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josselinSo my goal for October is to post something every day, to exorcise myself of all the snippets I have and maybe strike up some motivation to actually finish something. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
wrenlet is going to help keep me on track and yell at me if I skip a day or start slacking.
I'm pretty sure that I have enough half-finished fics, snippets, and story outlines to fill 31 days, so here goes day one:
Eye of the Storm (1/?, Supernatural)
This was one of my ideas from when I first started watching Supernatural and it made me want to write humor and angst at the same time. But mostly angst. And make Dean into a pretty, pretty girl.
Eye of the Storm
It was sometimes hard for Sam to tell when his dreams were just random elements from his subconscious playing themselves out in the theater of his sleeping mind, and when his dreams were like, trailers for upcoming films that he'd be staring in. Other times it seemed like he was directing, like things he did in his dreams sometimes actually made a difference in the waking world. He'd convinced the ghost of a little girl to move on in a dream once, only to find that when he and Dean hit the next town the temper tantrums of their resident spirit had conveniently stopped just a week before. That was the worst of it, actually, because Sam had learned the hard way in life that you couldn't actually run away from anything; it was always better to stand and fight, but his dreams he could never totally get rid of the desire to flee and wake up. Then later he was always forced to wonder if his subconscious cowardice made things worse for him in the end.
This particular dream hadn't seemed like that, though. He was a twenty-two year old guy, and his mind had flipped itself over to the porn channel. He was getting off lying in bed with this hot girl straddling him, and for once she didn't even look like Jess, just a woman, tanned, strong, who looked oddly like a combination of his brother and a model he'd seen on TV the week before. The dream was blurry but had a warm and lazy contented feel to it; he felt comfortable with this girl, they were laughing together, throatily, and her breasts were damp with sweat against his chest and he kept running his hands protectively over the warmth of her back.
Of course Dean had to wake him up.
“Up and at 'em Sammy-boy,” Dean bellowed, smacking his side with a rolled-up newspaper.
Sam moaned and protested and buried his face in the pillow.
“Time to hit the road, lazy-ass,” Dean said, sounding almost affectionate, and Sam gave in to the inevitable and lifted his head out of the pillow.
“I hate you,” he announced.
Dean rolled his eyes as Sam pushed himself out of bed. “If you got laid more often maybe you wouldn't be quite so desperate,” he called, and Sam flushed a little bit as he stepped into the bathroom.
They had investigated a strange scorpion infestation in Arizona and managed to take care of it without anyone getting stung, and now they were on their way to Wisconsin, again. Wisconsin had its share of drunk driving incidents in the North Woods, and Sam could understand why, having been there once and knowing first hand that there was nothing else to do in northern Wisconsin. But Dean's attention had been flagged by the fact that the last month had had seven fatal accidents on the same mile of highway, and while Sam suspected it might all be attributable to a particularly icy patch on a curve he didn't feel like arguing. He felt prickly, as though there were something coming, and while he didn't think it was this thing in Wisconsin, going to Wisconsin didn't feel wrong, either, he didn't feel drawn anywhere else, and sometimes it was nice to feel like it was just a ride.
***
When Dean had been little, only eight or nine, a bitter waitress had asked him how he was, and when he told her he was great with a gap-toothed smile, she told him that it was always when things were going great that everything went to shit. Dean doesn't remember how he took that particular pronouncement, but it certainly seems to be true.
Things hadn't been great, maybe, but they might have been the best they'd been since Dad left him. Sam seemed to be in the groove of it all, relaxed a little bit instead of killing himself by thinking about everything all the time. Dean knows that Sam thinks that Dean doesn't think about things enough, but Jesus, when he does, he wants to piss his pants or shoot himself in the head, and he can't imagine how it could be any better for Sam. But Sam had seemed lighter, the past few days, sleeping easier, and they'd laughed over a few beers at the bar before Dean found some likely pool victims.
So things had been going almost great, and then they definitely went to shit.
When Dean looked in the mirror and saw a woman he didn't recognize, his first thought was that Sam was going to freak the fuck out. Then he threw up.
