Lapsus Linguae [Supernatural]
Title: Lapsus Linguae
Series: Supernatural
Characters: Sam, Dean, implied Bobby
Word Count: Just shy of 2,500
Rating: PG13
Warnings: Language (in more ways than one). Many, many spoilers for Episode 4.07.
Notes: Something happened in this episode that sparked quite a bit of discussion on one of the boards I frequent. This story is my attempt to come to terms with that something (hence the spoiler warning). Many thanks to arliss and aishuu for beta reading.
Summary: What seems obvious isn't always true. When a post-hunt conversation takes an unexpected turn, the Winchesters learn this lesson the hard way.
Sam's head still felt like it was doing its best to turn into a Klein bottle, but that was the least of his problems. Dean stared at him for what felt like forever (the headache wasn't helping with the time perception) with an expression Sam really didn't want to categorize.
Fear. Disappointment. Despair. Anger. Grief. Loathing. The only acceptable answer would have been resignation, and even that...
Dean finally came into the chapel, his expression flickering briefly to a classic Dean-sneer as he glanced down at the former art teacher.
"Dean, I--"
"We'd better make tracks before those kids call the cops." Dean had on his best 'wrong? there's nothing wrong' face. Sam would have preferred anger. "I don't want to be the one to explain what the hell busted a bunch of corpses out of a mausoleum and put them to the torch."
Good, good... That meant they didn't have to worry about any other cleanup. Dean had done his job, and Sam...
Sam dabbed at the blood that had streamed from his nose. It felt like it had gone halfway down his chin. "Listen. About what just happened..."
Dean pulled a mostly clean paper napkin from his jacket. "Here. Wipe that off--looks like it's about to get in your mouth." He handed it over and headed back out of the mausoleum without looking back to see if Sam would follow.
Sam gave the napkin a suspicious sniff, scrubbed at the blood, then followed Dean outside. They were going to have this out. He'd had no other choice. It was worth the risk to use his powers. Yes, he'd said he would stop, but that was before twelve hundred people (and so many more after that) would have been pulled into a hell on earth.
He'd barely drawn breath to say 'we need to talk' when Dean flipped open his cell phone and held up a hand for silence. "Need to fill Bobby in, 'specially if we're another seal down." He shook his head in disgust. At what, Sam could only guess. Sam was standing close enough to hear the faint sound of ringing. "Remind me to ask our angel buddy how many we got left before... Yo, Bobby. Yeah, it's Dean."
Sam shook his head and scoffed. Buddy. Right. And just listen to Dean. He didn't sound like there was a damn thing wrong. Although, from the sharp look Sam got while Dean was listening to Bobby, it was clear that Dean was going to want to have that talk as well. Probably the minute they got back in the Impala, if Sam was any judge of things.
All at once, Sam didn't feel quite so eager to hash things out as he had just a few seconds ago.
"Haunted funeral home? Wow, that sounds like all kinds of suck. Yeah." Dean laughed, voice bitter but his face much more relaxed. "Well, that's a Happy Halloween for ya. Anyhow, we had something big go down here. Just wrapped it up."
They were clear of the graveyard now, and turned to head down the sidewalk, pausing only to let a pack of trick-or-treaters dash by. Even though he was paying attention to Bobby, Dean was cat-quick to light on a scrap of yellow and red. He barely even broke stride as he stooped to snatch up the fallen (and slightly trampled) Bit-O-Honey.
"Seriously--you're not going to eat that, are you?" Sam hissed.
Dean rolled his eyes and started working open the wrapper with his free hand. He had a chance to mouth 'wuss' before turning back to Bobby. Just like that, with the candy and the insults, it was as if things were normal again. "Yeah, yeah. We're good. We're both good. We aced the bad guy and got free with a few bruises and a bloody nose. What's not good is, it looks like we might be down another one of those seal things... Right. Least we sent the ugly fuck back down where it belongs. That's gotta count for something."
He finally managed to pry most of the wrapper away from the candy. "It was... huh? How'd we get rid of it?"
There was another sidelong look as things once more fell back from normal, but Dean said nothing more than a sharp, "Sam took care of it." There was a brief pause. Dean winced at whatever he heard, but recovered well enough. "He, uh, he had Ruby's knife with him. Right. That one."
