SPN FIC - Where the Wild Things Aren't (Part 1 of 2)

Oct 16, 2012 11:27

The Muse and I spotted the setting for this little adventure some time ago.  The OC followed pretty close behind, but none of us were quite sure what to do with 'em.  But I think we've got a handle on it now:  two exhausted brothers.  A ramshackle house in the middle of nowhere.  And a veil that's worn very thin in spots.

"Dean," Sam whispered.  "Dean?  What the hell, man."

CHARACTERS:  Dean and Sam, OMC
GENRE:  Gen
RATING:  PG
SPOILERS:  None (takes place in S7, prior to Death's Door)
LENGTH:  8000 words overall

WHERE THE WILD THINGS AREN'T
By Carol Davis

"Dean," Sam whispered.  "Dean? What the hell, man," but there was no need for him to speak, to give voice to his confusion.  He was obviously looking at the same thing Dean was: the collection of freakin' impossible they seemed to be at the core of.  Heaps of newspapers, books and magazines.  Pyramids of cans with bright labels.  Boxes and bins, sacks and buckets, the treasures of a hoarder with a yen for primary colors.

The thing was, they'd fallen asleep in an abandoned house.

An EMPTY abandoned house.

Sam had wormed his way out of his sleeping bag and was sitting cross-legged on top of it, right hand wrapped around his gun, fingers clutching and working the grip like it was a wad of Silly Putty.  Cross-legged wasn't the best position from which to spring into action - but springing, particularly for someone Sam's size, didn't seem at all advisable.  Not here, not now.  All that junk, the boxes and books and cans of Del Monte sliced pears, looked like a good stiff wind would topple it, bring it all down on top of them.  Leaning against it, or bumping it, would accomplish the same thing.

Death by canned fruit.

What the HELL.

"Are we -" Sam started.

Dean, still tucked inside his camo-patterned Coleman bag, tipped his head back and considered the ceiling.  That, at least, looked the same: water-stained, broken through in several places by weather and animal infestation.

Dammit.

Then he said it aloud: "Dammit."

They'd risked sleep, both of them - rather than one sleeping while the other sat sentry - because they were both exhausted.  Weeks of hiding from the Bigmouths, eating on the run, switching cars every few days, holing up in places without electricity, heat, or running water, had taken its toll.  They'd hit rock bottom; their gears were stripped.  They'd been driving for almost three days straight, grabbing snacks at gas station convenience stores, using the brush at the side of the road as a bathroom.  It made all those years of being on the road with Dad, crashing at seedy motels, seem like an extended vacation at Atlantis in the Caribbean.  So they'd broken into this place, this squat little collection of boards and broken windows somebody had forgotten to tear down, had exchanged a couple of weary sighs at the almost complete lack of amenities (the world had fully gone to shit, Dean figured, when you considered a floor an amenity), and said, almost in unison, "Screw it."

They'd gone to sleep.

And awakened to THIS.

"Are we -" Sam persisted.  "Is this a dream?"

"What, you want me to pinch you?"

"No, man.  No.  Did we get zapped somewhere?  What is all this?"

"Do I look like I know?"

"Somebody hauled all this in here while we were sleeping?"

Scowling, Dean crawled out of the Coleman bag and settled onto his haunches.  His gun lay near at hand, along with a variety of blades, a big spray bottle of borax-based cleanser, and the phone he'd bought the day before yesterday.  If somebody had crept in here during the night, he figured - if somebody had been stealthy enough, and he and Sam sleeping deeply enough, for them to accomplish all this without rousing him or Sam - they'd lacked the smarts that would have told them to take the weapons.

Of course, nothing said the weapons still worked.

"We should get out," Sam said.

"Yeah? How you figure on doing that?"

"Just -"

Sam shifted around a little. Considered their surroundings.  Realized that (and it was so gradual, for Dean it was like watching the sun crawl up over the horizon) the walls of junk were complete, and so carefully constructed they made the Great Pyramids look like a weekend DIY project.  There was no way out.  At least, not one that wouldn't involve an avalanche of telephone books and cans of string beans.

They were miles from the nearest town.  Miles from anything at all, except the road.

Miles from anybody who could have done this, even if the Winchesters had both been comatose.

