SPN/DA crossover fic: Of Desire and the Status Quo (31/38)
Story Title: Of Desire and the Status Quo
Chapter Title: Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely
Fandom(s): Supernatural, Dark Angel
Summary: In the end, it’s a complete accident that gets Dean Winchester out of Hell.
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 7,182
Disclaimer: Same stuff applies as in the first chapter. Oh, and unfortunately I neither own Supernatural nor Dark Angel. Just this.
Of Desire and the Status Quo
Chapter XXXI: Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely
Alec watches Dean closely, watches as he starts walking towards Sam and the woman, homicide in his eyes. Alec’s not inclined to let this shit go down, and grabs Dean’s arm, hard enough to leave bruises but not caring. Dean struggles against his grip, but Alec’s got test-tube created strength on his side, which, to Dean’s annoyance, trumps his adrenaline and anger.
That’s not to say that Alec’s disregarding this whole thing. Waiting a moment until he’s sure Dean won’t bolt, he then follows Sam and the woman quietly, a good distance away. Alec’s always been a master at tracking, at stealth and evasion, as has Dean, and so even with Sam’s hunter instincts, he doesn’t notice he’s being followed.
They wait a minute after Sam and the woman get into a yellow convertible, and then Alec starts up their own car and follows. It’s a good ten minutes from the forest to where Sam stops, pulling into a parking lot of a trashy motel. Dean is nearly vibrating with held-in anger and confusion, his body stiff in the seat.
They both get out, Alec looking up at the two-letters-out motel sign that reads “Astoria Hotel,” and moves towards where he’d seen Sam and the woman go-Room 207-when Dean puts a hand on his arm.
“Stay here,” he growls. “I don’t want you in there.”
Alec’s about to hotly reject, but sees Dean’s intense stare, and knows that this is something to be dealt with between brothers, between Dean and Sam, and while Alec felt he’d built up a kind of kinship with Dean over the last couple days, he’s cognizant enough to realize this isn’t his party. He nods, and Dean walks purposefully towards the room, shoulders square.
Of course, as much as Alec respects Dean’s decision, he’s not stupid. Harnessing the stealth of his cat DNA, he chases after Dean, hiding behind a pillar lest Dean see him. He hears Dean knock, and despite himself, he holds his breath. There’s what sounds like Dean’s shove, and then he walks in. It’s like being in a war zone, and he can’t do shit to stop or help whatever’s going to go down next. He’s a man of action, and this waiting crap is not his style.
It’s fucking annoying (and, though he wouldn’t cop to it, worrying) is what it is.
He hadn’t been able to hear Dean’s-and Sam’s-voices from where he was, so it gets his attention when, barely a minute after Dean had stepped in, he starts to hear noises. At first he doesn’t make anything of it, but when his finely-tuned ears hear what sounds like a scuffle, he runs into the room.
“HEY!” he yells, seeing Sam and Dean wrestling, Sam wielding a thick knife aimed toward Dean’s throat.
Even though Sam’s spitting fire from his eyes, his face screwed up in a terrible mixture of rage, desolation, and perhaps a little confusion, and is fighting his toughest, Alec can see Dean isn’t doing the same. It’s not even that his muscles still aren’t what they used to be; Alec knows Dean can fight almost just as well. But here…it’s plain to anyone that Dean’s not putting his heard into trying to defend himself, even more than just because his left shoulder is nowhere near optimum operation. Alec think sadly that the likely truth is that Dean doesn’t want to hurt Sam.
Luckily for Dean’s life, however, Alec had hung around, and, not giving a second thought to what Dean might chide him for, blurs in and catches Sam in the chest, throwing the taller man across the room and, most importantly, away from Dean. Sam hits the motel wall with echoing force, Alec using nearly all his strength behind the blow. He’s never fought against Sam before, doesn’t know Sam’s fighting styles or strength, and he isn’t going to take any chances. He wants Dean to reunite with his brother, certainly, but if the expense is Dean’s life? Not in a million years.
“Alec!” Dean shouts, with a good amount of breathiness behind it. “I told you to stay put!”
“He was gonna kill you!” Alec snaps back, keeping his peripheral on Sam, who’s slowly standing up, wincing.
“What…”
Sam can’t seem to say anything coherent, and in spite of the fact that he’s obviously one breath away from twigging out again, he manages to stay against the wall, and stares between Dean and Alec. Alec slightly feels guilty-Sam would’ve already been freaked enough (all evidence to that) with Dean reappearing; having, as far as he knows, twenty-one-year-old Dean and twenty-nine-year-old Dean together would be some definite mind fucking.
Dean turns his glare from Alec over to his brother, despite everything they just saw, the intensity changing from vexation to softness. “Sammy…it’s me,” he says, in the kind of voice Alec’s never heard before. Not in anyone.
Sam’s expression doesn’t change, that hatred reigning. For Dean, it’s strange seeing Sam like this; not just seeing him after two thousand years, but his face. His hair is still as floppy as ever, and his stature is still in the realm of a Sasquatch, but…there’s a lankness in his hair that makes it hang straight and mussed; Dean recognizes everything Sam’s wearing, as if he hadn’t bought any new clothes since that day; behind his still lightning-fast reflexes are muscles that don’t want to be used that hard anymore; there are lines and shadows in his face that had never been there before; worst of all, his eyes, his soulful green-blue eyes, are dead.
Dean looks into them, and it’s like looking into a deep well, the water murky and black, the end of it unfathomable and yet you know all that’s at the bottom is cold, hard stone.
“D-Dean?” Sam breathes, his voice choking on the name, like he hadn’t been able to utter it for thirteen years. And he probably hadn’t. “But…no…”
“I know,” says Dean, trying to withhold a smile (Sam had been drinking demon blood, he attempts to remind himself) and not quite succeeding, “I look fantastic, huh?”
Alec senses it before Dean could ever hope to, and as Sam hurls his silver knife through the air, Alec’s hand whips out to catch it only a few inches before it would have buried itself fatally into the middle of Dean’s heart. Disgusted, Alec throws the knife downward, the blade sticking fast in the wood flooring.
He looks up to see Sam’s face both surprised (Alec presumes it’s that, despite Sam’s expert aim, the knife had been caught out of midair) and infuriated. With more foreboding, he looks over to Dean’s. What once held affection now houses something between more of the deepest betrayal, the likes of which Alec had only seen in that forest, and horror. Dean’s been attacked by Sam before, but never when both of them were completely human.
Dean could handle that attack if he were, say, having his brains addled by a psychiatrist spirit, or a demon possessing him, or anything else that’s something Dean could fight. And he understands Sam’s shock. He’d be the same way if their roles were reversed. But he’d thought Sam would at least hear him out. If Dean were an evil bastard, and he’d wanted to kill Sam, he would have done it already.
He doesn’t know what to do know. He could’ve handled Sam’s initial fighting back-hell, he wants him to; God knows Dean wants a good fight, given what he saw Sam do-regardless of his weakened shoulder. Fine. But for Sam to have stopped the fighting and then to chuck a knife with a killing blow…Dean has no idea.
“Sammy,” Dean whispers, swallowing. If he wants to get to the bottom of this whole fuckup, he needs Sam to know it’s him. “Sammy, it’s me.”
“You think your fucking shapeshifter trick is gonna work on me?” Sam shouts, gesturing to both Alec and Dean. “What, you think that by bringing in two of you fuckers to look like Dean is gonna break me? Fuck you!”
Dean flinches, and Alec bristles. Truthfully, Alec doesn’t give a damn what Sam says about him, but to say that to Dean? Alec eyes the knife in the floor, debating whether to brandish it against Dean’s brother.
“Sam,” Dean implores, taking a step towards his brother, his every move watched by both men in the room. “Just…look.” Dean crosses past Alec, reaching down and yanking the knife out. “If I was anything-shapeshifter, revenant, whatever-could I do this with a silver knife?”
To Alec’s surprise, Dean places the blade against his forearm and drags it across his skin, a thick line of viscous red fluid welling up along the wound and dripping onto the hardwood. Nothing happens (not like Alec would’ve known if it did, but it didn’t look like anything happened), and Sam glances from the cut up to Dean’s face, his eyes narrowing.
“Fine,” Sam says harshly. “So the hell what? You could be a hundred different things. But you know something? You’re not my brother, you son of a bitch. My brother’s been dead thirteen fucking years, and he ain’t coming back!”
“Dude, stow the yelling,” Alec intervenes stepping forward. “There’s a reason for all of this, if you’d just hold off on the Terminator crap for two friggin’ seconds.”
Sam switches his attention to Alec, and Alec’s suddenly not sure he prefers this. “That’s the best you freaks could do?” Sam sneers. “Transforming into some scrawny imitation of m’brother? Try again.”
“I’ll list every single damn hunt we’ve been on, Sammy,” Dean says, finally gaining a foothold on his voice. “I’ll list everything only I could know about you, I’ll prove myself however, Sammy. It’s me.”
For a millisecond, Alec thinks he catches a glimmer of concession in Sam’s face, but then it’s back to disgust. “Eat me,” retorts Sam. “Who the hell knows what you bastards forced out of him? I’m not trusting anything that comes out of your mouth.”
“I didn’t break,” Dean refuses, and it’s true. It was stupid, but he’d felt that if he surrendered even the seemingly smallest bits of information, even something as frivolous as Sam’s middle name, he’d be losing Sam in a way. He didn’t care if the demons knew crap about himself, but Sam? No way. Never. He wouldn’t let them tarnish the one solid thing in his life. “You think I would?”
