Chapter 3
Sam desperately wanted it to be a bad dream.
Between being woken by wet towel pieces, ring tones, something that felt suspiciously like socks full of ice and a lampshade ("Hnh? What? Jesus, Dean, did you just throw a lampshade at me?" "I only had two socks on and it was all I could reach. Go get ice, bitch."), and Dean's repeated demands for ice, towels, water bottles and at 2 a.m. chicken soup and coffee, he felt worse than if he hadn't slept at all.
"Hey Jude, don't make it bad,
Take a sad song, and make it better..."
And now, lack of sleep was causing him to have auditory hallucinations. Fuck my life...
"Remember to let her into your heart,
Then you can start to make it better..."
Maybe not an hallucination, he decided, rolling over – he was still tired, so maybe he really was dreaming. Yeah, that was it, he was dreaming about being a kid again, when Dean would sing to him to help him get to sleep... with a small sigh of relief, he rolled over, snuggled into his pillow...
Then sat up with a small shriek as a boot landed on his pillow beside his head.
"About time, Francis," grumbled Dean, "We have to hit the road. Right after you stock us up on ice." He glared pointedly at the empty bucket.
Sam peered blearily at his brother. Dean looked worse than he felt. He still sat, looking paler and more anxious, with Jimi's head in his lap.
"Hey Jude, don't be afraid,
You were made to go out and get her..."
"Are you singing to Jimi?" asked Sam in disbelief, dragging himself out of bed. Jimi rolled mournful eyes at him, and managed to wag the last three inches of his tail.
"He had a rough night, as you'd know if you hadn't been blissfully and callously asleep through the whole thing," snarled Dean, "He barely dozed at all."
"Strangely enough, neither did I," answered Sam, "I can't think why…"
After packing their gear and making two surreptitious trips to the dumpster to consign the bodies of the towels that had died to soothe Jimi's gums to The Great Linen Cupboard In The Sky ("Leave it, Sam, that's what housekeeping does." "Dean, if we don't get rid of this mess they'll think we murdered someone in here! Your singing will just convince management that we tortured them first…"), they set off for Bobby's. Dean sat in the back seat with Jimi, one last unlucky towel under the large mournful head in his lap, issuing music requirements.
"Hey," protested Sam, "What happened to driver picks the music?"
"I am the driver, I'm just occupied with something important at the moment," Dean improvised shamelessly, "And we need something calming and soothing to help Jimi relax."
"This is calming and soothing," argued Sam, gesturing at the radio, "It's highlights from the works of Mascagni…"
"It's an overwrought hysterical racket!" asserted Dean, "How could anybody relax with that, that, that noise in the background?"
"Dean, this is the Intermezzo from 'Cavaleria Rusticana', it's very soothing and relaxing."
"No it's not."
"It is!"
"It's totally not! It sounds like cats having their tails pulled! Nobody can relax to cats having their tails pulled!"
"DEAN THIS MUSIC IS EXTREMELY FUCKING RELAXING!" shouted Sam.
"It's not in the least bit relaxing. End of argument." Dean gestured imperiously at the stereo. "We'll start with 'Ace of Spades'."
"Yeah, okay," grumbled Sam, fishing through the tapes box for the required item, "Because all the great tenors sound like they have gravel and Jack Daniels for breakfast every morning."
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A few hours later, Sam was starting to think that running the car into a pylon would be the most merciful course of action for all three of them. Jimi periodically yelped and whined as another tooth made itself felt, while Dean issued orders from the back seat with regard to music, pit-stops, catering requirements, adjustments to the heating, travel speed and road surface quality.
"What do you mean, I'm driving 'lumpy'?" asked Sam incredulously, giving Dean a shot of Bitchface #9™ (I Know What I'm Doing, Jerk) in the mirror.
"You're hitting every bump in the road," Dean told him grumpily, "And the jostling is upsetting Jimi."
"What the hell am I supposed to do about the state of the tar on the frigging road?" spluttered Sam.
"Aim for the least bumpy bits," instructed Dean a bit snippily.
"Right, dodge in and out of the lumps, bumps and dips that are going by so fast I can't even see them and probably don't even exist," Sam nodded, "Will do, big bro, leave it with me." Dean was turning into a, a, a… Sam found himself lost for an appropriate word. He was concerned for Jimi too, of course, but Dean was being utterly and obsessively neurotic about it. If Dean was a bride-to-be, he'd now officially be a Bridezilla. What was the word for someone behaving in a bridezilla-ish fashion over a dog this way? Vetzilla? Dogzilla? Divazilla? Deanzilla. Yeah, Deanzilla. Dean was being a total Deanzilla. He liked the sound of that one.
Dean was now officially a total Deanzilla.
...oooooOOOOOooooo... ...oooooOOOOOooooo... ...oooooOOOOOooooo...