To Dean's surprise, Sam reached for one of the bottles of water they'd brought in from the car, cranked off the lid, and drank the whole thing.  Apparently, he figured adequate hydration would give him a leg up on whatever this was.

"You better not need to take a leak," Dean told him.

"Buckets," Sam said crossly.  "There are buckets."

The two of them got up slowly, wary of dislodging anything, of their weight shifting the floor enough to upset the delicate balance of all that junk.  The hoard formed more of a cylinder than a box, Dean realized as he adjusted his balance, and that idea brought back the memory of something he'd seen a couple of times.  Black-and-white.  He remembered lying on his belly on a motel room bed, Sam nearby with a book.  Sam condemning the thing as dumb and creepy.

"Twilight Zone," Dean said.  "Remember?  Bunch of people wake up and they don't know where they are, or how they got there?  When they climb out, turns out they're dolls, and somebody tossed 'em in a Salvation Army bin."

"You think we're dolls."

"I think I'm making conversation.  Because this whole thing makes about that much sense."

He had to smile.  Clearly, whoever had built this house hadn't intended anyone like Sam to make use of it.  Standing fully upright, the thick soles of his boots adding another inch or so to his height, the top of Sam's head came perilously close to the ceiling.  "Fee fi fo fum," Dean chuckled, voice pitched deep, then broke into a full-on, Joker-like grin.

Sam groaned at him.  "Seriously."

"Why bother with 'serious'?  Dude.  We woke up surrounded by giant friggin' boxes of air conditioner filters and cans of pineapple juice.  I figure, if we're stuck here, at least we won't go hungry.  Or thirsty."

"And we'll have to crap in yellow plastic buckets."

"Glass half full, man."

"Is there any chance the Leviathans did this?"

"No," Dean said.  "I'm gonna go with 'no'."

"Trickster."

"Long dead."

"Do we know there was only the one?"

Sam said that half over his shoulder; he'd picked a likely spot in the wall and was probing it with his fingers, testing the arrangement of boxes and books.  The place made Bobby's house look like a Martha Stewart project, Dean observed as he watched his brother poke and prod - though to give credit where credit was due, this place wasn't dusty.  Didn't smell of herbs and old bones and dry rot.

Trickster, Dean thought.

Man, those were the days.

"Could be more," he conceded.  "Could be a whole herd of 'em, for all we know.  There's a ton of lore.  Couldn't all be Gabriel's doing.  You want me to -"

"No," Sam said.  "Don't touch anything.  You always sucked at Pick-Up Sticks."

Gently, using only his fingertips, Sam gripped the edges of a big green-and-white box of Pampers Cruisers and inched it toward him.  No wiggling involved; he pulled the box smoothly, straight out, a process that took a good couple of minutes.  Finally, when Dean had begun to grow lightheaded from not breathing, the box came free.

Nothing collapsed.

They both crouched a bit, and peered through the opening.

A face peered back at them.

"Well done, gentlemen," the owner of the face allowed.

Thin gray mat of beard.  Lumpish red nose.  Twinkling blue eyes.

Every once in a while, Dean wished fervently for a tiny little superpower: the ability to stretch out his hand and have his weapon of choice - lying just out of reach - leap into his grasp.  Not much to ask for, right?  A small thing.

As it was, he didn't move.  And of course, nothing leaped into his hand.  "Who are you?" he growled.

The owner of the blue eyes blinked.  Smiled.  "You can call me Theodore."

"You… live here?" Sam asked.

Fine, Dean figured.  Let Sam distract the bastard.  Theodore's field of view was limited, thanks to the wall of junk; with luck, he couldn't see much of Dean at all, particularly if Dean moved just a little to his right and crouched down a little more, so he could wrap his hand around the grip of his Colt.

"You don't need the gun, Dean," Theodore said.

Son of a BITCH.

Dean froze in place, his fingers a few inches shy of his Colt.  Trickster, he figured; it had to be one of those pains in the ass.  Demons and angels (of the non-WITSEC variety, at least - and, well, Zachariah, but he was better left unremembered) didn't generally bother with this kind of nonsense.  This building of elaborate non-reality for the sake of making a point.

