Fic: My Innermost Self is not a Hugger (SPN)
Title: My Innermost Self is not a Hugger
Genre: Gen, humour
Rating: G
Summary: People's clothes are spontaneously changing into items they've worn in the past. What sort of curse is this?
For prompt from an old comment fic meme at spn_bigpretzel where someone wanted a return of Dean's 'I Wuv Hugs' shirt and Sam's purple dog shirt.
“Here’s one,” Sam said, handing his tablet across the table to his brother. “Everybody in town’s clothes keep spontaneously changing into stuff they wore years ago. And I don’t mean people putting on their old clothes because retro is in. I mean they’re walking along in jeans and a t-shirt, then poof, purple velvet overalls.”
Dean looked at him for a moment. “I can read, Sam.” He scanned the page. “It’s weird, but it doesn’t seem to be hurting anyone. I mean, except that guy who had his tongue unexpectedly re-pierced. No one’s dying.”
Sam sighed. “I just thought it might be a nice change. A case where no one dies.”
Dean looked thoughtful. “This could just be the beginning. Sometimes curses and stuff seem good to start with, and then go bad. Remember that case with the wishing well?”
Sam nodded. “Teddy bear doctors. Still the weirdest profession we’ve ever claimed.”
“Teddy bears are inanimate,” Cas said quizzically, “Why would you claim something so implausible?”
“We’ll tell you on the way, Cas,” Dean told him, getting up. “Let’s go.”
***
“Does the air feel weird to you?” Dean asked, as they walked down the main street. He stepped aside to avoid a pair of elderly women, one in a pink tutu, and one in a highly disturbing leather corset with lines of metal spikes down it. He looked across at Sam and Cas. Somehow, while he had been distracted by Giselle and Madame Wrinkles, Sam’s plaid shirt had become a purple t-shirt with a picture of a dog on it. Cas, who had taken to wearing practical clothes similar to Dean’s now that he was human, was back in his suit and trenchcoat.
Dean chuckled. “Nice shirt, Sammy.”
Sam smirked back. “Dean. You’re wearing a shirt that says ‘I wuv hugs’ on it, I don’t think I’m the one who should be embarrassed here.”
Dean looked down. Dammit. “Yeah well - anyway, what could be causing it? We should interview people.”
Cas spoke up. “It is possible something is causing the innermost and most fundamental aspects of a person’s personality to be shown outwardly through their attire. Your friend Charlie informed me that an individual’s clothing choices strongly reflected that person’s taste, quirks and sense of self.”
Dean huffed, frowning. “Maybe it just changes you into the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever worn.”
Cas looked Dean up and down. “I am not embarrassed. I was very fond of my coat. And I doubt that shirt is the most embarrassing outfit you could be seen in. What about the time Rhonda Hurley-?”
“Okay, okay,” Dean broke in before he could finish. He guessed there were worse things his clothes could have turned into.
Sam’s eyes had lit up. “Who’s Rhonda Hurley?”
Dean clamped his mouth shut and glared at Cas, who looked away innocently. In the spot they had walked through a moment before, a teenage boy’s football jersey fuzzed out and became a blue t-shirt with a picture of a beaker and the words ‘Cornfields Middle School Science Club’ on it.
“I’m not embarrassed either,” said Sam. “I think Cas is on to something.”
Dean growled and glared at him. “My innermost self is not a hugger,” he insisted, “Let’s just talk to some people.”
“Aww Dean, are you embarrassed?” Sam cooed, “Do you need a hug?”
***
“We’re reporters,” Dean told the bikini clad woman.
“What, all of you?” She was in her late thirties, with chestnut hair in a neat bun, and the glowing white abdomen of someone who has clearly not worn a bikini for many years.
Dean gave her his most winning smile. “Sam’s our photographer. Did you forget your camera again, Sam? He’s always doing that.” He elbowed Cas in the ribs. Cas still hadn’t figured out that women got freaked out if you stared at them too long.
“You look cold,” Cas said. “Would you like my coat?”
The woman took the coat and started to put it on, but had only one arm in a sleeve when the air around them fuzzed and she was back in her bikini and Cas was back in his coat. Well, that answered the question of whether people could simply change clothes to solve the problem.
