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apocalypsos) wrote2006-08-27 03:37 pm
apocalypsos) wrote2006-08-27 03:37 pm
Entry tags:
Fic: Turn The Page (Supernatural)
Title: Turn The Page
Author: Troll Princess
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,000 words
Spoilers: General first season
Warnings: None
Disclaimer: Not mine, not mine, wheeeee!
Summary: Dean gets a new hobby after Sam leaves for Stanford.
Author's note: So, yeah, I blame![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
musesfool and that "five books Dean boosted from the library" list. It started out as Dean reading for fun and turned into this.
*****
Turn The Page
*****
1.
When Dean gets back in the car at the bus station, the rear end of a Greyhound to Stanford heading down the street in front of him, he finds the paperback on the seat like a too-thick "Dear John" letter.
He doubts Sammy left it behind on purpose. The kid carries a couple of paperbacks on him at all times, stuffed into the pocket of his jacket or tucked into his jeans. Sam had never been big on video games but he'd learned to read while curled up in the back seat of the Impala. The same steady movement that gave Dean headaches when he read anything longer than a grocery list in the car zoned his baby brother out, made it easier to tune out Dean's choice in music or the scowl on Dad's face.
Stupid kid's probably on the bus now without a damn thing to read, dying a slow death of boredom already.
"Dumbass," Dean mutters, and shakes his head as he chucks the worn copy of "On The Road" into the backseat.
2.
Two weeks later there's this girl sitting at the front table of this tiny neighborhood cafe, one of those places that serves the good coffee and the pie that's warm because it just got finished baking. She's got a pen in her mouth and green cat's-eye glasses sliding down her pert little nose. What he can see clearly from the Impala's parking spot across the street is a stack of English lit textbooks and glossy black curls that fall past her shoulders, the kind of curls that almost make him come just from sinking his fingers into them.
That's what he can see, of course. What he already knows is that her name is Erica Granger and he's pretty sure her roommate is the necromancer sending zombies after the small town college's faculty.
Another good-looking frat boy approaches her, the second in the fifteen minutes she's been sitting there, and it's the second ice-cold stare she delivers that sends him scurrying away. Dean smirks at that. Well, hell, if he's got to get her to come to him, he can do that.
Ten minutes later he's perched on a stool at the counter with a coffee and a slice of apple pie, wearing glasses instead of his contacts and pretending to read Sam's goddamn paperback.
The downside is that Erica never takes the bait.
He does start reading the book, though. He never does decide whether that's an upside or not.
3.
Dean never finishes the book because he's got a dead butcher's bones buried under a freaking parking lot, a pissed-off ghost advancing on him and the hole he managed to crack through the pavement, and no other kindling to be had.
Sal and Dean, though. That's pretty fucking funny, when you think about it.
4.
He's not even thinking about starting up a new hobby. Or, he supposes, starting up any hobby at all, considering he's such an all-hunting, all-the-time kind of guy. Well, unless you're counting girls and hustling as hobbies, and Dean would never stoop low enough to call anything that keeps him paid or laid a hobby.
But one morning he slides into the red leather booth of this diner with a wink and a smile for the waitress, which is why he's so distracted he doesn't even notice the romance novel until he's practically sitting on the damn thing.
He picks it up and thinks about getting the waitress's attention or tossing it into the lost-and-found box next to the register as he leaves.
Instead, he ends up reading the back cover and checking out the first chapter.
Well, this is what he gets for not picking up a goddamn newspaper before breakfast.
5.
Okay, so here's the thing they don't tell guys about romance novels.
It's like porn, but it's not even good porn. There's a story, for crying out loud. A real story, with a bunch of stupid British aristocrats who only seem to give a damn about getting married for money or love or both, if they can help it. If that's all they cared about back then, then it's no wonder they end up having all this vanilla sex and thinking it's just about the best thing ever.
And yet for some reason Dean can't even fathom, he keeps reading.
Oh, for fuck's sake.
Before Sammy left, he's positive he didn't even know the word "fathom."
6.
The problem is that the main character in the romance novel has something like twenty-seven thousand brothers and sisters. And all of them are interesting and snarky and desperate to fall in love with equally interesting and snarky people so they can have tons of fulfilling yet lame and unimaginative sex. So Dean figures it's not his fault that now he has to go out and pick up every single book in the series, because the people are cool even if their sex lives aren't.
The cashier at the trendy bookstore where he gets the rest of the books practically coos as soon as he walks up to the counter but dies squealing when she sees what he's buying.
"Oh, I love this one!" she yelps, plucking one with a red and gold cover from the pile. "Deborah falls in love with the mysterious stranger who kidnaps her, and it turns out it's her best friend Gareth."
