Orange Roughy - 1/2
Orange Roughy - 1/2
Rating: R, Gen (but if you believe in subtext clap your hands)
Characters: Sam/Jess, Dean, John
Disclaimer: The characters are sadly not mine. I’m just sticking pins into Winchester dolls for the purposes of general amusement. Sorry about the holes!
Word Count: 4,136/11,326
A/N: Crack! fic written for spn_halloween, 2009. Prompt no. 27: Some of Stanford’s finest find out why Sam Winchester really *hates* Halloween.
A companion piece to Noise. Part of The Colour Chronicles.
Setting: Stanford, CA (& elsewhere.) October 2006-2005- (Flashbacks? What flashbacks?)
Summary: Wherein Sam Winchester is emo, prone to listmaking, confused, and alone. Unfortunately, neither the leather outfit nor the prison cell he’s presently stuck in is helping him solve the real problem. Oh yeah, and did he forget to mention that it’s October 31st? Sam really hates Halloween.
Part 1 | Part 2
Sam had this thing. He couldn’t, or rather, wouldn’t even dare categorize it in the privacy of his confused mind. The most he’d ever come up with to describe it over the years was to admit that he had a problem … thing. Naturally, it was all Dean’s fault.
Stick to the plan, and nothing but the plan.
Palo Alto, CA. October 31st 2006 (7.14 p.m.)
Sam totally had things under control. Every goddamn thing.
He had a plan.
When he was sixteen and he realised that being what his annoying elder brother called a ‘geekormous nerdbrain’ might actually be useful for more than correcting Dean’s Latin grammar just before an exorcism went out with a whimper rather than a Winchester-approved bang, Sam came up with a plan.
He used his brain to build a tunnel out of his life. Plans were good.
Back then the plan consisted of one nice, neat, concise, point.
1. Leave.
Okay. Possibly the original plan was worded slightly differently. If Sam remembered correctly it had been more like.
1. Fuck Dad! Who needs this shit?
Sam was big on rhetorical questions in 1999. He was also prone to writing a lot more than that when he was upset. So, that point may have meandered on for a few more paragraphs, wherein he described the full nature of his grievances with the surreptitious assistance of half a bottle of his father’s JD.
4am runs with field packs even on school days! What’s wrong with joining the chess club? Dean shoots better. Do you know how hard it is to NOT get caught packing two knives and a pistol in high school these days? Dean runs faster. Soccer is too a sport! Dean’s fucking perfect and never talks back. Why can’t we stay somewhere longer than a hunt? You don’t need me when you’ve got…
Sam may have gone through a few sheets of paper initially before the Winchester part of his brain slapped the emo down and told him ‘Suck it up, Princess. You got a problem? Make a plan. Do the research. Take plenty of ammo. And make a Plan B in case it all goes to shit.’ Parts of his brain sounded eerily like Dean sometimes (except the research bit) - right down to the accompanying slap up the back of the inside of his head
So, Sam listened. And made a little to-do list. Which he blushingly renamed a plan almost immediately afterwards because that sounded more official and less like something Dean would laugh at. Bastard.
He made a plan. Then he made another one.
Plan A:
1. Be like everyone else.
2. Get a new life.
3. Be happy.
4. Stop having to kill things.
5. Be normal.
6. Stop trying to be just like Dean.
For two days in July after a midnight movie marathon with his brother the plan was reworded to say.
1. Get out of Dodge.
He blamed Dean’s love of cowboy movies for the pop culture reference.
‘Boots and guns, and chicks with boobs falling out of their tops! What’s not to like, Sammy? Only thing missing is real horsepower, and maybe a flamethrower.’
Every time they watched a western, Sam saw Dean swagger in through all those batwing doors to throw down on the man wearing a black hat and kiss the girl before riding off into the sunset. Except Dean was right. Forget historical authenticity, the hero should always have a car. Although Sam still had doubts about the flamethrower; certain things got his brother overexcited. Flamethrowers were fairly high on that list, even occasionally nudging hot girls down a notch.
Months later in a bad motel on the outskirts of Tallahassee while their father spent hours in the bathroom trying to scrape off a stubborn layer of noxious mustard slime - courtesy of an overly-familiar (now messily deceased) sewer demon of the smellier subphylum, Sam thought he’d struck TV gold when he found the only non-porn channel (at $15.95 a night it was clear that unlimited porn was cheaper and easier to supply than clean sheets and a can of Raid) was playing a static-ridden “Back to the Future III.” He should have predicted that Dean’s major reaction was going to be, ‘A fucking DeLorean?’
Eventually (after he hid the cable remote because porn wasn’t ever going to be something he wanted to share with his brother), Sam finally culled his plan down to one pertinent sentence.
1. Get out. Leave home.
And even if Plan A (which he didn’t like to admit he secretly referred to as Plan S -for Plan Sam- because that would be too embarrassing) only had the one point at this stage in his life, Sam still numbered it:
a) Because part of him always knew what the unwritten second point was.
b) Because… well, despite what certain people said anal wasn’t:
i) Something for Dean to smirk about.
ii) A necessarily bad character trait.
Though possibly over-editing and analysing something to death was. It didn’t stop him from making his point clearer to himself.
1. Leave.
So he did.
There are some things they don’t tell you about plans.
Good plans? The really big, life-changing, no do-overs ever, plans? The kind that take years to implement successfully?
They hurt.
