A/N: This is my first completed Supernatural fic. I started writing this in math today with a completely different idea in mind, and this just came out instead. Enjoy, and leave a comment with what you think of it. :D
Disclaimer: I don't own it. Unfortunately, that is Kripke's playground, and I was not invited to play.
No Dark Sarcasm in the Classroom
Dean doesn't like English. In fact, you could say that he hates it with a passion that he normally saves for demons. He hates writing, he hates having to read what he's written, and he especially hates listening to other people read what they've written. It was bad enough that he was stuck in school while his dad was out there, trying to track down the thing that had killed Dean's mother, but to have to sit through ninety-eight minutes' worth of kids fumbling over their own words? No thanks. In Dean's world, you shot first and asked questions later, and the idiots who took time to spill out their plans in eloquent words ended up with a silver bullet lodged in their heart before they could finish.
So now, sitting in an eleventh grade Honors English class somewhere in Alabama, listening to some girl bumble her way through her pathetic excuse for a vampire story, Dean is not what one would call pleased. It's bad enough having to listen to the description of how she'd gone into a haunted house in the middle of the night—who does that? Oh, right, idiots—and found some vampire that she described as dazzling, but when she gets to the part about how killing the vampire takes only a wooden stake and some holy water, Dean is ready to lose his freaking mind. "You can't kill a vampire with a stake," he wants to stand up and say. "That's a complete myth. You can only kill them if you shoot them full of dead man's blood and then decapitate them. Get your facts straight, dammit."
But the first rule of being a Winchester has been repeated often enough—We do what we do and we shut up about it—and Dean had never been one to ignore an order. He does precisely that, slumping in his desk and staring at the girl through half-lidded green eyes, trying to remember that none of these kids know what he does. None of them know that the vampires, werewolves, ghosts, and demons that they're so flippantly speaking of actually exist, and much less that one of their own classmates spends his free-time killing them.
And, correcting them would make him a geek-boy like Sammy. Dean Winchester is not a geek-boy and refuses to do anything that could possibly provoke that thought in others.
"Thank you, Miss Dawson. …Mr. Jones? Mr. Jones, it's your turn to read," his teacher—an older woman with thick green-framed glasses—calls. "Mr. Jones? Dean Jones!"
Dean jumps, mentally cringing. Stupid, he chides. They'd been posing as the Jones family—John Jones and his two troublesome teens, Dean and Sam—for nearly a month, but it was always difficult to keep up with the aliases. Anyway, he's Dean Winchester, not Dean Jones, and he's pretty damn proud of that fact. "Right, sorry," he says to his teacher, ignoring the snickering of the other students. (Why should he care what they think? They couldn't tell a hellhound from a bloodhound if one bit off their arm.)
Dean dutifully swaggers up to the front of the room. He sends a smirk toward the blonde girl he's been flirting with for the past few weeks, satisfied with the blush and the smile she gives him in return. Dean clears his throat and dramatically shakes out his paper. "The Weekend at Mortar Creek by Dean Jones," he reads. He takes a moment to wink at the blushing girl. "Sam Winchester and his younger brother Dan were on a hunt. Their dad, Jack, was using himself as bait, trying to lure their prey out of hiding." He pauses, looking out into the eyes of his classmates, before continuing. "But this wasn't a regular hunt. They weren't hunting deer, and they weren't even holding rifles—they had flare guns. They were hunting a Wendigo—the monster created from a human who started to eat human flesh to survive…"
His voice is low, but each word is clearly audible in the silent classroom. See, Dean might not like to write, and he might not like to read what he's written, but he sure as hell likes to brag about his job, and this? This was an opportunity to do so without getting locked up or shot at. He continues on with his story, voice rising and falling in just the right places to keep the kids on the edges of their seats. Half of his mind is back at that creek, crouching in the small cove, urging Sam to stay calm—shut it, Sammy, first hunt or not, you can't keep talking.
The other half of his mind is well-aware of the fact that several of his classmates are getting creeped out, and that some idiot in the back is turned around, whispering, "God, he's morbid. What a freak." That part of his mind realizes that his story is so much different than the others that had been read. Theirs were filled with a playful tone, what happened when you tried a little too hard to make something scary. They weren't real, and the kids reading them knew it—there was no conviction in their tones. Dean, however, had lived these events—and though he can't say so, he can put it into his storytelling and make them believe that somewhere, there is a once-human monster who keeps humans stored up as food during their hibernation.
"Sam fires off the flare gun and the sucker goes down in a blaze." Pause. "Er. The end."
Silence.
Dean lowers the paper and raises his eyebrows, not really surprised. "What, no applause?" he asks, his smirk returning. The blonde girl chews at her bottom lip and keeps her eyes trained on her desk. The other kids in the room are either staring at him or reacting like she did—avoiding eye contact at all costs. Hesitant clapping breaks through the awkward silence—one person, already reluctant, who stops when he realizes that no one else has joined in.
Dean shrugs and ambles over to the teacher, who is wide-eyed behind her glasses. He hands the paper to her and waits for her to say something.
"That was…interesting," she says slowly. He can see in her expression that she'd going through every word he's said, comparing it against a mental list of characteristics, trying to figure out if the snarky kid who knows too much about guns is going to go crazy on them.
Dean pulls out a bright smile. He leans forward slightly, letting his eyes widen innocently, just as his dad had taught him—a fool proof way to get answers out of almost anybody. He lets his Southern drawl become a little more pronounced as he says, "Thank you, ma'am."
While he walks back to his seat, he thinks that really, it doesn't matter if these kids think he's a morbid freak. It doesn't matter if the teacher calls the cops on him, thinking he's going to shoot up the school. It would be a little problematic, but really, the cops would be looking for Dean Jones, the flirtatious high school junior who's mother had died of cancer. By the time they came poking around, Dean Winchester, the flirtatious young demon hunter, would be a hundred miles away.
He can tell himself this all he wants, but when it all comes down to it, it still stands that he bribes Sam into writing every last one of his papers until he graduates. That's all teachers want to read, anyway—that pansy crap that Sam's always spewing about how he wants a normal life and hates how troubled his family is. Teachers want to hear that he feels alienated, not that he thrives in the fact that he kills everything evil in his path.
So, basically, Dean really hates English.