The North American Field Guide to Dean Winchester
Title: The North American Field Guide to Dean Winchester
Author: sylvia_locust
Pairing/Characters: Gen Sam & Dean
Rating: R for swearing?
Word Count: ~5300
Warnings: Language, mild self-harm
Note 1: Written for the spn_reversebang challenge.Thank you so much to gluisa88for the wonderful beta job, scarletscarletfor convincing me I could write a story about wings, and of course sillie82for her beautiful and amazing and inspiring artwork (and for making my first 'bang' so fun and painless). Check out her masterpost here.
Note 2: Takes place near the end of season 1. I guess technically this a crossover, since I stole a character from Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, but you don’t need to know anything about the book to understand this story.
Summary: “I always figured if I grew wings they’d be more badass,” Dean mumbles, mostly to himself.
(AO3)
Danny Quinn is bored. Minding the family antique store (unpaid) while his uncle Wayne pisses the day away down the block at Halloran’s Pub is not how he had planned to spend his Saturday afternoon. Smoking a bowl with his buddy Tony and watching Shaun of the Dead had sounded like a much better plan until his mom dragged him out of bed and hustled him down Main Street to open up the shop.
Oh, sorry, shoppe, he snorted to himself.
“Your uncle’s indisposed,” his mother said, thin lips pursed, “and I need you to watch the store while I take your sister to her recital.”
“Uncle Wayne’s on a bender you mean,” Danny muttered. His mother’s green eyes flashed.
“I think you can watch the store for me for two hours,” she said. Ungrateful freeloader, he heard in her tone.
“Nobody comes in here anyway,” Danny said. “This place is a money pit.”
His mom got that look on her face like she was itching to slap him into the neighbor’s yard. Instead she closed her eyes. Praying for patience, Danny guessed.
“The Bluebell Festival is going on in Plainview,” she sighed. “We might get some tourists through here and we could use the money.”
No shit, Danny thought. This stupid store had been in his family for 45 years even though each generation knew less about antiques than the one before. He figured his family held on to Quinn’s Artful Antiques through a combination of sheer spite and shitty property values.
So, it’s a beautiful day and he’s stuck inside this dusty old rattrap (not that any of his ruined plans had included fresh air), flipping through a Hustler he’s already read and re-read (and also “read”) countless times before. He suspects Uncle Wayne might have “read” it too, because Danny doesn’t remember the pages featuring the redhead rolling around in the sand sticking together quite so much the last time he had to watch the store.
“Fuck,” Danny mutters. “I’d kill for a beer.”
……….
The gentleman with the thistle-down hair is wandering from mirror to mirror along the King’s Roads feeling terribly sorry for himself and generally put out and bitter about the misfortunes he has suffered. Although the Roads allow him passage they will not grant him reentry into Faerie. He suspects his many cousins and relations sought to close the gates to him whilst he was slowly scraping his body back together after that last, mostly successful, attempt on his life. Probably they were kowtowing to the one who usurped his throne. He has been trapped on this tawdry plane of existence for decades, possibly centuries, watching the world grow tackier and uglier while he longs to return to his magnificent castle at Lost-hope, longs to return to the land of the Raven King.
So he drifts along the Roads between mirrors and puddles, panes of glass and shiny pools of water, occasionally dipping a toe into the mortal realm when he is especially bored or lonely. He stays mostly invisible unless something sparkly catches his eye or he happens to hear a thoughtless oath such as the one made by the strange, pimply human in the shop of filthy cast-offs.
“I’d kill for a beer,” he hears the mortal say. Oh, really? The gentleman thinks gleefully. He straightens his tie, smoothes the lines of his leaf-green jacket, and fluffs his cottony white hair before stepping purposefully through the art deco cheval mirror and into Danny Quinn’s afternoon.
“That is easily arranged, by one as accomplished as myself,” the gentleman says to the startled youth. “You are lucky it was I who heard your entreaty, for my magic is more powerful and potent than any others!”
