Black Regalia

WoW 03

2009-11-30T04:36:00Z

These are random funny events I've capped.

WHAT A LOVELY PICNIC, MR. BUMBLES

Viking women don't NEED airplanes.

Grobbulus and me, the good years.

Okay, I HONESTLY have no idea what was going on here. I was running through Stormwind when I noticed some people RPing. Then I noticed it involved the following: a night elf in a boat, a waterwalking human, two naked humans, and a rogue with a flying goblin on a bridge. Your quess is as good as mine.

For the non-WoWers... You can have vanity pets, which are these little creatures that will follow you around and be cute. If one person has a skunk out, and another person lets out a black cat, the skunk will chase the cat around, ala Pepe le Pew.

...and then inevitably get his heart broken.

Similarly, if you have two bunnies out, they will, er...make sweet bunny love, and produce bunny eggs.

Apparently no one at Blizzard though someone playing a night elf might hearth while sitting down.

Don't look back.

Fun times in Un'goro.

I was just out there, doing my dailies, and then...Arthas was there. And he was...fighting nothing. Seriously. He was running around, outside Icecrown Citadel, fighting thin air, like a stark raving loony.

MOON BEAR KNOW HOW TO JOUST

Stormwind's happy to see you!

Happy to see you with DEAD HUMANS.

I normally don't like to point out other player's names, but...holy crap, man.

Ring around the zombies, a pocket full of...zombies.

How little baby Gryphons are made.

RUN. THEY'VE LEARNED HOW TO RIDE HORSES.

Gobble gobble, motherfuckers.

Frogs fucking LOVE me, man. You have no idea.

NOT RIGHT

Close up of NOT RIGHT

I think my favorite thing about this picture is the Blood Elf DK behind them, who appears to be staring upwards in horror.

You can see I ALMOST missed this canon, in-game lesbianism.

WoW 02

2009-11-30T03:56:19Z

I'm sure a lot of folks remember the Doodad door. I miss it dearly :( *moment of silence*

I'm fairly certain that that isn't how it's supposed to be.

TRAUMA

I regret nothing.

Things I often wonder about my friends.

This is why my guild is awesome. You'd have to have seen the 'Canada Strike' episode of South Park to get the joke.

It's going to be a June wedding.

For those that don't play WoW... Druid's can turn into bears, which basically mimic the Warrior class. They have a "rage bar", which they need to fill to use special attacks. To build rage, they need to get hit, and, in turn, hit others. Sometimes a bear just doesn't get hit enough to get mad. Thus, we meet Anger Management Bear.

It is pretty good...

----

Here's my impressive collection of fucked up faces in the wonderful World of Warcraft...

WoW Image post

2009-11-30T03:39:30Z

So, I have been leveling with kiniro of late, and she, being a great lover of screenshots, has been asking me to upload my screenshot collection.

I'd kind of been wanting to do this anyways, as I'm rather proud of my collection, and I also wanted to sell more people on playing WoW with me, and I think the Wrath of the Lich King expansion is so goddamned fun and gorgeous, I think it's a great selling point.

I will be posting my screenshots in several posts, so I apologize in advance for the flist spam. Feel free to skip, but I encourage you to take a peak, even if you're not a WoW player!

WARNING: these posts are not for the faint of connection. There are a lot of images below the cuts, so if you're still on dial up, be prepared for a significant wait time.

______________

Character shots are usually just me goofing around and trying to get shots of my characters looking pretty, or doing something cool. Text desciptions of the caps are below each pic.

Roommate and I playing our Druid and Shaman, respectively. We look pretty fucking cool.

This is Dzi. She's my main. A Discipline Priest(Wooooo!). I also think Icecrown's really fucking cool looking so.

PENGUINS

I does a little dance.

Upsidedownterbird

I still think the parachutes are cool D: Shut up

A brisk evening jog off a mountain. Also, this was apparently back when I was sporting the Primal Mooncloth look.

I took this shot for two reasons: #1. I freaking love how Talbuks run. #2. HOWLING FJORD(more on this later)

Here's Lys doin' a fire dance. Lys is my tanky warrior. On a scale of 1 to 10, she's totally a lesbian.

Penthe wasn't the first character I rolled(that honor goes to my decommissioned human rogue), but she was the first character I leveled up. She sits at 80 now, and has a sordid RP past. Here she is, rockin' the Fire Festival look.

Explorin' places in Undercity.

Rockin' her new hair-do.

And then TURN INTO A BIRD AND FLY AWAY.

Up to no good.

Makin' seals make sweet sweet seal love.

Upsidedownterbird explores Icecrown.

It's possible that only one person on my flist will get this joke.

BEWARE: DANCING BEARS

We totally have your back.

It's our chair now, bitches. Also, that's Ash again, over on the far right. No idea what he's doing.

I'm doing a dance. Jos is, apparently, thinking happy thoughts. You can even see the pixie dust on her twinkling Pallie body.

Little did Illidan know that we weren't there to just take a nice photograph...

JAINA SMASH. No, seriously -- why the fuck is she so large in this raid? 0_o

Here's where you'll think I've gone insane. One of my favorite things to do is to cast Levitate on myself then take pictures of myself LOOKING COOL.

But really. LOOK HOW COOL I LOOK.

AND HERE

AND HE-- Oh wait. That's Lins.

AND HERE

This is possibly one of my favorite quests in the game. You get to surf. On a flaming harpoon. Here's Dzi doing it.

...And Lys

And Penthe!

I do, in fact, have about a ho-zillion more characters than that, but apparently they didn't do anything cool enough to warrant a screenshot.

Doom and Hooters Night

2009-07-17T10:08:14Z

ATTN: zed_pm , musical_junkie ,jadro , mllesays , sociologies , bourbonnapoleon staraflur, and any other Atlanta area folks.

Doom and Hooters Night at my place, y/y? staraflur is going to be gone for two and half weeks after this weekend, so I am thinking this Saturday afternoon/evening? Please leave comments with thoughts and whatnot :)

I will also send PMs to y'all, just to make sure no one misses this.

black_regalia @ 2009-07-14T17:54:00

2009-07-14T21:55:54Z

Gah, halp.

Where's the post for the Harry Potter ontd_st meetup? I swear there was one. Or I'm crazy.

Halp :( and soon, if you can, I'm trying to decide if I'm going to a midnight showing tonight or not.

Kitties!

2009-06-25T22:41:24Z

The kitties we took in are now old enough to be adopted out. I would really love them to go to people I know, or people who people I know trust. If I can't find people to take them, I will have to take them down to the Humane Society to adopt out.

So! Looking for people in Atlanta or the Atlanta area. I'm even willing to drive out and meet someone half way if they live in the surrounding states(except Florida, as that is a five hour drive). All I ask is that their new owners will get them spayed and neutered and that they won't ever de-claw them.

First we have Moppet, who is the biggest of the kittens. He is a long hair -- all poof and fluff and very cute. He, like his siblings, is a brown tabby, and has a white underbelly. He used to be very shy, but has recently come out of his shell. He is playful, social and loves to be pet. He makes sweet little squeaky growls when he plays with a feather teaser.

Tom Kitten is the other little boy. He is a short hair, and unlike his siblings, he has no white on him. He was always the most out going of the litter, so if you're looking for a very playful, active kitty, this is your guy.

Mittens is the little girl. She is a long hair, and marked very much the same as Moppet. She's my shy violet, and will require a home where people are gentle and patient and willing to let her come out of her shell.

This is kind of a long shot, but we also have their mom. Tabitha, or Mama Feral as we call her is a full feral. I expect to have her spayed, and then just release her, but if anyone out there has feral experience and want a very sweet young lady, I'll offer her up as well. Despite being full feral, she has never once clawed, swiped or bitten at me. She will hiss and growl when you reach for her, but she will let you pet her(though she is very uncomfortable with the whole thing). I have worked with her for a year and a half, and she is now socialized enough that she will happily be in rooms with humans, but just doesn't want them to come over to her. If you, or anyone you know, has feral experience and wants a feral cat(feral kitties can be very affectionate! Especially with the human who works with them to socialize them), she is also up for adoption.

Please do direct anyone near Atlanta to contact me. I'd love to give these kitties away to people I can meet face-to-face.

Internet Rant

2009-05-03T22:05:42Z

Fucking Bellsouth.

I haven't updated much, calicokat has, but if you don't know, she, Roommate and I have gotten a house together. We're prepping for moving, so, you know, we need the internet.

To live.

So I decide that today's the day I'm going to call Bellsouth and set up the DSL. I go to their webpage to look up their number, and click on 'Contact us'. It asks for really unnecessary info, like if I'm a residence or a business, and what zip code I am. And yeah, it is unnecessary. All I need is a big list of contact numbers, and then I'll PICK the residential line.

Anyways, I give them the info, then I get the screen I capped above, minus my colorful additions.

What? WHAT?! It's a fucking telecom site! They're a telecommunications company. And their website won't work? WHAT?

Bellsouth. You are not a Mom and Pop kitten selling opperation. You are a big ass telecom company. Why the fuck do you think people will buy your product if you can't build a fucking website?

And here's the thing. I bet most modern people think this is reasonable. Fucked up telecom companies have convinced the public that THIS is how the internet works. That you design your site to work on a limited number of browsers/OSes/settings because, you know, it's IMPOSSIBLE to design a site for everyone! And besides, it needs to be pretty, so, obviously, that's the priority.

I'm here to tell you: No.

That's not how the internet works. You can design a website that works on every single browser on every single OS on every single computer hooked up to the internet, regardless of settings or configuration. Wanna see it?

This is my webpage. Guess what?

THAT'S GODDAMNED RIGHT IT WORKS.

I'm sure this is what a lot of people would say, though:

"But..Mar! It's ugly!"

So fucking what? The web isn't here to look nice. It's the fucking web. It's databases, archives, and free information. I needed a list of numbers, so that I could call Bellsouth and give them money, and they wouldn't let me.

Yes, of course you want to make your webpage look nice. But that's an AFTERTHOUGHT. The first thing you do when building a webpage is make sure that it'll work on every browser and OS combo, and that it'll display REASONABLY for them. I'm looking at you, webpage that inexplicably takes up 100 pixels on my 1280x1024 monitor. Webpages should SCALE gracefully. That means that they're viewable on a 800x600 resolution, but scale up and look just as good on a 1280x1024.

And yes, that's completely possible to do. In fact, that is what it means to be a webpage designer.

Oh, and also? It should degrade gracefully. Say you use javascript on your webpage. What if someone who has javascript turned off comes to your webpage? Conventional webpage designers will stare at you blankly when you say this, because omg! Why would anyone ever turn off javascript.

NEWSFLASH: People do.

And if they do, they should still be able to view your webpage. What if they have images turned off? Still! They should be able to view your webpage. That means you test your code in every possible way. Make sure that every possible use-case is covered.

Again, the modern convention these days is that this method is completely unreasonable. That testing your webpage and making sure it works for everyone is not only impossible, but doesn't make any sense. Let me make an analogy.

If someone made a car that was beautiful, inside and out, that felt nice to sit in, and made people cry with joy when they looked upon it -- but wouldn't turn on if it was raining, had one tire that couldn't be screwed on and perpetually fell off, and lacked a steering wheel, would you buy it?

Of course not.

And cars go through rigorous testing on how they handle, weather conditions, and what should happen if the driver messes up. The automobile designer has to account for a huge variety of use cases, and has to account for people who will use the car completely incorrectly. And then, at the end, when all those things are accounted for? Then someone designs and puts on the pretty outside. But only once the machine is known to be fully functional.

That should be the web. The pretty stuff should be an afterthought. Something nice you lay over the well polished, well written code. If your webpage won't load in Opera? I'm gone. If your webpage takes more than 30 seconds to load? I'm gone. If your webpage uses flash? Not only am I gone, it won't even load.

I have javascript turned on just because it's so ubiquitous at this point it's impossible to navigate the web without it. But just so we're on good terms- If your webpage uses javascript? I hate you a lot. Yes you, Bellsouth.

And that's the worst bit. They're a telecom company. It's just embarrassing that they can't even make a functional website.

What's even more ridiculous is that their site won't even LET Opera try to load the page. Opera is a fucking badass of a browser. They say their code is so complex that only HIGH END browsers will load it. What they mean is the latest versions of IE and Netscape(seriously, DOES anyone use that anymore?). But I have the latest version of Opera. In all likelihood, Opera could load the page. But since the code doesn't even recognize Opera as a browser, it assumes that I have an outdated browser, and rather than letting me at least look at their broken code, it locks me out, so that I have no access to any information whatsoever. HOW IS THAT GOOD?

AUGH. I hate all webdesigners. I HATES THEM. We should just light them all on fire, using their own pretentious gases as accelerant.

I hate that I went to school for this shit.

SPN

2009-04-02T23:32:04Z

I think I'm not going to enjoy tonight's ep...

I think that fandom is going to the butt of a lot of the jokes. My prediction is going to be at least one line where one of them says something like "Man, the fans are so crazy!", and maybe one scene where they encounter a delusional or creepily obsessed female fan. Bonus points if she's fat/ugly.

I feel for the cast and crew of the show -- I do. They have to deal with some crazy ass motherfuckers. But you know what? At least 80% of fandom isn't like that.

I've never done anything crazycakes to them.

I've met one of the actors, once and only once, and the only thing I said was "That was a very good performance"(in reference to the play I'd just watched him in). I don't call the actors by their first names. I don't know the names of their dogs. I don't have creepy pictures of them and their families. I've never written them a postcard, a letter, or a scrapbook.

I watch their show, and yes, I write incest fanfic about the characters, but I have a healthy understanding of the difference between the characters on screen and the characters in my fic. If I want to write fictional fantasies about fictional characters, while having strong boundaries of what is real and what isn't, I don't think I need to be punished for it.

And I don't think I need to be punished because there are some people out there that can't draw those kinds of boundaries. I don't particularly want to watch an episode that's going to mock me for my support of their show. Just because some people are crazysauce doesn't mean we should all be stereotyped as crazy, desperate, scary women.

Now, I could be wrong. Maybe that won't be what the ep mocks. I'd be DELIGHTED to be wrong, and if I am, I'll happily eat my words! But I'm thinking that tonight is going to be a mockfest of a culture and subgroup that I've found and settled in as a home, and that's not going to be happy for me.

Flash embedded media is fail

2009-03-12T21:50:02Z

...but unfortunately it's my only option.

calicokat is here, and I found out she hadn't seen Mean Girls. Clearly this had to be rectified. Watching it, I pointed out the section that's my impersonation of Dean. For a couple of months now, I've been talking about how Dean is full of feelings, but I realized that maybe some folks might not be in on the meme.

So, now I present to you, a reasonable impersonation of Dean Winchester so far in Season 4:

He wants to bake a cake made out of rainbows and smiles and all eat it and be happy. He just has a lot of feelings.

Less QQ, more pewpew, noob.

RAGE

2008-12-02T16:35:58Z

I still have things to talk about in relation to NaNo, but first:

Record label refuses to promote Amanda Palmer.

Roadrunner Records is refusing to promote Amanda Palmer's album. Why? Because when they told her they wanted to cut scenes from her latest music video that show her having belly fat, she told them "No."

What is Roadrunner Records? It's supposed to be a metal label -- it's supposed to be counter-convention. But I guess that only applies to guys. God forbid WOMEN ever go against cultural training.

This thing sends me into a rage for pretty obvious reasons, but there's also the fact that it's Amanda Palmer. As in, the singer/pianist for The Dresden Dolls, aka The Best Band Since EVER. She's the most original singer/songwriter today, and, indeed, one of the very few who actually does BOTH. She's my hero, merrily raising her arms to show her unshaved pits, painting in her eyebrows and not caring if her make-up is smudged and smeered in a music video.

And hell! Look at the music video(in the first link). Tell me that isn't fabulous.

Also, tell me she's not sexy as all get out.

I mean, what the hell? I'd hit that in a skinny minute. Dressed in that open tux outfit, singing with that GORGEOUS alto/tenor -- she's a bonefide hotass! And they're worried about belly fat?

RAGE.

Please feel free to repost the link to the F-word article. I'd like as many people to know about this as possible.

---

Put this under a cut because it's largely unrelated.

It's mostly me just saying I love the Dresden Dolls. I first saw their Coin-Operated Boy video years ago, when I was in college. It was so amazing and unique that I made myself chant the name of the song in my head all day so that I wouldn't forget to go download it when I got home. Another music video from the same time is Girl Anachronism.

Since then, I've bought each album of theirs that has come out, and each one is filled with songs that I love. Until today, though, I didn't really bother to go look for move music videos by them. Turns out they've put out some for the Yes, Virginia... album! I found The Shores of California, which is my FAVORITE song from that album. The video is, of course, completely excellent, and features the guy from "Lemme borrow the top/Shoes" fame, and Margaret Cho.

Watching all the vids made me remember this one video they had on their site of a live performance where they got dressed and ready while on stage. This was from way back in the day, when they were still relatively unknown, and the audience is pretty small. The whole thing is HILARIOUS.

I Got You Babe/Hit Me Baby One More Time -- the video is really small, sorry about that. I tried to YouTube it, but there were only videos of some kid from a boy band performing with them, several years later, which make the whole thing a lot less ironic. The first four minutes feature Amanda Palmer and Brian Viglione singing 'I got you babe', while dressed up as Sonny and Cher. Now, I know they're singing it for awhile, but watch the whole thing, because when they're done with that, they both get dressed up as Britney Spears and sing 'Hit Me Baby One More Time', before getting into their full Dresden Dolls regalia.

That video always cracks me up, and makes me a little jealous. Their relationship is the kind of relationship that I wish I could have. Where's MY transvestite drummer boy? >> Want!

Anyways. Hopefully that spreads the Dresden Dolls love a little, and definitely spreads the rage about Roadrunner Records who can SUCK. MY HYPOTHETICAL. COCK.

NaNo 11/19 and Twilight review

2008-11-19T17:41:22Z

31,257 / 50,000
(62.5%)

I'm about 400 words behind schedule. It seems I've been playing catch up for the last couple weeks. I'll meet the word count one day, then slack off and do nothing the next day, then have to write 3k words the day after that. The good news, though, is that I'm not drowning. While I am behind, and I am having trouble getting myself to meet my quotas, being a few hundred words behind isn't too bad. I still have ten days to go, and 19k words doesn't seem that bad anymore, now that I've broken 30k.

One problem that I've been having is that I have a really, really developed plot for this story, and then I just have loose character notions for characters. I still feel like the characters I'm writing aren't really interesting or realized, 30 thousand words in. I know that's part of what I can fix in the editing stage, but it's still something that bugs me.

I think, however, I realized how to fix that yesterday: more characters. That might sound like madness, but the thing is, I had these four character concepts and they were just going to be my characters. For the whole story. Which is going to be the length of three books.

I realized, though, that you can't depend on just a handful of character to give a story life. Even in RPs, the ones where me and the other RPer are just RPing our two main characters have a lot less life, and we tend to run out of steam. It's the introduction of other characters, side characters from whatever show/comic/whatever we're RPing, or OCs, that make the RP into a world, one that's exciting to play in.

I now have some other character concepts, outside the main four, to add in later, and a lot of them I'm really excited to get to. I also added some secondary antagonists, to keep the story moving well as they journey their way to the primary antagonist. These other characters, which are broken up into other groups, are good distractions for when I don't know what to do with the mains.

Anyways...That's NaNo. In other news...

Now, you're probably thinking "Why would you go see that?" -- the answer is that Movie Critic had a screening. There's no way in hell I would have paid cash monies to see this pap. Having said that, it was HI-larious. Unintentionally, of course.

The evening started out with us arriving at the theatre, where there was a like 4-5 people thick line, going out the theatre and around corners. The mass was, of course, comprised of shrieking girls. Now, I always love walking straight passed a line and getting guided in by one of the people running the show, but it's even better when you're walking past a line of people who're desperate to get in, may very well cry when they're not be able to get in, and I don't even really care about the movie.

It feeds the gaping, soulless maw in the place where my heart should be.

In general, press screenings in the morning are usually for press only -- this means that the theatre is mostly empty, and the few people in it are movie critics and their friends/family; in other words no babies, no cell phones, no one talks; evening screenings have 4-5 rows reserved for press, and the rest of the theatre is filled up with the public. Usually movies that can stand on their own are shown in the morning, movies like 'Across the Universe' and 'Blindness', where the critic is expected to like the movie based on its own merits. They screen kids movies in the evening, because they know a lot of critics aren't going to like the movie themselves, but the studio hopes if they surround the critic with excited children, the critic will write a review that says "It's not for me, but the kids around me seemed to enjoy it, so your kids will too" -- in this case substitute "children" with "screaming women".

Unfortunately, as this was an evening screening, the people sponsoring the screening feel the need to "entertain" the crowd, by having various DJs talk and run contests for movie swag. Every few screenings, someone with actual talent gets handed the mic and this is fun. 9 times out of 10, though, it's some talentless, homogenized schmuck who opens his "performance" with the phrase "Yo yo yo" -- yes, that's right. He opens much like Santa would, but retarded.

The competition was bobbing for apples, which I gave them points for originality. After that, though, they decided to hand out T-Shirts to "whoever screams the most". And yes, my ears are still bleeding. If Paul McCartney and John Lennon had walked in to the room right then, I wouldn't have been surprised. I'm not even kidding when I say that some of these fans were on the verge of pissing themselves with excitment at the prospect of a free t-shirt.

A free t-shirt! C'mon, kids. It's a t-shirt. You could probably get it at Hot Topic for like ten bucks. And even if you couldn't, it's a t-shirt, not the motherfucking Mona Lisa.

On to the movie itself...

It opens strong, with a laugh-out-loud worthy shot of a guy tackling a deer. A guy tackling a deer. It's like one step above cow-tipping.

It goes from there to the female lead, Bella, moving from Arizona to Washington, to live with her dad, who is probably the best character in the movie. The actor who plays him manages to hit the right comedic and dramatic beats, underplaying him perfectly to give the impression of a closed off but good man. He was probably the only character I felt legitimately bad for, the entire time.

Bella goes to her new school, which appears to be populated by monkies that have been shot up with pure cocaine. I'm not sure what the director was saying to the actors between takes, but I can only imagine that it was something along the lines of "No, you're still acting too human. Act like you have a gun to your head, and if you don't jump once every five seconds, someone's going to shoot you. That's good! Now, run off and climb that tree in the background. Theeeere you go."

