It was an honest to god, living color, 3-D, girl in a bunny suit. The good kind, with the ears sticking up out of her hair-sprayed hair that dropped to the edge of her shiny black corset-thing that gaped above her miniskirt that wrapped around bright pink tights, sitting at the bar, sipping a pink thing in a tumbler, little white tail poking out over the back of the stool. She filled out that bunny suit like they were made for each-other.
There wasn't much to think about there. Dean swaggered over to her, propped himself up to his best advantage against the bar, grinned like the fun-loving young drifter he liked to be, and said, "Gorgeous, when you walked in here, you answered every prayer I ever prayed."
Bunny squeaked and clutched her drink, which was totally not the effect Dean was going for, and, given how she was dressed, completely unexpected. The girl's companion—female, in a really butch leather coat—spun on her own barstool and glared at him. Still glaring, she looked him up and down and broke into a grin. "It's okay, Sara, he's with the Con."
Bunny girl squinted. "Who's he sup—oh, it's your clone."
Butch girlfriend was wearing a Salvation army leather jacket, a button-shirt/t-shirt combo, plain jeans, work boots, and a lumpish tangle of brass wire strung long on a cord around her neck.
"Clones," Dean said tightly.
"Well, I'll leave you two Deans to get acquainted," Bunny rattled out, picking the drink up and down before leaving it on a napkin. "I'll be at the yaoi panel."
"Thanks for sparing me," creepy clone girl called as Bunny hustled away. She flicked squinty brown eyes at Dean. "Wow, you really pull it off. Mind if I steal the bit with the collar?"
"Y—uh, no, sure," said Dean, and watched as clone girl unfolded the collar of her jacket so it stood up around her ears.
She checked herself out in a mirror behind the bar, scrunching the leather to get it to fold right. "Badass," she announced, apparently satisfied with the results. She looked like a deranged bulldyke, the kind that Dean expected to try to slam him between the legs with a pool cue on general principle, but she didn't seem to be itching for violence. "Guys' clothes are hard. It's all in the styling, unless you're cosplaying some stupid Anime character with giant buttons and sashes and coat-tails everywhere, and it's not like I can ask the guys from the Con for help, 'cause if they could do it, they'd work at a record store or something and think they're too good for us."
She was cute when she smiled, but she wasn't Bunny Girl. "Your friend okay?" Dean asked, finding the bar empty of rabbit ears (though there was a Wookie in the back corner) and sitting at the empty stool for lack of anywhere else to be. He'd been chasing figurative rabbit trails all over the nerdfest that morning and deserved a break.
Clone Girl reached across the bar for a straw and went to work on her friend's abandoned pink drink. "Sara's fine. She just gets nervous when guys notice her."
"Huh." Maybe Sara wandered around in sweat-pants and muumuus the rest of the year, with her hair in a ponytail and giant hornrimmed glasses. Dean could imagine the travesty.
Or maybe the guys she hung out with were ball-less dweebs.
"So what's your favorite part of Supernatural?" Clone Girl was asking.
Ooh, awkward. You are a fan, Dean reminded himself. Just stick it out and maybe Bunny Girl will see the light and come back. "Uh, the car."
"The car," she repeated, skeptical.
"Yes, the car!"
"Sorry. I just, usually people say Sam, or Dean, or the philosophical exploration of destiny or something. Or the gore."
"Yeah, I actually read the books because of the car. It's the same—the exact same model year as my car."
Her eyes widened. "Is it pretty?"
Dean snorted. "She's gorgeous. Runs like the day she was made—she needed some major restoration a couple years back, thought she was a goner, but I couldn't just let her go, you know?" Clone Girl was doing this amused lip-curl thing. Dean remembered that the books mentioned the time he'd spent stripping bolts and spilling brake fluid in his eyes trying to save the car, and so she wouldn't think he'd confused fantasy with reality, he added, "So the books hit a little close to home."
"That's sweet," she said—'sweet' as in 'that was sooo sweet of you to rescue that kitten from a storm drain' as opposed to 'sweet ride, man,' or 'wicked sweet skills with the ladies.'
The car was not a kitten.
"So, you…" he prompted, giving her a Sly Grin.
She spread her arms and lifted one of her boots. "You'll never guess," she said wryly.
This was weird. Maybe good weird, unless… "You don't write those, uh," gross, gross, gross, didn't want to say it. "Those, uh."
"I'm not much of a ficcer," she said. She squinted at him. "Wait, are you—no, never mind."
"What?"