“So when did this all start?” Sam asked.
“About a week ago. Why don’t we take this inside,” Ms. Bikini suggested, gesturing to a nearby diner. “We’ve had hundreds of reporters here since then, but you guys seem nicest. All the rest had their clothes become high power business suits or lingerie. One of them was naked. It wasn’t pretty.”
Dean chose a seat with a direct line of sight to the spot where people’s clothes changed. A salt-and-pepper-haired man’s smart business suit fuzzed out and turned into a Metallica shirt and jeans. Dean scowled. He’d briefly had a Metallica shirt when he was in his early twenties. He didn’t see why his shirt couldn’t have turned into that instead of this stupid thing. He’d seen a group of teenagers not-very-subtly pointing and laughing while they had been looking for someone to interview. They hadn’t even stopped when he’d glared at them. It was hard to be scary when you were wearing an “I wuv hugs” t-shirt.
Ms. Bikini’s name turned out to be Belinda. To Dean’s dismay, her theory about what was going on was much the same as Cas’s. “See, I don’t wear this anymore,” she told them, “For one thing, we don’t live anywhere near the beach, and this isn’t really the kind of town where people walk around in bikinis. We moved here from Huntington Beach when my husband got his job. He’s pretty high up in the tractor manufacturing industry. On the business side. He doesn’t actually manufacture anything. His family is here, and it’s a good place for the kids and everything, but I miss California. I miss the beach, I miss the sun, and I miss walking down the beach in my bikini, with all the boys looking at me. I was just thinking about that the other day, actually, and then just as we were walking past Walker’s - that’s the junk shop - the air went all strange, and suddenly I was in my swimsuit, and Mark was wearing the overalls he used to wear on the farm growing up. It seems to work like that for other people, too. Like Mary Anne from the church.” Belinda pointed to a trim woman in her late forties with a conservative haircut, wearing a white t-shirt with the words “I hate everyone” scrawled across it in red marker pen. “She still hates everyone, but now she smiles at them while the hatred boils inside her like a pressure cooker. And poor old Mr. Turner’s clothes turned into his mother’s dress and high heels when he was walking down the street to buy the paper. Luckily, it was very early in the morning. I got him home before anyone could see. People in these parts aren’t exactly accepting of men who wear women’s clothing.”
Dean thanked his lucky stars his clothes had become a ridiculous t-shirt instead of Rhonda Hurley’s panties. “And this always happens as people walk past the junk shop?”
“It seemed to start there, but now it happens whichever way you come into town. You can’t get onto Main Street without revealing your true nature.”
***
“There must be something else going on here,” Dean said as they made their way to the junk shop, “Are you seriously trying to tell me that the core of Sam’s personality is that he’s a dog person? If this was showing people’s true natures, Sam would be wearing that nerdy-ass sweater vest and holy fire glasses, and I would be wearing my purgatory jacket and carrying my gun.” And Cas would be wearing his trenchcoat, because there was nothing Dean associated more strongly with Cas.
“You’re not carrying your gun?” Sam asked in surprise. “Why the hell would you leave it behind, Dean? We could be dealing with a witch, here.”
“I didn’t leave it behind. It disappeared when my clothes changed.” Actually, he was pretty sure it had turned into the toy dinosaur he had carried around with him constantly for about six months when he was four. He could feel its tail poking him in the hip. Sam didn’t need to know that, though.
“Yes,” said Cas.
Dean looked at him sideways. “Yes what?”
“Yes, Dean.”
“Why did you just say yes?”
“I was answering your question. Yes, the core of Sam’s personality, the one unchanging facet of him that has not been brought about by his life experiences or the influence of people or heaven or hell, is that he likes dogs. Much as you, at your core, are a warm and loving person.”
Dean automatically looked around to make sure no one had heard that.
“Dude,” Sam said, “I’m pretty sure everyone already worked that out from your shirt.”
Dean scowled. “Can we just ice whatever’s doing this so I can get my gun back?”
