SPN Fic: The Princess and the Other Princess, Part 1/2
Title: The Princess and the Other Princess
Fandom: Supernatural
Pairing: Sam/Dean, preslash
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 10,231
Warnings: pre-incest, lots of cursing
Spoilers: Set after 4.18, The Monster at the End of this Book.
Summary: It's another case based on fairytales for the Winchester brothers. There is a message in there somewhere - or maybe someone just likes to piss them off.
Note: Witten for radiumgirl's prompt "*coughsam/deancough* It's another fairy tale hunt for the Winchesters. Sam is Sleeping Beauty. Dean is not amused." at the ohsam h/c prompt challenge.
One day, after he had lived thirty years on Earth and forty years in hell, after he had learned that angels were real (dicks) and that demons were on their best way to kickstart the apocalypse, and that he, apparently, was the only one who could possibly stop them, Dean Winchester found out that he had fans.
Not that that in itself would have been much of a surprise. Dean was awesome, and he deserved to have fans. The thing was, it wasn’t so much fans as a fandom. An entire fandom, based on some books based on his life, written by a prophet in a bathrobe, because apparently Prophet of the Lord was the kind of job you chose when you failed at just about everything else. And since the job didn’t pay well, this particular Prophet of the Lord had decided to turn his prophecies into novels and sell the Winchester Gospel as cheap paperbacks to the masses.
And the masses loved the novels and created a fandom. And ‘fandom’, as far as Dean was able to tell from his brief exploration down this particular lane of the internet, meant that they shared their theories about Dean and his role in the heavenly plan, and had long discussions in forums and drew pictures of him and his car and wrote stories about him having sex with his brother.
That was where things started to get a little weird.
Now, Dean didn’t have an awful lot of experience with fandoms. He didn’t know how they worked. How would he? He didn’t even have a computer of his own, and the times he borrowed the laptop of the brother he was very pointedly not having sex with in any way shape or form, he used it only to surf for porn. Pure, simple porn without any back story attached to it. It didn’t really give him a chance to learn how fans thought these days, because as far as he could tell, Busty Asian Beauties didn’t have a fandom.
Why not, anyway? Everything in fandom seemed to be about sex lately, if his brief trip into the fandom of himself and his sidekick of a little brother was any indication. And not that there was anything wrong with that, but apparently fandom nowadays was dead set on ignoring all the hot chicks he met on a regular basis and focus on writing about men having sex with other men.
Oh, who was he kidding? Fandom had been like that since Star Trek.
The one thing he couldn’t wrap his head around was the incest thing. Sure, if the novels hadn’t introduced any characters that didn’t actually exist in real life, the number of male leads was damn limited. There were perhaps three other men important enough to keep the interest of the female fans, and the only one of those who wasn’t closely related to Dean was Bobby.
So, okay, being ‘slashed’ with his brother wasn’t the worst thing that could possible happen to him. But it was close. Because it was incest. And, well, it was Sam.
Seriously.
Three days after finding out about his Fandom of his Own, Dean found himself thinking that it was a pity Chuck’s novels had never been published to the point Castiel was introduced, because certainly then the slashers would have found something else to focus their creative energies on. He dropped that thought when he became aware that a) while he hated the fact that books using their life had been published, he now regretted that not more books using their life had been published, and b) he had just wished people would start writing about him having sex with an angel in a trench coat.
Still, he was sure Castiel would have made the fans happy. First of all, angel sex. Kinky. And more important, it would have offered an alternative to the incest and no one would write that anymore. Really, having sex with Cas wouldn’t be such a terrible price to pay for not having to have sex with his brother.
In a completely fictional sense, of course.
So, the Angel of the Lord would ban the sin of incest with his mere presence. That almost made sense, metaphorically speaking. After all, people only slashed Dean with Sam because they thought all hot men had to be slashed with other men, and there was no one else to slash him with, except Bobby, which would be worse. In the eyes of fandom, apparently, the need to write gay sex overrode the need not to write incestuous sex, but that didn’t change anything about incestuous sex still being wrong. Having grown up a little bit outside the rest of society, Dean wasn’t entirely sure what the moral standards of the normal population were at the moment, but he was fairly certain that doing it with your brother was still seen as wrong. No one would write that unless they had to.
Dean thought that maybe he was wasting a little too much thought on the matter.
But so, apparently, did someone else. Either that, or fate just hated him. Because while he was still not entirely sure about his role in the great heavenly plan, two weeks after he found out about the fandom thing, Dean realised what his role in the tale of Sleeping Beauty was, according to whoever had gotten them into this mess.
Despite his unbelievably good looks, it was not the part of the Beauty.
The sword fell from his hands and cluttered to the floor as he stumbled closer to the motionless form of his little brother. A ray of light fell onto Sam’s face from the window and his lips were slightly parted as if awaiting his True Love’s kiss.
“Seriously, man,” Dean said helplessly, stopping beside the bed. “Come on! What the fuck?”
-
“Dude.” Dean looked up from the heavy book to look at a nonspecific spot on the ceiling in bemusement. “What kind of king goes down into his orchard and counts the pears every single day? Wouldn’t he have servants to do that for him? I mean, what are you king for if you have to do stupid things like that by yourself?”
Sam frowned at him over the screen of his laptop. “I guess he was bored, because his servants did everything else for him. How exactly is that related to our case?”
“It’s a fairytale.”
“None of the ones I asked you to look up, Dean. Far as I know, neither of the victims so far had their hands missing.”
Trust Sam to be able to tell what fairytale it was just from the words King and Pears. Geek.
“So far,” Dean said triumphantly. “It might happen yet, and then we can catch up much faster if we already know the tale it was based on.”
“So, you’re going to read all two-hundred something tales by the Grimm brothers?” Sam’s mouth twitched suspiciously, as if he dared to doubt Dean’s dedication to their research. “Admit it - you picked that one out of morbid curiosity.”
“Hey, it was you who insisted that the MO of our culprit was fairy tale based,” Dean defended himself. “Again.”
“Just read the ones I told you to. Don’t worry, most of those stories have their general level of bloodshed.”
Dean rolled his eyes and closed the book. He thought that if they took the thing along they could probably club their monster to death with it. Perhaps that was even what they would get when they finally found how to kill it: “Smash in head with book containing the stories used.” It would bring some variation to the usual silver or iron or blessed brick from a church from the thirteenth century.
“I don’t need to read those,” he proclaimed. “It’s not like you gave me the exotic ones. Even I know the story of Snow White.”
