SPN FIC - O Tannenbaum
Christmas 1994, with trees and snow and plastic saucers. And boys.
Characters: Dean (15) and Sam (11), little bit of John
Pairings: none
Spoilers: none
Rating: PG, for language
Length: 2330 words
Disclaimer: Wow. I keep checking, and Kripke still owns everything.
There were girls nearby. Had to be. And they were probably giggling at him. Dean would be down here any minute now, yanking him up by the arm and brushing him off like Sam was three and a total idiot. To cut him off at the pass, Sam scrambled to his feet, seized the saucer - which had come to rest a few feet away - and started trudging back up the hill.
O Tannenbaum
By Carol Davis
Dean grabbed a fistful of Sam’s jacket and hauled him backwards. “Repeat what I just said.”
“No trees,” Sam sighed. “Stay away from the trees.”
“And why is that?”
“Because if I hit a tree going a hundred miles an hour, I’m gonna break my neck.” With the blue plastic saucer hanging from one gloved hand, Sam considered the snowy slope ahead and the location of the trees. “I don’t think I can build up to a hundred miles an hour going down that hill, Dean. It’s not that steep.”
“You’re gonna nitpick with me now?”
“I just -“
“The point, vacuum-brain, is to stay away from the trees. You got that?”
“Can I go now?”
Dean reached for the saucer. “Let me try it out first.”
Indignant, Sam swung the saucer out of Dean’s reach. “It’s my present. And if you go first, I’ve got to wait for you to come back up here.”
“So?”
“So, there’s girls down there. You won’t get back up here for a week.”
“Totally unfair, Sam.”
“Is not. Every time you see a bunch of girls, you go running over, like they’re magnetized or something. I’m not waiting up here all day for you to stand there and get all goofy with a bunch of girls. It’s my present. You can try it when I get done.”
Dean hiked a brow. “So that whole lesson on sharing zipped right on past you, huh?”
Sam just stared.
“Go,” Dean groaned. “Stay away from the trees.”
Muttering stay away from the trees in a whiny singsong, Sam took the saucer over to the top of the slope and calculated his trajectory. It wasn’t like he’d never used one before - he had plenty of experience in sledding and traying and cardboarding and saucering. Once, he’d made do with an old cookie sheet. Staying away from the trees was just a matter of tilting his body the right way. For his money, it was Dean who needed a few reminders to stay away from solid obstacles. Like with the car, for instance. And a hundred miles an hour? That wasn’t happening. The saucer didn’t have cooking spray all over it, like the one in the movie with Chevy Chase.
Now that was funny: Chevy Chase rocketing down the hill and across the freeway. Snickering to himself, Sam positioned the saucer and took a seat.
About four seconds later, he was at the bottom of the hill, face down in the snow.
“Hey, doofus,” Dean yelled down at him. “You okay?”
There were girls nearby. Had to be. And they were probably giggling at him. Dean would be down here any minute now, yanking him up by the arm and brushing him off like Sam was three and a total idiot. To cut him off at the pass, Sam scrambled to his feet, seized the saucer - which had come to rest a few feet away - and started trudging back up the hill.
“That was poetry,” Dean said when he got to the top. “Loved the double flip.”
“Screw you,” Sam announced.
Dean’s eyes widened in mock horror. “Who taught you that kind of language?”
“You did, dorkbrain.”
“You gonna give me a turn, or what?” When Sam opened his mouth to respond, Dean singsonged at him, “My present. My present. Blah blah blah. Anybody ever tell you you’re a monster pain in my ass?”
Sam flipped him the bird.
Dean shrieked and clapped his hands to his face.
“You don’t need to talk to girls,” Sam sneered. “You are a girl.”
There was one thing you had to credit Dean for: he was fast, and he telegraphed nothing. Sam was lying on his back in the snow a moment later, gaping up at the sky, unaware of what exactly had happened.
And Dean was flying down the hill, belly down, on Sam’s saucer.
“You SUCK!” Sam screeched down the slope.
Dean was kind of like poetry: steering gracefully around humps in the snow simply by adjusting his body in some slight way. He built up so much speed going down the hill that when he got to the bottom he kept going for a good hundred yards. When he finally stopped he got to his feet like a gymnast, all in one move.
