FIC: "A Radical Interpretation of the Text" (SPN, post-4.18)
A Radical Interpretation of the Text
by LJ
Spoilers: Post 4.18 “The Monster at the End of this Book”
About 3000 words, PG-13. Some of the fic references are real.
Summary: Dean discovers BroCon 2009.
Dean was bored. It was (they were sure) a simple salt-and-burn - a nice change from the angel!dickery that had taken over their lives lately - but they still hadn’t figured out if it was the first or fourth husband who was still causing trouble. They’d been at the library for two hours without the missing detail that would solve the damn thing, and he was bored. Really, really bored. He checked his watch; it was almost noon. He poked Sam: “Dude. It’s time for lunch.”
Sam didn’t react for a moment, frowning again at the copy of The History of Greene County, With Biographical Sketches in front of him and then finally set it down. “Dean, we just had breakfast. Just admit that you’re bored.”
Dean sighed. “Breakfast was ages ago, man.”
Sam gave him a Look.
“Okay, okay. Fine. I’m bored.”
“Look,” Sam said, sighing, “this is going to take forever. If you want to go, then go. I’ll be fine here. Honest.”
Dean was hesitant to leave Sam alone - he seemed to be getting himself into trouble on his own; he shuddered at the idea of Lilith popping into the library the moment he left Sam - but eventually he gave in and took off.
He found himself walking with no particular destination in mind but it was a pleasant spring day, the sun finally out and the breeze wasn’t too cold, and he smiled despite himself. There was a nice little diner advertising fresh-baked pie before long and he popped inside for a slice and a sandwich and a cup of coffee. He sat down at a booth with a window and ate slowly, and before long something caught his attention: a stream of women, not all at once but over twenty or thirty minutes, all going into the motel across the street. When the waitress came by and topped off his coffee, he asked her about it.
“I don’t know,” she said, leaning over the table. “Some kind of convention, I guess. A bunch of ‘em came over for breakfast this morning.”
“Thanks,” he said. The waitress went on to other tables, and behind him there was suddenly giggling. He frowned and listened, but couldn’t make out the words, there being too much excited laughter and talking over each other. Shrugging, he reached into his pocket for some cash and then scooted off the bench. Pulling on his jacket, he stepped away - and just about knocked over a woman leaving the booth that had had all the giggling. She dropped her bag as she tried to stay upright and he crouched down to pick it up. A book had fallen out when it fell and he took a moment to look at the cover.
It was Supernatural by Carver Edlund. Complete with the shirtless Fabio-wannabe standing in for Sam and the weird-looking butch dude for him. And judging by the condition of the spine, the woman must have had the damn thing memorized by now. He recovered quickly from the surprise and handed it back to her with one of his patented wide-and-charming grins. “You a Dean girl or a Sam girl?” he teased. Part of him was completely freaked out, but another part thought this would be an awesome opportunity for recon.
She laughed. “Actually, I’m more of a John girl,” she said. “And Becky over there-” She gestured to one of the other women; they were a foursome, all climbing out of the booth and getting their things together. “-She’s kind of got a thing for Bobby. How about you?” She grinned a little scarily. “You a Sam girl?”
Dean’s brain stumbled for a moment, struggling with the idea that some of the fans had the hots for two old men and not him or - a reasonable alternative - Sam. “Uh, Dean, actually,” he finally said. “I really get the whole older brother thing, you know?”
All the women were staring at him now.
“So, um,” Dean continued. “You guys have a book club or something?”
Becky - the Bobby fan - spoke up. “Actually, we’re here for BroCon,” she said, like he should have known about it.
“Bro…ken?” he repeated slowly, confused.
“BroCon,” the first woman - the John girl - corrected. “You know, the fan convention?” She paused, clearly waiting for him to recognize it like Becky had expected.
“There’s a convention?” he said in surprise. “For Supernatural?”
“Oh, my god, ladies,” said the John girl to her friends. “We’ve found a con virgin.” She turned back to Dean. “What’s your name, hon? And do you have the afternoon free?”
‘BroCon’, it turned out, was short for ‘Brothers Convention’. The name had been in place for a couple of years, Maggie - the John girl - explained, since the first Supernatural fan gathering in 2006. “Other names got batted around on the Internet - are you on LiveJournal?”
“Live what?” he asked. They’d been throwing these words around: live journal, delicious, vids, wrecks, fick, fen, crack, wing fick , slash. At least he knew the last one.
