Supernatural Fic: Intersections i.-iv. of xii
Intersections
Rating: T (implied sex of the het variety, implied violence and monster killing, profuse swearing, excessive abuse of various fandom canons and timelines, present tense and barely betaed)
Fandoms: Supernatural (spoilers through 4x10) with sides of... Buffy, Angel, Harry Potter, Roswell, Firefly, Dead Like Me, Southern Vampire Novels/True Blood (through ‘All Together Dead’), X-Files, Battlestar Galactica (sort of), Twilight, and Grey’s Anatomy.
Summary: Sometimes it’s not where you’re going that matters; it’s what happens along the way that counts.
Author’s Notes: Um… yeah, I really maybe should apologize for this? You get an idea in your head it sometimes it just… takes off. Most people would have written this as a crack fic and maybe it kind of begs for that. But… well, I wanted to see if I could do it in a slightly more serious way. I’ll leave it up to you to decide if it works or not. Note that to make this work, timelines (and locations) are skewed to fit my purposes. Also I have no idea when the last two parts of this will be posted. But, this works as a standalone too, so don't let that stop you from reading.
i.
They’re in Tulsa or Tucson or some other city with dry heat and too many fucking fake cacti masquerading as decorations. It’s not three hours since they’ve hit the city limits before Dean resolves loudly that they’re going someplace green with temperatures that aren’t in the triple digits after the damn Chupacabra they’re hunting is as dead as the people it’s been eighty-sixing. Weren’t too many goats for it to feed on in this part of the country, it seemed, so it’d decided that people were fair game. Well… that won’t last for long if Dean Winchester has anything to say about it.
He and Sam are Bon and Angus Young this week, despite Sam’s protests that he refuses to answer to the name ‘Angus.’ It doesn’t matter because Dean wins the minute he slams down a fake credit card on the chipped laminate counter of the hotel office and gives the clerk their aliases. There’s not much Sammy can say at that point to contradict him, but he does give a fake smile and grit his teeth in that way that Dean finds endlessly amusing.
Dean’s just a little bit disappointed when the hotel clerk doesn’t get it. Doesn’t anyone listen to good music these days? But the anonymity fake names give them is more than a luxury to them, so it’s only a little disappointment.
Their room is exactly like a hundred other rooms they’ve stayed in. The air conditioner is loud and ineffective and a thick film of tobacco residue coats an ash tray perched in front of a no smoking sign. It’s every hotel Dean’s stayed in since he was four years old and his dad’s trip to see Missouri changed all their lives almost as much as his mom’s death had a few weeks prior.
They aren’t in their hotel room for fifteen minutes before Sam’s giving him shit about how badly they need to do laundry and hands him the option of walking two blocks to clean their clothes or searching for Chupacabra feces to make sure that’s actually what they’re dealing with. Given that option, Dean realizes there’s really no fucking choice at all and heads a few blocks East with their dirt-and monster-stained clothes. Fuck if he’s going to dig through monster shit voluntarily. That’s the kind of thing little brothers are for.
Retrospectively, he’ll realize that’s even more true, because he strides into the laundromat with two suitcases worth of dirty clothes and sees her perched atop a dryer, somehow making sitting look lewd, which is a new one on him. Sam would have no fucking clue what to do in this situation, but he certainly does. She’s damn near riding the dryer with a grin that belies more experience than her barely 20-something body suggests as she tongues a lollypop like she’s trying to get the stick it’s on to orgasm.
He knows she’s dangerous before she says a word. And his certainty is only reaffirmed when she does talk, addressing him with a voice that reeks of smoke and honey, all slow and clinging to the air as she talks.
“Hey there, stud,” she over-annunciates, unabashedly checking him out as the words hang richly in the air.
“Hey yourself,” he says, claiming the washer across from her and leaning against it as he drinks her in.
She’s a tiny thing with dark hair and darker eyes that speak of experience, some of which is good but most of which isn’t. Even her curves, generous as they are, seem to have sharp angles to them, all hard and unyielding. Dean relates to her instantly, even if he doesn’t know her story. It doesn’t matter so much, the details; her life is the same as his.
“That’s an awful lot of blood there,” she says, paying too close attention as he loads his laundry into the washer. “You’re either a hell of a lot of fun or no fun at all. I’m guessing it’s the former.”
He’s awfully glad the laundromat is damn near empty at this point, just him and her and the apparent owner of the place eying them with a barely tolerating scowl. She might be hot as sin, but she’s far too perceptive for her own good - or, for his, anyhow - and he’s fully aware that he and Sam are still wanted by the feds.
“Hunting is a messy business,” he replies truthfully with an edge to his smile that speaks of secrets.
