Fic: Every Snowflake is a Drop of Water 1/?
So I’m trying to beat my writer’s block into submission, and right now the only tool available seems to be fic. So I am writing more, in this case of the ‘extremely silly’ variety. Basically a ridiculous SF AU extremely derivative bit of tomfoolery. Heh. “Tomfoolery.”
Every Snowflake is a Drop of Water
Warnings: Language, and um, silliness? Slight violence.
Parte the first
Parte the second
Parte the third
Parte the fourth
He said, “Okay.” Tried to make it sound firm, authoritative. Wasn’t sure he actually managed it, but he doubted the vendor actually noticed one way or another. He resisted the urge to dart his tongue quickly between his lips and ignored completely the sense of nervous sweat breaking out under his arms. He could do this. Of course he could.
“A pound, I guess,” he said, ruthlessly suppressing any waver of uncertainty threatening to worm its way into his voice. “The, uh, the red ones. And some bananas. Because-” Dean strangled the rest of the sentence before it could fly out of his mouth because shit, the man didn’t care why he was buying the fruit. Dean could’ve been planning to take them down to the ‘dock and fling them at random passersby and the man wouldn’t’ve cared.
“Apples, bananas.” The vendor stuffed the purchases into a sack and Dean accepted them with probably a greater air of reverence than the situation actually called for, but that wasn’t really his fault.
This was a very special occasion, after all.
He kept his thanks for the man simple, a brief nod, barest flash of eye contact, before slipping out into the afternoon crowd and weaving his way between the multitude of forms. He’d had a few hours to get used to that, at least, and he thought all things considered he’d done a pretty good job concealing his own amazement at the sheer variety contained within this tiny microcosm of a handful of city blocks. Never mind the sheer numbers, and he suspected that he wasn’t freaking out about it mostly due to the fact that the reality of the situation hadn’t fully sunk in yet.
Castiel was waiting for him in the shadow of an overhang, between a café and what looked like some kind of library. He gave Dean a pleased little smile when he waved the evidence of his successful foray at him.
“I think,” he said, as Dean approached, “I’ve found a place for us to stay, at least for a few days. Time to get our bearings, and earn some additional funds.”
“ ‘Funds’.” Dean tasted the word, and grinned in spite of himself. Castiel shot him a look.
“This is how the world operates, Dean,” he said stiffly, eyes narrowed a little. Dean shrugged.
“It’s just, you know,” he waved his free hand in a wide, vague arc, nearly braining some hapless person behind him, “All this. And that sky. And, things I never thought I’d see.” He didn’t know how to explain it, really. Something as exotic as money.
“I know a song about the sky,”Castiel blurted, face taking on an unexpected (but not unfamiliar) expression of wide-eyed innocence before just as swiftly ratcheting back to dour, with a hearty dose of irritation thrown in. “Claire, get off the line.”
“Where is the little rugrat, anyway?” Dean glanced up and down the street, but caught no sign of long blonde hair. “D’you stash her in the library?”
“At the apartment. I’m not leaving her alone in a public place. Not this close to the ‘dock.” His face switched again and Claire added, “Even though you totally could, I’m thirteen years old now and I can take care of myself! Claire! For the last time get off the line!”
Dean snorted and turned away. The link between Castiel, Jimmy and Claire made things confusing at the best of times, but there was no real need to exacerbate the situation by openly mocking any of them to Castiel’s face. Dean had no desire to bring down any sort of wrath on himself, especially in this new and slightly terrifying situation.
“Do you think it would have been better if we left her behind?” he asked, when no further response was forthcoming from Claire and Castiel drew up next to Dean, and although he’d directed the question at Castiel, it was Jimmy looking out of the eyes when he answered.
“No.”
--
Dean wanted Castiel to take him straight back to the “apartment,” practically bouncing out of his skin with excitement at the idea. Unfortunately, it seemed there were a variety of other things that needed to be acquired at the open-air market and Dean could put aside his eagerness at the prospect of being able to buy more things, though he was a little disappointed Castiel made him tag along for the stated purpose of “doing the heavy lifting.”
“We don’t have to buy furniture or anything, do we?”
“No. The apartment’s furnished. There’s no point in getting things we might have to leave behind if we need to make a quick getaway. But we need to make sure we have the right equipment for dodging the hunters, and Claire made me promise to bring her back a toy.”
