Supernatural: Tricks are for Kids (1/1)
Title: Tricks are for Kids
By: Vehemently (vee_fic)
Fandom: Supernatural
Spoilers: Through Season 2
Rating: PG-13 for language and adult themes
What is it: Gen. A series of road games. An epic goof-off opportunity. A lexicon.
Tagline: "There's only so many ways to make it funny falling off a cliff."
***
***
Dean was sitting on his bed in his underwear, eating a gigantic bowl of Froot Loops (two of those mini-boxes in one bowl, the glutton) and slurping the violently-colored milk while he watched cartoons. Sam held still, eyes slitted, in his own bed while noises of mayhem blared from the television.
"Oh, man, Wile E. That dude needs a medal." There was no way he could know Sam was awake, so for all Dean knew he was telling the walls. "Or maybe they should put him in charge of NASA."
Sam gave up the pretense of drowse and rubbed his eyes. "Where'd you get the cereal?"
"Continental breakfast, they called it. We're moving up in the world. Put some pants on before you go; they looked at me funny."
He was, indeed, not wearing any pants. His bare legs and feet were splayed on the covers, hammer toes and all. Dean's hair stuck up in more directions than should be possible, considering he basically had his head shaved every five weeks. The roughing-up he'd taken from the battle in Wyoming was still written all over his face. Yeah, they'd looked at him funny.
Sam sat up, owlish, while Dean returned to his cereal. On the television, Wile E. Coyote strapped himself to a rocket and lit it on fire. The rocket, of course, blew up without going anywhere. Dean guffawed with his mouth full. Wile E., undaunted, bought himself another rocket.
"Why doesn't he just go to a diner and order breakfast?" Sam asked at last. "That always bugged me." Wile E. blew up again, crashed into a boulder, fell off a cliff. He fell off a cliff again, this time bringing a boulder down on top of himself. The third time, he blew something up and then fell off a cliff.
Dean talked past a mouthful. "He's a coyote, you idiot. Coyotes don't go to diners. You remember that one time when they made him talk? Totally ruined it."
"They made Wile E. Coyote talk?"
"This is what actually doing your homework does to you, Sammy. I can't believe you've never watched that one."
Sam climbed out of bed and stretched. He was still sore from the Devil's Gate, too, sore and brittle. He looked Dean over, how he sat against the headboard, crunching away as if he didn't have anything to worry about. The cartoons went to commercial and Dean noticed that Sam was staring at him.
"So," Sam babbled, turning away, "so if he can't talk, how come he can write away for all those Acme kits?"
Dean had to swallow his mouthful to make the proper dismissive noise in his throat. "There's only so many ways to make it funny falling off a cliff." He shoveled in another mouthful, and picked up the remote to change channels.
Sam didn't have anything to say to that. He pulled on his jeans quickly and headed out in search of breakfast.
***
The barren hills surrounding Vegas are dotted with weird light fixtures: last-chance motels, a couple of brothels if you hit the right county, small-time operations that can't afford the glitz of the real thing. They've all got neon signs, one more garish than the next, like beacons of life in the desert. Sam was just worried about keeping Dean away from any rigged roulette tables, but Dean, in the driver's seat, was focussed on something else entirely.
"Ni-i-i-ice," he mumbled to himself, and Sam ducked his head to see. It was a sketch of a curvy woman in bright aqua, just the bustline and the hips and legs that disappeared into the earth. There were no defined features above her shoulders, just a lather of aqua curls that Sam belatedly realized was her hair. The neon bar that made up her welcoming arm flickered, more off than on, fitful.
He shook his head. "That's kind of creepy, actually. She has no face."
"Dude, what is wrong with you? She's doing the come-hither thing and her hair's in her eyes." Dean made a noise. "I thought you were the artist in this family." But he didn't slow the car as they came up to her, passed her, left her behind in her outpost misery. Sam checked in the rearview, and from the back she was just a blot of night, surrounded by aqua glow.
"I am. And I'm telling you, she has no face."
"You're such a killjoy. I bet you don't even like Jessica Rabbit." Dean drummed his fingers on the steering wheel.
"Wait, that live-action cartoon movie? With the detective and the bunny?" Sam smiled to himself, the desert too dark for anyone to see it. He schooled himself to serious attention before adding, "All I remember is you snuck me in to see it and I was like five years old. I think I was scarred for life."
Dean made an aggrieved noise. "How can you say such awful things about Jessica. She's just drawn that way."
"Seriously, dude. That movie was not for kids. I saw it again in college and, yeah, all the sex jokes, but the villain kills his victims by dipping them in a vat of acid."
"Yeah. Like Goldfinger, for cartoons."
Sam remembered the excellent dope he'd been smoking when he'd seen it the second time, and realized abruptly that that was probably the whole point of the movie, and that a nine-year-old shouldn't have gotten in to see it at all, much less dragged a kindergartener along with him. "I take it you don't remember making me sit next to you in the theatre with your jacket over my head cause I was so scared and you wouldn't leave?"
Dean snorted. "Oh, come on. It wasn't like it was real." Dean had never yet admitted to an imagination about things unseen. Or, Sam revised, he imagined women out of their clothes all the time; but his ability to blunt himself away from fear was impressive. He could sign up for Hell, with a pretty good idea of what that might be, and never let on that it scared him. Sam wanted to punch him in the face sometimes.
The silence had gone on too long; Sam scrambled for a segue. "Um, all I remember is the villain, he's a freak in a rubber face mask. He rips off his own face."
"Hey, yeah. Judge Doom, original skinwalker." The absurdity of it was enough to force a chuckle, and it was okay. Dean added, "But I think his face gets burned off, not ripped off."
"Trust Dean Winchester to find the only cartoon on the planet that's as gross as a Rob Zombie movie."