“Ain’t that the fuckin’ God’s honest truth?” she laughs grittily and he just knows she’s looking past what he’s saying to what he really means.
“I got some extra of this stuff,” she says, tossing him a small canister of something-or-other.
“Nothin’ gets blood out better than that,” she continues, playing with her lollypop like it’s a cigarette, absently puffing cherry flavor and red dye number five. “I should know. Done more than my fair share of hunting.”
“Thanks,” he says, more for the confidence than the stain remover.
“Bon Young,” he says as a greeting, as a test, extending his hand.
“Right,” she laughs. “And I’m Joan-fucking-Jett.”
He grins back, infinitely please that she passed the test.
“Dean Winchester,” he admits.
“Somehow,” she drawls, “I believe that.
“Faith,” she replies, shaking his hand as she simultaneously molests his fingertips.
“Just Faith?” he asks, half-amused and half-flirty.
“Yeah,” she replies. “Just Faith.”
ii.
Impersonating the FBI, in Sam’s experience, generally works better if the FBI isn’t actually involved. He’s nervous enough that he actually doesn’t catch the agents’ names and thankfully Dean steps up, smooth-talking his way back to claiming that they’re Homeland Security or Federal Marshalls something while Sam’s heart races in his throat.
The woman, a tiny redhead focused entirely on Dean, but not in the way women usually are, seems to not believe a word coming out of his mouth. Sam can’t blame her; none of it is true, after all. Her partner, though, he’s the more worrisome of the two.
Sometimes Sam resents just a little bit how easily Dean slips into the spotlight, pulling on the attentions of everyone around him. This isn’t one of those times. But the other FBI agent, he seems immune to Dean’s magnetism, paying at least as much attention to Sam as he does his brother and surveying their chintzy alien-themed surroundings with the look of a kid let loose in a candy store. Sam knows on sight that he’s one of those guys that sees everything, even when it looks like he isn’t paying attention at all. And isn’t that just the bitch of it? One of the few times Sam is glad for his brother’s ability to draw the focus of everyone around him, it fails.
He’s only half listening as Dean cajoles their way out of trouble, thinking instead how stupid it was for them to come here in the first place. Honestly. Roswell? Even if the whole alien thing were true, it’s hardly their area of expertise. Ghosts and demons were one thing, but aliens? That’s a whole different ballgame and one Sam really isn’t interested in playing.
They’re in this cute little diner filled with touristy shit that alien fanatics - apparently including the one FBI agent - seem to love and Sam would be certain there wasn’t anything here to find if two of the restaurant’s waitresses didn’t look certifiably nervous as they fidgeted with refilling bottles of Tabasco sauce over and over again. Fuck but he doesn’t want there to be anything here to find. Ghosts he can take. Or demons or werewolves or God-damned zombies. But aliens? They freak him the hell out.
“You know what?” Sam finally speaks up as he notices Dean get distracted by a jail-bait drop-dead gorgeous blonde eying him speculatively from a booth behind the female agent.
Only thing worse than a suspicious FBI agent when you’re wanted by the feds is one you’ve pissed off by not paying attention to ‘em. Dean’s a smart guy, certainly smart enough to know that, but he’s also got the attention span of a gnat when there’s a hot girl in the picture and Sam can just see this going downhill.
“Why don’t you give us your card and we’ll be in touch? Let you know if we find anything and compare notes?” Sam asks, smiling disarmingly at the female agent, effectively distracting her for the moment from Dean’s errant stare.
He’s pretty sure that she and her partner aren’t buying a word of what he and his brother are peddling - the guy in particular seems the skeptical type - but the agents have no reason to hold them and so he and Dean take their cards and high tail it out of there, getting the Impala on the road before the café door finishes shutting behind them.
Dean is less than happy about leaving a case unsolved, but there’s no deaths here, no damage done at all - just some local talk about a girl getting magically healed - so Sam really couldn’t give a shit and tells his brother as much.
“We just almost got busted. And for what? Aliens, Dean?” Sam scoffs, throwing his brother a disbelieving look. “Might as well be chasing after Bigfoot.”
iii.
You didn’t need an EMF reader to tell something was off about this town. From the moment they’d hit the city limits, it was evident that this wasn’t your average sleepy, one-Starbucks kind of place. It was the kind of town that only managed to mimic normal, and not terribly well, at that. All-in-all, the flattened welcome sign along the side of the road seemed oddly appropriate. Dean had a feeling that this town would break you, if you gave it half a chance.
“We should stop,” he says in a way that would have been an order if their dad had been the one saying it.
“No fucking way,” Sam says, eyes glued to the road and foot pressing firmly on the gas pedal.