Sam dropped back a pace, his mouth tightening into a line. He supposed he should be grateful that Dean wasn't going to throw him under the bus, but a fist to the jaw would have been better than this. As soon as they got back to the motel, they'd have this out even if it meant trashing the room and beating each other to a pulp.
"Anyhow it's over, and we managed to keep a town from getting all Sodom and Gommorrah'd off the map... Yup--you heard me. Castiel and a buddy of his--and let me tell you, angels can be real assholes, no lie--were ready to blast the whole place and everyone in it to atoms rather than risk this thing getting summoned." Dean popped the candy into his mouth, and his next words were a little garbled. "Yeah, a real big kahuna. Uh-huh. Sam found out its name and everything."
Dean glanced over his shoulder for confirmation. To Sam's surprise, he actually sounded a little proud as he told Bobby what they had just accomplished. "Apparently we just managed to ice Samhain."
The only reason Sam was able to understand what Dean had just said was that years of hard experience had taught him to decipher his brother's words when they were filtered through teeth stuck together with taffy, caramel, or--as in this case--stale Bit-O-Honey.
Bobby, on the other hand, was without the benefit of such experience. Dean scowled--clearly, he was being asked to speak up, or clarify, or stop mumbling like an idiot. "Samhain. You can't tell me you ain't heard of this dude."
Bobby was talking loud enough that Sam thought he heard something like 'can't understand a damned word you're saying.' In response Dean's voice grew louder and slower, but not any clearer.
"Here--let me talk to him." One long stride brought him even with Dean. He held out his hand for the phone, but Dean waved him off. Sam could practically hear the pop as Dean's teeth pulled free of the candy.
"Shit. I think I just lost a filling. Anyhow, it was Samhain." Again, it wasn't getting through, no matter that he was speaking perfectly clearly.
"Sam Hain," he repeated, this time breaking it up into two distinct syllables. Sam wished Dean wouldn't do that--the similarity to his own name was more distressing than he'd like to admit. "You know. S-A-M-H-A--"
Before Sam even had time to blink, Dean had cringed to about half his normal height and was holding the phone up and away from his ear as far as he could. Bobby was in full rant, and doing so loud enough that Sam could make out the word 'idjit.' In fact, he was able to make it out several times in quick succession.
A knot of passing trick-or-treaters paused in their rounds to enjoy the show. Sam was tempted to tell the little ingrates how close they'd come to being eaten.
"Hold on, hold on..." Dean eventually worked up the courage to bring the phone somewhere in the vicinity of his ear. "What's got you so worked up?" He blinked in confusion a few times. The look he was giving Sam had changed from a guilt-glare to a 'give me a hand, will ya?'
"Huh? Really? That's how it's pronounced? Well, shit." He laughed nervously, and Sam took a few steps back in case Dean did try to take him up on his earlier offer of talking this through with Bobby. Dean raised a hand to give him the finger, but caught sight of the trick-or-treaters and instead pointed at Sam in a 'I will so get you for this' manner.
"Well, Sam was the one who did all the research, and I guess he just pronounced it the way it's written..."
"You bastard!" Sam whispered. This earned him a sour-prunes look from a mother shepherding a trio of Disney Princesses. The first band of trick-or-treaters, who had been about to head off again, decided en masse to stay and watch the rest of the show.
There was another spate of barely coherent Singerian outrage. Dean listened. Eventually, Bobby had to pause for breath. "Right, right. 'Sow-an.' Never woulda guessed. Well, that's those crazy Celts for you. You can't really blame Sam for..." Dean winced and held the phone away for a second. It took Bobby a moment or two to calm down. As Dean listened, his expression began to change. "Uh-huh... Right... Reeeeeally?"
Dean went from looking like he was going under for the third time to being suffused with a malicious smugness that made Sam wish he could exorcise himself if it would only get him away from there.
"I see." Dean now spoke as much for Sam's benefit as Bobby's and reveled in every single bit of it. "So the pronunciation guide would have been right there on the very first page..."
His intentions had been good, but this lapse would never be forgotten.
