SPN/DA crossover fic: Of Desire and the Status Quo (35/38)
Story Title: Of Desire and the Status Quo
Chapter Title: A Grin Without a Cat
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: 5,854
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 XXXV: A Grin Without a Cat
Rade hadn’t exactly had a plan when she and Trinity headed out the medical bay to meet their potential demises, but she hadn’t considered that Trinity might. More specifically, that Trinity would have one in which she was to be used as bait.
So it comes as a complete surprise when Trinity’s arm comes around and under her neck in a stranglehold, just loose enough so she can breathe, but not comfortable by any means. She sputters and chokes, and looks up at Trinity, trying to convey with her eyes the words she’d much like to shout: “THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?!”
It doesn’t work. Or, more likely, Trinity is merely ignoring her.
All eyes, demon and transgenic alike, turn towards the pair, Trinity looking eerily demonic, Rade attempting to stay conscious while also not losing her hostage ruse. “Who are you?” asks one of the demons-Rade notes with some sadness that it’s one of the X5s, Zig, who’d occasionally helped her bandage up anyone on the rare occasion they’d cop to being hurt.
Of course, had it not been for the facial features, Rade thinks she’d not recognize him. The smirk, the way he holds himself, screams not Zig. His eyes are no longer black, rather their normal dark blue, but even those are...different.
“Trinity,” Trinity introduces, adding on a smirk of her own that looks completely alien. In fact, if Rade didn’t know better, she’d say the Psy Ops unit was possessed, too. “Well,” she laughs, “sort of.”
Zig snickers, Trinity’s mannerisms apparently demony enough to fool. “And that one?” he asks, pointing at Rade.
“Hell if I know,” says Trinity. “Found her sneaking out. Think she’s a medic or somethin’.”
Zig begins to walk towards them, then his eyes narrow. “How do I know this isn’t a trick?”
Trinity rolls her eyes-an affectation Rade had never seen her do before. “Come on. If I really were the freak in this body, why would I be stupid enough to walk into a room full of demons? Besides,” Trinity continues, and there’s a flash in her eyes that Rade saw a mere five minutes ago, “I’m not sure Azazel’s daughter would appreciate you wasting time interrogating one of your own, now would she?”
The bulk of the room’s members frown, Rade included, but the demons simply smile. “Precaution,” says Zig, “you understand.”
“Whatever,” replies Trinity. “I was stuck on sentry duty, didn’t hear the official reason-why are we just sitting here? If I had my say, these abominations would have their blood splattered all over the walls.”
“As would I,” says Zig, “but we’re waiting for Dean Winchester.”
Trinity nods. “Tell me we can torture him. He and his brother killed off one of my own a while back, and I’d like some revenge.”
“You’d have to talk to her about that,” says Zig. “She’s got a real personal beef with him.”
Trinity’s eyes glance towards the hallway leading to Max’s office and smiles. Then, in such a quick motion even Rade doesn’t realize is happening until it’s over, she shoves the medic to the floor, an “oomph” forcing its way out of Rade’s mouth.
Then she glances at Dalton; Dalton’s colorless face and impaled thigh in particular. “What happened to him?” she asks indifferently.
Zig grins. “Had a bit of an accident,” he replies. “We figure bleeding to death’ll send a message, yeah?”
Rolling her eyes again, Trinity gestures vaguely towards the X6. “Spare me the theatrics,” she says. “Just let this” here, she points at Rade, “fix him up. Nothing worse than a whiny, moaning transgenic to ruin the mood.”
Zig exchanges a glance with another one of his demon buddies, and then shrugs. “Fine,” he says. Addressing Rade, he commands, “Patch up the wound, and then get the hell away from him. No funny business.”
“I’ll try my best,” Rade deadpans. Making her way over to Dalton, she inspects the injury, carefully schooling her face to not show how gruesome it is. She looks up at Trinity and reports, “I’ll need some peroxide, gauze-a lot of it-and bandages. Now.”
“Keep an eye on her,” Trinity says, and quickly disappears into the medical bay. When she emerges again, Rade thinks she sees a small bulge in Trinity’s jacket that hadn’t been there before, but she can’t dwell much on it, because Trinity’s forcing the requested items into her hands and demanding with her eyes to do what Zig had said.
Rade undoes the belt around her waist and holds it out to Dalton. “Sorry, bud,” she says. “No anesthetic.”
Dalton sets his jaw-they’d all had worse-and nods, biting down on the hard leather. She makes quick work of dislodging the piece of metal from Dalton’s leg and disinfecting then dressing the gash, her hands shaking. Not in fear, or even nervousness, but rage. And right then and there, she makes a silent vow to, if Alec didn’t beat her to it, rip each and every one of the demons apart, so help her God.
Alec’s not sure who to thank that he doesn’t run into any cops on the freeway, so he settles for his own very sporadic luck. To be honest, he hadn’t really registered how fast he was driving until he saw the entrance sign to Idaho. Looking down at the speedometer, he noticed the needle was hovering at about a hundred, and though the old gal was groaning a little, Alec had the feeling this was far from the first time she’d been pushed to this limit. He was grateful that not only had highway patrol still deemed the Nowheresland of Wyoming and Montana to be at an seventy-five miles an hour speed limit (therefore going twenty-five over was perfectly reasonable), but that people were drunk or distracted enough at bars or diners to notice him siphoning their gas into the Impala’s tank.
They made it from their spot in Wyoming to Seattle in a hair over five hours, and while Alec’s worst-case scenario told him Max and the others were surely dead, his gut told him that whoever it was holding them captive wanted him and Dean more than they wanted the others. Which meant that until they arrived, no one would be seriously injured (or, well, dead, anyhow), lest he and Dean decide that in and of itself is reason alone to not come.
He briefly considers ditching Dean’s car somewhere safe, considering he’s not sure if he could guarantee it being in one piece what with the demons’ grudge against its owner (plus, the Impala is the only tangible memory Dean has of Sam, and Alec’ll be damned if he takes that away), but shoots it down a few seconds later. Not so much because he’s willing to risk the Impala being totaled as he wants-needs-to get to Max and the others as soon as physically possible. And, well, he’s not entirely positive with whom he’d leave the Impala anyway.
