Fic: Every Snowflake is a Drop of Water 5/?
Every Snowflake is a Drop of Water 5/?
Summary: SF AU, with flailing and whining! And an apple core and self-sacrificing Jimmy, and Castiel being mistaken for Major Kusanagi. Whee!
Parte the first
Parte the second
Parte the third
Parte the fourth
-
Hey, look at that.
___________________________________
Every Snowflake… 5/?
“Well, this is another fine mess,” Jimmy griped. Dean grimaced but didn’t turn around to face the smaller man. Instead he continued along his trajectory as quickly as his recently acquired, second-hand boots would allow.
“Dean.” His ears pricked at the sound of Jimmy drawing closer, and he hunched his shoulders in anticipation of a forestalling hand which did not come. (Still waiting for Sam’s gestures.) Instead Jimmy reiterated, “Dean,” softly, and continued, “What are we doing about this?”
“Hell, Jimmy, I don’t know,” Dean blurted, coming to a full stop and waving an arm a little wildly. “This wasn’t exactly something any of us planned for, Jesus!”
“I know that,” Jimmy scowled and Dean clearly heard the unvoiced you idiot tacked on to the end of the sentence. He shoved his hands in his pockets and glowered at Dean. “But we’re stuck in this situation now. We’re gonna have to do something. Something more proactive than flailing and whining.”
“We could just take him back to the hunters,” Dean offered, quirking a little smile which died a sad and lonely death in the face of Jimmy’s glare. Dean slumped.
“We’re screwed, aren’t we?”
“Well…” surprisingly, Jimmy’s voice softened. “We were pretty screwed long before we came anywhere near St. Sebastian, Dean. Things might’ve gotten more…uh, complicated…but we’ll deal. I guess. I mean, what else can we do?”
Dean folded his arms and gazed into the glassed-over, artificial sky of the orbiting platform. “We could call the cops. Report a kidnapping.”
“You want to inform on yourself?” Damn, Jimmy did incredulously snarky really surprisingly well.
“Not-what? No! The girl, I meant the girl. Jen or whatever. Report her missing. Jesus.”
“They’ll pick up any activity like that. The hunters. We won’t be able to run far enough.”
“Castiel could drop an anonymous tip, or stick something in the network.”
“Dean, the local P.D. is no match for two company-trained hunters, and you know it. Don’t be silly.”
“We left her there, Jimmy.”
“She’s a civilian. She’ll be fine." He paused. “Mostly.”
“ ‘Mostly’,” Dean repeated darkly. “Christ. Outside for five minutes and already we’re as bad as real people.”
“We’re going to have to think like real people from now on, Dean,” Jimmy told him flatly. “We don’t have the luxury of doing anything else.”
“Shit,” Dean observed.
“And of course that’s not even the biggest problem.”
Dean winced. He’d been trying to forget familiar eyes and long stupid hair. Trying, and almost managing. In the sense of not really managing at all.
“We could…I dunno. Tranq him and stick him on a flight to Nova Scotia. Or, like, New Seoul.” He paused. “The moon.”
“They’ll follow him. They’ve got his scent. You know they’ll follow him.”
Dean said, “This is all our fault.”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
He pressed his lips together, wavering from foot to foot, then shook his head sharply. He knew where he should be. He should be back at the room, dealing with the situation, instead of leaving…Sam…to be babysat by Cas and probably trying to climb the walls in frustration. There was no way he was suffering his unexpected captivity mildly; there’d never been a Sam in the history of the program who was capable of keeping his mouth shut when he was pissed off. And there was no possibility that Sam wasn’t pissed as hell right about now.
“Come on,” he said, starting to turn around, to head back and be the responsible older ‘sibling’ he was supposed to be. “Let’s get the lead out-” but he was prevented from finishing the rest of his sentence by Jimmy’s hand unexpectedly latching onto his arm, far too tightly for comfort. He looked sharply at the older man.