"No! Really? The very first sentence?"
And quite possibly, never forgiven.
"Of the freaking Wikipedia entry?"
By now, Dean was cackling. Sam lunged for the phone and got a noogie to the gut for his trouble.
The trick-or-treaters cheered. Dean held up two fingers in a 'V for Victory' sign.
Things might have become truly ugly at that point, but Bobby still had a good head of pissed-off going and wasn't about to waste it.
Sam just stood back and listened, watching Dean's face contort in interesting ways as Bobby chewed him out for not calling for help before things got out of hand and they lost another seal and stupidly put the whole world another step closer to perdition. And so on.
When the trick-or-treaters started clamoring for Dean to put the cell-phone on 'speaker,' he didn't do a darned thing to stop them.
* * *
Back at the motel, Dean figured they were both owed a night off. His ear still felt blistered from Bobby's tirade and Sam seemed fine with putting things off a little longer. They needed cartoons, a bag of candy, and a meat-lover's pizza a bit more than a clearing of the air and a couple of blackened eyes.
The next day, they hit the road. Where to, Dean wasn't exactly sure yet, but as long as it was a reasonable distance from the fair town of Almost Became A Smoking Crater, that was fine by him.
It would be another day or two before they had a chance to talk things out, but Dean wasn't in any particular hurry to get to that point. For some reason, he had a feeling that once they did, something was going to come up about these flashes of memory that were not just slipping through the cracks, but creating more cracks as they did.
Plus, in addition to both of them getting raked over the coals by Bobby, they'd had the dubious pleasure of intense and not very comfortable heart-to-hearts, each with a different angel.
Sam had been less than happy to hear that the whole thing had been some kind of test. Dean didn't even want to know how Sam's increasingly shaky faith would be affected by the knowledge that angels could have doubts. It wasn't that Dean, well, put much faith in faith, but he had a suspicion it might be one of the few things that was going to keep Sam from really going off the rails.
As for Dean, he had been downright furious when Sam confessed that he'd been deemed both useful and expendable because of his freaky demon mojo. Sam must have been pretty shaken by it, because he didn't get bitchy about the blasphemy when Dean lit on the similarity between the name of a certain archangel and the name of a certain piece of men's room equipment.
But he didn't laugh, either, or even pretend that he wasn't about to laugh.
They drove on in silence for a while. It could have been an uneasy kind of silence, what with the weight of everything they still had to talk about, but they'd been through this before. They'd have it out, but just not now. For now, they could rest and know that they would have it out.
So, in a sick sort of way that someone who wasn't a Winchester might not understand, it was a comfortable silence.
At least it was comfortable until Sam sat up a little, his face pinched in consternation.
"Dude, I keep telling you not to get those gas station burritos, but do you ever listen?" Even though there was a definite nip in the air, Dean started rolling down the window.
"It's not that," Sam snapped. Great. He was already halfway into bitchy princess mode. "I was just thinking about what Bobby told us."
Dean grinned. "You mean about your mad research skills, Mr. Full Ride to Stanford?"
"Bite me. I was thinking about how he corrected us about Samhain." Dean noticed that Sam now pronounced it as if he'd been studying Celtic languages since he was twelve. "We said it the 'wrong' way in front of Castiel and Uri... Uriel. I can't remember for sure, but I think they might have said it the same way, too. At least, they didn't correct us."
"Your point being?"
"Maybe..." Sam hesitated, as if a little afraid of what he had to say. "Do you think Bobby had it wrong?"
For some reason, the thought of Bobby being wrong on this was as unsettling as the idea that Castiel had doubts. Dean shook his head with a confidence he didn't really feel. "Nah. Bobby wouldn't get something like that wrong. He'd have it cross-referenced six ways to Sunday, you know that."
"But the angels--"
Dean held up a finger. "Ah-ah-ah... Sammy, what did we learn about angels on this trip?"
Sam settled back in his seat. The pinched look faded from his face, and there might have been the hint of a smile. When he spoke, he was halfway to laughing. "That they're dicks?"
"Damn straight," Dean confirmed. He flashed a grin at his brother, then lowered his foot on the accelerator and let the Impala sing.
