Good grief, I've created a monster – pirate!Jimiverse!Winchesters. You'd think I'd have learned by now, the way these things have a propensity to take on lives of their own. I mean, look at RJ. And Ronnie. And Andrew. And Das Bus. And The Haunted Tea Cosy Of Polecat Bottoms.
Oh, and an ***AUTHOR CREDIT*** goes to MaddyR, for a completely sadistic suggestion she made. Denizens; they are depraved, even if they do get shit done.
Chapter Twenty
Outing 'herself' as Samantha Plant writing as Jaqueline Hyde, Sam began a critique of ImpalaDude's latest offering, but quickly ran into trouble. He didn't want to come across as so offensive that he'd be booted off the server, but he had to be acerbic enough that it would be obvious he was really annoyed by the standard of the writing. And trying to think of a polite way to say YOU ARE AN INCOMPETENT IDIOT was making his head ache.
"Gah!" he snapped, sitting back and rubbing his eyes.
"The inspiration fairy not whackin' you with her wand?" grinned Dean, still typing.
"Oh, I got all the inspiration I need," Sam replied glumly, "It's the tact fairy's magic wand I really need here." He glared at his brother. "So you will be absolutely no help there."
"Haters gonna hate," smiled Dean with his usual obnoxious cheerfulness, "Spiters gonna spite spite spite spite spite, slighters gonna slight slight slight slight slight, I'm just gonna write write write write write…"
"I'm not spiting or slighting, Taylor," Sam grumbled, "I am trying to write a considered yet trenchant critique of your work."
"What, so this is your plan?" Dean sniffed. "Dissing my writing?"
"Exactly," confirmed Sam. "I want to attract the attention of whatever-it-is as a fellow campaigner for good writing, and the appreciation thereof. If we can't write crap that'll draw this thing out, then I'll try to get it to let me into its tent, so to speak."
Dean was instantly serious. "I don't like it," he intoned, "I don't like you trolling yourself as fugly bait, Sam."
"Well, you can hardly do it," Sam rolled his eyes. "And I've already shown myself to be a lone voice in the wilderness, drawing attention to terrible writing, even if there are people who find it amusing."
"I don't like it," Dean repeated, "Anything else you come up with, you run it past me before you even think of gettin' too close to this thing – the minute anybody makes any sort of contact that's suspicious, you tell me, bitch. You keep me informed on a minute by minute basis."
"Yes, Mom," Sam drawled, turning back to his screen with a sigh. "God, I never thought this would be so tricky."
"You need some help?" Dean returned to his infuriating grinning. "I am, after all, one of the most upvoted authors of the meeting."
"Yeah, maybe you can," Sam mused, "Can you think of a way to say 'JESUS CHRIST FOR THE LOVE OF CAS STOP WRITING AND NEVER GO NEAR A FRIGGING KEYBOARD AGAIN', only politely?"
"Bitch."
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In the end, Sam decided to sit on his critique overnight, then review it again. It was a strategy that Bobby had taught him when he was still at school, albeit using firearms rather than literary reviews as an example of how to avoid making rash decisions.
"Boy, let me tell you about my gun drawer. You see, when I decide that some idjit needs to be shot to make the world a better place, I load the gun, then lock it in the drawer, and leave it overnight, then I sleep on it. If I wake up in the mornin', and I'm still of the opinion that the asshat needs to be shot, then I can go get the gun – but mostly, I find I've cooled off enough to think about things more sensibly by then."
"Does it really work?" Sam had asked, "Does it really help you get less angry?"
"Your father's still alive, aint he?" Bobby had scowled.
So he was feeling less literarily outraged by the time they'd had breakfast at a small diner (where RJ had charmed the staff with his beaming and appreciative calls of 'Titi!' to every waitress), and more inclined to look past his brother's callous mistreatment of English expression in order to concentrate on the job.
That lasted right up until they were back at the small coffee shop at the meeting, and he got a look at the snippets Dean had added to his story.
Dean discussed the problem with Bobby and Castiel as the Impala was being resupplied.
"Okay, let's just say that the She-Wolf and her monster captain exist," said Dean, "How do we find her? She could be anywhere." He turned to the parrot that sat on his shoulder nibbling at his hat. "Stop that, little dude, or I'll hand you over to Benny and have him cook you up."
"Bollocks! Bollocks!" shrieked the parrot, bobbing up and down. "Bollocks! Bollocks! Lucifer's bum!"
"Seriously?" said Dean "If you're gonna do that go bug Bobby."
The parrot immediately flew to Bobby's shoulder, and proceeded to rub against his ear. "Darling, darling," it went.
"Knock it off, ya idjit bird," said Bobby "Well, desperate situation and all that, we could go and see Rowena."
"Bollocks! Bollocks!" the parrot yelled again.
"Well, if we gotta go see that witch, I'm leaving him on board – last time, he shat all over her and tried to peck her eyes out."
