SPN_Cinema Fic: The Martian, Starring Dean
Movie Prompt: The Martian
Pairing: None
Rating: PG (swearing)
Word Count: 6k
Summary: Dean's bouncing through TV shows at the Trickster's whim, but another planet now? Why is he stuck sciencing the shit out of this?
Notes: Thanks![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cybel for doing lovely art for The Martian for the SPN_Cinema challenge, and for graciously allowing me to play too when I got inspired to write for it! And thank you Cinema mods, and I'm sorry for pushing right through the last minute here!
The Trickster's smug, stupid face vanished, and Dean looked around at the new environment — new TV-set reality, he reminded himself —that the damn demigod (or whatever ) had picked for them this time.
For starters, Sam was nowhere in sight.
Coming close on the heels of that thought, as he drew in breath to yell for Sam, was Oh holy shit, what is that godawful smell?
He was in some kind of greenhouse. Some of the smell was green growing things, but most of it smelled like the fertilizer had come straight out of someone's ass, and then he'd hung around without bathing for a while on top of it.
Dean also felt…weird. It wasn't until he turned around to look behind him that he realized what it was, though: either he'd suddenly become super-strong, or he'd lost weight—a lot of weight. He bounced off the ground like it was spring-loaded, stumbled and fell forward, tried to turn it into a roll and wound up flying through the air until he fetched up against one of the flexible plastic walls.
He caught his breath and his balance, shutting down his body's fight response. Sudden movements were the opposite of helpful, okay. But he could move slowly. He pretended he was stalking something that'd kill him if he made a sound, and got to his feet.
The place had three big circular doors. Daylight filtered dimly through the ceiling. There were some small windows behind all the plastic sheeting, but he couldn't see through them with it in the way. This place hadn't been originally designed as a greenhouse, he concluded, even if that was what it was now.
There were also desks with laptops and a bunk area.
He needed to figure out how to get out of here and find Sam. He started for the nearest strange door. It looked pressure sealed. And as he got closer, he noticed the rack on the wall of… holy shit, spacesuits. Spacesuits plus low gravity equaled… not even on the same planet as Kansas anymore. He backed slowly away from the door—no, airlock—and sat down in the computer chair. He had better figure this shit out before he went leaping headfirst onto alien turf.
The computer wasn't locked. It did have the NASA logo, as did a lot of other stuff around here now that he was looking. He fought the odd feeling like he was finding government secrets lying openly around for anyone to pick up. Based on the room he was in, there weren't many other people around. There were bunks like a small group used to live here, but it also looked like only one of them had been used in a long time. Likely Dean was alone here. Maybe something out there had killed the others. He'd have to be wary if he didn't want to die: Trickster or no Trickster, no second-rate cheeseball movie alien was going to put Dean in the ground.
The first thing he found on the computer, front and center like it was meant to be found by a stranger sitting down here, was a series of video journal entries. Did that mean he—his character, whoever he was supposed to be playing here—was planning on dying, or at least prepared for it?
Dean took a deep breath and clicked "Play."
Well, crap. Apparently he was on Mars; he was the only frigging person on the entire planet; and there weren't even any warp drives in this sorry excuse for a space drama. No aliens (unless they were going to show up as a surprise twist and eat his kidneys; Dean had seen movies like this) and no transporter beams and he couldn't even talk to anybody else on Earth because his satellite dish had blown over and stabbed him through the ribs while the rest of his crew evacuated. Assholes; his character in the video diaries kept saying they'd made the right call and he didn't blame them, but Dean didn't know them and he was the one stuck eating nothing but potatoes. Potatoes which had, indeed, been grown in these people's crap.
Anyway, this Mark guy was looking at four years alone here until another ship could come, if he could grow enough food and keep the rest of his bodily functions running and take a rover across the planet when it was time.
And although it wasn't strictly necessary for his survival, re-establishing communications with his team and Earth would not only be good for his sanity, but also improve his chances: having a brain trust on call wasn't an advantage Dean was going to underestimate.
Mark's last log entry talked about setting up for a long rover trip, both to test out multi-day journeys in the thing and to try to find and retrieve an old lander which would be able to communicate with Earth.
Sounded like a great opportunity for aliens to show up and eat him if anything did; Dean had a suspicious soul and the Trickster's little Cave of Wonders wasn't making him any more trusting.
On the other hand, roadtrip across an alien planet after "ancient" '90s technology?
"Awesome," Dean muttered, starting to grin.
The rover was pretty sweet, all things considered. She was no Baby, of course, but Baby didn't have life support, two batteries, and a radioactive heater. Also, six all-terrain wheels.
The life support was only meant for day-trips, and to make the long trip to the other rocket launcher, 'Mark' was going to have to bring the big oxygenator and water reclaimer from the Hab. But for this trip, he should just be able to manage by bottling up enough oxygen and water to take with him. The solar panels would have to come with, of course, because he only had enough battery life for four hours of driving — two hours per battery — and he had at least 500 miles to go, each way. He wasn't going to be setting any land-speed records in this thing, that was for sure.
Although, this was Mars, so maybe he'd be setting Martian records. Huh.
For the long trip, he'd need to use the second rover as a trailer, but for this one he should just be able to get by by strapping his solar arrays to the roof of his rover, and then strapping Pathfinder next to them, assuming he found it. So he wouldn't need the trailer.
He had to pack water, oxygen, CO2 scrubbers, an EVA suit and a spare, food—the first round of potatoes had been harvested, so he was eating some of them along with the rationed meals—a shovel and ropes for when he got to the station, and of course weapons in case aliens attacked.
There were no guns, laser ray or ordinary; NASA didn't think they were necessary. Whatever. Dean was disappointed but he was adaptable. He could use lots of different kinds of weapons.
The first thing that had come to hand when he got here was a small utility knife; he'd kept it near to hand while he got oriented around the place, and it had, though meager, allowed him to focus on other things for a while. But once he started looking around for bigger and better, he realized his options were going to be limited.
On the most basic level, he had clubs. There were enough spare metal parts lying around, struts and oxygen tanks and so on, he wasn't worried about finding something to whack an alien with. Mars might not have much, but it did have rocks lying around in droves.
But assuming he wanted more options than "caveman," he was going to have to get creative. He'd hoped to find a hatchet or chainsaw or something packed away, but no dice. There were a couple drills, but they didn't have much battery life. Other than that the most significant sharp edges around were utility knives. Dean now carried five on his person. He also had one strapped to a stick to make a pole-arm. Nobody was going to be walking down the street looking at him funny here, at least.
It was too bad nothing in the place was flammable. Dean liked explosives. But he could also see the point that they were very likely to kill him along with any hypothetical aliens if he tried to blow anything up. So what were his next best options?
