The Passenger (Big Bang, NC-17, Dean/Victor)
Title: The Passenger (2/6)
Author: hansbekhart
Artist: evalens
Rating: NC-17 (Dean/Victor, Dean/Castiel)
Summary: Victor Henriksen survives Lilith’s attack only to be a plunged into a world beyond his experience and understanding, full of demons, angels and trickster gods. War is coming. He turns to the Winchesters for help, but Dean’s year is running out and Sam is desperate to find a way to save his brother. An outsider in their war, Victor finds himself caught up between good, evil and sheer chaos. He and the Winchester’s newfound allies must scramble to save a world that has already been destroyed by Armageddon. Slash. (Character death, horrific imagery, violence)
Victor flails out, forgetting all about his bad leg. The pain hits instantly and he almost topples sideways out of the chair. The man catches him and just as quickly backs off when Victor’s fists come up. He’s grinning, a little bit - eyes crinkled like it’s all so fucking funny. “Whoa, kiddo,” he says, “Slow that roll, I’m only here to help.”
“What the fuck,” Victor gasps. “What the fuck are you doing in my house? How did you do that?”
“Oh,” the man says, standing. His hands are still up, palms out, his whole body held open and harmless. “Those aren’t the questions you wanna be asking.”
“No?” Victor says. There’s a gun in the drawer right under his hand. He’s drunk or half-asleep, his whole body jangled with terror and pain, but he thinks he can get to it. “What should I be asking?”
“What’s coming for you,” the man says, and the smile drops off his face at the same moment Victor goes ice cold.
“What?” he asks.
“It ain’t her,” the man says. “But it’s bad enough that you need to be somewhere else for a little bit. Anywhere else. So get a move on, Hopalong.”
Victor gets to his feet. He’s shaking so hard that he stumbles on his first step forward. The man catches him by the elbows and at his touch, the world is clear again. The haze of booze is gone and he gapes up at the man, disbelieving. “What’s happening to me?”
It’s not what he wants to ask. The man tightens his grip on Victor - it’s almost affectionate, pitying - and then releases him. Victor reels back and is shocked to find himself steadily on his feet. “Let’s go,” the man says.
He follows, his bad leg dragging behind him. The ground is wet with rain and he’s shivering as soon as they’re out the door. All he’s wearing are socks, the same thin sweatshirt he came home wearing. He brings nothing with him. It doesn’t even occur to him. There’s a white El Camino parked across the street and the man leads him to it.
“Drive,” the man says. “Far and fast as you can. Get out of the storm.”
“Where?” Victor asks.
“Anywhere but west,” the man says. He rolls his eyes, grinning companionably at Victor. It shows all of his teeth. “Hate to say it, but you’re probably safest with the Winchesters. Give ‘em a call. Don’t tell ‘em I sent you, though. We’re not the best of friends.”
He presses the keys into Victor’s hand, opens up the driver’s side door with a flourish. “Your chariot,” he says. “Now get the fuck out of here.”
“No,” Victor says. He puts a hand on the door. His teeth are chattering. “Who the hell are you? Why are you doing this?”
The man looks at him for a long time without saying anything. “It’s not really my policy to get involved,” he says. “It’s been their world for a hell of a long time and I gotta make my fun where I can find it. You dig? But hell if I need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, Vic.”
“You don’t make any fucking sense,” Victor says, and the man laughs.
“When it starts to make sense, that’s when you get the hell out. Speaking of -”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Victor says. “Not until you tell me what you are.”
The man’s grin sharpens. “Oh, I like you. You’re going to be fun, I can tell. You can call me Coyote,” he tells Victor. “I’ll see you on the flip side.”
**
Victor opens his eyes. There’s a long, slow moment where all he does is blink, trying to figure out what he’s looking at. It’s not his ceiling. It’s not the hospital. He’s inside of a car. He can hear traffic rushing by, close enough that he must be parked in the breakdown lane. The whoosh of air ruffles the cab’s roof, great big pouches of beige fabric pulled loose here and there like tumors.
There was a man, he thinks, and pushes himself up. It takes him even longer to figure the rest of it out. He twitches the leg of his pants up. The skin underneath is whole. The burns and wheals are gone. He moves his ankle around in its socket. It’s the first time he’s been able to do that in a month. They told him it would be years before he’d recover that kind of movement. He puts his head down against his knees and breathes slowly. He counts to sixty before he can open his eyes again.
“There was a man,” he says slowly. “He was at the hospital, too. He was in my room in the middle of the night.”
It doesn’t sound any less crazy out loud. He opens the car door and only then notices that he’s fully dressed. Nice winter jacket. Working boots, steel toes. When he steps out of the car, there’s snow to crunch under his feet. He stares down at the snow and then around himself, his lips pursed. He shakes his head and crunches over to the driver’s seat. He’s woken up in a white ’68 El Camino. The registration isn’t in the glove compartment, but there is a wallet made out of bright green stingray leather, stuffed full of hundred dollar bills. Victor leans back in his seat and rolls his eyes back up to the roof. It’s got even fewer answers for him this time, so he puts the car into gear and drives.
He pulls off at the first gas station that he sees. The El Camino isn’t dressed for snow, and it slides a little. The highway signs are useless but the gas station maps suggest Michigan.
“What the fuck,” he says, and the girl behind the counter gives him a dirty look and goes back to watching the television.
He walks up and down the aisles for lack of anything better to do. There’s more money in the pockets of his coat, wrinkled tens and fives and twenties. He can’t even imagine whose coat it is. He was in his house - he was asleep - he had a nightmare. There was a man, but that’s impossible.
“What day is it?” he asks the cashier. It spooks her and she glances under the counter where she’s probably got a gun stashed.
“Friday?” she hazards, inching towards the gun.
It was Monday, Victor thinks. His beard hasn’t been trimmed since he’s been out of the hospital, but it’s a day’s worth of growth not four, it’s fucking impossible. He stares down at cans of Dinty Moore and knows all the way down to his bones that he has lost his mind.
It’s almost a relief, actually.
That’s when he hears his name on the television.
“ - no leads on the disappearance of Special Agent Victor Henriksen of the FBI,” is what the anchor is saying. “Agent Henriksen found himself in the center of a national spotlight in February when he led the capture of the notorious Dean and Sam Winchester, who were on the FBI’s Most Wanted List for a brutal string of murders and other crimes. The home of Agent Henriksen was burned four nights ago, and police fear that he has been kidnapped in reprisal of the Winchester’s deaths.”
There’s more, but Victor doesn’t hear it. He staggers out the door, clipping his hip on a shelf of candy bars, breaking into a run once he’s outside. He hits the El Camino with both hands and holds on. The world won’t stop spinning underneath him, but when he drops to his knees in the snow, there’s nothing in his stomach to throw up.
When he can stand again, he digs his hands through the rest of his pockets. There are just enough quarters there for a phone call to a Kansas number.
The pay phone’s around the side of the gas station. Looks dusty and disused. Victor drops the coins twice as he tries to slide them into the machine, his hands shaking. He remembers the number. It rings once. Picks up in the middle of the second ring.
“Yeah?”
“Dean,” Victor says, more of a sob than a name.
There’s a long stretch of heavy silence. Victor can imagine - he used to spend hours imagining what Dean Winchester was doing, where he was doing it, and this is the image that he finds now: an abandoned house, too cold to be lived in during April and too busted open to be lived in at all. Peeling green paint in the wall, wrought iron balcony leading up to nowhere, the stairs fallen through. Dean sitting at a kitchen table, wrapped in the heaviest coat he owns.
“Victor?” Dean asks, and the sound of his own name sparks something hot in Victor’s stomach.
“Yeah,” Victor says, steadier. “Yeah, it’s me.”
“Fuck,” Dean breathes. “What the hell - how did you get out? We thought you were dead, Victor, Jesus.”
“I don’t know,” Victor says. “I think someone saved my life.”
“Your house blew up,” Dean says. He sounds as shaky as Victor does. “Your entire neighborhood burned down. Three people are in the hospital, they didn’t find your body in the house, what the fuck happened to you.”
“I don’t know,” Victor says again. “I don’t know where I’ve been.”
“Where are you now?” Victor can hear the squeak of a chair against a tile floor as Dean stands. “Stay right where you are, I’ll come get you.”
“No,” Victor says, his eyes sweeping the parking list. “I need to keep moving. He said they were coming for me.”
“What? Who said that?”
Dean’s voice is abruptly tinny and far away. Victor’s eyes sweep the parking lot, the highway. His free hand goes to the charm around his neck and grips it tightly, but it’s hard to believe in it when he’s so fucking exposed. Even the stand-off at the station wasn’t this bad. He had no fucking clue how bad it could really get.