He could hear Sam calling to him as he was bent over the toilet, asking him if he was okay, and he braced himself for questions that he didn't have answers to and frantic explanations and reassurances and perhaps actual fighting. But when Sam came into the bathroom, saying “Dean?” again in a worried tone, Sam just stared at him for a long moment, and then bent over, retching into the sink.
“Fuck, are *you* okay?” Dean asked, surprised, but when he reached out to touch Sam, to rest a hand on his shoulder, Sam deflected Dean's hand with one of his own, brushing it away. For a moment, their fingers were tangled in the air, and Dean could see the two hands in the mirror. Even when he looked away from the mirror he didn't recognize his hand.
Sam spat into the sink. “You're a girl,” he said, face twisted at the acid in his mouth. He turned on the sink and filled a plastic cup with water.
“Uh, yeah, seems like it,” Dean said. Sam was taking this rather well, vomiting aside. Sam took a swallow of the water to swish around his mouth and then Dean stole the cup from his brother's hand to do the same thing. Sam walked back out into the main room muttering something that sounded like, “Should have seen this coming” which was utterly ridiculous, because this was *not* the kind of shit that you saw coming.
Dean had to piss—that was why he'd gotten up in the first place—but he stared at the toilet now, and grimaced, and decided that maybe he could hold it, because they had to fix whatever-the-fuck-this-was right away.
Sam was already apparently working on the problem, because when Dean emerged from the bathroom, Sam said, “Do you still have your tattoo?”
“What?” Dean said, confused, and suddenly frightened and pissed off. “Shouldn't you be asking, 'Who the fuck are you?' or something?”
“Well, I was trying to figure out if you've been implanted into a different body, or if your physical form has actually changed sex,” Sam said reasonably. “You look like you, still, but if you still have the same tattoos, scars, then we can be pretty sure that you've changed form and not just switched bodies with some chick out there who happens to look a lot like you.”
“How do you even know this is me?” Dean shouted. “I could be anybody!”
“Well, it is you, isn't it?” Sam said, with his brow slightly furrowed, and that was exactly the sort of infuriating answer Dean did not want to hear.
Dean had to take off his shirt to let Sam look at his back, compare scars, examine his tattoo, and he pulled the t-shirt over his head without hesitation, and then stood holding it in his hands awkwardly as he and Sam both stared at his chest. After a second Sam pointedly averted his eyes and turned his attention to Dean's back, where he confirmed that that the tattoo was the same.
“Yeah?” Dean said, pulling his shirt back on. “So what, then?”
Sam pursed his lips. “Actually, I've never heard of uh...sex changes. Body switching I've read about, but...” he trailed off, thinking, which was all well and good for him, except Dean needed to piss, and he was a frikkin' girl. He managed to hold it for twenty more minutes while Sam frowned and flipped through Dad's journal, and then he had to cave.
***
Dean was really freaked out, Sam could tell. Sam could normally count on his brother to take even the most bizarre circumstances in stride, but the entire morning had degenerated into Sam trying to puzzle out Dean's new sex change while Dean shouted, cursed at Sam for not shooting Dean when Sam should have thought Dean was a stranger in the bathroom, punched the wall twice, and made frequent trips to the bathroom. Sam wondered if Dean was having trouble figuring out the new equipment. How hard could it be? Sam would have guessed such things were instinctual, but maybe not.
Sam heard the toilet flush, and the sink run briefly, and then Dean emerged from the bathroom again, impatient and clapping his hands. “So, Sammy, what have you got?”
Sam had Dad's journal open to an unreadable page he swore was written in some kind of Sanskrit, a google search for “sex changes” that had brought up all the wrong things, and an empty word document. “Not much,” he said. “Seriously, Dean, this isn't something I've heard of before.”
“C'mon, you've got to have something,” Dean said, pacing back and forth in front of the bed Sam was sitting on. Dean's feet were smaller now.
“Well, there are stories about witches cursing men who they feel treated women inappropriately, but there is no verification of that besides popular literature.”