Easing back in the driver's seat, his elbow against the side window, Dean gave a comfortable sigh. "I'm going to take that as a compliment." He drove them onward through the darkness, towards their next opportunity for danger. The sky was huge above them, packed with stars, vivid and seemingly close, this far away from the light pollution of the cities. Sam mapped the Milky Way with his eye: a rushing river, a road, an arrow made of distant suns. It pointed them along their way, more or less. It looked like a heavenly command, although of course Sam knew intellectually that it was a galaxy, and looked the same to everybody, whatever they might be doing.
"You do what you have to to get you through the night," he said, and settled in to sleep in the passenger seat.
***
Texas. The endless brown horizon, wavering in the heat above the roadbed, and little brown critters skittering in front of the tires, from time to time. It made Sam's skin crawl unaccountably, as if they were in a video game, some kind of landscape of shifting tiles, instead of a highway. He found himself keeping punitive count of the smashed armadilloes and rodent-smears on the shoulder.
Dean was sunburnt, double the freckles on his face and shoulders. Shirtless, he let his free hand hang out the window, making aileron shapes in the wind, and sang something cheerful to himself. He was so alive it made Sam sick.
"It's hot as Hell in this car," he said abruptly, louder than was necessary. He waited till Dean eyeballed him to demonstrate how his sweaty t-shirt stuck to his back. Sam held his gaze way longer than bitching about the inadequacy of the air conditioning actually needed. Dean was a master at not noticing things like that.
"Well, steal a towel next time," he admonished, and glued his eyes back to the road. "Go shirtless. Take off your damn jeans, if you want to."
"Oh, yeah," Sam griped, "roasted nuts. Great idea."
A bird ran across the pavement, far enough in front of them that they weren't in danger of hitting it. It was just a flash of brown speckled feathers, and then gone. Dean opened his mouth and Sam was expecting him to tell a road runner joke. Instead he said, mild: "Porky Pig does okay without any pants."
Sam spat back, "Nobody in cartoons wears any pants."
"Mickey Mouse wears pants." Dean mulled it over, with all the seriousness he might give to cleaning his weapons. "But, I guess he doesn't count, cause he doesn't wear a shirt. Between him and Donald Duck, they have one whole outfit."
"That's kind of depraved, don't you think?" Sam savored Dean's surprised attention and how easy he was to shock. "Donald Duck running around with all his little nephews," and Sam made air-quotes with his hands, "wearing sailor outfits without the pants. It's like gay porn in cartoon format."
Explosive laughter "Ah, okay, lost me there, dude." Dean seemed content to shake his head at his brother. Of all the times to turn permissive, he had to do it when Sam was in the mood for a fight. He grabbed a handful of hot pennies from the ashtray and started tossing them at Dean one by one.
"Ow!" Dean batted one away by sheer luck, still looking at the road, and then his next blow clipped Sam upside the head. But he laughed, and could not be made angry. "Quit it, you little twerp."
Sam was out of pennies anyway, unless he was willing to crawl around the back seat and gather up the ones he'd already thrown. He wiped the sweat off his temples. The silence brewed promisingly, but after a minute or two Dean was humming again, off in his own doomed world. He was about to burst into some heartfelt chorus when Sam interrupted him: "Goofy wears clothes." Dean eyed him, maybe only now guessing at Sam's sour mood. "Shoes, pants, shirt, vest, even a stupid hat."
Dean pursed his lips, eyes narrow on the sere landscape in front of them. After a moment, he offered up his life's worth of wisdom: "Yeah, but do you really want to use Goofy as a good example? He's a dog, and he has a dog for a pet! That's some kind of inside-out bestiality."
The appalled look on Dean's face suddenly broke up Sam's clouds, and he could do nothing but laugh, doubled over in his seat, till his abs hurt and he was light-headed. "Oh, ow, oh my god. I have got to get out of this car. Are we there yet?"
Dean's smile was benevolent, despotic. "No, but if you shut the hell up I might buy you a creamsicle next time we stop for gas."
***
They crossed Ohio playing Alphabet (since it was the only state they knew of that had town named Xenia), but once they were into the plains of southern Indiana, they had to make their own fun. "Fuck chuck marry," called Dean. "Cheetara from Thunder Cats, Lady Jay from G. I. Joe, and that chick in the yellow hip boots from He-Man. What was her name, Talla? Teela?"
Sam cackled. "Okay, wait a minute, Cheetara? I thought you were the one had a problem with bestiality."
Dean rolled his eyes. "Oh, fine. How about... Smurfette?"
"Um," Sam considered carefully. "Not that I can imagine her kicking anybody's ass..."
"D'you see the shoes on her? Ass-kicking is not going to be a problem."
"Smurfette is like two inches tall!" Dean laughed at this indignant assertion of reality. Sam explained to him soberly: "If you want me to consider her then you gotta put her up against, like, Strawberry Shortcake and one of those little creepy Monchichi things that used to give me nightmares. Like, play the kinky shrinkydink card, or don't."
"I'll keep that in mind, Miss Priss." The slant of Dean's eyebrow meant that it was a very distinct possibility that all the rest of Indiana would involve the sexual hijinks of creatures smaller than a Barbie doll. "Let's go with Jayna from the Wonder Twins."
"Okay." Sam thought hard, worked through the significance of each choice while the miles flew past. "Uh, I'm gonna have to chuck yellow hip boot chick, and fuck Wonder Twin, and --"
"Whoa, dude, you are chucking the yellow hip boots? What kind of vanilla freak are you? You don't want to get busy with a lady that wears leather all the way up to her white hot pants?"
Sam felt the flush in his face. Really, there was no way Dean could possibly guess about Jess's boots. They had only gone up to her knees, but they were stacked platform heels, and they'd put her at just the right height, and she'd had a thing for mirrors anyway, and holy shit Dean was gawking, amazed, as if he'd guessed already.
"No fucking way. You -- no fucking way."
Sam looked out at the fields of green, shy and struggling to control a smile. After a second, it was okay -- he was thinking about Jess and it wasn't like having the wind knocked out of him. He mumbled, "Jess was six foot tall. I mean --" and found himself grinning.
