Once Upon a Mattress--SPN Reverse Big Bang 1/2
Title: Once Upon a Mattress
Author: borgmama1of5
Fandom/Genre: SPN gen, season 2 (Sam & Dean)
Pairing: None
Rating: G
Wordcount: 7400 (complete in 2 linked parts)
Warnings: None
Summary: Dean just wanted to get the two of them away from Baltimore as fast as he could. Pulling the Impala into a secluded area to get a couple hours' sleep shouldn't have been problematic.
Beta: The awesome sandymg
Disclaimer: Not mine. Just having fun with 'em.
Artist: alteredloc
Art Link: http://alteredloc.livejournal.com/19837.html
Takes place between “The Usual Suspects” and “Crossroads Blues”
October 2006, Season 2
Once Upon a Mattress
Diane, the lady cop, might have given them a break - technically they were innocent of the murders of Tony and Karen Giles -- but proving it would certainly have brought a lot of other things they weren’t exactly innocent of to light. This was why Dean wanted to put as much distance between them and Baltimore as he could right now. He headed out on I70 until he hit the middle of Ohio, then switched to the local roads.
“Just in case,” Dean said when Sam grumbled about the crappy roads. “Ohio is a good state to get lost in, if you know what I mean.”
“It’s been over eight hours, Dean,” Sam whined. “My butt is sore, I’m hungry, and I need to take a piss.”
“How much money you got, Sam?”
Dean knew he was going to get ‘why’ before he got an amount, and sure enough, he did. His brother was so predictable.
“The cops nicked our wallets with our cards. So we’re running on cash until we can get to the nearest drop box. Which is another ten hours away in Illinois.”
Sam muttered an expletive, then said, “Fourteen dollars. And some change.”
“I’ve got enough for a tank of gas in my duffle. You got enough for some food. Guess we’re sleeping in the car tonight.”
He was graced with an epic bitchface.
Burgers, fries, coffee, and pie (“Hey, if I might not get another meal for a day I want to make this one worthwhile”) at Barbara’s Kitchen, a couple Snickers, some Red Vines, and a fill-up later, and they were essentially broke.
Not the first time, not the last.
When Dean saw a little car-width turn-off breaking the wooded darkness, he pulled the Impala onto it and switched on his high-beams to be sure the packed-dirt path stayed drivable.
About four hundred yards in, the road just stopped in the middle of a clearing. “Huh. Weird.”
The cessation of movement roused Sam from his semi-conscious state. Took him a minute to grasp the oddness of the surroundings and then naturally he objected.
“This is unnatural, Dean. Roads don’t just stop for no reason.”
Later, Dean would say he’d just used up the last of the adrenaline that had been fueling him for the last few days as an excuse. But at that moment he was just tired of Sam arguing over every decision. Deciding to stay by the Impala’s steering wheel was his concession to caution.
“Hey, you don’t like it, find your own place to sleep. I’m sackin’ out here, in the front seat, Sasquatch. So move it.” He shifted sideways and kicked Sam’s thigh lightly. And ignored Sam’s bad attitude as Sam moved to the back seat.
Dean’d slept in the car so many times his body automatically shifted into the most comfortable contortions and he was asleep in minutes.
He wanted to roll onto his side but a heavy band across his chest pinned him down. His left shoulder was weighted down as well. The weight was warm and slightly familiar. For a moment he relaxed his muscles and went with it.
Then wrongness registered. Dean slit his eyes against the bright daylight and peered down at the top of his brother’s head. Sam’s arm had Dean pinned in place.
“Hey, Sam, gerroffame!” Dean started to push Sam off, and then froze as his mind processed that they were in the open, surrounded by trees and scrub, and sleeping on a mattress?
Where the hell was the car?
They were so pretty.
And vulnerable, even in the metal beast.
She could protect them.
But the metal beast could not stay within.
She pondered the best thing to do. Hadnilga would not approve. Hadnilga would say to leave the strangers, and if The Hunt finds them, it is no loss to the kin.
Once they had been helpers, guardians.
Now they were apart. The only way to be safe, Hadnilga said.
Her steps were soundless in the carpet of fallen leaves as she circled closer to the cold machine. Their bodies were twisted inside. Even as she watched, the one in the front moved to roll on his side but his arm banged the large circle he was wedged behind and he grunted, squirmed, flailed for a moment, and then settled back, still looking uncomfortably cramped.
Standing near enough that she could reach out and touch the metal - but of course she would not - she simply drank in the angles and curves of their faces. The front one’s lashes fluttered a butterfly’s beat as his breathing continued smooth and steady. They shadowed his face and softened the defined planes. She followed the curve of his nose down to full, soft lips. Her eyes traveled to the other one, scrunched like a root with too little space to grow. Hair covered his face, falling like a waterfall above his closed eyes. Cheeks like the side of a mountain, jutting in sharp angles cut only by the soft swoop of his nose. So different, yet equally mesmerizing.