Though he could have lived without knowing about the existence of John-slash-Bobby.
“Never mind.” She shook her head. “Anyway, BroCon is the name that stuck. Maybe if we knew what Sam and Dean’s last name was…well, the only chance is if Carver Edlund writes another book, but we’ve pretty much given up on that. Supposedly the publisher went under.”
Dean wondered what the women would think if they found out that Edlund was really a Prophet of the Lord named Chuck with an archangel hanging over his shoulder, but withheld the comment and made sympathetic noises instead - and then boggled as he entered the convention hall.
Women, of all ages, shapes and sizes, packed inside. There were folding chairs set up in rows, but all the seats were taken and there were people standing all along the walls. He gave the crowd a good once-over and discovered that he wasn’t the only male in the horde, but y-chromosomes were definitely in the minority. Maggie seemed to recognize the expression on his face. “Yeah, most fans - at least the ones who come to cons like this - most of us are women.”
“Cons like this?” Dean repeated.
“Well,” she said, blushing a little. “This isn’t a normal con, like the one in San Diego - ComicCon - or big Star Trek cons and stuff, where they get actors from TV shows and the writers and stuff. This is more of a fan-run convention. Most of us are involved in fannish stuff online. Fanfiction. Vids. Fan art. Icons.”
“Oh.”
“Come on,” Becky said and tugged at his sleeve. “We’ll introduce you around.”
And introduced he was. He got lost in the hectic rush of introductions, so much so that he lost the ability to flirt, but Becky and Maggie guided him around like a prize find anyway:
“Have you read Soulstealer’s epic? You know, where Sam rescued Dean from Lucifer’s clutches after No Rest for the Wicked and cured his PTSD with sweet, sweet love?”
“What did you think of AliciaM’s fanmix? I never would have paired Bob Dylan and Metallica like that, but it worked. It’s really great for reading Houses of the Holy.”
“Have you read the one where the boys became the gods of spring and ran into the crew from Firefly? How about the one where the geek from Criminal Minds was one of Azazel’s special kids? Please tell me you loved the one where Xander Harris was their long-lost half brother!”
“Are you in costume? I swear, that jacket is just like the one Dean’s wearing on the cover of In My Time of Dying.”
“Your name’s Dean? For real? That’s…actually kind of cool.”
“I really loved that icon set you posted last week, Becky. The colors were so awesome, and with the cover art from Heart and Bugs - oh. my. god.”
“So, there I am, rocking out to Led Zep while I put away my free weights, when - bam! It hits me. Baby!bros fic. Five times John had to go to parent/teacher conferences. And then the fourth time just kept going - I figured a thousand words for each, but the next thing I knew it was at least five and I knew I had something. I mean, we all know the one where Dean took home ec and sexed up the frumpy girl with glasses who was secretly totally hot in the dress she sewed for class, but what about Sam? What about the time Sam completely failed home ec?”
“Are you one of us air-quote ‘crazies’ unquote with the tattoo? Oh, god, Angela - come and look! Isn’t it marvelous? Where’d you get it done?”
“Don’t worry - we were all newbies once upon a time. One day you’ll wake up and discover that you’ve written fifty thousand words of absolute crack and realize that you’re happier than you’ve ever been. Hell, I probably invented half of the crack tropes for Supernatural fandom. The genderbender trilogy alone…”
It was the most surreal thing to happen to Dean since time travel, but it was…strangely fascinating and by the time the convention organizers had welcomed the hordes and blathered for a few minutes about changes to the schedule and summarized the topics of panels and seminars, his brain was functioning again and his heart was beating at a reasonable rate. “Scared you off yet?” Maggie asked.
Dean grinned. “No way.”
“Awesome.”
There were three rules Dean kept to while hunting, and BroCon 2009 was no different.
One: Be prepared.
This was the easiest rule to follow. He had lived the events of all the books, though his perspective was occasionally different than what Chuck had written and there were sometimes issues with minor details, but generally not so much that it got him into trouble. He could follow most of the “meta” discussions and actually found himself contributing a couple of times.
He wondered if this was how Sam had felt at Stanford, jumping into conversations and having people say, “That’s a really cool interpretation of the text.” Turned out that real life made for great ‘fanon’, whatever that was.
(Though a few of the Sam girls accused him of disregarding their woobie’s POV and motivations. Surprisingly, there were no hard feelings, and he wondered if any of this would make him understand his brother better.)
