SPN FIC - He's Got To Be Larger Than Life
A re-watch of The Monster At the End of This Book made me wonder about the various readers of the Supernatural book series. Surely (Shirley?) they're not all fangirls. From that came this: Dean, Chuck, Castiel, and a small boy who thinks Dean is Of Teh Awesome. Posted in two parts because of length. Title from Bonnie Tyler's "Holding Out For a Hero."
CHARACTERS: Dean, Chuck, Castiel, OCs
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG, for language
WARNINGS: If seriously ill children upset you, best avoid this
SPOILERS: The Monster At the End of This Book (4.18)
LENGTH: 5990 words
HE'S GOT TO BE LARGER THAN LIFE
By Carol Davis
The caller ID on Dean's phone says simply Chuck, but it might as well say My Whole Life Is a Big Bucket of Woe or Go Put Your Head Through the Wall Right Now and Save Yourself a Whole Lot of Grief. He sits looking at the phone as it rings, looking at that name on the little screen, those five letters that sure as God made macaroni mean his whole day's going to be ruined, and for all the enthusiasm he's able to work up, he might as well have a turd sitting in the palm of his hand.
He could ignore it, he supposes.
He could let the call go right to frickin' voicemail, but dealing with Chuck later instead of now isn't exactly a solution.
There's exactly nobody on Earth he'd rather talk to less than Chuck Shirley. Well, yes there is, but it's not really likely that any of the Jonas Brothers is gonna be calling him anytime soon. If Sam were here he'd make Sam answer the phone, but he hasn't seen or heard from his brother in almost five hours. He's starting to think he's less interested in talking to Sam than talking to Chuck, or the Jonas Brothers, when the ringtone itself starts to sound woeful and he realizes that he's less interested in talking to any of those people than in shoving a barbeque fork through his brain.
But maybe Chuck actually has something useful to tell him.
That's possible.
The Earth being hit by an asteroid is also possible. However, the odds of it happening in the next five seconds are kind of remote.
"What?" he barks into the phone.
"Dean."
"Yeah, Chuck."
"I need -"
Oh, fuck me running, Dean thinks. "What, Chuck?"
There's a long silence at the other end. Maybe the asteroid hit Chuck's house. Those little ones hit all the time, right? That would be awesome.
"I got an e-mail," Chuck says.
"Not really interested in your fan mail, Chuck."
"It's - I'll send it to you. Can I send it to you?"
"Do I have a choice?"
He wonders for about half a second how Chuck got his e-mail address, then remembers that this is Chuck. Chuck knows things about him that he doesn't know about him. He considers, sometimes, doing something really off the wall so he can blow some of Chuck's circuits - but if his so-called life hasn't sent Chuck over the edge before now, coming up with something that'd fire up the ol' Tilt-a-Whirl would be tough.
Really, really tough.
Which is not to say it would be impossible, and Dean enjoys a challenge.
Yes he does.
"I sent it to you," Chuck says. "Look in your In box. Please?"
He's got that tone in his voice, the one that says if Dean doesn't cave, he's gonna start whining. There's no barbeque fork in the kitchenette, but there's a dollar store half a block down and sure as hell they've got 'em. If Chuck starts whining, Dean's going for the fork. But he doesn't have his boots on. He's gonna have to go to the dollar store in his socks.
"Look -"
"Dean. Please."
"I don't have time for this, man."
Another silence. "You were watching the Home Shopping Network," Chuck says quietly.
"I was -"
Yeah, he was watching HSN.
Maybe a regular fork would work.
"All right, all right," he grouses. The laptop's over on the table, and he drops into the chair that's facing it like he's sitting down to be grilled by Kelly frigging Ripa. It takes him a minute to get to the In box. Sure enough, the e-mail's there, forwarded by…profetman09? Chuck's been hitting the hard stuff way too much, he thinks. But in Chuck's place? He would have bought one of those inflatable backyard pools and filled the damn thing with JD. Would've submerged himself in it. His body fat percentage is way low, so he wouldn't float. If he didn't paddle, he'd sink right down in.
"Are you reading it?" Chuck asks.