Dean was staring at the yellow dashes on the road, a deep, contemplative look on his face, as if he were sewing the leather seams of footwear with his mind. Sam wrote it down in his mental flipbook: How to Shut Up Dean Winchester, 1 Quick And Easy Step.
"Where was I?" Sam was having trouble containing his glee. "Oh yeah, the Wonder Twin. I figure, she could be form of some kind of, I don't know, mermaid or flying dragon or something cool like that, and you can do whatever you want with her creepy ice-pop brother."
A twitch of Dean's eyebrows was the only sign he'd even heard this invitation. Seemed like he was still stuck on the idea of boots.
"Anyway," Sam finished, and flicked Dean on the shoulder, which startled him so badly he swerved in their lane, "Anyway, I said, and that leaves the lovely Lady Jay for me to marry."
A sheepish half-grin, a chuckle. Dean emerged slowly from his carnal imagination. "Lady Jay. A girl who knows her way around a crossbow. I knew I raised you right."
"Absosmurfly," Sam said, and settled in for the next round.
***
They paced up and down the aisles of the grocery store, disoriented under the fluorescent lights. It was eleven at night, which meant they were lucky anything was open at all. Another half-hour, and they'd have go schlep forty miles to the college town and cross their fingers. Dean tucked a box of Froot Loops into the basket Sam was carrying.
"Um, essentials only?"
"Froot Loops are essential. A good breakfast is the healthy way to start your day, kiddo."
"I hate you."
"You say that now. You'll feel different when you get the toy surprise inside."
Sam shut his mouth. Dean perused the poptarts intently, but came away without any. He was a poptart purist: strawberry or nothing. He was looking wan, or maybe that was the fluorescent lights. Everything looked manic on the shelves, overbright: honey bears with insane plastic grins on their faces; glistening fruit on the jelly labels, pornographically plump. The Keebler elves followed him with their eyes as he stumbled down the cookie aisle. Sam needed more sleep.
They made it to the checkout line with WD-40, milk, eggs, bread, coffee, a handful of chocolate bars, condoms, four apples, and the box of Froot Loops. It was like a World War II care package, except they probably didn't have Froot Loops in World War II.
"You should try all the cereals, one by one," Sam said, staring at the brightly-colored Os on the box, while the clerk checked them out. There was a lifetime of sugar-shock wrestling over who got to choose the channel in that box. "Before the end," he blurted.
"What?" Dean turned away from the rack of tabloids, his brains still obviously deep in the suffering of Lindsey Lohan. "If you want Cap'n Crunch, go get some. I don't care."
Sam blinked. "I, uh, no, I don't want any. Just --" The clerk was gawking at him. Sam realized he'd said it right in front of a stranger, in front of somebody who didn't do life and death over breakfast. And then the clerk was giving him the annoyed, prompting shrug and Sam realized that it was just a matter of paying via cash or charge. He handed over a couple of bills, head down.
"Cap'n Crunch was never all that, anyway," said Dean, flipping through something trashy. He paused on a page and whistled to himself, but didn't show it to Sam. "Now, Count Chocula, at least he's scary."
Sam stood there with a handful of quarters and nickels from the clerks, thoughts jumbling like the coins, clink clink clink. After a second, he gave up and stuffed the change into his pocket. "The character, maybe. But the cereal was just like Cheerios in chocolate milk, after about thirty seconds. I liked Booberry better."
"Yeah, me too. Wonder why they stopped making it?" Dean pulled out his wallet to pay for a magazine, underclothed starlets looking unkempt and unhappy on its cover, and didn't even bother pretending it was for research.
"I don't know," said Sam, disconsolate, and his pockets jingled as they walked out of the store with their groceries. "I don't know why."
***
Dean was so easy to needle it was kind of criminal. They were stuck in traffic outside Minneapolis, with the windows down and their arms hanging out and all the car radios around them clashing into a tinny, toneless noise. Sam rapped on the passenger door for attention, and announced, "Okay, if you had to do one guy from the Justice League -- "
"Wait, what? What about the Super Friends?"
"Choose from whatever bowling league you want. Harvey Birdman, Barney Rubble, George Jetson, whatever. But it's got to be cartoon, and it's got to be a guy. So, who would you do it with?"
Dean watched him for a long moment, long enough for Sam to be grateful that traffic was at a dead stop. "Like, do it do it? That's kinda --."
"You are such a dinosaur," Sam chuckled, and watched the pink blush rise on Dean's cheeks.
"Is there something you're trying to tell me, little brother?" He had that half-serious look, like he still thought it was a joke but was steeling himself in case it wasn't.
Sam put on a wistful face to say, "Only that I'd let Gambit from the X-Men make sweet sweet love to me."
A brief silence. Dean sat there staring at the taillights of the SUV in front of him with his mouth hanging open. "I... really?" Sam bit his lips to keep from cracking up.
"Well, I mean, he'd have to give me flowers first, take me out someplace nice, tell me he liked my hair..." Finally Sam couldn't control himself, and laughed out loud, mostly at the strained unease on Dean's face. After a minute or two Dean conceded, and forced a chuckle as if he'd been had in some fine joke. Sam added, "I mean, really, at least he knows how to have a good time."
Dean shook his head. "You are so --"
"-- You are so gonna answer," Sam laughed, "or I'm gonna take all your credit cards away from you. Come on, theoretically. Nobody's going to make you actually do it. These people aren't real, you know."
"Fine." Dean paused, frowning out at the highway. "Fine. I -- Fine. Okay." He sounded annoyed, offended that he was required to even think about it. Sam watched the tension in his shoulders, and regretted a little that he couldn't help picking on Dean's weak spots. Finally, the answer came: "So, if it has to be a guy, I guess I gotta go with Spider-man. You know, he's got his shit together. Loves his family. Got a sense of humor, likes his job, and I always liked those little web-slingy things."