“Wha-?” the kid says. The gentleman smiles a devilish smile and waggles his mischievous eyebrows as he produces a stein of ale from behind his back.
“And because I am so terribly thoughtful, I’ll even let you choose who to trade for this beverage, ugly mortal. Your mother? Or your sister?”
The boy laughs at him then, until the gentleman steps aside and shows him in the large mirror the many ways that Daniel could bring about the deaths of his family, most of which involve sharp and glittering carving implements.
The boy stops laughing abruptly.
A bell tinkling over the front door alerts them to the presence of more humans, and the gentleman disappears into the mirror again. Two men, pretty and virile and dressed in handsome suits, are talking to the dazed youth. The gentleman reaches forward and traces a figure 8 on the back of the smaller freckled one with the green eyes. Perhaps if he makes a present of this one to his aunt, Lady of the Castle of Ash and Bone, he will be granted reentry to his homeland.
Of course, he has tried this gambit before with other lovely mortals, all decorated especially by the gentleman in ways sure to please his aunt. Such attempts usually ended with the gate slamming closed on him and the mortal lying in a pile of its own viscera but, well. The gentleman has little else to occupy him this fine spring day, and it is worth taking a chance.
……….
Three days later
“As Dean Winchester awoke one morning from uneasy dreams-” Sam intones, standing in the middle of their motel room and wearing his best “stodgy professor” face.
A hard day-old bagel sails across the room and clocks him in the middle of the forehead.
Well, even Sam has to admit, he kind of deserved that.
Still.
“Dammit, Dean!”
“So help me Sammy, if you bring up that Kafka shit one more time I will end you.”
Sam is kind of impressed with Dean’s aim considering how he’s stretched out on his stomach on the shiny motel coverlet, holding himself up on his forearms to avoid rolling on to his…
On to his…
Sam starts laughing again.
“Sammy!”
“Dean! You have fucking butterfly wings. What’s not funny about that?”
“Everything!”
Sam is pretty sure if the tables were turned Dean would be laughing like a hyena at Sam’s misfortune, but he does try to table his crazed hilarity for a little while. Unfortunately, every time he’s sure he’s achieved some measure of restraint, he catches sight of his brother scowling at his wings from the corner of his eye and it starts all over again. It’s a mad kind of laughter, born of anxiety and fear, the kind that constricts his muscles until they ache, but Sam is helpless to control it.
……….
They start at the nape of Dean’s neck and run down his spine almost to his tailbone.
Dean is standing with his back to the double sink, looking over his shoulder to get a better look at his wings in the motel mirror. They are a vivid emerald shot through with black, the forewings spanning more than 14 feet across when Dean stretches them out, but they look so fragile. Scary fragile, Sam thinks.
“Huh,” Sam says. “Y'know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a green butterfly.”
Dean closes his eyes. Sam can see a vein in his temple throbbing, and he takes a step backwards.
“Just, you know. Maybe it means something?” he offers.
“Maybe it means something. Maybe it means something. Because you’ve never seen a green butterfly.”
Sam shrugs, uncomfortable.
“And have you ever, geek boy, seen butterfly wings sprouting out of the back of a GODDAMN GROWN MAN?”
“Uhh…”
“So maybe this isn’t a goddamn nature special! They’re wings, they’re on my back, and I want them gone!”
As Dean shouts, his wings start flapping in agitation. Sam swallows down another nervous laugh and looks away, sits back down in front of his computer, biting his lip to maintain some semblance of self-control. He glances up and sees an odd flash of white in the mirror, looks over his own shoulder and sees nothing. When he turns back he sees only Dean reflected back at him, nothing that shouldn’t be there.
You’re losing your shit.
Researching on the computer is a complete bust, of course. The local paper offers no insight, no clues that witches are in town or some crazy butterfly disease is taking over the residents. In frustration Sam opens a generic search engine and types in ‘curse AND giant butterfly wings.’ The results are not terribly useful. Sam scratches his nose, adds ‘NOT bad poetry’ to the search parameters, and manages to remove some of the more annoying hits that way. Still, he can’t find anything remotely helpful and he closes the laptop in frustration, grabs a notebook, and begins making a list of all the towns they’ve been to recently, all the people they might have pissed off.
