SPN fic: "Occasional Demons" 1/7 ( PG, gen)
Well, here it is! My spn_j2_bigbang story! I had a blast writing it, even if it did drive me nuts.
Title: Occasional Demons
Author: marinarusalka
Artist:ileliberte art post.
Rating: PG
Characters: Sam, Dean, assorted OCs. No pairings.
Spoilers: Most of the stuff in both seasons. The story itself is set sometime after "No Exit" and sometime before "The Usual Suspects."
Summary: Sam thinks Dean needs a change of scenery. Dean thinks Sam needs some distance from all the things that are hunting him. A possibly haunted research ship traveling from Hawaii to California seems like the perfect opportunity for a working vacation. The boys really need to learn to be more wary of perfect opportunities.
Disclaimer: The fabulous Winchester boys and their world were created by Eric Kripke. I'm just playing around with them for fun.
Notes: Thanks to dotfic and researchgrrrl for helpful beta reading, endless encouragment, and lots of patient hand-holding. And all hail ileliberte for her gorgeous art! Her images came out so perfect, it's as if she reached in and pulled them straight out of my brain. (You will find thumbnails for the illustrations in chapters 5 and 6. Click on them to see the larger versions.)
Chapter 1
Sam was starting to think it was a conspiracy. For two weeks, everywhere they went, it rained. A steady downpour of damp gray misery followed them across six states, never pausing or changing, until Dean claimed he was starting to rust, and Sam spent three nights in a row dreaming of the rhythmic swoosh of windshield wipers against glass. Sam took to wrapping his cast in Saran Wrap whenever they had to spend long stretches of time outdoors, and still had to have it replaced twice when the rain soaked through.
"Arizona," Dean grumbled as he fetched the waste basket from under the sink and stuck it between their beds to catch the drip from the ceiling. The last four motel rooms they'd stayed in had all had leaky ceilings. Part of the conspiracy, obviously. "That's where we're heading next. Or maybe Nevada. I hear Death Valley is nice and dry."
"Anything evil going on in Death Valley?" Sam dumped his bag on the nearest bed and walked over to hold his hands over the radiator that clanked and hissed beneath the grimy window. The damn thing looked older than Sam and Dean put together, but the air rising from its rusty grill was pleasantly hot.
"I bet there is," Dean said. "And I bet it's dry evil. Look, I'm not picky. Death Valley, Mojave, Big Bend... find us a job in a desert, okay? I think I'm growing gills."
"I'll see what I can do." Sam reached for the laptop.
"Good." Dean sat down heavily on the edge of his bed and bent to unlace his boots. "Wake me up when you find something. Actually, no, scratch that. Wake me up in the morning."
"Dude." Sam frowned at him. "It's barely nine o'clock."
"Yeah, and?"
"You haven't eaten since lunch."
"Yeah, and? What are you, my brother or my granny?"
Before Sam could come up with an appropriate response to that, Dean had exchanged his jeans for a pair of sweatpants and was climbing under the covers.
"Remember, dry evil," he admonished one last time before face-planting into the lumpy motel pillow.
Sam booted up the laptop but found himself staring over the top of the screen at his brother's motionless form. There was an unpleasant gnawing feeling in his gut, a level of anxiety that went above and beyond the usual worried-about-Dean state that he'd existed in for the past few months. Ever since they slunk away from the Roadhouse, pursued by the shadow of whatever mysterious grudge the Harvelles held against their father, Dean had been running himself ragged. He insisted on taking jobs hundreds of miles apart, then raced to every destination at a breakneck pace, hands clenched on the steering wheel and music pounding from the speakers at deafening volume. He refused all attempts at conversation, refused to let Sam drive, insisted on eating their meals in the car whenever possible.
It was an impossible pace, and the strain was starting to show. The shadows under Dean's eyes looked like permanent bruises now, and his clothes fit more loosely. He was sleeping more, eating less, chugging coffee as if it was water. Five days ago they had stayed at a motel with a pool bar right next door, and Dean hadn't even bothered to check it out. Two days ago, during a rare sit-down meal at a truck stop off route 90, he had completely failed to notice their waitress's striking resemblance to Jessica Simpson. And now he wanted a job in the fucking desert, which meant at least a 500-mile trip tomorrow.
