(A)Typical Hunts 1/5
Title: (A)Typical Hunts - Tip-Off 1/5
Author:
lorely_lane
Beta:
lanerose
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: PG-13
Length: This chapter is 1881 words.
Warnings: Kinda spoils the story. If you’re seeing this through my lj or through the supernaturalfic community, highlight here to see: Deathfic If not, then sorry - I’m not html savvy enough to do any better.
Spoilers: Up through BUABS
Pairings/characters: Gen. Dean, Sam. OFC and assorted OCs as part of jobs.
(A)Typical Hunts
Chapter 1: Tip-Off
No matter how screwed up a hunt got, Dean could always break it down into five stages. Yeah, something could go wrong somewhere along the line, but no matter how strange or out-of-control it got, a hunt would always follow that basic formula. First, there would be the tip-off - they’d get wind of the new hunt. Then would come the research. At some point, there’d be a break in the case, some critical lead that would unravel the whole mess. Then would come the preparations and legwork - tracking down what they needed to resolve the situation. And finally, the grand finale, the big confrontation. That was how a hunt went. The aftermath varied depending on details - would they head off in search of another job? Or would they hole up for a little while and tend their wounds? Because the macho bullshit they were both guilty of did no good in the long run, and once everything for the hunt was taken care of, they both ensured the other healed up as necessary.
Sam may have craved normal, but Dean craved routine. It may not have been a normal routine, but it was his. He clung to it fiercely and hated when it was disrupted - when Sammy left, when Dad left, when Dad died, when -
Sam had wanted stability, had longed for a job and a home and a place where everyone knew his name or some shit like that. Dean had his stability already in the road and his car and his gun and his family, and it broke him a little each time something chipped away at it.
~
She wanted to laugh at him when she first met him - just laugh right in his face. Because, seriously? Agent Robert Halford? For chrissake, she had another job working part-time in a record shop in the town over. She sure as hell should recognize the name Rob Halford, lead vocalist for Judas Priest and so-called “Metal God” - and that’s not even counting Brenden Hooper’s weekly visits to the store and his frighteningly zealous attempts to convert her to a heavy metal fan.
But some instincts of self-preservation stayed her scorn and instead, she smiled politely as though she’d fallen for his story and his smile, as he’d clearly expected of her. Because despite that lovely smile, he was… creepy. Maybe it was the heavy jacket he wore despite the summer sun and the broken A/C. Maybe it was his eyes - just a bit manic and fever-bright set in a face that moved and smiled and spoke but was really as blank as a plastic mask.
“No offense to your fine establishment, Miss Chase - may I call you Fiona? Great - but why exactly would Mr. Wilkins eat here so much?”
“Jack could burn water,” she said bluntly. “I’ve never met anyone more hopeless at cooking - Jesus, even using the microwave - than him. He lived just down the street so this was the most convenient place for him.”
She wondered why this man - when he clearly wasn’t actually FBI - was here asking about Jack Wilkins. They thought he’d disappeared nearly three weeks ago. Truthfully, it was hard to pin down. Jack had been a bit of a loner and no one had realized he was gone until the people at his company had called his office for tech support and discovered he hadn’t come in for work since the last Friday. Fiona still felt illogically guilty for not realizing sooner when he’d missed the meatloaf special on Saturday.
“So you knew him pretty well then?”
“As well as anyone, I guess. He wasn’t too social.”
“And did he ever say anything? Was he, ah, worried about anything? Noticing anything unusual?”
“Nope - seemed happy. Managed to bag himself a new girlfriend.”
His smile warmed fractionally as his hair ruffled in a breeze, all the way down to the tendrils at the base of his neck. There must be a nice draft where he was standing, she thought jealously, as he proceeded to question her further about Jack’s girlfriend. Fiona had seen them together a few times. The woman had been attractive - no beauty model objectively speaking but compelling, with a confidence that carried off her slightly too strong jaw and a buxom figure that hearkened back to the screen goddesses of the classic black and white films. She thought she’d heard him calling her Lana.
When he finally left, seeming smugly pleased to hear that Jack and Lana had been planning to get together at her place, which Jack had had yet to see, she took a deep breath and let it out slowly. She was inordinately glad to see him gone, and she couldn’t understand why he unsettled her so severely.
~
You’ve lost weight again, you know.
Dude, stop with the mother-hen act, seriously.
Fine, whatever. I hear scrawny is the new look these days, anyway.