Things might not have been all better between them, but for the moment, everything felt just fine.
Series: Supernatural
Characters: Sam, Dean, implied Bobby
Word Count: Just shy of 2,500
Rating: PG13
Warnings: Language (in more ways than one). Many, many spoilers for Episode 4.07.
Notes: Something happened in this episode that sparked quite a bit of discussion on one of the boards I frequent. This story is my attempt to come to terms with that something (hence the spoiler warning). Many thanks to arliss and aishuu for beta reading.
Summary: What seems obvious isn't always true. When a post-hunt conversation takes an unexpected turn, the Winchesters learn this lesson the hard way.
Sam's head still felt like it was doing its best to turn into a Klein bottle, but that was the least of his problems. Dean stared at him for what felt like forever (the headache wasn't helping with the time perception) with an expression Sam really didn't want to categorize.
Fear. Disappointment. Despair. Anger. Grief. Loathing. The only acceptable answer would have been resignation, and even that...
Dean finally came into the chapel, his expression flickering briefly to a classic Dean-sneer as he glanced down at the former art teacher.
"Dean, I--"
"We'd better make tracks before those kids call the cops." Dean had on his best 'wrong? there's nothing wrong' face. Sam would have preferred anger. "I don't want to be the one to explain what the hell busted a bunch of corpses out of a mausoleum and put them to the torch."
Good, good... That meant they didn't have to worry about any other cleanup. Dean had done his job, and Sam...
Sam dabbed at the blood that had streamed from his nose. It felt like it had gone halfway down his chin. "Listen. About what just happened..."
Dean pulled a mostly clean paper napkin from his jacket. "Here. Wipe that off--looks like it's about to get in your mouth." He handed it over and headed back out of the mausoleum without looking back to see if Sam would follow.
Sam gave the napkin a suspicious sniff, scrubbed at the blood, then followed Dean outside. They were going to have this out. He'd had no other choice. It was worth the risk to use his powers. Yes, he'd said he would stop, but that was before twelve hundred people (and so many more after that) would have been pulled into a hell on earth.
He'd barely drawn breath to say 'we need to talk' when Dean flipped open his cell phone and held up a hand for silence. "Need to fill Bobby in, 'specially if we're another seal down." He shook his head in disgust. At what, Sam could only guess. Sam was standing close enough to hear the faint sound of ringing. "Remind me to ask our angel buddy how many we got left before... Yo, Bobby. Yeah, it's Dean."
Sam shook his head and scoffed. Buddy. Right. And just listen to Dean. He didn't sound like there was a damn thing wrong. Although, from the sharp look Sam got while Dean was listening to Bobby, it was clear that Dean was going to want to have that talk as well. Probably the minute they got back in the Impala, if Sam was any judge of things.
All at once, Sam didn't feel quite so eager to hash things out as he had just a few seconds ago.
"Haunted funeral home? Wow, that sounds like all kinds of suck. Yeah." Dean laughed, voice bitter but his face much more relaxed. "Well, that's a Happy Halloween for ya. Anyhow, we had something big go down here. Just wrapped it up."
They were clear of the graveyard now, and turned to head down the sidewalk, pausing only to let a pack of trick-or-treaters dash by. Even though he was paying attention to Bobby, Dean was cat-quick to light on a scrap of yellow and red. He barely even broke stride as he stooped to snatch up the fallen (and slightly trampled) Bit-O-Honey.
"Seriously--you're not going to eat that, are you?" Sam hissed.
Dean rolled his eyes and started working open the wrapper with his free hand. He had a chance to mouth 'wuss' before turning back to Bobby. Just like that, with the candy and the insults, it was as if things were normal again. "Yeah, yeah. We're good. We're both good. We aced the bad guy and got free with a few bruises and a bloody nose. What's not good is, it looks like we might be down another one of those seal things... Right. Least we sent the ugly fuck back down where it belongs. That's gotta count for something."
He finally managed to pry most of the wrapper away from the candy. "It was... huh? How'd we get rid of it?"
There was another sidelong look as things once more fell back from normal, but Dean said nothing more than a sharp, "Sam took care of it." There was a brief pause. Dean winced at whatever he heard, but recovered well enough. "He, uh, he had Ruby's knife with him. Right. That one."