He’d rather eat glass than have Logan look after it, and he’s pretty sure Dean would kill him if he did so; Cindy, while he’s sure would treat it with respect, has to bribe the police to even keep her apartment, and as such, a large car might not end up being under the radar; Sketchy would be a possibility, but his shitty pad is on the other side of town, and Alec really doesn’t feel like explaining, even in short, the situation to his friend who knows zilch about it.
He does, however, park the Impala a block away from T.C., both because there’s a gate separating the makeshift city from the actual city, and because he gets the sense the demons would be rather guarding the transgenics trapped inside than a car. (He hopes.)
Alec slows the car to a halt and shuts off the engine, the interior suddenly blasted with quiet. Without the rumbling growl as a tether, Alec feels…well, he’s not quite certain what he feels, just that it’s wrong.
He looks over at Dean for the first time since hundreds of miles ago, futilely hoping that maybe Dean would’ve come to his senses, but the half-mild interest with a side of confusion and weariness tells him otherwise. He just wishes he could jumpstart Dean like a withered battery, if nothing else than to help him save T.C. He wishes he had Sam-Sam would be able to.
“I don’t suppose you happen to believe me now that you’re not in Hell, do you?” Alec asks as a last resort.
Dean blinks. “This is bordering on pathetic,” he answers, his calm tone still unnerving.
Alec sighs, then gets out of the driver’s seat and walks around the car to open Dean’s door and drag him out. He’d thus far been refusing to use transgenic strength on his double, but right now, he’s not above it. As such, Dean is unable to shake him off, and finds himself yanked to a standing position, Alec glaring at him.
“Listen to me,” he says, trying to keep desperation out of his voice. “I’m about to walk into a room full of demons, to approach one who apparently not only wants my head on a platter, but yours as well, in order to try and save the majority of my race. And in all likelihood, die in the process.” He starts to turn around, then sighs and looks back at Dean.
“You know, I wish you’d never come here. We were doing just fine, then you come and fuck it all up. And now, ’cause’a you, my people and I are probably going to be slaughtered. For all you and Sam were all about helping others, about telling the government and supernatural to screw themselves, you’re doing exactly the opposite. Thanks, dude, really.”
He then does turn around and breaks into a run in the direction of T.C., specifically towards the back entrance he’d previously used to smuggle in contraband alcohol before Max inevitably discovered his dastardly plans. And right now, that’s all he aims to pay attention to-not, for instance, whether or not Dean is following him, or if his words had even penetrated the man’s remarkably thick skull. He’s facing his death sentence, and frankly? Despite the disappointment he declines to acknowledge, he can’t manage to give much of a shit about Dean Winchester.
Rade supposes the air in the command center isn’t any hotter than usual, but there’s sweat beading at her forehead and her clothes feel sticky, as if she weren’t in one of the chilliest cities in the Pacific Northwest. She notes that many of her brethren are in similar boats, some more than others. And some, the ones Manticore made for sheer brutality, are fidgeting with barely restrained anger and the need to do something.
They don’t, however, given that when one of them had tried something a couple hours back, the demon closest to him had nearly snapped his neck before Trinity managed to convince the demon to not kill him. After all, she’d said, they don’t want a dead body stinking up the joint.
She’d cleaned up Dalton well enough, but even with their hastened healing, the wound was deep, jagged, and they might as well have been out in the middle of nowhere for the level of sophistication of her medical supplies. She’s not a brain surgeon or anything, and she was made in a lab, but she is still a medic. Strictly speaking, she never swore the Hippocratic Oath, but it almost physically pains her to not be able to do absolutely everything within her ability to help.
The ashen, sweaty, tired face of the sixteen-year-old next to her is more than enough to make her hate the world. She reaches over and brushes the hair out of Dalton’s eyes, and he looks at her listlessly.
She’s interrupted in her simultaneous cursing of Alec for not getting here faster and praying that this’ll all be over soon (for better or worse) by Trinity’s sudden sharp intake of breath. Everyone, demons and transgenics alike, glance up to stare at her, though the demons are infinitely more suspicious.
When Trinity comes out of what everyone but the demons know to be a vision (or “feeling,” Rade remembers cynically), she looks at Zig, that foreign expression remaining on her face. “This damn body got some vision thing,” she scoffs. Zig raises his brow in question, and Trinity smiles. “Seems like we got a visitor.”
Zig matches her grin and begins to move towards the main entrance of Terminal City to greet whom he assumes are Alec and Dean, but Trinity puts a hand harshly on his chest. “Let me,” she says.
Zig looks disappointed-a look Rade would very much like to beat the shit out of-but then sighs. “Go ahead. We’ll all get a crack at him anyway,” he accedes, the implication nothing but threateningly clear.
“And anyway,” Trinity smirks, “wrong direction, sweetheart.”
Her words still nettling, she goes towards the heretofore virtually unknown entrance in search of Alec, soon vanishing down the hallway, passing Max’s office. Once she’s sure she’s out of ear- and eyeshot, she drops her shoulders and massages her temples, wishing she were back in her apartment. The lights and sounds of Command were the harsh and unwelcome antitheses to the blessed darkness she’s used to, and as much as she wants to help her fellow transgenics, her headache is a bitch.
She reaches the end of the hallway just as Alec is maneuvering his way through a window so caked with dust, rust, and unidentifiable matter that it’s nearly invisible. He lands silently-a perk of being part cat-and then notices he’s not alone.
“Trinity?” he asks with some surprise. Last he’d known, she was blocks away and by her lonesome.
“Shh,” she hisses. Her voice urgent, she holds up a hand to stave off any other words from him. “Listen to me very carefully. Demons have possessed some of our own, and have the rest of us on lockdown, Max getting her own personal one in her office. Dalton’s hurt pretty bad; Rade did her best, but he’s not doing so well. As far as everyone in there knows, I’m possessed as well and am supposed to be bringing you and Dean back here-where is Dean?”
