Fic: Abroad (1/3)
hokuton_punch, this one’s for you.
Abroad
Summary: Dean goes to Hell. Wackiness ensues.
Warnings: Gore, language, OC (yipe!), stupidity.
THIS IS WORSE THAN CRACK. IT MAKES CRACK LOOK WHOLESOME.
Notes: So while pondering the fact that there's really a dearth of fics dealing with Dean's horizon-broadening cultural-exchange experience in Hell, I realized that, yeah, I could write that. But while considering the idea, I also realized that I had no desire to write seriously about the mind-blistering horrors or whatever that such a story would seem to require. For one thing, that's pretty much been done to death, and for another, it'd be boring and depressing for me to write.
So I wound up with this idiotic thing. It's not really satire, it's not very funny, but it made me giggle, so, yeah.
________________________________________
Abroad
I'm betting that I'm just abnormal enough to survive.
-The Tick
Dean liked to think of himself as kind of an exchange student.
Not really, of course. For one thing, he hadn't actually exchanged with anybody, as far as he knew-nobody was toddling around topside in his old meatsuit or anything, dealing with little human issues like morning breath and itchy socks and mosquito bites and…whatever other fun and fascinating experiences went into ordinary human living. He'd been in the pit for over three decades, he couldn't be expected to remember every friggin' detail about life in a skin bag, right?
And okay, Dean would admit he wasn't technically a student, either, since Hell only went in for a specific kind of education, which everyone pretty much got no matter their actual their rank. On the other hand, he sure was learning a lot, tons more than just what he's been taught directly, what Alastair and Gabby and some of the others had shown him.
So even though he wasn't a student, and wasn't there on exchange, he knew he had to be getting something out of the experience, aside from an interesting collection of new injuries which, after all, only lasted about twenty-four hours before they faded like mist in the grass. If Hell, y'know, had grass. Or mist. Or weather patterns.
What it actually had, mostly, was dust. And sky. And firmament-there was an awful lot of that stuff. Also cities. Teeming cities, he'd heard Alastair call them once. And once he'd finally got his hands on a dictionary, Dean had had to admit that, yeah, if the cities did one thing above all others, they definitely teemed. Mostly with demons. And souls. And animals. And a neverending supply of weird shit that the sight of which would have driven the living completely insane but were, for the most part, just par for the course around here, and hardly even worth a second glance.
The Profane Cathedral was one of those drive-the-living-insane sort of deals. But Dean liked the Cathedral, even though he didn't really believe in the Devil-not the way demons did. And he didn't not believe, not the way Ruby had. It was more like…well, Dean was willing to bet his first seven vertebrae that, yeah, the guy was out there somewhere. Hell was definitely big enough, and if there was one thing he'd learned, it was that the place was full of surprises. So Dean honestly thought he wouldn't be too shocked if one day he discovered Lucifer lurking behind a potted plant, or hiding under the vestibule waiting to leap out and rend him and other unsuspecting souls-or, y'know, maybe sell him a full set of encyclopedias or something. That was just the sort of thing that always seemed to happen to him.
He didn't go to the Cathedral to worship, anyway. What was the point? Still a human soul, right? Technically he shouldn't even be allowed over the threshold, but Dean had special dispensation and a little badge Alastair'd made him, though by this time everyone within miles knew him by sight and he hadn't really been hassled in…well, a long time. Probably three or four years since he really had to make a thing out of it.
So they let him come and sit in the Cathedral, and the sacred prostitutes waved cheerfully and the acolytes scurried out of his way, and he found his favorite pew in the echoing sanctuary and, yeah, he could spend hours just sitting, swinging his legs, staring up into the abyss. The Cathedral was simply too large to be contained by mere architecture. It was also too large to be seen in its entirety from any vantage point in Hell, no matter how distant, and clouds moved through the tower and behind them, strange stars shone without ceasing.