Eight hours with the team chemist's laptop and a thorough search of the Hab's kitchen and medical supplies later, he carefully stowed eight well-wrapped plastic baggies (Small Flexible Sample Containers) in a compartment on Rover 2.
That part was done. Dean threw the rest of his supply list together, lugged it out to Rover 2, and packed it in.
Being out on Mars, in an honest-to-God NASA spacesuit, was totally fucking cool. The spacesuit would have been heavy as fuck on Earth, but on Mars it just brought his weight back up to about what it should have been anyway. It was kind of bulky and hard to move in, but on the other hand, he was on Mars. He spent a while squinting at the horizon to see if it curved more than Earth's, but it was irritatingly inconclusive. There were also two moons, but one was barely brighter than Venus would have been from Earth. The other looked about half the size of Earth's moon and zipped across the sky so fast you could see it move.
It was pretty flat where he was going. A long, featureless stretch of desert. Dean had a map that showed where he was and where Pathfinder was supposed to be, assuming hypothetical Martians hadn't screwed with it over the past twenty years. What he didn't have was GPS or roadsigns or, for large chunks of the trip, recognizable landmarks. He didn't even have a compass, because (according to the laptops in the NASA greenhouse) Mars didn't have any magnetic field to speak of, so they wouldn't work.
All he had were the stars. And the North Star wasn't even straight north anymore. Dean scowled at the sky. Tipping his head back wasn't easy in a spacesuit, either. And the rover didn't have a skylight in the roof: he could see to the front and sides, and that was it.
On the plus side, no such thing as a cloudy day on Mars. Dean shrugged and got in the rover, a cramped process involving an airlock. Once he was de-suited and sitting in the driver's seat, he took a moment just to get comfortable and admire the dash in front of him: he might not be in his baby with Sam, cruising down America's highways, but it was pretty awesome to be taking a roadtrip on Mars, Trickster's stupid games or no.
He put the rover in gear, letting himself relax into the role enough to figure out the controls through whatever rules the Trickster had running this psycho circus of his. It was like looking at those stupid visual illusions; he had to not quite concentrate on looking, and then the information popped into focus in the back of his brain. Weird, but it worked. He hit the gas (not real gas, electric-powered whatever crap) and he was off.
South. He had well over five hundred miles to go, and he'd only have a signal from the Hab to navigate by for about the first forty. At twenty-five miles per hour, terrain allowing, and four hours of driving per day before he had to let the solar cells recharge the batteries, that was at least six days, and he could probably count on the terrain to slow him down more. He had life support for 25 days before he was in trouble.
He was going to have a lot of downtime on this trip.
Honestly, it might be kind of nice, instead of blazing across the country in a hurry to stop the latest rash of supernatural deaths or put a hold on the end of the world.
Dean hated downtime. He'd never felt more cooped up in his life than spending practically all his time in a four-by-four glorified truck cab. He couldn't quite stand up straight, and he couldn't stretch out lying down, either. Plus, one side of him, usually his back, was always warmer than the other from his radioactive little heater. He'd taken to doing EVAs while the batteries charged just to have somewhere to move.
At this point Dean would welcome attacking aliens, just to alleviate the tedium. But there continued stubbornly to be no sign at all that anything except for himself had ever lived in this featureless wasteland.
"So much for tentacled rage-monsters," he grumbled. "Real disappointing show, guys." He kicked a rock with his space boot, just to see it fly up and land in a puff of dust. The dust was somehow dustier here, finer and lighter and it went everywhere without ever really sticking to anything. He kicked another rock, then picked one up and threw it as far as he could, which was pretty damn far.
Then he sighed and went for a run, which consisted of jump-waddling in a circle around his solar arrays wide enough to not get dust all over them until he felt stupid enough to quit and go back in the rover to watch the terrible 70s tv shows that had been on one of the personal laptops.
He was making about 75 miles a day. Never mind he could have driven 75 miles in an hour back on Earth. Featureless desert for three days, then a ridge of hills to his east for two, then another two days of desert. A couple craters, once he got within a day or two of Pathfinder; and then retracing the whole trip with his roof stacked double-high and hopefully finding the Hab again where he left it.
The Trickster was trying to kill him with boredom.
What was going on out in the real world while he and Sammy played stupid pet tricks in here? There was an apocalypse on, and all the angels seemed to care a lot about the timetable, for supposedly immortal beings.
He knew the Trickster had the power to mess with time, because of the time-loop he'd wrung Sam through the last time. But was this crap similarly taking no time in the real world, or would they pop out to find that Lucifer had had a party and trashed the neighborhood?
And where was Sam right now? Was he somewhere up in space, playing one of the crewmembers who'd taken off without him? Or back on Earth, peering through a telescope at Mars and wondering what was going on? Or had the Trickster thrown them into different simulations entirely this time, and Sam was off fighting space vampires in the Pegasus Galaxy?
Where was Cas? How had the Trickster been able to take him off the board like that? It shouldn't have been possible; angel should trump pagan god, especially on Christian turf, which America pretty much was.
Dean had no way to know, other than to get to the damn antique probe and figure out how to talk to Earth with it. Even after he laid his hands on the thing, he was going to have to bring it back to the Hab to actually get it running; he would be lucky if all it needed was a new battery. Luckily, being handy with mechanics was something he and Mark had in common.
Pathfinder was right where his map said it should be, for a wonder. Mostly buried in dust. A little digging revealed its lapdog-sized mini-rover a couple feet away.
Sojourner, the mini-rover, fit easily through the airlock into his big papa-rover. Pathfinder itself wasn't going to be quite that easy, but after a lot of cursing and heaving and piling rocks together, he got it up onto the roof of the damn van. Grave-digging was more fun than this; at least then he didn't have to worry every jostle was going to knock loose some critical piece of electronics.
And still no aliens had showed up. There wasn't even a mutating mat of malignant slime-mold underneath the landing balloons where microbes could have hitch-hiked from Earth; Dean had checked. Who even ever made a space adventure this boring? And who would actually pay money to watch it?
Grumbling to himself, he laboriously stacked his solar panels back up on the roof, now sharing space with his very own mobile communication station, and lashed everything down as securely as he could. He was top-heavy and precarious, but there was nothing to be done except drive carefully. The good part about all the featureless wasteland between him and Hab was that there wouldn't be much to tip or trip him.
Small blessings. Dean scowled once more on general principle, climbed into his increasingly stinky bubble of Earth atmosphere on wheels, and started maneuvering back the way he'd come.
Other than going stir-crazy enough to try *dragging* the rover overland when it was night and the cells couldn't charge, the trip back was very much the same as the trip out. He got about a foot and a half's progress for a half an hour's puffing effort, and gave up in disgust.
Sam had better have it better than him, wherever he was.