Sam wanted to smack him. Wanted to hide the car keys, to put sleeping pills into Dean's coffee, to lock him in the motel room and make him stay put for a week. He understood the need to hunt -- a newly acquired understanding, and won at far too high a price -- but Dean was taking it to a frightening, self-destructive extreme, and Sam had no idea what to do about it. Taking care of Dean was entirely new territory for him. He'd only just tested the borders of it and already he felt hopelessly lost, stumbling through an alien landscape with an incomplete map. Traveler beware. Here be dragons.
Maybe a trip to the desert wasn't such a bad idea after all. All this goddamn rain was enough to drive a Care Bear into a suicidal depression. Sam turned his attention away from his sleeping brother and toward the laptop, and was just typing a search criteria into Google when his cell phone vibrated in his back pocket. Sam glanced over at Dean to confirm he was still sleeping, and quietly slipped outside to take the call in the car.
"Uhm, hello? Is this... I'm looking for Sam Winchester." A female voice, unfamiliar, clearly nervous and embarrassed.
"This is Sam."
There was a lengthy pause before the woman spoke again, her voice now carrying a slightly forced note of professional calm.
"Hello, Mr. Winchester. I hope I'm not disturbing you. My cousin Zack gave me your number. He said you might be able to help with an issue I'm having."
"An issue. Right." Sam leaned forward in his seat and dug into the glove compartment in search of pen and paper. "Why don't you tell me about it?"
Sam did his best to be quiet coming back into the room, but Dean twitched and lifted his head off the pillow when the door clicked shut.
"What's up?" he muttered blearily.
"Nothing urgent," Sam told him, "go back to sleep."
Too late. Dean sat up and rubbed his hand over his face as he took in the phone and notepad in Sam's hand.
"Who called?"
"Do you remember Zack and Rebecca?" Sam asked.
"Your friends from St. Louis? What do they want now?"
"Not them, their cousin Claire. She has a job for us. Maybe."
Dean's expression went from grumpy to vaguely interested. "So what's her story?"
Sam looked down at his notes, pretending to study them while he mentally composed his pitch. Claire Manning's problem sounded like the perfect answer to his current worries, but he had a feeling that selling it to Dean would prove difficult.
"She's an oceanographer," he said finally, "and she thinks her research ship is haunted."
That was definitely the right approach to start off with. Dean perked up right away.
"Haunted ship? Cool! We've never done one of those."
"Well, here's your chance. Apparently, the RV Henry Stommel has been having a rash of bad luck lately. Brand-new equipment malfunctioning at critical moments, engine failures, people tripping over items that were supposedly bolted down in another part of the ship."
"Anyone killed?"
"Not yet. But one of the scientists broke his arm when a shelf collapsed on him, a student got burned in a chemical fire in one of the labs, and a crew member got his hand caught when a watertight door that had been latched open came unlatched all by itself. Lost three fingers."
"Ouch." Dean winced and flexed his own fingers nervously. "Okay, so that sucks pretty hard. But what makes you think this is our type of deal?"
Sam shrugged. "I don't know that it is. But you gotta admit, that's an awful lot of bad luck for one ship. And get this: the people who got hurt -- they all heard whistling nearby just before the accidents happened."
"Whistling." Dean looked at him blankly. "Is that supposed to signify something?"
"I don't know. But the scientist who got hurt was alone in a supply room when it happened. The student was in the lab with two other people, and they all heard the whistling, but not one will admit to doing it. Claire says she didn't take it seriously at first, but then last week she heard it too."
"Did she have an accident?"
"Yeah. A camera monitor came off the wall as she was standing under it. Would've brained her if she hadn't jumped back in time."
"Was she alone when it happened?"
Sam checked his notes. "There was a student with her, but he was way on the other end of the room. Claire says the whistling was close by, practically in her ear."
"Huh." Dean scratched at his chin, fingernails rasping against two-day stubble. "I guess it's worth checking out. Where do we meet up with this Claire chick?"
And now came the stumbling block. Sam took a deep breath and braced himself.
"Honolulu."
"Honowhat?" Dean had been slouching comfortably against the headboard, but now he sat bolt upright with his hands clenched in the sheets. "You're kidding, right? Please tell me you're kidding."
"I could tell you that," Sam said, "but it wouldn't be true."
"Sammy..."
"They're doing a hydrographic survey of the Pacific, Dean. Yokohama to Auckland to Honolulu to San Diego. Claire e-mailed Zack and Rebecca from Honolulu three days ago, and they referred her to us. "
"Honolulu is in Hawaii, Sam!"
"I know."
"In the middle of an ocean!" Dean's eyes had taken on a wild, trapped-animal look that made Sam want to back away slowly and move all the guns out of reach. "We can't drive to Hawaii, Sam!"