Now Dean was sitting in the dark, just watching, tracking a distant red light in the void and humming a little tune because the tiny worm-eggs under his skin were just starting to hatch and burrow out into the world, and even though he scratched at them a little and some nights he thought the itching and squirming would drive him literally out of his skull, he still cared. They were just babies, after all, tiny little blind things nosing out through his skin, and babies needed to hear lullabies, and be cared for and talked to and…stuff. So he hummed some songs that he knew, and some that Gabby had taught him, and some that he'd made up himself.
He'd been doing that for an hour or so when all of a sudden there was this almighty crash, and a noise went up from every corner like ten thousand tornado sirens being horribly killed. Dean flinched, and shot to his feet and clapped his hands over his ears as the awful grating shriek went on, and on, spiraling upward, and he staggered out of the row into the aisle and there was another noise, a supersonic boom of sound that shook the walls and drove him to his knees.
"Jesus!" he blurted, and yanked his hands off his ears to clap them over his mouth, but no one had noticed and the acolytes and priests were running all over the place, and in the distance he could hear the whores shrieking, and he got to his feet and ran out into the street where a crowd of demons was already gathering, the noise of their confused yammering filling the air.
"What the f-" he bit off the curse when something jostled him and he looked up into a looming nightmare with a face like a hundred strangled babies and a body so large it blocked the light of the sky.
"Hi, Lamashtu," he mumbled half-heartedly, and she peered down at him from the misty heights, eyebrows speckled with frost. She'd had a little bit of a crush on him, way back in the day, and when Gabby'd found out she'd gone around calling him Babyface for weeks, and cackling obscenely. Now the demon lowered her hideous visage and breathed stinking air across his face, and rumbled.
"Dean Winchester, as I live and breathe." She grinned at him, mouths full of razor sharp teeth. "Run along home, boy, before I eat you up myself." Smiling with all her faces, which really did absolutely nothing at all for her looks.
"What's going on?"
She shrugged, a ripple of mountain ranges. "Who knows? Nothing to do with you, little soul. Get along now." And she snaked a tongue in his direction, slapping him playfully on the ass. Dean squeaked a little, and slid quickly out of range, then took off half-running down the road, back to Alastair.
Lamashtu was right-whatever was going on was nothing to do with him.
--
"It's angels," Gabby enthused, bouncing on her hands and kicking her short little legs on the bench. Dean didn't look around; he had his tongue between his teeth and was concentrating hard on removing all the nerve clusters of the soul currently under his knife. He'd challenged himself to do them all in less than an hour; he now had thirteen minutes left.
"Angels, Dean, isn't it exciting?" She bounced off the bench and kicked a random femur out of the way, then scuttled over to the window to peer out at the afternoon light, the shrieks of various generals fighting to be the one to crush the invading force audible even from this distance. Dean drew out a quivering mess of tissue and the soul whimpered; the little accumulation dropped to the floor with a splat.
"Dean! Could you pay attention to me for a second? The angels are trying to bust in and nobody knows why. There's gonna be a total bloodbath. This kind of thing never happens around here!" She was practically squealing by the end, and Dean shook his head and bent more closely to his work. Just a few more…
"Dean!" and suddenly she was right there, climbing on him, crawling up his legs and digging her nails into his back. He grit his teeth as she clambered onto his shoulders and bent down over his head, golden hair falling across his line of sight and obscuring his view.
"Dean, gimme your eyes."
He glared into her upside-down face. He was never going to beat his old record at this rate.
"I need my eyes," he told her bluntly, plucking her from his shoulders and dropping her unceremoniously on the floor. "To work. Some of us still have quotas to worry about. Some of us don't get special treatment from the boss for being just so gosh-darn adorable."
Once upon a time such a statement would have led to much blushing and fluttering of lashes, which on the face of the apparent five-year-old was pretty downright disturbing. Now, though, Gabby just kicked out at his ankle and pouted.
"You don't need them both. Just gimme one. To play with. Pleeeeez Dean?"
"No! I'm using them both! Do the words 'depth perception' mean anything to you? When's the last time you even tortured a soul, anyway?"