Sam still had two plans. Plan B remained unchanged.
Plan A - the Stanford version? It wasn’t a different plan; it was just different. He elevated his second point, altering the verb when he finally put it in writing, though over the next few years its emphasis varied depending on how busy… okay, how fucking homesick he was!
1. Call…
1. Call!
1. Call.
1. Call.
1. Call.
1. Call?
But its priority stayed constant.
The rest of his ever-evolving plan ranged from the pedantic to the ridiculous, and back again over the course of his degree.
3. Register.
4. Find room.
5. Protect room.
6. Hide weapons.
7. Meet roommate.
20. Don’t get caught by roommate breathing into a paper bag after totalling the cost of your textbooks. (Full ride? Sure! Money? ‘Just as soon as we get the kinks out of our new software system…’) You’re still growing. It is entirely credible that you are trying to inhale the last cookie crumbs.
21. Don’t scare roommate.
22. Re-consider credit card fraud as an acceptable way to finance higher education.
23. Remember definition of ‘normal.’ Look for part-time job.
34. Buy second-hand bike.
37. Work harder at not scaring roommate.
38. Hide weapons better.
41. Find out who that hot blonde is.
44. Get lockbox.
45. Don’t let Samantha come out to play.
46. Meet new roommate. Todd? Ted. Normal. Normal. Normal.
48. Don’t kill new roommate. Sleepwalking is not always a sign of…
52. Get Jessica Moore’s cell no.
- Call Jessica.
- Pick up next semester’s textbook list from bookshop. Earn more money!
- Essays = money.
- Study.
- Ole Tequila! Ola Tequila?
- Buy milk.
- Essay mills = more money, and little sleep.
- Study.
- Write pol. sci. essay for Ted? Thad.
- STUDY!
- Coffee. LOTS OF COFFEE!!!
- Screams at midnight are never a good sign, even in California.
- Ask Jess out. Movie? "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” at the Classic?
- Don’t do shots with Thad ever again. His B+ is worth the $50, but not the hangover.
- Buy more aspirin.
- Call Jess. “Beaches” ???
Somewhere along the way he also gave up on keeping up with the numbering system. Except for no. 1. But Dean had always been pushy like that, even when he wasn’t really there... here…
So, Sam had a plan. Shut up! He went with what worked, he was still a Winchester.
He had this plan. And every October he made sure to include one other important point. Last week he added underlining in the vain hope that it would strengthen his resolve. Then he went over it with a thicker pen, twice (because bold had always worked for Dean.)
- Just don’t do it!
Right. Well, he wasn’t that good at holding firm against shots either. And Jessica was absolutely no help whatsoever in that regard.
‘174 reasons to celebrate. 174 shots to toast your future tonight,’ she sang only slightly off-key while adroitly ducking his enthusiastically windmilling arms and turbo-dancing him through the narrow hall in her scarlet platforms. Apparently singing either ‘I got rhythm’ or ‘Shake, shake, shake. Shake your booty!’ -even with attitude- under your breath is no help at all except to make somebody snicker. Bitch. Some of the time Jess was scarily like his brother.
For such a soccer-playing, casual-at-heart art student she wore heels with the careless panache of a fashion model. ’Must be a girl thing,’ Sam thought wistfully. At 5 foot 11 in her bare feet Jess didn’t have a problem reaching any bit of him she aimed her lips at. Wearing those heels? A sensible man knew when to let her do whatever she wanted. Sam loved those sandals, and he loved her in them even more. Jessica wasn’t averse to taking advantage of that fact every now and then, and sometimes four times on Sundays. And if Sam was taking careful note of the precise techniques his girlfriend was using to dip and twirl without breaking an ankle? An attentive boyfriend is a good boyfriend. Sam prided himself on being a great boyfriend.
Unfortunately Sam’s greatness was leading him places he’d sworn on his textbooks last year that he’d never go again. Jess’s naughty nurse costume wasn’t helping the situation either. Costumes… And she’d put a lot of thought into this year’s Halloween ensemble, even managing to match the exact shade of red (which was fabulous with her colouring. Sam was more of a warm autumn himself) of her Chanel Rouge Allure Passion lipstick, to her barely-visible thigh-high scratchy net underskirt, and those Target Marc Jacobs knock-offs. Shame they didn’t make them in a wider range of siz…
Fuck.
As they awkwardly swung into another 180˚ turn and headed back down the corridor again Sam tried desperately to regain his focus; luckily geeks knew better than anyone that scientific method begins with observation. He started to form some critical questions-from past experience alone he knew the pressure was a killer-but he got distracted (again) by the happy fact that this kind of dancing (even with an incompetent partner) required close contact which was… what was Dean’s favourite word? Awesome. Jess was also warm, and smelled really, really nice…
Damn it. And Sam hadn’t even got up to considering the testing stage yet.
‘Come on, Sam! We have to get you dressed.’
Distracted wasn’t quite the right word. Sam needed to come up with something stronger. Jess had finished spinning them gracefully to a standstill in the bedroom doorway, in full view of the dangerously open wardrobe door. God, she was good.
Dressed… costumes…
No way in hell I'm doing that all over again. Time to break the cycle. God damn you, Dean.
‘We’re going to be…,’ she started to insist, tugging him determinedly inside the room.
‘No. We’re going to christen this hall, right here and now. I’m sure we forgot it when we moved in. I can aim for 174 times if you feel that’s appropriate.