Dean finally sat down on the bed. His posture looked odd, now, with his legs spread open and leaning forward with his hands resting on his knees. “Still,” Dean said, “if it comes up often enough, maybe there's a grain of truth to it.”
“It's hardly an original concept,” Sam countered, “and witchcraft doesn't generally generate the kind of energy needed for a complete transformation of such a large quantity of mass.”
“Maybe it's not a complete transformation,” Dean said, looking hopeful. “Maybe this is just some sort of projection, like I'm not really a woman, I just look like one.”
“That's possible,” Sam acknowledged. “If we're looking at a witch, then obviously we should be trying to trace back any women who you might have offended recently--” he gave Dean a pointed look.
“Hey!” Dean objected.
“But it would be odd timing for that kind of motivation,” Sam continued, “because we just got here, and last night is probably one of the few nights of your life that you weren't trying to con some woman into bed.” It was probably only because there hadn't been any women at the bar they'd been at the night before. Early on there'd been a lot of older guys, the kind of guys who looked like they'd been drinking buddies for twenty years and had used up all of their conversation nineteen years ago. Later some younger guys had gotten back from a hunting trip (not Sam and Dean's kind of hunting, though) and they'd been happy to join Dean for a game of pool.
“Hey, women love me,” Dean protested.
“There wasn't much else,” Sam clicked a few keys on the laptop. “There's a famous story about a seer in Ancient Greece who was turned into a woman for the sake of settling a bet—that would involve gods at work, at least minor ones.”
“What was the bet?” Dean asked.
Sam chewed on the end of his pencil. “Please tell me you didn't make any bets last night.” He clicked back a few pages to check. “Uh, they were trying to settle whether women or men enjoyed sex more.”
“Who won?” Dean asked.
“Women,” Sam said absently, reading further into the article.
“Huh,” Dean said, with an interesting tone in his voice, and when Sam looked up from the computer Dean was eying himself with an odd expression.
“Don't tell me you're getting ideas,” Sam said.
Dean shook himself a little. “No, I want to get my dick back as soon as possible. How'd the Greek guy become a man again? Please tell me he turned back into a man.”
Sam scanned further. “He struck two copulating serpents with his staff.”
“Copulating serpents.”
Sam nodded.
“Somehow I doubt there are many of those around here.”
“Not in the winter,” Sam agreed.
Dean pushed off the bed and stood up. “So we've got to head somewhere warmer; find some snakes.”
Sam raised an eyebrow. “I don't think that's a good idea. There's no reason to think that there's any truth to the Greek legend or that it has anything to do with whatever has happened to you.”
Dean looked Sam in the eye intently. “Sam, I'm a girl.” He gestured at himself as though illustrating his point. “If hitting snakes with a stick worked for that guy, I'm willing to try it.” He looked away, thinking. “Hey, maybe a zoo would have snakes, or a pet store.” He turned back to Sam suddenly, “Do you suppose they have to be poisonous snakes?” Dean made a face.
“I think we should investigate this area, first,” Sam said. “I mean, this is where it happened, if it does have something to do with a local witch or with some sort of transformational power in this vicinity, then we should investigate that while we're still here and while it might still be active.”
Dean ran his fingers through his hair and made a frustrated noise in his throat. “Fine,” he conceded. He plucked at the shirt and boxers he was wearing and then started rummaging through his bag. “We can go back to the bar from last night and ask around, at least.”
“There isn't a university or anything nearby,” Sam added, “but we could ask a reference librarian about local legends, and maybe check out police reports, too. See if there are any missing people who disappear about the same time similar people arrive in town.”
Dean was about to pull off his t-shirt and change when Sam saw something on it, around the hem. “Dean, you've got something on your shirt.”
“Yeah?” Dean said, twisting around to try to see the spot Sam was pointing at. “What is it?”
Sam went over to look at the spot. There was a round stain at the bottom of Dean's white tee. “It feels greasy,” Sam rubbed it and sniffed his fingers, but it had no odor.
