Blow 1/1
Blow
Rating: R, Gen
Characters: Sam, Plastic!Dean
Disclaimer: The characters are sadly not mine. I’m just sticking pins into Winchester dolls for the purposes of general amusement. Sorry about the holes! Wow. For once this statement is scarily apt.
Word Count: 9,868
A/N: Crack - Bodyswap. Would you like angst with that?
Blame this on a long, slow, rush hour. I was driving mindlessly along to work when I looked over to see someone thing smirking plastically back at me from the passenger seat of a Volvo speeding past me in the T2 transit lane. As the driver smugly flipped me the bird I realised that the source of his contentment wasn’t just the fact that he was avoiding (albeit illegally) a traffic fine. Naturally my mind turned to Winchesters… and lo, there was crack.
Thanks to noirbabalon for the awesome beta (even if she does prefer her crack without angst)
Setting: The middle of rural Arkansas, December 2007 Yeah, I know. Should have been Florida, right? If it had been Florida Dean would have been more on guard, and this never would have happened. Ain’t life a bitch?
Summary: The one where Dean turns into a blow-up doll.
There are some things you should never have to learn about your brother.
SHAKE
It wasn’t a long drawn-out process full of subtle shifts as the universe gradually realigned itself into a much stranger configuration. Considering the magnitude of the event, it should have been.
It was nothing like that. One minute Sam was listening to the sound of his brother’s boots crunching over the broken asphalt on his way back to the car while he finished taking his own leak on the side of a frosty back road in Arkansas at 4 am, two minutes later everything had changed.
He’d been concentrating on the fact that he seemed to be freezing parts of his anatomy off that he wasn’t happy flashing in public after the age of two. Never mind what Dean said about no one else in their right mind being out this early on a December morning, even in farming country. The whole uncomfortable process was made that much harder by Dean yelling at him to, ‘Stop jiggling up and down like a hyperactive teabag, and make sure you point that thing downwind of my baby, or I swear I’ll…’
Thankfully doing the final shake, tuck, and zip, Sam turned around ready to launch into a scathing reminder of what life had been like driving with Dean after he’d got food poisoning from a bad burrito in Humboldt last month-Iowa was never going to be known for its Mexican cuisine.
Sam only just managed to get his brother’s name out before his world got even weirder than was usual for the Brothers Winchester.
Dean was gone.
Correction. His Dean was gone. What remained was one of those irritating gag gift inflatable plastic dolls sitting happily ensconced in the driver’s seat. Dean’s seat.
Dean had disappeared, and whoever had taken him had decided rub in the fact of the abduction… murder? Please God, no.
There wasn’t a trace of sulphur anywhere around the car. Sam did a second sweep to make sure before he dug Dean’s EMF reader out of the trunk and moved in to test the stand-in.
What he got was nothing more than standard low-level red pulses that indicated the usual background electricity from the car’s still rumbling engine. Sam tied not to flinch as he reached through the open window and past the intruder to flip the key to off. The display hiccuped briefly into a short series of green lights before going blank as Sam pulled himself back out of the car, which was odd because the lights never went green, but the whole situation was…
‘A VISION right about now would be nice!’ Sam screamed helplessly up into the lightening sky.
The sky stared mutely back. A few radically inclined leaden pewter clouds might have pulsed sullenly a bit, as if to shrug and say, ‘Not us, dude.’ But then again, they probably used that excuse on everyone.
The doll was apparently capable of doing its fair share of staring too.
It looked strangely reproachful from its ungainly position flat on its back on the gravel roadside a few feet from the Impala. Sam hadn’t meant to take it out on the doll. After all, it wasn’t its fault it was being used as part of someone or something’s warped sense of revenge and humour.
To put it simply, Sam hadn’t been able to stand to seeing it sitting there pretending to be Dean a moment longer. And maybe he had been a tad rough as he pulled it right through the window, out of the car and threw it as hard as he could away from him.
Here’s one thing you quickly find out about blow-up dolls, they may be unwieldy, but they weigh almost nothing, so you can’t throw them far for shit unless you happen to catch a gust of wind just right.
Today was dead calm, weatherwise-broody, uninformative clouds notwithstanding-and Sam was stuck with a doll that was still too close for comfort, lying there on the ground. Looking up at him. Looking at him as if he twirled kittens around his head for cheap thrills. As if he was tall, and mean, and mad as Hell.
Which he was.
Except for the mean bit. He wasn’t mean to kids, or little old ladies, or teenagers who listened to worse music than Dean, or women, or guys, or pretty much anyone he’d ever met. He was only mean to monsters, and demons, and things that stole his brother from him! But definitely not to fluffy kittens.
Okay, two out of three wasn’t bad.
He was still tall though. Really, really, tall in a way that always made him bite back a grin even when he had to duck his head to get through a doorway that Dean just sailed on through. Tall was the only race he’d ever beaten his brother in. Dean…
He was still mad though. Really, really, mad.
The doll had a smirk. Sam was sure blow-up dolls didn’t come equipped with a wide range of facial expressions. Of course, Sam hadn’t ever had a doll before. Possibly Dean was a top of the range model.
Nonononono! It wasn’t Dean. It was plastic. It wasn’t Dean. He had to call it something else…
No. It was a doll. Dolls didn’t need names. If Sam still hadn’t been being mean feeling mad he might have blushed because, boy would Dean have ribbed him good for being such a complete chick.
It was a doll. He had a doll. I am a girl. ‘Shit.’
It was a… dummy, stick with dummy. It was a dummy.
It was a dummy and it was lying there in the middle of the road, which counted as littering. Besides, the next car along would drive right over the top of it and…
It was a dummy. It can’t get hurt.
It can’t feel pain.
It doesn’t have feelings.
It was a dummy, and it was wearing his brother’s clothes.
It was … evidence.
It was a dummy, and it looked exactly like Dean.
The dummy had eyes as well as a smirk. Big, moss-green eyes surrounded with long soft lashes that…
Um. The dummy had these stupid round flat eyes with silly stubby, completely artificial-looking, painted-on lines that didn’t look real at all. And it definitely didn’t look like Dean.
And those fake eyes? Wouldn’t. Stop. Looking. At. Him.
‘Stop that!’
Sam didn’t have any choice in the matter. He had a dummy, and he was stuck with it until he got his brother back.
Despite what Dean always said, Sam was practical, organised and above all else, sensible. His last name wasn’t Winchester for nothing.
There was only one sensible thing to do. With the dummy.
Which didn’t explain why Sam ended up driving off thirty-two minutes later with the dummy back in the front seat.
He’d tried. God help him, he’d tried.
He’d opened the trunk, moved their tote bags around, and with a bit of swearing, and shoving, and bending-luckily the dummy was very flexible-he had the dummy safely tucked away.
It only took him three goes to shut the trunk. The first time he got it half way down. Then he got a glimpse of one of those flat eyes-the left one-staring out at him from under its contorted arms. He ignored it, continued to shut the trunk, paused with two inches left to go, and bent down to peer through the gap. He could still see the eye. He shut the trunk and stayed crouched beside the bumper for far too long. He opened the trunk again, just a tiny crack, and couldn’t help squinting into the darkness. Those eyes were plastic, they certainly weren’t capable of reflecting light, or looking really annoyed. He shut the trunk.
He lasted three minutes.
The back seat was a much better idea. More sensible. Lots of space for the dummy to lie there. It wasn’t squished up and getting ugly creases in the plastic. It was all good, even better when he didn’t look the dummy in the eyes.
But if he had to stop suddenly the dummy would…
Sitting up was better. Certainly the dummy looked a little brighter right side up. And there was the added advantage that it could spot trouble coming and brace itself if it had to.
Oh. Maybe not.
Hah! Seatbelts. Jammed down deep in the gap between the back and seat cushions. Not used since they were kids, and hardly then, regardless of any safety advertising from the AAA. Although Sammy had always started out trips being firmly buckled in by his elder brother, it never lasted long. The seatbelts always ended up getting in the way when they had food fights. Then there was that time that Dean Superglued a set of police issue handcuffs to… Dad had been pissed.
That was better. Totally sensible, and safe, and normal. The dummy was upright in the back seat, situated diagonally back from where Sam was. He could check on it easily. It had a good view. It was buckled in, protected in case of an accident. It could look around, and see where they were going. It didn’t have any need at all to sit there looking pissed.
Maybe it didn’t like seatbelts. Dean didn’t like them either. Said seatbelts were for pussies. Dean was an idiot.
Sam didn’t feel right sitting all alone in the front seat.
The passenger seat was a compromise. The seatbelt wasn’t.
If he’d been crazy, Sam would have sworn that the dummy’s eyes were slightly narrower now, as they focused on the steering wheel.
‘No way!’
A bump in the road was the only explanation for the way the dummy’s arms ended folded up over each other huffily and its head tipped sideways to leave it staring out the window and totally ignoring Sam.
Sam did his best to ignore the dummy too.
It was much harder to stop talking to it.
Backtracking was the logical thing to do. Somewhere, somehow, recently Dean had got something’s attention, and not in his usual ‘Hey, why don’t you write your number on my bar napkin?’ way. Warren had been their last stop en route to a tracking down a zombie in Thibodeaux, Louisiana, which could damn well keep working its way through the locals until after he saved Dean.
Sam got a room for two. The same room they’d had the last time. Luckily Battersby’s Come On Inn was the seediest and least popular motel in town and the owner was too desperate for business to even query why a customer would come back, let alone ask what was it about that room that was the big attraction. Sam was glad he didn’t have to go kick anyone else out of those particular beds, not that he wouldn’t have done it, even if it was mean. Because for Dean? Sam could be mean forever.
The owner also didn’t say a word as Sam carefully picked up the dummy he’d left leaning next to him against the counter, tucked it back under his arm, lifted his chin stoically, and walked off towards the dubious sanctuary that was Room 6.
Sam didn’t care if Battersby’s was the kind of place that everyone brought their toys to, that kind of discretion was going to earn the guy a big tip on Abba Björnsen‘s credit card when he and Dean left.
He was going to get Dean back. There was no doubt in his mind. No doubt at all.
It didn’t matter where Sam put it; the dummy’s eyes followed him.
After fifteen minutes of visual stalking Sam put the dummy in the bathroom.
After five minutes… okay, two, he felt guilty.
After ten he stood up, got it out of the bathroom and arranged it neatly on the second bed, thankful that it wasn’t a girl doll because despite what Dean said about him being a chick, even Sam drew the line at fluffing skirts. Then he spent a long time in the bathroom with the door shut.
Bobby wasn’t much help, and the bathroom was too small to pace successfully.
Sam peeked through the door at the dummy. It stared glumly back. Sam was glad he was a guy; dolls were scary, he hated to think what life could have been like growing up as Samantha Winchester trying to play with a Barbie on the backseat of the Impala.
‘I don’t know, Bobby! It’s been days since the last job, and that was just an amped up poltergeist. We haven’t done anything that could explain this.’
‘Is there anything abnormal about the … doll?’ Bobby sounded amazingly composed, if justifiably worried. A Winchester disappearing was never a good omen. That hadn’t stopped him laughing himself sick the second Sam told him he had a doll with him.
‘No. It’s just the kind of thing you’d get at a sex store. Nothing unusual about it, except for the fact that it’s wearing Dean’s clothes!’ Sam was trying to whisper, but the more upset he got, the louder he got. Which was just wrong, because Dean was the loud one. They’d come to an arrangement when Sam was thirteen. Dean got to be loud, Sam got to be emotional. They traded off occasionally, but on the whole it worked extremely well.
‘If the clothes are the problem, just get it a different … outfit,’ Bobby snickered sensibly.
‘I’m not Miss Congeniality and this isn’t dress up Sally time!’ Sam shouted louder than he’d meant to. The whole doll thing was starting to get to him.
Bobby changed the topic quickly. ‘What about Dean? He hook up with anyone on the way through? Piss someone off? Someone with enough powers to pull a switch while your back was turned?’
‘No, he didn’t! We were only here overnight. Got … burgers at the diner, and beers at the bar. Dean… he… he had more than me, but he wasn’t plastered. Beat a guy at darts, earned a few bucks, but we… we were taking it easy. No scams. Everyone left happy…’ Sam couldn’t stop himself crying. Dean was gone and suddenly he felt like he was three again and Dad and Dean were off in another room, and he was alone…
‘We… we crashed here, got up late, left the next afternoon. Then we… were just driving, stopped, took a leak, and he… was gone! It only took a minute and he was… gone!’
Sam collapsed down against the doorframe as he listened to Bobby’s brusque voice saying calm, coherent, things off in the distance. He finally managed to stammer out the few details he did have so that Bobby could start the research at his end.
‘We… I’ll… get online, see what I can find. I… I’ll call you back on the half hour, okay? Every hour… until we… I… we fix this.’
