Chapter Twenty-Five
Sam ground his teeth as he looked out the window, watching the world go by as they headed back to their room, and prayed to any deity who happened to be lurking around for patience.
"Look, I've said I was sorry, Dean."
"So am I, Sam, believe me, so am I."
"I was just following the plan we'd agreed on, bro."
"Uh-huh."
"Come on, Dean, you were the one who was so adamant that I had to prevent it!"
"And in the end, you were as preventative as a bucket of ice down the shorts. Well done you."
"Look, if I'd had any idea that you'd, uh, you know, changed your mind, I'd have waited."
"But you didn't. My clueless little brother didn't."
"What the... how was I supposed to know? What am I, psychic?"
"Well, actually..."
"Shut up. I was supposed to be saving you from a witch!"
"No, you were supposed to be helping me to save hot guys from the curse of not being able to get laid. News flash: I'm one of the hot guys. I was getting laid. God, was I getting laid..."
"For fuck's sake, Dean, I was just doing exactly what we planned! I did exactly what you told me to! I was following orders!"
"That didn't wash at Nuremberg, Sam, and it aint gonna wash with me." Dean sighed forlornly. "What you interrupted was something amazing – there's something really hot about a woman who aint afraid to enjoy herself, and say what she wants, and Karen sure knows how to enjoy herself, let me tell you..."
"Please don't," Sam begged. "Dean, please don't."
"You could learn something, Sammy," Dean insisted. "If nothing else, I'm pretty sure I learned something."
"Like how not to be an arrogant narcissistic hot guy?" prompted Sam.
"False modesty sucks, dude," Dean scoffed, "I was referring to what she did before you interrupted, when she..."
Sam let out a small keening noise, and shut his eyes. He'd always thought that Dean's Chicks I Have Banged stories were as bad as it could get. It turned out that his big brother's Chicks I Almost Finished Banging Before You Ruined Everything were pretty appalling as well.
"I thought that the pep talk you gave Karen was kind of inspired, though," he ventured, attempting to change the subject. "Use your talent for good, not evil, I wasn't actually expecting you to come up with something like that."
"Well, it was just kinda like what that cop said," Dean shrugged. "If you have a talent, a skill, an ability, hell, a personality, something that you can do well, something that's all you, well, you'll always have something beyond what the outside looks like. And Karen really does have an exceptional ability. She could use it to do a lot of good things for a lot of people."
"That's almost disturbingly mature coming from you," Sam commented. "But you're right. If she channels the sort of intellect that can get a cloud computing altar to work, what she could do by applying that ability to statistical analysis of big data, that sort of thinking could revolutionise the way that personalised medicine is..."
"I wasn't talking about that," Dean scoffed, "I was talkin' about getting laid."
"WHAT?" Sam glared at his brother with a Bitchface #1™ (Dean, I Don't Believe You Just Did/Said/Ate/Punched/Shot/Had Sex With That!). "I thought you meant her obvious talent for mathematical analysis of multi-dimensional data sets!"
"Yeah, whatever," Dean waved a hand dismissively, "That could be good too, I guess, but what that woman can do it bed? She could make so many guys happy. If she could pass on that knowledge to other people, she could make the world a much better place."
Sam slumped in defeat in the face of Dean's unsquelchable libido. "Can we go get a drink?" he asked plaintively. "I need a drink."
"So do I," agreed Dean. "A drink, and a frisky lady. But not until I change out of these damned Average Joe pants, and into something more appropriate for the Living Sex God. Not that it would really be a problem, I can be awesome no matter what I'm wearing, in fact I can be at my most awesome wearing nothin'..."
"Oh, God." Sam sighed, and let his head fall back. Dean was Dean. Dean would always be Dean. No matter what life or gods or witches or fate or the random motion of the universe threw at him, no matter what happened to him, Dean would always be unmitigated unalloyed unrepentantly Dean.
And at that thought, he couldn't help but smile.
There was something else he wanted to raise with his brother, though. "I finished listening to your conversation with Karen earlier, all the way through," he mentioned casually.
"That's okay," Dean said soothingly, "I understand, listenin' to some chick spout about her research, that's practically porn for you."
"Yeah, well, I did notice something interesting." He turned to look at his brother. "You didn't actually use any of the questions I'd given you."
"Yeah, well, when an egghead is in the zone, it's hard to get a word in edgeways," Dean shrugged dismissively.
"That's not what I mean – what I meant was, the ones you did ask sounded pretty authentic," Sam went on, watching his brother. "She was right. They were intelligent questions. And expressed clearly, in plain English, which is something that academics often struggle with."
"That's because I aint an academic," muttered Dean, watching the road, "I live out in the real world."