Dean stripped the shirt off to look at it himself. “I must have gotten something on it,” he said, looking at the circle. “Hey,” Dean said, pointing a finger at Sam, “I can take it out later using my new stain stick. You've got to see this thing, Sam, it gets blood out like you wouldn't believe.”
It was moments like that—with his brother transformed into a girl and earnestly telling Sam how excited he was about effective stain removal—that Sam was reminded of how utterly bizarre his life was.
***
The fic goes on and on (or it did in my head while I was planning it). I had the boys trying to figure out what had made Dean a girl for a while, looking at an Arabic legend with a ruby ring that fulfilled wishes and Dean being all indignant that of course he hadn't wished for this to happy and Sam pointing out gently that maybe Dean had inadvertently wished for something similar.
Anyway, at some point they realize that Dean is pregnant, and the weirdest part is that Sam doesn't have any visions of them with a baby. They don't talk about it much during the day but Dean wakes Sam up in the middle of the night to ask, frantically, how they possibly could raise a baby, and sometimes, during the darkest hours when they're the most exhausted, Dean asks Sam if he thinks it's even a baby after all. It could be anything, Dean says in the darkness, maybe they should be killing it now before anything else happens, and Sam just tells Dean he's sure it's a baby because the other options are too hard to think about. Dean presses Sam on this one night, keeps asking Sam if he's sure, and Sam knows that Dean is really asking if Sam has had a vision of this that lets him know it's definitely a baby, and Sam hasn't, but he tells Dean he's sure anyway.
The stain that starts on Dean's shirt in the first scene keeps spreading. The find random greasey stains from time to time and are never sure what caused them but don't think about it much. When Sam does laundry later there's no stain on Dean's shirt at all and he rolls his eyes figuring Dean's stain stick works, but later Dean makes an offhand comment that sounds like he never actually got around to treating that stain. A large stain starts spreading across the upholstery of the Impala and that's the one that really starts to get Dean worried. I pictured at least one scene of Dean and Sam frantically trying to wash out a stain in a crappy motel bathroom sink.
I didn't have a clear picture of what was causing the pregnancy or the suspicious stains, which was the biggest problem with writing this. There were also some problems because if the boys couldn't figure out why this was happening then they wouldn't be frantic the whole time, pretty much, but I also wanted to enjoy some more lighthearted antics while Dean was a pregnant girl. One of my favorite antics was when he and Sam got into some kind of fight over something, and then Dean punched Sam and Sam was shouting at him and trying to restrain him from doing any more damage when a police officer came along and yells at Sam for abusing his pregnant wife (they have the same last name) and sticks Sam in a holding cell overnight to cool off.
I had vague ideas about the sex change and pregnancy having something to do with the curse on their family, and since all the female members or potential members of their family die tragically someone else needed to carry on the family line. Eventually everything came to a head and Dean gave birth to a baby girl, and there was an epic battle, and Sam and Dean sort of won but really lost, and the baby was either killed or kidnapped by the evil thing a la Connor in Angel.
After that Dean was just broken, despondent and quiet and staring into space and just letting Sam direct him from motel beds to the passenger seat of the Impala without any real indication of caring or awareness. Sam keeps having visions, but they're vague now, clouds and haze and stuff he can't make out with any true meaning, and he's finally committed now, he's not just trying to get revenge and get back to normal life, this is his life for good now, and Dean's no longer really in it and Dad's gone and Sam really doesn't know how to do this on his own. Eventually he sought out Missouri and begged her for help, what should he do with Dean, how do they keep fighting when they can't even find the battle. Missouri laughs a little sympathetically tells Sam that a man might live out his whole life in the eye of the storm. This answer doesn't satisfy Sam, and he presses, "But what do we *do*," he wants to know.
And Missouri tells him that "What's important for you and Dean, honey, is to *remember*." It might not have anything to do with doing anything, they just have to know what happened in that battle when the baby died, and thirty years later (though they don't know this, this was just how I was imagining it) they have to train the next generation to continue the fight.
