Title: The Winchester Brothers Meet Another Urban Legend (or, What Little Brothers Do)
Author: randomstasis
Disclaimer: Nothing’s mine-not the boys, the gnome or the car they rode in on.
Rating: G
Genre: gen
Characters/Pairings: Sam, Dean, OC
Warnings: None at all
Summary: (Somehow, Sam convinced Dean that he really hates the prank wars. That kinda doesn’t suck.)
AN: for the second and third pics up at spnwriterloungepic prompt challenge- (not really, the rainbow, earnest!SamnDean and Dean's pixilated finger pics really prompted it:)

( to the fic )

Subject Line:The Miners Rest part 3/? rated R- Sam and Dean, OCs, gen

Title: The Miners Rest
Rating: rated R- for language, innuendo, and the Brothers Grimm.
Pairing/Characters: Sam and Dean, OCs Possible Sam or Dean/OC later
Disclaimer I don’t own them, I’m just wishing in one hand.
Summary The brothers investigate weird happenings in a western ghost town. Dean inadvertently reads naughty stories, Sam is embarrassed.
Notes This began as a one-shot response to a prompt about one of the brothers reading a fairy tale to a kid, then it ate my NaNo. Now it wants to be much longer, probably darker. Not beta’d, although it probably should be, since NaNo brings wordiness and rambling in its wake. (Concrit would be greeted with joy, rewarded with cookies)
( part 3 here )

Subject Line:The Miners Rest part 2/? rated R- Sam and Dean, OCs, gen

Title: The Miners Rest
Rating: rated R- for language, innuendo, and the Brothers Grimm.
Pairing/Characters: Sam and Dean, OCs Possible Sam or Dean/OC later
Disclaimer I don’t own them, I’m just wishing in one hand.
Summary The brothers investigate weird happenings in a western ghost town. Dean inadvertently reads naughty stories, Sam is embarrassed.
Notes This began as a one-shot response to a prompt about one of the brothers reading a fairy tale to a kid, then it ate my NaNo. Now it wants to be much longer, probably darker. Not beta’d, although it probably should be, since NaNo brings wordiness and rambling in its wake. (Concrit would be greeted with joy, rewarded with cookies:)
( story here )

Subject Line:The Miners Rest part 1/? rated R- Sam and Dean, OCs, gen

Title: The Miners Rest
Rating: rated R- for language, innuendo, and the Brothers Grimm.
Pairing/Characters: Sam and Dean, OCs Possible Sam or Dean/OC later
Disclaimer I don’t own them, I’m just wishing in one hand.

Summary The brothers investigate weird happenings in a western ghost town. Dean inadvertently reads naughty stories, Sam is embarrassed.
Notes This began as a one-shot response to a prompt about one of the brothers reading a fairy tale to a kid, then it ate my NaNo. Now it wants to be much longer, probably darker. Not beta’d, although it probably should be, since NaNo brings wordiness and rambling in its wake. (Concrit would be greeted with joy, rewarded with cookies:)
( story here )

Sloth

Down in the basement, a TV blared. Bad dialogue, with long, loud intervals praising the merits of drugs, detergents and hygiene products. Passions again.
Yesterday cartoons and reruns, last night ESPN, then WWE, then Skinamax and action movies and in the early morning, infomercials. Little Tubby Boy bouncing up and down, showing what aerobics could do for YOU.
Not. At least, not for Spike and not for Xander.

Glumly, Dawn and Buffy stirred the undissolved sugar in their tea, trying to ignore the sounds..

The doorbell rang. No-one answered it. It rang gain. Willow trotted down the stairs, stopped and looked uriously at the sisters in the kitchen. Neither made any move toward the door.
Willow grinned wearily. “You’re not going to answer that?”
Buffy snorted and took another gulp of her iced tea.
“As if.” The doorbell rang again. Willow pulled a glass out of the cabinet, dumped in ice cubes from the freezer and joined the sisters at the kitchen counter.

