Simpsons' Sky
Chapter I
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Sam was blaming it on the shock. Or maybe on the fact that he had been completely overwhelmed. With all that had been dumped on their heads over the last couple of weeks, it certainly made sense. Or maybe it was the healthy food.
Yeah… Sam was definitely blaming it on the healthy food.
You see, this whole mess had all started in the first place because Dean had been hungry. And while that wasn't especially news for Dean, hunger had recently taken on a whole new meaning when someone like Dean, who –unlike other human beings- actually needs his greasy food to survive, is subjected to a diet consisting of nothing but grilled tofu, lettuce salads and some detox drink that looked too much like watered-down piss for comfort.
All for the sake of some 'lesson' that Castiel's boss had deemed necessary.
Sam gripped the car wheel a little bit tighter, imagining it was the new angel's neck. Better to blame healthy food rather than Heaven, he'd always say, especially if you have demon blood in you.
Not that there wasn't plenty of blame to pass around, particularly to Heaven's emissaries.
So there he was, Sam Wesson, still ridding the coals of his epic resignation, when the world had literally shifted and dimmed around him. Suddenly, Sam Wesson was Sam Winchester and suddenly, smashing a phone was hardly the most noticeable thing he'd ever done in his life.
Dean had showed up not five minutes after that revelation, dragging him away with a pissy attitude and muttering about junkless dicks and how hungry he was.
They found the car with all their stuff inside. It was exactly where the latest angel-dick had said it would be; in the relative safety of an abandoned garage near the office building, fourth level, an important piece of information that had been shared as Dean stormed onto the elevator, ripping angrily at his tie and suspenders. Walking in his brother's coals, Sam could only follow and hear him muttering about the dimwit that had come up with the ridiculous idea that elastic pieces of crap were a good way to keep your pants up.
After a good twenty minute check of his baby, and a more clandestine inspection of the trunk contents, to determine no permanent damage had been done to the Impala, Dean finally climbed inside and started the engine, seeming to relax somewhat as he heard the familiar purr.
Seething in cooler anger, he stared straight-ahead, all the while ignoring Sam's pleas and slow burn of lost patience over finding out what the hell had just happened and why the fuck had it happened in the first place.
It wasn't until they were well out of the city's limits that Dean begun to talk, albeit in half cryptic, half rant, somewhat resembling answers. It came out of his clenched teeth, sounding more like muttered grunts peppered with individual words like "fucking dicks" and "mind fuckers" and "fucking hungry".
Fuck appeared to be Dean's operative word for the whole experience and everyone involved.
It took Sam a while to realize that the junkless dicks that Dean had been going on and on about were actually the late Uriel, Castiel and his boss, Zachariah.
Judging by the thunderous look on his brother's face, details would not be forthcoming until after their search to find the greasiest place they could see. Or smell.
Over the most disgusting display of beef juice and bacon grease to ever ooze off the sides of a burger, Sam listened patiently and with growing contempt. According to his brother, Heaven had decided to put them in alternative life styles, just to see how they handled a haunting without benefit of their know-how and experience. Not caring about how many victims were lost in the mean time, not caring about Dean or Sam's willingness, and particularly, not caring about Dean's dislike of ties and salads. And fucking suspenders.
God's own way of making them bark like chickens, Sam guessed.
It took Sam longer to pry out of Dean the reason why the ang... er... junkless dicks, had forced them into such a position. After a deep breath, the older Winchester related Alistair's revelations and the real reason why Lilith wanted him in Hell. That was when Dean lost his appetite and pushed aside the remains of the third burger that he had been wolfing down, all the while avoiding Sam's gaze as he tried to digest the fact that his brother had actually been the one to break the first seal.
Turns out Dean's capitulation to his meal was too little, too late, judging by the repercussions of those first two and a half burgers.
An interesting piece of trivia that Sam suspected and Dean had no idea about until he experienced it first hand: when your stomach spends three weeks digesting nothing but non-greasy, non-fried, nearly vegan type food? It actually rebels against the sudden re-introduction of said grease, meat, deep-fried, high fat and otherwise disgusting food.
Case in point, thirty minutes after hitting the road, the 'food' that had gone in, was desperately looking for a place to be let out. The middle of no-where gas station they came upon, complete with the handy, easily visible restroom sign, seemed heaven sent at the time.
After all that had happened recently, they should've been wearier of that.