‘Over-achiever,’ she purred into his mouth, happily diverted for now.
It was a small hall, and the bike added a touch terrifyingly reminiscent of one of Dad’s old Marine-based obstacle courses. But Sam was young, fit, motivated, and Winchester enough to cut that number back by nine (sue him if that was the combined ‘his’ and ‘hers’ total) It would have been ten if Jess’s nurse’s tutu thing hadn’t seemed to inclined to take on a life of its own at the start and appeared to be attempting to strangle Sam. If he muttered a quick ‘Christo’ while he was down on his knees Jessica was too busy to notice his odd choice in dirty talk.
Strangely enough, by the time they’d straightened their clothes and Jessica was striding back to the bedroom to reattach her cap, they were running late enough for the party that Sam got away with a bad excuse for not donning any sort of festive outfit. That kind of freakish luck meant Sam finally got to put a tick next to his anti-Nike resolution, and got a lot of amazing sex; even if his bike was undoubtedly going to be scarred for life as a result.
Sam grinned (unworried about the high cost of therapy for inanimate objects in California.) Success! He:
a) Had aced his LSAT.
b) Had his Law School interview on Monday.
c) Had broken the Winchester brothers’ Halloween curse habit at long last.
d) Had probably pulled a muscle, but it was totally worth it.
He wasn’t doing shots tonight. Definitely not. Absolutely not. Fuck it, maybe just a few. After all, he had everything to celebrate.
It wasn’t like he needed to prove anything to his brother. He was doing fine all on his own.
Unlike the debacles of the last few years, this year was going to be different.
Don’t go down to the woods today.
Deepest, darkest Stanford. Stanford, CA. October 31st 2003.
Sam had a plan.
Trouble is, plans disintegrate when soaked in alcohol. Sam knew that. He really did.
Nngggh.
Sam needed to remember not to fall asleep in whatever he was wearing when he was doing the aforementioned shots.
He also needed to find out who kept screaming outside his dorm at midnight. Clichés were noisy, and made the back of his head hurt like a kick from his Ferragamo-toed brother … uh … a kick from a witch.
If he could’ve remembered where the light switch was he’d have pulled out a pad and made a hunter-like list of the usual suspects. Sam hoped, albeit somewhat fuzzily, that it was squirrels, because:
a) They had that whole cute and furry thing going for them.
b) He was pretty sure he could take at least one in a fair fight (in daylight.)
Tiptoeing through the grounds of Stanford at 1.0 goddamn 3 in the morning trying to stalk rodents was not on Sam’s Plan C (what to do in case of a college hangover.)
Pesky little fucker kept moving further away like an auditory mirage.
Whispering, ‘Here, Secret Squirrel! Here, boy,’ didn’t seem to be improving his chances of catching the clever varmint. Possibly there was a mole out there helping to cover any tracks?
Nngggh. Nngggh. Nngggh. Nngggh. Nngggh.
Sam needed coffee. Maybe made with some of those caramel-flavoured Arabica beans with a hint of cinnamon? What the world, and Sam, needed now was coffee, sweet coffee. Sam selflessly promoted coffee five points on Plan A.
Fuck!
Sam didn’t fall over, then jump behind a tree when something yowelled and twined itself evilly between his legs. No he didn’t.
Not squirrels; cats. One cat to be precise. Huh.
‘Laugh it up, Fluffy,’ Sam snarled, twisting around trying to locate his target. He had a gun (if he could just get it out from under his garter), and he knew how to use it.
The feline genius snarled back through its whiskers from its lofty perch in the very same tree Sam had staged a dignified retreat to.
Right about then Sam discovered that he was a dog person (which Bobby could have told him years ago.) That was useful to know for future reference, but he doubted any dog would cope with being stuck in the Impala for hours at a stretch. Besides, Dean would insist on naming it something stupidly macho like Killer or Butch. Or maybe Hot Dog if it loved food as much as Dean did.
Sam swapped snarling for glaring through reddened eyes (note to self: put Visine on bedside cabinet before collapsing in a drunken stupor) and mentally reconsidered his not-so-defensible position.
A clanging noise from above reinforced Sam’s decision, and he made an unsteady dash to lean against what looked (damn the 1st quarter moon’s minimal glow) like a thankfully unoccupied oak surrounded by a large batch of reeds. Clanging? Was the little monster wearing armour? Surely not? That was probably just an unfortunate side effect of the shots.
Fucking cat! Sam wondered if it was feral or just plain evil, he was voting for the later.
A sharp hiss, and snort, followed by a series of heavy splashes nearby interrupted his befuddled pause to meditate on the nature of his quarry (and to rest because his arches were positively killing him.)
What the…?
Sam couldn’t work out for a moment why Fluffy’s needle-like claws had missed him. He wasn’t short like Dean. He was standing right there, even taller than usual. Maybe the cat had decided Sam was too much Winchester to handle, even at Halloween? Or…
Oh.
Reeds + splashes = water. Sam might still be slightly inebriated, but he hadn’t scored a scholarship to Stanford on the strength of his cute bangs alone.
Sam squinted down into the deep, dark, watery … well, depths actually.
He was standing next to, okay, ewww! Slightly in the shallows of what was probably, in the clear and alcohol-unclouded light of day, a tastefully landscaped fishpond.
Oops.
Oh. Oh. Sam’s neurons had finally decided to enrol in an academic program.
