(no subject)
Title: Never Let Me Down Again (Crappy Music Dean Would Totally Never Listen To, Except When He Does)
Author: hansbekhart
Rating: R for lots of the f-word
Summary: That's right, I used a Depeche Mode song to title a Supernatural fic.
Notes: So shored was sick of all the Winchester angst I've been dumping on her, and I agreed. This is for my sister, who managed to find the only other human being on the planet who also likes the song, "We Built This City."
So Dean made a lot of mix tapes back in the day; WKZO, Music to Rock Out With Your Cock Out, Bootleg Hour from 9 to 10 every night. He was just old enough that 9 wasn’t his bedtime anymore and John would let him sit up in Jim’s living room, inches away from the speakers, making tape after tape. He still has a couple of them, labelled with things like SUMMER ‘89 or FUCK EVERYONE MIX, but most of them burned in a haunted house when he was fifteen.
He only let Sammy make one tape when the kid was eleven, and boy, did he regret that one for years. They had to take turns picking music but since Dean had thirty tapes and Sam had only the one, well, let's just say that the odds were against him. And of course, the damn thing survived the fire and Dean cursed it at the time but over the years it’s migrated into his box of tapes, the tapes he actually listens to. It’s labelled RATT because Sammy will never, ever be desperate enough to touch RATT, not even if Dean loops Sabbath Bloody Sabbath ten times in a row.
And god, is it horrible. It isn’t even Music To Rock Out With Your Cock Out, it’s some easy listening bullshit station that Sammy liked better, and there’s Richard fucking Marx on it and Depeche fucking Mode and, to cap it all off, Starship. Starship. Not even Jefferson Starship, when Grace Slick was knee deep in white powder but still more or less functioning, but motherfucking Starship. You know, “We Built This City” Starship. Yeah, that one.
And the worst part of it is that every once in a while, every great once in a while, he’s not a total loser, his fingers find that dingy white cover with RATT carefully marked on it and he actually pops that motherfucker in the tape player.
Shut the hell up. It’s only once in a while. And he hasn’t done it in a really a long time. Like, maybe even months.
And hey, he heard that Johnny Cash even covered one of those Depeche Crap songs right before he died.
The stupid thing is that he doesn’t even like it, you know? The tape starts rolling and he lets it play all the way through once or twice, hating himself the entire time. It feels like being kicked in the balls, to be honest. Like Sammy is kicking him in the balls, stretching his gigantor legs all the way from California to give Dean The Sin.
He’s sorry to tell you that he knows exactly what that feels like. There were a couple of years, before Sammy lost all that pudge and grew eight feet, where the little shit really liked to kick people.
But honestly. "Just Can’t Get Enough."
He rolls the windows up when that one comes on. And then he turns it down just in case he pulls up next to anybody. No eye contact either, even if they can’t hear it. He doesn’t care how hot they are.
He thinks that Dad might’ve caught on to him. Nothing definite, just a suspicion, you know? The tape being in the wrong way or something, nothing he could put his finger even though he didn't think Dad made a habit of going through his stuff and he seriously doubted that Dad would even notice anything except for the fact that it was a tape full of music that sucked big hairy goat balls. But once or twice his fingers have actually lingered on the greasy plastic cover before passing it over for Creedence, the one compromise in Dean’s box of tapes.
Every time it’s happened, Dean’s come pretty close to just chucking the thing out the window, but he keeps catching himself chanting domo arigato Mr. Roboto under his breath and somehow that makes him want to toss it even less. It’s beyond the laws of man or something, he doesn’t know.
Eventually it breaks, of course; it’s a cockroach and it outlasts every other tape he has but one day "The Boys of Summer" goes all gurgly and underwater sounding and then it starts to smells real bad and he has to chivvy the stupid thing out of the player at the next rest stop. All of the ink has rubbed off where Sammy’s fat little fingers painstakingly traced out HAPPY BIRTHDAY DEAN but he squints at it anyway and then tosses it in the trunk. He thinks that maybe he could hang it up by its guts, maybe next to the dream catcher, but he’s only 100 miles out from Stanford and he just knows that even after two years of nothing Sammy would grab it and say, “You still listen to fucking RATT?”