The girls, of course, noticed every bit of that.
To Sam’s surprise, Dean came right back up the hill, and he was pretty fast at that, too. He looked happy and excited when he handed the saucer back to Sam. “That was excellent,” he said, and swiped the back of his hand against his nose. “Want to try one together? Bet we can get all the way to the uphill on the other side.”
“I thought you wanted to talk to those girls.”
“Don’t know ‘em. Come on, let’s try it.”
They made half a dozen runs down the hill, each one faster than the one before. By the time they got back to the top after the last run, they were both red-faced and winded, both of them laughing like a couple of jerks.
It was excellent, Sam thought.
Dean stood there considering the slope for a minute, then turned and grinned at Sam. Then he let his legs go limp underneath him and simply dropped to the snow and lay there laughing. Copying him would have been a little-kid stunt, so Sam sat down close by and pulled the saucer up beside him like a dog on a leash.
“I ever tell you about Dad and the trees?” Dean asked after a minute, when his laughter had finally petered out.
“What trees?”
“The Christmas trees. The haunted ones.”
That was another thing about Dean: you could never really tell if you were being set up. But this whole day was just so excellent that Sam took the bait. “No,” he said.
“It was when you were little.”
“Where?”
“Maine.”
“We were in Maine?”
“Yeah. That one time. Way up there, heading up towards Canada. Man, it’s cold up there. Anyway, Dad got this call from somebody saying that something was going on with all the Christmas trees around town. All the ornaments would start flying off. And the lights kept blinking, even if they weren’t supposed to.”
“Poltergeist?”
“That’s what Dad thought. So we went up there to check it out.” Dean hauled himself up to a cross-legged sit and scrubbed the snow off the back of his head. “That was the one year we didn’t have a Christmas tree, see, because Dad was afraid the spirit would go after it and mess things up. Man, he had some supplies stocked up for that one. Two sawed-offs, and a bunch of salt, consecrated iron, holy water, everything he could think of. He figured that had to be one seriously pissed-off spirit, to go after people’s Christmas trees and mess up Christmas for all those little kids.”
Sam propped his head on his hands. He had started to lose track of the fact that he was sitting in the snow and that his butt was pretty much frozen. “What did he do?”
“There was one house left where the tree was still okay. So Dad waited until the people had gone out - they went to their relatives’ or something. He jimmied the door and went on in and cased the place. Found the tree in the living room. A really big one, all done up with lights and tinsel and stuff, and all these presents underneath.”
“Yeah?”
“So he plugged the lights in. Then he got down behind a chair or something, and waited.”
“And what happened?”
“He waited…and waited…and then he heard this noise. And he saw the ornaments start to move a little, like the wind was blowing.” Dean leaned toward Sam a little and dropped his voice. “They made this little tinkling noise, real soft. And then…”
“Yeah?” Sam said, breathless. “What?”
“The spirit appeared!”
“And then what?”
“He started to yell MY PRESENT! MY PRESENT!” Laughing crazily, Dean launched himself at Sam, flipped him over and buried his face in the snow. The more Sam struggled, the tighter Dean’s grip became. Finally, when his breath had been reduced to gasps and tears were dribbling down his cheeks, Dean backed off and let Sam turn himself over.
Sam glowered at him and hissed, “You suck.”
“Man, I can’t believe you fall for stuff like that.” Still giggling, Dean got to his feet and reached out a hand to help Sam up. “Come on, we gotta get back. Dad’ll be home soon.”
“I’m gonna tell him.”
“What, that I busted your chops? He’ll be impressed.”
“You shouldn’t lie.”
“Aw, suck it up, Sam.”
Dean carried the saucer as they trudged back to the apartment. Halfway there he slung an arm around Sam’s shoulders.
Sam really couldn’t protest.
The warmth of the apartment felt good after a couple of hours out in the snow. Jackets and boots came off quickly, and the saucer was deposited up against the wall near the door to await its next use. Still shivering a little, Sam curled up at one end of the couch and picked up one of his Christmas-gift comic books to flip through. He was engrossed in the story when Dean came out of the kitchen with two mugs of Cup-a-Soup fresh from the microwave. There was just nothing like hot Cup-a-Soup on a cold day, as far as Sam was concerned. He let the chicken-scented steam seep up his nose, then took a careful sip.
