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apocalypsos) wrote2007-06-10 01:48 am
apocalypsos) wrote2007-06-10 01:48 am
Entry tags:
Fic: Cast Stones At Dragons (PG-13)
HOMG I FINISHED FIC. \o/
Title: Cast Stones At Dragons
Author: Troll Princess
Fandom: Supernatural
Spoilers: “All Hell Breaks Loose”
Summary: It’s been a decade since Dean’s year was up.
** Cast Stones At Dragons **
*
The manuscript isn’t due for a few more weeks at least, Glen says, but Sam doesn’t have much else to do these days. The weather’s been a joke the past week or so, heavy thunderstorms and sudden flooding and isn’t it just his dumb luck his cabin’s up on the top of the goddamn mountain. The thunderstorms inspire the hell out of him, though. No reason, he thinks, but then he pictures Dean staring out grimy motel windows with childlike glee as lightning reflects off his face and okay, yeah, maybe that’s why.
Sam’s done, for the most part. This is draft three of the seventh book, a few scenes rewritten, the ending hacked off and retooled, the Jo character edited out for now. He’d been tempted to leave her in, draping herself all over Martin Smith, getting in his goddamn way and fucking with his radio, but she doesn’t fit. Maybe in book eight, when Martin needs back-up for a demon infestation in Vermont. Jo will laugh her ass off.
For now, though, it’s chucking out extra commas, getting rid of ’that’ and ’really’ and ’actually’ where they take up space, jiving up the continuity. Fucking continuity. It’s not even the little stuff that grates on Sam’s nerves when he goes back like right-handed or left-handed, who’s sitting where or wearing what. It’s making a turn off that one street in Waterloo, Iowa when you can’t and that bridge in Pennsylvania that hasn’t carried railroad traffic since he rode under it in the Impala as a kid, it turns out.
He paces a lot when he edits. Back and forth, back and forth. He’s thinking of planting begonias in the trench that’s bound to get carved into the floor eventually.
The laptop is the centerpiece in a strange art sculpture of empty coffee cups and crumb-covered plates. He pauses every so often in his pacing to stare down the screen, putting the whole thing to quick and dirty memory. His editing process is slash and burn, step back and slice forward. If Dean were here he’d say it looks like the nerd’s version of knife training, like a younger skinnier Sam hacking pieces off a castoff papier mache mannequin but with words on a computer screen.
The Beetlejuice theme pours from speakers on either side of the laptop. Sam’s found over the years that movie scores get him in a writing mood, send him to familiar places in his head and heart. He’s got a lot of Danny Elfman’s stuff, playful and dark. It has no words, so it’s not distracting.
He moves in rolling circles in his office as the storm rages on. He can’t go out. He feels caged, trapped, and it helps.
This isn’t where he was supposed to be, he sometimes thinks.
He was supposed to be married to Jess, making partner at some law firm, getting Dad and Dean out of the occasional legal scrapes. There were supposed to be babies and picket fences, a mortgage and a minivan.
This is good, though. A shelf full of books with his pen name on the cover, a lifetime of extensive training put to some use. A life without guns, fear, demons.
This is good, too.
The cell phone rings halfway through the fifteenth chapter. Martin’s fighting a coven of witches, trying to break a curse, and he makes a literal wrong turn in Albuquerque. You can’t turn right there, Sam thinks, you end up in the lobby of a bank.
He types as he reaches for the phone, taps on the backspace key as he flips it open and says, “Hello?”
The connection is static and noise, crashing and banging.
“Hey, kiddo,” he hears from in between the fuzz. “I’m coming.”
Sam doesn’t notice he’s holding down the backspace key until an entire paragraph disappears. Martin’s not even downtown anymore now. Sam pulls his hand away from the keyboard before he stops Martin from driving off the I-40 exit, the tires of his black Corvette screaming in Sam‘s imagination.
“Dean?” he chokes out.
The call cuts off, abrupt as a door slamming.
*
In book one, Martin Smith has a partner.
