ratherastory (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ratherastory) wrote2010-02-04 06:47 am
ratherastory) wrote2010-02-04 06:47 am
Entry tags:
Take Me Home —Part 23
Title: Take Me Home
Summary: The Trickster decides to have some fun with Sam. Wackiness ensues, with a healthy helping of whump, because it's me and I can't leave the boys intact.
Spoilers: All aired episodes up to 5.10
Word Count: 1,992 for this chapter
Disclaimer: Luckily for them, I own nothing. Otherwise they'd be in for a world of hurt.
Warning: Utter crack. Language that is definitely not workplace-appropriate.
Neurotic Authorial Disclaimer: No beta, written in such a hurry I'm amazed my fingers managed to connect with the keyboard.
Neurotic Authorial Disclaimer #2:I take NO responsibility for this, because it's cracktastic and weird and I can't believe it came out of of my brain. If you are scarred for life after reading it, it's NOT my fault!
Neurotic Authorial Disclaimer #3: It's basically "Lassie Come-Home," Winchester-style. I dunno. STOP LOOKING AT ME LIKE THAT!
Master Post
Part 22
I'm a little surprised and really touched by how many people have written begging me to have Sam home for Christmas. You guys are so sweet! :D
Anyway, if anyone was wondering what was happening to Sam, now's your chance to find out. We're back to Doggy POV today. Please don't hate me too much by the end, I promise I'm planning to fix it.
*****
In spite of himself, Sam starts to remember things again. It happens when he's on the road, heading toward the setting sun, and can't quite make out which way to head. Going west is one thing, but getting to the exact place he needs to be is another entirely. That takes planning, and thinking, and putting thoughts together in order which isn't something he's able to to do usually. So he lets himself start looking at road signs, deciphering them letter by letter, number by number. Then he tries to hang onto the thoughts in his head that come with the signs, and he has to work really hard to keep them there and to put them all in the right order so that they make sense and tell him what he should do. It's not so bad at first, but the more he does it, the more his head gets fuzzy, the more the world around him goes all swimmy and funny-looking, as though there are things and colours he should be seeing but isn't, and he doesn't understand why that is.
The roads stretch out before him, and there's not much to do except simply walk, head down and tail dragging. That strange sense of Other that's with him almost constantly now tells him he ought to know how much time has gone by since he started looking for Dean, but he doesn't really understand what that means. Time is something the Other-Sam understands, finds important, even, but he can't wrap his mind around it. He knows that Other-Sam is really him, too, but it's easier to think of him as Other-Sam, because otherwise Other-Sam thinks too many confusing things. The sun goes up and the sun goes down, and dimly he thinks that that might be related to how time works, that and when the snow starts to fall. At least, Other-Sam seems to think so.
He's starting to get a better idea of which humans he can trust, too. Sometimes he can't help but have to go near them, and so he keeps watch, wary, looks for how they move, how they talk, most importantly how they smell. Some of them smell of sulfur, wrong-evil-bad, but he doesn't go near them, doesn't attack the way he did in the park when Dean was being threatened. They don't appear to notice him one way or the other. Children are safe —and often have some sort of food on them which they are more than happy to share before their parents snatch them away, yelling things about 'strange dogs' and 'dangerous.'
Sometimes humans stop and help him. It doesn't occur to him that they need a reason to, but he's always a bit surprised when they don't try to hurt him. He remembers that people aren't supposed to like him, that there's something terrible about him that should make them shun him. It's a distant, uneasy feeling, and he doesn't like to dwell on it much. Instead he takes advantage of the generosity of the man with the small terrier whose van smells like sweet smoke, as long as they're heading west. The man says something about 'Dean,' and for a joyous moment Sam thinks that maybe he understood, that he's going to take him all the way to Dean, but soon he works out that he was wrong, that the man isn't talking about his Dean at all. He's a bit like Dean, though, and Other-Sam starts talking louder and saying something about the man being hunter, and that makes sense.
They stop and venture into the woods, and because this is his pack for the moment he goes with them, the terrier —Zevon, the man calls him— senses the danger at the same time as him, but the animal whose territory they've invaded is too big and too fast and too strong, and it kills Zevon with one snapping crunch of jaws. Sam is sure that if it weren't for the man and his gun —rifle-bullets-pain— that he would be dead too, and Other-Sam agrees with him. He wants to run, but instead he follows at the man's heels and rides along with him until he stops heading west, because Other-Sam says it'll go faster in the van. He's a good man, but he's not Dean, and Dean is west, and so Sam scratches at the door to the van and barks and howls until the man lets him out to keep going.
