Crossing Business With Bridges
Y'all
This week's avoidance exercise....enjoy.
Title: Crossing Business With Bridges
Author: pdragon76
Worcount: 5000ish
Rating: M (for general potty-mouthedness)
Spoilers: through AHBL2
Summary: Dean underestimates a job in a fairly major way.
Disclaimer: All things Supernatural belong to Kripke and not me (Rinse & repeat)
A/N: Unbeta'd so all niggles, wtf's and humdingers are mine, all mine. Inspired by challenge # 6 over at
found_fic_spn
If you haven't checked it out yet, what are you waiting for?
Crossing Business With Bridges
The jacket was fucked. He lifted his sopping arms and flicked water uselessly from his hands. It didn’t matter anymore. He’d been too wet for it to matter seconds after the pipes had burst. Dean stood in the centre of the tiny room with his hands on his hips and tried to focus. Say for instance, on something other than what the water was doing to the leather. But man…three hundred dollar jacket…come on. At least the high pressure deluge buffeting him wasn’t sewage. Silver lining numero uno. But it was incessant, and loud, and very, very cold. His hair was plastered to his skull, and the water ran in rivulets down his face. He narrowed his eyes, cocked his chin a little to the left and the river hung a right towards his ear, started cascading in a waterfall from his jaw. He blinked wetly. He was utterly drenched but for all the attention he paid that fact, he could have been standing in broad sunshiney daylight. The point was, he wasn’t. He was in Gina Urquhart’s utility room in her basement, and it was filling with water. Fast.
Dean stepped to the left once and rattled the door handle again, as if the element of surprise was going to help. It didn’t. The handle swung smoothly, unhindered, but despite his entire thrown weight behind the door it wasn’t going anywhere. He stepped back and got a good three step run up, threw his shoulder against the wood one last time. Nothing. Fuck. He ran his hand up through his slick hair so it spiked sideways at his temples. The water was already pooling around the cuffs of his jeans. He shuffled his rapidly submerging boots with a long, aqueous sniff.
On the other side of the door where all things dry and free roamed, Sam looked down at his own shoes. He waited until the thumping stopped on the other side.
‘No good?’
‘It’s not budging.’ Dean’s voice was muffled. And calm. Surprisingly calm. He didn’t even sound annoyed. Sam ventured forth with a jibe.
‘Try opening it inwards.’
Silence. For just a beat. ‘Quit fucking around and get me outta here.’
* * * * * *
‘You got anything over there?’
Dean looked up at him blankly from the book he was reading. ‘You talking to me?’
Sam gave him a liberal dose of expectant face. ‘Who else would I be talking to?’
‘No, it’s just - I didn’t...’ He grimaced. ‘I don’t think I’m reading what you think I’m reading.’
Sam closed his eyes. He saw out a self-imposed cooling off period before he spoke again.
‘What are you reading, Dean?’ he asked patiently.
Dean slowly lifted the cover off the tabletop. He could see from Sam’s face that any sudden movement was ill-advised.
‘Seicho Jutsu?’
Dean shrugged sheepishly.
‘So we’ve been in this library for an hour and a half and the only thing you’ve found is a book on martial arts? Have you found anything useful since we got here?’
‘On Maggie Knight? No. But on the other hand, this book does have an index listing for armlocks, so…’ He spun the text book round for Sam to see, winked at him. ‘You know, ideal for those high pressure gee-I-could-really-use-an-armlock-about-now situations.’
Sam raised his eyebrows. ‘Like that bar in Houston?’
Dean snapped his fingers. ‘Exactly. Totally would have come in handy.’’
Sam narrowed his eyes. ‘Yeah? ‘Cause I seem to recall it was about six LESS beers that would have come in handy that night.’
Dean let that one by the keeper, slammed the book shut.
‘So what have you got over there, Geek Boy? Another standard salt and burn or are we actually gonna break a sweat on this one?’
‘Well, the good news is we know how she died. Drowned in the utility closet in the basement during a storm in 1947. Bad news is she was cremated, so no salt and burn.’
Dean rubbed his hands together. ‘So, good old fashioned exorcism?’
‘Maybe. While you’ve been brushing up on your torque locks over there I’ve been compiling a list -‘ Dean rolled his eyes ‘-of all the sightings and reports associated with the house in the last fifteen years. It’s really quite interesting.’
‘You mean actually interesting or Dear God, stab me in the eye with a pen?’
Sam tried and failed to suppress his amusement.
‘No, I mean actually interesting. The activity starts every year around April, random events all over the house, but as the year goes on it starts to converge on the basement. March thirteenth, every year, utility closet floods.’ Sam tapped his notepad with his biro.
Dean gave him a deadpan stare. ‘Pass me that pen?’
‘Dean, I’m serious. Two years ago a little girl died in that basement. Last year Gina Urquhart was in Australia for the whole of March, but she came home to a waterlogged basement and a dead cat bobbing around in the closet. I mean, it’s not exactly flipping the universal EMF needle but this is still definitely our kind of gig.’
Dean rubbed his jaw, made a face. ‘Alright. But after we get Maggie to hang up her rubber duckies, we’re finding ourselves a proper job.’
‘Whatever you say.’
‘I’m serious. None of this mamby pamby exorcism shit. I want shotguns, smackdown, explosions, the whole shebang. I want armlocks, Sam.’
* * * * * *
‘This is not good.’
Dean said it out loud as the water lapped at his groin. Parts of him he preferred to keep warm were about to get an arctic taste of basement water. And that wasn’t the only shit airborne and speeding fan-ward. He’d given the situation a pretty thorough going over, and come to an undesirable conclusion. He was fucked. Not just might be fucked, which would have been okay. Dean lived his entire life in Might Be Fucked. He owned real estate there. This was south of that border into Fucked Central.
On Sam’s insistence, he’d gotten down on his hands and knees before the water got too high and groped around for any missed resources on the floor of the closet. He’d come up with three paper clips and a ballpoint pen that had rolled under the shelving unit. When he’d shouted his findings through the door, Sam had for some reason chosen to mock him.
‘So when you’re done with your filing, you’ll get back to me about this burst pipe thing?’
Dean had blinked at the blank expanse of the door. He opened his mouth, shut it, then started again.
‘So, any ideas?’ He could kick his ass later. Correction, would kick his ass later. Repeatedly.
‘Maybe we can do something with the pen. I mean, other than write your famous last words.’
‘How about I stab you with it?’ Dean muttered, fishing in his pockets for anything he might have missed. ‘How about I jot that down?’
He had his pocket knife and his pick. But his brilliant idea of taking the door completely off its hinges had ended in failure when the screws all turned fine, but threaded themselves. And you couldn’t pick an unlocked door. It just wasn’t opening. This bitch of a spirit was really starting to piss him off.
‘Listen, Sam, you think we can hurry this along? I’m ass deep in borewater here.’
Sam didn’t answer right away, and when he did his tone had changed completely. ‘Already? How long you think?’
Dean looked around. A decomposing rat floated past his hip and he flicked at it with the back of his hand. Gross. He wondered what else was floating around in here. He sized up the room and made some rough calculations.
‘I’d say ‘bout twenty minutes.’
‘Seriously? That’s it?’
‘Maybe twenty five. But Sam? Do me a favor and bet on twenty.’
tap tappy here for Part II http://pdragon76.livejournal.com/4006.html