"I know," Sam sighed. "You hate flying, I get that. But... it's just this once, okay? The Stommel leaves Honolulu next Wednesday. We can get a flight from LA on Saturday afternoon, I called the airline and checked. And Claire said she'd reimburse our airfare and hotel costs. Three days in Hawaii, Dean, all expenses paid. And we don't even have to fly back -- the ship will take us to San Diego. That's worth a six-hour flight, isn't it?"
"Six. Hours." A muscle under Dean's left eye twitched. Sam struggled to keep a straight face. He shouldn't be amused. Dean was genuinely terrified. It wasn't funny. Not at all. Really.
"There will be sunshine," Sam pointed out, "and palm trees. Girls in bikinis. Hula dancers in those little grass skirts..." he trailed off, thinking that this was a good place to stop and let Dean enjoy the mental pictures for a while. The weather picked that moment to cooperate, too: a howling gust of wind rattled the window pane and threw a spray of frozen rain against the glass.
Dean's posture remained tense, but his death grip on the sheets relaxed a little and the expression on his face shifted from marginally crazed to thoughtful.
"So," he said after a while, "how long is the boat trip back going to take?"
It wasn't the response Sam had been expecting, but it wasn't an outright refusal, either. Sam looked down at his notes again.
"Four weeks. If the weather holds and the survey work goes well." He wasn't about to say so to Dean, but the return trip was his main reason for wanting to go in the first place. Most of their jobs took two to three days to complete. It was a rare, extra-difficult case that lasted as long as a week. Which meant they'd be free for three weeks or more once their job on the Stommel was finished. Three weeks on a boat in the South Pacific. Three weeks where Dean wouldn't be running, wouldn't be fighting, wouldn't be pushing himself into the grim, pale-faced exhaustion that had a permanent hold on him now. It was, perhaps, a somewhat extreme method of getting his brother to take a vacation. But Sam was at a point where he was ready for extreme measures.
He was wracking his brain for anything else Dean might consider an incentive (Surfing? Luaus? Umbrella drinks?) when Dean nodded abruptly, a look of firm resolve on his face.
"Okay, let's take it."
"Really?" Sam blurted out before regaining his composure with what he hoped was a subtle effort. "I mean, great! I'll order our plane tickets."
"Super." Dean's eye twitched again. "You do that."
Chapter 2
Title: Occasional Demons
Author: marinarusalka
Artist:ileliberte art post.
Rating: PG
Characters: Sam, Dean, assorted OCs. No pairings.
Spoilers: Most of the stuff in both seasons. The story itself is set sometime after "No Exit" and sometime before "The Usual Suspects."
Summary: Sam thinks Dean needs a change of scenery. Dean thinks Sam needs some distance from all the things that are hunting him. A possibly haunted research ship traveling from Hawaii to California seems like the perfect opportunity for a working vacation. The boys really need to learn to be more wary of perfect opportunities.
Disclaimer: The fabulous Winchester boys and their world were created by Eric Kripke. I'm just playing around with them for fun.
Notes: Thanks to dotfic and researchgrrrl for helpful beta reading, endless encouragment, and lots of patient hand-holding. And all hail ileliberte for her gorgeous art! Her images came out so perfect, it's as if she reached in and pulled them straight out of my brain. (You will find thumbnails for the illustrations in chapters 5 and 6. Click on them to see the larger versions.)
Chapter 1
Sam was starting to think it was a conspiracy. For two weeks, everywhere they went, it rained. A steady downpour of damp gray misery followed them across six states, never pausing or changing, until Dean claimed he was starting to rust, and Sam spent three nights in a row dreaming of the rhythmic swoosh of windshield wipers against glass. Sam took to wrapping his cast in Saran Wrap whenever they had to spend long stretches of time outdoors, and still had to have it replaced twice when the rain soaked through.
"Arizona," Dean grumbled as he fetched the waste basket from under the sink and stuck it between their beds to catch the drip from the ceiling. The last four motel rooms they'd stayed in had all had leaky ceilings. Part of the conspiracy, obviously. "That's where we're heading next. Or maybe Nevada. I hear Death Valley is nice and dry."
"Anything evil going on in Death Valley?" Sam dumped his bag on the nearest bed and walked over to hold his hands over the radiator that clanked and hissed beneath the grimy window. The damn thing looked older than Sam and Dean put together, but the air rising from its rusty grill was pleasantly hot.