"Oooh, you're so mean!" she leapt to her feet and aimed another kick, and Dean let out a little growl. Grabbing for the nearest poker, he spun around and rammed it clean through her skull and deep into the floor, pinning her.
"You're the most irritating person I know," he snapped. "Just stay there and lemme work, okay?"
But Gabby's eye-obsession would not be so easily deterred, and the noise of the soul begging and crying was drowned out almost completely by the little demon's cursing and the shriek of metal being yanked out of concrete.
"Dammit Dean!" she snarled, "This was my favorite head!"
"It's your only head, you idiot," he told her.
"I should make you buy me a new one! Look at these holes!"
"I don't get paid," Dean said, holding the soul's eye up to the light and peering at it critically before offering it to Gabby. "Look, you can have this one."
"I don't want that soul's nasty old eye!" she sulked. "I want yours! I only need a few more-" but it seemed she'd said too much, for she bit off the rest of the sentence, chewing on her lip and casting him nervous glances from under her lashes. Dean snorted. It wasn't as if he didn't know about the collection, after all. For a long time he'd assumed-logically-that she was simply eating all the eyes she got from him, which was a pretty typical demonic use for eyes, he'd found. It wasn't as if they made good jewelry or anything, though he'd seen people make the attempt. But since Dean did most of the cleaning around the place, it was only natural that one day, while trying to shift a particularly nasty tribe of dust bunnies, with a long pole and a machete, from under her bed he'd also managed to accidentally push the eye-box halfway across the floor, spilling it in the process and sending at least fifty of his own former orbs skittering and bouncing into every corner of the room like deranged superballs.
It'd taken ages to clean up, and he'd gotten reamed anyway for the time it took him away from his regular duties. Quotas were a pain in the ass.
"You can have my eyes when I'm not using them anymore," he growled at her, but she'd started the whole climbing thing back up again, this time digging her nails into his back, slowly, scratching at the lumps he knew were just near the base of his spine.
"Those are my worms," he told her, flapping a hand back around where he thought her head was. She snickered, but didn't reply. Slowly, slowly, he felt the nail of her index finger extend, pushing deeper under the skin, questing around, searching for-
"Dammit Gabby!" he squealed, "You know my spine is ticklish!"
"I'm tired of you working all the time and ignoring me," she muttered, and Dean squirmed and dropped his razor, slapping at the demon's hands as she dug into his flesh, teasing out something long, and thin, like pasta or-
"My worms, dammit-you can't-haha-s-stop it Gabby I have to-augh!" He was so, so ticklish and she was pulling the thing clean out of his body in one long piece, and this was probably not one of the baby worms after all, but something significantly larger, something that'd been there a while, and he flailed and shrieked absolute bloody murder in between laughing fits and gasps because he did not have time for this right now, dammit.
"Get off get off get off you little bitch!" he choked out, and felt his hand latch onto curly blond locks. He yanked and she growled and sank all her nails in deeper, and he did an insane little dance right in front of the soul and frankly he knew he'd lost any credibility as a torturer, but that was all sort of moot at this point because the door to the workroom slammed open and Gabby whimpered and slid off of him to stand on the floor, shuffling her feet and staring down.
"Oh," said Dean.
"…shit," Gabby finished.
Later, Dean had time to reflect that, say what you wanted about Alastair's management techniques, he was definitely a person who really enjoyed his work.
________________________________________
Next: Dean goes to the fair. No, really.
TBC! Aigh!
________________________________________
Q&A
Q: An OC? Dear god, why?
A: Because Alastair isn't funny. Um. Not that Gabby is either, but at least she's easy to make dance to my tune. Dance puppet!
Q: This fic? Dear god, why?
A: I'm pretty sure I was not in my right mind when I wrote this thing. It's my only explanation.
Q: What's with the worms? Yeech!
A: Based on a true story! Juliane Koepcke crash-landed in the Brazilian rainforest and hiked out--in a dress and a pair of heels. During which time, among other things, worms hatched under her skin and burrowed their way out. Arrrgh. And it was so disgusting and awful I had to include it because, y'know. Hell.