For a moment, the idea of having Gabriel back appealed to Dean - he and Sam had never really been able to make use of having the archangel on their side, and though angels certainly weren't as invulnerable as he'd once believed them to be (the night Cas had walked into that old barn through a hail of bullets like friggin' Superman, for instance), some angel juice would work wonders against the Bigmouths.

Right?

"Sam and Dean Winchester," Theodore said from the other side of the wall of groceries and art supplies, baby gear and laundry soap.  "I must say, you've had my curiosity piqued for quite some time now."

"Really," Sam said.

"Your fame precedes you.  You're legendary, you know - and that's unusual, given that you're human.  Not run-of-the-mill human, of course, but still."

"Why'd you bring us here?"

"Oh, I didn't.  You found this place all on your own.  Though I suppose you could make a case for the gate having drawn you here without your being aware of it."

"Gate?" Dean echoed.  "Gate to what?"

His nerve endings had started to hum.  He'd never been particularly claustrophobic - even after waking up trapped in a coffin, after Cas had hauled him back up out of Hell - but the lack of an available exit, and Theodore's chatting with them as if they'd all bumped into each other in the Housewares aisle at the Walmart, was sending the needle on his patience meter rapidly over toward the red zone.

Particularly since Theodore wasn't a Walmart customer.

Wasn't human.

"Gonna need a door," Dean said through his teeth.  "Like, right about RIGHT NOW."

"Dean -" Sam started.

Dean shifted to his right.  Dipped into a crouch, just long enough to grab his Colt, then came back up and leveled the weapon at the opening in the wall of junk.  It wasn't much of a window; it reduced his chance of being able to wound Theodore to practically nothing, but having the gun in his hand made him feel immeasurably better.

Right up until the room started to pivot around him.

Merry-go-round, he thought furiously, goddamn merry-go-round, and he'd always hated those freaking things, hated those dumbass painted horses and the way his equilibrium got messed up and it had no way been his fault, that time he'd stepped off the thing and ralphed his lunch into the grass, because he'd been feeling sick for two frigging DAYS before that…

