SPN Fic: Shine (Crack!Fic)
All right. Blame my supportive f*list for encouraging me to put this to post.I have no idea where this came from, it just kinda showed up in bright pink tennis shoes and demanded to be told before it would let me get back to polishing the lynching story. So I guess I'm going to tell it.
Crack!fic Crack!fic Crack!fic Crack!fic Crack!fic
Just in case anyone didn't get that already. This has NOTHING to do with anything that I actually see as being John, it just hit me at a time that will probably becomes somewhat apparent by the end of the story and it won't shut up. So let me know what y'all think. And if what you're thinking is that I'm a wee bit cracked? Well, yeah, but OTHER than that, what did you think of it? ;D
Title: Shine
Author:
dodger_winslow
Challenge: Paranormal 25 Chart
Challenge: Psych 30 Chart, Prompt #4 Ego/Id
Genre: Crack!Fic (het)
Rating: R
Warnings: Danger, Danger: Crack!Fic! Ahead.
Disclaimers: I don't own the boys, I'm just stalking them for a while.
Apologies: I'm sorry, John. Please forgive me.
Summary: Yeah, like I'm gonna tell you. It's frakkin CRACK!FIC, dammit!
Shine
The first time he saw the shine, they were fucking each other blind. He was one stroke short of the promised land when her eyes turned. They just turned.
Odd story, how they met. He was hunting, and so was she. The odd part was that they were hunting the same thing. He’d taken a bead on it and his trigger finger was half way squeezed to endgame when she flicked through his line of fire, and he damned near dropped the Winchester, it took that much effort to step off an action so nearly taken as to be already done.
He was calling her every name in the book and half a dozen more when he hit the clearing where she’d finished it. Crouched over its deader-than-dead body, she was gutting the wolf’s carcass even as it transmuted back to human form. She’d wiped at her face more than once, leaving wide swashes of garish blood on pale flesh that nearly glowed with the contrast.
She looked up as he stepped from the tree line, her arms bloody to the elbows, her eyes lit with a feral savagery he found almost as hot as he did dangerous. With no gun anywhere in sight, he had to assume she’d used her gutting knife to kill it, which he found odd at the time, and which he should have probably found odder, because who uses a knife to kill a werewolf anyway? Such close-quarters, blood-to-blood contact seemed an insane risk to take, a possibility he probably should have considered more seriously when she grinned at him, but he didn’t really, mostly because she was grinning at him with that look, the feral one, the one he found hot when he should have found it dangerous.
The one that hit him in places that hadn’t stirred in more than twenty years.
The werewolf behind her had completed it’s transmutation, once again completely human by the time she rose to approach him, the silver blade in her hand snaking back and forth near one hip in a way that was both threat and flirt. She had an easy grace to her movements he didn’t trust, and the way she studied him was the way he looked at things he intended to kill. Soon.
"You come much closer without a proper introduction, and it will be the end of what might otherwise be a beautiful thing," he’d told her calmly.
She laughed at that, a full throaty sound that might have seduced him into allowing a few more steps than he should before he actually killed her, something he really didn’t want to do unless he had to.
"A beautiful thing, huh?" She wiped her blade back to silver on one thigh before slipping it home in a sheath she kept somewhere behind her he couldn’t see. "You seem pretty confident for someone who just lost their prey."
He made a dismissive noise, saying philosophically, "My prey, your prey. When it comes to lycan, dead is dead and that’s all that really matters, isn’t it? Although I must admit, I’ve never seen anyone use a blade before. Seems a little risky, given the givens."
She cocked her head to one side, appraising him, evaluating him. "I’m immune to lycan blood," she said after a beat. "Old family curse."
"Handy," he responded.
"It can be. I’m Sienna." She stepped forward, extending one bloody hand.
He studied her for a long moment before making the choice to accept her offer. The blood between them was still warm when he took her hand. He held it several beats longer than required for a simple greeting, then dropped it as he said, "John," and nodded to the body behind her, sprawled awkwardly on the blood-soaked earth, its throat slit so deeply the head was only just still attached. "So … you’re a player then?"
"Depends on the game," she said, smiling.
