SPN fic: Homeward Bound By Proxy

[rokhal]

Done for ratherastory's comment meme, here, for the prompt below from shangrilada:

So Sam is having a really bad time with post-concussion crap and hallucinations and basically feeling overwhelmed and everything, and there's this little stray puppy that keeps crying at the door of Rufus's cabin. Naturally Sam starts leaving it food, but he discovers slowly how much the

Comments

[shangrilada]

!!!

THIS.
IS.
AMAZING.

Oh my God. LUCIFER. He's PERFECT. Sam slamming his funny bone to get rid of him seriously made my stomach hurt in the best way. This whole thing is just...gah. You NAILED the voices, and...wow. Thank you. Thank you so much.

[rokhal]

Thank you for prompting puppy!fic!

I'm sorry about the funny bone thing. I kind of imagine Sam having all these bizarre ticks develop, and he's all, "no, seriously, I'm not hearing voices anymore, I'm just incredibly clumsy. People accidentally stab themselves with forks sometimes, right?"

[shangrilada]

no, it was SO good. SO GOOD.

[rokhal]

Yaaaaay!

[greeneyes_fan]

Yay DOGGY! And poor broken!Sam.

And, the code-breaking stuff is creepy. (Although with a pocket calculator, that would only take about five minutes. In an hour I could do it by hand. Possibly without paper.)

[rokhal]

Glad you liked it!

I stole the code-breaking idea from "Harry Potter and the Principles of Rationality." I'm glad it worked, though! (Even though "what can't I possibly do in my head" isn't the best barometer for hard math.)

[greeneyes_fan]

Yeah, I'm a working number theorist. I independently discovered the optimal prime factorization algorithm while in middle school.

I might not be the best barometer either, though from another direction.

If they were three-digit primes, though, then it would be too hard for me in any reasonable time span. And 20-digit primes are too hard for computers.

[rokhal]

You meet the most awesome people in fandom.

That Harry Potter fanfic did the trick with three-digit primes (Harry was seeing if he could create stable time loops to perform tedious tasks with no effort, and I think the test case was probably using your algorithm), but I thought I was pushing it enough for Sam to remember the mechanism behind the code, and just left Dean to pick primes out of the gaps in the multiplication table.

[honeylocusttree]

Very fab! The thing I took away from this most of all is the fact that Sam never, ever gets a moment's respite. Ever. It was starting to grate on me and I was just reading about it. Eesh.

Really well-envisioned.

[rokhal]

Thank-you so much! There was just this dog, and then this prompt, and I had to do it.

Yeah, Sam's life really sucks. I think this is the sanest he's been in years, though, now that he doesn't have the Apocalypse on his shoulders, or his soul detached, or his mind fried on performance-enhancing drugs. At least now, the unfathomable horrors he's trying to ignore are just in his past . . .

You are so right.

[mentholpixie]

Ooh, I love! Especially that ending. Creepy.

[rokhal]

Thank-you so much!

I'm glad the ending worked; I'd been thinking about scrapping it.

[rokhal]

Thank-you!