He's aware of pain, too. There was that first time he got too close to a gun —rifle-bullets-pain— when he got distracted at the hen house, when the wound in his flank felt like fire and the noise rang in his ears for such a very long time. Other-Sam tells him it was hours, but he's not sure what 'hour' really means. It has something to do with the passage of time, and it makes everything go all jumbled together. There are other kinds of pain, too: pains in his stomach when he can't find food, pain when it's too cold out which makes his joints ache, and there was a terrible clenching pain that started in his chest when he tried swimming across the big lake. The worst was when he stepped on the metal thing —trap, his mind supplies, and he's not sure if it's himself remembering these things or Other-Sam telling him or if there's any difference between the two— and pain flared up his leg, white-hot. He tried to pull his paw out of the thing, but it was closed tight —spring trap, Other-Sam says, sounding smug— and he was trembling with exhaustion and hunger, and there wasn't anyplace to go. Then there was a man who smelled of dog and hay and sweat and goats, and he brought Sam to a woman who smelled of dogs and cats and another woman, and the two women gave him pats and bacon treats and made the terrible pain in his paw feel better. They put a nasty thing on his leg, but then they took it off again, and then when he was feeling better he found a hole in the fence because it was important to go find Dean.
The Other-Sam who keeps drifting in and out of his head tells him that can't just crawl under a bush and wait for either death or for the pain to go away when these things happen. He lets the people who come help him: they smell all right, of other dogs and kindness, and there's no sulfur, no trace of fear or anger that he can detect. He has to leave, though. Both he and Other-Sam are agreed on this: he has to find Dean. Dean is home, and home is west. So he goes west. Other-Sam makes him read the signs for South Dakota (he doesn't know what that is, but Other-Sam tells him it's west, and he believes Other-Sam), and he follows the roads, because Other-Sam tells him they're safer than the woods. He stepped in the trap in the woods, and there are no traps on the roads. There's food in the woods, but there are traps. There are no traps on the roads, but there's no food. He doesn't know if Other-Sam is right, but Other-Sam doesn't like it when he questions things too hard.
Other-Sam thinks about things, sometimes, if Sam lets his mind go blank while he's walking. He thinks about things that Sam finds confusing, like blood and 'red,' which Sam doesn't understand because Other-Sam seems to think that 'red' is something they ought to be able to see and he just can't. It's not really there, and he thinks maybe Other-Sam isn't really all there either. But then Other-Sam can put things together in an order which makes sense: he thinks about 'Lucifer,' and Sam remembers that weird scent —bad-evil-wrong— from the cabin, and anxiety twists in his chest. Other-Sam tells him they have to stay away from Lucifer, and keep Dean safe from him, and Sam has never been more on board with a plan in his life. Except that keeping Dean safe means they have to be with Dean, and that means they have to keep going west, no matter how much he hurts, no matter that the nasty stinging stuff on some of the roads cuts into the pads of his paws —salt, Other-Sam tells him, along with explanations Sam doesn't understand about cars and ice— and he leaves copper-smelling streaks on the white snow. 'Red,' Other-Sam says, and Sam still doesn't understand.
Slowly the scenery changes as the snow keeps falling. Gradually the dead grass behind the wooden fences disappears, replaced with vast expanses of white rolling hills. Sometimes the fields are replaced with woods, trees looming over his head and closing off the road like great walls. The sky is filled with clouds broken only by the occasional patch of blue sky ('blue' is something on which he and Other-Sam can agree) and great swirling flocks of ravens ('an unkindness of ravens' Other-Sam supplies, confusingly) that shriek and caw above him. It gets colder and colder, and he has to put his head down and keep his eyes almost completely closed, but he keeps walking, shivering in spite of his thick coat. His leg hurts where the trap closed on it, and he's still stiff on the side where he was shot with the rifle, but the thought of Dean drives him like a goad. Find-Dean-find-Dean-find-Dean regulates the rhythm of his walk, drives him forward into the wind, past the flurries of snow, makes him ignore the cars going by and making terrible honking noises.
Other-Sam takes him right through the towns now, with a new-found sense of urgency. Now there are more people, and men with poles and large looped wires who try to catch him and load him into big grey vans. Other-Sam warns him about them, but he doesn't need the warning: they smell of anger and nervousness, and he wants nothing to do with them. The houses here all have bright lights hung on strings, and sometimes the lights are strung on the trees, too. Other-Sam tells him about them, but he's too tired and too hungry and too cold to make any sense of it. It's bad enough when Other-Sam talks about colours, but when he tries to think about time in that strange way of 'hours' and 'days' and 'weeks' it makes the whole world tilt sideways, and eventually Other-Sam gives up entirely because Sam can't walk and think about that at the same time, and walking is more important.