The tiles were cool and hard, and it didn’t matter that they started to hurt before too long. He just sat there, knees tucked up under his chin, staring blankly out into the bedroom.
A gust of wind must have come through the open window at some stage because the dummy had been blown off the bed and was flat on its face on the dirty motel shagpile with both arms outstretched towards him.
It looked like it had been trying to get to Sam.
RATTLE
It shouldn’t have made Sam feel better, but it did. How pitiful did that make him? Wishing there was some weird connection between the dummy and his brother, believing even for a second that it had wanted to comfort him.
‘Snap out of it, Sam,’ he told himself, trying to Dean himself into some commonsense.
He did the right thing. He picked the doll up, fully intending to place it back out of the way on the second bed. Dean’s bed… Closest to the door. Between Sam and danger. Always.
‘You’re not Dean! You’re just some sick fuck’s joke on a Winchester!’ He had one hand twisted into Dean’s shirt, the other around the doll’s fragile neck, slamming it into the wall over and over, not caring that he’d somehow ripped open the faded khaki henley in his rage.
Sam wasn’t normally the sort of person who would yell at a doll, but having it right there in front of him just made him crazy. It wasn’t Dean…
‘Stop looking at me!’
It was just letting him punish it. Silent. Amulet bedecked. Plastic. Stupid cheap-looking Goth chick tattoo on its shoulder that didn’t show how much blood and pain had gone into its creation. How every hour through that long night while Bobby read endless incantations over them both, another layer of protections had been bound down until those symbols soaked invisibly through his skin to become a part of Dean. Hours of listening to Dean complain to Bobby that it wasn’t macho enough for a Winchester and why couldn’t they get matching flaming skulls?
Just a doll made up to look like his brother. That’s all it was. A plastic inflatable doll, and it shouldn’t hurt this much.
‘You’re not my brother!’ Throwing it into a twisted heap on the bed didn’t help the rage either, though it did prove that the doll company was good at making a really flexible product.
Tattooed…
Just like Sam. Just like Dean.
Tattooed…
‘D…Dddee...?’
‘Awww, Dean.’
The essence of Dean seemed to be seeping through the plastic the longer Sam sat there beside it, and properly looked at it… him… Fuck.
‘It’s really you, isn’t it? You’re not just a dummy-a plastic changeling-that they left for a joke? You’re really… you.’
If the doll… Dean could have rolled it’s… his eyes, he would have.
It was Dean.
His brother was a doll. A plastic blow-up doll.
Plastic!Dean.
‘Dude, this is just so… wrong.’
Dean somehow slipped sideways down the headboard and came crashing into Sam. Sam assumed it was Dean’s way of whacking him up the back of the head. Plastic or not, some things never changed.
‘What are we going to do?’ We. There were two of them again. He wasn’t alone. He had Dean back. Hadn’t really lost him all this time. He’d been here all along. Sam had never been so glad to have a doll in his entire life.
Uh. ‘Sorry about throwing you out onto the road.’
Silence.
‘I wouldn’t have let anything run over it… you. Not really. I’m not mean. Don’t look at me like that. I wouldn’t have!’
Damn it, Dean.
‘Really, I would have got you out of the way in time if anything had come through.’
Sam ducked his head; he couldn’t take the reproachful look he was getting. Who knew that a Dean doll could make him feel so guilty? Sam didn’t know whether that was more of a doll thing or a big brother thing. ‘And the trunk. I’m sorry for that. And for the backseat.’
‘Okay, and for the freaking seatbelt, okay?’
Uh. Definitely not okay. Doll Dean was better at holding grudges than the original, almost as good as Sam.
‘But I’m not sorry I didn’t leave you behind the wheel of your metal baby!’ Sam was all for civil liberties but he didn’t think America was ready to hand out driver’s licences to blow-up dolls just yet.
Plastic!Dean let out a resigned, if definitely still irritated, huff of breath.
Dolls didn’t breathe. Air. Air… escaping.
Bad sign. Really, bad sign.
‘Don’t breathe. I mean, hold your breath. Stick your finger in the dyke till I get back. Whatever you do, just don’t move!’
Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit. Where the fuck was it?
‘Could it hurt you to just put everything back in its place after every hunt? Oh no. “Stuff it; we’ll sort it later. Let’s go get a beer, Sammy. Find some action. Man, I’m pumped.” Huh!’ Captain Adrenaline.
Guns. Knives. Salt. Salt. Salt. ‘Dreamcatcher.’ Can’t believe he kept that. Made it for him when I was like twelve, for God’s sake. Explosives, machete, holy water… Why don’t we have a doll repair kit? We’ve got everything else in here.
‘Found it!’ he cried as he dashed back inside to jump onto the bed and straddle a slightly limp Dean.
‘Where? Where? Where? Can’t see… Got to be leaking somewhere. Goddamnit!’ He flipped Dean over, trying to track down the exit wound by the tiny whistle of air seeping out. ‘Give me a sign! X marks the spot-I don’t care; just let me find it in t…’
‘Gotcha!’
Sam slapped a strip of duct tape over the hole in the back of Dean’s neck. ‘It’s like I always told you when I was a kid, Dean. MacGyver knows everything.’
‘It’s okay. I hear it happens to everyone once, Dean.’ Heh. Okay, maybe not the most sensitive thing he could have said, but? Honestly? Sam didn’t often get an opportunity to mock Dean back. Of course he was going to take the shot. Dean would have…
Dean would have if he hadn’t been busy looking humiliated, a few inches shorter, and more noticeably bow-legged. Regardless of the fact that Dean made a very pretty, short, doll, possibly now wasn’t the best time to tell his brother that.
‘I’m sorry I threw you against the wall and…’ Ruptured your integrity? ‘Holed you. I’ll be more careful in future. I just have to remember that you’re kinda fragile right now.’
Dean’s flat, and all too expressive, eyes looked insulted.
It was probably best to change the topic just a bit. ‘Wanna beer?’ Fuck. Wrong thing to say. Having a plastic brother was confusing. Sam knew he wasn’t going to find a textbook out there that would teach him how to handle this situation.
‘Sorry, Dean. Forgot for a second.’ Forgot you weren’t real any more. Forgot you were just a plastic membrane filled with air, and not blood and flesh and bone and Winchester anymore.
‘Air. Damn. I stopped the leak, but we’re going to have to get you…’ Blown up? ‘Reinflated.’
Dean looked worried.
‘We need to get you a pump.’
Extremely worried. But still short.
There was no way he could leave his brother on his own while he went doll accessory shopping. Dean was totally defenceless like this. He couldn’t hold a gun or a knife, or even lace up his boots. What was he going to do if a demon turned up? Stare them straight back to Hell?
Besides, what would the maid say?
Come on, …’ Dean? It was right. It just felt weird saying that to a doll. Plastic!Dean? PD? Doll!Dean? Hell with it, it was still Dean, he was just a little… Epidermically compromised? Materially challenged? Not all there? Shit, there was no politically correct way around it. He was plastic, but there was no point hurting his feelings by rubbing that fact in. ‘Come on, Dean. I’m taking you to get fixed… I mean I’m going to get you fixed right up.’
Dean looked frightened, then doubtful. That was a lot of expression for a doll.
Getting Dean out of the motel room for their shopping trip turned out to be even harder than checking in had been.
For an ugly, disastrously fruit-themed, and formerly almost empty motel, it was suddenly teeming with guests. Lots of guests, lots of gob-smacked, nosey, milling around with nothing better to do, and unfortunately not at all blind, guests.
Oh, God.
‘Smile, Dean,’ Sam hissed as quietly as he could.
Not quietly enough.
Sam glared down from a moral high point at his new neighbours from Hell.
Just me and my doll. Nothing to see here. These aren’t the droids you are looking for.
Alas, Sam’s putative abilities weren’t worth squat when the doll chips were down.
Sam blamed the evil that was the holiday season.
Christmas weddings were bad. Very bad.
Hen’s nights were bad. Very, very, bad.
A bunch of drunk, pretty in pink satin, bunny rabbit-ear wearing, flirtatious, doll-loving, girls tottering unsteadily in circles around their Mary Kay convertible was worse. Much, much, worse.
‘I’m sorry, Dean. I got you back as soon as I could. How was I to know that they’d be so quick, and determined, feisty, and prepared to fight dirty if they had to?’
‘Being kidnapped to be mascot isn’t necessarily a bad thing, Dean.’
Those girls were good.
‘No, I didn’t know they could run so fast in high heels, all right?’
‘It was only forty-five minutes, Dean.’
‘Yeah, I know it probably seemed longer to you.’
‘I’m sorry about the bunny ears.’ Not going to tell him how awesome that sight was.
‘Look at it this way, you’ve always told me you were a chick-magnet. This just proves you’ve still got it.’
‘Dean?’
‘Dean?’
Dolls clearly had masculinity issues. Dean evidently had more than most.
Sam left Dean sitting safely in the passenger seat as he charged towards the gas station, there was no way he was going to get lucky twice and get an attendant who’d be blasé about a customer lugging an adult-sized doll up and down the aisles, and it was only going to take him a… He turned around, grabbed Dean under his left arm, and ran back inside. Fuck the attendant.
A tiny voice in his head said approvingly ‘That’s better. Can’t leave him alone, look what happened last time.’ Besides, it was a very hot day and Sam had a feeling that blow-up dolls weren’t manufactured to have a high tolerance to heat.
Bicycle pumps took forever.
And Sam wasn’t even going into how embarrassing it had been for him to have to get Dean naked to find his valve. He might be plastic, but he was still his brother, and it felt like he was taking advantage because he certainly didn’t have informed consent. When it turned out that Dean was an anatomically correct full-sized-okay, well above average… oh all right, hung like a… Whoa! Just for a minute Dean had been right there in his head. Weird. Anyway, Dean-neither of the Deans, uh either of the… Fuck. Dean- had nothing to be ashamed of even if that was the only other race Sam happened to be a natural winner in. Oh God. Now Sam felt more like a pervert than ever. Some days it didn’t pay to be a Winchester.
Just finish the job, Sam. He had to concentrate on fixing Dean; then work on getting him back. For real.
‘Sorry, Dean.’
Sam wished Dean could talk, and wasn’t that ironic after all the years he spent growing up praying for Dean to be a little less verbal? If he could just hear him now, this might be easier. Dean would have known what to say. Though, undoubtedly if Dean had been able to speak he’d have spent the entire time cracking obscene jokes. Sam knew his brother, and there was no way he wasn’t mentally asking, ‘Was it good for you too, baby?’ as Sam disconnected the pump and resealed Dean’s valve. Sometimes Sam thought Dean was still eight years old. Today he wouldn’t have minded hearing that voice.
Sam swore that after he’d managed to change Dean back, they were both getting drunk for a week, and with a bit of luck they’d be able to blot out this entire warped experience.
Failing that, he was so booking them in for a joint therapy session. Maybe they could tell the psychiatrist the doll thing was a dream. Sam knew that dream therapy was still big in California. Thank goodness for the Freudians.
ROLL
Knowing it was Dean, and being able to explain it to someone else, even if that someone was Bobby-especially to Bobby-were two entirely different things.
Belief was strange, not that Sam needed to have taken that extra philosophy class to know that. James had it right; it was all about will, though Nietzsche probably put it better when he called it the “good dumb will to believe.”
Sam wanted-needed-to believe that this was Dean. Had he only convinced himself that this was Dean? No, that was wrong, he knew it was true. This was his brother. Once he’d made the mental leap and recognised his brother it explained everything. Uh, except for who or what had managed to de… reconstruct Dean. Telling Bobby that Dean was plastic, however, almost made him doubt himself again, until he looked across at Dean, and was reassured to see his brother staring back at him.
Still, Sam couldn’t help but think that a walking, talking, Dean doll might have given them an advantage, been able to tell them who’d done this to him and speeded up the process of Sam finding and killing whoever it was. Preferably before he had to blow Dean up again.
‘It’s Dean? The doll? Dean’s a… sex toy?’ Bobby sounded stunned.
Sam was just glad he hadn’t laughed or muttered anything sarcastic about cosmic justice or Malibu Ken. Though Ken would have been a lot easier to carry around than the blow-up version of Dean. Sam was sure Ken came with a leather jacket as an optional extra.
Dean was definitely looking insulted at the possibility that he’d ever be turned into anything less than something hot.
Okay, not a Ken doll then.
Sam was frightened at how easy he was finding it to read the minute differences in Dean’s expressions. He didn’t know if it was just the way the mid-afternoon sunlight bounced off Dean’s plastic exterior or if he was simply getting better with practice.
Problem was-Sam? Well, he was having trouble with the concept of having to be the Winchester family interpreter. It wasn’t like Dean could speak, or use sign language to communicate anything even remotely useful in this situation other than the fact that he was supremely pissed off at not being human. Sam had only just managed to stop himself from asking Dean to blink once for yes, and twice for no.