What if they wake up tomorrow to find that Dean is more insect than man? What if he keeps changing until Sam has to turn him loose in a fucking field of flowers?
What’s the average lifespan of a butterfly, anyway?
He’s starting to freak out again and kind of misses the uncontrollable laughter.
This is so fucked up.
……….
It had started early that morning. Sam had awoken just after dawn to the sounds of Dean moaning and thrashing around in the other bed. He had lain still for a minute, trying to figure out if Dean was having a nightmare or having the kind of dream that made Sam bury his head in pillows and pretend he was deaf. But when Dean groaned in pain, Sam threw back his covers and crossed to the other bed.
“Dean?” he asked as his brother continued to flail. In the blue early morning light, all Sam could tell was that Dean had twisted around in his blankets so thoroughly that he was wrapped up like a burrito.
“Dean! Wake up!”
Dean opened bleary eyes and peered up at Sam.
“Hot,” Dean groaned. “Wet.”
“Umm…” Sam said, taking a step back. Maybe it was the other kind of dream?
Then Dean said “I don’t feel right,” and Sam saw beads of sweat breaking out on his forehead.
“I told you not to eat that gas mart hot dog,” Sam said. “’It was practically green.” He rolled Dean gently to one side, trying to find the beginning of the sheet so he could unravel his brother. “Christ, you’re burning up, and you sweated through your…”
He trailed off, not exactly sure what he was seeing. The scratchy white motel sheet was wadded up in both of his hands, but Dean still looked like he was wrapped up snug in something.
He snapped on the lamp and looked down at his brother’s body, blinking stupidly.
It looked like Dean was folded up from his neck to his knees in a green and black blanket that almost resembled… resembled a pair of…
“What’s wrong with me?” Dean asked, sitting up carefully. The movement caused his damp wings to unfurl.
“Sammy?”
“You have… you have wings,” Sam answered as he sat down heavily on the other bed, his voice sounding far away to his own ears.
……….
As he tries to remember every town they’ve driven through in the past week, every diner they stopped at, every store owner they questioned when they were trying to track down haunted Confederate sword, he teases Dean mercilessly.
“I think we’re out of butterfly bandages, should I pick up some next time we’re at-?”
“Fuck you.”
A few minutes later, “Have you seen my butterfly knife lately? I think I might have left it in-”
“Seriously?”
And then, “What was your best stroke again, that year you were on the swim team? Wasn’t it the-”
“Bush league, Sammy.”
Dean punctuates each reply by throwing something at Sam’s head. Sam figures he was lucky the stale bagel is the only thing that’s connected so far. Or possibly Dean has the good sense not to knock his only ally unconscious when he’s pretty much helpless and trapped in a shitty motel room. He does have pretty good aim, after all.
“All right, I’ll stop. I promise,” Sam says as he pushes away from the table and stretches his arms over his head. “I’m gonna go grab some food. What sounds good?”
“Potatoes. Apples. Rocks,” Dean says, flexing his throwing arm.
“Right.”
Sam walks the couple of blocks down to a doughnut shop he spotted the day before. It’s mostly empty at one in the afternoon and he orders two egg sandwiches, two coffees, and a half dozen doughnuts.
It feels good to stretch his legs and walk in the sun. The air is warm and sweet with the scent of dogwood blooms, and he wonders how long they might be stuck in their stale motel room, where the NO SMOKING sign has been flagrantly ignored for years, while they wait for Dean to go back to normal.
If Dean goes back to normal.
He pushes open the motel door with a boot, unable to resist calling out, “They were all out of nectar so I had to get you-”
He takes in the sight of his brother, bloody and slumped over the sink, and drops everything in a sloshy mess of coffee and pastry as he bolts across the room. Dean is resting his head against the warped, grimy mirror, blood oozing down his back in dark rivulets. His right hand is loosely gripping his hunting knife; his left wing is half torn away.