He arrives at a crossroads just as night is falling, and something in the air tells him that he's close, so close, and the feeling gives him a sudden burst of energy. He tosses his head, picks up his tail, breaks into a loping run, tongue lolling. He's going to see Dean, he knows this with all the joyful exuberance of that first moment when Dean said 'Sam' to him and all pieces of his life fell into place like a burst of song and light, and no matter what Other-Sam says about time, he knows that now he has to hurry. He throws himself forward, barely registering the alien screeching sound further up the road, the familiar sound of a blaring car horn, and then something huge and heavy collides with his shoulder, pain flares up in his side, at once familiar and terrifying, and he goes rolling and tumbling into the frozen ditch by the side of the road.
*****
Part 24
Summary: The Trickster decides to have some fun with Sam. Wackiness ensues, with a healthy helping of whump, because it's me and I can't leave the boys intact.
Spoilers: All aired episodes up to 5.10
Word Count: 1,992 for this chapter
Disclaimer: Luckily for them, I own nothing. Otherwise they'd be in for a world of hurt.
Warning: Utter crack. Language that is definitely not workplace-appropriate.
Neurotic Authorial Disclaimer: No beta, written in such a hurry I'm amazed my fingers managed to connect with the keyboard.
Neurotic Authorial Disclaimer #2:I take NO responsibility for this, because it's cracktastic and weird and I can't believe it came out of of my brain. If you are scarred for life after reading it, it's NOT my fault!
Neurotic Authorial Disclaimer #3: It's basically "Lassie Come-Home," Winchester-style. I dunno. STOP LOOKING AT ME LIKE THAT!
Master Post
Part 22
I'm a little surprised and really touched by how many people have written begging me to have Sam home for Christmas. You guys are so sweet! :D
Anyway, if anyone was wondering what was happening to Sam, now's your chance to find out. We're back to Doggy POV today. Please don't hate me too much by the end, I promise I'm planning to fix it.
In spite of himself, Sam starts to remember things again. It happens when he's on the road, heading toward the setting sun, and can't quite make out which way to head. Going west is one thing, but getting to the exact place he needs to be is another entirely. That takes planning, and thinking, and putting thoughts together in order which isn't something he's able to to do usually. So he lets himself start looking at road signs, deciphering them letter by letter, number by number. Then he tries to hang onto the thoughts in his head that come with the signs, and he has to work really hard to keep them there and to put them all in the right order so that they make sense and tell him what he should do. It's not so bad at first, but the more he does it, the more his head gets fuzzy, the more the world around him goes all swimmy and funny-looking, as though there are things and colours he should be seeing but isn't, and he doesn't understand why that is.
The roads stretch out before him, and there's not much to do except simply walk, head down and tail dragging. That strange sense of Other that's with him almost constantly now tells him he ought to know how much time has gone by since he started looking for Dean, but he doesn't really understand what that means. Time is something the Other-Sam understands, finds important, even, but he can't wrap his mind around it. He knows that Other-Sam is really him, too, but it's easier to think of him as Other-Sam, because otherwise Other-Sam thinks too many confusing things. The sun goes up and the sun goes down, and dimly he thinks that that might be related to how time works, that and when the snow starts to fall. At least, Other-Sam seems to think so.
He's starting to get a better idea of which humans he can trust, too. Sometimes he can't help but have to go near them, and so he keeps watch, wary, looks for how they move, how they talk, most importantly how they smell. Some of them smell of sulfur, wrong-evil-bad, but he doesn't go near them, doesn't attack the way he did in the park when Dean was being threatened. They don't appear to notice him one way or the other. Children are safe —and often have some sort of food on them which they are more than happy to share before their parents snatch them away, yelling things about 'strange dogs' and 'dangerous.'
Sometimes humans stop and help him. It doesn't occur to him that they need a reason to, but he's always a bit surprised when they don't try to hurt him. He remembers that people aren't supposed to like him, that there's something terrible about him that should make them shun him. It's a distant, uneasy feeling, and he doesn't like to dwell on it much. Instead he takes advantage of the generosity of the man with the small terrier whose van smells like sweet smoke, as long as they're heading west. The man says something about 'Dean,' and for a joyous moment Sam thinks that maybe he understood, that he's going to take him all the way to Dean, but soon he works out that he was wrong, that the man isn't talking about his Dean at all. He's a bit like Dean, though, and Other-Sam starts talking louder and saying something about the man being hunter, and that makes sense.