Alec had up till now been doing exactly as Trinity asked, face stoic in the way only a list of battle schematics can bring, but at her abrupt stop, he looks away. Trinity’s slap jolts him back into the right (though unsavory) frame of mind.
“Sam died,” he says. He’s not sure how much Trinity knows, but she’s thankfully letting him be the one to say it. “We found him finally, but he’d been hanging with a demon for the last thirteen years, and long story short, he ended up saving both of us, but he got killed in the process. Dean…Dean went off the deep end. He thinks he’s back in Hell, that this is all some illusion, that Sam’s alive. I can’t snap him out of it.”
Trinity nods. Though she’d never been in combat directly, she is a Manticore creation: she knows the stakes, the consequences. Even if the current ones are worse than even Manticore could cook up.
“So what do you want to do?” Trinity asks.
Alec laughs humorlessly; isn’t that the million-dollar question. He shrugs. “I haven’t the slightest clue.”
To Alec’s surprise, Trinity smiles-this one genuine and not laced with evil-and replies, “I have a few ideas.”
Alec’s look of impatient doubt is prompt enough.
“The way I see it, we’ve got two major issues here,” Trinity says, so quickly Alec has to concentrate doubly hard to understand it all. “We need to get the demons out of those of us they hijacked, especially the one possessing Kali, and we need to get Dean to exterminate the other half of that demon’s plan.”
“Okay…how do we do that?” Alec inquires. He’d in another case hate being the one not knowing what to do, taking orders instead of giving them, but here he’s more than happy to let Trinity take the wheel.
“Rade got me in the first place so I could read Dix’s mind, because in the explosion he was rendered acutely amnesic-”
“Wait, explosion?” Alec sputters. “Missed that memo.”
Trinity snaps her fingers. “Not the matter at hand,” she bites. Alec shakes his head violently to clear his thoughts. “I saw a whole lotta things, but one in particular stood out: if my instincts are right, and they usually are, one of those images was of a symbol to trap a demon.” She pulls aside her shirt to show the raised red etching on her chest, and Alec tilts his head, not in confusion, but in comprehension. Or, more accurately, recollection.
Immensely grateful that he hadn’t left it in the Impala, he pulls out of his jacket the journal from which he’d read the incantation that exorcised Ruby. Flipping through the pages like he’d done it dozens of times before, he finally comes upon the page with the incantation…next to which he sees the symbol identical to the crude tattoo Trinity and Rade carved.
“It’s called a devil’s trap,” he reads, eyes scanning the text. “Looks like you just have to draw this thing, lure the demon into it, and they can’t get out unless the lines are broken. I’m gonna say that’s our best bet, what do you think?”
“Yes,” Trinity immediately agrees. She hesitates for a moment, and then says in a softer, more apprehensive voice, “If we can get the demon guarding Max out there-which, considering she wants you, that’s pretty likely-I think I can distract the demons long enough for you to draw the symbol and trap her.”
“Distract? How?” Alec asks warily.
She merely looks at him, expecting him to fill in the blanks. When he doesn’t, she reluctantly elaborates, “I can do more than reprogram people and make them forget things,” she says, and Alec’s eyes flicker with painful remembrance of when she’d worked him over after Rachel. “A lot more. I can’t guarantee anything, including my life or the lives of the transgenics that are possessed, but it’s our best shot.”
Alec’s gut reaction is to tell her she’s insane, that the risk isn’t worth it. But this is war, and he knows better than just about anyone that in such times, sacrifice is needed. As much as it hurts to say so.
“Okay,” he slowly agrees. “But, uh…what about Dean? What’s the demon’s plan?”
“I have more heightened senses than you all,” Trinity says, and Alec resists a No duh response. “I heard the demon tell Max things. She met with White. Made some sort of deal, an arrangement.”
Alec groans. “Perfect. White and demons, just what we need.”
“I’m not entirely sure what the plan is, but I can guess.”
Alec doesn’t need to have heard the specifics either to make his own more-or-less-accurate conjecture. Sliding his fingers tiredly through his hair, he suggests, “I’m betting White is so power-hungry that he thinks teaming up with a demon will help his Apocalypse fantasy along. ’Course, I’m also betting that little shit doesn’t realize that the only thing the demons want is Dean.”
“Sounds plausible,” Trinity says. “I’m thinking we just might have a chance to beat all this if Dean can head off White and we can capture these demons.”
“Okay, assuming we can, what then? We can’t exactly have a trapped demon forever right in the middle of Command, Trinity,” Alec snarks.
She barely holds herself back from clocking him one, the sole reason for refraining being that she knows that in this instance, his snark is merely a poor cover-up for his fear and panic. “I’m hoping Dean can finish her off. Somehow.”
Alec stares at her, incredulous. “You’re betting all our lives on Dean knowing some secret trick? That’s real encouraging.”
“You got something better, genius, I’d love to hear it!” Trinity snarls, her tone only barely below the threshold of it carrying down the hallway. Alec doesn’t respond, though he’d love to. “Exactly. Now, here.” She takes from her pocket a small bottle of spray paint they’d used to demarcate rations and parts that she’d nicked from when she went to get Rade’s supplies. “This should do.”
Alec looks at the aerosol in his hand, still in disbelief that it is, for lack of a better term, their Holy Grail. The strategy, he knows, is in theory simple enough-certainly on paper easier than that Prague job he’d had-but the execution for which he has a feeling of dread will be anything but.
“All right, so, how are you going to bungee Dean back to sanity?” Alec asks, Dean still the primary wild card in this whole harebrained operation.
In a level of confidence both transgenics wish were mountains more concrete, she replies, “I’ve got an idea for that, too. Though not one anyone’ll like, least of all Dean.”
Sighing, Alec has to acknowledge that delicacy is the one thing none of them can afford at the moment. “Do it,” he confirms. “Do whatever you have to. Right now, we need as many able-bodied people as we can.”
Trinity nods. Jerking her head towards Command, she says, “The demons in there are dumber than rocks; they’re brute force only, near as I can make out. Just tell them the truth-that I was lying, that I wasn’t possessed, and that you let me escape. They won’t hurt you; they can’t.”
