomit now?”
“You vomit burning acid! Also I’m allergic to having my spine snapped in half by centrifugal forces!”
“Sissy.”
“Just…pick something else, okay?”
She pouted, as usual, but finally settled on the merry-go-round, of all things, though probably just because it was close and the lines weren’t too long. Dean refused to go anywhere near the thing, mostly because he felt that chimeras and manticores and winged griffins with poles rammed through their spines might be slightly testy and inclined to take it out on whatever soul was nearest. Dean just didn’t really want to spend the rest of the day with bleeding chunks ripped out of his abdomen-he felt instinctively that would just make things unpleasant. He waved when Gabby went spinning by, though.
“Dean! Dean! Lookit meeeeee!” And she waved and grinned wildly, razor teeth flashing in the light, and Dean laughed.
“I wanna go on, I wanna go on,” she gasped breathlessly when she’d spun around enough times that the chimera she’d been riding had finally stopped trying to bite her foot off and gone back to looking bored, “I wanna I wanna-ooh! Ooh! Dean look!” and she grabbed his hand in an iron grip and yanked him down a random causeway, past milling demons and colored tents and the sorts of rides that would have given living Dean nightmares for years.
“What-Gabby where’re we-"
She hauled him past sword-swallowers and special fancy fair tortures with flashy knives and rare poisons, and wouldn’t even let him dawdle a little to watch. Pulled up short at a booth with skulls and ribcages hung up on the velvety wall. It took Dean a minute to realize what he was looking at.
“Win one for me Dean, pleeaaaase?”
He looked down at the rifles, then up at the stacked milk bottles-milk bottles? Really? And said, “It’s been pretty long since I fired a gun, Gabs…”
“You can do it! You can do it better than anyone else here, you’re still a soul, you’ve still got alllll your memories!”
It was true, of course. Mostly.
“We have skulls at home,” he told her skeptically.
“Don’t wanna skull,” she grinned. “Skulls are so totally last millenium.”
He cocked his head at the prizes.
“A ribcage? What the hell are you gonna do with a ribcage?”
At the snort from the demon running the booth he looked down and realized that Gabby’s grin had grown wider.
“…you’re going to wear it, aren’t you.”
It wasn’t really a question.
“Please Dean? For me?” And she latched onto his arm and threw him the Bambi-eyes, which was really kind of awful, and Dean rolled his own apparently pretty, pretty eyes and picked up the rifle.
“Does it fire anything I should know about?” he asked, and the stall-demon shrugged. The milk bottles exploded on impact, glass shards flying everywhere, and Dean swore and dropped the gun.
“Dammit!”
But Gabby was squealing and ignoring him, grabbing her bony prize and planting it on her head-spinal cord trailing down her back-as Dean spat curses and picked glass shards out of his neck and face.
“This is all your fault,” he told her, and yanked his hand away when she tried to grab it. She pouted briefly, then was off and running again, and Dean swore a bit more before taking off after her, trailing shards of glass like glitter.
She hauled him down to watch the drummers, which were actually pretty good even if the drums were made of soul-flesh, and still technically attached to the bodies and therefore difficult to hear over the screaming, and then past the exotic dancers (which were very exotic indeed) where the air was full of sticky sweetness and he found himself dawdling, again, though this time torture wasn’t so much on his mind. Gabby finally got him moving by grabbing the skin and muscle just above his knee and squeezing, and he yelped and let her prod him past the collage of stalls.
“Gladiators,” she said firmly, and Dean sighed.
So they went and saw the gladiators, which were actually kind of awesome (if more than a little ridiculous in their chain-mail panties and offensively taut pectorals), and he let Gabby drag him to the Pit of Eternal Flame, the Pit of Eternal Darkness, and the Pit of Eternal Reality TV. The only one she got upset about him pretending to toss her into was the last one, and Dean figured that just went to show…something, though he didn’t know what. They stopped by the Well of Souls (the fifteenth Well of Souls Dean’d seen in the last seven years, but whatever) and Gabby tossed a coin in and watched the shadows thrash around blindly for far longer than he considered healthy. She hauled him down to the meat market and they watched a genuine demonstration of animal butchering techniques that ran the gamut from the pedestrian--hell-pigs and hell-cows-to the bizarre, in this case some kind of tentacled pineapple/bear thing that flailed mightily and sprayed the entire crowd with blood and slime and citrus.