Dean could have wept when the Hab's dinky short-range signal finally registered on the rover's radio. It was just a fancy overgrown greenhouse, a slightly less stinky bubble of Earth air with enough space for him to stand up straight and walk around in a circle, but no fleatrap motel had ever looked better at the end of a long drive.
Hey, the Hab was guaranteed flea-free, at the very least.
Even though the Hab airlocks were bigger than the rover's, he didn’t think Pathfinder was going to be fitting through them. He'd have to take it apart as carefully as he could, haul each piece individually through the airlock, and then put it together inside, hoping that he wasn't breaking anything more than was broken already, and that he could fix whatever had made it stop working in the first place.
He hoped it was just that the battery was dead. There was no way to know until he could get into it.
But taking it apart outside the Hab meant working on it wearing astronaut gloves, which was going to suck balls. The things were stiff and bulky and awkward no matter how many boatloads of cash NASA had sunk into them.
First things first. Dean pulled up outside the Hab, put his spacesuit on to get from the rover into the Hab, and once he was inside, took his spacesuit off, got entirely naked, and ran in circles, yelling just to hear his voice filling the space.
The next day, he was back outside, wrangling Pathfinder down off the roof of the rover and beginning the laborious process of unscrewing its parts.
He'd only detached the base when he stopped, panting, to stand straight for a minute and found himself squinting at the airlock door and back at Pathfinder. There actually wasn't as much of a size problem as he'd thought. If he got the antenna squinched down and could tilt the thing on its side without breaking it...
It was possible. He hoped tilting it on its side wouldn't break anything. The thing had been built to hit the ground surrounded by airbags and bounce, so it should have been made pretty durably. But if he broke the antenna, he was screwed. The Trickster was perfectly capable of leaving him in this stupid simulation until he starved to death, especially if Dean had the opportunity to get himself out and jacked it up through incompetence.
He poked gingerly at the antenna: it flexed easily. Good. It hadn't made the trip through space from Earth extended like this: and what had gone up could come back down. He compressed it experimentally. It was a genius design: it accordioned more-or-less smoothly into a short cylinder and, once he found the catch, stayed.
So far so good. He eyed the distance from his large hunk of delicate metal and the airlock: not far, because he’d driven the rover as close as he could before unloading it. He could crabwalk the thing around okay; the spacesuit was bulky and annoying, but the gravity was much lighter and that helped. The dust got everywhere but that was a given. He was tempted to heave the lander up on its side and roll it across the ground, but it was too likely to jar something loose that he wouldn’t be able to fix.
Hopefully he hadn’t already jarred it too badly, between getting it onto the rover, across hundreds of miles of Martian landscape, and off the rover again plus detaching the base.
Only one way to find out. He spent the next hour carefully crabwalking Pathfinder to the airlock and tilted it precariously up on one edge to get it in the door. There wasn’t room for him to squeeze past it in his suit to get to the inside door controls, so he had to go around to another airlock and get inside that way. At least he could take the damn suit off.
It went a lot easier from there, getting his squat hunk of metal in through the inner door of the airlock and centered in the largest open space he had that wasn’t covered with potato sprouts. Dean wanted out of this place before those were all he had to live on. He hoped Sam was faring better, wherever he was.
The largest open space was by the bunks. He got Pathfinder situated and opened up the side panels. The battery was dead: that much was obvious. NASA had strongly suspected the battery running too low in the cold and being unable to restart itself was what had killed Pathfinder in the first place. Even if something else had gone wrong instead, the battery would still have died as soon as dust blew over the solar panels, so replacing the power supply was his first task.
He didn’t have an appropriate battery, but it was easy enough to run a power cord over from the Hab’s power supply, controlling for voltage. He let loose the catch on the antenna and it gracefully expanded itself. If he was lucky, now, Pathfinder would be sending a signal to Earth and all he needed to do was wait for whoever was manning the desks back there to detect it and respond. It wouldn’t be instantly: it would take eleven minutes just for the radio waves to travel at the speed of light from Mars to Earth, and then they’d have to travel back.
He’d eaten lunch (not nearly enough) and checked over the potatoes to keep himself occupied, but when an hour went by and then another without Pathfinder doing anything other than sitting there, something had to be wrong. Damn.
He spent the rest of the day running diagnostics and reading up on anything the computers could find him on the specs, which wasn’t much. He pried off panels and looked at the electronics; he disassembled components, cleaned dust out of them, and put them back. At the end of the day he still didn’t have any idea what was wrong: everything looked like it should be functioning normally, it just wasn’t getting any reply from NASA. He ran his hands through his hair in frustration. All of the suit radios hung up on the wall could receive the signal Pathfinder was sending out, so either it was just weaker than it should be for some reason, or NASA didn’t know to listen for it or was having to go dig up computer programming manuals from last century to figure out how to reply.
Uneasily he decided to hope it was just taking them time. It had been a long day. With the ease of a lifetime of going to bed in strange places and stranger situations, Dean laid himself out on Watney’s bunk where he had a good view of the mobile camera. Maybe they would have figured out how to respond by morning.
It still hadn’t moved. Dean was getting real tired of this whole stupid game. He stared at his tools and contemplated diving deeper into the innards of the fancy hunk of electronics and instruments that had taken millions of dollars and dozens if not hundreds of engineers to design, and then he cursed and turned around and got back into a now-familiar spacesuit.
There was something peaceful about the wide-open expanse of the sky and the featureless plain outside. The rover was fully charged and Dean got in and drove, picking a direction at random, wanting just to move. A couple days able to stretch out in the Hab had been great, but now it seemed like a prison: the astronaut’s knowledge whispered away in the back of his brain, maddeningly inaudible but conveying the sense that he was missing something obvious, and it was going to mean he would rot here, starve to death on not enough potatoes with the Trickster laughing at him all the way to the end.
Dean stopped the rover when the battery died. He’d driven his two hours. He still had his other full battery, but he should turn back as soon as he swapped it out unless he wanted to be stuck laying out the solar panels still on the roof and twiddling his thumbs for eight hours while they recharged.
Once the batteries were swapped and he was de-suited again back inside, he turned the rover around. His tracks were clear before him: following his trail out would bring him back to the Hab, even if he could’ve gotten lost this close to it. He brought up the radio signal the Hab was broadcasting anyway: sure enough, it was in the direction it was supposed to be.
He frowned. Then he checked through all the frequencies again. The only thing the rover could hear was the short-range beacon designed for exactly this sort of short-range rover trip. If there was a signal broadcasting which was supposed to make it all the way to Earth, he should be able to hear it from two hours away at the rover’s snail-crawl.
Goddammit. That meant the problem was almost certainly on his end. He’d been able to hear Pathfinder just fine from the suits inside the Hab, and the suits had been able to hear each other…
But they hadn’t heard the rover’s unit from inside the Hab. It was designed to broadcast its own little signal constantly, just in case a rover or an astronaut somehow managed to lose themselves in this sea of dust and rock.