Sam starts to respond, but is interrupted when a woman, dressed in a burgundy t-shirt and cropped shorts, saunters through the door and into the room. “Sam, I got the-”
She stops when she notices it’s not only Sam in the room. As she takes the others in, Alec, his over-accurate eyes focusing on her, sees her face pale the slightest bit. He doubts Dean, or even Sam, could tell the difference, but Alec immediately knows something’s up.
She’s pretty, Alec will give her that, her hair chocolate brown and reaching to right below her breast, her body perfectly proportioned, but in her dark eyes, there’s something…not right. It isn’t even like how Sam’s are, all dead inside, it’s…Alec can’t describe it, beyond just plain wrong.
Whether Dean had seen her face whiten or not, however, he sees something entirely different in the young woman’s visage. His own face twists into pure hate, the worst Alec’s seen, and he adjusts his grip on the serrated blade Sam had thrown at him.
“Ruby,” Dean growls low in his throat, taking steps towards her and looking more like a predator stalking its prey than Alec knows any of the X’s looked. Lydecker would be proud, he thinks sickly. “The fuck are you doing here, you lying, manipulative bitch?”
Sam frowns deeply, glancing between this “Ruby” person-apparently she’s of some note, but Alec doesn’t know for what-and Dean, shocked. “How did you-”
Dean, deciding he’s done with the foreplay, whips the knife, as fast if not faster than Sam had, at Ruby’s chest. She only has time to move a little out of the way, taken off-guard not only by Dean’s appearance, but also at the out-of-the-blue attack, and the metal sinks itself to the hilt in her sternum.
Alec expects her to drop dead, but she doesn’t. She looks in a certain amount of discomfort, but merely grasps the handle and slowly pulls it out, the metal coated in blood. “Dean…” Ruby says, keeping her voice the kind of tone meant to put on a show for someone, but to others make a threat known. Alec feels no compunction to abide. “Looks like you got friends in high places.”
Dean’s fists are clenched so tight his short nails dig into his palms, near to the point of breaking skin. Tearing his gaze away from her, he instead turns it to Sam, a certain amount of incredulity in it. “Sam?” he grinds out. “What the hell are you doing? Kill her!”
“Tell your brother to shut it, Sam,” Ruby says, her tone more clipped than she would usually take with the younger sibling. (Older? Alec’s not sure how to refer to them…)
Sam flicks his eyes between Ruby and Dean. “What?” he asks hoarsely, no concentrating only on Ruby. “My brother?”
Ruby looks appropriately Oh, shit-faced, and then makes to flee the room. As Sam doesn’t look to stop her, and Alec thinks Dean’s brain isn’t firing on all cylinders just yet, he blurs over and blocks her exit. She starts, obviously not expecting Alec’s ability.
“Hold up there, sister,” he says with a sneer. “You ain’t goin’ anywhere.”
“Get the hell out of my way, pipsqueak,” Ruby orders, her threat completely belying the sweet nature her body would imply.
Alec spares the minutest of seconds to glance up at Dean. His expression hadn’t changed much since Ruby’d arrived, but there’s a shade of pleading in it that Alec picks up. pleading, he’d wager, to stop Ruby. Alec doesn’t know how she plays into anything, but it’s not like she’s done jack thus far to get particularly in Alec’s good graces, so.
In another flurry of motion that no one else in the room would be able to pinpoint, Alec simultaneously vises Ruby’s wrists together behind her back and puts his free arm across her throat, cutting off her air supply. In another state of affairs, Ruby would be able to fight Alec off like any other human. But Alec isn’t any other human, and even though Ruby’s demonically enhanced strength might even still be able to match him-as Kalinda had-Alec’s got one thing going for him: fury. And protective instincts he’d never experienced before.
Sam moves to, Alec presumes, get him off Ruby, but in a shocking display of loyalty, Dean mirrors the actions, sufficiently preventing Sam from doing so. The two brothers staring at each other like some kind of old west showdown, Alec gives a final yank of his arm, and Ruby slumps to the floor, unconscious.
“She was annoying,” Alec says, stepping over her body.
“She’s a demon,” Dean snarls, the abhorrence behind it aligned with that of Hitler towards Jews. That is to say, not favorably.
“A demon?” asks Alec, the indignation on Dean’s behalf coming through now that he’d finally accepted-well, “accepted”-their existence, especially now having seen it firsthand. “How did you know?”
Dean snorts heartily, looking very much like he’d like nothing more than to spit on her limp form. “Oh, trust me,” he says, and Alec thinks that’s a little redundant (he’s long since trusted Dean). “After a while Down There, you learn who your enemies are. And how to tell them apart, even if they are possessing some poor chick.”
Uneasy silence passes between the three for what could be days, and then Sam puts a hand on the headboard of the closest bed, like he’s steadying himself.
His face crumbles, and his eyes mist over. “Dean?” he says in a choked kind of voice, staring straight at his brother. “But you…this isn’t possible.”
“After everything we’ve seen, you think anything’s impossible?” Dean says, taking steps toward Sam, even though Alec watches the both of them like a homicidal kind of hawk.
After a few more moments, Sam suddenly crosses the distance and envelopes his brother in a rib-crushing hug, his eyes squeezed shut, arms unforgiving against Dean’s shoulders. Dean returns it in kind, not caring in the least that Sam’s worsening his injury, and the stitches are probably groaning against the movement. He’s a good four inches shorter than Sam, but neither really gives a shit, Dean’s hand coming up to grasp the collar of Sam’s shirt in a white-knuckled grip, like trying to convince himself Sam is, after all these years, real.
Alec stands impatiently, not giving up on his suspicion and dislike of Sam so far-evidently Dean had forgotten for the moment that whole demon blood detail-and casting a glance at Ruby’s prone body, ready for any sign whatsoever that she might be faking her unconsciousness. He may not be completely familiar with demon antics or the extent of their powers, but he’s tensed for anything, won’t hesitate for a second to once again stop her. Kill her if he needs to.
Finally, the brothers separate, though still only an arm and a half’s length apart. “H-How?” Sam asks coarsely. “Dean, you…Bobby and I buried you.”
Dean works his jaw at the mention of Bobby, flashing back to the man’s bodiless grave, but ultimately gets a hold of himself. “Why did you bury me?” he counters, the idea festering in the back of his mind ever since he’d awakened in that snake- and Harry Potter wannabes-filled warehouse.
Sam looks regretful. “Bobby wanted you salted and burned,” he explains, and Dean gives a Well, duh face, Alec sustaining his disbelief at how normal this conversation seems to be going for the Winchesters, “but I couldn’t, Dean. I couldn’t. Not yet.”
Dean’s eyes narrow, their green depths searching for something invisible. “You made a deal,” he breathes, almost hoping that’s why Sam had drunk Ruby’s blood. “You made a deal.”
Sam, however, doesn’t seem to follow Dean’s train of thought. “I tried. I wish I had done it,” he admits, his own chest constricting at the vision of himself, smashed, begging that Crossroads Demon. “But no demon would deal, all right? I tried finding Lilith, tried opening the Devil’s Gate, tried fucking everything. You were rotting in Hell for years, for years, and I couldn’t stop it. I’m so sorry, Dean. I’m sorry it wasn’t me. I tried so hard to get you back.”
Dean wants to say something like There’s no other way this could have gone down, or There’s no other reason why you were drinking Ruby’s blood, shake Sam until he confessed that his soul is on the line, that he’d brought Dean back. But he can’t, can’t get rid of the notion that his return had something very much to do with the Latinating, red-robed snake-people. He can see the raw truth-truth in Sam’s trying to resurrect Dean-can read his expressions just as well as he’d always been able to. Even though Sam’s older, his features more angular and haunted, he can still read Sam like an open book.
“I believe you,” says Dean, exhaling sharply.
“Well, I fucking don’t,” Alec snaps, and both brothers flinch, like they’d completely forgotten his presence. They turn to look at him, Alec suddenly finding their resemblance uncanny, can see they’re really brothers, family, but he has to get past it for now.
“Alec,” Dean chastises, as Sam stares openly at Alec once more.
Who firmly disregards both of them. “Look, it’s super that Sam’s soul is safe or what the hell ever, but we got at least two questions here: what got you out of Hell, Dean, and what has Sammy here been doing with Demon Bitch?”
Sam’s got that look again, and though Alec won’t back down, he’s still wary. It isn’t like Sam’s been particularly kind to him thus far. “I’ve got a question,” Sam says in a tone not unlike ice, and directed as much toward Dean as Alec. “Who’s he? Tell me he’s not another ’shifter…”
“God fuck it!” Alec shouts, his tolerance shot. “I’m not a damn shapeshifter!”
Dean holds back on amusement of all things, and instead looks to Sam. “He’s, uh…they call ’em transgenics,” he says, realizing that because they’d spent so much time and energy finding Sam, they hadn’t thought much about figuring out the link between him and Alec. He makes a mental note to get on that. With Sam around, maybe it’d go faster.
Alec really doesn’t fancy explaining everything about himself again, but he discovers he doesn’t have to. Sam’s face turning to comprehension, he glances between the two doubles. “You’re a transgenic?” he asks. “Aren’t you guys supposed to be in Washington?”
