LAS Challenge #10
Jan. 16th, 2011 09:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
glasslogicStory Title: Days Of Our Lives (LAS Prompt #10 - X Finds a Suspicious Package) [NON-ENTRY]
Name: glasslogic
Characters: Sam, Dean
Disclaimer: I have no rights to any of the copyrighted characters/material in this fic, and I make no profit from it.
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 1000
Warnings/Spoilers: language
This story is for the SPN Last Author Standing challenge, one prompt a week, one story per prompt, one author voted off each cycle until only one is left. Stories must be between 100 - 1000 words. No betas allowed, voting is completely blind.
This story is very rough, and a little bit over 1k. It was NOT entered into the challenge, I skipped 10. I was just about to start editing it into shape for submission, but then it occurred to me that I had a bunch of skips and probably only a round or two left to use any. The smart thing to do seemed to skip so... Yeah, I felt kind of like a weasel too *shifty*
Anyways - this is pretty much the rawest form of what I write, but spell-checked *grins* It's written and I have no other use for it, so I decided to go ahead and post it in case anyone got some momentary enjoyment from the ficlet.
“Hey, what do you think this is?” Dean pulled a box from the dark recesses of the cabinet he was cleaning out and looked it over curiously. Bobby had press-ganged his visitors into searching through his basement storage for a rare Egyptian artifact he had agreed to lend another hunter. But he hadn't seen it for over a decade and only had a vague idea of where it might be located.
Six hours into the search it was still elusive, and boredom was setting in with a vengeance.
“I think it's something you should put down. Bobby said it was little, looks like a cat, and is in a flat stone box. That looks like a cardboard box about the size of your head.” Sam had been sneezing from all the dust for the last half hour and just wanted to find the stupid cat and be done.
“It feels like cardboard,” Dean eyed the package closer, “but this is butcher paper. And it's old – these postage stamps say are from the sixties and it doesn't even look like Bobby ever opened it.”
Sam was interested despite himself. “What does it say?”
“Light sucks in here.” Dean took the box out of the storage room and back into the main area at the base of the stairs which was more like a separate room than a landing since Bobby insisted on keeping all the doors shut to try and keep the dust contained. Sam followed, grateful for any excuse to breathe some cleaner air.
“So?'
Dean shrugged. “It says 'Bobby, the clock is wound but once. Love Wanda.' Looks like it was shipped from Newport.”
Sam took the box with a frown to read the label himself. “There are an awful lot of 'Fragile' stamps on this. And he never opened it? Just shoved it on a shelf full of various supernatural crap and left it?”
“Maybe he lost it?” Dean speculated.
“Maybe we should just put it back and just get on with our job.” Sam held the box back out to Dean.
Dean reached for it, mind already moving back to the mystery of the missing artifact – until somewhere in the passing the unthinkable happened and the package slipped and crashed onto the stone floor with an ominous tinkle of broken glass.
“Fuck, Sam!”
“Hey! You were the one holding it!”
“Obviously I wasn't!”
“Obviously you should have been!”
Dean swore again. “Go tell Bobby, for all we know this is some magical bomb and we have ten minutes to live now.”
Sam looked rebellious, but just nodded tightly and headed for the stairs. Or he would have, if he could have gotten the door open. He hauled with all his strength, and when the door remained stubbornly stuck in place, and none of the other doors would move either, turned to Dean with an expression of growing alarm. Dean, for his part, just looked grim and crouched to start carefully peeling open the package.
They both stared at the contents for a few minutes in puzzlement. Sam finally said it aloud as if hearing the words might change something. “It's an hourglass.”
“No shit, Sherlock.”
The highly polished, plain wooden frame was still intact, but the shattered glass of the mechanism and sand was broken up not only in the box itself, but now also all over the stone floor beneath from having trickled out of the corners when Dean removed the wrapping.
After another twenty minutes of frustration two things became apparent: nothing that wasn't either the package or themselves could be moved, opened, or used; and time appeared to be ...paused.
Sam was still examining a moth in the corner of the room that was frozen mid-flutter. He was just giving it another tentative poke when Dean spoke up suddenly.
“This might be a great opportunity, you know? If the entire rest of the world is like this,” he nodded towards the moth, “then can you imagine all of the things out there we can do and find out?”
“Would that be before or after we die of dehydration?” Sam waved a frustrated hand towards one of the frozen doors. This one was actually standing open a handspan, but it might have been a fortress wall for all the good that did them.
Dean's face fell. “You don't think... I mean, time isn't passing for us either, right? We aren't really going to die of thirst?”