He couldn’t hear the suits from inside the Hab, either, though his own suit and the spare in the rover were showing nice and clear. Maybe it was just the distance. But if it wasn’t?
His brain was clicking pieces together now. The roof of the Hab, and for that matter of the rover, were a lot thicker than they needed to be just to keep an airtight bubble. Thermal insulation and durability, he’d assumed, but that wasn’t enough to explain it now that he was thinking about it. They were thick because they were designed to shield the astronauts from all the radiation that Mars’ atmosphere was too thin to block.
And if they were thick enough to block radiation, they were probably blocking radio signals, too. The Hab’s beacon was mounted on the outside, just like its original communication array had been.
Pathfinder could be working fine. If he was right, the only problem was that nobody on Earth would ever know, because he’d dragged it under a roof that radio waves couldn’t get through.
He’d know soon enough. If he got close to the Hab and he still couldn’t hear the suits, that would be confirmation enough. Then all he’d have to do would be to drag the damn thing back outside, fingers crossed, and run a power cord out to it. What he should have done in the first place, if it turned out he was right.
Dammit. He had the nasty feeling he was being laughed at. At least the sussurating input from the Mark character in his hindbrain had stopped pestering him. That, more than anything, meant he was probably onto the problem.
The Hab’s impenetrability did, in fact, turn out to be the problem. He spent the rest of the day getting Pathfinder back out through the airlock and powered properly from outside the Hab, and then he had nothing to do but wait some more while Earth was below the horizon, since his radio signals weren’t going to travel through the entire width of Mars any better than the Hab’s insulation. He went inside and pushed a potato around on his plate without eating it. If it didn’t work this time…
But in the morning the mobile camera was pointed straight at the sign he’d made, “Yes.” Yes, they were receiving him: yes, they could read his homemade signs with whatever question he wanted to ask: yes, they could answer by pointing the camera at different points around Pathfinder. All he had to do was put signs up so that their pointing meant something.
There was one question that was foremost on his mind. He wanted to hold up a sign that just read, “SAM?” But that would be ignoring the rules of the game. He’d been through enough of these now to know that the Trickster would find some way to make his life worse if he was that blatant: probably aliens would show up and destroy all his non-potato meals. He was used to the idea of having the entire planet to himself; he’d stopped expecting trouble, which meant it was the best time for it to find him.
He needed to be able to communicate to get off this damn planet or at least bring the drama to a close. Yes or no questions wouldn't get them far. He needed them to be able to tell him things he hadn’t asked about.
Dean made fifteen signs and staked them to the ground around Pathfinder. He wrote two letters and a number on them until he ran out of numbers, and then added a period, space, and question mark to the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth signs. After thirteen he was through the whole alphabet, so on the fourteenth sign he wrote, “MIDDLE ROW” and on the fifteenth “NUMBERS ETC.” They could point to any sign to mean the top row of letters, they could point to the fourteenth and another sign to hit the rest of the letters, and the final sign for anything else.
With the twenty-two minutes it took just for a signal to make it from Mars to Earth and a response to get from Earth to Mars, plus the time for the camera to move (which he had to be watching or he’d miss what they were saying) and for him to work out what they were saying and then write his own response where they could see it through the camera, it was hardly a lightning round of witty repartee. But they were only a couple rounds in when Dean got the answer he’d been waiting for, after they’d asked : G-L-A-D- -T-O- -S-E-E- -Y-O-U- -B-R-O-T-H-E-R.
Sam was on the other end! Safe on Earth, geeking out in NASA headquarters, not on the ship that had left him here or anywhere else in tv-land, or dead in some game Dean hadn’t even had an option to play. It was a good thing brother had been at the end of a message because he would have missed anything that came after that. He spent about five minutes just lying flat on his back in the Martian dust, and then another minute after that awkwardly rolling to his feet in the damn spacesuit.
He had to write back, but he had a dozen things all clamoring to be said at once…
Snap!
His spacesuit was gone. The barren reddish plain of Mars still extended around him as far as the eye could see, but there was nothing protecting his air from the thin cold lifeless air of Mars…
But somehow he could still breathe. Someone clapped slow and sarcastic behind him and he turned. Trickster. All of this had only ever been his game…
Sam stood near them, wearing a tie and a pocket protector, looking nonplussed as he stared around the Martian landscape. “Was this breathable air the whole time?”
“Now, that would be telling,” the damn demigod smirked. “Wouldn't want to ruin the illusion of being about to die from a little fresh air, now would we?”
“You and your damn illusions,” Dean growled. “You were perfectly happy making me get in and out of a space suit six times a day for your own sick amusement…”
“Come on, Dean. Do you know how many people would kill for an all-expenses paid vacation on an alien planet?”
Dean had to work to maintain his scowl. Parts of it hadn't sucked completely. “With a bunch of broken shit I had to fix…”
“All part of the package,” the Trickster waved a hand airily. “You got to play mechanic to your heart’s content, while Sam got to geek out with a bunch of other eggheads running a space program…”
“Endless meetings,” Sam groaned. “Sitting at desks the whole time unless we had to go sit in an airplane to go to another meeting…”
“Whine, whine. You two are never happy. You wanted a break, I gave you a break. Now you're complaining it was boring. It's a whole other freaking planet!”
“We never asked you to drop us into whatever crappy space documentary from the future this is!” Dean said. “We wanted your help fighting Lucifer…”
“And I gave you this instead,” the Trickster said. “So what's the lesson?”
“Lesson?” Sam growled, more pissed than ever. “What part of being dragged into somebody else's story to play out their drama is supposed to be fun? Everybody kept calling me Venkat!”
Dean snorted a little. He couldn't help it.
The Trickster pointed to him. “There, see? That's what I'm talking about. Sometimes, you just gotta take your fun where you can find it.”
Sam and Dean both stared at him. “That's it, that's the lesson?” Dean said incredulously. “That's bullshit!”
The Trickster, for one of the first times they'd seen him, looked serious. “You think I've never had anybody trying to write my life for me?” he said. “Trust me, kids, it's not all candy and popcorn at my level. Sometimes you have to go along with what the big boys want…but sometimes playing your own games in somebody else's sandbox keeps you going. So you play as hard as you can whenever you can, whether that's pulling doughnuts in a rover on a barren wasteland or putting gum on the chairs of directors you don't like.” He looked at Sam, but Sam was determinedly scuffing at the ground with the toe of his shoe.
“Sammy? Way to go, little bro!” Dean said reflexively. Then he looked at the pagan demigod more thoughtfully. “Does that mean you’re not a fan of all this archangel bullshit any more than…”
“Sorry, Bucko,” the Trickster gave a wide, insincere smile. “Break time’s over. Next show starts...now!”