Part 2
Part 3
Abroad
Summary: Dean goes to Hell. Wackiness ensues.
Warnings: Gore, language, OC (yipe!), stupidity.
THIS IS WORSE THAN CRACK. IT MAKES CRACK LOOK WHOLESOME.
Notes: So while pondering the fact that there's really a dearth of fics dealing with Dean's horizon-broadening cultural-exchange experience in Hell, I realized that, yeah, I could write that. But while considering the idea, I also realized that I had no desire to write seriously about the mind-blistering horrors or whatever that such a story would seem to require. For one thing, that's pretty much been done to death, and for another, it'd be boring and depressing for me to write.
So I wound up with this idiotic thing. It's not really satire, it's not very funny, but it made me giggle, so, yeah.
________________________________________
Abroad
I'm betting that I'm just abnormal enough to survive.
-The Tick
Dean liked to think of himself as kind of an exchange student.
Not really, of course. For one thing, he hadn't actually exchanged with anybody, as far as he knew-nobody was toddling around topside in his old meatsuit or anything, dealing with little human issues like morning breath and itchy socks and mosquito bites and…whatever other fun and fascinating experiences went into ordinary human living. He'd been in the pit for over three decades, he couldn't be expected to remember every friggin' detail about life in a skin bag, right?
And okay, Dean would admit he wasn't technically a student, either, since Hell only went in for a specific kind of education, which everyone pretty much got no matter their actual their rank. On the other hand, he sure was learning a lot, tons more than just what he's been taught directly, what Alastair and Gabby and some of the others had shown him.
So even though he wasn't a student, and wasn't there on exchange, he knew he had to be getting something out of the experience, aside from an interesting collection of new injuries which, after all, only lasted about twenty-four hours before they faded like mist in the grass. If Hell, y'know, had grass. Or mist. Or weather patterns.
What it actually had, mostly, was dust. And sky. And firmament-there was an awful lot of that stuff. Also cities. Teeming cities, he'd heard Alastair call them once. And once he'd finally got his hands on a dictionary, Dean had had to admit that, yeah, if the cities did one thing above all others, they definitely teemed. Mostly with demons. And souls. And animals. And a neverending supply of weird shit that the sight of which would have driven the living completely insane but were, for the most part, just par for the course around here, and hardly even worth a second glance.
The Profane Cathedral was one of those drive-the-living-insane sort of deals. But Dean liked the Cathedral, even though he didn't really believe in the Devil-not the way demons did. And he didn't not believe, not the way Ruby had. It was more like…well, Dean was willing to bet his first seven vertebrae that, yeah, the guy was out there somewhere. Hell was definitely big enough, and if there was one thing he'd learned, it was that the place was full of surprises. So Dean honestly thought he wouldn't be too shocked if one day he discovered Lucifer lurking behind a potted plant, or hiding under the vestibule waiting to leap out and rend him and other unsuspecting souls-or, y'know, maybe sell him a full set of encyclopedias or something. That was just the sort of thing that always seemed to happen to him.
He didn't go to the Cathedral to worship, anyway. What was the point? Still a human soul, right? Technically he shouldn't even be allowed over the threshold, but Dean had special dispensation and a little badge Alastair'd made him, though by this time everyone within miles knew him by sight and he hadn't really been hassled in…well, a long time. Probably three or four years since he really had to make a thing out of it.
So they let him come and sit in the Cathedral, and the sacred prostitutes waved cheerfully and the acolytes scurried out of his way, and he found his favorite pew in the echoing sanctuary and, yeah, he could spend hours just sitting, swinging his legs, staring up into the abyss. The Cathedral was simply too large to be contained by mere architecture. It was also too large to be seen in its entirety from any vantage point in Hell, no matter how distant, and clouds moved through the tower and behind them, strange stars shone without ceasing.