Dean blinked. “A toy? Why?”
Castiel shrugged. “Who knows? Girls seem to like fuzzy soft things, even if they’re well past the age when playing with them would be appropriate.” He paused, head cocked slightly, eyes gone distant with an expression Dean knew all too well. Somewhere miles away, Claire was probably yelling her little golden head off. A tiny smile quirked the corner of Castiel’s lips, and Dean rolled his eyes.
“Listen, why don’t you just…take care of that, and I’ll go look around for the rest of the little things, toothbrushes and whatever, okay? And, uh, meet you back here.”
Castiel waved him off with a distracted air, and Dean snorted and sidled away, easing back out into the crowd of humanity flooding the street.
People! He’d seen pictures, of course, and video, and read books and knew, consciously, that the world and all the settlements housed well over nineteen billion human beings, in every shape, size, and color imaginable, and probably a few that weren’t. Conscious awareness of something, however, was a far cry from actually experiencing it, and Dean knew that when he actually had time to decompress and process everything that had happened in the last three-and-a-half hours, he’d probably have to take a minute to huddle in a corner in the bathroom and have a long-overdue freakout. There were people with purple hair, and complicated tattoos, and children whose genetic markers he couldn't even begin to guess at. And people seemed to be dressed in whatever-the-hell they felt like, some of them tottering around in shoes that should've been outlawed as cruel and unusual punishment. Dean felt grungy in the jeans and t-shirt Cas had scrounged up somewhere outside the Blue City, and he ran a hand self-consciously across the material of his shirt. It was soft to the touch, and well-worn.
Dean was basically making everything up as he went along. He was grateful that at least the crowds and buildings concealed any evidence of a horizon. He'd never have believed he had agoraphobic tendencies if it hadn't been for the disastrous near-collapse on the flight here, and Castiel had harangued him for a good half-hour for giving into what he was convinced was entirely a fabrication of Dean's mind ("What good is a phobia to anyone, Dean? You're imagining things. There's no program for that kind of neurosis."). It'd taken Claire kicking him in the shin to finally shut him up. Dean had barely manage not to lose his lunch all over the three (four) of them.
He was currently mostly just ignoring the fact that the myriad faces around him were all not only wholly unfamiliar, but completely different from one another. He wondered what Claire thought about all this. He couldn’t ask Castiel, of course-he'd retained his usual equanimity in the face of the bizarre. Jimmy might have something to say on the subject , though, and Dean resolved to ask him about it next time he got a chance. They were a lot closer in age and life experience , even if the smaller man's exposure to the outside world was being mostly buffered by Castiel's consciousness.
Ducking off the street and wandering through a small shop with the words “drug store” emblazoned on the front, Dean quickly acquired seven toothbrushes, of varying degrees of softness (why hadn’t Castiel thought to explain the significance of bristle stiffness at some point in his long lecture about blending in and survival in the outside world?) some kind of toothpaste flavored like bubblegum, which Dean acquired purely to see the look on Jimmy’s face, and a variety of soaps and shampoos that would probably be sufficient to keep the three of them clean well into the next millennium. He ignored the strange look the clerk kept trying to direct his way-he was a tourist, right? And tourists did all kinds of crazy inexplicable shit, it was practically expected of them-pocketed the remains of his funds (heh, ‘funds’) and strolled out into the street back the way he'd come.
When he finally realized he was being followed, he was halfway back to where he’d left Castiel, and the realization shocked him so completely that he actually came to a dead stop in the middle of the crowd, and only barely managed to cover his confusion by pretending to peruse the items on offer behind the nearest shop’s windows. Unfortunately it was some kind of lingerie shop, and mannequins kind of gave Dean the creeps.
He should run. He knew he should run, drop everything and just go. Leave Castiel, and Claire, and Jimmy-when he didn’t turn up, they’d know something had gone wrong, and maybe they’d make it out. Get away. He could buy them some time, at least.
He slipped back out into the street as nonchalantly as possible, through the spring was gone from his step and he had to concentrate to keep his mouth from setting itself into a hard line.