“Oh yeah?” Alec coughs in skepticism. “Pretty sure that demon said she wanted both me and Dean.”
“Yes,” Trinity concurs, “but I gather that she knows that killing you won’t help her find out where Dean is. Besides, if all goes right, he’ll come back here after he’s finished with White.”
Alec laughs. “If all goes right…” He can’t believe they’re even having this conversation. A week ago, if someone had told him he and Trinity would be devising a plan held together by shoelaces and duct tape, he’d think they were mentally unsound.
“Good luck, Alec,” Trinity says solemnly.
“Yeah, you, too,” he replies, and pulls her into a brief hug.
“Just keep ’em busy until I come back,” she calls as she hoists herself up and out the window through which Alec had come.
Her departure makes the air seem uncomfortably hot and compressing, and he feels like he’s back standing on the edge of a deep tank, being told that he’s going to be tested on how long he can hold his breath while being chained underwater. In short, not very assured.
“‘Just keep ’em busy,’” he repeats sarcastically. “Yeah, no sweat.”
Squaring his shoulders, he strides down the hallway. Command is far different than he remembered, and not just because there’s a pile of dismembered computers and mangled metal where the computer terminals used to be. All the people he’d come to know well are assembled stiffly on the ground, and though he’d only before seen one demon, he can instantly determine which transgenics drew the short straw.
“Aww,” he says in a voice full of false nonchalance, “somebody throw a party without me?”
Both Max and Meg’s heads snap towards the door as they hear Alec’s apparently unperturbed voice. Max can’t help but feel immense relief, even though he’s just one man facing a small army of demons. Her mind starts up again, thinking of possible ways this could go down in their favor. She knows Alec’s doing-or had done-the same thing, because getting out of jams is just what he does. Granted, he usually needs her to save him, but he more often than not at least is thinking of a plan.
Meg grabs Max’s upper arm tight enough to cut off circulation, and places the gun back to her head. They walk out the door and instantly attention is turned from Alec to them. Max sees equal relief in his face-albeit admirably concealed-and the smallest of smiles. “Hey, Maxie,” he says. She didn’t realize how much she’d missed his smartass tone until now, when it might actually rescue them all. “If you wanted to see me, all you had to do was ask. You didn’t have to orchestrate this whole circus.”
Max feels Meg getting annoyed, and hopes that she’s the kind of person-demon-who gets sloppy when frustrated, rather than trigger-happy. Meg narrows her eyes as she looks at Alec. “Where is Dean?”
“Oh. Yeah, him,” Alec says calmly, his voice deceptively casual. “He couldn’t make it. Previous engagement. You wouldn’t believe how popular a dead guy come back to life can be.”
“Shut up,” Meg growls. “Or I’ll put a bullet through her brain.”
Max sees the tiniest glimmer of anxiety tighten Alec’s stance, but he doesn’t react more than that. “No you won’t,” he says. “You don’t want Max, you don’t want any of the transgenics or transhumans. You want me, and you want Dean.” Meg stays silent, and Alec chuckles. “Oh come on, you thought I was that stupid? Your plan is ridiculous. I can see right through it.”
“Is that so?” Meg counters, raising her eyebrows.
Alec smirks. “Definitely,” he replies. “You have a stupid, petty personal vendetta against Dean because he sent you to Hell-that’s gotta sting a little. Then he went to Hell and still you couldn’t beat him. So you figure now that he can die again, you’ll kill him once and for all. And for good measure, you’ll kill the dude who shares his DNA. But…well, I guess you can save the bullet you’d hoped could be used on Sam.”
He doesn’t say it outright, but no one in the room is under pretense as to what he means. A somber atmosphere passes over everyone (excluding the demons), even though they didn’t know Sam. Some didn’t even know he existed, but each knows what family means, especially how much family means to Ordinaries. And the few who were aware of the Winchesters before Dean arrived know how much they in particular relied on each other.
Max closes her eyes for a couple moments, silently cursing everyone and everything from here to eternity. Although it does beg her the question as to how Dean took it. For that matter, what happened to him.
“One Winchester and one freak of nature to go, then,” Meg sneers. “Fabulous.”
Alec shakes his head. “Nah,” he objects. “I’d like to think I’m enough a pain in the ass to be considered a Winchester myself, eh, Maxie?”
Max shrugs. “With your ego, I’d say you’d fit right in.”
“Enough!” Meg snaps. “Where’s Dean?”
Alec throws up his hands. “Jesus, you demons are so fucking impatient,” he says. “Dean’s long gone. If I’m not mistaken, he’s about to pay our mutual buddy White a visit.” Meg’s eyes flare black, and her grip around the gun constricts. “Yeah, I know. Bummer, right? The way I see it, you got two options, bitch: You try and off Dean but leave me to exorcise every one of your minions here, or you stay and let Dean come to you.”
“You’re lying,” says Meg, her eyes still coal black.
“Nope,” Alec replies. “Sent your pal Ruby back to where she belongs with fifty words of Latin. It was oddly invigorating.”
Meg laughs, “Ruby’s no friend of mine.”
“Whatever,” Alec says. “Which one you gonna choose?”
Meg’s face twitches, and Alec tries to contain his distress at how creepy it is to see the pure wickedness on Kalinda’s otherwise innocent and pretty features. “Sit,” she commands.
“I prefer to stand, if you-”
In an instant, Meg moves the gun from Max’s head to point at Alec, and shoots. The bullet misses his head by a fraction of an inch, but no one knows the miss as anything but intentional. “I said sit.”
Alec promptly does as she said. “All righty, then,” he says. “Sitting it is.”
Meg proceeds to shove Max down onto the hard stone, and despite the fact that she’s now absent a direct hostage, the malice seeping through her every pore is all too evident.
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Max whispers to her second-in-command, sitting up gingerly.
Alec quirks a grin. “’Course I do,” he murmurs.
“Chance of success?”
“Twenty, thirty percent.”
Max groans. “Great.”