About to go into another outburst, Alec sputters to a stop as Dean speaks up for him. “He’s all right, Sammy,” he says placidly. “He’s a damn pain in the ass, but he’s one of the good guys. If you heard some of what they went through, Sam…”
Alec purses his lips, not wanting Dean to elaborate to someone Alec’s still shaky on trusting, but thankfully he doesn’t. Just leaves it to the imagination, which, in Alec’s case, is more likely better than the actual truth. Of course, apparently just because Sam had been dead inside his own body, it hadn’t completely squelched his thirst for knowing everything.
“So…why does he look like you?” Sam inquires, far from getting over the zero difference between Dean from twenty-one years ago and the Dean dopplegänger in front of him now.
“I have a name,” says Alec waspishly. “It’s Alec, thanks very much.”
Sam would rather distance the man who’d just identified himself from the Dean he knew when he was seventeen, but he’s quickly coming to surrender that, thus far, their mannerisms are also in that zero difference category. Sending a concerned eye over to Ruby, who’s in a position eerily similar to her last body upon demise, Sam regards Alec with an identical mood as Alec does him.
“Okay, Alec,” Sam emphasizes, forcing himself to try and see past the countenance and tell himself it’s not Dean, “care to explain the resemblance thing you’ve got with my brother?”
“Sam, calm down,” Dean interjects again, feeling fairly unexpected rushes to defend Alec, even if from Sam. “We haven’t figured that out yet. We…wanted to find you first.”
Alec literally bites his tongue to prevent from lashing out. He’s afraid that if he were to, he’d say something that would make Dean look at him like Alec never wants to be looked at again. He’s afraid that any wrong move now, and Dean would dump him for Sam in an instant, even ignoring Dean’s various interruptions of Sam’s antagonism.
Just because Alec had spent a week with Dean wouldn’t, he knows, replace twenty-five years of love and family and blood that Dean shares with Sam. Alec wonders what Max would say if he returned to Terminal City sans Dean, and had to explain to her that Dean’d dropped him like an old hat to go and spend his time with Sam instead. He doesn’t know if he could handle her pity and I-told-you-so looks.
“I don’t suppose you’re one of those assholes who thinks we’re the lowest scum of the earth and deserve to be ripped apart by mobsters,” says Alec flatly, his eyes guarded and level.
Whether Sam senses he’s possibly in danger of Alec’s wrath, or whether he simply doesn’t care one way or the other, he answers with a shrug, “Hadn’t crossed my mind. I’m used to people being assuming bastards.”
Alec thinks Sam’s trying to form an allusion to his and Dean’s work being severely underappreciated and misunderstood, but Alec can’t quite accept it. The populace may have wanted the brothers behind bars at Supermax, but that doesn’t equate to the populace wanting to slaughter, crucify, burn Alec and his brethren on crude pyres in the from of an X. It isn’t like Sam and Dean were exactly forced to flee into a toxic waste dump with a twenty-four/seven military guard around them.
“Yeah, well,” Alec hedges, “you did try to maim me. I’ll withhold judgment if you don’t mind.”
Dean raises an eyebrow at Alec, the gesture explicitly accusing him of being a hypocrite. And fine, maybe he is (though, to be fair, Dean also committed a Sam to him) but something about this whole situation seems off to him, and he’d rather be on his guard than be caught unawares. That nonchalance has bitten him in the ass before-getting too cocky after a cage fight and so being captured by a genocidal sociopath, anyone?-and he’d really rather not have it happen again.
“Anyway,” Alec continues, undeterred for the most part, “uh…if that chick over there is some death-worthy demon…why in the world is she still fuckin’ alive?”
For a second, Dean looks like he wants to slam Alec against the wall in anger, but, in spite of his distraction of actually believing that somehow Dean’s back from Hell, and that Ruby’s currently unconscious, he’d really like that particular mystery solved. Of course, it has to be just some ploy of Sam’s, some trick of nicety so he can use Ruby, the drinking her blood just a ruse, but…
Everything is made worse when Sam shifts his weight, the appearance a poster for guilty discomfort. “Dean...”
“You’re not working with her,” Dean states despairingly.
Trained to decode expressions and essentially be his own personal polygraph, Alec can see lies written all over Sam’s face, but for the time being, he’ll hold his words. It’s something Dean needs to decipher for himself.
“It’s not what you think,” Sam defends solidly.
“Fuck, Sam, please tell me you’re just exploiting her,” Dean pleads, a desperation that Alec hasn’t seen since he realized Dean wanted to find Sam in part because Sam could understand Dean’s Hell. “You have to know she’s the epitome of evil.”
“She was helping me find Lilith, thinking of ways to get you out,” Sam defends. At Dean’s disbelief, he exclaims, “You don’t know what it was like! Ruby was the only one who could help me with all of this!”
“She’s a demon, Sam! You’re choosing her over me? I know she’s evil! I was there!”
“You trusted her, too, you know.”
Dean gives himself a second to close his eyes and breathe deeply. “I never fucking trusted her,” he says coldly. And he hadn’t-acknowledged her occasional helpfulness, sure, but trust? Hardly. “I never thought you’d be stupid enough to fall for her lies, Sam. Especially after everything she did.”
Alec wonders how everything had suddenly gotten so out of hand. It’s like riding a roller coaster no matter how many Winchesters are in the room. It’d been bad enough with Dean, he thinks, but with Sam here, too? Might as well be watching Russian Roulette ping pong, his eyes darting between the two, trying to see Sam’s side, yet entirely unable to. Even if he doesn’t know all the particulars, he can’t imagine how someone could actually believe a demon’s manipulations, drink their blood. Alec knows he wouldn’t, and he wonders how the hell Sam, a demon hunter could.
“You were in Hell, Dean,” Sam chokes, the words getting caught in his throat. “You don’t know how it was for me, losing you like that…I thought I was going to die, Dean. I almost did.”
“So, what,” Dean retorts, in full acknowledgement that Sam probably was close to suicide, but unable to see past him being fuck buddies with Ruby, “you thought you’d honor my memory by inducting that bitch in place of me? That goes against everything we fought for, Sam! Everything I tried to protect you from!”
Sam’s jaw clenches, his back stiff as he looks down at Dean. “Protect me?” he parrots, eyes showing a remembrance that everyone except Alec is all too aware of. “That didn’t work out so well, did it?”
Dean flinches like Sam had slapped him, staring at him, not able to believe the words coming out of his brother’s mouth. “You didn’t use to need demonic help,” Dean remarks. “What happened to that Sam?”
“He died with you,” Sam answers, his sallow face reflecting the misery of the sentence. “Ruby was willing to accept that, and she helped me, Dean. She changed.”
“Demons don’t change, Sam,” Dean says, disappointment written everywhere. “When they lost their humanity, they lost any ability to actually care. They manipulate, they lie, they twist everything until it sounds right. But they don’t ever change. I know that better than anyone.”
The legitimacy behind it is staggering, and Alec knows he’s not the only one who hears it. “Dean…I didn’t…”
“Forget it, Sammy,” Dean cuts off, fatigued. “Just leave her behind, and let’s go. We can figure all this shit out later, but just…just come with us, Sam, please.”
In Alec’s opinion, it’s a good enough offer. Not one he would’ve chosen-had he his way, he’d give Sam a good, old-fashioned beat down-but a compromising offer nonetheless. He can already seen Dean reverting into real big brother mode, his voice holding an undertone of command, and both he and Dean expect to see Sam grumble but ultimately surrender to what Dean’d said.
But Sam doesn’t.
“Dean, listen…”
“Sam,” Dean barks, and this time Sam’s name isn’t so much held with reverence, but rather order. Alec doesn’t like being told what to do, and Dean had never taken that tone with him before, never, but had he…well, Alec would’ve done whatever Dean dictated. Simply because Dean had said it. “What the fuck are you doing? Leave her.”
Sam looks down at Ruby’s body, and Alec sees it-again-before Dean: Sam’s been doing way more than simply gallivanting about with the demon. Alec’s seen that kind of look multiple times; Sam’s more attached to Ruby than any of them had picked up on. The demon blood was just the start.
“You don’t understand,” Sam begs, in his lack of words trying to make Dean do just that.
“I understand,” Dean says, breath caught in his chest. “I come back from Hell, come back from things worse than even your nightmares could manufacture, and the first thing I knew I had to do was find my little brother. I finally do that, and you’d rather stick with that lowlife than me. So yeah, Sam, I understand perfectly.”
“Looks like you’ve got your own little replacement for me, too, Dean!” Sam objects, gesturing wildly at Alec.
Alec opens his mouth to dispute this with words not suitable for younger audiences, when Dean surprises him again. In fact, if Alec saw right, Dean stepped the tiniest bit closer, as if with the intent to stand between him and Sam. He doesn’t completely, but Alec marvels at the effort.
“Don’t compare Alec to Ruby,” Dean spits, doing some marveling of his own at how Sam could even conceive a similarity. “He left his own goddamn city, his own goddamn family, the only place he’d known some kind of brotherhood, to come with me to find you, Sam. Why? Hell if I know, but what I do know is that he’s been a damn good guy this last week, when he didn’t have to. And the best part is, he never took over some innocent person’s body or was reborn into hellfire.”
Staring openly at Dean, Alec can’t believe what he’d just heard. He wouldn’t go so far as to say Dean’d chosen him over Sam, but…the way the sentences sounded to Alec make it as if he might as well have. With good reason, as Alec comes to think of it, given that never in his life had similar sentiments been said about him.
Not from Joshua, not from Mole, especially not from Max…he pointedly ignores whatever it may mean that he gains more solace in the ones coming from his kind-of-clone than any other person. (He also pointedly ignores that his only opponent in that argument is a demon Dean has massive issues with.)