Before Sam could answer, Dean's stomach rumbled in hunger and they exchanged horrified looks.
Lacking any other options after hours of fruitless arguing and pacing, Sam had tried to sleep to see if something would occur to him, but he couldn't get his mind to settle. The air was too still and felt ...tight. He finally gave up when it occurred to him that he hadn't heard sounds of Dean's movement for sometime. Sam sat back up and turned to look, only to find Dean seated cross-legged before the pile of smashed glass and sand peering at something held gingerly in one hand, while in the other hand holding a tube of ...superglue?
“You can't be serious.”
“Have a better idea?” Dean asked without shifting his attention.
“You can't fix time, with superglue!”
“Hey, you should just be grateful I had the damn tube in my pocket in the first place.”
Sam glared, and Sam bitched, but in the end he had to admit that any plan was better than no plan and he settled down to help. Hours uncounted passed marked by nothing but exhaustion and the growing needs of their bodies. They slept in shifts and rubbed at aching eyes as they took turns piecing together the tiny delicate shards of glass.
Eventually the glass was all but finished and back in it's base, every grain of sand having been painstakingly scraped back in. They were filthy, thirsty, hungry, and Sam at least had very little hope that the messy slipshod repair they had made would work.
Dean squinted and carefully laid the last piece into place.
“This won't work,” Sam predicted for the hundreth time.
“It had better. And a little less skepticism from you wouldn't hurt either.”
“It's going to break again as soon you turn it over.”
“Think happy thoughts.” Dean carefully pulled his hand back.
For a moment, the hourglass just sat there in all it's tacky, wobbly glory and nothing happened at all – but then it shimmered like a desert mirage and all of the cracks and damage smoothed over until in seconds it sat pristine as it must have on Bobby's shelf for decades.
Sam and Dean stood up slowly, looking around warily to see if anything else had changed. Sam grabbed Dean's arm and pointed. In the corner of the room the moth bumped against the light fixture, no longer trapped in an endless instant of time. Footsteps creaked overhead and Dean elbowed Sam out of the way as they headed hastily for the stairs.
“I can't decide what I want more first; water, or a hamburger.”
“All I know is that in the future, Bobby can find his own damn artifacts in his creepy ass basement.”
“Definitely.”
Name: glasslogic
Characters: Sam, Dean
Disclaimer: I have no rights to any of the copyrighted characters/material in this fic, and I make no profit from it.
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 1000
Warnings/Spoilers: language
This story is for the SPN Last Author Standing challenge, one prompt a week, one story per prompt, one author voted off each cycle until only one is left. Stories must be between 100 - 1000 words. No betas allowed, voting is completely blind.
This story is very rough, and a little bit over 1k. It was NOT entered into the challenge, I skipped 10. I was just about to start editing it into shape for submission, but then it occurred to me that I had a bunch of skips and probably only a round or two left to use any. The smart thing to do seemed to skip so... Yeah, I felt kind of like a weasel too *shifty*
Anyways - this is pretty much the rawest form of what I write, but spell-checked *grins* It's written and I have no other use for it, so I decided to go ahead and post it in case anyone got some momentary enjoyment from the ficlet.
“Hey, what do you think this is?” Dean pulled a box from the dark recesses of the cabinet he was cleaning out and looked it over curiously. Bobby had press-ganged his visitors into searching through his basement storage for a rare Egyptian artifact he had agreed to lend another hunter. But he hadn't seen it for over a decade and only had a vague idea of where it might be located.
Six hours into the search it was still elusive, and boredom was setting in with a vengeance.
“I think it's something you should put down. Bobby said it was little, looks like a cat, and is in a flat stone box. That looks like a cardboard box about the size of your head.” Sam had been sneezing from all the dust for the last half hour and just wanted to find the stupid cat and be done.
“It feels like cardboard,” Dean eyed the package closer, “but this is butcher paper. And it's old – these postage stamps say are from the sixties and it doesn't even look like Bobby ever opened it.”
Sam was interested despite himself. “What does it say?”
“Light sucks in here.” Dean took the box out of the storage room and back into the main area at the base of the stairs which was more like a separate room than a landing since Bobby insisted on keeping all the doors shut to try and keep the dust contained. Sam followed, grateful for any excuse to breathe some cleaner air.
“So?'
Dean shrugged. “It says 'Bobby, the clock is wound but once. Love Wanda.' Looks like it was shipped from Newport.”
Sam took the box with a frown to read the label himself. “There are an awful lot of 'Fragile' stamps on this. And he never opened it? Just shoved it on a shelf full of various supernatural crap and left it?”