"I bet there is," Dean said. "And I bet it's dry evil. Look, I'm not picky. Death Valley, Mojave, Big Bend... find us a job in a desert, okay? I think I'm growing gills."
"I'll see what I can do." Sam reached for the laptop.
"Good." Dean sat down heavily on the edge of his bed and bent to unlace his boots. "Wake me up when you find something. Actually, no, scratch that. Wake me up in the morning."
"Dude." Sam frowned at him. "It's barely nine o'clock."
"Yeah, and?"
"You haven't eaten since lunch."
"Yeah, and? What are you, my brother or my granny?"
Before Sam could come up with an appropriate response to that, Dean had exchanged his jeans for a pair of sweatpants and was climbing under the covers.
"Remember, dry evil," he admonished one last time before face-planting into the lumpy motel pillow.
Sam booted up the laptop but found himself staring over the top of the screen at his brother's motionless form. There was an unpleasant gnawing feeling in his gut, a level of anxiety that went above and beyond the usual worried-about-Dean state that he'd existed in for the past few months. Ever since they slunk away from the Roadhouse, pursued by the shadow of whatever mysterious grudge the Harvelles held against their father, Dean had been running himself ragged. He insisted on taking jobs hundreds of miles apart, then raced to every destination at a breakneck pace, hands clenched on the steering wheel and music pounding from the speakers at deafening volume. He refused all attempts at conversation, refused to let Sam drive, insisted on eating their meals in the car whenever possible.
It was an impossible pace, and the strain was starting to show. The shadows under Dean's eyes looked like permanent bruises now, and his clothes fit more loosely. He was sleeping more, eating less, chugging coffee as if it was water. Five days ago they had stayed at a motel with a pool bar right next door, and Dean hadn't even bothered to check it out. Two days ago, during a rare sit-down meal at a truck stop off route 90, he had completely failed to notice their waitress's striking resemblance to Jessica Simpson. And now he wanted a job in the fucking desert, which meant at least a 500-mile trip tomorrow.
Sam wanted to smack him. Wanted to hide the car keys, to put sleeping pills into Dean's coffee, to lock him in the motel room and make him stay put for a week. He understood the need to hunt -- a newly acquired understanding, and won at far too high a price -- but Dean was taking it to a frightening, self-destructive extreme, and Sam had no idea what to do about it. Taking care of Dean was entirely new territory for him. He'd only just tested the borders of it and already he felt hopelessly lost, stumbling through an alien landscape with an incomplete map. Traveler beware. Here be dragons.
Maybe a trip to the desert wasn't such a bad idea after all. All this goddamn rain was enough to drive a Care Bear into a suicidal depression. Sam turned his attention away from his sleeping brother and toward the laptop, and was just typing a search criteria into Google when his cell phone vibrated in his back pocket. Sam glanced over at Dean to confirm he was still sleeping, and quietly slipped outside to take the call in the car.
"Uhm, hello? Is this... I'm looking for Sam Winchester." A female voice, unfamiliar, clearly nervous and embarrassed.
"This is Sam."
There was a lengthy pause before the woman spoke again, her voice now carrying a slightly forced note of professional calm.
"Hello, Mr. Winchester. I hope I'm not disturbing you. My cousin Zack gave me your number. He said you might be able to help with an issue I'm having."
"An issue. Right." Sam leaned forward in his seat and dug into the glove compartment in search of pen and paper. "Why don't you tell me about it?"
Sam did his best to be quiet coming back into the room, but Dean twitched and lifted his head off the pillow when the door clicked shut.
"What's up?" he muttered blearily.
"Nothing urgent," Sam told him, "go back to sleep."
Too late. Dean sat up and rubbed his hand over his face as he took in the phone and notepad in Sam's hand.
"Who called?"
"Do you remember Zack and Rebecca?" Sam asked.
"Your friends from St. Louis? What do they want now?"
"Not them, their cousin Claire. She has a job for us. Maybe."
Dean's expression went from grumpy to vaguely interested. "So what's her story?"
Sam looked down at his notes, pretending to study them while he mentally composed his pitch. Claire Manning's problem sounded like the perfect answer to his current worries, but he had a feeling that selling it to Dean would prove difficult.
"She's an oceanographer," he said finally, "and she thinks her research ship is haunted."
That was definitely the right approach to start off with. Dean perked up right away.
"Haunted ship? Cool! We've never done one of those."
"Well, here's your chance. Apparently, the RV Henry Stommel has been having a rash of bad luck lately. Brand-new equipment malfunctioning at critical moments, engine failures, people tripping over items that were supposedly bolted down in another part of the ship."