Bobby was waiting for them when they finally pulled into the yard. "Hey there, little guy," he smiled at Jimi, who wagged his tail a little and leaned affectionately into Bobby's chin scratching, "What's going on with you, hey? Tweedledum and Tweedledumber tell me you got some grief with your tee- GOD'S TITS!" Jimi yelped, and Bobby stared in amazement as a tooth made an appearance, leaving a cut on his hand before retracting. "Balls," he humphed, inspecting his hand, "That's a hell of a trick you're developing there, youngster." He grinned ruefully at the dog, who pawed unhappily at his face and whined, butting against Bobby for more patting and reassurance.
"You okay, Bobby?" asked Sam, hefting his bag.
"Just nicked me, is all," Bobby reassured him. Rumsfeld and Janis had come to greet them, and sat close to Jimi, licking his ears and sniffing at his muzzle. Bobby grinned. "Maybe he'll feel a bit better for having his Mommy here to kiss his boo-boos better," he speculated. "Bring him in, boys, I've got a few things for him to try."
Dean and Jimi settled on the sofa and Sam followed Bobby to the back porch. "Lots of dogs have pain when they're teething," Bobby said, "Something cold to chomp on, have against their gums, can often give 'em relief, or just having something to chew seems to help with the pain and take their minds off it." He hefted some hanks of frozen hemp rope out of his porch freezer. "We'll try him with these."
Jimi inspected the ropesicles, and chewed on one contentedly. It seemed to soothe his gums, for all of the thirty seconds it took his hell-teeth to shred it. He looked at the shredded fibre with the same mildly surprised expression he developed every time one of his toys disintegrated, ruptured, bisected traumatically or suffered an acute and fatal prolapse of the squeaker.
"Okaaaaay, something a bit more robust, then," mused Bobby, returning to the freezer for a piece of larger diameter rope.
That lasted longer. Sixty seconds longer.
"Well, we seem to be on the right track," he decided, as Jimi looked up hopefully from the mess of hemp fibre in Dean's lap, "We just gotta find something that Hellhound teeth can chew on, and not destroy in sixty seconds flat."
They tried a large chunk of hardwood. Jimi had it whittled to sawdust within minutes. "We could hire him out as a wood-chipper," observed Dean.
Next, Bobby fetched a truly enormous beef bone from the freezer. "I didn't know you shot elephants in these parts," marvelled Sam. It was a testament to how tired and anxious Dean was that he didn't make any crack about 'the size of the bone', or ask which bit of the elephant it was from. He encouraged Jimi to try it, without so much as a lewd waggle of his eyebrows.
It was like watching an industrial meat-grinder: frozen giant bone went in one side of Jimi's mouth, pulverised squishy red goo came out the other.
"Oh, well," mused Sam philosophically, "At least the sawdust is soaking up some of it…"
Bobby thought he was onto a winner when he brought in a spare wheel, plonking it down triumphantly in from of Jimi. "An old rubber boot did the trick for Rumsfeld," he told them, "A whole tyre should keep him busy."
It did. It lasted nearly three minutes.
"Um, maybe we could try a steel-belted radial?" suggested Dean.
"That was a steel-belted radial," Bobby informed him glumly.
Sam sighed. "I'll go get a shovel," he offered, as Jimi made a start on the wheel rim. Tiny shards of aluminium alloy confetti fell to the carpet and made pretty patterns around Dean's feet. "I don't think the vacuum cleaner will cope very well."
"I guess we could try a steel rim," pondered Bobby.
Admittedly, the pressed steel wheel took longer for Jimi to gnaw into submission, but the noises he made whilst doing it set all the nearby human ears – and the dog ears, too, if the howling that Rumsfeld and Janis set up outside was anything to go by – on edge.
"Gah! That's worse than someone with amalgam fillings chewing on foil!" shuddered Sam, his eyes crossing slightly. "Nails down a blackboard have nothing on that sound!"
Bobby frowned. "Sam," he said, "Come with me." They disappeared into the yard, and returned some time later, grunting and swearing, carrying a large chunk of metal between them.
"Are you sure about this, Bobby?" asked Sam dubiously, eyeing the cylinder head.
"Damned thing's cracked, no use to man or beast," replied Bobby, "Unless a beast can make use of it keeping his new teeth busy."
It was an education to watch, it really was. A full seven minutes passed with no sounds except Jimi's enthusiastic chewing, the tortured groan of twisting metal, and the gentle hiss of sparks landing on the carpet and Dean's jeans.
"Stupid Jap crap parts!" snarked Dean, patting frantically at his trousers before they could catch fire. "Don't just sit there, you two, go get him some American iron!"
Sam and Bobby did just that, heading out again and returning, greasy and tired, with an engine block in a wheelbarrow. The wheelbarrow's tyre blew under the weight as they manoeuvred it to sit beside sofa.