“So” she said brightly, reaching for the pitcher of tea.
“You think they can hear that?”
Dawn rolled her eyes.
“Duh, vampire hearing.”
And, duh, Xander’s built in junk food locating device.” Buffy added.
Willow raised her voice slightly to compete with the desperate groans and calls for help drifting up the stairs accompanied by a full choir caroling about whiter whites.

“You think that’ll do it?”
Buffy shrugged. “Well, ONE of them had to come upstairs to call in the order.”
Willow stared at her in consternation. A blush slowly climbed her neck, right to the roots of her hair.

“What?” Dawn said sharply. “Willow, you didn’t..”
No! “ Willow said frantically, looking guilty.
Buffy said sternly. “Wills, you know they have to fight the transformation for themselves. They have to want to be human.”

“No, really I didn’t. Totally not fighting any
“be as you are”curses on our friends in the basement, Missy. Cuz, that would be.. Bad. So I’m.. Not.. Not doing anything at all about it.
Not magically. Or..you know, physically.”
She glanced pointedly at Buffy’s top, white eyelet lace, low-cut, with several buttons left undone.

Buffy held up a warding hand.
“Hey! What they don’t see can’t interfere, right? Besides,” she smirked, “ it’s hot.”
“It’s not that hot,” Dawn disagreed.
Smugly, Buffy tugged the non-existent collar lower..
“Yes, it is. I quote “Hot enough to make a dead man walk” unquote.”
“Eeuw.”
“And apparently, not working,” Willow added with a smirk of her own.
“Well, they can’t SEE it,” Buffy grumped. “It would work if they could!”

The doorbell rang again. Something thumped hard against the door. A muffled voice called out in despair. They clearly heard “extra sauce” followed by words that sounded suspiciously like “pizza” or maybe “wings”.

In the basement the chorus of groans momentarily drowned out furious accusations of “Homewrecking slut!” on the television.
Buffy glared at Willow, “ And anyway, so not the point here, Wills, what did you do? Who ordered delivery?”
“Nobody” Willow squirmed under identical stares of disbelief.
“Except, you know, I might have..”
“Might have what?” Two Summers women armed with ice cubes are more intimidating than one, Willow noted, cringing.
“LentXandermycellphoneyesterday!” she squeaked.
“He said, he..he had to call about a job. I thought it was a good sign.”
Dawn dropped her head to the counter in despair.
“Oh, Willow.”

Outside the thumping stopped. Dawn looked up again, cautiously hopeful.
Footsteps retreated down the walk.
“Talk about dodging a bullet” Willow muttered. All three girls exchanged relieved looks.
They all waited for the slam of the delivery car door.
Nothing. Dawn leaned perilously far on her stool to peer out the window.
“He’s not getting in the car. He’s got.. Like a radio thingy. He’s just waiting.”
They exchanged puzzled, nervous glances.
Then,the Slayer's ears caught faint, familiar strains of music. She looked hard at the basement door.
Willow, did you put the Mighty Mouse theme song on your cell phone ?
“Uh, yes?” The footsteps came back up the walk, and continued around the house.
“N-no,”Buffy breathed. “He wouldn’t dare.”

All three heard the basement window shatter. Several small thuds followed.
The girls stared at each other in uneasy surmise, until a thick, nearly unintelligible voice drifted up the stairs, counterpoint to passionately insincere avowals of fidelity.
“Bloody hell” “Oi! The sauce- Whelp, can y’reach the sauce? ‘Spouring all over the carpet, wasted like.”
Another barely recognizable voice grunted a negative.
“Let’s hear it for the determined demonic delivery boys of Sunnydale.” Dawn sighed.
Buffy groaned, as the first voice said philosophically,
..” not like it matters. ‘Ere! Don’t stretch yerself mate, you’ll drop the..”
another thud,
“ Dammit, I can get it” and another thump.
Two voices groaned horribly.
“Now what will we do? One asked plaintively.
“Who cares, mate, it’s already on Passions, innit? What’d we need ta change channels for?”
Willow perked up and Dawn’s eyes lit hopefully until the other voice sighed.
“I..s’pose...” They drooped again.
After a long, hopeless silence, broken only by the
soft clink of melting ice cubes, Buffy growled and leapt up. Her chair hit the wall. A trickle of plaster from the ceiling falling into their drinks, startled Willow and Dawn out of their misery.