Now Dean was sitting in the dark, just watching, tracking a distant red light in the void and humming a little tune because the tiny worm-eggs under his skin were just starting to hatch and burrow out into the world, and even though he scratched at them a little and some nights he thought the itching and squirming would drive him literally out of his skull, he still cared. They were just babies, after all, tiny little blind things nosing out through his skin, and babies needed to hear lullabies, and be cared for and talked to and…stuff. So he hummed some songs that he knew, and some that Gabby had taught him, and some that he'd made up himself.
He'd been doing that for an hour or so when all of a sudden there was this almighty crash, and a noise went up from every corner like ten thousand tornado sirens being horribly killed. Dean flinched, and shot to his feet and clapped his hands over his ears as the awful grating shriek went on, and on, spiraling upward, and he staggered out of the row into the aisle and there was another noise, a supersonic boom of sound that shook the walls and drove him to his knees.
"Jesus!" he blurted, and yanked his hands off his ears to clap them over his mouth, but no one had noticed and the acolytes and priests were running all over the place, and in the distance he could hear the whores shrieking, and he got to his feet and ran out into the street where a crowd of demons was already gathering, the noise of their confused yammering filling the air.
"What the f-" he bit off the curse when something jostled him and he looked up into a looming nightmare with a face like a hundred strangled babies and a body so large it blocked the light of the sky.
"Hi, Lamashtu," he mumbled half-heartedly, and she peered down at him from the misty heights, eyebrows speckled with frost. She'd had a little bit of a crush on him, way back in the day, and when Gabby'd found out she'd gone around calling him Babyface for weeks, and cackling obscenely. Now the demon lowered her hideous visage and breathed stinking air across his face, and rumbled.
"Dean Winchester, as I live and breathe." She grinned at him, mouths full of razor sharp teeth. "Run along home, boy, before I eat you up myself." Smiling with all her faces, which really did absolutely nothing at all for her looks.
"What's going on?"
She shrugged, a ripple of mountain ranges. "Who knows? Nothing to do with you, little soul. Get along now." And she snaked a tongue in his direction, slapping him playfully on the ass. Dean squeaked a little, and slid quickly out of range, then took off half-running down the road, back to Alastair.
Lamashtu was right-whatever was going on was nothing to do with him.
--
"It's angels," Gabby enthused, bouncing on her hands and kicking her short little legs on the bench. Dean didn't look around; he had his tongue between his teeth and was concentrating hard on removing all the nerve clusters of the soul currently under his knife. He'd challenged himself to do them all in less than an hour; he now had thirteen minutes left.
"Angels, Dean, isn't it exciting?" She bounced off the bench and kicked a random femur out of the way, then scuttled over to the window to peer out at the afternoon light, the shrieks of various generals fighting to be the one to crush the invading force audible even from this distance. Dean drew out a quivering mess of tissue and the soul whimpered; the little accumulation dropped to the floor with a splat.
"Dean! Could you pay attention to me for a second? The angels are trying to bust in and nobody knows why. There's gonna be a total bloodbath. This kind of thing never happens around here!" She was practically squealing by the end, and Dean shook his head and bent more closely to his work. Just a few more…
"Dean!" and suddenly she was right there, climbing on him, crawling up his legs and digging her nails into his back. He grit his teeth as she clambered onto his shoulders and bent down over his head, golden hair falling across his line of sight and obscuring his view.
"Dean, gimme your eyes."
He glared into her upside-down face. He was never going to beat his old record at this rate.
"I need my eyes," he told her bluntly, plucking her from his shoulders and dropping her unceremoniously on the floor. "To work. Some of us still have quotas to worry about. Some of us don't get special treatment from the boss for being just so gosh-darn adorable."
Once upon a time such a statement would have led to much blushing and fluttering of lashes, which on the face of the apparent five-year-old was pretty downright disturbing. Now, though, Gabby just kicked out at his ankle and pouted.
"You don't need them both. Just gimme one. To play with. Pleeeeez Dean?"
"No! I'm using them both! Do the words 'depth perception' mean anything to you? When's the last time you even tortured a soul, anyway?"