All things considered, Spider-man was an incredibly sane and reasonable choice. If Dean chose his girlfriends the way he'd worked out his theoretical boyfriend, he would probably have saved himself a lot of drama, a couple of awkward pants-down chases along motel hallways, and at least one case of the clap. "What about your totally obvious crush on Batman?"
"Batman? Fuck no." Dean chuckled. "That dude's issues have issues. It would be like screwing a girl who thinks she's ugly."
Sam said slowly, "I think a lot of women think they're ugly. I mean, if you ever talked --"
"And at least with Spider-man I got half a chance of a threesome with Mary Jane, right?" He winked at Sam, gave him a thumbs-up.
Sam put his head back on the top of the seat and giggled at the ceiling. "Oh, Dean. Always looking on the bright side." And then he heard himself, and sat up straight again.
"...Anyway, Harvey Birdman?" asked Dean. He showed no sign of having noticed Sam's change of demeanor. "What kind of kinky freak are you?"
***
"Okay. Say you're... hung suspended by your ankles over a vat of acid."
Dean pulled into a parking space with a view of the river. On a weekday, it wasn't likely there would be any boats or beachcombers to look at, just the vestiges of industrial trade too mundane for Fedex. He turned off the car, and sat in it, pondering. "You know, you're the one traumatized by acid. Doesn't do much for me."
"Whatever," Sam grumped. "Stuck on an airplane about to crash. Just, pick your trauma. You're in some unwinnable situation, the kind of cliffhanger that you'll wait all summer to find out how they can possibly pull that off, like hanging by your fingernails over a pit full of tigers or strapped to a table with the destructo-ray heading towards your crotch."
"Now that's a danger I can understand." Dean rifled through the bags in the footwell, and came up with a chocolate bar for each of them. They sat with the windows open discussing the best cliffhangers they'd seen. Suspended above a volcano, attacked by bears, falling into shark-infested waters, and the winner and still champion: frozen in carbonite. In front of them, the morning mist dissipated from the river while they licked melting chocolate off their fingers.
Sam balled up the tinny candy wrapper and tossed it into the back seat. "So, okay. Given the cliffhanger of your choice, what one superhero, comics, cartoons, or live-action, would you want to swoop in and save the day?"
Dean shifted in his seat, as if he'd rather just get out of the car and walk away. "Seriously, Sam. Come on." He squinted out the windshield, and the sun made shadows in the lines around his eyes.
"What?" Sam scoffed carefully. "If you're going to call on your boyfriend Spider-man again --"
"Shut up, you." Dean knocked him with an elbow, and Sam knocked him back, and it was okay.
"Seriously, who? Any superhero you want," Sam said, staring out the window as if it didn't matter.
Dean thought it over for a long while. Down on the concrete flood barrier, a couple of crows strutted at each other, tossing insults and clacking their beaks. Behind them, some big lazy boat like a barge trundled against the current and floated out of view. Sam breathed and waited.
"Hey," said Dean at last, nodding his head, "you know who I'd want? Samurai Jack. That dude was awesome." He was so awesome that Dean continued nodding to himself, half-breaking into a smile over something Jack had done.
"Huh." Sam watched the competing crows leap at each other, wings wide. They looked like two tiny Batmans, posturing, puffing their chests to seem scary.
"What?"
"That's just -- totally not what I was expecting you to say."
Dean smiled, waggled his eyebrows as if he were a constant surprise to everyone around him. He never believed people who told him how bad a liar he was. "Why, who'd you pick?"
"I thought you'd go with somebody like Deathstroke, or the Punisher, or like Rohrschach from Watchmen," Sam confessed. "Like, the baddest badasses out there."
"Are you kidding? Guys like that, they'd spend so much time blowing the villain away, I'd fall into the vat of acid without them noticing. Come on." Dean climbed out of the car, without waiting to ascertain that Sam would follow. Of course Sam would follow; they skidded on their heels down the loose dirt of the hillside, and tramped up and down the flood barrier. The two crows that had been arguing squawked, and flew away.
Sam watched them go, and realized, "Wait, Samurai Jack can't even fly. He just jumps really high. How can he possibly save you?"
"He's a right guy," said Dean carelessly, and kicked around in the dirt for good rocks. He crouched to select two or three, and came up hefting them with a look of mischief on his face. "Most skips gets to drive the next leg."
"You haven't let me drive in three weeks," Sam reminded him. But Dean paid him no mind, and stood sideways to the river to get the proper underhand stance. He held the rock, a striped gray stone made smooth from the river, in the crook of his index finger, David against the Philistines. He snapped his arm forward suddenly, shoulder-elbow-wrist in a neat economical motion, and they counted the skips on the river's surface. Ten splashes in a left-handed arc, ending in a skid and the rock sank under the surface.
"You know why else Samurai Jack?" he asked, rattling the keys under Sam's nose. He had a couple of stones left in his hand, but Sam kicked through the scree to find his own to compete with. "One, he has a samurai sword. Two, he can do all that shit in flip flops and tighty-whities. Dude could probably tie knots with his toes. And three, he's got the furry blue monkeys on his side."
Sam held two rocks, one in each hand, and weighed them against each other. "I thought they were orange monkeys."
"No, you idiot." Dean elbowed him when he wasn't expecting it, and Sam had to throw his weight so he wouldn't fall right off the barrier into the river. He got his balance back and realized Dean had got his fingers into Sam's collar, just in case. He shrugged, and Dean let go. "The bad guys were pink, and they were gorillas anyway. The furry blue monkeys were the ones that could jump. So, who'd you pick?"
"Pick for what?" Sam asked, absently. He stood with the sun on his face, planning his throw and the angle at which the stone would have to hit the water. He threw it like a curve ball, sidearmed and with that last flick of his fingers to keep it spinning. It leapt from his hand far out onto the water, and danced on the shining surface like a sprite. Sam stopped counting at fourteen, and the stone twirled one last time and disappeared. He turned to Dean, smiling, and held out his hand for the keys.