It was a good answer. A damn good answer. They spent the rest of the night drinking bourbon and trading war stories. He told her about the boys, about Mary, about all those years chasing the demon until they finally burned his ass to ash somewhere south of Arizona. She told him about a group she used to run with, all of them hunters, all of them dead now. Somewhere along the line, she said, the hunters became the hunted. He nodded, knowing exactly what she meant, because that was pretty much the way it always played in the end.
She specialized in werewolves, although she wasn’t above taking on any kind of predator, as long as it was corporeal. She wasn’t all that on the non-corporeal end of the game. Not enough meat to them, she said. He thought it was a joke, and it was, but he didn’t get the punchline until months later.
She expected him to fuck her that night, but he didn’t, mostly because she expected it, but also because he wasn’t sure that was where he wanted to go. The need to feed the fire of Mary in his heart had lessened somewhat over the years since killing the demon. He’d even found a few women he’d put to bed just to be sure he could still do it (he could). But to a woman, they’d been dalliances of whim and circumstance, passing fancies who held no danger of tying him up in an emotional commitment.
Or a physical one.
But she was different. He could tell that from the way her laugh cut through him to light up a place that hadn’t seen the light of a woman since the night Mary burned. She wasn’t someone he was willing to play with. It was either all or nothing with her, and he wasn’t sure he had what it took to commit to all again.
Later, when he thought about it, he had to suspect this is when she started hunting him. Maybe because she couldn’t have him. Maybe because he hit her in hidden places the same way she did him. But for whatever reason, the dynamic between them became something predicated on chase and evade, with her doing the chasing, and him doing the evading.
It was the old way of doing things - the woman choosing rather than the man - and he kind of liked it, knowing her willingness to pursue him this way spoke of a seasoning to life that would keep her from failing him later, if he decided to let her catch him.
The young could be capricious in their tastes. Unpredictable and arbitrary in what they were looking for, in what they were willing to sacrifice for. But once a woman seasoned into her own, she developed a narrow taste for what would scratch her itch, and when she found it, she didn’t let it buy her a drink and walk away. The world was too empty of them for that. When you hit the one you were looking for, you couldn’t afford to let it go.
That was the way she was, and he was the one she was looking for; so as long as he wasn’t willing to accept her invitation to pursue her, she went ahead and took it upon herself to do the pursuing.
She pursued him across three states and twelve kills over the next month. He’d catch a glimpse of her at odd times: in a bar when he was drinking his bruises quiet, as another guest in the motel where he was staying, sometimes even in the middle of the hunt itself, just showing up in the huddle of the victimized as if she was nothing more than another one of those who stumble into the path of supernatural harm without ever realizing the world has never been the place they take it to be.
When he finally decided to call her on it, he did so by grabbing her arm as she walked past his motel room with a bucket of ice, pulling her inside, throwing her not-so-gently against a wall to demand an accounting for her unwillingness to let him be what he would be: Alone. She was smiling that feral smile when she emptied the bucket of ice down the front of him, soaking him from mid belly to boots.
He did almost fuck her then, just because he wanted to so badly it almost didn’t matter he knew it would be the wrong way to go, the wrong door to open, the wrong woman to indulge unless he was willing to set himself up again to lose something he couldn’t bear to lose. And he wasn’t. As much as he wanted her, he wasn’t. His mouth was on hers and her clothes were coming off by the handful when he remembered what it was like to die inside, to lose all faith in everything he believed in, to care so little about anything but tasting blood, tasting revenge that even his children were small buffer to the darkness gathering beyond the light she had been.
She felt his intentions change. One hand knotting itself in his shirt, she held on to him, held him to her, resisting his change of heart for a moment when he would have stepped back. Then she let him go, and he walked away. She didn’t pursue. She didn’t push it, didn’t deny him the right to be what he wanted to be: Alone.
Slipping back into what clothing he’d removed, she left without saying a word. Left him sitting on the end of a motel bed, his head in his hands, his heart beating so fast against his sternum he thought it might stop.
Just stop.
Please stop.
He didn’t think he’d ever see her again, but she was waiting for him the next morning, leaning against the truck's grill, arms crossed, eyes indifferent, a small duffel of whatever she owned sitting on the asphalt at her feet. When he asked what she wanted, she laughed at him. He understood the response as a surrender of sorts, a willingness to compromise between what she wanted and what she could have.
They started hunting together after that. It was easier than evading her and less distracting than trying to pretend he didn’t know she was there. Though they slept together in the same motel rooms, in was always in different beds, always separated by a distance far more than the few feet between them requiring only a single word to bridge.