Seriously, every shot her "friends" are in, they're acting like they just took mood altering medication. They're constantly, and physically, bouncing. They're all also creepily obsessed with Bella from the moment she steps on campus. Every five minutes a new character is being introduced, and each one wants to talk to Bella/take her picture/or just be around her always. The weirdness is heightened by their inability to stay still.

At this point we're introduced to the vampires, and the male lead vampire, Edward. As the character enters the scene, we're getting narration from one of Bella's new "friends", who describes Edward as incredibly handsome. Like, beyond belief handsome, giving the audience the idea that any sane woman would kill a man just to be with him.

It's curious to me, then, that for some reason they cast an actor that got beat with the ugly stick. Several times. Over many years.

What happened? Did Hollywood run out of young attractive males? Really?

His almost Neanderthal-ian head is made even worse by the most god awful hair-do I've ever seen on a human being. Honestly, if they'd styled his hair to look like Screech from Saved by the Bell it would have been more of a success. Looking like he stopped by 'Something About Mary' to jis up his hair, a la Cameron Diaz, the actor's hair stands some four inches above his head, doing some kind of insane wave thing.

At points in the movie it looks like a deadly tsunami, coming in to wipe out his face.

I will say, however, that despite his 'I just got hit with an 18-wheeler and had to have reconstructive surgery' appearance, the kid could act pretty well. That is, when he wasn't being fed lines from a dime-store romance.

There are a lot of scenes around this point with Edward and Bella being awkward teenagers at one another, and these scenes are actually quite successful. The movie manages to get the weird, uncomfortable-ness of high school, and we watch Edward vascilate between being friendly to Bella, then being a dickwad -- all with the feeling of a kid on the playground, who doesn't know how to deal with his feelings.

Bella, in return, is befuddled and confused most of the time, and poking and prodding him to find out what the hell is up.

The scenes are actually quite sweet, and they actually have the kids acting like kids, which is pretty refreshing.

Unfortunately, though, it can't last, as the vampire plot has to be introduced. Edward does that stopping-the-car thing from the trailer, in the fakest looking stunt car crash ever put to film(the driver of the van has to swerve to avoid a car pulling out of a parking space -- instead of both drivers slamming on the brakes, as I've always seen every time something like this happens, the van-driver decides to excelerate, steering his van right towards Bella!11!!!). From there we see Bella trying to figure out what Edward is.

She talks to her ~~werewolf~~ friend from her childhood, who tells her a story about his people having some conflict with some other-worldly creatures, several hundred years prior. Bella goes home and looks up a book on ~~werewolf's~~ her friend's tribe, and their legends. Instead of going to the first google result, she looks up a book on the subject, then selects what is basically "Local Native American Store" from the google list, and goes to a tiny Mom and Pop bookstore that wouldn't be listed in the first 5 results of Google if they had made a sacrifice to the gods of Google on the eve of Google-haim wearing Google inspired hats.

She picks up a book, gets harrassed by some hooligans, and gets saved by Edward. Again.

At this point Edward basically admits to stalking her. Instead of trying to slap a restraining order on him, Bella seems to think this is romantic -- as did the audience, apparently, as they all cooed at the screen while Movie Critic and I visibly shuddered.

Bella goes home and reads her book, and finds a picture of a mask, with the caption 'Mask of a Cold One'. She googles 'Cold one', and, presumably, has to skip several result pages of Budweiser, Michelob, and Miller Lite, along with blogs saying things like "Grab me a cold one!", finds out that Cold Ones are more than just beer, they're vampires!

Now, despite my mockery, up to this point the movie wasn't terrible. It was silly, sure, but between some pretty decent acting on the parts of the leads and nothing too over the top, the movie was salvageable.

The next scene, however, I was laughing so hard I almost peed myself.

Bella goes out into the forest to talk to Edward and tell him she knows he's a vampire. He asks if she's scared of him, and she says no. He responds, dramatically and full of woe, that she needs to see his true form first, and runs with her up a hill towards the sunlight.

At this point I was thinking 'I thought the Twilight vampires just sparkled in the sunlight? I guess there's something else that I didn't hear about. Maybe they have a horrible visage beneath their sparkly experior?' -- but no. He gets to the sunlight, rips open his shirt, and sparkles at Bella, and says, I shit you not "See! I'm a monster!", stopping just short of putting his hand dramatically over his face.

WTF? You're sparkling, dude. There are girls who get body glitter to do just that. Okay, admittedly, you're going to fit in better at the local gay bar than on the football team, but it's sparkles, not unspeakable psyche scaring twisted flesh and a malformed visage.

Maybe he was just talking about his face, I don't know.

Also, for some reason, his sparkles make sound. Maybe this is just a vampire thing, but when the sunlight hits him, he makes a "tinkletinkltinkle!" noise. Now, in my world, gems don't make noises when sunlight hits them, but who knows. Maybe vampire skin is just extra special.

The rest of the scene plays out just as silly, with both of them declaring their undying love and want for one another, while Edward leaps around the clearing for no particular reason. While the undying-love thing isn't that unexpected from Edward, who's been stalking her, Bella's feels like she just decided, right then, that it's Edward or nothing for her.

Fortunately, this scene ends and we move back into the two being awkward teenagers at one another, which is, again, executed pretty well.

Eventually Bella has to meet Edward's family, who live in, I kid you not, the world's most gorgeous house. I want that house. It's fuckdiculously pretty. Also, Edward's family is one of the better parts of the story. Having domestic vampires is actually pretty neat to watch, especially when the "mom" and "dad" have a Leave-It-To-Beaver kind of appearance.

I can't really remember what happens next, but at some point Edward takes Bella to come play a game of baseball with his family, who can, apparently, only play during a thunderstorm.

This statement is never explained.

To this very moment, I have no idea why they can only play baseball in a thunderstorm. Are vampires powered by electricity? Are they afraid that they'll sparkle so bright the world will end if they dare play on a non-thunder storm day? Or do they just think the thunderstorm makes them look more dramatic?

It's for me, and the non-Twilight reading audience to figure out for ourselves.

The bad guys of the piece show up, and there's a hilariously bad vamp show-down over Bella, with all the actors striking crazy, and honestly, stupid looking poses as they threaten each other. After that, the movie is mostly the bad-vamp chasing after Bella, with a lot of Edward swearing to protect her, care for her, and buckle her into cars, cause she can't do it herself.

The movie ends with them going to prom, with ~~werewolf~~ Bella's old friend showing up, and a rather unnecessary and heavy handed "I leave you along for two minutes and the wolves descend" comment from Edward. Seriously dude. I knew he was a werewolf like five minutes in, and I've never read the books. It wasn't foreshadowed. It was just fucking said.

On the whole, the movie is the perfect level of bad -- easy and fun to mock, but not so bad that it's just boring. I'm sure, however, that it'll have a huge box office take, and we'll have to go through several more films.

Oh, yeah...And the scene where Edward admits he broke into Bella's house and watched her sleep? The audience cooed. What the hell is wrong with those people?!

Apparently the apple thing comes from some scene where Bella drops an apple and Edward catches it? Seriously? That's why there's an apple on the book cover?

Also, for those of you who don't speak fluent Jojo, allow me to offer you a translation.

What Jojo says: I'll be around this week, definitely.
What Jojo means: I won't be around this week. At all.

Devilish Fangirls

2008-10-22T03:41:18Z

Okay, I have more to say about WinCon than just this, but...

Brothers on a Hotel Bed, But Really, from fic idol(you know, the one with the disembodied cock) was posted, and they posted it under a sock puppet and pretended like it was a serious fic, which ROCKS MY SOCKS.

I'm going to go make a fake journal and leave hideously simpering comments.

WHO'S WITH ME?

[Fic] "But Let Patience Have Her Perfect Work" (Supernatural; R)

2008-10-13T23:19:57Z

Title: But Let Patience Have Her Perfect Work
Author: black_regalia - all other fic here
Series: Supernatural
Pairings/Characters: Dean, Sam, Jessica Moore. Implied Dean/Sam/Jess, Dean/Sam
Rating: R - swearing and non-graphic incest
Warnings: None
Word Count: 21,261
Spoilers/Setting: Set about one month after 2x21(All Hell Breaks Loose, Part 2). Contains spoilers for the show up till that point. Does not include any season 3 canon.
Summary: During a routine hunt, Jess falls through into a world unfamiliar to her -- a world where she's dead, and the Sam and Dean she meets aren't her Sam and Dean.

A/N: This story is based in the Transmutation Verse, by mona1347 and poisontaster. The link there will take you to the line up of fics, from the original to all the other pieces set in it. If you haven't read this story, not only are you missing out on some of the best fics in this fandom, you also won't understand this fic at all.

Thanks: Huge thanks go to mona1347 and poisontaster for letting me play in their sandbox. I love love love this universe, and getting to write in it was crazy fun, even if I took a year to write it(srsly, I asked them for permission at last year's WinCon -- someone grant me the gift of being able to write faster). And, of course, to baileytc, who beta'd the whole thing. I am, as always, so very grateful.

But let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing.

The Book of James; Chapter 1, Verse 4

Part One | Part Two | Part Three

But Let Patience Have Her Perfect Work [Part 3]

2008-10-13T08:17:45Z

Title: But Let Patience Have Her Perfect Work [Part 3]
Word Count: 8,702 for this part

Master Post

Part One | Part Two | Part Three

----

Jess had been away from her world for almost a month, and for some reason, it was the moment she got her period that she decided she was fucked.

She looked at the blood on the tissue paper, sitting there on the toilet, and she started to cry. She felt like she’d cried more in this month than she had in the last two years. She’d thought she’d lost her whole life when she was burned, thought that was the biggest thing to ever happen to her – marred her face and body, changed who she was as a person, changed the world she lived in as she learned what was really out there.

It turned out that that was nothing when compared to having to face the idea of never being in her own world again. She could never speak to her parents again. Even if she didn’t anyway, at least the option had been there. She could never again speak to her little brother, who was starting college and had been calling her cell phone every time he got drunk or homesick or both. She’d never be with her boys again, her boys who loved her and needed her and would never see her again.

She wondered if they even knew what’d happened to her, or if she’d just disappeared from them, something they’d have to live with the rest of their lives. They didn’t deal well with guilt or loss. That thought just made her cry harder.

She threw the toilet paper in the bowl as she got up, flushing before moving to the sink to wash her hands. She splashed her face with water, but it didn’t stop her lips from stretching into a grimace as she just sobbed harder. It was probably the hormones. If nothing else, the hormones definitely weren’t helping. But it was also all the little things.

Things like the tampons that Dean always carried around that wouldn’t be there, because this Dean wasn’t used to having a girl who didn’t track her period with him. He wouldn’t magically materialize with a tampon and a bottle of aspirin and that big grin, offering to get her chocolate if she was good.

Sam wouldn’t know to get one of their heat packs from the trunk, the ones they used when they had stretched or sprained muscles. He wouldn’t put it on her tummy when she lay in bed with them, and he probably didn’t remember that her cramps were always the worst on the third day. They wouldn’t remember things like that her boobs got tender, and know not to tug on her nipples when they had sex (because a little blood on their cocks didn’t scare either of them).

Jess leaned over the sink, crying so hard she thought she would vomit.

She remembered being sixteen and told that she couldn’t go out with her friends that Thursday to the movies, and sobbing in her room like this, at how unfair it was--the world, her parents. She remembered watching Steel Magnolias for the first time and thinking, That is so deep. She remembered crying over Sam, when they’d been dating for four months, and realizing she was in love with a man who had no intentions of letting her in, who dodged all her questions with that awkward little smile that seemed cute before it became infuriating. She remembered waking up in the hospital and thinking that her life would never be the same.

She remembered all these things and how big they seemed at the time. How significant. How life-changing and gut-wrenching.

But it was nothing in the face of coming to accept that she’d lost her entire world--literally. She was never going home again, in the cruelest and most literal of ways. Everything she knew was gone, everything she loved was lost, and everything she’d ever wanted could never be obtained.

She almost wished that pregnancy test had come back positive. She would have been six months pregnant, and at least she knew she would have had something, one single piece of her boys that wasn’t left behind.

And it was worse then, when she realized she would grow old and begin to forget the differences – how her Sam looked in the morning, different from this Sam. How Dean couldn’t stop smiling stupidly when he was drunk, instead of scowling miserably. How Sam would finally give in to her poking him and read her a bedtime story, but translating it into Latin just to irritate her – instead of looking at her with too much significance to name and too much longing for her to ever fulfill.

“Ah—” she grunted, a noise of pain, leaning over the sink, sobbing open-mouthed now and gripping her midsection. It was the kind of crying where she couldn’t get enough breath, sucking it in but never able to get enough, like she was being hollowed out and couldn’t make up for all the volume lost. Her chest hurt, and her ribs hurt, and her lungs hurt, and her womb cramped with muscles contracting, and it was the most ridiculous thing to be upset about here, knowing she’d lost everything, to be crying over her fucking period.

It was two hours later that Sam burst into the hotel room with a book in his hands and told her that he knew how to send her home.

----

“It’s like…It’s the things we use, you know?” Sam said, moving around the room in a hurried fashion. He dug through his bag for something. Sam got like this sometimes, whenever he figured out he was on the right track. This Dean knew it, too, apparently, because he was watching his brother with the same expression that Jess could only imagine was on her own face.

“No, I don’t know, Sam.” Dean shifted his weight, crossing his arms over his chest as he waited for his brother to get with the explaining.

“Well, I mean, people long before us figured out how to kill these things. They figure out what it is, and then they pass down the mechanism, and by the time three thousand years have passed, all you have is things like ‘Vampires have to be decapitated’ and ‘Wendigos have to be burned.’”

“Yeah, so?” Dean raised an eyebrow.

“So, didn’t you ever wonder why it’s like that?”

“No. Generally when something doesn’t have a head or is burned to a crisp, it’s dead. Seems to make sense to me.”

“Yeah, but why not burn a vampire? Or behead a wendigo?”

“Because that’s backwards.”

Sam made a sound of disgust.

“No.” Sam ignored what he apparently thought was Dean’s willful ignorance and continued, “I mean, there’re reasons these things work. Biological ones. Spiritual ones. I mean, why a Latin exorcism, right? Why that particular god? Demons flinch at the name of Christ, but why not Shiva? Or Odin? Because there’s something going on there, something that some hunter in antiquity figured out. We just don’t know what that something is.” Sam pulled out their father’s journal, thumbing through it. “We get told that we have to use an iron knife for fair folk or that silver kills a shapeshifter, and we believe it, but we never figure out why those things work and others don’t. And that’s the thing here.” He stood up and turned around, tossing the open journal on the bed, next to where Jess was sitting and Dean was standing. They both looked down at it, then back up at Sam, expecting more, but Sam was just looking proud.

“What’s the thing here?” Jess finally pushed. Sam’s expression fell.

“The—the ritual. I mean, a gorgon is banished by this ritual, right? That’s what we used, because that’s what the journal said to do.”

“And?” Dean made the “continue” motion.

“And that’s what was the culprit. We assumed it was the gorgon, because, well, that’s what seemed to be obvious. But—” Sam moved back to his bag (the man purse, Dean called it) and pulled out a huge tome on ancient language “—that wasn’t it. It was us. We just didn’t stop to think about where we’d banished it to. The legends say that gorgons can’t be killed. Only Medusa was mortal; all the other gorgons were immortal, and their heads would just grow back if cut off.”

“Yeah, but those’re just legends. Legends are usually wrong, or at least off a bit,” Dean said, shifting back to lean against the wall. “And I mean, clearly, in this case, ’cause we killed the thing.”

“No, we didn’t.”

“We didn’t?”

“The ritual, when you translate it, is all about shifting time. The ancients knew you couldn’t kill a gorgon, so they figured out another way of dealing with it. Like people sending their trash off to a third-world country: out of sight, out of mind. They found they could open windows, doors, whatever you want to call them, slices of time, and just…send the gorgon away.”

“So. What? Just dump it on some other unsuspecting reality?”

“Yeah. I mean, so long as it’s not killing your tribe or your village, who cares? They just sent it away where it couldn’t come back, and that was good enough.”

“But that didn’t happen.” Jess finally spoke up, torn between being hopeful and being dubious. “I mean, we were doing the same ritual on our side of things. So our gorgon would have come through to here.”

“That’s what connected us. The same people in the same place, performing the same reality-bending ritual—I imagine it as kind of like sending out a fishing line. With the two reaching out like that, it was inevitable that our reality and yours would connect. Too much coincidence. As for the gorgons…I’m not sure. I’ve spent most of the day translating the ritual, so anything beyond that…it’s just speculation.”

“So,” Jess pushed, “speculate.”

She heard Dean make a little noise of pain, because she knew once you got Sam going, it was hard to stop him. He was the kind of person who genuinely liked knowing everything about everything. But she had to know these things, and even if it was just speculation, Sam was usually right about things like this. Or at least close enough.

“We were sending a gorgon to your reality at the same time you were sending one to us. They were—I think it’s something like a collision. They couldn’t pass through each other; they had to impact. It’s not the same as physical space. You can’t just move around something. There’s a very specific shape and size, the—the shape of the amount of time and the amount of space bent. And those things were going down a gorgon-sized tunnel towards each other. I can only imagine that they’re either still out there, caught in the space between, or else they just…” Sam made the universal sign for ‘explosion.’

“But there’s no Jess here,” Dean said lowly, after a long moment of silence. But the moment after he said it was even longer.

“No,” Sam said finally, nodding jerkily. “There’s…there was an absence. A hole where she should be but isn’t. And you”—he looked at Jess—“you passed through it. I guess it would have been like a vacuum. There’s you on one side and no Jess over here, and…the worlds were just trying to compensate. Balance out a missing element. There’s a window in that barn to another world. You fell through it and into the absence of Jess.”

“So we just repeat the ritual?” Jess asked, wondering if it could really be that simple. A horrible thought suddenly occurred to her. “Do my Sam and Dean have to be performing it also? At the same time?” They were fucked, if that was the case.

“No, I don’t think so.” Sam shook his head. “I don’t think our worlds ever became disconnected. So long as you’re here, this world and that one are synced. I think…it’s a Jess-shaped window and only you can pass through it. Just gotta give you the right shove.” Sam lowered his hand, brushing it over the journal on the bed.

“And I can go home?” she asked, her voice shaking a bit.

“Yeah. And you can go home,” Sam replied, smiling at her.

----

The prep for the ritual was exactly the same as it was in her world. They went by the same Greek restaurant and spoke to Basha Papandreou, the grandmother of the family who had immigrated to America some seventy years prior. They needed another set of the herbs and pouches that she had made for them previously. Jess remembered being fussed over by her in strongly accented English, but Mrs. Papandreou didn’t recognize her, never having met her in this reality.

They still had the same heavy text that they’d checked out from the library before, and Sam had already set to transcribing it into their father’s journal on the crisp new pages he’d added. Jess and Dean were on candle duty, having to drive a good ways out of town to hit up the nearest New Age and Pagan bookstore and grab a couple basketsful of candles. At least this time they wouldn’t have to do all this while an angry gorgon sussed them out.

It took all of two days to get everything in order. At that point, it was just up to time. Sam wanted to perform the ritual exactly twenty-eight days after the original ceremony, to make sure the moon would be in the same phase. They all went back out to the barn and scoped out the area, making sure there were no drifters occupying it and setting up and consecrating the circle they needed.

It was thirty-six hours and counting, and Jess felt like her whole body was on pins and needles in anticipation. She was going home.

----

The Gavins Point Dam was just west of Yankton, running across a wide stretch of the Missouri River with a road on top making the whole thing double as a bridge. Not a lot of cars came by, as it was out in the forest and surrounded by rural towns. Every so often, a vehicle would rush across it, going a good few miles over the speed limit, its motor loud until it came to the dam and the noise was covered by the sound of the rushing water pouring through the sections on the downstream side.

Most of the land surrounding the dam was pastures, and there was no sidewalk for Sam and Jess to walk on until they reached the dam. Sam’s hands were tucked into his pockets, his posture hunched, while Jess’s arms swung free at her sides, her gait double that of Sam’s to keep up. They’d been walking since leaving the motel, with no particular destination in mind. Just a walk, Sam had said, to clear their minds. Jess suspected he just wanted to spend time with her before they performed the ritual to send her home, but she didn’t call him on it.

They jogged across the road, once they were on the dam, although there were no cars in either direction. They moved over to the downstream side where they could look over the edge, watching the churning water spill out, white with anger.

Sam leaned against the railing, having no problem peering over the high barrier. Jess hitched herself up, feet dangling over the sidewalk a little as she looked out at the river.

“I always think of rivers as these little things,” she said, looking out at the broad length of water. “I forget how fucking big they get out here. Doesn’t matter how many times I see the Mississippi.”

“This is the Missouri River.”

“I know, I meant… I just meant that even with the Mississippi, I’m always surprised. Fuck you, you messed me up. I was waxing poetic.”

“Not very well,” Sam responded with the hint of a smile, looking over at her. All his expressions seemed weak, like he had only so much energy. She supposed that that was actually the case. She’d put him through the wringer the past four weeks.

Tomorrow they’d go back to the barn she’d fallen through time into. There was always the possibility the ritual wouldn’t work, of course, but Jess didn’t think it wouldn’t, for some reason. Sam said it would probably work, and she knew she should be worried that she’d be stuck here. But Sam said it would probably work, and she was too wrung out from doubting and hurting to do anything but believe.

A car drove by behind them, going fast down the deserted highway. She felt the shove of wind at her back, throwing her hair all around her face. She dropped back down to the sidewalk, pulling it back over her shoulders.

“I wish,” Sam started, but licked his lips, as if he had no particular destination in mind or he was unwilling to reach it. “I wish…”

“That I could stay?” Jess ventured, turning her head to watch him. It was hard to hear over the rush of the water, and she wondered if maybe she was missing parts of what he was saying.

“Yeah.” He nodded and gave her a small smile. He looked wistful, but he wasn’t looking at her, wasn’t begging her, which just made it worse.

“Sam,” she started, straightening to stand up fully, pushing herself off the railing. “I--I can’t. You know I can’t, I—“

“No, I know.” He shook his head and turned to face her properly, though he still had one elbow against the railing. “I wasn’t going to ask you. I wouldn’t anyway. I don’t want you to stay. I just…wish you could. And there’s a difference there.”

“There is?” she asked, doubtful.

“Yes. I want you to go back. I want you to go—go home.” He smiled and looked out over the dam. She couldn’t describe his expression to save her life, but it felt like it cut up everything in her chest. “I like the idea that there’s a Sam out there that still has his Jess.”

She didn’t have a reply to that, not one that fit. So she just swallowed and nodded, looking down, because he was so genuine, so fucking genuine about this that she didn’t have the balls to watch.