Snap!
The End
Pairing: None
Rating: PG (swearing)
Word Count: 6k
Summary: Dean's bouncing through TV shows at the Trickster's whim, but another planet now? Why is he stuck sciencing the shit out of this?
Notes: Thanks
cybel for doing lovely art for The Martian for the SPN_Cinema challenge, and for graciously allowing me to play too when I got inspired to write for it! And thank you Cinema mods, and I'm sorry for pushing right through the last minute here!The Trickster's smug, stupid face vanished, and Dean looked around at the new environment — new TV-set reality, he reminded himself —that the damn demigod (or whatever ) had picked for them this time.
For starters, Sam was nowhere in sight.
Coming close on the heels of that thought, as he drew in breath to yell for Sam, was Oh holy shit, what is that godawful smell?
He was in some kind of greenhouse. Some of the smell was green growing things, but most of it smelled like the fertilizer had come straight out of someone's ass, and then he'd hung around without bathing for a while on top of it.
Dean also felt…weird. It wasn't until he turned around to look behind him that he realized what it was, though: either he'd suddenly become super-strong, or he'd lost weight—a lot of weight. He bounced off the ground like it was spring-loaded, stumbled and fell forward, tried to turn it into a roll and wound up flying through the air until he fetched up against one of the flexible plastic walls.
He caught his breath and his balance, shutting down his body's fight response. Sudden movements were the opposite of helpful, okay. But he could move slowly. He pretended he was stalking something that'd kill him if he made a sound, and got to his feet.
The place had three big circular doors. Daylight filtered dimly through the ceiling. There were some small windows behind all the plastic sheeting, but he couldn't see through them with it in the way. This place hadn't been originally designed as a greenhouse, he concluded, even if that was what it was now.
There were also desks with laptops and a bunk area.
He needed to figure out how to get out of here and find Sam. He started for the nearest strange door. It looked pressure sealed. And as he got closer, he noticed the rack on the wall of… holy shit, spacesuits. Spacesuits plus low gravity equaled… not even on the same planet as Kansas anymore. He backed slowly away from the door—no, airlock—and sat down in the computer chair. He had better figure this shit out before he went leaping headfirst onto alien turf.
The computer wasn't locked. It did have the NASA logo, as did a lot of other stuff around here now that he was looking. He fought the odd feeling like he was finding government secrets lying openly around for anyone to pick up. Based on the room he was in, there weren't many other people around. There were bunks like a small group used to live here, but it also looked like only one of them had been used in a long time. Likely Dean was alone here. Maybe something out there had killed the others. He'd have to be wary if he didn't want to die: Trickster or no Trickster, no second-rate cheeseball movie alien was going to put Dean in the ground.
The first thing he found on the computer, front and center like it was meant to be found by a stranger sitting down here, was a series of video journal entries. Did that mean he—his character, whoever he was supposed to be playing here—was planning on dying, or at least prepared for it?
Dean took a deep breath and clicked "Play."
Well, crap. Apparently he was on Mars; he was the only frigging person on the entire planet; and there weren't even any warp drives in this sorry excuse for a space drama. No aliens (unless they were going to show up as a surprise twist and eat his kidneys; Dean had seen movies like this) and no transporter beams and he couldn't even talk to anybody else on Earth because his satellite dish had blown over and stabbed him through the ribs while the rest of his crew evacuated. Assholes; his character in the video diaries kept saying they'd made the right call and he didn't blame them, but Dean didn't know them and he was the one stuck eating nothing but potatoes. Potatoes which had, indeed, been grown in these people's crap.
Anyway, this Mark guy was looking at four years alone here until another ship could come, if he could grow enough food and keep the rest of his bodily functions running and take a rover across the planet when it was time.
And although it wasn't strictly necessary for his survival, re-establishing communications with his team and Earth would not only be good for his sanity, but also improve his chances: having a brain trust on call wasn't an advantage Dean was going to underestimate.
Mark's last log entry talked about setting up for a long rover trip, both to test out multi-day journeys in the thing and to try to find and retrieve an old lander which would be able to communicate with Earth.
Sounded like a great opportunity for aliens to show up and eat him if anything did; Dean had a suspicious soul and the Trickster's little Cave of Wonders wasn't making him any more trusting.
On the other hand, roadtrip across an alien planet after "ancient" '90s technology?
"Awesome," Dean muttered, starting to grin.
The rover was pretty sweet, all things considered. She was no Baby, of course, but Baby didn't have life support, two batteries, and a radioactive heater. Also, six all-terrain wheels.
The life support was only meant for day-trips, and to make the long trip to the other rocket launcher, 'Mark' was going to have to bring the big oxygenator and water reclaimer from the Hab. But for this trip, he should just be able to manage by bottling up enough oxygen and water to take with him. The solar panels would have to come with, of course, because he only had enough battery life for four hours of driving — two hours per battery — and he had at least 500 miles to go, each way. He wasn't going to be setting any land-speed records in this thing, that was for sure.
Although, this was Mars, so maybe he'd be setting Martian records. Huh.
For the long trip, he'd need to use the second rover as a trailer, but for this one he should just be able to get by by strapping his solar arrays to the roof of his rover, and then strapping Pathfinder next to them, assuming he found it. So he wouldn't need the trailer.
He had to pack water, oxygen, CO2 scrubbers, an EVA suit and a spare, food—the first round of potatoes had been harvested, so he was eating some of them along with the rationed meals—a shovel and ropes for when he got to the station, and of course weapons in case aliens attacked.
There were no guns, laser ray or ordinary; NASA didn't think they were necessary. Whatever. Dean was disappointed but he was adaptable. He could use lots of different kinds of weapons.
The first thing that had come to hand when he got here was a small utility knife; he'd kept it near to hand while he got oriented around the place, and it had, though meager, allowed him to focus on other things for a while. But once he started looking around for bigger and better, he realized his options were going to be limited.
On the most basic level, he had clubs. There were enough spare metal parts lying around, struts and oxygen tanks and so on, he wasn't worried about finding something to whack an alien with. Mars might not have much, but it did have rocks lying around in droves.
But assuming he wanted more options than "caveman," he was going to have to get creative. He'd hoped to find a hatchet or chainsaw or something packed away, but no dice. There were a couple drills, but they didn't have much battery life. Other than that the most significant sharp edges around were utility knives. Dean now carried five on his person. He also had one strapped to a stick to make a pole-arm. Nobody was going to be walking down the street looking at him funny here, at least.
It was too bad nothing in the place was flammable. Dean liked explosives. But he could also see the point that they were very likely to kill him along with any hypothetical aliens if he tried to blow anything up. So what were his next best options?
