Chapter Text
“I’m fuckin’ tired, man,” is what ends up coming out of Dean Winchester’s mouth. Over the phone he hears Sam sigh, and he wedges the receiver, because this cottage has a landline, which is hooked up, along with an Internet connection that came out of a reheated dinosaur egg, for three hundred Canadian dollars a month courtesy of what seems to be some kinda fuckin’ monopoly corporation, between his cheek and his shoulder so he can better swipe extra, extra honey mustard onto his sandwich. “I’m just. I’m done. I’m tired of this—I’m tired of writing, I’m tired of pretending to be a woman, I’m tired of—I’m tired of Becky, I’m definitely tired of frigging Twitter—”
This time, as the knife clatters into the sink and he manages to screw the lid back onto the jar, Sam interrupts. “Okay, first off, you’re not pretending to be a woman.”
“Don’t like that implication,” Dean mutters, because he has to, and drops ham from the package onto the honey mustard puddle.
“Second, I get that Becky is…overwhelming. She’s…enthusiastic.”
“I have met and considered shooting at small yappy dogs who were less enthusiastic.” He adds lettuce, because “bad cholesterol” is apparently a thing and can kill you, and slams another piece of bread on top like he’s trying to re-kill the pig. The lettuce, ham, and honey mustard get thrown back into the small and rusting fridge.
“Okay, you don’t—you don’t own a gun anymore,” Sam says. And then, “And I totally get being tired of Twitter, man, I do. Like, it sucks. But I know you don’t hate writing.” He huffs a laugh. “It’s the only thing you don’t hate.”
“A teenager called me a rapist today! Said I was promoting the, the sexual assault inflicted on the unsuspecting public by the Church! I mean, why are they even reading my books? I checked their profile! Thirteen, Sam! Adults do not interact, their profile said, whatever the flying fuck that’s supposed to mean! Where’s the—where’s the damn mother?!”
There’s a silence as Dean flops down with several creaks, some of which come from the upholstery and at least one of which comes from his back, onto the floral-patterned couch.
“I don’t know why…a teenager would be…reading your books and then taking,” Sam pauses, delicately, and Dean can hear him adjusting the phone and then almost definitely signing this entire sentence to Eileen, “political issue with your, uh, priest porn.”
“Bestselling Vatican-approved Catholic erotica,” Dean says around a mouthful of sandwich. “Father, uhhh, James Martin reviewed it on his blog last month. Said it exemplified the moral quandaries faced by consenting adults with high power differentials and made a valid argument for Church-sanctioned gay marriage.” Whatever any of that meant. Becky had burst into his twenty-five-hundred-dollar Airbnb in Vancouver yelling that in her highest-pitched shriek. Father Martin had noticeably declined to comment on the piss portion of the latest instalment.
Yep. That sound is Eileen howling in the background.
“Okay,” Sam says. Dean can tell he’s capital-d Done with him, because he sounds like he’s gonna start laughing now. “Okay, man. Are you tired of making tons of bank, then?”
Dean lets Sam listen to him chew for a few seconds. Thirty seconds, solid.
“No,” he growls finally.
“Then, uh,” Sam says, and there’s a few clacking and rustling noises before Eileen’s voice blares into his ear. “Nut up or shut up!”
“Yeah,” Sam agrees, wrestling the phone back. “That. Besides, tour’s over. You’re just there to write. So just shut up, sit down in your little waterfront cabin, and write.”
Waterfront cabin.
He hangs up with Sam and makes the effort to put the phone back onto his cradle. It’s a an old pink thing, the colour of the puke buckets they give you in hospitals. It came with the cottage, and much like everything that came with the cottage, it looks dingy and well-used, because when you’re travelling this far into the bumfuck fish-hillbilly portion of Canada, apparently the best accommodations you can get are…
Whatever this is.
He’s been here for about a day so far. It is not a waterfront cabin. It is a fire hazard with mice.
By the estimate Google Maps gives him when he steps out onto the front porch to get cell service (screened-in, mercifully, against the buzzing, apocalyptic clouds of mosquitoes—this, at least, is like home. The least pleasant parts of home, sure, but home), he’s twenty-three minutes from the nearest grocery store, thirty-two minutes from the closest liquor store, and forty-five minutes from the only bar, which is only open until 9 p.m. for reasons he’s not clear on.