If she could have split herself in two, left one Jess here while the other went home, she would have done it in a heartbeat. It would almost have been easier if Sam’d begged her to stay. It would have been easier, even, if he hadn’t meant what he had just said. If he’d just said it to try and make her feel better, but was secretly wishing she’d change her mind.

She knew she should have said something comforting, something to make him feel better about the fact that he was losing his second chance. Instead, she looked up and said, “I know you’ll save your brother.”

His expression fell, though it hadn’t been a cheery thing to begin with. Now it was colored with doubt, and she pursed her lips tightly. He looked over the side of the dam again, looking for answers the river couldn’t give him.

“Yeah?” he asked hopelessly. “How do you figure?”

“Because my Sam never fails. I know you’re the same.” She walked past him, back on the road towards the motel. She glanced back when he didn’t follow and found him still leaning there. “What?”

“I did fail, though, Jess.” He straightened to stand, looking directly at her. “I can’t be the same because…I already failed.” He looked at her and saw the very picture of his failure, the portrait of the girl he couldn’t save.

She nodded, considering this, before meeting his eyes.

“Then you’ll save him. Because you know what it’s like to lose.”

He still looked pained (fuck, tortured), but he nodded, looking out to the river. He looked like he didn’t quite believe her, and she wasn’t surprised. He wouldn’t be Sam if he wasn’t consumed by doubt. But he also wouldn’t be Sam if that doubt didn’t stir him to succeed, like he always had.

She had once said that he would crash and burn without her. It wasn’t true. He was burned, burning, in a way she hadn’t, like he was carrying his Jess’s scars on his insides, but he was still there. Still going.

If it was his place to doubt, it had always been hers to believe. And she knew he’d save his brother.

----

Jess had honestly expected Sam to ask her to stay, and she spent the rest of the day waiting for it, but it didn’t come.

At least, not from Sam.

It was Dean, instead, who drew her aside that evening. They planned to drive out tomorrow morning, back to the barn to perform the ritual, and the evening was tense with preparation. Sam was going over the ritual, making sure he had everything perfect, and Jess felt safe in his hands. She meant what she’d said to him at the dam: He wouldn’t fail—not her, not Dean—mainly because he was Sam, but also because he was a Sam who’d been pushed to the brink, further than her Sam ever had been. She knew he’d take care of her and get her home.

She didn’t know quite what to do with herself; there was nothing she had to get done and nowhere to go. She was watching the Food Network in the hotel room, watching the boring but still hypnotic program that wasn’t doing much other than making her hungry, when Dean told her to get up and help him go get dinner.

“Goddamned show’s making me want pesto,” Dean grumbled as he watched the woman on the screen put the basil leaves in to the food processor.

“Do you even know what pesto tastes like?”

“I’m a redneck, not a savage,” he replied, grabbing his coat and tugging it around his shoulders. She watched him flick the collar up around his neck and smiled a little, because some things never changed, then got up from the bed, flicking the TV off. She picked up Sam’s jacket on the way out the door, her skin prickling with goosebumps as she walked out onto the breezeway. She quickly pulled the big jacket around her, the sleeves hanging down over her hands, and she held the front together instead of zipping it up.

“C’mon,” Dean said, moving out to the parking lot. He walked by the Impala, and Jess followed him as he made his way over to the Taco Bell across the street.

“Pesto?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.

“You think I can afford pesto?” he scoffed, stepping over the curb as they jogged across the street. She walked past him and up towards the side entrance of the store, but stopped when she realized that he wasn’t following her.

“What?” she asked, looking back at him, her hand on the handle of the door.

“Jess,” he said, and shifted his weight. He put his hands in his pockets, hunching his shoulders up until it looked like he had no neck, and he looked somewhere else in the way that her Dean did whenever he was opening a conversation he didn’t really want to start. He made a face. “Look…I—I want to ask you something.”

“Of course, I’ll come to your commitment ceremony,” she said quickly with a teasing grin, leaning back against the glass door.

“Fuck you!” he said, looking petulant and hunching his shoulders up even more. It was different from how he’d said that phrase to her three weeks ago, two weeks ago. It was the irritating, scowling way he said it to Sam, not the vehement, angry way that he’d been directing at her. It made her relax a little.

“What, Dean. What is it?” she asked finally, quieter this time. Dean needed more space to talk than Sam did. Sam liked to talk about things, work things out until he felt safe. Dean never felt safe talking about things.

“Look, I want you to—I want you to stay here.”

“What?” She furrowed her brow, looking at him in confusion. He lifted his head and finally met her eyes.

“I…Some bad stuff happened a while back. Couple months ago. Sam—Sam was...” He stopped there, breath steaming in the air. “Some bad stuff happened. And I did what I had to to keep Sammy safe, okay? But thing is, I’m not going to be around much longer.”

If she didn’t already know about his deal, she would have been pressing him for more information, desperate to know what he’d done. He wasn’t her Dean, but she couldn’t look at his face and not love him. It didn’t work like that.

As it was, though, she just stayed quiet and let him have that space.

“And Sammy…he’s got it in his head to save me, and I know he’s gonna try real hard, and I appreciate that, I do. But I don’t think he’ll do it. I don’t want him to do it. Somethin’—somethin’ real bad could happen to him, so…I’m not gonna let him go through with it. Anything. Whatever it is he’s plannin’ to do.” Dean looked down at the asphalt, biting at his lower lip. “Thing is, once I’m gone, he’s gonna be all alone. And the kid’s been through a lot. Losin’ you. Losin’—losin’ Dad. There was this girl a while back, only girl since you. Sam had to put her down like a dog. And all these other people, these kids that didn’t deserve it. He’s been through a lot. And I don’t like the idea of him being all alone. So I’m askin’—I’m askin’ if you’d stay here. Not go back. Stay here with Sam.”

She took that in, let it have a minute in her because it was a hell of a lot to put on her. Sam. Dean. This deal between them, and the absence of her. It made her feel a lot of things, too many things to go through, a ridiculous amount of love, yeah, and anger, too. Hell of a lot of anger.

“Goddamnit, Dean,” she hissed out finally. Her hand tightened on the front of the jacket where she was holding it closed. “You’re a fucking moron, you know that?”

He looked up at her, surprise written on his face. It made her wonder just how willfully dense he could be. Apparently, she hadn’t found the bottom of that well yet.

“You think Sam didn’t tell me what you did? And you’re a fucking idiot for that, too, by the by. But yeah, I know about the deal you made, and I can’t believe you’d think Sam’d be alright with that.”

“Of course he wouldn’t be alright,” Dean snapped back. “He’s gonna be…But he’ll be alive, and he’ll move on, eventually. Better than being dead. He’s got a better chance of makin’ it than I did. Besides, I never wanted him to know about it. He wasn’t supposed to find out.”

“You think Sam, your brother Sam, the guy in that motel room who figured out, in under a month, how alternate realities work, the guy who got a full ride at Stanford fucking University, who’s fluent in at least three dead languages and a couple living ones, wasn’t going to figure out what happened? How long did it take him to crack the code, Dean?”

Dean was silent.

“How long?”

“A day.”

“And you thought you’d be able to keep it from him for a year? You’re his big brother. He gets you. You’re the center of his fucking universe, and you thought he wouldn’t notice that something was up with you?”

“You tell me you could look at him dead and not do the same thing!” Dean snapped out suddenly, and she went silent, the thought enough to pale her. “You think you could carry his body to the car, huh? Load him up like a package of meat? He was grey. His skin was…He was grey. He wasn’t…moving. Breathing. He—He was dead. Bobby was askin’ me if I wanted to bury him or burn him. You think you could do all that and not sell your soul for him? You honestly saying you’d let him rot?”

“No,” she said, very quietly. “No. Of course not.”

They were quiet then, silent for a long time. It had started to snow a little sometime in the middle of Dean’s yelling, and the tiny white dots spiraled down to the ground, disappearing as they melted on contact. They were left standing there awkwardly, just outside the door of a Taco Bell, most of their words burned up, hot in the cold air. They were two people who loved someone so much they couldn’t even articulate it, but she supposed she didn’t need to. Dean knew perfectly well what it was like to love Sam. Both of them knew what it was like to try and keep someone like that, someone they both knew was someone, something, better than them.

Loving Sam was the most painful, most amazing part of her life. And there was really only one person who could understand that, understand all the things she went through to keep that one extraordinary person, and that person was standing there in front of her.

Of course, she’d sell her soul for Sam. It wasn’t even a question, really.

“I can’t stay here, Dean,” she said finally. He needed to know that.

“Why not?” he asked, his voice scraped raw with need. He needed someone to take care of his little brother, and she saw that, but it couldn’t be her. Not here.

“Because I have my own world, my own Dean and my own Sam who need me. I can’t leave that all behind, give all that up to stay here and fix this.”

“You’re fucking selfish, you know that?” he accused, and she knew he was just upset. He was angry and desperate, and Dean didn’t react well to emotional pressure like that. All the same, she knew she couldn’t let him get away with it.

“I’m selfish? You’re standing there asking me to give up my entire life, my entire world, so that I can stay here and fix your mistake? You don’t think that’s selfish? That you can honestly ask that of me and expect it to be okay?”

He jerked his head to the side. He rolled his lower lip through his teeth, and she wanted to kiss him, take his head in her hands and drag him down to her, show him what it was like to have a girl love him and not be ashamed of him, not be scared of him or unable to understand him. It wasn’t her place, though, because this wasn’t her Dean, not the Dean who loved her back just as much.

“It wasn’t a mistake,” he said finally, his voice tight and low, almost inaudible. But she knew he meant it. He’d do it again, damn the consequences, if he had to. She understood that.

“No, it wasn’t,” she agreed, but she couldn’t say anything else, because even if she would have run to the crossroads, too, even if she knew she’d let her soul burn to keep her lovers safe and whole, she couldn’t bring herself to tell him that it was all okay. Just because she was as much of a sinner as he was didn’t mean she could absolve him of his guilt.

There were some things in life you just had to feel guilty for. Things like leaving behind two people who needed you. Things like leaving Dean to suffer when she knew it was within her power to help him. There were no easy answers.

She opened the door to the Taco Bell, the warm air falling out around her, her fingers white with cold against the door frame.

“C’mon,” she goaded. “Let’s get food.”

It warmed her more that he let her hold his hand later, when they walked back to the motel room.

----

Jess didn’t sleep much that night.

She kept rolling back and forth in her bed, occasionally hearing Dean bitch at her to “shut up and go to sleep.” She couldn’t decide if it was anticipation, excitement or worry that kept her up or a cycle of all three. By the time the sun rose, she was tired of tossing and turning, so she got up and got showered and dressed, and then shook Dean awake, listening to him curse. She knocked on Sam’s door to wake him up, and while he was bleary-eyed, he just nodded and went to go get dressed.

She shivered out in the cool morning air, waiting for them. She was scared to hope. She just wanted this to be over. She wanted to be home and safe again and not have to worry about any of this ever again.

They drove out of Yankton at a sedate pace, Jess’s skin itching as she watched Sam put together the ritual, just like he had one month ago when they’d drove out to take care of the gorgon.

Being back in the barn was a déjà vu-inducing experience.

Jess wandered around the dusty building, weaving in and out of stalls and looking at the cracked wooden walls like they could give her some answer to what had happened to her, what would happen to her. She could hear Sam and Dean behind her, getting things together and pulling out the books they would need. They sounded just the same as her Sam and Dean had when they’d set up for this ritual the first time, before she’d crashed forward into this world.

They even bickered the same. It was close enough to home to make her heart ache with homesickness.

She’d just put a hand up against the wall to steady herself, when she heard Sam call for her.

“Jess?” he asked, standing up. “You okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” she assured him, turning to face them and leaning back against the wood. “How’s it coming?”

“We’re ready when you are.”

Part of her wanted to scream ‘I’m ready, God, yes, I’m ready, send me home!’ but she reined herself in and nodded once, pushing herself off the wall. There were other parts of her that felt terrible, though, leaving this Sam and Dean, pale shadows of her boys, all alone again. They weren’t hers, but she still felt some responsibility towards them.

Now that she knew this world existed at all, she wanted to know there would be a happy ending for it.

She walked over to where they’d set the candles up on the floor, and there was an awkward pause, all of them looking anywhere but each other, each of them with certain hopes and expectations. She wasn’t certain what she was supposed to say. ‘Good luck, hope you both don’t die’ seemed a little harsh and probably unrealistic, considering the circumstances.

“Good luck,” Dean said finally. “Hope you don’t die on the way back.” He rubbed under his nose, and Jess laughed, burying her face in her hands. She wanted to cry and laugh at the same time because she couldn’t think of them as not hers. Even if they were strange, sad creatures, there was still so much of them that made them Sam and Dean. She wanted to keep them safe, heal them if she could. She didn’t want to run out on them like she knew so many people in their lives had.

But she couldn’t run out on her boys, her world, either.

She lifted her head and wiped at her eyes, red around the rims. She pulled Dean into a hug, which he stiffened for and returned awkwardly.

“Bye, Jess,” he said, patting her on the back as he drew away.

“Bye, Dean. Take care,” she responded, looking up at him. “Stop being stupid, okay?” She put a hand against his cheek.

“Yeah, okay.” Dean pursed his lips into a strange smile and shrugged.

She paused there awkwardly, not wanting to turn around and do this next part. As hard as it was to say goodbye to Dean, this Dean who had no memories of her save a brief meeting, it would be a thousand times harder to say goodbye to Sam. She had to hold her breath when she turned, looking across the ritual circle at him, a book in his hands and that small, accepting smile on his face.

“Sam,” she said tightly, and his smile widened, eyes crinkling up with that stupid, ridiculous warmth. It would be so much easier if he could just hate her for abandoning him.

“Be careful, alright?” he said lowly. “The trip back’s going to be bumpy, I suspect. But I won’t let anything happen to you. I promise.”

She nodded, throat too tight for words.

“The gorgon’s gone, so you should be safe when you get through to the other side. Just make sure to destroy whatever signs of your side of the ritual might be left. You don’t want to accidentally trip back through.” He licked his lips and looked down at the book as he flipped it open to the right page, obviously finding it easier to talk without looking at her. “Um, it shouldn’t take too long. I mean…same as last time, so…”

“Sam,” she said, a rasp of a sound over her vocal cords.

“If you just stand in the circle, or, uh, I guess wherever you were standing when you came through the first time...”

“Sam.”

He looked up finally, gripping the book white-knuckled.

She hadn’t been his Jess for a long time. She wasn’t the girl who didn’t know that there were really monsters under people’s beds. She wasn’t the girl who made straight A’s (okay, mostly), and ate diet food to keep her waistline. She didn’t put mascara on in the mornings, and she didn’t paint anymore. She also wasn’t just his Jess but Dean’s as well, as much as he was Dean’s and Dean was theirs.

But this Sam wasn’t mourning her. He could look at her and appreciate that she was someone different and treat her as well as he always treated people, trying so desperately to understand in a world where no one could ever have all the answers. But despite all that, it wasn’t her that he missed. It wasn’t her that he was still carrying around, a weight on his shoulders like the pilgrim trying to reach the cross.

It was the Jess he’d never gotten a chance to say goodbye to. And Jess knew she could pull that Jess back out, for one last performance.

She walked over to him, seeing him watch her without any defenses (which was so stupid she wanted to hit him. God, how could he still be this stupid, after all this time? Why couldn’t he ever take care of himself first?), and lifted her hand to move the book aside. She was aware of Dean watching them, aware that he didn’t turn away like any other brother might, but she didn’t care. She put her hands on Sam’s jaw and pulled him down to her, having no problem going to her tiptoes to kiss him. She was used to it.

Her shoulders hunched up and she cradled his head close, their kiss slow, exploratory at first, before she heard the thump of the book hitting the dusty ground. His arms moved around her and pulled her up against him. He tipped her head back but never sped up his movements, never let it become heated or sexual. This wasn’t that kind of kiss.

This was them saying goodbye.

When he pulled back, he was crying, and she lowered herself to the flats of her feet. She wrapped her arms around his neck, though, and he held on to her tightly, like he might lose her if he didn’t.

“Jess.” His words were muffled into her neck because he’d hunched so far down to reach it, and she didn’t know if she could be a lee for someone so tall, so strong. She felt his tears running down her neck and she shut her eyes tightly, throat tight. His hands scrabbled at the cloth of her shirt, against her back, until they could twist into it and grip tight. She felt his back jerk and twitch with sobs under her hands. “I miss you so much,” he said, so low that if it weren’t for the utter silence of the barn, she knew Dean wouldn’t have heard it.

She shut her eyes, and the one that could still make tears let one go.

He pulled back slowly, looking down at her, his face a mess. She grabbed the sleeves of her shirt in her hands, lifting them to try and clean off his cheeks, not caring about the snot and mucus soaking into her clothes. He stood there and let her, a ridiculously gentle giant, pliant in her hands.

“It’s okay,” she said quietly. “It’s not your fault.” She did her best to absolve him, watching his eyes squeeze shut at the words, more tears escaping. She cupped his cheeks. “Stop blaming yourself, okay? I never wanted that for you.” He nodded, a small, jerky motion in her hands. She paused there for a moment, then finally stepped away.

She moved around the ritual circle and stepped into it. He opened his eyes to watch her, then crouched down to pick up the book he’d dropped. He opened it with shaking fingers, flipping through the pages.

“Bye, Sam,” she said quietly.

He looked up from the spell, face wet and eyes red, his breathing uneven.

“Goodbye, Jess.”

She heard him sniff, and then his Latin came, trembling in his throat as he spoke the words. He never stuttered despite the fact that he was still crying, tears dripping off his jaw, some trailing down his neck. He licked his lips and spoke the words perfectly, even if his tone oscillated wildly.

The déjà vu hit her again, harder now as she heard the same words she had then, though she was listening more closely before. Her memory of falling through the worlds was hazy at best; she had no memory of time or space flying by her or seeing any gorgons dying. She just remembered—

She looked around the barn. Sam was standing there, near the center, with Dean out to the side, on guard. She remembered Sam reciting the ritual, just like he was now, though his voice had been surer then, booming over the sound of the gorgon’s screams. She turned around, looking up at the small window in the barn’s loft, pale afternoon light coming through it, dust motes floating lazily through the beams. She remembered that. She remembered standing there, near a coil of rope.

She’d been listening to Sam chant, a little bored by the lack of action before the gorgon had come out. She rubbed her head, fingers carding in the white stripe of hair as she tried to remember. She’d stepped backwards, about to turn around and check out the stalls. That was right.

Her eyes widened as she turned.

She’d been going to go and scout the other side of the barn for any other dangers when there’d been a noise near the circle behind her, Dean shouting something in surprise, and a loud hissing growl. She’d taken a quick step to turn and help when she’d tripped—

----

—and hit the ground like a stone.

She didn’t hit the actual stone this time, at least not with her face. She broke the fall with her hands, palms slapping down against the ground, where the stone cut in near her thumb. The ground was hard-packed, and dust flew up everywhere around her. All the air went whooshing out of her lungs on impact, making her cough even harder than she had last time.

“Sam?” she choked out, looking around as she got up. “Dean?” She coughed more into the hazy air of the barn, and she began to walk around, looking for them. Everything was quiet, and it made her nervous. She opened the barn door and yelled their names, even louder now, but the surrounding fields were empty.

She was about twenty miles out of town, so she had to make her way to the road, tripping in varmint holes in her distraction. She walked the edge of the highway for about fifteen minutes before she managed to flag down a truck. From a distance, she looked like a pretty, curvy young girl. It wasn’t until the driver stopped that he saw her burns, but by then, it was too late to rescind his offer. Normally, she would have been perversely amused, watching the driver’s face shifting from opportunistic smile to disappointed realization to politely distant, but today she had bigger things on her mind.

“Yankton,” she said, looking down the road. “As near to the Blue Look Inn as you can.”

The man nodded tightly, disinterested, and pulled back onto the road.

Jess felt her breath heavy in her throat, hand tight on the door as she stared forward, feeling anticipation and worry lancing through her.

----

Getting the key in the door was an ordeal, her fingers shaking too hard. The room was empty, though. Their things, bags, clothes, weapons and articles…all gone. The beds, though, were still messed, the cleaning service having not been through yet. She ran out of the room and to the front desk, the bell on the door ringing sharply as she dashed through it, and she slammed her hands down on the countertop.

“The men in 14B–when did they check out?” she asked, staring at the middle-aged receptionist with desperate eyes.

“Can’t tell you that, dear,” the woman responded.

“I need to know where they are,” Jess hissed.

“I can’t give out detail about our guests to—”

“Tell me where they are!” Jess shrieked, breathing hard. There was a long, tense silence, then Jess shook her head, realizing she wasn’t thinking straight. “Just—just let me use your phone.”

The woman nodded warily and handed the phone across the desk. Jess grabbed at it, dialing the numbers to Sam’s cellphone numbly. She messed the digits up the first time and had to hit the hook and dial again. It rang four times, and Jess closed her eyes, praying to a god she thought she didn’t believe in anymore.

“Hello?” Sam’s voice came through after she heard him clear his throat. He sounded tired and almost groggy, but not like he’d been asleep.

“Sam,” she replied, her voice bleeding relief.

There was a long silence where she could hear her heart in her ears like she’d decided her skull was the best place to keep it. She swallowed dryly, and he finally replied.

“Jess?” he croaked out, and she nodded, which was stupid because he couldn’t see her nodding.

“Yeah, yeah, it’s me. Where are you?”

“I’m—I—We…”

“I’m in Yankton. I’m at the inn. Please…come back.” She sniffed back, but it didn’t do any good because she was crying and beginning to get all choked up, her eyes shut. She could hear Dean in the background, his voice sharp as he said “What? Is it really—?” and “How?”.

“Of course, of course, we’ll be—be right there,” Sam said, and then his voice became a little more distant as he spoke to Dean. “Turn around, she’s in Yankton. I don’t know, just turn the fuck around!”

She heard the screeching of tires on the other end of the line, and she shoved the phone back at the receptionist, running back outside into the parking lot. She looked both ways on the highway, and she knew it was stupid, because who knew how far away they were? They could have left days ago, and someone else could have checked into the room for all she knew.

It didn’t matter to her because she stood there, paced and waited until she heard the roar of the engine and the car pulled into the parking lot with a harsh shriek. Sam was out of the car before it stopped, stumbling away from the passenger-side door, while Dean had to throw the car into park and run around from the driver’s side.