“Come on, Sammy. This place crawls,” Dean groans in a long-suffering voice. “This is what we do!”
Sam shoots him a disbelieving look, never varying the car’s speed as the EMF reader wails with a loud, constant, otherworldly whine in the backseat.
“Do you have a deathwish? Seriously, man. This is not at all what we do,” he counters. “This is so beyond what we do. The EMF has been shrieking like a banshee for at least two miles.”
“It could be a banshee,” Dean says.
“It could be a hundred banshees, not a banshee,” Sam replies stoically.
They haven’t had a good fight since that demon in Flagstaff two weeks ago and Dean is itching for something to kill. Sam knows it. Honestly, he’s feeling it, too. That’s the problem with this life. Or, it’s part of the problem, anyhow. You do this long enough, you forget how to do anything else. It all becomes a long line of hunts with shitty motel rooms and shittier truck stop meals punctuating the time between.
“There’s something here,” Dean argues.
“You think?” Sam asks, sarcasm heavy in his voice. “Have you ever seen a town with this many damn graveyards? What is that, the tenth one we’ve seen?”
The cemetery in question is gothic and creepy in a way that oddly fits the town and Dean’s seen a hell of a lot of cemeteries, so calling it creepy really means something coming from him. He almost would have been more surprised if nothing had happened, if some nightmare come to life hadn’t reared its evil head amidst the cracked mausoleums and broken headstones. But, as it turns out, Dean isn’t disappointed.
The Winchester boys have seen a lot of crazy things over the years - demons and mummies, vampires and werewolves… everything but the goddamn boogeyman, it seems like. But Dean’s pretty damn sure he ain’t never seen anything like this. If it weren’t sweltering in the dead heat of summer, he’d have been checking his calendar to see if it was Halloween and he’d somehow forgotten. The thing he spies in the graveyard looks more like a half-assed costume than any sort of actual monster. And, even knowing all the evil sons of bitches that exist in the world, he questions for a minute if what he’s seeing is real.
“Sammy… I’m not hallucinating, am I?” he asks cautiously.
“If you are, I am, too,” his brother replies, the car crawling to a halt. “What is that thing?”
“It’s… It’s… Well, it’s slimy,” Dean says finally, staring somewhat blankly at the thing.
“With antlers,” Sam follows up, cocking his head to the side and studying the thing with scholarly interest.
“Well, whatever it is, it’s dead,” Dean says suddenly with a little too much enthusiasm, opening the car door quickly as the thing stalks a pretty blonde girl and her wannabe Sid Vicious boyfriend strolling nearby.
He’s all set to yell at Sam to pop the trunk when he sees his brother’s eyebrows raise in surprise, his gaze still set toward the graveyard.
“I… I think they’ve got it covered, Dean,” Sam says and Dean turns just in time to see Sid toss his cheerleader girlfriend what looks like a scythe - and where the hell had he been hiding that- so she can lop the thing’s head clean off, antlers and all.
“…the hell?” Dean asks rhetorically.
“Maybe Bobby will know about that thing? Or Dad’s journal could have something on the town?” Sam asks not sounding particularly confident.
Sid and California Barbie have spotted them, him offering up a nod that might have been a bit of a challenge or maybe was appreciative toward the car or possibly a little of both. For her part, his companion is standing nearby trying lamely to hide the scythe behind her petite frame. Dean nods back, impressed with their handling of… whatever that thing was.
“What was the name of this town, anyhow?” Sam asks as his brother climbs back in the car.
“Dunno. Sunvale or Moondale or something like that,” Dean shrugs. “Let’s go, man. This place gives me the creeps.”
iv.
It’s not so much raining as it is misting, like the damn air is sweating. Dean hadn’t thought that much of anything could make him long for Tulsa or Tucson in the heat of summer, but Seattle in early Fall has him second guessing that. He’s all for greenery, but damn… not at the expense of sunlight.
Reports of a pair of seemingly unrelated deaths and a rash of mechanical failures on the ferries that run on Puget Sound had brought the brothers to Washington on the hunt for a poltergeist. But, after witnessing a third and fourth death for themselves, it was Sam who’d first figured out what was really going on.
“Damn. Gravelings,” Sam had sighed, watching the same dour looking girl stride away as they’d seen the last time someone had died on the ferry.
“I hate gravelings,” Dean grumbled. “Not that I like a great many monsters, but gravelings are on a level all their own. Most people can’t even see ‘em.”
“Yeah,” Sam agreed absently, continuing to eye the retreating figure as she crumples up a post-it note and tosses it in a garbage bin.
“You realize what that makes her, then?” Dean asked, gesturing toward the girl, who thankfully didn’t notice them.
