death by shoes (almost)
Thing that is weird: having your mate's girlfriend (who you get on well enough with, but you're not exactly close) ping you out of the blue for- and I just checked- three minutes of smalltalk. OKAY!
But anyway, last night I dreamt Jensen was a werewolf (suddenly it all makes sense- he isn't shy and/or filled with fan-hate at all! He's just scared he'll EAT us!) and today I spent a surprise two hours writing weechester fic on my typewriter. I was caught in the Regina Spektor zone. You can't not write, when you're in the Regina Spektor zone. And I swear, every time I whack a sheet of paper in my typewriter for the hell of it, some weechesters come out.
Only, more like teenchesters in this case, really. (HEY sirryluv, THIS WAS ENTIRELY INSPIRED BY WHAT WE TALKED ABOUT LAST NIGHT.) There is no ending. This may or may not be because it isn't finished.
There’s something stupidly optimistic about hospital interior design, like they somehow think a lick of paint (orange- it’s almost always orange) and a couple pictures on the walls will confuse people into forgetting they’ve got cancer or no legs or their intestines are dribbling out around their ankles or whatever. Like they’ll be so distracted by the decoratively arranged pot-plants they’ll go buy teddies and balloons. The problem is- and Sam’s been watching people come and go all his life, and in this particular hospital for two hours now, so he’s pretty much an expert on the subject- the problem is that the pot-plant distraction technique actually seems to work. He stopped counting the number of teddy bears passing through the gift shop’s well-polished doors fifty minutes ago, it was getting that repetitive. Maybe, he’s just about willing to concede, just maybe the designers weren’t so much naively optimistic as they were actually on to something. How cynical do you have to be to figure that people will actually spend money on this crap in between worrying about the mortality of their loved ones? Cynical enough.
Sam hunches down a little further into his chair and watches as yet another guy in a suit rushes by with a cross-eyed bear. The guy’s probably been having an affair or something, and Sam can feel the plastic chair back digging into ever single vertebrae of his squashed-up spine (cervical, thoracic, lumbar). He’ll move again soon; he’s two seat-swaps away from a full circuit of the whole waiting room, and this view’s gotten old fast. The big clock (orange, always with the freaking orange) is on the wall opposite here, practically at eye-level when he leans his head back against the chair, and it’s not like he needs any more reminders of how long it’s been since Dad sat him down two metres away and said stay here, Sam, just stay here before he rushed away, leaving Sam alone and terrified.
Past tense. It’s pretty hard to maintain that level of anxiety- the kind where he couldn’t even chase after his dad because he was shaking so hard and he’d felt like he was choking on his own tongue and his head was going to explode- it’s hard to maintain that for longer than ten, fifteen minutes tops. And then you just get bored. That’s why everything happens so quickly in medical dramas, Sam figures. No need for counting floor tiles or swapping chairs when people are busy having heart-attacks all over the place, limbs that have to be amputated by doctors armed with nothing but a pen-lid and a ball of yarn. Nobody ever buys teddies in medical dramas, either. Or gets torn to shreds by a pissy skinwalker.
If Sam doesn’t move soon, his butt is going to fall off, he’s pretty sure of it. He wiggles against the plastic, feeling the tingle of it as his blood rushes back to long forgotten places, and swings his feet up onto the empty chair next to him. He can rest his chin on his knees and pretend to tie his laces, and he’s got maybe five minutes before one of the nurses tells him off for putting his feet up on the furniture again. It probably doesn’t help when you’ve got blood all over your sneakers.
He wishes he could clean them. Really, really wishes he could. Or just something. He hasn’t even got a gun to clean instead, or a book to read, and all his homework is back at their motel. Not that it’s like he could clean a gun here anyway, not with the place swarming with civilians. They just wouldn’t understand.
Dean would understand.
Sam sighs, throwing his feet back on to the floor before a nurse can catch him again. The last thing any of them needs is for him to be thrown out, after all; Dad would probably kill him. (Unless.) With his head thrown back against the edge of the chair, he can almost make out the doors Dad disappeared through, upside down, blood pounding at his temples and between his eyes. His ankles hook around the chair-legs. Plastic creaks violently.
“Hello,” says a voice somewhere above and to the left, little girl soft. Sam twists his head around, wincing as the blood sloshes about inside, and finds himself nose-to-nose with a little girl. She’s kneeling up on the chair diagonal to his (he sat on it half an hour ago; it squeaked), her fingers gripping the top of it and her hair a mousy brown mess in her eyes. “You look funny,” she says, and then she giggles.