"She really was right, you know," Sam told his brother, "Educated is not automatically the same thing as intelligent. You can be plenty intelligent without a college degree, Mr GED. You have the mind of an engineer."
"But not the pocket protector, or the glasses," Dean grinned as annoyingly and dismissively as he knew how. "I'm gonna salt and burn those damned things."
"I mean it, Dean," Sam's voice was serious. "You know how stuff works. You keep this car running, you can look at any mechanism and understand how it runs, or how it should run, you can see patterns, connections. The military would pay a damned fortune to get their hands on a mind like yours."
"Of course they would," Dean's eyebrows waggled, clearly happy to be back at home on their own face, "They could drop me in the Middle East, and I'd demoralise the terrorists into giving up because none of the ladies would want to be with 'em anymore. Believe me, there's nothing more demoralisin' about not being able to get laid. They wouldn't last a week once I arrived and the womenfolk discovered the talents of the Living Sex God, and none of 'em would dare try to gank me, because I'd make sure that they knew of my awesome housebreaking skills, and I'd put out the rumour that I knew how to get into Paradise and by the time any of thought they would get there, well, there sure wouldn't be any virgins left..."
Sam smiled as Dean outlined his One Point Plan for peace in the Middle East; somewhere, his mind speculated idly, somewhere, in an alternative history, Dean had had the chance to develop and hone his abilities, gone on to further study to give him the theory and language to describe what he could do, and maybe even how he could do it, to others. Maybe he developed the next big thing in alternatives to the internal combustion engine. Maybe he rewrote the textbooks for mechanical engineering. Maybe he was the hot-shot young professor who was forever behind with his grant applications and his faculty paperwork, but whose lab continually turned out papers and students of exceptional quality, even as he drove the rest of the academic staff nuts with his habit of putting his booted feet on the table at faculty meetings and calling bullshit on anybody who used pompous language, and he did it all with a cocky smile because his undergrad and postgrad students idolised him and he knew that if they tried to terminate him he could walk onto any campus in the country, if not overseas, and his peers would fall upon him will inarticulate little noises of intellectual gratification, and maybe if Sam went into academia rather than practising Law they'd even have ended up with tenure on the same campus, maybe even settled down like normal folks, and Dean with just one woman permanently, wouldn't that be something, and maybe even a nephew and niece for him to corrupt, but no matter how hectic their lives were and how often their careers took them apart they'd still find time to get together on weekends and sit on the car with beers and watch the stars...
Knowing his luck, though, Dean would still take those opportunities to regale him with a highlights reel from The Dean Winchester Story: Chicks I Banged Before I Got Hitched.
Yup, Sam thought, letting his brother's monologue wash over him. Dean wasn't back; Dean had never left.
...oooooOOOOOooooo... ...oooooOOOOOooooo... ...oooooOOOOOooooo... ...oooooOOOOOooooo... ...oooooOOOOOooooo...
They found a bar and were getting on with the serious business of drinking when they heard a voice calling them from across the busy room. "Sam? Dean? Hey, it is you! Hi, guys!"
They turned to see that they were being hailed by Gary. Gary, in all his gym-junkie, chicken-steaming, beach-posing, broccoli-munching, shake-swilling glory. He was positively beaming as he made his way towards them.
"Wow, Karen works quick," muttered Dean. "He's back to himself again."
"It must've gone a lot more smoothly than she'd anticipated," agreed Sam, looking at his watch.
"Hi!" Gary repeated as he arrived at their table. "Hey, Dean, good to see you back to your awesome self, man!"
"Uh, you too, Gary," Dean replied, seeing that he had a woman accompanying him. "So, uh, who's this?"
"Oh, let me introduce you!" the other man enthused as his companion smiled, "Guys, this is Heidi, who I haven't seen since we were at school! Heidi, this is Dean, and this is Sam, they're awesome guys."
"Hello, Heidi," Sam and Dean shook hands politely, both of them noticing that she was not exactly the sort of hot woman that someone like Gary might gravitate to; she was, in fact, extremely average.
"Hang on, let me get drinks!" Gary said before heading for the bar.
"So," Sam began, determined to make polite conversation, "How did you two, er, meet up again?"
"Oh, it was completely random!" Heidi laughed. "I'm in town for a workshop in the Biosciences school, and when I spotted Gary in the street this afternoon, I barely recognised him!"
Sam and Dean exchanged a look. "So, he's, uh, changed since high school?"
"Oh, we both have," Gary cut in as he arrived with the drinks, "And definitely for the better. We were the two fat kids. Remember my skin? I looked like a spherical meatball in my Senior year."
"My braces is what I remember," Heidi laughed again. "Oh, do you remember my Prom dress?"
"You went to Prom together?" asked Sam.