"Really?"
Damn. He'd been hoping she'd hook up with the hot stable boy.
Well, okay, it's not like that cancels it out from happening or anything, right?
7.
Dean donates the books to Goodwill the day he feels the insane and violent urge to write a romance novel.
Oh, come on. If anybody can do it, he can do it, right? All you have to do is come up with two likable people who like to snap at one another a lot and probably should never ever hook up. You get a guy who's walking sex on a stick and a girl who's not half as hot before she starts making out with the guy in question as she is afterwards. And then there can be a spy or blackmail or something --
No. No.
He's absolutely not convincing himself to write a freakin' romance novel.
Except for the part where he apparently is.
Oh, stop laughing.
8.
What Dean is supposed to be doing is researching whatever might be haunting the elementary school and what it might take to stop the damn thing from destroying any more property.
What Dean is actually doing is spell-checking three chapters worth of soft-core porn for chicks.
Let's never discuss this again.
9.
Okay, fine, we can discuss it a little.
See, somewhere in between hunts and girls and the occasional pool game, Dean's got to do something. Sam's not around to torture, obviously, and ever since he packed up and headed off to college, Dad's become a little ... eh, "overworked"? Yeah, all right, overworked feels right. If he isn't running off on another hunt, he's sending Dean off to hunt something on his own.
"We split up, we can cover more ground," he keeps saying.
Which is true, sure, but that doesn't mean it doesn't suck beyond the telling of it.
It kind of helps, though. If Dad saw the thick notebook Dean's got stuffed into the glove compartment, he'd laugh his ass off.
10.
"Hey, whatcha writin'?"
The girl leans over the other side of the cafe's counter to try and get a peek at whatever Dean's scribbling down, but doesn't get much of a peek before Dean slides his folded newspaper over his notes. He does get a fine gander down the front of her top, though, and he can't say he doesn't appreciate that.
"Oh, nothing," he says, flashing her that charming grin that'll practically have her begging for his motel room key.
Hell, there's a lot of ways to do research. He's just sayin'.
11.
It starts out as this swoony Victorian pile of crap with swordfights and intrigues and dowries, as if he could even tell you anything about dowries and shit other than what he learned from somebody else's bad romance novel.
Jesus, who the fuck ever said he knew anything about Victorian England? Or England in general?
It's an island, though. He thinks he got that much right.
About a third of the way through, he changes the whole damn thing around. Now the main characters are hunters, traveling across the country fighting evil in hot cars with heavy artillery, and they keep meeting up to fight this wicked motherfucker and fall for one another along the way.
He names the main characters John and Mary because ...
Well, it's a love story, man. Come on.
12.
About two years after Sam leaves for Stanford, there's four different notebooks stashed all over the Impala full of not-all-that-bad porn. Sure, Dean had to boost about twenty romance novels from the Salvation Army or the occasional library to make sure it didn't sound too stupid in the long run, but it turned out that most romance novels look exactly the same.
It makes it a lot easier when he just starts going through every new one he gets and rips out the scenes that sound like complete and utter bullshit.
Anyway, the shapeshifter's dead and he's standing over the corpse telling Dad over the phone that he got the bastard, his gun weighing down his arm. The guy he just saved looks up at him like some sort of warrior angel come down from Heaven or something, and when Dean helps the guy to his feet, he dazedly slips Dean his card.
"I'll bet you've got some interesting stories to tell," the guy says with a nervous smile.
As for the business card, it says, "Michael Watson, Literary Agent."
13.
A guy's got to keep some secrets, you know what I'm saying? Especially when your brother wouldn't think twice about teasing you because of it.
So when Sam comes back and digs through the trunk one day only to find a plastic bag filled with a bunch of paperback romance novels all written by the same author, Dean just shrugs.
"I saved the author this one time," he says, tossing the bag back into the trunk.
Something about the smirk on his face and the tilt of his head makes Sam roll his eyes.
"Yeah, I'll just bet you did."
14.
The highway's practically deserted and has been for the last twenty miles, too early in the morning for headlights. Dean starts to think that the only light for miles is Sam's flashlight pointing down at the paperback in his hand, and he's about to make a sarcastic crack about Sammy reading in the damn car when he realizes exactly what he's got in his hands.
And that Sam's gaze keeps darting over to him like he's figuring out a puzzle in his head.
He probably is, the gigantic geek.
"So, when you said you saved the author," Sam says slowly, "exactly how much did you tell --"
"Gimme that." Dean reaches over and tries to grab for the book. "Your virgin eyes are too young to read that shit."
"No way, man," Sam says, snatching the book back.
He settles into the seat and makes a face as if he's just waiting for Dean to tease him.