He lowers the tip of his forefinger to the little silver bar.
How bad can it be? he thinks.
Dear Mr. Edlund, it starts off. That's Chuck's pen name. His nom de plume. Carver Edlund. Makes him sound respectable. Classy. Like somebody who writes his books on a nice laptop, sitting in an ergonomic chair in a home office on the top floor of a townhouse, with classical music playing on the sound system.
On the other hand, nobody like that would be writing shit like…
…loves your stories…
…not able to go outside any more…
…We tried contacting Make-a-Wish but they didn't…
"I can't go," Chuck says so softly that Dean almost can't hear him. "They don't want to meet me. I'm not what they want."
…If you could possibly…
"Dean?"
"Fuck," Dean mumbles.
"You've met me," Chuck says. "I'm not - I can't -"
There's never a good asteroid around when you need one.
~~~~~~~~~~
She's there waiting when he gets to the door of Room 407 in the Peds ward. She looks a little tired - no, she looks a lot tired.
No. She looks like she passed tired about five hundred miles back.
"Mr. Edlund?" she says, and tries to paste a smile onto her face, but she's using that cheap glue, the kind that won't even hold an envelope shut. She's pretty, or would be if she were a lot less tired. Blue eyes, dark curly hair. She reminds Dean of somebody, but he can't think who. "Thank you so much for coming. This is - I can't say how much I appreciate this."
She extends a hand.
Her name is Kathy Boylan. They talked on the phone the day before yesterday. She has a nice voice, a soft voice. A mom voice. She held herself together pretty well during the ten or fifteen minutes they talked, even though putting this situation into words and getting them to come out of your mouth had to be about as tough as yanking golf balls out through your nostrils. He couldn't do this, he thinks. Couldn't hang tough like she's doing.
Her hand is small and warm and she doesn't so much grasp his hand as simply touch it.
He glances past her, into the room. There's a bed in there, of course, and a lot less equipment than he expected.
There's a little boy in the bed. A bald little boy.
Nobody's blocking his path. He could turn around and haul ass out of here.
"You didn't say where you live," says Kathy Boylan. "Did you have to travel very far? I hope it wasn't too much of a trip for you."
He was four states away. "No," he says. "Not that far."
The kid's eyes are closed, and then they're not. They fix on him, and he has to struggle not to flinch. Those eyes look enormous. Maybe it's the dark circles around them, or the baldness. The kid's face looks like it's all eyes.
He could go.
Kathy Boylan touches his arm, indicates that they should go into the room. She's still wearing that limp, fluttery smile. "This is Brendan," she says when they get close to the bed. "Bren, this is Mr. Edlund."
The kid beams at him.
Fuckin' beams.
"Hi there," he manages. He has to look to Kathy, has to ask silently whether it's all right to touch, to take hold of the hand that's even smaller than hers, whether it would cause some cascade of terrible crap to come avalanching down on this kid, this little bald kid who's so very, very sick. There's something welling up inside him that makes him wonder if he'll be able to go on breathing, whether he'll need one of those rubber tubey things that pipes oxygen into your nose, like the one the kid is wearing. Cannula, he thinks. That's what it's called. A cannula. It's soft, and if you have it on for a while it dries your nose out something ferocious.
Maybe the kid can't talk. Maybe he can just lie there.
He's twelve, Kathy Boylan told him over the phone. Twelve years old. But he looks younger than that. Smaller. Dean would have guessed eight or nine. But maybe he can't guess well. The only kid he's known long enough to track is Sam, and you can't base assumptions about the general population on what happened with Sam.
"I read all your books," the kid says.
His voice sounds stronger than Dean expected. "Oh," Dean murmurs.
"Scarecrow is my favorite."
"Oh yeah?"
"I read it eight times."
Scarecrow, Dean thinks. Human sacrifice. That fugly-ass thing hanging in the apple orchard. Leaving Sam in the middle of the road. He read a lot of that one himself because he wanted to know what Sam did, what he said to Meg. Not much of it was surprising, even the part about Meg slicing open the guy's throat and letting him bleed into a chalice so she could talk to her daddy the sonofabitchin' yellow-eyed demon.