"I said never mind, it's none of my business," she said, swirling the ice in her stolen Pink Thing.
Dean wasn't sure he liked the sound of that. But, anyway…he glanced back at the door for Bunny Girl, debated trying to track down the yoweye panel, whatever that was, since that was apparently where the hot nerdy chicks hung out. Then he considered the Halloween atmosphere of the Convention, and decided against it. Just because a girl here was dressed like a freewheeling fox didn't mean she was one. He ordered himself a cheap on-tap beer, and noticed the bartender sighing with relief at getting a straightforward, simple request that didn't demand six different liqueurs or Pepsi products.
"Thanks, man," he muttered, and his eyes wandered over to a brunette in a plate armor bikini with dragon wings painted all down her back, and stuck there for a second or two. Watched her move her arms when she talked. Watched her fix her bra strap, keep talking.
Clone Girl cracked up.
"What?" he demanded, losing track of Dragon Xena in a crowd of giant cartoon animals.
"Sorry," she said, gasping as she failed to compose herself. "Sorry. It's just—that was just so perfect. You got the character so down, with the big eyes and the kinda slack jaw, I mean, it looked like if there was a treadmill over there and she was standing on it, your eyes would go like this," and she swung a finger back and forth in front of her face, tracking it like she was doing a sobriety test.
"Seriously?" said Dean, pulling at his beer. This was a learning experience. All the best learning experiences involve psychic or bodily anguish, so suck it up, Dean.
"Oh, yeah," Clone Girl crowed, her grin crinkling all the way up through her eyes to her forehead. Dean had never seen anyone smile with their entire face before. "I mean, that's—that's, like, my second favorite aspect of Dean, the way he just loves life and throws himself into things and rolls around in it. I mean, the crappy pie filling that comes out of a can half the time, and the lonely barfly women, and the dysfunctional family relationships—his life sucks but he doesn't let anything stop him from milking out something fun wherever he goes."
Dean wondered if Clone Girl had taste-tested much diner pie, and decided she must not have his nose for the places that served the good stuff. The rest of her speech, he prodded a little, red-flagged, and diverted to the less used parts of his brain for burial. "That's really interesting," he said, and, oh, crap, that was what he said to girls when he wanted them to keep talking.
"He's just got this innocence, you know?" Clone Girl rhapsodized. "Even though he's always trying to 'corrupt' Sam and hitting bars and sleeping around. And it's not like when real guys go out looking to get laid—Dean's totally cheesy and macho, and he uses these ridiculous pickup lines, but I always want him to get the girl because he likes the girls and he wants them to have fun. He's like this big, inappropriate puppy, and I just wanna take him home and smack him with a rolled up newspaper."
Dean was very glad that Sam was not there.
"So you like him because he's…cheerful," Dean summarized.
"Triumph of the human spirit," she agreed. "Light in a dark place."
"Till it burns out," he muttered into his beer.
His pocket vibrated, and he snapped his phone out—anything to tear himself away from his own morbid curiosity. He read the text and snorted.
"What?" She leaned over on her stool, trying to see.
There wasn't anything incriminating on the screen, this time. "Apparently I gotta go bid on a 'staff weapon.' Not sure I wanna know what that is…"
"It's from Stargate," she said. "The original series."
"Okay," said Dean, still staring down at his phone screen leerily.
"It's like a quarterstaff with a club on each end that shoots plasma balls," she explained. "You don't watch Stargate?"
"Doesn't look like it," Dean replied, draining a third of his beer and swirling it to bring some foam back up. "What's it about?"
"It's," she said, wide-eyed. "It was…okay, so there's this artifact, right? And there's this really cute archaeologist, who thinks aliens built the pyramids. Only it turns out, aliens really did build the pyramids. So, um, so…it's about the US Air Force exploring the galaxy, fighting for truth, justice, and the American Way. And it's got Richard Dean Anderson and Michael Shanks in it."
"So I'm buying an alien plasma bazooka," said Dean. He finished his beer and stood up.
"What for?" she asked, looking like she was going to follow him. Please no. "Since you don't even know what it's from."
"My, uh, kid brother," Dean explained hurriedly. "My really, really nerdy kid brother. He was begging on his knees, it was kinda sad."
"Aw, that's sweet of you," she said, finishing Bunny Girl's pink drink with a slurp of water-ice-straw-glass.
Dean spotted a large, tense shape lurking beyond the frosted glass at the bar entrance. "There he is now," he said, and strode purposefully off. He wasn't scurrying. You can't scurry in steel-toed boots.