“Dean,” Jimmy said, eyes tight, fixed on some point down the street. “Get out of here. Go.”
Dean followed the direction his gaze, eyes widening.
“Get to Sam. Save Claire. Go now.”
--
“That’s it,” Sam said, “I’m getting out of here.”
The girl (Claire or GLaDOS or Major Kusanagi or what-the-hell-ever) had apparently lapsed into some kind of trance thing, which was incredibly creepy, seated at the desk and facing the collection of what should have been derelict machines and tangled wires with her eyes partially closed, her back to him. Occasionally she made a small atonal humming noise that reminded him, weirdly, of singing bowls or the chanting of priests. She was really, really freaking him out.
He’d finished the apple ages ago and had dithered about whether to search the room for a trashcan, or stay put and avoid the wrath of the deeply unnerving child. He’d sat on the edge of the bed with the gradually browning apple core perched between thumb and forefinger, licking his lips as they grew increasingly dry and alternately shooting glances between Claire and the door. The closed door. The closed door that even now beckoned him, promising freedom. Promising escape from this sudden and bizarre situation. Promising, above all else, Jess.
But he had a feeling. Just a feeling, nothing to really base it on, call it a hunch, that if he moved so much as a muscle, his tiny watchdog would know. Might, in fact, be aware even before he had actually made any motion. He was probably overreacting. Sure, he was overreacting. Absolutely.
He shot a glance at her be-scarved head, and licked dry lips. Looked back at the door. Looked, ridiculously, at the apple core in his hand, as if it might hold some sort of answers about his next best move. All it held were seeds. Which weren’t very helpful.
Slowly, carefully, he got to his feet. The bed didn’t make a sound as it decompressed, and the floor, weirdly, did not creak. Nothing much happened as he shifted his weight, and he darted a nervous tongue against his lips and cast quick glances at Claire. Nothing. Not so much as a twitch.
Okay, he strove to keep his mental voice calm. Okay. No panicking. Easy does it. Just slide across the floor, that’s it, pay no attention to the terrifying blonde child with the voice of doom sitting by the wall-
“Sam.”
Voice of Doom. There it was.
Shit.
“What?” he croaked, a little wildly, and the girl half-turned and gave him a look. He didn’t know what the look was meant to indicate. It wasn’t the sort of thing he was used to seeing on the faces of tiny teenagers. It wasn’t so much “Oh my gawd what is your issue?” as it was “Your strange movements and bizarre human behaviors make me question your mental cohesion.” Which was a strange collection of concepts to associate with a child and which Sam wanted to dismiss as a translation out-of-hand.
He really really did. The problem was that it seemed to fit.
But she was clearly human. As was he.
“You, uh,” he tried, and licked his lips. The girl went on staring. “You know me.”
“I told you, explanations would be best left for later.” She paused. “Eat your apple.”
“I ate my apple!” he flared, waving the core around a little wildly. “I’m going stir-crazy here!”
She paused. Blinked at him.
“Do you want another apple?”
“Do I-does it look like I-okay, seriously? This? Enough. Just, enough. I’m done sitting her like a lump on a shitty bed in a crap motel with the doomsday child and roaches and rats and mold while my girlfriend is being God-knows-what by a couple of crazy rejects from some really awful movie involving lots of guns and macho throwdowns and-and shit! All right? Are you hearing me? I am done, I am finished, I swear to God I am leaving right now and if you’re going to stop me then go ahead, but the only thing that’ll keep me from Jess is going to be you putting a few new holes through my skull so you’d better get to whatever crazy mojo you have up your sleeve and just put me out of my misery or I will walk through that door in the next five seconds so help me God!” He finished on a kind of ragged wail and gasped for breath, while the girl turned completely in her chair to regard him with nothing so much as a twitch of an eyebrow to indicate her response to his tirade. Sam panted a little, and when no action from the girl seemed forthcoming, flung himself at the door and reached for it with both hands.
