Dean and Sam's Ass-rainbow, for shay_reynolds (gen, R)

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Title: Dean and Sam's Ass-rainbow
Author: fryadvocate / Ricky Nelson
Recipient: shay_renoylds
Rating: R
Author's Notes: ~1,700 words. Disclaimer: I own neither SPN nor Dean and Sam. Thanks to antheia who is awesome to the max. Written for the request: 3. Wing!fic with mythic connotations 4. In which Dean actually does the research intelligently and Sam is left feeling useless
Summary: It had seemed pretty serious until Sam started shooting rainbows out of his ass.


******


It had seemed pretty serious until Sam started shooting rainbows out of his ass.

At that point, Dean figured that they weren't exactly dealing with a diabolical genius.

"Hey, Rainbow Brite, try to keep your happies to yourself." Dean made a show of brushing off where the light had hit his jacket.

It had taken a few minutes to figure out that the rainbows were, in fact, just light. Not age-inducing light, or laser-beam-of-death rainbows. Just light. Dean made shadow puppets in it until Sam figured out that Dean wasn't examining the light anymore.

"Asshole," Sam said, and his expression as soon as he said it was resigned. Dean figured that Sam had to know what was coming.

Dean smirked. "I think that's my line."

"Whatever," Sam said. He turned around and headed into the bathroom, slamming the door behind him. On the wall, the only picture frame shook from the force.

A feather floated to the ground behind him.

The problem was, of course, that they had no idea yet if the wings were harmless.

"I'm going to go do some research." Dean picked up his wallet and car keys from the bedside table, his fingers dragging along the surface of the wood.

"Find out about internet!" Sam yelled from the bathroom.

Dean shrugged, but he didn't really think it was much of a possibility in a place that thought that the Desperate Housewives edition of Playboy needed to be framed and put on a wall.

On his way past the office, he ducked his head in and said, "Hey. You got wireless?"

The manager was an overweight man with thick dark eyebrows and he frowned whenever he looked at Dean.

"No," he said shortly.

Dean called Sam from the Impala, taking a sip of the half filled Starbucks cup on the dash. It was cold, but it gave him a jolt.

"No 'net," he said. "Hey you think that this is about that girl that you turned down last night?"

Sam hung up on him.

*****

The library in town was two stories, periodicals on the second floor, and Dean spent an hour going through back issues of the local paper before he gave up and searched through the National Enquirer online.

There were a lot of stories about people with wings, but most of them were babies with wings and Sam didn't quite fit into that category. Dean checked out the photos of women with three breasts for a while before he bit the bullet.

The librarian was a petite blonde who wasn’t his usual type – too aware of her appearance, too thick glasses, too lesbian. Still, when he smiled, she caved and really that was the important part.

“Local legends about men with wings? No...” She trailed off into a question mark.

He couldn’t help watch where she was biting her lip, and thought about the fact that she was probably getting lipstick on her teeth.

“No witch hunts or anything nearby?”

Her mouth fell open a little and he could see the lipstick on her two front teeth.

“We’re in California,” she said, like he could have missed the blondes in BMWs.

Grinning at her, he tried to look like someone she could tell about the secret witch burnings. She squinted at him, and he thought that with glasses, she really shouldn’t do that, it made her eyes look kind of beady.

“You said this was for a research project?” she asked.

“On guys with wings,” Dean nodded. He leaned against her desk, hip cocked.

Her desk was stacked with books, and he played with a barcode sticker that was coming unpeeled from the cover of North American Swallows.

“Have you tried the mythology section?” she asked, reaching out to tug the book from under his elbow.

Dean grinned.

*****

He went through Icarus and Daedalus, but Sam wasn’t dripping like a candle, so he flipped through to the pictures.

Dean answered Sam's phone call, turning his back to the front desk to hide his cell phone from the lesbian librarian.

“Yeah,” he whispered.

“Dean, I swear to God, if you’re flirting with the librarian...”

“I’m not flirting with the librarian,” Dean said, defensively. He looked at a picture of a pale girl with wings sprouting out of her back... and rainbows shooting out of her ass.

The caption called her, “Iris, messenger of Hera.”

“Hey, Red Ranger, you want to send any messages with your rainbow power?”

“What are you talking about, Dean?” Sam sounded pissed, but Dean could hear the applause of a daytime talk show in the background.

“It wasn’t the Power Rangers with the whole rainbow power?” Dean flipped to the section about Iris.

“Could you be serious, Dean?” The noise of television in the background disappeared and Dean bit his lip so that he wouldn’t ask if the best friend was pregnant with the husband’s baby yet. “Did you check on local myths? Witch burnings?”