So I loved the idea of Sam having visions of Dean as a girl before it happened, and I loved the slowly spreading stain that the reader would be all suspicious of long before the guys caught on, but all in all this story was so depressing that I'm glad I became interested in other things. :)
wrenlet is going to help keep me on track and yell at me if I skip a day or start slacking.I'm pretty sure that I have enough half-finished fics, snippets, and story outlines to fill 31 days, so here goes day one:
Eye of the Storm (1/?, Supernatural)
This was one of my ideas from when I first started watching Supernatural and it made me want to write humor and angst at the same time. But mostly angst. And make Dean into a pretty, pretty girl.
Eye of the Storm
It was sometimes hard for Sam to tell when his dreams were just random elements from his subconscious playing themselves out in the theater of his sleeping mind, and when his dreams were like, trailers for upcoming films that he'd be staring in. Other times it seemed like he was directing, like things he did in his dreams sometimes actually made a difference in the waking world. He'd convinced the ghost of a little girl to move on in a dream once, only to find that when he and Dean hit the next town the temper tantrums of their resident spirit had conveniently stopped just a week before. That was the worst of it, actually, because Sam had learned the hard way in life that you couldn't actually run away from anything; it was always better to stand and fight, but his dreams he could never totally get rid of the desire to flee and wake up. Then later he was always forced to wonder if his subconscious cowardice made things worse for him in the end.
This particular dream hadn't seemed like that, though. He was a twenty-two year old guy, and his mind had flipped itself over to the porn channel. He was getting off lying in bed with this hot girl straddling him, and for once she didn't even look like Jess, just a woman, tanned, strong, who looked oddly like a combination of his brother and a model he'd seen on TV the week before. The dream was blurry but had a warm and lazy contented feel to it; he felt comfortable with this girl, they were laughing together, throatily, and her breasts were damp with sweat against his chest and he kept running his hands protectively over the warmth of her back.
Of course Dean had to wake him up.
“Up and at 'em Sammy-boy,” Dean bellowed, smacking his side with a rolled-up newspaper.
Sam moaned and protested and buried his face in the pillow.
“Time to hit the road, lazy-ass,” Dean said, sounding almost affectionate, and Sam gave in to the inevitable and lifted his head out of the pillow.
“I hate you,” he announced.
Dean rolled his eyes as Sam pushed himself out of bed. “If you got laid more often maybe you wouldn't be quite so desperate,” he called, and Sam flushed a little bit as he stepped into the bathroom.
They had investigated a strange scorpion infestation in Arizona and managed to take care of it without anyone getting stung, and now they were on their way to Wisconsin, again. Wisconsin had its share of drunk driving incidents in the North Woods, and Sam could understand why, having been there once and knowing first hand that there was nothing else to do in northern Wisconsin. But Dean's attention had been flagged by the fact that the last month had had seven fatal accidents on the same mile of highway, and while Sam suspected it might all be attributable to a particularly icy patch on a curve he didn't feel like arguing. He felt prickly, as though there were something coming, and while he didn't think it was this thing in Wisconsin, going to Wisconsin didn't feel wrong, either, he didn't feel drawn anywhere else, and sometimes it was nice to feel like it was just a ride.
***
When Dean had been little, only eight or nine, a bitter waitress had asked him how he was, and when he told her he was great with a gap-toothed smile, she told him that it was always when things were going great that everything went to shit. Dean doesn't remember how he took that particular pronouncement, but it certainly seems to be true.
Things hadn't been great, maybe, but they might have been the best they'd been since Dad left him. Sam seemed to be in the groove of it all, relaxed a little bit instead of killing himself by thinking about everything all the time. Dean knows that Sam thinks that Dean doesn't think about things enough, but Jesus, when he does, he wants to piss his pants or shoot himself in the head, and he can't imagine how it could be any better for Sam. But Sam had seemed lighter, the past few days, sleeping easier, and they'd laughed over a few beers at the bar before Dean found some likely pool victims.
So things had been going almost great, and then they definitely went to shit.
When Dean looked in the mirror and saw a woman he didn't recognize, his first thought was that Sam was going to freak the fuck out. Then he threw up.