This, refreshingly, he can’t blame on the goddamned Christians. He’s been blaming nearly everything on them for the last five years, ever since he dipped his toes into the apparently very murky and extremely profitable waters of, technically, priest porn. After the first priest porn they wanted the second priest porn, and after the second priest porn they wanted him to do a tour, which he had to hire someone to pretend to be Deanna Wesson for, and after the tour they wanted a third priest porn, and honestly after that he was scraping the bottom of the barrel of what he knew about priests, and Catholics, and in fact Christians, and after the fourth one he had to relinquish control of all of Deanna’s social media to be controlled by his publicist and glorified PA Becky (a devout and current Catholic), and his body-double and tech expert Charlie (a vindictive and violent ‘recovering Catholic,’ her words), because it turns out some people got really aggressive over priest porn.
And by the fifth one he had what Sam said was a drinking problem and also had resorted to including watersports.
Holy water, that is.
Texas tea.
(The cable in the cottage, another definitely God-forsaken amount of monthly Canabux, picks up a handful of channels. One of them is 24/7 reruns of The Beverly Hillbillies, which he’s been watching for 8 out of the last 24 hours. Sue him. Or, wait, don’t. That last one, Archbishop Zachariah Adler v. Deanna Wesson, had almost lost him money. And the Archbishop had found out who was behind Deanna, and it was very nearly a whole thing. Apparently he was…promoting…gender? Politics? Something? Dean had gotten drunk for a week straight after that.)
It’s chilly out here. The ocean is nearer to him than any bar. It smells like rotten seaweed and salt, mostly. He steps back into the cottage and pours a few fingers of whiskey into a glass, downs it, pours a few more, and turns on the television, old and bulkier than the 80” flatscreen the Airbnb had come equipped with. Sam was right on a few things. But he’s pretty sure he’s wrong about this one: he is so fucking tired of writing.
He crashes hard after the last couple days of travel, and all night in his dreams, Jethro in black and white is trying to drown himself in the ce-ment pond again.
***
His waterfront cabin has curtains, on a technicality, but they’re scratchy lace sewed and almost certainly put up by someone’s grandma, probably twenty years ago—the lace has gone yellow and has cobwebs. Ostensibly the cleaning service (two women over the age of 75 who lived nearby and were maybe married—who knew, lots of people in Canada were gay married) he had hired before renting the place had cleaned the place, and this was all the end result of that. Maybe it had been much worse. At least the gay grannies had gotten nearly everything on his grocery list, even the Johnnie Walker.
So he wakes up feeling like he’s giving a rimjob to the crusty and hairy asscrack of dawn, with dull grey ocean-tinged light seeping through the living room picture window facing the couch he regrets falling asleep on. The pattern feels imprinted on his cheek, glued there with sticky drool. His neck is burning all the way into his shoulder-blades, and when he eases his face away from the window and buries it in the couch cushion, he gets a whiff of mothballs and mildew and has to use his stiff elbows to lever himself upright.
“Okay,” he says. “Okay. You’re here to write.” His head pounds, mostly from the neck, probably some from the whiskey, and maybe a fair bit from that last plane ride onto the rainy grey rock in which he’s setting Priest Porn 6: Anal Revenge of the Archdiocese (Becky says he can’t call it that. Chuck, his editor, agrees).
“So we’re just gonna get up off the couch,” he says, “and write.” His feet hit the floor first, hands and knees unexpectedly second, and he pukes.
Bless him, Father, for he has sinned; but the whiskey bottle is empty below the coffee table.
By the time he gets the honey mustard-coloured vomit off the linoleum and out from under the couch, and three co-codamol (over the counter here, which it decidedly is not in the big city of Lebanon, Kansas), one cup of coffee, and half a pack of back bacon into his body, the colour of the light outside has changed.
The cottage smells like puke anyway. He washes his face in the tiny bathroom’s stained porcelain sink, changes clothes from his suitcase, and steps outside.
As an afterthought, he pockets his notebook and pen.