Dean, curled up in Dad’s chair, asked him, “So, you having a good Christmas, geek boy?”
“Yeah,” Sam said. “Are you?”
“Not bad.”
“I thought maybe you were still mad at Dad. About the whole sex thing.”
That made Dean’s expression shift. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Are you gonna find another girlfriend?”
“I don’t know,” Dean muttered.
“He just doesn’t want you to mess up your life.”
“Yeah, like my life is so freakin’ fabulous. Eat your soup.”
Sam took a few more sips, swirling the mug around in between so the noodles wouldn’t all drop to the bottom. “If you got another girlfriend, I wouldn’t say anything. Because…you know. Someday I might get a girlfriend and I might not want you to say anything.”
“You think so.”
“Yeah.”
“Thanks,” Dean said with a lopsided smirk.
They spent a while swizzling their soup and drinking it. When it was finally gone, Sam took the mugs and rinsed them out in the sink, returning to the living room with a handful of cookies that he shared with Dean.
“We could watch TV,” he suggested.
Dean shook his head. “The quiet’s good. Kind of got a headache.” He finished eating his cookies, then dragged the ottoman over in front of the chair, stretched out his legs and closed his eyes.
Sam let him rest for a few minutes. Then he murmured, “Hey, Dean?”
“Hmm.”
“Is there like a draft or something in here?”
“What? No. I don’t think so.”
“Are you sure?”
With a grunt of dismay, Dean opened his eyes and looked around the room. “Are the windows shut tight?”
Then he noticed Sam’s expression. “What?” he demanded.
Pop-eyed, Sam pointed to the Christmas tree. “Did you see it?”
“See what?”
“There.”
Dean’s head cranked around. “What?”
“It keeps moving.”
“What?” Dean said, his voice strained.
“That ornament. The red one. Right there. It keeps going back and forth.”
Dean shifted in the chair, leaning over the arm to get a better look at the tree. “I don’t see anything moving.”
“I swear, Dean, it moved.”
“You’re crazy.” But he got up from the chair anyway, peered hard at the red ornament, then went from window to window to see that they were all closed tight. He even checked the windows in the bedrooms. When he came back, his face was pinched with concern.
And that was the thing about Sam. He could be absolutely poker-faced when he wanted to be.
“Maybe we ought to call Dad,” Sam suggested.
“No. I can -“
Sam’s expression slipped, the very tiniest bit. But that was okay.
“You little freak,” Dean squealed.
“I got you,” Sam grinned.
“I’m gonna pound you. I’m gonna turn you into paste, and we can use you to wax the floor. You little bitch.”
They were wrestling their way across the floor when the apartment door opened.
“Hey, Dad,” Dean sputtered, extricating himself from the tangle of arms and legs.
“Hi, Dad,” Sam echoed.
Dad kept an eye on them, dry as dust, as he took off his coat and hung it up. By the time he finished, the two of them were sitting primly on the couch. “Anything I should know about?” he asked.
“No sir,” they said in unison.
He disappeared into his room. After a moment they could hear him talking on the phone.
“Totally got you,” Sam whispered at his brother.
“Did not.”
Sam giggled. He sounded exactly like the dog in that one cartoon, he thought. “You thought it was moving. You jerk.”
“Gonna pound you.”
“Gonna tell Dad you swiped my present.”
“Bitch,” Dean hissed.
“Jerk.”
Dean clamped an arm around Sam’s neck, fist on Sam’s shoulder, forearm braced under his chin. “I could snap you like a twig. Bigger than you.”
“Won’t always be.”
“Jerk.”
“Bitch.”
“There a problem out there?” Dad said from the bedroom.
Sam got hold of Dean’s little finger and began bending it backward.
“You wouldn’t do it,” Dean hissed.
“Try me.”
When Dad came out of the bedroom they were sitting side by side on the couch. They could have been a picture by that guy Norman Rockwell. Except for the rumpled clothes and hair and the way Dean was nursing his little finger.
“Nice,” Dad said.
“Yes, sir,” they agreed.
“So…you having a good Christmas?”