He caught up with Sam, who had this horrified, flabbergasted look on his face, and jigged a hard left past the line at the Convention Center's bathrooms, then a hard right around a cluster of aging Trekkies, then stopped at a corner between a wall and a potted jungle tree. "So it looks like there's Supernatural fans here," he panted casually.
"Yeah," said Sam, bug-eyed. He stared at him a moment, as though checking if his head was about to explode, then relaxed a bit and looked disapproving. "Dude, that's…that's a conflict of interest or something. It's weird."
"Sam, I don't need rescuing from the crazy fan girls," Dean said. "We were talking about—" he stifled his smirk—"staff weapons."
"That's great," Sam said, like he was still surprised that Dean could research in a bar. "I talked to some of the former prop guys in there, and it sounds like anyone who handles one of the full-scale mockups more than a couple times gets possessed by a dead Jaffa and starts killing people in the name of his system lord. Explains the tattoos, eyeliner, and abdominal wounds."
Ghost, possession. Check. "Who we gotta burn?" Dean asked, heading off toward the biggest commotion he could see.
Sam headed in a slightly different direction, probably because he knew where the auction actually was, and Dean changed course to follow him. "The Jaffa are a fictional alien race," Sam lectured. "You said you talked about the show."
"Well, yeah, but not every piddling little—"
"They're the primary ground enemy for the first five seasons," Sam said.
"Whatever. Staff weapons shoot fireballs."
"Plasma blasts."
"Same thing," Dean muttered. "So it's some kind of Tulpa? Fans like these could give it the juice to cause that kind of damage. So we just gotta destroy the staff weapon. Easy."
"Yeah, that's great, as long as the power of belief hasn't turned the thing into actual Naquadah."
"I'm guessing that doesn't burn," Dean said.
"Depending on which fans you talk to, it might be inert or it might explode with about twelve kilotons of force."
"Could be cursed," Dean suggested. "Like to see the curse that puts out that kind of payload."
Sam crinkled his ginormous forehead. "With all the grimoires available online lately, I'm surprised we haven't seen more nerds playing witchcraft."
Christie, having lost Awesome Dean Impersonator and his tall brother at the restroom lines, wandered over to the yaoi panel, dodging between giggly girls and booths displaying sketches of bishi boys hugging each-other suggestively. Sara was easy to locate with those ears sticking up.
"He's gone," Christie stage-whispered.
Sara reddened. "I kinda wish I'd gone as Zelda or something," she muttered, looking down at her outfit. She pointed at a charcoal sketch, one of the more obnoxious things she'd exposed Christie to. "Think that'd look good on my wall?"
"I'd say 'I told you so,' but I'm too nice," said Christie.
Sara pointed at the sketch again and glared.
"They look underage," said Christie, acting horrified like she always did. "They don't even have chest hair."
"Oh, like Clone Guy?"
"I don't know, he had like three layers on," Christie explained. "But he had stubble, so I know he could grow a beard. Or sideburns."
"You and sideburns," Sara muttered, rolling her eyes.
Christie pictured Hugh Jackman as Wolverine. Then Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy. She sighed. Then she shook herself. "Anyway, he was a nice guy when you talk to him," she said. "He was doing this character bit…" She thought a moment, then frowned, puzzled.
"What?" Sara asked.
"You know," said Christie slowly, "I think he might actually be straight."
"Sam?" Dean muttered as they sat on folding chairs in front of the auction platform. Sam twitched, keeping his eyes locked ahead, legs sticking out so far his feet jammed under the row in front of them. "Would you describe me as a 'light in a dark place?'"
Sam boggled at him. Dean grinned.
"Don't be jealous 'cause I get all the cool fans," Dean said.
Sam gripped his shoulder, smiled for real, and shook his head to himself.
Then their auction came up.
!
This was inspired by the fact that Dean and I are leather jacket twins. Total coincidence, but it's probably the biggest reason I like the show.
Also, when the show looks at fandom, it pretty much ignores all the female fans that don't support the porn subculture's exploitation of men and women. Lots of women identify with male leads instead of looking at them solely as sex objects. I'll bet lots of men identify with Lara Croft, too—it's not like they wouldn't love to be able to finger-climb stone ledges and leap twice their own height while plugging packs of ravenous guard wolves with dual .45s. I wanted Dean to meet a Gen fan—who would, of course, horrify him just as much as Becky horrified Sam but for more Deanish reasons.
I totally share Christie's opinion of Hugh Jackman and Colin Firth and their fantastic sideburns (sorry Sam, yours don't work so well).