"There ya go," panted Bobby, collapsing into his favourite chair, "She's the biggest thing we can get in the wheelbarrow and still move it. All the way from Detroit. Enjoy." Jimi sniffed at the block, then some teeth extruded, and he took an experimental little nibble…
"I swear, he swallowed some of it," declared Sam nine minutes later when the cast iron block had been reduced to teeny tiny pellets, peering in fascination at Jimi, "He chewed it up, and some of it, he swallowed."
"Guess he won't be suffering from any iron deficiency any time soon then," rumbled Bobby in resignation. He looked down at the detritus on his living room floor. "I guess we can just shovel it straight back into the wheelbarrow, take it to the scrap bin." He peered a bit more closely. "Damn critter took a bite out of my wheelbarrow, too."
"It's really pretty finely ground," observed Sam, "We should save some of it for packing iron shot cartridges…"
"YAIPE!" went Jimi, another tooth making itself felt.
Dean dabbed at the blood on the dog's chin. "Don't just stand there, Francis," he demanded, "Go fetch him another block!"
"Dean, it took him less than ten minutes to get through that one!" exclaimed Sam as Bobby let out a snort of disbelief. "It took a block and tackle, and a lot of swearing, to shift it! I don't think just chewing is going to be a solution for Jimi," he added. "He doesn't so much chew as, well, disintegrate."
Dean turned desperate eyes to Bobby.
"Uh, I've got a couple of butcher's steel mesh gloves," he mused, scratching his head, "Maybe we could fill those with ice and you can try to encourage him to, you know, just kind of suck on them."
"Right, right, steel gloves, ice," Dean nodded vigorously, "You do that, Bobby, while you, Francis, go fetch more tyres. We can fill them with water, freeze them, and…"
"This is now officially ridiculous," pronounced Sam. "Dean, I really think that this is just part of Jimi growing up… there, see?" Two teeth emerged together before retracting. "He's just going to have to grow through it, and into it, like all animals with teeth do."
"There must be something we can do to help him," Dean pleaded.
"I'm not sure there is in this case, son," Bobby told him gently. "We can't just let him chew up the entire inventory of the yard – my scrap bins aren't that big, and Sam will stop shovelling shrapnel long before that."
"You got that bit right," Sam grumbled, making a start on shovelling Jimi's leavings back into the wheelbarrow.
"He'll survive this, Dean," Bobby reassured him. "If it's meant to happen, and I think Sam is right, he'll survive it. Give him a little bit of moral support, coddle him a little bit, but he'll survive it. He'll be fine."
"You two are the most unfeeling, heartless, insensitive, inhuman, merciless, brutal, callous, pitiless, indifferent, uncaring, cold and, and, and… you meanies!" Dean finished unhappily.
"Yup, that's us," confirmed Bobby, "We be those evil assholes. "Right now, it's time to think about chow. All that physical exertion gives a body an appetite. What about you, Adolf?" He turned to Sam. "How about you go fetch us some grub, when you're done there? Maybe get us some kittens to eat for dessert?"
"Sounds like a plan, Ghengis," agreed Sam, still shovelling, "I'll just deal with this, then get food. Maybe we could do something fun this evening, maybe oppress some people who look different to us, or a spot of genocide after dinner? Or, we could just tie tin cans to the dogs' tails."
"No, I got my Pointless Vivisection Of Really Cute Baby Monkeys Club tonight," said Bobby in a regretful tone, "The Secretary has some utterly adorable little capuchins, torn from their mothers before they're even weaned. Should be a hoot."
"Well, I might catch up on my torturing of crippled children, then," mused Sam, picking up the wheelbarrow handles, "I still got a whole box of 'em I haven't opened yet." He paused in the doorway. "You want your kittens short-haired or long-haired?" he asked.
"Short-haired," Bobby specified, "The long-haired ones give me wind."
"I hate you both so much," growled Dean.
"No kittens for you, then, bro?" Sam grinned at him.
"Bring me pie, bitch," Dean growled. "And more soup. Best get some for yourself, too, because you keep this up, and it'll be all you can eat with your broken jaw wired shut."
"Don't forget some food pellets for the mother hen, here," added Bobby, dodging the cushion that sailed past at head height. He stuck his head out the door, and called loudly to Sam,
"Hey, bring in another tyre while you're at it."
"What for?" asked Sam, ditching the last of the metal confetti, "Jimi will just eat it in under a minute."
"It's not for the dog," Bobby kept his voice raised, "I want it for your brother – he's very close to chewing on the walls, and I want a substitute to keep him away from the plasterwork…"
He was actually quite impressed with the way Dean made the next cushion boomerang through the door, around a corner and down the hall.
Every time you leave a review, someone feeds Celine Dion into a wood-chipper in an alternative universe. Meanwhile, if you want some soothing music, the Intermezzo from Cavaleria Rusticana is a good choice. It really is fucking relaxing. Drowns out Celine's screams nicely, too.