Eight hours with the team chemist's laptop and a thorough search of the Hab's kitchen and medical supplies later, he carefully stowed eight well-wrapped plastic baggies (Small Flexible Sample Containers) in a compartment on Rover 2.
That part was done. Dean threw the rest of his supply list together, lugged it out to Rover 2, and packed it in.
Being out on Mars, in an honest-to-God NASA spacesuit, was totally fucking cool. The spacesuit would have been heavy as fuck on Earth, but on Mars it just brought his weight back up to about what it should have been anyway. It was kind of bulky and hard to move in, but on the other hand, he was on Mars. He spent a while squinting at the horizon to see if it curved more than Earth's, but it was irritatingly inconclusive. There were also two moons, but one was barely brighter than Venus would have been from Earth. The other looked about half the size of Earth's moon and zipped across the sky so fast you could see it move.
It was pretty flat where he was going. A long, featureless stretch of desert. Dean had a map that showed where he was and where Pathfinder was supposed to be, assuming hypothetical Martians hadn't screwed with it over the past twenty years. What he didn't have was GPS or roadsigns or, for large chunks of the trip, recognizable landmarks. He didn't even have a compass, because (according to the laptops in the NASA greenhouse) Mars didn't have any magnetic field to speak of, so they wouldn't work.
All he had were the stars. And the North Star wasn't even straight north anymore. Dean scowled at the sky. Tipping his head back wasn't easy in a spacesuit, either. And the rover didn't have a skylight in the roof: he could see to the front and sides, and that was it.
On the plus side, no such thing as a cloudy day on Mars. Dean shrugged and got in the rover, a cramped process involving an airlock. Once he was de-suited and sitting in the driver's seat, he took a moment just to get comfortable and admire the dash in front of him: he might not be in his baby with Sam, cruising down America's highways, but it was pretty awesome to be taking a roadtrip on Mars, Trickster's stupid games or no.
He put the rover in gear, letting himself relax into the role enough to figure out the controls through whatever rules the Trickster had running this psycho circus of his. It was like looking at those stupid visual illusions; he had to not quite concentrate on looking, and then the information popped into focus in the back of his brain. Weird, but it worked. He hit the gas (not real gas, electric-powered whatever crap) and he was off.
South. He had well over five hundred miles to go, and he'd only have a signal from the Hab to navigate by for about the first forty. At twenty-five miles per hour, terrain allowing, and four hours of driving per day before he had to let the solar cells recharge the batteries, that was at least six days, and he could probably count on the terrain to slow him down more. He had life support for 25 days before he was in trouble.
He was going to have a lot of downtime on this trip.
Honestly, it might be kind of nice, instead of blazing across the country in a hurry to stop the latest rash of supernatural deaths or put a hold on the end of the world.
Dean hated downtime. He'd never felt more cooped up in his life than spending practically all his time in a four-by-four glorified truck cab. He couldn't quite stand up straight, and he couldn't stretch out lying down, either. Plus, one side of him, usually his back, was always warmer than the other from his radioactive little heater. He'd taken to doing EVAs while the batteries charged just to have somewhere to move.
At this point Dean would welcome attacking aliens, just to alleviate the tedium. But there continued stubbornly to be no sign at all that anything except for himself had ever lived in this featureless wasteland.
"So much for tentacled rage-monsters," he grumbled. "Real disappointing show, guys." He kicked a rock with his space boot, just to see it fly up and land in a puff of dust. The dust was somehow dustier here, finer and lighter and it went everywhere without ever really sticking to anything. He kicked another rock, then picked one up and threw it as far as he could, which was pretty damn far.
Then he sighed and went for a run, which consisted of jump-waddling in a circle around his solar arrays wide enough to not get dust all over them until he felt stupid enough to quit and go back in the rover to watch the terrible 70s tv shows that had been on one of the personal laptops.
He was making about 75 miles a day. Never mind he could have driven 75 miles in an hour back on Earth. Featureless desert for three days, then a ridge of hills to his east for two, then another two days of desert. A couple craters, once he got within a day or two of Pathfinder; and then retracing the whole trip with his roof stacked double-high and hopefully finding the Hab again where he left it.
The Trickster was trying to kill him with boredom.
What was going on out in the real world while he and Sammy played stupid pet tricks in here? There was an apocalypse on, and all the angels seemed to care a lot about the timetable, for supposedly immortal beings.
He knew the Trickster had the power to mess with time, because of the time-loop he'd wrung Sam through the last time. But was this crap similarly taking no time in the real world, or would they pop out to find that Lucifer had had a party and trashed the neighborhood?
And where was Sam right now? Was he somewhere up in space, playing one of the crewmembers who'd taken off without him? Or back on Earth, peering through a telescope at Mars and wondering what was going on? Or had the Trickster thrown them into different simulations entirely this time, and Sam was off fighting space vampires in the Pegasus Galaxy?
Where was Cas? How had the Trickster been able to take him off the board like that? It shouldn't have been possible; angel should trump pagan god, especially on Christian turf, which America pretty much was.
Dean had no way to know, other than to get to the damn antique probe and figure out how to talk to Earth with it. Even after he laid his hands on the thing, he was going to have to bring it back to the Hab to actually get it running; he would be lucky if all it needed was a new battery. Luckily, being handy with mechanics was something he and Mark had in common.
Pathfinder was right where his map said it should be, for a wonder. Mostly buried in dust. A little digging revealed its lapdog-sized mini-rover a couple feet away.
Sojourner, the mini-rover, fit easily through the airlock into his big papa-rover. Pathfinder itself wasn't going to be quite that easy, but after a lot of cursing and heaving and piling rocks together, he got it up onto the roof of the damn van. Grave-digging was more fun than this; at least then he didn't have to worry every jostle was going to knock loose some critical piece of electronics.
And still no aliens had showed up. There wasn't even a mutating mat of malignant slime-mold underneath the landing balloons where microbes could have hitch-hiked from Earth; Dean had checked. Who even ever made a space adventure this boring? And who would actually pay money to watch it?
Grumbling to himself, he laboriously stacked his solar panels back up on the roof, now sharing space with his very own mobile communication station, and lashed everything down as securely as he could. He was top-heavy and precarious, but there was nothing to be done except drive carefully. The good part about all the featureless wasteland between him and Hab was that there wouldn't be much to tip or trip him.
Small blessings. Dean scowled once more on general principle, climbed into his increasingly stinky bubble of Earth atmosphere on wheels, and started maneuvering back the way he'd come.
Other than going stir-crazy enough to try *dragging* the rover overland when it was night and the cells couldn't charge, the trip back was very much the same as the trip out. He got about a foot and a half's progress for a half an hour's puffing effort, and gave up in disgust.
Sam had better have it better than him, wherever he was.