Sam glanced at his brother. “Yes, sir,” he said. “I am.”
Characters: Dean (15) and Sam (11), little bit of John
Pairings: none
Spoilers: none
Rating: PG, for language
Length: 2330 words
Disclaimer: Wow. I keep checking, and Kripke still owns everything.
There were girls nearby. Had to be. And they were probably giggling at him. Dean would be down here any minute now, yanking him up by the arm and brushing him off like Sam was three and a total idiot. To cut him off at the pass, Sam scrambled to his feet, seized the saucer - which had come to rest a few feet away - and started trudging back up the hill.
O Tannenbaum
By Carol Davis
Dean grabbed a fistful of Sam’s jacket and hauled him backwards. “Repeat what I just said.”
“No trees,” Sam sighed. “Stay away from the trees.”
“And why is that?”
“Because if I hit a tree going a hundred miles an hour, I’m gonna break my neck.” With the blue plastic saucer hanging from one gloved hand, Sam considered the snowy slope ahead and the location of the trees. “I don’t think I can build up to a hundred miles an hour going down that hill, Dean. It’s not that steep.”
“You’re gonna nitpick with me now?”
“I just -“
“The point, vacuum-brain, is to stay away from the trees. You got that?”
“Can I go now?”
Dean reached for the saucer. “Let me try it out first.”
Indignant, Sam swung the saucer out of Dean’s reach. “It’s my present. And if you go first, I’ve got to wait for you to come back up here.”
“So?”
“So, there’s girls down there. You won’t get back up here for a week.”
“Totally unfair, Sam.”
“Is not. Every time you see a bunch of girls, you go running over, like they’re magnetized or something. I’m not waiting up here all day for you to stand there and get all goofy with a bunch of girls. It’s my present. You can try it when I get done.”
Dean hiked a brow. “So that whole lesson on sharing zipped right on past you, huh?”
Sam just stared.
“Go,” Dean groaned. “Stay away from the trees.”
Muttering stay away from the trees in a whiny singsong, Sam took the saucer over to the top of the slope and calculated his trajectory. It wasn’t like he’d never used one before - he had plenty of experience in sledding and traying and cardboarding and saucering. Once, he’d made do with an old cookie sheet. Staying away from the trees was just a matter of tilting his body the right way. For his money, it was Dean who needed a few reminders to stay away from solid obstacles. Like with the car, for instance. And a hundred miles an hour? That wasn’t happening. The saucer didn’t have cooking spray all over it, like the one in the movie with Chevy Chase.
Now that was funny: Chevy Chase rocketing down the hill and across the freeway. Snickering to himself, Sam positioned the saucer and took a seat.
About four seconds later, he was at the bottom of the hill, face down in the snow.
“Hey, doofus,” Dean yelled down at him. “You okay?”
There were girls nearby. Had to be. And they were probably giggling at him. Dean would be down here any minute now, yanking him up by the arm and brushing him off like Sam was three and a total idiot. To cut him off at the pass, Sam scrambled to his feet, seized the saucer - which had come to rest a few feet away - and started trudging back up the hill.
“That was poetry,” Dean said when he got to the top. “Loved the double flip.”
“Screw you,” Sam announced.
Dean’s eyes widened in mock horror. “Who taught you that kind of language?”
“You did, dorkbrain.”
“You gonna give me a turn, or what?” When Sam opened his mouth to respond, Dean singsonged at him, “My present. My present. Blah blah blah. Anybody ever tell you you’re a monster pain in my ass?”
Sam flipped him the bird.
Dean shrieked and clapped his hands to his face.
“You don’t need to talk to girls,” Sam sneered. “You are a girl.”
There was one thing you had to credit Dean for: he was fast, and he telegraphed nothing. Sam was lying on his back in the snow a moment later, gaping up at the sky, unaware of what exactly had happened.
And Dean was flying down the hill, belly down, on Sam’s saucer.
“You SUCK!” Sam screeched down the slope.
Dean was kind of like poetry: steering gracefully around humps in the snow simply by adjusting his body in some slight way. He built up so much speed going down the hill that when he got to the bottom he kept going for a good hundred yards. When he finally stopped he got to his feet like a gymnast, all in one move.
The girls, of course, noticed every bit of that.