***
END
By: Vehemently (vee_fic)
Fandom: Supernatural
Spoilers: Through Season 2
Rating: PG-13 for language and adult themes
What is it: Gen. A series of road games. An epic goof-off opportunity. A lexicon.
Tagline: "There's only so many ways to make it funny falling off a cliff."
***
***
Dean was sitting on his bed in his underwear, eating a gigantic bowl of Froot Loops (two of those mini-boxes in one bowl, the glutton) and slurping the violently-colored milk while he watched cartoons. Sam held still, eyes slitted, in his own bed while noises of mayhem blared from the television.
"Oh, man, Wile E. That dude needs a medal." There was no way he could know Sam was awake, so for all Dean knew he was telling the walls. "Or maybe they should put him in charge of NASA."
Sam gave up the pretense of drowse and rubbed his eyes. "Where'd you get the cereal?"
"Continental breakfast, they called it. We're moving up in the world. Put some pants on before you go; they looked at me funny."
He was, indeed, not wearing any pants. His bare legs and feet were splayed on the covers, hammer toes and all. Dean's hair stuck up in more directions than should be possible, considering he basically had his head shaved every five weeks. The roughing-up he'd taken from the battle in Wyoming was still written all over his face. Yeah, they'd looked at him funny.
Sam sat up, owlish, while Dean returned to his cereal. On the television, Wile E. Coyote strapped himself to a rocket and lit it on fire. The rocket, of course, blew up without going anywhere. Dean guffawed with his mouth full. Wile E., undaunted, bought himself another rocket.
"Why doesn't he just go to a diner and order breakfast?" Sam asked at last. "That always bugged me." Wile E. blew up again, crashed into a boulder, fell off a cliff. He fell off a cliff again, this time bringing a boulder down on top of himself. The third time, he blew something up and then fell off a cliff.
Dean talked past a mouthful. "He's a coyote, you idiot. Coyotes don't go to diners. You remember that one time when they made him talk? Totally ruined it."
"They made Wile E. Coyote talk?"
"This is what actually doing your homework does to you, Sammy. I can't believe you've never watched that one."
Sam climbed out of bed and stretched. He was still sore from the Devil's Gate, too, sore and brittle. He looked Dean over, how he sat against the headboard, crunching away as if he didn't have anything to worry about. The cartoons went to commercial and Dean noticed that Sam was staring at him.
"So," Sam babbled, turning away, "so if he can't talk, how come he can write away for all those Acme kits?"
Dean had to swallow his mouthful to make the proper dismissive noise in his throat. "There's only so many ways to make it funny falling off a cliff." He shoveled in another mouthful, and picked up the remote to change channels.
Sam didn't have anything to say to that. He pulled on his jeans quickly and headed out in search of breakfast.
***
The barren hills surrounding Vegas are dotted with weird light fixtures: last-chance motels, a couple of brothels if you hit the right county, small-time operations that can't afford the glitz of the real thing. They've all got neon signs, one more garish than the next, like beacons of life in the desert. Sam was just worried about keeping Dean away from any rigged roulette tables, but Dean, in the driver's seat, was focussed on something else entirely.
"Ni-i-i-ice," he mumbled to himself, and Sam ducked his head to see. It was a sketch of a curvy woman in bright aqua, just the bustline and the hips and legs that disappeared into the earth. There were no defined features above her shoulders, just a lather of aqua curls that Sam belatedly realized was her hair. The neon bar that made up her welcoming arm flickered, more off than on, fitful.
He shook his head. "That's kind of creepy, actually. She has no face."
"Dude, what is wrong with you? She's doing the come-hither thing and her hair's in her eyes." Dean made a noise. "I thought you were the artist in this family." But he didn't slow the car as they came up to her, passed her, left her behind in her outpost misery. Sam checked in the rearview, and from the back she was just a blot of night, surrounded by aqua glow.
"I am. And I'm telling you, she has no face."
"You're such a killjoy. I bet you don't even like Jessica Rabbit." Dean drummed his fingers on the steering wheel.
"Wait, that live-action cartoon movie? With the detective and the bunny?" Sam smiled to himself, the desert too dark for anyone to see it. He schooled himself to serious attention before adding, "All I remember is you snuck me in to see it and I was like five years old. I think I was scarred for life."
Dean made an aggrieved noise. "How can you say such awful things about Jessica. She's just drawn that way."
"Seriously, dude. That movie was not for kids. I saw it again in college and, yeah, all the sex jokes, but the villain kills his victims by dipping them in a vat of acid."
"Yeah. Like Goldfinger, for cartoons."
Sam remembered the excellent dope he'd been smoking when he'd seen it the second time, and realized abruptly that that was probably the whole point of the movie, and that a nine-year-old shouldn't have gotten in to see it at all, much less dragged a kindergartener along with him. "I take it you don't remember making me sit next to you in the theatre with your jacket over my head cause I was so scared and you wouldn't leave?"
Dean snorted. "Oh, come on. It wasn't like it was real." Dean had never yet admitted to an imagination about things unseen. Or, Sam revised, he imagined women out of their clothes all the time; but his ability to blunt himself away from fear was impressive. He could sign up for Hell, with a pretty good idea of what that might be, and never let on that it scared him. Sam wanted to punch him in the face sometimes.
The silence had gone on too long; Sam scrambled for a segue. "Um, all I remember is the villain, he's a freak in a rubber face mask. He rips off his own face."
"Hey, yeah. Judge Doom, original skinwalker." The absurdity of it was enough to force a chuckle, and it was okay. Dean added, "But I think his face gets burned off, not ripped off."
"Trust Dean Winchester to find the only cartoon on the planet that's as gross as a Rob Zombie movie."