Carp? Koi? Giant mutant goldfish? Some of them looked more like Orange Roughy (it was Stanford, so anything was possible) to Sam’s confused and piscine-challenged mind.
Fish. Slippery, slimy, gold, and red, and orange, fish. Really cunning and fast-moving fish too.
Sam ignored the mud beginning to seep between the soles of his expensive sandals and his well-manicured toes, and took a minute to enjoy the sight of an irritated Fluffy (soon to be rechristened Soggy by the look of his tangled fur) bounding through waterlilies, clawing, and continually overshooting his prey. Heh.
Looked like Sam could safely cross ‘investigate midnight screams’ off Plan A.
As he trudged moistly dormwards, Sam came to another significant realisation.
Heels really were a bitch on grass, and it wasn’t advisable to get them wet.
Play to win.
Ford Center. Stanford, CA. October 30th 2004.
Sam had a plan.
He just needed to re-read it occasionally.
The Stanford Women's Gymnastics team’s annual Halloween "Meet the Team" event wasn’t what Sam had envisioned when Thad had talked him into coming to the party. Fine. It was a bad bet during a poker game, and who knew both of Thad’s parents must have been cardsharps back in the day? It was the only explanation for a Winchester losing an honest game. Either that or Sam was starting to lose his touch. Dean would be so pissed…
The Bay area was obviously a Mecca for fans of the sport. Or they had a single-minded appreciation for lithe lycra-clad bodies that his brother had also been known to embrace on occasion. The stands were packed, and it wasn’t just the children that were in costume. Phew! Sam relaxed and adjusted the seams of his stockings. Ordinarily he would have been starting to worry about plausible deniability, but luckily his friend was clothed in an eye-catching pair of pumpkin satin gym shorts, which he had cheerfully ‘matched’ with a lime-green t-shirt left over from St. Patrick’s Day, and a battered bunny-ear headdress (for reasons best left unasked.) Sam’s apparel was extremely tasteful by comparison.
Sam managed to sit stoically through the demonstration, though he nodded off during the Q&A. Some things in life were better viewed through a Tequila-hazed lens. Sam wasn’t normally big on self-medication (unless required after a hunt), but he always made an exception at Halloween.
Halloween equaled getting plastered. This too, was Dean’s fault.
Sam took another long slug from his thigh flask. At least this year his heels were safe. Ole!
Orgies are ill-adv(ert)ised.
Stanford University. Stanford, CA. October 31st 2005.
This year was going to be different.
Sam had a plan.
Sam was fairly sure that: - Drunken orgy at the Mausoleum.Was not part of the plan, in fact he was sure Plan A excluded such energetic activities. 98% sure. Urk. Make that 75%.
‘More shots!’
That wasn’t his voice. Sam was 68% sure of that. He was also sure that while the student handbook encouraged “student participation in a wide-range of academic, cultural, sporting, and social activities,” this wasn’t quite what the editors had in mind when they compiled the latest volume.
Sam was also completely certain that he’d never seen so many creatively carved pumpkins in his life. Only at Stanford would some nerd think Π was a seasonally appropriate pun.
And he was 25% sure th…
‘More shots!’
Okay, that wasn’t his voice this time. That was Jess’s.
Jess was awesome.
Sam had no idea why she’d agreed to go out with him in the first instance, never mind saying yes to a second date. But, girlfriend? Moving in, and happy ever after? That still made no sense to him, even when he wasn’t drunk. Not that Sam was drunk. No way, José. Or Johnny, or Jack, or whosoever the fuck he was drinking.
As, - Life! Be in it!Was on the plan, Sam decided to embrace José as his personal savior. Shots were good. Body shots with Jessica were better. ‘More shots!’
Turned out that the flier advertising ‘Drunken orgy at the Mausoleum!’ should have read ‘Halloween party at the Mausoleum.’ The local print shop had just learned that sometimes it wasn’t cost effective to hire students as cheap labour. Though according to the Mayhem Society’s (Sociolinguistics Sub-chapter) underground newspaper “Halloween party” was a well-known regional synonym for “drunken orgy.”
It also eventuated that the location was wishful thinking, and that students were still banned from the venue. Apparently the dead preferred a quiet life. Sam thought it wise not to ask exactly what had occurred to break what used to be a long-standing Stanford tradition.
As fate would have it the “misprint” strangely tripled the number of partygoers, and the Quad was soon overflowing with eager students of Greek and Roman religious and social customs.
Sam was just glad that he had consulted the weather report and he wasn’t one of the many toga-draped clones shivering and shimmying to the beat of the perky local Abba tribute band.
Sam liked to fit in without making the fatal mistake of becoming a fashion lemming. And thanks to his brother’s example over the years, he was more of a leather-all-the-way man.
Sure, he wasn’t the only guy or girl emulating this particular icon, but Sam had it on good authority (Jess and Thad - Go, Team Sam!) that his particular interpretation truly embodied the essence of the original.
Aglow with the party spirit (and José) Sam grabbed Jessica’s hand; brushed past a flaming torch (nice historical touch,) and finally succeeded in pushing through the crowd to leap on stage and snatch the microphone from Benny, or was it Agnetha? It was hard to tell when all four of them had beards.
As he moved forward to strut his stuff to the tune of “Sweet Transvestite” Sam only had one thought in mind.
‘If he could see me now.’