It wasn't…

Not…

He felt himself hit the deck, then everything went black.

~~~~~~~~~~

"Dean?  You awake, man?"

For a moment, he tried to convince himself that he'd fallen asleep in a motel bed; that the way he felt was the result of dehydration and the wrong kind of food, of stress and worry and having had just about enough of this endless trail of shit.

But what he was lying on felt too solid to be a motel mattress.

"Gnnuhhhff," was the best he could manage.

Something had him by the back of the neck, claws piercing up through his skull.  That sensation was nothing unusual, but…

Damned place smelled like donuts.

"Dean?  Man?  You okay?"

He forced one eye open halfway, enough to allow him to locate Sam, who had the courtesy to be wearing the Patented Sammy Look of Great Concern - the one that shifted into an encouraging (if noticeably fake-looking) smile, then back into worry-slash-pondering.  After he'd determined that Sam was neither (a) tied up or (b) bleeding, he shut the eye again and set about convincing himself to throttle back enough to think.

"Been better," he said.

Then he asked, "How long was I out?"

"Not sure," Sam told him.  "I - seems like it was a while.  But my watch stopped working.  And it's - time seems kind of weird here."

Dean cracked the eye again.

The word gate crawled back into his head.

"Maybe you should sit up," Sam suggested.

Accomplishing that took a considerable amount of effort from both of them, although Dean's determination spiked when he began to take note of what lay around them.  The collection of junk he might have referred to as Everything You and the Kiddies Will Need to See You Through the Apocalypse!!! had vanished.  Now, what surrounded him and Sam was… somebody's home.  Nice stone fireplace, currently unlit.  Comfy overstuffed chair and footstool, reading lamp on a small table alongside them.  A slightly larger, rough-hewn table and two straight-back wooden chairs.  Over in the corner, a four-poster bed made up with white linens and a patchwork quilt.  All of it undersized, as if put together for a child, which made him think of The Twilight Zone again, of that episode where that fiendish giggling kid was using a terrified couple as props in a giant dollhouse.

"When you hit the floor, it all changed," Sam said.

Place smelled like donuts.

And it had no door.  No windows.

"We could try tunneling out through the floor, I guess," Sam sighed.

The room started to wobble.  If it started to rotate again, Dean figured, there was likely to be a repeat of the merry-go-round incident, and that was annoying as all hell.  He didn't get motion sick.  Even before the angels had buffed him up, turned him into Dean 2.0!, new and improved and - heh - rehymenated, he hadn't suffered from any of that nonsense the drug companies claimed to have cures for: no seasonal allergies, no acid reflux, no COPD, no fibromyalgia, no tinnitus, and certainly - DEFINITELY - no erectile dysfunction.

He was a friggin' masterwork of nature.

But there were times when things went a little wonky.

Just a little…

"You okay, man?" Sam asked.

"Stop asking me that."

"I didn't -"

Carefully, Dean shifted his weight, intending to climb to his feet.  "We're gonna get the hell out of here.  Like, right now."

"How?"

"That's what I get from you?  'How'?"

"I just think - I mean, I've been sitting here for a while, man.  I'm thinking it might be better if we find out what he wants.  Like that time Gabriel dumped us into TV Land.  It works better if you find out what they want, and go along with it."

"I am not these sons-of-bitches' bitch, Sam."

"I'm just saying."

"Fine, then.  You set up your little Camp David Accord if it makes you feel good.  I'm gonna find a way out of here.  And I'm sorry, but why does this freaking place smell like DONUTS?"

Sam's left shoulder twitched.

Searching the place didn't take long.  It was no bigger than a two-car garage, had no closets or cupboards or drawers.  Nothing of use lay underneath the bed or that cushy overstuffed chair.  The floor, though composed of hardwood planks, was smooth and solid; the plaster ceiling, ditto.  The walls felt like plaster as well - plaster over lathe, Dean assumed, the old-school building method, used for home construction for centuries before drywall came along.  Not all that difficult to chop through, if he could pry off one of the chair legs and use it as a tool.

"You know," he said over his shoulder as he knelt down beside the chair, intending to flip it over and set to work on the legs, "you could help with this."

Unless…

He settled back on his heels.  Took a long look at Sam.

"What?" Sam asked.

"We playing a little Bait-and-Switch, here?"

"What are you talking about, man?"

"Maybe you're not Sam.  Maybe you're that asswipe with the beard, and this is just your Halloween costume."

Sam - if it was Sam - took a long look back at him, then sighed again and ran a hand through his hair.  "God, man," he said.  "All we wanted to do was sleep.  Just take a few hours and rest.  We picked out a little beat-to-hell abandoned house in the middle of nowhere, with no water, no electricity, no nothing.  All we wanted to do was sleep.  Maybe he's right.  Maybe the weird stuff draws us in like a magnet.  Maybe we're completely incapable of getting away from it, even for a little while."

"Don't," Dean told him.

Rather than proceed with his plan to disassemble the chair, he knee-walked across the floor and sat down next to his brother.  He wasn't terribly surprised when Sam leaned toward him, the way he had when they were kids and Sam wanted comfort for some reason or another.  They were long past that now in terms of years, in terms of the football fields' worth of crap they'd had to dig their way through, but when you came down to it…

Yeah.  Sam was still his little brother.

Most days, that was all either one of them had.