Yes, Sam seemed to have a slight idea of what Dean was feeling. No, it wasn’t helping them fix this.
‘You’re sure?’ Bobby finally said quietly.
Sam shrugged helplessly, what more could he say? That it explained why Dean’s pet EMF turned magically green for him? Got a warranty sticker on the sole of his left foot that says he’s guaranteed for twelve months of normal handling? Too much information? Maybe he should stick with the basics? His brother was a lewd inflatable novelty item. That Sam still loved him and wanted him back. ‘Yeah, Bobby. Dean’s a sex toy.’
And he’s still Dean.
Bobby may have had some strong misgivings, which he expressed pithily as only he could. But Sam wasn’t letting anything get in the way of his intention to get Dean changed back as soon as humanly or supernaturally possible.
Once Sam’s total certainty eventually wore Bobby down, he switched instantly into research mode, firing a number of increasingly awkward questions at Sam.
‘No, I already checked. No workers from adult toy companies using magic to become a reverse Gepetto.’ Some of the search terms he’d used for the research had landed him in sites that were much worse than BustyAsianBeauties.com. Sam reminded himself to clear his browser history when this was all over. He didn’t need Dean corrupting the laptop any more than he did already.
‘Ditto for any angry anti-sex toy campaigners active locally. No signs anyone is turning people into dolls. Apart from some Civil War soldiers that are supposed to haunt Mark’s Mill, there isn’t anything in this region except for a lot of pink tomatoes. Was that what you had in mind when you asked about weird stuff?’ So Sam was getting a little snarky, a little more Dean, but who could blame him?
Bobby swore comprehensively. In Latin. ‘Couldn’t find anything from my end either. No unusual disappearances reported on your route apart from…’
Dean.
‘To all accounts the weirdest thing in town is the annual tomato festival.’
‘If Dean had been turned into a giant pink tomato we’d be onto something. We haven’t got anything,’ Sam said despairingly. ‘This is Arkansas not Louisiana. It’s farm country, not exactly a hotbed of supernatural activity.’
Dean was looking like he wished he could object. Sam knew that under that plastic coating, somewhere deep down Dean was swearing about apples, Burkitsville, and appearances being fucking deceptive. Dean had a point. At least in Indiana they’d had a pattern; signs that pointed towards ritual sacrifice. Here they just had Dean.
‘We need to find out what Dean knows,’ Bobby said when they’d finally exhausted all the unusual suspects. ‘There must have been some trigger, something that he’d remember. That he saw. Can he see?’
‘Of course he can see!’ Sam said, heroically sticking up for his doll’s abilities.
‘Well, did he see anything?’
Sam looked at his brother sitting slightly slumped over in the chair Sam had carefully placed right next to his own. Just because he was a doll, there was no reason for Sam to exclude him from the joint discussion.
Dean’s face was blanker than usual.
‘No, nothing germane to the problem.’
For a moment Sam was sure that Dean’s incredibly girlish, “Come on, you know you want me,” pink and plastic lips curled in disgust. ‘I mean, nope, Dean knows fuck all.’
‘Sam?’ Bobby’s voice had a peculiar edge to it.
‘What? Trust me. That’s what he’d say if he could.’ It was what Dean was saying to Sam.
‘Something else you want to tell me here? About how sure you are about what Dean’s thinking?’
No.
Bobby coughed uncomfortably. ‘Is this a… psychic thing?’
Oh, God. ‘No, it’s more a Dean and Sam thing,’ Sam said soberly.
‘Dunno why I should be so surprised. Apart from college you boys never spent more than a few days apart in your entire lives. You probably don’t realise it, but, Hell, a lot of the time the two of you end up saying the same thing at the same time. Almost like twins.’
Brothers. That wasn’t the half of it, but now wasn’t the time or place for Sam to go into how close he and Dean had become since Jericho.
‘Yeah, well, Dean always could read me like a book too. Just didn’t need to most of the time.’
Not some damned bookworm.
Sam surely wasn’t imagining the slight groove in the plastic that appeared momentarily between Dean’s scarily Piaf-like painted-on eyebrows.
Books aren’t hot. I’m…
Yup, really was Dean.
Sammy likes books. Sammy’s not hot like…
The longer they were in this situation, the closer Sam seemed to feel as if he was getting inside Dean’s head. That scared Sam almost as much as Dean being plastic.
Freak.
A lot closer. You’re a freak, jerk.
I am not… Shit.
‘Shit.’
‘Sam? You still with me?’
‘Yeah, sorry, Bobby. Just…’ Not really hearing him am I? I’m just imagining what he’d say if he could talk to me. I’m just… ‘…talking with Dean.’
Holy shit!
Christ, was that him or me?
Duh!
‘Sam? I don’t need to know the details, for now, but are you listening hard enough for him to tell you what, if anything, he remembers about what happened then?’
‘Uh. Gimme a second.’
Sam didn’t bother putting his hand over his cell’s microphone. ‘Dean? Did you insult any of the tomato people when I wasn’t looking?’
Dean didn’t bother answering, aloud anyway.
‘Dean said, “Not even the round, red, fugly ones.” At least I think that’s what he meant.’
Possibly not a good first question. So, maybe there was a part of Sam that was scared about putting this to a real test. Part of him couldn’t believe he was sitting there having a conversation with a doll.
‘I’m trying, Bobby!’ Sam was slumped cross-legged on the floor in front of Dean. ‘I’ve been asking all afternoon. I know he’s in there, but nothing’s coming through. Nothing useful anyway.’
‘So what are you getting?’ Bobby asked shortly.
‘It’s stupid. If I didn’t know it was Dean, I’d think I was imagining it.’
‘Sam.’
God, Bobby could sound frighteningly like Dad at times. Sam leaned forward and rested his head on Dean’s squishy lap, doing his best to ignore the sounds of the plastic squelching underneath him. Need you back, Dean. Call me emo as much as you like, but I’m all dolled out.
One of Dean’s hands somehow flopped softly onto his head as Sam turned his face sideways breathing in the smell of leather and denim; something uniquely Dean underlaid with a faint hint of chlorine that made him think of school swimming pools and… plastic. ‘Dean. Oh, Jesus.’
‘Sam? Tell me you didn’t break Dean?’
Sam lifted his head up from under Dean’s hand and picked up his phone again. ‘Sorry, Bobby. We’re okay… we’re dealing, all right? It’s not as clear as before, I don’t know why; I’m just getting fragments. None of them make any sense.’
‘I don’t need to be a Pitman expert to take it down, Sam. Shoot. Tell me everything you got. Then we can start on working it all out. He’s bound to be trying to give you a clue.’
‘Uh, some stuff about coffee, and cherry pie.’
‘You’re right. It is Dean.’ Bobby was obviously too worn out to even sound surprised by now. ‘But that’s just Dean being Dean. What else ya got?’
Sam scratched the back of his head. ‘It sounds stupid. Sometimes he’s singing.’
‘Singing what?’
‘Hey, girl, stop what you're doin'!
Hey, girl…’
Sam let his voice trail off, because he wasn’t drunk enough to sing, even in front of Dean, not with Bobby listening in. Though if all else failed he could finally take Dean to Vegas; a psychic singing doll was sure to be a hit. The Sam and Dean Show.
The Dean and Sam Show, Bitch.
‘Do you suppose he’s bored?’ Bobby asked puzzled.
No, just plastic. ‘Nah, I think it means something. But Dean’s always had this weird-ass musical memory, and all I’m getting is that one line. I wish I could remember what it was from. It’s not like I haven’t heard him sing everything a million times over the years.’
‘Did you look it up, ya idjut?’ Bobby sounded tired, and irritated. Just like always.
‘Um.’ No? ‘Damn it.’ Sam pulled the laptop back across the vine-bedecked carpet towards him. ‘Lyrics… rock music… Hey, girl…’ Oh.
‘Bobby? He wasn’t bored.’
‘I’m growing older here, Sam. Tell me already.’
‘Led Zeppelin. Communication breakdown.’
‘Guess our boy’s making a statement,’ Bobby said calmly. Luckily he didn’t bother to comment on Sam’s inability to stay in tune.
Possibly Dean could do a solo show?
‘Well, we know he’s trying to tell you something. Give me the rest.’
‘The rest makes even less sense. I hear his name, and I keep getting flashes of random letters.’
‘Letters?’
‘Coloured wooden blocks with letters on, like they give to babies. That’s all. Letters. Black, white, and yellow. And I hear him saying his name.’
‘You’re right. Nothing that will tell us anything. But if you get any more of those letters take note of them. It might be an anagram. Or it could be…’
Sam was glad Bobby didn’t bother to finish the sentence. Neither of them wanted to think of what this could be doing to Dean the longer he was stuck like this. Who knows how long they had before Dean was 0% Winchester and 100% doll?
They’d spent the day going around in circles, neither Bobby nor Sam coming up with anything useful. Dean? Dean seemed to have given up music for the time being and was mostly saying his own name, interspersed every now and then with the occasional quiet ‘Sammy’ and a plaintive plastic cry for ‘pie?’
Sam knew he wasn’t going crazy. Not yet. But if he didn’t get Dean fixed soon he wasn’t going to responsible for what he did to the world.
‘Pie? Hungry, huh? Me too.’
Sam shoved the computer off his lap and stood up, stretching the kinks out of his spine, one hand firmly gripping the back of the chair that Dean was still slouched in.
‘You okay? Sam prodded Dean’s right shoulder gently. ‘Still firm? Got enough air? Do you need a top up?’ If he had to he’d use that bicycle pump every five minutes no matter how weird it was.
Dean. D.E.A.N. Dean Win…
‘Uh huh. Love you too, Spelling Queen.’
Pie.
‘Gotcha. You wanna order in? Whatever you li…’ Fuck. ‘You name it. I’ll get it for us.’ Sam was a sure as Hell buying whatever Dean wanted regardless of the fact that he wouldn’t be able to taste it, let alone eat it.
Sammy. S.A.M.M…
‘You know what? Forget having anything delivered, it’d take forever anyway. Let’s get out of here. Diner sound good to you?’ Sam smiled brightly at his brother. Just another day. And with any luck those girls were long gone. If not, Sam was taking them out the very second they started making eyes at his doll. They could just go buy their own.
Pie.
‘10-4 on the pie, you one-track doll. Come on; let’s see what’s on the menu.’
‘Two burgers, one with everything, fries, coffee, Thanks.’ Sam did his best to smile serenely at the bored waitress.
‘Something for your … friend?’ To her credit the waitress didn’t hesitate more than a few seconds. Of course that could have been put down to the gum she was busy masticating to death. Or maybe she really had seen it all before. She was on the wrong side of fifty and looked like she’d spent longer than that earning her bunions pounding the narrow eight foot strip of aisle between the kitchen and the booths at the Hot Pink Tomato.
‘He’ll have the pie of the day as well, but no coffee. I’m trying to wean him off caffeine. It makes him a little hyper when he’s driving.’
‘Sure thing, Sugar.’ She expertly popped a large faded purple Bubblicious balloon at them and limped off, leaving the lingering stench of artificial grape flavouring wafting over their table.
‘Good to be out of the room, huh?’
Dean’s eyes didn’t widen, but Sam could hear his ‘Awkward!’ loud and clear.
‘Shut up!’ He muttered to his brother. ‘s not like this is easy you know.’
Dean might have felt a little guilty, but Sam doubted it. It took a lot to faze his brother.
Dinner.
Dean looked coy. Sam blamed the eyebrows and those lips.
‘Yeah, I know. You’re not that kind of girl.’
Dean let a suspiciously naughty glint enter his flat plastic eyes, and Sam certainly shouldn’t have been thinking what he was thinking…
‘You are?’ Of course you are.
Winchesters always put out on the first date.
Please, God, let Sam have imagined that. Still, he’d learnt over the years that the best way to handle Dean when he was drunk, or flirty, or heaven help them-plastic-was to just try and keep up.
‘I’ll spring for dinner, but if you want to go dancing later, you’re on your own.’
Sam thought he’d be able to tough out staying at the diner long enough to force an entire meal down. He was wrong.
He carefully arranged Dean’s artery-clogging food in front of his brother. He was going to kill himself before he admitted they weren’t just having a normal night out. Dean might be plastic, but if he wanted a burger and pie, he was going to damn well get to sit there and look at them as long as he liked.
‘Ketchup?’ It was a rhetorical question. He knew Dean liked to drown his “vegetables” in a bloody red bath of sauce.
‘Or would you like the local version? It’s pink, and it’s totally your colour too.’ Okay, probably that was mean, but it felt good. Normal.
He ignored his own words and squirted the Heinz bottle over Dean’s plate, then contented himself with only stealing three fries before going back to his own meal.
‘Hey, Mister. Why you got a dolly?’
Shit.
‘Ah.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Kill me…’
Kill me now.
Huh, Bobby was right.