She wondered if she could still work a transformation. It had been a very long time since she had the occasion to do one. And on metal … though she thought there was just enough natural material to do it … There was much salt inside, that would help. But into what?
The man in the rear stirred, moved to straighten his bent legs, instead thudded his feet against the side.
“Dammit, Dean …” he muttered, half-sitting, then flopping over again.
She had gone immobile at his movement, and by the time he was still once more, she knew what she would do. A dim memory blended with a thought from one of the men
Three times she circled the metal cage, moving her dark arms in the summoning gestures. At the completion of the third loop she said a word. Green light filled the clearing, filtered through her and enveloped the thing that did not belong, and transformed it into something soft. It did look something like she remembered, and the two young men’s bodies were now unbound and could relax to fill the surface.
As she waited for her strength to replenish, for there was still more to be done to ensure their safety, she watched as the longer one stretched and then rolled to bump against the other. Minutes later his arm secured the long-lashed one to him.
At the peacefulness that came over both sleeping faces, Pieryn knew she had done the right thing.
Especially when the unnatural wail cut through the quiet night.
“Sammy!”
Dean didn’t often panic. But this was too bizarre to process. Had to be dreaming.
“D’ … wha …”
Sam’s bewilderment mirrored his own as Dean shoved his brother off him and sat up. Sam followed him upright.
“Dean, where’s the car?”
“I don’t know!”
“Where did this … mattress … come from?”
“Do I look like I freakin’ know?”
Dean saw the exact moment Sam snapped to the present when his lips curled into his ‘aggrieved little brother’ look.
“I told you this was a bad place to stop.”
“You were just bitchin’ to be bitchy!” Dean directed a light smack to the back of his brother’s head as Sam turned to look at their surroundings.
“Ow!”
“So where’s the car?” Like Sam would know.
“How the hell would I know, Dean? You’re the one with the physic connection to it!”
They both stood, moved in opposite directions to the clearing’s edge, and yelled at the same time as they each hit an invisible wall.
It didn’t exactly hurt, was more like Dean had walked into a padded wall and gotten a prickle of an electric charge. But there was nothing there. He’d instinctively rebounded from it, so he slowly extended his hand to feel the soft inflexibility and sting against his palm.
“Sam?”
“It’s like a force field.”
Without further discussion they both moved to the right, feeling along the impossibly concrete invisible barrier for any opening. Nothing. Except a lingering tingle in both hands from being dragged against something that couldn’t be there. Only it was.
Wordlessly, Dean turned back to examine the mattress. Just an ordinary, cheap hotel-quality one. Sam joined him a minute later and they patted it down, then upended it to see if there were any clues on the underside or on the ground beneath it.
Nothing save the Impala’s tire tracks leading in and stopping right under where the mattress had been laying.
“All the weapons are gone.”
“Still have my boot knife.” As he said it, Dean slid it out and stalked back to the boundary. “Let’s see what … Ouch!”
Unlike the mild sting he’d gotten before, as soon as the knife blade connected with the invisible shield a white-hot sizzle shot up Dean’s arm and he dropped the knife reflexively.
“Son of a bitch!” Dean rubbed his sleeve, then picked up the fallen blade.
“Mmmm, guess that wasn’t a good idea,” Sam smirked.
“Well, genius, let’s see you try to get us out,” Dean snarled.
“Okay, what’s the last thing you remember?” Sam shook his bangs out of his eyes and sat back down on the mattress. For lack of anything better to do, Dean sat as well.
“Falling asleep in the front seat.”
“Okay, before that. The road, was there anything odd about it? When did you see it?”
“Just looked like an unused turn-off. Figured I could follow it to a place I could pull over. Then it ended here.”
“So we went to sleep in the car and woke up on a mattress and … nothing else?”
Dean just shook his head.
“Magic spell? You piss off any witches lately, Dean?”
“No!” Dammit, Sam was treating this like it was funny. Dean glared at him.
Sam seemed to get the message and started processing seriously. “Can’t see how this would have anything to do with Baltimore, do you?”
Dean shook his head. “Nah, that ghost gave it up when the bad cop went down. And the other stuff was the cop to begin with.”
“Okay, then, what supernatural crap is associated with forests … and circles?”
Dean stood and walked around their prison, kicking leaves aside with his boots and studying the ground.
“Don’t see any mushrooms,” he finally said. “So not a fairy circle.”
Sam didn’t respond, so Dean went back to the barricade and started to explore it more thoroughly. It extended as high as he could reach and was flush against the ground. When Sam noticed what Dean was doing, he came over to join the painstaking job of feeling for any break or seam.
They’d gone a third of the way around when Sam got Dean’s attention.
“Look, Dean.”
Dean looked where Sam was pointing. “There. On that tree. Do you see it?”