Dean could have wept when the Hab's dinky short-range signal finally registered on the rover's radio. It was just a fancy overgrown greenhouse, a slightly less stinky bubble of Earth air with enough space for him to stand up straight and walk around in a circle, but no fleatrap motel had ever looked better at the end of a long drive.
Hey, the Hab was guaranteed flea-free, at the very least.
Even though the Hab airlocks were bigger than the rover's, he didn’t think Pathfinder was going to be fitting through them. He'd have to take it apart as carefully as he could, haul each piece individually through the airlock, and then put it together inside, hoping that he wasn't breaking anything more than was broken already, and that he could fix whatever had made it stop working in the first place.
He hoped it was just that the battery was dead. There was no way to know until he could get into it.
But taking it apart outside the Hab meant working on it wearing astronaut gloves, which was going to suck balls. The things were stiff and bulky and awkward no matter how many boatloads of cash NASA had sunk into them.
First things first. Dean pulled up outside the Hab, put his spacesuit on to get from the rover into the Hab, and once he was inside, took his spacesuit off, got entirely naked, and ran in circles, yelling just to hear his voice filling the space.
The next day, he was back outside, wrangling Pathfinder down off the roof of the rover and beginning the laborious process of unscrewing its parts.
He'd only detached the base when he stopped, panting, to stand straight for a minute and found himself squinting at the airlock door and back at Pathfinder. There actually wasn't as much of a size problem as he'd thought. If he got the antenna squinched down and could tilt the thing on its side without breaking it...
It was possible. He hoped tilting it on its side wouldn't break anything. The thing had been built to hit the ground surrounded by airbags and bounce, so it should have been made pretty durably. But if he broke the antenna, he was screwed. The Trickster was perfectly capable of leaving him in this stupid simulation until he starved to death, especially if Dean had the opportunity to get himself out and jacked it up through incompetence.
He poked gingerly at the antenna: it flexed easily. Good. It hadn't made the trip through space from Earth extended like this: and what had gone up could come back down. He compressed it experimentally. It was a genius design: it accordioned more-or-less smoothly into a short cylinder and, once he found the catch, stayed.
So far so good. He eyed the distance from his large hunk of delicate metal and the airlock: not far, because he’d driven the rover as close as he could before unloading it. He could crabwalk the thing around okay; the spacesuit was bulky and annoying, but the gravity was much lighter and that helped. The dust got everywhere but that was a given. He was tempted to heave the lander up on its side and roll it across the ground, but it was too likely to jar something loose that he wouldn’t be able to fix.
Hopefully he hadn’t already jarred it too badly, between getting it onto the rover, across hundreds of miles of Martian landscape, and off the rover again plus detaching the base.
Only one way to find out. He spent the next hour carefully crabwalking Pathfinder to the airlock and tilted it precariously up on one edge to get it in the door. There wasn’t room for him to squeeze past it in his suit to get to the inside door controls, so he had to go around to another airlock and get inside that way. At least he could take the damn suit off.
It went a lot easier from there, getting his squat hunk of metal in through the inner door of the airlock and centered in the largest open space he had that wasn’t covered with potato sprouts. Dean wanted out of this place before those were all he had to live on. He hoped Sam was faring better, wherever he was.
The largest open space was by the bunks. He got Pathfinder situated and opened up the side panels. The battery was dead: that much was obvious. NASA had strongly suspected the battery running too low in the cold and being unable to restart itself was what had killed Pathfinder in the first place. Even if something else had gone wrong instead, the battery would still have died as soon as dust blew over the solar panels, so replacing the power supply was his first task.
He didn’t have an appropriate battery, but it was easy enough to run a power cord over from the Hab’s power supply, controlling for voltage. He let loose the catch on the antenna and it gracefully expanded itself. If he was lucky, now, Pathfinder would be sending a signal to Earth and all he needed to do was wait for whoever was manning the desks back there to detect it and respond. It wouldn’t be instantly: it would take eleven minutes just for the radio waves to travel at the speed of light from Mars to Earth, and then they’d have to travel back.
He’d eaten lunch (not nearly enough) and checked over the potatoes to keep himself occupied, but when an hour went by and then another without Pathfinder doing anything other than sitting there, something had to be wrong. Damn.
He spent the rest of the day running diagnostics and reading up on anything the computers could find him on the specs, which wasn’t much. He pried off panels and looked at the electronics; he disassembled components, cleaned dust out of them, and put them back. At the end of the day he still didn’t have any idea what was wrong: everything looked like it should be functioning normally, it just wasn’t getting any reply from NASA. He ran his hands through his hair in frustration. All of the suit radios hung up on the wall could receive the signal Pathfinder was sending out, so either it was just weaker than it should be for some reason, or NASA didn’t know to listen for it or was having to go dig up computer programming manuals from last century to figure out how to reply.
Uneasily he decided to hope it was just taking them time. It had been a long day. With the ease of a lifetime of going to bed in strange places and stranger situations, Dean laid himself out on Watney’s bunk where he had a good view of the mobile camera. Maybe they would have figured out how to respond by morning.
It still hadn’t moved. Dean was getting real tired of this whole stupid game. He stared at his tools and contemplated diving deeper into the innards of the fancy hunk of electronics and instruments that had taken millions of dollars and dozens if not hundreds of engineers to design, and then he cursed and turned around and got back into a now-familiar spacesuit.
There was something peaceful about the wide-open expanse of the sky and the featureless plain outside. The rover was fully charged and Dean got in and drove, picking a direction at random, wanting just to move. A couple days able to stretch out in the Hab had been great, but now it seemed like a prison: the astronaut’s knowledge whispered away in the back of his brain, maddeningly inaudible but conveying the sense that he was missing something obvious, and it was going to mean he would rot here, starve to death on not enough potatoes with the Trickster laughing at him all the way to the end.
Dean stopped the rover when the battery died. He’d driven his two hours. He still had his other full battery, but he should turn back as soon as he swapped it out unless he wanted to be stuck laying out the solar panels still on the roof and twiddling his thumbs for eight hours while they recharged.
Once the batteries were swapped and he was de-suited again back inside, he turned the rover around. His tracks were clear before him: following his trail out would bring him back to the Hab, even if he could’ve gotten lost this close to it. He brought up the radio signal the Hab was broadcasting anyway: sure enough, it was in the direction it was supposed to be.
He frowned. Then he checked through all the frequencies again. The only thing the rover could hear was the short-range beacon designed for exactly this sort of short-range rover trip. If there was a signal broadcasting which was supposed to make it all the way to Earth, he should be able to hear it from two hours away at the rover’s snail-crawl.
Goddammit. That meant the problem was almost certainly on his end. He’d been able to hear Pathfinder just fine from the suits inside the Hab, and the suits had been able to hear each other…
But they hadn’t heard the rover’s unit from inside the Hab. It was designed to broadcast its own little signal constantly, just in case a rover or an astronaut somehow managed to lose themselves in this sea of dust and rock.