Naturally (because Fate is a bitch who hates Sam Winchester), that’s when the police arrived…
Part 2
Rating: R, Gen (but if you believe in subtext clap your hands)
Characters: Sam/Jess, Dean, John
Disclaimer: The characters are sadly not mine. I’m just sticking pins into Winchester dolls for the purposes of general amusement. Sorry about the holes!
Word Count: 4,136/11,326
A/N: Crack! fic written for spn_halloween, 2009. Prompt no. 27: Some of Stanford’s finest find out why Sam Winchester really *hates* Halloween.
A companion piece to Noise. Part of The Colour Chronicles.
Setting: Stanford, CA (& elsewhere.) October 2006-2005- (Flashbacks? What flashbacks?)
Summary: Wherein Sam Winchester is emo, prone to listmaking, confused, and alone. Unfortunately, neither the leather outfit nor the prison cell he’s presently stuck in is helping him solve the real problem. Oh yeah, and did he forget to mention that it’s October 31st? Sam really hates Halloween.
Part 1 | Part 2
Sam had this thing. He couldn’t, or rather, wouldn’t even dare categorize it in the privacy of his confused mind. The most he’d ever come up with to describe it over the years was to admit that he had a problem … thing. Naturally, it was all Dean’s fault.
Stick to the plan, and nothing but the plan.
Palo Alto, CA. October 31st 2006 (7.14 p.m.)
Sam totally had things under control. Every goddamn thing.
He had a plan.
When he was sixteen and he realised that being what his annoying elder brother called a ‘geekormous nerdbrain’ might actually be useful for more than correcting Dean’s Latin grammar just before an exorcism went out with a whimper rather than a Winchester-approved bang, Sam came up with a plan.
He used his brain to build a tunnel out of his life. Plans were good.
Back then the plan consisted of one nice, neat, concise, point.
1. Leave.
Okay. Possibly the original plan was worded slightly differently. If Sam remembered correctly it had been more like.
1. Fuck Dad! Who needs this shit?
Sam was big on rhetorical questions in 1999. He was also prone to writing a lot more than that when he was upset. So, that point may have meandered on for a few more paragraphs, wherein he described the full nature of his grievances with the surreptitious assistance of half a bottle of his father’s JD.
4am runs with field packs even on school days! What’s wrong with joining the chess club? Dean shoots better. Do you know how hard it is to NOT get caught packing two knives and a pistol in high school these days? Dean runs faster. Soccer is too a sport! Dean’s fucking perfect and never talks back. Why can’t we stay somewhere longer than a hunt? You don’t need me when you’ve got…
Sam may have gone through a few sheets of paper initially before the Winchester part of his brain slapped the emo down and told him ‘Suck it up, Princess. You got a problem? Make a plan. Do the research. Take plenty of ammo. And make a Plan B in case it all goes to shit.’ Parts of his brain sounded eerily like Dean sometimes (except the research bit) - right down to the accompanying slap up the back of the inside of his head
So, Sam listened. And made a little to-do list. Which he blushingly renamed a plan almost immediately afterwards because that sounded more official and less like something Dean would laugh at. Bastard.
He made a plan. Then he made another one.
Plan A:
1. Be like everyone else.
2. Get a new life.
3. Be happy.
4. Stop having to kill things.
5. Be normal.
6. Stop trying to be just like Dean.
For two days in July after a midnight movie marathon with his brother the plan was reworded to say.
1. Get out of Dodge.
He blamed Dean’s love of cowboy movies for the pop culture reference.
‘Boots and guns, and chicks with boobs falling out of their tops! What’s not to like, Sammy? Only thing missing is real horsepower, and maybe a flamethrower.’
Every time they watched a western, Sam saw Dean swagger in through all those batwing doors to throw down on the man wearing a black hat and kiss the girl before riding off into the sunset. Except Dean was right. Forget historical authenticity, the hero should always have a car. Although Sam still had doubts about the flamethrower; certain things got his brother overexcited. Flamethrowers were fairly high on that list, even occasionally nudging hot girls down a notch.
Months later in a bad motel on the outskirts of Tallahassee while their father spent hours in the bathroom trying to scrape off a stubborn layer of noxious mustard slime - courtesy of an overly-familiar (now messily deceased) sewer demon of the smellier subphylum, Sam thought he’d struck TV gold when he found the only non-porn channel (at $15.95 a night it was clear that unlimited porn was cheaper and easier to supply than clean sheets and a can of Raid) was playing a static-ridden “Back to the Future III.” He should have predicted that Dean’s major reaction was going to be, ‘A fucking DeLorean?’
Eventually (after he hid the cable remote because porn wasn’t ever going to be something he wanted to share with his brother), Sam finally culled his plan down to one pertinent sentence.
1. Get out. Leave home.
And even if Plan A (which he didn’t like to admit he secretly referred to as Plan S -for Plan Sam- because that would be too embarrassing) only had the one point at this stage in his life, Sam still numbered it:
a) Because part of him always knew what the unwritten second point was.
b) Because… well, despite what certain people said anal wasn’t:
i) Something for Dean to smirk about.
ii) A necessarily bad character trait.
Though possibly over-editing and analysing something to death was. It didn’t stop him from making his point clearer to himself.
1. Leave.
So he did.
There are some things they don’t tell you about plans.
Good plans? The really big, life-changing, no do-overs ever, plans? The kind that take years to implement successfully?
They hurt.
Sam still had two plans. Plan B remained unchanged.