After a minute of searching, Dean saw what had caught Sam’s attention: about four feet outside the circle, scratched into the bark at waist level, was a symbol. A circle with a triangle overlapping it, and a ‘V’ above it. Without a word they each started scanning for more of the marks.
Got one!”
“Over here!”
Their voices overlapped.
Turned out there were three trees with the design carved in the bark. The trees’ position to the triangle of the symbol seemed pretty obvious. Both of them were silent, thinking. Suddenly Dean smacked his jacket and then reached for the inside pocket.
“I still have Dad’s journal! Maybe he’s got something on it.”
Dean tumbled back onto the mattress and started flipping pages.
After a minute, Sam sat down as well.
“Dean?” Sam finally broke the silence.
“Yeah?”
“You don’t happen to have a water bottle, or a candy bar, or a … cheeseburger stashed in your coat pocket, do you?”
Crap. “No. You?”
“Uh-uh.”
Stillness was her natural state, so Pieryn just watched as the men woke and reacted with puzzlement. Her sisters would be looking for her even though Pieryn had sent them the sense of her well-being so that they would not have feared for her during last night’s Hunt.
Deep down she knew that she should have released them at sun-up, but it had been so long since she had seen the big people, she just wanted to enjoy them. They moved with such fluid grace. The names they called each other were odd, but as she watched the synchronicity of their movements, she perceived an underlying unity between them. As they felt along the schutzwand though, Pieryn began to realize she had made a mistake. She could not undo the ward without them seeing her. And they needed to be gone before nightfall.
The pretty one jumped up suddenly from sitting on the bed she had made them. She did not see what he had in his hand as he pushed against the wall but she felt a searing pain in her chest. He made a noise as well but she was reeling from the unexpected attack. She leaned into the tree bark and waited for the burning to subside.
The others will have felt her pain and they will come looking for her concerned. She would have to meet them first, before they found what she had done. With one more look Pieryn slipped away through the woods.
A complete search of his jacket pockets had yielded three lighters, two paperclips, his holy water flask, nail clippers, a dollar and eighty-seven cents in change, a ballpoint pen and a Sharpie, a nail, a fistful of store and gas station receipts, a stick of gum, and several empty gum wrappers.
Sam had a pocket flashlight, forty-two cents, three pens, a small notebook, four paperclips, two safety pins, a plastic spoon, another lighter, five napkins, and two packets of salt.
Dean looked at the random pile in the middle of the bed.
“Well, good thing you’re not a demon, Sam. Have some holy water.” He passed over the flask.
Sam gave him the ‘you are the most annoying creature on the planet’ look and said, “Only if you will, too.”
“Okay, fine.” Dean grabbed it back, put it to his lips, and faked-chugged a mouthful. “Your turn.”
Still glaring, Sam took a small sip.
“We could make a fire. Maybe the force field would burn.”
"That is a phenomenally bad idea, Dean. We could end up roasting ourselves if it acts like a furnace.”
“Where’s your sense of adventure, dude?”
“With the car.”
Low blow.
Dean picked up the plastic spoon and studied it a moment. Ridiculous idea, but he had nothing better to do so he walked back to the boundary, expediently finding it by bouncing off it. He knelt next to the invisible prison wall and started digging … well, scraping at the dirt. Sam peered over Dean’s shoulder.
On the fifth scoop the spoon snapped and Dean swore.
“Pretty sure they use metal spoons to tunnel out of prison in the movies, Dean.”
Dean didn’t bitchface. He death-glared.
“Okay, okay, just saying …” Sam actually took a step back. “ ’S not a bad idea, actually. Maybe we can find some branches to dig with.”
The only result of an hour of trying to dig under the shield with puny branches that kept breaking was that Dean was frustrated, thirsty, and really, really hungry. Also hot and sweaty.
“This isn’t getting anywhere.” He threw the freshly broken stick across the clearing. It bounced off the air and fell to the ground.
There hadn’t been anything in Dad’s journal resembling the symbol, or invisible walls. And none of the references to ‘circles in woods’ seemed pertinent.
He stomped back to the mattress where the piles from their jackets were still heaped. He scooped everything except the receipts and gum wrappers back in his pockets, pushed Sam’s junk to the side and sprawled out, ignoring the black streaks his boots left on the white cotton. He took the tiniest sip from the flask, then thrust it at Sam.
“Your turn.”
He returned the flask to his pocket after Sam gave it back, then squirmed, trying to get comfortable.
Sam looked incredulous. “You’re just going to lay there and take a nap?”
“You won’t let me try to burn our way out. Digging didn’t work. Figure whatever caged us is gonna come visiting, but I’d say it’s a good bet not until dark. So I might as well sleep, since you’re gonna stay all hyper and pissy anyway. Something shows up early, just wake me. Man, I wish I had a pillow though.”