They stop and venture into the woods, and because this is his pack for the moment he goes with them, the terrier —Zevon, the man calls him— senses the danger at the same time as him, but the animal whose territory they've invaded is too big and too fast and too strong, and it kills Zevon with one snapping crunch of jaws. Sam is sure that if it weren't for the man and his gun —rifle-bullets-pain— that he would be dead too, and Other-Sam agrees with him. He wants to run, but instead he follows at the man's heels and rides along with him until he stops heading west, because Other-Sam says it'll go faster in the van. He's a good man, but he's not Dean, and Dean is west, and so Sam scratches at the door to the van and barks and howls until the man lets him out to keep going.
He's aware of pain, too. There was that first time he got too close to a gun —rifle-bullets-pain— when he got distracted at the hen house, when the wound in his flank felt like fire and the noise rang in his ears for such a very long time. Other-Sam tells him it was hours, but he's not sure what 'hour' really means. It has something to do with the passage of time, and it makes everything go all jumbled together. There are other kinds of pain, too: pains in his stomach when he can't find food, pain when it's too cold out which makes his joints ache, and there was a terrible clenching pain that started in his chest when he tried swimming across the big lake. The worst was when he stepped on the metal thing —trap, his mind supplies, and he's not sure if it's himself remembering these things or Other-Sam telling him or if there's any difference between the two— and pain flared up his leg, white-hot. He tried to pull his paw out of the thing, but it was closed tight —spring trap, Other-Sam says, sounding smug— and he was trembling with exhaustion and hunger, and there wasn't anyplace to go. Then there was a man who smelled of dog and hay and sweat and goats, and he brought Sam to a woman who smelled of dogs and cats and another woman, and the two women gave him pats and bacon treats and made the terrible pain in his paw feel better. They put a nasty thing on his leg, but then they took it off again, and then when he was feeling better he found a hole in the fence because it was important to go find Dean.
The Other-Sam who keeps drifting in and out of his head tells him that can't just crawl under a bush and wait for either death or for the pain to go away when these things happen. He lets the people who come help him: they smell all right, of other dogs and kindness, and there's no sulfur, no trace of fear or anger that he can detect. He has to leave, though. Both he and Other-Sam are agreed on this: he has to find Dean. Dean is home, and home is west. So he goes west. Other-Sam makes him read the signs for South Dakota (he doesn't know what that is, but Other-Sam tells him it's west, and he believes Other-Sam), and he follows the roads, because Other-Sam tells him they're safer than the woods. He stepped in the trap in the woods, and there are no traps on the roads. There's food in the woods, but there are traps. There are no traps on the roads, but there's no food. He doesn't know if Other-Sam is right, but Other-Sam doesn't like it when he questions things too hard.
Other-Sam thinks about things, sometimes, if Sam lets his mind go blank while he's walking. He thinks about things that Sam finds confusing, like blood and 'red,' which Sam doesn't understand because Other-Sam seems to think that 'red' is something they ought to be able to see and he just can't. It's not really there, and he thinks maybe Other-Sam isn't really all there either. But then Other-Sam can put things together in an order which makes sense: he thinks about 'Lucifer,' and Sam remembers that weird scent —bad-evil-wrong— from the cabin, and anxiety twists in his chest. Other-Sam tells him they have to stay away from Lucifer, and keep Dean safe from him, and Sam has never been more on board with a plan in his life. Except that keeping Dean safe means they have to be with Dean, and that means they have to keep going west, no matter how much he hurts, no matter that the nasty stinging stuff on some of the roads cuts into the pads of his paws —salt, Other-Sam tells him, along with explanations Sam doesn't understand about cars and ice— and he leaves copper-smelling streaks on the white snow. 'Red,' Other-Sam says, and Sam still doesn't understand.
Slowly the scenery changes as the snow keeps falling. Gradually the dead grass behind the wooden fences disappears, replaced with vast expanses of white rolling hills. Sometimes the fields are replaced with woods, trees looming over his head and closing off the road like great walls. The sky is filled with clouds broken only by the occasional patch of blue sky ('blue' is something on which he and Other-Sam can agree) and great swirling flocks of ravens ('an unkindness of ravens' Other-Sam supplies, confusingly) that shriek and caw above him. It gets colder and colder, and he has to put his head down and keep his eyes almost completely closed, but he keeps walking, shivering in spite of his thick coat. His leg hurts where the trap closed on it, and he's still stiff on the side where he was shot with the rifle, but the thought of Dean drives him like a goad. Find-Dean-find-Dean-find-Dean regulates the rhythm of his walk, drives him forward into the wind, past the flurries of snow, makes him ignore the cars going by and making terrible honking noises.
