SPN FIC - The Canned Peaches Story
Urgh. Argh. Four down, and...heaven knows how many to go. Send in food. And chocolate. If you can manage, have the boys bring it.
This is (in a small way) an homage to the All in the Family episode "Edith's Accident," where Edith responds to a simple question with a long, rambling and nearly incoherent story about a can of cling peaches.
Sam snapped his mouth shut, knowing that wouldn’t help. The switch had already been flipped inside his head: the thing Dean called the Babble Button. The thing that would - as it always did - guarantee that he’d dig both of them a hole deep enough for there to be no hope of climbing out of, and that somebody would dump in on top of them about fifteen thousand gallons of the stuff that got pumped out of septic tanks.
Characters: John and the Teen!Chesters
Pairings: none
Length: 2057 words
Spoilers: none
Rating: PG, for language
Disclaimer: Still not mine. Still no money.
The Canned Peaches Story
By Carol Davis
“In here. NOW.”
It was a sound that struck terror into the hearts of men. Had on occasion made one or two of them consider pissing his pants.
One, anyway.
Maybe two.
Dean glanced over at his brother with an expression that had a bright, aluminum-foil-like edge of panic.
Sam looked back at him and whispered, “You got us screwed.”
“Sam. Dean. I said NOW.”
They were moving; they were certainly moving. Putting one foot in front of the other and leaving a trail of odd-smelling ooze behind. About fifty feet ahead of them, looking way scarier than the Dzoavit he’d hunted down a couple of weeks ago, Dad stood holding open the front door of their apartment with one booted foot. His arms were folded across his chest and he looked like he was about to unleash a bolt of heat vision that would blow up the car - the smelly, sticky car - just like the tripod things did in War of the Worlds.
“Don’t tell -“ Dean hissed.
But he kept moving. Neither of them dared drag his feet, not with Dad ready to blow stuff up.
Dad let them get all the way into the living room before he banged the door shut. It was a cheap, badly hung door, so the echoing crash of it probably woke up everybody within at least three blocks of the apartment (not to mention the people upstairs), but Dad was not in a place where he gave a crap about what the neighbors thought.
“Where were you?” he demanded.
Dean didn’t say anything. He had dropped into parade rest, hands clasped behind his back, ooze dribbling off his jeans and his shoes onto the rug.
“The store?” Sam offered.
“At one-thirty in the morning?”
“I wanted -“
Sam snapped his mouth shut, knowing that wouldn’t help. The switch had already been flipped inside his head: the thing Dean called the Babble Button. The thing that would - as it always did - guarantee that he’d dig both of them a hole deep enough for there to be no hope of climbing out of, and that somebody would dump in on top of them about fifteen thousand gallons of the stuff that got pumped out of septic tanks.
Meaning, shit. Lots and lots of shit.
“Dean?” Dad said.
Then he stopped. And he did the worst possible thing he could have done. He turned on the lights.
It was funny, in a way, how his face changed when he got a good look at them.
“Where were you? What -“
He was almost babbling. He was…yeah, pretty much awestruck. Sam shifted his gaze just enough to catch a glimpse of himself and Dean in the mirror over the couch. He didn’t dare look away from Dad for too long, but that was okay; he could catalogue from memory everything that was soaked into, dripping off of, stuck to, or impaled into him and Dean.
Chocolate syrup. At least two quarts of teriyaki stir fry. Frozen fish sticks that had thawed out somewhere along the way. Vlassic Classic dill pickles. Purina cat chow, chicken flavor. Some Diet Pepsi, the crumbled remains of eighteen boxes of powdered sugar donuts, and a lot of barbecued wings.
Plus, of course, the broken glass.
Being that it’d hit almost a hundred degrees yesterday afternoon, and was probably still close to ninety, they were both wearing t-shirts. Which left exposed the mottled mess of their arms. Judging by the way the looked now, they’d both have some pretty kickass bruises on all four of their arms tomorrow, to go along with the ones on their faces.
Sam figured when they stripped and showered all the gook off, they’d be bruised pretty much head-to-toe.
And wouldn’t Dad be impressed with that.
Dad stepped in closer, put his hand under Dean’s chin and lifted Dean’s head up to take a closer look at the truly Guinness Book of World Records-class shiner that was painted around Dean’s left eye. He asked Dean a question without saying anything, and Dean reacted the way he usually did: with a silent shrug of apology.
“What the hell is all over you?” Dad asked, still pretty much awed.
“Food,” Sam told him.
“From the store.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You -“ And Dad stopped. Blew out a long breath. “You went to the Piggly-Wiggly, didn’t you?”
Dean said softly, “Yes, sir.”
“Alone?”
“It was just one spirit, Dad,” Sam said. “We figured we could take it.”
“You did.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Obviously you did a bang-up job of it.”
“Kind of.”
“Kind of?” Dad echoed. “What does the store look like?” He turned to Dean for an answer. Or, rather, to silence him into not providing an answer. “For God’s sake, Dean, what were you thinking?” Shaking his head, he took hold of the slimy mess that was Dean’s t-shirt and pulled it carefully up over Dean’s head. The extent to which Dean’s torso was indeed scratched and bruised made him wince. He wasn’t any happier when he pulled Sam’s shirt off. “Are you hurt, either one of you?”
They both knew what he meant: hurt bad enough to need a doctor. The shit would have really hit the fan if that had been true.
Maybe it was true, for all Sam knew; Dean had been wobbly for a good ten minutes after the can of cling peaches hit him in the head.
“We’re okay,” Dean replied, eyes cast downward.
“Are you sure?”