“I. Have. Had. Enough.” Buffy glared at her sister and her best friend, daring them to stop her.
“They will get up on their own two feet. They will beat this curse. And they will Clean. That. Rug.”

With the grim determination that fired a rocket launcher at Sunnydale’s Ascending Mayor, the Slayer flung the freezer door open, yanked out a bag of ice and stomped toward the basement.
Putting on her best Resolve Face, the Witch levitated the sweating pitcher of cold tea and marched after her.
The Key shrugged. With a wicked grin she grabbed two icy bottles from the fridge and followed Witch and Slayer down into the darkness, shaking the beer furiously as she went.

She ran into Willow at the bottom of the stairs,
knocking her into Buffy so hard the ice fell from her numbed hands onto the empty couch. Neither said a word.
Dawn’s apology died on her lips as she followed their shocked stares up, to the pipes that ran like a Sunnydale City planner’s blueprint all over the ceiling.

“Oh, no.” Buffy breathed, tears slipping down her face.
“It’s too late.”

Two shapeless furry bodies hung above them, four sets of paws clung to the pipes.
Still fixed on the flickering television screen, one pair of golden eyes glowed in a comical white mask, and one pair of sad brown eyes peered through shaggy dark fur.

Dawn whimpered.
Two long tails dangled down, inches above the remote and cell phone that lay in the center of the floor, near a spreading pool of greasy sauce.
One still strained lazily toward the remote just out of reach.
The other long tail waved at them, dipped languorously into Willow’s floating pitcher and drifted, dripping, up into the tiny mouth under those familiar yellow eyes.
A soft slurp, followed by a spitting sound startled them all.

“B’dy Hhh..ll.Red, “The rough voice slurred. “s’not bl..d. s’Tea!”
One brown eye, glinting red in the light from the stairs, rolled hopefully toward the pitcher.

“T..?” the deep voice chirped hopefully. “Sweet?”

The dark tail abandoned its desultory quest for the unreachable remote, wavering at the pitcher instead as Willow shuddered.
The yellow eyes fixed firmly on the two bottles still in Dawns hands, and a pale tail yearned past the slayer, falling short.
“C’mere, B..t. Cl..s.r.”

Shaking her head in denial, Dawn backed away. Buffy was right. They were too late.
The transformation was complete.

All Souls

All the goddamned souls.

Babbling.
They know him, know he’s a hunter. They know he can see. They cluster around him, so thick he can't see anything else. He can hear them.
Babbling.

Hedidithediditcouldn’tlivewithouthimgoddambitchjust
happenedshouldnabeenjustanaccidentiswearididn’tmean
tohelphelphelpme...

Damned souls.

He tries to push through them, but they cling, cold and tenacious.

He shivers. He tries to bat them away.

He can’t see.
He can’t see the streetlights, or the headlights. Can’t see the candles flickering in glass votives, glowing behind empty eye holes and jagged vegetable teeth.

He sees faces and pale corpselights and their voices are an endless rushing in his ears.

HelpmepleaseIcan’tgohomecan’tevergohome...

Every stone is a luminario glowing blue as the skin on a dead man’s face, a pale sickly light that detaches itself and attaches itself to him.

The cold light goes where he goes. They all go where he goes. They’re in his eyes and he can’t see anything but ghosts.

He can’t see the path or the flashlight his brother carried before they came. They’re so cold. He’s so cold.
He can see the ghosts and feel them whirling around him. It’s a cold wind that doesn’t even lift his hair but it sucks his breath away and it’s so cold. He shivers and they laugh and scream at him.

can'tgohomeIcan’tgohomenotyettoosooncan’tmakemewon’tletyoumakeme...

His foot catches on a stone set too low and he can’t stop himself. He’s falling into the cold light, blue flashes behind his eyes and the earth is cold and musty smelling and yielding under his hands. He can’t move, he can’t stand up.
He pushes and it gives. He pushes and the ghosts push back.