"Oooh, you're so mean!" she leapt to her feet and aimed another kick, and Dean let out a little growl. Grabbing for the nearest poker, he spun around and rammed it clean through her skull and deep into the floor, pinning her.
"You're the most irritating person I know," he snapped. "Just stay there and lemme work, okay?"
But Gabby's eye-obsession would not be so easily deterred, and the noise of the soul begging and crying was drowned out almost completely by the little demon's cursing and the shriek of metal being yanked out of concrete.
"Dammit Dean!" she snarled, "This was my favorite head!"
"It's your only head, you idiot," he told her.
"I should make you buy me a new one! Look at these holes!"
"I don't get paid," Dean said, holding the soul's eye up to the light and peering at it critically before offering it to Gabby. "Look, you can have this one."
"I don't want that soul's nasty old eye!" she sulked. "I want yours! I only need a few more-" but it seemed she'd said too much, for she bit off the rest of the sentence, chewing on her lip and casting him nervous glances from under her lashes. Dean snorted. It wasn't as if he didn't know about the collection, after all. For a long time he'd assumed-logically-that she was simply eating all the eyes she got from him, which was a pretty typical demonic use for eyes, he'd found. It wasn't as if they made good jewelry or anything, though he'd seen people make the attempt. But since Dean did most of the cleaning around the place, it was only natural that one day, while trying to shift a particularly nasty tribe of dust bunnies, with a long pole and a machete, from under her bed he'd also managed to accidentally push the eye-box halfway across the floor, spilling it in the process and sending at least fifty of his own former orbs skittering and bouncing into every corner of the room like deranged superballs.
It'd taken ages to clean up, and he'd gotten reamed anyway for the time it took him away from his regular duties. Quotas were a pain in the ass.
"You can have my eyes when I'm not using them anymore," he growled at her, but she'd started the whole climbing thing back up again, this time digging her nails into his back, slowly, scratching at the lumps he knew were just near the base of his spine.
"Those are my worms," he told her, flapping a hand back around where he thought her head was. She snickered, but didn't reply. Slowly, slowly, he felt the nail of her index finger extend, pushing deeper under the skin, questing around, searching for-
"Dammit Gabby!" he squealed, "You know my spine is ticklish!"
"I'm tired of you working all the time and ignoring me," she muttered, and Dean squirmed and dropped his razor, slapping at the demon's hands as she dug into his flesh, teasing out something long, and thin, like pasta or-
"My worms, dammit-you can't-haha-s-stop it Gabby I have to-augh!" He was so, so ticklish and she was pulling the thing clean out of his body in one long piece, and this was probably not one of the baby worms after all, but something significantly larger, something that'd been there a while, and he flailed and shrieked absolute bloody murder in between laughing fits and gasps because he did not have time for this right now, dammit.
"Get off get off get off you little bitch!" he choked out, and felt his hand latch onto curly blond locks. He yanked and she growled and sank all her nails in deeper, and he did an insane little dance right in front of the soul and frankly he knew he'd lost any credibility as a torturer, but that was all sort of moot at this point because the door to the workroom slammed open and Gabby whimpered and slid off of him to stand on the floor, shuffling her feet and staring down.
"Oh," said Dean.
"…shit," Gabby finished.
Later, Dean had time to reflect that, say what you wanted about Alastair's management techniques, he was definitely a person who really enjoyed his work.
________________________________________
Next: Dean goes to the fair. No, really.
TBC! Aigh!
________________________________________
Q&A
Q: An OC? Dear god, why?
A: Because Alastair isn't funny. Um. Not that Gabby is either, but at least she's easy to make dance to my tune. Dance puppet!
Q: This fic? Dear god, why?
A: I'm pretty sure I was not in my right mind when I wrote this thing. It's my only explanation.
Q: What's with the worms? Yeech!
A: Based on a true story! Juliane Koepcke crash-landed in the Brazilian rainforest and hiked out--in a dress and a pair of heels. During which time, among other things, worms hatched under her skin and burrowed their way out. Arrrgh. And it was so disgusting and awful I had to include it because, y'know. Hell.
Part 2
Part 3