Saturday, February 22nd, 2014
Four men and two women were all that remained of the human population after the virus broke out.
The hotel ballroom was swarming with infected, milling about and crashing into each other, following the intoxicating scent of the last six living survivors huddled behind a row of tables. Cubicle-style walls had been set up to create long corridors and sharp turns where the walking dead lurked, waiting to rend living flesh from bone. The lights had dimmed, reducing visibility in the room along with long swathes of camo netting hung like a canopy, gauzy webbing dripping down here and there, obscuring passages and providing the perfect hiding place for any number of the dead.
"Okay," the flame-haired leader of the small human resistance whispered, peeking around the edge of their hide-out, "there's what, a twenty-five? Thirty of them?"
"Yeah, about that," confirmed her green-eyed second in command, "I think we can break for the bunker on the far wall - get into a secure area. You said they had a two turn delay?"
"It's half a turn," argued the blonde woman in the camoflage jacket, "there's too many of them, we're screwed!"
"I could provide a distraction," offered the dark haired man in the beige trench coat.
"No, it's better if we stick together," the tall mop-haired man interjected, "we could do like Roman-formation, you know, turtle up?"
"I still don't know why I'm here," griped the youngest member of their band of misfits, "I should never have let you assholes drag me into this. And I'm pretty sure you mean 'Testudo Formation', Sam."
"That's not a bad idea," the redhead agreed, "do we have anything we can use as shields?"
"We could use Dean," the kid offered, "he's meaty. He'll keep them busy for a while."
"Shut up Kevin," Dean smirked. "Hey, Charlie, what if we do like in Shaun of the Dead and we just, y'know, 'pretend that we're dead'?"
"Right," Kevin snorted, "because that ever works in real life."
"Right. So, no shields," Sam sighed. "Should we try it?"
"Fuck it," Dean shrugged, "let's roll! Cas, stick with me, okay?"
Banding together, the six survivors made their way around the edge of the tables, huddled tight and cards gripped in their hands as they inched out of the safe zone and into the labyrinth where the dead waited.
"Stay away from the nets and the corners," Charlie reminded the crew, "don't let them tag you in the back."
"Damn it!" A shout came from the end of their line; the young blonde woman was face to face with one of the creatures, holding an eight of Spades in her hand, the zombie grinning back with a nine of diamonds held up between his thumb and forefinger.
"Go go go!" Sam hissed at the rest of the team as they picked up their pace, closing the gap left behind by their fallen camrade.
The swarm came then, closing in on the survivors on all sides. Dean moved between Castiel and a pimple-faced kid in a Pikachu costume, cards flying. Kevin fell next, turning his back for just a moment and allowing himself to be tagged by a particularly sneaky zombie that had been concealed in a curtain of green mesh webbing.
"Ah, frak!" Charlie pouted as she pulled a two from her opponent's hand, leaving only the Winchesters and Castiel against the hoarde.
"I think now we're probably screwed," Sam suggested as they broke away from the skirmish, heading toward the bunker.
"Gee, Sammy, ya think?" Dean huffed. "Wait, where the hell is Cas?"
Dean stopped, searching the corridor for the fallen angel and getting himself blind-sided by a tag to the back of the head.
"If I'm going down, so're you," Charlie grinned up at him as he spun around to face her, smugly rubbing in his face that he'd had his guard down. "This is a cut-throat game, Winchester - can't let your boyfriend distract you if you wanna win."
"Shaddap," he snarked back, giving her a playful shove. "Hey, they haven't called Last Man yet."
"So Sam's not the last survivor," Charlie grinned wider. "Let's go get'em"
The two newly infected zombies worked together in tandem, locating the younger Winchester just a few feet from the bunker.
"You guys suck," Sam whined at his brother and their friend as he drew up short, "zombies are supposed to swarm, not work together and form attack plans!"
"Aw, come on, Samantha," Charlie smirked and nudged him in the ribs with her elbow, "don't get butthurt because you lost."
A few moments later the lights in the ballroom came on, bathing the room in flourescence as the hosts announced the 'Last Man Standing'.
"How the hell did you manage to make it into the bunker, Cas?" Dean groused, playfully bumping the shoulders with dark-haired man next to him at their table in the hotel's bar, taking a break from the multitude of activities that AdventureCon had to offer.
Castiel smirked, taking a sip of Long Island Iced Tea. "I have years of experience in stealth combat of which you could not begin to fathom the number. Just because this simulation used cards rather than physical combat does not negate that my knowledge of battle tactics are superior."
"Game."
Cas blinked at Charlie, one eyebrow raised questioningly.
"It's a game, Cas," she said, rolling her eyes in jest, "not a 'battle simulation."
"All of your 'games'", he finger quoted at her, "are simulations of practical situations. Games such as this have been played since long before your species learned to draw pictures on the walls of caves."
"All right, Spock, enough with the history lessons," Dean interrupted, cutting off further arguments from the angel with his mouth, earning him a grunt of protest and resigned reciprocation.
"Ugh, you guys are disgusting," Sam said, whapping his brother lightly on the arm for emphasis, but smirked at the two anyway as he finished the dregs of his beer. "Get a room, jeez."
"We have a room, Sam," Castiel informed the younger Winchester, frowning slightly.
"He knows that, Cas, he's just being a bitch," Dean grinned.
"I was merely going to inform him," Castiel continued in a surly tone, eyebrows innocently arched, "that we already have a room here at the hotel, and if he wishes to, he may find something to occupy himself whilst we use it to fornicate. That is, I assume, what you were suggesting, Sam?"