"Bollocks! Bollocks!"
"Shut up, Crowley!"
…
When the pain in his leg and side and head backed off some Sam sat up and took another drink from the bottle that had been left beside him, and looked around. It was dark and he was in a cabin that was bigger than what he was used to. A figure moved in the shadows.
"Who's there?" he said.
"The person who hauled your arse out of the shitfest," came the reply. "Drink up."
"Who are you?" said Sam "And where are we?"
"You can call me 'Captain', or 'Ma'am', the voice said, "Although if you forget and call me 'Sir' I don't mind that much and its an easy mistake to make what with me looking totally like a guy like I do." The shape moved into the light from the lamp.
"Holy shit!" said Sam.
The scarred face smiled. "You're aboard the She-Wolf," said the ugly woman, "Yes she's real, yes I'm real, no you're not dead. Drink up."
Sam took another drink. "This is pretty good stuff I've never tasted grog like it."
"It's called houndswort" she said.
"Hey, where are my clothes" said Sam.
"You won't need em tonight," she said, "Come on, drink up and come below deck so I can lock you up."
"Dafuq?" said Sam.
"I could chain you up instead if you prefer, but locking you up will be easier in the long run, as cute as I'm sure you'd look in a collar."
Oh great, thought Sam, I've been abducted by a kinky bitch just what I need I wish Dean was here he likes this sort of thing, I've heard enough from that brothel called the Nevada where Madam Amanda keeps a bawdy house for men with an appreciation for frisky women who know a lot about tying knots which might be useful on a ship but not so much ashore unless you're into that sort of thing which I'm not and I think I might be going to cry just thinking about it...
…
"It don't make sense," said Dean, looking at the map, "This compass doesn't work, that damned witch, when we get back I'm gonna take Crowley to crap on her."
"Bollocks!"
"Shut up, Crowley." He felt a presence behind him and turned to see Charlie the cabin boy trying to look at the map. "What are you doing, Charlie?"
"Sorry, Captain," the boy looked down.
"No, wait, he's got a good head on his shoulders," said Bobby thinking for the thousandth time that there was something about the cabin boy that he just couldn't put his finger on "Let him look."
Charlie peered at the map and the strange magic compass and pronounced "I think that if this is going around in circles, we might have to sail around in circles – wait for something to come to us."
"Good work Charlie," Dean said thinking that if the boy's balls didn't drop soon he'd have to drop in to a port and have him seen by a doctor "Bobby, set us a course"…
…
"Humbug?" asked the smaller man, proffering a bag of boiled sweets through the bars.
"Fuck off," growled Sam, prowling along one wall of the brig which was a stout metal cage.
"Suit yourself," shrugged the other man, crunching another piece candy.
"My father taught me never to accept candy from strangers," said Sam, "And you are definitely strange."
"I'm Gabriel," said the other man. "I wish you'd sit down, being locked in the brig with another naked guy is awkward enough, dude."
"Shut up," Sam sat down. "Why are we here anyway?"
"Because the captain ordered it," said Gabriel.
"We should be trying to break out," said Sam.
"Right," said Gabriel, "I'll just snap my fingers and mojo us some clothes, will I? And how do you propose to get past that?" He pointed out the large dog that had been left to guard them. "He looks hungry, and there's a lot of lean meat on you. You'd have to be damned quick to get past him."
"I'd only have to be quicker than you," said Sam…
…
"Nothing but fog, Captain," called the look-out from the crow's nest, "Fog, and I think I saw an iceberg."
"We shouldn't be hitting ice here" said Castiel. "The air is very cold, though."
"It aint natural" said Dean.
Suddenly a shape loomed out of the fog bank – it was a ship!
"Is it the She-Wolf?" yelled Bobby.
Dean looked through is spyglass. "Nope," he said, striking a manly and resolute pose to inspire courage in his crew, "It's worse than that. It's the Perdition."
"Oh no!" cried Charlie the cabin boy in his strangely high voice "That's the ship of the man they call Captain Lucifer, the most ruthless asshole to sail the seven seas!"
"Sonofabitch," said Dean, "Cas, what's wrong?"
Castiel looked terribly sad. "It's true that Captain Lucifer is a most ruthless and brutal man," he said. "I know this because he is my brother."
"Dafuq?" said Dean.
"I have never said anything about this before because our family is ashamed of him," explained Castiel. "As a swordsman he is second only to our oldest brother Michael. He is truly dangerous."
As they watched, the Perdition closed the gap between them strangely fast.
"Prepare to come about, and man the guns!" called Dean commandingly in a totally pirate voice, but the Perdition presented a broadside first and fired all her cannons…
…
Dean coughed and peered through the smoke when he heard a voice call "Ahoy Impala stand to and prepare to be boarded!"
"Fuck you – board this, asshole!"