“Reaper,” Sam answered.
“One of the few things I hate more than gravelings and we can’t even kill ‘em,” Dean replied glumly.
“Can’t kill death,” Sam said. “Gravelings, however…”
“Yeah,” Dean said, pulling a shotgun out of the trunk before slamming it shut. “Let’s get to work.”
They wasted a whole mess of gravelings, but the thing about hunting monsters is that sometimes they hunt back. Sam had gotten the worst of it, getting conked in the head to the point where he’d needed stitches and an overnight stay in the hospital. The whole thing’d been surreal, though. Twice Dean coulda sworn he’d seen their dad in the hallway and Sam’s doctor, a blonde chick who looked too young to have finished med school and too pretty to be taken seriously as a doctor, seemed eerily familiar. All-in-all, Dean had been near as happy as Sam to get the hell out of there as soon as possible.
Two days after the fight on the ferry, they see the girl - the reaper - again. Sam hadn’t been discharged from the hospital for twenty and Dean’d been whining the whole time about having to endure hospital food, so they stopped after two blocks at some waffle house with a bad faux German theme going on that made Dean think somewhat wistfully of Oktoberfest.
Hungry as he is, if he hadn’t ordered yet when they spotted the reaper, Dean woulda agreed with Sammy that they ought to leave. Reapers are bad omens in just about every culture on Earth. But Dean’s got a blueberry waffle with a double side of sausage on the way and there ain’t nobody living or dead that’s gonna come between him and his breakfast after suffering the indignity of eating Sam’s hospital issue sugar-free jello and stale rolls for a day.
“Heads up,” Sam mutters after losing the battle with Dean to get the hell out of there. “She’s got company.”
The reaper is sitting with a mish-mosh group of other people who look like they couldn’t possibly have a thing in common. Unfortunately, as Dean notes this he’s also forced to note that the whole lot of them are staring back. So… there’s that that they’ve got in common anyhow.
“Look alive, Sammy,” Dean mutters as the older man in the group and a thin, snooty looking blonde make their way over to their table with the dour looking girl they’d seen before following, but hanging back slightly.
“Pardon me,” the man says, looking like saying the pleasantry actually pains him. “But my companions and I couldn’t help but notice we’d garnered your attention.”
“I saw you on the ferry,” the girl spits out guardedly. “You were watching me.”
“Watching your work, more like,” Dean smiles humorlessly.
“George,” the man grits toward the girl without his eyes leaving Dean. “Let me handle it.”
“George?” Dean questions. “Your name is George? Did your parents hate you or something?”
“Yes,” the girl says in dull agreement.
“And your names are?” the man asks, domineering over the table in a way that shields the others from Sam and Dean’s view.
“Sam and Dean,” Sam replies before Dean can stop him.
And damn, Dean wonders. How - in a lifetime of this shit - had Sam retained the instinct for honesty?
“Sam and Dean,” the man repeats and Dean can damn near see the lightbulb go on over the guy’s head as recognition dawns. “Sam and Dean Winchester? I’ve heard your names around the office. We don’t get a lot of repeat business in our line of work.”
“I’d imagine not,” Sam replies dryly.
“You’re famous,” says the blonde, speaking up for the first time and scrunching her upturned nose toward Dean in a way she must have thought to be attractive. “I’m Daisy, Daisy Adair. Care to buy me a drink, handsome?”
“Sorry, darlin’. You’re cute for a dead girl, but you’re still a corpse,” he replies, surveying her with an unusual mixture of appreciation and disdain. “A guy’s gotta have standards, you know.”
Sam shoots him a disgruntled look that Dean smiles cheekily at.
“Well… some guy’s have gotta have standards, anyhow,” he amends. “But, I’m afraid you’re still out of luck. I’m pretty sure my brother’s a one corpse kinda guy.”
“Ruby’s not dead… exactly,” Sam protests.
“Yeah. Keep tellin’ yourself that,” Dean smiles. “Oh! Big waffle!”
The older Winchester promptly stuffs his face with an oversized bite of waffle the second the plate hits his table, the group of reapers shifting slightly to allow the waitress to deliver the food, but not leaving.
“What are you guys worried about anyhow?” Sam asks as soon as the waitress is gone. “It’s not like we can axe you guys.”
“Can’t reap the reaper,” Dean agrees, which actually sounds more like ‘Can eep thu eepuh’ through his mouthful of half-chewed sausage.
The blonde no longer looks interested.
“We’re here for breakfast, not a job,” Sam clarifies.
“We’re… uneasy with you here,” the man says diplomatically. “Call it a bad omen.”
“No shit? Well there’s one thing we got in common, anyhow,” Dean says, stabbing a sausage with a fork.