“Sam.”
He ignored the claws-on-the-chalkboard sensation of every hair on his body trying to stand on end at the tone, and grit his teeth. He was going. He was leaving right now. Here he was, Samuel freakin’ Winchester, walking out the goddamned door and into the rest of his life.
Only his escape was decisively interrupted when the door burst open and a more than slightly wild-eyed Dean slammed into the room, preceded by his voice which managed to both growl and shout simultaneously.
“Cas! Cas! Grab the gear, whatever you can carry. They’ve got Jimmy. They’ve got Jimmy! They know where we are, we gotta move now, come on!”
Sam resisted the urge to quail when furious green eyes fell on him, and he barely registered his own bizarre attempt to scramble backward across the room (even though he wasn’t scared of the guy. Totally. Wasn’t.) even as Dean surged forward and latched onto Sam’s upper arm with iron-strong fingers.
“You’re comin’ too, princess,” he ground out, and Sam most definitely did not yelp. He did struggle, unsuccessfully, to yank free of the vice clamped on his arm, gritting his teeth in a manful way, however.
“Hey!” Dean gave him a little shake and waved something metallic and solid in his face. “You know how to use this?”
Sam stared in horror as he realized the older man was holding a handgun inches from his nose-a sleek and ugly machine designed for the sole purpose of killing people. He swallowed hard and shook his head vigorously.
What the hell. What the hell.
“Typical,” Dean muttered, “Still makin’ my life difficult.”
Still?
Dean shoved the weapon into the waistband of his pants and grabbed up a nearby duffle, which clanked.
“Congratulations. You’ve been demoted to pack mule.”
Sam bristled as the heavy bag was shoved unceremoniously into his arms, but his snide comeback was trampled equally unceremoniously by the girl (had Dean called her Cas? Then who was the dark haired man?) striding quickly to the door hauling a backpack over one slender shoulder.
“I’m ready,” she declared, eyes fierce, without any sign of distress over Dean’s obvious anxiety. “Let’s go.”
Sam blinked at the pair of them, but had no time to do more as he was hustled quickly out the door, clutching the bag to his chest. As he passed the threshold, a glimpse of red caught his eye: the bag of apples, lying forgotten in a corner.
“Shit,” Dean was snarling to himself as Sam hurried to catch up to him and…Cas. “Shit shit shit.” And Sam blinked at the fervor in the man’s voice, the fury and the crackling edge of something like…fear? Was Dean afraid? Of Gordon? Or…for his friend?
“This is pretty bad, Dean,” the girl observed. Dean’s hands twitched, as if considering making fists.
“What exactly happened, Dean?”
“Not now, Cas! We have to go…up, I guess.”
Up?
“There.” Dean waved a hand at the side of the building they’d recently vacated and Sam took a moment to note that it seemed to be some sort of converted hotel, now a tumbledown apartment building in a neighborhood that had clearly seen better days, like most of the neighborhoods in St. Sebastian.
The girl darted ahead toward a conveniently situated dumpster and clambered up with surprising dexterity. Sam didn’t gape, but it was a very near thing.
“Go, already, Jesus!” Dean grabbed his arm and shoved him, half-stumbling, in the wake of the girl and he fetched up, wincing, against the dumpster. The girl peered down at him, and shook her head minutely. Dean scrambled onto the dumpster and hoisted the girl up to grasp the bottom rung of a fire escape, and Sam realized, suddenly, that they were both focused completely and totally on climbing and no one was paying him the slightest attention.
He didn’t drop the bag. He didn’t stop to think.
He just ran.
__________________________________________________________
tbc... Part 6
__________________________________________________________
Note: I really am just writing this to amuse myself, and to give myself something to do when I’m not actively trying to work on anything I care about. Which is why I’m not keeping to a schedule and why I haven’t just written the whole thing all in one go. And is also the reason for the various typos and grammar issues I normally would take the time to weed out. Just FYI.
