Fic: A Potentially Dangerous Impression, SPN/HSM, Sam/Ryan, NC-17 (26/?)
Title: A Potentially Dangerous Impression (part 26 of ?)
Author: SallySimpson
Fandoms: Supernatural collides with High School Musical
Pairing: Sam Winchester/Ryan Evans
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 1914, this chapter
Disclaimers: The usual. I am in no legal or professional way associated with any of the assorted films, shows, studios, actors, etc. I do not pretend this story actually happened, particularly as it's about fictional characters.
Summary: East High is the scene of a bizarre string of cyclical unexplained murders. It's got to be a job for Sam and Dean, but only one of them can go undercover as a high school student.
Innumerable thanks to zillah975 for pushing me to keep the boys' voices true.
1 || 2 || 3 || 4 || 5 || 6 || 7 || 8 || 9 || 10 || 11 || 12 || 13 || 14 || 15 || 16 || 17 || 18 || 19 || 20 || 21 || 22 || 23 || 24 || 25
In this chapter: Dean is good at sibling manipulation. But Sharpay perfected it.
“Rock. Hip-hop. Broadway. Blues. Off-Broadway...” Ryan muttered to himself as he hunched over his laptop. He was starting to get a crick in his neck, and probably really should have just sat down at his desk in the first place, but that would have meant sorting through the piles of sheet music and homework papers and books on the desk first. Sitting on the floor was just so much easier. “Ben Lee is not hard rock. Christ, you people.” He moused through iTunes, selecting all of his Ben Lee library and editing the collective track info. “And for heaven’s sake, Bob Marley is not alternative!"
“Talking to yourself is a really bad sign, you know that,” Sharpay pointed out, entering his bedroom uninvited. She stood there, hands on hips, and looked down on her brother. “Maybe you’re getting as crazy as your boyfriend.”
Ryan’s shoulders stiffened in an instant, his whole body going rigid. “I’m not crazy,” he muttered. And Sam’s not my boyfriend, was the logical next piece of the unwelcome conversation. But Ryan swallowed it down, led astray by some errant bit of hope.
Because hope just did so much good for people. Right.
“Would you say that Massive Attack is trip-hop?” he asked, not even looking up at his sister.
“What?” Sharpay frowned and bent to pick up the salmon-colored tennis visor he’d so carelessly cast aside. She began pseudo-thoughtfully brushing it off - a sure sign that she intended to stay a while and talk to Ryan for his own good - and Ryan groaned inwardly.
“iTunes automatically tagged all my Massive Attack songs as electronica and dance,” he explained. “I don’t think that’s exactly right. They’re totally ignoring the subtleties of sub-genres, and Massive Attack practically originated trip-hop in the first place-“
“Maybe Apple just isn’t down with trip-hop,” Sharpay cut in, her tone rich with sarcasm, mild though it was. But Ryan knew from experience that she was just warming up. “Get up. Put your moisturizer on already. We’ve got things to do today.”
“I’m busy,” Ryan answered petulantly, “I’ve got things to do today.”
“Really.” Sharpay strolled over until she was directly in his line of view, so that even when he was stubbornly staring at his laptop screen, she was still unavoidably in his peripheral vision. “Like what?”
“I am re-tagging every single song in my iTunes library,” he replied. “Obviously. Because their so-called organization is absolutely ridiculous.”
“Ryan-“
“I won’t have it!” he snapped defensively, and Sharpay rolled her eyes.
“Right. Your whole library,” she said. “And just how much music is that?”
Ryan checked the bottom of his screen. “16.8 days,” he replied. “I’ll be a while.”
Now Sharpay groaned. “Fine. You don’t want to come with me? Then don’t,” she said, throwing her hands up in the air. “But first, just tell me why Dean thinks we need to stay away from the school today.”
Dean? Ryan’s breath hitched in sharply, and he schooled himself to indifference. “How the hell should I know? He’s a Winchester. Probably their whole family is nuts.”
“Think so?” Sharpay finally gave in and sat down on the floor next to him, stretching her legs out straight and crossing them at the ankles. She took a moment to admire her boots - Alexander McQueen’s 2009 collection, Ryan couldn’t help but approve - before she spoke again. “Well, Sam insists that your life is in danger, and suddenly Dean wants to make sure that you and I absolutely don’t set foot in the school for the entire weekend. Put two and two together, and I think that’s just weird. Times four.”
“Of course it’s weird,” Ryan muttered. “The two of them are always weird.” He sat by her in silence for long moments, aggressively re-tagging - Erasure, twee? Oh hell no - but eventually his reluctant curiosity ate away at him. “How do you know all that, anyway?”
Being his sister, she didn’t reply right away. Of course not. She wanted him weakened and vulnerable first. When eventually he gave in and looked up to meet her eyes, she finally deigned to answer. “Dean called me this morning. He wanted to know if I’d be busy with the drama club thing at the school today.”
“There is no drama club thing today,” Ryan said, bemused.
“Duh, Ryan.” Sharpay let out an egregious sigh. “That’s why it’s so suspicious. So add that to the fact that he never calls me, plus I don’t think he gives a shit about theater. So you tell me. Sam wants you out of school because he’s worried you’ll get hurt. Now suddenly Dean thinks so too.” She raised a perfectly-plucked eyebrow. “Doesn’t that make you wonder what the hell is really going on?”
Yes. “No.”
“Liar. It’s totally eating away at you,” she shot back.
“It is not,” Ryan retorted. “Sam’s a psycho, Dean’s probably a sociopath from birth, but I, on the other hand, am totally fine. So go take your curiosity elsewhere.”