“Then why’d you even want to get me?” Sam asks. “If Alec’s so perfect.”
“’Cause I missed my goddamn little brother!” Dean shouts, pressing his lips together, as if in endeavor to not cry. “’Cause I had faith in you for two thousand years, that you’d get me out, and when I finally busted free, I needed to see my brother. Please, Sammy,” he continues, but softer this time, “come back with me. We-We can be a family again. Try to be a family again.”
Alec’s out of his element with all this; not simply because he’s meeting Sam Winchester, but because he’s never really seen big brother Dean before. Dean had shown somewhat fraternal tendencies over Alec, but he’d never really had that familial, bound-by-more-than-blood, die-for-you feeling from him. Seeing Dean so caring and pleading is just…weird.
“A family,” Sam repeats, and Alec realizes that Sam’s posture has never changed from intense rigidity. “How were we ever a family, Dean? We were dysfunctional beyond belief.”
“We…were never the Bradys, but I thought we were doing okay.”
“We were so far from ‘okay,’ Dean,” Sam says caustically, folding his arms over his chest. “It wasn’t working. At all.”
“So,” Dean says, exhaling slowly, “I guess all it took for you to tell me you hated me was for me to die and go to Hell.”
“Dean, I didn’t-”
“You know what? Never mind, Sam,” says Dean with an edge in his voice that Alec wishes weren’t there, no matter his skepticism toward Sam. “I’ll go and leave you alone if that’s what you really want. Tell Ruby a good scotch’ll wake her right up. Oh, maybe a demon blood chaser for you, too.”
“Dean…” It’s Alec’s voice this time, glancing first at Sam-who is in shock at Dean’s last remark-then at Dean’s hard but pained face. He’s not Sam’s biggest fan, but selfishly, Alec had left T.C. and traveled thousands of miles to find the damn guy; the least Dean can do is hang around for a while. Unless Sam goes all Voorhees on the joint. Then Alec may have to give Sam a stern talking-to. “Maybe you should think about this…”
Alec may as well not have spoken at all for all the attention Dean pays to him. As if expecting Alec to follow, Dean gives Sam one last look fraught with hundreds of emotions, and then, his body turning so heavily it’s like there were a ropes holding him back, he strides toward the door, accidentally-on-purpose stepping on Ruby’s body along the way.
“Dean!” Sam yells, finally finding his voice. Right as Dean gets to the door, it slams shut, rattling on the old hinges. Alec’s eyes widen-unless the wind had suddenly reached gale-force, the door had closed on its own. He’d been ready to believe in demons and other supernatural fuglies, but invisible forces? That’s a whole ’nother can of worms.
He looks over to Sam, whose hand is outstretched, and he realizes that it hadn’t been Ruby or something that Alec had half hoped had been the case, but Sam. Evidently, telekinesis was a small nitpick Dean had failed to mention about his brother.
Yet, the way Dean looks as he turns around quells Alec’s annoyance at him, for Dean’s as dumbfounded, if not more so, than Alec is. More than that, he’s…scared? It’s a beyond odd thing to recognize, because Alec’s never seen Dean scared. Aside from when he’d gone into brief spates of psychosis back in Seattle, but those were memories of Hell, those were different. Dean’s looking at Sam like he doesn’t know him, worse than he had in the forest, like, Alec dares to think, he’s one of the evil things they used to hunt.
“Sammy, what…?” Dean asks in fear. “What are you…?”
To his credit, Sam does look a little shaken (but not enough for the action to be completely foreign to him, which freaks Alec out even more). “It’s not what you think,” Sam says by way of excuse.
“Seems to be your mantra,” Dean comments, breaths carefully calculated. Then, simultaneously with Alec, he recalls an identical movement when they’d first seen Sam. “How long has this been going on?”
“It’s always been in me,” replies Sam. “This…power.”
“Ruby’s told you that drinking her blood would…reinforce this or some shit, didn’t she? However the hell’d you think that was right?”
Alec’s been relatively okay with the strange telepathy Sam and Dean seem to have had up to this point, but now it’s just getting ridiculous. He knows a lot of it has to do with them having a history and everything that Alec wasn’t privy to, but he’s more than pissed about not being in the loop. Maybe because he’s usually the center of it back “home,” but this exclusion thing sucks balls.
“For those of us non-Winchesters,” Alec pipes up angrily, “what the fuck was that?”
Sam remains indifferent to Alec, but it’s better than outright distaste. Sam and Dean don’t look at each other like they had before as though they’d been communicating silently, but now it’s disjointed; Sam knowing one thing, Dean hopelessly clawing for a handle on it.
“Long story,” grits Sam.
“Fuck no,” Alec protests, becoming agitated again. “I can believe a lot-and in the past couple of days, that level’s been jacked up creepily high-but that shit right there? Deserves a hell of a lot more than just ‘long story.’”
“Look, kid-”
“A demon infected Sam with blood when he was a baby,” Dean interrupts, his gaze never moving from Sam.
Dean hadn’t been lying when he told Sam that Alec was a pain in the ass, but…he won’t downplay the guy’s help or presence ever since Dean had woken up in that warehouse. Sure, they’d been hostile early on, but Alec had gotten Dean out of that bunker, and he had gone with him to find Sam on a whim. It took cajones, and Dean owes him for that.
“This demon blood crap isn’t new?” Alec says incredulously. “Next you’ll tell me Dean has angel blood.”
“Don’t be stupid, there’s no such thing as angels,” Dean immediately snaps. Then he glances Sam up and down, sneering. “But the drinking demon blood is something new.”
Alec gives Dean then Sam a withering glare. “So you’re full on Sith now,” he proposes. “Awesome.”
“What happened to staying on the side of normal?” Dean asks his brother. “Not only are you BFFs with a demon, but she’s teaching you to use your demonic powers. What happened to you, Sammy? When I said ‘Remember everything I taught you,’ I meant it. What happened to…to you staying human?”
“Don’t say that,” Sam whispers thickly. “Don’t say that. I-I am human. I’m just…I was just trying to get by, Dean. Without you.”
“Well, the smarter brother’s back in town,” Dean replies. And although it pains him to the core to just gloss over everything (however temporarily), he adds, “Come on, Sam. You’re getting the ass-reaming of the century later, but let’s just go. Now.”
“Go where?” Sam retorts. “What, to Seattle with Alec’s buddies?”
“Hey!”
“We’ve lived in shitty places before, but I’m not going to a toxic waste dump, with people that are just waiting to kill any human, not to mention are on the government’s kill list.”
“It’s a fuck load better than sticking with Ruby!”
“Dean, I’m not going with you,” Sam says stiltedly.
Alec feels like the hurt tension in the air could shatter at any moment, and so Alec clears his throat anxiously. “Okay, I know Terminal City’s not exactly the Hilton, but I don’t think anyone would give a damn if you guys came. Maybe give you shit for being Ordinaries, but at least Sam isn’t a pansy ass and doesn’t have any doubles there.”
By which Alec means there’s a slim possibility that T.C.’s residents wouldn’t shut the doors and leave Sam (maybe Dean-or, hell, him-as well) outside. It wouldn’t even be that they’re Ordinaries, either, Alec presumes. Rather, they’re not interested in rocking the boat any more than it already is, and bringing Sam into the fray would only serve that purpose. If the government caught sight of Sam and Dean Winchester integrating into the transgenics’ ranks…
Shit hitting the fan wouldn’t begin to cover it.
Regardless of the fact that the majority of the soldiers and officials and police and whomever wouldn’t recall who Sam and Dean are, it by no means vanishes the threat. Alec doesn’t know how precisely the government would react to the two supposed mass murderers, but he has no doubts it would put a serious gash in the transgenics’ lives. Alec can see the news now:
TRANSGENICS IN LEAGUE WITH PRESUMED DEAD SERIAL KILLERS
SAM AND DEAN WINCHESTER
The public would have no idea who the brothers are, or remember their allegations, but that wouldn’t prevent them from pretending they do. Wouldn’t prevent them from adding the Winchesters to their witch-hunt. And while Alec’s allegiance will always lean toward his kind, he by no stretch of the imagination wishes harm on Dean. (Sam’s a different story at this point, but since Dean won’t let go of him without a fight, Alec includes him by reluctant extension.)
“Sammy, please,” Dean begs again, and Alec knows he’s not imagining the watery sheen to Dean’s eyes. “After all we’ve been through, after I came back from Hell…just…please. Please.”
Sam’s gaze shifts, not as hard anymore, and Alec knows he’s this close to coming around. But then, add Alec’s never-good luck to Sam and Dean’s, and catastrophe is inevitable.
“Sorry, Deano, can’t let that happen,” comes Ruby’s voice from the corner of the room.
Three heads whip towards her, all of them having been too involved in the conversation to notice that Ruby had-thanks to her being a demon, no doubt-come out of her Alec-induced unconsciousness.
Before even Alec can figure out what her intentions are, she flings her hand out, and both Alec and Dean get tossed backward, hitting the wall with enough force to cause some plaster to fall from the ceiling.
“Sammy here’s mine, and I can’t let a maggot like you screw that up.”
Alec watches her smirk, and for quite possibly the first time in his life, he wishes Max would bust through the door and save his ass. He’d welcome her tirade. Unfortunately, she’s more than halfway across the country and, though it’s not known to Alec, wrapped up in a demon problem of her own.