“Hey, cut it with the backseat driving, LeVar Burton,” Dean said.

There was a pause on the other end of the phone and Sam asked, slowly, “What?”

“The Reading Rainbow dude. I know I made you watch that show.” Dean pulled down another book on Greek mythology, and said, “Listen, I'll call you when I have something.”

As he closed the phone, he could hear Sam yelling at him.

*****

The thing was, Iris was pretty harmless when it came to goddesses. She didn’t eat people’s brains or kill their villages. She flew around and delivered messages.

The librarian frowned when she found him in the middle of an aisle, stacks of books surrounding him as he flipped through looking for more information about Iris.

“You’re being a fire hazard,” she said.

“I’m leaving.” He stood up, helping her reach down for the books on the floor.

“The Women’s Reading Circle was asking about these books,” she said.

There were a few common translations that Dean had picked up over the years.

‘Widower’ usually meant ‘wife-killer’.

‘Noisy pipes’ usually meant ‘ghost.’

And ‘women’s reading circle’ always meant ‘coven’.

*****

“...So, they must be trying to get Iris for some reason.”

Sam made a face, “But I’m not a girl.”

Dean looked at Sam, the little pout and pissy look. The clothes that were fifty dollars short of being A&F.

“Easy to see how they could get confused.” He ducked when Sam swung around, wings extended. “Watch those things.”

“So.” Sam bit out, eyes narrow at Dean. “We go confront them?”

It was pretty hard to take a man with rainbows shooting out of his ass seriously.

“Yep.” Dean sat back in his chair.

“Where are they?” Sam still looked like the rainbows were causing constipation.

“I’ll tell you if you let me do shadow puppets with your ass-rainbow.”

“Oh my god, no, Dean.”

Dean thought that he should have brought home some of that old person constipation medicine. Sam looked like he needed it pretty badly.

“Then you’ll have to live with the ass-rainbow,” Dean said.

“Would you stop calling it that?”

Dean raised his eyebrows innocently.

*****

“Star Wars Ass Rainbow Shadow Puppets” got 1000 hits on YouTube within the first hour. The quality was pretty bad because it was recorded only on a camera phone, but the sound was good enough that the multiple death threats were audible.

*****

When Dean threw open the door, handgun raised, the women were sitting around in a semi-circle, a bust of Hera in front of them. The scent of burning herbs hit him like a slap in the face.

“Woah.” He waved his hand in front of his nose.

The women were all staring at him, and he realized that none of them could be less than forty. Their hair was a uniform auburn, and he opened his mouth a few times before he could manage, “How’d you give Sam his ass-rainbow?”

Sam slapped him on the back of the head, still muttering under his breath about the shadow puppets and the sharp objects he knew how to use.

”Sam?” One of them asked, her eyes still wide.

Sam waved, and the wings stuttered upwards, rising towards the ceiling.

The one closest to the door seemed to be in charge, and raised her arms when she saw the wings.

“It is the messenger!”

She bowed down low, face close to the ground and Sam stuttered out, ‘no’s and ‘you really have the wrong guy.’

“Oh, c’mon, Sam. Have a little rainbow pride.” Dean grinned, but kept the safety off on his gun.

“I can kill you,” Sam hissed.

“You have to give us the message from our goddess.” She didn’t look up, but there was something faintly reproachful in her tone, like she was scolding him.

It was the universal mother tone and even Dean felt a little guilty before he snapped out of it.

“Hey!” He frowned at them. “Sam is not some wind up doll, you can’t just-“

“This body is my messenger,” Sam said, his eyes distant. “I will do as I please.”

For a second, Dean couldn’t think of anything to say. “...Hera?” Dean asked.

“Goddess!” the women said, their voices high and excited.

“I have a message for you,” Sam said. He put a hand on his hip, and looked them over critically, like Dean had seen women examine the competition. “Get over him. He’s not worth it. He never is.”

Staring down at all of them, Sam arched one eyebrow. “And don’t ever call me again. Lose my number.”

Sam coughed violently and the wings exploded off his back in a puff of feathers. Dean watched the ass-rainbow disappear unhappily. He was hoping for a ‘Return of the Ass-Rainbow’ video.

*****

Later, over more than a few shots of Jose Cuervo, Sam said, "Hey, that was... that was some good research, Dean."

"Yeah, well, you can make it up to me sometime, Dorothy."

Sam rolled his eyes and took another shot while Dean started humming an off-key rendition of 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow.'

*****

End.