I ATEN'T DEAD
I was just assaulted by Easter. And Gainful Employment. And Real Life. Yep, the ol' Unpleasantly Solid Parsnip Of Mundane Reality has been At It Again. Also I ate enough hot cross buns to put me into a sugar coma for about two months. So I may actually be dictating this via a Ouija board. Or maybe Beau-Ponty just clammed up because he saw me eating chocolate Lindt bunnies, and was worried that he might be next...
Chapter Twenty-One
One of the things that any university student has to learn is time management. Some of them are good at it, some of them are not. Some students try to simplify their workload by concentrating on the important activities (lab, library, drinking, gaming time) and ignoring the ones they see as non-essential (cleaning, laundry, sensible nutrition, personal hygiene). But one way or another, they have to develop a routine to get things done in the time available. Into every post grad, a little Sheldon Cooper must fall.
Karen clearly knew how to use a washing machine and was well acquainted with bathroom and toiletries, which suggested that she had a routine. And Dean had always had a particular talent for spotting patterns against the background, homing in on the signal amongst the noise, so a couple of days of covert surveillance had established that her daily movements were relatively predictable.
Which is why, as she set out on her morning coffee run, she went to the same small cafe, at the same time most days, and crossed the road at the same place...
Mind half on her work (which is the usual state of mind for post-grads), she didn't realise that there was traffic coming her way until she heard the sharp squeal of tyres and felt the looming presence of nearly two tons of Detroit steel disconcertingly close.
She let out a little shriek as she heard a voice say "Fuck!" and a door slammed. "Oh, God, are you all right?" the voice went on.
"Uh, I think so," she quavered, feeling the adrenaline spike fade as her heart attempted to slow.
"I'm so sorry, I just... Karen?"
She realised that the speaker was Dean, the man she'd spoken to at work the previous night; his face was as white as a sheet, his expression a mask of horror, as he seized her hands and gazed earnestly at her. "Oh, God, Karen, I am so sorry! I nearly hit you!"
She couldn't help herself; the tremor in his voice just made her smile.
He looked confused. "Uh, are you traumatised or something?" he asked.
"No," she shook her head, "It's just, well, you look even more scared than me!"
"I think I might be, you know." He looked forlorn, but his face changed as a car honked from behind. "Hey, knock it off!" he yelled, "There's a lady been scared half to death here!"
"I'm all right," she told him hurriedly, "Really, I just got a fright. I should probably have been watching the street, not thinking about my research..."
Dean looked indecisive, then appeared to made a decision – a look that could only be described as Daddy's Brave Little Trooper manifested on his face. "Okay. Come on." Gently but firmly, he took her elbow and ushered her towards his car. "Hop in," he told her, opening the door.
Karen hesitated. "I was just going to get coffee," she told him.
"You will have coffee," he stated firmly, "Because I am taking you to have coffee. To make it up to you. For scaring you." His face assumed the scared little boy expression she'd been so surprised to see the previous evening. "Please? If you don't need it, I sure as hell do," he confided.
She laughed out loud, and slid into shotgun.
"We're sorry, aint we, Baby?" Dean crooned as he re-started the stalled engine, patting the dash. "Oh, uh, that's my car," he explained as Karen quirked an eyebrow. "My Baby. She didn't try to kill you, her name aint Christine, that was all me." He blushed. "Uh, I mean, it was all my fault, I wasn't tryin' to hit you, Oh, God, I'm sorry, should I just shut up and drive?"
"Yes, Dean," Karen chuckled, "Just drive."
He did, as far as a small place that did really good coffee. He insisted that they sit down and have pie with it, "To settle our nerves. Or at least, to settle mine."
"I really should be getting back to the lab..." she protested, somehow feeling that she wanted him to talk her out of that.
"Hey, you've just been almost hit by a car!" Dean said, "You are allowed to take some time to recover after almost getting killed!" He thanked the waitress who brought their order to the table. "You can tell me all about it," he stated firmly.
She gave him an incredulous look. "Do you really want to hear about what I'm doing?" she asked doubtfully.