Because, apparently, being a transgenic in a transgenics-must-die country isn’t enough.
Next
Chapter Title: Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely
Fandom(s): Supernatural, Dark Angel
Summary: In the end, it’s a complete accident that gets Dean Winchester out of Hell.
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 7,182
Disclaimer: Same stuff applies as in the first chapter. Oh, and unfortunately I neither own Supernatural nor Dark Angel. Just this.
Of Desire and the Status Quo
Chapter XXXI: Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely
Alec watches Dean closely, watches as he starts walking towards Sam and the woman, homicide in his eyes. Alec’s not inclined to let this shit go down, and grabs Dean’s arm, hard enough to leave bruises but not caring. Dean struggles against his grip, but Alec’s got test-tube created strength on his side, which, to Dean’s annoyance, trumps his adrenaline and anger.
That’s not to say that Alec’s disregarding this whole thing. Waiting a moment until he’s sure Dean won’t bolt, he then follows Sam and the woman quietly, a good distance away. Alec’s always been a master at tracking, at stealth and evasion, as has Dean, and so even with Sam’s hunter instincts, he doesn’t notice he’s being followed.
They wait a minute after Sam and the woman get into a yellow convertible, and then Alec starts up their own car and follows. It’s a good ten minutes from the forest to where Sam stops, pulling into a parking lot of a trashy motel. Dean is nearly vibrating with held-in anger and confusion, his body stiff in the seat.
They both get out, Alec looking up at the two-letters-out motel sign that reads “Astoria Hotel,” and moves towards where he’d seen Sam and the woman go-Room 207-when Dean puts a hand on his arm.
“Stay here,” he growls. “I don’t want you in there.”
Alec’s about to hotly reject, but sees Dean’s intense stare, and knows that this is something to be dealt with between brothers, between Dean and Sam, and while Alec felt he’d built up a kind of kinship with Dean over the last couple days, he’s cognizant enough to realize this isn’t his party. He nods, and Dean walks purposefully towards the room, shoulders square.
Of course, as much as Alec respects Dean’s decision, he’s not stupid. Harnessing the stealth of his cat DNA, he chases after Dean, hiding behind a pillar lest Dean see him. He hears Dean knock, and despite himself, he holds his breath. There’s what sounds like Dean’s shove, and then he walks in. It’s like being in a war zone, and he can’t do shit to stop or help whatever’s going to go down next. He’s a man of action, and this waiting crap is not his style.
It’s fucking annoying (and, though he wouldn’t cop to it, worrying) is what it is.
He hadn’t been able to hear Dean’s-and Sam’s-voices from where he was, so it gets his attention when, barely a minute after Dean had stepped in, he starts to hear noises. At first he doesn’t make anything of it, but when his finely-tuned ears hear what sounds like a scuffle, he runs into the room.
“HEY!” he yells, seeing Sam and Dean wrestling, Sam wielding a thick knife aimed toward Dean’s throat.
Even though Sam’s spitting fire from his eyes, his face screwed up in a terrible mixture of rage, desolation, and perhaps a little confusion, and is fighting his toughest, Alec can see Dean isn’t doing the same. It’s not even that his muscles still aren’t what they used to be; Alec knows Dean can fight almost just as well. But here…it’s plain to anyone that Dean’s not putting his heard into trying to defend himself, even more than just because his left shoulder is nowhere near optimum operation. Alec think sadly that the likely truth is that Dean doesn’t want to hurt Sam.
Luckily for Dean’s life, however, Alec had hung around, and, not giving a second thought to what Dean might chide him for, blurs in and catches Sam in the chest, throwing the taller man across the room and, most importantly, away from Dean. Sam hits the motel wall with echoing force, Alec using nearly all his strength behind the blow. He’s never fought against Sam before, doesn’t know Sam’s fighting styles or strength, and he isn’t going to take any chances. He wants Dean to reunite with his brother, certainly, but if the expense is Dean’s life? Not in a million years.
“Alec!” Dean shouts, with a good amount of breathiness behind it. “I told you to stay put!”
“He was gonna kill you!” Alec snaps back, keeping his peripheral on Sam, who’s slowly standing up, wincing.
“What…”
Sam can’t seem to say anything coherent, and in spite of the fact that he’s obviously one breath away from twigging out again, he manages to stay against the wall, and stares between Dean and Alec. Alec slightly feels guilty-Sam would’ve already been freaked enough (all evidence to that) with Dean reappearing; having, as far as he knows, twenty-one-year-old Dean and twenty-nine-year-old Dean together would be some definite mind fucking.
Dean turns his glare from Alec over to his brother, despite everything they just saw, the intensity changing from vexation to softness. “Sammy…it’s me,” he says, in the kind of voice Alec’s never heard before. Not in anyone.
Sam’s expression doesn’t change, that hatred reigning. For Dean, it’s strange seeing Sam like this; not just seeing him after two thousand years, but his face. His hair is still as floppy as ever, and his stature is still in the realm of a Sasquatch, but…there’s a lankness in his hair that makes it hang straight and mussed; Dean recognizes everything Sam’s wearing, as if he hadn’t bought any new clothes since that day; behind his still lightning-fast reflexes are muscles that don’t want to be used that hard anymore; there are lines and shadows in his face that had never been there before; worst of all, his eyes, his soulful green-blue eyes, are dead.
Dean looks into them, and it’s like looking into a deep well, the water murky and black, the end of it unfathomable and yet you know all that’s at the bottom is cold, hard stone.
“D-Dean?” Sam breathes, his voice choking on the name, like he hadn’t been able to utter it for thirteen years. And he probably hadn’t. “But…no…”
“I know,” says Dean, trying to withhold a smile (Sam had been drinking demon blood, he attempts to remind himself) and not quite succeeding, “I look fantastic, huh?”
Alec senses it before Dean could ever hope to, and as Sam hurls his silver knife through the air, Alec’s hand whips out to catch it only a few inches before it would have buried itself fatally into the middle of Dean’s heart. Disgusted, Alec throws the knife downward, the blade sticking fast in the wood flooring.
He looks up to see Sam’s face both surprised (Alec presumes it’s that, despite Sam’s expert aim, the knife had been caught out of midair) and infuriated. With more foreboding, he looks over to Dean’s. What once held affection now houses something between more of the deepest betrayal, the likes of which Alec had only seen in that forest, and horror. Dean’s been attacked by Sam before, but never when both of them were completely human.
Dean could handle that attack if he were, say, having his brains addled by a psychiatrist spirit, or a demon possessing him, or anything else that’s something Dean could fight. And he understands Sam’s shock. He’d be the same way if their roles were reversed. But he’d thought Sam would at least hear him out. If Dean were an evil bastard, and he’d wanted to kill Sam, he would have done it already.
He doesn’t know what to do know. He could’ve handled Sam’s initial fighting back-hell, he wants him to; God knows Dean wants a good fight, given what he saw Sam do-regardless of his weakened shoulder. Fine. But for Sam to have stopped the fighting and then to chuck a knife with a killing blow…Dean has no idea.
“Sammy,” Dean whispers, swallowing. If he wants to get to the bottom of this whole fuckup, he needs Sam to know it’s him. “Sammy, it’s me.”
“You think your fucking shapeshifter trick is gonna work on me?” Sam shouts, gesturing to both Alec and Dean. “What, you think that by bringing in two of you fuckers to look like Dean is gonna break me? Fuck you!”
Dean flinches, and Alec bristles. Truthfully, Alec doesn’t give a damn what Sam says about him, but to say that to Dean? Alec eyes the knife in the floor, debating whether to brandish it against Dean’s brother.
“Sam,” Dean implores, taking a step towards his brother, his every move watched by both men in the room. “Just…look.” Dean crosses past Alec, reaching down and yanking the knife out. “If I was anything-shapeshifter, revenant, whatever-could I do this with a silver knife?”
To Alec’s surprise, Dean places the blade against his forearm and drags it across his skin, a thick line of viscous red fluid welling up along the wound and dripping onto the hardwood. Nothing happens (not like Alec would’ve known if it did, but it didn’t look like anything happened), and Sam glances from the cut up to Dean’s face, his eyes narrowing.
“Fine,” Sam says harshly. “So the hell what? You could be a hundred different things. But you know something? You’re not my brother, you son of a bitch. My brother’s been dead thirteen fucking years, and he ain’t coming back!”
“Dude, stow the yelling,” Alec intervenes stepping forward. “There’s a reason for all of this, if you’d just hold off on the Terminator crap for two friggin’ seconds.”
Sam switches his attention to Alec, and Alec’s suddenly not sure he prefers this. “That’s the best you freaks could do?” Sam sneers. “Transforming into some scrawny imitation of m’brother? Try again.”
“I’ll list every single damn hunt we’ve been on, Sammy,” Dean says, finally gaining a foothold on his voice. “I’ll list everything only I could know about you, I’ll prove myself however, Sammy. It’s me.”
For a millisecond, Alec thinks he catches a glimmer of concession in Sam’s face, but then it’s back to disgust. “Eat me,” retorts Sam. “Who the hell knows what you bastards forced out of him? I’m not trusting anything that comes out of your mouth.”
“I didn’t break,” Dean refuses, and it’s true. It was stupid, but he’d felt that if he surrendered even the seemingly smallest bits of information, even something as frivolous as Sam’s middle name, he’d be losing Sam in a way. He didn’t care if the demons knew crap about himself, but Sam? No way. Never. He wouldn’t let them tarnish the one solid thing in his life. “You think I would?”