Sam dropped back a pace, his mouth tightening into a line. He supposed he should be grateful that Dean wasn't going to throw him under the bus, but a fist to the jaw would have been better than this. As soon as they got back to the motel, they'd have this out even if it meant trashing the room and beating each other to a pulp.
"Anyhow it's over, and we managed to keep a town from getting all Sodom and Gommorrah'd off the map... Yup--you heard me. Castiel and a buddy of his--and let me tell you, angels can be real assholes, no lie--were ready to blast the whole place and everyone in it to atoms rather than risk this thing getting summoned." Dean popped the candy into his mouth, and his next words were a little garbled. "Yeah, a real big kahuna. Uh-huh. Sam found out its name and everything."
Dean glanced over his shoulder for confirmation. To Sam's surprise, he actually sounded a little proud as he told Bobby what they had just accomplished. "Apparently we just managed to ice Samhain."
The only reason Sam was able to understand what Dean had just said was that years of hard experience had taught him to decipher his brother's words when they were filtered through teeth stuck together with taffy, caramel, or--as in this case--stale Bit-O-Honey.
Bobby, on the other hand, was without the benefit of such experience. Dean scowled--clearly, he was being asked to speak up, or clarify, or stop mumbling like an idiot. "Samhain. You can't tell me you ain't heard of this dude."
Bobby was talking loud enough that Sam thought he heard something like 'can't understand a damned word you're saying.' In response Dean's voice grew louder and slower, but not any clearer.
"Here--let me talk to him." One long stride brought him even with Dean. He held out his hand for the phone, but Dean waved him off. Sam could practically hear the pop as Dean's teeth pulled free of the candy.
"Shit. I think I just lost a filling. Anyhow, it was Samhain." Again, it wasn't getting through, no matter that he was speaking perfectly clearly.
"Sam Hain," he repeated, this time breaking it up into two distinct syllables. Sam wished Dean wouldn't do that--the similarity to his own name was more distressing than he'd like to admit. "You know. S-A-M-H-A--"
Before Sam even had time to blink, Dean had cringed to about half his normal height and was holding the phone up and away from his ear as far as he could. Bobby was in full rant, and doing so loud enough that Sam could make out the word 'idjit.' In fact, he was able to make it out several times in quick succession.
A knot of passing trick-or-treaters paused in their rounds to enjoy the show. Sam was tempted to tell the little ingrates how close they'd come to being eaten.
"Hold on, hold on..." Dean eventually worked up the courage to bring the phone somewhere in the vicinity of his ear. "What's got you so worked up?" He blinked in confusion a few times. The look he was giving Sam had changed from a guilt-glare to a 'give me a hand, will ya?'
"Huh? Really? That's how it's pronounced? Well, shit." He laughed nervously, and Sam took a few steps back in case Dean did try to take him up on his earlier offer of talking this through with Bobby. Dean raised a hand to give him the finger, but caught sight of the trick-or-treaters and instead pointed at Sam in a 'I will so get you for this' manner.
"Well, Sam was the one who did all the research, and I guess he just pronounced it the way it's written..."
"You bastard!" Sam whispered. This earned him a sour-prunes look from a mother shepherding a trio of Disney Princesses. The first band of trick-or-treaters, who had been about to head off again, decided en masse to stay and watch the rest of the show.
There was another spate of barely coherent Singerian outrage. Dean listened. Eventually, Bobby had to pause for breath. "Right, right. 'Sow-an.' Never woulda guessed. Well, that's those crazy Celts for you. You can't really blame Sam for..." Dean winced and held the phone away for a second. It took Bobby a moment or two to calm down. As Dean listened, his expression began to change. "Uh-huh... Right... Reeeeeally?"
Dean went from looking like he was going under for the third time to being suffused with a malicious smugness that made Sam wish he could exorcise himself if it would only get him away from there.
"I see." Dean now spoke as much for Sam's benefit as Bobby's and reveled in every single bit of it. "So the pronunciation guide would have been right there on the very first page..."
His intentions had been good, but this lapse would never be forgotten.
"No! Really? The very first sentence?"