Trinity feels less and less sure about her plan as she walks further from Terminal City, which is somewhat remarkable, bearing that that she was never all that sure in the first place. The last time she’d had this much pressure put on her was…well, when she’d fucked with Alec’s head. The symmetry isn’t lost on her at the fact that she’s now going to fuck with Alec’s double’s head. If she’s completely honest, however, she thinks she’s going to hate the latter even more than the former, which is saying a hell of a lot.
Worse still, she’s never done what she’s about to do. She’d pulled things from people’s brains many times before, but she’s never tried to dredge them forth. Not implant, per se, but instead force memories. She’s not sure it’ll even work, let alone whether it’ll make Dean better or worse. And since she’s not really wired to be an optimist, she can’t help but think that if she makes even one mistake, she’s dooming them all.
When the long black car finally comes into view, she’s hit with a tidal wave of emotion, ranging from one end of the spectrum to the other. She swallows, steeling herself against the unexpected onslaught, and walks a few yards closer.
Dean is lying on the Impala’s hood, eyes staring up at the gray sky like he can find meaning from it. Denial is coming off him in torrents, undercut by longing, loss, abhorrence, and anguish. All of which she’d felt before, but never in such raw quantity. She’d known Dean would be a harder subject than those she’d had before, but she hadn’t counted on just quite how much harder.
“Dean,” she says, attempting to once again pull herself together. She knows the costs if she doesn’t.
Dean turns his head toward her, and then languidly sits up. “This is a nice surprise,” he says. (Even his voice is sown with refusal to accept reality, she painfully observes.) “Demons aren’t usually this attractive.”
“I’m not a demon,” Trinity says. “Everything Alec told you is the truth. You’re not in Hell anymore, Dean Winchester. Sam is dead, and my people and I are all in grave danger, courtesy of a demon you know very well. We need your help.”
“Oh, Christ,” Dean scoffs. “Not this shit again.”
Trinity really doesn’t have time or patience for the gentle approach she knows this kind of thing should take. She walks over to him and, grabbing his shirt collar, pulls him down off the roof of the car ungracefully and slams him against the door, his feet finding purchase on the debris-laden ground at the last moment.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “There’s no other way to do this. We need you. You’re our only hope.”
Dean frowns, but before he can say or do anything, Trinity places her hands on either side of his head, like she had Dix’s, and shuts her eyes. She feels Dean’s memories and thoughts-both repressed and free-bubbling to the surface like those had in so many others, but instead of copying them into her own knowledge, she focuses on amplifying them and shooting them back into Dean’s conscious. As they come forth in dizzyingly agonizing fervor, she forces herself not to drop the connection.
Cassette tapes, disparaging annoyance. A smarmy smile.
Childish pranks. Glue, a spoon, beer.
Getups. “We are so screwed.”
Bad, off-tune singing. Air tense with impending death.
A graveyard, a broken wrist, a promise of healing.
Laughter, from better times, from times before.
A body gray, dead. A kindred spirit alive, but in physicality only.
The body once more animated. Both animated. Sitting on a hood.
A graveled crossroads, a dilapidated bar.
A carefree driver. One perpetually worried and annoyed. Both at home.
“It’s my turn to drive.”
Tossed keys-a passing of the torch.
A desperate, grateful, loving hug.
Family. Brothers. Once upon a time.
Both Trinity and Dean come out of the link with fast and harsh breaths, reeling. Trinity would have swirled up more memories, but she simply couldn’t handle it. They were too powerful, too vigorous, too painful, even if she hadn’t magnified them. She blinks rapidly, trying to get her head back in the game.
She almost wishes she didn’t have to look at Dean. His hands are scraping against the side of the Impala, his nails digging into the paint, and there’s one sole tear falling down his cheek. She didn’t realize until just this moment that if the process was this intense for her, a transgenic, then it must have been unbearable for Dean, an Ordinary.
She puts her palms on his face, one on each side, but this time there’s no power emitted. She angles his head and he wearily drags his eyes over to hauntingly rest on hers.
“Dean,” she whispers. “Please.”
His gaze is clear, but dead. There’s no longer denial, simply depressed, morbid, I-beg-you-to-end-my-misery anguish. She knows vaguely that it’s necessary, that she has to do this, that to save the all, you must sacrifice the one, but she’ll be damned if she doesn’t regret what she’d just done.
“You’re our only hope,” she repeats.
“I can’t.” Dean’s words are so brokenly quiet that she almost doesn’t catch them. “I can’t. You can’t.”
Trinity closes her eyes and takes a deep breath before laboriously opening them again. “Dean, if you do this for me, for us, I swear to you I will do whatever you wish. Send you to a better place, let you walk away, wipe your mind, anything. I promise. Just please help.”
Dean’s hands ball into fists, and Trinity can damn near almost see him piece together just enough of himself to function. But he’s held together by old superglue, the kind that looks solid but can crumble at any moment, leaving that precious vase in hundreds of pieces once more.
“What do I need to do?” he asks, in the same near-silent voice as before.
She tells him, each syllable like a knife to her heart. After she’s finished, he gives her a tiny nod, and as if on autopilot, shuffles to the driver’s door and gets behind the wheel. She knows the only reason he’s willing (“willing” being a very generous term) to do this at all is because there’s the promise of salvation, of peace if he completes the task she asked of him.
Her own task far from over, she watches as the lights of the Impala disappear around the corner, and turns around, heading back towards Terminal City and hoping that when she gets there, she won’t find a room full of blood and death.
Next
Chapter Title: A Grin Without a Cat
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: 5,854
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 XXXV: A Grin Without a Cat
Rade hadn’t exactly had a plan when she and Trinity headed out the medical bay to meet their potential demises, but she hadn’t considered that Trinity might. More specifically, that Trinity would have one in which she was to be used as bait.
So it comes as a complete surprise when Trinity’s arm comes around and under her neck in a stranglehold, just loose enough so she can breathe, but not comfortable by any means. She sputters and chokes, and looks up at Trinity, trying to convey with her eyes the words she’d much like to shout: “THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?!”