Sam starts to respond, but is interrupted when a woman, dressed in a burgundy t-shirt and cropped shorts, saunters through the door and into the room. “Sam, I got the-”
She stops when she notices it’s not only Sam in the room. As she takes the others in, Alec, his over-accurate eyes focusing on her, sees her face pale the slightest bit. He doubts Dean, or even Sam, could tell the difference, but Alec immediately knows something’s up.
She’s pretty, Alec will give her that, her hair chocolate brown and reaching to right below her breast, her body perfectly proportioned, but in her dark eyes, there’s something…not right. It isn’t even like how Sam’s are, all dead inside, it’s…Alec can’t describe it, beyond just plain wrong.
Whether Dean had seen her face whiten or not, however, he sees something entirely different in the young woman’s visage. His own face twists into pure hate, the worst Alec’s seen, and he adjusts his grip on the serrated blade Sam had thrown at him.
“Ruby,” Dean growls low in his throat, taking steps towards her and looking more like a predator stalking its prey than Alec knows any of the X’s looked. Lydecker would be proud, he thinks sickly. “The fuck are you doing here, you lying, manipulative bitch?”
Sam frowns deeply, glancing between this “Ruby” person-apparently she’s of some note, but Alec doesn’t know for what-and Dean, shocked. “How did you-”
Dean, deciding he’s done with the foreplay, whips the knife, as fast if not faster than Sam had, at Ruby’s chest. She only has time to move a little out of the way, taken off-guard not only by Dean’s appearance, but also at the out-of-the-blue attack, and the metal sinks itself to the hilt in her sternum.
Alec expects her to drop dead, but she doesn’t. She looks in a certain amount of discomfort, but merely grasps the handle and slowly pulls it out, the metal coated in blood. “Dean…” Ruby says, keeping her voice the kind of tone meant to put on a show for someone, but to others make a threat known. Alec feels no compunction to abide. “Looks like you got friends in high places.”
Dean’s fists are clenched so tight his short nails dig into his palms, near to the point of breaking skin. Tearing his gaze away from her, he instead turns it to Sam, a certain amount of incredulity in it. “Sam?” he grinds out. “What the hell are you doing? Kill her!”
“Tell your brother to shut it, Sam,” Ruby says, her tone more clipped than she would usually take with the younger sibling. (Older? Alec’s not sure how to refer to them…)
Sam flicks his eyes between Ruby and Dean. “What?” he asks hoarsely, no concentrating only on Ruby. “My brother?”
Ruby looks appropriately Oh, shit-faced, and then makes to flee the room. As Sam doesn’t look to stop her, and Alec thinks Dean’s brain isn’t firing on all cylinders just yet, he blurs over and blocks her exit. She starts, obviously not expecting Alec’s ability.
“Hold up there, sister,” he says with a sneer. “You ain’t goin’ anywhere.”
“Get the hell out of my way, pipsqueak,” Ruby orders, her threat completely belying the sweet nature her body would imply.
Alec spares the minutest of seconds to glance up at Dean. His expression hadn’t changed much since Ruby’d arrived, but there’s a shade of pleading in it that Alec picks up. pleading, he’d wager, to stop Ruby. Alec doesn’t know how she plays into anything, but it’s not like she’s done jack thus far to get particularly in Alec’s good graces, so.
In another flurry of motion that no one else in the room would be able to pinpoint, Alec simultaneously vises Ruby’s wrists together behind her back and puts his free arm across her throat, cutting off her air supply. In another state of affairs, Ruby would be able to fight Alec off like any other human. But Alec isn’t any other human, and even though Ruby’s demonically enhanced strength might even still be able to match him-as Kalinda had-Alec’s got one thing going for him: fury. And protective instincts he’d never experienced before.
Sam moves to, Alec presumes, get him off Ruby, but in a shocking display of loyalty, Dean mirrors the actions, sufficiently preventing Sam from doing so. The two brothers staring at each other like some kind of old west showdown, Alec gives a final yank of his arm, and Ruby slumps to the floor, unconscious.
“She was annoying,” Alec says, stepping over her body.
“She’s a demon,” Dean snarls, the abhorrence behind it aligned with that of Hitler towards Jews. That is to say, not favorably.
“A demon?” asks Alec, the indignation on Dean’s behalf coming through now that he’d finally accepted-well, “accepted”-their existence, especially now having seen it firsthand. “How did you know?”
Dean snorts heartily, looking very much like he’d like nothing more than to spit on her limp form. “Oh, trust me,” he says, and Alec thinks that’s a little redundant (he’s long since trusted Dean). “After a while Down There, you learn who your enemies are. And how to tell them apart, even if they are possessing some poor chick.”
Uneasy silence passes between the three for what could be days, and then Sam puts a hand on the headboard of the closest bed, like he’s steadying himself.
His face crumbles, and his eyes mist over. “Dean?” he says in a choked kind of voice, staring straight at his brother. “But you…this isn’t possible.”
“After everything we’ve seen, you think anything’s impossible?” Dean says, taking steps toward Sam, even though Alec watches the both of them like a homicidal kind of hawk.
After a few more moments, Sam suddenly crosses the distance and envelopes his brother in a rib-crushing hug, his eyes squeezed shut, arms unforgiving against Dean’s shoulders. Dean returns it in kind, not caring in the least that Sam’s worsening his injury, and the stitches are probably groaning against the movement. He’s a good four inches shorter than Sam, but neither really gives a shit, Dean’s hand coming up to grasp the collar of Sam’s shirt in a white-knuckled grip, like trying to convince himself Sam is, after all these years, real.
Alec stands impatiently, not giving up on his suspicion and dislike of Sam so far-evidently Dean had forgotten for the moment that whole demon blood detail-and casting a glance at Ruby’s prone body, ready for any sign whatsoever that she might be faking her unconsciousness. He may not be completely familiar with demon antics or the extent of their powers, but he’s tensed for anything, won’t hesitate for a second to once again stop her. Kill her if he needs to.
Finally, the brothers separate, though still only an arm and a half’s length apart. “H-How?” Sam asks coarsely. “Dean, you…Bobby and I buried you.”
Dean works his jaw at the mention of Bobby, flashing back to the man’s bodiless grave, but ultimately gets a hold of himself. “Why did you bury me?” he counters, the idea festering in the back of his mind ever since he’d awakened in that snake- and Harry Potter wannabes-filled warehouse.
Sam looks regretful. “Bobby wanted you salted and burned,” he explains, and Dean gives a Well, duh face, Alec sustaining his disbelief at how normal this conversation seems to be going for the Winchesters, “but I couldn’t, Dean. I couldn’t. Not yet.”
Dean’s eyes narrow, their green depths searching for something invisible. “You made a deal,” he breathes, almost hoping that’s why Sam had drunk Ruby’s blood. “You made a deal.”
Sam, however, doesn’t seem to follow Dean’s train of thought. “I tried. I wish I had done it,” he admits, his own chest constricting at the vision of himself, smashed, begging that Crossroads Demon. “But no demon would deal, all right? I tried finding Lilith, tried opening the Devil’s Gate, tried fucking everything. You were rotting in Hell for years, for years, and I couldn’t stop it. I’m so sorry, Dean. I’m sorry it wasn’t me. I tried so hard to get you back.”
Dean wants to say something like There’s no other way this could have gone down, or There’s no other reason why you were drinking Ruby’s blood, shake Sam until he confessed that his soul is on the line, that he’d brought Dean back. But he can’t, can’t get rid of the notion that his return had something very much to do with the Latinating, red-robed snake-people. He can see the raw truth-truth in Sam’s trying to resurrect Dean-can read his expressions just as well as he’d always been able to. Even though Sam’s older, his features more angular and haunted, he can still read Sam like an open book.
“I believe you,” says Dean, exhaling sharply.
“Well, I fucking don’t,” Alec snaps, and both brothers flinch, like they’d completely forgotten his presence. They turn to look at him, Alec suddenly finding their resemblance uncanny, can see they’re really brothers, family, but he has to get past it for now.
“Alec,” Dean chastises, as Sam stares openly at Alec once more.
Who firmly disregards both of them. “Look, it’s super that Sam’s soul is safe or what the hell ever, but we got at least two questions here: what got you out of Hell, Dean, and what has Sammy here been doing with Demon Bitch?”
Sam’s got that look again, and though Alec won’t back down, he’s still wary. It isn’t like Sam’s been particularly kind to him thus far. “I’ve got a question,” Sam says in a tone not unlike ice, and directed as much toward Dean as Alec. “Who’s he? Tell me he’s not another ’shifter…”
“God fuck it!” Alec shouts, his tolerance shot. “I’m not a damn shapeshifter!”
Dean holds back on amusement of all things, and instead looks to Sam. “He’s, uh…they call ’em transgenics,” he says, realizing that because they’d spent so much time and energy finding Sam, they hadn’t thought much about figuring out the link between him and Alec. He makes a mental note to get on that. With Sam around, maybe it’d go faster.
Alec really doesn’t fancy explaining everything about himself again, but he discovers he doesn’t have to. Sam’s face turning to comprehension, he glances between the two doubles. “You’re a transgenic?” he asks. “Aren’t you guys supposed to be in Washington?”
