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Listen, it isn’t what you think.
It’s definitely not what it looks like, I didn’t plan for any of this.
The whole thing started as an accident. After that, well, brothers will be brothers will be brothers. You know what I mean?
Maybe you don’t. That’s okay, let’s back it up.
The first thing that happens is that all the sugar in the bunker turns to salt. Every shaker, bowl and bag of it in the kitchen and the pantry. Even the little paper packets in Dean’s pockets and the glove box of his car, saved and stockpiled from every coffee run. Just in case. Except, just-in-case doesn’t account for magic, certainly not magical mishaps.
In his defense, Sam didn’t know he’d fucked anything up until a day or two later. Sure, when he tried the transmutation spell, he prided himself on nailing it on the first try, but that was a spoonful of sugar. Just to try it. Just to see if he could.
To be clear, I had nothing to do with that one. Transmutation is an alchemical process, not strictly magical but biochemical as well, and casting an incorrect circle left the rest of the bunker subject to the spell’s area of effect. Honestly, he was damn lucky the impact was relegated to granulated sugar. With less precision, he could have transmuted all the sugars in their bodies, which may well have been the thing that dropped both Winchesters, for good.
“Sonuvabitch!” Dean’s curse echoes through the halls, storming into the library with a scowl on his face. “Sam!”
“What’s your problem?” Sam looks over his cup of coffee, perfectly fine. He takes his with two milk, no sugar. Or, rather, no salt, at least today.
“Swapping the sugar for salt? Amateur hour.” Dean’s knuckles are white around the chipped handle of his mug. He has half a mind to force his brother to drink the coffee, thick with cream and heavy with salt. “You’re gonna regret starting this by screwing around with my coffee.”
What you need to remember here is that the Mark emblazoned on Dean’s forearm predisposes him to fits of unparalleled violence, no matter how he tries to hide it beneath the roll of his shirtsleeve. Unfortunately, it also curbs his usual lighthearted nature, makes him even more of a self-serious asshat that he was already. It’s tedious, it’s dangerous, and it’s why I decided to stick around for a while, see if I can’t lighten that load some. Prolong the inevitable.
That, and I love a good prank, have been known to pull off one or two of my own.
“Dean, I haven’t done anything to the coffee.” Sam holds his mug up as evidence. “I’m drinking it too. All that that prank crap is your deal.”
“Chickenshit! You’re not even gonna admit it?” The wrong side of the bed still grips Dean and he points sharply at his younger brother. If he had any magical inclinations, natural or otherwise, you can be sure Sam would wind up hexed. “Mistake, buddy. Now it’s on.”
On, indeed.
That night, Dean swaps Sam’s protein powder with a blend of cornstarch and instant pancake mix. The anticipation is mild torture, that bubbling excitement you have to sit on hard to keep it from seeping out and giving the game away.
Sam’s bellow, reverberating off the concrete and tile, fills him with the sort of delight reserved for the young. Good thing Dean considers himself young at heart. He hears Sam come back from a run, the thrum of the blender not long after. It stills every base function in Dean’s body, waiting for the punchline.
“Dean!” Sam throws open the door to Dean’s bedroom, glaring at him. He’s stretched out on top of his covers, headphones over his ears, he taps them pretending he can’t hear him. “They’re not on, Dean. You know how I know? The needle isn’t down. Hell, the record isn’t even turning.”
Dean looks at his turntable, raising his brows in innocent surprise. “Huh. Weird.” He slips the phones down around his neck, a feigned picture of innocence. “What’s up, Sammy?“
“You know what’s up.” He’s wearing that pinched, sort of prissy, pissed off face he gets and Dean thinks it is hilarious. I do, too. You can see the effort it takes, stifling his glee. “You switched my protein powder.” He holds up the glass, green and unappetizing as always and Dean wrinkles his nose. “What’d you even put in there? It’s basically glue.”
Sam tips the glass on its side and Dean’s about ready to leap off the bed and pummel him, except the sludge in his glass is moving like half dried, poorly mixed concrete: slow, thick and chunky. “That’s fuckin’ gross, dude.”
“Yeah.” Sam tips the glass back up, too mature or too wise to actually dump any on Dean’s rug. “I know.”
“You know, I’m pretty hungry.“ Dean settles himself back against his pillows, crossing his arms over his chest. “So if you go for a breakfast run, I’d take one of those lumberjack sandwiches they make at the coffee shop.”