“Thanks,” says Sam. He doesn’t bother lifting his head up, but she grins down at him anyway.
“My name’s Jenny, um. I’m seven.” Jenny pauses to wipe her nose on the edge of her sleeve, sniffing deeply and gleefully. He really, really hopes she isn’t lost; he doesn’t feel like moving yet.
“Are you lost?” he asks regretfully. You’ve just got to look after little girls, really, even the ones dressed entirely in pink and with no apparent sense of personal space. Even the ones with dripping noses.
“My mommy’s over there,” she says, with an extravagant wave of a hand- pink nail varnish fingers- that almost sends her toppling backwards off her chair. “We’re gonna visit my nana and look at her and give her a bear and, um, stuff.”
“That’s great,” Sam allows. Jenny holds the teddy bear up for him. It looks exactly the same as every other stupid bear he’s seen today, with the added bonus of having its face twisted out of shape by a little girl’s over-enthusiastic grip, but she’s smiling down at him, gap-toothed, like it’s the best freaking thing she’s even seen. “That’s great, Jenny. You can stop showing me now.”
“Okay!” she hollers, but she makes the teddy dance in his face all the same, one long, fur-filled moment that stretches for what feels like a million years. The orange clock on the wall tells him it’s been ten minutes since he last looked at it; two hours and ten minutes since Dad disappeared through those doors.
Jenny tugs on his hair. “Are you gonna see your nana?”
“No,” Sam says.
“Is your mommy here too?”
He closes his eyes. “No.”
Jenny sounds perplexed. “Who are you gonna see, then?”
“Look,” he snaps, sitting up too fast, before he can bite down on his tongue and get a freaking grip. You don’t yell at little girls. Especially not when their mom’s close by. He scrubs a hand across his face. “Sorry, sorry. My brother. I’m here to see my brother.”
“Is he sick?” she whispers.
Sam shrugs, hunching back down in his stupid, uncomfortable chair. “He got hurt. Bitten by a, er, a dog. Real big dog. But he’ll be fine.”
Jenny’s tiny, little hand finds its way onto his forehead and pats him, clumsily. Stickily. “Dogs are scary.”
You have no idea, Sam thinks. The taste of it settles heavy in the back of his throat. Two hours and fourteen minutes. “Hey, uh. Why the teddy, Jenny?”
She frowns down at him, fingers splayed across his face, the look on her own more incredulous than a seven-year-old girl has any right to be. “So nana can cuddle it,” she says, the duh implied. “When I’m not there. And then she can think of when I am there, and it’ll make her better, see?”
He doesn’t, really, but he doesn’t have a chance to say so before a pair of hands are hooking under Jenny’s armpits and lifting her up out of her chair and “for heaven’s sake, Jenny, how many times do I have to tell you, you never, ever wander off when mommy’s back is turned.” The words are scolding, but there’s love in them, and in the woman’s face too (mousy brown hair and a mouth that, if it smiled and lost a few teeth, would be a grown up replica of Jenny’s own) as she hugs her daughter close, smoothes a hand through her messy hair. “She wasn’t bothering you, was she?”
It takes a moment for the words to sink in, for Sam to realises she’s talking to him. “No, it’s fine, she was fine.” He shrugs, and Jenny grins down at him from her mom’s arms.
“Mommy, this is, um. His brother was eaten by a mean dog,” she explains brightly. “He likes nana’s teddy.”
“Well, of course he does, sweetheart. Who wouldn’t like such a lovely gift?” Jenny’s mom smiles down at her- yeah, there it is, exactly the same- and presses a kiss to her forehead. “But now we’ve got to go see your nana, so say bye-bye to your friend. Thank you,” she adds, serious again, giving Sam a small-scale version of the full-watt grin her daughter is beaming in his direction, “for keeping an eye on her.”
Sam shrugs, “No problem,” and offers Jenny a half-hearted wave goodbye. They disappear through the doors, and he slumps back down into his chair, breathes out a sigh. Two hours and twenty minutes since, reads the clock on the wall, and Dean will laugh so hard when Sam tells him all about this, and he’ll say something like ‘man, how can you be so shit with little girls when you’re just a couple extra feet away from being one?’, because Dean’s as good with little girls as he is with girl girls, but then he’ll throw an arm around Sam’s shoulders and everything will be fine.
Two hours and twenty-three minutes. Sam draws his feet up onto the chair again, rests his chin back on his knees, screw the bitchy nurse, and he closes his eyes. He’ll move again in a minute, find himself a new wall to stare at. He’s just two away from a full circuit of the waiting room, after all, and Dad’ll be back any moment now.
