Fic: It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Bradbury!
Title: It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Bradbury!
Author: brightly_lit
Rating: PG
Genre: gen, humor
Characters: Dean, Sam, Charlie
Word Count: 1,800
Summary: It's Halloween, and Sam and Dean need some fake blood for a hunt, so they enlist Charlie, who takes them shopping in suburbia. Suffice to say, suburbia is not Dean's kind of place.
"Jeez, acting was hard work. You had to go stand on the colored tape on the floor, and say a bunch of stuff, and everyone was always mad at you and telling you you weren’t doing a good job ..."
“Son of a bitch!”
“What?” Sam asked mildly.
“You got salad dressing on my baby’s upholstery!”
Sam leaned down and peered closer. “Um, Dean, that’s not salad dressing, that’s pastry frosting.”
Dean dipped his finger into whatever it was and had a lick. It was sweet ... like frosting. Whatever. Dean scowled and took out his gun. He cracked it open to make sure the magazine was full.
Sam was smirking. “Worried we’ll run into trouble in the crafts store?”
“Nervous habit,” Dean growled, holstering it in the back of his pants.
“Um, Dean,” Charlie piped up anxiously from the back seat. When Dean looked at her in the rearview mirror, he saw her nod her head surreptitiously at the adjacent car. Dean looked over and saw a tiny old woman, staring at him fearfully from the passenger seat. He’d kind of been checking his gun in full view of the old gal. It’s not like he hadn’t glanced around before he took it out to make sure no one could see, but she was sunk so far down in her seat, he’d missed her.
Sam leaned forward to look past him, then settled back again with a little smirk. “Terrorizing little old ladies. This has been a great day already. Maybe we should have stayed in bed.”
“You got all that gum off before you got in the car, right?” Dean asked for the third time, give or take five times.
“Yes, Dean,” Sam answered pointedly before the words were even all the way out of Dean’s mouth.
Dean glanced at Sam’s shoe, his baby’s upholstery, and the little old lady--who was now poking haplessly at a cell phone--not a good sign, ’cos maybe she was trying to dial the cops--and eyed Sam again. “You didn’t happen to ... find a lucky rabbit’s foot this morning ... right?”
Sam just rolled his eyes, but Charlie suddenly crowed, “Ooh, that one was my favorite! When Sam’s shoe went down the grate--” She howled. Great, so Chuck had apparently made that brief, dark phase of their lives into a comedy--you know, where Bela robbed them and shot Sam and they’d barely escaped with their lives. Freakin’ Chuck. Dean seethed.
Dean interrupted Charlie’s reminiscences of her favorite tome in the Supernatural series quickly, because Sam looked at least as pained by the reminder as Dean was. “You’re sure they’ll have what we need?”
“Fake blood?” said Charlie. “Probably. Craft stores are the go-to place for costumy stuff.”
Some clever ghouls had allied with a vampire nest to consume the bodies of the vamps’ victims, a real win-win for both of them. Garth had someone on the vampire nest, but Charlie had found the case in the first place and she was dying to get in on a hunt, so Sam and Dean had agreed to take care of the ghouls, having experience with them and all, which Chuck probably also found some way to turn into hilarity. He and Sam were going to pose as vamp victims to catch them, because as it turned out ghouls were hard to lure out of hiding, unless they happened to be stalking you personally. “I still don’t get why we don’t just use real blood and get it over with. I mean, Crowley’s full of the stuff. Next time we decide to torture him ....” He glanced hopefully over at Sam, who frowned. “All right, fine. Let’s get this over with.”
They got out of the car. Dean grinned in the old lady’s direction and said loudly, as if actually talking to Sam and Charlie, “The gun is part of my costume! Isn’t Halloween fun?”
Charlie tittered. Even Sam looked amused.
“What?” Dean growled, letting the painful, fake smile fall from his face the instant they were away from the old lady’s car.
“You’re so good at that,” Sam said, deadpan. “You should go into acting.”
