Fic: The Most Peculiar Dialect (1/1)
Title: The Most Peculiar Dialect
Rating: PG
Characters: Hugo "Hurley" Reyes, Dean Winchester, Sam Winchester
Word Count: 1,799
Summary: "Crazy" is a matter of perspective. For the spnlost_otp Inaugural Community Comment Fic Meme, for the prompt Dean & Hurley - discussing Star Wars. General Series Spoilers for Lost and Supernatural.
Disclaimer: I own nothing but the plot.
Author’s Notes: Random. Oh so very random.
The Most Peculiar Dialect
He hears the guy on his cell phone; it’s the slam of his door -- heavy, old, solid; like the Camaro’s used to be -- that catches his attention, makes him take note.
He shrugs on a jacket -- too heavy for the heat, head cocked to keep the phone tight against his chin as he scowls off into the distance, rolls his eyes toward the giant guy who’s unfolding himself from the passenger seat; he doesn’t look like he belongs here, really -- but then again, Hugo doesn’t know where he might imagine the guy would belong, so he doesn’t dwell.
“Well, tell him Agent Calrissian wants to talk to him,” Hugo hears over the shuffle of shoes on the asphalt -- shiny shoes. He picks at the looping line of threads at the bottom of the pocket on his robe.
The blond -- he might be a brunette, maybe, but the sun’s kinda bright, and Hugo’s squinting through the cracks in his hand as he blocks out the light, tries to see; the guy’s walking toward him, kinda swaggering, kinda straightening his tie like he’s not used to it, and Hugo remembers ties -- remembers them washed up on the beach in ownerless luggage, remembers them tied around cuts and slices in skin.
He shivers, looks back up. They’re closer, now.
“Look, Sammy,” the first guy, with the blondish hair; he points to the familiar sign -- Santa Rosa Mental Health Institute, swabbed in flaking paint -- smirks hard, tight like he’s got something to prove, like he’s trying to change a subject that’s thick in the air, that Hugo can’t put a finger on, can’t ever know. “Always said you’d drive me to the nuthouse, right?”
The other guy -- the tall one, with the dark hair -- he doesn’t smile, exactly, even though Hugo’s pretty sure that was the whole point; his lips quirk, though, enough to hint at maybe-dimples that make Hugo think of handcuffs and skeletons and stale beer, and Hugo knows enough about almosts and maybes that he figures a quirk’s better than nothing.
Blond-guy ducks his head, smiles a little at the ground; so yeah -- better than nothing.
“You know the odds of actually getting any useful information from the patients are like, two-hundred to one,” the taller one purses his lips, rubs his palms on his thighs; “If we’re lucky.”
He gets a cocky sort of grin in response, and a flippant “Never tell me the odds;” and yeah, Hugo knows that look. He remembers owning at ping pong and wiping that look clear off someone’s face.
There’s a ping pong table in the rec room, here. Hugo doesn’t play anymore.
His eyes are on the ground when the shoes -- shiny shoes -- enter his line of sight; these dudes, they move pretty fast.
“Excuse me,” the blond one says, reaches into his jacket and flashes a badge that looks real enough, but Hugo’s pretty skeptical about real things in general; “Agents Calrissian and Antilles,” he introduces them both, and Hugo can’t really be expected to fight the urge to laugh, because, well, seriously.
“Those are fake,” Hugo cuts him off; blinks once, twice. Both of the guys are still there.
He blinks a third time, for good measure -- Charlie usually goes away after a good third blink.
Nope, they’re still there. Looking, well -- kinda pissed.
“Excuse me?” The blond one asks, takes a step forward, or more like half-a-step; angles himself so he’s crowding Hugo where he sits on his bench, just a little. Things like that don’t scare him anymore.
“Those are fake names,” Hugo squints up at him, because duh. No one hates their kids that much, in real life.
“Sir, my name is Wedge Antilles, and this is my partner, Lando Calrissian,” the tall one says with too much seriousness -- Hugo knows dire when he sees it, nowadays, and this isn’t really it; “And I assure you, those are very much our real names.”
“You look kinda scruffy looking for a Federal Agent,” Hugo shoots back levelly, spreads his arms out on the back of the bench, leans and tries not to wedge a splinter in his skin.
“Who’s scruffy looking?” the tall one -- Not-Wedge -- asks, sounds offended as he scratches at the stubble on his chin.
“Fuckin’ Nerf-herder,” Not-Lando mutters under his breath, like he can’t help himself, and Hugo snickers a little when he hears it; Not-Lando stiffens when he does, eyes wide, and yeah, these guys are totally fakes.
That kinda makes Hugo like them a little more.
“Besides, you called him Sammy,” Hugo adds, grabs for the Hot Pocket -- only now it’s like a Cold Pocket, ‘cause it’s been sitting there, and that’s lame -- that he brought out with him for a snack, takes a bite and finishes the thought with his mouth full; “Not Wedge.”