That wasn’t an idle question, an inquiry about boo-boos. It demanded an inventory of pain, dull or sharp; blurry vision, ringing in the ears, nausea, fuzzy thinking. It demanded that they not try to tough things out, because - as Dad had explained to them periodically since they were old enough to know up from down - they weren’t old enough or smart enough to decide on their own whether an injury needed care or it didn’t.
Pretty much, they had sewage between their ears.
Dean definitely did.
Dad tipped Dean’s head up again, stuck up a finger and waved it back and forth in front of Dean’s eyes. Dean must have reacted the right way, because Dad nodded to himself, then tipped his head in the direction of the bathroom. “Get cleaned up,” he said.
Sam was first in and out of the shower. It took longer than usual: scrubbing the mess out of his hair took three shampooings. He came out of the bathroom to find Dean standing in the hallway wearing nothing but his undershorts and a weary, defeated look.
“Sam,” Dad said from the living room.
When Sam went in there, he got another once-over, even more intensive than the initial one. As soon as Dad was satisfied that Sam wasn’t likely to keel over, or start spontaneously hemorrhaging, he gestured Sam into a seat beside him on the couch.
“Start talking.”
Two o’clock in the morning wasn’t the best time for picking a good jumping-off point for a story. Sam thought it over for a moment, then settled for saying, “It was just a poltergeist. We figured we could take care of it before you got back.”
“In spite of the fact that you’ve never hunted on your own.”
“We didn’t really hunt it. We knew where it was. Because of - you know, all the people who got hurt.”
Dad squinted at him, but it was too late: the Babble Button had been pushed.
“So we were gonna, you know, exorcise it. We had the incantation and everything. Dean picked the lock on the door out by the loading dock, and we got everything set up. It went really well, Dad.”
“Until it didn’t,” Dad said dryly.
Sam heaved a big shrug. “It started throwing things. Back in the stock room. But it was okay, because we ducked. It mostly hit the wall with stuff and it splashed down on us. That’s how our clothes got all messed up. Especially with that teriyaki stuff. But then it kind of chased us down the aisle and out into the store. We were okay in the baby aisle, because that’s mostly diapers, but when we got to fruits and vegetables, it started chucking cling peaches. That’s when Dean got clobbered.”
“With a can of peaches?”
Dad started looking in the direction of the bathroom. “Yeah,” Sam told him, “but it didn’t really hit him, it just sort of grazed him.”
The toe of Dad’s boot lifted up and touched back down.
“He’s okay,” Sam said.
“That thing could have killed you, Sam.”
Two o’clock in the morning. Not the best time for clear thinking. “You go after stuff all the time that could kill you, Dad.”
“I’m not twelve years old.”
“We’re okay. Really.”
Really, Sam thought, it didn’t make any difference whether Dad was twelve or forty. Most of the stuff he went after - most of the time all by himself - was way worse than a poltergeist armed with bargain-packs of Huggies. Or canned peaches. Or…
A giggle got out before he could stop it.
“This is funny?” Dad said.
Another giggle followed the first. It made him sound like a girl, Sam thought, but what the hell. “It’s almost like that song. The Christmas one? Four cans of peaches, two canned hams, three frozen turkeys…”
“And an older brother whose brain is apparently buried in his ass. This is not funny, Sam.”
“It sort of is,” Sam insisted.
“Can I not leave the two of you alone? Is that what it’s coming down to? I can’t trust either one of you?”
Neither of them had noticed that the water was no longer running in the shower. The bathroom door opened and Dean came padding toward them in pajama bottoms. The shiner looked worse now; his eye was swollen almost half-shut. He stopped in the doorway and stood silently looking at his family for a minute, sheepish and tired and covered with bruises.
“You screwed up,” Dad said.
“Yeah, but we got it,” Sam replied.
That got Dad’s attention. “You…what?”
“We got it. Exorcised it. It’s gone.”
“Are you sure?”
Dean sighed softly and leaned against the doorframe. “Yeah, we’re sure. The Piggly-Wiggly’s safe for blue-haired little old ladies once again.”
“You’re positive.”
Dean’s face shifted. To almost anyone else he would have offered something like, “Did you not freaking hear me?”
To Dad, he said, “Yes, sir.”
“It still wasn’t the best choice in the world.”
“You didn’t have time for it. And there’s nobody else in this area who could’ve done it.”
Dad thought that over for a while, then nodded. “Get some sleep, then. It’s late, and you’ve got school in the morning.”
“Yes, sir.”
Dean turned and took a step toward the bedroom he and Sam shared. “Dean?” Dad said, and when Dean looked back over his shoulder, Dad nodded again, this time in silent approval. Not a hundred percent approval, because there was still gunk all over the car and the rug and their clothes, a ton of groceries had been ruined, and Dean was going to have to explain that wicked shiner to his teachers. Not to mention the bruises all over Sam. But still…the poltergeist was history.
Dean smiled fleetingly and went on his way.
“You see what the situation is,” Dad said, half to Sam and half to the air.
Sam did. It was what it had always been: too many things to explain meant they’d have to pack up and move on.
But still…
“We got it, Dad,” Sam said quietly, with a note of triumph in his voice.
Dad reached out and gently ruffled Sam’s hair, wary of bruises he might not be able to see. “Get some sleep. We’ll talk about this more tomorrow.”
“It was funny, Dad. All that stuff flying through the air.”
“I’m sure it was.”
“And we’re okay. Besides, it’s the family business. Right, Dad? That’s what you told Dean.”
To Sam’s surprise, Dad leaned forward and kissed him on the forehead, then rested a hand on Sam’s neck. Left it here, big and warm, for a minute. When he finally took it away, he offered Sam a smile that was the saddest thing Sam had ever seen.
“Yeah, Sammy,” he said. “I guess it is.”