‘She’s pretty. Want to see my dolly?’ Three foot and possibly one inch of tiny Latino sunshine bundled up in a yellow snowsuit was beaming up at them both.
‘Uh, sure, honey. Wow, she’s pretty too.’ Sam was desperately not looking at his brother. Oh God, I’m going to lose it.
‘Her name’s Tiffany! Mine’s Britney. What’s yours?’
‘S…Sam, my name’s Sam, and this is Dean. He’s my bro…’ Um. ‘He’s my … brother’s … dolly.’ Definitely not looking at Dean, or Britney’s parents who were snickering callously in the adjoining booth.
‘Cool. My brother doesn’t have a dolly yet, just a teddy bear,’ she nodded sadly. ‘But he’s only two. How old’s your brother?’
‘A … little bit older than that,’ Sam admitted wryly.
‘Uh huh.’ Britney propped Tiffany up on Dean’s leg while she rummaged in her pink plastic Barbie shoulder bag. She solemnly pulled out a bright blue and red tube and stubbed it carefully over her lips. ‘Where’s your brother? Did he let you borrow his dolly?’
‘He… wasn’t feeling very well. We just came to get dinner. Maybe we should take it back to him.’
Britney smiled. ‘You could have a picnic. My dolly likes picnics.’
‘Good idea, Britney. Think we’ll do that. Excuse me for a minute.’ Sam made a dash for the restrooms before he broke down in front of the perky toddler. He’d rather not end the day traumatising an innocent kid.
It only took him a few minutes of dunking his head under cold water to sober up. It really wasn’t that funny. Maybe it would be funny after this was all over. Months and months after this was over. But now? Not funny. Okay, maybe a little funny.
Sam allowed himself one small chuckle before he went back to get his dolly and dinner to go.
Dean was alone, slumped forward over the table, torso just missing being basted by ketchup.
‘Dean?’ Oh, God, he’s sprung another leak! Got to get the duct tape. ’Shit. Shit. Shit…’
‘Dean?’
Sam frantically yanked Dean upright. Where was the hole this time?
Dean was… Dean was…
Dean’s already pink and pouty lips had been roughly coloured in with bright red ChapStick.
Dean was still whimpering pathetically twenty minutes later, or at least that’s what Sam assumed the faint wailing sound was weaving through the backblocks of his mind.
Sam was doing his best to be a sympathetic and supportive little brother, but…
‘Dude! You got graffitied by a five-year-old girl!’
On the positive side it did gain Sam a few moments peace before Dean went back to his mental spelling bee.
Dean Winchester. D.E…
‘If you start spelling Britney, I’m gagging those plastic lips.’ Sam wasn’t sure that would work, after all Dean wasn’t actually talking out loud. But he was doing his best to stand firm.
B.
‘No. There’s no way I’m ever going to go kill a kid for you, even if she was mean.’
Sometimes the point needed to be made more than once. Sam was just grateful that little Britney had knocked him off the top of the Arkansas mean list.
Pie, bitch!
Sam liked to think he’d been coping pretty well during a stressful occasion. But even Sam had limits.
Being woken up at 6.30 am on an ice-cold winter morning to find your brother had somehow rolled over on top of you and was currently smothering your face with so much of his plastic six-pack that you were in danger of suffocating brought him close to the edge.
When his tortured imagination, or what he’d foolishly downplayed to Bobby as that “Dean and Sam thing,” started demanding he get up and get his brother some pie or suffer the consequences; that tipped him over.
As he rammed Dean into the shower stall and turned the cold water on full he decided that what Dean needed was a short time-out to come to his plastic senses.
Listening to Dean’s inner voice gasp in shock before it shakily slipped back into a hauntingly familiar refrain Sam knew deep down that it was a lost cause.
Dean. D.E.A.N.
The trouble was, amazing as it sounded, despite everything Dean was still very much Dean.
Possibly plastic had hitherto unknown powers of conductivity.
‘I’m running out of things to look up, Dean. I’ve even hit every plastics website between here and Tennessee. Something did this to you. Something malicious. You’ve been a doll for three days now and nothing Bobby has come up with has turned even your left pinky finger back to normal.’
Dean kept looking at his feet. Sam presumed he’d napped through most of his marathon research sessions. He could have still been asleep for all Sam knew. Do dolls sleep? Does Dean? Sam shook himself out of that mental detour. It was more likely that Dean was just thinking about pie.
‘We still don’t know what did this to you. You’re so big on spelling all of a sudden, why don’t you give me a Y?’
Dean emitted a faint raspberry sound, but that could have just been an unfortunate side effect of his plastic skin getting stuck to the metal arm of the chair. Or not.
‘Help me out here, Dean! We don’t get this fixed in the next twenty-four hours, Bobby’s going to be hopping in his pick-up and driving out here to supervise us in person.’ Sam knew how good a threat that was. He knew how hard it was for Dean to have Sam see him like this, let alone someone else, even if it was Bobby.
W.
Huh? ‘Dean?’
W.
‘Oh for Pete’s sake! Not witches again!’
Dean managed to slip off the chair and onto the floor where he could look Sam right in the eye and engage in a long drawn-out staring contest. He was very good at it. Possibly not having to blink gave him an unfair advantage.
Sam interpreted that look to mean Dean was asking, ‘How can you be sure it wasn’t witches?’
‘No. It wasn’t witches.’
Dean just lay there.
‘No, I’m really sure. Bobby and I already checked that possibility out. Twice.’
Four times actually but Dean didn’t need to know how worried they were getting. Besides, Dean had good reason to be paranoid about witches. Every time Dean met a witch he ended up… Well, a witch was never a good look on a Winchester. But this time, unfortunately, Dean was wrong. Sam wished he wasn’t because he was getting better at dealing with Dean’s witches. This? Was a whole other problem.
‘Not a witch. Read my lips, Doll-face.’ Oops.
‘Sorry, Dean.’
Dean just lay there gazing up at the ceiling as if mentally counting witches on broomsticks looping the loop around flying pigs.
‘Absolutely positive it wasn’t witches.’
W.
‘I know you hate witches. I kinda do too now.’
Wwwwwwwwww…
‘Still more crazy stuff, Bobby.’
‘How crazy?’
‘After he calmed down about Britney…’
‘Britney?’
‘Seriously, Bobby? You don’t want to know.’
‘Move it along, ya idjut.’
‘After the witches, he flipped right back to his pet mantra. I swear he’s still going on about his name, like he was stuck back in his first year of school. Dean Winchester. W. I. N. C…’
‘I know how to spell it, Sam.’
“Apparently Dean does too. D.E.A.N. W…’
‘Sam!’
‘How do you think I feel? It’s all I’m getting, hour in, hour out. I should be grateful he’s not Andy because then I’d be getting the porn channel streamed live through my third eye. Which, considering Dean, I’m kind of surprised I’m not getting. But no, most of the time I just get Dean proudly spelling his name out like he was on Sesame Street.’
‘Well, Dean has always has had a high opinion of himself,’ Bobby said truthfully.
‘And of his spelling. Take now for instance…’
Dean Winchester was here, bitches!
‘All I can hear is “Dean Winchester was here.” I’ve been hearing it so long I can almost see it traced out in yellow cursive writing in the snow… SHIT!’
‘WHAT? Sam?’
‘Dean? FUCK! How could I have been so stupid?’
SOUL
‘Sam? What in tarnation’s going on, boy?’
Sam threw his cell onto the dash, ignoring the faint bleating that was Bobby swearing up a storm under the tire roar as he threw the Impala into a fast reverse and spun out of the car park to leave the Come On Inn, Warren, and hen’s night parties in their rear view mirror, hopefully forever. Adios tomatoes.
Dean. D.E.A.N. Dean.
‘I hear you, Dean. This time I hear you.’
‘Gods, Bobby. Arkansas; Ozarks off on the edges of the state. Old beliefs, and a quite a few people not holding to the more modern faiths. Old religions. Celtic gods and who knows what else. Not to mention earlier inhabitants and the old cave culture. All those pictographs and painted petroglyphs archaeologists have been studying. Gimme shelter. Fuck!’
‘Sam? That’s a hell of a lot of territory to cover. You’re talking myths and legends of several different cultures. There’s no way we can narrow anything down quickly.’
‘Don’t need to, Bobby. Dean told me exactly where it happened. And now I know what he did. There’s only one thing we can do now…’
Sam answered Bobby’s questions as well as he could as he barrelled the Impala down the highway on his way back to the spot where Dean had literally been converted. He knew what, and why, and even had an inkling as to whom. But none of that mattered.
It was his doll. It was Dean. And he wasn’t letting it go.
‘Dean, you pissed on a God.’
Nooooooo…?
‘Well, an altar to a God. Same thing really.’
As he stood there in the falling snow beside the roadside where it all began, Dean held securely upright inside the protection of his encircling arm, Sam knew that Dean was yelling with frustration. Here in the empty countryside with nothing to get between them Dean’s thoughts were coming in loud and clear.
It looked like a fucking rock under the snow! How was I supposed to know?
‘Not only did you piss on him, you pissed out, “Dean Winchester was here, bitches.” With an exclamation point! You don’t think he’d get mad?’
Uh?
‘Angry enough to turn you into a sex-toy? Put your tallywhacker, and the rest of you away where you couldn’t do anything, for as long as he willed it?’
Not really. Wasn’t thinking about Gods, Sammy. Was just taking a freaking leak! When a guy’s got to go, he’s got to go. Besides, you pissed on him too!
‘But you did it first!’
No I didn… Damn it, Sammy!
‘Dean. Shut the fuck up for a minute!’
Nngh?
‘Say you’re sorry.’
‘m not sorry. ‘m mad! Dude turned me into a fucking blow-up doll, Sammy!
‘Dean!’
What?
‘Sorry. NOW! And if you mean it we might get lucky enough that we can both walk away from this on our own two feet.’
Erm.
‘Dean.’
Sorry.
‘Don’t think he can hear you, Dean. I can hardly hear you. Suck it up, and say you’re sorry, because I don’t want to have to lug your plastic ass around with me for the rest of our lives!’
Fuck. I’m sorry!
‘Tell it to him, Dean.’
Oh.
I’m sorry. Really fucking sorry I … uh … desecrated your stone, okay? ‘m sorry you got mad and made me plastic. Really sorry that Sammy got upset and worried and had to deal with me.
Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.
Just turn me back, and me and Sam’ll get out of here and never come back again. And you can get on with the good old-fashioned smiting of some real heathens and Sammy and I will go back to killing demons. What do you say? Do we have a deal?
‘Dean!’
I’m telling him!
I’m sorry. Sam’ll even lay flowers if that’s what you want. I would if I could, but I’m still PLASTIC! Nothing says you’re sorry like flowers, right?
I’m SORRY!
Uh…
Can I have my dick back now?
Sammy?
Taranis’ thunder rolled its wheels across the sky, some guilty-by-close-association clouds tittered, tattered, and dispersed elsewhere now they’d had their fun, and Dean let out a jubilant, totally audible, undoll-like yell and jumped Sam, ending up with his arms around Sam’s neck and his legs around his waist, heels digging into his kidneys, hugging him tighter than a Velcro monkey.
‘You did it, Sam!’
‘Dean?’ Sam choked out through the stranglehold his brother had on him. ‘I love you too, but you’re a little big even for me to piggyback whichever way you jump me.’
‘Oh.’
‘Get off me you stupid lug!’
Dean sheepishly unwound his limbs and clambered all the way down off his little brother, leaving a suspicious red smudge behind on Sam’s t-shirt.
‘Knew you could do it, Sam.’
‘Yeah? Well I’m glad one of us had some faith. Didn’t think that was going to work.’
‘What do you mean you didn’t think it would work? You mean you had me stand here yelling at a freaking God on the off chance?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, okay then.’ Dean was always good about moving onto the next shiny thing fast. ‘Let’s go get us some pie.’
‘Sure, Dean. But after this it’s McDonald’s restrooms all the way.’
‘Told you, you were the girl.’ Dean slapped Sam on the shoulder. Hard. ‘I mean it’s not like thunder’s ever going to strike twice is it?’
The only sound Sam made was a pitiful whistling wail as he slowly started deflating.
Dean’s first thought was…
Okay, not going there.
Dean’s second thought was how unfair it was that even as a doll, Sam still managed to loom over him.
Dean’s third thought was that there was no way that a bicycle pump was going to be big enough to get the job done.
Dean’s first and fourth thoughts started out, Fuck! Sammy’s …
There are definitely some things you should never have to learn about your brother.
A/N: Additional thanks for some extraordinarily disparate inspirations (What? Crack comes from everywhere!) also go to two of Kansas’ own:
Vance Randolph’s Pissing in the Snow and Other Ozark Folktales. Collections of Randolph’s manuscripts are held in the University of Arkansas Libraries.
Big Joe Turner’s version of Shake, Rattle and Roll. The lyrics and video are here.