The bell above the door jingled as he shoved it open harder than necessary. Inside, the junk shop was packed with piles of stuff almost to the ceiling. Bookshelves lined the walls, packed with old, falling-apart paperbacks and dusty encyclopedias. The overflow was piled on the floor and on top of ancient furniture, mixed in with old toys and record players and dressmaking dummies. There were cabinets and trunks full of trinkets and cracked ornaments and old teapots. One whole half of the shop was devoted to clothing, dresses and coats on racks, hat stands with moth-eaten felt hats on them, shelves of shoes, baskets and boxes of unsorted clothing blocking the aisles. Dean fought his way to the counter, stepping around a pile of books in his way. He found himself struggling against the strong urge to stop and tidy up. There was probably some cool stuff buried in there somewhere.
Behind the counter was a white-bearded man in a snazzy 1940’s suit. He didn’t wear it as well as Dean had worn his (Why couldn’t his clothes have turned into that? He’d looked awesome in his 40s’ suit.), but still, it looked right on him. He was reading a book.
“Hehem,” Sam cleared his throat, having waded through the piles of junk to reach Dean. Dean looked around for Cas and saw him in the clothing section, closely examining one of the hats. Good. Might as well have Cas looking around for a cursed object while they talked to this guy. It was going to take forever to look through the whole shop, and Cas still sucked at interviews.
“Hehem,” Sam cleared his throat more insistently.
This time, the guy looked up from his dusty volume of The Old Curiosity Shop. “What?” He asked impatiently. “Buy something or get out.”
Sam looked a little taken aback. “We will, sir. I was just about to look through the books. But first we have a few questions for you.”
“I don’t have a catalogue. If you can’t be bothered looking for it, you don’t really want it.” Beardy returned his attention to his book.
“Wait, when did your clothes change? Did it go all fuzzy and then you were wearing a suit? What day would you say that was?” Dean asked quickly.
Beardy looked at him like he was crazy, then looked him up and down, his face softening. “Sonny, I know I look like Santa, but I’m not him. What would he be doing in Kansas? I picked my suit out this morning and got dressed, same as you. Now, why don’t you go and look through the toys, like a good boy, and mind what your brother here says.”
Dean felt himself turning red.
“Yeah Dean, why don’t you look through the toys while the grown-ups talk?” Sam suggested.
Dean glowered at him. Couldn’t a grown man wear a t-shirt with a teddy bear on it and be taken seriously while asking strange questions? Sam’s shirt had a dog on it. It wasn’t like that was a shirt a mature adult should be wearing. But he went over and started looking through the toys anyway, because Cas was going to need some help looking through all the crap for something suspicious, and anyway, he’d caught a glimpse of a really cool clockwork digger on the way in.
Dean dug through the first toy chest. He found a one-eyed teddy bear with most of its fur worn off, sixteen matchbox cars (all scratched and dented), a jigsaw puzzle for learning shapes and colours, missing the square, a practically new soft toy rabbit, and the clockwork digger, which he was seriously considering buying and putting in the bunker kitchen to make cooking dinner more fun. Nothing that looked like it would cause a clothing curse, though. He was just starting on the second box when Sam crouched beside him. They waved Cas over for a whispered conversation.
“That guy hasn’t been outside in weeks,” Sam hissed. “Lives over the shop. Said he doesn’t have any reason to go outside and make nice with all the people with their fake smiles and carefully constructed images, and that books and things don’t pretend to be something they’re not.”
“I think we can safely say it’s him causing it, then.”
“So we kill him, then?” Cas suggested, reaching for his blade.
Dean tugged him back down. “We don’t always have to kill someone, Cas.”
Sam laughed. “You really are just a cuddly teddy bear deep down, aren’t you? We don’t always kill people. It doesn’t seem like he ever explicitly wished for this though. I’m thinking it’s like the wishing well case, and we just need him to touch the object and un-wish this before it starts snowing and Belinda gets frostbite.”
Dean looked around. “Good luck with that. He tell you anything he got in last week?”
“He doesn’t really keep track. New stuff should be on top. It’s probably something appearance related, if it’s cursing clothing.”
“It’s not any of the hats,” said Cas, “I’ll look through the coats.”
