apocalypsos | Fic: That's Easy For You To Say (Supernatural)

Title: That's Easy For You To Say
Author: Troll Princess
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2,750 words
Spoilers: "Asylum"
Characters: Dean, Sam, OFC (Gen)
Warnings: One or two bad words
Disclaimer: Not mine, not mine, wheee!
Summary: The classic debate over what's worse, a pack of werewolves or a schlocky tourist trap.
Author's note: I really just needed to get this off my desktop, damn it. It's been there for the better part of a week. Oh, and I'd say this leans more than a little bit towards crackfic.

*****

That's Easy For You To Say

*****

1.

So Dean knows this girl.

Granted, Dean knows a lot of girls, although he mostly knows them for about an hour or so in sleazy motel rooms. Possessed of great and elegant standards in the women he sleeps with, Dean's never been.

And yeah, half of the population is made up of girls, so it would be pretty difficult if Dean didn't know any of them. Not that he's ever sat down with many of them and had a long involved discussion of anything more important than the color of their panties. Oh, sure, he's had the occasional talk with a female victim, some poor defenseless damsel in distress haunted by something dark and sinister or chased by some evil fanged creature. But Sam's always been pretty sure that "Did the thing that tried to eat your sister have four arms or six?" really doesn't count as sterling conversation.

The difference between this girl and the others is that this one is pointing a shotgun at them.

Okay, mostly at Dean.

Sam doesn't even know this girl's name yet, but considering his brother's sordid past, Dean's probably earned it.

Well, honestly. You have met Dean, right?

2.

The thing is that Dean doesn't actually know Robin.

See, they never slept together, so there's that. He's really only seen her face-to-face on seven different occasions, only one of which ended without him getting a gun aimed at some important body part. And both of her arms were broken that one time, so he's not even sure that counted.

He's pretty sure she could have aimed at him with her toes if she were that desperate anyway. Not that she would have hit him, but still.

The list of things that he knows about Robin goes a little something like this:

1. She looks exactly like one of the Olsen twins, if they were both stuck on a deserted island, one had to eat the other one to live and the surviving twin ballooned up to the weight of a normal girl.
2. She's a lousy drunk. Half a beer and she's threatening bikers the size of Humvees.
3. She drives a beat-up rustbucket of a Chevy Cavalier that she bought from her aunt. Sometimes it runs just fine, and the rest of the time it makes for a great punchline.
4. She really likes to shoot at him.

Oh, she doesn't seem to like hitting him much, though. Maybe she figures being at the business end of a double barrel is enough.

Anyway, they're in this no-account little farm town on the trail of what's looking to be an entire pack of werewolves hanging around the high school grounds, and that's when Robin appears out of nowhere behind the football field and aims a shotgun at them.

Sure, they're so surprised they end up pointing guns at her, too, but it would be really nice if Sam and Dean weren't the only ones to lower their guns as soon as they realized they weren't aiming at something with gigantic snapping jaws.

"I was here first," she snaps.

Okay, so maybe they were aiming at something with snapping jaws. Everything's open to debate.

Dean just smirks, because she hates it when he does that. "We're not back to calling dibs again, are we?"

Robin cocks an eyebrow.

"Seriously? I thought we stopped after Des Moines."

"You stopped after Des Moines. Your dad told you not to anymore, remember?"

Dean grumbles at that.

"Can't we all go after this pack together?" Sam asks. It seems the right thing to ask, partly because three is better odds than one or two any day of the week and partly because Robin's roughly about the size of a chew toy.

Robin's eyebrow goes right back up again. It's like there's a puppeteer somewhere tugging a string on that fucking thing.

A half hour later with the crazy girl with the shotgun behind them and both brothers sitting in the front seat of their big black gas guzzler under cover of darkness, Sam turns to Dean with a completely straight face and says, "So which one does this make me, Elwood or Jake?"

Dean mutters, "Shut it, Sammy," marvels in his restraint at not committing fratricide, and sincerely hopes Robin stays in the rearview.

3.

Not that they leave town, of course. That would just be stupid.

"Are you sure you two didn't --"

Sam tries three times and only gets that far before a motel pillow comes flying at his head.

4.

Hunting a werewolf pack is not really as hard as you'd think. You just have to make sure you have guns and silver bullets, and after that it's just like any other hunt, except if you go hunting whitetail and make a wrong move, you don't turn into Bambi.