"Sure!" Dean beamed. "I know I'll never look at football the same way again after your explanations last night!" He paused. "Uh, I might not understand much of it, but you can still tell me. Hey," he smiled, "You can pretend that I'm a corporate head honcho, and you can practise explaining to me why your work will make my pharma company gazillions of dollars, so you have to tell me how it works, but do it in language that can be understood by an asshole in an expensive suit!"
"I thought you were trying not to be an asshole?" she teased.
"Well, I can just go to an Assholes Anonymous meeting, and tell 'em I had a lapse," Dean gestured dismissively, "It's all that corporate raiding, being a professional asshole all day, it's sometimes hard to just leave it all at the office, I mean, when you've sacked a hundred overworked analysts and informed your interns that they will all be paid in actual peanuts and then cancelled Christmas all before you go power-lunching to plan a way to have your drugs manufactured in a Third World country by crippled orphans, it's kind of hard just to turn that off, you know, I go home to my beach side mansion and like to relax by looking for unemployed single parents to kick..."
"Nope," she stated with a snort of laughter, "I am not working for you. Your organisation has no social conscience."
"I'll pay you real money," Dean wheedled, "Or as many interns as you can eat."
"No deal." She took a mouthful of pie. "But I can tell you what I'm working on. It's a problem of having multiple variable parameters within a population." She took a pen from a pocket, and began to draw on a napkin. "Because, for example, humans in something like a drug trial are not just a single measurement. Say you have a drug that you think will be better at controlling high blood pressure. But humans don't just have blood pressure, they have other properties that might be affected and might be important, like blood sugar, or blood lipids," she drew three curves on the napkin.
"That's not three snakes that have eaten elephants, is it?" he commented.
"No!" she laughed, "They're bell curves. They describe a distribution where most of the population, measured for a single parameter, tend to be clustered towards the mean. That's the average."
"That's what you called a normal distribution, right?" Dean interjected.
"Exactly. So, it's reasonably straightforward with a single measurement, in a normal distribution, but if you have to look at more than one distribution at a time, it gets more complicated..."
"Dean frowned at the napkin. "Okay, but what if... what if, these are people with high blood pressure, right? So, what if, to start with, they aint exactly, uh, a normal distribution?" He took the pen, and drew a skewed curve. "What if it's, like, squashed towards one end, because these people aren't exactly healthy to start with? Or," He drew two connected curves, "What if there's a group here, but there's this blip here? What then? I mean, do you start your experiments on everybody, or do you just pick out the unhealthy ones?"
Karen stared at him. "Dean," she said in an even voice, "Those are very intelligent questions."
"Oh, uh," he looked flustered. "It was just what you were sayin' about people not bein' a single thing. You know, a man is not his blood pressure. It seemed the, uh, logical next step. Um. Thank you?"
Smiling, she took the pen back. "That's exactly the sort of question that I've been working on. So, the approach I've taken is this..."
...oooooOOOOOooooo... ...oooooOOOOOooooo... ...oooooOOOOOooooo... ...oooooOOOOOooooo... ...oooooOOOOOooooo...
If Dean had looked shell-shocked after his first conversation with Karen, he now looked like he was ready to take up residence in a home for the terminally bewildered.
"So, how did it go?" asked Sam anxiously.
"I think she broke my brain," Dean complained, dropping heavily onto his bed. "Seriously, how is it legal for anybody to talk like that outside of a controlled containment environment?"
"Funny," Sam smiled just a little smugly, "I've wondered the same about you and your Chicks I Have Banged stories. Speaking of which..."
Dean let out a sad moan, and fell sideways onto his bed. With a consoling whuff, Jimi moved in to begin tenderly washing his Alpha's ears. "Yeah, I got a date tonight," he sighed. "To make it up to her. For nearly killing her. Which I coulda done."
"Dean!" Sam yapped in horror, "You couldn't possibly have done that!"
"No, it woulda been easy," Dean waved a hand casually, "She really did just step of the kerb and right out in front of me, thinkin' about her deviations, I guess. I really had to stomp on the brake; a small hesitation, no jury would've convicted me..."