“Victor?” Dean asks. “You there?”
Victor snaps back to himself. The parking lot is empty. The girl working the gas station’s quit paying attention to him, her back to the glass front of the store.
“I’ll meet you halfway,” Victor says. “Tell me how to get to you. Tell me where you are.”
Dean isn’t far. Whatever hand of fate brought him to Michigan was a benign one, as far as Victor can figure. The man in his house is hazy, like a dream he didn’t really have. The radio tells him more about what happened to his house and neighbors, as he drives. No one is listening to the witnesses, who are telling anyone that will listen that animals came for them in the middle of the night, animals with black eyes and bloody hands. A few more days and the media will give Victor up for dead, buried in some backwater field or bled dry for Satanic rituals.
An old man burned alive in his bed, two houses down from Victor. He hadn’t known the old man anymore than he knew the rest of his neighbors, didn’t say hi on his way to work, didn’t sit out on sunny days. But he recognizes the man’s name and puts the pieces together as the highway markers count down - he had three grandchildren that would come to visit him every few months, sullen children who would shuffle around in their grandfather’s back garden and throw lemons over the fence.
Three people hospitalized. The teenager from three doors down, her mother. Listed in fair condition. A man who had only been driving by when the first house went up. Victor’s front door had gone through his windshield. He hadn’t regained consciousness yet.
The media had plenty of time to build a mini-frenzy in the days that Victor has lost. Serial killer culture, disintegration of the fabric of society, what are video games doing to our youth sort of thing. Victor’s familiar enough with it, same as he can figure what the media, the public, the Bureau imagines what has happened to him. It isn’t a pretty thought, but it’ll sell well enough for a few weeks. He wonders if John Walsh has run a follow-up story, asking for his safe return. He’ll have to ask Dean.
He thinks of his parents, and just as quickly pushes it away. He can’t afford to worry about them, what Josiah must think. Not until he knows what’s going on. If he’s really just losing his mind. It used to impress Victor, really. The absolute certainty of the insane. That fervent belief that their version of the world was right. He was tortured by a demon and his home has been burned to the ground, and he’s running towards a man whose family he spent the last five years hunting, and he’d give anything to have made it all up.
The news has moved on to reports of flash floods all over the country, and Victor switches the radio off, drives the last hundred miles in silence.
Dean is waiting for him, parked underneath an old trestle bridge on a road that’s more dirt than gravel. The spot is tucked away in the woods not too far off the highway. It’s isolated enough that the only sound is the crunch of his own tires, everything else swallowed up by the snowfall. There’s someone sitting in the passenger seat with Dean, probably Sam, although there’s enough snow on Dean’s windshield that it’s hard to tell. It doesn’t look like they’re talking. He can see Dean’s hands braced on the wheel.
He draws the car up close to the Chevy, close enough that their bumpers are nearly touching. Dean’s tracks are the only ones visible, and Victor’s guessing this spot doesn’t see a lot of traffic. He glances down when he pulls the keys out of the ignition, and when he looks back up Dean is alone in his car.
Victor gets out slowly, checking the surrounding hills carefully. He looks back when Dean’s door creaks shut. They’re standing kitty corner, on opposite sides of their cars and for a second they just look at each other. Dean smiles, briefly. He moves towards Victor, slipping in between their cars, and pulls Victor into a fierce hug.
Victor flinches - he can’t help it - but Dean hangs on like grim death and after a second, Victor’s arms come up and return it. He can feel Dean shivering, his breath hot on Victor’s neck. He thinks it’s the first time anyone’s touched him other than - he can’t remember, the man’s face caught in his mind and then gone completely.
Dean breaks the embrace but doesn’t pull away. One hand slides down Victor’s arm and curls around his elbow. The other is stuffed into his own jacket pocket. He doesn’t say anything. Victor thinks, distantly, that it’s a mark of how upside down the world has become that all he feels is safe and warm, standing next to a man that has haunted his nightmares for years. The silence tightens, and Victor clears his throat. Dean lets him go, glancing down at his feet. “Where’s Sam?” Victor asks, to say something.
Dean shrugs one shoulder, his mouth twisting. “Left him at a friend’s house in South Dakota. He’s … looking into something for me.”
Victor opens his mouth to ask who was in the car and where the hell did they go, but Dean cuts him off. “How did you get out? What the hell happened to you, where have you been for four fucking days? Why the hell didn’t you call me sooner?”
Victor shakes his head. “It hasn’t been - I don’t know. I fell asleep in my house and something - someone saved me. I woke up in that car and it was four days later. I don’t know what’s happening to me.”
He expects Dean to be surprised, to tell Victor that he’s going insane, but Dean frowns. “You lost four days? What the hell can do that?”
“There was a man,” Victor says slowly. It’s hard to focus on it, on the idea. There was a man. He closes his eyes. “He woke me up and told me to run. Anywhere but west. He said his name was Coyote.”
“Son of a bitch,” Dean breathes. “That smug son of a bitch, I can’t even fucking believe it.”
“What?” Victor demands. “This a friend of yours?”
Dean makes a noise in his throat, disgusted. “Something we’ve hunted. He popped up on our radar recently - God only know what he wants this time but it’s not going to be good, fuck - ”
“Tell me what he is,” Victor says tightly, and Dean’s mouth snaps shut.
“We call him the Trickster,” Dean says, “and he’s a god.”
Victor waits for Dean to laugh but Dean just looks at him, his mouth drawn thin. “That’s not funny,” Victor says.
“It’s not a joke,” Dean says.
Victor pulls away from him, sags back against the car. He can feel chill metal through the seat of his pants, the backs of his knees. He holds onto that, waiting for the ground to stop spinning underneath him. “What does he want from me?” Victor asks. “What do the - the demons, what the fuck do they want from me?”
“I don’t know,” Dean says. “I wish to god I did, Victor. We had no idea she’d come for you at the station - I wouldn’t have left you if I’d thought for a second you’d be a target, you gotta know that.”
“She didn’t even ask us where you were,” Victor says, and Dean goes still.
“What?” he says, low.
“She didn’t ask us where you were,” Victor says, measuring each word carefully. “Not even once. Forty-five minutes and she didn’t ask anything. Lilith said she just wanted to have some fun. Demons, I thought - I can handle demons, I walk among evil every day, I sleep in it and breathe it in. I could do that. I could do what you do and make a difference. I had no idea what evil was, Dean. Everything is different now.”
Dean sucks in a breath. He opens his mouth to say something and Victor rides right over him. He couldn’t stop talking if he wanted to. It feels like poison leaking out of his skin. “She filleted Nancy’s skin right off her body. You remember her? Lilith made us all watch. That poor girl never. Stopped. Screaming. The deputy? She broke his bones - every single bone in his feet, then his hands, then his legs. There were three other people with us. Just bystanders, the ones who were possessed. We’d put them in one of the offices to sleep it off and she woke them up and drained all the blood out of their bodies. You wanna know what she did with it? She painted the walls - with her fingers. Like she really was a little girl. She drew us a big old sun and a house and kittens and puppy dogs and - ”
That’s when Dean kisses him. Lunges forward and shuts Victor up. His mouth is wet and soft and Victor is so shocked that he grabs Dean by the shoulders and slams him against the car. “What the fuck was that?” Victor hisses, but he doesn’t wait for an answer.
It’s awkward and violent. Dean kisses with teeth, his hands fisted in Victor’s jacket. He pushes against Victor like it’s a contest, hips grinding hard together. It’s the most alive Victor’s felt since the last time he caught Dean Winchester. He drags his hands down Dean’s back and up under his jacket without thinking of icy fingers. Dean breaks away with a gasp, shuddering all over. “Holy shit,” he says, “holy shit.”
“Get in the car,” Victor says, and Dean looks up at him through his eyelashes, mouth open and red. He licks his lips and Victor kisses him, slow. Closes his teeth on Dean’s lower lip and Dean yields to him, tips his head back and lets Victor take what he wants.
“Okay,” he says.
Dean’s on him as soon as they’re inside, one leg between Victor’s, the other pressed into the foot well, keeping him balanced. It’s so fucking hard to wait for the car to warm up, for their hands and skin to warm up, to reach for Dean and have him reach back and when he pulls Dean’s pants open his hands are still a little too cold for it. Dean doesn’t push him away. Then it’s more messy fumbling, Dean’s hand around Victor’s cock and Victor’s on Dean’s and then pushing together, closer, faster. Victor’s got all his clothes on and Dean’s got one arm pulled out of his jacket sleeve, and it’s good. So fucking good.