Easing back in the driver's seat, his elbow against the side window, Dean gave a comfortable sigh. "I'm going to take that as a compliment." He drove them onward through the darkness, towards their next opportunity for danger. The sky was huge above them, packed with stars, vivid and seemingly close, this far away from the light pollution of the cities. Sam mapped the Milky Way with his eye: a rushing river, a road, an arrow made of distant suns. It pointed them along their way, more or less. It looked like a heavenly command, although of course Sam knew intellectually that it was a galaxy, and looked the same to everybody, whatever they might be doing.
"You do what you have to to get you through the night," he said, and settled in to sleep in the passenger seat.
***
Texas. The endless brown horizon, wavering in the heat above the roadbed, and little brown critters skittering in front of the tires, from time to time. It made Sam's skin crawl unaccountably, as if they were in a video game, some kind of landscape of shifting tiles, instead of a highway. He found himself keeping punitive count of the smashed armadilloes and rodent-smears on the shoulder.
Dean was sunburnt, double the freckles on his face and shoulders. Shirtless, he let his free hand hang out the window, making aileron shapes in the wind, and sang something cheerful to himself. He was so alive it made Sam sick.
"It's hot as Hell in this car," he said abruptly, louder than was necessary. He waited till Dean eyeballed him to demonstrate how his sweaty t-shirt stuck to his back. Sam held his gaze way longer than bitching about the inadequacy of the air conditioning actually needed. Dean was a master at not noticing things like that.
"Well, steal a towel next time," he admonished, and glued his eyes back to the road. "Go shirtless. Take off your damn jeans, if you want to."
"Oh, yeah," Sam griped, "roasted nuts. Great idea."
A bird ran across the pavement, far enough in front of them that they weren't in danger of hitting it. It was just a flash of brown speckled feathers, and then gone. Dean opened his mouth and Sam was expecting him to tell a road runner joke. Instead he said, mild: "Porky Pig does okay without any pants."
Sam spat back, "Nobody in cartoons wears any pants."
"Mickey Mouse wears pants." Dean mulled it over, with all the seriousness he might give to cleaning his weapons. "But, I guess he doesn't count, cause he doesn't wear a shirt. Between him and Donald Duck, they have one whole outfit."
"That's kind of depraved, don't you think?" Sam savored Dean's surprised attention and how easy he was to shock. "Donald Duck running around with all his little nephews," and Sam made air-quotes with his hands, "wearing sailor outfits without the pants. It's like gay porn in cartoon format."
Explosive laughter "Ah, okay, lost me there, dude." Dean seemed content to shake his head at his brother. Of all the times to turn permissive, he had to do it when Sam was in the mood for a fight. He grabbed a handful of hot pennies from the ashtray and started tossing them at Dean one by one.
"Ow!" Dean batted one away by sheer luck, still looking at the road, and then his next blow clipped Sam upside the head. But he laughed, and could not be made angry. "Quit it, you little twerp."
Sam was out of pennies anyway, unless he was willing to crawl around the back seat and gather up the ones he'd already thrown. He wiped the sweat off his temples. The silence brewed promisingly, but after a minute or two Dean was humming again, off in his own doomed world. He was about to burst into some heartfelt chorus when Sam interrupted him: "Goofy wears clothes." Dean eyed him, maybe only now guessing at Sam's sour mood. "Shoes, pants, shirt, vest, even a stupid hat."
Dean pursed his lips, eyes narrow on the sere landscape in front of them. After a moment, he offered up his life's worth of wisdom: "Yeah, but do you really want to use Goofy as a good example? He's a dog, and he has a dog for a pet! That's some kind of inside-out bestiality."
The appalled look on Dean's face suddenly broke up Sam's clouds, and he could do nothing but laugh, doubled over in his seat, till his abs hurt and he was light-headed. "Oh, ow, oh my god. I have got to get out of this car. Are we there yet?"
Dean's smile was benevolent, despotic. "No, but if you shut the hell up I might buy you a creamsicle next time we stop for gas."
***
They crossed Ohio playing Alphabet (since it was the only state they knew of that had town named Xenia), but once they were into the plains of southern Indiana, they had to make their own fun. "Fuck chuck marry," called Dean. "Cheetara from Thunder Cats, Lady Jay from G. I. Joe, and that chick in the yellow hip boots from He-Man. What was her name, Talla? Teela?"
Sam cackled. "Okay, wait a minute, Cheetara? I thought you were the one had a problem with bestiality."
Dean rolled his eyes. "Oh, fine. How about... Smurfette?"
"Um," Sam considered carefully. "Not that I can imagine her kicking anybody's ass..."
"D'you see the shoes on her? Ass-kicking is not going to be a problem."
"Smurfette is like two inches tall!" Dean laughed at this indignant assertion of reality. Sam explained to him soberly: "If you want me to consider her then you gotta put her up against, like, Strawberry Shortcake and one of those little creepy Monchichi things that used to give me nightmares. Like, play the kinky shrinkydink card, or don't."
"I'll keep that in mind, Miss Priss." The slant of Dean's eyebrow meant that it was a very distinct possibility that all the rest of Indiana would involve the sexual hijinks of creatures smaller than a Barbie doll. "Let's go with Jayna from the Wonder Twins."
"Okay." Sam thought hard, worked through the significance of each choice while the miles flew past. "Uh, I'm gonna have to chuck yellow hip boot chick, and fuck Wonder Twin, and --"
"Whoa, dude, you are chucking the yellow hip boots? What kind of vanilla freak are you? You don't want to get busy with a lady that wears leather all the way up to her white hot pants?"
Sam felt the flush in his face. Really, there was no way Dean could possibly guess about Jess's boots. They had only gone up to her knees, but they were stacked platform heels, and they'd put her at just the right height, and she'd had a thing for mirrors anyway, and holy shit Dean was gawking, amazed, as if he'd guessed already.
"No fucking way. You -- no fucking way."
Sam looked out at the fields of green, shy and struggling to control a smile. After a second, it was okay -- he was thinking about Jess and it wasn't like having the wind knocked out of him. He mumbled, "Jess was six foot tall. I mean --" and found himself grinning.