Twenty minutes after watching Dean race to the bathroom door, looking like he was on the verge of giving birth, Sam started to wonder if everything was alright. Granted, he had spent those twenty minutes going over everything that was not alright in their existence, starting with his self imposed demon-blood diet and Dean's new position as both Heaven's and Hell's bulls-eye.
Because neither had mentioned it, but both were very much aware that, between Uriel's failed plan of taking Dean out using Alistair and all the trouble that Zachariah had gone through to change Dean's mind, it was pretty clear that Dean wasn't as replaceable or unimportant to the game as the traitor angel and all the demons had lead them to believe before.
Suddenly feeling the weight that rested on his brother's shoulders, Sam was more than a little ticked at the amount of time Dean was taking in the bathroom and decided to check for himself.
"Dean?" With no answer to his careful call and accompanying knocks, Sam took a deep breath and turned the door handle. After having more than one experience with the consequences of bad food, both on his and Dean's digestive system, Sam released his breath through his mouth and peeked around the grimy door. The room was empty.
So, yeah… Sam was definitely blaming it on the healthy food. Because otherwise he would have to blame himself.
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It was one of those unwritten rules that pretty much everyone obliges because, seriously, some things you just don't do.
Like, you don't hit on your best friend's girl, not even if she's extremely hot and hitting on you; or take advantage of someone's handicap, unless you really, really need to; or you don't put itchy powder on your brother's underwear unless he's messed with your car… likewise, you don't attack a man when his pants are down. Literally.
Half way through his second burger, Dean knew that this would not end well. The funny noises his stomach started making, accompanied by the fact that he could sort of feel the weight of the greasy food sinking deeper and deeper inside of him, were all well known warning signs. Still, he gave it no thought, because his taste buds demanded compensation for the weeks of sensory deprivation, and he forged ahead. The return of the salty, meaty, pickle-ridden juice inside his mouth, that right there… was heaven!
Even when Sam turned the conversation toward things that he really wasn't ready to talk about, Dean still tried to force his mouth to work through both undercooked meat and hard words. That didn't last long, but at least the lack of further appetite gave him a good excuse to abandon the roadside restaurant and hit the road once again.
He had missed the road.
Three weeks of nothing but a mechanical, drone-driven life, a posh apartment and totally douche office –his office, for Christ-sake!– and Dean was more than ready to go from Ohio to Sacramento in one go. Back in his car. A real car. Not that lame excuse for a machine Prius.
A fucking, tree-hugging Prius! The thought alone made him want to just turn around and go back to smash in that car's toy-engine.
But the toy-car wasn't the problem. The problem wasn't even the boring, normal life that had been shoved down their throats with oh!so much care for the past weeks. The problem was everything that had happened before, what Dean had learned about himself and the unchangeable facts about his future.
Dean, savior of all mankind. It sounded wrong on so, so many levels... Sacramento wasn't nearly far enough.
They needed a lot more miles between this and them. So many more that Dean was even willing to get on a plane and just put whatever distance he could between them and this whole mess. They could move to the North Pole… or Finland… maybe Russia. Any place as far from the south as they could get. Any place cold enough to dissuade the demons from going after them and icy enough to freeze the angels' wings before they could reach them.
But he knew he was only fooling himself. Zachariah's little stunt, if anything, had proven to him that he couldn't escape this. Fate was a vicious bitch and, for better or for worse, he and Sam were stuck with their own destinies and nothing they did or could do would ever put a dent in that.
Speaking of dent…
Dean held the steering wheel with one hand while the other cradled his stomach. Underneath the skin, he could feel his guts undulating and doing the hula-hula around his last meal. That couldn't be good.
The sight of the of the middle of no-where gas station with the huge sign announcing 'restroom' in a lovely shade of red paint in the otherwise white wall, was like a stripper's bar in the middle of an Amish county.
Before Sam could ask what he was doing, Dean had already turned the car around and parked outside the fuelling area.
"Be right back," Dean threw back at his brother, hurriedly making a mad dash for the bathroom. Lord, that door had better be unlocked.
And if he was walking kind of funny and his ass was clenching harder than it should, it was only because Dean was too cool of a guy to actually run to the bathroom. And because all of his concentration was focused on his mind-over-matter issues of not crapping himself silly on the way to the john, Dean completely failed to notice the group of people coming out of the gas station. The group that was watching him with too much glee on their faces to be good.