That's some weird-ass shit to let a kid read, he thinks, and then he remembers Route 666.
"My friends say movies are scarier," the kid - Brendan - goes on. "But I think books are. You can use your imagination."
Route 666, man. That was graphic.
And holy crap, Heart. He peeked at Heart. Peeking was all he could manage.
"He hasn't read all of them," Kathy says, as if she knows what he's thinking. "I read them first. There were a couple that were a little -"
"No problem," Dean sputters.
"I don't like the emo parts," Brendan says. "Or the romance stuff. I like the action better. Shooting the ghosts with the rock salt. That's pretty cool. Oh, and Bloody Mary. I know kids that tried that, but nothing happened. That was freaky, about her coming out of the mirror to get the people who had a secret. And what's that other one? The Wendigo! I loved that one. Where Dean dropped all the M&Ms so Sam would know where he went."
Dean grins a little. "Yeah. Ingenious, huh?"
"She likes the one about the haunted painting." Brendan points to his mother. "It's okay. I like how it rematerialized after they burned it. But all the romance stuff, I skipped over that. I don't care about Sam kissing people."
"I liked Sarah," Kathy offers. "She's very cool."
There's something about this, something that almost erases the fact that he's in a hospital, that there's that smell he's had to put up with too many times, those sounds that trigger memories he wishes he didn't have. They're mild, of course, compared to his memories of Hell - they're nothing at all stacked up against what he remembers of Hell - but that isn't to say he enjoys sorting through them. They say you forget pain, that you can't piece together exactly how bad it was, but he can. He was in a hospital not that long ago, after Alastair worked him over. He remembers that really, really well. Remembers it well enough that he has to close his eyes for a moment.
"Are you all right?" Kathy asks.
"I'm good," he says.
"We won't keep you. It's so kind of you to do this. We don't want to inconvenience you, really, not when you've been so generous."
"How do you think of all that stuff?" Brendan asks.
"Dunno," Dean replies.
He didn't think of it, of course, didn't invent it out of whole cloth like other people do - Stephen King or Dean Koontz or any of those guys. It happened to him, it's his life, and while it's still freakishly weird to know that Chuck typed it all out and people paid money to read about him, about Sam, about all the places they've been and the stuff they've done, and while it's not a normal life, it's his life and there were definitely parts of it that were cool. "Dead in the Water," he says. "That was a good one. I think that's my favorite. When I - Dean, I mean, when Dean saved that kid, got him out of the lake. That was pretty awesome. I like that part."
"Yeah, when Lucas drew the pictures?"
Lucas, Dean thinks. He saved Lucas. Who has a good life now, he hopes.
"You made vampires all different," Brendan goes on. "About them being able to go out in the light and all that."
"Yeah."
And they talk.
Dean pulls up a chair after a few minutes, turns it around, straddles it so he can rest his arms along its back.
There's something about this. Something he needed, he thinks. Sometimes, he can talk to Sam about what they do, can laugh about it, can point to things and say, My God, man, that was amazing. They can share a few beers and compare notes and…talk shop, he guesses it is. He's been able to do that now and then with other people, for a little while, but with them, with Sam, even, there's been something missing.
"That's so cool," Brendan sighs.
He means I want that life. And no he doesn't, of course he doesn't, because he doesn't know the reality of it. Doesn't know what living in seedy motel rooms and eating diner food and dealing with bedbugs and fleas and nuts with guns and Sam, always Sam - he doesn't know what it all means. He doesn't know what it's like to be so scared you can't think.
But… Yes. Brendan does.
He knows.
When Dean speaks, his voice is raspy, and Kathy misinterprets it. "I'm going to get us something to drink," she says, and before Dean can object or say thank you or offer her some change for the soda machine, she's gone, leaving him alone with Brendan. The two of them are silent for a minute, and that makes the beeping and hissing of the machines more obvious. Brendan glances over at them and sighs, then looks back at Dean as if he's apologizing, as if he's saying I wish we could have met someplace different. Then his expression shifts a little and he fixes his attention on Dean. Looks at him steady and long, as if he's trying to fix the image of Dean in his mind.