Sam crashed into her like a landslide, and she flung her arms around his neck. He crushed her against him, and about two seconds later, she felt a second force impact her side. She moved just enough to toss one arm around Dean, and Sam was kissing the side of her neck while Dean tried to find her lips.

“Jess,” Dean said, his voice tight and pained, like he was trying to hold it all back.

“We—we tried and…” Sam picked up, speaking into her skin. “Couldn’t find you or anything. Tried to find out what happened but you were just gone and it’s been almost a month, thought you were—thought you were—thought you were…”

Sam didn’t say it, but she knew what he meant. She knew what the world of Sam and Dean looked like without a Jess now. She tightened her arms around the both of them, tongue pressing in against Dean’s wetly.

Sam pushed his way into the kiss as well, which was downright impossible to continue, and it was more like licking than kissing, saliva and tears and snot all getting mixed up as they both tried to press in against her mouth together. She pulled them in, welcomed them, her boys, her Winchesters, not caring what they looked like, the three of them trying to make out on the side of the rural highway. She didn’t care how messy the kiss got or how much her neck hurt, head cricked back to match their height.

Eventually, they began to calm down, breathing hard, all of them hurt and relieved, back where all of them had thought they’d never make it back to. She kept her arms around them both, Sam’s hand on her waist, thumb in her belt loop, and Dean’s against her back, holding onto her bra through her shirt. They all stayed there, their foreheads pressed against each other, heads meeting together in the middle of a triangle of bodies.

She sniffed in and tried to calm down, but it was difficult. It had been a month, after two years of being with them almost constantly, and even she had begun to doubt that she’d ever be able to get back here again. Even she had started to give in, begun to believe that she would be trapped in that world with a broken Sam and an angry Dean and no Jess to temper them but her. All that, and the knowledge that she hadn’t been up to the job at all.

It took her a few minutes to regain enough of her composure to draw back a little. One of them made a noise of complaint, though she couldn’t tell which one it was. Both of them, though, tightened their holds on her, so that she couldn’t draw back too far.

She moved her arms so that she could put one hand on each of them, palms pressed to their cheeks, thumbs against their cheekbones. She sniffled again, only one side of her face properly wet, the tear duct on her other eye not working as well as it had before the fire.

“Listen, shh…listen, I--” She hiccupped a little, but began to even out her breathing.. “It’s okay, I’m here…I…God, Sam, Dean…” She breathed in, one slow, steady breath. “Boys…”

She opened her eyes, looking up at both of them when she said:

“I know how to kill the demon.”

End

But Let Patience Have Her Perfect Work [Part 2]

2008-10-13T08:17:29Z

Title: But Let Patience Have Her Perfect Work [Part 2]
Word Count: 6,619 for this part

Master Post

Part One | Part Two | Part Three

----

Three-way relationships were problematic.

There was no way for them not to be, their very nature uneven. She knew that three was a special number in spellwork and ritual. The three-faced goddess. The triumvirate of the god, goddess, and all creation. The Christian trinity. The law of three.

Unfortunately, humans and spells didn’t work the same.

The weird thing was that Jess was pretty certain that she should be the one who was worried and doubtful about the whole thing. After all, Sam and Dean’d had each other all their lives, basically. The three of them moved like animals in a pack, but Sam and Dean? They danced together, though she’d never tell them that. She’d learned to hunt, and Dean’d told her she was good, that she had natural ability. She’d struggled hard and trained long hours to become who she was, and she knew she was good. But she wasn’t anywhere near Sam and Dean, couldn’t be, with twenty years of training that she just couldn’t make up for.

It was the difference between a child growing up bilingual and a person learning a second language as an adult. There was no way to make up that kind of difference.

Still, for all the issues she had with her parents, she knew they had to have done something right, because she didn’t doubt herself with them much at all. They were brothers, bound by blood as well as love, and while she was their lover, she knew she couldn’t be part of that bond. Didn’t want to be. Didn’t want to damage it or break it, didn’t hate it or resent it. She was fine with the knowledge that some parts of Sam would never be hers, some parts of Dean the same. After all, there were parts of both of them that belonged to her, and parts of her that belonged only to herself.

Sam and Dean, on the other hand? They lived in doubt. They may have had twenty years of training, but they’d traded a lot of things for that knowledge, and being emotionally stable adults was one of those things.

Dean doubted in sharp, sudden bursts. The doubt was always there, under the surface, but he was so good at tucking it all away for the sake of others that he honestly didn’t notice it most of the time. With the hunt and the music and the booze and the sex, Dean mostly convinced himself that he was fine.

It was only when there was a lull, when things quieted down enough for him to begin to question, that it all got out of hand. It was painful to watch, but it was, at least, painfully transparent. She and Sam knew the signs, and if they didn’t always know the way to make things better, they at least knew how to try.

After all, Dean was the front man. She and Sam couldn’t kick down a door with such art as Dean could, and neither of them could sling the Impala around, tires screeching, and barrel off down the highway. Dean jumped into things recklessly, had been trained to override his self-preservation instinct and act immediately, without conscious thought. It wasn’t surprising that his doubt was easy to spot.

But Sam? Sam had mastered the subtle arts: the smooth way his fingers flicked into someone’s pocket, pulling out a wallet without even having to bump into the mark to throw him off; the gentle motion of the lock picks as they moved the tumblers into position, like foreplay, until the lock orgasmed to open. Traps, knowledge, reasoning, organization, and documents forged too well.

Sam could trip her up.

He was too good at hiding things. He was used to lying, could come up with things on the fly and sell them perfectly. She knew him well, but Dean knew him better, and Dean still didn’t notice shit.

Dean doubted in deep, depressive fits, but Sam doubted all the time, a low-grade buzz in the back of his head that followed him around, and though she couldn’t hear it, she knew it thrummed loud and clear whenever he looked at her or Dean.

It drove her damned near crazy trying to keep the both of them afloat, and sometimes she wondered how they survived without her there. Now, though, now she knew. And the answer wasn’t pretty.

As the days wore on with no answers, she lived with this strange duo, this Sam and Dean that weren’t her Sam and Dean. The first week passed into the second, and she was watching a living, breathing example of what happened to them without her. Dean was reckless beyond salvation, a desperate thing who seemed all too happy to throw himself in front of death, like he needed to go out in a blaze of glory.

Sam was like a ghost, and she had to wonder if he wasn’t gone already. He drifted in and out of the motel rooms so unnoticeably that sometimes she’d almost forget he was there. He always had a distant look to him, gazing out of windows and off to the horizon, like everything he wanted was just down the road a little further. He looked like a person who had lost everything he valued, and sometimes Jess wondered why he was here at all. Except then he’d look at Dean, and something would spark – the barest hint of life still left.

She supposed that she saw the whole situation as darker than they did. They didn’t appear to think anything was wrong with them. They drove around and worked cases while researching how to send Jess back (and Sam had his own personal project, but she could never move quickly enough to see what was on the screen of the laptop before it closed), and they laughed and joked with each other. They teased each other just like she was used to, and she was pretty certain that they thought they were okay.

But Jess knew different.

She was the only person who could compare them to another version of themselves – versions that were actually happy, not just faking it to get by. It wasn’t like her Sam and Dean weren’t fucked up. God, were they ever. It was just that they were working through it, trying to come out the other side as something better than how they entered this life. They despaired, but they also hoped, and when they couldn’t get up by themselves, they weren’t afraid to look to her for a helping hand.

The more time went on, the more she missed them. She supposed it was strange to miss people she was currently living with, but it wasn’t the same, and the differences between the two pairs stood out in stark contrast when she could see all the millions of ways that these boys weren’t hers.

And god, she wanted to be back. She wanted to be back with them.

----

Dean left the room early in the evening, which wasn’t unusual for him. She didn’t stop to think about it until it was one in the morning and he still wasn’t back. Sometimes he went to booze it up or play some rigged poker or hustle pool, but he was usually back once he was done. Dean didn’t really need alone time like Jess did. He was happy to spend all his time with the two of them.

Sam didn’t seem to mind it much either. It was a Winchester thing.

“Aren’t you worried?” she asked, standing by the window.

“About what?” Sam was watching her, like he always did. She wished he’d just come out and say it, but Sam never came out and said anything. She knew it was a game of waiting with him. Only Dean had the power to prod Sam into anything at all.

“Dean. It’s late and he’s not back.”

“Yeah, he’s fine. He stays out late.”

“Most the bars are going to be closed by now. This is a small town.”

“He’s not at the bar. He’s with whoever he picked up.”

Sam said it so casually that she was amazed how hard it hit her gut. Somehow, the idea just hadn’t occurred to her. Dean, out there, with some other girl’s legs around him, not thinking about Sam or Jess. He didn’t do that shit anymore. Sam (her Sam) had told her that Dean had, before Sam left for college, and she knew Dean had for a while after they all started traveling together. But once they were together, joined, after the ritual, especially…Dean just didn’t do that shit.

They’d still come in to find him jerking off to a magazine or with some skeevy-looking porno on the TV and a hopeful expression on his face as he pointed out positions and acts he wanted them to try out, but he didn’t go out looking for something else. Someone else.

He had Sam and Jess waiting for him in his bed, ready to go along with all his freaky sexual fantasies. What did he need a bar floozy for?

But this Dean didn’t have a Jess. So for some reason, he went out looking for skanks, but Jess hadn’t stopped to think about it. Now that she did, of course, she felt her skin prickle with jealousy. She had some irrational urge to go out and find the woman and show her all the tricks she’d learned with her knives.

Wasn’t fair to the girl, she knew that, knew that she was being one of those horrible, irrational women who took their frustrations out on the soft hides of their fellows instead of on the target that deserved it, but there were bits of her too steeped in that society to let go of. She swallowed hard, pushing it all down, still weirded out that even without a Jess, Dean did that to Sam.

“You let him do that?”

“Let him?” Sam looked over at her, raising an eyebrow. His curiosity seemed to be enough to make him drop that wondering, longing expression he kept sending her way, long enough for her to actually turn and meet his eyes.

“Let him fuck other people.”

“Other? He just…That’s what Dean does. That’s his…release.” Sam seemed a little flustered at his accidental innuendo. “What I mean is…It’s not up to me what he does.”

“You don’t get jealous?” Jess asked, her brow furrowing. The idea that Sam wasn’t possessive of Dean like he was in her version of the world bothered her. Dean deserved people who were possessive of him.

“No. I mean…There hasn’t been anyone since you--well, I mean, not seriously, anyway.” There was that burned look again, and Jess couldn’t see it all, but it was something more than a bad break-up. She remembered what Dean’d told her the first night she’d arrived here, how he’d mentioned that Sam had killed before. “Anyway. Girls and I…Always ends badly, for them.” He shrugged, eyes slanting off to the side, looking weirdly small, all hunched over.

It took Jess a minute to understand what he’d said, because it made no sense to her. Both her eyebrows shot up when she realized that Sam thought she was asking if he was jealous of Dean’s ability to get chicks, not if he was jealous of the chicks’ ability to get Dean.

“No, fuck. No. I mean…Don’t you--Aren’t you jealous that he sleeps with people other than you?”

Sam made a noise like a cat hissing, a gargle in his throat, and took a half-step back.

“What? Dean and—what?” He shook his head. “No, no—We’re…In this universe, Dean and I are brothers.” He moved his hands back and forth in front of him, in that ‘no way’ gesture.

“Sam,” she said, exasperated. She realized that Sam and Dean hid this aspect of themselves from people. That must have been what this was. It wasn’t like Sam would just come out and admit it to her. “I know that you and him are brothers. You’re brothers in my world, too. And I know that you two used to fuck, before you came to Stanford.”

“Jess,” he said, looking so pale and sick that she was beginning to realize just how wrong she was. “I…I don’t know about what’s going on in your world, but…Dean never touched me like that. He didn’t…molest me.”

“Molest you? Jesus, Sam.” Now she felt just as sick. The idea that Dean would ever, ever do something like that to Sam offended her. No one talked about her boys like that. No one called their love for each other something so disgusting and vile. “You…You’re serious? You two have never…?”

“No!” Sam said vehemently, eyes still wide.

She wasn’t sure how to process that. She didn’t know if she could imagine a Sam and Dean that weren’t….SamandDean. Even if they weren’t SamDeanJess, they were at least always SamandDean. It took her a few minutes to find her voice, but the first thing she used it for was to defend her boys.

“Dean didn’t molest Sam. My Sam, I mean. They…They just...” She shrugged, looking over at one of the beds. “I don’t know. They don’t talk about it a lot. When it started, how it started. They just always had a thing for each other. They used to fuck before he came to Stanford. Then, when I came, we all…” She made some vague motions with one hand, and Jess didn’t think any more blood could drain from Sam’s head without him fainting, but he went even paler. Her stomach clenched, sick with the idea that Sam didn’t, couldn’t, see the three of them as the beautiful thing they were.

She could see her Sam superimposed over this one. Her Sam, who would sit up at night and watch over the both of them when he couldn’t sleep, Dean’s head on his thigh and Jess curled around in a little ball so that she was almost backwards on the bed, and her back pressed against the side of his other leg. Whenever she woke up, absently in the middle of a dream, or groggy and with a painful bladder demanding attention, she could see Sam’s face, watchful and careful and soft. One hand would be on Dean’s head and the other on her shoulder, and he couldn’t say he loved them more if he’d spoken the words.

That was nothing like this face, blanched and disgusted. Reviling. This face that looked sickened at the idea of him and Dean together, and revolted at the idea of the three of them together.

“It’s not like that.” She tried to defend it again, but she knew her words were weak. Sam and Dean, they drove at the weaknesses in her, could always make her knees shake, either with desire or with worry. She had nothing to say that could make this Sam see it, but she suddenly wished she had photographs and pie charts to show him just how good the three of them were for each other.

“Jess,” he said finally. “I gotta…I gotta go outside. I’ll be…I’ll be just outside. Just outside the door. But…I’ve...”

“Sam,” she started, voice a little stronger with frustration. “You can go as far as you like. I’ll be fine. I can take care of myself.”

“No.”

“Sam! I said I—”

“No!” he bellowed, his voice dropping to some strange, harsh register that she’d never heard out of Sam before, not even in panic or anger. It was freaky as all hell, and some irrational part of her thought it made the furniture shake. Her Sam could get mad or pissed or grumpy, and sometimes when he thought something terrible was going to happen to her or Dean on a hunt, he’d yell their names in shock and desperation, but it wasn’t anything like that.

His intensity frightened her, and she hadn’t been frightened of a human being in almost two years. She’d kicked the asses of men twice her size and monsters even bigger. She’d brawled with Sam and pinned him. She’d been afraid for him, or for Dean, but never afraid of him. She wanted to think it was just being here, being away from her world and her boys and being worried that she might never be able to get back, but she was pretty certain that that was a lie.

“I’ll be outside,” he said, softer again, but she could still hear that scary intensity just underneath, everything boiling near the surface. “Just…I’m sorry I yelled. Just please stay in here.”

She was about to say ‘Fuck you. I can take care of myself, you bastard.’ She was about to say ‘Screw that, I’m going out for a walk, and you can just suck my cock.’ She was going to show him just how good with a knife she was, but instead she just said, ”Okay.”

While he was outside, she could hear him pacing, but after a few moments, she had to lay down on her bed because if she was going to cry like a fucking girl, it was at least going to be muffled by a pillow.

----

Sam didn’t talk with her for a few days.

It wasn’t like he didn’t talk at all, but it was mostly limited to questions about what she wanted to eat and if she was okay. Always if she was okay. She cussed at him just about every time, but it didn’t seem to dissuade him from asking her again half an hour later. She couldn’t seem to convince him that she wasn’t going to break.

When she got back to her world, she was going to apologize to her Sam. She’d thought he was irritating back in those first few weeks after she’d gotten out of the hospital. Apparently, he didn’t have anything on a Sam whose Jess had actually died.

Sometimes she wished he’d get pissed off at her again, but he just looked sad and smiled like he was convincing someone that he was okay with this.

Given that he wasn’t willing to get into anything, she had to do her best to ignore it all. When they went in for lunch the next day she ate her chili cheese fries distractedly, munching on them in the side of her mouth as she looked around the diner. Some chili dropped from her lips and landed on the convenient table of her boobs. She sighed and shoved the rest of the fries in her mouth to get a napkin, dabbing at the spot on her shirt.

“You sure can pick ‘em, Sammy,” Dean said with a raised eyebrow, watching her skeptically.

“Go fuck yourself,” Jess responded sweetly, giving him an insincere smile.

Sam looked a little shocked, like he always did when she didn’t act like the Jess he’d known. She knew she was different. She didn’t get how Sam couldn’t get that, though. It’d been two years, two whole years, in which she’d been hunting evil and fucking two men who happened to be brothers. Not to mention that she’d almost died in a fire and had to rebuild her life around a permanent disfigurement.

She wasn’t ever going to be that Jess again. Hell, she didn’t want to be.

Her Sam got that. Loved her just as she was. This Sam looked like she’d killed his kitty every time she did anything untoward. The weirdest part was trying to remember how she had acted back then.

She dropped the napkin on the table, giving up her shirt as a lost cause, and got right back to eating her fries, because only carbs could save her now.

“You used to hate stuff like that in college,” Sam said quietly, referring to her food.

“That’s ‘cause I used to be worried about my waistline.” She remembered eating big salads for lunch and cooking things like salmon and tofu for dinner. It was shit hard to run a hunt on crap like that. She ran around enough to burn off whatever she ate, and sometimes she needed that extra energy for nights when they were up for thirty-plus hours. “’Sides, you aren’t eating any better.” She poked a fry at him, indicating his deflated and greasy-looking burger, sitting half-eaten on his plate.

“No, I didn’t mean—” He shook his head. “I didn’t mean it like that. I just…it’s strange. Getting used to you.”

“No,” she said softly, leaning her head against her hand and looking out the window. “It’s strange getting used to you…”

----

Most days, they didn’t come up with anything new on how to get Jess back home.

It was just about driving her crazy because with every day that passed, she only wanted to be home more. Sam assured her that he was doing all he could, and she believed him. He had a stack of books from the local library on the coffee table, but she wasn’t sure how the Yankton Public Library was going to help them figure out inter-dimensional travel. Still, Sam was on the case, and she knew that if he was anything like her Sam, he wouldn’t let her down.

All the same, she had noticed that he seemed to have some other project on his hands. He only pulled it out on the evenings when Dean was out (which still weirded her out a lot), but she’d begun to see a pattern: a different document on his computer, a book he pulled out of his bag, little things that had at first just blended together into the background noise of research. It was only two weeks in that she began to note the differences enough to know that Sam had something else on his mind besides getting her home.

“What’s that?” Jess asked, leaning over Sam’s shoulder to get a look at the notebook he was writing in. Sam slammed it shut before she could read even a word. “Goddamn, okay.” She raised an eyebrow, standing up straight again. “What, were you writing porn or something?”

“No,” he said, giving her a funny look. “No! I— Sorry. I didn’t mean to—Sorry.” He shrugged and turned back to open the notebook. “It’s not a secret or anything. It’s just…I’m used to having to hide it from Dean.”

“If it’s not a secret, why do you have to hide it from him?”

“Because…” Sam stopped and made a face. He made some vague gestures and tried to come up with a sentence for a few seconds, then let his hands flop down on his knees. “It’s complicated.”

That was something you never wanted to hear a Winchester boy say. Jess had learned that much. She sat down on the end of one of the beds, leaning back on her hands and crossing her legs at the knee.

“Alright. Complicated then.” She nodded. “If it’s not a secret, you should be able to tell me.”

Sam grimaced again.

“Christ on a stick.” She let out an exasperated breath. “What did you two get yourselves into?”

“A deal,” Sam responded, lacing his fingers together between his thighs. He didn’t say anything more, though he was clearly trying to find the words.

“A deal?” Jess prompted him to continue.

“Look, it’s—Like I said, it’s complicated.” He sighed. “A few months ago, I—I died.”

Jess’s eyes widened, and she leaned forward immediately, concern in her eyes. She rested her elbows on her knees as she uncrossed them, looking over at Sam like she expected him to say ‘Surprise! I’m a zombie!’

“Oh my God. Sam. What happened?”

“I got stabbed. I got—I was stabbed in the back, by this guy…Another kid that was tied in with the demon.” Sam bit at his lower lip. “And you know Dean. I mean…I assume you do with”--Sam coughed and looked a little flustered--“I mean, what you told me about your world.”

“You mean the fact that I have sex with both of you,” she said dryly, watching him flush and avert his eyes. “In a ménage a trois relationship.”

“Yeah, um…that.” Sam rubbed a hand over his face. “Anyway…You know how he is. Especially with family. He went to the crossroads.”

“Shit.”

“He went to the crossroads and he summoned a demon.”

“Fuck.”

“Yeah.”

“Fuck.” Jess stood up, her heart beating a bit faster with fear. She tried to remind herself that this wasn’t her Dean. Her Dean hadn’t summoned a demon. Her Dean wasn’t in danger. All the same, she felt like a panicked bird was fluttering away in her chest, trying to escape. “What…What were the terms?” She remembered working a case down in Mississippi with folks making deals with the devil. It didn’t end well.

“One year. He gets to live for one year, and I was brought back to life. When the year’s up, he’ll die, and his soul belongs to Hell.” Sam let out a long breath, the sound of someone in chronic pain, and put his hand on the notebook. “This is what I’ve got so far.”

“To break the deal,” she said in a monotone.

“Yeah.”

“Sam,” she said, not wanting to say it. “You know you can’t break devil deals. You know that.”

“I don’t know anything. Not until I’ve tried.”

“Well, you know that no one else has ever been able to break them.”

“Jess,” he said, low and determined. “No one’s done a lot of things that we’ve done. And I don’t know until I try. Everything has to happen for the first time. If the ritual to save him doesn’t exist, then I’ll be the one to write it.”

She sighed and put her hands on her hips, wondering at how there could be two Sams that were so alike and so different. She didn’t get how every mannerism, every turn of his head or lilt in his voice struck her wrong, like he was in some uncanny valley of Samness that made him not her Sam. But then he could turn around and do something like this, something so bullheaded and determined, with so much good will and unflinching faith that he couldn’t be anybody but Sam.

“So.” She managed to speak again, after a few seconds of marveling over that. “Why do you have to keep it a secret from Dean?”

“Because he’d burn my research or something,” Sam huffed in that ‘Dean’s a stupid bastard’ way that she recognized from both herself and her own Sam.

“He doesn’t want you to break it?”

“No. The demon told him…” Sam sighed. “The demon said that if he tries to break the deal, I die. So he doesn’t want me to do anything, because he’s afraid I’ll keel over again.”