She watched him in silence for a minute, then shrugged. “Fine,” she said, getting to her feet and brushing off her Miss Sixty skinny jeans. Coral blue. So not her color. “You can go ahead and stay here, locked up with your anal-retentive self all day. I’m going to school.”
“What?” He looked up at her in surprise, and his heart started beating faster. “Why would you want to go to school?”
“Because I want to know what’s going on, Ryan! I bet you anything those Winchesters are doing something weird, and I want to know what it is,” she answered, turning to view herself from all angles in Ryan’s trio of full-length mirrors.
“It’s a waste of time, Shar.” Ryan shook his head and turned back to his laptop. But hell if he could be bothered with his music library anymore.
“Maybe.” She blew him a kiss, turned on her spike heel, and strode out of his bedroom.
He frowned, his shoulders hunching once more. And he listened to the sounds echoing through their otherwise quiet house, of Sharpay selecting her purse and grabbing her car keys and cell phone, pausing by the foyer mirror to pucker up and apply one last coat of lip gloss. She wasn't going to find anything weird at the school, Ryan was sure of it. Sam and Dean weren't even going to be there. And there wasn't a damn fucking thing to make him worry, or think something was actually wrong, or fear that Sharpay might be walking into something way bigger than she was expecting. Something really really bad.
“Damn it,” he whispered, his blood suddenly swimming with cold unease, and he climbed to his feet. “Sharpay, wait!”
* * *
“Where did he transfer from, again?” Sharpay briefly took her eyes off the road to glance aside at Ryan, slumped and sulking in the passenger seat of her custom-pink convertible Mercedes. The Barbie Dream Car, as Ryan had privately dubbed it.
“I don’t know. Someplace in Texas, I think.” He hid a quick yawn behind his hand and stared idly at the xeriscape, which blurred to a dull wash of gray-green in passing.
“Well, why’d they move here?” Sharpay pressed. “What does his father do?”
“I don’t know,” Ryan said again. “Sam never said.”
“What about their mother, then? Did they move because of her career?”
“I have no idea, Shar.” Ryan tipped his head back against the headrest, squinting at the bright sky through his mirrored shades. “And before you ask, no, I don’t know if Sam can dance, I don’t know what he wants to be when he grows up, and I don’t know who his favorite author is.” He bit his lip meditatively. “Although I do know his shoe size.”
Sharpay snorted, an incredibly unladylike sound which she would never confess to in court. “That, I believe. Don’t you know anything else about him? Seriously, anything?”
Ryan frowned, and then shrugged. “Not really. We don’t usually talk that much.” And that fact had never bothered Ryan, before. Particularly as the reason for it was that they were usually way too wrapped up in each other for actual speech. But now, under Sharpay’s prodding, he was beginning to realize just how little he actually knew about Sam.
“Have you ever been to his house?” Sharpay asked, turning down the stereo a notch.
“No.”
“Do you even know where he lives?”
“No,” Ryan answered, annoyed with her. Outwardly, anyway. Inwardly... it might have been with Sam. Or, at this point, he might have just been irritated with himself. Ryan liked to pride himself on his smooth timing, his quiet insight into people, and his unerring judgment when it came to foolish and laughable things that other people did.
Falling for Sam Winchester definitely hadn’t been one of his better moves.
“Look, I told you we don’t talk much. And we’ve never needed to go to his house, because we always have sex in my bedroom,” he said, sitting up straight against the leather seat and glaring at his sister.
“That is so unfair,” Sharpay grumbled, just like he knew she would.
Ryan shrugged. “Hey, don’t blame me if Mom doesn’t have the same worries about me that she has about you. No matter how kinky we get, Sam is never going to get me pregnant.”
She shot him a glare which promised a slow and painful death, and he grinned. Probably for the first time all morning. Then she braked - barely - and made a sharp rocky turn into the school parking lot. The section dedicated for the students’ parking was entirely empty, and only a few lone cars sat scattered in the employee lot.
“See? I told you,” Ryan said, working to conceal his sudden relief, “they’re not here. This was a total waste of time. And if you-“
His words stopped abruptly as she drove around the corner of the sprawling building. There, hidden from the road between the smokers’ alley and the football field, was a black car, some kind of clunky-looking vintage thing with its smooth surface buffed to a loving shine. “Go over there,” Ryan ordered, narrowing his eyes.
When Sharpay pulled up alongside, Ryan slipped out of her convertible and approached the old car with the same caution he’d give a rattlesnake lying in wait. It was empty of people, protected from the harsh sunshine by the shadow of the building. Stepping closer, he peeked inside the windows to find nothing but some beat-up cassette tapes, a Styrofoam coffee cup... and Sam’s brown leather jacket.
“Damn it,” he whispered, his heart sinking. After a moment, resigned, he turned around to face his sister. “You were right. They’re here.” He shrugged, and stared glumly at the asphalt beneath his shoes. “I don’t know how they got in.”
“No?” Sharpay leaned in to peer into the car, then pulled a small ring of keys from her purse with a flourish. “But I know how we’re going to get in.”
Ryan blinked at her in surprise. “Where did you-are those Ms. Darbus’s keys? The ones she was bitching about losing?”
“Yep.” Shar was nothing if not unrepentant as she sorted through the collection of keys. “Props closet, costume room, green room, dressing rooms... and the side door from the track field to the theater.”
“Sharpay...” Ryan was still staring at her, bemused. “You’re like a Bond girl.”
“Please, Ryan, forget those overdone sluts.” She grinned mischievously at him. “I’m Bond.”
To Chapter 27