“What the fuck man? I wasn’t even gone twenty minutes!”
“Tried to get rid of ‘em,” Dean mutters. “Can’t fly, wha’s the point?”
“The point? The point! Godammit Dean, how about the point is those wings are fucking fused to you! That means skin, that means blood…” He slams his hand into the wall and narrowly avoids calling his brother a dumbass.
Dean slouches down further. “Yeah. Figured that out on my own. Dumbass.”
His wings droop listlessly as Sam grabs for a rough hotel towel and presses it into Dean’s back.
“You did sterilize the knife at least, right?” he asks as he maneuvers Dean over to the bed and sits him down.
“Not an idiot, Sam.”
“Look, we’ll figure this out, okay? Just, no more home surgery.”
Sam turns away for a minute, rustling around in Dean’s duffel bag. He passes Dean the bottle of Old Crow that had been nestled in a pile of shirts, and Dean tips it towards Sam in acknowledgement.
“Fine. No more surgery.”
Sam sits down heavily next to Dean and resumes compressing the towel against his brother’s back as the blood slows to a trickle. They stare at the ugly floral wallpaper for several minutes.
“I have wings, Sam.”
“I know, Dean.”
“Fucking wings.”
“Yeah.”
……….
Dean kneels between the two beds while Sam tries to stitch him up. The wing feels strange under his fingers, soft and fluttery and hard to grasp. If he grips it too hard delicate scales fall off and drift to the floor, leaving sad translucent patches behind.
“Maybe we should go camping until this clears up or, you know. Whatever.”
“Camping?”
“Why not? The weather’s nice, we’ve got everything we need in the trunk except for food. And beer.”
“You know I’m not actually an insect, right?”
“All right, it was just a suggestion. I thought you’d be more comfortable if you could spread your… spread out more.”
“I hate camping,” Dean grumbles.
“Yeah,” Sam sighs. Then, remembering that he’s trying to convince his brother, he adds, “It’s not that bad. Not when we aren’t being wendigo bait, and dad isn’t complaining that the tent isn’t regulation. ” He says that last bit in his gruff Dad-voice that used to make them both giggle like fools when they were little.
Now, they both fall silent. Sam regrets bringing up their father, still in the wind and doing God knows what. Discussing John Winchester is the quickest way to break up the fragile alliance his sons have forged in his absence. He continues stitching Dean up until he’s just about ready to tie off when the door behind them opens.
“Dios mio,” Sam hears a voice whisper behind him, then louder, “Dios mio! DIOS MIO!”
Sam looks over his shoulder to see a horrified middle-aged woman taking in the room, the blood, Dean. Then she’s gone and they hear the sharp slap-slap of sneakers on pavement as she sprints toward the front of the motel, towel cart abandoned.
“Shit!” Sam adds a last hasty stitch and looks around wildly for the Neosporin and bandages.
“Didn’t put out the sign, huh Sammy?”
Sam ignores him as he races around the room, gathering up clothes and toiletries and weapons.
“She can really run,” Dean adds, standing up slowly and hunting around for his boots.
“So, camping?” Dean asks after a long silence broken up only by the sounds of Sam stuffing the entire contents of their lives into a series of duffel bags and backpacks and grocery sacks and even the gray plastic ice bucket.
“Camping, yeah,” Sam calls over his shoulder as he runs an armful of their gear out to the car. He jumps into the driver’s seat and pulls the car up lengthwise to the door of their room. Reluctantly Dean leaves the relative safety of room 8 and lowers himself into the rear footwell, trying and mostly failing to keep his wings from banging up against the roof of the car.
“Shit,” Dean says, trying to get comfortable in the cramped space. “This fucking sucks.”
……….
“I always figured if I grew wings they’d be more badass,” Dean mumbles, mostly to himself.
