Fic: His Girl Friday (6/9)
Fic: His Girl Friday (6/9)
Summary: He had to figure out where they stood. Otherwise, they couldn't go forward
Author: pen37
Beta: Clarksmuse
Fandoms: Smallville/Supernatural/DCU
Characters: Chloe, Sam, Dean, Jo
Pairing:Chloe/Dean
Rating: G
This is a part of the Special Projects series. You can find the rest of the series here.
Written for the Crossovers100 challenge. Prompt #58 Dinner. The table is here.
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9a, Part 9b
Sam had been in a lot of bars. But he'd never been there in the capacity of an employee. Though technically, he was only being paid in room and board, he'd done more for less before and called it a job.
So while Jo and Mike the clucrichaun cleaned up the bar, and restocked and took care of the few daytime patrons, Sam looked the bar over for likely spots to put traps in order to catch demons.
“So what do you think?” Jo asked as she leaned her elbows on the bar. Sam glanced over to see that she'd changed out of her disguise and back into her work clothes - boots, tight jeans, and a gingham button-down. He admired the way she looked in the outfit: feminine, yet capable.
She seemed to realize that he was checking her out, and frowned in response: as if his polite interest was remotely comparable to the open leer that Dean used to give her back at Ellen's roadhouse.
Sam frowned but explained what he was doing anyway.
“I'm trying to figure out the best spot to paint a trap.”
“Why don't you just put them under each chair?” Jo shrugged.
“That wouldn't work,” Sam said. “A demon has to be all the way inside one for it to work. And if you paint it under a chair, it's facing the wrong way.”
“Floors?”
Sam shook his head again. “With all the people who walk around, the paint would scuff off in a few months.”
“So what about the walls?”
“Do you have an open wall that you can protect?” Sam asked. “One that someone isn't going to try to hang a painting or a gun rack on? And one that a Demon won't see a mile away and avoid?”
Jo looked up, and Sam followed her gaze.
“Looks like you get to paint the ceiling then, Picasso.”
“Michelangelo did ceilings. Picasso was a cubist who liked to paint prostitutes.”
“Was he the one who painted square naked chicks with three breasts?” Jo rolled her eyes.
“That’s him,” Sam said. “So I'm just going to paint a big trap right here in the middle of the ceiling.” He waved his arm over his head so that she could envision it. “It'll be large enough to cover most of the room.”
Jo cocked her head sideways in a pose of thinking. “What about putting a smaller one over each window and door? That way if anything tries to walk in, it'll stop them right there?”
“It's really kind of unnecessary,” Sam shook his head. “If anything wanted to get in that badly, it would just knock out a wall.”
She shrugged. “The only thing we lose by trying is a little elbow grease.”
“Easy for you to say,” Sam rolled his eyes. “It's not your elbow grease.”
“It's not your bar, either,” Jo snarked. “Let’s paint one on the floor and cover it with a door mat, while we're at it.”
Sam sighed, and nodded before heading back to the storeroom for some paint.
Like a blue-collar Michelangelo, he rigged up a makeshift scaffold with two ladders and a few wooden planks. Then he set about painting designs on the ceiling with a brush in one hand, and his key-of-Solomon in the other.
While he worked, he wondered why Jo was suddenly so cold to him. The abrupt change in her demeanor was like the first chill of autumn: an unexpected and foreboding portent.
She'd seemed pretty open to the idea of a relationship before. She'd even flown out to see him in Branson after a hunt that went bad. The only thing he could think had happened was that he'd nearly died back there, and it had scared her.
He sighed. Several years of hunting on her own had boosted Jo's maturity level considerably. It was sometimes hard to remember that underneath that tough exterior, she was still vulnerable in a lot of ways. And now she was pushing him away, and he didn't know how to make her stop. Or even if he should.
Sam wasn't blind to his situation. The only time he'd ever had a stationary home was in California with Jess. For so much of his life, home had been associated with people, not places. He didn't foresee settling down anytime soon. Especially not with a demon war on the horizon.
Which meant that he didn't have much to offer.
He was a far cry from the kid with the bright future in tax law. Not exactly the kind of guy you wanted to bring home to meet the folks. This was, he knew, why Dean hadn't bothered to make friends - or find a steady girlfriend.
In many ways, Dean was lucky to have had Chloe find them. Sam knew how rare it was to find a girl who would fit like an interlocking puzzle piece into a life as warped as theirs was. As he glanced wistfully at Jo where she stood polishing glasses behind the bar, he found himself wishing that he had that.
The job took most of the afternoon. He packed up his scaffold, and tried to find the energy to lift a beer with tired arms as the first patrons trickled in.