Sam choked on his Heineken, face turning beet-red as his brother laughed raucously, clapping the fallen angel on the back. Dean knew that Sam was fine with him and Cas being him and Cas, but that didn't mean that Dean wouldn't jump on any opportunity he could find to fuck with his kid brother.
The last few months had been rough. Acclimatizing Castiel to his new life was full of ups and downs, fraught with panic attacks and arguments and a hurricane of guilt. Luckily, Dean had been there to catch the fallen angel each time he fell, their bond becoming more and more profound. It had been slow building, but everything had fallen into place in the end, and Dean found himself (literally) living the dream.
Only now it seemed that real life was better than he'd dreamed; he still had his brother, still found his angel and Charlie had quickly become like the little sister he never knew he wanted. For the first time since losing Bobby, Dean felt like he had a family and a home again.
They'd ended up staying in the bunker, after all, which was fine by Dean; he still didn't know how he'd managed to live in that tiny apartment in that other timeline - it felt so freaking claustrophobic. After a lifetime of moving from motel to motel, the bunker was positively palatial, his very own Batcave. Besides, there was plenty of room in the Men of Letters bunker for Sam to move his room to the far, far end of the dormitory, well away from the room shared by Dean and Castiel.
"I'm gonna go get another round, who's in?" Dean asked as he stood, heading over to the bar.
They still hunted the odd monster or ghost, but cases had been fewer and further between since the gates of Hell were shut. On occasion they would even come across a fallen angel, but it seemed as though most of the angels aside from Cas had either lost their memories of Heaven or gone mad from the ordeal. Dean hated it, but they would just keep moving forward. Cas said nothing to show that these encounters affected him in any way, but would usually disappear into a spare room upon returning to the bunker and they wouldn't see him again for a day or two.
It had been seven months since Heaven fell and the gates of Hell were locked tight. They hadn't seen any other angels in at least three months now, and their last job had been a stray leviathan that had holed itself up on a chicken farm in Kentucky, back in December. Garth still kept them in the loop whenever something did come up, but the hunter's network had become so organized over the last few years that most of the little stuff got dealt with before the Winchesters ever caught wind of it.
Kevin kept working on the Angel Tablet, searching for a way to restore Heaven and take out Metatron, but the angelic scribe hadn't bothered them since kicking his siblings out of Cloud City. Cas had insisted that the prophet had done more than enough on Heaven's behalf and all but commanded the kid to go back to school like he had wanted before being drawn into the world of monsters and angels and demons. Kevin had relented, applying to and getting accepted at Princeton (with a little unsolicited help from Charlie).
When Dean brought their drinks back to the table, the blonde girl from the Zombie Apocalypse LARP (Tracy? Stacy? Dean couldn't remember) was chatting with Charlie, who was showing the other woman how to operate her digital camera. Charlie's eyes lit up as Dean set the bottles down, giving Sam and Castiel a conspiratory little smile.
"We need a picture of all of us," she suggested, as though afraid Dean would balk at the idea. "We've been hanging out for months now and I don't have one picture of any of you."
Dean couldn't help but grin, because he remembered it now; the bar, Charlie and his angel, and now his little brother, too. He remembered how happy he'd looked in that picture, how he hadn't understood by looking at it how he could possibly feel so light and burden-free, or how easily a smile could fit on his or Cas' face after everything they'd been through.
He understood it now, though. He felt lighter, he felt burden free. They had accomplished so much in their short, eventful lives. They'd stopped the Apocalypse, sealed the Leviathan, survived Hell and Purgatory and even Heaven. They'd slain monsters and gods and even a fucking dragon once for fuck's sake. Now that the worst of it was gone, locked away in its hole for eternity, Dean felt like he had every right to feel as happy as he did, especially since he didn't have to sacrifice anyone to get it.
"All right," he shrugged, smirking at the surprized look of skepticism on Charlie and Sam's faces, "but I want a copy."
Dean slipped behind Castiel as Blondie took up position and aimed the camera at them, wrapping his arms around his angel from behind with his chin resting on the other man's shoulder and grinning like an idiot, flanked on either side by his little brother and his adopted little sister.
For a Winchester, it couldn't really get much better than this.
(A/N: And that, as they say, is a wrap! As angsty and painful and tragic as it was this fic was, I felt like the boys deserved a bit of fluffy down time, and Charlie did insist that Dean and Cas still go to AdventureCon :P
Please review ._. I love reviews. Reviews make me very happy.
If you were confused about the 'cards' thing in the zombie LARP at the beginning, it's one of the ways to do live-action World of Darkness (WhiteWolf) roleplay - typically I've only seen it used in Masquerade and Werewolf, but basically the idea is that WoD dice pools are based off of 'successes' on a D10 - an 8 or higher being a success - the higher the number of successes the better you accomplished the skill or attack. Basically, cards are easier to use when you're moving around and not using a table to play, so each player is given a stack of ten playing cards (Ace[1], 2-10) and when two players are engaged in combat or an action or skill etc, your draw a card from your opponent's stack, and your opponent does the same, and whoever draws the higher card wins the attack. A tag in Last Man Standing (your typical zombie apocalypse) is achieved when you, while infected, can manage to sneak up on a survivor and 'infect' them without a direct confrontation. Wow, that was way too much explanation...
idk if anyone caught it, but Pretend We're Dead is a reference to an L7 song.)