Ten years gone by, and Sam doesn’t exactly remember writing most of the first book. He remembers tequila and lots of it, and thinking a lot when he was sober about that time freshman year when he’d gotten drunk enough at a party to knock on a stranger’s door and ask to puke in their toilet. That story’s only funny in retrospect because the guy was cool about the whole thing, because he laughed his ass off at Sam and because Sam’s still not in that bathroom that reeked of pot puking his guts out.
What he remembers vividly later on, though, is waking up in Bobby’s spare room after a month-long bender surrounded by story notes.
Back then, they start out as the basics of Dean -- hair and eye color, height and weight, favorite music and food and weapons and that cheap dime-store cologne he gave off like substitute body odor. Like he’s been trying to keep little bits of Dean around, like he’s been trying not to forget or something.
He rifles through the paperwork and finds the birth of Martin Smith, who fights monsters and breaks the law, who romances women and swills booze and deals out decks of cards, who’s the responsible one.
In book one, Martin Smith has a brother.
He dies in the first chapter. Something sets him on fire.
They’d been half-brothers, Martin Smith and John Wesson, because the joke isn’t funny without the goddamn punch line. Sam reads through his notes, reads through what he scribbled and typed down in a Jack Daniels haze. Half of it is done already. He expects to need a magical combo of whisky and beer to know what came next, and can’t say he’s pleasantly surprised to find out there isn’t one.
Ellen flips through what he’s written when he’s done, lips curled in a faint smile, and says, “You know, Billy’s brother used to work in publishing, last I checked.”
He dedicates the book to, “My brother, Dean, wherever you are.” No elaboration, none needed.
The problem comes when he gets a chance to talk to the artist doing the book cover, tucks back a couple of longnecks with the guy in the corner of Ellen’s spit-shined new roadhouse.
“Got any requests?” the guy asks.
Sam could stop himself, wave him off, say graphic design isn’t his thing. Instead something makes him grab a napkin and a pen, do a quick sketch from memory.
“Just one,” he says, and slide the napkin over. “Think you could sneak this in somewhere?”
The guy shrugs. “Hell, why not?”
Two months after the book is released, the cover staring out from the window of every bookstore he drove past, Sam’s phone rings.
He doesn’t hear anything at the other end, not a voice or a word behind the static, but somehow he just knows.
That’s the first time.
*
By the second time the phone rings, Sam’s starting to make a name for himself.
It isn’t his real name but it isn’t in him to care. He says no interviews or press tours, no conventions or book signings, worries and worries until Glen says, “No, no, I can work with that.” There’s glimmers of his future, a household name without a face.
Sam stays home and writes, sends Martin here and there and back again in an country he hasn’t driven through in years. Sam goes to town, buys groceries and rents movies and that’s it. Doesn’t hunt anything, hasn’t killed anything in ages. All of his weapons are stashed away in the trunk of a fictional black Corvette.
He isn’t afraid, hasn’t felt so in years.
The third book comes out, the same dedication as always, and Sam hasn’t asked but there’s that damn symbol again painted like common graffiti in the background of the cover art. Tucked away behind Martin’s gun hand, blending into the scenery except for the way it really isn’t.
The call comes at midnight, Sam still mostly asleep and grabbing blindly for his cell as he rolls over.
“’Lo?” he says.
Nothing but static hissing in his ear, and he perks up.
“Hello?”
It’s too much to hope for, really, but then a man’s voice says his name through the scratch and wail and, Oh.
The last time, it seems, wasn’t a fluke.
*
The third time the phone rings, Sam nearly ignores it.
He’s just starting book six and his focus tends to narrow every time he starts a new one. The research is done, the characters are real solid people, the plotting is done down to the very last detail. Martin’s going to get three new scars, half of his wardrobe covered in blood, a jump in his personal worth, and fantastically laid. It’ll be brilliant if Sam pulls it off.
His cell vibrates, humming across the top of the computer desk.
Martin just ran out of a burning nightclub, the one he usually visits to find a new case to handle. The building’s going to burn to the ground, Martin’s two closest contacts already dead inside. Martin’ll want revenge, but then again he always does.
Sam can barely pull himself away but the phone just won’t stop ringing, not even to go to voicemail.
His fingertips freeze over the surface of the laptop keys.
The ringing doesn’t stop.
He could just leave it, just let it ring, forever and ever. Drop it in the back of his desk and try to tune it out for days, weeks, months, a twisted version of the telltale heart.