“The original fairytale, Dean. Not the Disney movie.”
“There’s a difference?”
“Just in the amount of gore.”
Sam shook his head and rolled his eyes in silence when Dean opened the book with renewed interest.
There’d been four victims so far, and three of them had died. At first Dean had laughed at Sam’s theory that this case was based on fairytales, because that was kind of idiotic, and just because it had happened once didn’t mean it had to happen twice. Because it was idiotic, and because the chances of two ghosts having the same modus operandi were rather slim, once that modus operandi left the usual muster of ‘Haunt the asses of your killers’ or ‘Just generally haunt everyone who happens to be close to where you died’.
But after a girl had been confronted with the smashed form of her boyfriend lying in her bathroom just seconds after she had thrown a dictionary on a nastily obnoxious frog, even he had to admit that his brother might have a point.
Thinking of the last time they had had to deal with a ghost killing people based on fairytales, they had checked the local hospital for comatose patients, but the local hospital was tiny and seven of the ten people in there were awake. The other three were dead, and victims of this particular case, so no likely culprits even as ghosts.
Digging through the history of the town hadn’t helped either. Currently, Sam was digging through all available information on the victims, while Dean was digging through the collective works of the brothers Grimm. Secretly, he suspected that Sam made him do that only so he would have something to do and not be tempted to throw wet paper balls at his brother out of boredom.
He was still bored. Fairytales were so no cool reading material for adults.
Oh, look at that! Snow White’s evil stepmother dancing in glowing hot iron boots was kind of… graphic.
Ew.
“So, Julie Ellerics ended up in a coma after chocking on a piece of apple. She died three days later.” Sam sounded thoughtful, as if something was bothering him about it. Dean didn’t see what it would be. That wasn’t exactly new information.
“What about it? They all died.”
“All but Trixie Bold. She came to her husband in her changed form and managed to convince him that it was really her. He kissed her, she changed back and they lived happily ever after.”
“While poor James got smashed by a dictionary after freaking out his girlfriend.” Dean nodded slowly, seeing what his brother was aiming at. “But I don’t get what that’s got to do with Julie Ellerics.”
“Don’t you? Think about it, Dean!” Sam shifted in his chair, leaning forward, his eyes gleaming in the way they did when his brain was working overtime. “All victims had lovers or husbands who were apparently the key to them living or dying. All but Julie. As far as we know she was single. No one even seems to care she’s dead.”
“So you think she must have a lover somewhere?”
“It’s a guess.”
“But even if we found him, how would that help?” Dean asked. “We already talked to the partners of the other victims. What could Julie’s boyfriend tell us that would be in any way helpful?”
“I don’t know,” Sam admitted even as he closed his laptop and stood. “But if it’ll keep you from chewing through that book, it’s worth a try.”
-
Julie Elleric’s boyfriend turned out to be a girlfriend, and she wasn’t very hard to find in the end. They had learned before that no one had come for the young woman during the three days she was in a coma, but as it turned out, her landlords had called the hospital every day to see how she was doing.
Paying the couple a visit they found the man vaguely upset about the death of the withdrawn but nice woman, and his wife unsuccessfully trying to hide her utter devastation.
It was Sam who took her aside and talked to her. Of course it was Sam. Because Sam might have changed since Dean came back from hell, he might have secrets and a hard edge that wasn’t there before, but he still had those eyes that made people tell him everything he wanted to know. Do everything he wanted them to do. Dean suspected it might have something to do with his sympathy being genuine, because he had tried the trick himself and found that large, soulful eyes didn’t work so well when they were distracted by the recipient’s décolleté.
But Sam had the unique ability of looking into people’s eyes (even if he wouldn’t look into Dean’s eyes much anymore, and that was a bit bothersome but not related to the case) and got everything out of Suzie, wife of Rob and secret lover of Julie, while Dean waited at the diner around the corner and ate pancakes.
When Sam joined him there, he told Dean of the affair Suzie and Julie were having and about how Suzie loved Julie so much but didn’t want to leave her husband, scared of losing the security of her marriage, of being the bad one, the cheater, and of coming out as loving a woman.
“She was so scared of being found out that she didn’t even dare to go see Julie in the hospital,” Sam explained, thoughtfully looking down into his coffee. “She regrets that now, of course. Hell, she pretty much regrets her whole life.”
“I guess you didn’t tell her that she could have saved her lover by growing a backbone and giving her a kiss, did you?” Dean was munching his food, but his eyes never left Sam’s face, because that had been a real question, and before - before hell, before Sam became a stranger - it wouldn’t have been.
“We don’t know that yet,” Sam said, which Dean hoped was an answer. “It’s just a theory.”
“Of course.” Dean still didn’t take his eyes off his brother. “So you didn’t tell her, right?”
For the first time since he got back, Sam actually looked at him, and he looked annoyed and hurt enough for Dean to almost feel a little ashamed. “No, Dean, I didn’t. Because I’m not a dick.”
Well, of course not. They both knew who the dick in the family was, after all.
“So does that help us?” Dean asked, glad to change the topic.
“It actually might,” Sam said to his surprise. “Julie was the love of Suzie’s life, but Suzie didn’t dare to accept that and Julie died. The Bolds were in the process of getting a divorce, but seem to have changed their mind after the incident. Apparently Trixie’s husband wanted to leave her for a new job in another country when she didn’t want to follow him there, but now they realised that they love each other more than anything.”
“Well, they must, if he was willing to kiss that thing to get her back.” Dean shuddered at the memory of the photo they’d been shown of the creature Trixie had been turned into. And seriously, who kept photos of something like that?
Perhaps Ernest Bold just had a particularly weird kink…
“How do you know that, anyway?” Dean asked with a scowl, because he really didn’t want to hear that his little brother could read minds now. That would be bad, not to mention embarrassing because of the things Dean was constantly thinking.
But of course, if Sam could read minds, he wouldn’t tell Dean. Because mind-reading, and Demon-sex, and ‘Oh, by the way, I can kill you with my brain’ apparently weren’t really worth mentioning.
“Stop it,” Sam said.
“Stop what?”
“Stop thinking!”
Dean froze. So Sam could read his mind, except if he could, he wouldn’t have said that because that was admitting he could, which if he really could Sam wouldn’t do. “What am I thinking about?” he asked cautiously.
Sam had that annoyed scowl on his face that said he was annoyed. “How would I know? But you’re looking at me with that expression that tells me you’re thinking, and it isn’t nice.”