“Shut up,” Dean growled, but truthfully, Charlie’s delighted tittering kind of made it all right ... until she started going on about that weird interlude when they were some actor guys named Padaleski and Arkles playing Sam and Dean in an alternate universe, working herself into hysterics. Chuck’s latest books must be a laugh riot. Dean looked back over those years. Apocalypse, Lucifer stalking Sam, other angels stalking Dean ... it really hadn’t seemed like a comedy goldmine to Dean. Jeez, acting was hard work. You had to go stand on the colored tape on the floor, and say a bunch of stuff, and everyone was always mad at you and telling you you weren’t doing a good job. Dean would take hunting over that any day.
... He’d take a battle with a monster over wandering around a craft store, too, he soon discovered. Charlie noticed his shudder as he spotted a knick-knack that involved kittens and yarn all tangled up together. She peered over his shoulder. “Creeped out by ... kittens?” she asked with a smirk.
“Creeped out by pretty much everything in here,” he muttered.
Charlie looked around. “Housewives and knitters and fake flowers?”
“Yeah, yeah! All of it. Let’s find the blood and get outta here!”
“Maybe all that time you spent in hell gave you a new definition of creepy,” Charlie suggested.
Something had. Could be that he was used to places where danger was ever-present; the cutesy veneer of this store made him nervous, because he couldn’t tell where the danger was. All the nice people wandering around, too; they just seemed like bait to Dean--bait that would be really hard to keep alive in a fight. He thought back on purgatory, where the rule was simple: kill everything. Nice, simple purgatory. Ahh, those were the days. He had another look around the sewing section and wrinkled his nose.
Charlie expertly led them to the Halloween makeup. They had everything--everything!--except fake blood. The clerk Charlie asked suggested they check out the Halloween store two storefronts down, so they trekked up the sidewalk and went inside.
Surrounded by ghosts and vampires and zombies, Dean felt much more at home. Evidently an expert on fake blood, too (all the cosplay, she noted), Charlie pored over the options until she found some she was satisfied with. It mostly came in little tubes. They got the bucket o’ blood instead. Twenty bucks. “Still don’t see why we don’t just drain Crowley,” Dean complained once they were in the check-out line. Twenty bucks would buy a lot of pie. Or upholstery shampoo. “Hey,” he said, having a thought, “can ghouls smell blood? Because if they can, this is pointless.”
Dean could tell from Sam’s lack of expression that he’d already long since thought of this. Freakin’ Sam. He’d always already thought of everything. What, had he taken Advanced Ghoul Smelling at Stanford?? Dean got distracted, wondering if they really might have such a class at Stanford. Maybe college wasn’t such a waste of time, after all. “Garth says they can smell death. Not blood. So Crowley wouldn’t work, either, because he’s ... not exactly dead.”
“Great, so what, now we’ve got to dig up some dead animals?” This job was just getting better and better.
Sam and Charlie were staring at him, with this particular look on their faces, like there was something he just wasn’t getting. Few things annoyed him more. Well, all right, lots of things annoyed him more, but this annoyed him a lot.
“What?!” he said, getting louder. “I’m so sick of digging up corpses! Me ’n’ Sam do it freakin’ constantly! If you really want to become a hunter, Charlie, I’m tellin’ you, all you need to do is get strong enough to dig down six feet a couple times a week.”
Now Sam and Charlie were looking embarrassed and making urgent faces at him. “What’s wrong with you two?” Dean demanded.
“You have such a detailed backstory for your Halloween character!” Charlie said, as loudly as Dean was talking.
Sam gave a forced laugh. “He gets really into character!” he agreed.
“What?!” Dean said, baffled. “Y--” Dean became aware of many eyes on them in the check-out line--disturbed, grossed-out, troubled eyes. Pretty judgmental for a bunch of people buying zombie-hunting paraphernalia and severed heads. Apparently Dean felt a little too comfortable in the Halloween store.
Once through the check-out line, Dean hurried back to the car, relieved to be about to get these ghouls and get the hell out of Dodge ... or, in this case, suburbia. He could see his baby, and liberty was nigh ... when a respectable-looking business man suddenly popped out from between two late-model SUVs as if he’d been waiting to pounce on him, and Dean barely managed to keep from going for his gun.