Two: Don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty.
“Come on, it’ll be fun,” Becky said, dragging him to another group session. “And drabbles are easy - just a hundred words.” He gave in and accepted a pencil and a few sheets of paper.
“The prompts we’re using today are song titles,” said Lady Nimue Harvelle, who Marisol had informed him was something called a ‘BNF’. “All the bands have been mentioned at least once in the books, and most of the songs as well, so hopefully they’ll be familiar. We have the lyrics printed out up here if anyone needs them.”
He put his hand into the hat when it came around and pulled out a little piece of paper with ‘Lynyrd Skynyrd - Gimme Three Steps’ in clear, typewritten letters. He grinned, remembering a job in Molalla, Oregon, back when it was just him and Dad, and a girl there he’d made the mistake of being a little too friendly with. Her name hadn’t been Linda Lou, but what the hell.
When the time was up, he had two pages filled with cramped, messy handwriting and he hadn’t even gotten to the part where Dad had kneed the guy with the proverbial .44 on his behalf. The bar fight had been spectacular.
“It was supposed to be just a hundred words!” Maggie hissed as someone started reading their story aloud.
“Guess I had a good prompt,” he whispered back.
On the other side of him, Becky laughed. “Told you it would be fun.”
Three: Recognize the right time to retreat.
He got glares when his cell phone suddenly rang during Molly Jamison’s reading of her term paper on ‘images of family in Supernatural’ but there were really only two people who had the number, and a call from either one was worth interrupting the most amazing analysis of his life he’d ever heard. He answered even as he got up and ran out of the room. He let the doors close behind him before speaking at normal volume. “Sam. Everything okay?”
Sam’s sigh came through clearly. “Yes, Dean, I’m fine. Where the hell have you been?”
“What? Oh, well, you know. Keeping out of your way,” Dean said. He hadn’t decided yet what he was going to tell Sam about BroCon 2009. If anything.
“It’s been six hours.”
Dean hadn’t realized how long it had been. “Did you figure it out?”
“The fourth husband,” Sam replied, sounding long-suffering. Angela said it was because Sam was the baby of the family and was ‘longing for opportunities to be authoritative that John and Dean had never given him as a child and teenager’. Carlie said it was because Sam was a whiner. “He’s buried in the next county over, so we need to get going if we want to get it taken care of before midnight.”
“Want me to come get you? Grab dinner and then drive over?”
“Actually,” Sam said, “I’m already in the car. I would have figured you’d take it with you, but… Where are you, anyway?”
Dean gave him the name of the motel and then they hung up. He turned around and discovered that Becky, Maggie, Shannon, Marisol, and Carlie were there, watching him intently. “Everything okay?” Becky asked.
“Yeah,” he said, stuffing the phone into his jacket pocket. “Well, ladies, I have had the time of my life, but I’ve got to be going now.”
“We knew it had to end sometime,” Maggie teased. “I mean, we did drag you away from whatever it was you were planning to do today.”
“Nah,” Dean replied. “Didn’t really have any plans. I was just waiting for my brother to get done with something. Running into you all was the best thing that could’ve happened.”
“Well, keep in touch,” said Carlie, hugging him. “And I’ll get Molly to email you her paper. Oh, yeah,” she added with a teasing grin. “I saw you in there. Her ideas were really getting to you.”
“What can I say,” he replied. “It kind of hit close to home.”
They insisted on following him outside. It was after six, the sun only starting to go down now that the weather was getting warmer, and the light glinted off the Impala perfectly as Sam drove up a few minutes later. “You’re kidding,” exclaimed Marisol. “You are, like, the ultimate Dean fan. This is the most perfect car in the universe. And - holy crap - Kansas plates?”
Dean winked at her as Sam climbed out of the driver’s seat and walked around the front of the car. “New friends?” Sam asked with an incredulous look.
Dean grinned. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “This is Marisol - Carlie - Shannon - Becky - Maggie. Ladies, this is my younger brother Sam.”
“No way,” said Shannon. “The Sasquatch lives.”
“Dean, what’s going on?” Sam hissed. “Who are these women?” His expression turned hard. “Do I need to remind you about the thing with the harem up in Clarkston-Lewiston?”
“This is a really elaborate LARP,” Becky said, shaking her head. “Wow. You had us fooled, buddy. ‘Oh, my name’s Dean and it’s just a coincidence. And I’m totally a con newbie.’ Yeah, right.”