Dean eventually found a small, wooden-framed hand-held mirror in one of the toy chests. It had writing in an unfamiliar script carved around the outside. Cas said it was the dead language of the now extinct people of an island in the pacific that had been swallowed by the sea long before anyone had the transport or technology to chart it. “Be not who you are told to be, but who you are,” Cas read.
“Wow!” said Sam, “You know, most of the pacific peoples had no written languages until…”
“Yeah, okay Sam, Cas already knows, he was there, and I don’t care. Let’s just get him to look in it again, and then break it, so I can have my gun back.”
They took the mirror to the counter along with Dean’s digger, the pile of books that had somehow managed to accumulate in Sam’s arms, and a coat Cas had found that looked suspiciously like the one he was currently wearing.
It turned out getting Beardy to un-wish that people would show who they were outwardly was much harder than just threatening him at gun point (why did Sam get to keep his gun, anyway?). It took nearly an hour of intellectual debate, during which time Dean got some worrying insight into the discrepancy between Sam’s claims of wanting honesty, and his actual views on the matter. Dean kept out of it and rummaged through the piles of vinyl records, looking for stuff to make Cas listen to. Finally, Beardy looked into the mirror and said begrudgingly, “This guy’s right. Society isn’t better off if people show who they truly are.”
The air around them buzzed, and Dean felt the dinosaur at his hip morphing into the heavier and much more reassuring shape of his gun. Sam’s dog shirt had become loose plaid again. Cas was back in his jeans, which Dean still wasn’t used to, but he had his new second-hand coat over his arm. They left the shop, taking the mirror with them. Dean had wanted to break and burn it, but apparently it was important to Sam to keep hold of what could be the only example of written language from some tiny dead nation in the pacific which Dean had already forgotten the name of.
“Did you mean all that stuff you said to get him to un-wish it,” Dean asked when they were safely back in the car, “About it being important to keep parts of yourself protected and stuff? And about it being part of being human to have to navigate social situations without knowing everything about the other person?”
“Sure,” said Sam. “Plus, I’m not that cool with being boiled down to ‘likes dogs’. I’m way more complicated than that. Like you are.”
“I don’t like dogs,” said Dean, and concentrated on the road, because they were never talking about this again. He just hoped Sam didn’t try to hug him or anything when they got home.
Genre: Gen, humour
Rating: G
Summary: People's clothes are spontaneously changing into items they've worn in the past. What sort of curse is this?
For prompt from an old comment fic meme at spn_bigpretzel where someone wanted a return of Dean's 'I Wuv Hugs' shirt and Sam's purple dog shirt.
“Here’s one,” Sam said, handing his tablet across the table to his brother. “Everybody in town’s clothes keep spontaneously changing into stuff they wore years ago. And I don’t mean people putting on their old clothes because retro is in. I mean they’re walking along in jeans and a t-shirt, then poof, purple velvet overalls.”
Dean looked at him for a moment. “I can read, Sam.” He scanned the page. “It’s weird, but it doesn’t seem to be hurting anyone. I mean, except that guy who had his tongue unexpectedly re-pierced. No one’s dying.”
Sam sighed. “I just thought it might be a nice change. A case where no one dies.”
Dean looked thoughtful. “This could just be the beginning. Sometimes curses and stuff seem good to start with, and then go bad. Remember that case with the wishing well?”
Sam nodded. “Teddy bear doctors. Still the weirdest profession we’ve ever claimed.”
“Teddy bears are inanimate,” Cas said quizzically, “Why would you claim something so implausible?”
“We’ll tell you on the way, Cas,” Dean told him, getting up. “Let’s go.”
***
“Does the air feel weird to you?” Dean asked, as they walked down the main street. He stepped aside to avoid a pair of elderly women, one in a pink tutu, and one in a highly disturbing leather corset with lines of metal spikes down it. He looked across at Sam and Cas. Somehow, while he had been distracted by Giselle and Madame Wrinkles, Sam’s plaid shirt had become a purple t-shirt with a picture of a dog on it. Cas, who had taken to wearing practical clothes similar to Dean’s now that he was human, was back in his suit and trenchcoat.
Dean chuckled. “Nice shirt, Sammy.”
Sam smirked back. “Dean. You’re wearing a shirt that says ‘I wuv hugs’ on it, I don’t think I’m the one who should be embarrassed here.”