He picks up the phone and flips it open.
Doesn’t say anything, damn it, because he has to listen. Static crackles across the line, scratching at his eardrums like an angry cat.
In between the hissing and sputtering, he could swear he can hear someone say, “Soon.”
*
“I’m coming,” the voice says.
This is the fourth time.
After the call, Sam sits in his office, his head in his hands and his books stacked on the floor in front of him, and stares at the cover art on all of them. At the silhouette of a tall, slightly bow-legged figure on the front, at the symbol that appears in every single picture. It’s an amulet dangling from some pretty girl’s neck on book two, a tattoo on the villain’s arm on book four, a scribble in the margins of Martin’s notebook on book five.
For some reason it looks out of place when it isn’t drawn on the wall of some rundown shack in Texas.
Sam sits, and he waits.
*
In book five Martin Smith leans over the piano played by the little boy whose life he just saved, whose baby sister is still missing, and gently pushes the framed photograph of her adorning the piano into the kid’s line of sight.
“You know, kid,” he says, “all you’ve got to do is think about the person you’re missing, and wish really hard, and sometimes … sometimes they’ll come back.”
The line loops in Sam’s brain, continuous and strange, until the engine roars in the driveway.
He darts to the window, wipes condensation from the glass with one hand, and narrows his eyes at the car.
He’s less surprised than he should be to see a Corvette.
There’s a missing step between staring out the window and standing on the porch, the air heavy with humidity and ozone. The car rumbles happily, a great playful leopard. The window rolls down, smooth and steady, and the man in the driver’s seat waves a hand in Sam’s direction.
“Well, what are you waiting for, little brother?” he says.
The voice is achingly familiar. It’s Dean’s voice and Dean’s hand and Dean’s goddamn smirk calling to him, but Martin Smith shares ownership on all of those. It’s Martin’s car and Martin’s story and Martin’s goddamn life brought to existence by a hopeful fan base, but it’s Dean he’s been hoping for. Waiting for.
Sam wonders what happens if he goes, if this life of his just vanishes, if the name on his license changes, if he bursts into flames and turns to char or if John Wesson gets a second chance, too.
He wonders, but he steps off the porch anyway.
Title: Cast Stones At Dragons
Author: Troll Princess
Fandom: Supernatural
Spoilers: “All Hell Breaks Loose”
Summary: It’s been a decade since Dean’s year was up.
*
The manuscript isn’t due for a few more weeks at least, Glen says, but Sam doesn’t have much else to do these days. The weather’s been a joke the past week or so, heavy thunderstorms and sudden flooding and isn’t it just his dumb luck his cabin’s up on the top of the goddamn mountain. The thunderstorms inspire the hell out of him, though. No reason, he thinks, but then he pictures Dean staring out grimy motel windows with childlike glee as lightning reflects off his face and okay, yeah, maybe that’s why.
Sam’s done, for the most part. This is draft three of the seventh book, a few scenes rewritten, the ending hacked off and retooled, the Jo character edited out for now. He’d been tempted to leave her in, draping herself all over Martin Smith, getting in his goddamn way and fucking with his radio, but she doesn’t fit. Maybe in book eight, when Martin needs back-up for a demon infestation in Vermont. Jo will laugh her ass off.
For now, though, it’s chucking out extra commas, getting rid of ’that’ and ’really’ and ’actually’ where they take up space, jiving up the continuity. Fucking continuity. It’s not even the little stuff that grates on Sam’s nerves when he goes back like right-handed or left-handed, who’s sitting where or wearing what. It’s making a turn off that one street in Waterloo, Iowa when you can’t and that bridge in Pennsylvania that hasn’t carried railroad traffic since he rode under it in the Impala as a kid, it turns out.
He paces a lot when he edits. Back and forth, back and forth. He’s thinking of planting begonias in the trench that’s bound to get carved into the floor eventually.
The laptop is the centerpiece in a strange art sculpture of empty coffee cups and crumb-covered plates. He pauses every so often in his pacing to stare down the screen, putting the whole thing to quick and dirty memory. His editing process is slash and burn, step back and slice forward. If Dean were here he’d say it looks like the nerd’s version of knife training, like a younger skinnier Sam hacking pieces off a castoff papier mache mannequin but with words on a computer screen.