Dean was staring at the yellow dashes on the road, a deep, contemplative look on his face, as if he were sewing the leather seams of footwear with his mind. Sam wrote it down in his mental flipbook: How to Shut Up Dean Winchester, 1 Quick And Easy Step.
"Where was I?" Sam was having trouble containing his glee. "Oh yeah, the Wonder Twin. I figure, she could be form of some kind of, I don't know, mermaid or flying dragon or something cool like that, and you can do whatever you want with her creepy ice-pop brother."
A twitch of Dean's eyebrows was the only sign he'd even heard this invitation. Seemed like he was still stuck on the idea of boots.
"Anyway," Sam finished, and flicked Dean on the shoulder, which startled him so badly he swerved in their lane, "Anyway, I said, and that leaves the lovely Lady Jay for me to marry."
A sheepish half-grin, a chuckle. Dean emerged slowly from his carnal imagination. "Lady Jay. A girl who knows her way around a crossbow. I knew I raised you right."
"Absosmurfly," Sam said, and settled in for the next round.
***
They paced up and down the aisles of the grocery store, disoriented under the fluorescent lights. It was eleven at night, which meant they were lucky anything was open at all. Another half-hour, and they'd have go schlep forty miles to the college town and cross their fingers. Dean tucked a box of Froot Loops into the basket Sam was carrying.
"Um, essentials only?"
"Froot Loops are essential. A good breakfast is the healthy way to start your day, kiddo."
"I hate you."
"You say that now. You'll feel different when you get the toy surprise inside."
Sam shut his mouth. Dean perused the poptarts intently, but came away without any. He was a poptart purist: strawberry or nothing. He was looking wan, or maybe that was the fluorescent lights. Everything looked manic on the shelves, overbright: honey bears with insane plastic grins on their faces; glistening fruit on the jelly labels, pornographically plump. The Keebler elves followed him with their eyes as he stumbled down the cookie aisle. Sam needed more sleep.
They made it to the checkout line with WD-40, milk, eggs, bread, coffee, a handful of chocolate bars, condoms, four apples, and the box of Froot Loops. It was like a World War II care package, except they probably didn't have Froot Loops in World War II.
"You should try all the cereals, one by one," Sam said, staring at the brightly-colored Os on the box, while the clerk checked them out. There was a lifetime of sugar-shock wrestling over who got to choose the channel in that box. "Before the end," he blurted.
"What?" Dean turned away from the rack of tabloids, his brains still obviously deep in the suffering of Lindsey Lohan. "If you want Cap'n Crunch, go get some. I don't care."
Sam blinked. "I, uh, no, I don't want any. Just --" The clerk was gawking at him. Sam realized he'd said it right in front of a stranger, in front of somebody who didn't do life and death over breakfast. And then the clerk was giving him the annoyed, prompting shrug and Sam realized that it was just a matter of paying via cash or charge. He handed over a couple of bills, head down.
"Cap'n Crunch was never all that, anyway," said Dean, flipping through something trashy. He paused on a page and whistled to himself, but didn't show it to Sam. "Now, Count Chocula, at least he's scary."
Sam stood there with a handful of quarters and nickels from the clerks, thoughts jumbling like the coins, clink clink clink. After a second, he gave up and stuffed the change into his pocket. "The character, maybe. But the cereal was just like Cheerios in chocolate milk, after about thirty seconds. I liked Booberry better."
"Yeah, me too. Wonder why they stopped making it?" Dean pulled out his wallet to pay for a magazine, underclothed starlets looking unkempt and unhappy on its cover, and didn't even bother pretending it was for research.
"I don't know," said Sam, disconsolate, and his pockets jingled as they walked out of the store with their groceries. "I don't know why."
***
Dean was so easy to needle it was kind of criminal. They were stuck in traffic outside Minneapolis, with the windows down and their arms hanging out and all the car radios around them clashing into a tinny, toneless noise. Sam rapped on the passenger door for attention, and announced, "Okay, if you had to do one guy from the Justice League -- "
"Wait, what? What about the Super Friends?"
"Choose from whatever bowling league you want. Harvey Birdman, Barney Rubble, George Jetson, whatever. But it's got to be cartoon, and it's got to be a guy. So, who would you do it with?"
Dean watched him for a long moment, long enough for Sam to be grateful that traffic was at a dead stop. "Like, do it do it? That's kinda --."
"You are such a dinosaur," Sam chuckled, and watched the pink blush rise on Dean's cheeks.
"Is there something you're trying to tell me, little brother?" He had that half-serious look, like he still thought it was a joke but was steeling himself in case it wasn't.
Sam put on a wistful face to say, "Only that I'd let Gambit from the X-Men make sweet sweet love to me."
A brief silence. Dean sat there staring at the taillights of the SUV in front of him with his mouth hanging open. "I... really?" Sam bit his lips to keep from cracking up.
"Well, I mean, he'd have to give me flowers first, take me out someplace nice, tell me he liked my hair..." Finally Sam couldn't control himself, and laughed out loud, mostly at the strained unease on Dean's face. After a minute or two Dean conceded, and forced a chuckle as if he'd been had in some fine joke. Sam added, "I mean, really, at least he knows how to have a good time."
Dean shook his head. "You are so --"
"-- You are so gonna answer," Sam laughed, "or I'm gonna take all your credit cards away from you. Come on, theoretically. Nobody's going to make you actually do it. These people aren't real, you know."
"Fine." Dean paused, frowning out at the highway. "Fine. I -- Fine. Okay." He sounded annoyed, offended that he was required to even think about it. Sam watched the tension in his shoulders, and regretted a little that he couldn't help picking on Dean's weak spots. Finally, the answer came: "So, if it has to be a guy, I guess I gotta go with Spider-man. You know, he's got his shit together. Loves his family. Got a sense of humor, likes his job, and I always liked those little web-slingy things."