Aside from that, your biggest problem is trying to figure out who's in the pack.

This would be a hell of a lot easier if you could just put a plastic baggie of bacon in your pocket and wait for someone's ears to perk up. Unfortunately, the only way to find out who's been stalking around under cover of moonlight in a shaggy, smelly fur coat eating anything or anyone that crosses their path is to wait until nightfall. The upside is that during the day, you can just hang out in town and eat at the local diner and it's really easy to forget the town's infested with werewolves. The downside is ... well, same thing.

"Dean, you did not just find dog hair in your grits."

Yeah, he really didn't, but you try telling Dean that. God knows it doesn't seem to be working all that well for Sam.

Dean glances around the diner furtively before leaning forward with the aforementioned dog hair between his pinched fingertips. It's probably a stray strand of cornsilk or something, and that's if they're lucky. The chef's balding, and what hair is left appears to be holding on for dear life.

But like I said, try telling Dean that.

"Then tell me what this is."

Sam shrugs and says, "Your imagination run wild?" before shoveling scrambled eggs into his mouth.

"I am not imagining that hair, Sammy."

Chew and swallow, and, "No, but I think you're a little paranoid about its origins."

"You did see the same overgrown Labrador with rabies I saw last night, right?"

For a second, Sam wonders if Dean's talking about Robin, but then he remembers the werewolf they'd spotted right before they'd gotten a faceful of shotgun. Pretty neat trick, that. Normally it would take an act of global thermonuclear war to forget a wolf the size of a Mini Cooper.

On the other side of the diner, a couple of babies start crying at the same time. Sam envies them.

"So, what, you think it snuck into the kitchen and shed all over your breakfast?"

"It doesn't have to sneak in, Sam, now, does it?"

Dean scowls, and he's practically growling and whispering at the same time here, and Sam just mutters, "Okay, so a lot paranoid, then," before going back to his own breakfast with gusto.

One flick of his wrist and the hair Dean's holding disappears. Here's hoping it didn't land in the grits again, or we'll end up having to listen to this conversation all over again.

5.

They don't see Robin that morning.

They do, however, find all four tires on the Impala leaking air. So it's probably a good thing that they don't see Robin that morning, because Dean probably would have throttled her.

And blamed her for the dog hair in his grits, but let's not even get into that again.

6.

The thing with any small town that has a werewolf pack hunting in the outskirts is that you can't come in and start asking questions left and right. That's just begging for trouble. Act a little too much like you're looking to fill a bunch of big wolves full of lead, and you'll wake up the night of your first hunt with a two-hundred-pound wolf standing on your chest.

See, you think I'm joking about that.

When hunting werewolves, the trick is to be casual. Almost painfully casual. If possible, saying that you've come to town to see whatever world's largest ball of something they've got on display for bored tourists never hurts.

Granted, most of those giant balls of twine or string cheese or used dental floss are meant to lure in prey, but nobody ever expects prey to shoot them between the eyes with a .45 loaded with silver. Prey's really polite like that.

"-- started making this sucker in 1988, when he was at home with two broken legs after his bull got into the kitchen --"

Sam plasters on a vacant smile for the sake of their tour guide, if you can even call someone who tells you the life story of a rubber band ball a "guide," and leans over to whisper to Dean, "So where did you even meet this girl anyway?"

Dean smirks over at the bored blond girl next to him, who's busy scraping the toe of her sneaker across the cement floor. The rest of her family -- dad, mom, twin baby brothers in a double stroller -- listens to the guide with rapt attention. You'd think this was the kind of story where somewhere along the line, someone would discover the butler murdered someone.

"-- has over seven thousand rubber bands, most of which were liberated from the local post office --"

The giant ball of rubber bands lives in one side of a two-car garage. It smells a lot like sawdust. Or, Sam supposes, like a lot of sawdust. Either description works.

It's like some sort of delayed reaction, like it takes a minute for the question to sink into Dean's thick skull.

"Dean?"

"In an ice cream truck."

"What?"

"I met her in an ice cream truck."

Funny. Sam had been expecting something a little more ... geographic. A state, a city. Maybe just a hemisphere, if he were lucky.

"It was a haunted ice cream truck."

"Who was haunting it?"