*Gets down off geekbox and wanders off to play with her Dean doll*
Rating: R, Gen
Characters: Sam, Plastic!Dean
Disclaimer: The characters are sadly not mine. I’m just sticking pins into Winchester dolls for the purposes of general amusement. Sorry about the holes! Wow. For once this statement is scarily apt.
Word Count: 9,868
A/N: Crack - Bodyswap. Would you like angst with that?
Blame this on a long, slow, rush hour. I was driving mindlessly along to work when I looked over to see someone thing smirking plastically back at me from the passenger seat of a Volvo speeding past me in the T2 transit lane. As the driver smugly flipped me the bird I realised that the source of his contentment wasn’t just the fact that he was avoiding (albeit illegally) a traffic fine. Naturally my mind turned to Winchesters… and lo, there was crack.
Thanks to noirbabalon for the awesome beta (even if she does prefer her crack without angst)
Setting: The middle of rural Arkansas, December 2007 Yeah, I know. Should have been Florida, right? If it had been Florida Dean would have been more on guard, and this never would have happened. Ain’t life a bitch?
Summary: The one where Dean turns into a blow-up doll.
There are some things you should never have to learn about your brother.
SHAKE
It wasn’t a long drawn-out process full of subtle shifts as the universe gradually realigned itself into a much stranger configuration. Considering the magnitude of the event, it should have been.
It was nothing like that. One minute Sam was listening to the sound of his brother’s boots crunching over the broken asphalt on his way back to the car while he finished taking his own leak on the side of a frosty back road in Arkansas at 4 am, two minutes later everything had changed.
He’d been concentrating on the fact that he seemed to be freezing parts of his anatomy off that he wasn’t happy flashing in public after the age of two. Never mind what Dean said about no one else in their right mind being out this early on a December morning, even in farming country. The whole uncomfortable process was made that much harder by Dean yelling at him to, ‘Stop jiggling up and down like a hyperactive teabag, and make sure you point that thing downwind of my baby, or I swear I’ll…’
Thankfully doing the final shake, tuck, and zip, Sam turned around ready to launch into a scathing reminder of what life had been like driving with Dean after he’d got food poisoning from a bad burrito in Humboldt last month-Iowa was never going to be known for its Mexican cuisine.
Sam only just managed to get his brother’s name out before his world got even weirder than was usual for the Brothers Winchester.
Dean was gone.
Correction. His Dean was gone. What remained was one of those irritating gag gift inflatable plastic dolls sitting happily ensconced in the driver’s seat. Dean’s seat.
Dean had disappeared, and whoever had taken him had decided rub in the fact of the abduction… murder? Please God, no.
There wasn’t a trace of sulphur anywhere around the car. Sam did a second sweep to make sure before he dug Dean’s EMF reader out of the trunk and moved in to test the stand-in.
What he got was nothing more than standard low-level red pulses that indicated the usual background electricity from the car’s still rumbling engine. Sam tied not to flinch as he reached through the open window and past the intruder to flip the key to off. The display hiccuped briefly into a short series of green lights before going blank as Sam pulled himself back out of the car, which was odd because the lights never went green, but the whole situation was…
‘A VISION right about now would be nice!’ Sam screamed helplessly up into the lightening sky.
The sky stared mutely back. A few radically inclined leaden pewter clouds might have pulsed sullenly a bit, as if to shrug and say, ‘Not us, dude.’ But then again, they probably used that excuse on everyone.
The doll was apparently capable of doing its fair share of staring too.
It looked strangely reproachful from its ungainly position flat on its back on the gravel roadside a few feet from the Impala. Sam hadn’t meant to take it out on the doll. After all, it wasn’t its fault it was being used as part of someone or something’s warped sense of revenge and humour.
To put it simply, Sam hadn’t been able to stand to seeing it sitting there pretending to be Dean a moment longer. And maybe he had been a tad rough as he pulled it right through the window, out of the car and threw it as hard as he could away from him.
Here’s one thing you quickly find out about blow-up dolls, they may be unwieldy, but they weigh almost nothing, so you can’t throw them far for shit unless you happen to catch a gust of wind just right.
Today was dead calm, weatherwise-broody, uninformative clouds notwithstanding-and Sam was stuck with a doll that was still too close for comfort, lying there on the ground. Looking up at him. Looking at him as if he twirled kittens around his head for cheap thrills. As if he was tall, and mean, and mad as Hell.
Which he was.
Except for the mean bit. He wasn’t mean to kids, or little old ladies, or teenagers who listened to worse music than Dean, or women, or guys, or pretty much anyone he’d ever met. He was only mean to monsters, and demons, and things that stole his brother from him! But definitely not to fluffy kittens.
Okay, two out of three wasn’t bad.
He was still tall though. Really, really, tall in a way that always made him bite back a grin even when he had to duck his head to get through a doorway that Dean just sailed on through. Tall was the only race he’d ever beaten his brother in. Dean…
He was still mad though. Really, really, mad.
The doll had a smirk. Sam was sure blow-up dolls didn’t come equipped with a wide range of facial expressions. Of course, Sam hadn’t ever had a doll before. Possibly Dean was a top of the range model.
Nonononono! It wasn’t Dean. It was plastic. It wasn’t Dean. He had to call it something else…
No. It was a doll. Dolls didn’t need names. If Sam still hadn’t been being mean feeling mad he might have blushed because, boy would Dean have ribbed him good for being such a complete chick.
It was a doll. He had a doll. I am a girl. ‘Shit.’
It was a… dummy, stick with dummy. It was a dummy.
It was a dummy and it was lying there in the middle of the road, which counted as littering. Besides, the next car along would drive right over the top of it and…
It was a dummy. It can’t get hurt.
It can’t feel pain.
It doesn’t have feelings.
It was a dummy, and it was wearing his brother’s clothes.
It was … evidence.
It was a dummy, and it looked exactly like Dean.
The dummy had eyes as well as a smirk. Big, moss-green eyes surrounded with long soft lashes that…
Um. The dummy had these stupid round flat eyes with silly stubby, completely artificial-looking, painted-on lines that didn’t look real at all. And it definitely didn’t look like Dean.
And those fake eyes? Wouldn’t. Stop. Looking. At. Him.
‘Stop that!’
Sam didn’t have any choice in the matter. He had a dummy, and he was stuck with it until he got his brother back.
Despite what Dean always said, Sam was practical, organised and above all else, sensible. His last name wasn’t Winchester for nothing.
There was only one sensible thing to do. With the dummy.
Which didn’t explain why Sam ended up driving off thirty-two minutes later with the dummy back in the front seat.
He’d tried. God help him, he’d tried.
He’d opened the trunk, moved their tote bags around, and with a bit of swearing, and shoving, and bending-luckily the dummy was very flexible-he had the dummy safely tucked away.
It only took him three goes to shut the trunk. The first time he got it half way down. Then he got a glimpse of one of those flat eyes-the left one-staring out at him from under its contorted arms. He ignored it, continued to shut the trunk, paused with two inches left to go, and bent down to peer through the gap. He could still see the eye. He shut the trunk and stayed crouched beside the bumper for far too long. He opened the trunk again, just a tiny crack, and couldn’t help squinting into the darkness. Those eyes were plastic, they certainly weren’t capable of reflecting light, or looking really annoyed. He shut the trunk.
He lasted three minutes.
The back seat was a much better idea. More sensible. Lots of space for the dummy to lie there. It wasn’t squished up and getting ugly creases in the plastic. It was all good, even better when he didn’t look the dummy in the eyes.
But if he had to stop suddenly the dummy would…
Sitting up was better. Certainly the dummy looked a little brighter right side up. And there was the added advantage that it could spot trouble coming and brace itself if it had to.
Oh. Maybe not.
Hah! Seatbelts. Jammed down deep in the gap between the back and seat cushions. Not used since they were kids, and hardly then, regardless of any safety advertising from the AAA. Although Sammy had always started out trips being firmly buckled in by his elder brother, it never lasted long. The seatbelts always ended up getting in the way when they had food fights. Then there was that time that Dean Superglued a set of police issue handcuffs to… Dad had been pissed.
That was better. Totally sensible, and safe, and normal. The dummy was upright in the back seat, situated diagonally back from where Sam was. He could check on it easily. It had a good view. It was buckled in, protected in case of an accident. It could look around, and see where they were going. It didn’t have any need at all to sit there looking pissed.
Maybe it didn’t like seatbelts. Dean didn’t like them either. Said seatbelts were for pussies. Dean was an idiot.
Sam didn’t feel right sitting all alone in the front seat.
The passenger seat was a compromise. The seatbelt wasn’t.
If he’d been crazy, Sam would have sworn that the dummy’s eyes were slightly narrower now, as they focused on the steering wheel.
‘No way!’
A bump in the road was the only explanation for the way the dummy’s arms ended folded up over each other huffily and its head tipped sideways to leave it staring out the window and totally ignoring Sam.
Sam did his best to ignore the dummy too.
It was much harder to stop talking to it.
Backtracking was the logical thing to do. Somewhere, somehow, recently Dean had got something’s attention, and not in his usual ‘Hey, why don’t you write your number on my bar napkin?’ way. Warren had been their last stop en route to a tracking down a zombie in Thibodeaux, Louisiana, which could damn well keep working its way through the locals until after he saved Dean.
Sam got a room for two. The same room they’d had the last time. Luckily Battersby’s Come On Inn was the seediest and least popular motel in town and the owner was too desperate for business to even query why a customer would come back, let alone ask what was it about that room that was the big attraction. Sam was glad he didn’t have to go kick anyone else out of those particular beds, not that he wouldn’t have done it, even if it was mean. Because for Dean? Sam could be mean forever.
The owner also didn’t say a word as Sam carefully picked up the dummy he’d left leaning next to him against the counter, tucked it back under his arm, lifted his chin stoically, and walked off towards the dubious sanctuary that was Room 6.
Sam didn’t care if Battersby’s was the kind of place that everyone brought their toys to, that kind of discretion was going to earn the guy a big tip on Abba Björnsen‘s credit card when he and Dean left.
He was going to get Dean back. There was no doubt in his mind. No doubt at all.
It didn’t matter where Sam put it; the dummy’s eyes followed him.
After fifteen minutes of visual stalking Sam put the dummy in the bathroom.
After five minutes… okay, two, he felt guilty.
After ten he stood up, got it out of the bathroom and arranged it neatly on the second bed, thankful that it wasn’t a girl doll because despite what Dean said about him being a chick, even Sam drew the line at fluffing skirts. Then he spent a long time in the bathroom with the door shut.
Bobby wasn’t much help, and the bathroom was too small to pace successfully.
Sam peeked through the door at the dummy. It stared glumly back. Sam was glad he was a guy; dolls were scary, he hated to think what life could have been like growing up as Samantha Winchester trying to play with a Barbie on the backseat of the Impala.
‘I don’t know, Bobby! It’s been days since the last job, and that was just an amped up poltergeist. We haven’t done anything that could explain this.’
‘Is there anything abnormal about the … doll?’ Bobby sounded amazingly composed, if justifiably worried. A Winchester disappearing was never a good omen. That hadn’t stopped him laughing himself sick the second Sam told him he had a doll with him.
‘No. It’s just the kind of thing you’d get at a sex store. Nothing unusual about it, except for the fact that it’s wearing Dean’s clothes!’ Sam was trying to whisper, but the more upset he got, the louder he got. Which was just wrong, because Dean was the loud one. They’d come to an arrangement when Sam was thirteen. Dean got to be loud, Sam got to be emotional. They traded off occasionally, but on the whole it worked extremely well.
‘If the clothes are the problem, just get it a different … outfit,’ Bobby snickered sensibly.
‘I’m not Miss Congeniality and this isn’t dress up Sally time!’ Sam shouted louder than he’d meant to. The whole doll thing was starting to get to him.
Bobby changed the topic quickly. ‘What about Dean? He hook up with anyone on the way through? Piss someone off? Someone with enough powers to pull a switch while your back was turned?’
‘No, he didn’t! We were only here overnight. Got … burgers at the diner, and beers at the bar. Dean… he… he had more than me, but he wasn’t plastered. Beat a guy at darts, earned a few bucks, but we… we were taking it easy. No scams. Everyone left happy…’ Sam couldn’t stop himself crying. Dean was gone and suddenly he felt like he was three again and Dad and Dean were off in another room, and he was alone…
‘We… we crashed here, got up late, left the next afternoon. Then we… were just driving, stopped, took a leak, and he… was gone! It only took a minute and he was… gone!’
Sam collapsed down against the doorframe as he listened to Bobby’s brusque voice saying calm, coherent, things off in the distance. He finally managed to stammer out the few details he did have so that Bobby could start the research at his end.
‘We… I’ll… get online, see what I can find. I… I’ll call you back on the half hour, okay? Every hour… until we… I… we fix this.’
The tiles were cool and hard, and it didn’t matter that they started to hurt before too long. He just sat there, knees tucked up under his chin, staring blankly out into the bedroom.