The problem was that Dean didn’t know this place, or even this kind of place. He was surrounded by unfamiliar forms and faces, random wild colors and sounds and a kind of ongoing, low-level chaos that he really couldn’t make sense of. The streets were laid out haphazardly, apparently with no forethought at all, and Dean didn’t know the layout, couldn’t begin to guess at it. The main road branched off into countless smaller footpaths and alleys and streets, and Dean turned down one at random, then when it branched picked another, and then a third. He was far away from any sort of place intended for tourists now, he knew. Not lost, but on the way.
Dean swore under his breath when another random turning brought him up short against a whitewashed wall, wrapped around somebody’s property. An open sewer nearby filled the air with the smell of slime and soap, and his nostrils flared.
The hair on the back of his neck prickled and he dropped the bags of apples and soap and toothbrushes near his feet and drew one deep, steadying breath. Turned around.
“Oh,” he blurted, eyebrows shooting halfway up his forehead.
He almost laughed at the two men doing their level best to loom menacingly behind him. They were big, sure, but not in a way that screamed ‘well fed,’ ‘highly trained,’ or even ‘particularly stable.’ The bad hair and tattoos didn’t help their appearance any, and Dean felt his mouth open slightly as comprehension finally dawned.
“Muggers?” Dean wondered aloud, “I’m being mugged?”
He was so relieved he was inclined to just give them everything he had-they looked like they needed the soap and toothpaste a lot more than he did, anyway. He offered a little wave and pointed at the bags at his feet.
“Hey, guys,” he said, with his best ‘harmless nice-guy’ grin, “I’m not lookin’ for any trouble. You see something in there you like, you help yourselves, okay?”
But maybe that wasn’t how this sort of exchange was supposed to go. Castiel would probably have something to say about alpha males and macho posturing and the human capacity for unmotivated, pointless violence, or whatever. Dean guessed they’d probably picked him out as someone alone and harmless, and in need of having his face redecorated. Because apparently that was the sort of thing people did to each other out in the real world. Dean had seen movies. He knew about this kind of stuff.
So it wasn’t a major surprise when mugger (assailant?) number one, the one with a big stupid tattoo of some kind of lizard thing right across his face, lunged clumsily in his direction, fist flying wide in a poorly-executed haymaker that Dean wouldn’t have believed if he hadn’t seen it himself.
Dean stepped neatly out of Lizard-face’s way and, as an afterthought, planted a boot behind the man’s knee and shoved until something cracked. The man let loose a definitely undignified sound and faceplanted into the wall. Dean winced, but the other guy, shorter and broader and with absolutely no distinguishing characteristics whatsoever, came rushing in. This time Dean simply grabbed Unremarkable Guy by the hair and swung him around, then proceeded to bounce his head off the wall a couple of times for good measure.
“What’s your problem, anyway?” he demanded irritably as he released the guy to drop in a heap beside his whimpering friend. “I was trying to be nice.”
Annoyed at the inexplicable behavior of these people whose faces, Dean realized with a strange little wrench, he would probably never see again, Dean snatched up his bags and, taking in the pallor of the man whose leg he’d broken, and the poor bastard whose face he’d reduced to red mush, he frowned.
“Guess I can’t just leave you here to wait for help, huh?” He sighed heavily, then startled at a sudden, unexpected noise at the tail end of the sound-a kind of choked-off gasp. Raising his head sharply, he caught sight of a flash of blond hair, disappearing quickly into a large, if dilapidated, house.
“Hey!” Dean shouted, scrambling up and darting in the direction of the house, “Hey-excuse me? Miss?”
The door was closed when he clattered up the steps to the wide wooden porch, (still clutching his bags, the sort of idiotic thing Jimmy would never let him hear the end of if he heard about it), and knocked on the door. Lightly. Trying for respectful.
“Miss?” he calleda gain. “I just-I thought maybe somebody should call-” Medical? Backup? No, what was the word? “A doctor? Or, um, the hospital? Ambulance? Hello?”
He dithered a bit on her porch, trying to ignore the still-audible noise of the two men alternating between whimpering and softly crying. He didn’t want to feel guilty dammit; they were the ones who’d attacked him. So he should just take his apples and toothpaste and go find Cas and the others. Go far away. Never wander down this particular road in this particular town in this particular settlement for the rest of his unnatural life.
He knocked again.
“Miss?”
When the door opened, when it clicked and Dean got a good look at the person filling the doorway, he literally clamped his tongue between his teeth to prevent the words that tried to leap out of his mouth from escaping.