Afterwards, they put themselves back together without speaking. They stay in the car, knees brushing. It’s been three years since Victor quit smoking but he would kill for a cigarette now. A thought occurs to him and he leans across Dean, pops the glove compartment open. A pack of Camels are waiting for him. There’s even a lighter. “You want one?” Victor asks, and Dean shakes his head. “You mind?”
“Just crack a window,” Dean says.
The windows are steamed up. It’s snowing again, a quiet white noise as it falls against the roof of the car. Dean’s leg jiggles where it’s propped up against the dash. Victor’s first drag is amazing until he starts coughing. Dean grins. “Been a while?”
Victor rolls his eyes. They fall into a companionable silence. The thin stream of cold air leaking in through the window feels good. The warm ache of his body feels even better. There’s a comfortable lack of the need to talk about what just happened.
“You see my car?” Dean says, after a long time. Victor glances at the car and then at Dean, frowning. “She belonged to my dad. Had it since before Sammy and I were born. I rebuilt her a few years ago. The only thing that wasn’t completely fucked up was the alternator. Just about everything else is brand fucking new.”
“What happened to her?” Victor asks.
Dean laughs shakily. “T-boned by a semi,” he says. “We never even saw it coming. I was in the back, sitting on the wrong side. I was going to die, and my dad sacrificed himself for me.”
Victor sits up a little straighter. They’d thought John was dead, but there was never any proof of it, never any reason to think he was anywhere but just off the grid except for what Dean told him the first time they’d ever spoken, my dad was a hero.
“He made a deal,” Dean continues. “He was stupid to do it. And for a long time I hated him for it, for putting me in that position. But a few months ago, I was still alive to do the same thing for someone else. I’m not exactly a - a believer, that’s more Sam’s thing, but maybe there are reasons. Maybe it’s not all random fucked up evil. Maybe there’s a reason you’re still here.”
Victor closes his eyes, leans his head back against the seat. He breathes in the smells of cigarette smoke and sex, Dean’s leather jacket. “Thanks,” he says. Dean scoots closer, bumps his shoulder against Victor’s.
“I’ll keep you safe,” he says. “I promise.”
**
They leave the El Camino underneath the trestle, slowly being buried in the snow. Dean’s listening to the blues, which surprises Victor; witness statements have compiled a soundtrack of classic rock. The recording is old enough that it sounds like it was made underwater, the song and singer some kind of bridge between slave music and blues. He falls asleep and when he wakes up, AC/DC has replaced it and it’s the middle of the night.
“Dean,” Victor slurs, and a hand passes over his cheek and trails down his neck. He’s cold where his body has been pressed up against metal and Dean’s skin is an instant counterpoint of heat. He groans softly without even realizing it and the hand stills, one thumb pressed lightly against the line of his jaw.
“Go back to sleep,” Dean says gently.
“I can drive,” Victor says, trying to sit up. The hand presses him gently back against the seat. Victor cracks his eyes open, rubs them with the back of his good hand. Dean’s eyes are on the road, highway lights passing over his face. He looks tired. He needs a shave.
“S’okay,” Dean says. “I’m used to it, go back to sleep. We’ll get there by morning. Let’s hit up a hit a Waffle House for breakfast, okay? I fuckin’ love Waffle House.”
Victor groans again, already mostly asleep, and Dean laughs. “All right, all right. I’ll shut up.” Victor reaches for him - wraps his fingers around Dean’s wrist and squeezes, the best response he can give - and is asleep again almost before he’s let go.
They hit South Dakota a little past dawn. Victor is still asleep, and he wakes up on the way out of town. There’s a bag of donuts sitting on the seat next to him, and two large coffees held between Dean’s thighs. When Victor sits up, Dean passes him one, and they sit together in silence. When they reach Sioux Falls, Victor knows where they’re heading.
Singer Salvage Yard looks just the same as the last time Victor was there. The only detail missing is the big dog sleeping on the porch, guarding the front door from all comers. Dean walks in as if he lives there. The house smells like old books and good food. “Bobby!” Dean bellows, “we’re here!”
“Yeah, yeah,” comes a voice from the kitchen, “Quit yer hollerin’, I heard you come in.”
Dean throws a grin over his shoulder at Victor. Victor grimaces and follows Dean into the kitchen.
“Special Agent Henriksen,” Bobby Singer says, resplendent in a dirty yellow apron, hands on his hips. The apron is printed with the Venus de Milo’s body and when he moves, it stretches her tits across his saggy ones. “Been a while since you’ve darkened my door.”
“Not long enough,” Victor says. They regard each other, Dean in between like a shield.
“Dean tells me you’ve quit chasin’ the good guys,” Singer says. “That a fact?”
“Yes sir,” Victor says. “Pretty sure my chasing days are over.”
Singer folds his arms across his chest. “Doubt that,” he says. “Well, you might as well come on in. If Dean’ll vouch for you, that’s good enough for me. Have a beer.” He indicates the open bottles on his counter, one for each of them. Dean rolls his eyes at Bobby. It’s as if a small argument passes between them in a look, and when it’s over Dean picks up a bottle in each hand and gives one to Victor.
“Drink up,” he says. “Make the old man happy.”
“Fine,” Victor says uncertainly. He takes a long pull from the beer, his eyes never leaving Dean’s. A slow smile spreads over Dean’s face, and Victor’s breath catches. Dean looks back to Singer.
“Satisfied?”
“I will be after you take your turn,” Singer says.
They take their beers - spiked with holy water, it turns out, but Victor’s gotten to the point where it’s kind of funny - to finish in what passes for a living room, out from under Singer’s suspicious eye. Dean makes Victor tell him all about the three times he’s previously met Bobby Singer, each time more unpleasant than the last. The last time, the dog chased them off, and Reidy didn’t stop laughing for a hundred miles.
“I’m guessing he’s not too fond of the authorities,” Victor says.
“No,” Dean says, grinning, “You could definitely say he’s not too fond. He’s never said anything about a Fed having his location, though.”
“Well,” Victor says, finishing his beer. He sets it down at his feet and leans back in the couch. He can’t lean too far before a stack of books will topple over on him. Dean is precariously balanced on the other end of the couch, looking completely at ease. “That was before I was really on your tail.”
“That so,” Dean says. “Whose tail were you on?”
“Your dad’s,” Victor says shortly, but Dean just looks amused.
“Bet he led you on some good chases,” Dean says.
Victor shakes his head. “Don’t think he cared either way. There wasn’t a whole lot of pressure on him from us. He wasn’t a priority case - grave desecrations and credit card fraud, mostly. I was working the credit card angle. It was always the best way to track him. It wasn’t until he fell off the grid and you popped on it that the case became urgent.”
“Should I be flattered?” Dean asks. He seems honestly curious. Bobby curses at something in the kitchen and Victor flinches. Dean’s eyes narrow almost imperceptibly, but he doesn’t say anything.
“It was after St. Louis,” Victor tells him. “Your dad wasn’t a serial killer.”
“Lucky for him,” Dean says. “You were a big pain in our ass.”
“Glad to hear it.”
**
Sam puts in an appearance just before dinner is ready. He roars into the salvage yard in one of the most wrecked Fairlanes Victor has ever seen. He offers Victor a handshake but seems otherwise unaffected to see him returned from the dead. There’s a physical tension between Dean and Sam, who circle each other warily around Bobby’s house. They never stay on the same side of the room as the other, and Victor is reminded of how he felt at first, seeing them together. They had made him think of wolves. It had been Dean, back then- the way he looked up from under his eyelashes, ready and dangerous. Now Sam’s presence fills the room: Dean’s eyes always dark on his brother’s turned back, Victor and Singer orbiting around them, Sam the oblivious epicenter. Except he isn’t oblivious, really - he makes small talk with Singer but Victor can see the tension in his shoulders, the tightness around his eyes. There’s something different about Sam- he stands straighter, holds his shoulders back, and something about the line of his spine makes Victor wonder if maybe Sam has been the most dangerous Winchester all along.
Dinner is served as the sun is sliding down the copse of trees behind Singer’s house. There’s been a ham bone simmering on the stove all day and as the day dragged on, it’s evolved into red beans and rice. Dean pitched in and made cornbread from scratch, and it’s at least as good as the kind Victor buys in a box.
Sam and Singer dominate the conversation. Dean eats like he hasn’t seen food for a month, his head down. Victor tries to listen, but whenever he glances down at his bowl, he can’t look away. He has no idea when he last had a home cooked meal. Even before he ran - before the hospital - it had been months of diner food and burgers, always on the road. He’d forgotten how different it really was. He watches butter melt over his cornbread, glistening in the dim light of Bobby’s kitchen, and feels sick to his stomach.