Yup, he was totally blaming this on the healthy food.
Because otherwise, how else would Dean Winchester, savior of all mankind, ever be caught with his pants down, in a gas station bathroom, making weird faces and even weirder noises and taken so completely off guard that when the two men crashed through his stall he was too stunned to do anything but look surprised and allow himself to be knocked unconscious?
Healthy food sucked.
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Sam was not surprised to see the utterly disastrous condition of the now empty public bathroom. Having been attacked in one himself, not that long ago, by a very pissed, and very dead Henriksen, Sam was well aware of how horribly bad a close-quarters fight in a place like that could go.
Unlike him, however, Dean's attackers seemed to have been more of the human variety rather than the supernatural. The air in there smelled of many things that Sam would've rather never smelled in his life, but sulphur wasn't one of them, which pretty much excluded demons as the culprits, and ghosts didn't leave size fourteen footprints in crashed bathroom stalls.
The very stall, Sam was realizing, with the still fresh bloodstain on the water deposit. The younger Winchester swallowed hard at the fear threatening to strangle him. Fear and anger.
Who the hell attacks a guy in a bathroom stall? It's just wrong!
There were other footprints in the room, a couple that Sam would swear to be a bit too small for a men's bathroom, but given the place, it was impossible for him to figure which of those belonged to the people who had taken Dean and which belonged to people just going in there to relieve themselves. Or, you know... whatever else.
Sam stepped outside, looking at his deserted surroundings. There were no surveillance cameras outside, none that he could see in the gas station itself.
In his mind, Sam went over all the cars that he had lazily watched earlier come and go as he waited for Dean. One of them had left carrying his brother against his will and Sam's mind had been so deeply sunken in misery and self-commiseration that he had failed to notice.
Trying really hard not to panic, Sam went inside the gas station. The half asleep guy at the counter hardly knew which day of the week it was, let alone if he'd seen a tall man (wearing a size fourteen he had to be either tall or a really short Bigfoot) dragging someone from the bathroom. Sam asked anyway, just in case he was making the wrong assumptions about this guy, holding out hope that the goopy eyes staring back at him weren't connected to an equally goopy brain.
The cashier, maybe around forty going on eighty-five, turned crusty eyes on the stranger and shrugged. "It's a public bathroom dude," he simply said, like that explained everything.
That statement gave Sam a pretty good idea of the weird stuff that the cashier had probably seen going in or coming out of there. One man dragging another wouldn't even reach the top ten.
"Think. Harder," he insisted, using his bigger frame to lean in and asphyxiate the other man's personal space with the sheer volume of his presence. "It's a slow day… there can't have been that many people going through here today."
The guy gulped down his growing fear, probably thinking that yesterday would've been a good day to quite that shitty job, and scratched his too long hair. "Well, there were a couple of guys in here, earlier… hum… two guys and a chick."
"Go on," Sam urged, taking a half-step back. A small reward for the man's new found memories and an encouragement for him to keep going. "What about them?"
"They… they were acting kind of funny, cruising the shelves but not really buying anything, you know?"
Waiting… biding their time. Waiting for them. Waiting for Dean.
Sam nodded. He knew exactly what he meant.
His looming presence became more friendly than intimidating, him and the cashier, just like two buddies, chatting about the weather. "What did they look like?"
Another shrug, this time an honest one and not a sign of dismissal as before. They had been just a couple more customers, bad ones at that. At the time, the cashier had only paid attention to any pocketing of merchandise or sign that they were there to rob the place. "The gal was kind of hot; you know, in that backwater, white trash, hillbilly kind of way. A bottle red-head."
"You didn't happen to notice what they were driving, did you?"
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It was an earthquake.
Or maybe a really wild horse.
Dean couldn't quite decide which one. Whatever it was, it kept jarring his aching head in a way that, were it not to stop really soon, everything he'd eaten in the past couple of months would be making an appearance shortly.
"Hey, look! He's awake!" Someone blared way too near his ears.
Two sharp and loud taps of hand on metal and the earthquake stopped. As did the engine that was causing it. Come to think of it, maybe he was just in a car.
Dean opened his eyes. Nothing but clear blue sky above.
"Get up!" A different voice, a female voice, said this time. The vicious kick to his left shin was a lot more convincing than the words had been.