“Oh, the force is fucking strong with this one,” Not-Lando sneers over at Not-Wedge, and Hugo swallows fast, wipes his mouth on the striped terry-cloth of his sleeve.
“Dude, I’m crazy. Not stupid.”
Something shifts in Not-Lando’s eyes, something that makes a tension Hugo didn’t even notice at first ease out from him, lets him sink lower in his seat. “Easy, Chewie,” he counters, backtracks a little and tries to smooth things over. “We just want to ask you a couple of questions.”
Hugo grins at the name; kinda wants to hug this random guy when he says it.
“What kind of questions?” He misses Sawyer, sometimes.
“Anything out of the ordinary been going on around here lately?” And that’s a loaded kind of question, for a place like this.
“That’s a loaded kind of question, for a place like this.”
Not-Lando snickers at that, like he understands. Hugo wonders if maybe he does. “Different set of rules around these parts, eh?”
“You must unlearn what you have learned,” Hugo says, like it’s an answer. The blond guy nods, and maybe it is.
“Okay so aside from,” and he looks around in all the right places, takes in the people that make this place what it is, “the usual,” and that’s a nice way to put it; “anything, you know, out of the... not ordinary?”
He bites his lip as he thinks on it; figures, with all the stuff he sees, that he’s probably a really unreliable witness, or... whatever it’s called.
He’s probably not the best person to ask.
“I think you’re probably looking for someone else to answer that question, dude,” he tries to shrug it off, tries not to think too much on how he plays cards with Boone sometimes, reads to Mr. Eko because the guy misses reading the most, he says.
“Looking?” Not-Lando quirks an eyebrow at him. “Found someone, I have, wouldn’t you say?” and Hugo laughs, because it’s just got a hint of the right accent, and the word order’s dead on, and damn, but he still loves Empire.
“Lots of weird stuff happens here, man,” Hugo tries to side-step the question, the fact that he’s been pumped full of antipsychotics and clonaze-whatever for the past seven weeks. “Your friend doesn’t say much,” he glances at the taller-than-Wedge Not-Wedge guy in a half-ditch attempt to change the subject, because he’s not real good with quiet these days, not real good with questions. Sometimes.
“He doesn’t much care for the West coast,” Not-Lando mutters, breaks eye contact, and something dark passes over both their features for a second, like a shadow or smoke, and it makes Hugo’s gut churn before it clears, quicker than it came, and Not-Lando’s forcing a smile, just this side of a grimace, unknotting whatever has settled, whatever happened here before.
“But he has his moments,” he reaches out, nudges the tall guy with his shoulder -- it’s the kind of thing that makes more sense for a guy named Sammy than a guy named Wedge, for some reason; “Not many of them, but he does have them.”
Hugo wonders, for a second, how likely it is that there’s an actual alternate universe where Star Wars characters work for the government, or at least pretend to. He figures the odds might actually be up there with surviving a plane crash and landing on a magical, disappearing Island, so hey -- pretty good.
“Look,” Not-Lando talks, cuts through his thoughts; Not-Wedge isn’t looking at him anymore, his back ram-rod straight and his hands stuffed awkwardly in his front pockets. And Hugo’s got a bad feeling about this, he really does, but Hugo wants to tell them, for a split second before he looses his nerve -- before he remembers what normal people think of a lot of the stuff he says; but he really wants to say out loud that he’s never seen a dead person he didn’t know before, or at least that didn’t know someone he knew before -- and the lady who’s been watching him rinse the shampoo out of his hair for the past three weeks? He hasn’t got a clue who she is, or where she came from.
He wants to, but he doesn’t. Because he knows enough to realize that, to just about everybody, it sounds really freaking crazy.
“If you do see anything weird?” Not-Lando leans forward, holds out a business card and gestures toward it when Hugo takes it in his hand; “Give us a buzz, man,” and he turns to leave, hot on Not-Wedge’s heels.
“So long, Princess,” Hugo says with a lazy salute and a half-hearted nod, running his fingers over the stiff edges of the card in his hand.
Special Agent Lando Calrissian. It’s almost legit.
“Wait,” Hugo says, because now that he thinks about it, he saw the woman in the shower stall after he started the meds. Both Wedge and Lando turn on the spot, as soon as he calls out.
“You’re looking for weird stuff?” he asks; they don’t step closer, but they don’t move any farther away. He gets up and shoves his thumbs in the loops that hold the tie on his robe. “You mean like the dead chick in the bathroom?”
They don’t look at him like he’s crazy; they look at him like he’s, well, kinda clever for a human being, or something.
Hugo grins, and he waves them along to follow as he leads the way toward the entrance, feeling a little bit adventurous, a little bit reckless.