Sam is driving as fast as he dares down S.R. 74 towards Iowa when Dean starts talking from his awkward position on the floor of the backseat. His shins are squished up against the driver’s side door and his wings pulse weakly in and out as much as they can in the confining interior of the old car. The delicate tips of the forewings look like they’re starting to break apart where they crush up against the roof.
“You’ve, um, considered this possibility?” Sam asks.
Dean shrugs, causing his wings to gently lift and fall again.
Sam glances in the rearview mirror to try to catch Dean’s eye but all he sees are large green and black wings obstructing his view of the road behind him. For just a second Sam thinks he sees a flash of white in the mirror, like cotton or thistle down, and then it’s gone.
“Witches, cursed objects, something like this was bound to happen sooner or later.”
“Bound to happen?”
“Well, yeah, you know, law of averages and all that.”
“Law of…” Sam echoes.
“Dude, stop repeating what I say!” Dean snaps, but Sam has already trailed off, eyes fixed on the road in front of him, hands gripping the steering wheel until the bones of his hand start to ache.
For the first time in months, Sam lets himself imagine the life he’d tried to carve out in California. Late nights in the Law Library, creating outlines to make sense of dense legal texts, competing for summer internships with kids who’d had everything handed to them. A life where he’d be more concerned about snappish professors and maintaining a B average than sentient scarecrows or racist trucks.
Or the possibility that insect wings could one day erupt from his spine.
He sees his future stretch out before him, a future where he’s constantly afraid for himself and his family, where his big brother can die of heart failure for trying to save little kids from a monster. Where waking up with wings is just another Tuesday.
Bound to happen.
Law of averages.
He feels a fluttering panic settle in his chest like delicate bird wings beating against a cage.
He comes back to himself in time to hear Dean say, “Anyway, I think they’re moth wings.”
“They’re not,” Sam says faintly.
“How would you know?”
Sam blinks, tries to return fully to the here and now.
“First of all, when they’re not spread out they point straight out from your back instead of off to the s-”
“Who asked you?” Dean snaps.
“Dean,” Sam says patiently. “You realize moth wings are not any, um, manlier, than butterfly wings, right?”
“Oh, right. Because little girls have glittery moths on their t-shirts, not butterflies. And little girls get moth tattoos, not butterflies.”
“I’m pretty sure they don’t let little girls get tattoos of any kind.”
Dean fumes silently from his uncomfortable position on the floorboards.
“Getting kind of cold back here, Sammy,” he grumbles. “Maybe you think it’s warm enough for camping since, you know, you can still wear your fucking shirts! ”
“Here, I meant to give this to you earlier.” Sam reaches over to the passenger seat and rummages through his backpack. He throws a wrinkled flannel over his shoulder. “Put this on backwards till we figure something else out.”
Dean snorts in disgust but he slides his arms into the shirt sleeves.
“When was the last time you washed this thing? It stinks,” Dean says.
Sam ignores him and a few miles later he spots the sign he’s been looking for.
“Welcome to the Mystery Caves,” the bored DNR guy says, eyes barely flicking up from the book he’s reading. He takes Sam’s cash and waves him in the general direction of the campsites. Then his head snaps around as he takes in the voluminous green wings that fill the whole backseat of the car, and his eyes grow wide.
“My brother,” Sam says, twirling a finger around his ear. “He really loves nature.”
He presses down on the accelerator and leaves the incredulous guard staring after them.
……….
Sam is slicing up his brown and grey long-sleeved shirt so he can sew the flaps around Dean’s wings. It’s the middle of May, yeah, but it’s also southeast Minnesota and the temperature is sure to drop significantly as the sun goes down.
Dean is sitting on a fallen log, facing the road to camouflage his wings in case any hikers or campers stumble across them. Even though they had retreated off the path and deeper into the woods, away from the marked camp sites.
“What if-?” Dean asks suddenly, tossing aside the battered western he’s been reading, the Longarm novel that’s been rolling around in the trunk for almost a decade. Sam knows for a fact that Dean’s read The Kansas Killer at least five times; Sam himself has read it twice.