A gust of wind must have come through the open window at some stage because the dummy had been blown off the bed and was flat on its face on the dirty motel shagpile with both arms outstretched towards him.
It looked like it had been trying to get to Sam.
RATTLE
It shouldn’t have made Sam feel better, but it did. How pitiful did that make him? Wishing there was some weird connection between the dummy and his brother, believing even for a second that it had wanted to comfort him.
‘Snap out of it, Sam,’ he told himself, trying to Dean himself into some commonsense.
He did the right thing. He picked the doll up, fully intending to place it back out of the way on the second bed. Dean’s bed… Closest to the door. Between Sam and danger. Always.
‘You’re not Dean! You’re just some sick fuck’s joke on a Winchester!’ He had one hand twisted into Dean’s shirt, the other around the doll’s fragile neck, slamming it into the wall over and over, not caring that he’d somehow ripped open the faded khaki henley in his rage.
Sam wasn’t normally the sort of person who would yell at a doll, but having it right there in front of him just made him crazy. It wasn’t Dean…
‘Stop looking at me!’
It was just letting him punish it. Silent. Amulet bedecked. Plastic. Stupid cheap-looking Goth chick tattoo on its shoulder that didn’t show how much blood and pain had gone into its creation. How every hour through that long night while Bobby read endless incantations over them both, another layer of protections had been bound down until those symbols soaked invisibly through his skin to become a part of Dean. Hours of listening to Dean complain to Bobby that it wasn’t macho enough for a Winchester and why couldn’t they get matching flaming skulls?
Just a doll made up to look like his brother. That’s all it was. A plastic inflatable doll, and it shouldn’t hurt this much.
‘You’re not my brother!’ Throwing it into a twisted heap on the bed didn’t help the rage either, though it did prove that the doll company was good at making a really flexible product.
Tattooed…
Just like Sam. Just like Dean.
Tattooed…
‘D…Dddee...?’
‘Awww, Dean.’
The essence of Dean seemed to be seeping through the plastic the longer Sam sat there beside it, and properly looked at it… him… Fuck.
‘It’s really you, isn’t it? You’re not just a dummy-a plastic changeling-that they left for a joke? You’re really… you.’
If the doll… Dean could have rolled it’s… his eyes, he would have.
It was Dean.
His brother was a doll. A plastic blow-up doll.
Plastic!Dean.
‘Dude, this is just so… wrong.’
Dean somehow slipped sideways down the headboard and came crashing into Sam. Sam assumed it was Dean’s way of whacking him up the back of the head. Plastic or not, some things never changed.
‘What are we going to do?’ We. There were two of them again. He wasn’t alone. He had Dean back. Hadn’t really lost him all this time. He’d been here all along. Sam had never been so glad to have a doll in his entire life.
Uh. ‘Sorry about throwing you out onto the road.’
Silence.
‘I wouldn’t have let anything run over it… you. Not really. I’m not mean. Don’t look at me like that. I wouldn’t have!’
Damn it, Dean.
‘Really, I would have got you out of the way in time if anything had come through.’
Sam ducked his head; he couldn’t take the reproachful look he was getting. Who knew that a Dean doll could make him feel so guilty? Sam didn’t know whether that was more of a doll thing or a big brother thing. ‘And the trunk. I’m sorry for that. And for the backseat.’
‘Okay, and for the freaking seatbelt, okay?’
Uh. Definitely not okay. Doll Dean was better at holding grudges than the original, almost as good as Sam.
‘But I’m not sorry I didn’t leave you behind the wheel of your metal baby!’ Sam was all for civil liberties but he didn’t think America was ready to hand out driver’s licences to blow-up dolls just yet.
Plastic!Dean let out a resigned, if definitely still irritated, huff of breath.
Dolls didn’t breathe. Air. Air… escaping.
Bad sign. Really, bad sign.
‘Don’t breathe. I mean, hold your breath. Stick your finger in the dyke till I get back. Whatever you do, just don’t move!’
Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit. Where the fuck was it?
‘Could it hurt you to just put everything back in its place after every hunt? Oh no. “Stuff it; we’ll sort it later. Let’s go get a beer, Sammy. Find some action. Man, I’m pumped.” Huh!’ Captain Adrenaline.
Guns. Knives. Salt. Salt. Salt. ‘Dreamcatcher.’ Can’t believe he kept that. Made it for him when I was like twelve, for God’s sake. Explosives, machete, holy water… Why don’t we have a doll repair kit? We’ve got everything else in here.
‘Found it!’ he cried as he dashed back inside to jump onto the bed and straddle a slightly limp Dean.
‘Where? Where? Where? Can’t see… Got to be leaking somewhere. Goddamnit!’ He flipped Dean over, trying to track down the exit wound by the tiny whistle of air seeping out. ‘Give me a sign! X marks the spot-I don’t care; just let me find it in t…’
‘Gotcha!’
Sam slapped a strip of duct tape over the hole in the back of Dean’s neck. ‘It’s like I always told you when I was a kid, Dean. MacGyver knows everything.’
‘It’s okay. I hear it happens to everyone once, Dean.’ Heh. Okay, maybe not the most sensitive thing he could have said, but? Honestly? Sam didn’t often get an opportunity to mock Dean back. Of course he was going to take the shot. Dean would have…
Dean would have if he hadn’t been busy looking humiliated, a few inches shorter, and more noticeably bow-legged. Regardless of the fact that Dean made a very pretty, short, doll, possibly now wasn’t the best time to tell his brother that.
‘I’m sorry I threw you against the wall and…’ Ruptured your integrity? ‘Holed you. I’ll be more careful in future. I just have to remember that you’re kinda fragile right now.’
Dean’s flat, and all too expressive, eyes looked insulted.
It was probably best to change the topic just a bit. ‘Wanna beer?’ Fuck. Wrong thing to say. Having a plastic brother was confusing. Sam knew he wasn’t going to find a textbook out there that would teach him how to handle this situation.
‘Sorry, Dean. Forgot for a second.’ Forgot you weren’t real any more. Forgot you were just a plastic membrane filled with air, and not blood and flesh and bone and Winchester anymore.
‘Air. Damn. I stopped the leak, but we’re going to have to get you…’ Blown up? ‘Reinflated.’
Dean looked worried.
‘We need to get you a pump.’
Extremely worried. But still short.
There was no way he could leave his brother on his own while he went doll accessory shopping. Dean was totally defenceless like this. He couldn’t hold a gun or a knife, or even lace up his boots. What was he going to do if a demon turned up? Stare them straight back to Hell?
Besides, what would the maid say?
Come on, …’ Dean? It was right. It just felt weird saying that to a doll. Plastic!Dean? PD? Doll!Dean? Hell with it, it was still Dean, he was just a little… Epidermically compromised? Materially challenged? Not all there? Shit, there was no politically correct way around it. He was plastic, but there was no point hurting his feelings by rubbing that fact in. ‘Come on, Dean. I’m taking you to get fixed… I mean I’m going to get you fixed right up.’
Dean looked frightened, then doubtful. That was a lot of expression for a doll.
Getting Dean out of the motel room for their shopping trip turned out to be even harder than checking in had been.
For an ugly, disastrously fruit-themed, and formerly almost empty motel, it was suddenly teeming with guests. Lots of guests, lots of gob-smacked, nosey, milling around with nothing better to do, and unfortunately not at all blind, guests.
Oh, God.
‘Smile, Dean,’ Sam hissed as quietly as he could.
Not quietly enough.
Sam glared down from a moral high point at his new neighbours from Hell.
Just me and my doll. Nothing to see here. These aren’t the droids you are looking for.
Alas, Sam’s putative abilities weren’t worth squat when the doll chips were down.
Sam blamed the evil that was the holiday season.
Christmas weddings were bad. Very bad.
Hen’s nights were bad. Very, very, bad.
A bunch of drunk, pretty in pink satin, bunny rabbit-ear wearing, flirtatious, doll-loving, girls tottering unsteadily in circles around their Mary Kay convertible was worse. Much, much, worse.
‘I’m sorry, Dean. I got you back as soon as I could. How was I to know that they’d be so quick, and determined, feisty, and prepared to fight dirty if they had to?’
‘Being kidnapped to be mascot isn’t necessarily a bad thing, Dean.’
Those girls were good.
‘No, I didn’t know they could run so fast in high heels, all right?’
‘It was only forty-five minutes, Dean.’
‘Yeah, I know it probably seemed longer to you.’
‘I’m sorry about the bunny ears.’ Not going to tell him how awesome that sight was.
‘Look at it this way, you’ve always told me you were a chick-magnet. This just proves you’ve still got it.’
‘Dean?’
‘Dean?’
Dolls clearly had masculinity issues. Dean evidently had more than most.
Sam left Dean sitting safely in the passenger seat as he charged towards the gas station, there was no way he was going to get lucky twice and get an attendant who’d be blasé about a customer lugging an adult-sized doll up and down the aisles, and it was only going to take him a… He turned around, grabbed Dean under his left arm, and ran back inside. Fuck the attendant.
A tiny voice in his head said approvingly ‘That’s better. Can’t leave him alone, look what happened last time.’ Besides, it was a very hot day and Sam had a feeling that blow-up dolls weren’t manufactured to have a high tolerance to heat.
Bicycle pumps took forever.
And Sam wasn’t even going into how embarrassing it had been for him to have to get Dean naked to find his valve. He might be plastic, but he was still his brother, and it felt like he was taking advantage because he certainly didn’t have informed consent. When it turned out that Dean was an anatomically correct full-sized-okay, well above average… oh all right, hung like a… Whoa! Just for a minute Dean had been right there in his head. Weird. Anyway, Dean-neither of the Deans, uh either of the… Fuck. Dean- had nothing to be ashamed of even if that was the only other race Sam happened to be a natural winner in. Oh God. Now Sam felt more like a pervert than ever. Some days it didn’t pay to be a Winchester.
Just finish the job, Sam. He had to concentrate on fixing Dean; then work on getting him back. For real.
‘Sorry, Dean.’
Sam wished Dean could talk, and wasn’t that ironic after all the years he spent growing up praying for Dean to be a little less verbal? If he could just hear him now, this might be easier. Dean would have known what to say. Though, undoubtedly if Dean had been able to speak he’d have spent the entire time cracking obscene jokes. Sam knew his brother, and there was no way he wasn’t mentally asking, ‘Was it good for you too, baby?’ as Sam disconnected the pump and resealed Dean’s valve. Sometimes Sam thought Dean was still eight years old. Today he wouldn’t have minded hearing that voice.
Sam swore that after he’d managed to change Dean back, they were both getting drunk for a week, and with a bit of luck they’d be able to blot out this entire warped experience.
Failing that, he was so booking them in for a joint therapy session. Maybe they could tell the psychiatrist the doll thing was a dream. Sam knew that dream therapy was still big in California. Thank goodness for the Freudians.
ROLL
Knowing it was Dean, and being able to explain it to someone else, even if that someone was Bobby-especially to Bobby-were two entirely different things.
Belief was strange, not that Sam needed to have taken that extra philosophy class to know that. James had it right; it was all about will, though Nietzsche probably put it better when he called it the “good dumb will to believe.”
Sam wanted-needed-to believe that this was Dean. Had he only convinced himself that this was Dean? No, that was wrong, he knew it was true. This was his brother. Once he’d made the mental leap and recognised his brother it explained everything. Uh, except for who or what had managed to de… reconstruct Dean. Telling Bobby that Dean was plastic, however, almost made him doubt himself again, until he looked across at Dean, and was reassured to see his brother staring back at him.
Still, Sam couldn’t help but think that a walking, talking, Dean doll might have given them an advantage, been able to tell them who’d done this to him and speeded up the process of Sam finding and killing whoever it was. Preferably before he had to blow Dean up again.
‘It’s Dean? The doll? Dean’s a… sex toy?’ Bobby sounded stunned.
Sam was just glad he hadn’t laughed or muttered anything sarcastic about cosmic justice or Malibu Ken. Though Ken would have been a lot easier to carry around than the blow-up version of Dean. Sam was sure Ken came with a leather jacket as an optional extra.
Dean was definitely looking insulted at the possibility that he’d ever be turned into anything less than something hot.
Okay, not a Ken doll then.
Sam was frightened at how easy he was finding it to read the minute differences in Dean’s expressions. He didn’t know if it was just the way the mid-afternoon sunlight bounced off Dean’s plastic exterior or if he was simply getting better with practice.
Problem was-Sam? Well, he was having trouble with the concept of having to be the Winchester family interpreter. It wasn’t like Dean could speak, or use sign language to communicate anything even remotely useful in this situation other than the fact that he was supremely pissed off at not being human. Sam had only just managed to stop himself from asking Dean to blink once for yes, and twice for no.
Yes, Sam seemed to have a slight idea of what Dean was feeling. No, it wasn’t helping them fix this.