It doesn’t work. Or, more likely, Trinity is merely ignoring her.
All eyes, demon and transgenic alike, turn towards the pair, Trinity looking eerily demonic, Rade attempting to stay conscious while also not losing her hostage ruse. “Who are you?” asks one of the demons-Rade notes with some sadness that it’s one of the X5s, Zig, who’d occasionally helped her bandage up anyone on the rare occasion they’d cop to being hurt.
Of course, had it not been for the facial features, Rade thinks she’d not recognize him. The smirk, the way he holds himself, screams not Zig. His eyes are no longer black, rather their normal dark blue, but even those are...different.
“Trinity,” Trinity introduces, adding on a smirk of her own that looks completely alien. In fact, if Rade didn’t know better, she’d say the Psy Ops unit was possessed, too. “Well,” she laughs, “sort of.”
Zig snickers, Trinity’s mannerisms apparently demony enough to fool. “And that one?” he asks, pointing at Rade.
“Hell if I know,” says Trinity. “Found her sneaking out. Think she’s a medic or somethin’.”
Zig begins to walk towards them, then his eyes narrow. “How do I know this isn’t a trick?”
Trinity rolls her eyes-an affectation Rade had never seen her do before. “Come on. If I really were the freak in this body, why would I be stupid enough to walk into a room full of demons? Besides,” Trinity continues, and there’s a flash in her eyes that Rade saw a mere five minutes ago, “I’m not sure Azazel’s daughter would appreciate you wasting time interrogating one of your own, now would she?”
The bulk of the room’s members frown, Rade included, but the demons simply smile. “Precaution,” says Zig, “you understand.”
“Whatever,” replies Trinity. “I was stuck on sentry duty, didn’t hear the official reason-why are we just sitting here? If I had my say, these abominations would have their blood splattered all over the walls.”
“As would I,” says Zig, “but we’re waiting for Dean Winchester.”
Trinity nods. “Tell me we can torture him. He and his brother killed off one of my own a while back, and I’d like some revenge.”
“You’d have to talk to her about that,” says Zig. “She’s got a real personal beef with him.”
Trinity’s eyes glance towards the hallway leading to Max’s office and smiles. Then, in such a quick motion even Rade doesn’t realize is happening until it’s over, she shoves the medic to the floor, an “oomph” forcing its way out of Rade’s mouth.
Then she glances at Dalton; Dalton’s colorless face and impaled thigh in particular. “What happened to him?” she asks indifferently.
Zig grins. “Had a bit of an accident,” he replies. “We figure bleeding to death’ll send a message, yeah?”
Rolling her eyes again, Trinity gestures vaguely towards the X6. “Spare me the theatrics,” she says. “Just let this” here, she points at Rade, “fix him up. Nothing worse than a whiny, moaning transgenic to ruin the mood.”
Zig exchanges a glance with another one of his demon buddies, and then shrugs. “Fine,” he says. Addressing Rade, he commands, “Patch up the wound, and then get the hell away from him. No funny business.”
“I’ll try my best,” Rade deadpans. Making her way over to Dalton, she inspects the injury, carefully schooling her face to not show how gruesome it is. She looks up at Trinity and reports, “I’ll need some peroxide, gauze-a lot of it-and bandages. Now.”
“Keep an eye on her,” Trinity says, and quickly disappears into the medical bay. When she emerges again, Rade thinks she sees a small bulge in Trinity’s jacket that hadn’t been there before, but she can’t dwell much on it, because Trinity’s forcing the requested items into her hands and demanding with her eyes to do what Zig had said.
Rade undoes the belt around her waist and holds it out to Dalton. “Sorry, bud,” she says. “No anesthetic.”
Dalton sets his jaw-they’d all had worse-and nods, biting down on the hard leather. She makes quick work of dislodging the piece of metal from Dalton’s leg and disinfecting then dressing the gash, her hands shaking. Not in fear, or even nervousness, but rage. And right then and there, she makes a silent vow to, if Alec didn’t beat her to it, rip each and every one of the demons apart, so help her God.
Alec’s not sure who to thank that he doesn’t run into any cops on the freeway, so he settles for his own very sporadic luck. To be honest, he hadn’t really registered how fast he was driving until he saw the entrance sign to Idaho. Looking down at the speedometer, he noticed the needle was hovering at about a hundred, and though the old gal was groaning a little, Alec had the feeling this was far from the first time she’d been pushed to this limit. He was grateful that not only had highway patrol still deemed the Nowheresland of Wyoming and Montana to be at an seventy-five miles an hour speed limit (therefore going twenty-five over was perfectly reasonable), but that people were drunk or distracted enough at bars or diners to notice him siphoning their gas into the Impala’s tank.
They made it from their spot in Wyoming to Seattle in a hair over five hours, and while Alec’s worst-case scenario told him Max and the others were surely dead, his gut told him that whoever it was holding them captive wanted him and Dean more than they wanted the others. Which meant that until they arrived, no one would be seriously injured (or, well, dead, anyhow), lest he and Dean decide that in and of itself is reason alone to not come.
He briefly considers ditching Dean’s car somewhere safe, considering he’s not sure if he could guarantee it being in one piece what with the demons’ grudge against its owner (plus, the Impala is the only tangible memory Dean has of Sam, and Alec’ll be damned if he takes that away), but shoots it down a few seconds later. Not so much because he’s willing to risk the Impala being totaled as he wants-needs-to get to Max and the others as soon as physically possible. And, well, he’s not entirely positive with whom he’d leave the Impala anyway.
He’d rather eat glass than have Logan look after it, and he’s pretty sure Dean would kill him if he did so; Cindy, while he’s sure would treat it with respect, has to bribe the police to even keep her apartment, and as such, a large car might not end up being under the radar; Sketchy would be a possibility, but his shitty pad is on the other side of town, and Alec really doesn’t feel like explaining, even in short, the situation to his friend who knows zilch about it.
He does, however, park the Impala a block away from T.C., both because there’s a gate separating the makeshift city from the actual city, and because he gets the sense the demons would be rather guarding the transgenics trapped inside than a car. (He hopes.)