Jess covered her face with her hands. She was pretty certain that when she got back (if she got back), she’d never let her boys out of her sight again. Clearly, they became raving lunatics if she didn’t keep a handle on them.

“Don’t tell him about this, alright?” Sam asked. “I’ve got enough problems to deal with without him trying to destroy my stuff. And don’t worry, this isn’t taking away from my working to get you back. I just have to write down an idea when it occurs to me, or I’ll forget it.”

“No, Sam, that’s fine. Don’t…Look.” She lowered her hand from her face. “I’m not mad at you for working on this, I’m just…I can’t believe—I’m just worried. That’s all.”

Sam nodded understandingly.

“Me, too.”

She took a deep breath, swallowing down that flutter of panic, some paranoid notion bouncing around in her head that this was what was happening to her boys while she was gone. She was scared she’d come back and find everything in some terrible mess because she wasn’t there to keep them safe and whole.

“Alright,” she said, moving to the other chair at the motel room coffee table. She turned it around and sat down on it backwards, straddling the seat. She folded her arms on top of the back. “Show me what you got.”

----

Jess had trouble thinking about her life before the boys.

It wasn’t like her memories weren’t sharp. She still remembered when she was twelve and her little brother stuck gum in her hair, forcing her parents to cut it all off. She remembered swearing to never forgive him. She remembered growing up in Massachusetts and driving out to Martha’s Vineyard for the summers, the way the sparklers stung her hands on the Fourth of July, running up and down the darkened beaches as the fireworks exploded in the sky over the sea.

She remembered being a raging bitch in high school, and remembered that at the time she thought she was just being the only way she could be. She remembered getting in to Stanford for their medical school, planning to be a nurse, a career that her father approved of. She remembered her first year there and meeting Sam Winchester. She remembered taking that photography class to fill her core art requirement and seeing something of herself develop in the chemicals as she moved the paper with her tongs. She remembered that screaming match she’d had with her father when she’d switched her major to art and Sam being the only person in her life who understood.

She remembered becoming Jess, instead of Jessica. She remembered that first set of oil paints, the eight-color set, all Sam could afford to get her for her birthday on his court clerk’s salary. She remembered finding their apartment and filling it with herself. She remembered walking into a room that felt like home for the first time in her life.

She remembered burning.

But as much as she remembered, it felt like someone had injected the memory from someone else’s life into her head. It didn’t feel like her. As much as she’d become Jess in that little apartment in Palo Alto, she hadn’t become Jess Winchester until she’d found that Moore didn’t fit her anymore. When she’d cut all those ties to the world she thought was real, she’d become something entirely different.

Like the ancient alchemists, trying to turn coal into gold, she was something melted down by fire and re-forged into a new creature, something sharp and dangerous, not that decorative little piece kept on a rich man’s desk to show off as the model daughter.

And the boys, her boys, were such a huge part of that. Dean the anvil and Sam the hammer, the two of them crafting her even as she twisted herself into her new shape. Crafting her even as she found herself remaking them.

They were her masterpiece.

For all the things she’d painted, she didn’t think she’d ever made something as beautiful as them. For all the ways her life had changed, the day-to-day things, the basic belief that there was nothing in the dark but shadows, the life and the lifestyle, their lives had changed, too. It was more than just having to deal with bras and panties when they went to the laundromat. It was more than the king-sized bed they needed to get to fit them all. It was more than the little pink magnetic breast-cancer ribbon that Dean had let her put on the Impala’s fender after her mother had had her mastectomy.

She’d become the crux of the new family Winchester. She hadn’t let Sam and Dean drift apart again; she hadn’t let herself come between them. And as relieved as she’d been to see that little “negative” on the pregnancy test, she knew that one day, someday, it would be a little “positive,” pink and bright. She would give new life to a family that had only seen loss for as long as they could remember.

And she wouldn’t let them fall apart. They’d made her strong like that.

And without them there, the three of them together and building each other up, she felt them like phantom limbs, missing and needed. She only needed to look over her shoulder and see this Sam buried in his books, gaunt and despairing as he searched for answers. Or look the other way to Dean, self-destructive and desperate as he tried to put his affairs in order. They were all she needed to look at to know that they were missing a crucial element.

The third piece of their puzzle. Someone to temper them, to mediate. Someone who could kick them when they needed it and hold them when they couldn’t hold it together anymore.

Someone to tell them that they loved each other when they couldn’t find the words to tell one another. It made her want to fix them anew, even if they weren’t hers to have, hers to reshape. She wanted to make them whole.

----

“Kiss for me.” She quirked her head to the side and watched them.

They were in the motel room one night when she couldn’t help it. She had to bring it up. She just couldn’t accept the idea that they weren’t the way she knew them to be. Maybe it was hidden. Maybe they just didn’t know how to articulate it. The idea of them just not being together struck Jess strange and sideways, and she had to see it for herself. It was so bizarre that she needed to see with her own eyes that there was nothing there.

“Huh?” Sam asked, looking up. Dean didn’t say anything, but he was watching Jess with those wary eyes.

“I want you to kiss each other.”

“And why would we do that?” Dean asked derisively, looking back to the gun he was cleaning. “We’re not perverts, like your version of us.” Sam had been awkward for days, so Jess had eventually had to spill the beans to Dean as well, as hesitant as she was to do so. He’d reacted pretty much like she’d expected.

“How do you know, if you haven’t tried?” She would have punched him, except she was pretty certain it wouldn’t get her anywhere. She glared at him.

“How do you know dog shit doesn’t taste like chocolate cake?”

“Dean!” Sam moved to stand.

“What?” Dean replied testily.

“What is up with you? Damn it…”

“This isn’t your Jess, Sam,” Dean said in his commanding tone, the one that Jess and her Sam always rolled their eyes at. It was weird seeing this Sam perk up and listen.

“Fuck you, Dean. It doesn’t matter. She’s still Jess, she’s still…Look, just don’t talk to her like that.”

“I’ll talk to her any way I goddamned want, Sam. She is not your girlfriend, and she’s not meant to be here. I wanna get her home safe, yeah, but I am not about to let her come in here and fuck with our heads.”

“Dude, she is a victim in this.” Sam half-circled around Dean, glaring at his older brother. “If nothing else, she’s someone who was hurt by what we hunt, and this is not how we treat the victims.”

“Hey, I’m not a—” Jess started indignantly, but they weren’t listening to her anymore.

“And that’d be fine, if this was a normal case. It’s nota normal case, Sam. Stop trying to pretend it is. I know what’s going on in that big head of yours.”

“Yeah? And what’s that?”

“Her! What else? This was the girl you were shopping for rings for.”

Jess jerked back. Sam had never told her about that in her world.

“I know,” Sam said after a second, lowering his voice. “I know that. I’m not saying it’s easy. And I know you’re just trying to protect me, but seriously, man, back off. You’re not making it easier.”

Dean made a face, looking a little contrite.

“I don’t want to be breaking up fights between you two. Trust me, it’s not helping,” Sam continued.

“Yeah,” Dean agreed lowly, looking elsewhere. He finally looked over at Jess, who was, as always, it seemed these days, trying to factor so much new information into her life. “But it’d be better if you stopped trying to pick fights with me.”

“I’m not,” she said, and saw him bristle. “Seriously. I’m not. I just can’t believe you guys aren’t doing it. It’s weird to me.”

“It’s weird to you that two brothers aren’t having sex?” he replied, raising an eyebrow.

She shrugged and nodded. Dean’s mouth screwed up like he’d bitten into a lemon, then shifted smoothly to a superior look, and his shoulders straightened.

“Fine, then,” he said, putting his hands on his hips. Sam glanced over at him curiously, not following. “Come here.” Dean jerked his head at Sam.

“What?” Sam said, then caught up. “No. We’re not—No.”

“Why not?” Dean challenged. “You said I should get along with her. And c’mon, I don’t have cooties.”

“I’d need lab tests to confirm. And even if you didn’t, you still have a remarkably similar gene structure,” Sam said snarkily, and slapped at Dean’s hand as it reached out for him. Jess could clearly see this had devolved into brotherly teasing.

“C’mon, Sammy, pucker up,” Dean encouraged with a wide grin, grabbing Sam’s shirt and tugging him over.

“Let go, you sicko,” Sam replied, turning up his nose. He opened his mouth to say something else, but Dean planted it on him right there. Sam made some meaningless motions with his hands, but didn’t push his brother away. If Jess could name the expression on Sam’s face, it would have been exasperation. He gave in and kissed back, somehow managing to press his tongue forward and roll his eyes at the same time.

Jess observed the whole thing, seeing aspects of her boys—like looking at the same object from a different angle. She used all the knowledge she’d built up from her time with them, and it wasn’t a perfect dictionary, but it wasn’t bad.

They weren’t devoid of tension. There was something there, not a spark, nothing so active, but more like a dim ember, flaring a little for the moment. She knew it would return to a slow burn once she was gone. This Sam and Dean weren’t in love. They never had been. Somehow, everything was the same. Everything. Except that.

She was fairly certain, from all the theory they discussed in Philosophy 101 at Stanford, that this wasn’t how time and reality rifts worked. When an insect died in one universe and lived in another, their timelines were supposed to become distinct from one another.

But here were Sam and Dean, who’d had a falling out and come back together and gone to Jericho and seen their Jess (only Sam’s Jess, here) burn on a ceiling. While everything here had changed after her death, apparently their lack of an incestuous affair didn’t change a thing. Or maybe this was normal, and it was her world that was strange. But even so, the fact that Sam and Dean had been together there didn’t seem to change anything.

Like it was such a natural, easy thing that the universe couldn’t be bothered to notice it.

The two of them pulled apart, Sam looking more uncomfortable than grossed out and Dean just looking like he’d totally one-upped his brother. She didn’t see desire in their faces, no lust or yearning or long-hidden longing. She just saw how too-close they were, so much in each other’s pockets that even kissing, even frenching, didn’t seem to weird them out too much.

“Not as hot,” she muttered.

Part Three

But Let Patience Have Her Perfect Work [Part 1]

2008-10-13T08:17:12Z

Title: But Let Patience Have Her Perfect Work [Part 1]
Word Count: 5,938 for this part

Master Post

Part One | Part Two | Part Three

----

Jess hit the ground like a stone.

Hit an actual stone too. It dug into her cheek on impact, bursting through the tough scar tissue and jarring her cheekbone. It was the kind of pain that hurt too sharp for noise. She’d been hurt worse, much worse, but bones always sang with pain like they’d just been waiting to tell you all about it.

She broke her fall with her hands down, smacking into the hard-packed dirt, a few pebbles digging into the flesh of her palm. She grunted after a second, when air came back to her. She breathed in, which was a bad idea, because while the dirt was hard packed, the dust was not, and it flew up into the back of her throat, making her cough as she raised herself onto hands and knees.

She hacked for a couple of seconds, rubbing at her throat, hair hanging messy around her face.

“You alright?” she heard Sam ask. She nodded a few times to let him know the injuries were all superficial, and lifted her free hand to brush her hair back, fingers combing through the strands and leaving a few stains of pink in their wake. She heard Sam make a noise, but she ignored it to hock up a loogie of red dust and dirt, spitting it out onto the ground as she began to breath normally again. She swallowed, then sniffed up into her sinuses, and sat back on her calves.

She was breathing a little hard when she turned to look at her boys, and her eyes caught on Sam’s face. She knew that face so well, knew almost every expression—almost—and thought she’d seen just about every one.

He looked shattered, something so ragged it made her chest feel hollow, like her stomach was floating in zero G. He was staring at her without blinking, dust motes floating into his eyes and sticking, eyelids not working to blink them away.

“Sam?” she asked, confused, reaching out. He flinched away from her and finally blinked, but then he froze again, a few more inches back. She frowned. He looked different. Not just his expression. Just…everything. Wrong.

“Your hair…” she said, finger just brushing the wisps to either side of his forehead. “Your hair’s all weird.”

It was the first indication she had that something was not right.

It was confirmed when Dean shoved Sam to the side and cocked a pistol at her, arm a straight line and gaze traveling down the barrel of the gun. She scrambled back a foot, but that black hole followed her. She knew it was centered between her eyes.

If it was Sam, she might have brushed it aside, stared at him, then yelled at him. Maybe kicked some dirt at him if he didn’t have that damned puppy look aimed at her. Sam bluffed with a gun.

Dean didn’t.

“Dean,” she said, in what she hoped was her reasonable voice. She held up a hand. “Dean. What are you doing?”

“What are you?”

“What…? What the hell, Dean!?”

“I said, what are you?” He put his other hand on the gun and she went still.

“Okay. Okay, just…Jesus, Dean. Calm down. I’m…I’m Jess. Jessica.”

“The hell you are.”

“Dean,” she said, feeling herself begin to hyperventilate. “Dean, please, please listen to me, Dean, you are going to shoot me, and I’m going to die, and whatever…whatever’s gotten a hold of you, you’ll kill it, but you won’t be able to un-kill me. Dean…just, listen to me, listen to me, please…Dean.” She shut her eyes, mouth still working, unable to stop saying his name. “Dean, don’t kill me.” She thought she might have believed, once, that if anyone was to kill her, she would prefer it to be someone like Dean, so she could die seeing someone she loved. But all she could think now was that she didn’t want her lover to shoot her in the head. “Please, Dean. Please, fuck, God. Dean…”

“Dean.”

She opened her eyes, and she could see Sam, still kneeling on the ground. He looked like he was on the verge of passing out, but his hand was on Dean’s forearm, and he was looking up at his brother, shaking a little.

“Dean, don’t.”

“It’s not her, Sam. It’s a trick.”

“It’s not a trick.”

“Fuck that! How would you know, Sam?” He was talking to Sam, but he wasn’t looking anywhere but at Jess. “How would you know?”

“Because she’s burned,” Sam said, and he looked at her, made eye contact, and if Dean’s gun didn’t kill her, she was certain Sam’s gaze would. “If it was a trick, she would be perfect.” He studied her, sad and vulnerable. “She would be perfect.”

Jess looked up at Dean and saw him slowly lower the gun in that wary way that let her know he’d raise it again in a heartbeat if she made the wrong move. Her heart was hammering in her chest, but Sam’s words were beginning to pierce her panic a bit at a time, reminding her of those early days when he’d looked at her like a stranger and touched her like china.

They hurt more the second time he said them.

----

The car was strange.

She couldn’t put her finger on it, not quite, but there was something wrong with it. She felt it when she opened one of the back doors and heard it creak harshly, worse than normal. When she shut the door, it closed awkwardly, like it didn’t quite fit in the frame anymore.

She shifted onto the seat, the leather crisp and new, not worn enough to belong to the same car that she was used to. She wasn’t certain what was going on at all. Her first thought was that she had been missing, maybe for quite some time.

“How long was I gone?” she asked quietly, after Sam and Dean had gotten into the front seat, Dean on the driver’s side, and she was at least relieved to see that that hadn’t changed. The engine turned over and Dean started driving them back towards Yankton, where they’d been staying while working the case.

“Gone?” Sam asked, looking back at her.

“I…Did I die or something?” It was the only way to explain why Sam was surprised that she was burned. Maybe she had died on this job and had come back to life years later, and Sam figured she’d come back without her scars. It was pretty much the only explanation she could come up with.

“Yeah, yeah, you did,” Sam said, stiff and uncomfortable. His voice was sort of hoarse. “In a fire, in our apartment in Palo Alto.”

“Jesus fuck,” she swore, and Sam swiveled around to look at her, concerned.

It didn’t make any sense. She’d been with Sam and Dean for two years after the fire. She couldn’t have died in the fire. Not unless everything between then and now had been some kind of dream. Some kind of hallucination.

“I don’t remember that…I mean, I remember you two pulling me down from the ceiling, then the hospital…”

“That didn’t happen,” Sam responded, watching her with something strange in his gaze. It weirded her out a little. “I came home from…looking for Dad, with Dean, and…There was a fire.”

Jess narrowed her eyes. Something about his tone was off. It was familiar to her, but it was something he’d never used on her before.

“You’re using your ‘talking to the normals’ voice,” she said, shaking her head slowly. “You hunt, though, right? Demons? Ghosts, skinwalkers, those kinds of things?”

Sam stared at her, his eyes huge, and he shook his head a little, but she was pretty certain it was more out of disbelief than anything else. He finally nodded, looking down.

“Y-yes…We do, I—How did you know?”

“Because…it can’t have been a hallucination. I lived that life. You two pulled me down from the ceiling, and we’ve been hunting together since then. You’ve just…forgotten or something. Something’s made you think that I died.”

“That’s not possible,” Dean said, his voice hard and adamant.

“Well, one set of memories has to be wrong,” Jess pointed out.

“Yeah, well, it ain’t ours, and I’m not ready to jump onto the whole ‘you’re not actually a monster’ train just yet.”

Things were tense and silent in the car after that, Jess glaring daggers at Dean when she wasn’t looking worriedly at Sam, who looked like he was about to shake himself apart. The Impala swung into a parking lot, Jess looking out at a building that could have been any one of the million motels she’d stayed in over the last two years but was definitely the one that she and the boys had checked into only the day before. They all got out of the car, Dean watching her and her watching Sam and Sam staring at the ground as they made their way into their room.

Jess stopped when she entered the room, expecting there to be evidence of her existence – her bag, her weapons, her bra hanging off the headboard. There was nothing there, though, just Sam and Dean’s things and nothing else.

“I don’t understand,” she said, moving around the room, looking under beds and tossing articles of clothing in search of something hers. “My stuff was here. It was right here when we left the room.”

“You mean you remember being in this room?” Sam asked, a quizzical look on his face, clearly seeing that as something significant.

“Yes. This is the room we checked into yesterday. We came here to investigate some disappearances and found out it was a gorgon. We were out all day today taking care of it, but I was here last night, and my things were here.” She got frustrated, flinging one of Dean’s shirts down on the floor as she stood up again. “What the hell is going on?!”

“The easiest explanation is that you’re some kind of shapeshifter or monster with a mean streak and enough info on us to go for the sweet spot,” Dean said, leaning back against the coffee table.

“Would you lay off? Good fucking god, Dean, as if I’m not already dealing with enough, you’ve gotta be riding me the whole time?” she yelled, used to not backing down with either of them.

“Hey!” Sam said suddenly, and he was holding up his hands, though they were shaking. “Both of you. Just…stop.”

Jess let out an angry huff, but she didn’t say anything else, Sam’s expression enough to rein her in. Evidently, the same was true of Dean, because he was looking consternated and out the window of the room.

“Now,” Sam said, lowering his hands and still looking at her like she was a ghost. He took a shaky breath. “You know about hunting, which you didn’t know about before…And you were in this room yesterday, but all your things are gone, right?”

Jess nodded, knowing to keep her mouth shut. Her anger was bleeding out fast, the pain on Sam’s face making her wish that she’d been more coolheaded and not put him in the position of having to be the mediator.

“It could be that…you were a ghost and rationalizing the things you saw,” Sam said.

“It was too real for that,” Jess said, feeling a little bit sick to even consider that everything that had happened between her and her boys had been a dream. “Besides, how would I…come back to life? And like this?” She motioned to herself. “I’m just like I was in my…version of things.” The burn scars were stretched over her skin, over the muscles that had been built up through hunting. She remembered getting those muscles. She remembered working for every callus.

“I don’t know.” Sam shook his head, sitting down slowly on the end of a bed and looking downwards. He shut his eyes, rubbing at his forehead like he did when there was a headache coming on. She knew it helped if she sat behind him and rubbed his temples, but she didn’t go over to him. “What…happened? In your memory, how did everything happen?”

“You went out to Jericho with Dean.” She stayed standing, too much energy in her to sit. She rocked back and forth on her feet, crossing her arms loosely. “You were gone for a couple of days, and just before you got back, I saw…a man with yellow eyes. I was pinned to the ceiling when you and Dean came in, and you two set up a circle of salt around the bed, recited Latin prayers until I came down. Not before I caught on fire, but...” She shrugged. “I spent a while in a coma at the hospital while my burns healed, went through some physical therapy…And I made you two tell me what had happened. All of it. The truth. After that, I came with you, and you taught me how to hunt. After that, we set off on the road. We hunt together now.”

Sam ran his fingers through his hair, and it looked like his whole body was trembling. Dean got up and paced around the room, watching Sam, and Jess could tell he wanted to go over to Sam, but he didn’t.

“And…and you guys killed the demon? In the cemetery?” Sam asked, and Jess’s eyes grew large.

“No, we haven’t. We’ve been…looking for your Dad, mostly, I--You killed the demon?”

“Dad’s alive?” Dean asked sharply, standing very suddenly still.

“Yeah,” Jess said, breathless and distracted. “Last—last I knew of, anyway. He doesn’t contact us often. We looked for him for about a year after I got out of the hospital, but we’ve started tracking the demon on our own now.” She swallowed slowly. “He’s…dead, here?”

“Has been, almost a year now,” Dean said, tight lipped.

“This—this isn’t right,” Jess said, shaking her head slowly. This wasn’t the world she’d left behind when she walked out of the motel room this morning. It wasn’t her world. Her knees were trembling.

“What if,” Sam started and stopped, and Jess wondered if they were all on the verge of passing out. Sam’s voice didn’t sound so great, and Jess was sinking down onto the edge of the other bed. “What if everything she’s saying is real—“

“Sam—”

“No, listen…I mean. It’s possible, right? There’re…other possibilities. That maybe there’s a timeline where we save Jess, like…like the way you saw with Mom—“

“That was a dream, Sam. It was the djinn – all fake. It wasn’t real,” Dean insisted.

“I know, but what if places like that are real? That time it was fake, sure, but…What if there’re whole other realities out there? Maybe…maybe we’re not the only version of how it happens…”

Jess let out a breath like she’d just been drowning and that sentence was her reprieve. She clung to it, because it was the only idea that suggested there was a way back to a world that made sense. Of all the options, that was the best. Any way she could get back to her Sam and Dean.

“Fuck,” Dean muttered, and paced the room again, stopping when he glanced back over his shoulder to look at Sam, pale and drawn. “Damn it, Sam. Lie down or something. You look like you tied your corset too damned tight.”

She took some consolation in the fact that things weren’t so screwed up here that Dean wouldn’t take charge in a situation like this. She watched as he tried to convince Sam to sleep, Sam’s eyes never leaving her, and she eventually got up and walked outside, crossing her arms under her chest against the cold air. Dean watched her leave warily, but Sam called for her to wait.

She shut the door, hearing the hushed tones of them arguing, which became not-so-hushed very quickly. She stood in the outdoor hallway, looking over at the Impala, her thumbs rubbing her upper arms.