‘You’re sure?’ Bobby finally said quietly.
Sam shrugged helplessly, what more could he say? That it explained why Dean’s pet EMF turned magically green for him? Got a warranty sticker on the sole of his left foot that says he’s guaranteed for twelve months of normal handling? Too much information? Maybe he should stick with the basics? His brother was a lewd inflatable novelty item. That Sam still loved him and wanted him back. ‘Yeah, Bobby. Dean’s a sex toy.’
And he’s still Dean.
Bobby may have had some strong misgivings, which he expressed pithily as only he could. But Sam wasn’t letting anything get in the way of his intention to get Dean changed back as soon as humanly or supernaturally possible.
Once Sam’s total certainty eventually wore Bobby down, he switched instantly into research mode, firing a number of increasingly awkward questions at Sam.
‘No, I already checked. No workers from adult toy companies using magic to become a reverse Gepetto.’ Some of the search terms he’d used for the research had landed him in sites that were much worse than BustyAsianBeauties.com. Sam reminded himself to clear his browser history when this was all over. He didn’t need Dean corrupting the laptop any more than he did already.
‘Ditto for any angry anti-sex toy campaigners active locally. No signs anyone is turning people into dolls. Apart from some Civil War soldiers that are supposed to haunt Mark’s Mill, there isn’t anything in this region except for a lot of pink tomatoes. Was that what you had in mind when you asked about weird stuff?’ So Sam was getting a little snarky, a little more Dean, but who could blame him?
Bobby swore comprehensively. In Latin. ‘Couldn’t find anything from my end either. No unusual disappearances reported on your route apart from…’
Dean.
‘To all accounts the weirdest thing in town is the annual tomato festival.’
‘If Dean had been turned into a giant pink tomato we’d be onto something. We haven’t got anything,’ Sam said despairingly. ‘This is Arkansas not Louisiana. It’s farm country, not exactly a hotbed of supernatural activity.’
Dean was looking like he wished he could object. Sam knew that under that plastic coating, somewhere deep down Dean was swearing about apples, Burkitsville, and appearances being fucking deceptive. Dean had a point. At least in Indiana they’d had a pattern; signs that pointed towards ritual sacrifice. Here they just had Dean.
‘We need to find out what Dean knows,’ Bobby said when they’d finally exhausted all the unusual suspects. ‘There must have been some trigger, something that he’d remember. That he saw. Can he see?’
‘Of course he can see!’ Sam said, heroically sticking up for his doll’s abilities.
‘Well, did he see anything?’
Sam looked at his brother sitting slightly slumped over in the chair Sam had carefully placed right next to his own. Just because he was a doll, there was no reason for Sam to exclude him from the joint discussion.
Dean’s face was blanker than usual.
‘No, nothing germane to the problem.’
For a moment Sam was sure that Dean’s incredibly girlish, “Come on, you know you want me,” pink and plastic lips curled in disgust. ‘I mean, nope, Dean knows fuck all.’
‘Sam?’ Bobby’s voice had a peculiar edge to it.
‘What? Trust me. That’s what he’d say if he could.’ It was what Dean was saying to Sam.
‘Something else you want to tell me here? About how sure you are about what Dean’s thinking?’
No.
Bobby coughed uncomfortably. ‘Is this a… psychic thing?’
Oh, God. ‘No, it’s more a Dean and Sam thing,’ Sam said soberly.
‘Dunno why I should be so surprised. Apart from college you boys never spent more than a few days apart in your entire lives. You probably don’t realise it, but, Hell, a lot of the time the two of you end up saying the same thing at the same time. Almost like twins.’
Brothers. That wasn’t the half of it, but now wasn’t the time or place for Sam to go into how close he and Dean had become since Jericho.
‘Yeah, well, Dean always could read me like a book too. Just didn’t need to most of the time.’
Not some damned bookworm.
Sam surely wasn’t imagining the slight groove in the plastic that appeared momentarily between Dean’s scarily Piaf-like painted-on eyebrows.
Books aren’t hot. I’m…
Yup, really was Dean.
Sammy likes books. Sammy’s not hot like…
The longer they were in this situation, the closer Sam seemed to feel as if he was getting inside Dean’s head. That scared Sam almost as much as Dean being plastic.
Freak.
A lot closer. You’re a freak, jerk.
I am not… Shit.
‘Shit.’
‘Sam? You still with me?’
‘Yeah, sorry, Bobby. Just…’ Not really hearing him am I? I’m just imagining what he’d say if he could talk to me. I’m just… ‘…talking with Dean.’
Holy shit!
Christ, was that him or me?
Duh!
‘Sam? I don’t need to know the details, for now, but are you listening hard enough for him to tell you what, if anything, he remembers about what happened then?’
‘Uh. Gimme a second.’
Sam didn’t bother putting his hand over his cell’s microphone. ‘Dean? Did you insult any of the tomato people when I wasn’t looking?’
Dean didn’t bother answering, aloud anyway.
‘Dean said, “Not even the round, red, fugly ones.” At least I think that’s what he meant.’
Possibly not a good first question. So, maybe there was a part of Sam that was scared about putting this to a real test. Part of him couldn’t believe he was sitting there having a conversation with a doll.
‘I’m trying, Bobby!’ Sam was slumped cross-legged on the floor in front of Dean. ‘I’ve been asking all afternoon. I know he’s in there, but nothing’s coming through. Nothing useful anyway.’
‘So what are you getting?’ Bobby asked shortly.
‘It’s stupid. If I didn’t know it was Dean, I’d think I was imagining it.’
‘Sam.’
God, Bobby could sound frighteningly like Dad at times. Sam leaned forward and rested his head on Dean’s squishy lap, doing his best to ignore the sounds of the plastic squelching underneath him. Need you back, Dean. Call me emo as much as you like, but I’m all dolled out.
One of Dean’s hands somehow flopped softly onto his head as Sam turned his face sideways breathing in the smell of leather and denim; something uniquely Dean underlaid with a faint hint of chlorine that made him think of school swimming pools and… plastic. ‘Dean. Oh, Jesus.’
‘Sam? Tell me you didn’t break Dean?’
Sam lifted his head up from under Dean’s hand and picked up his phone again. ‘Sorry, Bobby. We’re okay… we’re dealing, all right? It’s not as clear as before, I don’t know why; I’m just getting fragments. None of them make any sense.’
‘I don’t need to be a Pitman expert to take it down, Sam. Shoot. Tell me everything you got. Then we can start on working it all out. He’s bound to be trying to give you a clue.’
‘Uh, some stuff about coffee, and cherry pie.’
‘You’re right. It is Dean.’ Bobby was obviously too worn out to even sound surprised by now. ‘But that’s just Dean being Dean. What else ya got?’
Sam scratched the back of his head. ‘It sounds stupid. Sometimes he’s singing.’
‘Singing what?’
‘Hey, girl, stop what you're doin'!
Hey, girl…’
Sam let his voice trail off, because he wasn’t drunk enough to sing, even in front of Dean, not with Bobby listening in. Though if all else failed he could finally take Dean to Vegas; a psychic singing doll was sure to be a hit. The Sam and Dean Show.
The Dean and Sam Show, Bitch.
‘Do you suppose he’s bored?’ Bobby asked puzzled.
No, just plastic. ‘Nah, I think it means something. But Dean’s always had this weird-ass musical memory, and all I’m getting is that one line. I wish I could remember what it was from. It’s not like I haven’t heard him sing everything a million times over the years.’
‘Did you look it up, ya idjut?’ Bobby sounded tired, and irritated. Just like always.
‘Um.’ No? ‘Damn it.’ Sam pulled the laptop back across the vine-bedecked carpet towards him. ‘Lyrics… rock music… Hey, girl…’ Oh.
‘Bobby? He wasn’t bored.’
‘I’m growing older here, Sam. Tell me already.’
‘Led Zeppelin. Communication breakdown.’
‘Guess our boy’s making a statement,’ Bobby said calmly. Luckily he didn’t bother to comment on Sam’s inability to stay in tune.
Possibly Dean could do a solo show?
‘Well, we know he’s trying to tell you something. Give me the rest.’
‘The rest makes even less sense. I hear his name, and I keep getting flashes of random letters.’
‘Letters?’
‘Coloured wooden blocks with letters on, like they give to babies. That’s all. Letters. Black, white, and yellow. And I hear him saying his name.’
‘You’re right. Nothing that will tell us anything. But if you get any more of those letters take note of them. It might be an anagram. Or it could be…’
Sam was glad Bobby didn’t bother to finish the sentence. Neither of them wanted to think of what this could be doing to Dean the longer he was stuck like this. Who knows how long they had before Dean was 0% Winchester and 100% doll?
They’d spent the day going around in circles, neither Bobby nor Sam coming up with anything useful. Dean? Dean seemed to have given up music for the time being and was mostly saying his own name, interspersed every now and then with the occasional quiet ‘Sammy’ and a plaintive plastic cry for ‘pie?’
Sam knew he wasn’t going crazy. Not yet. But if he didn’t get Dean fixed soon he wasn’t going to responsible for what he did to the world.
‘Pie? Hungry, huh? Me too.’
Sam shoved the computer off his lap and stood up, stretching the kinks out of his spine, one hand firmly gripping the back of the chair that Dean was still slouched in.
‘You okay? Sam prodded Dean’s right shoulder gently. ‘Still firm? Got enough air? Do you need a top up?’ If he had to he’d use that bicycle pump every five minutes no matter how weird it was.
Dean. D.E.A.N. Dean Win…
‘Uh huh. Love you too, Spelling Queen.’
Pie.
‘Gotcha. You wanna order in? Whatever you li…’ Fuck. ‘You name it. I’ll get it for us.’ Sam was a sure as Hell buying whatever Dean wanted regardless of the fact that he wouldn’t be able to taste it, let alone eat it.
Sammy. S.A.M.M…
‘You know what? Forget having anything delivered, it’d take forever anyway. Let’s get out of here. Diner sound good to you?’ Sam smiled brightly at his brother. Just another day. And with any luck those girls were long gone. If not, Sam was taking them out the very second they started making eyes at his doll. They could just go buy their own.
Pie.
‘10-4 on the pie, you one-track doll. Come on; let’s see what’s on the menu.’
‘Two burgers, one with everything, fries, coffee, Thanks.’ Sam did his best to smile serenely at the bored waitress.
‘Something for your … friend?’ To her credit the waitress didn’t hesitate more than a few seconds. Of course that could have been put down to the gum she was busy masticating to death. Or maybe she really had seen it all before. She was on the wrong side of fifty and looked like she’d spent longer than that earning her bunions pounding the narrow eight foot strip of aisle between the kitchen and the booths at the Hot Pink Tomato.
‘He’ll have the pie of the day as well, but no coffee. I’m trying to wean him off caffeine. It makes him a little hyper when he’s driving.’
‘Sure thing, Sugar.’ She expertly popped a large faded purple Bubblicious balloon at them and limped off, leaving the lingering stench of artificial grape flavouring wafting over their table.
‘Good to be out of the room, huh?’
Dean’s eyes didn’t widen, but Sam could hear his ‘Awkward!’ loud and clear.
‘Shut up!’ He muttered to his brother. ‘s not like this is easy you know.’
Dean might have felt a little guilty, but Sam doubted it. It took a lot to faze his brother.
Dinner.
Dean looked coy. Sam blamed the eyebrows and those lips.
‘Yeah, I know. You’re not that kind of girl.’
Dean let a suspiciously naughty glint enter his flat plastic eyes, and Sam certainly shouldn’t have been thinking what he was thinking…
‘You are?’ Of course you are.
Winchesters always put out on the first date.
Please, God, let Sam have imagined that. Still, he’d learnt over the years that the best way to handle Dean when he was drunk, or flirty, or heaven help them-plastic-was to just try and keep up.
‘I’ll spring for dinner, but if you want to go dancing later, you’re on your own.’
Sam thought he’d be able to tough out staying at the diner long enough to force an entire meal down. He was wrong.
He carefully arranged Dean’s artery-clogging food in front of his brother. He was going to kill himself before he admitted they weren’t just having a normal night out. Dean might be plastic, but if he wanted a burger and pie, he was going to damn well get to sit there and look at them as long as he liked.
‘Ketchup?’ It was a rhetorical question. He knew Dean liked to drown his “vegetables” in a bloody red bath of sauce.
‘Or would you like the local version? It’s pink, and it’s totally your colour too.’ Okay, probably that was mean, but it felt good. Normal.
He ignored his own words and squirted the Heinz bottle over Dean’s plate, then contented himself with only stealing three fries before going back to his own meal.
‘Hey, Mister. Why you got a dolly?’
Shit.
‘Ah.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Kill me…’
Kill me now.
Huh, Bobby was right.
‘She’s pretty. Want to see my dolly?’ Three foot and possibly one inch of tiny Latino sunshine bundled up in a yellow snowsuit was beaming up at them both.