“We’ll figure something out,” Sam says, throwing Dean another can of beer and cracking one open for himself.
“Right.” Dean sounds so low, voice gruff and worn, that Sam feels that tremor of fear from before return, tries to remember why they throw themselves into the path of monsters on a daily basis. He tries to think of more butterfly jokes, any jokes, because the ritual of teasing each other provides its own measure of comfort, and because dealing with an irritated Dean is way easier than dealing with a depressed Dean.
Turns out he’s shot his wad though; butterflies just aren’t that funny.
“Right.” Sam crosses to his brother and gestures for Dean to remove the old flannel that’s barely protecting his arms from the chill, kneels behind him and gently places the shredded shirt over Dean’s neck. Dean pushes his arms through the sleeves and then Sam lays the flaps to either side of his wings.
His wings.
His brother has wings.
Christ.
“What do they feel like?” Sam asks as he begins sewing the flaps of the ripped shirt together to protect Dean from the northern air
“What do you think they feel like?”
Honestly, Sam has no idea, which was why he had asked. He wonders if Dean was hurting where the wings were crumpled and torn, or whether they felt itchy or ticklish where they joined with his skin.
“Gonna piss,” Dean says, shoving Sam away and turning angrily towards the dense trees.
Sam starts to argue, sees the set of his brother’s shoulders, and sits back down on the abandoned log. There’s no talking to Dean when he’s like this. He picks up the book, pages wrinkled from a coffee spill that probably happened years ago, and starts reading for the third time about Curtis Long and the Prussian assassin he’s trying to capture.
……….
The gentleman with the thistle-down hair steps out of a drop of dew glinting on a blade of grass in the cool moonlight and into Dean Winchester’s evening.
“Do you like my gift?” he asks the mortal, who jumps and turns quickly to face him.
“Who the hell are you?” the mortal asks, reaching down towards right ankle.
“My gift,” the gentleman repeats, eyes narrowing as he takes in the bedraggled wings and torn clothes. “You do not seem to be taking care of that which I so generously bestowed upon you.”
“Bestowed…? You did this? You fucking did this to me?” the mortal yells. “Take it back!”
“You do not appreciate the fine wings I’ve granted you?” he asks coldly.
“Why would you do this? Who the hell are you anyway?”
The gentleman feels his features shift in anger, from his usual handsome, sharp-featured face to one more animalistic and fox-like, as he considers the brash, uncouth freckled one.
“Umm…” the pretty mortal says, eyes wide. He takes a step back and then another, freeing a silver knife from his boot.
The gentleman hisses; he does not like silver. This gift is turning quite troublesome, and seems just as likely to grant him passage home as his other gifts. The Lady of Ash and Bone likes pretty things, yes, but she will not appreciate a mortal with such scant conversation skills, a mortal who will not take care of his lovely embellishments.
Especially not if he continues to wave silver weapons around.
Still, he will try to deliver this present. If he is denied entrance to Faerie again he will be no worse off than he is now. The freckled mortal doubtless will not survive the encounter with his aunt but the gentleman will be free to continue his travels and try again another day.
He encircles the mortal’s wrist with his strong fingers and tugs him towards the drop of dew, towards home.
……….
Sam has read the same paragraph three times by the light of the Coleman before he decides that Dean has been gone long enough. He knows his brother well enough to know that anything private he needs to do in the woods can be done in less than ten minutes, and he’s been gone twice that long. Sure, he’s probably just sulking, but (maybe he’s turned into an insect, all of him) Dean can do that just fine where Sam can see him. He slides his Taurus into the waistband of his jeans and rises to his feet, pushing forward into the deepening forest gloom.
Five minutes later he steps into a clearing and sees Dean looking dazed as he walks alongside a strangely dressed man with silvery white hair.
“Hey!” Sam shouts, raising his gun. “Who the fuck are you?”