Sam scowls at him, nostrils flaring. His bone deep commitment to being the bigger person, despite always being the little brother, is the only thing that stays his hand from chucking green paste across the room. Instead, he slams the glass down on Dean’s dresser and leaves it there. Bad enough Sam has to clean out the blender himself, Dean can deal with the other half of the mess.
Dean shrugs and slides the phones back over his ears, pretending once again that he can’t hear Sam anymore. Sam rolls his eyes hard enough you have to wonder if he’s going to detach a retina. “Player’s still not on, you know.”
From there, Sam bides his time, makes Dean think his well’s gone dry, half assed shit like short sheeting him on the road, flushing the toilet every time Dean gets into a motel shower to screw with the pressure.
Then, like a god damn pro, Sam snakes the next hookup Dean tries to close on the road.
They’re in Clayton, Delaware when he gets the chance, Dean leaves his phone on the dash when he runs in to take a piss at a gas station. Sam punches in a code hack, forwarding Dean’s calls and texts to Sam’s phone, then sits back and waits.
She’s a forensic video analyst, caught the eye flare that helped crack their case. She’s cute, smart, way more Sam's type than Dean's. It’s easy to charm her, he's a pretty charming guy, it’s barely a lie that Dean must’ve given her Sam’s number by accident.
But his loss is my gain ;)
Needless to say, Dean is livid when he walks in on them half naked, getting hot and heavy. “God damnit, dude, that’s my bed!”
“Bed’s big enough, if you wanna join.” She grins over Sam’s shoulder at Dean, hovering by the door. Sam cranes his neck around and Dean looks from his brother to the girl in his lap, then back to Sam, who gives him a what the hell look, because she's offered them a win-win.
Sam doesn’t bother waiting for Dean to make up his mind, turns back to the girl, thick fingers tangled in her hair, whispers something that makes her giggle.
“Fuck it.” The giggle is what breaks Dean. He slams the door behind him, tugs at his tie, sheds his jacket, loses his shoes by the time he’s standing behind her, running his hands down her sides. He warns his brother not to do anything freaky with a glare and Sam just rolls his eyes.
Sam and Dean consider that one a draw. The analyst, however, calls it a resounding W.
Trust me, you would too.
After that, all bets are off. Dean meets Crowley at a bar, plays some darts, spitballs ideas on how to torment Sam. Sam tries to extort Rowena, tells her that the book of the damned’s location might become less confidential if she declines to help him. Cas suggests they have bigger things to worry about and should be making better use of their time, but he’s never had my sense of humour. Charlie thinks it’s hilarious and, while she refuses to pick sides, she asks if she can come watch the chaos.
This is when things get out of hand. Specifically, out of their hands and into mine.
Up til this point, I really haven’t done anything except watch. It’s not my fault that people tend to act the scoundrel more when I’m around, whether they know I’m there or not. You can’t think worse of me for that natural charisma. And it’s just so easy to make a mess of magic, you can’t think worse of me for that, either.
Dean gets a lost & found charm that’s supposed to make it so one of Sam’s Blundstone’s is always missing. It only takes a slight change of wording, easily blamed on Dean’s horrible penmanship, and suddenly every left shoe, boot and slipper in Lebanon winds up in the woods about a quarter mile behind the bunker.
Sam works a poppet spell, against Rowena’s advice she’ll have me add, to make it so Dean hears nothing but Taylor Swift for forty-eight hours. This succeeds, in a literal sense, but only because it surrounds Dean with an aural field that broadcasts Swift’s full catalog, non-stop, on loop for everyone to hear. All that takes is a little switcheroo, swapping the fabric he uses to a wool-poly blend instead of the real deal. It’s the plastics, the synthetic, that’s the devilish detail, but that’s really besides the point.
“I told you, Samuel, this is delicate spellcraft. Not for the uninitiated” He barely hears her over Dean’s cacaphonic aura, which seems to get louder the more irritated he gets. “And, beyond your woeful inexperience, I suspect you’ve amassed no shortage of confounding magical energies, between yourselves and the Men of Letters before you.”
Whether she can sense my influence at work or not, she isn’t wrong. The warning is lost on Sam, though. He can’t hear anything, his phone cutting to static as Dean gets in his face trying to yell at him. His point gets across, even if his pithy tirade is lost in the din of pop singles.