"I don't believe I'm hearing this!" Sam responded, "How could you think of just killing her then and there?"
"Of course I wouldn't," Dean responded indignantly, "I'm just sayin', I could have done."
"Glad to hear it," muttered Sam.
"Because I can't kill her until after we break this curse."
"Dean..."
"Then I'll happily gank her myself."
"Dean!" Sam pinched the bridge of his nose. "Can we just concentrate more on the curse breaking, and less on the ganking, just for the moment?"
"Says he who hasn't been averaged," griped Dean. "So, I'm going out to dinner tonight with Karen. I'm going to dinner with a witch. Dean Winchester is going to dinner with a frigging witch. A date with an entity who's more computer than a frigging Dalek. Cal-cu-late! Cal-cu-late! Cal-cu-late! It must be the next Apocalypse."
"So, you asked her the questions?" Sam pressed, pointedly ignoring his brother's melodramatics with a Bitchface #8™ (You Are Now Officially Talking Complete Shit, Dean)
"Yeah," humphed Dean, "And worse, she answered them. Here." He threw his phone at his little brother. "I recorded the entire sordid encounter, listen to it, write me some CliffsNotes, and think up some more things I can say, while I attempt to recover, and prepare for tonight's encounter." He sat up and made his way to the small refrigerator. "What the... Francis, I cannot drown my sorrows with this kombucha stuff!"
"Take the dog for a whiskey-word," suggested Sam, "The fresh air and the cardio will do you both good."
"Great," grumbled Dean, "Not only do I have to pretend to be infatuated with a witch, I have to do it sober. Fuck my life."
Sam's face became worried. "I'm really not happy about you doing this," he muttered.
"Neither am I," Dean replied grimly, "But desperate situations require desperate measures. We stick with the plan: I have dinner with her, I go home with her, you follow, I, uh, distract her, and you destroy her damned altar before I have to do the deed so we can undo the curse, gank her, and get the hell out."
"She's intelligent, Dean," Sam reminded her, "This will have to be one hell of an act."
"I've managed it so far," Dean growled, "And the Living Sex God still knows how to 'distract' a woman..."
"If you start talking about cars, destinations and manual shifts, I may just hurt you," Sam stated flatly.
"It's a perversion of my skills," Dean observed gloomily, "A waste, a travesty, sacrilegious, even, to be using them to show a witch a good time. Seriously, Sam, you seriously have to get that altar seriously destroyed, before things in the bedroom get, uh, serious."
"There is a real potential problem looming here," Sam's face was, well, serious, "I mean, okay, The Living Sex God knows how to show a woman a good time, sure, but, uh, that's in his usual body, and let's face it, this one has form for, um, how do I put this, uh, stalling? Missing? Running out of gas just before the finish line? Given that you'll be putting on a performance, what happens if you, er, you know..."
"It won't come to that," growled Dean, "Because you, little brother, will have immaculate timing, and you will destroy the altar before proceedings become too, uh, proceeded."
"This has to be a first," Sam grinned, "The Living Sex God actually wants me to interrupt one of his virtuoso performances." The smile fell off his face. "Of course, this means that I'm actually going to have to pay attention, whereas usually I try very hard not to hear your, uh, performance."
Dean shrugged fatalistically. "At the very least, you might learn something."
"Under the circumstances, I prefer to believe that ignorance can, sometimes, actually be bliss."
"It can also get you killed, Sammy."
"Will in this case, I'd die blissful, then."
"Where did I go wrong with you? Are you sayin' that you'd rather die than learn from the awesome talents of the Living Sex God?"
"Well, if I have to be honest about it, if I really have to answer that truthfully..."
"Yeah?"
"I'll need some time to think about it."
"Bitch."
Oh the sacrifices the Living Sex God is willing to make in the line of duty. Or at least, in the line of getting his hotness back. Will he make it through dinner? And will Sam's timing be good enough? Will Sam be able to stage an 'intervention' without throwing up? Tune in next chapter? No, seriously, Beau-Ponty, I'm not going to eat you. Unless you are made of very good quality chocolate.