And ‘don’t worry, Sammy,’ he’ll say with that flash-of-a-grin of his, ‘Dean’s fine.’
But anyway, last night I dreamt Jensen was a werewolf (suddenly it all makes sense- he isn't shy and/or filled with fan-hate at all! He's just scared he'll EAT us!) and today I spent a surprise two hours writing weechester fic on my typewriter. I was caught in the Regina Spektor zone. You can't not write, when you're in the Regina Spektor zone. And I swear, every time I whack a sheet of paper in my typewriter for the hell of it, some weechesters come out.
Only, more like teenchesters in this case, really. (HEY sirryluv, THIS WAS ENTIRELY INSPIRED BY WHAT WE TALKED ABOUT LAST NIGHT.) There is no ending. This may or may not be because it isn't finished.
There’s something stupidly optimistic about hospital interior design, like they somehow think a lick of paint (orange- it’s almost always orange) and a couple pictures on the walls will confuse people into forgetting they’ve got cancer or no legs or their intestines are dribbling out around their ankles or whatever. Like they’ll be so distracted by the decoratively arranged pot-plants they’ll go buy teddies and balloons. The problem is- and Sam’s been watching people come and go all his life, and in this particular hospital for two hours now, so he’s pretty much an expert on the subject- the problem is that the pot-plant distraction technique actually seems to work. He stopped counting the number of teddy bears passing through the gift shop’s well-polished doors fifty minutes ago, it was getting that repetitive. Maybe, he’s just about willing to concede, just maybe the designers weren’t so much naively optimistic as they were actually on to something. How cynical do you have to be to figure that people will actually spend money on this crap in between worrying about the mortality of their loved ones? Cynical enough.
Sam hunches down a little further into his chair and watches as yet another guy in a suit rushes by with a cross-eyed bear. The guy’s probably been having an affair or something, and Sam can feel the plastic chair back digging into ever single vertebrae of his squashed-up spine (cervical, thoracic, lumbar). He’ll move again soon; he’s two seat-swaps away from a full circuit of the whole waiting room, and this view’s gotten old fast. The big clock (orange, always with the freaking orange) is on the wall opposite here, practically at eye-level when he leans his head back against the chair, and it’s not like he needs any more reminders of how long it’s been since Dad sat him down two metres away and said stay here, Sam, just stay here before he rushed away, leaving Sam alone and terrified.
Past tense. It’s pretty hard to maintain that level of anxiety- the kind where he couldn’t even chase after his dad because he was shaking so hard and he’d felt like he was choking on his own tongue and his head was going to explode- it’s hard to maintain that for longer than ten, fifteen minutes tops. And then you just get bored. That’s why everything happens so quickly in medical dramas, Sam figures. No need for counting floor tiles or swapping chairs when people are busy having heart-attacks all over the place, limbs that have to be amputated by doctors armed with nothing but a pen-lid and a ball of yarn. Nobody ever buys teddies in medical dramas, either. Or gets torn to shreds by a pissy skinwalker.
If Sam doesn’t move soon, his butt is going to fall off, he’s pretty sure of it. He wiggles against the plastic, feeling the tingle of it as his blood rushes back to long forgotten places, and swings his feet up onto the empty chair next to him. He can rest his chin on his knees and pretend to tie his laces, and he’s got maybe five minutes before one of the nurses tells him off for putting his feet up on the furniture again. It probably doesn’t help when you’ve got blood all over your sneakers.
He wishes he could clean them. Really, really wishes he could. Or just something. He hasn’t even got a gun to clean instead, or a book to read, and all his homework is back at their motel. Not that it’s like he could clean a gun here anyway, not with the place swarming with civilians. They just wouldn’t understand.
Dean would understand.
Sam sighs, throwing his feet back on to the floor before a nurse can catch him again. The last thing any of them needs is for him to be thrown out, after all; Dad would probably kill him. (Unless.) With his head thrown back against the edge of the chair, he can almost make out the doors Dad disappeared through, upside down, blood pounding at his temples and between his eyes. His ankles hook around the chair-legs. Plastic creaks violently.
“Hello,” says a voice somewhere above and to the left, little girl soft. Sam twists his head around, wincing as the blood sloshes about inside, and finds himself nose-to-nose with a little girl. She’s kneeling up on the chair diagonal to his (he sat on it half an hour ago; it squeaked), her fingers gripping the top of it and her hair a mousy brown mess in her eyes. “You look funny,” she says, and then she giggles.
“Thanks,” says Sam. He doesn’t bother lifting his head up, but she grins down at him anyway.