Dean looked down. Dammit. “Yeah well - anyway, what could be causing it? We should interview people.”
Cas spoke up. “It is possible something is causing the innermost and most fundamental aspects of a person’s personality to be shown outwardly through their attire. Your friend Charlie informed me that an individual’s clothing choices strongly reflected that person’s taste, quirks and sense of self.”
Dean huffed, frowning. “Maybe it just changes you into the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever worn.”
Cas looked Dean up and down. “I am not embarrassed. I was very fond of my coat. And I doubt that shirt is the most embarrassing outfit you could be seen in. What about the time Rhonda Hurley-?”
“Okay, okay,” Dean broke in before he could finish. He guessed there were worse things his clothes could have turned into.
Sam’s eyes had lit up. “Who’s Rhonda Hurley?”
Dean clamped his mouth shut and glared at Cas, who looked away innocently. In the spot they had walked through a moment before, a teenage boy’s football jersey fuzzed out and became a blue t-shirt with a picture of a beaker and the words ‘Cornfields Middle School Science Club’ on it.
“I’m not embarrassed either,” said Sam. “I think Cas is on to something.”
Dean growled and glared at him. “My innermost self is not a hugger,” he insisted, “Let’s just talk to some people.”
“Aww Dean, are you embarrassed?” Sam cooed, “Do you need a hug?”
***
“We’re reporters,” Dean told the bikini clad woman.
“What, all of you?” She was in her late thirties, with chestnut hair in a neat bun, and the glowing white abdomen of someone who has clearly not worn a bikini for many years.
Dean gave her his most winning smile. “Sam’s our photographer. Did you forget your camera again, Sam? He’s always doing that.” He elbowed Cas in the ribs. Cas still hadn’t figured out that women got freaked out if you stared at them too long.
“You look cold,” Cas said. “Would you like my coat?”
The woman took the coat and started to put it on, but had only one arm in a sleeve when the air around them fuzzed and she was back in her bikini and Cas was back in his coat. Well, that answered the question of whether people could simply change clothes to solve the problem.
“So when did this all start?” Sam asked.
“About a week ago. Why don’t we take this inside,” Ms. Bikini suggested, gesturing to a nearby diner. “We’ve had hundreds of reporters here since then, but you guys seem nicest. All the rest had their clothes become high power business suits or lingerie. One of them was naked. It wasn’t pretty.”
Dean chose a seat with a direct line of sight to the spot where people’s clothes changed. A salt-and-pepper-haired man’s smart business suit fuzzed out and turned into a Metallica shirt and jeans. Dean scowled. He’d briefly had a Metallica shirt when he was in his early twenties. He didn’t see why his shirt couldn’t have turned into that instead of this stupid thing. He’d seen a group of teenagers not-very-subtly pointing and laughing while they had been looking for someone to interview. They hadn’t even stopped when he’d glared at them. It was hard to be scary when you were wearing an “I wuv hugs” t-shirt.
Ms. Bikini’s name turned out to be Belinda. To Dean’s dismay, her theory about what was going on was much the same as Cas’s. “See, I don’t wear this anymore,” she told them, “For one thing, we don’t live anywhere near the beach, and this isn’t really the kind of town where people walk around in bikinis. We moved here from Huntington Beach when my husband got his job. He’s pretty high up in the tractor manufacturing industry. On the business side. He doesn’t actually manufacture anything. His family is here, and it’s a good place for the kids and everything, but I miss California. I miss the beach, I miss the sun, and I miss walking down the beach in my bikini, with all the boys looking at me. I was just thinking about that the other day, actually, and then just as we were walking past Walker’s - that’s the junk shop - the air went all strange, and suddenly I was in my swimsuit, and Mark was wearing the overalls he used to wear on the farm growing up. It seems to work like that for other people, too. Like Mary Anne from the church.” Belinda pointed to a trim woman in her late forties with a conservative haircut, wearing a white t-shirt with the words “I hate everyone” scrawled across it in red marker pen. “She still hates everyone, but now she smiles at them while the hatred boils inside her like a pressure cooker. And poor old Mr. Turner’s clothes turned into his mother’s dress and high heels when he was walking down the street to buy the paper. Luckily, it was very early in the morning. I got him home before anyone could see. People in these parts aren’t exactly accepting of men who wear women’s clothing.”
