PUCKER UP

Tags: Paris (take your pick), fairies and blue

Challenge set by Elrik Lasanti; 2000 words. Keep a wiper handy for the screen, and a hug for Dean.

"Be the devil and angel too, got a heart and soul and body, let's see what this love can do, maybe I'm perfect for you…"

The song emitting from the TV, which depicted a blonde woman in a bikini, practically humping a palm tree, mingled with the pounding jackhammers in her brain, until she finally slumped forwards onto the table top, groaning, holding her forehead like her brain was going to leak out. "Why?" she moaned pitifully, "Why?"

The Winchesters and her best friend ignored her, safe and headache-less behind their shiny diner menus, deciding what they wanted to eat this morning. The thought of consumption merely made her want to vomit, so she laid her brow against the surface of the table, the sticky laminated blue not cold enough to ease her pain, but if she rolled it, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth…

"Lauren, what the hell are you doing?"

She peeked upwards through the honey curls sprawled across the table and dangling in her eyes at Dean, who was eyeing her over the top of his menu as though he wasn't sure if she'd cracked, finally. "I'm…uh…" she blanked, trying to remember what exactly it was she was doing, through the little construction men running along her synapses, gouging with bulldozers behind her eyes, and swinging wrecking balls at her frontal lobe. "Rolling?"

Thankfully, she was saved from having to listen to whatever smart-ass comment he'd cooked up by screams and a series of loud crashes from the diner kitchen, the noise making her wince, clutch her forehead. Shrill, imaginative cursing came from the same place seconds later, and then a couple of waitresses came out to reassure everyone, one flouncing over to their table to collect their orders.

"What was all that about?" Sam asked, when the woman turned to him, using his big, wide, innocent blue green eyes to immediately butter her up, and she smiled sweetly down at him before shooting a glance over her shoulder and inclining her head forwards to gossip. The blonde woman sat up through the pain, and pasted a smile on her mouth, trying to look trustworthy as everyone else around her naturally leaked the aura into the air.

"Oh, we've just been havin' all these li'l mishaps lately, honey. Ev'rytime we turn 'round 'slike somethin' else is goin' wrong. Just now Miz Mandy – that there's our cook – she found a 'eadless mouse in the pancake batter, if that don' beat all."

"Guess that rules out a stack for me this morning," Dean said, and grinned, looking completely unfazed, as he perused his menu once more and the table's other three occupants paled visibly.

"I'm tellin' you, 'slike we're cursed, or somethin'," Marie – the waitress – said, and sighed, tucking some dry, dull brown hair behind her ear. "All the li'l accidents ain't nothing compared to what Rose's been goin' through, though. Trouble like you wouldn' believe. Now what can I get you four?"

She should have known better to bring up curses around hunters.

"Cursed?" Sam leans forwards, sincerity like a mantle around his shoulders, clinging to the sides of his head and hiding his true intentions from view. He uses it like a lasso, sending it out to loop around Marie's ears and pull her into his questions – and she does it as though she's happy to, smiling and shifty with the guilty pleasure of spreading rumours to a stranger.

"So, let me get this straight," she says, stifling curses as her jeans tangle in some bramble, scratching without mercy against her shin, and she pulls at the denim savagely before trotting to catch up with the other three, muttering darkly in her head. "Just because that diner waitress –"

"Marie," Sam inserts – ever the thoughtful one – ducking an overhanging branch, and keeping his hand on it as Sharika steps under it and smiles up at him. The blonde woman pretends not to notice when he drops his hand, this dreamy smile smearing across his face, and the branch thwacks him in the back of his noggin as though to reprimand him.

"– Marie says that the diner's owner has been having a streak of bad luck –"

"Lauren, crashing your car three times in one morning is a little more serious than bad luck –"

"Yeah, Dean, it's called bad driving, and she wasn't the only one who –"

"Oh, no, you are not going to start insulting my driving –"

"I wouldn't have to say anything if you had been concentrating on the damn road –"

"Would you two maybe consider that this isn't the time?" Sam interrupts the two fighters, sarcasm and bite evident, and they turn identical glowers onto him, before gritting their teeth and drawing shattered dignity around themselves. The four hunters continue on in silence, Dean and Lauren each promising themselves they'll continue this later, and be the victorious one.

Its midnight, and the four hunters are trooping about the woods, stumbling over logs, slipping in substances they'd prefer not to think about, getting scratched up, bitten by insects, and stained with sap and grasses, searching for fairy circles. Marie had sparked Sam's interest, after she'd informed them all about Rose McKay's – the diner owner's – sudden and vicious string of bad luck. Apparently as soon as she'd filed for divorce against her quote – nasty, vile, sleazy, slime-bag bastard of a husband – end quote, things had gone from bad to worse, from the crashes, to millions of tiny things going wrong at the diner, when the Hygiene Inspector was due in two days, to cockroaches infesting her house, and someone tee-pee-ing it.

They'd done a little bit of a background check, because Sam couldn't let it go, finally uncovering Mr McKay's involvement with the ancient fairy folk hereabouts, and though everyone had thoroughly deplored the idea of bumbling around the treacherous woods at night, apparently it was the only time the fairies would communicate with mortals – and only then, if they'd located a circle. So, there they were – pissed off, and now getting rained upon, stumbling about in the dark, trying to avoid the mini cliff that sat like a crouching presence to their right.