He could hear Sam calling to him as he was bent over the toilet, asking him if he was okay, and he braced himself for questions that he didn't have answers to and frantic explanations and reassurances and perhaps actual fighting. But when Sam came into the bathroom, saying “Dean?” again in a worried tone, Sam just stared at him for a long moment, and then bent over, retching into the sink.
“Fuck, are *you* okay?” Dean asked, surprised, but when he reached out to touch Sam, to rest a hand on his shoulder, Sam deflected Dean's hand with one of his own, brushing it away. For a moment, their fingers were tangled in the air, and Dean could see the two hands in the mirror. Even when he looked away from the mirror he didn't recognize his hand.
Sam spat into the sink. “You're a girl,” he said, face twisted at the acid in his mouth. He turned on the sink and filled a plastic cup with water.
“Uh, yeah, seems like it,” Dean said. Sam was taking this rather well, vomiting aside. Sam took a swallow of the water to swish around his mouth and then Dean stole the cup from his brother's hand to do the same thing. Sam walked back out into the main room muttering something that sounded like, “Should have seen this coming” which was utterly ridiculous, because this was *not* the kind of shit that you saw coming.
Dean had to piss—that was why he'd gotten up in the first place—but he stared at the toilet now, and grimaced, and decided that maybe he could hold it, because they had to fix whatever-the-fuck-this-was right away.
Sam was already apparently working on the problem, because when Dean emerged from the bathroom, Sam said, “Do you still have your tattoo?”
“What?” Dean said, confused, and suddenly frightened and pissed off. “Shouldn't you be asking, 'Who the fuck are you?' or something?”
“Well, I was trying to figure out if you've been implanted into a different body, or if your physical form has actually changed sex,” Sam said reasonably. “You look like you, still, but if you still have the same tattoos, scars, then we can be pretty sure that you've changed form and not just switched bodies with some chick out there who happens to look a lot like you.”
“How do you even know this is me?” Dean shouted. “I could be anybody!”
“Well, it is you, isn't it?” Sam said, with his brow slightly furrowed, and that was exactly the sort of infuriating answer Dean did not want to hear.
Dean had to take off his shirt to let Sam look at his back, compare scars, examine his tattoo, and he pulled the t-shirt over his head without hesitation, and then stood holding it in his hands awkwardly as he and Sam both stared at his chest. After a second Sam pointedly averted his eyes and turned his attention to Dean's back, where he confirmed that that the tattoo was the same.
“Yeah?” Dean said, pulling his shirt back on. “So what, then?”
Sam pursed his lips. “Actually, I've never heard of uh...sex changes. Body switching I've read about, but...” he trailed off, thinking, which was all well and good for him, except Dean needed to piss, and he was a frikkin' girl. He managed to hold it for twenty more minutes while Sam frowned and flipped through Dad's journal, and then he had to cave.
***
Dean was really freaked out, Sam could tell. Sam could normally count on his brother to take even the most bizarre circumstances in stride, but the entire morning had degenerated into Sam trying to puzzle out Dean's new sex change while Dean shouted, cursed at Sam for not shooting Dean when Sam should have thought Dean was a stranger in the bathroom, punched the wall twice, and made frequent trips to the bathroom. Sam wondered if Dean was having trouble figuring out the new equipment. How hard could it be? Sam would have guessed such things were instinctual, but maybe not.
Sam heard the toilet flush, and the sink run briefly, and then Dean emerged from the bathroom again, impatient and clapping his hands. “So, Sammy, what have you got?”
Sam had Dad's journal open to an unreadable page he swore was written in some kind of Sanskrit, a google search for “sex changes” that had brought up all the wrong things, and an empty word document. “Not much,” he said. “Seriously, Dean, this isn't something I've heard of before.”
“C'mon, you've got to have something,” Dean said, pacing back and forth in front of the bed Sam was sitting on. Dean's feet were smaller now.
“Well, there are stories about witches cursing men who they feel treated women inappropriately, but there is no verification of that besides popular literature.”
Dean finally sat down on the bed. His posture looked odd, now, with his legs spread open and leaning forward with his hands resting on his knees. “Still,” Dean said, “if it comes up often enough, maybe there's a grain of truth to it.”