“I’ve called the police.” The figure said. “Go away.”
Dean grinned a sickly grin. Backed up a bit. Looked up into long eyes he knew better than his own. Took in the fall of surprisingly long, but familiar, brown hair. Noted the shape of the jaw, the set of the shoulders, the uneasy stance that he'd once taken for granted as part of an ordinary day.
He didn’t say, “Sam.” (Sammy.) Didn’t say anything. Just backed away, rictus plastered on his face, and narrowly avoided tumbling backward down the stairs.
In the distance, a siren was drawing closer. Dean tore his eyes away from the strange, familiar, terrible figure in the doorway, turned almost a full circle in sudden geographical confusion, and finally nearly sprinted back the way he’d come.
Jesus. Jesus. How? It wasn’t possible. It was unthinkable, beyond the realm of possibility. Like the sun coming out at night.
He knew what Castiel would say, or even Claire. Eyes all big and serious, with that shared genetic predisposition to distant compasson.
“It isn’t him,” they’d say, and Dean would be forced to agree. “He’s not your Sam.”
And he’d say, “I know,” without looking directly at either of them. “I know.”
Because Dean’s Sam was dead.
________________________________________________________
TBC: Part 2!
________________________________________________________
Heh.
Every time I tried to write this over the past few weeks, it invariably started with some version of Castiel calling Dean an idiot and/or blaming him for something. Like, "This is the worst idea you've ever had," or, "This is all your fault." Also, "I can't believe I let you talk us into this," and "This whole thing is insane."
So the new opening isn't a whole lot better. But I changed it because I refuse to be bullied into writing stuff by my own brain. Here's a bit of the snark I wrote a while back:
"This whole thing is insane," Castiel said, and Dean grinned.
"Think they've started looking for us yet?"
"Dean, they started looking for us the moment somone looked in your room and noticed you were gone. It would've only taken about five minutes for them to realize that I was gone, too."
"Because we're such good buddies."
"Because I don't have the good sense not to listen to you," he ground out, and Dean's grin seemed to widen, if such a thing was even physically possible.
"Stop doing that before your face splits in half," Castiel told him.
--
There's a bit more, mostly about Dean's phobia of flight, and Castiel ragging on him. What can I say? Their relationship just makes me want to write snark. *shrugs*
__________________________
Every Snowflake is a Drop of Water
Warnings: Language, and um, silliness? Slight violence.
Parte the first
Parte the second
Parte the third
Parte the fourth
He said, “Okay.” Tried to make it sound firm, authoritative. Wasn’t sure he actually managed it, but he doubted the vendor actually noticed one way or another. He resisted the urge to dart his tongue quickly between his lips and ignored completely the sense of nervous sweat breaking out under his arms. He could do this. Of course he could.
“A pound, I guess,” he said, ruthlessly suppressing any waver of uncertainty threatening to worm its way into his voice. “The, uh, the red ones. And some bananas. Because-” Dean strangled the rest of the sentence before it could fly out of his mouth because shit, the man didn’t care why he was buying the fruit. Dean could’ve been planning to take them down to the ‘dock and fling them at random passersby and the man wouldn’t’ve cared.
“Apples, bananas.” The vendor stuffed the purchases into a sack and Dean accepted them with probably a greater air of reverence than the situation actually called for, but that wasn’t really his fault.
This was a very special occasion, after all.
He kept his thanks for the man simple, a brief nod, barest flash of eye contact, before slipping out into the afternoon crowd and weaving his way between the multitude of forms. He’d had a few hours to get used to that, at least, and he thought all things considered he’d done a pretty good job concealing his own amazement at the sheer variety contained within this tiny microcosm of a handful of city blocks. Never mind the sheer numbers, and he suspected that he wasn’t freaking out about it mostly due to the fact that the reality of the situation hadn’t fully sunk in yet.
Castiel was waiting for him in the shadow of an overhang, between a café and what looked like some kind of library. He gave Dean a pleased little smile when he waved the evidence of his successful foray at him.
“I think,” he said, as Dean approached, “I’ve found a place for us to stay, at least for a few days. Time to get our bearings, and earn some additional funds.”
“ ‘Funds’.” Dean tasted the word, and grinned in spite of himself. Castiel shot him a look.