Other-Sam takes him right through the towns now, with a new-found sense of urgency. Now there are more people, and men with poles and large looped wires who try to catch him and load him into big grey vans. Other-Sam warns him about them, but he doesn't need the warning: they smell of anger and nervousness, and he wants nothing to do with them. The houses here all have bright lights hung on strings, and sometimes the lights are strung on the trees, too. Other-Sam tells him about them, but he's too tired and too hungry and too cold to make any sense of it. It's bad enough when Other-Sam talks about colours, but when he tries to think about time in that strange way of 'hours' and 'days' and 'weeks' it makes the whole world tilt sideways, and eventually Other-Sam gives up entirely because Sam can't walk and think about that at the same time, and walking is more important.
He arrives at a crossroads just as night is falling, and something in the air tells him that he's close, so close, and the feeling gives him a sudden burst of energy. He tosses his head, picks up his tail, breaks into a loping run, tongue lolling. He's going to see Dean, he knows this with all the joyful exuberance of that first moment when Dean said 'Sam' to him and all pieces of his life fell into place like a burst of song and light, and no matter what Other-Sam says about time, he knows that now he has to hurry. He throws himself forward, barely registering the alien screeching sound further up the road, the familiar sound of a blaring car horn, and then something huge and heavy collides with his shoulder, pain flares up in his side, at once familiar and terrifying, and he goes rolling and tumbling into the frozen ditch by the side of the road.
Part 24
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Really looking forward to the next chapter.
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As for the Christmas thing, well, you'll have to wait and see. I don't want to give too much away.
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Other-Sam is a pain in Doggy!Sam's butt, that's for sure. He keeps insisting on thinking about things that make no sense. ;)
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evil I say!
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Sorry! I was all excited too, but it made more sense from a narrative perspective to do something really mean to Sam rather than a too-easy happy ending.
I promise the story won't end with the poor doggy dead in a ditch. Promise and cross my heart!
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I love how you have Sam's thoughts and awareness as a human as this confusing background voice. It lets him get to where he needs to be, but really the dog has to be in control. I also love it that you mentioned an unkindness of ravens. That's one of my favorites- that and a murder of crows.
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Poor Sam: his head is getting to be a very confusing place for him. ;)
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*hides in a corner*
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But at least you update super regularly. ;D
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And yes, please, Sam home for Christmas. :-D
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Don't worry. Unlike Kripke, I also enjoy fixing what I break. Occasionally. ;)
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Yes, I'm evil. I give off this girl-next-door vibe, but really I enjoy torturing my characters waaaay too much for me to actually be nice. Most people eventually figure this out about me.
On the plus side, I try to post regularly and, unlike Kripke, I also like to fix the things I break. ;)
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Oh, and he was so CLOSE! Your brilliance makes you evil. Or, is that the other way around? Do not know. Awesome damned stuff and is it tomorrow yet? I think the wait may kill me.
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I'm glad you... uh.. liked it? "Like" may be the wrong word.
I still have some work to do with Dean and Castiel first, though, before I can get everyone back together. So.
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Anyway, there are just times when you have to be rotten to your characters. When you get so many awesome reactions, you know you're doing it right. :)
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Being mean to the characters means that people appreciate it even more when you're nice to them after.
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It's all for the sake of the story! And unlike Kripke, I do plan on fixing what I broke. ;)
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Sometimes humans stop and help him. It doesn't occur to him that they need a reason to, but he's always a bit surprised when they don't try to hurt him. He remembers that people aren't supposed to like him, that there's something terrible about him that should make them shun him.
Oh my God. That's ... a really horrifying bit of insight into Sam's head-space, that THIS is what he remembers from being human.
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Oh just rip my heart out and stomp on it, why don't you? Poor Sam, he really has been put through the ringer, hasn't he? Poor boy's repeatedly called himself a freak on the show, so I guess it should come as no surprise that he'd think that. But it was still a gut punch to read.
The second I read "crossroads" I knew something bad was going to happen, but I was thinking something supernatural. Wasn't expecting a car. Eep!
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I have to say that I LOVE the way you've balance dog!Sam and human!Sam.
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Also, you'll be pleased to know I got HATE MAIL after posting this chapter. All of it along the lines of "OMG HOLY SHIT YOU HIT SAM WITH A CAR! WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?!?"
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what can I say? I hated the idea of Sam getting hit by a car but I love the limp!