“My name’s Jenny, um. I’m seven.” Jenny pauses to wipe her nose on the edge of her sleeve, sniffing deeply and gleefully. He really, really hopes she isn’t lost; he doesn’t feel like moving yet.
“Are you lost?” he asks regretfully. You’ve just got to look after little girls, really, even the ones dressed entirely in pink and with no apparent sense of personal space. Even the ones with dripping noses.
“My mommy’s over there,” she says, with an extravagant wave of a hand- pink nail varnish fingers- that almost sends her toppling backwards off her chair. “We’re gonna visit my nana and look at her and give her a bear and, um, stuff.”
“That’s great,” Sam allows. Jenny holds the teddy bear up for him. It looks exactly the same as every other stupid bear he’s seen today, with the added bonus of having its face twisted out of shape by a little girl’s over-enthusiastic grip, but she’s smiling down at him, gap-toothed, like it’s the best freaking thing she’s even seen. “That’s great, Jenny. You can stop showing me now.”
“Okay!” she hollers, but she makes the teddy dance in his face all the same, one long, fur-filled moment that stretches for what feels like a million years. The orange clock on the wall tells him it’s been ten minutes since he last looked at it; two hours and ten minutes since Dad disappeared through those doors.
Jenny tugs on his hair. “Are you gonna see your nana?”
“No,” Sam says.
“Is your mommy here too?”
He closes his eyes. “No.”
Jenny sounds perplexed. “Who are you gonna see, then?”
“Look,” he snaps, sitting up too fast, before he can bite down on his tongue and get a freaking grip. You don’t yell at little girls. Especially not when their mom’s close by. He scrubs a hand across his face. “Sorry, sorry. My brother. I’m here to see my brother.”
“Is he sick?” she whispers.
Sam shrugs, hunching back down in his stupid, uncomfortable chair. “He got hurt. Bitten by a, er, a dog. Real big dog. But he’ll be fine.”
Jenny’s tiny, little hand finds its way onto his forehead and pats him, clumsily. Stickily. “Dogs are scary.”
You have no idea, Sam thinks. The taste of it settles heavy in the back of his throat. Two hours and fourteen minutes. “Hey, uh. Why the teddy, Jenny?”
She frowns down at him, fingers splayed across his face, the look on her own more incredulous than a seven-year-old girl has any right to be. “So nana can cuddle it,” she says, the duh implied. “When I’m not there. And then she can think of when I am there, and it’ll make her better, see?”
He doesn’t, really, but he doesn’t have a chance to say so before a pair of hands are hooking under Jenny’s armpits and lifting her up out of her chair and “for heaven’s sake, Jenny, how many times do I have to tell you, you never, ever wander off when mommy’s back is turned.” The words are scolding, but there’s love in them, and in the woman’s face too (mousy brown hair and a mouth that, if it smiled and lost a few teeth, would be a grown up replica of Jenny’s own) as she hugs her daughter close, smoothes a hand through her messy hair. “She wasn’t bothering you, was she?”
It takes a moment for the words to sink in, for Sam to realises she’s talking to him. “No, it’s fine, she was fine.” He shrugs, and Jenny grins down at him from her mom’s arms.
“Mommy, this is, um. His brother was eaten by a mean dog,” she explains brightly. “He likes nana’s teddy.”
“Well, of course he does, sweetheart. Who wouldn’t like such a lovely gift?” Jenny’s mom smiles down at her- yeah, there it is, exactly the same- and presses a kiss to her forehead. “But now we’ve got to go see your nana, so say bye-bye to your friend. Thank you,” she adds, serious again, giving Sam a small-scale version of the full-watt grin her daughter is beaming in his direction, “for keeping an eye on her.”
Sam shrugs, “No problem,” and offers Jenny a half-hearted wave goodbye. They disappear through the doors, and he slumps back down into his chair, breathes out a sigh. Two hours and twenty minutes since, reads the clock on the wall, and Dean will laugh so hard when Sam tells him all about this, and he’ll say something like ‘man, how can you be so shit with little girls when you’re just a couple extra feet away from being one?’, because Dean’s as good with little girls as he is with girl girls, but then he’ll throw an arm around Sam’s shoulders and everything will be fine.
Two hours and twenty-three minutes. Sam draws his feet up onto the chair again, rests his chin back on his knees, screw the bitchy nurse, and he closes his eyes. He’ll move again in a minute, find himself a new wall to stare at. He’s just two away from a full circuit of the waiting room, after all, and Dad’ll be back any moment now.
And ‘don’t worry, Sammy,’ he’ll say with that flash-of-a-grin of his, ‘Dean’s fine.’