“Excuse me, but is there any chance you could give me a jump?”
Dean’s expression melted into a smile. Finally, one thing going right today! Dean hadn’t had a chance to talk cars with anyone in months. Even Benny was all about boats; cars were kind of after his time, and of course Sam was no good for that. Sam probably thought a carburetor was what was in fattening foods. Dean got distracted, thinking about this, because wait, maybe ‘carb’ was short for carburetor. What was the full word? He told the guy he’d be happy to help as he opened the Impala’s trunk, still ruminating. He could ask Sam later, but Sam would make fun of him.
He rummaged through the stuff in the trunk distractedly. He grabbed what he thought were jumper cables, saying happily, “Here we go!” then realized belatedly it was actually a taser. Whoops. He threw it back in the trunk and dug around under it, pulling out the next thing that looked like thick electrical cords, only to see it was a long length of blood-stained rope. Crap. Dean gave the guy a winning grin, only to see an expression of fixed horror on the guy’s face. Sam and Charlie stood beyond him, arms folded, looking completely unsurprised.
Dean’s forced laugh sounded even faker than Sam’s. “Halloween!” Dean tried. “We, uh ... we’re building a haunted house--it’s gonna be great, it’ll have everything: ropes, and crossbows, and tasers ....”
Charlie’s lips twitched unmistakably. Dean looked away quickly, hoping enough happened between now and the next time the three of them were alone together that they might forget about putting him through the ceaseless ribbing he could already tell was headed his way. Sam was right; they should’ve stayed in bed.
“Seriously,” Charlie whispered as she started helping him rummage, “how do you guys manage when it’s not Halloween?”
~ The End ~
Notes:
- This story was directly inspired by going to the crafts store, and subsequently the Halloween store, looking for fake blood and imagining Sam and Dean doing the same thing--down to the tiny old lady in the adjacent car. Because, you know, Sam and Dean's life doesn't jibe well with normal life, but it's fun to imagine them trying!
Author: brightly_lit
Rating: PG
Genre: gen, humor
Characters: Dean, Sam, Charlie
Word Count: 1,800
Summary: It's Halloween, and Sam and Dean need some fake blood for a hunt, so they enlist Charlie, who takes them shopping in suburbia. Suffice to say, suburbia is not Dean's kind of place.
"Jeez, acting was hard work. You had to go stand on the colored tape on the floor, and say a bunch of stuff, and everyone was always mad at you and telling you you weren’t doing a good job ..."
“Son of a bitch!”
“What?” Sam asked mildly.
“You got salad dressing on my baby’s upholstery!”
Sam leaned down and peered closer. “Um, Dean, that’s not salad dressing, that’s pastry frosting.”
Dean dipped his finger into whatever it was and had a lick. It was sweet ... like frosting. Whatever. Dean scowled and took out his gun. He cracked it open to make sure the magazine was full.
Sam was smirking. “Worried we’ll run into trouble in the crafts store?”
“Nervous habit,” Dean growled, holstering it in the back of his pants.
“Um, Dean,” Charlie piped up anxiously from the back seat. When Dean looked at her in the rearview mirror, he saw her nod her head surreptitiously at the adjacent car. Dean looked over and saw a tiny old woman, staring at him fearfully from the passenger seat. He’d kind of been checking his gun in full view of the old gal. It’s not like he hadn’t glanced around before he took it out to make sure no one could see, but she was sunk so far down in her seat, he’d missed her.
Sam leaned forward to look past him, then settled back again with a little smirk. “Terrorizing little old ladies. This has been a great day already. Maybe we should have stayed in bed.”
“You got all that gum off before you got in the car, right?” Dean asked for the third time, give or take five times.
“Yes, Dean,” Sam answered pointedly before the words were even all the way out of Dean’s mouth.
Dean glanced at Sam’s shoe, his baby’s upholstery, and the little old lady--who was now poking haplessly at a cell phone--not a good sign, ’cos maybe she was trying to dial the cops--and eyed Sam again. “You didn’t happen to ... find a lucky rabbit’s foot this morning ... right?”