Plan A - the Stanford version? It wasn’t a different plan; it was just different. He elevated his second point, altering the verb when he finally put it in writing, though over the next few years its emphasis varied depending on how busy… okay, how fucking homesick he was!
1. Call…
1. Call!
1. Call.
1. Call.
1. Call.
1. Call?
But its priority stayed constant.
The rest of his ever-evolving plan ranged from the pedantic to the ridiculous, and back again over the course of his degree.
3. Register.
4. Find room.
5. Protect room.
6. Hide weapons.
7. Meet roommate.
20. Don’t get caught by roommate breathing into a paper bag after totalling the cost of your textbooks. (Full ride? Sure! Money? ‘Just as soon as we get the kinks out of our new software system…’) You’re still growing. It is entirely credible that you are trying to inhale the last cookie crumbs.
21. Don’t scare roommate.
22. Re-consider credit card fraud as an acceptable way to finance higher education.
23. Remember definition of ‘normal.’ Look for part-time job.
34. Buy second-hand bike.
37. Work harder at not scaring roommate.
38. Hide weapons better.
41. Find out who that hot blonde is.
44. Get lockbox.
45. Don’t let Samantha come out to play.
46. Meet new roommate. Todd? Ted. Normal. Normal. Normal.
48. Don’t kill new roommate. Sleepwalking is not always a sign of…
52. Get Jessica Moore’s cell no.
- Call Jessica.
- Pick up next semester’s textbook list from bookshop. Earn more money!
- Essays = money.
- Study.
- Ole Tequila! Ola Tequila?
- Buy milk.
- Essay mills = more money, and little sleep.
- Study.
- Write pol. sci. essay for Ted? Thad.
- STUDY!
- Coffee. LOTS OF COFFEE!!!
- Screams at midnight are never a good sign, even in California.
- Ask Jess out. Movie? "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” at the Classic?
- Don’t do shots with Thad ever again. His B+ is worth the $50, but not the hangover.
- Buy more aspirin.
- Call Jess. “Beaches” ???
Somewhere along the way he also gave up on keeping up with the numbering system. Except for no. 1. But Dean had always been pushy like that, even when he wasn’t really there... here…
So, Sam had a plan. Shut up! He went with what worked, he was still a Winchester.
He had this plan. And every October he made sure to include one other important point. Last week he added underlining in the vain hope that it would strengthen his resolve. Then he went over it with a thicker pen, twice (because bold had always worked for Dean.)
- Just don’t do it!
Right. Well, he wasn’t that good at holding firm against shots either. And Jessica was absolutely no help whatsoever in that regard.
‘174 reasons to celebrate. 174 shots to toast your future tonight,’ she sang only slightly off-key while adroitly ducking his enthusiastically windmilling arms and turbo-dancing him through the narrow hall in her scarlet platforms. Apparently singing either ‘I got rhythm’ or ‘Shake, shake, shake. Shake your booty!’ -even with attitude- under your breath is no help at all except to make somebody snicker. Bitch. Some of the time Jess was scarily like his brother.
For such a soccer-playing, casual-at-heart art student she wore heels with the careless panache of a fashion model. ’Must be a girl thing,’ Sam thought wistfully. At 5 foot 11 in her bare feet Jess didn’t have a problem reaching any bit of him she aimed her lips at. Wearing those heels? A sensible man knew when to let her do whatever she wanted. Sam loved those sandals, and he loved her in them even more. Jessica wasn’t averse to taking advantage of that fact every now and then, and sometimes four times on Sundays. And if Sam was taking careful note of the precise techniques his girlfriend was using to dip and twirl without breaking an ankle? An attentive boyfriend is a good boyfriend. Sam prided himself on being a great boyfriend.
Unfortunately Sam’s greatness was leading him places he’d sworn on his textbooks last year that he’d never go again. Jess’s naughty nurse costume wasn’t helping the situation either. Costumes… And she’d put a lot of thought into this year’s Halloween ensemble, even managing to match the exact shade of red (which was fabulous with her colouring. Sam was more of a warm autumn himself) of her Chanel Rouge Allure Passion lipstick, to her barely-visible thigh-high scratchy net underskirt, and those Target Marc Jacobs knock-offs. Shame they didn’t make them in a wider range of siz…
Fuck.
As they awkwardly swung into another 180˚ turn and headed back down the corridor again Sam tried desperately to regain his focus; luckily geeks knew better than anyone that scientific method begins with observation. He started to form some critical questions-from past experience alone he knew the pressure was a killer-but he got distracted (again) by the happy fact that this kind of dancing (even with an incompetent partner) required close contact which was… what was Dean’s favourite word? Awesome. Jess was also warm, and smelled really, really nice…
Damn it. And Sam hadn’t even got up to considering the testing stage yet.
‘Come on, Sam! We have to get you dressed.’
Distracted wasn’t quite the right word. Sam needed to come up with something stronger. Jess had finished spinning them gracefully to a standstill in the bedroom doorway, in full view of the dangerously open wardrobe door. God, she was good.
Dressed… costumes…
No way in hell I'm doing that all over again. Time to break the cycle. God damn you, Dean.
‘We’re going to be…,’ she started to insist, tugging him determinedly inside the room.
‘No. We’re going to christen this hall, right here and now. I’m sure we forgot it when we moved in. I can aim for 174 times if you feel that’s appropriate.