All things considered, Spider-man was an incredibly sane and reasonable choice. If Dean chose his girlfriends the way he'd worked out his theoretical boyfriend, he would probably have saved himself a lot of drama, a couple of awkward pants-down chases along motel hallways, and at least one case of the clap. "What about your totally obvious crush on Batman?"
"Batman? Fuck no." Dean chuckled. "That dude's issues have issues. It would be like screwing a girl who thinks she's ugly."
Sam said slowly, "I think a lot of women think they're ugly. I mean, if you ever talked --"
"And at least with Spider-man I got half a chance of a threesome with Mary Jane, right?" He winked at Sam, gave him a thumbs-up.
Sam put his head back on the top of the seat and giggled at the ceiling. "Oh, Dean. Always looking on the bright side." And then he heard himself, and sat up straight again.
"...Anyway, Harvey Birdman?" asked Dean. He showed no sign of having noticed Sam's change of demeanor. "What kind of kinky freak are you?"
***
"Okay. Say you're... hung suspended by your ankles over a vat of acid."
Dean pulled into a parking space with a view of the river. On a weekday, it wasn't likely there would be any boats or beachcombers to look at, just the vestiges of industrial trade too mundane for Fedex. He turned off the car, and sat in it, pondering. "You know, you're the one traumatized by acid. Doesn't do much for me."
"Whatever," Sam grumped. "Stuck on an airplane about to crash. Just, pick your trauma. You're in some unwinnable situation, the kind of cliffhanger that you'll wait all summer to find out how they can possibly pull that off, like hanging by your fingernails over a pit full of tigers or strapped to a table with the destructo-ray heading towards your crotch."
"Now that's a danger I can understand." Dean rifled through the bags in the footwell, and came up with a chocolate bar for each of them. They sat with the windows open discussing the best cliffhangers they'd seen. Suspended above a volcano, attacked by bears, falling into shark-infested waters, and the winner and still champion: frozen in carbonite. In front of them, the morning mist dissipated from the river while they licked melting chocolate off their fingers.
Sam balled up the tinny candy wrapper and tossed it into the back seat. "So, okay. Given the cliffhanger of your choice, what one superhero, comics, cartoons, or live-action, would you want to swoop in and save the day?"
Dean shifted in his seat, as if he'd rather just get out of the car and walk away. "Seriously, Sam. Come on." He squinted out the windshield, and the sun made shadows in the lines around his eyes.
"What?" Sam scoffed carefully. "If you're going to call on your boyfriend Spider-man again --"
"Shut up, you." Dean knocked him with an elbow, and Sam knocked him back, and it was okay.
"Seriously, who? Any superhero you want," Sam said, staring out the window as if it didn't matter.
Dean thought it over for a long while. Down on the concrete flood barrier, a couple of crows strutted at each other, tossing insults and clacking their beaks. Behind them, some big lazy boat like a barge trundled against the current and floated out of view. Sam breathed and waited.
"Hey," said Dean at last, nodding his head, "you know who I'd want? Samurai Jack. That dude was awesome." He was so awesome that Dean continued nodding to himself, half-breaking into a smile over something Jack had done.
"Huh." Sam watched the competing crows leap at each other, wings wide. They looked like two tiny Batmans, posturing, puffing their chests to seem scary.
"What?"
"That's just -- totally not what I was expecting you to say."
Dean smiled, waggled his eyebrows as if he were a constant surprise to everyone around him. He never believed people who told him how bad a liar he was. "Why, who'd you pick?"
"I thought you'd go with somebody like Deathstroke, or the Punisher, or like Rohrschach from Watchmen," Sam confessed. "Like, the baddest badasses out there."
"Are you kidding? Guys like that, they'd spend so much time blowing the villain away, I'd fall into the vat of acid without them noticing. Come on." Dean climbed out of the car, without waiting to ascertain that Sam would follow. Of course Sam would follow; they skidded on their heels down the loose dirt of the hillside, and tramped up and down the flood barrier. The two crows that had been arguing squawked, and flew away.
Sam watched them go, and realized, "Wait, Samurai Jack can't even fly. He just jumps really high. How can he possibly save you?"
"He's a right guy," said Dean carelessly, and kicked around in the dirt for good rocks. He crouched to select two or three, and came up hefting them with a look of mischief on his face. "Most skips gets to drive the next leg."
"You haven't let me drive in three weeks," Sam reminded him. But Dean paid him no mind, and stood sideways to the river to get the proper underhand stance. He held the rock, a striped gray stone made smooth from the river, in the crook of his index finger, David against the Philistines. He snapped his arm forward suddenly, shoulder-elbow-wrist in a neat economical motion, and they counted the skips on the river's surface. Ten splashes in a left-handed arc, ending in a skid and the rock sank under the surface.
"You know why else Samurai Jack?" he asked, rattling the keys under Sam's nose. He had a couple of stones left in his hand, but Sam kicked through the scree to find his own to compete with. "One, he has a samurai sword. Two, he can do all that shit in flip flops and tighty-whities. Dude could probably tie knots with his toes. And three, he's got the furry blue monkeys on his side."
Sam held two rocks, one in each hand, and weighed them against each other. "I thought they were orange monkeys."
"No, you idiot." Dean elbowed him when he wasn't expecting it, and Sam had to throw his weight so he wouldn't fall right off the barrier into the river. He got his balance back and realized Dean had got his fingers into Sam's collar, just in case. He shrugged, and Dean let go. "The bad guys were pink, and they were gorillas anyway. The furry blue monkeys were the ones that could jump. So, who'd you pick?"
"Pick for what?" Sam asked, absently. He stood with the sun on his face, planning his throw and the angle at which the stone would have to hit the water. He threw it like a curve ball, sidearmed and with that last flick of his fingers to keep it spinning. It leapt from his hand far out onto the water, and danced on the shining surface like a sprite. Sam stopped counting at fourteen, and the stone twirled one last time and disappeared. He turned to Dean, smiling, and held out his hand for the keys.
***
END