Sam just rolled his eyes, but Charlie suddenly crowed, “Ooh, that one was my favorite! When Sam’s shoe went down the grate--” She howled. Great, so Chuck had apparently made that brief, dark phase of their lives into a comedy--you know, where Bela robbed them and shot Sam and they’d barely escaped with their lives. Freakin’ Chuck. Dean seethed.
Dean interrupted Charlie’s reminiscences of her favorite tome in the Supernatural series quickly, because Sam looked at least as pained by the reminder as Dean was. “You’re sure they’ll have what we need?”
“Fake blood?” said Charlie. “Probably. Craft stores are the go-to place for costumy stuff.”
Some clever ghouls had allied with a vampire nest to consume the bodies of the vamps’ victims, a real win-win for both of them. Garth had someone on the vampire nest, but Charlie had found the case in the first place and she was dying to get in on a hunt, so Sam and Dean had agreed to take care of the ghouls, having experience with them and all, which Chuck probably also found some way to turn into hilarity. He and Sam were going to pose as vamp victims to catch them, because as it turned out ghouls were hard to lure out of hiding, unless they happened to be stalking you personally. “I still don’t get why we don’t just use real blood and get it over with. I mean, Crowley’s full of the stuff. Next time we decide to torture him ....” He glanced hopefully over at Sam, who frowned. “All right, fine. Let’s get this over with.”
They got out of the car. Dean grinned in the old lady’s direction and said loudly, as if actually talking to Sam and Charlie, “The gun is part of my costume! Isn’t Halloween fun?”
Charlie tittered. Even Sam looked amused.
“What?” Dean growled, letting the painful, fake smile fall from his face the instant they were away from the old lady’s car.
“You’re so good at that,” Sam said, deadpan. “You should go into acting.”
“Shut up,” Dean growled, but truthfully, Charlie’s delighted tittering kind of made it all right ... until she started going on about that weird interlude when they were some actor guys named Padaleski and Arkles playing Sam and Dean in an alternate universe, working herself into hysterics. Chuck’s latest books must be a laugh riot. Dean looked back over those years. Apocalypse, Lucifer stalking Sam, other angels stalking Dean ... it really hadn’t seemed like a comedy goldmine to Dean. Jeez, acting was hard work. You had to go stand on the colored tape on the floor, and say a bunch of stuff, and everyone was always mad at you and telling you you weren’t doing a good job. Dean would take hunting over that any day.
... He’d take a battle with a monster over wandering around a craft store, too, he soon discovered. Charlie noticed his shudder as he spotted a knick-knack that involved kittens and yarn all tangled up together. She peered over his shoulder. “Creeped out by ... kittens?” she asked with a smirk.
“Creeped out by pretty much everything in here,” he muttered.
Charlie looked around. “Housewives and knitters and fake flowers?”
“Yeah, yeah! All of it. Let’s find the blood and get outta here!”
“Maybe all that time you spent in hell gave you a new definition of creepy,” Charlie suggested.
Something had. Could be that he was used to places where danger was ever-present; the cutesy veneer of this store made him nervous, because he couldn’t tell where the danger was. All the nice people wandering around, too; they just seemed like bait to Dean--bait that would be really hard to keep alive in a fight. He thought back on purgatory, where the rule was simple: kill everything. Nice, simple purgatory. Ahh, those were the days. He had another look around the sewing section and wrinkled his nose.
Charlie expertly led them to the Halloween makeup. They had everything--everything!--except fake blood. The clerk Charlie asked suggested they check out the Halloween store two storefronts down, so they trekked up the sidewalk and went inside.
Surrounded by ghosts and vampires and zombies, Dean felt much more at home. Evidently an expert on fake blood, too (all the cosplay, she noted), Charlie pored over the options until she found some she was satisfied with. It mostly came in little tubes. They got the bucket o’ blood instead. Twenty bucks. “Still don’t see why we don’t just drain Crowley,” Dean complained once they were in the check-out line. Twenty bucks would buy a lot of pie. Or upholstery shampoo. “Hey,” he said, having a thought, “can ghouls smell blood? Because if they can, this is pointless.”