Dean thanked his lucky stars his clothes had become a ridiculous t-shirt instead of Rhonda Hurley’s panties. “And this always happens as people walk past the junk shop?”
“It seemed to start there, but now it happens whichever way you come into town. You can’t get onto Main Street without revealing your true nature.”
***
“There must be something else going on here,” Dean said as they made their way to the junk shop, “Are you seriously trying to tell me that the core of Sam’s personality is that he’s a dog person? If this was showing people’s true natures, Sam would be wearing that nerdy-ass sweater vest and holy fire glasses, and I would be wearing my purgatory jacket and carrying my gun.” And Cas would be wearing his trenchcoat, because there was nothing Dean associated more strongly with Cas.
“You’re not carrying your gun?” Sam asked in surprise. “Why the hell would you leave it behind, Dean? We could be dealing with a witch, here.”
“I didn’t leave it behind. It disappeared when my clothes changed.” Actually, he was pretty sure it had turned into the toy dinosaur he had carried around with him constantly for about six months when he was four. He could feel its tail poking him in the hip. Sam didn’t need to know that, though.
“Yes,” said Cas.
Dean looked at him sideways. “Yes what?”
“Yes, Dean.”
“Why did you just say yes?”
“I was answering your question. Yes, the core of Sam’s personality, the one unchanging facet of him that has not been brought about by his life experiences or the influence of people or heaven or hell, is that he likes dogs. Much as you, at your core, are a warm and loving person.”
Dean automatically looked around to make sure no one had heard that.
“Dude,” Sam said, “I’m pretty sure everyone already worked that out from your shirt.”
Dean scowled. “Can we just ice whatever’s doing this so I can get my gun back?”
The bell above the door jingled as he shoved it open harder than necessary. Inside, the junk shop was packed with piles of stuff almost to the ceiling. Bookshelves lined the walls, packed with old, falling-apart paperbacks and dusty encyclopedias. The overflow was piled on the floor and on top of ancient furniture, mixed in with old toys and record players and dressmaking dummies. There were cabinets and trunks full of trinkets and cracked ornaments and old teapots. One whole half of the shop was devoted to clothing, dresses and coats on racks, hat stands with moth-eaten felt hats on them, shelves of shoes, baskets and boxes of unsorted clothing blocking the aisles. Dean fought his way to the counter, stepping around a pile of books in his way. He found himself struggling against the strong urge to stop and tidy up. There was probably some cool stuff buried in there somewhere.
Behind the counter was a white-bearded man in a snazzy 1940’s suit. He didn’t wear it as well as Dean had worn his (Why couldn’t his clothes have turned into that? He’d looked awesome in his 40s’ suit.), but still, it looked right on him. He was reading a book.
“Hehem,” Sam cleared his throat, having waded through the piles of junk to reach Dean. Dean looked around for Cas and saw him in the clothing section, closely examining one of the hats. Good. Might as well have Cas looking around for a cursed object while they talked to this guy. It was going to take forever to look through the whole shop, and Cas still sucked at interviews.
“Hehem,” Sam cleared his throat more insistently.
This time, the guy looked up from his dusty volume of The Old Curiosity Shop. “What?” He asked impatiently. “Buy something or get out.”
Sam looked a little taken aback. “We will, sir. I was just about to look through the books. But first we have a few questions for you.”
“I don’t have a catalogue. If you can’t be bothered looking for it, you don’t really want it.” Beardy returned his attention to his book.
“Wait, when did your clothes change? Did it go all fuzzy and then you were wearing a suit? What day would you say that was?” Dean asked quickly.
Beardy looked at him like he was crazy, then looked him up and down, his face softening. “Sonny, I know I look like Santa, but I’m not him. What would he be doing in Kansas? I picked my suit out this morning and got dressed, same as you. Now, why don’t you go and look through the toys, like a good boy, and mind what your brother here says.”
Dean felt himself turning red.
“Yeah Dean, why don’t you look through the toys while the grown-ups talk?” Sam suggested.