“Victor?” Dean asks, his voice pitched low enough that Sam and Singer don’t even pause. Victor swallows.
“Fine,” he says. “I’m fine.” He looks away when Dean doesn’t, turns his face towards Sam and pointedly sticks a huge forkful of rice and beans into his mouth. He manages not to choke on it, but only barely.
They’re talking about frogs. “Plagues of ‘em,” Singer says, “and in four different states. Can’t even track a weather pattern to ‘em and they’re gone in about thirty-six hours.”
“Gone?” Sam asks, and Singer nods.
“Like they were never there,” he says. Victor shivers, and turns his face away.
After dinner, they go outside with a few beers and sit on Singer’s creaking, splintered swing. Sam props his butt up on the railing, which is sheltered from the snow by the eaves. Singer claims the king’s spot, which is an upturned packing crate. Dean presses back and forth with his heels, rocking the swing. If Dean were a cute girl in a poodle skirt this would be some sort of surreal meet-the-parents date, but what Singer has in his hands isn’t a cigar.
He takes his time rolling the joint. It’s professional, as even as if it was made by a cigarette machine. “Unless The Man wants to object,” Singer says pointedly, looking hard at Victor.
Dean smirks, and Victor rolls his eyes. “Feel free,” he says. His breath plumes out of his mouth.
Singer lights it and takes a long, luxurious toke. He passes it to the right, to Sam, who looks more comfortable with the joint between his fingers than Victor would’ve imagined. Victor hasn’t gotten stoned since college and it’s strange to see it being done so openly, without furtive glances and quick passing. Dean tips his head back and lets the smoke drift upwards into a thick halo around his head. The porch light behind them makes Dean look otherworldly.
Dean catches Victor staring and flips him a grin. He holds the joint up between his knuckles, like a cigarette. “Victor?” he asks. Somehow it’s the worst thing that Dean could have said. It’s not a challenge, just an invitation, the intimacy of his own name. It’s still a punch in the gut, to hear Dean say it. He wants to take Dean upstairs and fuck him stupid, to bend him over that dining room table, hold him open and lick him loose. He wants to go home. He takes the joint from Dean and he can see Singer relax slightly, out of the corner of his eye, like it’s another fucking test.
“This spiked with holy water too?” he asks, and Dean’s eyes widen. For a second, Victor knows he’s said the wrong thing, but Dean only shakes his head.
Their fingers brush when he takes the joint. It’s just pot. It tastes green and thick and Victor coughs on the exhale. It’s bad enough that Dean reaches over and rubs between his shoulder blades, finishes up with a good whack. “Fuck you,” Victor croaks, and Sam laughs.
They finish the joint. It comes around to Victor three, four times. He drinks his beer. It’s so much easier to listen now, to sit and watch Singer and Dean laugh together about … something, he can’t really follow the conversation all that well but it must be pretty fucking funny, they’re all laughing about it.
“And then,” Dean says, shaking. He’s grinning so hard that his face looks split in two. “And then I trip over my own fucking feet and go right into the grave, and she lands on top of me and goes, ‘I shoulda turned left at Albuquerque.’ Man, I just left that one alone, didn’t salt and burn shit. More fuckin’ power to her.”
He thinks he’s more drunk than anything else, loose-limbed, heavy in his body the way he remembers from college. He looks over his shoulder, waiting for Reidy to come out of the house and join the party already, and it actually hurts to remember where he is, everything that’s happened. Reidy had a hero’s funeral and this, Victor thinks, this is life now. He lets his eyes go from Dean to Sam to Singer, over the peeling paint on the porch rail, lets himself smell old grease and whiskey in the kitchen. This is his life now. The circle of light on the porch is small and cold, the darkness behind Sam a solid force.
This is life now, Victor thinks again, and no matter how fast he runs there will always be something moving out there in the dark.
“Victor?”
It’s Dean’s voice in his ear, low and soft. He pulls back and looks at Victor carefully. His eyes are red at the corners but he’s looked tired all day. Victor looks back at him, considering, and that seems to make up Dean’s mind. “I think I’m going to put our little G-man to bed,” he says to Sam and Singer. Victor’s aware enough to see Singer’s long, considering look. He misses Sam’s eyes slide away, into the darkness, his attention already somewhere else.
Dean stays close to Victor’s elbow, like he’s stumbling drunk. He’s not even all that stoned, really. He just has to remind himself of every step, of every stack of books on the floor. The state of Singer’s house embarrasses him. When he puts his hands on the banister they come away sticky with something that isn’t quite dust. Dean’s hands are in his pockets. It makes him lean towards Victor, balancing on the balls of his feet.
“We usually just sleep downstairs,” Dean says. It’s an apology, but when he opens the door, all that Victor can think is, at least it’s clean. The room smells musty but it smells like that all over the house. There’s a thin layer of dust on the headboard. Victor sits down on the bed and only then realizes that Dean is still lingering in the doorway, watching him with dark eyes. Victor feels numb all over.
“You coming in or what?” he asks.
Dean comes in.
He comes forward until he’s standing almost between Victor’s knees, not quite touching, his hands still in his pockets. “This isn’t,” he says, and stops.
“Isn’t what?” Victor asks. He reaches for Dean, one hand on each of Dean’s hips, and Dean sways towards him, stumbles that last half-step.
“A good idea?” Dean tries, bending to kiss him. He tastes like beer and smoke and underneath just ordinary saliva, and Dean moans very softly into Victor’s mouth. He’s right - it’s not a good idea. It’s so far from a good idea that Victor used to bury this terrible idea where no one could get to it and see just how far gone he was, how deep he’d let Dean Winchester into his head. They’d have taken him off the case and he’d needed to see it done, so he never breathed a word. There was nobody who would’ve understood what Victor imagined doing to Dean Winchester.
Victor pushes up the bottom of Dean’s shirt, sets his thumbs against the hard curve of Dean’s hipbones, digs in just enough that Dean hisses through his teeth. His nose brushes against Victor’s. It’s so hard to breathe, to focus. He’s not even sure if he’s stoned anymore, if he’s even still drunk. Everywhere that Dean touches him hurts.
“You didn’t tell Sam about Coyote,” Victor says abruptly. Dean pulls back far enough to give Victor a confused look, like, you want to talk about my brother right now?
“No,” Dean says. He bites on Victor’s lower lip, gently. Testing him, Victor thinks. “Sam’s … we had a run-in with the Trickster a few weeks ago and he’s just sort of. He was different, afterwards. It put him on this time-loop, a hundred Tuesdays, and every day I died in some different, horrible way.”
“Jesus,” Victor says. He thinks of the man in his house, that open, ordinary face. He leans away from Dean, slides one hand up Dean’s side far enough that he can put his mouth on bare skin, let Dean feel his teeth. “Why would he do that?”
Dean shudders and still manages to shrug, his eyes cutting away from Victor’s. even as he tips his head back. He’s standing straight over Victor again, his hands still on Victor’s shoulders. Waiting for Victor to take the lead. “Who the fuck knows. That thing exists just to mess with people. But - Sammy changed. I think that something worse happened. I know, what could be worse than seeing me get squashed by pianos and shot in the head and run over by cars,” Dean says. He’s got one corner of his mouth quirked up, but his voice shakes, “but something was. He won’t tell me what happened, but it was bad.”
It sounds ridiculous, to Victor. A hundred Tuesdays doesn’t make any more sense than anything else Dean says, demons and possessions and sacrifice. Part of him - the part that went to church every Sunday until the Bureau became his religion - wants to ask him just how the hell demons and trickster gods can exist in the same universe, side by side like it doesn’t invalidate everything Victor’s ever been taught.
He yanks Dean closer by the hips until his shins hit the bed, until Dean has to knee-walk awkwardly up Victor’s body to keep his balance, following Victor down. Victor wants to kick his boots off, pull Dean’s shirt over his head but that would mean letting go. He runs his hands up the line of Dean’s spine, over his ribs, sucks in a long breath when Dean leans forward and presses his cock against Victor’s.
“Such a bad idea,” Dean mutters, like it was a good idea to jerk Victor off in the El Camino, like any of this is a good fucking idea. Victor laughs into Dean’s mouth and finally convinces himself to take Dean’s shirt off, to pop open the belt buckle on his jeans and shove his hand inside. He can feel a shiver in Dean’s thighs, braced on either side of his own. Victor should really take his boots off.
This is life, Victor thinks, and rolls Dean over onto the bed underneath him.
