so there's this show I watch sometimes

Jun 29, 2011 00:09

I have a confession to make. It's very secret. See, I really really really really really really really really like this one show. Maybe you've heard of it:


?

Aaaaaand that realization is about as far as I've gotten in my spn_summergen. But I felt these feelings were novel and therefore worth reporting. I never talk about Supernatural in this journal.

To make this post marginally less ridiculous, here's my fic for the most recent spn_las round. THIS WAS WRITTEN somewhere in a flurry of 72 straight ours of taking finals and writing papers and not moving and not really sleeping or eating MAGICALLY.

The prompt was to 'fix something from canon.' Do you remember the scene in 5x22 where Chuck is describing Sam and Dean stargazing on the hood of the Impala? I don't buy that. Not with those facial expressions, or with those postures, they didn't. So I fixed that. Except for the first half. The first half is just me self-indulgently describing what my ribcage felt like, through Dean. You know, gratuitous preamble.

tl;dr fic cohesion is for pansies.

a piece of night
Sam, Dean, Dean/Hell, subliminal Sam/Ruby, ~700 words

Sam asks, "Are you...on something?"

"The car," Dean says.

And, "I see that," says Sam.



Bones don't mean as much as they used to. Used to be, they broke. Diaphyseal facture, Frykman classifications, metacarpal shrapnel--any and all of the above, doctor jargon he'd heard enough times by the time he hit twenty they came almost as easy as omnis immundus spiritus. (--Not that he's ever made appropriate use of either. He doesn't, will never, know which bones go where, what Latin is actually fucking useful and which parts are just fluff. But fitting pain and di-a-phy-se-al into his mind at the same time is a hell of a lot more complicated than letting pain and jesus motherfucking shit! make nice with each other in the same small space.

And complicated is good. It's damn good.)

But it's different now. Bones. Blood. Raw, scream-ripped throats. Bones. Sometimes, it's like they all just kind of fall together like liquid slop, collapse because they've finally figured out the con--there's nothing, no one left to prop up, come on. Get real. Don't need a ribcage if there's no heart, a skeleton if you're headed nowhere. Dean's pretty sure those are song lyrics, song lyrics from somewhere, though it's been a while since he and Sam've tuned in. Some dickwad angel screwed the stereo to hell.

So Dean'll just have to make due with silence. Sam's taking a call somewhere. For once, Dean hopes it's a long one. He hopes Sam tells Ruby all his hopes and dreams, all the playground gossip, the dirty things written in the bathroom. Maybe even with phone sex to cherry top it off.

(His mind is wandering again. His bones and muscles checked out and his mind just took off, five hundred mile sprint to all places but here.)

Dean lies on the hood of his car, boneless. Dean lies on the hood of his car because he can't do anything else. Except breathe, maybe, and then only because he's had forty years of practice learning to breathe out of his eyes and not his lungs. He looks up at the sky. He breathes stars.

"What are you doing?" Sam asks. Back-too-soon Sam.

Dean tells it to him from the top. And he knows what must sound like, because Sam asks, "Are you...on something?"

"The car," Dean says.

And, "I see that," says Sam. But he doesn't say more, and he climbs up on the hood with Dean, and he looks up at the stars. Dean breathes.

Cassiopeia, Sam says, eventually. Before Dean can work around his bonelessness, manage some kind of gutter retort, Sam says, It's that one, there. See? There's her throne. She's chained to it.

Huh. Cas.--Dean thinks. But Sam keeps going. And that one--that's the Phoenix. Sam speaks stars, names the entire sky by the time Dean finds his skeleton, can move again. Naturally, Dean's committed all Sam's names to memory, another jumble of too many syllables he'll never place correctly. But at least Sam has his shit together. There's that. Sam doesn't need to know that all those stars--they've got different names in Hell. And Dean knows them all.

And then--just the once--Sam says a name Dean's never heard before in clear air. It's the kind of name you can't say right with all your teeth, or all your tongue. But Sam's pronunciation is good enough, and his aim when he points to the stars is good enough, and Dean wonders. Sam won't say who he learned that one from. He shrugs. "School, I guess. Maybe I'm wrong. What, suddenly you know?" And he laughs, genuinely.

Dean knows.

Dean knows, and says nothing, because Sam doesn't need to. (Sam is trying. He knows Sam is trying. Sam's just losing.)

They sit on the hood of the Impala, staring up at the sky, and Sam talks, and Sam loves, and Dean remembers his bones.

RL picspam and flist catch-up forthcoming~

i use lj the way other people use tumblr, fandom: spn, i can't watch tv like a normal person, fic: spn, mistaking reality for spn again

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