‘Over-achiever,’ she purred into his mouth, happily diverted for now.
It was a small hall, and the bike added a touch terrifyingly reminiscent of one of Dad’s old Marine-based obstacle courses. But Sam was young, fit, motivated, and Winchester enough to cut that number back by nine (sue him if that was the combined ‘his’ and ‘hers’ total) It would have been ten if Jess’s nurse’s tutu thing hadn’t seemed to inclined to take on a life of its own at the start and appeared to be attempting to strangle Sam. If he muttered a quick ‘Christo’ while he was down on his knees Jessica was too busy to notice his odd choice in dirty talk.
Strangely enough, by the time they’d straightened their clothes and Jessica was striding back to the bedroom to reattach her cap, they were running late enough for the party that Sam got away with a bad excuse for not donning any sort of festive outfit. That kind of freakish luck meant Sam finally got to put a tick next to his anti-Nike resolution, and got a lot of amazing sex; even if his bike was undoubtedly going to be scarred for life as a result.
Sam grinned (unworried about the high cost of therapy for inanimate objects in California.) Success! He:
a) Had aced his LSAT.
b) Had his Law School interview on Monday.
c) Had broken the Winchester brothers’ Halloween curse habit at long last.
d) Had probably pulled a muscle, but it was totally worth it.
He wasn’t doing shots tonight. Definitely not. Absolutely not. Fuck it, maybe just a few. After all, he had everything to celebrate.
It wasn’t like he needed to prove anything to his brother. He was doing fine all on his own.
Unlike the debacles of the last few years, this year was going to be different.
Don’t go down to the woods today.
Deepest, darkest Stanford. Stanford, CA. October 31st 2003.
Sam had a plan.
Trouble is, plans disintegrate when soaked in alcohol. Sam knew that. He really did.
Nngggh.
Sam needed to remember not to fall asleep in whatever he was wearing when he was doing the aforementioned shots.
He also needed to find out who kept screaming outside his dorm at midnight. Clichés were noisy, and made the back of his head hurt like a kick from his Ferragamo-toed brother … uh … a kick from a witch.
If he could’ve remembered where the light switch was he’d have pulled out a pad and made a hunter-like list of the usual suspects. Sam hoped, albeit somewhat fuzzily, that it was squirrels, because:
a) They had that whole cute and furry thing going for them.
b) He was pretty sure he could take at least one in a fair fight (in daylight.)
Tiptoeing through the grounds of Stanford at 1.0 goddamn 3 in the morning trying to stalk rodents was not on Sam’s Plan C (what to do in case of a college hangover.)
Pesky little fucker kept moving further away like an auditory mirage.
Whispering, ‘Here, Secret Squirrel! Here, boy,’ didn’t seem to be improving his chances of catching the clever varmint. Possibly there was a mole out there helping to cover any tracks?
Nngggh. Nngggh. Nngggh. Nngggh. Nngggh.
Sam needed coffee. Maybe made with some of those caramel-flavoured Arabica beans with a hint of cinnamon? What the world, and Sam, needed now was coffee, sweet coffee. Sam selflessly promoted coffee five points on Plan A.
Fuck!
Sam didn’t fall over, then jump behind a tree when something yowelled and twined itself evilly between his legs. No he didn’t.
Not squirrels; cats. One cat to be precise. Huh.
‘Laugh it up, Fluffy,’ Sam snarled, twisting around trying to locate his target. He had a gun (if he could just get it out from under his garter), and he knew how to use it.
The feline genius snarled back through its whiskers from its lofty perch in the very same tree Sam had staged a dignified retreat to.
Right about then Sam discovered that he was a dog person (which Bobby could have told him years ago.) That was useful to know for future reference, but he doubted any dog would cope with being stuck in the Impala for hours at a stretch. Besides, Dean would insist on naming it something stupidly macho like Killer or Butch. Or maybe Hot Dog if it loved food as much as Dean did.
Sam swapped snarling for glaring through reddened eyes (note to self: put Visine on bedside cabinet before collapsing in a drunken stupor) and mentally reconsidered his not-so-defensible position.
A clanging noise from above reinforced Sam’s decision, and he made an unsteady dash to lean against what looked (damn the 1st quarter moon’s minimal glow) like a thankfully unoccupied oak surrounded by a large batch of reeds. Clanging? Was the little monster wearing armour? Surely not? That was probably just an unfortunate side effect of the shots.
Fucking cat! Sam wondered if it was feral or just plain evil, he was voting for the later.
A sharp hiss, and snort, followed by a series of heavy splashes nearby interrupted his befuddled pause to meditate on the nature of his quarry (and to rest because his arches were positively killing him.)
What the…?
Sam couldn’t work out for a moment why Fluffy’s needle-like claws had missed him. He wasn’t short like Dean. He was standing right there, even taller than usual. Maybe the cat had decided Sam was too much Winchester to handle, even at Halloween? Or…
Oh.
Reeds + splashes = water. Sam might still be slightly inebriated, but he hadn’t scored a scholarship to Stanford on the strength of his cute bangs alone.
Sam squinted down into the deep, dark, watery … well, depths actually.
He was standing next to, okay, ewww! Slightly in the shallows of what was probably, in the clear and alcohol-unclouded light of day, a tastefully landscaped fishpond.
Oops.
Oh. Oh. Sam’s neurons had finally decided to enrol in an academic program.