"It's pretty good, actually."
Dean doesn't stop grinning for the rest of the day.
Author: Troll Princess
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,000 words
Spoilers: General first season
Warnings: None
Disclaimer: Not mine, not mine, wheeeee!
Summary: Dean gets a new hobby after Sam leaves for Stanford.
Author's note: So, yeah, I blame
musesfool and that "five books Dean boosted from the library" list. It started out as Dean reading for fun and turned into this.Turn The Page
*****
1.
When Dean gets back in the car at the bus station, the rear end of a Greyhound to Stanford heading down the street in front of him, he finds the paperback on the seat like a too-thick "Dear John" letter.
He doubts Sammy left it behind on purpose. The kid carries a couple of paperbacks on him at all times, stuffed into the pocket of his jacket or tucked into his jeans. Sam had never been big on video games but he'd learned to read while curled up in the back seat of the Impala. The same steady movement that gave Dean headaches when he read anything longer than a grocery list in the car zoned his baby brother out, made it easier to tune out Dean's choice in music or the scowl on Dad's face.
Stupid kid's probably on the bus now without a damn thing to read, dying a slow death of boredom already.
"Dumbass," Dean mutters, and shakes his head as he chucks the worn copy of "On The Road" into the backseat.
2.
Two weeks later there's this girl sitting at the front table of this tiny neighborhood cafe, one of those places that serves the good coffee and the pie that's warm because it just got finished baking. She's got a pen in her mouth and green cat's-eye glasses sliding down her pert little nose. What he can see clearly from the Impala's parking spot across the street is a stack of English lit textbooks and glossy black curls that fall past her shoulders, the kind of curls that almost make him come just from sinking his fingers into them.
That's what he can see, of course. What he already knows is that her name is Erica Granger and he's pretty sure her roommate is the necromancer sending zombies after the small town college's faculty.
Another good-looking frat boy approaches her, the second in the fifteen minutes she's been sitting there, and it's the second ice-cold stare she delivers that sends him scurrying away. Dean smirks at that. Well, hell, if he's got to get her to come to him, he can do that.
Ten minutes later he's perched on a stool at the counter with a coffee and a slice of apple pie, wearing glasses instead of his contacts and pretending to read Sam's goddamn paperback.
The downside is that Erica never takes the bait.
He does start reading the book, though. He never does decide whether that's an upside or not.
3.
Dean never finishes the book because he's got a dead butcher's bones buried under a freaking parking lot, a pissed-off ghost advancing on him and the hole he managed to crack through the pavement, and no other kindling to be had.
Sal and Dean, though. That's pretty fucking funny, when you think about it.
4.
He's not even thinking about starting up a new hobby. Or, he supposes, starting up any hobby at all, considering he's such an all-hunting, all-the-time kind of guy. Well, unless you're counting girls and hustling as hobbies, and Dean would never stoop low enough to call anything that keeps him paid or laid a hobby.
But one morning he slides into the red leather booth of this diner with a wink and a smile for the waitress, which is why he's so distracted he doesn't even notice the romance novel until he's practically sitting on the damn thing.
He picks it up and thinks about getting the waitress's attention or tossing it into the lost-and-found box next to the register as he leaves.
Instead, he ends up reading the back cover and checking out the first chapter.
Well, this is what he gets for not picking up a goddamn newspaper before breakfast.
5.
Okay, so here's the thing they don't tell guys about romance novels.
It's like porn, but it's not even good porn. There's a story, for crying out loud. A real story, with a bunch of stupid British aristocrats who only seem to give a damn about getting married for money or love or both, if they can help it. If that's all they cared about back then, then it's no wonder they end up having all this vanilla sex and thinking it's just about the best thing ever.
And yet for some reason Dean can't even fathom, he keeps reading.
Oh, for fuck's sake.
Before Sammy left, he's positive he didn't even know the word "fathom."
6.
The problem is that the main character in the romance novel has something like twenty-seven thousand brothers and sisters. And all of them are interesting and snarky and desperate to fall in love with equally interesting and snarky people so they can have tons of fulfilling yet lame and unimaginative sex. So Dean figures it's not his fault that now he has to go out and pick up every single book in the series, because the people are cool even if their sex lives aren't.
The cashier at the trendy bookstore where he gets the rest of the books practically coos as soon as he walks up to the counter but dies squealing when she sees what he's buying.
"Oh, I love this one!" she yelps, plucking one with a red and gold cover from the pile. "Deborah falls in love with the mysterious stranger who kidnaps her, and it turns out it's her best friend Gareth."
"Really?"
Damn. He'd been hoping she'd hook up with the hot stable boy.