She was so totally fucked.

She wasn’t even entirely certain how she got here, let alone how to get back. Of all the things they’d thought up, only two made sense: that she was from some other reality, or that she was something trying to trick Sam and Dean. And she was pretty fucking sure she wasn’t the latter.

And she knew why Sam didn’t think she was, either.

If it was a trick, she would be perfect.

She winced and hung her head, hair hiding scars she hadn’t been ashamed of in a long time. She didn’t cry. She didn’t know if that was just because she was in shock or because she really was that hardcore.

“Fuck,” she said, running her fingers through her messed-up hair, turning her face upwards, shutting her eyes. “Fuck.”

----

Dean came out of the room about forty minutes after she did, and she could tell he wanted to slam the door but didn’t.

“You fuck this up,” he said, jabbing his finger at her, “and I will end you, I don’t care where you came from.”

“Is he asleep?” she asked, not cowed by him.

“Yes,” Dean replied, backing off only marginally and only to pace in short laps a couple of times. “Once I drugged him, goddamnit. You think he would just sleep with you here?”

“I don’t know, Dean. I don’t know this Sam! Or you, for that matter!”

Dean muttered something and resumed his pacing, rubbing at the back of his neck.

“Don’t you think we should pick this up tomorrow or something?” she asked. “We’re all pretty on edge, if you haven’t noticed.”

“No, because tomorrow he’s going to wake up and you’re going to say something that makes him go back twenty steps!” Dean hissed, rounding on her. Even though he was speaking emphatically, he was still keeping his voice low enough to not disturb Sam.

“What do you mean?” Jess asked. She knew that he was talking about her death, but there was more than just that. Sam was fucked up, sure. Who wouldn’t be after having your girlfriend die like that? But there was more than just that.

“I mean that if you hurt him, I will make you regret it.”

“What happened?” she asked in an almost pleading voice, desperate to know what did this to them, what made them these people on the edge of being broken.

Dean ceased his pacing, breath coming slightly faster with emotion, and stood there like he was appraising her. It took him a long time to speak, and she didn’t hurry him.

“He watched you burn,” Dean said very quietly, making her skin prickle. “He walked into the apartment, and he lay down on the bed, and he watched you burn. Every person he’s reached out to since then, every person, he’s either had to leave behind or kill. I get that you’re Jessica, and I get that you don’t deserve this, but I will end you before I let you tear him up any more.”

Jessica didn’t say anything; she just leaned back against one of the concrete pillars that held up the stairs to the second floor.

She could very clearly remember Sam back then, back after the fire, when she’d finally gotten out of the hospital. She remembered how he didn’t touch her and how she’d felt like he didn’t want her anymore, that he was repulsed by her. It had been months later that he’d admitted the truth to her, not long after the three of them had started sleeping together: that it was himself he was repulsed by, his failure to keep her safe.

She could only imagine how much worse that would be in a Sam who had lost his Jess. Worse—a Sam who had had to watch his Jess die. It would have been one thing to come back and find a charred ruin or the building on fire. She had assumed that that’s what had happened, if Sam had been unable to save her, not that he’d gotten back just in time to be utterly powerless. It was something altogether different to imagine him lying there, seeing her suddenly, and knowing exactly what was happening, all the while helpless to stop it. She didn’t know what had been different--whether they’d gotten home earlier, whether they’d reacted faster--that had allowed her Sam and Dean to save her.

“Dean,” she said quietly, still rubbing her arms. She could feel the ridges of her scars under her shirt. “I just want to go home.”

“Alright,” he said, taking a half-step back. “Okay. We’ll…try. Just…Fuck. Please don’t fuck his head up any more. He already has enough to deal with.” There was a tense pause. “You can take the other bed. I’ll sleep on the chair.”

This wasn’t even nearly done. There was no way it could be. But it was late, and her adrenaline was running stale, and bed sounded so damned good.

As she stepped through the motel door, though, all she could think was that she hoped she would wake up tomorrow and this would all be a very bad dream.

----

At first, Jess didn’t pay much attention to the differences between this world and her own. Not because they weren’t plentiful, but because she thought she’d be tugged back to her own reality any second, the universe trying to balance itself out and this only a hiccup.

Every day, she woke up expecting to be home or to find this all some strange and terrible nightmare, but it didn’t happen. By the time a week had passed, she started to accept that this was long term.

Sam and Dean treated her with gloves of different kinds. Dean was wary of her. He seemed to expect her to burst out with a bunch of tentacles and horns and try to eat the him and Sam whole, while Sam kept staring at her in that distant way that made her
uncomfortable. It sort of reminded her of when she’d first started traveling with them (with her boys), after she’d gotten out of the hospital: Dean not knowing how to deal with her, and Sam guilting so hard that he couldn’t even see that he was hurting her by pushing her away.

They got a second room the day after she arrived, and Dean and she shared because he didn’t trust her to not do something nefarious. She tried to avoid Sam’s room because she could stand Dean glaring at her suspiciously, but she couldn’t take that broken look on Sam’s face whenever she was around.

By the third day, she was eating meals with them at the diner down the block because she was hungry and sick of being padlocked in the room whenever Dean had to leave. When the first week passed, and she was forced to accept that this wasn’t just a passing thing, she started hanging around with them both. It turned out to be kind of a bad decision, because then Sam decided to become her watcher, but in a completely different way. While Dean looked at her warily, Sam watched her like she was about to break and would, too, if she was out of his sight for even a second.

Sometimes when she came out of the diner bathroom, he was leaning up against the wall just outside the door, waiting for her.

She tried to get him to spar with her so she could prove just how good of a fighter she was, but he always turned her down. She wished she could just clock him one, but she knew she’d feel like a dick afterwards.

He asked her lots of questions about her burns: how long they took to heal (months), do they still hurt (no, but they itched if she exerted herself, the pores melted over and nowhere for sweat to excrete), would she ever get the plastic surgery to lessen their deformity (no). He asked her about hunting, about why she chose to leave her family and go on the road with them. He couldn’t seem to grasp that after all she’d been through, she’d prefer to have the truth over a lie. The lie kept her safer, kept her feeling better, but it was still a lie, and with the physical proof of the supernatural on her skin, she’d rather fight it than hide from it.

Sometimes, Sam just followed her around like a puppy, and while she was wandering the sidewalks of Yankton, she’d do loops around a tree or jump over a wide puddle just to make it harder on him. Not that it ever dissuaded him.

She thought a lot about her own boys: what they were doing, how they were handling this. Given their history with people in their lives disappearing on them, she was pretty certain they wouldn’t be handling her being gone well. She desperately wanted to just find her way home. She could tell them it was okay, she was okay, and that they didn’t have to worry. She wanted to be back in a world she knew, a world that made sense, with a Dean that loved her and a Sam that trusted her. She wanted this nightmare world to be gone.

But the first week passed, and nothing changed.

----

“So,” Dean said, clearing his throat awkwardly.

That didn’t surprise Jess, given that Dean had been an asshole to her the entire time she’d been here. Starting a casual conversation with her wasn’t going to be easy.

“Yeah?” she responded tartly, her hands behind her head. She was lying on the hood of the Impala, looking up at the night sky. Dean leaned against the car’s side. Sam was indoors, researching how to get her back. They hadn’t talked about it much (though she asked almost every day at the diner), but it was pretty clear that he still didn’t have any good leads.

“My Dad,” Dean started. Jess could hear him shift his weight behind her. “You said…he’s still alive in your world?”

“Yep.” She nodded. “He doesn’t meet up with us often. He’s been hunting the demon for the last two years, staying mostly underground. It’s tried to trap him, using us as bait so…Mostly we don’t see him. I’ve only met him twice.”

“He doesn’t mind you hunting with us?”

“He doesn’t get much say in it.” She half-sat up, leaning back on her elbows. She glanced back at Dean over her shoulder, giving him an arch look. “And oh yeah, he sure gave you two shit for it the first time we met up, but he couldn’t yell at me, because I’m”—she held up one finger—“one: not his kid”—she held up a second one—“two: a girl. He totally can’t yell at girls. It’s awesome.”

Dean looked kind of blank, blinking at her owlishly.

“I told him that it wasn’t up to him whether I hunted or not, and so long as it wasn’t him I was hunting with, he also didn’t get to decide who I worked with. You and Sam’s faces were priceless.” She flopped back against the car. “Sam and I argued with him for a while, and he finally threw his hands up and left. He didn’t talk with any of us for eight months. I dunno if that was because he was pissed or just because he wasn’t in contact, because it’s pretty normal not to hear from him for that long. Next time I saw him was at the house of this psychic in Lawrence.”

“Missouri Moseley.” Dean perked up, looking interested.

“Yeah, you know her?” Jess tilted her head back.

“Yeah. On the case with our old house? That poltergeist and…and the other spirit?”

“No.” Jess shook her head, looking confused. “We didn’t work that case. We met up in Lawrence when there was a lead on the demon. Missouri phoned us out of the blue and told us to get to Lawrence ‘cause John was about to do something stupid. We didn’t know who the hell she was, but we figured we should hightail it down there, just in case.

“John…he’s a lot like Sam. Just gets these…blinkers on, whenever something piques his interest. Of course, with him, the only thing that piques his interest is the demon.”

“Was the same here,” Dean said lowly. “Only Sam was obsessed with the demon, too. ‘Cause of you.”

Jess paused, not having thought about that – that in a world where the demon killed her, Sam would be as obsessed with finding it as John was. It was an unpleasant thought. She considered John a kind of extended family, but she would never wish his life on anyone, let alone one of her boys. She pursed her lips, biting at the lower one a bit before breaking the silence again.

“Dean?”

“Yeah?”

“How’d you kill the demon?” She could hear him scuff the gravel of the parking lot a bit behind her, obviously hesitant to give her info. She had no illusions; he was out here talking to her because he was still keeping her under watch. He didn’t trust her. It wasn’t in his nature to overlook possible threats.

“The Colt,” he said finally.

“Like…a gun?” She frowned, sitting up. He nodded, not looking at her. “But how could a gun kill the demon?” It was too damned easy.

“Not any Colt. A special one. Made by Samuel Colt himself. Made for a hunter. It can kill anything. Anything at all.”

“Jesus,” she muttered. She couldn’t begin to imagine how useful a weapon like that was. Something that could even out the imbalance of power between the paranormal and humans. “I guess you couldn’t be talked into giving it up, huh?”

“If you’re thinkin’ you can bring it back to your world…no. Well, not and have it do anything. It came with a limited number of bullets. We used the last one to kill the demon; now it’s mostly just something we keep for sentimental value. That and if it has any other power, we don’t want anything else getting its hands on it.”

“Damn,” she sighed, rolling back over onto her back. She wondered what life would be like with that thing dead. Would they keep hunting? Would they stop? They’d always be together, she knew that much, but the rest was more up in the air. She wondered if she’d stop feeling afraid. If she knew that it was dead, maybe she’d stop dreaming of yellow eyes and fire and being unable to breathe.

“Daniel Elkins,” Dean said.

“What?” She opened her eyes, trying concentrate on what Dean was saying, her mind already running through all kinds of hypothetical scenarios.

“When you get back, look for a hunter named Daniel Elkins. He has the gun. If he’s dead, look for a pack of vampires. They stole it from him. Beyond that, you’re on your own.”

She rolled onto her stomach to stare at him in disbelief.

“Vampires? Really?”

“Hey.” He held up his hands. “I was as surprised as you are.”

----

As far as they could tell, there was nothing different here about how the hunt had gone in her world. All the same, they went over it a thousand times, trying to find the key to the puzzle. Everything was exactly the same, except for her.

The first time they ran through the events was almost exactly one week after she arrived. It wasn’t like she hadn’t tried to speed things up a little, but a certain amount of time had been required to prove to Dean that she was telling the truth, and even more time was required for Sam to be mentally there enough to sit down and go over the problem. There was also a certain expectation, on the part of all three of them, that this was just a temporary thing and would work itself out. By the time a week had passed, it was clear that their intervention was needed, and she was already itching to go home.

“Okay, so,” Dean said, pacing the length at the end of the beds slowly, his hands clasped together as if in prayer. “You figured out it was a gorgon.”

“Yes,” Jessica replied tiredly. “We searched the property for anything we could find out about the missing people, but we couldn’t find anything. There were no suspicious stories in the microfiche, no real urban legends specific to the town, and Jeremy Gilroy, the last owner of the property, had died sixty years ago. And he literally died in his sleep – no violent death, not even close.”

“That’s pretty much the same as what happened with us,” Sam said, taking notes of her situation. “We went to scout the property at night, and didn’t find anything major, but two days later another kid went missing.”

“Same as it always is,” Dean said, leaning against the wall. “Once something weird happens, it becomes the talk of the town, then every bored teenager within a hundred miles wants to hump it out here and stay through midnight or some shit.”

“The kid’s friends came back into town the next morning,” Jess continued, the story unfolding like a round robin with no blips yet. “They said he’d vanished, but they hadn’t seen anything strange. We had nothing to go on, until we went back in the day, and Sam— ” She halted for a moment, looking awkward. “I mean, my Sam—he found some white rocks over by the barn and said they looked like marble, which shouldn’t be native to the area. We took it to a geologist over in Vermillion, at the university, who told us it was Penteli marble, which is native only to Greece.

“At that point, we at least knew what to look for, culturally. People vanishing and strange deposits of rocks left in their place? A gorgon was the most likely answer. I’d always assumed it turned people into statues, but Sam said—“

“That maybe it just turned people to rock instead,” Sam finished for her in a low tone, still looking somewhat blown away at the idea of another version of him being out there, saying almost the same things. Jess just nodded in agreement, and Sam cleared his throat, continuing, “We looked up the banishing ritual, went out there, Dean on the lookout, and took the thing out just as it was coming for us. Except…right after it vanished, you appeared.”

“Exactly the same,” Jess replied. “We performed the ritual, Dean was trying to fight the thing off, and I was turning to go help him when I…I don’t know. I hit the ground and wasn’t there anymore.”

“Well, that’s just spiffy,” Dean mumbled. “So we did the same stuff. We’ve never done the same stuff as other versions of us in other dimensions or whatever? Why aren’t we having inter-dimensional travel all the damn time?”

“I don’t know,” Sam said with a sigh. He looked down at the pad of paper in his hands, tapping it with the end of his pen. He finally looked up at Jess, taking a deep breath. “Okay…Start again. From the top. Tell me everything that happened, Jess.”

She let out a puff of breath and ran her fingers through her hair. She paused a second, taking a deep breath before starting all over again.

“So…We figured out it was a gorgon…”

Part Two

SPN 4x01 - [Lazarus Rising]

2008-09-20T01:06:34Z

Spoilers for ep under the cut.

Epic squee.

OMG MY SHOW IS BACK ;_;

And I don't mean 'from hiatus'. I mean 'from sucking a whole bunch.'

I mean, I'll be fair: Mystery Spot and A Very Supernatural Christmas rocked my rocks, and Bad Day and Black Rock and Jus in Bello were pretty good too. But a handful of episodes does not a good strong season make, and I found season three to be lacking in many ways.

But if season four can continue to deliver like this ep did...OH BABY.

#1. I'm really, really glad that Dean doesn't remember Hell. One thing I was afraid we were going to get was Super Dean, or Woe Is Me Dean. If they'd made him come back all broken and afflicted, it would have just been all the lameness of Buffy season six all over again. They brought back Dean. Proper Dean, that steals porno mags. *thumbs up*

#2. Everyone has squeed over Bobby and his disbelief, and Sam and Dean's EPIC HUG, and the necklace being handed back. I squee too X) ALL AWESOME.

#3. A canon invitation to a threesome. Yeah, fandom's going to go fucking nuts with that XD AND I APPROVE.

#4. OMG OMG OMG OMG SAM POWERS. I'VE BEEN WAITING. THREE SEASONS. OMG. I was a tiny, tiny ball of squee when that was happening. I was watching the show with baileytc and maygra, so I didn't want to like...SCREAM, so I just clamped my hands over my mouth. EPIC. AWESOME. Srsly -- that alone would have made the ep amazing for me. Sam-powers is basically the reason I fell in love with the show.

#5. Ruby! No, seriously. I liked Ruby! It's a first! God. What a difference an actress makes. I'm so, so intensely glad that Cassidy is gone, as well as her one-note, monotonous simmering-rage routine. Instead of the cardboard, one dimensional character from last season, we were presented with a character that had actual feelings, portrayed by someone with the ability to emote.

God, I LOVED the scene with Sam and Ruby talking in the diner. I DLed the ep and rewatched it just to make sure I wasn't tricking myself -- and nope. I definitely like Ruby. For starters, they didn't make her emasculate Sam in every scene she was in, like in season three. Instead of needing to belittle men in order to act "strong", this character doesn't need the approval, fear, or hatred from other character to establish a presence on screen.

Also, I TOTALLY MISSED that that was Ruby in the first scene with Sam. I'm personally of the opinion that they are not sleeping together, as that would be rape. But! The alternative to them sleeping together is TOTALLY SQUEE because it implies they've been living out of motel rooms together, and wander around in their underwear.

(FIC REQUEST: Someone write me a fic where Ruby and Sam live out of motels together, and he bitches at her for leaving her bras places, and tells her she can only possess people for two or three days tops, so that they don't significantly mess with anyone's lives. And they eat pizza and watch late night TV together, and are totally platonic buddies, like a buddy-cop show. And sometimes Sam gets really depressed about Dean, and Ruby doesn't know how to deal with him, so she just puts a mickey in his beer and makes him go to bed, and does her best to take care of him, cause they watch each other's backs.)

So yeah, I really loved their partnership dynamic, which was waaaay more interesting to me than the generic 'I'm just bitchy and snarky' Ruby from last season. You get the feeling with them that they've really become friends over the last four months, especially when Ruby says that even though she's not a big fan of Dean's, she knows that Dean is important to Sam.

#6. The angel storyline is GREAT. Because Houses of the Holy, for me, was a little preachy. It made the Christian God out to be...somehow DIFFERENT from all the other Gods they encounter. Here, the angels are just another side to a war -- and from the way Castiel behaves, they're not necessarily good people. And DEAR GOD the way they showed wings was AWESOME.

#7. Heaven trying to get Dean on their side while Hell wants Sam on theirs is so...THERE ARE NO WORDS. I love the idea of the world forcing the brothers against each other, but the two of them still desperate to stay together. I'm not interested in pure-evil!Sam, where he's all...megolomaniacal and happy about it. But I am VERY interested in the both of them trying to do the right thing, but it turns out that they're on different ends of the ideological spectrum, and don't know how to resolve that.

Interesting character drama, OM NOM NOM.

So yeah.

I'm not saying that this means that S4 is automatically going to be better than S3, but if they can keep this up, it'll be AMAZING. Like...Season two amazing.

I mean, seriously -- compare this to The Magnificent Seven. There is no contest.

Neat Movie Critic stuff

2008-09-12T10:07:40Z

Neat stuff:

Movie Critic had an interview with Jim Beaver yesterday -- gotta find out how that went.

He has an article up with two S4 SPN clips! Spoilers, obviously.

And he mentioned yesterday that he might be getting a screener copy of the premiere. Squee!

Speaking of...We watched the first two eps of House S5. Non-spoiler: Good stuff.

The first ep is called "Death Changes Everything", and is pretty good. Thirteen continues to rock my freakin' socks, while Talb is a complete moron. He spends the entire episode whining about how they can't do anything unless House is there. Thirteen does her goddamned job and attempts to cure the patient, regardless of what childish game House is playing.

I didn't like that they reverse everything that happens in the ep(the plot is about a woman who is the assistant for a woman who champions women's rights; the assistant believes that she's a nobody, and is happy to work for her boss, who doesn't value her, because at least then she'll be close to someone who's important -- Thirteen manages to convince the assistant that she's worth something, and the assistant considers going to for a new job, something that will value her more; of course, this being House MD, she ends up not going for it, and reverting to her former self). I felt the episode had some really powerful scenes, especially ones between Thirteen and the assistant, that were kind of negated when they took it all back.

But the ep really rocks for the ending. Wilson leaves the hospital -- and as he does so, finally admits that the reason he's leaving is because he can't stand to be around House anymore. He out and out says that he doesn't blame House for Amber's death, but that House taints everything around him, and that he(Wilson) can't deal with that. He needs to save himself by cutting off the gangrenous limb that is House, and tells him that he's no longer his friend.

\o/

It's a powerful, and incredibly acted scene, and takes Wilson from uninteresting side-kick character to a real powerhouse. Also, it's very nice to see House get kicked in the nuts(emotionally) after he's a complete douche to everyone in the rest of the ep.

Even Cuddy shows some guts. Not a lot, mind. But some.

(Srsly, why do people think of Cuddy as the "strong" female and Cameron as the "weak" one? Cuddy gives in to House every time. Cameron manipulates and out-plans House at his own games from time to time, and even when he out-plays her, she always finds a way to come out with at least some gain. Cuddy just gets walked all over, all the time.)

The second ep is "Not Cancer", and has an AMAZING opening. One of the best of the show. The rest of the ep is also really good, but I can't remember significant scenes, cause it's 6AM, and I kinda watched the eps last week.

Oh!! That's it. There's an incredible new character introduced. He's a PI(Private Investigator) that House hires, and turns out to be awesome. He plays games with House's head, which is pretty hilarious to watch. He's basically replacement-Wilson, but I think he's better at the role. Wilson was always kind of hollow to me, until the end of season four, when they decided to give him a character. The actor is very good, but when the writers were just feeding him one liners, it kind of wasted his abilities. He ended up coming off as a kind of nothing of a person.

The PI character is played by more of a character actor, so he fits the comedic side-kick role better.

All in all, it's shaping up to be a really good season.

Fandoms

2008-08-28T23:19:26Z

Copied from brynwulf. Pick ten through fifteen fandoms and have your friends list guess your least favorite character from each. If you have more than one least favorite, you may put them all, but don't get excessive with it. Try to see who can get the most correct.

ETA: Don't confuse least favorite with hate. Not always the same.

I'm adding favorite as well as least favorite. Some of these will be EXTREMELY easy for y'all, other ones are things I was into before I met you, or we haven't talked a lot about.