Dean glowered at him. Couldn’t a grown man wear a t-shirt with a teddy bear on it and be taken seriously while asking strange questions? Sam’s shirt had a dog on it. It wasn’t like that was a shirt a mature adult should be wearing. But he went over and started looking through the toys anyway, because Cas was going to need some help looking through all the crap for something suspicious, and anyway, he’d caught a glimpse of a really cool clockwork digger on the way in.
Dean dug through the first toy chest. He found a one-eyed teddy bear with most of its fur worn off, sixteen matchbox cars (all scratched and dented), a jigsaw puzzle for learning shapes and colours, missing the square, a practically new soft toy rabbit, and the clockwork digger, which he was seriously considering buying and putting in the bunker kitchen to make cooking dinner more fun. Nothing that looked like it would cause a clothing curse, though. He was just starting on the second box when Sam crouched beside him. They waved Cas over for a whispered conversation.
“That guy hasn’t been outside in weeks,” Sam hissed. “Lives over the shop. Said he doesn’t have any reason to go outside and make nice with all the people with their fake smiles and carefully constructed images, and that books and things don’t pretend to be something they’re not.”
“I think we can safely say it’s him causing it, then.”
“So we kill him, then?” Cas suggested, reaching for his blade.
Dean tugged him back down. “We don’t always have to kill someone, Cas.”
Sam laughed. “You really are just a cuddly teddy bear deep down, aren’t you? We don’t always kill people. It doesn’t seem like he ever explicitly wished for this though. I’m thinking it’s like the wishing well case, and we just need him to touch the object and un-wish this before it starts snowing and Belinda gets frostbite.”
Dean looked around. “Good luck with that. He tell you anything he got in last week?”
“He doesn’t really keep track. New stuff should be on top. It’s probably something appearance related, if it’s cursing clothing.”
“It’s not any of the hats,” said Cas, “I’ll look through the coats.”
Dean eventually found a small, wooden-framed hand-held mirror in one of the toy chests. It had writing in an unfamiliar script carved around the outside. Cas said it was the dead language of the now extinct people of an island in the pacific that had been swallowed by the sea long before anyone had the transport or technology to chart it. “Be not who you are told to be, but who you are,” Cas read.
“Wow!” said Sam, “You know, most of the pacific peoples had no written languages until…”
“Yeah, okay Sam, Cas already knows, he was there, and I don’t care. Let’s just get him to look in it again, and then break it, so I can have my gun back.”
They took the mirror to the counter along with Dean’s digger, the pile of books that had somehow managed to accumulate in Sam’s arms, and a coat Cas had found that looked suspiciously like the one he was currently wearing.
It turned out getting Beardy to un-wish that people would show who they were outwardly was much harder than just threatening him at gun point (why did Sam get to keep his gun, anyway?). It took nearly an hour of intellectual debate, during which time Dean got some worrying insight into the discrepancy between Sam’s claims of wanting honesty, and his actual views on the matter. Dean kept out of it and rummaged through the piles of vinyl records, looking for stuff to make Cas listen to. Finally, Beardy looked into the mirror and said begrudgingly, “This guy’s right. Society isn’t better off if people show who they truly are.”
The air around them buzzed, and Dean felt the dinosaur at his hip morphing into the heavier and much more reassuring shape of his gun. Sam’s dog shirt had become loose plaid again. Cas was back in his jeans, which Dean still wasn’t used to, but he had his new second-hand coat over his arm. They left the shop, taking the mirror with them. Dean had wanted to break and burn it, but apparently it was important to Sam to keep hold of what could be the only example of written language from some tiny dead nation in the pacific which Dean had already forgotten the name of.
“Did you mean all that stuff you said to get him to un-wish it,” Dean asked when they were safely back in the car, “About it being important to keep parts of yourself protected and stuff? And about it being part of being human to have to navigate social situations without knowing everything about the other person?”
“Sure,” said Sam. “Plus, I’m not that cool with being boiled down to ‘likes dogs’. I’m way more complicated than that. Like you are.”
“I don’t like dogs,” said Dean, and concentrated on the road, because they were never talking about this again. He just hoped Sam didn’t try to hug him or anything when they got home.