Hunters were an observant bunch. Most of them noticed the traps on the ceiling immediately. Jo sent them Sam's way to field questions. Although all he wanted to do was go to sleep, he wearily fell into the role as teacher. Because the last thing he wanted was for a hunter to try and duplicate his work, and get it wrong.
As he had explained to Jo earlier, most hunters operated with a basic working knowledge of the supernatural. Few of them bothered to learn about anything more basic than rock salt and cold iron.
Within a few hours, he was sketching out basic traps on the backs of cocktail napkins - like the one that he'd used to secure Dean's trunk against the Yellow-Eyed Demon's children. He realized with a start that he might be here all night if he didn't do something - there were an infinite variety of traps, one book, and a lot of interested hunters milling around and waiting for a turn to buy him a beer.
Plus? Even after years with Dean, he couldn’t drink that much beer and expect to stay coherent enough to sketch out a decent trap.
Then inspiration hit. Hadn't Chloe added some of those designs to her on line database? And hadn't she been adamant about having a more widely-available resource for hunters?
He looked over the room. Most of the hunters that he spoke with looked like they could at least figure out how to turn on a computer and launch a browser, and the more sensitive, metahuman stuff was password protected anyway. With a mental shrug, he started passing out the Wall of Weird web address, and her affiliated email address.
“What's this?” A short, redheaded girl asked when he'd given her Chloe's web address in response to her question about locking traps for her weapons cellar.
“This is a friend's hunter's journal on line,” he explained. “Research is her strong point, and there's quite a bit of metahuman lore in here as well, but you should be able to find a good example of a basic trap for the ceiling, and a locking trap for the door. It’s a little overkill to use both, but if you want to take the belt and suspenders approach, the way we did here --”
“Sam?” Jo interrupted him tersely. She held the telephone out to him. “Dean.”
As Sam reached for the telephone, Jo leaned over and whispered to him. “You know, if you and Chloe end up spending all your time as the hunter version of Onstar, Dean is going to kick your ass.”
Sam sighed, and nodded. He took the phone, and crossed back to the back room where he could speak in privacy.
“So the thought occurred to me that you probably spent the entire day demon-proofing the bar, and you never put the moves on Jo.”
“Not everything is about sex, Dean.” Sam sighed.
“Then why do you get free CNN at a motel, but you have to pay for porn?”
Sam blinked. “You've given this some thought, haven't you?”
“A lot more than you have, obviously.”
He rolled his eyes. “Did you have a point to calling me, Dean?”
“I just wanted to see how things were going.”
Sam sighed. “They're going fine.”
“I bet they'd go better if you did this thing --”
“So how are things with Chloe?” Sam changed the subject like a drowning man lurching for a bit of driftwood.
“I got a date!” Dean crowed.
“Date?” Sam raised his eyes. “You date?”
“I asked her. She said yes.”
“Do you even know how to date?”
“I'm working on it,” he heard Dean mutter.
“Whatever you do, don't take her to the movies.”
There was a long pause. “What's wrong with the movies?”
“Nothing, if you're sixteen. As far as dates go, taking a chick to the movies is so uninspired.”
“I was just thinking - dark theatre, scary movie. She'd practically be in my lap by the end.”
“Except that Chloe probably saw scarier stuff before she was seventeen. Besides, you don't want to put the moves on a girl on the first date.”
“Why not?”
Sam grinned. His brother was, in a roundabout way, coming to him for advice. And now the student has become the master. Since he was totally alone, he gave a tiny fist-pump. “Trust me, Dean. Second base is totally not even until the second date. Why did you ask her on a date to begin with?”
“I . . . because chicks like dates?”
“Nice,” Sam said. “Speaking from personal experience - the whole point of a date is to spend time with someone doing something you both enjoy.”
“That's it? I spend time with Chloe all the time. I spent most of today helping her unpack her apartment.”
Sam blinked at that. “Her apartment wasn't unpacked?”
“Dude - I'm not sure she ever lived there.”
“And you helped show her that she could live there? As opposed to out on the road with us?”
“No, I . . . You don't think she thought . . . shit.”
Sam shook his head. Sometimes Dean was a real idiot. “Look, this is fixable. Take her out somewhere nice. Give her flowers. Complement her looks. Avoid saying anything even remotely suggestive - I know that's difficult for you. Don't try to do more than give her a kiss or two. At the end of the date, pop the question.”
“Huh?”
“I mean, ask her to come with us, moron.”
“Right. I knew that.”
“Whatever Jerk.”
“Bitch.”