Summary: SF AU, with flailing and whining! And an apple core and self-sacrificing Jimmy, and Castiel being mistaken for Major Kusanagi. Whee!
Parte the first
Parte the second
Parte the third
Parte the fourth
-
Hey, look at that.
___________________________________
Every Snowflake… 5/?
“Well, this is another fine mess,” Jimmy griped. Dean grimaced but didn’t turn around to face the smaller man. Instead he continued along his trajectory as quickly as his recently acquired, second-hand boots would allow.
“Dean.” His ears pricked at the sound of Jimmy drawing closer, and he hunched his shoulders in anticipation of a forestalling hand which did not come. (Still waiting for Sam’s gestures.) Instead Jimmy reiterated, “Dean,” softly, and continued, “What are we doing about this?”
“Hell, Jimmy, I don’t know,” Dean blurted, coming to a full stop and waving an arm a little wildly. “This wasn’t exactly something any of us planned for, Jesus!”
“I know that,” Jimmy scowled and Dean clearly heard the unvoiced you idiot tacked on to the end of the sentence. He shoved his hands in his pockets and glowered at Dean. “But we’re stuck in this situation now. We’re gonna have to do something. Something more proactive than flailing and whining.”
“We could just take him back to the hunters,” Dean offered, quirking a little smile which died a sad and lonely death in the face of Jimmy’s glare. Dean slumped.
“We’re screwed, aren’t we?”
“Well…” surprisingly, Jimmy’s voice softened. “We were pretty screwed long before we came anywhere near St. Sebastian, Dean. Things might’ve gotten more…uh, complicated…but we’ll deal. I guess. I mean, what else can we do?”
Dean folded his arms and gazed into the glassed-over, artificial sky of the orbiting platform. “We could call the cops. Report a kidnapping.”
“You want to inform on yourself?” Damn, Jimmy did incredulously snarky really surprisingly well.
“Not-what? No! The girl, I meant the girl. Jen or whatever. Report her missing. Jesus.”
“They’ll pick up any activity like that. The hunters. We won’t be able to run far enough.”
“Castiel could drop an anonymous tip, or stick something in the network.”
“Dean, the local P.D. is no match for two company-trained hunters, and you know it. Don’t be silly.”
“We left her there, Jimmy.”
“She’s a civilian. She’ll be fine." He paused. “Mostly.”
“ ‘Mostly’,” Dean repeated darkly. “Christ. Outside for five minutes and already we’re as bad as real people.”
“We’re going to have to think like real people from now on, Dean,” Jimmy told him flatly. “We don’t have the luxury of doing anything else.”
“Shit,” Dean observed.
“And of course that’s not even the biggest problem.”
Dean winced. He’d been trying to forget familiar eyes and long stupid hair. Trying, and almost managing. In the sense of not really managing at all.
“We could…I dunno. Tranq him and stick him on a flight to Nova Scotia. Or, like, New Seoul.” He paused. “The moon.”
“They’ll follow him. They’ve got his scent. You know they’ll follow him.”
Dean said, “This is all our fault.”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
He pressed his lips together, wavering from foot to foot, then shook his head sharply. He knew where he should be. He should be back at the room, dealing with the situation, instead of leaving…Sam…to be babysat by Cas and probably trying to climb the walls in frustration. There was no way he was suffering his unexpected captivity mildly; there’d never been a Sam in the history of the program who was capable of keeping his mouth shut when he was pissed off. And there was no possibility that Sam wasn’t pissed as hell right about now.
“Come on,” he said, starting to turn around, to head back and be the responsible older ‘sibling’ he was supposed to be. “Let’s get the lead out-” but he was prevented from finishing the rest of his sentence by Jimmy’s hand unexpectedly latching onto his arm, far too tightly for comfort. He looked sharply at the older man.