About to go into another outburst, Alec sputters to a stop as Dean speaks up for him. “He’s all right, Sammy,” he says placidly. “He’s a damn pain in the ass, but he’s one of the good guys. If you heard some of what they went through, Sam…”
Alec purses his lips, not wanting Dean to elaborate to someone Alec’s still shaky on trusting, but thankfully he doesn’t. Just leaves it to the imagination, which, in Alec’s case, is more likely better than the actual truth. Of course, apparently just because Sam had been dead inside his own body, it hadn’t completely squelched his thirst for knowing everything.
“So…why does he look like you?” Sam inquires, far from getting over the zero difference between Dean from twenty-one years ago and the Dean dopplegänger in front of him now.
“I have a name,” says Alec waspishly. “It’s Alec, thanks very much.”
Sam would rather distance the man who’d just identified himself from the Dean he knew when he was seventeen, but he’s quickly coming to surrender that, thus far, their mannerisms are also in that zero difference category. Sending a concerned eye over to Ruby, who’s in a position eerily similar to her last body upon demise, Sam regards Alec with an identical mood as Alec does him.
“Okay, Alec,” Sam emphasizes, forcing himself to try and see past the countenance and tell himself it’s not Dean, “care to explain the resemblance thing you’ve got with my brother?”
“Sam, calm down,” Dean interjects again, feeling fairly unexpected rushes to defend Alec, even if from Sam. “We haven’t figured that out yet. We…wanted to find you first.”
Alec literally bites his tongue to prevent from lashing out. He’s afraid that if he were to, he’d say something that would make Dean look at him like Alec never wants to be looked at again. He’s afraid that any wrong move now, and Dean would dump him for Sam in an instant, even ignoring Dean’s various interruptions of Sam’s antagonism.
Just because Alec had spent a week with Dean wouldn’t, he knows, replace twenty-five years of love and family and blood that Dean shares with Sam. Alec wonders what Max would say if he returned to Terminal City sans Dean, and had to explain to her that Dean’d dropped him like an old hat to go and spend his time with Sam instead. He doesn’t know if he could handle her pity and I-told-you-so looks.
“I don’t suppose you’re one of those assholes who thinks we’re the lowest scum of the earth and deserve to be ripped apart by mobsters,” says Alec flatly, his eyes guarded and level.
Whether Sam senses he’s possibly in danger of Alec’s wrath, or whether he simply doesn’t care one way or the other, he answers with a shrug, “Hadn’t crossed my mind. I’m used to people being assuming bastards.”
Alec thinks Sam’s trying to form an allusion to his and Dean’s work being severely underappreciated and misunderstood, but Alec can’t quite accept it. The populace may have wanted the brothers behind bars at Supermax, but that doesn’t equate to the populace wanting to slaughter, crucify, burn Alec and his brethren on crude pyres in the from of an X. It isn’t like Sam and Dean were exactly forced to flee into a toxic waste dump with a twenty-four/seven military guard around them.
“Yeah, well,” Alec hedges, “you did try to maim me. I’ll withhold judgment if you don’t mind.”
Dean raises an eyebrow at Alec, the gesture explicitly accusing him of being a hypocrite. And fine, maybe he is (though, to be fair, Dean also committed a Sam to him) but something about this whole situation seems off to him, and he’d rather be on his guard than be caught unawares. That nonchalance has bitten him in the ass before-getting too cocky after a cage fight and so being captured by a genocidal sociopath, anyone?-and he’d really rather not have it happen again.
“Anyway,” Alec continues, undeterred for the most part, “uh…if that chick over there is some death-worthy demon…why in the world is she still fuckin’ alive?”
For a second, Dean looks like he wants to slam Alec against the wall in anger, but, in spite of his distraction of actually believing that somehow Dean’s back from Hell, and that Ruby’s currently unconscious, he’d really like that particular mystery solved. Of course, it has to be just some ploy of Sam’s, some trick of nicety so he can use Ruby, the drinking her blood just a ruse, but…
Everything is made worse when Sam shifts his weight, the appearance a poster for guilty discomfort. “Dean...”
“You’re not working with her,” Dean states despairingly.
Trained to decode expressions and essentially be his own personal polygraph, Alec can see lies written all over Sam’s face, but for the time being, he’ll hold his words. It’s something Dean needs to decipher for himself.
“It’s not what you think,” Sam defends solidly.
“Fuck, Sam, please tell me you’re just exploiting her,” Dean pleads, a desperation that Alec hasn’t seen since he realized Dean wanted to find Sam in part because Sam could understand Dean’s Hell. “You have to know she’s the epitome of evil.”
“She was helping me find Lilith, thinking of ways to get you out,” Sam defends. At Dean’s disbelief, he exclaims, “You don’t know what it was like! Ruby was the only one who could help me with all of this!”
“She’s a demon, Sam! You’re choosing her over me? I know she’s evil! I was there!”
“You trusted her, too, you know.”
Dean gives himself a second to close his eyes and breathe deeply. “I never fucking trusted her,” he says coldly. And he hadn’t-acknowledged her occasional helpfulness, sure, but trust? Hardly. “I never thought you’d be stupid enough to fall for her lies, Sam. Especially after everything she did.”
Alec wonders how everything had suddenly gotten so out of hand. It’s like riding a roller coaster no matter how many Winchesters are in the room. It’d been bad enough with Dean, he thinks, but with Sam here, too? Might as well be watching Russian Roulette ping pong, his eyes darting between the two, trying to see Sam’s side, yet entirely unable to. Even if he doesn’t know all the particulars, he can’t imagine how someone could actually believe a demon’s manipulations, drink their blood. Alec knows he wouldn’t, and he wonders how the hell Sam, a demon hunter could.
“You were in Hell, Dean,” Sam chokes, the words getting caught in his throat. “You don’t know how it was for me, losing you like that…I thought I was going to die, Dean. I almost did.”
“So, what,” Dean retorts, in full acknowledgement that Sam probably was close to suicide, but unable to see past him being fuck buddies with Ruby, “you thought you’d honor my memory by inducting that bitch in place of me? That goes against everything we fought for, Sam! Everything I tried to protect you from!”
Sam’s jaw clenches, his back stiff as he looks down at Dean. “Protect me?” he parrots, eyes showing a remembrance that everyone except Alec is all too aware of. “That didn’t work out so well, did it?”
Dean flinches like Sam had slapped him, staring at him, not able to believe the words coming out of his brother’s mouth. “You didn’t use to need demonic help,” Dean remarks. “What happened to that Sam?”
“He died with you,” Sam answers, his sallow face reflecting the misery of the sentence. “Ruby was willing to accept that, and she helped me, Dean. She changed.”
“Demons don’t change, Sam,” Dean says, disappointment written everywhere. “When they lost their humanity, they lost any ability to actually care. They manipulate, they lie, they twist everything until it sounds right. But they don’t ever change. I know that better than anyone.”
The legitimacy behind it is staggering, and Alec knows he’s not the only one who hears it. “Dean…I didn’t…”
“Forget it, Sammy,” Dean cuts off, fatigued. “Just leave her behind, and let’s go. We can figure all this shit out later, but just…just come with us, Sam, please.”
In Alec’s opinion, it’s a good enough offer. Not one he would’ve chosen-had he his way, he’d give Sam a good, old-fashioned beat down-but a compromising offer nonetheless. He can already seen Dean reverting into real big brother mode, his voice holding an undertone of command, and both he and Dean expect to see Sam grumble but ultimately surrender to what Dean’d said.
But Sam doesn’t.
“Dean, listen…”
“Sam,” Dean barks, and this time Sam’s name isn’t so much held with reverence, but rather order. Alec doesn’t like being told what to do, and Dean had never taken that tone with him before, never, but had he…well, Alec would’ve done whatever Dean dictated. Simply because Dean had said it. “What the fuck are you doing? Leave her.”
Sam looks down at Ruby’s body, and Alec sees it-again-before Dean: Sam’s been doing way more than simply gallivanting about with the demon. Alec’s seen that kind of look multiple times; Sam’s more attached to Ruby than any of them had picked up on. The demon blood was just the start.
“You don’t understand,” Sam begs, in his lack of words trying to make Dean do just that.
“I understand,” Dean says, breath caught in his chest. “I come back from Hell, come back from things worse than even your nightmares could manufacture, and the first thing I knew I had to do was find my little brother. I finally do that, and you’d rather stick with that lowlife than me. So yeah, Sam, I understand perfectly.”
“Looks like you’ve got your own little replacement for me, too, Dean!” Sam objects, gesturing wildly at Alec.
Alec opens his mouth to dispute this with words not suitable for younger audiences, when Dean surprises him again. In fact, if Alec saw right, Dean stepped the tiniest bit closer, as if with the intent to stand between him and Sam. He doesn’t completely, but Alec marvels at the effort.
“Don’t compare Alec to Ruby,” Dean spits, doing some marveling of his own at how Sam could even conceive a similarity. “He left his own goddamn city, his own goddamn family, the only place he’d known some kind of brotherhood, to come with me to find you, Sam. Why? Hell if I know, but what I do know is that he’s been a damn good guy this last week, when he didn’t have to. And the best part is, he never took over some innocent person’s body or was reborn into hellfire.”
Staring openly at Dean, Alec can’t believe what he’d just heard. He wouldn’t go so far as to say Dean’d chosen him over Sam, but…the way the sentences sounded to Alec make it as if he might as well have. With good reason, as Alec comes to think of it, given that never in his life had similar sentiments been said about him.
Not from Joshua, not from Mole, especially not from Max…he pointedly ignores whatever it may mean that he gains more solace in the ones coming from his kind-of-clone than any other person. (He also pointedly ignores that his only opponent in that argument is a demon Dean has massive issues with.)