Sam hung up the phone, and shook his head ruefully. “He's screwed.”
Summary: He had to figure out where they stood. Otherwise, they couldn't go forward
Author: pen37
Beta: Clarksmuse
Fandoms: Smallville/Supernatural/DCU
Characters: Chloe, Sam, Dean, Jo
Pairing:Chloe/Dean
Rating: G
This is a part of the Special Projects series. You can find the rest of the series here.
Written for the Crossovers100 challenge. Prompt #58 Dinner. The table is here.
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9a, Part 9b
Sam had been in a lot of bars. But he'd never been there in the capacity of an employee. Though technically, he was only being paid in room and board, he'd done more for less before and called it a job.
So while Jo and Mike the clucrichaun cleaned up the bar, and restocked and took care of the few daytime patrons, Sam looked the bar over for likely spots to put traps in order to catch demons.
“So what do you think?” Jo asked as she leaned her elbows on the bar. Sam glanced over to see that she'd changed out of her disguise and back into her work clothes - boots, tight jeans, and a gingham button-down. He admired the way she looked in the outfit: feminine, yet capable.
She seemed to realize that he was checking her out, and frowned in response: as if his polite interest was remotely comparable to the open leer that Dean used to give her back at Ellen's roadhouse.
Sam frowned but explained what he was doing anyway.
“I'm trying to figure out the best spot to paint a trap.”
“Why don't you just put them under each chair?” Jo shrugged.
“That wouldn't work,” Sam said. “A demon has to be all the way inside one for it to work. And if you paint it under a chair, it's facing the wrong way.”
“Floors?”
Sam shook his head again. “With all the people who walk around, the paint would scuff off in a few months.”
“So what about the walls?”
“Do you have an open wall that you can protect?” Sam asked. “One that someone isn't going to try to hang a painting or a gun rack on? And one that a Demon won't see a mile away and avoid?”
Jo looked up, and Sam followed her gaze.
“Looks like you get to paint the ceiling then, Picasso.”
“Michelangelo did ceilings. Picasso was a cubist who liked to paint prostitutes.”
“Was he the one who painted square naked chicks with three breasts?” Jo rolled her eyes.
“That’s him,” Sam said. “So I'm just going to paint a big trap right here in the middle of the ceiling.” He waved his arm over his head so that she could envision it. “It'll be large enough to cover most of the room.”
Jo cocked her head sideways in a pose of thinking. “What about putting a smaller one over each window and door? That way if anything tries to walk in, it'll stop them right there?”
“It's really kind of unnecessary,” Sam shook his head. “If anything wanted to get in that badly, it would just knock out a wall.”
She shrugged. “The only thing we lose by trying is a little elbow grease.”
“Easy for you to say,” Sam rolled his eyes. “It's not your elbow grease.”
“It's not your bar, either,” Jo snarked. “Let’s paint one on the floor and cover it with a door mat, while we're at it.”
Sam sighed, and nodded before heading back to the storeroom for some paint.
Like a blue-collar Michelangelo, he rigged up a makeshift scaffold with two ladders and a few wooden planks. Then he set about painting designs on the ceiling with a brush in one hand, and his key-of-Solomon in the other.
While he worked, he wondered why Jo was suddenly so cold to him. The abrupt change in her demeanor was like the first chill of autumn: an unexpected and foreboding portent.
She'd seemed pretty open to the idea of a relationship before. She'd even flown out to see him in Branson after a hunt that went bad. The only thing he could think had happened was that he'd nearly died back there, and it had scared her.
He sighed. Several years of hunting on her own had boosted Jo's maturity level considerably. It was sometimes hard to remember that underneath that tough exterior, she was still vulnerable in a lot of ways. And now she was pushing him away, and he didn't know how to make her stop. Or even if he should.
Sam wasn't blind to his situation. The only time he'd ever had a stationary home was in California with Jess. For so much of his life, home had been associated with people, not places. He didn't foresee settling down anytime soon. Especially not with a demon war on the horizon.
Which meant that he didn't have much to offer.
He was a far cry from the kid with the bright future in tax law. Not exactly the kind of guy you wanted to bring home to meet the folks. This was, he knew, why Dean hadn't bothered to make friends - or find a steady girlfriend.
In many ways, Dean was lucky to have had Chloe find them. Sam knew how rare it was to find a girl who would fit like an interlocking puzzle piece into a life as warped as theirs was. As he glanced wistfully at Jo where she stood polishing glasses behind the bar, he found himself wishing that he had that.
The job took most of the afternoon. He packed up his scaffold, and tried to find the energy to lift a beer with tired arms as the first patrons trickled in.