"Remember," Sam said, voice soft and frustrated from slightly up ahead. The blonde woman has fallen behind a little, getting tired and bored, soaked through and achy, muddy and mutinous. "Make sure you don't actually step into the circle – they can trap you that way."

"Yeah, that's if we ever find one," she griped forebodingly, and then her left boot crashes through a fern over-hanging the 'path', slips in a puddle, and she's careening down the slope, bushes and tree trunks and moonlit, starry wet sky tumbling overhead and underneath, and just as suddenly the world stops moving. She blinks, swallows, winces, scrapes forest floor and leaves and a bit of blood from her face. "This is what I get for tempting fate," she says, sighing, and tries to smile beguilingly up at the thing standing just outside her encompassing ring of mushrooms.

The thing doesn't look like the stereotypical fairy – there is nary a blush, twinkle or naturally-shaped, human-usque limb in sight. The thing is all stick figure angles and points, pale, waxy skin, sharp rotting brown teeth and twiggy, dirty hair. It has wings – ridged things that rise out of its slim shoulders like dead and cracking leaves, brittle looking, like one too hard a puff of air could shatter them. That's how the whole figure looks come to think of it; easily breakable – but that goes without mentioning the serious, supernatural-freak-out factor. This thing is ugly – and it has a look in its startling, sky-blue eyes that can't be healthy or safe. If the blonde woman had to qualify it she'd say, fuckingscaryhomicidal, and that would be the most articulate response anyone could hope for.

It grins at her, baring more decomposing molars, and she struggles to hold onto politeness and respect – they needed to bargain with this thing and its buddies for their job; it probably wouldn't appreciate her snarking at it. Plus, she's kind of alone right now, and in its power. She has no leverage, has to wait for the others to get their asses down here, or try and think of a way out all on her lonesome. Yeah, right.

"Ye seem to be in a wee bit of a fix, hunter," the fairy says down at the blonde woman, who's now squatting on her haunches, eyes flicking for any way out of the treacherously-innocent-looking, white-mushroom prison. "Don't ye know not to play with things beyond your ken?"

"Never was much for Barbie's boy," she says, bites her tongue. Idiot. "Let's cut the niceties, shall we? How are you going to swing this? I've done nothing to set you against me – I came in peace."

"Ah, but I know why ye are here. And we folks do not like mortals to meddle in our plans. We do not like that at all." Menace dangles from its words in thick saliva strands; wet and slick and sour-smelling. But she refuses to show any fear.

"You know there are others like me. They won't let you keep me, you know."

"I don't want to keep ye, or hurt ye, hunter. We want ye to tell McKay to stop bothering us, we don't want any part of his revenge."

"Why did ye – I mean, you – go along with him in the first place then?"

"Irrelevant. Now –"

Suddenly the older boy is there, gun in hand, pointing it at the fairy, eyes narrowed, glaring and dangerous, the protective instinct gathered around his shoulders like a tangible cloud, and Lauren feels safe, at last. Well, kind of. She still can't leave the circle. "Let. Her. Go," Dean says, barrel unwavering in his huge hand. The fairy reaches maybe his thighs in height, and looks ridiculous in comparison.

"Now, now, boy," the fairy says, gleeful and cackling, and suddenly is scary again, its lack in height more than made up for with its presence. "Ye don't want to do that; look at where ye lady-love be."

Dean looks, tries not to pale, gives her a look that tells her they'll be talking about this later – at length – and flicks his eyes back to the fairy, all in a split-second. "She's not my 'lady-love'. And I suggest you let her go, unless you want to be full up of cold, consecrated iron, you fugly son-of-a-bitch." But it's an empty threat – if he shoots, she'll never be freed, they need the fairy magic to let her out.

"Dean, he said he didn't want to hurt me. Let's listen to what he has to say first, alright?"

"You trust it?"

"Uh, no? I'm not that stupid." She turns back to the fairy, who's been watching them talk with interest, vicious smile still in place, dry green lips pulled back wide and twitching. "You were saying?"

"We're willing to let ye free hunter, if ye promise to stop McKay for us."

"Done."

"Nuh, uh, now," the fairy tsks, wagging a finger and leering. "We'll be needing a seal to this promise, missy. Can't just take ye word for it – everyone knows hunters'll lie with their dying breath."

"What did you want?"

"A kiss, of course."

"A kiss?!"

"Lauren, just do it and lets get out of here. It's no big deal." Dean's smirking too now, gun still steadily trained on the fairy, thinking Lauren's clearly getting her comeuppance and then some, the nasty, snivelling bastard.

"Glad ye think that way boy; ye are the one we want it from."

"We never speak of that, ever again," Dean's saying through a continuous cycle of rinse and spit in the bathroom sink, new bottle of mouthwash already half-used in his fist.

"Speak of what?" she asks, innocent, and when his mouth is full once more, "Pucker up, Dean."

Dean chokes on mouthwash, just like he did on fairy tongue.

AN: Reviews are love!