Alec slows the car to a halt and shuts off the engine, the interior suddenly blasted with quiet. Without the rumbling growl as a tether, Alec feels…well, he’s not quite certain what he feels, just that it’s wrong.
He looks over at Dean for the first time since hundreds of miles ago, futilely hoping that maybe Dean would’ve come to his senses, but the half-mild interest with a side of confusion and weariness tells him otherwise. He just wishes he could jumpstart Dean like a withered battery, if nothing else than to help him save T.C. He wishes he had Sam-Sam would be able to.
“I don’t suppose you happen to believe me now that you’re not in Hell, do you?” Alec asks as a last resort.
Dean blinks. “This is bordering on pathetic,” he answers, his calm tone still unnerving.
Alec sighs, then gets out of the driver’s seat and walks around the car to open Dean’s door and drag him out. He’d thus far been refusing to use transgenic strength on his double, but right now, he’s not above it. As such, Dean is unable to shake him off, and finds himself yanked to a standing position, Alec glaring at him.
“Listen to me,” he says, trying to keep desperation out of his voice. “I’m about to walk into a room full of demons, to approach one who apparently not only wants my head on a platter, but yours as well, in order to try and save the majority of my race. And in all likelihood, die in the process.” He starts to turn around, then sighs and looks back at Dean.
“You know, I wish you’d never come here. We were doing just fine, then you come and fuck it all up. And now, ’cause’a you, my people and I are probably going to be slaughtered. For all you and Sam were all about helping others, about telling the government and supernatural to screw themselves, you’re doing exactly the opposite. Thanks, dude, really.”
He then does turn around and breaks into a run in the direction of T.C., specifically towards the back entrance he’d previously used to smuggle in contraband alcohol before Max inevitably discovered his dastardly plans. And right now, that’s all he aims to pay attention to-not, for instance, whether or not Dean is following him, or if his words had even penetrated the man’s remarkably thick skull. He’s facing his death sentence, and frankly? Despite the disappointment he declines to acknowledge, he can’t manage to give much of a shit about Dean Winchester.
Rade supposes the air in the command center isn’t any hotter than usual, but there’s sweat beading at her forehead and her clothes feel sticky, as if she weren’t in one of the chilliest cities in the Pacific Northwest. She notes that many of her brethren are in similar boats, some more than others. And some, the ones Manticore made for sheer brutality, are fidgeting with barely restrained anger and the need to do something.
They don’t, however, given that when one of them had tried something a couple hours back, the demon closest to him had nearly snapped his neck before Trinity managed to convince the demon to not kill him. After all, she’d said, they don’t want a dead body stinking up the joint.
She’d cleaned up Dalton well enough, but even with their hastened healing, the wound was deep, jagged, and they might as well have been out in the middle of nowhere for the level of sophistication of her medical supplies. She’s not a brain surgeon or anything, and she was made in a lab, but she is still a medic. Strictly speaking, she never swore the Hippocratic Oath, but it almost physically pains her to not be able to do absolutely everything within her ability to help.
The ashen, sweaty, tired face of the sixteen-year-old next to her is more than enough to make her hate the world. She reaches over and brushes the hair out of Dalton’s eyes, and he looks at her listlessly.
She’s interrupted in her simultaneous cursing of Alec for not getting here faster and praying that this’ll all be over soon (for better or worse) by Trinity’s sudden sharp intake of breath. Everyone, demons and transgenics alike, glance up to stare at her, though the demons are infinitely more suspicious.
When Trinity comes out of what everyone but the demons know to be a vision (or “feeling,” Rade remembers cynically), she looks at Zig, that foreign expression remaining on her face. “This damn body got some vision thing,” she scoffs. Zig raises his brow in question, and Trinity smiles. “Seems like we got a visitor.”
Zig matches her grin and begins to move towards the main entrance of Terminal City to greet whom he assumes are Alec and Dean, but Trinity puts a hand harshly on his chest. “Let me,” she says.
Zig looks disappointed-a look Rade would very much like to beat the shit out of-but then sighs. “Go ahead. We’ll all get a crack at him anyway,” he accedes, the implication nothing but threateningly clear.
“And anyway,” Trinity smirks, “wrong direction, sweetheart.”
Her words still nettling, she goes towards the heretofore virtually unknown entrance in search of Alec, soon vanishing down the hallway, passing Max’s office. Once she’s sure she’s out of ear- and eyeshot, she drops her shoulders and massages her temples, wishing she were back in her apartment. The lights and sounds of Command were the harsh and unwelcome antitheses to the blessed darkness she’s used to, and as much as she wants to help her fellow transgenics, her headache is a bitch.
She reaches the end of the hallway just as Alec is maneuvering his way through a window so caked with dust, rust, and unidentifiable matter that it’s nearly invisible. He lands silently-a perk of being part cat-and then notices he’s not alone.
“Trinity?” he asks with some surprise. Last he’d known, she was blocks away and by her lonesome.
“Shh,” she hisses. Her voice urgent, she holds up a hand to stave off any other words from him. “Listen to me very carefully. Demons have possessed some of our own, and have the rest of us on lockdown, Max getting her own personal one in her office. Dalton’s hurt pretty bad; Rade did her best, but he’s not doing so well. As far as everyone in there knows, I’m possessed as well and am supposed to be bringing you and Dean back here-where is Dean?”
Alec had up till now been doing exactly as Trinity asked, face stoic in the way only a list of battle schematics can bring, but at her abrupt stop, he looks away. Trinity’s slap jolts him back into the right (though unsavory) frame of mind.
“Sam died,” he says. He’s not sure how much Trinity knows, but she’s thankfully letting him be the one to say it. “We found him finally, but he’d been hanging with a demon for the last thirteen years, and long story short, he ended up saving both of us, but he got killed in the process. Dean…Dean went off the deep end. He thinks he’s back in Hell, that this is all some illusion, that Sam’s alive. I can’t snap him out of it.”
Trinity nods. Though she’d never been in combat directly, she is a Manticore creation: she knows the stakes, the consequences. Even if the current ones are worse than even Manticore could cook up.