“Dean,” Jimmy said, eyes tight, fixed on some point down the street. “Get out of here. Go.”
Dean followed the direction his gaze, eyes widening.
“Get to Sam. Save Claire. Go now.”
--
“That’s it,” Sam said, “I’m getting out of here.”
The girl (Claire or GLaDOS or Major Kusanagi or what-the-hell-ever) had apparently lapsed into some kind of trance thing, which was incredibly creepy, seated at the desk and facing the collection of what should have been derelict machines and tangled wires with her eyes partially closed, her back to him. Occasionally she made a small atonal humming noise that reminded him, weirdly, of singing bowls or the chanting of priests. She was really, really freaking him out.
He’d finished the apple ages ago and had dithered about whether to search the room for a trashcan, or stay put and avoid the wrath of the deeply unnerving child. He’d sat on the edge of the bed with the gradually browning apple core perched between thumb and forefinger, licking his lips as they grew increasingly dry and alternately shooting glances between Claire and the door. The closed door. The closed door that even now beckoned him, promising freedom. Promising escape from this sudden and bizarre situation. Promising, above all else, Jess.
But he had a feeling. Just a feeling, nothing to really base it on, call it a hunch, that if he moved so much as a muscle, his tiny watchdog would know. Might, in fact, be aware even before he had actually made any motion. He was probably overreacting. Sure, he was overreacting. Absolutely.
He shot a glance at her be-scarved head, and licked dry lips. Looked back at the door. Looked, ridiculously, at the apple core in his hand, as if it might hold some sort of answers about his next best move. All it held were seeds. Which weren’t very helpful.
Slowly, carefully, he got to his feet. The bed didn’t make a sound as it decompressed, and the floor, weirdly, did not creak. Nothing much happened as he shifted his weight, and he darted a nervous tongue against his lips and cast quick glances at Claire. Nothing. Not so much as a twitch.
Okay, he strove to keep his mental voice calm. Okay. No panicking. Easy does it. Just slide across the floor, that’s it, pay no attention to the terrifying blonde child with the voice of doom sitting by the wall-
“Sam.”
Voice of Doom. There it was.
Shit.
“What?” he croaked, a little wildly, and the girl half-turned and gave him a look. He didn’t know what the look was meant to indicate. It wasn’t the sort of thing he was used to seeing on the faces of tiny teenagers. It wasn’t so much “Oh my gawd what is your issue?” as it was “Your strange movements and bizarre human behaviors make me question your mental cohesion.” Which was a strange collection of concepts to associate with a child and which Sam wanted to dismiss as a translation out-of-hand.
He really really did. The problem was that it seemed to fit.
But she was clearly human. As was he.
“You, uh,” he tried, and licked his lips. The girl went on staring. “You know me.”
“I told you, explanations would be best left for later.” She paused. “Eat your apple.”
“I ate my apple!” he flared, waving the core around a little wildly. “I’m going stir-crazy here!”
She paused. Blinked at him.
“Do you want another apple?”
“Do I-does it look like I-okay, seriously? This? Enough. Just, enough. I’m done sitting her like a lump on a shitty bed in a crap motel with the doomsday child and roaches and rats and mold while my girlfriend is being God-knows-what by a couple of crazy rejects from some really awful movie involving lots of guns and macho throwdowns and-and shit! All right? Are you hearing me? I am done, I am finished, I swear to God I am leaving right now and if you’re going to stop me then go ahead, but the only thing that’ll keep me from Jess is going to be you putting a few new holes through my skull so you’d better get to whatever crazy mojo you have up your sleeve and just put me out of my misery or I will walk through that door in the next five seconds so help me God!” He finished on a kind of ragged wail and gasped for breath, while the girl turned completely in her chair to regard him with nothing so much as a twitch of an eyebrow to indicate her response to his tirade. Sam panted a little, and when no action from the girl seemed forthcoming, flung himself at the door and reached for it with both hands.
“Sam.”
