[fic] brightly_lit: Traffic Stop
[ Gen ]
Title: Traffic Stop
Writer: brightly_lit
Status of work: complete
Characters and/or pairings: OC, Dean, Sam
Rating: PG-13
Warnings, kinks & contents: Outsider POV.
Length: ~1700 words
Summary: A small-town cop with a habit of taking care of "bad guys" using his own questionable methods pulls over a black '67 Impala for a minor traffic violation.
"Laughing, he was laughing. These psychopaths. What had Troy gotten himself into?"
Reccer's notes: I think generally when you read outsider POV fic, the Winchesters are either seen as tragic or terrifying. Occasionally, smokin' hot. This fic is remarkable, to me, for being more even-handed in its portrayal. The perception this outsider's POV creates is no less dissonant when it clashes with the Winchesters that the reader knows, has internalized, and the outsider is no less wrong or hmm, tapered in his portrayal of the Winchesters, but he is also extremely right. Not in an "astute observations offered up from beyond the chaotic vortex that is the Winchester hivemind" sort of way, but in a manner very much his own. There's an evenness to him that by rights should come across as quotidian and expected, but is actually very special indeed.
It's fun to see the general public's misperceptions of the Winchesters, not only for their true identities/characters being misunderstood--also for those things being quite well understood, if from a perspective we're not always privy to as readers/viewers. Since the Winchesters are so often the POV characters in canon and in fic, we don't always get to see the world outside of their quite biased perceptions of it, their casual (but all the same, not necessarily vicious?) violences.
The interactions between the outsider POV and Sam and Dean here is a series of incompletes and preconceptions on both sides, and the end result is pitch perfect.
[Short excerpt]Then he saw an expression he wasn’t expecting at all: bored irritation, as if Troy was a not-unexpected, minor irritation, the like of which Dean saw every day. Dean’s eyes flicked to Troy’s walkie-talkie, where Walt was just reporting that he was only a couple minutes away. “Fuck,” Dean muttered.
It happened so fast, Troy couldn’t have said exactly what Dean did, but it was definitely Dean, because the passenger jumped out of the car as Dean dragged a sagging Troy over, wrenched open the door while bracing Troy’s weight, and tossed him in the backseat, too dazed to struggle. He’d hit his head--in fact, due to the sound of ringing metal echoing in his mind, Troy thought Dean must have slammed his head against the car.