Supernatural:
Favorite: Sam denisitap
Least Favorite: Ruby kiniro

House:
Favorite:
Least Favorite:

Firefly:
Favorite:
Least Favorite:

Buffy:
Favorite: Spike denisitap
Least Favorite:

Sex and the City:
Favorite:
Least Favorite:

Devil May Cry:
Favorite: Virgil denisitap (this is a little bit of a lie, as I love Dante and Trish almost as much)
Least Favorite:

X-Files:
Favorite: Scully kiniro
Least Favorite:

Kingdom Hearts:
Favorite:(this one's a trick question; careful)
Least Favorite:

[Fic] "Something Blue" (Supernatural; PG-13)

2008-08-16T00:20:41Z

Title: Something Blue
Author: black_regalia - all other fic here
Series: Supernatural
Pairings/Characters: Sam, Dean, Rebecca, OCs; no pairings
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: None
Word Count: 5,367
Spoilers: 1x07 - Skin. Takes place about ten years in the future, but contains no real reference to seasons two or three.
Summary: Kathy Dunstan is getting married, but there is one guest in particular who's been on her mind.

baileytc killed her sensei in a duel and never said why. But she beta'ed this fic for me because she's awesome.

----

“And the eternal question…” Kathy sighed, holding her hair up off her neck as she looked at herself in the mirror. “Hair up…?” She dropped her hand, letting her hair fall down around her shoulders. “Or down?”

“My aunt had one of those…what is it, Renaissance Fair hairstylists do her hair for her wedding,” Judy chimed in. “It was really pretty.”

“Yeah, but your aunt is a crazy old cat lady,” Claire said around the flower pins in her mouth, one eyebrow raised as the others laughed. She held a bunch of fake flowers in her hands, taking pins from her mouth to group them together into the most graceful arrangements she could manage.

“Well, not anymore. She just got married.”

“Yeah, but that just makes her a married crazy old cat lady," Kathy quipped.

Judy shoved Kathy’s shoulder, and Kathy dropped the pearls she’d been attempting to put on. She laughed as she reached down to pick them up.

“You should get it curled.” Rebecca stood behind her, playing with the bride-to-be’s hair once she sat back up. “You have great hair. Mine’s always so dead straight. I can’t do anything with it.”

“Whatever. I don’t want to hear it from the person who’s, like, fifty pounds lighter than I am.”

“Oh god, can we just not be girls for a moment?” A dark-haired woman stood in the doorway, holding a bulky-looking clothing bag.

“Cynth! You got the dress!” Kathy said with relief, her shoulders slumping a little. It seemed that just about anything was stressing her out these days, even the idea of someone transporting her dress from the bridal store to here.

“I got the dress,” Cynthia responded with an easy, lopsided smile. “Who’s the best bridesmaid?”

“You are, of course.” Kathy got up, moving over to give Cynthia a kiss on the cheek. “Now you gotta help me get into it.”

“Kat, it’s gonna take all six of us to get you into that poofball,” Rebecca said with an arched eyebrow. “You know, for a woman so concerned with her weight, you sure picked the dress that’d make you look as fat as possible.” She made a face, trying to sort out the bottom from the top of the dress, a mess of chiffon.

“You’re such a bitch.” Kathy stumbled slightly as she pulled off her shoes, muttering the phrase unconcernedly. Denise was sitting on the floor over by the dresser, working on her own little project and just generally being in the way of everyone in the small room. Kathy had to do her best to avoid Denise as she stepped into the hoop skirt.

“You need some help with that?” Raquel asked, nodding to Rebecca, who was still struggling with the dress.

“No. No, I think I got it…” Rebecca’s brow was furrowed as she found yet another strap, this one to go around some mysterious piece of anatomy.

“You are such a dumb blonde,” Kathy tsked, moving to help Rebecca sort it out.

“You two are horrible to each other,” Cynthia sighed, but sounded like she was used to it.

“Kat,” Claire said tiredly, plopping her tired arms down after she finished yet another bouquet. “Seriously, we couldn’t have hired someone to do this flower shit? I swear, I'm not doing this right.”

“No, here—” Rebecca mumbled, shifting around and trying to get Kathy into the wedding dress properly.

“Claire, they look fine,” Kathy insisted, trying to step where Rebecca instructed. “Will and I can’t afford to hire someone for the flowers. We have some three zillion people showing up for this thing, and all our money has gone into the food and the booze.”

Claire sighed dramatically but picked up another piece of ribbon, looping it around the stems of the silk flower arrangements and tying it off with less-than-artistic fingers. There was a growing pile of bouquets on the floor, all to be moved out onto the tables that had been placed under the huge canvas cover set up outside for the reception.

The room fell into a rare silence, save for the rustle of fabric and flowers, the seven women each working on their own project and trying to bring together a wedding made out of disapproving parents and limited funds. The peace was broken by the quietest of them all.

“Oh my god,” Denise murmured softly, holding a photo in her hand. She was surrounded by old photo albums, shoeboxes of photos, and ridiculously decorated scrapbooks, putting together some kind of slide show for the rehearsal dinner. The others looked over to her, still working on their own projects.

“What?” Cynthia asked, sewing a rather racy slit into her bridesmaid’s dress.

“Oh my god,” Denise repeated, a sad little smile coming to her lips. “Look, guys.” She turned the picture, which showed some of them during their college days. Claire, Judy, and Cynthia weren’t in the picture, but Kathy was in the front, her arm slung around the slim shoulders of a tan girl with hair in blonde ringlets, smiling irrepressibly. Behind them were Raquel hanging off the shoulders of her then-boyfriend, Rebecca with her brother giving her bunny ears, and a tall young man in the background. Denise herself had taken the snapshot.

Kathy stopped in her motions, her dress still hanging half off and her bra visible as she leaned in, peering at the photo. Her expression fell to something between fondness and regret.

“Jess…” she said, looking at the blonde she’d tossed her arm around so casually back then. If she’d known what was going to happen, the electrical fire that would end their junior year so terribly, she would have held on so much tighter. “Oh my god.” She sat down on the floor, her dress poofing out around her as she reached for the photo and held it between her hands. “I haven’t…I mean, I haven’t thought about her in so long, you know?” She grimaced, looking guilty. “I know that sounds horrible, I didn’t, I mean—”

“It’s been almost ten years, Kat,” Raquel said softly, her voice comforting. “You couldn't be expected to be thinking about her every day. None of us…” There was no good end to that sentence, so it just dangled in the air.

“I know,” Kathy murmured, sniffling a bit, running her hand under her nose. “I know, it's just…God. I thought she’d be here, you know? We pledged to the same sorority and got kicked out together.” She smiled weakly. “We were supposed to…graduate together, and be at each other’s weddings, and…have our kids have playdates and all that girly shit…”

There was a long pause, a silence where no one knew quite what to say. None of them had been as close to Jess as Kathy had, except for Rebecca, who was oddly silent in the back, looking out of the changing room they were all in at the sanctuary of the church, empty on a Tuesday afternoon.

Denise licked her lips, speaking up hesitantly.

“Do you want me to put it in the pile? For the slide show?” she asked as tenderly as she knew how.

Kathy took in a shaky breath, looked up after a moment, and shook her head, a couple of tears coming loose. She smiled again for the audience.

“No.” She laughed weakly. “No. That’s…It’s supposed to make people laugh, you know? Not cry. ’Sides, it’s supposed to be about me and Will, right? Not just…not just my friends.” She ran her fingers over the glossy paper of the photo, and her breath hitched as she looked at it. “Holy shit…Sam.”

Rebecca turned to look at her friend, her head jerking in the motion, making her blonde hair swish a little, but no one was looking at her.

“Sam?” Cynthia asked, having heard about Jess before in a few pained, drunken sentences she’d gotten out of her friends. Having met the group later in the life, she was always a little bit out of the loop when it came to their college stories. “Who’s Sam?”

“He was…he was a friend of ours in college,” Kathy said, turning to look at her friend and holding the photo up. “See? Here, standing in the back.” She pressed her finger to the photo, next to the tall young man lingering in the background of the shot. “Sam, um…Fuck, it was a— Crap. His name was really distinctive, too…”

“Winchester,” Rebecca said quietly.

“Yeah, Sam Winchester. Crap, my brain is just…” Kathy made a swirly motion next to her head, swallowing hard. She was no longer crying, but her face was still blotchy, and she kept sniffling back mucus, trying to get her voice under control. “He was our friend in college. Really…really nice guy. Kind of a weirdo. We used to make fun of him all the time in the sorority. I didn’t meet him until Jess and I got kicked out and she started hanging out with him. I was freaked at first, ‘cause…I mean, seriously. The guy looked like a serial killer.” She laughed weakly, smiling that fond smile of memory. “Always…hanging around in dark corners, just watching people, you know? But…Jess really liked him, and then we started to get to know him. I guess he was just shy or something, ‘cause he turned out to be this really great guy. He was living with Jess when she died. Police suspected him for a while, ‘cause he was in the apartment when the fire started, but it was okay.” She swallowed again, turning the picture back to herself and lowering it to her lap, looking down at it.

“It wasn’t him. It couldn’t have been,” Raquel picked up as Kathy left off. She looked at Cynthia and Claire, Judy just behind her. “They didn’t find anything on him, and seriously, the guy was head over heels for Jess. We all knew he didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“So, what, you guys just stopped talking to him?” Claire asked, holding her most recent bouquet in her lap.

“No.” Raquel shook her head. “He left town. Never came back after Jess…I know,” she said, responding to the skeptical look Claire gave her. “It sounds weird, but…He was a good guy.” She shrugged.

“I should invite him,” Kathy said out of the blue, looking down at the photo.

“Huh?”

“I should invite him.” Kathy nodded firmly and looked up. “I mean…He was a really good friend of ours in college.” She looked around at her friends, looking for approval. “He should be here. I want to see him, and…and Jess…Jess would have—” She licked her lips, the room too quiet again for a moment, awkwardly so. “Becky.”

Rebecca flinched.

“You saw him, didn’t you?" Kathy turned to look at her friend. "I remember you telling me about everything that happened to Zach. Sam came to help you, right? In St. Louis?” Kathy rubbed under her nose again, taking in a deep, calming breath. It had taken a lot of talking, at the time, for Rebecca to convince them that Sam’s brother had been framed, but she had been so ardent about it that Kathy couldn’t believe it was just some kind of Stockholm Syndrome. “You know where he is? How I can contact him?”

“Kat…” Rebecca said, sounding stilted. She swallowed and rubbed her hands against the sides of her jeans. “I—I dunno if that’s such a good idea…”

“Why not?” Kathy asked hotly, obviously still too emotional to see her friend’s distress. “C’mon…I know you know where he is. Tell me—Tell me where. I just want to send him an invitation. He can say no if he wants to, right? Just…Just tell me.”

Rebecca looked down at her friend, hesitating again, her lips pursed and her brow furrowed, and she looked halfway guilty and halfway reticent. She sighed, though, finally, and moved over to her purse. She dug around for a while, looking through all the pockets of the huge thing, until she pulled out her wallet. She flipped it open and pulled a small, folded piece of paper that had been tucked into one of the card slots. She held it in her hand a moment, uncertain, then turned and walked over to Kathy, offering it to her.

“Thank you,” Kathy said gratefully. She reached up, taking the piece of paper and carefully unfolding it. It was old and worn soft, with fold lines all across it and torn in some places. The message on it was written in pen, but even so, repeated foldings and unfoldings had rubbed some of the ink away with the creases. The scrawl on it was so familiar and borderline illegible that it hit Kathy like a punch to the gut.

P.O. Box 826-2936
410 Oak Street
Blue Earth, Minnesota 30957

In case of emergency.

S.W.

----

She forgot about it, of course, once three weeks had passed and the caterers had cancelled and they’d gotten the wrong order of wine for the reception. By the time the adjustments had been made to the dress and she’d finished putting up decorations in the church and writing her vows, Kathy Dunstan (soon to be Katherine Barclay) had forgotten all about the invitation she’d sent to Sam Winchester. It’d been on her mind for the first week, but he’d never RSVPed, and eventually it had bled out into the background noise of her life.

By the time she was walking down the aisle, there was very little room left in her mind for anything other than breathe, just breathe. All she could concentrate on was not tripping and falling on her carefully coiffed and well-dressed ass. She walked behind the flower girl, her hands trembling.

Things were better when she reached the altar and Will took her from her father and smiled widely. She let out a shaky breath when she realized that neither of them was going to bolt, and tried to swallow around what felt like a ball of cotton in her mouth.

No, she didn’t think about Sam Winchester at all. Not until the priest instructed her and Will to kneel and receive communion. She turned to the side to pick up the skirts of her long dress and she glimpsed him out of the corner of her eye at the back of the sanctuary. She went still, and it almost interrupted the ceremony, until she reminded herself to keep moving and knelt on the pillowed knee stand.

He wasn’t dressed in anything fine or wedding-like, a tall figure standing out against the white walls in jeans and a bulky-looking jacket. She knew it was him, though she didn’t see him closely or for more than a second. No one else was that tall, that out of place while blending in.

She said her vows and put her ring on her husband’s finger, and Sam Winchester drifted from her mind again, just something in the sea of faces watching her but nothing in focus like Will. But it tugged at her quietly, even with all the people watching her walk down the aisle, all the people throwing flower petals over her as she ducked out of the church door, her hand tightly clasped in Will’s. It tugged at her still as they slid into the limo and one of Will’s hands came to her hip and the other to the side of her face and they kissed.

“Mrs. Kathy Barclay…” he murmured against her lips.

“I should totally have made you take my name,” she grumbled, and pulled him back in. The clatter of the cans attached to the car dragging along the pavement drowned everything else out.

----

“It was a beautiful ceremony.”

“Thank you, Ms. Deacon. I’m so glad you could make it,” Kathy said, reaching out to take the older woman’s hand in both of her own.

“It was no trouble at all.” The older woman smiled graciously, shaking Kathy’s hand unsteadily. “You know I couldn’t miss your wedding.”

“Of course—” Kathy felt her attention drawn away, her eight-year-old cousin tugging on her dress. “Hey, sweetie,” she said, crouching down to take her cousin in her arms. Everyone wanted a piece of the bride. People had told Kathy that, but she hadn’t realized just how bad it’d be. By the time she was done giving her cousin a hug, she had to go and greet Will’s aunt and uncle, who’d flown down from British Columbia and had to be paid attention to for that. After that, she had to go and make sure the band was gearing up, because they were supposed to be playing already, but her attention was snagged by Billy and Carol, and she was nothing but grateful when Will managed to snag her a glass of champagne. It was only when she lowered the glass and took a moment to breathe that she stopped.

Sam was standing at one end of the dance floor.

His hands were in his pockets, shoulders hunched, and he had that meek smile that he always wore back in college. He looked so simple and humble. At that moment, though, she saw him like some ancient statue, or less refined and more true, like a stone. He was some uncarved rock, worn down through time by rain and wind, scarred but not defeated.

He looked so old, not tired but timeless, immutable, while everyone else passed around him. There were couples and chatting groups, her older relatives and her friends from college, some toting babies . She knew they were the real ones, they were the life she knew, but in that moment they all seemed so fleeting and transitory, like ghosts made out of mist swirling around the one real thing there.

She muttered something, something like “oh my god” or possibly “I can’t believe…” but whatever it was, she didn’t finish the thought.

Kathy weaved through the crowds of people milling about under the tent, the weather grey but not damp, at least, and she moved off the hardwood floor that had been put down for dancing and into the grass.

Sam pushed himself up from where he’d been leaning against a table and made his way over to her.

“Kathy, hey…” he said, reaching out to take her in a hug. She shut her eyes tightly. “Hey, congratulations.” He tightened his arms in a brief squeeze before letting her go.

“Th-thanks,” she managed to get out, opening her eyes only to flutter her eyelids in a vain attempt to blink tears away. “Jesus…I can’t believe you came. I can’t believe you're here.”

“I wouldn’t miss it.” Sam drew back, his arms slipping from around her waist, and she settled back on her heels, lifting a hand to wipe at her eyes. “You alright there?”

“Yeah, yeah I’m fine.” She sniffed and raised her head, looking at him properly for the first time and going still. “Oh my god, what happened?” She lifted a hand to his left cheek, where a jagged scar ran. It was old, pink and white and malformed flesh, and the scabs had fallen away a long, long time ago. It didn’t look like anyone had stitched it up, running from his temple down to his jaw, the scar tissue flipped on either side of the wound.

“Nothing.” He dismissed her concern with an easy smile. “Bar fight…My brother can piss people off really--He can piss people off, is all.”

She nodded a little, fingers tracing the scar tissue before dropping down.

“Oh, well…I’m sorry,” she tacked on, feeling a little awkward.

“Nah, it’s alright. Not a big deal.”

“If you say so…” she said, sounding doubtful. Sam Winchester was the epitome of strange, verging on otherworldly. How he could stand there, after ten years of being a missing person, and smile at her on her wedding day with a scar the size of Texas on his face, she didn’t know. She stared up at him, and he didn’t shrink under her gaze or cough uncomfortably, so she didn’t notice that they’d just been standing there for a minute or two in silence. She scrambled for something to say, some trivial piece of small talk. “So, um, what have you been up to?”

It was a stupid question.

She even visibly winced once it was out her mouth, because it was a stupid-ass question. He was clearly not living the high life; anyone could tell that. Besides the scar, he wasn’t wearing exactly wedding apparel, and he’d been missing for ten years, apparently still traveling around with his brother, who was a fugitive from the law.

She was grateful that he seemed to have retained the grace he’d always had with awkward moments.

“Nothing interesting. Still on the road with my brother.”

“Wow, still?” She didn’t think she could get any worse, but apparently her mouth was finding all-new lows.

“Yeah,” Sam said with that sheepish smile, walking towards the buffet table with her, watching as she picked up two glasses of champagne for them and deposited her empty one on the table. He took his with a grateful nod but didn’t sip from it. “It was just supposed to be a temporary thing, but…I mean, Becky told you, about, um—”

“Yeah, she told me,” Kathy hastened to confirm, not wanting him to get into any kind of trouble for coming here, given what happened in St. Louis.

“Well, there’s not a lot we can do about it.” Sam shrugged half-heartedly. Kathy wanted to ask why they couldn’t just go to the police and get it all cleared up, but she knew she’d have to take the metaphoric silver spoon out of her mouth to do so. “And our dad passed away, so…”

“Oh my god, Sam…I’m sorry. When? How?”

“Long time ago. I mean…not long after Jess. Car accident.”

She reached out and put her hand against the side of his arm, because she felt like a rich little bitch standing there in her $2,000 wedding dress under her pretty tent with all her perfect flowers. It was going to be the happiest day in her life, champagne popping around her and her gorgeous man over there waiting to feed her wedding cake like in all those cheesy movies. She’d been stressing for the last few weeks, trying to scramble to get things together. Looking at Sam now, she couldn’t believe she’d had the audacity to not view herself as privileged.

It was almost a culture shock to see someone she hadn’t seen in ten years, who clearly wasn’t married because the girl that he was supposed to marry was six feet down in the ground. A man whose father had died not long after, who had a brother wrongfully wanted for murder. Who couldn’t just go to the police and clear things up because while she had been raised to see the police as a paragon of safety and trustworthiness, it wasn’t the same for people like Sam. People who came from the heart of Kansas with the dirt still on their hands and their necks still red from the sun.

Nobody said life was fair.

But nobody had warned them just how bad it could get, either.

“Sam…”

“It’s okay, Kathy.” He smiled, shaking his head. She could see the dimple form in his right cheek as he did so, but she felt a pain in her chest to realize that the one on the left cheek had been scratched out by whatever had left the scar. “Anyways…Tell me about the groom.”

“Will?”

“Yeah, how’d you two meet?” Sam leaned back against the table, far enough on the end that he wasn’t getting in anyone’s way.

“Oh, we—Well, my office was having one of those coworker workshops. You know, trust falls and all that. Anyway, Will’s office was at the same event, and we ended up complaining to each other during the lunch break.” She laughed a little and shook her head. “It’s a kind of stupid story.”

“No,” Sam said seriously, a warm smile on his lips. “It’s not.” She looked up curiously, and saw him rapt, wanting to hear more, like it was some marvelous tale and not the mundane thing it was.

“Sam.” She smiled fondly, eyes crinkling. “I can’t believe how little you’ve changed…”

“Really?” His eyebrows rose like some inquisitive dog. “I would have thought--”

“No, you’re just the same. I mean, I never met anyone who was so genuinely interested to hear people’s stupid stories. This is the kind of stuff most people tune out. Nod their heads and say ‘uh huh.’ But you always ate this stuff up.”

Sam flushed a little and shrugged, having no words but playing it off so naturally.

“We miss you,” Kathy murmured finally. “Bad enough we don’t have Jess, but…God, we miss you, Sam. You just…vanished.”

He winced a little.

“I’m sorry,” he replied. “It’s not like I don’t wanna be there—“

“You remember David? He has kids now, you know,” she said. Sam looked torn, grieved, almost. “And Lorraine?” Kathy continued. “She lives in Colorado now. She’s an advertising manager for a ski resort. Remember how good she was on the slopes? You could barely stand up in skiis”

“Kathy, I miss you guys, I do.”

“Then why haven’t you called? Visited? Anything! Even written, for Christ’s sake.” She reached out, putting her hands over his. “Sam, you just vanished. It was like you fell off the face of the earth. I lost Jess, but at least I knew why I’d lost her. You, it was just…a mystery.” She paused, looking into his eyes. For once, he was almost at eye level with her, slumped back against the table as he was. “You were always a mystery.”

Things were silent for a while, because she’d run out of words and he had no reply. Her chest felt tight, and she willed him to speak, to say anything. She just wanted to know. Something. Anything. Any piece or clue about this tall, shaggy enigma in her life.

“Kathy,” he said finally, pushing himself to stand. Her hands dropped and she felt a kind of despair in the pit of her stomach. “I didn’t come to ruin your wedding day with tales of woe.” He smiled, tired and kind of sheepish, like it was all his fault. “I just wanted to come and wish you all the best.”

She knew it was a goodbye, polite and simple, and she knew she had scared him away with her concern, her wanting to know more about the ambiguous Sam Winchester. She wanted to say stay, ruin it, please, but the words stuck in her throat as he leaned down to kiss her cheek.

“Congratulations, Kathy. I really do wish you the best. You deserve it.”

So do you, she wanted to say, but it got caught behind that first sentence, and she watched him turn and walk away. He didn’t rush it, didn’t run away, as if he knew that she was rooted to the spot, watching him fade out again into whatever passing storm he lived in.

Will came up behind her and wrapped his arms around her, kissing her neck and laughing. He was talking to her, and she turned her head to look at him, to offer him a small smile.

By the time she looked back, Sam was gone.

----

“Be careful,” Rebecca said, her gaze shuttered.

“I will.”