He ignored the claws-on-the-chalkboard sensation of every hair on his body trying to stand on end at the tone, and grit his teeth. He was going. He was leaving right now. Here he was, Samuel freakin’ Winchester, walking out the goddamned door and into the rest of his life.
Only his escape was decisively interrupted when the door burst open and a more than slightly wild-eyed Dean slammed into the room, preceded by his voice which managed to both growl and shout simultaneously.
“Cas! Cas! Grab the gear, whatever you can carry. They’ve got Jimmy. They’ve got Jimmy! They know where we are, we gotta move now, come on!”
Sam resisted the urge to quail when furious green eyes fell on him, and he barely registered his own bizarre attempt to scramble backward across the room (even though he wasn’t scared of the guy. Totally. Wasn’t.) even as Dean surged forward and latched onto Sam’s upper arm with iron-strong fingers.
“You’re comin’ too, princess,” he ground out, and Sam most definitely did not yelp. He did struggle, unsuccessfully, to yank free of the vice clamped on his arm, gritting his teeth in a manful way, however.
“Hey!” Dean gave him a little shake and waved something metallic and solid in his face. “You know how to use this?”
Sam stared in horror as he realized the older man was holding a handgun inches from his nose-a sleek and ugly machine designed for the sole purpose of killing people. He swallowed hard and shook his head vigorously.
What the hell. What the hell.
“Typical,” Dean muttered, “Still makin’ my life difficult.”
Still?
Dean shoved the weapon into the waistband of his pants and grabbed up a nearby duffle, which clanked.
“Congratulations. You’ve been demoted to pack mule.”
Sam bristled as the heavy bag was shoved unceremoniously into his arms, but his snide comeback was trampled equally unceremoniously by the girl (had Dean called her Cas? Then who was the dark haired man?) striding quickly to the door hauling a backpack over one slender shoulder.
“I’m ready,” she declared, eyes fierce, without any sign of distress over Dean’s obvious anxiety. “Let’s go.”
Sam blinked at the pair of them, but had no time to do more as he was hustled quickly out the door, clutching the bag to his chest. As he passed the threshold, a glimpse of red caught his eye: the bag of apples, lying forgotten in a corner.
“Shit,” Dean was snarling to himself as Sam hurried to catch up to him and…Cas. “Shit shit shit.” And Sam blinked at the fervor in the man’s voice, the fury and the crackling edge of something like…fear? Was Dean afraid? Of Gordon? Or…for his friend?
“This is pretty bad, Dean,” the girl observed. Dean’s hands twitched, as if considering making fists.
“What exactly happened, Dean?”
“Not now, Cas! We have to go…up, I guess.”
Up?
“There.” Dean waved a hand at the side of the building they’d recently vacated and Sam took a moment to note that it seemed to be some sort of converted hotel, now a tumbledown apartment building in a neighborhood that had clearly seen better days, like most of the neighborhoods in St. Sebastian.
The girl darted ahead toward a conveniently situated dumpster and clambered up with surprising dexterity. Sam didn’t gape, but it was a very near thing.
“Go, already, Jesus!” Dean grabbed his arm and shoved him, half-stumbling, in the wake of the girl and he fetched up, wincing, against the dumpster. The girl peered down at him, and shook her head minutely. Dean scrambled onto the dumpster and hoisted the girl up to grasp the bottom rung of a fire escape, and Sam realized, suddenly, that they were both focused completely and totally on climbing and no one was paying him the slightest attention.
He didn’t drop the bag. He didn’t stop to think.
He just ran.
__________________________________________________________
tbc... Part 6
__________________________________________________________
Note: I really am just writing this to amuse myself, and to give myself something to do when I’m not actively trying to work on anything I care about. Which is why I’m not keeping to a schedule and why I haven’t just written the whole thing all in one go. And is also the reason for the various typos and grammar issues I normally would take the time to weed out. Just FYI.