"Yeah," Gary shrugged. "We were kind of left over when everybody else had asked everybody else, so we figured, why not? I remember that stupid sash thing I had to wear with the suit," Gary groaned. "My Mom made it, and used it as a table runner afterwards."
"My dress could've double as a tent," Heidi told them frankly. "I'm not kidding, I looked like a hot air balloon made of taffeta."
"Thankfully, we're both healthier now," Gary commented. "Seriously, Heidi, you are half the size you were back then!"
"You're certainly a lot healthier that I initially thought," Heidi observed, "When we met this afternoon, I thought you looked better than you had at school, but I didn't have my contacts in – now, you're completely buff! What do you eat, whole cattle?"
"You'd be amazed at how he cleans up with a shower and a clean shirt," Sam chirped brightly, intent on steering the conversation away from the manner in which Gary's appearance had changed from average to hot guy between lunchtime and happy hour.
"And you really don't want to know what he eats," Dean cautioned ominously.
"Well, the funny thing is, I actually do," Heidi corrected him.
"She totally does," Gary nodded eagerly, "Heidi is a professional nutritionist!"
At Sam's quizzical look, Heidi went on. "We got talking, and the conversation turned to Gary's diet..."
"Why doesn't that surprise me," muttered Dean for Sam's ears only.
"...And she made some suggestions," Gary took up the thread, "And she can explain what she means really clearly. She knows all about supplements, and isolated thingo-cyanide..."
"Isothiocyanates!" Heidi laughingly corrected him.
"Yeah, the stuff in crucified vegetables that makes them..."
"Cruciferous, Gary, cruciferous veggies!" she laughed again. "Kale, sprouts, broccoli."
"Yeah, so, this lady right here, I told her, you're a nutrition genius!" declared Gary, "And she's gonna help me tweak my diet!"
"He's actually already managed to get pretty damned close to, well, a perfectly nutritionally sound intake," Heidi told them. "I wouldn't want to eat it myself, but I think there could even be a market for those shakes. What we'll need to do is get you do brew some up, then run some assays on them – we really have to get a handle on the liver content."
"That's the secret ingredient!" insisted Gary.
"Yes, but you can have too much of it," Heidi countered earnestly. "Liver is high in Vitamin A, which is beneficial in small doses, but can lead to hypervitaminosis A, and possibly to bone pathology, malabsorption of other vitamins, even interfere with mitochondrial function, the basis of your cellular energy generation. And too much cruciferous vegetable can interfere with thyroid function..."
"Yeah, but I'm using the whole vegetable, not just juicing it," Gary pointed out, "So, I get the fibre as well, right? Makes you feel full, you don't feel you need as much?"
"Sure, but I think it would be sensible to check the sort of levels – if necessary, you can just tweak your recipe. And we need to look at your BCAAs..."
Sam and Dean sat bewildered and let the nutrition discussion go on between Gary and his newly acquired guru. As soon as they decently could, they finished their drinks and excused themselves.
"I don't think they've even noticed that we're gone," Dean noted.
"At least he found a way to break his own curse," shrugged Sam, "Apparenlty, telling a woman that she's a nutrition genius was the highest compliment that Gary could pay to any woman."
"It's always nice when two people find that they have an interest in common," Dean observed, glancing back, "Although with those two right there, having an obsession with disgusting if nutritionally sound food might just tip over into pathological."
"Well, one person's interest is another person's weird obsession," Sam told him philosophically. "Who knows, it might even be good for Gary if he learns that there's a lot more to a woman that just what she looks like on the outside."
"Speaking of women..." Sam turned to look at his brother just as the Killer Smile, back on its home territory, strutted onto Dean's face: it was aimed at a leggy blonde who was sitting at the bar, openly appreciating the physical traits of Dean v1.0.
"Yeah, yeah," Sam rolled his eyes as Dean handed over the car's key, "I know, don't worry, and don't wait up."
"That's my boy," Dean took a moment to give his little brother an infuriating grin before strolling over to the bar and leaning on it like he owned it.
Shaking his head at the inevitability of it all, Sam headed out, wondering if, now that his good luck charm had dispelled, he would still be able to find a really good documentary on the TV.
As he left, he glanced back, getting a final look at the Living Sex God in action. Dean bought the blonde woman a drink.
As he did so, he offered the female bartender, a middle-aged woman, a friendly smile and a few words that made her laugh.
Smiling to himself, he left his brother to it.
Thumpa, ka-thumpa, ka-thumpa... recognise that noise? Of course, it's the sound of a plot bunny thundering towards the finish line. Gooooo Beau-Ponty! Just pause briefly and give your readers a big wistful smile and great big soulful eyes so they'll pause to leave you reviews before moving on. It would be such a shame for such a cute little bunny to starve to death before we get to the end and squelch him...