‘Uh, sure, honey. Wow, she’s pretty too.’ Sam was desperately not looking at his brother. Oh God, I’m going to lose it.
‘Her name’s Tiffany! Mine’s Britney. What’s yours?’
‘S…Sam, my name’s Sam, and this is Dean. He’s my bro…’ Um. ‘He’s my … brother’s … dolly.’ Definitely not looking at Dean, or Britney’s parents who were snickering callously in the adjoining booth.
‘Cool. My brother doesn’t have a dolly yet, just a teddy bear,’ she nodded sadly. ‘But he’s only two. How old’s your brother?’
‘A … little bit older than that,’ Sam admitted wryly.
‘Uh huh.’ Britney propped Tiffany up on Dean’s leg while she rummaged in her pink plastic Barbie shoulder bag. She solemnly pulled out a bright blue and red tube and stubbed it carefully over her lips. ‘Where’s your brother? Did he let you borrow his dolly?’
‘He… wasn’t feeling very well. We just came to get dinner. Maybe we should take it back to him.’
Britney smiled. ‘You could have a picnic. My dolly likes picnics.’
‘Good idea, Britney. Think we’ll do that. Excuse me for a minute.’ Sam made a dash for the restrooms before he broke down in front of the perky toddler. He’d rather not end the day traumatising an innocent kid.
It only took him a few minutes of dunking his head under cold water to sober up. It really wasn’t that funny. Maybe it would be funny after this was all over. Months and months after this was over. But now? Not funny. Okay, maybe a little funny.
Sam allowed himself one small chuckle before he went back to get his dolly and dinner to go.
Dean was alone, slumped forward over the table, torso just missing being basted by ketchup.
‘Dean?’ Oh, God, he’s sprung another leak! Got to get the duct tape. ’Shit. Shit. Shit…’
‘Dean?’
Sam frantically yanked Dean upright. Where was the hole this time?
Dean was… Dean was…
Dean’s already pink and pouty lips had been roughly coloured in with bright red ChapStick.
Dean was still whimpering pathetically twenty minutes later, or at least that’s what Sam assumed the faint wailing sound was weaving through the backblocks of his mind.
Sam was doing his best to be a sympathetic and supportive little brother, but…
‘Dude! You got graffitied by a five-year-old girl!’
On the positive side it did gain Sam a few moments peace before Dean went back to his mental spelling bee.
Dean Winchester. D.E…
‘If you start spelling Britney, I’m gagging those plastic lips.’ Sam wasn’t sure that would work, after all Dean wasn’t actually talking out loud. But he was doing his best to stand firm.
B.
‘No. There’s no way I’m ever going to go kill a kid for you, even if she was mean.’
Sometimes the point needed to be made more than once. Sam was just grateful that little Britney had knocked him off the top of the Arkansas mean list.
Pie, bitch!
Sam liked to think he’d been coping pretty well during a stressful occasion. But even Sam had limits.
Being woken up at 6.30 am on an ice-cold winter morning to find your brother had somehow rolled over on top of you and was currently smothering your face with so much of his plastic six-pack that you were in danger of suffocating brought him close to the edge.
When his tortured imagination, or what he’d foolishly downplayed to Bobby as that “Dean and Sam thing,” started demanding he get up and get his brother some pie or suffer the consequences; that tipped him over.
As he rammed Dean into the shower stall and turned the cold water on full he decided that what Dean needed was a short time-out to come to his plastic senses.
Listening to Dean’s inner voice gasp in shock before it shakily slipped back into a hauntingly familiar refrain Sam knew deep down that it was a lost cause.
Dean. D.E.A.N.
The trouble was, amazing as it sounded, despite everything Dean was still very much Dean.
Possibly plastic had hitherto unknown powers of conductivity.
‘I’m running out of things to look up, Dean. I’ve even hit every plastics website between here and Tennessee. Something did this to you. Something malicious. You’ve been a doll for three days now and nothing Bobby has come up with has turned even your left pinky finger back to normal.’
Dean kept looking at his feet. Sam presumed he’d napped through most of his marathon research sessions. He could have still been asleep for all Sam knew. Do dolls sleep? Does Dean? Sam shook himself out of that mental detour. It was more likely that Dean was just thinking about pie.
‘We still don’t know what did this to you. You’re so big on spelling all of a sudden, why don’t you give me a Y?’
Dean emitted a faint raspberry sound, but that could have just been an unfortunate side effect of his plastic skin getting stuck to the metal arm of the chair. Or not.
‘Help me out here, Dean! We don’t get this fixed in the next twenty-four hours, Bobby’s going to be hopping in his pick-up and driving out here to supervise us in person.’ Sam knew how good a threat that was. He knew how hard it was for Dean to have Sam see him like this, let alone someone else, even if it was Bobby.
W.
Huh? ‘Dean?’
W.
‘Oh for Pete’s sake! Not witches again!’
Dean managed to slip off the chair and onto the floor where he could look Sam right in the eye and engage in a long drawn-out staring contest. He was very good at it. Possibly not having to blink gave him an unfair advantage.
Sam interpreted that look to mean Dean was asking, ‘How can you be sure it wasn’t witches?’
‘No. It wasn’t witches.’
Dean just lay there.
‘No, I’m really sure. Bobby and I already checked that possibility out. Twice.’
Four times actually but Dean didn’t need to know how worried they were getting. Besides, Dean had good reason to be paranoid about witches. Every time Dean met a witch he ended up… Well, a witch was never a good look on a Winchester. But this time, unfortunately, Dean was wrong. Sam wished he wasn’t because he was getting better at dealing with Dean’s witches. This? Was a whole other problem.
‘Not a witch. Read my lips, Doll-face.’ Oops.
‘Sorry, Dean.’
Dean just lay there gazing up at the ceiling as if mentally counting witches on broomsticks looping the loop around flying pigs.
‘Absolutely positive it wasn’t witches.’
W.
‘I know you hate witches. I kinda do too now.’
Wwwwwwwwww…
‘Still more crazy stuff, Bobby.’
‘How crazy?’
‘After he calmed down about Britney…’
‘Britney?’
‘Seriously, Bobby? You don’t want to know.’
‘Move it along, ya idjut.’
‘After the witches, he flipped right back to his pet mantra. I swear he’s still going on about his name, like he was stuck back in his first year of school. Dean Winchester. W. I. N. C…’
‘I know how to spell it, Sam.’
“Apparently Dean does too. D.E.A.N. W…’
‘Sam!’
‘How do you think I feel? It’s all I’m getting, hour in, hour out. I should be grateful he’s not Andy because then I’d be getting the porn channel streamed live through my third eye. Which, considering Dean, I’m kind of surprised I’m not getting. But no, most of the time I just get Dean proudly spelling his name out like he was on Sesame Street.’
‘Well, Dean has always has had a high opinion of himself,’ Bobby said truthfully.
‘And of his spelling. Take now for instance…’
Dean Winchester was here, bitches!
‘All I can hear is “Dean Winchester was here.” I’ve been hearing it so long I can almost see it traced out in yellow cursive writing in the snow… SHIT!’
‘WHAT? Sam?’
‘Dean? FUCK! How could I have been so stupid?’
SOUL
‘Sam? What in tarnation’s going on, boy?’
Sam threw his cell onto the dash, ignoring the faint bleating that was Bobby swearing up a storm under the tire roar as he threw the Impala into a fast reverse and spun out of the car park to leave the Come On Inn, Warren, and hen’s night parties in their rear view mirror, hopefully forever. Adios tomatoes.
Dean. D.E.A.N. Dean.
‘I hear you, Dean. This time I hear you.’
‘Gods, Bobby. Arkansas; Ozarks off on the edges of the state. Old beliefs, and a quite a few people not holding to the more modern faiths. Old religions. Celtic gods and who knows what else. Not to mention earlier inhabitants and the old cave culture. All those pictographs and painted petroglyphs archaeologists have been studying. Gimme shelter. Fuck!’
‘Sam? That’s a hell of a lot of territory to cover. You’re talking myths and legends of several different cultures. There’s no way we can narrow anything down quickly.’
‘Don’t need to, Bobby. Dean told me exactly where it happened. And now I know what he did. There’s only one thing we can do now…’
Sam answered Bobby’s questions as well as he could as he barrelled the Impala down the highway on his way back to the spot where Dean had literally been converted. He knew what, and why, and even had an inkling as to whom. But none of that mattered.
It was his doll. It was Dean. And he wasn’t letting it go.
‘Dean, you pissed on a God.’
Nooooooo…?
‘Well, an altar to a God. Same thing really.’
As he stood there in the falling snow beside the roadside where it all began, Dean held securely upright inside the protection of his encircling arm, Sam knew that Dean was yelling with frustration. Here in the empty countryside with nothing to get between them Dean’s thoughts were coming in loud and clear.
It looked like a fucking rock under the snow! How was I supposed to know?
‘Not only did you piss on him, you pissed out, “Dean Winchester was here, bitches.” With an exclamation point! You don’t think he’d get mad?’
Uh?
‘Angry enough to turn you into a sex-toy? Put your tallywhacker, and the rest of you away where you couldn’t do anything, for as long as he willed it?’
Not really. Wasn’t thinking about Gods, Sammy. Was just taking a freaking leak! When a guy’s got to go, he’s got to go. Besides, you pissed on him too!
‘But you did it first!’
No I didn… Damn it, Sammy!
‘Dean. Shut the fuck up for a minute!’
Nngh?
‘Say you’re sorry.’
‘m not sorry. ‘m mad! Dude turned me into a fucking blow-up doll, Sammy!
‘Dean!’
What?
‘Sorry. NOW! And if you mean it we might get lucky enough that we can both walk away from this on our own two feet.’
Erm.
‘Dean.’
Sorry.
‘Don’t think he can hear you, Dean. I can hardly hear you. Suck it up, and say you’re sorry, because I don’t want to have to lug your plastic ass around with me for the rest of our lives!’
Fuck. I’m sorry!
‘Tell it to him, Dean.’
Oh.
I’m sorry. Really fucking sorry I … uh … desecrated your stone, okay? ‘m sorry you got mad and made me plastic. Really sorry that Sammy got upset and worried and had to deal with me.
Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.
Just turn me back, and me and Sam’ll get out of here and never come back again. And you can get on with the good old-fashioned smiting of some real heathens and Sammy and I will go back to killing demons. What do you say? Do we have a deal?
‘Dean!’
I’m telling him!
I’m sorry. Sam’ll even lay flowers if that’s what you want. I would if I could, but I’m still PLASTIC! Nothing says you’re sorry like flowers, right?
I’m SORRY!
Uh…
Can I have my dick back now?
Sammy?
Taranis’ thunder rolled its wheels across the sky, some guilty-by-close-association clouds tittered, tattered, and dispersed elsewhere now they’d had their fun, and Dean let out a jubilant, totally audible, undoll-like yell and jumped Sam, ending up with his arms around Sam’s neck and his legs around his waist, heels digging into his kidneys, hugging him tighter than a Velcro monkey.
‘You did it, Sam!’
‘Dean?’ Sam choked out through the stranglehold his brother had on him. ‘I love you too, but you’re a little big even for me to piggyback whichever way you jump me.’
‘Oh.’
‘Get off me you stupid lug!’
Dean sheepishly unwound his limbs and clambered all the way down off his little brother, leaving a suspicious red smudge behind on Sam’s t-shirt.
‘Knew you could do it, Sam.’
‘Yeah? Well I’m glad one of us had some faith. Didn’t think that was going to work.’
‘What do you mean you didn’t think it would work? You mean you had me stand here yelling at a freaking God on the off chance?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, okay then.’ Dean was always good about moving onto the next shiny thing fast. ‘Let’s go get us some pie.’
‘Sure, Dean. But after this it’s McDonald’s restrooms all the way.’
‘Told you, you were the girl.’ Dean slapped Sam on the shoulder. Hard. ‘I mean it’s not like thunder’s ever going to strike twice is it?’
The only sound Sam made was a pitiful whistling wail as he slowly started deflating.
Dean’s first thought was…
Okay, not going there.
Dean’s second thought was how unfair it was that even as a doll, Sam still managed to loom over him.
Dean’s third thought was that there was no way that a bicycle pump was going to be big enough to get the job done.
Dean’s first and fourth thoughts started out, Fuck! Sammy’s …
There are definitely some things you should never have to learn about your brother.
A/N: Additional thanks for some extraordinarily disparate inspirations (What? Crack comes from everywhere!) also go to two of Kansas’ own:
Vance Randolph’s Pissing in the Snow and Other Ozark Folktales. Collections of Randolph’s manuscripts are held in the University of Arkansas Libraries.
Big Joe Turner’s version of Shake, Rattle and Roll. The lyrics and video are here.
*Gets down off geekbox and wanders off to play with her Dean doll*