“No you won’t. Look at you,” she said, eyes misting as her voice tightened, looking at the mangled mess of skin on his face. She knew enough to imagine the nightmare thing that had caused it. She lifted a hand to cover her lips, worried and grieved at the sight of him. “You think I can rest easy, knowing what kind of terrible thing probably gave you that?”

“Shh, it’s okay, I’m okay,” Sam said, reaching out to put a hand on her shoulder, but she moved back from it.

“Look…Look after Dean. At least he has the sense to look out for you,” she responded finally, holding it all back. Sam smiled warmly.

“Yeah, he’s good at that.”

“You should get on the road before someone who knows just enough about you to do something idiotic calls the cops. Just…don’t go after anything too dangerous, alright?”

“That’s kind of our job, Becky.”

“Don’t ‘Becky’ me,” she shot back, but without much punch. She wiped the butt of her palm under her eyes. “Zach sends his love.”

“Yeah, only ‘cause we got him out of jail,” Sam replied with a wry smile, and she laughed weakly. “Look after yourself, Becky. I’ll see you at the next reunion, huh?”

He turned and began walking down to the parking lot, where a big black Impala was parked in the fire lane. He waved to her as he did so, looking back over his shoulder.

“Yeah, right.” She rolled her eyes, but she waved back. She wished she knew better what to say.

----

Dean leaned up against the side of the car, munching on the plate of hors d'oeuvres that Rebecca had stolen for him from the buffet while Sam was inside.

“Dude, your friends rock,” Dean said, popping another salmon puff in his mouth.

“You say that about anyone who brings you food,” Sam reminded him, coming down to the passenger side of the car. “Well, except me, even though I bring you food all the time.”

“Yeah,” Dean agreed, balling up the paper plate and napkin in his hands as he chewed. “But you just don’t have the rack.”

“Nice.” Sam rolled his eyes.

Dean moved over to the trash can on the sidewalk, tossing away the ball of garbage he’d made. He wiped his mouth on his hand, swallowing down his last mouthful, then stopped to look up the hill to where the tent had been set up for the reception. He could hear the wedding band playing some cheesy conga music and the buzz of many voices chatting and laughing, but it was distant and removed from them. He looked back over at his brother.

“You sure you’re ready to leave? I mean, we can stay…” He let his offer drift off, shrugging and gesturing half-heartedly at the reception.

“No, it’s okay, Dean.” Sam shook his head, turning around fully to lean back against the car. He tipped his head to the side, trying to find words. It took him a moment to get them out. “I just…I wanted to come.” He shifted his shoulders uncomfortably. “I just need to see, is all. Every so often. I mean, Kathy’s never gonna have to know about what’s really out there. I just need to see that. The reason why we do this.” He glanced at Dean, that same little-brother need for reassurance in his expression, even though he was over thirty now, even though he was his own man.

“Yeah,” Dean said, giving that reassurance as easy as breathing. “I get that.” There was a pause, a not-uncomfortable silence while Sam looked up at the people in the pavilion, and Dean at his brother. The moment passed quickly, though, like it always did, and Dean rubbed his hands against his coat before grabbing his keys. “You ready to hit the road?”

Sam didn’t respond right away, seemingly distracted.

“Yeah,” he muttered, then seemed to register the words and straighten. “Yeah,” he said more loudly, turning around to get into his side of the car. It didn't take Dean long to start the car, still glancing over at his brother. They pulled out from the curb, and the Impala moved through the crowded parking lot, engine thrumming loudly.

Only Rebecca was watching when they drove away.

Moar Comic-Con stuff

2008-08-12T20:55:18Z

I've been real lazy. Like, real lazy. Anyways, some two weeks ago I picked up Movie Critic from the airport after Comic-Con, and he told me lots of fun stories. Since he was press, he got to do a lot of insanely neat shit, including hanging out with some very rad people. I was v. jealous. Apparently his boss is friends with a gujillion folks, including Simon Pegg, who they hung with for awhile. Again -- v. jealous.

Anyways, when we got back to his place, he let me listen to his taped interviews with the SPN folks, which, as he said, were not handled too well by the press people. He really did only get five-ten minutes with each person; it's crazy.

I ended up getting a little bit more spoiled than I really wanted to. For instance, I now know that Dean spent four months in hell, and S4 will pick up after those four months have passed. I also heard Ackles describing a scene where he has to claw himself out of a grave...So I imagine that that will be happening.

Some of the stuff I hear makes me hopeful, some makes me a little leary(I really, really don't want super!Dean, so-angsty-he-takes-over-the-entire-show!Dean, or a-mix-of-the-two!Dean).

It was really weird to hear Movie Critic's voice asking a question...then hearing Jared Padalecki answer.

I mean, you have to keep in mind, I went to high school with Movie Critic. I once chased him around our courtyard with a lightsaber. I used to tie his shoes to these giant wooden lawn chairs our school had, then leave him out in the rain while I went to class...Yeah, I don't really know why he decided to stay friends with me. He's the guy that makes the Pillbery Dough Boy squeak noise whenever you poke him. It was so surreal to hear him in such a professional environment.

...talking with Jared Padalecki.

Anyways, here are the audio files of the interviews. There are some other press at his table -- also, he kind of messed some of my questions up XD But c'est la vie. It was still cool to get some of my questions answered.

I'm too lazy to make a GUI for this, so here's the directory. If you want to link to these files, please link to this post, so that my server doesn't get directly linked all around teh intarwebs.

Interviews.

IBARW: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

2008-08-09T23:23:02Z

I witnessed IBARW(International Blog Against Racism Week) last year, and was really struck by it. I've always been the type of person who gets jazzed seeing a bunch of people come together to work to dissolve a negative aspect of our world.

A big part of that is that I've tried to do things, from petitioning my elementary school to allow girls to lead prayers(I'm not even shitting you -- from 3rd-5th I went to a Christian private school that taught, in class that women were inferior to men), to getting feral cats on my college campus spayed and neutered, and many times I'm met with a resounding apathy to get anything done as a group. My generation is fraught with 'I don't care's and 'It's all going to hell anyway's. Sometimes I let it get to me. Sometimes I can't help but see a hopelessness.

Which is why I love IBARW, and watching it bloom over my Flist. It's like seeing a million people suddenly rise up and say 'No, I do care', and seeing that blows me away. And makes me hopeful again.

For those of you who haven't been to sparkymonster's journal yet, I suggest starting there, as there are already many brilliant entries there. I link to her not only for that, but also because for me, she's a big part of my inspiration when it comes to IBARW. Her journal was the first place I became aware of it, and has linked to many other incredible people that I hadn't previously known.

So I have my own piece to put forward. It's not quite the level of relevant as essays on race, sex, intersectionality, culture and academia, but it's something that's been bothering me, so, with that, I give you:

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom: Srsly, Racism 101, kids

When I was a little girl, I loved Indiana Jones movies. They had a lot of action, adventure, and all kinds of crazy stuff. My favorite of the trilogy was the Temple of Doom. I think a big part of this was that it was the only one we owned, and so it got the most viewing. I can't even begin to describe how much I loved this movie as a kid. It had volcanos, monkey brains, the scene with the hat, a still beating heart, and runaway mine carts.

At the tender age of seven, I didn't really know that more than half of these elements were wrapped around an inherent racism. I didn't notive all the other things going on in the movie, and the way situations played out between the races. At that time, it was just something flashy and fun.

And that's fine, when you're seven.

When you're twenty seven, though, it's not cool anymore.

I spotted the film on TV a few years back. I hadn't seen it since I was a kid, so I happily flicked it on and sat down to watch as an adult, and see how well it held up. By the time it was over, my jaw was on the floor.

I could not believe what I had just seen.

The movie was so blatently offensive that I didn't even know where to start. It was the kind of movie I might have expected in the 1950s(special effects aside), not the mid 1980s. We should have come further by that point. It took me awhile to even process all I had seen, both the racism and sexism, and just how repugnant my childhood love was.

Instead of discussing the film linearly, I have decided to go through it based on themes and offensive notions. I will therefore be skipping around within the film in each sections, discussing the instances of a particular kind of offense within the film.

Good, Noble, Powerless Savages

The movie opens with a scene in China, fraught with it's own problems, but then moves to Indy and the crew being in an airplane, which susequently crashes in India. They travel down river, and come upon a small Indian village.

Right off the bat, the villagers are portrayed as strange, foreign, and slightly frightening -- but not menacing. They are skinny, dirty, and of no threat. It's not that there aren't examples of poverty, worldwide, that fit this description, but that the film choses to display only TWO groups of people of color is very telling.

This is the first group. The village is suffering, its sacred stone having been stolen, along with all the children. Without children, the village has no future. The characters are obviously "good guys", in that they are not evil. However, the price of being Good and also Not-White, is that they must then be Powerless.

The villagers are displayed as the Noble Savage -- someone of good intent, but who is uncivilized and dirty to the modern eye. While they are good people, they are unable to act their will in any sort of way: mainly because they have no will. To keep these figures from being threatening, they must be displayed as completely powerless, weak, and alone. "Don't worry, White America," the film seems to be saying. "We know they're scary and foreign, but it's okay. See? They're unable to do much more than shamble around."

Frightening, villanous, evil Pagans and their wacky heartstopping hijinks

The second group of people of color presented in the movie are the powerful and evil Thuggees cult. Indy and crew go to visit the local palace, and discover the royalty there living in opulance. They have power, but because they are powerful and not-white, they must therefore be evil -- effectively the message of the film is that "good" non-whites know their place and remain powerless, while non-whites who attempt to "disrupt the natural order" and gain power must therefore be evil. The royalty live in luxury while the people of the area suffer and live in poverty.

There's a terribly offensive food scene, which I will cover later in the xenophobia section.

Eventually Indy and Co. descend through the basement of the mansion and into the caves below, where they witness a barbaric ritual that involves a pagan priest tearing the still-beating heart from a man's chest, before lowering him(kept alive by black magic) into the lava below. The point here is to drive home how villanous the Thuggees are, and the danger of black magic. Part of this is the fear of Paganism -- that good, Christian folk(for those of you who haven't lived in America, this is generally code for "rich, white people like me, who should be able to get away with shit because I'm white"; for example: "How could you accuse me of shoplifting? I'm a good, Christian woman.") never do evil, but that the worship of Pagan gods leads to human sacrifice.

Those of us who are familiar with ancient art, culture and religion can happily cite all the Pagan societies and cults that specifically list human sacrifice as a damnable sin -- but who needs logic when you can pat your culture on the back for picking the "right" religion?

Unfortunately, though, you can never be sure that you've convinced your audience on who's Evil and who's Good, so, just to drive that notion home, the story then goes on to show us that not only do the Thuggees practice human sacrifice(while running around mostly naked and painted in make up and human bones, mind, so that they look as threatening and foreign to the audience as they possibly can), but they keep child slaves. That's right, the children from the beginning of the movie have been kidnapped to work in the underground quarries, by the Thuggees! As an adult, you really have to wonder about this. Why kidnap small, emaciated children to carry large rocks when you could extort adults in the surrounding area to work for you, and get more done?

The movie, at this point, is just desperate to convince the audience of how undeniably EVIL the bad guys are that it seems to be going out of its way to show you. Instead of blackmailing and extorting adults, who will work harder and get more done, the villains have instead chosen to go after children -- for no other reason, it seems, than because it's more evil. I can just see the conversation...

Lackey: But sir, the children can't even move the rocks we need them to move. It doesn't matter how much we whip them. It's physically impossible. The laws of physics just don't work that way.
Evil Pagan Priest: BWA HA HA. Physics mean nothing to us heathens!
Lackey: You know, there's a town down in the valley, with plenty of adults who'd be willing to sell themselves into slavery to get their children back. We would double our profits!
Evil Pagan Priest: Profits! I didn't get into being Ridiculously Evil for profits! I want children slaves! I won't have it any other way.
Lackey: *sighs and subtracts a substancial amount of money from their Evil Spreedsheet*

Nice White ~~Lady~~ Adventuring Archeologist Saves the Day!

Of course, given that set up(Good, Powerless Savages versus Evil, Powerful Heathens), there's nothing else to be done but to get a Good, Heroic, White guy to come save the day.

The film has gone through hoops, at this point, to set up the fact that the day can't be saved by anyone BUT the white main character, and thus, Indy goes swinging in to do so.

I think the offense of this notion should be fairly obvious. The first group of PoC in the film are unable to solve their own problems, are painted as a group who are powerless and inept, unable to acquire the skills of competance to save their own children. Only a white male, who is literally depicted as the superior race, is able to solve their problems. And, because he's White, and therefore Good, he deigns to help, because that's what a Good White Person does.

The way things are presented in the film depicts a world in which PoC who "know their place" must depend on the white guy to save them, from PoC who DON'T "know their place" and have attempted to gain power.

Sexism and the Modern Adventurer

While racism is the most glaring and overarching offense in this film, it's not the only one.

While there are basically NO speaking parts for women of color in the film, there is the one token white female. Her name is Willie, and she couldn't be more offensive if she tried. For starters, she's shallow, and a money grabber. In the opening the film, while an entire club is being shot up, she is DESPERATELY trying to get to a diamond that has fallen by the wayside. She ignores the chaos all around her, scrambling about on her knees to get the diamond.

Even worse, this is depicted as comedic.

"Oh, ha ha, look at that silly women, overrun by her emotional greed, unable to see what's important!" This is comedic because it's obvious to the audience that the diamond ISN'T what's most important at that moment, and the fact that Willie is so priocupied that she is blind to that is supposed to be funny.

Willie gets caught up in everything that happens, and ends up dragged to India with Indy and his sidekick(another example of racism, a Chinese stereotype named "Shortround" -- srsly, that's his name), complaining all the way. Willie is offended by just about everything, whining and winging about being wet, being dirty, being in the situation at all. She then gets to the impoverished Indian village and shows disdain for them, turning up her nose at them and their food. Indy admonishes her, but the message is clear: The man must tame the emotional woman's inability to show tact in a difficult situation. Indy is calm, composed and rational, while Willie is high pitched, intense, and flipping out at every damned thing.

The rest of the film is the same kind of stuff, nothing really worth pointing out that's any different from what's been depicted so far. She basically continues to be whiny and hysterical, consistantly getting Indy into trouble because she can't control that damned wandering womb, and doesn't know to keep quiet when they're trying to hide.

As the movie ends, Willie, who has professed a deep hatred for Indy the entire film, tries to walk away from him. He proceeds to use his whip to literally rope her in. She is physically unable to walk away from him as he controls her movements, and he pulls her into a kiss. Even though she hasn't shown any interest in him the whole time, and she is being forced into the kiss, she eventually stops trying to bat him away and sinks into it. She smiles doeishly, tamed and quiet finally, appeased by the control Indy has exerted over her.

Who cares if she actually wants him? She's only a woman, after all.

Intersectionality: Or, what's this xenophobia doing in my racism?

The film is too ambitious to settle for mere racism, and so attempts to go the extra mile, affirming America's fear of the Outsider.

The film is not only depicting other races as "less", but is doing so in a context outside America. It attempts to convince the audience that outside of America is a crazy, mixed up world where all kinds of Non-Whites are in power, and everything is messed up because of it. It assures the American audience that they are safe in a world of hotdogs and white male Presidents, while outside their borders is a scary, threatening world full of frightening people of color with their scary, threatening foods and scary, threatening religions.

Several times the movie has eating scenes, in which supposed "ethnic" cuisines are depicted. This includes the infamous "monkey brains" scene, in which the main characters, at a huge banquet, are served a monkey head, with the scalp and top of the skull cut off, revealing what is, to the modern eye, very obviously jello. It doesn't look even remotely brain like.

However, in the context of the film, it is supposed to be brains, and Willie proceeds to freak out over it, while Indy calmly snacks. There are other food items in the scene, including a pregnant snake, which is cut open, spilling live baby snakes all over the table, which are eaten. There are several other "gross out" foods.

The point of the scene is to drive home how strange and foreign these people are.

"Be afraid, America. They don't eat the same things we do! They don't worship the same God we do! And, even worse, they don't have a white man running their country! We must stop this terrible, child enslaving menace."

The film solves all its issues by having the British colonials save the day.

I'm not even shitting you. The British colonials.

That's right, the characters of the film are saved by colonialism. In the film's logic, it's the natural result of the dilenma it has posed -- if "good" people of color are powerless, and people of color with power are "evil", then the only conclusion is that white people need to come and rule over them, reducing the "evil" PoCs to their "natural" place as powerless citizens, ruled by the Benevolent, Intelligent, Christian Whites.

The film's message, from beginning to end, is "Non-white, non-western countries are frightening. The only thing we can do is go in and take over. Then peace will be restored."

It's a message, that, unfortuantely, hasn't died out in our culture today.

But don't take away my sweet nostalgia!

I know that Indiana Jones is a popular franchise, and I know that a lot of people loved it as kids. I know. I was one of those kids.

But just because you loved it as a child doesn't mean that it's automatically "good". It also doesn't mean that you were a racist because you liked it when you were a kid. We don't expect seven year olds to be able to recognize racism and sexism in popular culture, but we do expect rational adults to be able to own up to it when it's there.

I'm not even saying that you have to hate the film. The special effects and action scenes have nothing to do with racism. You can say "I liked the special effects" or "I liked the fight scenes" or "I just like the character of Indy." You can say all of those things and still say "But the film has strong and offensive racist overtones."

There are a lot of things I really enjoy that I find to have sexist properties -- in our culture, it's almost impossible to find something that's 100% non-racist and non-sexist. I can still enjoy the bits I like and frown on the sexism and racism. But just because you like something doesn't mean you get to wipe away the possibility that it did something morally wrong. Even more, it doesn't mean that you get to yell at people who did notice the immorality. If nothing else, just say "I'm afraid I don't see it" and walk away -- don't turn around and yell at someone for taking offense at something.

Trust me. You're not going to change their mind that way.

If nothing else, you're only going to offend them more.

I say these things because I've brought up this movie a few times since my re-viewing it as an adult, with family, with different groups of friends, and I have consistantly found people who effectively say "But I LIKE Indiana Jones. I don't WANT it to be racist." Their reaction is that I'm being "too serious" or "too sensitive". A couple people have gone back and rewatched the film and have apologized to me for what they said, and admitted that they just hadn't noticed the racism in it before -- but most people still insist that the film isn't racist, and I'm just crazy, and ruining their fun.

The other argument I've heard is that the racism is supposed to be there. That's right. It's intentional. So it's not racist, right? It can't be racism if they wanted it to be racist.

Uh. What?

The film does not depict the racism in an ironic sense, nor in a historic sense(IE, it's not attempting to depict how things "really were" in India in the 1930s -- they didn't eat monkey brains, and they didn't tear people's still beating hearts out; sorry kids, this isn't a historical story), but presents it plainly and bold-facedly. The racism is just part of the film. It's part of the plot, part of what the film is, at its core. I've heard people argue that "the film is just getting the racism from that era -- it's an homage to 1930s films".

So, what you're effectively saying is that they're paying an homage to racism. Well, that's...special.

If they wanted to pay homage to the 1930s adventure flicks, they can do so without also paying homage to overt and offensive racism. Including that element implies that they thought it was something worth paying homage too. It would have been one thing if the racism was included ironically(IE, that while the British Colonials save the day and take over, they're depicted as ignorant of local politics and unable to govern, while the native groups, who were ignored for their being PoCs, are actually the strong, and competant government), but it's not ironic at all. It's just racist.

I understand the need to over-look racism -- it's nice to think that racism doesn't exist. It's nice to think that it's a thing of the past. We all want to think that these nasty, gross things of our past are just that: the past. But they're not. They're just as much with us today, but they've turned insideous, hiding behind innocent faces and holding up hands saying "But I didn't mean to be racist, so it's not my fault."

But so long as we continue to overlook the things that make us uncomfortable, they're never going to go away. The only way to get rid of them, or start to get rid of them, is to stop turning our faces away, face up, own up, accept our mistakes, and try to do better in the future.

Comic-Con stuff

2008-07-27T20:28:20Z

Movie Critic just called me from ComicCon with news from the Roundtables. Unfortunately the organizing was REALLY bad -- they had the roundtables before the panel, so the press had very little time to interview the writers and actors. Apparently Movie Critic got some time with Kripke, Gamble, and Ackles, but almost no time with Edlund and Padalecki, and because of the time crunch he had to pick and chose questions.

He didn't get to ask the question about female perjoratives on the show, which made me quite sad, but :(

He DID, however, give me some excellent spoilers for season four. These aren't in depth, nor are they about the demon mythology -- they're effectively one line summaries for one shot episodes that have me squeeing my ass off.

Let's get the bad out of the way first. Apparently there's going to be more Ghostfacers :/ Sigh. Such a shitty ep. And apparently both the actors were at the roundtables, and had more time for questions than any of the others. Movie Critic was very displeased.

But the AWESOME stuff is that apparently there's going to be a time travel ep -- which is AWESOME by itself, but even BETTER when it's going to be about the boys seeing how John and Mary met. !!!!! I CANNOT WAIT.

The other one is that there's going to be an ep where they're working a case in a town they used to live in as teenagers, with a high school they used to go to. \o/!!!! CANNOT WAIT.

He was getting ready to go to the airport, so we didn't have a lot of time to talk. I'm picking him up later this evening and going to find out everything I can from him -- apparently he got Sera Gamble to sign my DVD :D ...using my nickname from highschool *headdesk* Oh well. It's what he calls me, so I can't say I blame him.

Also, apparently Dean and Jess having the same birthday is a coincidence. It's Eric Kripke's wife's birthday, and they accidently used it twice. Good game, kids.

ANYWAYS. More later. I'll leave this post unlocked in case non-friends wanna come peak; having read nooo spoilers up till this point, I dunno how much of this was already out and about *g*

Super awesome things

2008-07-12T01:25:06Z

So, I finally forced Movie Critic to sit down and watch SPN -- and he loved it. Yay!

He's now watched all three seasons(and said he also thought season three was a fluke, and that the show would return to form, which, having yet another person I really respect see that makes me a lot more hopeful for season four).

Best part? One of the companies he works for is sending him to ComicCon, and since he's press, he can organize interviews with people. A couple weeks ago, he told me he was going to schedule an interview with the SPN writers(Kripke, Gamble, and Edlund are going to be there, as well as the comic book writer), and told me to give him questions I wanted to ask \o/ WIN.

Best. Payoff. From a high school friendship. Ever.

I told him that he has to ask Sera Gamble if she'll marry me. He said it'd be super awkward, but he'd try.

That last bit was me just kidding around. I'm NOT actually making him ask this, obviously.

Weird shit I find on the internet

2008-07-07T17:01:34Z

Dude.

The boys need this resource. Y/N?