That was a little too close to the truth for Dean’s liking. “You can’t know that! I could think about anything and just happen to look at you.”
“I know, because you’re looking at me like that all the time lately,” Sam snapped. “And it’s quite distracting. So stop it, I’m trying to work a case here!”
“So am I,” Dean defended himself against the implied accusation of not being focused on their work. “I was totally thinking about the case.”
“Totally,” Sam dead-panned. Then he shifted on his seat, leaned a little closer to Dean and got back on topic. “So, both of those relationships were less than perfect,” he said, leaving Dean no time to take a step back and remember what they had been talking about in the first place. “And Cynthia Smith has a fiancé.”
“Had,” Dean corrected, once he remembered who Cynthia Smith was. “She smashed him with her Oxford Advanced English dictionary, remember?”
“No, that was her boyfriend,” Sam said triumphantly. “Her fiancé is the guy James didn’t know about, the guy she was going to leave him for. She told me her parents are going to make her marry him because they didn’t think James was of the required social standing for the family’s reputation, and she’s going along with it since she doesn’t want to lose her parents’ love.”
“Some love.” Dean grimaces. “Let me guess - she kinda regrets that now.”
“You bet.”
“Wait.” Dean frowned. “She told you when exactly?”
“After I spoke to Suzie. I called her.”
“Ah.”
“So, eat up!” Sam gestured to the leftovers of Dean’s pancakes. “We have to talk to the partner of the fourth victim. See if there was any trouble in paradise.”
-
There was no trouble in paradise. There was no paradise to begin with. The boyfriend of the other girl who’d died hadn’t been her boyfriend in the first place but only her friend, who’d loved her and never dared to tell her. It fell in place with their theory.
“Great,” Dean said when they left the bar the guy was working in and rubbed his hands in satisfaction. “That falls in place with our theory. Let’s go have pie!”
They did.
-
“So, we know the facts,” Dean said with his mouth full of pie. “Monster of the Moment picks couples that are in denial of their feelings, about to break up for the wrong reasons or generally just in the process of fucking up a relationship that could be perfect, takes one of them and gives the other the opportunity to save them by simply wrapping their heads around their feelings, except the situation comes without a manual and most fail the test.” He shook his head. “If that’s a ghost, it’s one of the stranger ones.”
Sam was staring at him in fascination, slowly shaking his head.
“What?” Dean swallowed the pie. “You think it’s a ghost?”
“No, I just can’t believe you got through that speech with so much food in your mouth.”
“I’m just that talented. The real question is how knowing all that actually helps.”
“Well, for starters, we now know what kind of people the thing targets.”
“Yeah, so we go around and warn everyone who looks to be in a happy relationship not to fuck it up, else their partner might end up choking on a fruitcake. I can see that working just great.”
Sam gave him that annoyed frown again. “We know for sure you’re not a potential victim, at least.”
“Yeah, but what about you? You think this curse also works for demons? You might want to warn Ruby not to come around if she doesn’t want to get killed by an evil stepmother.” Or alternatively by Dean. Just the thought of the black-eyed bitch coming near his brother made Dean’s skin crawl. The only thing that was worse was knowing that Sam willingly let her.
At least the annoyed frown was gone. Instead, Sam’s lips were pressed into a thin line and his glare was almost hostile.
Dean felt not actually very proud of himself.
But Sam didn’t pick up on the opportunity to have a fight and got back to the relevant topic again, because he was professional like that. “If it is a ghost, we have at least an idea what it’s pissed about,” he pointed out. “Could be a suicide out of love, or the person otherwise blamed some love interest on their fate. That narrows it down. I’ll see if I can find out if there was someone who fits.” And once they knew who it was they could dig up the bones and have a good, classic salt ‘n’ burn.
Unfortunately, the chances of finding the origin of the ghost like that got considerably lower the less recent the person had died. And they didn’t even know if it really was a ghost to begin with.
“Tries to teach someone a lesson by killing someone else,” Dean muttered darkly. “Seems like a guy with a rather twisted sense of humour to me.”
Sam’s face was grim, the hard line around his mouth telling Dean that his brother had the same thought. An unexpected feeling of protectiveness rushed through him. Ruby wasn’t the only evil creature that had messed with his brother and left him damaged while Dean wasn’t looking. She also wasn’t the only one who deserved to die for it.
“Might be anything, as far as we know,” Sam said, reminding Dean that just because he was pissed at someone, that someone didn’t necessarily have to be in any way connected to the case. “But we know now that we shouldn’t only concentrate on the victims, but on their partners as well. See if they happen to have anything in common, went to the same places, anything.”
It was something to work with, at least. Dean mentally prepared for a long day running around doing research while he reached over and claimed the pie Sam hadn’t even touched.
-
What Dean meant with ‘running around doing research’ was that Sam would do research and Dean would run around. Sam was more likely to come up with something useful by looking at books and googleing things than Dean anyway. Dean was good at running around until he just happened to come across something useful. That was how it had always worked: Sam searched for stuff, Dean found stuff. Not that Sam didn’t find stuff as well, it was just that Dean happened to find stuff without actually aiming for it. Sam was perfectly content locking himself away and working hard to get what he wanted, Dean just got out and hoped to find what he wanted by accident, maybe over a beer.
That was why he was the happier person.
So while Sam sat down with his laptop in their motel room, Dean took a walk. He enjoyed the weather while he wandered to the place where the first victim had been found, then to the place where the second victim had unexpectedly changed shape. Unfortunately, there was no way to ask the third victim where and under what circumstances exactly he had found himself as a frog, so Dean went to the park for him, because it wasn’t far from his girlfriend’s house and there was a pond.
All those places were within walking distance to the others, but in a small town like this pretty much everything was within walking distance to everything else.
Though ‘walking distance’ could still mean a walk of an hour. Dean’s feet were hurting and he began regretting not having taken the impala when he wandered back to the motel, still looking for unexpected clues and evil janitors. He found neither, but he came across a building in the town’s centre that made him say, “Oh.”
Chances were that in Dean's absence, Sam had found the same thing. It was something that was kind of sticking out as a clue in a fairytale related case inside a picturesque small town, after all. Still, couldn’t hurt for Dean to call him and brag a little about his brilliant discovery before he went in there and risked his life and good looks in service of the ignorant public.
Because obviously, he was a potential victim. He was cool and handsome, after all, and someone was bound to be hopelessly in love with him while thinking themselves too uncool to approach him about it. Possibly Sammy. Because Sammy was kind of uncool, in that geeky-little-brother kind of way.