Dean laughed. “You’ve got my email address, ladies. I hope to hear from you,” he said, and then slid into the driver’s seat. The Impala roared back to life and with a jaunty wave to the ladies, he drove off.
“Dean, what the hell were you doing for six hours with those women - no, wait,” Sam stopped himself. “I don’t think I want to know.”
They stopped at a drive-thru fast food restaurant on the way out of town. As they waited for their turn at the menu, Dean turned to his brother and asked, “Sam, do you crave opportunities to be an authority?”
The look Sam gave him was quite eloquent. Dean changed the subject.
TO: d_winchester1979@gmail.com
FROM: deans_carlie@hotmail.com
RE: BroCon 2009
ATT: eng412_final_paper_jamison_molly.doc
Hey, Dean (if that’s really your name!),
Here’s Molly’s paper. Enjoy!
BroCon 2009 is over, but we’re already talking about next year, so let me know if you have any ideas or suggestions for improvement. Also, some of the girls are talking about a get-together in Seattle or Portland in June. Let me know if you’re interested.
Finally, your fic won an award - best character POV. Congrats! I went ahead and posted it on the con website with the other award winners. Hope you don’t mind.
Hope you and “Sam” are doing fine,
Carlie
TO: deans_carlie@hotmail.com
FROM: s_winchester1983@gmail.com
RE: Supernatural meta
Dear Carlie,
Dean gave me your email address. He let me read the term paper you sent him and I’d like to read more of this “meta”. Can you send me some links or citations?
Thanks,
Sam Winchester
TO: d_winchester1979@gmail.com
FROM: daddyjohnfan225@yahoo.com
RE: Your brother
Dean,
I don’t know if you know, but Carlie sent Sam some meta links last week and…well…he didn’t like what he read. I guess he takes his LARPing seriously? Could you talk to him, give him some netiquette pointers? He ended up on fandom_wank, for cryin’ out loud.
Thanks,
Maggie
P.S. Did you guys have anything to do with a grave desecration in Springfield the same weekend as the convention? Dude, not cool.
P.P.S. That said, you guys are totally hard-core. Got any room for a Jo Harvelle or a Ruby in your LARP?
[end]
by LJ
Spoilers: Post 4.18 “The Monster at the End of this Book”
About 3000 words, PG-13. Some of the fic references are real.
Summary: Dean discovers BroCon 2009.
Dean was bored. It was (they were sure) a simple salt-and-burn - a nice change from the angel!dickery that had taken over their lives lately - but they still hadn’t figured out if it was the first or fourth husband who was still causing trouble. They’d been at the library for two hours without the missing detail that would solve the damn thing, and he was bored. Really, really bored. He checked his watch; it was almost noon. He poked Sam: “Dude. It’s time for lunch.”
Sam didn’t react for a moment, frowning again at the copy of The History of Greene County, With Biographical Sketches in front of him and then finally set it down. “Dean, we just had breakfast. Just admit that you’re bored.”
Dean sighed. “Breakfast was ages ago, man.”
Sam gave him a Look.
“Okay, okay. Fine. I’m bored.”
“Look,” Sam said, sighing, “this is going to take forever. If you want to go, then go. I’ll be fine here. Honest.”
Dean was hesitant to leave Sam alone - he seemed to be getting himself into trouble on his own; he shuddered at the idea of Lilith popping into the library the moment he left Sam - but eventually he gave in and took off.
He found himself walking with no particular destination in mind but it was a pleasant spring day, the sun finally out and the breeze wasn’t too cold, and he smiled despite himself. There was a nice little diner advertising fresh-baked pie before long and he popped inside for a slice and a sandwich and a cup of coffee. He sat down at a booth with a window and ate slowly, and before long something caught his attention: a stream of women, not all at once but over twenty or thirty minutes, all going into the motel across the street. When the waitress came by and topped off his coffee, he asked her about it.
“I don’t know,” she said, leaning over the table. “Some kind of convention, I guess. A bunch of ‘em came over for breakfast this morning.”
“Thanks,” he said. The waitress went on to other tables, and behind him there was suddenly giggling. He frowned and listened, but couldn’t make out the words, there being too much excited laughter and talking over each other. Shrugging, he reached into his pocket for some cash and then scooted off the bench. Pulling on his jacket, he stepped away - and just about knocked over a woman leaving the booth that had had all the giggling. She dropped her bag as she tried to stay upright and he crouched down to pick it up. A book had fallen out when it fell and he took a moment to look at the cover.