Rating: T (implied sex of the het variety, implied violence and monster killing, profuse swearing, excessive abuse of various fandom canons and timelines, present tense and barely betaed)
Fandoms: Supernatural (spoilers through 4x10) with sides of... Buffy, Angel, Harry Potter, Roswell, Firefly, Dead Like Me, Southern Vampire Novels/True Blood (through ‘All Together Dead’), X-Files, Battlestar Galactica (sort of), Twilight, and Grey’s Anatomy.
Summary: Sometimes it’s not where you’re going that matters; it’s what happens along the way that counts.
Author’s Notes: Um… yeah, I really maybe should apologize for this? You get an idea in your head it sometimes it just… takes off. Most people would have written this as a crack fic and maybe it kind of begs for that. But… well, I wanted to see if I could do it in a slightly more serious way. I’ll leave it up to you to decide if it works or not. Note that to make this work, timelines (and locations) are skewed to fit my purposes. Also I have no idea when the last two parts of this will be posted. But, this works as a standalone too, so don't let that stop you from reading.
i.
They’re in Tulsa or Tucson or some other city with dry heat and too many fucking fake cacti masquerading as decorations. It’s not three hours since they’ve hit the city limits before Dean resolves loudly that they’re going someplace green with temperatures that aren’t in the triple digits after the damn Chupacabra they’re hunting is as dead as the people it’s been eighty-sixing. Weren’t too many goats for it to feed on in this part of the country, it seemed, so it’d decided that people were fair game. Well… that won’t last for long if Dean Winchester has anything to say about it.
He and Sam are Bon and Angus Young this week, despite Sam’s protests that he refuses to answer to the name ‘Angus.’ It doesn’t matter because Dean wins the minute he slams down a fake credit card on the chipped laminate counter of the hotel office and gives the clerk their aliases. There’s not much Sammy can say at that point to contradict him, but he does give a fake smile and grit his teeth in that way that Dean finds endlessly amusing.
Dean’s just a little bit disappointed when the hotel clerk doesn’t get it. Doesn’t anyone listen to good music these days? But the anonymity fake names give them is more than a luxury to them, so it’s only a little disappointment.
Their room is exactly like a hundred other rooms they’ve stayed in. The air conditioner is loud and ineffective and a thick film of tobacco residue coats an ash tray perched in front of a no smoking sign. It’s every hotel Dean’s stayed in since he was four years old and his dad’s trip to see Missouri changed all their lives almost as much as his mom’s death had a few weeks prior.
They aren’t in their hotel room for fifteen minutes before Sam’s giving him shit about how badly they need to do laundry and hands him the option of walking two blocks to clean their clothes or searching for Chupacabra feces to make sure that’s actually what they’re dealing with. Given that option, Dean realizes there’s really no fucking choice at all and heads a few blocks East with their dirt-and monster-stained clothes. Fuck if he’s going to dig through monster shit voluntarily. That’s the kind of thing little brothers are for.
Retrospectively, he’ll realize that’s even more true, because he strides into the laundromat with two suitcases worth of dirty clothes and sees her perched atop a dryer, somehow making sitting look lewd, which is a new one on him. Sam would have no fucking clue what to do in this situation, but he certainly does. She’s damn near riding the dryer with a grin that belies more experience than her barely 20-something body suggests as she tongues a lollypop like she’s trying to get the stick it’s on to orgasm.
He knows she’s dangerous before she says a word. And his certainty is only reaffirmed when she does talk, addressing him with a voice that reeks of smoke and honey, all slow and clinging to the air as she talks.
“Hey there, stud,” she over-annunciates, unabashedly checking him out as the words hang richly in the air.
“Hey yourself,” he says, claiming the washer across from her and leaning against it as he drinks her in.
She’s a tiny thing with dark hair and darker eyes that speak of experience, some of which is good but most of which isn’t. Even her curves, generous as they are, seem to have sharp angles to them, all hard and unyielding. Dean relates to her instantly, even if he doesn’t know her story. It doesn’t matter so much, the details; her life is the same as his.
“That’s an awful lot of blood there,” she says, paying too close attention as he loads his laundry into the washer. “You’re either a hell of a lot of fun or no fun at all. I’m guessing it’s the former.”
He’s awfully glad the laundromat is damn near empty at this point, just him and her and the apparent owner of the place eying them with a barely tolerating scowl. She might be hot as sin, but she’s far too perceptive for her own good - or, for his, anyhow - and he’s fully aware that he and Sam are still wanted by the feds.
“Hunting is a messy business,” he replies truthfully with an edge to his smile that speaks of secrets.