…Or maybe Dean just needed to get laid very badly. According to Sam, the only person who was hopelessly in love with Dean was his ego, anyway, which gave Dean the mental image of himself having to give his comatose body a kiss, and he wondered if he would get it right or freak out and run and effectively commit suicide.
Yeah, he definitely needed sex. Or a beer.
So he pulled out his mobile phone, flipped it open the very moment it started ringing, and spend ten seconds staring at it in confusion, not quite understanding how he could already be connected. Then he spend five seconds suspecting his mobile of being telepathic and conspiring with Sam, before he finally lifted it to his ear to listen to the voice of his brother.
“…you to check it out,” Sam was saying.
“Check out what?”
There was a moment of silence and an irritated grunt. “Did you listen to anything I said, Dean?”
“No, I didn’t. I was busy suspecting my phone of being telepathic. What was it again?”
There was another moment of silence during which Dean imagined Sam’s confused bitchface. In the end, Sam apparently decided that he had no time to indulge in his brother’s weirdness.
“There’s a building I want to check out,” he said impatiently.
“I know.” Dean grinned. “I’m standing before it right now.”
Sam sounded surprised. “You’re standing in front of the Miller villa?”
“The what?” Dean looked at the building in front of him and frowned. “No, I’m standing in front of the Grimm Museum. I don’t know, seems like a good place to start looking for a fairytale killer. What’s that about a villa?”
“Oh, good!” Sam exclaimed. “That’s the building I wanted you to check out! Maybe you’ll find something.”
“Since when do you decide who checks out what?”
“Since I figured you’d be closer to the museum than the villa.”
Dean looked at the museum and accepted that Sam had a point. “So, that villa…?”
“Wasn’t here until two months ago.”
“So it’s a new building. What makes it special?”
“The fact that it isn’t a new building at all. It seems to have been here for at least fifty years, but according to the archives, the ground it occupies used to be a potato acre until recently. Then the villa was just there and no one seems to find that strange, but the archives still claim there’s nothing there.”
“So maybe someone just forgot to put it down in the books…?” Dean said doubtfully.
“It’s a freaking large three storey villa, Dean,” Sam told him. “It’s not exactly easy to overlook.”
Dean cursed under his breath. Randomly appearing buildings made it so much more unlikely that this was a simple ghost case. (Even though ghosts sometimes came with their own randomly appearing ships, or in the form of killer trucks.)
“So you get the creepy mansion and I get the lame-ass museum? No way! Wait for me, I’m coming with you!”
“Dean, I’m not five.” Sam sounded annoyed. “And I’m not you. I’m not running in there with my guns blazing, I just want to see if anyone’s home, hear what they’ve got to say. Before I break in there I’ll get you. But we shouldn’t break in anywhere creepy before we checked the museum, and we definitely don’t need two men for that.”
He had a point. Perhaps Dean would find something that would make it unnecessary to break in anywhere. Which would be good, because buildings like that rarely ever were friendly.
On the other hand it would be a pity. Mansions mysteriously appearing out of nowhere were so cool!
“Okay,” he gave in. “But as soon as anything happens, you call me.”
He could almost hear Sam rolling his eyes at the other end of the line.
-
The museum took time. More time than Dean had anticipated. He’d thought he would run through the exhibition, find something useful within about five minutes and then run back to Sam and save him from having to go to the creepy house by himself. Because if Sam did that, he would inevitably end up inside the creepy house, and then they creepy house would eat him. That was how creepy houses worked. So Dean hurried up. And within five minutes he found absolutely nothing of interest.
Within about an hour and near the point of giving up looking he found a hat once belonging to Jacob Grimm. And any article of clothing meant hair, skin particles, anything that might bind a spirit to a place, and suddenly Dean found himself confronted with the possibility of the ghost they were hunting actually being the ghost of one of the Grimm brothers. He hadn’t really seen that coming. That was kind of like hunting the ghost of Elvis (except Elvis totally wasn’t dead), or James Dean, just less cool.
He then had to steal the hat, of course, and give it an honourable fire-burial in some backyard. Stealing an object from an exhibition, even a not very well visited one, during business hours, however, was a little bit difficult, and Dean had to wait for a long time for a chance to grab the thing.
An additional difficulty was that he hadn’t been prepared for a salt and burn when he left the motel, so he didn’t have any salt with him and needed to go buy some from the nearest supermarket. By the time he watched the doubtlessly very expensive hat go up in flames, the sun was beginning to set.
And his phone rang.
“Dean,” Sam’s voice greeted him through the line. “I seem to have a bit of a problem.” He didn’t sound very worried, though, so Dean wasn’t either.
“What kind of problem.”
“I checked the house, and the door was wide open, so I went inside to see if anyone was home. Now the door’s closed and I can’t seem to get it to open.”
He had absolutely no right to sound so unconcerned. “You idiot!” Dean exploded. “Don’t you ever watch horror movies? You don’t enter the creepy mansion that pops up out of thin air! Because this is what happens if you do: you get trapped. And then you die!”
“Dean.” Sam sounded annoyed, which he shouldn’t. He should sound scared and not move until his big brother came to rescue him. “I’ve watched as many horror movies as you have. And I know if this house was going to eat me, my phone wouldn’t work.”
There was some truth in that. Except, what if the monster had changed its MO from fairytales to monster movies and somewhat sucked at the latter? Got the details wrong because it wasn’t really into it? Knew about the eating but not the phone?
“I’m coming,” Dean said, already running. “Don’t go anywhere.”
“If I could, you wouldn’t have to get here,” Sam pointed out before he gave his brother the exact address of the villa. “But Dean,” he added. “Don’t panic. The door’s stuck, but it’s nothing I can’t handle. The furniture doesn’t look particularly evil either.”
“Don’t take any chances,” Dean ordered. “Stay clear of any furniture, evil or not. Back to the wall, no moving, got it?”
“How about scratching my nose?” Sam sounded amused now, not worried, as he should.
“No moving!” Dean repeated.
“Oh, right, I’ll jus- ouch.”
“Ouch? Ouch what?”
“Ouch, I pricked my finger. Calm down, Dean, nothing dramatic is going on here.”
“Pricked your finger on what? How can you prick your finger on anything if you’re standing against the wall and not moving?”
Dean waited for the inevitable prissy reply, but nothing came. “Sam?” he asked into his phone. “You still there?”