The Beetlejuice theme pours from speakers on either side of the laptop. Sam’s found over the years that movie scores get him in a writing mood, send him to familiar places in his head and heart. He’s got a lot of Danny Elfman’s stuff, playful and dark. It has no words, so it’s not distracting.
He moves in rolling circles in his office as the storm rages on. He can’t go out. He feels caged, trapped, and it helps.
This isn’t where he was supposed to be, he sometimes thinks.
He was supposed to be married to Jess, making partner at some law firm, getting Dad and Dean out of the occasional legal scrapes. There were supposed to be babies and picket fences, a mortgage and a minivan.
This is good, though. A shelf full of books with his pen name on the cover, a lifetime of extensive training put to some use. A life without guns, fear, demons.
This is good, too.
The cell phone rings halfway through the fifteenth chapter. Martin’s fighting a coven of witches, trying to break a curse, and he makes a literal wrong turn in Albuquerque. You can’t turn right there, Sam thinks, you end up in the lobby of a bank.
He types as he reaches for the phone, taps on the backspace key as he flips it open and says, “Hello?”
The connection is static and noise, crashing and banging.
“Hey, kiddo,” he hears from in between the fuzz. “I’m coming.”
Sam doesn’t notice he’s holding down the backspace key until an entire paragraph disappears. Martin’s not even downtown anymore now. Sam pulls his hand away from the keyboard before he stops Martin from driving off the I-40 exit, the tires of his black Corvette screaming in Sam‘s imagination.
“Dean?” he chokes out.
The call cuts off, abrupt as a door slamming.
In book one, Martin Smith has a partner.
Ten years gone by, and Sam doesn’t exactly remember writing most of the first book. He remembers tequila and lots of it, and thinking a lot when he was sober about that time freshman year when he’d gotten drunk enough at a party to knock on a stranger’s door and ask to puke in their toilet. That story’s only funny in retrospect because the guy was cool about the whole thing, because he laughed his ass off at Sam and because Sam’s still not in that bathroom that reeked of pot puking his guts out.
What he remembers vividly later on, though, is waking up in Bobby’s spare room after a month-long bender surrounded by story notes.
Back then, they start out as the basics of Dean -- hair and eye color, height and weight, favorite music and food and weapons and that cheap dime-store cologne he gave off like substitute body odor. Like he’s been trying to keep little bits of Dean around, like he’s been trying not to forget or something.
He rifles through the paperwork and finds the birth of Martin Smith, who fights monsters and breaks the law, who romances women and swills booze and deals out decks of cards, who’s the responsible one.
In book one, Martin Smith has a brother.
He dies in the first chapter. Something sets him on fire.
They’d been half-brothers, Martin Smith and John Wesson, because the joke isn’t funny without the goddamn punch line. Sam reads through his notes, reads through what he scribbled and typed down in a Jack Daniels haze. Half of it is done already. He expects to need a magical combo of whisky and beer to know what came next, and can’t say he’s pleasantly surprised to find out there isn’t one.
Ellen flips through what he’s written when he’s done, lips curled in a faint smile, and says, “You know, Billy’s brother used to work in publishing, last I checked.”
He dedicates the book to, “My brother, Dean, wherever you are.” No elaboration, none needed.
The problem comes when he gets a chance to talk to the artist doing the book cover, tucks back a couple of longnecks with the guy in the corner of Ellen’s spit-shined new roadhouse.
“Got any requests?” the guy asks.
Sam could stop himself, wave him off, say graphic design isn’t his thing. Instead something makes him grab a napkin and a pen, do a quick sketch from memory.
“Just one,” he says, and slide the napkin over. “Think you could sneak this in somewhere?”
The guy shrugs. “Hell, why not?”
Two months after the book is released, the cover staring out from the window of every bookstore he drove past, Sam’s phone rings.
He doesn’t hear anything at the other end, not a voice or a word behind the static, but somehow he just knows.
That’s the first time.
By the second time the phone rings, Sam’s starting to make a name for himself.