To Sam’s surprise, Dean came right back up the hill, and he was pretty fast at that, too. He looked happy and excited when he handed the saucer back to Sam. “That was excellent,” he said, and swiped the back of his hand against his nose. “Want to try one together? Bet we can get all the way to the uphill on the other side.”
“I thought you wanted to talk to those girls.”
“Don’t know ‘em. Come on, let’s try it.”
They made half a dozen runs down the hill, each one faster than the one before. By the time they got back to the top after the last run, they were both red-faced and winded, both of them laughing like a couple of jerks.
It was excellent, Sam thought.
Dean stood there considering the slope for a minute, then turned and grinned at Sam. Then he let his legs go limp underneath him and simply dropped to the snow and lay there laughing. Copying him would have been a little-kid stunt, so Sam sat down close by and pulled the saucer up beside him like a dog on a leash.
“I ever tell you about Dad and the trees?” Dean asked after a minute, when his laughter had finally petered out.
“What trees?”
“The Christmas trees. The haunted ones.”
That was another thing about Dean: you could never really tell if you were being set up. But this whole day was just so excellent that Sam took the bait. “No,” he said.
“It was when you were little.”
“Where?”
“Maine.”
“We were in Maine?”
“Yeah. That one time. Way up there, heading up towards Canada. Man, it’s cold up there. Anyway, Dad got this call from somebody saying that something was going on with all the Christmas trees around town. All the ornaments would start flying off. And the lights kept blinking, even if they weren’t supposed to.”
“Poltergeist?”
“That’s what Dad thought. So we went up there to check it out.” Dean hauled himself up to a cross-legged sit and scrubbed the snow off the back of his head. “That was the one year we didn’t have a Christmas tree, see, because Dad was afraid the spirit would go after it and mess things up. Man, he had some supplies stocked up for that one. Two sawed-offs, and a bunch of salt, consecrated iron, holy water, everything he could think of. He figured that had to be one seriously pissed-off spirit, to go after people’s Christmas trees and mess up Christmas for all those little kids.”
Sam propped his head on his hands. He had started to lose track of the fact that he was sitting in the snow and that his butt was pretty much frozen. “What did he do?”
“There was one house left where the tree was still okay. So Dad waited until the people had gone out - they went to their relatives’ or something. He jimmied the door and went on in and cased the place. Found the tree in the living room. A really big one, all done up with lights and tinsel and stuff, and all these presents underneath.”
“Yeah?”
“So he plugged the lights in. Then he got down behind a chair or something, and waited.”
“And what happened?”
“He waited…and waited…and then he heard this noise. And he saw the ornaments start to move a little, like the wind was blowing.” Dean leaned toward Sam a little and dropped his voice. “They made this little tinkling noise, real soft. And then…”
“Yeah?” Sam said, breathless. “What?”
“The spirit appeared!”
“And then what?”
“He started to yell MY PRESENT! MY PRESENT!” Laughing crazily, Dean launched himself at Sam, flipped him over and buried his face in the snow. The more Sam struggled, the tighter Dean’s grip became. Finally, when his breath had been reduced to gasps and tears were dribbling down his cheeks, Dean backed off and let Sam turn himself over.
Sam glowered at him and hissed, “You suck.”
“Man, I can’t believe you fall for stuff like that.” Still giggling, Dean got to his feet and reached out a hand to help Sam up. “Come on, we gotta get back. Dad’ll be home soon.”
“I’m gonna tell him.”
“What, that I busted your chops? He’ll be impressed.”
“You shouldn’t lie.”
“Aw, suck it up, Sam.”
Dean carried the saucer as they trudged back to the apartment. Halfway there he slung an arm around Sam’s shoulders.
Sam really couldn’t protest.
The warmth of the apartment felt good after a couple of hours out in the snow. Jackets and boots came off quickly, and the saucer was deposited up against the wall near the door to await its next use. Still shivering a little, Sam curled up at one end of the couch and picked up one of his Christmas-gift comic books to flip through. He was engrossed in the story when Dean came out of the kitchen with two mugs of Cup-a-Soup fresh from the microwave. There was just nothing like hot Cup-a-Soup on a cold day, as far as Sam was concerned. He let the chicken-scented steam seep up his nose, then took a careful sip.