Apparently, he wasn’t.
Continued HERE
Fandom: Supernatural
Pairing: Sam/Dean, preslash
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 10,231
Warnings: pre-incest, lots of cursing
Spoilers: Set after 4.18, The Monster at the End of this Book.
Summary: It's another case based on fairytales for the Winchester brothers. There is a message in there somewhere - or maybe someone just likes to piss them off.
Note: Witten for radiumgirl's prompt "*coughsam/deancough* It's another fairy tale hunt for the Winchesters. Sam is Sleeping Beauty. Dean is not amused." at the ohsam h/c prompt challenge.
One day, after he had lived thirty years on Earth and forty years in hell, after he had learned that angels were real (dicks) and that demons were on their best way to kickstart the apocalypse, and that he, apparently, was the only one who could possibly stop them, Dean Winchester found out that he had fans.
Not that that in itself would have been much of a surprise. Dean was awesome, and he deserved to have fans. The thing was, it wasn’t so much fans as a fandom. An entire fandom, based on some books based on his life, written by a prophet in a bathrobe, because apparently Prophet of the Lord was the kind of job you chose when you failed at just about everything else. And since the job didn’t pay well, this particular Prophet of the Lord had decided to turn his prophecies into novels and sell the Winchester Gospel as cheap paperbacks to the masses.
And the masses loved the novels and created a fandom. And ‘fandom’, as far as Dean was able to tell from his brief exploration down this particular lane of the internet, meant that they shared their theories about Dean and his role in the heavenly plan, and had long discussions in forums and drew pictures of him and his car and wrote stories about him having sex with his brother.
That was where things started to get a little weird.
Now, Dean didn’t have an awful lot of experience with fandoms. He didn’t know how they worked. How would he? He didn’t even have a computer of his own, and the times he borrowed the laptop of the brother he was very pointedly not having sex with in any way shape or form, he used it only to surf for porn. Pure, simple porn without any back story attached to it. It didn’t really give him a chance to learn how fans thought these days, because as far as he could tell, Busty Asian Beauties didn’t have a fandom.
Why not, anyway? Everything in fandom seemed to be about sex lately, if his brief trip into the fandom of himself and his sidekick of a little brother was any indication. And not that there was anything wrong with that, but apparently fandom nowadays was dead set on ignoring all the hot chicks he met on a regular basis and focus on writing about men having sex with other men.
Oh, who was he kidding? Fandom had been like that since Star Trek.
The one thing he couldn’t wrap his head around was the incest thing. Sure, if the novels hadn’t introduced any characters that didn’t actually exist in real life, the number of male leads was damn limited. There were perhaps three other men important enough to keep the interest of the female fans, and the only one of those who wasn’t closely related to Dean was Bobby.
So, okay, being ‘slashed’ with his brother wasn’t the worst thing that could possible happen to him. But it was close. Because it was incest. And, well, it was Sam.
Seriously.
Three days after finding out about his Fandom of his Own, Dean found himself thinking that it was a pity Chuck’s novels had never been published to the point Castiel was introduced, because certainly then the slashers would have found something else to focus their creative energies on. He dropped that thought when he became aware that a) while he hated the fact that books using their life had been published, he now regretted that not more books using their life had been published, and b) he had just wished people would start writing about him having sex with an angel in a trench coat.
Still, he was sure Castiel would have made the fans happy. First of all, angel sex. Kinky. And more important, it would have offered an alternative to the incest and no one would write that anymore. Really, having sex with Cas wouldn’t be such a terrible price to pay for not having to have sex with his brother.
In a completely fictional sense, of course.
So, the Angel of the Lord would ban the sin of incest with his mere presence. That almost made sense, metaphorically speaking. After all, people only slashed Dean with Sam because they thought all hot men had to be slashed with other men, and there was no one else to slash him with, except Bobby, which would be worse. In the eyes of fandom, apparently, the need to write gay sex overrode the need not to write incestuous sex, but that didn’t change anything about incestuous sex still being wrong. Having grown up a little bit outside the rest of society, Dean wasn’t entirely sure what the moral standards of the normal population were at the moment, but he was fairly certain that doing it with your brother was still seen as wrong. No one would write that unless they had to.
Dean thought that maybe he was wasting a little too much thought on the matter.
But so, apparently, did someone else. Either that, or fate just hated him. Because while he was still not entirely sure about his role in the great heavenly plan, two weeks after he found out about the fandom thing, Dean realised what his role in the tale of Sleeping Beauty was, according to whoever had gotten them into this mess.
Despite his unbelievably good looks, it was not the part of the Beauty.
The sword fell from his hands and cluttered to the floor as he stumbled closer to the motionless form of his little brother. A ray of light fell onto Sam’s face from the window and his lips were slightly parted as if awaiting his True Love’s kiss.
“Seriously, man,” Dean said helplessly, stopping beside the bed. “Come on! What the fuck?”
-
“Dude.” Dean looked up from the heavy book to look at a nonspecific spot on the ceiling in bemusement. “What kind of king goes down into his orchard and counts the pears every single day? Wouldn’t he have servants to do that for him? I mean, what are you king for if you have to do stupid things like that by yourself?”
Sam frowned at him over the screen of his laptop. “I guess he was bored, because his servants did everything else for him. How exactly is that related to our case?”
“It’s a fairytale.”
“None of the ones I asked you to look up, Dean. Far as I know, neither of the victims so far had their hands missing.”
Trust Sam to be able to tell what fairytale it was just from the words King and Pears. Geek.
“So far,” Dean said triumphantly. “It might happen yet, and then we can catch up much faster if we already know the tale it was based on.”
“So, you’re going to read all two-hundred something tales by the Grimm brothers?” Sam’s mouth twitched suspiciously, as if he dared to doubt Dean’s dedication to their research. “Admit it - you picked that one out of morbid curiosity.”
“Hey, it was you who insisted that the MO of our culprit was fairy tale based,” Dean defended himself. “Again.”
“Just read the ones I told you to. Don’t worry, most of those stories have their general level of bloodshed.”
Dean rolled his eyes and closed the book. He thought that if they took the thing along they could probably club their monster to death with it. Perhaps that was even what they would get when they finally found how to kill it: “Smash in head with book containing the stories used.” It would bring some variation to the usual silver or iron or blessed brick from a church from the thirteenth century.
“I don’t need to read those,” he proclaimed. “It’s not like you gave me the exotic ones. Even I know the story of Snow White.”
