Chapter Nineteen

Sam was wearing an expression like thunder as he plonked himself down next to his brother. He was not happy. He was not at all happy. He'd felt himself alone, an island of intellect, a reef of reason, a peninsula of propriety, maybe even an archipelago of articulation (or maybe just an atoll), surrounded by a sea of substandard storytelling, as the women around him has sighed and gushed and, and, yeah, they'd fangirled over Dean's story, which was just as bad as the previous one.

"Hey, Sammy," Dean barely looked up from his laptop.

"What the hell was that?" Sam began without preamble, "What the hell did you think you were writing?"

Dean looked up. "I just did what you told me," he said, "I wrote the exact opposite."

"No you didn't!" snapped Sam, "You wrote exactly the damned same!"

"I did not!" protested Dean.

"Dean, it was another Dean-goes-out-to-kill-Ronnie story!" Sam growled, "Just like the other one!"

"It was not!" Dean insisted, "It was totally different!"

"How?" demanded Sam, "How was it different? The premise was improbable and contrived, the dialogue was one-sided, the grammar, holy crap, it's like you don't have much punctuation to use to start with and you use it all up in the first few paragraphs. And 'fucky turns'?"

"You know," Dean twirled a finger, "When a ballerina stands up on her toes, and turns around on the spot. Fucky turns. Bobby said I nailed it, fifty-two of 'em, and Odile is only supposed to do thirty-two."

"Fouetté, Dean," Sam said between clenched teeth, "The term is fouetté."

'Well, it felt fucky," Dean sniffed disdainfully. "I sure felt fucky afterwards. How the hell those chicks do that without throwin' up is a mystery…"

"The point was," Sam cut in, "You were supposed to write something completely different!"

"It was different in everything," asserted Dean, "This time, I didn't want to kill her, but I had to, and I did the whole angst thing, and best of all, I won!" He paused. "If it was so crappy, why are you so pissed? I thought you wanted me to write crap."

"I did!" Sam agreed.

"So, according to you, I wrote crap," Dean pressed, "So, why the face like your underwires are pokin' into you?"

"Oh, God, did you have to mention the bra thing?" Sam practically wailed. "Gah! I'm looking forward to burning these things when this job is done!" He tweaked at a strap in irritation. "You might've written crap, but they loved it!"

"They did, didn't they?" Dean smiled sunnily. "I've been gettin' reviews."

"They weren't supposed to love it!" griped Sam. "But they kept going on and on about how 'authentic' the voice of 'Dean' was, and how the rambling is just a manifestation of your capacity to take your Egyptian cruises up the Nile River, you know, where you sail along as Deanopatra, Queen of Denial…"

"At least I wrote crap," Dean sniffed disdainfully, "They used your story. What the hell happened to it between 'Ooooooh it's so hard to write so badly' and submitting it?"

"The first version was too crap," Sam stated Sam firmly, "It was just so crap, that it would've been spotted as artificially crap, intentionally crap, straight away. So I had to make a few changes, just to make sure it was, you know, naturally crap."

"That was crap?" Dean cocked a disbelieving eyebrow. "That first chapter you submitted, you think that was crap?"

"It was total crap," Sam sighed, "I was embarrassed to put it out there in the public domain. I mean, there was no real intro to the OC, no indication of a setting, or a time period, the expression was stilted, the premise, ha, there wasn't one, the whole 'Oooooh look I'm in a Supernatural story!' thing was as flimsy as TP, and…"

"Oh, great," groaned Dean, "Mr Perfectionist has his OCD game on. They loved it, bitch. They went nuts for it! The panel kept referring back to it as an example of how to do a self-insert without immediately alienating your entire audience! You check your account, they'll be gushing all over it."

Sam dropped his head into his hands. "Oh, God, how is this so difficult?" he complained. "You're writing crap, and they love it, I'm writing crap – "

"Which isn't even crap," interrupted Dean.

"It was totally crap!" asserted Sam.

"Maybe at Stanford it would be crap," Dean suggested, "But here, they keep goin' on about how this is mean to be fun – for people who aren't so keen to get their grammar nazi jackboots on first thing in the mornin', it aint such a problem. One person's crap is another person's trashy enjoyment."

Sam groaned. "This is turning out to be harder than I'd thought," he sighed, "If the stories that are crap aren't being perceived as crap, just how crap do they have to be to set off this fugly's crap detector? The women who turned on each other, I'm telling you, their writing was appalling…"

"According to you," Dean noted.

Sam took the small mirror compact out. "Mirror mirror, in my lap, who decides who's writing crap?"