Chapter One * Chapter Three
Author: hansbekhart
Artist: evalens
Rating: NC-17 (Dean/Victor, Dean/Castiel)
Summary: Victor Henriksen survives Lilith’s attack only to be a plunged into a world beyond his experience and understanding, full of demons, angels and trickster gods. War is coming. He turns to the Winchesters for help, but Dean’s year is running out and Sam is desperate to find a way to save his brother. An outsider in their war, Victor finds himself caught up between good, evil and sheer chaos. He and the Winchester’s newfound allies must scramble to save a world that has already been destroyed by Armageddon. Slash. (Character death, horrific imagery, violence)
Victor flails out, forgetting all about his bad leg. The pain hits instantly and he almost topples sideways out of the chair. The man catches him and just as quickly backs off when Victor’s fists come up. He’s grinning, a little bit - eyes crinkled like it’s all so fucking funny. “Whoa, kiddo,” he says, “Slow that roll, I’m only here to help.”
“What the fuck,” Victor gasps. “What the fuck are you doing in my house? How did you do that?”
“Oh,” the man says, standing. His hands are still up, palms out, his whole body held open and harmless. “Those aren’t the questions you wanna be asking.”
“No?” Victor says. There’s a gun in the drawer right under his hand. He’s drunk or half-asleep, his whole body jangled with terror and pain, but he thinks he can get to it. “What should I be asking?”
“What’s coming for you,” the man says, and the smile drops off his face at the same moment Victor goes ice cold.
“What?” he asks.
“It ain’t her,” the man says. “But it’s bad enough that you need to be somewhere else for a little bit. Anywhere else. So get a move on, Hopalong.”
Victor gets to his feet. He’s shaking so hard that he stumbles on his first step forward. The man catches him by the elbows and at his touch, the world is clear again. The haze of booze is gone and he gapes up at the man, disbelieving. “What’s happening to me?”
It’s not what he wants to ask. The man tightens his grip on Victor - it’s almost affectionate, pitying - and then releases him. Victor reels back and is shocked to find himself steadily on his feet. “Let’s go,” the man says.
He follows, his bad leg dragging behind him. The ground is wet with rain and he’s shivering as soon as they’re out the door. All he’s wearing are socks, the same thin sweatshirt he came home wearing. He brings nothing with him. It doesn’t even occur to him. There’s a white El Camino parked across the street and the man leads him to it.
“Drive,” the man says. “Far and fast as you can. Get out of the storm.”
“Where?” Victor asks.
“Anywhere but west,” the man says. He rolls his eyes, grinning companionably at Victor. It shows all of his teeth. “Hate to say it, but you’re probably safest with the Winchesters. Give ‘em a call. Don’t tell ‘em I sent you, though. We’re not the best of friends.”
He presses the keys into Victor’s hand, opens up the driver’s side door with a flourish. “Your chariot,” he says. “Now get the fuck out of here.”
“No,” Victor says. He puts a hand on the door. His teeth are chattering. “Who the hell are you? Why are you doing this?”
The man looks at him for a long time without saying anything. “It’s not really my policy to get involved,” he says. “It’s been their world for a hell of a long time and I gotta make my fun where I can find it. You dig? But hell if I need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, Vic.”
“You don’t make any fucking sense,” Victor says, and the man laughs.
“When it starts to make sense, that’s when you get the hell out. Speaking of -”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Victor says. “Not until you tell me what you are.”
The man’s grin sharpens. “Oh, I like you. You’re going to be fun, I can tell. You can call me Coyote,” he tells Victor. “I’ll see you on the flip side.”
**
Victor opens his eyes. There’s a long, slow moment where all he does is blink, trying to figure out what he’s looking at. It’s not his ceiling. It’s not the hospital. He’s inside of a car. He can hear traffic rushing by, close enough that he must be parked in the breakdown lane. The whoosh of air ruffles the cab’s roof, great big pouches of beige fabric pulled loose here and there like tumors.
There was a man, he thinks, and pushes himself up. It takes him even longer to figure the rest of it out. He twitches the leg of his pants up. The skin underneath is whole. The burns and wheals are gone. He moves his ankle around in its socket. It’s the first time he’s been able to do that in a month. They told him it would be years before he’d recover that kind of movement. He puts his head down against his knees and breathes slowly. He counts to sixty before he can open his eyes again.
“There was a man,” he says slowly. “He was at the hospital, too. He was in my room in the middle of the night.”
It doesn’t sound any less crazy out loud. He opens the car door and only then notices that he’s fully dressed. Nice winter jacket. Working boots, steel toes. When he steps out of the car, there’s snow to crunch under his feet. He stares down at the snow and then around himself, his lips pursed. He shakes his head and crunches over to the driver’s seat. He’s woken up in a white ’68 El Camino. The registration isn’t in the glove compartment, but there is a wallet made out of bright green stingray leather, stuffed full of hundred dollar bills. Victor leans back in his seat and rolls his eyes back up to the roof. It’s got even fewer answers for him this time, so he puts the car into gear and drives.
He pulls off at the first gas station that he sees. The El Camino isn’t dressed for snow, and it slides a little. The highway signs are useless but the gas station maps suggest Michigan.
“What the fuck,” he says, and the girl behind the counter gives him a dirty look and goes back to watching the television.
He walks up and down the aisles for lack of anything better to do. There’s more money in the pockets of his coat, wrinkled tens and fives and twenties. He can’t even imagine whose coat it is. He was in his house - he was asleep - he had a nightmare. There was a man, but that’s impossible.
“What day is it?” he asks the cashier. It spooks her and she glances under the counter where she’s probably got a gun stashed.
“Friday?” she hazards, inching towards the gun.
It was Monday, Victor thinks. His beard hasn’t been trimmed since he’s been out of the hospital, but it’s a day’s worth of growth not four, it’s fucking impossible. He stares down at cans of Dinty Moore and knows all the way down to his bones that he has lost his mind.
It’s almost a relief, actually.
That’s when he hears his name on the television.
“ - no leads on the disappearance of Special Agent Victor Henriksen of the FBI,” is what the anchor is saying. “Agent Henriksen found himself in the center of a national spotlight in February when he led the capture of the notorious Dean and Sam Winchester, who were on the FBI’s Most Wanted List for a brutal string of murders and other crimes. The home of Agent Henriksen was burned four nights ago, and police fear that he has been kidnapped in reprisal of the Winchester’s deaths.”
There’s more, but Victor doesn’t hear it. He staggers out the door, clipping his hip on a shelf of candy bars, breaking into a run once he’s outside. He hits the El Camino with both hands and holds on. The world won’t stop spinning underneath him, but when he drops to his knees in the snow, there’s nothing in his stomach to throw up.
When he can stand again, he digs his hands through the rest of his pockets. There are just enough quarters there for a phone call to a Kansas number.
The pay phone’s around the side of the gas station. Looks dusty and disused. Victor drops the coins twice as he tries to slide them into the machine, his hands shaking. He remembers the number. It rings once. Picks up in the middle of the second ring.
“Yeah?”
“Dean,” Victor says, more of a sob than a name.
There’s a long stretch of heavy silence. Victor can imagine - he used to spend hours imagining what Dean Winchester was doing, where he was doing it, and this is the image that he finds now: an abandoned house, too cold to be lived in during April and too busted open to be lived in at all. Peeling green paint in the wall, wrought iron balcony leading up to nowhere, the stairs fallen through. Dean sitting at a kitchen table, wrapped in the heaviest coat he owns.
“Victor?” Dean asks, and the sound of his own name sparks something hot in Victor’s stomach.
“Yeah,” Victor says, steadier. “Yeah, it’s me.”
“Fuck,” Dean breathes. “What the hell - how did you get out? We thought you were dead, Victor, Jesus.”
“I don’t know,” Victor says. “I think someone saved my life.”
“Your house blew up,” Dean says. He sounds as shaky as Victor does. “Your entire neighborhood burned down. Three people are in the hospital, they didn’t find your body in the house, what the fuck happened to you.”
“I don’t know,” Victor says again. “I don’t know where I’ve been.”
“Where are you now?” Victor can hear the squeak of a chair against a tile floor as Dean stands. “Stay right where you are, I’ll come get you.”
“No,” Victor says, his eyes sweeping the parking list. “I need to keep moving. He said they were coming for me.”
“What? Who said that?”
Dean’s voice is abruptly tinny and far away. Victor’s eyes sweep the parking lot, the highway. His free hand goes to the charm around his neck and grips it tightly, but it’s hard to believe in it when he’s so fucking exposed. Even the stand-off at the station wasn’t this bad. He had no fucking clue how bad it could really get.