Bobby was wrong, he thought, I shouldn't just be loading the gun, but figuratively speaking I should be using consecrated iron, or maybe silver, or possibly even his Anti-Demon Mark V rounds with the sanctified dog crap, because Dean's writing is truly diabolical…
"I'm impressed," he snarked over coffee, "Just when I thought you couldn't get worse – you did."
"Tell that to my fans," replied Dean sunnily, "They love it!"
"They're philistines!" snapped Sam. "Jesus, Dean, after I read your latest laughable attempts at literature, I had to go and read a Crobby story!"
Dean's eyes bugged. "Hey, if you're gettin' into that, there's something wrong with you," he growled.
"I'm not 'getting into that'," Sam corrected his brother, "I had to go and read something that had spelling! And grammar! And, and, and no dangling participles! It's another platonic one about Crowley and Bobby teaming up to beat a demon who's getting ideas above his station, then heading off to the opera. Oh, there's a plot," Sam sighed wistfully, "There's a plot, and there's punctuation, and I'm not kidding, the Latin is perfect…"
"Well, maybe you should go find this perfect writer, and you can sit around and feel superior to the rest of us," sniffed Dean disdainfully. "Look, my readers are comin' to my defence – oh, they're not too pleased with you, Samantha."
"Good," griped Sam, "I hope it brings the fugly out, looking for me. If I'm lucky, I can get an insight into what it is and how it's operating. If I'm even luckier, it will tear my head off and eat my brains and I won't have to read any more of this, this, this trash!"
"I'm just gonna write write write write write," Dean hummed infuriatingly, jiggling RJ as the child clapped along. "Oh, hey, little dude, we've talked about this before, it's bad enough that Auntie Samantha keeps buying it for you, but if you're gonna have the frothed milk stuff, you gotta drink it, not play with it…"
"Titi faff!"
"Uh, yeah, thanks." Dean sighed, and took a handful of napkins to wipe the froth off his décolleté, "So, what's on for you now?"
"This one," Sam indicated one of the morning sessions. "It's called 'Fallen But Loved', which means it's gonna be all about you and Cas, and just crawling with terrible writing."
"Maybe I should just concentrate on my story," mused Dean.
"Whatever," Sam grumbled, heading into the meeting.
Dean watched him go. "The whole bra thing is really makin' him cranky, isn't it?" he said to RJ, who was absorbed in playing with his frothy milk. "And he doesn't even have underwires. What a lightweight."
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Samantha seated herself in the room, steeled to hear tales Dean and Cas doing everything from going fishing to each other, but determined to stick it out in order to find more fodder for criticism. He expected it to be bad, very bad, very very bad indeed.
It wasn't.
It was worse than that.
Unfortunately, by the time the session started and the first story was a fully R-rated Samifer fic, it was too late to get out…
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Samantha decided to sit and maybe knit for a while before heading back out to find her bestie Dee – she was convinced that, between the Samifer, the Destiel, the Samstiel and the utter travesty that she could only label as Deastiam, the only way for her to prevent her head from exploding entirely was to wipe the hard drive and try to reboot the OS from scratch.
Seeing as she was burdened with a flawed and unreformattable squishy wetware brain rather than a reassuringly reprogrammable silicon one, a coffee and a huge piece of indulgently decorated black forest cake would have to do.
Strangely enough, she found herself feeling better with each desperate gulp of sugar-soaked fat-laden empty calories. Ronnie had once suggested that a piece of really good chocolate cake was a good remedy for anything for a broken heart to a seized engine, on the grounds that it couldn't possibly make things worse. By the time she was halfway through it, her left eye had stopped twitching and her hands had stopped shaking enough for her to pick up her knitting.
She was just finishing the first row when she felt a presence beside her, and looked up.
A young woman, perhaps a little younger than herself, stood smiling down at her. "Hi. You're Samantha, aren't you? Samantha Plant? Writing as Jaqueline Hyde?"
"Uh, yeah," Samantha replied.
"I'm Fiona," the other woman said, holding out a hand, "I loved your first chapter! I hope you keep going with that one! And I wanted to thank you for bringing up some of the problems with the writing that we've had – it was you yesterday, too, wasn't it?"
"Uh, yeah," Samantha nodded. "I mean, I don't want to be rude, or nasty, but I just, I just think if people would just spend some time to get their expression right, you know? Carelessness really gets on my nerves, because it's so unnecessary!" Then, because she was feeling particularly vexed, she added, "There's this one writer, ImpalaDude, whose stuff is just driving me crazy…"
"That's what I wanted to talk to you about," Fiona cut in, "I'm with some of the organising committee, and we're on the lookout for people who know good writing when they see it – would you be interested in helping us out?"
Gasp! What is Alfie-Con the plot bunny up to (apart from traumatising Sam)? Feed him reviews and find out, because Reviews Are The Extraordinarily Large Slices Of Utterly Delicious Black Forest Cake In The Tea Break Of Life!