Well, okay, it's not like that cancels it out from happening or anything, right?
7.
Dean donates the books to Goodwill the day he feels the insane and violent urge to write a romance novel.
Oh, come on. If anybody can do it, he can do it, right? All you have to do is come up with two likable people who like to snap at one another a lot and probably should never ever hook up. You get a guy who's walking sex on a stick and a girl who's not half as hot before she starts making out with the guy in question as she is afterwards. And then there can be a spy or blackmail or something --
No. No.
He's absolutely not convincing himself to write a freakin' romance novel.
Except for the part where he apparently is.
Oh, stop laughing.
8.
What Dean is supposed to be doing is researching whatever might be haunting the elementary school and what it might take to stop the damn thing from destroying any more property.
What Dean is actually doing is spell-checking three chapters worth of soft-core porn for chicks.
Let's never discuss this again.
9.
Okay, fine, we can discuss it a little.
See, somewhere in between hunts and girls and the occasional pool game, Dean's got to do something. Sam's not around to torture, obviously, and ever since he packed up and headed off to college, Dad's become a little ... eh, "overworked"? Yeah, all right, overworked feels right. If he isn't running off on another hunt, he's sending Dean off to hunt something on his own.
"We split up, we can cover more ground," he keeps saying.
Which is true, sure, but that doesn't mean it doesn't suck beyond the telling of it.
It kind of helps, though. If Dad saw the thick notebook Dean's got stuffed into the glove compartment, he'd laugh his ass off.
10.
"Hey, whatcha writin'?"
The girl leans over the other side of the cafe's counter to try and get a peek at whatever Dean's scribbling down, but doesn't get much of a peek before Dean slides his folded newspaper over his notes. He does get a fine gander down the front of her top, though, and he can't say he doesn't appreciate that.
"Oh, nothing," he says, flashing her that charming grin that'll practically have her begging for his motel room key.
Hell, there's a lot of ways to do research. He's just sayin'.
11.
It starts out as this swoony Victorian pile of crap with swordfights and intrigues and dowries, as if he could even tell you anything about dowries and shit other than what he learned from somebody else's bad romance novel.
Jesus, who the fuck ever said he knew anything about Victorian England? Or England in general?
It's an island, though. He thinks he got that much right.
About a third of the way through, he changes the whole damn thing around. Now the main characters are hunters, traveling across the country fighting evil in hot cars with heavy artillery, and they keep meeting up to fight this wicked motherfucker and fall for one another along the way.
He names the main characters John and Mary because ...
Well, it's a love story, man. Come on.
12.
About two years after Sam leaves for Stanford, there's four different notebooks stashed all over the Impala full of not-all-that-bad porn. Sure, Dean had to boost about twenty romance novels from the Salvation Army or the occasional library to make sure it didn't sound too stupid in the long run, but it turned out that most romance novels look exactly the same.
It makes it a lot easier when he just starts going through every new one he gets and rips out the scenes that sound like complete and utter bullshit.
Anyway, the shapeshifter's dead and he's standing over the corpse telling Dad over the phone that he got the bastard, his gun weighing down his arm. The guy he just saved looks up at him like some sort of warrior angel come down from Heaven or something, and when Dean helps the guy to his feet, he dazedly slips Dean his card.
"I'll bet you've got some interesting stories to tell," the guy says with a nervous smile.
As for the business card, it says, "Michael Watson, Literary Agent."
13.
A guy's got to keep some secrets, you know what I'm saying? Especially when your brother wouldn't think twice about teasing you because of it.
So when Sam comes back and digs through the trunk one day only to find a plastic bag filled with a bunch of paperback romance novels all written by the same author, Dean just shrugs.
"I saved the author this one time," he says, tossing the bag back into the trunk.
Something about the smirk on his face and the tilt of his head makes Sam roll his eyes.
"Yeah, I'll just bet you did."
14.
The highway's practically deserted and has been for the last twenty miles, too early in the morning for headlights. Dean starts to think that the only light for miles is Sam's flashlight pointing down at the paperback in his hand, and he's about to make a sarcastic crack about Sammy reading in the damn car when he realizes exactly what he's got in his hands.
And that Sam's gaze keeps darting over to him like he's figuring out a puzzle in his head.
He probably is, the gigantic geek.
"So, when you said you saved the author," Sam says slowly, "exactly how much did you tell --"
"Gimme that." Dean reaches over and tries to grab for the book. "Your virgin eyes are too young to read that shit."
"No way, man," Sam says, snatching the book back.
He settles into the seat and makes a face as if he's just waiting for Dean to tease him.
"It's pretty good, actually."
Dean doesn't stop grinning for the rest of the day.
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