“The original fairytale, Dean. Not the Disney movie.”
“There’s a difference?”
“Just in the amount of gore.”
Sam shook his head and rolled his eyes in silence when Dean opened the book with renewed interest.
There’d been four victims so far, and three of them had died. At first Dean had laughed at Sam’s theory that this case was based on fairytales, because that was kind of idiotic, and just because it had happened once didn’t mean it had to happen twice. Because it was idiotic, and because the chances of two ghosts having the same modus operandi were rather slim, once that modus operandi left the usual muster of ‘Haunt the asses of your killers’ or ‘Just generally haunt everyone who happens to be close to where you died’.
But after a girl had been confronted with the smashed form of her boyfriend lying in her bathroom just seconds after she had thrown a dictionary on a nastily obnoxious frog, even he had to admit that his brother might have a point.
Thinking of the last time they had had to deal with a ghost killing people based on fairytales, they had checked the local hospital for comatose patients, but the local hospital was tiny and seven of the ten people in there were awake. The other three were dead, and victims of this particular case, so no likely culprits even as ghosts.
Digging through the history of the town hadn’t helped either. Currently, Sam was digging through all available information on the victims, while Dean was digging through the collective works of the brothers Grimm. Secretly, he suspected that Sam made him do that only so he would have something to do and not be tempted to throw wet paper balls at his brother out of boredom.
He was still bored. Fairytales were so no cool reading material for adults.
Oh, look at that! Snow White’s evil stepmother dancing in glowing hot iron boots was kind of… graphic.
Ew.
“So, Julie Ellerics ended up in a coma after chocking on a piece of apple. She died three days later.” Sam sounded thoughtful, as if something was bothering him about it. Dean didn’t see what it would be. That wasn’t exactly new information.
“What about it? They all died.”
“All but Trixie Bold. She came to her husband in her changed form and managed to convince him that it was really her. He kissed her, she changed back and they lived happily ever after.”
“While poor James got smashed by a dictionary after freaking out his girlfriend.” Dean nodded slowly, seeing what his brother was aiming at. “But I don’t get what that’s got to do with Julie Ellerics.”
“Don’t you? Think about it, Dean!” Sam shifted in his chair, leaning forward, his eyes gleaming in the way they did when his brain was working overtime. “All victims had lovers or husbands who were apparently the key to them living or dying. All but Julie. As far as we know she was single. No one even seems to care she’s dead.”
“So you think she must have a lover somewhere?”
“It’s a guess.”
“But even if we found him, how would that help?” Dean asked. “We already talked to the partners of the other victims. What could Julie’s boyfriend tell us that would be in any way helpful?”
“I don’t know,” Sam admitted even as he closed his laptop and stood. “But if it’ll keep you from chewing through that book, it’s worth a try.”
-
Julie Elleric’s boyfriend turned out to be a girlfriend, and she wasn’t very hard to find in the end. They had learned before that no one had come for the young woman during the three days she was in a coma, but as it turned out, her landlords had called the hospital every day to see how she was doing.
Paying the couple a visit they found the man vaguely upset about the death of the withdrawn but nice woman, and his wife unsuccessfully trying to hide her utter devastation.
It was Sam who took her aside and talked to her. Of course it was Sam. Because Sam might have changed since Dean came back from hell, he might have secrets and a hard edge that wasn’t there before, but he still had those eyes that made people tell him everything he wanted to know. Do everything he wanted them to do. Dean suspected it might have something to do with his sympathy being genuine, because he had tried the trick himself and found that large, soulful eyes didn’t work so well when they were distracted by the recipient’s décolleté.
But Sam had the unique ability of looking into people’s eyes (even if he wouldn’t look into Dean’s eyes much anymore, and that was a bit bothersome but not related to the case) and got everything out of Suzie, wife of Rob and secret lover of Julie, while Dean waited at the diner around the corner and ate pancakes.
When Sam joined him there, he told Dean of the affair Suzie and Julie were having and about how Suzie loved Julie so much but didn’t want to leave her husband, scared of losing the security of her marriage, of being the bad one, the cheater, and of coming out as loving a woman.
“She was so scared of being found out that she didn’t even dare to go see Julie in the hospital,” Sam explained, thoughtfully looking down into his coffee. “She regrets that now, of course. Hell, she pretty much regrets her whole life.”
“I guess you didn’t tell her that she could have saved her lover by growing a backbone and giving her a kiss, did you?” Dean was munching his food, but his eyes never left Sam’s face, because that had been a real question, and before - before hell, before Sam became a stranger - it wouldn’t have been.
“We don’t know that yet,” Sam said, which Dean hoped was an answer. “It’s just a theory.”
“Of course.” Dean still didn’t take his eyes off his brother. “So you didn’t tell her, right?”
For the first time since he got back, Sam actually looked at him, and he looked annoyed and hurt enough for Dean to almost feel a little ashamed. “No, Dean, I didn’t. Because I’m not a dick.”
Well, of course not. They both knew who the dick in the family was, after all.
“So does that help us?” Dean asked, glad to change the topic.
“It actually might,” Sam said to his surprise. “Julie was the love of Suzie’s life, but Suzie didn’t dare to accept that and Julie died. The Bolds were in the process of getting a divorce, but seem to have changed their mind after the incident. Apparently Trixie’s husband wanted to leave her for a new job in another country when she didn’t want to follow him there, but now they realised that they love each other more than anything.”
“Well, they must, if he was willing to kiss that thing to get her back.” Dean shuddered at the memory of the photo they’d been shown of the creature Trixie had been turned into. And seriously, who kept photos of something like that?
Perhaps Ernest Bold just had a particularly weird kink…
“How do you know that, anyway?” Dean asked with a scowl, because he really didn’t want to hear that his little brother could read minds now. That would be bad, not to mention embarrassing because of the things Dean was constantly thinking.
But of course, if Sam could read minds, he wouldn’t tell Dean. Because mind-reading, and Demon-sex, and ‘Oh, by the way, I can kill you with my brain’ apparently weren’t really worth mentioning.
“Stop it,” Sam said.
“Stop what?”
“Stop thinking!”
Dean froze. So Sam could read his mind, except if he could, he wouldn’t have said that because that was admitting he could, which if he really could Sam wouldn’t do. “What am I thinking about?” he asked cautiously.
Sam had that annoyed scowl on his face that said he was annoyed. “How would I know? But you’re looking at me with that expression that tells me you’re thinking, and it isn’t nice.”