It was Supernatural by Carver Edlund. Complete with the shirtless Fabio-wannabe standing in for Sam and the weird-looking butch dude for him. And judging by the condition of the spine, the woman must have had the damn thing memorized by now. He recovered quickly from the surprise and handed it back to her with one of his patented wide-and-charming grins. “You a Dean girl or a Sam girl?” he teased. Part of him was completely freaked out, but another part thought this would be an awesome opportunity for recon.
She laughed. “Actually, I’m more of a John girl,” she said. “And Becky over there-” She gestured to one of the other women; they were a foursome, all climbing out of the booth and getting their things together. “-She’s kind of got a thing for Bobby. How about you?” She grinned a little scarily. “You a Sam girl?”
Dean’s brain stumbled for a moment, struggling with the idea that some of the fans had the hots for two old men and not him or - a reasonable alternative - Sam. “Uh, Dean, actually,” he finally said. “I really get the whole older brother thing, you know?”
All the women were staring at him now.
“So, um,” Dean continued. “You guys have a book club or something?”
Becky - the Bobby fan - spoke up. “Actually, we’re here for BroCon,” she said, like he should have known about it.
“Bro…ken?” he repeated slowly, confused.
“BroCon,” the first woman - the John girl - corrected. “You know, the fan convention?” She paused, clearly waiting for him to recognize it like Becky had expected.
“There’s a convention?” he said in surprise. “For Supernatural?”
“Oh, my god, ladies,” said the John girl to her friends. “We’ve found a con virgin.” She turned back to Dean. “What’s your name, hon? And do you have the afternoon free?”
‘BroCon’, it turned out, was short for ‘Brothers Convention’. The name had been in place for a couple of years, Maggie - the John girl - explained, since the first Supernatural fan gathering in 2006. “Other names got batted around on the Internet - are you on LiveJournal?”
“Live what?” he asked. They’d been throwing these words around: live journal, delicious, vids, wrecks, fick, fen, crack, wing fick , slash. At least he knew the last one.
Though he could have lived without knowing about the existence of John-slash-Bobby.
“Never mind.” She shook her head. “Anyway, BroCon is the name that stuck. Maybe if we knew what Sam and Dean’s last name was…well, the only chance is if Carver Edlund writes another book, but we’ve pretty much given up on that. Supposedly the publisher went under.”
Dean wondered what the women would think if they found out that Edlund was really a Prophet of the Lord named Chuck with an archangel hanging over his shoulder, but withheld the comment and made sympathetic noises instead - and then boggled as he entered the convention hall.
Women, of all ages, shapes and sizes, packed inside. There were folding chairs set up in rows, but all the seats were taken and there were people standing all along the walls. He gave the crowd a good once-over and discovered that he wasn’t the only male in the horde, but y-chromosomes were definitely in the minority. Maggie seemed to recognize the expression on his face. “Yeah, most fans - at least the ones who come to cons like this - most of us are women.”
“Cons like this?” Dean repeated.
“Well,” she said, blushing a little. “This isn’t a normal con, like the one in San Diego - ComicCon - or big Star Trek cons and stuff, where they get actors from TV shows and the writers and stuff. This is more of a fan-run convention. Most of us are involved in fannish stuff online. Fanfiction. Vids. Fan art. Icons.”
“Oh.”
“Come on,” Becky said and tugged at his sleeve. “We’ll introduce you around.”
And introduced he was. He got lost in the hectic rush of introductions, so much so that he lost the ability to flirt, but Becky and Maggie guided him around like a prize find anyway:
“Have you read Soulstealer’s epic? You know, where Sam rescued Dean from Lucifer’s clutches after No Rest for the Wicked and cured his PTSD with sweet, sweet love?”
“What did you think of AliciaM’s fanmix? I never would have paired Bob Dylan and Metallica like that, but it worked. It’s really great for reading Houses of the Holy.”
“Have you read the one where the boys became the gods of spring and ran into the crew from Firefly? How about the one where the geek from Criminal Minds was one of Azazel’s special kids? Please tell me you loved the one where Xander Harris was their long-lost half brother!”
“Are you in costume? I swear, that jacket is just like the one Dean’s wearing on the cover of In My Time of Dying.”