“Dammit Dean!” Gabby snarled, pawing at him as he smeared the mess into her hair (the ribcage-hat had disappeared into a pocket at some point), and grinned at her distress. “Alastair tied these ribbons!”
So he made it up to her with a piggyback ride and she only dug her nails into his scalp a tiny bit, and they wandered back toward the drummers and wove their way around bon-odori dancers and faceless musicians and Dean paused at the weird dancing…monkey…thing, and there was a shout and a crash and Gabby drummed her fists against his skull and jerked his head around to stare at the flash of gold and roar of flame coming up the street.
Of course in Hell the dragon dance was done with a real dragon.
They scurried out of the way, pressing back into the crowd as cheers went up and the eight-story serpent stomped and wove its way down the street, spewing fire and kicking over kiosks and sending demons spinning and bouncing like dropped marbles. Dean clutched at Gabby’s hands on his skull and laughed and dodged with everyone else, ducking low when a gout of flame nearly singed his scalp and scurrying to the side when the booth behind them exploded. Unfortunately that meant he wasn’t paying close attention to holding onto his small charge and it was only the sound of her shriek and the sudden lightness on his shoulders that alerted him to the fact that the dragon had snatched her up in its jaws. Her tiny legs kicked as she disappeared upward, screaming her lungs out. Metaphorically speaking. Actually her lungs were still in her body. Probably.
“Gabby! You get back down here this instant! Gabby!” But it was already too late, and with two short snaps the dragon gobbled her up, the only lingering evidence of her existence the itch in Dean’s scalp where she’d drawn blood. He scowled at the giant lizard, but it was already halfway down the road and there wasn’t much he could do that would have any sort of impact on a monster that size. Crap.
Then he brightened. Gabby was gone, which meant if he hurried he’d have…at least a good half-hour before she turned up again depending on how quickly she managed to claw her way out of the belly of the beast. Those scales had looked pretty metallic, which might give him anywhere up to forty-five minutes…
He glanced around quickly, then darted out of the wrecked concourse, and a few quick queries and greased palms later he was strolling past the whore pits, grinning a little grin.
Gabby would be absolutely livid when she found out.
She didn’t actually turn up for almost an hour, by which time Dean was halfway through getting his face and…other parts of his anatomy painted. The fact that he was a soul didn’t seem to bother the girl-things too much; and fortunately he didn’t have to deal with anyone looking like Lamashtu or, worse, Stheno, who he’d seen once, and afterward spent the better part of the day vomiting, while Alastair laughed and laughed. They weren’t as pretty as the whores at the Profane Cathedral, of course, or as well-care-for, but they had nice teeth and long fingers (sometimes more than the standard ten) and demons and humans had an awful lot in common, after all, so Dean was generally enjoying himself. Until his pants thwapped him across the face and the nearest female-ish body let out a little squeal of indignation.
“Put your damn pants on, you ho,” snarled a voice he recognized all too well. Dean sighed. His face was only half done, but after all he figured he could understand where Gabby was coming from. The inside of a dragon, for one thing, if the acidic blood dripping off of her and eating through the ground around her feet was anything to go by.
“Thought you’d be here like, twenty minutes ago,” he told her as he hopped into his pants, and she snorted.
“You owe me tooth-rotting things for ditching me like that,” she told him, taking his hand with a proprietary air, tossing a victorious glare at the scowling demonesses around them. “So sorry, ladies.”
“You look like a five-year-old and you’re old enough to be my great-great- great- great- great- great grandmother, y’know,” he muttered as he trailed in her wake, casting longing glances backward and risking a surreptitious wave, “I don’t know why you always get so upset when I wanna have a little fun.”
“It’s my job to keep you out of trouble,” she said cheerfully.
“Out? I get into more trouble when you’re around and you know it!”
“It’s just the little kind of trouble, though,” she told him with a sweet, terrifying smile, “You’d totally never survive without me.”
Dean shuddered.
_____________________________
To be concluded. Next: Bela!
______________________________
Q&A
Q: Why are there Bon festival dancers in a Judeo-Christian Hell?
A: Because I like them. And if you want a more technically appropriate answer, because there are many societies with a Christian contingent, which also maintain their own traditions-including those of Japan and China. So although Bon is a Buddhist holiday, and the dragon dance similarly non-Christian, I think there would be enough souls with a background in these cultures that something like that could easily turn up.
If you accept the rest of it, anyway. People being physically tortured in Hell? Sure why not.
Q: Is the ribcage-hat thing a reference?
A: Yes. Yes it is.
part 3