“Victor?” Dean asks. “You there?”
Victor snaps back to himself. The parking lot is empty. The girl working the gas station’s quit paying attention to him, her back to the glass front of the store.
“I’ll meet you halfway,” Victor says. “Tell me how to get to you. Tell me where you are.”
Dean isn’t far. Whatever hand of fate brought him to Michigan was a benign one, as far as Victor can figure. The man in his house is hazy, like a dream he didn’t really have. The radio tells him more about what happened to his house and neighbors, as he drives. No one is listening to the witnesses, who are telling anyone that will listen that animals came for them in the middle of the night, animals with black eyes and bloody hands. A few more days and the media will give Victor up for dead, buried in some backwater field or bled dry for Satanic rituals.
An old man burned alive in his bed, two houses down from Victor. He hadn’t known the old man anymore than he knew the rest of his neighbors, didn’t say hi on his way to work, didn’t sit out on sunny days. But he recognizes the man’s name and puts the pieces together as the highway markers count down - he had three grandchildren that would come to visit him every few months, sullen children who would shuffle around in their grandfather’s back garden and throw lemons over the fence.
Three people hospitalized. The teenager from three doors down, her mother. Listed in fair condition. A man who had only been driving by when the first house went up. Victor’s front door had gone through his windshield. He hadn’t regained consciousness yet.
The media had plenty of time to build a mini-frenzy in the days that Victor has lost. Serial killer culture, disintegration of the fabric of society, what are video games doing to our youth sort of thing. Victor’s familiar enough with it, same as he can figure what the media, the public, the Bureau imagines what has happened to him. It isn’t a pretty thought, but it’ll sell well enough for a few weeks. He wonders if John Walsh has run a follow-up story, asking for his safe return. He’ll have to ask Dean.
He thinks of his parents, and just as quickly pushes it away. He can’t afford to worry about them, what Josiah must think. Not until he knows what’s going on. If he’s really just losing his mind. It used to impress Victor, really. The absolute certainty of the insane. That fervent belief that their version of the world was right. He was tortured by a demon and his home has been burned to the ground, and he’s running towards a man whose family he spent the last five years hunting, and he’d give anything to have made it all up.
The news has moved on to reports of flash floods all over the country, and Victor switches the radio off, drives the last hundred miles in silence.
Dean is waiting for him, parked underneath an old trestle bridge on a road that’s more dirt than gravel. The spot is tucked away in the woods not too far off the highway. It’s isolated enough that the only sound is the crunch of his own tires, everything else swallowed up by the snowfall. There’s someone sitting in the passenger seat with Dean, probably Sam, although there’s enough snow on Dean’s windshield that it’s hard to tell. It doesn’t look like they’re talking. He can see Dean’s hands braced on the wheel.
He draws the car up close to the Chevy, close enough that their bumpers are nearly touching. Dean’s tracks are the only ones visible, and Victor’s guessing this spot doesn’t see a lot of traffic. He glances down when he pulls the keys out of the ignition, and when he looks back up Dean is alone in his car.
Victor gets out slowly, checking the surrounding hills carefully. He looks back when Dean’s door creaks shut. They’re standing kitty corner, on opposite sides of their cars and for a second they just look at each other. Dean smiles, briefly. He moves towards Victor, slipping in between their cars, and pulls Victor into a fierce hug.
Victor flinches - he can’t help it - but Dean hangs on like grim death and after a second, Victor’s arms come up and return it. He can feel Dean shivering, his breath hot on Victor’s neck. He thinks it’s the first time anyone’s touched him other than - he can’t remember, the man’s face caught in his mind and then gone completely.
Dean breaks the embrace but doesn’t pull away. One hand slides down Victor’s arm and curls around his elbow. The other is stuffed into his own jacket pocket. He doesn’t say anything. Victor thinks, distantly, that it’s a mark of how upside down the world has become that all he feels is safe and warm, standing next to a man that has haunted his nightmares for years. The silence tightens, and Victor clears his throat. Dean lets him go, glancing down at his feet. “Where’s Sam?” Victor asks, to say something.
Dean shrugs one shoulder, his mouth twisting. “Left him at a friend’s house in South Dakota. He’s … looking into something for me.”
Victor opens his mouth to ask who was in the car and where the hell did they go, but Dean cuts him off. “How did you get out? What the hell happened to you, where have you been for four fucking days? Why the hell didn’t you call me sooner?”
Victor shakes his head. “It hasn’t been - I don’t know. I fell asleep in my house and something - someone saved me. I woke up in that car and it was four days later. I don’t know what’s happening to me.”
He expects Dean to be surprised, to tell Victor that he’s going insane, but Dean frowns. “You lost four days? What the hell can do that?”
“There was a man,” Victor says slowly. It’s hard to focus on it, on the idea. There was a man. He closes his eyes. “He woke me up and told me to run. Anywhere but west. He said his name was Coyote.”
“Son of a bitch,” Dean breathes. “That smug son of a bitch, I can’t even fucking believe it.”
“What?” Victor demands. “This a friend of yours?”
Dean makes a noise in his throat, disgusted. “Something we’ve hunted. He popped up on our radar recently - God only know what he wants this time but it’s not going to be good, fuck - ”
“Tell me what he is,” Victor says tightly, and Dean’s mouth snaps shut.
“We call him the Trickster,” Dean says, “and he’s a god.”
Victor waits for Dean to laugh but Dean just looks at him, his mouth drawn thin. “That’s not funny,” Victor says.
“It’s not a joke,” Dean says.
Victor pulls away from him, sags back against the car. He can feel chill metal through the seat of his pants, the backs of his knees. He holds onto that, waiting for the ground to stop spinning underneath him. “What does he want from me?” Victor asks. “What do the - the demons, what the fuck do they want from me?”
“I don’t know,” Dean says. “I wish to god I did, Victor. We had no idea she’d come for you at the station - I wouldn’t have left you if I’d thought for a second you’d be a target, you gotta know that.”
“She didn’t even ask us where you were,” Victor says, and Dean goes still.
“What?” he says, low.
“She didn’t ask us where you were,” Victor says, measuring each word carefully. “Not even once. Forty-five minutes and she didn’t ask anything. Lilith said she just wanted to have some fun. Demons, I thought - I can handle demons, I walk among evil every day, I sleep in it and breathe it in. I could do that. I could do what you do and make a difference. I had no idea what evil was, Dean. Everything is different now.”
Dean sucks in a breath. He opens his mouth to say something and Victor rides right over him. He couldn’t stop talking if he wanted to. It feels like poison leaking out of his skin. “She filleted Nancy’s skin right off her body. You remember her? Lilith made us all watch. That poor girl never. Stopped. Screaming. The deputy? She broke his bones - every single bone in his feet, then his hands, then his legs. There were three other people with us. Just bystanders, the ones who were possessed. We’d put them in one of the offices to sleep it off and she woke them up and drained all the blood out of their bodies. You wanna know what she did with it? She painted the walls - with her fingers. Like she really was a little girl. She drew us a big old sun and a house and kittens and puppy dogs and - ”
That’s when Dean kisses him. Lunges forward and shuts Victor up. His mouth is wet and soft and Victor is so shocked that he grabs Dean by the shoulders and slams him against the car. “What the fuck was that?” Victor hisses, but he doesn’t wait for an answer.
It’s awkward and violent. Dean kisses with teeth, his hands fisted in Victor’s jacket. He pushes against Victor like it’s a contest, hips grinding hard together. It’s the most alive Victor’s felt since the last time he caught Dean Winchester. He drags his hands down Dean’s back and up under his jacket without thinking of icy fingers. Dean breaks away with a gasp, shuddering all over. “Holy shit,” he says, “holy shit.”
“Get in the car,” Victor says, and Dean looks up at him through his eyelashes, mouth open and red. He licks his lips and Victor kisses him, slow. Closes his teeth on Dean’s lower lip and Dean yields to him, tips his head back and lets Victor take what he wants.
“Okay,” he says.
Dean’s on him as soon as they’re inside, one leg between Victor’s, the other pressed into the foot well, keeping him balanced. It’s so fucking hard to wait for the car to warm up, for their hands and skin to warm up, to reach for Dean and have him reach back and when he pulls Dean’s pants open his hands are still a little too cold for it. Dean doesn’t push him away. Then it’s more messy fumbling, Dean’s hand around Victor’s cock and Victor’s on Dean’s and then pushing together, closer, faster. Victor’s got all his clothes on and Dean’s got one arm pulled out of his jacket sleeve, and it’s good. So fucking good.