Dean could tell from Sam’s lack of expression that he’d already long since thought of this. Freakin’ Sam. He’d always already thought of everything. What, had he taken Advanced Ghoul Smelling at Stanford?? Dean got distracted, wondering if they really might have such a class at Stanford. Maybe college wasn’t such a waste of time, after all. “Garth says they can smell death. Not blood. So Crowley wouldn’t work, either, because he’s ... not exactly dead.”
“Great, so what, now we’ve got to dig up some dead animals?” This job was just getting better and better.
Sam and Charlie were staring at him, with this particular look on their faces, like there was something he just wasn’t getting. Few things annoyed him more. Well, all right, lots of things annoyed him more, but this annoyed him a lot.
“What?!” he said, getting louder. “I’m so sick of digging up corpses! Me ’n’ Sam do it freakin’ constantly! If you really want to become a hunter, Charlie, I’m tellin’ you, all you need to do is get strong enough to dig down six feet a couple times a week.”
Now Sam and Charlie were looking embarrassed and making urgent faces at him. “What’s wrong with you two?” Dean demanded.
“You have such a detailed backstory for your Halloween character!” Charlie said, as loudly as Dean was talking.
Sam gave a forced laugh. “He gets really into character!” he agreed.
“What?!” Dean said, baffled. “Y--” Dean became aware of many eyes on them in the check-out line--disturbed, grossed-out, troubled eyes. Pretty judgmental for a bunch of people buying zombie-hunting paraphernalia and severed heads. Apparently Dean felt a little too comfortable in the Halloween store.
Once through the check-out line, Dean hurried back to the car, relieved to be about to get these ghouls and get the hell out of Dodge ... or, in this case, suburbia. He could see his baby, and liberty was nigh ... when a respectable-looking business man suddenly popped out from between two late-model SUVs as if he’d been waiting to pounce on him, and Dean barely managed to keep from going for his gun.
“Excuse me, but is there any chance you could give me a jump?”
Dean’s expression melted into a smile. Finally, one thing going right today! Dean hadn’t had a chance to talk cars with anyone in months. Even Benny was all about boats; cars were kind of after his time, and of course Sam was no good for that. Sam probably thought a carburetor was what was in fattening foods. Dean got distracted, thinking about this, because wait, maybe ‘carb’ was short for carburetor. What was the full word? He told the guy he’d be happy to help as he opened the Impala’s trunk, still ruminating. He could ask Sam later, but Sam would make fun of him.
He rummaged through the stuff in the trunk distractedly. He grabbed what he thought were jumper cables, saying happily, “Here we go!” then realized belatedly it was actually a taser. Whoops. He threw it back in the trunk and dug around under it, pulling out the next thing that looked like thick electrical cords, only to see it was a long length of blood-stained rope. Crap. Dean gave the guy a winning grin, only to see an expression of fixed horror on the guy’s face. Sam and Charlie stood beyond him, arms folded, looking completely unsurprised.
Dean’s forced laugh sounded even faker than Sam’s. “Halloween!” Dean tried. “We, uh ... we’re building a haunted house--it’s gonna be great, it’ll have everything: ropes, and crossbows, and tasers ....”
Charlie’s lips twitched unmistakably. Dean looked away quickly, hoping enough happened between now and the next time the three of them were alone together that they might forget about putting him through the ceaseless ribbing he could already tell was headed his way. Sam was right; they should’ve stayed in bed.
“Seriously,” Charlie whispered as she started helping him rummage, “how do you guys manage when it’s not Halloween?”
~ The End ~
Notes:
- This story was directly inspired by going to the crafts store, and subsequently the Halloween store, looking for fake blood and imagining Sam and Dean doing the same thing--down to the tiny old lady in the adjacent car. Because, you know, Sam and Dean's life doesn't jibe well with normal life, but it's fun to imagine them trying!