A word he wouldn’t say.
In contrast to the pressures of the night against his skin, the passing of days began to remind him of what it was like to live. Working jobs with her felt like returning to the fold of a home never known. They moved in a synchronous tandem that was scary at times, anticipating each other’s strategies like they were cut from the same cloth, pressed from the same mold, carved from the same piece of stone. They alternated between corporeal and non-corporeal, picking up a rhythm in their mutual bloodlust that began to make a primal sort of sense to him. He could feel it when she needed him. She could feel it when he wanted her.
What began as a compromise evolved into a way of life.
For years, his boys had tried to convince him there was life beyond hunting. He never tried to explain to them how little they actually understood of what drove him to kill the things he killed. They were both his children, men he raised from the children they once were and who he loved beyond all rational measure; but in so many ways, they were so much more their mother’s sons than they would ever be his.
That was the way it always worked, when men like him fell for women like Mary. Her humanity was their humanity; her heart was their heart. They inherited everything from her, and very little from him except his capacity for spilling blood, and perhaps his ability to see things in the dark that others didn’t know were there.
He was glad for that; it meant they could find lives once the demon was gone and he could release them from the obligations of waging a war never theirs the way it would always be his. But it also meant where they needed to go, he couldn’t follow. The kind of lives they lived made them happy … even Dean, who had always been so much more his father's son than Sammy could ever be.
But that life held nothing for John. He’d tried it once, for Mary, because it was what she wanted, and she was what he wanted. In defiance of everything he was, he followed her there, living in her world rather than bringing her over to his, and it cost him all he’d ever really cared about. His only real shot at happiness in that kind of life burned to ash in Sammy’s nursery as he watched, helpless to save her because he’d never given her the only true advantage any of them ever had.
That was the last time he was helpless when the fight came to his doorstep; the last time he chose neutrality in a war that offered no sanctuaries from the ageless struggle between light and dark, between good and evil. Unfortunately, it was also the last time he had a future rather than a simple bloodlust he could pass off, in the right company, as a righteous calling; but that was, in truth, more of his way of making those who took Mary away from him pay.
He’d counted on Mary being his for life, so it burned him beyond anger, beyond rage to have her ripped away from him like that, like she was nothing more than a sacrificial pawn in their fucking stratagems for recruiting power to one side or the other. Losing her is what made him a player - a true player - in this game they wouldn’t let him sit out. Losing her is what made him play with the ferocity of a man who had nothing more to lose because, in truth, he had nothing more to lose.
And so he hunted. First alone, and then with his sons, and then alone again, and now with her. And in all that time, it was only with her that he found his stride. Only with her that the hunt came alive in him again, only with her that he returned to who he’d been before he followed Mary into a life he was never meant to lead.
Only with her that the hunt became who he was rather than what he did. The longer they hunted together, the stronger his need to hunt became until hunting with her became a life he wanted to live.
He wanted to live.
He knew then he was fucked. He knew it the day the pack split on them, when the alpha bitch hit him from behind, and her teeth sank into his body, and he tasted fear in the fight of it because he wanted to live.
That was when he knew he’d already lost himself to her. That he didn’t have be with her to need to be with her, to miss her when she was gone, to ache for her if she stepped too far away from him in the dark and he lost the comfort it was to feel her familiar against his senses. That the bond of sex meant little compared to the bond of the hunt, and he’d been a fool to think she’d ever compromised in her pursuit of him at all, merely changing tactics, running with him instead of after him, hunting him from the inside rather than from the out.
They’d been hunting for three days straight when they took the last of the pack down. The price paid in blood and pure exhaustion might have killed others less driven to the hunt, but it was a sense of accomplishment for them, a sense of having done what they set out to do.
The night was quiet and peaceful, free for the first time in decades from the bloody reign of predators who’d hunted these woods for so long the locals had no real ken of when the legends began. His body tingled each place she touched, burning with the fire of her fingertips against his skin as she cleaned and stitched his wounds, laughing at the memory of brutalities that would quail another woman to a corner with horror.
The alpha bitch hitting him between the shoulder blades, driving him to the ground with her teeth tearing at his flesh, had been an epiphany of sorts for him. For her, it was the punchline to a joke she told at his expense, equating him to a chew toy, laughing at the profane way he grunted his opinion of her sense of humor while she closed his wounds, making his pain irrelevant.