“It's hardly an original concept,” Sam countered, “and witchcraft doesn't generally generate the kind of energy needed for a complete transformation of such a large quantity of mass.”
“Maybe it's not a complete transformation,” Dean said, looking hopeful. “Maybe this is just some sort of projection, like I'm not really a woman, I just look like one.”
“That's possible,” Sam acknowledged. “If we're looking at a witch, then obviously we should be trying to trace back any women who you might have offended recently--” he gave Dean a pointed look.
“Hey!” Dean objected.
“But it would be odd timing for that kind of motivation,” Sam continued, “because we just got here, and last night is probably one of the few nights of your life that you weren't trying to con some woman into bed.” It was probably only because there hadn't been any women at the bar they'd been at the night before. Early on there'd been a lot of older guys, the kind of guys who looked like they'd been drinking buddies for twenty years and had used up all of their conversation nineteen years ago. Later some younger guys had gotten back from a hunting trip (not Sam and Dean's kind of hunting, though) and they'd been happy to join Dean for a game of pool.
“Hey, women love me,” Dean protested.
“There wasn't much else,” Sam clicked a few keys on the laptop. “There's a famous story about a seer in Ancient Greece who was turned into a woman for the sake of settling a bet—that would involve gods at work, at least minor ones.”
“What was the bet?” Dean asked.
Sam chewed on the end of his pencil. “Please tell me you didn't make any bets last night.” He clicked back a few pages to check. “Uh, they were trying to settle whether women or men enjoyed sex more.”
“Who won?” Dean asked.
“Women,” Sam said absently, reading further into the article.
“Huh,” Dean said, with an interesting tone in his voice, and when Sam looked up from the computer Dean was eying himself with an odd expression.
“Don't tell me you're getting ideas,” Sam said.
Dean shook himself a little. “No, I want to get my dick back as soon as possible. How'd the Greek guy become a man again? Please tell me he turned back into a man.”
Sam scanned further. “He struck two copulating serpents with his staff.”
“Copulating serpents.”
Sam nodded.
“Somehow I doubt there are many of those around here.”
“Not in the winter,” Sam agreed.
Dean pushed off the bed and stood up. “So we've got to head somewhere warmer; find some snakes.”
Sam raised an eyebrow. “I don't think that's a good idea. There's no reason to think that there's any truth to the Greek legend or that it has anything to do with whatever has happened to you.”
Dean looked Sam in the eye intently. “Sam, I'm a girl.” He gestured at himself as though illustrating his point. “If hitting snakes with a stick worked for that guy, I'm willing to try it.” He looked away, thinking. “Hey, maybe a zoo would have snakes, or a pet store.” He turned back to Sam suddenly, “Do you suppose they have to be poisonous snakes?” Dean made a face.
“I think we should investigate this area, first,” Sam said. “I mean, this is where it happened, if it does have something to do with a local witch or with some sort of transformational power in this vicinity, then we should investigate that while we're still here and while it might still be active.”
Dean ran his fingers through his hair and made a frustrated noise in his throat. “Fine,” he conceded. He plucked at the shirt and boxers he was wearing and then started rummaging through his bag. “We can go back to the bar from last night and ask around, at least.”
“There isn't a university or anything nearby,” Sam added, “but we could ask a reference librarian about local legends, and maybe check out police reports, too. See if there are any missing people who disappear about the same time similar people arrive in town.”
Dean was about to pull off his t-shirt and change when Sam saw something on it, around the hem. “Dean, you've got something on your shirt.”
“Yeah?” Dean said, twisting around to try to see the spot Sam was pointing at. “What is it?”
Sam went over to look at the spot. There was a round stain at the bottom of Dean's white tee. “It feels greasy,” Sam rubbed it and sniffed his fingers, but it had no odor.
Dean stripped the shirt off to look at it himself. “I must have gotten something on it,” he said, looking at the circle. “Hey,” Dean said, pointing a finger at Sam, “I can take it out later using my new stain stick. You've got to see this thing, Sam, it gets blood out like you wouldn't believe.”