~
Sam found that he kind of liked Arizona. They didn’t go on many jobs in this part of the country and he found it a refreshing change from the humid Midwestern forests that they seemed to spend most of their time in. There was a strange stark beauty in the severe landscape, especially now that they were passing into the Tonto National Forest - a misleading name if ever there was one. Vast open spaces, orangey dirt dotted with the muted green of low scrubby bushes, and clear skies, somehow more immense here than anywhere else but cut through with towering saguaros - the so-called forests. Even the mesas and cliffsides that jutted up across the terrain were intriguingly alien with their red and yellow and white shades, and their sheer suddenness.
Plus, it was nice to not be so cold all the time. The air conditioning in the Impala was definitely not up to tangling with temperatures in the hundreds, and while Dean was clearly suffering and short-tempered, Sam was enjoying the chance to shed his hoodie and his multiple layers of shirts.
The flickers at the corners of his vision flared ominously, and he quickly wrenched his attention away from the empty sky, blue as the pictures he’d seen of the Caribbean. He’d quickly learned that the visions were often exacerbated when his field of sight was fairly blank, as though they thought his eyes needed to be busier or something.
He’d felt it happening when Meg had been expelled, felt her try to dig in metaphysically speaking as though she could cling to the very crevices of his brain. And when she was ripped away, he’d felt something… snap, something break deep in his mind, resounding with ominous finality.
At first, he’d ignored what he’d felt, figuring it was simply a side effect of the exorcism, especially given the unusual and extenuating nature of how it had been done. But that night he’d had one of those dreams, and the next night he’d had three - each directing him in a wholly new direction. Within a week, his nights had become a nonstop panorama of premonitory nightmares.
When the visions had started intruding during his waking hours, he had been terrified - convinced he was going to be subsumed, his mind buried by the unceasing images until he entirely lost his hold on the external world - assuming, of course, that his mental movie marathon of blood and death and horror didn’t splinter his sanity first.
The next few days he experienced in broken flickers, snatched between the end of one vision and the onset of another. He remembered Dean, eyes wide and vulnerable and his jaw clenched stubborn and hard as granite in an attempt to belie that vulnerability as he urged some pills on Sam. He remembered the coldness of the water he drank and how it made his teeth ache in welcome distraction from the pain burrowing outward from the center of his brain as though it could burst from his forehead in the Alien version of Athena leaping from Zeus’s head. He remembered being bundled into the Impala, Dean surprisingly adept and gentle at maneuvering Sam’s larger frame, and how everything seemed to swim around him as Sam was doped to the gills with the strongest painkillers they’d scrounged and stolen in an effort to alleviate the pain in his head.
He remembered a brief view of a rundown store front, his forehead pressed against the car window and the driver’s seat empty next to him. He remembered Dean’s hand warm against his neck and his fingers twitching unconsciously in mute testament to his brother’s frustration. He remembered opening his eyes to a steering wheel an inch from his nose and realizing that his head was pillowed in Dean’s lap, that he must have tipped him over at some point in an effort to make him more comfortable while he was incapacitated by the visions. More store fronts and Sam had realized that Dean was searching for a psychic, hoping for help. Earlier phone calls to Bobby and Ellen had yielded nothing and Missouri had insisted that she couldn’t help without seeing Sam in person - but she was miles and days away. Sam had known he didn’t have time for the drive and Dean’s desperate search told him that Dean had realized it too.
He remembered staring at Dean, noticing the shadowed pits his eyes had become and the way his skin stretched too tight over the bones of his face and thinking he looked more like a living skull than his big brother. And then finally he remembered a couch, fake velvet that scratched, eggplant purple, and smelling strongly of cigarettes. And he remembered a husky contralto voice, honey-rich like Ella Fitzgerald’s, saying words he couldn’t catch, and Dean’s voice saying his name, insistent and sharp with ill-suppressed dread.
Automatically squinting against the brightening light even though he knew it wasn’t his eyes that were seeing it, he fished around for the constitutional law textbook they’d picked up secondhand when they’d passed through Phoenix, ignoring Dean’s worried glance. They’d stayed with Annalise Mariden for nearly a month while Sam learned how to live with a brain with a smashed-to-gravel psychic dam as Annalise had described it - the trickle of premonitions he’d grown used to had become a mighty and steady river and there was no fixing that. Eventually, he learned to relegate the visions that played in his head like a tv stuck on without the remote control to something like white noise, or the audiovisual version of that, though some of the more insistent visions still blasted through. And when his control slipped, they’d discovered that reading was the best method of helping him regain his equilibrium.
Dean had tried to make a joke out of that, in reference to his longstanding opinion of Sam as the most gigantic geek alive, but his fear had been still too fresh and Sam’s control still too tenuous for him to really pull it off. Nowadays, Dean carried a dog-eared paperback of Ender’s Game for Sam in the same way a diabetic would carry insulin or an allergic person would carry an epi-pen. And at night, which still sucked, Dean would read aloud, awkward but resolute, because it helped stave off the visions that came in his sleep.