Hunters were an observant bunch. Most of them noticed the traps on the ceiling immediately. Jo sent them Sam's way to field questions. Although all he wanted to do was go to sleep, he wearily fell into the role as teacher. Because the last thing he wanted was for a hunter to try and duplicate his work, and get it wrong.
As he had explained to Jo earlier, most hunters operated with a basic working knowledge of the supernatural. Few of them bothered to learn about anything more basic than rock salt and cold iron.
Within a few hours, he was sketching out basic traps on the backs of cocktail napkins - like the one that he'd used to secure Dean's trunk against the Yellow-Eyed Demon's children. He realized with a start that he might be here all night if he didn't do something - there were an infinite variety of traps, one book, and a lot of interested hunters milling around and waiting for a turn to buy him a beer.
Plus? Even after years with Dean, he couldn’t drink that much beer and expect to stay coherent enough to sketch out a decent trap.
Then inspiration hit. Hadn't Chloe added some of those designs to her on line database? And hadn't she been adamant about having a more widely-available resource for hunters?
He looked over the room. Most of the hunters that he spoke with looked like they could at least figure out how to turn on a computer and launch a browser, and the more sensitive, metahuman stuff was password protected anyway. With a mental shrug, he started passing out the Wall of Weird web address, and her affiliated email address.
“What's this?” A short, redheaded girl asked when he'd given her Chloe's web address in response to her question about locking traps for her weapons cellar.
“This is a friend's hunter's journal on line,” he explained. “Research is her strong point, and there's quite a bit of metahuman lore in here as well, but you should be able to find a good example of a basic trap for the ceiling, and a locking trap for the door. It’s a little overkill to use both, but if you want to take the belt and suspenders approach, the way we did here --”
“Sam?” Jo interrupted him tersely. She held the telephone out to him. “Dean.”
As Sam reached for the telephone, Jo leaned over and whispered to him. “You know, if you and Chloe end up spending all your time as the hunter version of Onstar, Dean is going to kick your ass.”
Sam sighed, and nodded. He took the phone, and crossed back to the back room where he could speak in privacy.
“So the thought occurred to me that you probably spent the entire day demon-proofing the bar, and you never put the moves on Jo.”
“Not everything is about sex, Dean.” Sam sighed.
“Then why do you get free CNN at a motel, but you have to pay for porn?”
Sam blinked. “You've given this some thought, haven't you?”
“A lot more than you have, obviously.”
He rolled his eyes. “Did you have a point to calling me, Dean?”
“I just wanted to see how things were going.”
Sam sighed. “They're going fine.”
“I bet they'd go better if you did this thing --”
“So how are things with Chloe?” Sam changed the subject like a drowning man lurching for a bit of driftwood.
“I got a date!” Dean crowed.
“Date?” Sam raised his eyes. “You date?”
“I asked her. She said yes.”
“Do you even know how to date?”
“I'm working on it,” he heard Dean mutter.
“Whatever you do, don't take her to the movies.”
There was a long pause. “What's wrong with the movies?”
“Nothing, if you're sixteen. As far as dates go, taking a chick to the movies is so uninspired.”
“I was just thinking - dark theatre, scary movie. She'd practically be in my lap by the end.”
“Except that Chloe probably saw scarier stuff before she was seventeen. Besides, you don't want to put the moves on a girl on the first date.”
“Why not?”
Sam grinned. His brother was, in a roundabout way, coming to him for advice. And now the student has become the master. Since he was totally alone, he gave a tiny fist-pump. “Trust me, Dean. Second base is totally not even until the second date. Why did you ask her on a date to begin with?”
“I . . . because chicks like dates?”
“Nice,” Sam said. “Speaking from personal experience - the whole point of a date is to spend time with someone doing something you both enjoy.”
“That's it? I spend time with Chloe all the time. I spent most of today helping her unpack her apartment.”
Sam blinked at that. “Her apartment wasn't unpacked?”
“Dude - I'm not sure she ever lived there.”
“And you helped show her that she could live there? As opposed to out on the road with us?”
“No, I . . . You don't think she thought . . . shit.”
Sam shook his head. Sometimes Dean was a real idiot. “Look, this is fixable. Take her out somewhere nice. Give her flowers. Complement her looks. Avoid saying anything even remotely suggestive - I know that's difficult for you. Don't try to do more than give her a kiss or two. At the end of the date, pop the question.”
“Huh?”
“I mean, ask her to come with us, moron.”
“Right. I knew that.”
“Whatever Jerk.”
“Bitch.”
Sam hung up the phone, and shook his head ruefully. “He's screwed.”