He was watching the last glow of embers dying in the firepit, listening to the sound of her voice take him places he’d never wanted to go again, when he finally let her catch him. Her hands left him to dig for more antibiotic ointment in the first aid kit, and he missed them so intensely it made him look up, see her, let her see him.
She smiled. And then he was fucking her.
Fucking her deaf, dumb and blind. Fucking her into his heart and his soul and every fiber of a body he’d tried so hard to keep from her, so hard to keep the way he wanted it to be: Alone.
And that’s the first time he saw the shine. He was one stroke short of the promised land when her eyes turned. They just turned.
Not that he hadn’t turned eyes before in his day. In fact, before Mary, it had been his specialty, fucking a woman into a place where her eyes turned, where they rolled back in her head in search of some sacramental inner sanctum as she moaned incoherent mewls spawned in the darkest recesses of her here-to-fore untapped primal brain.
It’s a myth that such places only exist in men. The primal brain is the Shangri-la of all Humanity, the origin of the concepts of Nirvana, Canaan, Elysium, Eden. A place of pure sensation so feral in its intensity it strips the enlightened soul to its most basic components, baring it to the unbuffered experiencing of every raw emotion, every elemental urge, every carnal craving.
It is the place where the Human soul begins, and the kabbalah to return there is hardwired into every Human physiology
And she was there. She was so there. The aboriginal moans whispering through her as he bent himself to the task of fucking her well fucked were older than time itself. The primal nature of them lit his bones to fire, driving him to such a primitive place himself that when he saw her eyes turn, when he saw the shine and recognized it for what it was, he was too far gone, too far over the edge of the known universe to pull them back, even if he’d wanted to, which he didn’t.
He so didn’t.
Later, while she was smoking, and he was drinking bourbon to take the edge off the lingering taste of her in his mouth, he mentioned the shine to her, just to see what she’d say. She laughed the way she had the first day he met her, then she looked at him the way she had the first time he wanted to fuck her.
He realized then she’d known from the very beginning. All this time, chasing him, hunting him, knowing what he was, knowing he would bend to her will in the end. She smelled it on him, she told him when he asked. Smelled how far he’d strayed from the old ways in trying to live a life never meant for their kind. For hunters.
He’d told Daniel something very similar the day the old man saw his shine. When Elkins caught the turn of his protégé’s eyes after saying something that put John to mind of Mary, he was sure he’d found a wolf in the fold, a spy sent to learn the ways of a hunter so what few of them remained could avoid the fate Elkins and his friends spent their lives meting out by machete.
It took John over an hour, throat to blade, to convince the old man he was exactly what he’d said he was: a hunter out to take down those who destroyed his family. When Elkins finally relented, he did so unwillingly, going against his every instinct in believing John Winchester could have really stepped away from the old ways, trying to live a life never meant for their kind in hunting his blood fresh from predators rather than from prey.
Elkins let him live that day only because he believed John’s pain. Only because he’d seen in John the reflection of everything John lost in losing the mate he chose for life, a woman he knew would never live as long as he would as she was when he chose her, but who he counted on living long enough to turn her after their children were grown and happy with families of their own.
He’d chosen Mary like Sienna chose him. A mate for life. Someone without whom, there was no life.
He had a bowie knife under one thigh when he asked her about the shine. If she’d lied to him, he would have taken her head off, even knowing what it would cost him, even knowing it was more than he could pay. He’d have gutted them both right there in the moonlight, left their corpses for the animals and been glad for the chance to do it, if what she intended for them was to be what he’d spent his life with Mary and Mary’s children hunting.
But he could see the shine in her when she laughed. See it when she told him she’d known who he was since that first day, and that she’d loved him since he didn’t fuck her that first night, touching her in places that hadn’t seen light since a pack of werewolves slaughtered the man she’d chosen for life. A hunter, like him, only human.
Still human in a way neither of them would ever be again.
There are no hard and fast rules about these things. Being a hunter is always a matter of discretion. Who lives and who dies is a judgement call you make simply by who you pursue and who you let go. As much as beauty, as much as love, what constitutes good and what constitutes evil is purely in the eye of the beholder.
And in John’s eyes, she was life. He could see his future in her shine.