It was moments like that—with his brother transformed into a girl and earnestly telling Sam how excited he was about effective stain removal—that Sam was reminded of how utterly bizarre his life was.
***
The fic goes on and on (or it did in my head while I was planning it). I had the boys trying to figure out what had made Dean a girl for a while, looking at an Arabic legend with a ruby ring that fulfilled wishes and Dean being all indignant that of course he hadn't wished for this to happy and Sam pointing out gently that maybe Dean had inadvertently wished for something similar.
Anyway, at some point they realize that Dean is pregnant, and the weirdest part is that Sam doesn't have any visions of them with a baby. They don't talk about it much during the day but Dean wakes Sam up in the middle of the night to ask, frantically, how they possibly could raise a baby, and sometimes, during the darkest hours when they're the most exhausted, Dean asks Sam if he thinks it's even a baby after all. It could be anything, Dean says in the darkness, maybe they should be killing it now before anything else happens, and Sam just tells Dean he's sure it's a baby because the other options are too hard to think about. Dean presses Sam on this one night, keeps asking Sam if he's sure, and Sam knows that Dean is really asking if Sam has had a vision of this that lets him know it's definitely a baby, and Sam hasn't, but he tells Dean he's sure anyway.
The stain that starts on Dean's shirt in the first scene keeps spreading. The find random greasey stains from time to time and are never sure what caused them but don't think about it much. When Sam does laundry later there's no stain on Dean's shirt at all and he rolls his eyes figuring Dean's stain stick works, but later Dean makes an offhand comment that sounds like he never actually got around to treating that stain. A large stain starts spreading across the upholstery of the Impala and that's the one that really starts to get Dean worried. I pictured at least one scene of Dean and Sam frantically trying to wash out a stain in a crappy motel bathroom sink.
I didn't have a clear picture of what was causing the pregnancy or the suspicious stains, which was the biggest problem with writing this. There were also some problems because if the boys couldn't figure out why this was happening then they wouldn't be frantic the whole time, pretty much, but I also wanted to enjoy some more lighthearted antics while Dean was a pregnant girl. One of my favorite antics was when he and Sam got into some kind of fight over something, and then Dean punched Sam and Sam was shouting at him and trying to restrain him from doing any more damage when a police officer came along and yells at Sam for abusing his pregnant wife (they have the same last name) and sticks Sam in a holding cell overnight to cool off.
I had vague ideas about the sex change and pregnancy having something to do with the curse on their family, and since all the female members or potential members of their family die tragically someone else needed to carry on the family line. Eventually everything came to a head and Dean gave birth to a baby girl, and there was an epic battle, and Sam and Dean sort of won but really lost, and the baby was either killed or kidnapped by the evil thing a la Connor in Angel.
After that Dean was just broken, despondent and quiet and staring into space and just letting Sam direct him from motel beds to the passenger seat of the Impala without any real indication of caring or awareness. Sam keeps having visions, but they're vague now, clouds and haze and stuff he can't make out with any true meaning, and he's finally committed now, he's not just trying to get revenge and get back to normal life, this is his life for good now, and Dean's no longer really in it and Dad's gone and Sam really doesn't know how to do this on his own. Eventually he sought out Missouri and begged her for help, what should he do with Dean, how do they keep fighting when they can't even find the battle. Missouri laughs a little sympathetically tells Sam that a man might live out his whole life in the eye of the storm. This answer doesn't satisfy Sam, and he presses, "But what do we *do*," he wants to know.
And Missouri tells him that "What's important for you and Dean, honey, is to *remember*." It might not have anything to do with doing anything, they just have to know what happened in that battle when the baby died, and thirty years later (though they don't know this, this was just how I was imagining it) they have to train the next generation to continue the fight.
So I loved the idea of Sam having visions of Dean as a girl before it happened, and I loved the slowly spreading stain that the reader would be all suspicious of long before the guys caught on, but all in all this story was so depressing that I'm glad I became interested in other things. :)