He’d give Sam a ten for that bitchface.
Through almost-closed eyes he watched Sam meticulously put his crap back in his pockets. There was no shade and Dean imagined the roasting sensation was about how a turkey felt being cooked. Minus being stuffed, fortunately. Dammed if he was going to take his coat off, though. Didn’t want that up and vanishing, too. Or maybe morphing into a chicken suit or something. Dean relaxed, let his thoughts free-form.
“I figured out what it is, Sammy.”
Clearly out of stubbornness, Sam was sitting stiffly on the opposite side of the mattress.
“What?”
"It’s gotta be aliens, man, the gray ones with the big bug eyes … they’re coming tonight and gonna beam us up into their spaceship and do tests on us. With their probes and everything.”
Dean saw the handful of leaves coming with just enough time to turn his face away.
She thought she managed to keep the clan from becoming suspicious by claiming that she’d stepped on a piece of discarded metal on the forest floor, although she had to agree to show Afreid where it was later so no one else would be hurt.
As she passed the blanket with the afternoon meal laid out, she realized with a wave of guilt that the big people had nothing to eat or drink inside the ward. That was unconscionable! Her intent had been to protect them, not cause them harm.
Pieryn tucked her loaf of bread into her apron pocket, filled a jug with water, and slipped away from the gathering.
She took a roundabout way back to the circle, not wanting any of her kin to follow. She knew now that her attempt at doing a good deed had been a poor decision. What she didn’t know was how to undo the mistake without further compounding the damage. But she would start by making sure the men had sustenance.
She stayed behind the trees, assessing. Pretty one was sleeping on the bed she had made for them. Tall one was sitting opposite, hands clenched, staring into the woods. She threaded through the trees, around the wall until the sitting one’s back was to her.
Now was the moment she risked discovery, as she stepped to the schutzwand and walked through it. Just two paces, enough so she could set the water jug and the bread down and then back out.
She had backed up one step when the sleeping one flung himself at her even as he yelled “Sam!” She scrambled and his hand hit the wall instead of seizing her, and she frantically darted to safety.
“Did you see it?”
Sam shook his head. “Just a glimpse. All I could tell you, it was brown and not very big.”
“Looked like … like branches. That walked. With … eyes.”
“Look.” Sam pointed at a clay jug and a square, crusty lump. He picked up the loaf and turned it in his hands, brought it to his nose for a sniff, then broke a piece off. “This might be bread. Do you think it’s feeding us?”
“So we’re the newest exhibit in the zoo? Screw that!”
“If it is food, we might as well eat it.” Sam started to put a piece in his mouth, but Dean snatched it from his fingers.
“Don’t put that in your mouth! It might be poisoned!”
“If it wants us as an exhibit, it wouldn’t make sense to give us poisoned food, Dean.”
“But we don’t know what it wants.”
Sam bent over to pick up the jug and spilled a little of the contents out onto his hand.
“I’m pretty sure this is just water. And the little holy water left isn’t going to be enough for both of us.”
“Fine. I’ll try it first.”
Dean popped the chunk he had swiped from Sam into his mouth before Sam could react. Still chewing, he said, “I think it is bread. Almost tasty.”
He swallowed. “So am I turning purple or sprouting feathers?”
“You’re an idiot.”
“Gimme the jug. Wash this down.”
He wiped his hand on the back of his mouth. “How long d’ya think we need to wait?”
“I don’t know!” Exasperation. “Five minutes.”
Dean endured Sam’s annoyed stare for a few minutes, then, “Hell, if nothing’s happened by now, let’s just eat.”
He plopped back on the mattress and sliced the lump in half with his knife, then started taking bites out of his share.
Sam sat beside him and pulled off mouth-sized pieces, eating them one at a time.
Suddenly Dean grinned. “Hey, Sammy, we’re having a picnic. All we’re missing are the freakin’ ants.” Dean smirked waiting for Sam’s expression.
Barely a four. Dean was losing his touch.
Pieryn stopped before she was halfway back to her sisters. She dared not tell any of them what she had done. She had to release the strangers before dark, but there was no way to do that without revealing herself to them. And they scared her.
She melted into the closest tree when she heard voices.
“… wrong. She stayed away all night when The Hunt was about. We need to find her.”
Afreid was walking with Hadnilga in the direction of the schutzwand and Pieryn had no more time for making a clever plan. She wasn’t sure what they would do if they found the big people, but Pieryn didn’t think Hadnilga would be very concerned with the strangers’ well-being.
And only Pieryn knew of the transformation of the metal beast. Which meant that only she could reverse it.
So stupid, she was, just because the pretty men caught her fancy, made her remember long ago when the clan wasn’t always in hiding.
She had to correct her mistake before any more harm was done.
She hoped the strangers would give her time to do that.
Part 2: http://borgmama1of5.livejournal.com/51203.html