It isn’t his real name but it isn’t in him to care. He says no interviews or press tours, no conventions or book signings, worries and worries until Glen says, “No, no, I can work with that.” There’s glimmers of his future, a household name without a face.
Sam stays home and writes, sends Martin here and there and back again in an country he hasn’t driven through in years. Sam goes to town, buys groceries and rents movies and that’s it. Doesn’t hunt anything, hasn’t killed anything in ages. All of his weapons are stashed away in the trunk of a fictional black Corvette.
He isn’t afraid, hasn’t felt so in years.
The third book comes out, the same dedication as always, and Sam hasn’t asked but there’s that damn symbol again painted like common graffiti in the background of the cover art. Tucked away behind Martin’s gun hand, blending into the scenery except for the way it really isn’t.
The call comes at midnight, Sam still mostly asleep and grabbing blindly for his cell as he rolls over.
“’Lo?” he says.
Nothing but static hissing in his ear, and he perks up.
“Hello?”
It’s too much to hope for, really, but then a man’s voice says his name through the scratch and wail and, Oh.
The last time, it seems, wasn’t a fluke.
The third time the phone rings, Sam nearly ignores it.
He’s just starting book six and his focus tends to narrow every time he starts a new one. The research is done, the characters are real solid people, the plotting is done down to the very last detail. Martin’s going to get three new scars, half of his wardrobe covered in blood, a jump in his personal worth, and fantastically laid. It’ll be brilliant if Sam pulls it off.
His cell vibrates, humming across the top of the computer desk.
Martin just ran out of a burning nightclub, the one he usually visits to find a new case to handle. The building’s going to burn to the ground, Martin’s two closest contacts already dead inside. Martin’ll want revenge, but then again he always does.
Sam can barely pull himself away but the phone just won’t stop ringing, not even to go to voicemail.
His fingertips freeze over the surface of the laptop keys.
The ringing doesn’t stop.
He could just leave it, just let it ring, forever and ever. Drop it in the back of his desk and try to tune it out for days, weeks, months, a twisted version of the telltale heart.
He picks up the phone and flips it open.
Doesn’t say anything, damn it, because he has to listen. Static crackles across the line, scratching at his eardrums like an angry cat.
In between the hissing and sputtering, he could swear he can hear someone say, “Soon.”
“I’m coming,” the voice says.
This is the fourth time.
After the call, Sam sits in his office, his head in his hands and his books stacked on the floor in front of him, and stares at the cover art on all of them. At the silhouette of a tall, slightly bow-legged figure on the front, at the symbol that appears in every single picture. It’s an amulet dangling from some pretty girl’s neck on book two, a tattoo on the villain’s arm on book four, a scribble in the margins of Martin’s notebook on book five.
For some reason it looks out of place when it isn’t drawn on the wall of some rundown shack in Texas.
Sam sits, and he waits.
In book five Martin Smith leans over the piano played by the little boy whose life he just saved, whose baby sister is still missing, and gently pushes the framed photograph of her adorning the piano into the kid’s line of sight.
“You know, kid,” he says, “all you’ve got to do is think about the person you’re missing, and wish really hard, and sometimes … sometimes they’ll come back.”
The line loops in Sam’s brain, continuous and strange, until the engine roars in the driveway.
He darts to the window, wipes condensation from the glass with one hand, and narrows his eyes at the car.
He’s less surprised than he should be to see a Corvette.
There’s a missing step between staring out the window and standing on the porch, the air heavy with humidity and ozone. The car rumbles happily, a great playful leopard. The window rolls down, smooth and steady, and the man in the driver’s seat waves a hand in Sam’s direction.
“Well, what are you waiting for, little brother?” he says.
The voice is achingly familiar. It’s Dean’s voice and Dean’s hand and Dean’s goddamn smirk calling to him, but Martin Smith shares ownership on all of those. It’s Martin’s car and Martin’s story and Martin’s goddamn life brought to existence by a hopeful fan base, but it’s Dean he’s been hoping for. Waiting for.
Sam wonders what happens if he goes, if this life of his just vanishes, if the name on his license changes, if he bursts into flames and turns to char or if John Wesson gets a second chance, too.
He wonders, but he steps off the porch anyway.
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