“Your name’s Dean? For real? That’s…actually kind of cool.”
“I really loved that icon set you posted last week, Becky. The colors were so awesome, and with the cover art from Heart and Bugs - oh. my. god.”
“So, there I am, rocking out to Led Zep while I put away my free weights, when - bam! It hits me. Baby!bros fic. Five times John had to go to parent/teacher conferences. And then the fourth time just kept going - I figured a thousand words for each, but the next thing I knew it was at least five and I knew I had something. I mean, we all know the one where Dean took home ec and sexed up the frumpy girl with glasses who was secretly totally hot in the dress she sewed for class, but what about Sam? What about the time Sam completely failed home ec?”
“Are you one of us air-quote ‘crazies’ unquote with the tattoo? Oh, god, Angela - come and look! Isn’t it marvelous? Where’d you get it done?”
“Don’t worry - we were all newbies once upon a time. One day you’ll wake up and discover that you’ve written fifty thousand words of absolute crack and realize that you’re happier than you’ve ever been. Hell, I probably invented half of the crack tropes for Supernatural fandom. The genderbender trilogy alone…”
It was the most surreal thing to happen to Dean since time travel, but it was…strangely fascinating and by the time the convention organizers had welcomed the hordes and blathered for a few minutes about changes to the schedule and summarized the topics of panels and seminars, his brain was functioning again and his heart was beating at a reasonable rate. “Scared you off yet?” Maggie asked.
Dean grinned. “No way.”
“Awesome.”
There were three rules Dean kept to while hunting, and BroCon 2009 was no different.
One: Be prepared.
This was the easiest rule to follow. He had lived the events of all the books, though his perspective was occasionally different than what Chuck had written and there were sometimes issues with minor details, but generally not so much that it got him into trouble. He could follow most of the “meta” discussions and actually found himself contributing a couple of times.
He wondered if this was how Sam had felt at Stanford, jumping into conversations and having people say, “That’s a really cool interpretation of the text.” Turned out that real life made for great ‘fanon’, whatever that was.
(Though a few of the Sam girls accused him of disregarding their woobie’s POV and motivations. Surprisingly, there were no hard feelings, and he wondered if any of this would make him understand his brother better.)
Two: Don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty.
“Come on, it’ll be fun,” Becky said, dragging him to another group session. “And drabbles are easy - just a hundred words.” He gave in and accepted a pencil and a few sheets of paper.
“The prompts we’re using today are song titles,” said Lady Nimue Harvelle, who Marisol had informed him was something called a ‘BNF’. “All the bands have been mentioned at least once in the books, and most of the songs as well, so hopefully they’ll be familiar. We have the lyrics printed out up here if anyone needs them.”
He put his hand into the hat when it came around and pulled out a little piece of paper with ‘Lynyrd Skynyrd - Gimme Three Steps’ in clear, typewritten letters. He grinned, remembering a job in Molalla, Oregon, back when it was just him and Dad, and a girl there he’d made the mistake of being a little too friendly with. Her name hadn’t been Linda Lou, but what the hell.
When the time was up, he had two pages filled with cramped, messy handwriting and he hadn’t even gotten to the part where Dad had kneed the guy with the proverbial .44 on his behalf. The bar fight had been spectacular.
“It was supposed to be just a hundred words!” Maggie hissed as someone started reading their story aloud.
“Guess I had a good prompt,” he whispered back.
On the other side of him, Becky laughed. “Told you it would be fun.”
Three: Recognize the right time to retreat.
He got glares when his cell phone suddenly rang during Molly Jamison’s reading of her term paper on ‘images of family in Supernatural’ but there were really only two people who had the number, and a call from either one was worth interrupting the most amazing analysis of his life he’d ever heard. He answered even as he got up and ran out of the room. He let the doors close behind him before speaking at normal volume. “Sam. Everything okay?”
Sam’s sigh came through clearly. “Yes, Dean, I’m fine. Where the hell have you been?”
“What? Oh, well, you know. Keeping out of your way,” Dean said. He hadn’t decided yet what he was going to tell Sam about BroCon 2009. If anything.
“It’s been six hours.”
Dean hadn’t realized how long it had been. “Did you figure it out?”
“The fourth husband,” Sam replied, sounding long-suffering. Angela said it was because Sam was the baby of the family and was ‘longing for opportunities to be authoritative that John and Dean had never given him as a child and teenager’. Carlie said it was because Sam was a whiner. “He’s buried in the next county over, so we need to get going if we want to get it taken care of before midnight.”