“Ain’t that the fuckin’ God’s honest truth?” she laughs grittily and he just knows she’s looking past what he’s saying to what he really means.
“I got some extra of this stuff,” she says, tossing him a small canister of something-or-other.
“Nothin’ gets blood out better than that,” she continues, playing with her lollypop like it’s a cigarette, absently puffing cherry flavor and red dye number five. “I should know. Done more than my fair share of hunting.”
“Thanks,” he says, more for the confidence than the stain remover.
“Bon Young,” he says as a greeting, as a test, extending his hand.
“Right,” she laughs. “And I’m Joan-fucking-Jett.”
He grins back, infinitely please that she passed the test.
“Dean Winchester,” he admits.
“Somehow,” she drawls, “I believe that.
“Faith,” she replies, shaking his hand as she simultaneously molests his fingertips.
“Just Faith?” he asks, half-amused and half-flirty.
“Yeah,” she replies. “Just Faith.”
ii.
Impersonating the FBI, in Sam’s experience, generally works better if the FBI isn’t actually involved. He’s nervous enough that he actually doesn’t catch the agents’ names and thankfully Dean steps up, smooth-talking his way back to claiming that they’re Homeland Security or Federal Marshalls something while Sam’s heart races in his throat.
The woman, a tiny redhead focused entirely on Dean, but not in the way women usually are, seems to not believe a word coming out of his mouth. Sam can’t blame her; none of it is true, after all. Her partner, though, he’s the more worrisome of the two.
Sometimes Sam resents just a little bit how easily Dean slips into the spotlight, pulling on the attentions of everyone around him. This isn’t one of those times. But the other FBI agent, he seems immune to Dean’s magnetism, paying at least as much attention to Sam as he does his brother and surveying their chintzy alien-themed surroundings with the look of a kid let loose in a candy store. Sam knows on sight that he’s one of those guys that sees everything, even when it looks like he isn’t paying attention at all. And isn’t that just the bitch of it? One of the few times Sam is glad for his brother’s ability to draw the focus of everyone around him, it fails.
He’s only half listening as Dean cajoles their way out of trouble, thinking instead how stupid it was for them to come here in the first place. Honestly. Roswell? Even if the whole alien thing were true, it’s hardly their area of expertise. Ghosts and demons were one thing, but aliens? That’s a whole different ballgame and one Sam really isn’t interested in playing.
They’re in this cute little diner filled with touristy shit that alien fanatics - apparently including the one FBI agent - seem to love and Sam would be certain there wasn’t anything here to find if two of the restaurant’s waitresses didn’t look certifiably nervous as they fidgeted with refilling bottles of Tabasco sauce over and over again. Fuck but he doesn’t want there to be anything here to find. Ghosts he can take. Or demons or werewolves or God-damned zombies. But aliens? They freak him the hell out.
“You know what?” Sam finally speaks up as he notices Dean get distracted by a jail-bait drop-dead gorgeous blonde eying him speculatively from a booth behind the female agent.
Only thing worse than a suspicious FBI agent when you’re wanted by the feds is one you’ve pissed off by not paying attention to ‘em. Dean’s a smart guy, certainly smart enough to know that, but he’s also got the attention span of a gnat when there’s a hot girl in the picture and Sam can just see this going downhill.
“Why don’t you give us your card and we’ll be in touch? Let you know if we find anything and compare notes?” Sam asks, smiling disarmingly at the female agent, effectively distracting her for the moment from Dean’s errant stare.
He’s pretty sure that she and her partner aren’t buying a word of what he and his brother are peddling - the guy in particular seems the skeptical type - but the agents have no reason to hold them and so he and Dean take their cards and high tail it out of there, getting the Impala on the road before the café door finishes shutting behind them.
Dean is less than happy about leaving a case unsolved, but there’s no deaths here, no damage done at all - just some local talk about a girl getting magically healed - so Sam really couldn’t give a shit and tells his brother as much.
“We just almost got busted. And for what? Aliens, Dean?” Sam scoffs, throwing his brother a disbelieving look. “Might as well be chasing after Bigfoot.”
iii.
You didn’t need an EMF reader to tell something was off about this town. From the moment they’d hit the city limits, it was evident that this wasn’t your average sleepy, one-Starbucks kind of place. It was the kind of town that only managed to mimic normal, and not terribly well, at that. All-in-all, the flattened welcome sign along the side of the road seemed oddly appropriate. Dean had a feeling that this town would break you, if you gave it half a chance.
“We should stop,” he says in a way that would have been an order if their dad had been the one saying it.
“No fucking way,” Sam says, eyes glued to the road and foot pressing firmly on the gas pedal.