The glass fogged and swirled…

This man's work is that man's leisure;
This girl's crap is that girl's treasure

"Great," Sam grumbled, "So, crap is in the eye of the beholder." He looked at his watch. "I vote we give it up for today, get back to the room, and, and, I don't know, eat a handful of aspirin because I'm getting a headache."

"Have a bubble bath," suggested Dean, "Go get your nails done, it's very relaxing. And while you're there…"

"Dean, NOBODY is waxing me, okay?" Sam growled. "It's not like anybody will be looking at my legs, so I don't care."

"It's all about bein' your best self, Sammy," beamed Dean, "And feeling happy in your own skin."

"Well, I'm feeling just fine with my follicles occupied, thanks very much."

Dean let out a large sigh. "I bet Cinderella's fairy godmother never had this much trouble." RJ made a querulous noise. "Yeah, I think somebody else wants dinner, too."

"Well, we can order in," Sam decided, not wanting to give 'Dee' any excuse to head out and possibly be diverted by a bar.

"Great!" chirped Dean, "I can get to work on my next story!"

"This time, it has to be something different, okay?" Sam stipulated. "Something totally different. Really, totally different." He tapped at the meeting program. "Try an AU, and make it crap."

"AU?"

"Alternative Universe," Sam reminded his brother, "Like that time we ended up in an alternative reality, where Dean and Sam Winchester were federally employed Hunters, and Bobby was our boss? It's a story where we're us, but in a different setting. Seventeenth century. Or Twenty-fourth century. Or we're in high school. Or in a band. Or something. Cas always pops up. It's us, and the people we know, but in a totally alternative setting." He shuddered. "Think HELL-TV."

"Yeah?" Dean frowned in thought. "It's us, Jim, but not as we know it? So, I could have my own workshop, where I restore classic cars?"

"Yeah."

"Or, I could be captain of the football team!"

"Yeah, you could."

"Or international billionaire playboy, bein' chased around the world by beautiful women."

"I guess so."

"On my own amazing private yacht, because I aint flyin'."

"Naturally."

"I could have this huge, amazing boat! I could be captain of my own ship!"

"I can see you're getting the idea," Sam narrowed his eyes. "Plenty of scope to screw it up royally, and write some real crap."

"Well, it will be a shame to disappoint my fans," pouted Dean, "But I can give it a go." He shut the laptop. "But I'll bet that whatever reality we end up in, you'll still be the one who cries like a little bitch."

"Jerk."

...oooooOOOOOooooo... ...oooooOOOOOooooo... ...oooooOOOOOooooo... ...oooooOOOOOooooo... ...oooooOOOOOooooo...

Sam did decide to have a bath to try to relax – the whole exercise, the genderbending thing, the damned foundation garments, the apparent inability of anybody to see just how crap his brother's writing was, was getting to him and , strangely, he found he was craving chocolate cookies. He found a dog-eared copy of The Grapes Of Wrath in their room and, almost gibbering with gratitude, took it into the bathroom with his cookies. As he stuffed the delicious goodies into his face, to the background rattle of Dean's typing, he thought that maybe things weren't as bad as he thought they were, and that tomorrow would be better.

"Feel better, Princess Samantha?" asked Dean.

"Actually, yeah, I do," Sam replied.

"You look like somebody's grandma in those pyjamas."

"Flannel is warm and comfy," Sam shot back, "And at least I don't look like a hooker."

"Aint nothin' wrong with wantin' to feel pretty," Dean said airily, returning to the keyboard. "So, how many cookies are left… did you eat them all? You greedy bitch!"

With a serene smile, Sam seated himself on his bed, and opened his laptop. He had a plan. It was a cunning plan. A very cunning plan. A very very cunning plan indeed. In fact, his plan was so cunning, you could put a hat on it and call it Bobby Singer.

"What are you smirkin' at?" Dean demanded.

"I have an idea," Sam mused, "Maybe I've been goin' at this the wrong way around. Given my inability to write what's accepted as 'crap', and your readers' inability to realise that you are writing crap…"

"What do you mean?"

"It's just an idea," Sam shrugged, "But I'm going to test a theory. We want to attract the attention of this fugly, right?"

"Yeah."

"So, maybe we've been using the wrong strategy."

"What are you gonna do?"

"I'm gonna review whatever it is that you've been writing."

"Okay," Dean smiled, "It's totally different, like you said, an AU story. My fans like it so far!"

"Why does that not reassure me in the least," muttered Sam, tapping at the keys until he found ImpalaDude's story account on the conference site. Under 'Works In Progress For Comment', he opened a file.