Afterwards, they put themselves back together without speaking. They stay in the car, knees brushing. It’s been three years since Victor quit smoking but he would kill for a cigarette now. A thought occurs to him and he leans across Dean, pops the glove compartment open. A pack of Camels are waiting for him. There’s even a lighter. “You want one?” Victor asks, and Dean shakes his head. “You mind?”
“Just crack a window,” Dean says.
The windows are steamed up. It’s snowing again, a quiet white noise as it falls against the roof of the car. Dean’s leg jiggles where it’s propped up against the dash. Victor’s first drag is amazing until he starts coughing. Dean grins. “Been a while?”
Victor rolls his eyes. They fall into a companionable silence. The thin stream of cold air leaking in through the window feels good. The warm ache of his body feels even better. There’s a comfortable lack of the need to talk about what just happened.
“You see my car?” Dean says, after a long time. Victor glances at the car and then at Dean, frowning. “She belonged to my dad. Had it since before Sammy and I were born. I rebuilt her a few years ago. The only thing that wasn’t completely fucked up was the alternator. Just about everything else is brand fucking new.”
“What happened to her?” Victor asks.
Dean laughs shakily. “T-boned by a semi,” he says. “We never even saw it coming. I was in the back, sitting on the wrong side. I was going to die, and my dad sacrificed himself for me.”
Victor sits up a little straighter. They’d thought John was dead, but there was never any proof of it, never any reason to think he was anywhere but just off the grid except for what Dean told him the first time they’d ever spoken, my dad was a hero.
“He made a deal,” Dean continues. “He was stupid to do it. And for a long time I hated him for it, for putting me in that position. But a few months ago, I was still alive to do the same thing for someone else. I’m not exactly a - a believer, that’s more Sam’s thing, but maybe there are reasons. Maybe it’s not all random fucked up evil. Maybe there’s a reason you’re still here.”
Victor closes his eyes, leans his head back against the seat. He breathes in the smells of cigarette smoke and sex, Dean’s leather jacket. “Thanks,” he says. Dean scoots closer, bumps his shoulder against Victor’s.
“I’ll keep you safe,” he says. “I promise.”
**
They leave the El Camino underneath the trestle, slowly being buried in the snow. Dean’s listening to the blues, which surprises Victor; witness statements have compiled a soundtrack of classic rock. The recording is old enough that it sounds like it was made underwater, the song and singer some kind of bridge between slave music and blues. He falls asleep and when he wakes up, AC/DC has replaced it and it’s the middle of the night.
“Dean,” Victor slurs, and a hand passes over his cheek and trails down his neck. He’s cold where his body has been pressed up against metal and Dean’s skin is an instant counterpoint of heat. He groans softly without even realizing it and the hand stills, one thumb pressed lightly against the line of his jaw.
“Go back to sleep,” Dean says gently.
“I can drive,” Victor says, trying to sit up. The hand presses him gently back against the seat. Victor cracks his eyes open, rubs them with the back of his good hand. Dean’s eyes are on the road, highway lights passing over his face. He looks tired. He needs a shave.
“S’okay,” Dean says. “I’m used to it, go back to sleep. We’ll get there by morning. Let’s hit up a hit a Waffle House for breakfast, okay? I fuckin’ love Waffle House.”
Victor groans again, already mostly asleep, and Dean laughs. “All right, all right. I’ll shut up.” Victor reaches for him - wraps his fingers around Dean’s wrist and squeezes, the best response he can give - and is asleep again almost before he’s let go.
They hit South Dakota a little past dawn. Victor is still asleep, and he wakes up on the way out of town. There’s a bag of donuts sitting on the seat next to him, and two large coffees held between Dean’s thighs. When Victor sits up, Dean passes him one, and they sit together in silence. When they reach Sioux Falls, Victor knows where they’re heading.
Singer Salvage Yard looks just the same as the last time Victor was there. The only detail missing is the big dog sleeping on the porch, guarding the front door from all comers. Dean walks in as if he lives there. The house smells like old books and good food. “Bobby!” Dean bellows, “we’re here!”
“Yeah, yeah,” comes a voice from the kitchen, “Quit yer hollerin’, I heard you come in.”
Dean throws a grin over his shoulder at Victor. Victor grimaces and follows Dean into the kitchen.
“Special Agent Henriksen,” Bobby Singer says, resplendent in a dirty yellow apron, hands on his hips. The apron is printed with the Venus de Milo’s body and when he moves, it stretches her tits across his saggy ones. “Been a while since you’ve darkened my door.”
“Not long enough,” Victor says. They regard each other, Dean in between like a shield.
“Dean tells me you’ve quit chasin’ the good guys,” Singer says. “That a fact?”
“Yes sir,” Victor says. “Pretty sure my chasing days are over.”
Singer folds his arms across his chest. “Doubt that,” he says. “Well, you might as well come on in. If Dean’ll vouch for you, that’s good enough for me. Have a beer.” He indicates the open bottles on his counter, one for each of them. Dean rolls his eyes at Bobby. It’s as if a small argument passes between them in a look, and when it’s over Dean picks up a bottle in each hand and gives one to Victor.
“Drink up,” he says. “Make the old man happy.”
“Fine,” Victor says uncertainly. He takes a long pull from the beer, his eyes never leaving Dean’s. A slow smile spreads over Dean’s face, and Victor’s breath catches. Dean looks back to Singer.
“Satisfied?”
“I will be after you take your turn,” Singer says.
They take their beers - spiked with holy water, it turns out, but Victor’s gotten to the point where it’s kind of funny - to finish in what passes for a living room, out from under Singer’s suspicious eye. Dean makes Victor tell him all about the three times he’s previously met Bobby Singer, each time more unpleasant than the last. The last time, the dog chased them off, and Reidy didn’t stop laughing for a hundred miles.
“I’m guessing he’s not too fond of the authorities,” Victor says.
“No,” Dean says, grinning, “You could definitely say he’s not too fond. He’s never said anything about a Fed having his location, though.”
“Well,” Victor says, finishing his beer. He sets it down at his feet and leans back in the couch. He can’t lean too far before a stack of books will topple over on him. Dean is precariously balanced on the other end of the couch, looking completely at ease. “That was before I was really on your tail.”
“That so,” Dean says. “Whose tail were you on?”
“Your dad’s,” Victor says shortly, but Dean just looks amused.
“Bet he led you on some good chases,” Dean says.
Victor shakes his head. “Don’t think he cared either way. There wasn’t a whole lot of pressure on him from us. He wasn’t a priority case - grave desecrations and credit card fraud, mostly. I was working the credit card angle. It was always the best way to track him. It wasn’t until he fell off the grid and you popped on it that the case became urgent.”
“Should I be flattered?” Dean asks. He seems honestly curious. Bobby curses at something in the kitchen and Victor flinches. Dean’s eyes narrow almost imperceptibly, but he doesn’t say anything.
“It was after St. Louis,” Victor tells him. “Your dad wasn’t a serial killer.”
“Lucky for him,” Dean says. “You were a big pain in our ass.”
“Glad to hear it.”
**
Sam puts in an appearance just before dinner is ready. He roars into the salvage yard in one of the most wrecked Fairlanes Victor has ever seen. He offers Victor a handshake but seems otherwise unaffected to see him returned from the dead. There’s a physical tension between Dean and Sam, who circle each other warily around Bobby’s house. They never stay on the same side of the room as the other, and Victor is reminded of how he felt at first, seeing them together. They had made him think of wolves. It had been Dean, back then- the way he looked up from under his eyelashes, ready and dangerous. Now Sam’s presence fills the room: Dean’s eyes always dark on his brother’s turned back, Victor and Singer orbiting around them, Sam the oblivious epicenter. Except he isn’t oblivious, really - he makes small talk with Singer but Victor can see the tension in his shoulders, the tightness around his eyes. There’s something different about Sam- he stands straighter, holds his shoulders back, and something about the line of his spine makes Victor wonder if maybe Sam has been the most dangerous Winchester all along.
Dinner is served as the sun is sliding down the copse of trees behind Singer’s house. There’s been a ham bone simmering on the stove all day and as the day dragged on, it’s evolved into red beans and rice. Dean pitched in and made cornbread from scratch, and it’s at least as good as the kind Victor buys in a box.
Sam and Singer dominate the conversation. Dean eats like he hasn’t seen food for a month, his head down. Victor tries to listen, but whenever he glances down at his bowl, he can’t look away. He has no idea when he last had a home cooked meal. Even before he ran - before the hospital - it had been months of diner food and burgers, always on the road. He’d forgotten how different it really was. He watches butter melt over his cornbread, glistening in the dim light of Bobby’s kitchen, and feels sick to his stomach.