Dean suddenly turns to him with a serious look on his face. "Dude, do you want to know how Farmer Ted keeps the rubber bands from snapping or not?"

Speaking of guys who should be sainted for their ability not to commit fratricide ... well, Sam. I don't think I need to elaborate here.

7.

The next time Sam and Dean see Robin, she's standing outside the mini-mart drinking a Slushie and wearing a "World's Largest Rubber Band Ball" T-shirt.

Some people, it turns out, are just better at casual than other people.

8.

The old freight station at the edge of town where the pack seems to be congregating isn't exactly the kind of place you just waltz right into and start shooting full of holes. At the very least, you keep the waltzing to a bare minimum to avoid ramming your foot through a rotten floorboard. That's the common sense talking right there.

Other than that, there's absolutely no reason either Winchester would avoid sneaking inside with guns in hand, other than the whole thing being a really bad idea.

Might as well save their good ideas for things like getting into stupid arguments before they go into the building and not after.

"Sam, I swear she won't shoot you."

"I'll be standing right beside you. What if she misses?"

"Trust me, she'd rather hit me than you."

"Why?"

"Because I shot her first."

"You shot her?"

"It wasn't like I did it on purpose. The ghost made me do it, all right?"

"You shot her?"

"Hey, I don't need commentary from peanut galleries full of people who filled my chest full of rock salt."

"... the ghost made me do it."

"I rest my case."

9.

There's certain things you just don't expect to come barreling at you as you enter a werewolf's den. The short list includes elephants, banana cream pies, the Dallas Cowboys, a cement mixer, and a tidal wave of molasses. Most of those will come as a great shock and perhaps throw you so completely off your guard as to render you incapacitated when the werewolves finally do attack.

Come to think of it, it's a wonder more werewolf dens don't have more security systems that look like that.

On the other hand, something they should probably expect more of and never quite see comes hurtling at Dean as soon as they both sneak in through the back, and ... well.

"Puppies?"

One of the puppies on Sam's chest leans down and swipes a raspy little tongue over his cheek. The other one yips happily and bounces up and down on his chest like it's a trampoline.

Obviously, the training in being bloodthirsty creatures of the night doesn't come until later.

As for Dean, he'd be laughing right now if it weren't for the .45 pointed at his head. You'd be amazed how quickly that can kill your sense of humor. That's why there aren't more successful bank-robbing comedians.

"Hi, boys," Robin says. "Back again?"

10.

"This is what you've been doing the last few months?"

Robin shrugs as she puts away her guns, the three of them watching as the puppies bound around the freight station's cement floors play-fighting and nipping at one another's legs. The other three werewolves curl up in the corner watching Sam, Dean, and Robin like someone would watch a field full of cows. Oh, how cute! Damn, now I want steak.

"They pay well," she says. "And all I really have to do is babysit."

Sam and Dean just stare at her.

"Okay, wolfsit."

Dean looks over at the trio of wolves on the floor across the room, more than a little confused. Not that they've never encountered a pack of wolves with enough common sense to get wranglers for when they're changed, but ... well, that blond chick was hot, damn it. Seeing her on her back with her legs in the air wasn't exactly the same when she was a dog.

"You're doing a bang-up job if one of them got out the other night," Dean says with a smirk.

"Ashley was coming back here, wasn't she?"

"Hey, we can't all be good at our jobs."

"No, we can't. Want me to let one of the puppies jump on you this time?"

Dean just scowls.

Sam would say something, but when you're grinning like an idiot to keep from laughing like a lunatic, speaking comes in a distant third.

One of the puppies runs up to Dean, drops a tennis ball from his mouth at Dean's feet, and yips as he waits for Dean to play catch with him.

It's kind of hard to shoot a puppy after that.

11.

So they're on their way out of town when Sam makes his mistake.

Sam learned a long time ago that opening the glove compartment in the Impala was usually a bad idea. Sure, you found things like maps and registration and napkins, but you also found things like dried slime and two-month-old french fries and women's underwear left behind from Dean's conquests.

This time, though ...

"Dean, why is there a rubber band ball in the glove compartment? Did you just start making this?"

Dean just turns up the volume on "Cover You In Oil" and hits the gas.

For the record, no member of AC/DC has ever made or visited an enormous ball of rubber bands.

I think.