“Come on, Sammy. This place crawls,” Dean groans in a long-suffering voice. “This is what we do!”
Sam shoots him a disbelieving look, never varying the car’s speed as the EMF reader wails with a loud, constant, otherworldly whine in the backseat.
“Do you have a deathwish? Seriously, man. This is not at all what we do,” he counters. “This is so beyond what we do. The EMF has been shrieking like a banshee for at least two miles.”
“It could be a banshee,” Dean says.
“It could be a hundred banshees, not a banshee,” Sam replies stoically.
They haven’t had a good fight since that demon in Flagstaff two weeks ago and Dean is itching for something to kill. Sam knows it. Honestly, he’s feeling it, too. That’s the problem with this life. Or, it’s part of the problem, anyhow. You do this long enough, you forget how to do anything else. It all becomes a long line of hunts with shitty motel rooms and shittier truck stop meals punctuating the time between.
“There’s something here,” Dean argues.
“You think?” Sam asks, sarcasm heavy in his voice. “Have you ever seen a town with this many damn graveyards? What is that, the tenth one we’ve seen?”
The cemetery in question is gothic and creepy in a way that oddly fits the town and Dean’s seen a hell of a lot of cemeteries, so calling it creepy really means something coming from him. He almost would have been more surprised if nothing had happened, if some nightmare come to life hadn’t reared its evil head amidst the cracked mausoleums and broken headstones. But, as it turns out, Dean isn’t disappointed.
The Winchester boys have seen a lot of crazy things over the years - demons and mummies, vampires and werewolves… everything but the goddamn boogeyman, it seems like. But Dean’s pretty damn sure he ain’t never seen anything like this. If it weren’t sweltering in the dead heat of summer, he’d have been checking his calendar to see if it was Halloween and he’d somehow forgotten. The thing he spies in the graveyard looks more like a half-assed costume than any sort of actual monster. And, even knowing all the evil sons of bitches that exist in the world, he questions for a minute if what he’s seeing is real.
“Sammy… I’m not hallucinating, am I?” he asks cautiously.
“If you are, I am, too,” his brother replies, the car crawling to a halt. “What is that thing?”
“It’s… It’s… Well, it’s slimy,” Dean says finally, staring somewhat blankly at the thing.
“With antlers,” Sam follows up, cocking his head to the side and studying the thing with scholarly interest.
“Well, whatever it is, it’s dead,” Dean says suddenly with a little too much enthusiasm, opening the car door quickly as the thing stalks a pretty blonde girl and her wannabe Sid Vicious boyfriend strolling nearby.
He’s all set to yell at Sam to pop the trunk when he sees his brother’s eyebrows raise in surprise, his gaze still set toward the graveyard.
“I… I think they’ve got it covered, Dean,” Sam says and Dean turns just in time to see Sid toss his cheerleader girlfriend what looks like a scythe - and where the hell had he been hiding that- so she can lop the thing’s head clean off, antlers and all.
“…the hell?” Dean asks rhetorically.
“Maybe Bobby will know about that thing? Or Dad’s journal could have something on the town?” Sam asks not sounding particularly confident.
Sid and California Barbie have spotted them, him offering up a nod that might have been a bit of a challenge or maybe was appreciative toward the car or possibly a little of both. For her part, his companion is standing nearby trying lamely to hide the scythe behind her petite frame. Dean nods back, impressed with their handling of… whatever that thing was.
“What was the name of this town, anyhow?” Sam asks as his brother climbs back in the car.
“Dunno. Sunvale or Moondale or something like that,” Dean shrugs. “Let’s go, man. This place gives me the creeps.”
iv.
It’s not so much raining as it is misting, like the damn air is sweating. Dean hadn’t thought that much of anything could make him long for Tulsa or Tucson in the heat of summer, but Seattle in early Fall has him second guessing that. He’s all for greenery, but damn… not at the expense of sunlight.
Reports of a pair of seemingly unrelated deaths and a rash of mechanical failures on the ferries that run on Puget Sound had brought the brothers to Washington on the hunt for a poltergeist. But, after witnessing a third and fourth death for themselves, it was Sam who’d first figured out what was really going on.
“Damn. Gravelings,” Sam had sighed, watching the same dour looking girl stride away as they’d seen the last time someone had died on the ferry.
“I hate gravelings,” Dean grumbled. “Not that I like a great many monsters, but gravelings are on a level all their own. Most people can’t even see ‘em.”
“Yeah,” Sam agreed absently, continuing to eye the retreating figure as she crumples up a post-it note and tosses it in a garbage bin.
“You realize what that makes her, then?” Dean asked, gesturing toward the girl, who thankfully didn’t notice them.
“Reaper,” Sam answered.