Chapter 2
Author:
lorely_lane
Beta:
lanerose
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: PG-13
Length: This chapter is 1881 words.
Warnings: Kinda spoils the story. If you’re seeing this through my lj or through the supernaturalfic community, highlight here to see: Deathfic If not, then sorry - I’m not html savvy enough to do any better.
Spoilers: Up through BUABS
Pairings/characters: Gen. Dean, Sam. OFC and assorted OCs as part of jobs.
(A)Typical Hunts
Chapter 1: Tip-Off
No matter how screwed up a hunt got, Dean could always break it down into five stages. Yeah, something could go wrong somewhere along the line, but no matter how strange or out-of-control it got, a hunt would always follow that basic formula. First, there would be the tip-off - they’d get wind of the new hunt. Then would come the research. At some point, there’d be a break in the case, some critical lead that would unravel the whole mess. Then would come the preparations and legwork - tracking down what they needed to resolve the situation. And finally, the grand finale, the big confrontation. That was how a hunt went. The aftermath varied depending on details - would they head off in search of another job? Or would they hole up for a little while and tend their wounds? Because the macho bullshit they were both guilty of did no good in the long run, and once everything for the hunt was taken care of, they both ensured the other healed up as necessary.
Sam may have craved normal, but Dean craved routine. It may not have been a normal routine, but it was his. He clung to it fiercely and hated when it was disrupted - when Sammy left, when Dad left, when Dad died, when -
Sam had wanted stability, had longed for a job and a home and a place where everyone knew his name or some shit like that. Dean had his stability already in the road and his car and his gun and his family, and it broke him a little each time something chipped away at it.
~
She wanted to laugh at him when she first met him - just laugh right in his face. Because, seriously? Agent Robert Halford? For chrissake, she had another job working part-time in a record shop in the town over. She sure as hell should recognize the name Rob Halford, lead vocalist for Judas Priest and so-called “Metal God” - and that’s not even counting Brenden Hooper’s weekly visits to the store and his frighteningly zealous attempts to convert her to a heavy metal fan.
But some instincts of self-preservation stayed her scorn and instead, she smiled politely as though she’d fallen for his story and his smile, as he’d clearly expected of her. Because despite that lovely smile, he was… creepy. Maybe it was the heavy jacket he wore despite the summer sun and the broken A/C. Maybe it was his eyes - just a bit manic and fever-bright set in a face that moved and smiled and spoke but was really as blank as a plastic mask.
“No offense to your fine establishment, Miss Chase - may I call you Fiona? Great - but why exactly would Mr. Wilkins eat here so much?”
“Jack could burn water,” she said bluntly. “I’ve never met anyone more hopeless at cooking - Jesus, even using the microwave - than him. He lived just down the street so this was the most convenient place for him.”
She wondered why this man - when he clearly wasn’t actually FBI - was here asking about Jack Wilkins. They thought he’d disappeared nearly three weeks ago. Truthfully, it was hard to pin down. Jack had been a bit of a loner and no one had realized he was gone until the people at his company had called his office for tech support and discovered he hadn’t come in for work since the last Friday. Fiona still felt illogically guilty for not realizing sooner when he’d missed the meatloaf special on Saturday.
“So you knew him pretty well then?”
“As well as anyone, I guess. He wasn’t too social.”
“And did he ever say anything? Was he, ah, worried about anything? Noticing anything unusual?”
“Nope - seemed happy. Managed to bag himself a new girlfriend.”
His smile warmed fractionally as his hair ruffled in a breeze, all the way down to the tendrils at the base of his neck. There must be a nice draft where he was standing, she thought jealously, as he proceeded to question her further about Jack’s girlfriend. Fiona had seen them together a few times. The woman had been attractive - no beauty model objectively speaking but compelling, with a confidence that carried off her slightly too strong jaw and a buxom figure that hearkened back to the screen goddesses of the classic black and white films. She thought she’d heard him calling her Lana.
When he finally left, seeming smugly pleased to hear that Jack and Lana had been planning to get together at her place, which Jack had had yet to see, she took a deep breath and let it out slowly. She was inordinately glad to see him gone, and she couldn’t understand why he unsettled her so severely.
~
You’ve lost weight again, you know.
Dude, stop with the mother-hen act, seriously.
Fine, whatever. I hear scrawny is the new look these days, anyway.
~
Sam found that he kind of liked Arizona. They didn’t go on many jobs in this part of the country and he found it a refreshing change from the humid Midwestern forests that they seemed to spend most of their time in. There was a strange stark beauty in the severe landscape, especially now that they were passing into the Tonto National Forest - a misleading name if ever there was one. Vast open spaces, orangey dirt dotted with the muted green of low scrubby bushes, and clear skies, somehow more immense here than anywhere else but cut through with towering saguaros - the so-called forests. Even the mesas and cliffsides that jutted up across the terrain were intriguingly alien with their red and yellow and white shades, and their sheer suddenness.