That was a little too close to the truth for Dean’s liking. “You can’t know that! I could think about anything and just happen to look at you.”
“I know, because you’re looking at me like that all the time lately,” Sam snapped. “And it’s quite distracting. So stop it, I’m trying to work a case here!”
“So am I,” Dean defended himself against the implied accusation of not being focused on their work. “I was totally thinking about the case.”
“Totally,” Sam dead-panned. Then he shifted on his seat, leaned a little closer to Dean and got back on topic. “So, both of those relationships were less than perfect,” he said, leaving Dean no time to take a step back and remember what they had been talking about in the first place. “And Cynthia Smith has a fiancé.”
“Had,” Dean corrected, once he remembered who Cynthia Smith was. “She smashed him with her Oxford Advanced English dictionary, remember?”
“No, that was her boyfriend,” Sam said triumphantly. “Her fiancé is the guy James didn’t know about, the guy she was going to leave him for. She told me her parents are going to make her marry him because they didn’t think James was of the required social standing for the family’s reputation, and she’s going along with it since she doesn’t want to lose her parents’ love.”
“Some love.” Dean grimaces. “Let me guess - she kinda regrets that now.”
“You bet.”
“Wait.” Dean frowned. “She told you when exactly?”
“After I spoke to Suzie. I called her.”
“Ah.”
“So, eat up!” Sam gestured to the leftovers of Dean’s pancakes. “We have to talk to the partner of the fourth victim. See if there was any trouble in paradise.”
-
There was no trouble in paradise. There was no paradise to begin with. The boyfriend of the other girl who’d died hadn’t been her boyfriend in the first place but only her friend, who’d loved her and never dared to tell her. It fell in place with their theory.
“Great,” Dean said when they left the bar the guy was working in and rubbed his hands in satisfaction. “That falls in place with our theory. Let’s go have pie!”
They did.
-
“So, we know the facts,” Dean said with his mouth full of pie. “Monster of the Moment picks couples that are in denial of their feelings, about to break up for the wrong reasons or generally just in the process of fucking up a relationship that could be perfect, takes one of them and gives the other the opportunity to save them by simply wrapping their heads around their feelings, except the situation comes without a manual and most fail the test.” He shook his head. “If that’s a ghost, it’s one of the stranger ones.”
Sam was staring at him in fascination, slowly shaking his head.
“What?” Dean swallowed the pie. “You think it’s a ghost?”
“No, I just can’t believe you got through that speech with so much food in your mouth.”
“I’m just that talented. The real question is how knowing all that actually helps.”
“Well, for starters, we now know what kind of people the thing targets.”
“Yeah, so we go around and warn everyone who looks to be in a happy relationship not to fuck it up, else their partner might end up choking on a fruitcake. I can see that working just great.”
Sam gave him that annoyed frown again. “We know for sure you’re not a potential victim, at least.”
“Yeah, but what about you? You think this curse also works for demons? You might want to warn Ruby not to come around if she doesn’t want to get killed by an evil stepmother.” Or alternatively by Dean. Just the thought of the black-eyed bitch coming near his brother made Dean’s skin crawl. The only thing that was worse was knowing that Sam willingly let her.
At least the annoyed frown was gone. Instead, Sam’s lips were pressed into a thin line and his glare was almost hostile.
Dean felt not actually very proud of himself.
But Sam didn’t pick up on the opportunity to have a fight and got back to the relevant topic again, because he was professional like that. “If it is a ghost, we have at least an idea what it’s pissed about,” he pointed out. “Could be a suicide out of love, or the person otherwise blamed some love interest on their fate. That narrows it down. I’ll see if I can find out if there was someone who fits.” And once they knew who it was they could dig up the bones and have a good, classic salt ‘n’ burn.
Unfortunately, the chances of finding the origin of the ghost like that got considerably lower the less recent the person had died. And they didn’t even know if it really was a ghost to begin with.
“Tries to teach someone a lesson by killing someone else,” Dean muttered darkly. “Seems like a guy with a rather twisted sense of humour to me.”
Sam’s face was grim, the hard line around his mouth telling Dean that his brother had the same thought. An unexpected feeling of protectiveness rushed through him. Ruby wasn’t the only evil creature that had messed with his brother and left him damaged while Dean wasn’t looking. She also wasn’t the only one who deserved to die for it.
“Might be anything, as far as we know,” Sam said, reminding Dean that just because he was pissed at someone, that someone didn’t necessarily have to be in any way connected to the case. “But we know now that we shouldn’t only concentrate on the victims, but on their partners as well. See if they happen to have anything in common, went to the same places, anything.”
It was something to work with, at least. Dean mentally prepared for a long day running around doing research while he reached over and claimed the pie Sam hadn’t even touched.
-
What Dean meant with ‘running around doing research’ was that Sam would do research and Dean would run around. Sam was more likely to come up with something useful by looking at books and googleing things than Dean anyway. Dean was good at running around until he just happened to come across something useful. That was how it had always worked: Sam searched for stuff, Dean found stuff. Not that Sam didn’t find stuff as well, it was just that Dean happened to find stuff without actually aiming for it. Sam was perfectly content locking himself away and working hard to get what he wanted, Dean just got out and hoped to find what he wanted by accident, maybe over a beer.
That was why he was the happier person.
So while Sam sat down with his laptop in their motel room, Dean took a walk. He enjoyed the weather while he wandered to the place where the first victim had been found, then to the place where the second victim had unexpectedly changed shape. Unfortunately, there was no way to ask the third victim where and under what circumstances exactly he had found himself as a frog, so Dean went to the park for him, because it wasn’t far from his girlfriend’s house and there was a pond.
All those places were within walking distance to the others, but in a small town like this pretty much everything was within walking distance to everything else.
Though ‘walking distance’ could still mean a walk of an hour. Dean’s feet were hurting and he began regretting not having taken the impala when he wandered back to the motel, still looking for unexpected clues and evil janitors. He found neither, but he came across a building in the town’s centre that made him say, “Oh.”
Chances were that in Dean's absence, Sam had found the same thing. It was something that was kind of sticking out as a clue in a fairytale related case inside a picturesque small town, after all. Still, couldn’t hurt for Dean to call him and brag a little about his brilliant discovery before he went in there and risked his life and good looks in service of the ignorant public.
Because obviously, he was a potential victim. He was cool and handsome, after all, and someone was bound to be hopelessly in love with him while thinking themselves too uncool to approach him about it. Possibly Sammy. Because Sammy was kind of uncool, in that geeky-little-brother kind of way.