"You doin' okay?" Dean asks.
"Yeah."
"This kind of sucks. All this."
He remembers twelve. Remembers being twelve, remembers Sam being twelve. Remembers feeling that he was starting to get a handle on things, a little bit.
"You want to know something?" he asks Brendan.
"Okay."
"I think you're a pretty cool kid."
"You do?"
"Yeah, I definitely do."
"My sister doesn't."
"But she's a chick, right? How old is she?"
"Sixteen."
Sixteen. He remembers sixteen. Remembers Sam at twelve. "Listen," he says. "There's this other story I never wrote down. Did you like that older stuff, about when Sam and Dean were kids?"
A cloud passes over Brendan's expression. "When their dad was gone?"
"Well - yeah."
"My dad's gone."
It's on his face: he means bailed. "I'm sorry, man," Dean says.
"What's the story?"
Brendan really wants to hear it. He does. So Dean tells it, and it's good, because things were good then, in spite of Sam getting all bitchy and stubborn and starting to pick fights because he wanted to do normal stuff instead of doing the job, wanted to be a real kid with a real life, wanted to be like everybody else. It's occurred to Dean now and then that even normal people aren't normal, that normal's kind of relative, but back then there was them and us and while it was clear to him that he'd always been and likely always would be an us, Sam was pretty determined to at least straddle the fence, if not fall off of it altogether and land smack on his ass on the other side.
Back then being an us had seemed pretty cool. Dad was something extraordinary, Dean had decided pretty early on. He wasn't a TV dad, for sure, didn't worry about birthday cakes and parent-teacher meetings and proper nutrition and all that crap, but he was helping people. Spent his whole life helping people.
Dean tells it all, about himself and Sam and Dad, and the telling feels good, helps him go back to a time when there was no Deal and no Lucifer Rising and no Sammy maybe going darkside, none of that, not a bit of it. It helps him reclaim something that used to be his, that was his normal, and after a while he loses track of the fact that he's not saying Dean, he's saying I and me and mine.
Kathy's gone for a while, longer than it should have taken to get some sodas, so maybe she was talking with somebody, or maybe just taking a break. Either way, she comes back eventually and sits in a chair near the door and doesn't say anything, just listens. If she notices that Dean is saying me and mine and ours and us, she doesn't object to it. Dean glances over at her a couple of times and she smiles, smiles in a way that looks a lot less tired than she was a while ago.
Thank you, she mouths.
If she cries, he thinks, he'll stop talking, he'll excuse himself, but she doesn't, so he keeps going. It's good to be back there, back when Dad was alive and kicking ass, and he and Sam were a team, all three of them were a team, they were us. There was a sprite involved, a nasty little sonofabitch (he says that, calls it a son of a bitch, but Brendan doesn't even blink and neither does Kathy), and he and Sammy tracked it down together.
They felt pretty amazing then. Him and Sam.
He's getting towards the end of it when a nurse comes to the door and asks to see Kathy, needs to tell her something about something. Dean finishes the story with an audience of one, this little bald kid who looks much younger than he supposedly is and according to his mother, according to that e-mail she sent to Chuck thinking he was some dude in a townhouse, isn't going to get a whole lot older. Brendan's eyelids are starting to look a little droopy, but each time they drift below half-mast he snaps them open again so he won't miss anything.
"And they lived happily ever after," Dean says when he's done.
Brendan grins at him.
"I should let you get some sleep, dude."
The little bald head tilts, nods. The eyelids, those thin, pale lids shadowed with dark gray, are heading steadily southward now. Dean smiles at the little boy but doesn't get a smile in return, so he gets up from the chair and lifts it, returns it silently to its place up against the wall. Brendan's eyes are closed all the way now, and he seems to be asleep, seems to be resting in a way that doesn't look painful.
Then, while Dean is looking at him, he opens his eyes again.
And says, "Dean?"
"Yeah?"
The boy's voice drops to a whisper. "You're Dean."
Part 2 is here...