“This is how the world operates, Dean,” he said stiffly, eyes narrowed a little. Dean shrugged.
“It’s just, you know,” he waved his free hand in a wide, vague arc, nearly braining some hapless person behind him, “All this. And that sky. And, things I never thought I’d see.” He didn’t know how to explain it, really. Something as exotic as money.
“I know a song about the sky,”Castiel blurted, face taking on an unexpected (but not unfamiliar) expression of wide-eyed innocence before just as swiftly ratcheting back to dour, with a hearty dose of irritation thrown in. “Claire, get off the line.”
“Where is the little rugrat, anyway?” Dean glanced up and down the street, but caught no sign of long blonde hair. “D’you stash her in the library?”
“At the apartment. I’m not leaving her alone in a public place. Not this close to the ‘dock.” His face switched again and Claire added, “Even though you totally could, I’m thirteen years old now and I can take care of myself! Claire! For the last time get off the line!”
Dean snorted and turned away. The link between Castiel, Jimmy and Claire made things confusing at the best of times, but there was no real need to exacerbate the situation by openly mocking any of them to Castiel’s face. Dean had no desire to bring down any sort of wrath on himself, especially in this new and slightly terrifying situation.
“Do you think it would have been better if we left her behind?” he asked, when no further response was forthcoming from Claire and Castiel drew up next to Dean, and although he’d directed the question at Castiel, it was Jimmy looking out of the eyes when he answered.
“No.”
--
Dean wanted Castiel to take him straight back to the “apartment,” practically bouncing out of his skin with excitement at the idea. Unfortunately, it seemed there were a variety of other things that needed to be acquired at the open-air market and Dean could put aside his eagerness at the prospect of being able to buy more things, though he was a little disappointed Castiel made him tag along for the stated purpose of “doing the heavy lifting.”
“We don’t have to buy furniture or anything, do we?”
“No. The apartment’s furnished. There’s no point in getting things we might have to leave behind if we need to make a quick getaway. But we need to make sure we have the right equipment for dodging the hunters, and Claire made me promise to bring her back a toy.”
Dean blinked. “A toy? Why?”
Castiel shrugged. “Who knows? Girls seem to like fuzzy soft things, even if they’re well past the age when playing with them would be appropriate.” He paused, head cocked slightly, eyes gone distant with an expression Dean knew all too well. Somewhere miles away, Claire was probably yelling her little golden head off. A tiny smile quirked the corner of Castiel’s lips, and Dean rolled his eyes.
“Listen, why don’t you just…take care of that, and I’ll go look around for the rest of the little things, toothbrushes and whatever, okay? And, uh, meet you back here.”
Castiel waved him off with a distracted air, and Dean snorted and sidled away, easing back out into the crowd of humanity flooding the street.
People! He’d seen pictures, of course, and video, and read books and knew, consciously, that the world and all the settlements housed well over nineteen billion human beings, in every shape, size, and color imaginable, and probably a few that weren’t. Conscious awareness of something, however, was a far cry from actually experiencing it, and Dean knew that when he actually had time to decompress and process everything that had happened in the last three-and-a-half hours, he’d probably have to take a minute to huddle in a corner in the bathroom and have a long-overdue freakout. There were people with purple hair, and complicated tattoos, and children whose genetic markers he couldn't even begin to guess at. And people seemed to be dressed in whatever-the-hell they felt like, some of them tottering around in shoes that should've been outlawed as cruel and unusual punishment. Dean felt grungy in the jeans and t-shirt Cas had scrounged up somewhere outside the Blue City, and he ran a hand self-consciously across the material of his shirt. It was soft to the touch, and well-worn.
Dean was basically making everything up as he went along. He was grateful that at least the crowds and buildings concealed any evidence of a horizon. He'd never have believed he had agoraphobic tendencies if it hadn't been for the disastrous near-collapse on the flight here, and Castiel had harangued him for a good half-hour for giving into what he was convinced was entirely a fabrication of Dean's mind ("What good is a phobia to anyone, Dean? You're imagining things. There's no program for that kind of neurosis."). It'd taken Claire kicking him in the shin to finally shut him up. Dean had barely manage not to lose his lunch all over the three (four) of them.