“Want me to come get you? Grab dinner and then drive over?”
“Actually,” Sam said, “I’m already in the car. I would have figured you’d take it with you, but… Where are you, anyway?”
Dean gave him the name of the motel and then they hung up. He turned around and discovered that Becky, Maggie, Shannon, Marisol, and Carlie were there, watching him intently. “Everything okay?” Becky asked.
“Yeah,” he said, stuffing the phone into his jacket pocket. “Well, ladies, I have had the time of my life, but I’ve got to be going now.”
“We knew it had to end sometime,” Maggie teased. “I mean, we did drag you away from whatever it was you were planning to do today.”
“Nah,” Dean replied. “Didn’t really have any plans. I was just waiting for my brother to get done with something. Running into you all was the best thing that could’ve happened.”
“Well, keep in touch,” said Carlie, hugging him. “And I’ll get Molly to email you her paper. Oh, yeah,” she added with a teasing grin. “I saw you in there. Her ideas were really getting to you.”
“What can I say,” he replied. “It kind of hit close to home.”
They insisted on following him outside. It was after six, the sun only starting to go down now that the weather was getting warmer, and the light glinted off the Impala perfectly as Sam drove up a few minutes later. “You’re kidding,” exclaimed Marisol. “You are, like, the ultimate Dean fan. This is the most perfect car in the universe. And - holy crap - Kansas plates?”
Dean winked at her as Sam climbed out of the driver’s seat and walked around the front of the car. “New friends?” Sam asked with an incredulous look.
Dean grinned. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “This is Marisol - Carlie - Shannon - Becky - Maggie. Ladies, this is my younger brother Sam.”
“No way,” said Shannon. “The Sasquatch lives.”
“Dean, what’s going on?” Sam hissed. “Who are these women?” His expression turned hard. “Do I need to remind you about the thing with the harem up in Clarkston-Lewiston?”
“This is a really elaborate LARP,” Becky said, shaking her head. “Wow. You had us fooled, buddy. ‘Oh, my name’s Dean and it’s just a coincidence. And I’m totally a con newbie.’ Yeah, right.”
Dean laughed. “You’ve got my email address, ladies. I hope to hear from you,” he said, and then slid into the driver’s seat. The Impala roared back to life and with a jaunty wave to the ladies, he drove off.
“Dean, what the hell were you doing for six hours with those women - no, wait,” Sam stopped himself. “I don’t think I want to know.”
They stopped at a drive-thru fast food restaurant on the way out of town. As they waited for their turn at the menu, Dean turned to his brother and asked, “Sam, do you crave opportunities to be an authority?”
The look Sam gave him was quite eloquent. Dean changed the subject.
TO: d_winchester1979@gmail.com
FROM: deans_carlie@hotmail.com
RE: BroCon 2009
ATT: eng412_final_paper_jamison_molly.doc
Hey, Dean (if that’s really your name!),
Here’s Molly’s paper. Enjoy!
BroCon 2009 is over, but we’re already talking about next year, so let me know if you have any ideas or suggestions for improvement. Also, some of the girls are talking about a get-together in Seattle or Portland in June. Let me know if you’re interested.
Finally, your fic won an award - best character POV. Congrats! I went ahead and posted it on the con website with the other award winners. Hope you don’t mind.
Hope you and “Sam” are doing fine,
Carlie
TO: deans_carlie@hotmail.com
FROM: s_winchester1983@gmail.com
RE: Supernatural meta
Dear Carlie,
Dean gave me your email address. He let me read the term paper you sent him and I’d like to read more of this “meta”. Can you send me some links or citations?
Thanks,
Sam Winchester
TO: d_winchester1979@gmail.com
FROM: daddyjohnfan225@yahoo.com
RE: Your brother
Dean,
I don’t know if you know, but Carlie sent Sam some meta links last week and…well…he didn’t like what he read. I guess he takes his LARPing seriously? Could you talk to him, give him some netiquette pointers? He ended up on fandom_wank, for cryin’ out loud.
Thanks,
Maggie
P.S. Did you guys have anything to do with a grave desecration in Springfield the same weekend as the convention? Dude, not cool.
P.P.S. That said, you guys are totally hard-core. Got any room for a Jo Harvelle or a Ruby in your LARP?
[end]