When Bobby Singer, Quartermaster of the Impala, went looking for his captain he headed straight for the tavern called The Salvage Yard because it had the prettiest and buxomest and wenchiest wenches in all of London and Dean would definitely head there with his pockets full of gold from their last expedition for some gambling and drinking and some beautiful natural acts although he usually never had to pay for it because he was so awesome that the wenches queued up when he was ashore. He found the rakishly handsome devil-may-care young captain at the bar, not wearing a sissy ruffly shirt of course he was totally cool in a black shirt with a wench on one arm and a tankard in the other, regaling the proprietor with stories of their latest voyage. First Mate Castiel sat next to him, radiating the sort of cat's ass disapproval he always did whenever Dean wanted to do anything fun because he was a total Puritan.

"Bobby!" he called when he saw his Quartermaster approaching, "Come and have a drink with us! Ellen, another tankard and some more of your best grog!"

"You pay me first, you damned pirate," Ellen said in a totally grumpy voice.

"I'm not a pirate, I'm a privateer," said Dean, giving the girl in his arm a squeeze "I totally have a letter of Mark"

"Bobby what's wrong?" asked First Mate Castiel, seeing Bobby's face.

"Dean, I got some bad news," Bobby said "About your brother."

Dean sat up looking very manly and serious and worried about his little brother who was a lieutenant on the Navy ship Stanford. "Sam? What about him?"

"His ship was attacked and sunk," Bobby said, to general gasps of horror from the people in the tavern, "And your brother was wounded in action and taken prisoner."

Dean snarled in a really masculine way and his hand went to his cutlass. "What ship?" he said "I'm gonna sail the seven seas to rescue Sammy if I have to sink every ship between here and Antarctica."

"Dean," said Castiel, "Antarctica hasn't been discovered yet."

"Whatever,dude I'm gonna rescue Sam and sink whoever took him. What ship was it?"

Bobby's face darkened. "There were only a couple of survivors," he said "And they said that the Stanford and the Chevrolet saw action against… the She-Wolf."

Everybody in the tavern gasped.

"Aint no such ship," said Dean "It's a myth that lady pirates use to frighten their kids, like, if you don't shut up and go to sleep right now, the She-Wolf will come and take you away and the captain will eat you."

"Plenty of sailors think she's real," said Ellen the bartender "I've heard enough men talk about her although there are rarely survivors."

"And the stories are remarkably consistent," Castiel said, with his usual gravelly voice as he stared intently at Dean in that really worried but not at all homoerotic way he had, "A vessel with a figurehead depicting a ravening wolf's head and if fired on she returns fire with so many guns that there is something unnatural about it."

"That just means she got a well-trained crew," Dean said "And I don't believe the crap about her captain either."

"Nobody knows what to believe about her captain" Castiel went on, still doing the eye sex stare thing (no homo). "They say the captain is deformed, they say the captain keeps a pack of savage dogs as part of the crew and they tear seamen apart and cannot be killed with gunfire."

"That's crap" Dean said "You put enough rounds into anybody they die. If it bleeds we can kill it."

"They say the captain is not even human, but is an unnatural abomination of some sort," said Bobby, "And there are those who claim they've been on board and survived and say… she's actually a woman."

There was a round of nervous laughter from the tavern because the idea of a woman captaining a pirate ship was like totally unbelieveable but plenty of others had heard about the mysterious ship that rarely left any survivors behind and then this figure at the bar waring a cloak and hood like a Sith or something said "Its all true"

"Dafuq?" said Dean

The mysterious hooded figure turned towards him "It's all true the captain of the She-Wolf is a woman. Well, she's female, whether she counts as a woman or not is up for debate frankly but she is not human, she is a monster, and she sails the seven seas forever searching."

"Now, don't go bothering my customers, Andrew" said Ellen in a totally severe voice, "Don't mind him he was injured at sea and he's not right in the head."

"And how would you know then, mysterious strange man?" asked Dean with a chuckle. "What's she searching for?"

The figure threw back the hood to reveal a scarred face with one eye missing. "Because I have met her," he said "And if your brother is taken then if he is young and handsome though probably not as handsome as you he is in great danger. She is searching for her life partner, her pair-bond."

"Holy shit!" yelled Dean "What the fuck happened to you?"

"I displeased her," the mysterious Andrew answered "And barely escaped with my life. If your brother is taken alive it can mean only one thing – she finds him attractive, and means to mate with him."

Deary deary me - poor Sam, is there no end to the outrages that his brother insists on inflicting upon his delicate literary sensibilities? No ruffles, no homo, and no mercy shown to punctuation.

Feed Alfie-Con reviews so we can find out what Sam's cunning plan is.

And if anybody finds pictures of pirate!Winchesters out there in interwebsland, I DON'T WANT TO KNOW, all right? Denizens: they are depraved.