“Maybe he lost it?” Dean speculated.
“Maybe we should just put it back and just get on with our job.” Sam held the box back out to Dean.
Dean reached for it, mind already moving back to the mystery of the missing artifact – until somewhere in the passing the unthinkable happened and the package slipped and crashed onto the stone floor with an ominous tinkle of broken glass.
“Fuck, Sam!”
“Hey! You were the one holding it!”
“Obviously I wasn't!”
“Obviously you should have been!”
Dean swore again. “Go tell Bobby, for all we know this is some magical bomb and we have ten minutes to live now.”
Sam looked rebellious, but just nodded tightly and headed for the stairs. Or he would have, if he could have gotten the door open. He hauled with all his strength, and when the door remained stubbornly stuck in place, and none of the other doors would move either, turned to Dean with an expression of growing alarm. Dean, for his part, just looked grim and crouched to start carefully peeling open the package.
They both stared at the contents for a few minutes in puzzlement. Sam finally said it aloud as if hearing the words might change something. “It's an hourglass.”
“No shit, Sherlock.”
The highly polished, plain wooden frame was still intact, but the shattered glass of the mechanism and sand was broken up not only in the box itself, but now also all over the stone floor beneath from having trickled out of the corners when Dean removed the wrapping.
After another twenty minutes of frustration two things became apparent: nothing that wasn't either the package or themselves could be moved, opened, or used; and time appeared to be ...paused.
Sam was still examining a moth in the corner of the room that was frozen mid-flutter. He was just giving it another tentative poke when Dean spoke up suddenly.
“This might be a great opportunity, you know? If the entire rest of the world is like this,” he nodded towards the moth, “then can you imagine all of the things out there we can do and find out?”
“Would that be before or after we die of dehydration?” Sam waved a frustrated hand towards one of the frozen doors. This one was actually standing open a handspan, but it might have been a fortress wall for all the good that did them.
Dean's face fell. “You don't think... I mean, time isn't passing for us either, right? We aren't really going to die of thirst?”
Before Sam could answer, Dean's stomach rumbled in hunger and they exchanged horrified looks.
Lacking any other options after hours of fruitless arguing and pacing, Sam had tried to sleep to see if something would occur to him, but he couldn't get his mind to settle. The air was too still and felt ...tight. He finally gave up when it occurred to him that he hadn't heard sounds of Dean's movement for sometime. Sam sat back up and turned to look, only to find Dean seated cross-legged before the pile of smashed glass and sand peering at something held gingerly in one hand, while in the other hand holding a tube of ...superglue?
“You can't be serious.”
“Have a better idea?” Dean asked without shifting his attention.
“You can't fix time, with superglue!”
“Hey, you should just be grateful I had the damn tube in my pocket in the first place.”
Sam glared, and Sam bitched, but in the end he had to admit that any plan was better than no plan and he settled down to help. Hours uncounted passed marked by nothing but exhaustion and the growing needs of their bodies. They slept in shifts and rubbed at aching eyes as they took turns piecing together the tiny delicate shards of glass.
Eventually the glass was all but finished and back in it's base, every grain of sand having been painstakingly scraped back in. They were filthy, thirsty, hungry, and Sam at least had very little hope that the messy slipshod repair they had made would work.
Dean squinted and carefully laid the last piece into place.
“This won't work,” Sam predicted for the hundreth time.
“It had better. And a little less skepticism from you wouldn't hurt either.”
“It's going to break again as soon you turn it over.”
“Think happy thoughts.” Dean carefully pulled his hand back.
For a moment, the hourglass just sat there in all it's tacky, wobbly glory and nothing happened at all – but then it shimmered like a desert mirage and all of the cracks and damage smoothed over until in seconds it sat pristine as it must have on Bobby's shelf for decades.
Sam and Dean stood up slowly, looking around warily to see if anything else had changed. Sam grabbed Dean's arm and pointed. In the corner of the room the moth bumped against the light fixture, no longer trapped in an endless instant of time. Footsteps creaked overhead and Dean elbowed Sam out of the way as they headed hastily for the stairs.
“I can't decide what I want more first; water, or a hamburger.”
“All I know is that in the future, Bobby can find his own damn artifacts in his creepy ass basement.”
“Definitely.”
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-01-17 04:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-17 05:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-17 05:53 am (UTC)I was wondering if Dean knew that only duct tape fixes everything, but apparently duct tape and superglue share certain properties.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-17 06:37 am (UTC)Fixing an hourglass with duct tape would certainly been more of a challenge *grins*