…Or maybe Dean just needed to get laid very badly. According to Sam, the only person who was hopelessly in love with Dean was his ego, anyway, which gave Dean the mental image of himself having to give his comatose body a kiss, and he wondered if he would get it right or freak out and run and effectively commit suicide.
Yeah, he definitely needed sex. Or a beer.
So he pulled out his mobile phone, flipped it open the very moment it started ringing, and spend ten seconds staring at it in confusion, not quite understanding how he could already be connected. Then he spend five seconds suspecting his mobile of being telepathic and conspiring with Sam, before he finally lifted it to his ear to listen to the voice of his brother.
“…you to check it out,” Sam was saying.
“Check out what?”
There was a moment of silence and an irritated grunt. “Did you listen to anything I said, Dean?”
“No, I didn’t. I was busy suspecting my phone of being telepathic. What was it again?”
There was another moment of silence during which Dean imagined Sam’s confused bitchface. In the end, Sam apparently decided that he had no time to indulge in his brother’s weirdness.
“There’s a building I want to check out,” he said impatiently.
“I know.” Dean grinned. “I’m standing before it right now.”
Sam sounded surprised. “You’re standing in front of the Miller villa?”
“The what?” Dean looked at the building in front of him and frowned. “No, I’m standing in front of the Grimm Museum. I don’t know, seems like a good place to start looking for a fairytale killer. What’s that about a villa?”
“Oh, good!” Sam exclaimed. “That’s the building I wanted you to check out! Maybe you’ll find something.”
“Since when do you decide who checks out what?”
“Since I figured you’d be closer to the museum than the villa.”
Dean looked at the museum and accepted that Sam had a point. “So, that villa…?”
“Wasn’t here until two months ago.”
“So it’s a new building. What makes it special?”
“The fact that it isn’t a new building at all. It seems to have been here for at least fifty years, but according to the archives, the ground it occupies used to be a potato acre until recently. Then the villa was just there and no one seems to find that strange, but the archives still claim there’s nothing there.”
“So maybe someone just forgot to put it down in the books…?” Dean said doubtfully.
“It’s a freaking large three storey villa, Dean,” Sam told him. “It’s not exactly easy to overlook.”
Dean cursed under his breath. Randomly appearing buildings made it so much more unlikely that this was a simple ghost case. (Even though ghosts sometimes came with their own randomly appearing ships, or in the form of killer trucks.)
“So you get the creepy mansion and I get the lame-ass museum? No way! Wait for me, I’m coming with you!”
“Dean, I’m not five.” Sam sounded annoyed. “And I’m not you. I’m not running in there with my guns blazing, I just want to see if anyone’s home, hear what they’ve got to say. Before I break in there I’ll get you. But we shouldn’t break in anywhere creepy before we checked the museum, and we definitely don’t need two men for that.”
He had a point. Perhaps Dean would find something that would make it unnecessary to break in anywhere. Which would be good, because buildings like that rarely ever were friendly.
On the other hand it would be a pity. Mansions mysteriously appearing out of nowhere were so cool!
“Okay,” he gave in. “But as soon as anything happens, you call me.”
He could almost hear Sam rolling his eyes at the other end of the line.
-
The museum took time. More time than Dean had anticipated. He’d thought he would run through the exhibition, find something useful within about five minutes and then run back to Sam and save him from having to go to the creepy house by himself. Because if Sam did that, he would inevitably end up inside the creepy house, and then they creepy house would eat him. That was how creepy houses worked. So Dean hurried up. And within five minutes he found absolutely nothing of interest.
Within about an hour and near the point of giving up looking he found a hat once belonging to Jacob Grimm. And any article of clothing meant hair, skin particles, anything that might bind a spirit to a place, and suddenly Dean found himself confronted with the possibility of the ghost they were hunting actually being the ghost of one of the Grimm brothers. He hadn’t really seen that coming. That was kind of like hunting the ghost of Elvis (except Elvis totally wasn’t dead), or James Dean, just less cool.
He then had to steal the hat, of course, and give it an honourable fire-burial in some backyard. Stealing an object from an exhibition, even a not very well visited one, during business hours, however, was a little bit difficult, and Dean had to wait for a long time for a chance to grab the thing.
An additional difficulty was that he hadn’t been prepared for a salt and burn when he left the motel, so he didn’t have any salt with him and needed to go buy some from the nearest supermarket. By the time he watched the doubtlessly very expensive hat go up in flames, the sun was beginning to set.
And his phone rang.
“Dean,” Sam’s voice greeted him through the line. “I seem to have a bit of a problem.” He didn’t sound very worried, though, so Dean wasn’t either.
“What kind of problem.”
“I checked the house, and the door was wide open, so I went inside to see if anyone was home. Now the door’s closed and I can’t seem to get it to open.”
He had absolutely no right to sound so unconcerned. “You idiot!” Dean exploded. “Don’t you ever watch horror movies? You don’t enter the creepy mansion that pops up out of thin air! Because this is what happens if you do: you get trapped. And then you die!”
“Dean.” Sam sounded annoyed, which he shouldn’t. He should sound scared and not move until his big brother came to rescue him. “I’ve watched as many horror movies as you have. And I know if this house was going to eat me, my phone wouldn’t work.”
There was some truth in that. Except, what if the monster had changed its MO from fairytales to monster movies and somewhat sucked at the latter? Got the details wrong because it wasn’t really into it? Knew about the eating but not the phone?
“I’m coming,” Dean said, already running. “Don’t go anywhere.”
“If I could, you wouldn’t have to get here,” Sam pointed out before he gave his brother the exact address of the villa. “But Dean,” he added. “Don’t panic. The door’s stuck, but it’s nothing I can’t handle. The furniture doesn’t look particularly evil either.”
“Don’t take any chances,” Dean ordered. “Stay clear of any furniture, evil or not. Back to the wall, no moving, got it?”
“How about scratching my nose?” Sam sounded amused now, not worried, as he should.
“No moving!” Dean repeated.
“Oh, right, I’ll jus- ouch.”
“Ouch? Ouch what?”
“Ouch, I pricked my finger. Calm down, Dean, nothing dramatic is going on here.”
“Pricked your finger on what? How can you prick your finger on anything if you’re standing against the wall and not moving?”
Dean waited for the inevitable prissy reply, but nothing came. “Sam?” he asked into his phone. “You still there?”
Apparently, he wasn’t.
Continued HERE