Carp? Koi? Giant mutant goldfish? Some of them looked more like Orange Roughy (it was Stanford, so anything was possible) to Sam’s confused and piscine-challenged mind.
Fish. Slippery, slimy, gold, and red, and orange, fish. Really cunning and fast-moving fish too.
Sam ignored the mud beginning to seep between the soles of his expensive sandals and his well-manicured toes, and took a minute to enjoy the sight of an irritated Fluffy (soon to be rechristened Soggy by the look of his tangled fur) bounding through waterlilies, clawing, and continually overshooting his prey. Heh.
Looked like Sam could safely cross ‘investigate midnight screams’ off Plan A.
As he trudged moistly dormwards, Sam came to another significant realisation.
Heels really were a bitch on grass, and it wasn’t advisable to get them wet.
Play to win.
Ford Center. Stanford, CA. October 30th 2004.
Sam had a plan.
He just needed to re-read it occasionally.
The Stanford Women's Gymnastics team’s annual Halloween "Meet the Team" event wasn’t what Sam had envisioned when Thad had talked him into coming to the party. Fine. It was a bad bet during a poker game, and who knew both of Thad’s parents must have been cardsharps back in the day? It was the only explanation for a Winchester losing an honest game. Either that or Sam was starting to lose his touch. Dean would be so pissed…
The Bay area was obviously a Mecca for fans of the sport. Or they had a single-minded appreciation for lithe lycra-clad bodies that his brother had also been known to embrace on occasion. The stands were packed, and it wasn’t just the children that were in costume. Phew! Sam relaxed and adjusted the seams of his stockings. Ordinarily he would have been starting to worry about plausible deniability, but luckily his friend was clothed in an eye-catching pair of pumpkin satin gym shorts, which he had cheerfully ‘matched’ with a lime-green t-shirt left over from St. Patrick’s Day, and a battered bunny-ear headdress (for reasons best left unasked.) Sam’s apparel was extremely tasteful by comparison.
Sam managed to sit stoically through the demonstration, though he nodded off during the Q&A. Some things in life were better viewed through a Tequila-hazed lens. Sam wasn’t normally big on self-medication (unless required after a hunt), but he always made an exception at Halloween.
Halloween equaled getting plastered. This too, was Dean’s fault.
Sam took another long slug from his thigh flask. At least this year his heels were safe. Ole!
Orgies are ill-adv(ert)ised.
Stanford University. Stanford, CA. October 31st 2005.
This year was going to be different.
Sam had a plan.
Sam was fairly sure that: - Drunken orgy at the Mausoleum.Was not part of the plan, in fact he was sure Plan A excluded such energetic activities. 98% sure. Urk. Make that 75%.
‘More shots!’
That wasn’t his voice. Sam was 68% sure of that. He was also sure that while the student handbook encouraged “student participation in a wide-range of academic, cultural, sporting, and social activities,” this wasn’t quite what the editors had in mind when they compiled the latest volume.
Sam was also completely certain that he’d never seen so many creatively carved pumpkins in his life. Only at Stanford would some nerd think Π was a seasonally appropriate pun.
And he was 25% sure th…
‘More shots!’
Okay, that wasn’t his voice this time. That was Jess’s.
Jess was awesome.
Sam had no idea why she’d agreed to go out with him in the first instance, never mind saying yes to a second date. But, girlfriend? Moving in, and happy ever after? That still made no sense to him, even when he wasn’t drunk. Not that Sam was drunk. No way, José. Or Johnny, or Jack, or whosoever the fuck he was drinking.
As, - Life! Be in it!Was on the plan, Sam decided to embrace José as his personal savior. Shots were good. Body shots with Jessica were better. ‘More shots!’
Turned out that the flier advertising ‘Drunken orgy at the Mausoleum!’ should have read ‘Halloween party at the Mausoleum.’ The local print shop had just learned that sometimes it wasn’t cost effective to hire students as cheap labour. Though according to the Mayhem Society’s (Sociolinguistics Sub-chapter) underground newspaper “Halloween party” was a well-known regional synonym for “drunken orgy.”
It also eventuated that the location was wishful thinking, and that students were still banned from the venue. Apparently the dead preferred a quiet life. Sam thought it wise not to ask exactly what had occurred to break what used to be a long-standing Stanford tradition.
As fate would have it the “misprint” strangely tripled the number of partygoers, and the Quad was soon overflowing with eager students of Greek and Roman religious and social customs.
Sam was just glad that he had consulted the weather report and he wasn’t one of the many toga-draped clones shivering and shimmying to the beat of the perky local Abba tribute band.
Sam liked to fit in without making the fatal mistake of becoming a fashion lemming. And thanks to his brother’s example over the years, he was more of a leather-all-the-way man.
Sure, he wasn’t the only guy or girl emulating this particular icon, but Sam had it on good authority (Jess and Thad - Go, Team Sam!) that his particular interpretation truly embodied the essence of the original.
Aglow with the party spirit (and José) Sam grabbed Jessica’s hand; brushed past a flaming torch (nice historical touch,) and finally succeeded in pushing through the crowd to leap on stage and snatch the microphone from Benny, or was it Agnetha? It was hard to tell when all four of them had beards.
As he moved forward to strut his stuff to the tune of “Sweet Transvestite” Sam only had one thought in mind.
‘If he could see me now.’
Naturally (because Fate is a bitch who hates Sam Winchester), that’s when the police arrived…
Part 2