[Fic] indiachick: Sixteen Snapshots from the House of Pachinko
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Title: Sixteen Snapshots from the House of Pachinko
Writer: indiachick
Alternate Link: A03
Status of work: complete
Characters and/or pairings: Sam, Dean, Eva (Dr. Roberts' assistant), OCs
Rating: PG-13
Warnings, kinks & contents: [Click to read]permanent injury (Great Wall of Sam/blindness
Length: 7000 words
Summary: Dean can power up a whole city with his quick hands and crazy energy. Sam’s barely keeping a light bulb lit for the sake of his brother. This is how they are, and they are kind of okay, except when they’re not.
Living above a pachinko parlor in Chinatown, Sam and Dean adapt in different ways to the pile of crap that’s brought them there. Unbeknownst to them, they are being watched. Some of the watchers are benevolent, some not very, but all of them are curious.
Reccer's notes: Does "READ THIS OR YOU'RE DOING YOURSELF A GREAT DISSERVICE" count as a note? If ever there were an appropriate time for such a note, this fic would be it. The atmosphere of this fic is so rich with spirits, No. 232 full to bursting with them as they linger in their specific ways and travel, some half-detected, and others completely undiscernable. And the way the whole house and all its (dis)contents filter the Winchesters and all their ghosts, their dreams and memories of other monsters, other highways, other mythologies full of Hell and hallucination and alcoholism, is sheer art.
You need this in your life. It's gorgeous and Sam and Dean are perfect and so are all of the other voices and bodies and spirits that join them here.
[Short excerpt]Among the tsukomogami, you have the tiny pearl-studded dragons that breathe green fire. They do so only on full-moon nights, preferring to be asleep on all other days. The moon is heavy and condescending to them, but still they pretend. They are from an 18th century artisan in rural Hokkaido, but when they dream, they dream of flying above the orange arches of Fushimi Inari.
The Laughing Buddha and the Three-Legged Money Frog compose haikus by night, but the Buddha mostly wins because the Frog is limited in vocabulary by the glass ball in its mouth. The Frog is waiting for the love-poem scroll’s one-hundredth birthday so it can get its soul and come alive. Then maybe the Frog’s haikus will get written down elegantly instead of being spat out around the glass ball.
The abalone Mary came to Sachi from a Christian missionary in Yokosuka, and will only tell stories about the woes of crustaceans. If asked about the Bible, it will pretend to be deaf.
The Elephant That Ate A City feels lonely because it is from the streets of Chandni Chowk, and does not know any Japanese.