Author: hansbekhart
Rating: R for lots of the f-word
Summary: That's right, I used a Depeche Mode song to title a Supernatural fic.
Notes: So shored was sick of all the Winchester angst I've been dumping on her, and I agreed. This is for my sister, who managed to find the only other human being on the planet who also likes the song, "We Built This City."
So Dean made a lot of mix tapes back in the day; WKZO, Music to Rock Out With Your Cock Out, Bootleg Hour from 9 to 10 every night. He was just old enough that 9 wasn’t his bedtime anymore and John would let him sit up in Jim’s living room, inches away from the speakers, making tape after tape. He still has a couple of them, labelled with things like SUMMER ‘89 or FUCK EVERYONE MIX, but most of them burned in a haunted house when he was fifteen.
He only let Sammy make one tape when the kid was eleven, and boy, did he regret that one for years. They had to take turns picking music but since Dean had thirty tapes and Sam had only the one, well, let's just say that the odds were against him. And of course, the damn thing survived the fire and Dean cursed it at the time but over the years it’s migrated into his box of tapes, the tapes he actually listens to. It’s labelled RATT because Sammy will never, ever be desperate enough to touch RATT, not even if Dean loops Sabbath Bloody Sabbath ten times in a row.
And god, is it horrible. It isn’t even Music To Rock Out With Your Cock Out, it’s some easy listening bullshit station that Sammy liked better, and there’s Richard fucking Marx on it and Depeche fucking Mode and, to cap it all off, Starship. Starship. Not even Jefferson Starship, when Grace Slick was knee deep in white powder but still more or less functioning, but motherfucking Starship. You know, “We Built This City” Starship. Yeah, that one.
And the worst part of it is that every once in a while, every great once in a while, he’s not a total loser, his fingers find that dingy white cover with RATT carefully marked on it and he actually pops that motherfucker in the tape player.
Shut the hell up. It’s only once in a while. And he hasn’t done it in a really a long time. Like, maybe even months.
And hey, he heard that Johnny Cash even covered one of those Depeche Crap songs right before he died.
The stupid thing is that he doesn’t even like it, you know? The tape starts rolling and he lets it play all the way through once or twice, hating himself the entire time. It feels like being kicked in the balls, to be honest. Like Sammy is kicking him in the balls, stretching his gigantor legs all the way from California to give Dean The Sin.
He’s sorry to tell you that he knows exactly what that feels like. There were a couple of years, before Sammy lost all that pudge and grew eight feet, where the little shit really liked to kick people.
But honestly. "Just Can’t Get Enough."
He rolls the windows up when that one comes on. And then he turns it down just in case he pulls up next to anybody. No eye contact either, even if they can’t hear it. He doesn’t care how hot they are.
He thinks that Dad might’ve caught on to him. Nothing definite, just a suspicion, you know? The tape being in the wrong way or something, nothing he could put his finger even though he didn't think Dad made a habit of going through his stuff and he seriously doubted that Dad would even notice anything except for the fact that it was a tape full of music that sucked big hairy goat balls. But once or twice his fingers have actually lingered on the greasy plastic cover before passing it over for Creedence, the one compromise in Dean’s box of tapes.
Every time it’s happened, Dean’s come pretty close to just chucking the thing out the window, but he keeps catching himself chanting domo arigato Mr. Roboto under his breath and somehow that makes him want to toss it even less. It’s beyond the laws of man or something, he doesn’t know.
Eventually it breaks, of course; it’s a cockroach and it outlasts every other tape he has but one day "The Boys of Summer" goes all gurgly and underwater sounding and then it starts to smells real bad and he has to chivvy the stupid thing out of the player at the next rest stop. All of the ink has rubbed off where Sammy’s fat little fingers painstakingly traced out HAPPY BIRTHDAY DEAN but he squints at it anyway and then tosses it in the trunk. He thinks that maybe he could hang it up by its guts, maybe next to the dream catcher, but he’s only 100 miles out from Stanford and he just knows that even after two years of nothing Sammy would grab it and say, “You still listen to fucking RATT?”