Dean, curled up in Dad’s chair, asked him, “So, you having a good Christmas, geek boy?”
“Yeah,” Sam said. “Are you?”
“Not bad.”
“I thought maybe you were still mad at Dad. About the whole sex thing.”
That made Dean’s expression shift. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Are you gonna find another girlfriend?”
“I don’t know,” Dean muttered.
“He just doesn’t want you to mess up your life.”
“Yeah, like my life is so freakin’ fabulous. Eat your soup.”
Sam took a few more sips, swirling the mug around in between so the noodles wouldn’t all drop to the bottom. “If you got another girlfriend, I wouldn’t say anything. Because…you know. Someday I might get a girlfriend and I might not want you to say anything.”
“You think so.”
“Yeah.”
“Thanks,” Dean said with a lopsided smirk.
They spent a while swizzling their soup and drinking it. When it was finally gone, Sam took the mugs and rinsed them out in the sink, returning to the living room with a handful of cookies that he shared with Dean.
“We could watch TV,” he suggested.
Dean shook his head. “The quiet’s good. Kind of got a headache.” He finished eating his cookies, then dragged the ottoman over in front of the chair, stretched out his legs and closed his eyes.
Sam let him rest for a few minutes. Then he murmured, “Hey, Dean?”
“Hmm.”
“Is there like a draft or something in here?”
“What? No. I don’t think so.”
“Are you sure?”
With a grunt of dismay, Dean opened his eyes and looked around the room. “Are the windows shut tight?”
Then he noticed Sam’s expression. “What?” he demanded.
Pop-eyed, Sam pointed to the Christmas tree. “Did you see it?”
“See what?”
“There.”
Dean’s head cranked around. “What?”
“It keeps moving.”
“What?” Dean said, his voice strained.
“That ornament. The red one. Right there. It keeps going back and forth.”
Dean shifted in the chair, leaning over the arm to get a better look at the tree. “I don’t see anything moving.”
“I swear, Dean, it moved.”
“You’re crazy.” But he got up from the chair anyway, peered hard at the red ornament, then went from window to window to see that they were all closed tight. He even checked the windows in the bedrooms. When he came back, his face was pinched with concern.
And that was the thing about Sam. He could be absolutely poker-faced when he wanted to be.
“Maybe we ought to call Dad,” Sam suggested.
“No. I can -“
Sam’s expression slipped, the very tiniest bit. But that was okay.
“You little freak,” Dean squealed.
“I got you,” Sam grinned.
“I’m gonna pound you. I’m gonna turn you into paste, and we can use you to wax the floor. You little bitch.”
They were wrestling their way across the floor when the apartment door opened.
“Hey, Dad,” Dean sputtered, extricating himself from the tangle of arms and legs.
“Hi, Dad,” Sam echoed.
Dad kept an eye on them, dry as dust, as he took off his coat and hung it up. By the time he finished, the two of them were sitting primly on the couch. “Anything I should know about?” he asked.
“No sir,” they said in unison.
He disappeared into his room. After a moment they could hear him talking on the phone.
“Totally got you,” Sam whispered at his brother.
“Did not.”
Sam giggled. He sounded exactly like the dog in that one cartoon, he thought. “You thought it was moving. You jerk.”
“Gonna pound you.”
“Gonna tell Dad you swiped my present.”
“Bitch,” Dean hissed.
“Jerk.”
Dean clamped an arm around Sam’s neck, fist on Sam’s shoulder, forearm braced under his chin. “I could snap you like a twig. Bigger than you.”
“Won’t always be.”
“Jerk.”
“Bitch.”
“There a problem out there?” Dad said from the bedroom.
Sam got hold of Dean’s little finger and began bending it backward.
“You wouldn’t do it,” Dean hissed.
“Try me.”
When Dad came out of the bedroom they were sitting side by side on the couch. They could have been a picture by that guy Norman Rockwell. Except for the rumpled clothes and hair and the way Dean was nursing his little finger.
“Nice,” Dad said.
“Yes, sir,” they agreed.
“So…you having a good Christmas?”
Sam glanced at his brother. “Yes, sir,” he said. “I am.”