He was currently mostly just ignoring the fact that the myriad faces around him were all not only wholly unfamiliar, but completely different from one another. He wondered what Claire thought about all this. He couldn’t ask Castiel, of course-he'd retained his usual equanimity in the face of the bizarre. Jimmy might have something to say on the subject , though, and Dean resolved to ask him about it next time he got a chance. They were a lot closer in age and life experience , even if the smaller man's exposure to the outside world was being mostly buffered by Castiel's consciousness.
Ducking off the street and wandering through a small shop with the words “drug store” emblazoned on the front, Dean quickly acquired seven toothbrushes, of varying degrees of softness (why hadn’t Castiel thought to explain the significance of bristle stiffness at some point in his long lecture about blending in and survival in the outside world?) some kind of toothpaste flavored like bubblegum, which Dean acquired purely to see the look on Jimmy’s face, and a variety of soaps and shampoos that would probably be sufficient to keep the three of them clean well into the next millennium. He ignored the strange look the clerk kept trying to direct his way-he was a tourist, right? And tourists did all kinds of crazy inexplicable shit, it was practically expected of them-pocketed the remains of his funds (heh, ‘funds’) and strolled out into the street back the way he'd come.
When he finally realized he was being followed, he was halfway back to where he’d left Castiel, and the realization shocked him so completely that he actually came to a dead stop in the middle of the crowd, and only barely managed to cover his confusion by pretending to peruse the items on offer behind the nearest shop’s windows. Unfortunately it was some kind of lingerie shop, and mannequins kind of gave Dean the creeps.
He should run. He knew he should run, drop everything and just go. Leave Castiel, and Claire, and Jimmy-when he didn’t turn up, they’d know something had gone wrong, and maybe they’d make it out. Get away. He could buy them some time, at least.
He slipped back out into the street as nonchalantly as possible, through the spring was gone from his step and he had to concentrate to keep his mouth from setting itself into a hard line.
The problem was that Dean didn’t know this place, or even this kind of place. He was surrounded by unfamiliar forms and faces, random wild colors and sounds and a kind of ongoing, low-level chaos that he really couldn’t make sense of. The streets were laid out haphazardly, apparently with no forethought at all, and Dean didn’t know the layout, couldn’t begin to guess at it. The main road branched off into countless smaller footpaths and alleys and streets, and Dean turned down one at random, then when it branched picked another, and then a third. He was far away from any sort of place intended for tourists now, he knew. Not lost, but on the way.
Dean swore under his breath when another random turning brought him up short against a whitewashed wall, wrapped around somebody’s property. An open sewer nearby filled the air with the smell of slime and soap, and his nostrils flared.
The hair on the back of his neck prickled and he dropped the bags of apples and soap and toothbrushes near his feet and drew one deep, steadying breath. Turned around.
“Oh,” he blurted, eyebrows shooting halfway up his forehead.
He almost laughed at the two men doing their level best to loom menacingly behind him. They were big, sure, but not in a way that screamed ‘well fed,’ ‘highly trained,’ or even ‘particularly stable.’ The bad hair and tattoos didn’t help their appearance any, and Dean felt his mouth open slightly as comprehension finally dawned.
“Muggers?” Dean wondered aloud, “I’m being mugged?”
He was so relieved he was inclined to just give them everything he had-they looked like they needed the soap and toothpaste a lot more than he did, anyway. He offered a little wave and pointed at the bags at his feet.
“Hey, guys,” he said, with his best ‘harmless nice-guy’ grin, “I’m not lookin’ for any trouble. You see something in there you like, you help yourselves, okay?”
But maybe that wasn’t how this sort of exchange was supposed to go. Castiel would probably have something to say about alpha males and macho posturing and the human capacity for unmotivated, pointless violence, or whatever. Dean guessed they’d probably picked him out as someone alone and harmless, and in need of having his face redecorated. Because apparently that was the sort of thing people did to each other out in the real world. Dean had seen movies. He knew about this kind of stuff.
So it wasn’t a major surprise when mugger (assailant?) number one, the one with a big stupid tattoo of some kind of lizard thing right across his face, lunged clumsily in his direction, fist flying wide in a poorly-executed haymaker that Dean wouldn’t have believed if he hadn’t seen it himself.