Plus, it was nice to not be so cold all the time. The air conditioning in the Impala was definitely not up to tangling with temperatures in the hundreds, and while Dean was clearly suffering and short-tempered, Sam was enjoying the chance to shed his hoodie and his multiple layers of shirts.
The flickers at the corners of his vision flared ominously, and he quickly wrenched his attention away from the empty sky, blue as the pictures he’d seen of the Caribbean. He’d quickly learned that the visions were often exacerbated when his field of sight was fairly blank, as though they thought his eyes needed to be busier or something.
He’d felt it happening when Meg had been expelled, felt her try to dig in metaphysically speaking as though she could cling to the very crevices of his brain. And when she was ripped away, he’d felt something… snap, something break deep in his mind, resounding with ominous finality.
At first, he’d ignored what he’d felt, figuring it was simply a side effect of the exorcism, especially given the unusual and extenuating nature of how it had been done. But that night he’d had one of those dreams, and the next night he’d had three - each directing him in a wholly new direction. Within a week, his nights had become a nonstop panorama of premonitory nightmares.
When the visions had started intruding during his waking hours, he had been terrified - convinced he was going to be subsumed, his mind buried by the unceasing images until he entirely lost his hold on the external world - assuming, of course, that his mental movie marathon of blood and death and horror didn’t splinter his sanity first.
The next few days he experienced in broken flickers, snatched between the end of one vision and the onset of another. He remembered Dean, eyes wide and vulnerable and his jaw clenched stubborn and hard as granite in an attempt to belie that vulnerability as he urged some pills on Sam. He remembered the coldness of the water he drank and how it made his teeth ache in welcome distraction from the pain burrowing outward from the center of his brain as though it could burst from his forehead in the Alien version of Athena leaping from Zeus’s head. He remembered being bundled into the Impala, Dean surprisingly adept and gentle at maneuvering Sam’s larger frame, and how everything seemed to swim around him as Sam was doped to the gills with the strongest painkillers they’d scrounged and stolen in an effort to alleviate the pain in his head.
He remembered a brief view of a rundown store front, his forehead pressed against the car window and the driver’s seat empty next to him. He remembered Dean’s hand warm against his neck and his fingers twitching unconsciously in mute testament to his brother’s frustration. He remembered opening his eyes to a steering wheel an inch from his nose and realizing that his head was pillowed in Dean’s lap, that he must have tipped him over at some point in an effort to make him more comfortable while he was incapacitated by the visions. More store fronts and Sam had realized that Dean was searching for a psychic, hoping for help. Earlier phone calls to Bobby and Ellen had yielded nothing and Missouri had insisted that she couldn’t help without seeing Sam in person - but she was miles and days away. Sam had known he didn’t have time for the drive and Dean’s desperate search told him that Dean had realized it too.
He remembered staring at Dean, noticing the shadowed pits his eyes had become and the way his skin stretched too tight over the bones of his face and thinking he looked more like a living skull than his big brother. And then finally he remembered a couch, fake velvet that scratched, eggplant purple, and smelling strongly of cigarettes. And he remembered a husky contralto voice, honey-rich like Ella Fitzgerald’s, saying words he couldn’t catch, and Dean’s voice saying his name, insistent and sharp with ill-suppressed dread.
Automatically squinting against the brightening light even though he knew it wasn’t his eyes that were seeing it, he fished around for the constitutional law textbook they’d picked up secondhand when they’d passed through Phoenix, ignoring Dean’s worried glance. They’d stayed with Annalise Mariden for nearly a month while Sam learned how to live with a brain with a smashed-to-gravel psychic dam as Annalise had described it - the trickle of premonitions he’d grown used to had become a mighty and steady river and there was no fixing that. Eventually, he learned to relegate the visions that played in his head like a tv stuck on without the remote control to something like white noise, or the audiovisual version of that, though some of the more insistent visions still blasted through. And when his control slipped, they’d discovered that reading was the best method of helping him regain his equilibrium.
Dean had tried to make a joke out of that, in reference to his longstanding opinion of Sam as the most gigantic geek alive, but his fear had been still too fresh and Sam’s control still too tenuous for him to really pull it off. Nowadays, Dean carried a dog-eared paperback of Ender’s Game for Sam in the same way a diabetic would carry insulin or an allergic person would carry an epi-pen. And at night, which still sucked, Dean would read aloud, awkward but resolute, because it helped stave off the visions that came in his sleep.
Chapter 2