“Victor?” Dean asks, his voice pitched low enough that Sam and Singer don’t even pause. Victor swallows.
“Fine,” he says. “I’m fine.” He looks away when Dean doesn’t, turns his face towards Sam and pointedly sticks a huge forkful of rice and beans into his mouth. He manages not to choke on it, but only barely.
They’re talking about frogs. “Plagues of ‘em,” Singer says, “and in four different states. Can’t even track a weather pattern to ‘em and they’re gone in about thirty-six hours.”
“Gone?” Sam asks, and Singer nods.
“Like they were never there,” he says. Victor shivers, and turns his face away.
After dinner, they go outside with a few beers and sit on Singer’s creaking, splintered swing. Sam props his butt up on the railing, which is sheltered from the snow by the eaves. Singer claims the king’s spot, which is an upturned packing crate. Dean presses back and forth with his heels, rocking the swing. If Dean were a cute girl in a poodle skirt this would be some sort of surreal meet-the-parents date, but what Singer has in his hands isn’t a cigar.
He takes his time rolling the joint. It’s professional, as even as if it was made by a cigarette machine. “Unless The Man wants to object,” Singer says pointedly, looking hard at Victor.
Dean smirks, and Victor rolls his eyes. “Feel free,” he says. His breath plumes out of his mouth.
Singer lights it and takes a long, luxurious toke. He passes it to the right, to Sam, who looks more comfortable with the joint between his fingers than Victor would’ve imagined. Victor hasn’t gotten stoned since college and it’s strange to see it being done so openly, without furtive glances and quick passing. Dean tips his head back and lets the smoke drift upwards into a thick halo around his head. The porch light behind them makes Dean look otherworldly.
Dean catches Victor staring and flips him a grin. He holds the joint up between his knuckles, like a cigarette. “Victor?” he asks. Somehow it’s the worst thing that Dean could have said. It’s not a challenge, just an invitation, the intimacy of his own name. It’s still a punch in the gut, to hear Dean say it. He wants to take Dean upstairs and fuck him stupid, to bend him over that dining room table, hold him open and lick him loose. He wants to go home. He takes the joint from Dean and he can see Singer relax slightly, out of the corner of his eye, like it’s another fucking test.
“This spiked with holy water too?” he asks, and Dean’s eyes widen. For a second, Victor knows he’s said the wrong thing, but Dean only shakes his head.
Their fingers brush when he takes the joint. It’s just pot. It tastes green and thick and Victor coughs on the exhale. It’s bad enough that Dean reaches over and rubs between his shoulder blades, finishes up with a good whack. “Fuck you,” Victor croaks, and Sam laughs.
They finish the joint. It comes around to Victor three, four times. He drinks his beer. It’s so much easier to listen now, to sit and watch Singer and Dean laugh together about … something, he can’t really follow the conversation all that well but it must be pretty fucking funny, they’re all laughing about it.
“And then,” Dean says, shaking. He’s grinning so hard that his face looks split in two. “And then I trip over my own fucking feet and go right into the grave, and she lands on top of me and goes, ‘I shoulda turned left at Albuquerque.’ Man, I just left that one alone, didn’t salt and burn shit. More fuckin’ power to her.”
He thinks he’s more drunk than anything else, loose-limbed, heavy in his body the way he remembers from college. He looks over his shoulder, waiting for Reidy to come out of the house and join the party already, and it actually hurts to remember where he is, everything that’s happened. Reidy had a hero’s funeral and this, Victor thinks, this is life now. He lets his eyes go from Dean to Sam to Singer, over the peeling paint on the porch rail, lets himself smell old grease and whiskey in the kitchen. This is his life now. The circle of light on the porch is small and cold, the darkness behind Sam a solid force.
This is life now, Victor thinks again, and no matter how fast he runs there will always be something moving out there in the dark.
“Victor?”
It’s Dean’s voice in his ear, low and soft. He pulls back and looks at Victor carefully. His eyes are red at the corners but he’s looked tired all day. Victor looks back at him, considering, and that seems to make up Dean’s mind. “I think I’m going to put our little G-man to bed,” he says to Sam and Singer. Victor’s aware enough to see Singer’s long, considering look. He misses Sam’s eyes slide away, into the darkness, his attention already somewhere else.
Dean stays close to Victor’s elbow, like he’s stumbling drunk. He’s not even all that stoned, really. He just has to remind himself of every step, of every stack of books on the floor. The state of Singer’s house embarrasses him. When he puts his hands on the banister they come away sticky with something that isn’t quite dust. Dean’s hands are in his pockets. It makes him lean towards Victor, balancing on the balls of his feet.
“We usually just sleep downstairs,” Dean says. It’s an apology, but when he opens the door, all that Victor can think is, at least it’s clean. The room smells musty but it smells like that all over the house. There’s a thin layer of dust on the headboard. Victor sits down on the bed and only then realizes that Dean is still lingering in the doorway, watching him with dark eyes. Victor feels numb all over.
“You coming in or what?” he asks.
Dean comes in.
He comes forward until he’s standing almost between Victor’s knees, not quite touching, his hands still in his pockets. “This isn’t,” he says, and stops.
“Isn’t what?” Victor asks. He reaches for Dean, one hand on each of Dean’s hips, and Dean sways towards him, stumbles that last half-step.
“A good idea?” Dean tries, bending to kiss him. He tastes like beer and smoke and underneath just ordinary saliva, and Dean moans very softly into Victor’s mouth. He’s right - it’s not a good idea. It’s so far from a good idea that Victor used to bury this terrible idea where no one could get to it and see just how far gone he was, how deep he’d let Dean Winchester into his head. They’d have taken him off the case and he’d needed to see it done, so he never breathed a word. There was nobody who would’ve understood what Victor imagined doing to Dean Winchester.
Victor pushes up the bottom of Dean’s shirt, sets his thumbs against the hard curve of Dean’s hipbones, digs in just enough that Dean hisses through his teeth. His nose brushes against Victor’s. It’s so hard to breathe, to focus. He’s not even sure if he’s stoned anymore, if he’s even still drunk. Everywhere that Dean touches him hurts.
“You didn’t tell Sam about Coyote,” Victor says abruptly. Dean pulls back far enough to give Victor a confused look, like, you want to talk about my brother right now?
“No,” Dean says. He bites on Victor’s lower lip, gently. Testing him, Victor thinks. “Sam’s … we had a run-in with the Trickster a few weeks ago and he’s just sort of. He was different, afterwards. It put him on this time-loop, a hundred Tuesdays, and every day I died in some different, horrible way.”
“Jesus,” Victor says. He thinks of the man in his house, that open, ordinary face. He leans away from Dean, slides one hand up Dean’s side far enough that he can put his mouth on bare skin, let Dean feel his teeth. “Why would he do that?”
Dean shudders and still manages to shrug, his eyes cutting away from Victor’s. even as he tips his head back. He’s standing straight over Victor again, his hands still on Victor’s shoulders. Waiting for Victor to take the lead. “Who the fuck knows. That thing exists just to mess with people. But - Sammy changed. I think that something worse happened. I know, what could be worse than seeing me get squashed by pianos and shot in the head and run over by cars,” Dean says. He’s got one corner of his mouth quirked up, but his voice shakes, “but something was. He won’t tell me what happened, but it was bad.”
It sounds ridiculous, to Victor. A hundred Tuesdays doesn’t make any more sense than anything else Dean says, demons and possessions and sacrifice. Part of him - the part that went to church every Sunday until the Bureau became his religion - wants to ask him just how the hell demons and trickster gods can exist in the same universe, side by side like it doesn’t invalidate everything Victor’s ever been taught.
He yanks Dean closer by the hips until his shins hit the bed, until Dean has to knee-walk awkwardly up Victor’s body to keep his balance, following Victor down. Victor wants to kick his boots off, pull Dean’s shirt over his head but that would mean letting go. He runs his hands up the line of Dean’s spine, over his ribs, sucks in a long breath when Dean leans forward and presses his cock against Victor’s.
“Such a bad idea,” Dean mutters, like it was a good idea to jerk Victor off in the El Camino, like any of this is a good fucking idea. Victor laughs into Dean’s mouth and finally convinces himself to take Dean’s shirt off, to pop open the belt buckle on his jeans and shove his hand inside. He can feel a shiver in Dean’s thighs, braced on either side of his own. Victor should really take his boots off.
This is life, Victor thinks, and rolls Dean over onto the bed underneath him.
Chapter One * Chapter Three