He couldn’t hear the suits from inside the Hab, either, though his own suit and the spare in the rover were showing nice and clear. Maybe it was just the distance. But if it wasn’t?
His brain was clicking pieces together now. The roof of the Hab, and for that matter of the rover, were a lot thicker than they needed to be just to keep an airtight bubble. Thermal insulation and durability, he’d assumed, but that wasn’t enough to explain it now that he was thinking about it. They were thick because they were designed to shield the astronauts from all the radiation that Mars’ atmosphere was too thin to block.
And if they were thick enough to block radiation, they were probably blocking radio signals, too. The Hab’s beacon was mounted on the outside, just like its original communication array had been.
Pathfinder could be working fine. If he was right, the only problem was that nobody on Earth would ever know, because he’d dragged it under a roof that radio waves couldn’t get through.
He’d know soon enough. If he got close to the Hab and he still couldn’t hear the suits, that would be confirmation enough. Then all he’d have to do would be to drag the damn thing back outside, fingers crossed, and run a power cord out to it. What he should have done in the first place, if it turned out he was right.
Dammit. He had the nasty feeling he was being laughed at. At least the sussurating input from the Mark character in his hindbrain had stopped pestering him. That, more than anything, meant he was probably onto the problem.
The Hab’s impenetrability did, in fact, turn out to be the problem. He spent the rest of the day getting Pathfinder back out through the airlock and powered properly from outside the Hab, and then he had nothing to do but wait some more while Earth was below the horizon, since his radio signals weren’t going to travel through the entire width of Mars any better than the Hab’s insulation. He went inside and pushed a potato around on his plate without eating it. If it didn’t work this time…
But in the morning the mobile camera was pointed straight at the sign he’d made, “Yes.” Yes, they were receiving him: yes, they could read his homemade signs with whatever question he wanted to ask: yes, they could answer by pointing the camera at different points around Pathfinder. All he had to do was put signs up so that their pointing meant something.
There was one question that was foremost on his mind. He wanted to hold up a sign that just read, “SAM?” But that would be ignoring the rules of the game. He’d been through enough of these now to know that the Trickster would find some way to make his life worse if he was that blatant: probably aliens would show up and destroy all his non-potato meals. He was used to the idea of having the entire planet to himself; he’d stopped expecting trouble, which meant it was the best time for it to find him.
He needed to be able to communicate to get off this damn planet or at least bring the drama to a close. Yes or no questions wouldn't get them far. He needed them to be able to tell him things he hadn’t asked about.
Dean made fifteen signs and staked them to the ground around Pathfinder. He wrote two letters and a number on them until he ran out of numbers, and then added a period, space, and question mark to the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth signs. After thirteen he was through the whole alphabet, so on the fourteenth sign he wrote, “MIDDLE ROW” and on the fifteenth “NUMBERS ETC.” They could point to any sign to mean the top row of letters, they could point to the fourteenth and another sign to hit the rest of the letters, and the final sign for anything else.
With the twenty-two minutes it took just for a signal to make it from Mars to Earth and a response to get from Earth to Mars, plus the time for the camera to move (which he had to be watching or he’d miss what they were saying) and for him to work out what they were saying and then write his own response where they could see it through the camera, it was hardly a lightning round of witty repartee. But they were only a couple rounds in when Dean got the answer he’d been waiting for, after they’d asked : G-L-A-D- -T-O- -S-E-E- -Y-O-U- -B-R-O-T-H-E-R.
Sam was on the other end! Safe on Earth, geeking out in NASA headquarters, not on the ship that had left him here or anywhere else in tv-land, or dead in some game Dean hadn’t even had an option to play. It was a good thing brother had been at the end of a message because he would have missed anything that came after that. He spent about five minutes just lying flat on his back in the Martian dust, and then another minute after that awkwardly rolling to his feet in the damn spacesuit.
He had to write back, but he had a dozen things all clamoring to be said at once…
Snap!
His spacesuit was gone. The barren reddish plain of Mars still extended around him as far as the eye could see, but there was nothing protecting his air from the thin cold lifeless air of Mars…
But somehow he could still breathe. Someone clapped slow and sarcastic behind him and he turned. Trickster. All of this had only ever been his game…
Sam stood near them, wearing a tie and a pocket protector, looking nonplussed as he stared around the Martian landscape. “Was this breathable air the whole time?”
“Now, that would be telling,” the damn demigod smirked. “Wouldn't want to ruin the illusion of being about to die from a little fresh air, now would we?”
“You and your damn illusions,” Dean growled. “You were perfectly happy making me get in and out of a space suit six times a day for your own sick amusement…”
“Come on, Dean. Do you know how many people would kill for an all-expenses paid vacation on an alien planet?”
Dean had to work to maintain his scowl. Parts of it hadn't sucked completely. “With a bunch of broken shit I had to fix…”
“All part of the package,” the Trickster waved a hand airily. “You got to play mechanic to your heart’s content, while Sam got to geek out with a bunch of other eggheads running a space program…”
“Endless meetings,” Sam groaned. “Sitting at desks the whole time unless we had to go sit in an airplane to go to another meeting…”
“Whine, whine. You two are never happy. You wanted a break, I gave you a break. Now you're complaining it was boring. It's a whole other freaking planet!”
“We never asked you to drop us into whatever crappy space documentary from the future this is!” Dean said. “We wanted your help fighting Lucifer…”
“And I gave you this instead,” the Trickster said. “So what's the lesson?”
“Lesson?” Sam growled, more pissed than ever. “What part of being dragged into somebody else's story to play out their drama is supposed to be fun? Everybody kept calling me Venkat!”
Dean snorted a little. He couldn't help it.
The Trickster pointed to him. “There, see? That's what I'm talking about. Sometimes, you just gotta take your fun where you can find it.”
Sam and Dean both stared at him. “That's it, that's the lesson?” Dean said incredulously. “That's bullshit!”
The Trickster, for one of the first times they'd seen him, looked serious. “You think I've never had anybody trying to write my life for me?” he said. “Trust me, kids, it's not all candy and popcorn at my level. Sometimes you have to go along with what the big boys want…but sometimes playing your own games in somebody else's sandbox keeps you going. So you play as hard as you can whenever you can, whether that's pulling doughnuts in a rover on a barren wasteland or putting gum on the chairs of directors you don't like.” He looked at Sam, but Sam was determinedly scuffing at the ground with the toe of his shoe.
“Sammy? Way to go, little bro!” Dean said reflexively. Then he looked at the pagan demigod more thoughtfully. “Does that mean you’re not a fan of all this archangel bullshit any more than…”
“Sorry, Bucko,” the Trickster gave a wide, insincere smile. “Break time’s over. Next show starts...now!”
Snap!
The End