The man (the gentleman, his mind supplies absurdly) turns to look at him and Sam sees danger in those eyes.
“Let go of my brother!”
“Marvelous,” the gentleman sneers he regards Sam with cruel blue eyes. “Another huntsman.”
“Dean!” he shouts, but Dean is staring up at the stars. Sam can see his silver dagger, abandoned several feet away.
“What are you doing to him?”
“I am making a present of him to my aunt, Lady of the Castle of Ash and Bone, ruler of the most esteemed-”
“The hell you are. Let go of him. Now.”
The gentleman ignores him and takes another step forward, and Sam realizes that the strange man’s foot is being swallowed up by the earth.
Sam fires and hits the gentleman in the chest.
“Ah!” The gentleman jumps back a step in surprise, and then fingers the torn material of his shirt, clearly annoyed.
“Do you have any idea how hard it is to find talented clothiers in this realm?” he complains.
Sam fires again, hitting him in the arm.
The gentleman howls in fury but Sam doesn’t think he felt the bullet at all. Sam might as well be shooting bubbles for all it’s affecting him.
“He gave me wings,” Dean speaks up suddenly. “Butterfly, flutterby. Now we’re going to a party.”
“Fix. Him. Now.” Sam snarls. The gentleman eyes him up and down scornfully.
“I could kill you both in an instant, foolish boy, I could enslave you and make you dance at my parties forever, make you-”
Sam fires again, this time aiming for the pants.
“I have a lot of bullets,” Sam tells him calmly. “And you don’t have a…clothier.”
The gentleman draws himself up to his full height and then seems to grow even taller, until he and Sam are facing each other eye to eye.
“I could exsanguinate you where you stand, excoriate your flesh, eviscerate-”
Sam is beginning to realize this strange creature is not as powerful as he’d have Sam believe, or he would already be dead. He lowers his aim to one of the gentleman’s dapper black shoes.
“Stop that now!” The gentleman rages.
“Fix my brother and let him go.”
The gentleman casts an appraising eye over Dean, lip curling in distaste, and then turns back to Sam.
“As it turns out,” the gentleman says, buffing a fingernail on his ruined green jacket, “your brother is not quite so careful of his deportment and dress as I had first thought. You were both rather more…clean and tailored when I spied you in that store of cast-offs.”
They’d visited more than a dozen second-hand stores last week in search of that stupid haunted sword; Sam has no idea which one led to this bizarre confrontation in the woods.
“I am no longer convinced he would make a suitable paramour for my aunt,” the gentleman continues. “She is rather particular, after all,” he says in an obvious bid to save face, and the rest of his wardrobe.
Sam snorts. “Fine. Whatever.”
The gentleman waves his hand over Dean’s back carelessly. The wings vanish into nothing and the fog lifts from Dean’s eyes.
“Oh, you son-of-a,” Dean says, diving for his knife, but before he can swing it, the gentleman with the thistle-down hair steps into a puddle and is gone. Within seconds there is only Dean and Sam, pointing weapons at each other in an otherwise empty clearing.
They are silent as they walk back to the campsite, silent as Dean pulls on about five layers of shirts, silent as they pack up their gear and put out the sputtering fire Sam had tried to build.
“You were enchanted,” Sam finally says.
“Shut up. I was definitely not enchanted.”
“Enchanted. Like a princess in a fairytale.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Dean snaps. “I don’t read fairytales.”
They’re halfway back to town, to the closest bar they can find, when Sam asks, “How about entranced? Or mesmerized? Ensorcelled?”
“Ensorcelled? How are we even related?”
“Charmed?”
“You get one more,” Dean says. “Then I start stabbing. Also? We’re never talking about this again.”
“Shouldn’t we at least try to do a little research, figure out what that thing was?”
“Never. Again.”
“Yeah, okay,” Sam agrees reluctantly. He starts humming under his breath, and Dean reaches over and punches him in the arm.
“Ow!”
“That’s Jeannie, dumbass,” Dean says. “I think you meant Bewitched.”