Don’tgowon’tgostayherestaydownstay....

There’s a stone by his hand, an upright stone and it’s glowing like the others, too cold to touch, but he grabs it because he needs its help. He has to get upright too, so he pulls on it and pushes against the yielding grave. The light leeches onto him, rushes down his arm, stealing his strength. He can hear it in his bones.

Won’tgodon’tgostaystaystay...

But he’s getting there. Getting up, standing. He’s going. “Stay down!”
He shakes his head and tries to stand.

“Goddammit, stay down!” And it isn’t a cold voice, it’s hot with rage so he stays down while the light cracks apart with a roar and a scream, a thousand screams, and the ghosts are gone.
He’s shivering, but it’s because the mud is cold, October cold and the ghosts have taken all his warmth.
He hears the salt pattering down all around him, on him, and it’s warm as spring rain.
His brother’s hand is on him, and that’s warm, and the light is yellow and familiar and safe.

“Goddammit, can’t you stay with me? Can’t leave you alone for a minute, you gotta run off and play with your little friends while I’m busting ass?”
And that’s warm too, warm honey in his ears..

There’s warm hands pulling at him, pulling him up. He sees a solid dark bulk against the pyre in the grave behind him and saying “Come on” so he does that.
He stands, and he’s leaning against that solid bulk warm all down his side still trying to breathe and he can still hear the voice, anger and humor warm over cold fear.

“Dude, if you wanted a costume you coulda said, you know.”
A warm huff of breath in his ear.

“ Jeez. We coulda wrapped you in a sheet like normal people do, but no, freak boy has to wrap himself in real ghosts for Halloween.”
He puts a hand on his brothers chest and looks around. He sees the cold lights, and hears the whispers.

Stayherestaystaystay...

He wants to stay there, warm and solid with a fire behind them but he knows he can’t. He pushes at his brother with shaking hands.

“Dude, shut up already. I’m ok. Just..gimme the salt.”

“Oh, you’re carrying more than the salt, princess.”

The strap of the duffel bag hits his shoulder, weighing him down, heavy and solid and real.
He smiles. He’s still got a hand free for the bag of salt.
He hears his brother gathering up the tools, clanking, and knows he’s behind him with shotgun and shovel.

He looks around again.
Every tombstone is glowing with pale corpselight, ghostly luminarios scattered everywhere, whispers flying on the wind and no clear path.

He digs into the bag and throws a fistful of salt, back the way they came, out into the lights and angry pleading voices. It patters down white and clear and cold, in the sudden silence.
He takes a step, throws another handful out on the path they have to walk.
“Let’s go.”

He can hear his brother’s solid footsteps crunching behind him as he goes, throwing salt like flowers into the dark.

Well, we have had the traditional pre halloween snowfall..causing some
amusement at the school, as students dragged in late and wild-eyed with
hair-raising stories of their first attempts to drive on ice. I particularly
liked;

"i couldn't stop, but everybody else saw me coming very fast and stopped so
there was no accident. I was surprised. (duh, that's what the defensive
driving video was about, bud!)
"My brakes didn't work so I put on the handbrake and the car turned around
twice in the middle of Grand avenue (ditto for the winter driving video,
bud!)
and number 1 in the "oh that's funny but you're still in trouble"
sweepstakes.."I couldn't come to class yesterday because there was so much
snow on my car I couln't see to drive.." (A nice policeman showed him how to
brush the snow off the windshield and advised him to go buy his own brush.)
We didn't show a video on that one but I DID do an impromptu demo in the
parking lot at break one day...and loaned out my brush so everyone could
try brushing and scraping a light skiff off their own windshields..
I didn't have to demonstrate snowballs..they figured that out on
their own. Now if I could just convince them that chunks of ice should be
left out of play...

wishing I knew of a website where a mandarin speaker can practice English pronuciation? the poor guy in the next office is currently working with Americans over the counter, and having some trouble with people who can't listen well!