“One of the few things I hate more than gravelings and we can’t even kill ‘em,” Dean replied glumly.
“Can’t kill death,” Sam said. “Gravelings, however…”
“Yeah,” Dean said, pulling a shotgun out of the trunk before slamming it shut. “Let’s get to work.”
They wasted a whole mess of gravelings, but the thing about hunting monsters is that sometimes they hunt back. Sam had gotten the worst of it, getting conked in the head to the point where he’d needed stitches and an overnight stay in the hospital. The whole thing’d been surreal, though. Twice Dean coulda sworn he’d seen their dad in the hallway and Sam’s doctor, a blonde chick who looked too young to have finished med school and too pretty to be taken seriously as a doctor, seemed eerily familiar. All-in-all, Dean had been near as happy as Sam to get the hell out of there as soon as possible.
Two days after the fight on the ferry, they see the girl - the reaper - again. Sam hadn’t been discharged from the hospital for twenty and Dean’d been whining the whole time about having to endure hospital food, so they stopped after two blocks at some waffle house with a bad faux German theme going on that made Dean think somewhat wistfully of Oktoberfest.
Hungry as he is, if he hadn’t ordered yet when they spotted the reaper, Dean woulda agreed with Sammy that they ought to leave. Reapers are bad omens in just about every culture on Earth. But Dean’s got a blueberry waffle with a double side of sausage on the way and there ain’t nobody living or dead that’s gonna come between him and his breakfast after suffering the indignity of eating Sam’s hospital issue sugar-free jello and stale rolls for a day.
“Heads up,” Sam mutters after losing the battle with Dean to get the hell out of there. “She’s got company.”
The reaper is sitting with a mish-mosh group of other people who look like they couldn’t possibly have a thing in common. Unfortunately, as Dean notes this he’s also forced to note that the whole lot of them are staring back. So… there’s that that they’ve got in common anyhow.
“Look alive, Sammy,” Dean mutters as the older man in the group and a thin, snooty looking blonde make their way over to their table with the dour looking girl they’d seen before following, but hanging back slightly.
“Pardon me,” the man says, looking like saying the pleasantry actually pains him. “But my companions and I couldn’t help but notice we’d garnered your attention.”
“I saw you on the ferry,” the girl spits out guardedly. “You were watching me.”
“Watching your work, more like,” Dean smiles humorlessly.
“George,” the man grits toward the girl without his eyes leaving Dean. “Let me handle it.”
“George?” Dean questions. “Your name is George? Did your parents hate you or something?”
“Yes,” the girl says in dull agreement.
“And your names are?” the man asks, domineering over the table in a way that shields the others from Sam and Dean’s view.
“Sam and Dean,” Sam replies before Dean can stop him.
And damn, Dean wonders. How - in a lifetime of this shit - had Sam retained the instinct for honesty?
“Sam and Dean,” the man repeats and Dean can damn near see the lightbulb go on over the guy’s head as recognition dawns. “Sam and Dean Winchester? I’ve heard your names around the office. We don’t get a lot of repeat business in our line of work.”
“I’d imagine not,” Sam replies dryly.
“You’re famous,” says the blonde, speaking up for the first time and scrunching her upturned nose toward Dean in a way she must have thought to be attractive. “I’m Daisy, Daisy Adair. Care to buy me a drink, handsome?”
“Sorry, darlin’. You’re cute for a dead girl, but you’re still a corpse,” he replies, surveying her with an unusual mixture of appreciation and disdain. “A guy’s gotta have standards, you know.”
Sam shoots him a disgruntled look that Dean smiles cheekily at.
“Well… some guy’s have gotta have standards, anyhow,” he amends. “But, I’m afraid you’re still out of luck. I’m pretty sure my brother’s a one corpse kinda guy.”
“Ruby’s not dead… exactly,” Sam protests.
“Yeah. Keep tellin’ yourself that,” Dean smiles. “Oh! Big waffle!”
The older Winchester promptly stuffs his face with an oversized bite of waffle the second the plate hits his table, the group of reapers shifting slightly to allow the waitress to deliver the food, but not leaving.
“What are you guys worried about anyhow?” Sam asks as soon as the waitress is gone. “It’s not like we can axe you guys.”
“Can’t reap the reaper,” Dean agrees, which actually sounds more like ‘Can eep thu eepuh’ through his mouthful of half-chewed sausage.
The blonde no longer looks interested.
“We’re here for breakfast, not a job,” Sam clarifies.
“We’re… uneasy with you here,” the man says diplomatically. “Call it a bad omen.”
“No shit? Well there’s one thing we got in common, anyhow,” Dean says, stabbing a sausage with a fork.