And whatever, so that’s kinda unbecoming of a Jedi. He’ll deal.
Rating: PG
Characters: Hugo "Hurley" Reyes, Dean Winchester, Sam Winchester
Word Count: 1,799
Summary: "Crazy" is a matter of perspective. For the spnlost_otp Inaugural Community Comment Fic Meme, for the prompt Dean & Hurley - discussing Star Wars. General Series Spoilers for Lost and Supernatural.
Disclaimer: I own nothing but the plot.
Author’s Notes: Random. Oh so very random.
The Most Peculiar Dialect
He hears the guy on his cell phone; it’s the slam of his door -- heavy, old, solid; like the Camaro’s used to be -- that catches his attention, makes him take note.
He shrugs on a jacket -- too heavy for the heat, head cocked to keep the phone tight against his chin as he scowls off into the distance, rolls his eyes toward the giant guy who’s unfolding himself from the passenger seat; he doesn’t look like he belongs here, really -- but then again, Hugo doesn’t know where he might imagine the guy would belong, so he doesn’t dwell.
“Well, tell him Agent Calrissian wants to talk to him,” Hugo hears over the shuffle of shoes on the asphalt -- shiny shoes. He picks at the looping line of threads at the bottom of the pocket on his robe.
The blond -- he might be a brunette, maybe, but the sun’s kinda bright, and Hugo’s squinting through the cracks in his hand as he blocks out the light, tries to see; the guy’s walking toward him, kinda swaggering, kinda straightening his tie like he’s not used to it, and Hugo remembers ties -- remembers them washed up on the beach in ownerless luggage, remembers them tied around cuts and slices in skin.
He shivers, looks back up. They’re closer, now.
“Look, Sammy,” the first guy, with the blondish hair; he points to the familiar sign -- Santa Rosa Mental Health Institute, swabbed in flaking paint -- smirks hard, tight like he’s got something to prove, like he’s trying to change a subject that’s thick in the air, that Hugo can’t put a finger on, can’t ever know. “Always said you’d drive me to the nuthouse, right?”
The other guy -- the tall one, with the dark hair -- he doesn’t smile, exactly, even though Hugo’s pretty sure that was the whole point; his lips quirk, though, enough to hint at maybe-dimples that make Hugo think of handcuffs and skeletons and stale beer, and Hugo knows enough about almosts and maybes that he figures a quirk’s better than nothing.
Blond-guy ducks his head, smiles a little at the ground; so yeah -- better than nothing.
“You know the odds of actually getting any useful information from the patients are like, two-hundred to one,” the taller one purses his lips, rubs his palms on his thighs; “If we’re lucky.”
He gets a cocky sort of grin in response, and a flippant “Never tell me the odds;” and yeah, Hugo knows that look. He remembers owning at ping pong and wiping that look clear off someone’s face.
There’s a ping pong table in the rec room, here. Hugo doesn’t play anymore.
His eyes are on the ground when the shoes -- shiny shoes -- enter his line of sight; these dudes, they move pretty fast.
“Excuse me,” the blond one says, reaches into his jacket and flashes a badge that looks real enough, but Hugo’s pretty skeptical about real things in general; “Agents Calrissian and Antilles,” he introduces them both, and Hugo can’t really be expected to fight the urge to laugh, because, well, seriously.
“Those are fake,” Hugo cuts him off; blinks once, twice. Both of the guys are still there.
He blinks a third time, for good measure -- Charlie usually goes away after a good third blink.
Nope, they’re still there. Looking, well -- kinda pissed.
“Excuse me?” The blond one asks, takes a step forward, or more like half-a-step; angles himself so he’s crowding Hugo where he sits on his bench, just a little. Things like that don’t scare him anymore.
“Those are fake names,” Hugo squints up at him, because duh. No one hates their kids that much, in real life.
“Sir, my name is Wedge Antilles, and this is my partner, Lando Calrissian,” the tall one says with too much seriousness -- Hugo knows dire when he sees it, nowadays, and this isn’t really it; “And I assure you, those are very much our real names.”
“You look kinda scruffy looking for a Federal Agent,” Hugo shoots back levelly, spreads his arms out on the back of the bench, leans and tries not to wedge a splinter in his skin.
“Who’s scruffy looking?” the tall one -- Not-Wedge -- asks, sounds offended as he scratches at the stubble on his chin.
“Fuckin’ Nerf-herder,” Not-Lando mutters under his breath, like he can’t help himself, and Hugo snickers a little when he hears it; Not-Lando stiffens when he does, eyes wide, and yeah, these guys are totally fakes.
That kinda makes Hugo like them a little more.
“Besides, you called him Sammy,” Hugo adds, grabs for the Hot Pocket -- only now it’s like a Cold Pocket, ‘cause it’s been sitting there, and that’s lame -- that he brought out with him for a snack, takes a bite and finishes the thought with his mouth full; “Not Wedge.”