They both get texts from a Delaware Planned Parenthood, telling them a sexual partner has tested positive for an STI. Neither of them mention it, but they do run into each other at the Lebanon Walk-In Clinic later that week. They get an unhinged voicemail later that night, barely coherent through hysterical laughter. “Gotcha, bitches!”
Charlie’s prank is, by far, my personal favourite.
“Goddamnit, Charlie.” They have her on speaker phone, Dean is practically steaming. “You said you weren’t getting involved.”
“No, I said I wasn’t picking sides. And I haven’t.” She snickers, they hear a few rapid clicks on her keyboard. “I’ve got your results here, by the way. Sam, you’re clean, but Dean.” She tsks. “Oh, Dean.”
“Not picking sides.” He bites. “What the hell do you call this, then?”
“A public service. From what I can see here, neither of you get tested half as often as you should.” Sam can hear the smile on Charlie’s face, Dean can, too. She’s infectious in that way, for better and worse. “Don’t worry, I’m just messing with ya. You’re clean too.”
“Should we be concerned that you’re accessing our medical records?” Sam asks, as if the possibility Charlie has thoroughly snooped them is occurring to him for the very first time.
“Probably, but I use my powers for good.” She hits them with that audible grin again, he can see her cheeks scrunching up around it in his head. “Never forget, I have the internet at my disposal. I’ll take that over magic or demon deals every time. ”
Dean actually laughs, a genuine honest to god Dean Winchester laugh, and Charlie and Sam share a look, spiritually, since they’re not in the same room. He and levity have been strangers for far too long, a treacherous and miserable effect of bearing Cain’s Mark. Besides all the rage, not to mention the murder, you become one hell of a buzzkill.
Something about Charlie dunking on both of them eases their one-upmanship, and the bunker settles again. Dean is still dour, skulking about trying to hide from the venom that is slowly consuming him, and Sam is still secretly conspiring with gingers to relieve his brother’s burden. Despite all this, things seem a little lighter. For a while.
So, here we are back at the beginning, coming to the end, and you can see now that it really isn’t what you think.
It’s definitely not what it looks like.
Because it looks like I’m poking the bear for no good reason, stirring a pot that was already plenty stirred and settled. It looks that way.
A Trickster by any other name, right?
Honest to Dad, though, I set this one up just after Delaware, even did it the old fashioned way. A little Rain-X, a touch of artistic flair, a moment unseen with that ridiculous car. All it needed was precipitation, but that didn't show for weeks.
Now here we are, on snowy afternoon milk run into town, the sort of tedious errand Dad created for Tuesdays. I get bored, being dead and all, have to make my own fun. Sometimes that means a covert ride along with the Dysfunction Brothers.
Sam is standing by the car, laughing so hard tears start to prick at his eyes. He’d be doubled over, save for the bag of groceries he’s holding on to for dear life. A menagerie of dicks adorn the front and rear windshields of the Impala, like ancient relief sculptures etched into the frosted glass. It’s a work of art, if I do say so myself.
“Sonovabitch!” Dean glares at Sam, circling the car a few times, taking it all in. He pulls his sleeve down over his hand and starts clearing the snow off the windshield. “You really wanna start this up again?”
“I didn’t do this, Dean.” Sam is still trying to contain himself, swapping the paper bag in his hands for the snowbrush lying on the floor of the back seat. “I don’t even know how to do this.”
“That I believe.” Dean grumbles, shaking himself off. There’s still the shadow of my handiwork clinging to the glass, it won’t fully clear until the dashboard heat melts the frost that clings beneath the snow.
“You gotta admit.” The whole car sinks under Sam’s weight as he drops into the passenger seat. “It is pretty funny.”
Dean shakes his head, scoffing at first. He can’t help it. It grows into another real human laugh and even I can feel a relief from the weight of Cain on him.
Maybe this is the point, my final summation. The reason for this whole dog and pony show. That these chuckleheads shouldn’t be trying to fight primordial evils with darker, older, scarier ones. I know, I’m just one dead Archangel, and not even one of the most powerful ones, but I was there at the beginning. Good humour goes back as far as creation, a light just as powerful as the dark.
What is it Mark Twain said? “The human race has only one really effective weapon and that is laughter.” That’s gotta count for something, right?
That, and dick jokes are always, always funny.