Smiling, though it was no more genuine than Sam's smile had been a few minutes ago, Dean slung an arm around Sam and gave him a pat on the back.  Sam's crazy-long hair brushed against his hand en route and it brought back memories of teasing Sam way-back-when, calling him hippie chick and Rapunzel, daring him to show up one afternoon with a military buzz cut, just to see how Dad would react.  Really, it wouldn't have mattered much if Sam had turned up with a purple Mohawk, or with the shape of a mongoose shaved onto his head, any more than it would have mattered if Sam had taken to wearing kilts and knee socks, or if he'd painted himself gold and started calling himself Miss Moneypenny.

It wouldn't have made any difference what Sam did, or wore, or thought, or liked.

As long as he stuck around.

Their weapons hadn't made the trip to the current version of This Old House, but the sleeping bags had; they lay side-by-side in the center of the floor, and Dean had in fact awakened lying on top of his.

"Came here to sleep," he said after a minute.  "Maybe we oughta."

Sam frowned.  "Now?"

"Unless you wanna help me chop through a wall."

Dean had seen the look in Sam's eyes, the bone-deep exhaustion Sam had never been good at hiding, even when it was to his advantage to claim he was fine, ready to rock-and-roll, kick whatever monster ass needed kicking.  Hell, for all Dean knew, he himself had never been any good at hiding it either; he never bothered looking in a mirror when he was trying to sell himself as being the right fit for a particular situation.  He suspected he probably looked as much like last week's dirty socks as Sam did.  That any stranger off the street could point to them both and say, "Yep.  Running on fumes."

They weren't helping anybody, being stuck in here - wherever "here" was.

But maybe they still had a chance to rest.

"You're safe here," Theodore's voice confirmed.

Dean and Sam both shot a look around.  Dean found no trace of the bearded man, and from the look on Sam's face, he hadn't either.

Then Theodore strolled through the wall.

His hands were tucked into the pockets of loose-fitting, deeply cuffed brown trousers.  His wide-collared white shirt was loose and blousy as well; the pants were held up by a pair of blue suspenders.  Well-scuffed brown boots completed the ensemble.  He looked old-school, and somewhat European, as if he'd raided the wardrobe trunk for a middle school production of Heidi.

And he was a little person.  A dwarf, no more than four feet tall.

That explained the downsized furnishings.

"Sometimes, we find what we need, even if we're not aware we're searching for it in the first place," Theodore said mildly, strolling around the room, taking note of things with a brief touch, a smile, as if he hadn't seen any of it in a while.

"And what is it you figure we need?" Dean grumbled.

"Haven?  Perhaps?"

"Yeah, well, we don't need to be magicked into it.  We were doing fine on our own, thanks a big steaming pile."

"Were you."

"Been doing it for a lot of years."

Theodore's eyebrows slid up toward his receded hairline in response to that, but the reaction only lasted a moment.  "I assure you, I had nothing to do with your arriving here, though I can't say I'm disappointed that it happened.  As I said, we can find things without knowing we're looking for them.  You could add, sometimes the things need you."

"Need a door," Dean said.

"So you can see what lies outside."

"So we can get back to our job."

Theodore took up a position alongside the bed and leaned back against it, butt resting against the edge of the mattress, arms folded across his chest.  "What would you say if I proposed a slight change in career?"

"I'd repeat: where's the door?"

"You won't even hear me out?"

"We get kind of tired of games," Sam said.  "It's been years now.  We've been jerked around by every conceivable kind of supernatural being.  And you know?  Nobody likes being used as a pawn.  If you want to play games, why don't you go back to playing them with each other, and leave us the hell out of it?"

The corner of Theodore's mouth twitched.  He tried for a smile and fell quite a ways short of it.  "Oh, Sam," he said.  "You were never 'out of it'."

"Because we're 'chosen'.  Is that it?"

"No.  Because you're part of the scheme of things.  The big picture."

"We just wanted to sleep."

The little man took note of the two sleeping bags, laid side by side on the floor.  Of the two of them, sitting close enough to each other that Sam could use Dean as a prop.  "Hear me out," he said again.  "What if you could go on doing your job - keeping others safe, 'saving' them, as it were.  Without risking your own lives, your own safety.  Your own comfort."

"I'd say it sounds like a bunch of crap."

"You're familiar with the gates of hell, I'm told."

"Way too familiar."

"There are a number of them.  You were there when one opened, out in Wyoming.  Witnessed the reality of it."  Theodore gestured, a swipe of one stubby-fingered hand, to silence the Winchesters before either of them could respond.  "Maybe this has occurred to you; maybe it hasn't.  There are gates to other places, as well.  As real as the gates of hell.  Present in what you think of as the real world, but disguised, as the hellgates are.  You could walk right up to one, lay your hand on it, and have no inkling of what lay beyond.  No tingling feeling.  No gooseflesh.  No hairs standing on end on the back of your neck.  Unless you have a key in hand.  Or the veil's a little bit thin."

Theodore's head tilted toward his left shoulder.

There was a door in the wall to the left of him: downsized, like everything else in this house, held in place with an old-fashioned latch.

It hadn't been there a minute ago.

Part 2...

dean, sam, season 7

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