“Oh, the force is fucking strong with this one,” Not-Lando sneers over at Not-Wedge, and Hugo swallows fast, wipes his mouth on the striped terry-cloth of his sleeve.
“Dude, I’m crazy. Not stupid.”
Something shifts in Not-Lando’s eyes, something that makes a tension Hugo didn’t even notice at first ease out from him, lets him sink lower in his seat. “Easy, Chewie,” he counters, backtracks a little and tries to smooth things over. “We just want to ask you a couple of questions.”
Hugo grins at the name; kinda wants to hug this random guy when he says it.
“What kind of questions?” He misses Sawyer, sometimes.
“Anything out of the ordinary been going on around here lately?” And that’s a loaded kind of question, for a place like this.
“That’s a loaded kind of question, for a place like this.”
Not-Lando snickers at that, like he understands. Hugo wonders if maybe he does. “Different set of rules around these parts, eh?”
“You must unlearn what you have learned,” Hugo says, like it’s an answer. The blond guy nods, and maybe it is.
“Okay so aside from,” and he looks around in all the right places, takes in the people that make this place what it is, “the usual,” and that’s a nice way to put it; “anything, you know, out of the... not ordinary?”
He bites his lip as he thinks on it; figures, with all the stuff he sees, that he’s probably a really unreliable witness, or... whatever it’s called.
He’s probably not the best person to ask.
“I think you’re probably looking for someone else to answer that question, dude,” he tries to shrug it off, tries not to think too much on how he plays cards with Boone sometimes, reads to Mr. Eko because the guy misses reading the most, he says.
“Looking?” Not-Lando quirks an eyebrow at him. “Found someone, I have, wouldn’t you say?” and Hugo laughs, because it’s just got a hint of the right accent, and the word order’s dead on, and damn, but he still loves Empire.
“Lots of weird stuff happens here, man,” Hugo tries to side-step the question, the fact that he’s been pumped full of antipsychotics and clonaze-whatever for the past seven weeks. “Your friend doesn’t say much,” he glances at the taller-than-Wedge Not-Wedge guy in a half-ditch attempt to change the subject, because he’s not real good with quiet these days, not real good with questions. Sometimes.
“He doesn’t much care for the West coast,” Not-Lando mutters, breaks eye contact, and something dark passes over both their features for a second, like a shadow or smoke, and it makes Hugo’s gut churn before it clears, quicker than it came, and Not-Lando’s forcing a smile, just this side of a grimace, unknotting whatever has settled, whatever happened here before.
“But he has his moments,” he reaches out, nudges the tall guy with his shoulder -- it’s the kind of thing that makes more sense for a guy named Sammy than a guy named Wedge, for some reason; “Not many of them, but he does have them.”
Hugo wonders, for a second, how likely it is that there’s an actual alternate universe where Star Wars characters work for the government, or at least pretend to. He figures the odds might actually be up there with surviving a plane crash and landing on a magical, disappearing Island, so hey -- pretty good.
“Look,” Not-Lando talks, cuts through his thoughts; Not-Wedge isn’t looking at him anymore, his back ram-rod straight and his hands stuffed awkwardly in his front pockets. And Hugo’s got a bad feeling about this, he really does, but Hugo wants to tell them, for a split second before he looses his nerve -- before he remembers what normal people think of a lot of the stuff he says; but he really wants to say out loud that he’s never seen a dead person he didn’t know before, or at least that didn’t know someone he knew before -- and the lady who’s been watching him rinse the shampoo out of his hair for the past three weeks? He hasn’t got a clue who she is, or where she came from.
He wants to, but he doesn’t. Because he knows enough to realize that, to just about everybody, it sounds really freaking crazy.
“If you do see anything weird?” Not-Lando leans forward, holds out a business card and gestures toward it when Hugo takes it in his hand; “Give us a buzz, man,” and he turns to leave, hot on Not-Wedge’s heels.
“So long, Princess,” Hugo says with a lazy salute and a half-hearted nod, running his fingers over the stiff edges of the card in his hand.
Special Agent Lando Calrissian. It’s almost legit.
“Wait,” Hugo says, because now that he thinks about it, he saw the woman in the shower stall after he started the meds. Both Wedge and Lando turn on the spot, as soon as he calls out.
“You’re looking for weird stuff?” he asks; they don’t step closer, but they don’t move any farther away. He gets up and shoves his thumbs in the loops that hold the tie on his robe. “You mean like the dead chick in the bathroom?”
They don’t look at him like he’s crazy; they look at him like he’s, well, kinda clever for a human being, or something.
Hugo grins, and he waves them along to follow as he leads the way toward the entrance, feeling a little bit adventurous, a little bit reckless.
And whatever, so that’s kinda unbecoming of a Jedi. He’ll deal.