“Then why’d you even want to get me?” Sam asks. “If Alec’s so perfect.”
“’Cause I missed my goddamn little brother!” Dean shouts, pressing his lips together, as if in endeavor to not cry. “’Cause I had faith in you for two thousand years, that you’d get me out, and when I finally busted free, I needed to see my brother. Please, Sammy,” he continues, but softer this time, “come back with me. We-We can be a family again. Try to be a family again.”
Alec’s out of his element with all this; not simply because he’s meeting Sam Winchester, but because he’s never really seen big brother Dean before. Dean had shown somewhat fraternal tendencies over Alec, but he’d never really had that familial, bound-by-more-than-blood, die-for-you feeling from him. Seeing Dean so caring and pleading is just…weird.
“A family,” Sam repeats, and Alec realizes that Sam’s posture has never changed from intense rigidity. “How were we ever a family, Dean? We were dysfunctional beyond belief.”
“We…were never the Bradys, but I thought we were doing okay.”
“We were so far from ‘okay,’ Dean,” Sam says caustically, folding his arms over his chest. “It wasn’t working. At all.”
“So,” Dean says, exhaling slowly, “I guess all it took for you to tell me you hated me was for me to die and go to Hell.”
“Dean, I didn’t-”
“You know what? Never mind, Sam,” says Dean with an edge in his voice that Alec wishes weren’t there, no matter his skepticism toward Sam. “I’ll go and leave you alone if that’s what you really want. Tell Ruby a good scotch’ll wake her right up. Oh, maybe a demon blood chaser for you, too.”
“Dean…” It’s Alec’s voice this time, glancing first at Sam-who is in shock at Dean’s last remark-then at Dean’s hard but pained face. He’s not Sam’s biggest fan, but selfishly, Alec had left T.C. and traveled thousands of miles to find the damn guy; the least Dean can do is hang around for a while. Unless Sam goes all Voorhees on the joint. Then Alec may have to give Sam a stern talking-to. “Maybe you should think about this…”
Alec may as well not have spoken at all for all the attention Dean pays to him. As if expecting Alec to follow, Dean gives Sam one last look fraught with hundreds of emotions, and then, his body turning so heavily it’s like there were a ropes holding him back, he strides toward the door, accidentally-on-purpose stepping on Ruby’s body along the way.
“Dean!” Sam yells, finally finding his voice. Right as Dean gets to the door, it slams shut, rattling on the old hinges. Alec’s eyes widen-unless the wind had suddenly reached gale-force, the door had closed on its own. He’d been ready to believe in demons and other supernatural fuglies, but invisible forces? That’s a whole ’nother can of worms.
He looks over to Sam, whose hand is outstretched, and he realizes that it hadn’t been Ruby or something that Alec had half hoped had been the case, but Sam. Evidently, telekinesis was a small nitpick Dean had failed to mention about his brother.
Yet, the way Dean looks as he turns around quells Alec’s annoyance at him, for Dean’s as dumbfounded, if not more so, than Alec is. More than that, he’s…scared? It’s a beyond odd thing to recognize, because Alec’s never seen Dean scared. Aside from when he’d gone into brief spates of psychosis back in Seattle, but those were memories of Hell, those were different. Dean’s looking at Sam like he doesn’t know him, worse than he had in the forest, like, Alec dares to think, he’s one of the evil things they used to hunt.
“Sammy, what…?” Dean asks in fear. “What are you…?”
To his credit, Sam does look a little shaken (but not enough for the action to be completely foreign to him, which freaks Alec out even more). “It’s not what you think,” Sam says by way of excuse.
“Seems to be your mantra,” Dean comments, breaths carefully calculated. Then, simultaneously with Alec, he recalls an identical movement when they’d first seen Sam. “How long has this been going on?”
“It’s always been in me,” replies Sam. “This…power.”
“Ruby’s told you that drinking her blood would…reinforce this or some shit, didn’t she? However the hell’d you think that was right?”
Alec’s been relatively okay with the strange telepathy Sam and Dean seem to have had up to this point, but now it’s just getting ridiculous. He knows a lot of it has to do with them having a history and everything that Alec wasn’t privy to, but he’s more than pissed about not being in the loop. Maybe because he’s usually the center of it back “home,” but this exclusion thing sucks balls.
“For those of us non-Winchesters,” Alec pipes up angrily, “what the fuck was that?”
Sam remains indifferent to Alec, but it’s better than outright distaste. Sam and Dean don’t look at each other like they had before as though they’d been communicating silently, but now it’s disjointed; Sam knowing one thing, Dean hopelessly clawing for a handle on it.
“Long story,” grits Sam.
“Fuck no,” Alec protests, becoming agitated again. “I can believe a lot-and in the past couple of days, that level’s been jacked up creepily high-but that shit right there? Deserves a hell of a lot more than just ‘long story.’”
“Look, kid-”
“A demon infected Sam with blood when he was a baby,” Dean interrupts, his gaze never moving from Sam.
Dean hadn’t been lying when he told Sam that Alec was a pain in the ass, but…he won’t downplay the guy’s help or presence ever since Dean had woken up in that warehouse. Sure, they’d been hostile early on, but Alec had gotten Dean out of that bunker, and he had gone with him to find Sam on a whim. It took cajones, and Dean owes him for that.
“This demon blood crap isn’t new?” Alec says incredulously. “Next you’ll tell me Dean has angel blood.”
“Don’t be stupid, there’s no such thing as angels,” Dean immediately snaps. Then he glances Sam up and down, sneering. “But the drinking demon blood is something new.”
Alec gives Dean then Sam a withering glare. “So you’re full on Sith now,” he proposes. “Awesome.”
“What happened to staying on the side of normal?” Dean asks his brother. “Not only are you BFFs with a demon, but she’s teaching you to use your demonic powers. What happened to you, Sammy? When I said ‘Remember everything I taught you,’ I meant it. What happened to…to you staying human?”
“Don’t say that,” Sam whispers thickly. “Don’t say that. I-I am human. I’m just…I was just trying to get by, Dean. Without you.”
“Well, the smarter brother’s back in town,” Dean replies. And although it pains him to the core to just gloss over everything (however temporarily), he adds, “Come on, Sam. You’re getting the ass-reaming of the century later, but let’s just go. Now.”
“Go where?” Sam retorts. “What, to Seattle with Alec’s buddies?”
“Hey!”
“We’ve lived in shitty places before, but I’m not going to a toxic waste dump, with people that are just waiting to kill any human, not to mention are on the government’s kill list.”
“It’s a fuck load better than sticking with Ruby!”
“Dean, I’m not going with you,” Sam says stiltedly.
Alec feels like the hurt tension in the air could shatter at any moment, and so Alec clears his throat anxiously. “Okay, I know Terminal City’s not exactly the Hilton, but I don’t think anyone would give a damn if you guys came. Maybe give you shit for being Ordinaries, but at least Sam isn’t a pansy ass and doesn’t have any doubles there.”
By which Alec means there’s a slim possibility that T.C.’s residents wouldn’t shut the doors and leave Sam (maybe Dean-or, hell, him-as well) outside. It wouldn’t even be that they’re Ordinaries, either, Alec presumes. Rather, they’re not interested in rocking the boat any more than it already is, and bringing Sam into the fray would only serve that purpose. If the government caught sight of Sam and Dean Winchester integrating into the transgenics’ ranks…
Shit hitting the fan wouldn’t begin to cover it.
Regardless of the fact that the majority of the soldiers and officials and police and whomever wouldn’t recall who Sam and Dean are, it by no means vanishes the threat. Alec doesn’t know how precisely the government would react to the two supposed mass murderers, but he has no doubts it would put a serious gash in the transgenics’ lives. Alec can see the news now:
TRANSGENICS IN LEAGUE WITH PRESUMED DEAD SERIAL KILLERS
SAM AND DEAN WINCHESTER
The public would have no idea who the brothers are, or remember their allegations, but that wouldn’t prevent them from pretending they do. Wouldn’t prevent them from adding the Winchesters to their witch-hunt. And while Alec’s allegiance will always lean toward his kind, he by no stretch of the imagination wishes harm on Dean. (Sam’s a different story at this point, but since Dean won’t let go of him without a fight, Alec includes him by reluctant extension.)
“Sammy, please,” Dean begs again, and Alec knows he’s not imagining the watery sheen to Dean’s eyes. “After all we’ve been through, after I came back from Hell…just…please. Please.”
Sam’s gaze shifts, not as hard anymore, and Alec knows he’s this close to coming around. But then, add Alec’s never-good luck to Sam and Dean’s, and catastrophe is inevitable.
“Sorry, Deano, can’t let that happen,” comes Ruby’s voice from the corner of the room.
Three heads whip towards her, all of them having been too involved in the conversation to notice that Ruby had-thanks to her being a demon, no doubt-come out of her Alec-induced unconsciousness.
Before even Alec can figure out what her intentions are, she flings her hand out, and both Alec and Dean get tossed backward, hitting the wall with enough force to cause some plaster to fall from the ceiling.
“Sammy here’s mine, and I can’t let a maggot like you screw that up.”
Alec watches her smirk, and for quite possibly the first time in his life, he wishes Max would bust through the door and save his ass. He’d welcome her tirade. Unfortunately, she’s more than halfway across the country and, though it’s not known to Alec, wrapped up in a demon problem of her own.
Because, apparently, being a transgenic in a transgenics-must-die country isn’t enough.
Next