And quite possibly, never forgiven.
"Of the freaking Wikipedia entry?"
By now, Dean was cackling. Sam lunged for the phone and got a noogie to the gut for his trouble.
The trick-or-treaters cheered. Dean held up two fingers in a 'V for Victory' sign.
Things might have become truly ugly at that point, but Bobby still had a good head of pissed-off going and wasn't about to waste it.
Sam just stood back and listened, watching Dean's face contort in interesting ways as Bobby chewed him out for not calling for help before things got out of hand and they lost another seal and stupidly put the whole world another step closer to perdition. And so on.
When the trick-or-treaters started clamoring for Dean to put the cell-phone on 'speaker,' he didn't do a darned thing to stop them.
* * *
Back at the motel, Dean figured they were both owed a night off. His ear still felt blistered from Bobby's tirade and Sam seemed fine with putting things off a little longer. They needed cartoons, a bag of candy, and a meat-lover's pizza a bit more than a clearing of the air and a couple of blackened eyes.
The next day, they hit the road. Where to, Dean wasn't exactly sure yet, but as long as it was a reasonable distance from the fair town of Almost Became A Smoking Crater, that was fine by him.
It would be another day or two before they had a chance to talk things out, but Dean wasn't in any particular hurry to get to that point. For some reason, he had a feeling that once they did, something was going to come up about these flashes of memory that were not just slipping through the cracks, but creating more cracks as they did.
Plus, in addition to both of them getting raked over the coals by Bobby, they'd had the dubious pleasure of intense and not very comfortable heart-to-hearts, each with a different angel.
Sam had been less than happy to hear that the whole thing had been some kind of test. Dean didn't even want to know how Sam's increasingly shaky faith would be affected by the knowledge that angels could have doubts. It wasn't that Dean, well, put much faith in faith, but he had a suspicion it might be one of the few things that was going to keep Sam from really going off the rails.
As for Dean, he had been downright furious when Sam confessed that he'd been deemed both useful and expendable because of his freaky demon mojo. Sam must have been pretty shaken by it, because he didn't get bitchy about the blasphemy when Dean lit on the similarity between the name of a certain archangel and the name of a certain piece of men's room equipment.
But he didn't laugh, either, or even pretend that he wasn't about to laugh.
They drove on in silence for a while. It could have been an uneasy kind of silence, what with the weight of everything they still had to talk about, but they'd been through this before. They'd have it out, but just not now. For now, they could rest and know that they would have it out.
So, in a sick sort of way that someone who wasn't a Winchester might not understand, it was a comfortable silence.
At least it was comfortable until Sam sat up a little, his face pinched in consternation.
"Dude, I keep telling you not to get those gas station burritos, but do you ever listen?" Even though there was a definite nip in the air, Dean started rolling down the window.
"It's not that," Sam snapped. Great. He was already halfway into bitchy princess mode. "I was just thinking about what Bobby told us."
Dean grinned. "You mean about your mad research skills, Mr. Full Ride to Stanford?"
"Bite me. I was thinking about how he corrected us about Samhain." Dean noticed that Sam now pronounced it as if he'd been studying Celtic languages since he was twelve. "We said it the 'wrong' way in front of Castiel and Uri... Uriel. I can't remember for sure, but I think they might have said it the same way, too. At least, they didn't correct us."
"Your point being?"
"Maybe..." Sam hesitated, as if a little afraid of what he had to say. "Do you think Bobby had it wrong?"
For some reason, the thought of Bobby being wrong on this was as unsettling as the idea that Castiel had doubts. Dean shook his head with a confidence he didn't really feel. "Nah. Bobby wouldn't get something like that wrong. He'd have it cross-referenced six ways to Sunday, you know that."
"But the angels--"
Dean held up a finger. "Ah-ah-ah... Sammy, what did we learn about angels on this trip?"
Sam settled back in his seat. The pinched look faded from his face, and there might have been the hint of a smile. When he spoke, he was halfway to laughing. "That they're dicks?"
"Damn straight," Dean confirmed. He flashed a grin at his brother, then lowered his foot on the accelerator and let the Impala sing.
Things might not have been all better between them, but for the moment, everything felt just fine.