Dean gasped and looked around him, fumbling to push himself upright. Placing one hand down, the other followed unintentionally and he stopped, staring dazedly at his hands, mind still fuzzy. Took him a moment to realize the reason why his hands were working as one was because his wrists were trapped in cold metal cuffs. "What... t'fuck?"
Gazing at his surroundings, he noticed more metal in the form of low metal walls, painted black. Some kind of pickup truck, the opened back littered with too many bodies.
The black guy in front of him, the one with no patience to wait for the barely conscious man to situate himself and get up on his own, grabbed Dean's white (well, not so much anymore) dress shirt and pulled up.
During his rapid ascent, Dean heard a loud sound of tearing that he really hoped had been made by the hideous shirt that his corporate self had chosen to wear and not by something that he valued more, like his skin. "Easy on the goods, Sinbad" he managed to hiss out as the world danced and changed colors wildly around him.
A disturbingly large hand slapped his face around so hard that Dean could actually hear his neck crack. He decided it was wise to shut up, at least until he could figure who these yahoos were and what they wanted from him. Or, you know, until he could focus enough to actually see the yahoos.
He covertly looked around. There was a lot of green around and in the distance, Dean thought he could hear water running. Much nearer, closer than he felt comfortable with, were the three strangers.
One was a large black man, a neatly trimmed mustache contrasting brutally with the yellow teeth and the cigar stub hanging from his lips; the other was a woman with bright red hair, whom under different circumstances Dean would actually find appealing, were it not for the predatory look in her eyes and the invasive way her hands were holding the belt loop of his pants, on the pretext of keeping him upright.
The third was yet another man, a wiry guy with a mullet hair cut, who kind of reminded him of Ash, except for the little beetle-like eyes and pock-marked face. Any resemblance faded completely when the guy's cold, lifeless stare locked on Dean; a keen sense of loss for the geeky computer genius they'd lost in the fire at the Roadhouse suddenly swamped his soul.
Three guys, plus, Dean guessed, that there would be another one driving the car and probably even a fifth person riding shotgun.
"Focus!" Beetle eyes said, punctuating his request with another slap to the back of Dean's head.
The Winchester did just that, his mouth shut but the sharp look in his eyes expressing clearly what he was focusing on. Squashed beetle.
Up ahead, the door of the pickup opened with a squeak and a pair of booted feet hit the ground. Dean turned his head, eyeing the driver as he made his way back. "Bring that trash over here."
Dean didn't have to do a thing. The big black guy, hands still fisting his shirt, just pushed him out and let gravity take care of the rest.
For the whole two seconds that it took his body to fly from the back of the pickup to land on the unforgiving ground, the only thing that Dean could think was that... that was going to hurt.
He wasn't wrong.
Without use of his hands to break his fall, Dean landed on his face, feeling his nose crack on the impact. "Shit!"
"Get'im up!"
Before the order had even registered, there were hands under Dean's armpits and suddenly there was nothing but air under his feet until he registered the pain as his back crashed against a tree trunk. Opening his eyes, Dean spit the blood that had slid from his broken nose in to his throat.
The action struck him as strangely familiar and suddenly Dean remembered that only three weeks ago, Alistair had broken his nose too. Come to think of it, Alistair had broken a lot of stuff that didn't feel broken now – except for his nose, of course.
Dean guessed that Castiel's boss had fixed all of that, getting him ready and dandy to be angel-jacked from the hospital and stuck in a pretend life for all those weeks, waiting for Dean to 'come around' and accept his fate. And just in time to have his face broken again by the merry group gathering around him now.
"Who the fuck are you people and what the fuck do you want?" Dean asked in a nasal voice, forgetting his vow of silence and bent on finding some answers. His life was too full of questions lately for him to fuck around waiting for the bad guy's monologue.
"I'm Eeny," the Mexican guy said, pointing at himself with a sarcastic smile, "that's Meeny," indicating the woman, "and those are Miny and Moe."
Dean blinked. "Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe… that's funny man, real funny," he said without humor. "Does that make me the Tiger?"
His only answer was a meaty fist in his exposed stomach, the soft flesh bending over the assault and squishing inside him, taking room in his lugs, where air should be.
"No, he's Tiger," the black man said matter-of-factly, pointing at one more guy who chose that moment to exit the truck. "You're his toes, coño!"
When Dean was able to clear his watered vision he got a load of the newcomer. Tiger was tall. And he looked way too pleased with himself.
"Dean Winchester," Tiger said as a greeting. "We have a lot to talk about."
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