Dean stepped neatly out of Lizard-face’s way and, as an afterthought, planted a boot behind the man’s knee and shoved until something cracked. The man let loose a definitely undignified sound and faceplanted into the wall. Dean winced, but the other guy, shorter and broader and with absolutely no distinguishing characteristics whatsoever, came rushing in. This time Dean simply grabbed Unremarkable Guy by the hair and swung him around, then proceeded to bounce his head off the wall a couple of times for good measure.
“What’s your problem, anyway?” he demanded irritably as he released the guy to drop in a heap beside his whimpering friend. “I was trying to be nice.”
Annoyed at the inexplicable behavior of these people whose faces, Dean realized with a strange little wrench, he would probably never see again, Dean snatched up his bags and, taking in the pallor of the man whose leg he’d broken, and the poor bastard whose face he’d reduced to red mush, he frowned.
“Guess I can’t just leave you here to wait for help, huh?” He sighed heavily, then startled at a sudden, unexpected noise at the tail end of the sound-a kind of choked-off gasp. Raising his head sharply, he caught sight of a flash of blond hair, disappearing quickly into a large, if dilapidated, house.
“Hey!” Dean shouted, scrambling up and darting in the direction of the house, “Hey-excuse me? Miss?”
The door was closed when he clattered up the steps to the wide wooden porch, (still clutching his bags, the sort of idiotic thing Jimmy would never let him hear the end of if he heard about it), and knocked on the door. Lightly. Trying for respectful.
“Miss?” he calleda gain. “I just-I thought maybe somebody should call-” Medical? Backup? No, what was the word? “A doctor? Or, um, the hospital? Ambulance? Hello?”
He dithered a bit on her porch, trying to ignore the still-audible noise of the two men alternating between whimpering and softly crying. He didn’t want to feel guilty dammit; they were the ones who’d attacked him. So he should just take his apples and toothpaste and go find Cas and the others. Go far away. Never wander down this particular road in this particular town in this particular settlement for the rest of his unnatural life.
He knocked again.
“Miss?”
When the door opened, when it clicked and Dean got a good look at the person filling the doorway, he literally clamped his tongue between his teeth to prevent the words that tried to leap out of his mouth from escaping.
“I’ve called the police.” The figure said. “Go away.”
Dean grinned a sickly grin. Backed up a bit. Looked up into long eyes he knew better than his own. Took in the fall of surprisingly long, but familiar, brown hair. Noted the shape of the jaw, the set of the shoulders, the uneasy stance that he'd once taken for granted as part of an ordinary day.
He didn’t say, “Sam.” (Sammy.) Didn’t say anything. Just backed away, rictus plastered on his face, and narrowly avoided tumbling backward down the stairs.
In the distance, a siren was drawing closer. Dean tore his eyes away from the strange, familiar, terrible figure in the doorway, turned almost a full circle in sudden geographical confusion, and finally nearly sprinted back the way he’d come.
Jesus. Jesus. How? It wasn’t possible. It was unthinkable, beyond the realm of possibility. Like the sun coming out at night.
He knew what Castiel would say, or even Claire. Eyes all big and serious, with that shared genetic predisposition to distant compasson.
“It isn’t him,” they’d say, and Dean would be forced to agree. “He’s not your Sam.”
And he’d say, “I know,” without looking directly at either of them. “I know.”
Because Dean’s Sam was dead.
________________________________________________________
TBC: Part 2!
________________________________________________________
Heh.
Every time I tried to write this over the past few weeks, it invariably started with some version of Castiel calling Dean an idiot and/or blaming him for something. Like, "This is the worst idea you've ever had," or, "This is all your fault." Also, "I can't believe I let you talk us into this," and "This whole thing is insane."
So the new opening isn't a whole lot better. But I changed it because I refuse to be bullied into writing stuff by my own brain. Here's a bit of the snark I wrote a while back:
"This whole thing is insane," Castiel said, and Dean grinned.
"Think they've started looking for us yet?"
"Dean, they started looking for us the moment somone looked in your room and noticed you were gone. It would've only taken about five minutes for them to realize that I was gone, too."
"Because we're such good buddies."
"Because I don't have the good sense not to listen to you," he ground out, and Dean's grin seemed to widen, if such a thing was even physically possible.
"Stop doing that before your face splits in half," Castiel told him.
--
There's a bit more, mostly about Dean's phobia of flight, and Castiel ragging on him. What can I say? Their relationship just makes me want to write snark. *shrugs*
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