"Anyone killed?"
"Not yet. But one of the scientists broke his arm when a shelf collapsed on him, a student got burned in a chemical fire in one of the labs, and a crew member got his hand caught when a watertight door that had been latched open came unlatched all by itself. Lost three fingers."
"Ouch." Dean winced and flexed his own fingers nervously. "Okay, so that sucks pretty hard. But what makes you think this is our type of deal?"
Sam shrugged. "I don't know that it is. But you gotta admit, that's an awful lot of bad luck for one ship. And get this: the people who got hurt -- they all heard whistling nearby just before the accidents happened."
"Whistling." Dean looked at him blankly. "Is that supposed to signify something?"
"I don't know. But the scientist who got hurt was alone in a supply room when it happened. The student was in the lab with two other people, and they all heard the whistling, but not one will admit to doing it. Claire says she didn't take it seriously at first, but then last week she heard it too."
"Did she have an accident?"
"Yeah. A camera monitor came off the wall as she was standing under it. Would've brained her if she hadn't jumped back in time."
"Was she alone when it happened?"
Sam checked his notes. "There was a student with her, but he was way on the other end of the room. Claire says the whistling was close by, practically in her ear."
"Huh." Dean scratched at his chin, fingernails rasping against two-day stubble. "I guess it's worth checking out. Where do we meet up with this Claire chick?"
And now came the stumbling block. Sam took a deep breath and braced himself.
"Honolulu."
"Honowhat?" Dean had been slouching comfortably against the headboard, but now he sat bolt upright with his hands clenched in the sheets. "You're kidding, right? Please tell me you're kidding."
"I could tell you that," Sam said, "but it wouldn't be true."
"Sammy..."
"They're doing a hydrographic survey of the Pacific, Dean. Yokohama to Auckland to Honolulu to San Diego. Claire e-mailed Zack and Rebecca from Honolulu three days ago, and they referred her to us. "
"Honolulu is in Hawaii, Sam!"
"I know."
"In the middle of an ocean!" Dean's eyes had taken on a wild, trapped-animal look that made Sam want to back away slowly and move all the guns out of reach. "We can't drive to Hawaii, Sam!"
"I know," Sam sighed. "You hate flying, I get that. But... it's just this once, okay? The Stommel leaves Honolulu next Wednesday. We can get a flight from LA on Saturday afternoon, I called the airline and checked. And Claire said she'd reimburse our airfare and hotel costs. Three days in Hawaii, Dean, all expenses paid. And we don't even have to fly back -- the ship will take us to San Diego. That's worth a six-hour flight, isn't it?"
"Six. Hours." A muscle under Dean's left eye twitched. Sam struggled to keep a straight face. He shouldn't be amused. Dean was genuinely terrified. It wasn't funny. Not at all. Really.
"There will be sunshine," Sam pointed out, "and palm trees. Girls in bikinis. Hula dancers in those little grass skirts..." he trailed off, thinking that this was a good place to stop and let Dean enjoy the mental pictures for a while. The weather picked that moment to cooperate, too: a howling gust of wind rattled the window pane and threw a spray of frozen rain against the glass.
Dean's posture remained tense, but his death grip on the sheets relaxed a little and the expression on his face shifted from marginally crazed to thoughtful.
"So," he said after a while, "how long is the boat trip back going to take?"
It wasn't the response Sam had been expecting, but it wasn't an outright refusal, either. Sam looked down at his notes again.
"Four weeks. If the weather holds and the survey work goes well." He wasn't about to say so to Dean, but the return trip was his main reason for wanting to go in the first place. Most of their jobs took two to three days to complete. It was a rare, extra-difficult case that lasted as long as a week. Which meant they'd be free for three weeks or more once their job on the Stommel was finished. Three weeks on a boat in the South Pacific. Three weeks where Dean wouldn't be running, wouldn't be fighting, wouldn't be pushing himself into the grim, pale-faced exhaustion that had a permanent hold on him now. It was, perhaps, a somewhat extreme method of getting his brother to take a vacation. But Sam was at a point where he was ready for extreme measures.
He was wracking his brain for anything else Dean might consider an incentive (Surfing? Luaus? Umbrella drinks?) when Dean nodded abruptly, a look of firm resolve on his face.
"Okay, let's take it."
"Really?" Sam blurted out before regaining his composure with what he hoped was a subtle effort. "I mean, great! I'll order our plane tickets."
"Super." Dean's eye twitched again. "You do that."
Chapter 2