“So what do you want to do?” Trinity asks.
Alec laughs humorlessly; isn’t that the million-dollar question. He shrugs. “I haven’t the slightest clue.”
To Alec’s surprise, Trinity smiles-this one genuine and not laced with evil-and replies, “I have a few ideas.”
Alec’s look of impatient doubt is prompt enough.
“The way I see it, we’ve got two major issues here,” Trinity says, so quickly Alec has to concentrate doubly hard to understand it all. “We need to get the demons out of those of us they hijacked, especially the one possessing Kali, and we need to get Dean to exterminate the other half of that demon’s plan.”
“Okay…how do we do that?” Alec inquires. He’d in another case hate being the one not knowing what to do, taking orders instead of giving them, but here he’s more than happy to let Trinity take the wheel.
“Rade got me in the first place so I could read Dix’s mind, because in the explosion he was rendered acutely amnesic-”
“Wait, explosion?” Alec sputters. “Missed that memo.”
Trinity snaps her fingers. “Not the matter at hand,” she bites. Alec shakes his head violently to clear his thoughts. “I saw a whole lotta things, but one in particular stood out: if my instincts are right, and they usually are, one of those images was of a symbol to trap a demon.” She pulls aside her shirt to show the raised red etching on her chest, and Alec tilts his head, not in confusion, but in comprehension. Or, more accurately, recollection.
Immensely grateful that he hadn’t left it in the Impala, he pulls out of his jacket the journal from which he’d read the incantation that exorcised Ruby. Flipping through the pages like he’d done it dozens of times before, he finally comes upon the page with the incantation…next to which he sees the symbol identical to the crude tattoo Trinity and Rade carved.
“It’s called a devil’s trap,” he reads, eyes scanning the text. “Looks like you just have to draw this thing, lure the demon into it, and they can’t get out unless the lines are broken. I’m gonna say that’s our best bet, what do you think?”
“Yes,” Trinity immediately agrees. She hesitates for a moment, and then says in a softer, more apprehensive voice, “If we can get the demon guarding Max out there-which, considering she wants you, that’s pretty likely-I think I can distract the demons long enough for you to draw the symbol and trap her.”
“Distract? How?” Alec asks warily.
She merely looks at him, expecting him to fill in the blanks. When he doesn’t, she reluctantly elaborates, “I can do more than reprogram people and make them forget things,” she says, and Alec’s eyes flicker with painful remembrance of when she’d worked him over after Rachel. “A lot more. I can’t guarantee anything, including my life or the lives of the transgenics that are possessed, but it’s our best shot.”
Alec’s gut reaction is to tell her she’s insane, that the risk isn’t worth it. But this is war, and he knows better than just about anyone that in such times, sacrifice is needed. As much as it hurts to say so.
“Okay,” he slowly agrees. “But, uh…what about Dean? What’s the demon’s plan?”
“I have more heightened senses than you all,” Trinity says, and Alec resists a No duh response. “I heard the demon tell Max things. She met with White. Made some sort of deal, an arrangement.”
Alec groans. “Perfect. White and demons, just what we need.”
“I’m not entirely sure what the plan is, but I can guess.”
Alec doesn’t need to have heard the specifics either to make his own more-or-less-accurate conjecture. Sliding his fingers tiredly through his hair, he suggests, “I’m betting White is so power-hungry that he thinks teaming up with a demon will help his Apocalypse fantasy along. ’Course, I’m also betting that little shit doesn’t realize that the only thing the demons want is Dean.”
“Sounds plausible,” Trinity says. “I’m thinking we just might have a chance to beat all this if Dean can head off White and we can capture these demons.”
“Okay, assuming we can, what then? We can’t exactly have a trapped demon forever right in the middle of Command, Trinity,” Alec snarks.
She barely holds herself back from clocking him one, the sole reason for refraining being that she knows that in this instance, his snark is merely a poor cover-up for his fear and panic. “I’m hoping Dean can finish her off. Somehow.”
Alec stares at her, incredulous. “You’re betting all our lives on Dean knowing some secret trick? That’s real encouraging.”
“You got something better, genius, I’d love to hear it!” Trinity snarls, her tone only barely below the threshold of it carrying down the hallway. Alec doesn’t respond, though he’d love to. “Exactly. Now, here.” She takes from her pocket a small bottle of spray paint they’d used to demarcate rations and parts that she’d nicked from when she went to get Rade’s supplies. “This should do.”
Alec looks at the aerosol in his hand, still in disbelief that it is, for lack of a better term, their Holy Grail. The strategy, he knows, is in theory simple enough-certainly on paper easier than that Prague job he’d had-but the execution for which he has a feeling of dread will be anything but.
“All right, so, how are you going to bungee Dean back to sanity?” Alec asks, Dean still the primary wild card in this whole harebrained operation.
In a level of confidence both transgenics wish were mountains more concrete, she replies, “I’ve got an idea for that, too. Though not one anyone’ll like, least of all Dean.”
Sighing, Alec has to acknowledge that delicacy is the one thing none of them can afford at the moment. “Do it,” he confirms. “Do whatever you have to. Right now, we need as many able-bodied people as we can.”
Trinity nods. Jerking her head towards Command, she says, “The demons in there are dumber than rocks; they’re brute force only, near as I can make out. Just tell them the truth-that I was lying, that I wasn’t possessed, and that you let me escape. They won’t hurt you; they can’t.”
“Oh yeah?” Alec coughs in skepticism. “Pretty sure that demon said she wanted both me and Dean.”
“Yes,” Trinity concurs, “but I gather that she knows that killing you won’t help her find out where Dean is. Besides, if all goes right, he’ll come back here after he’s finished with White.”
Alec laughs. “If all goes right…” He can’t believe they’re even having this conversation. A week ago, if someone had told him he and Trinity would be devising a plan held together by shoelaces and duct tape, he’d think they were mentally unsound.
“Good luck, Alec,” Trinity says solemnly.
“Yeah, you, too,” he replies, and pulls her into a brief hug.
“Just keep ’em busy until I come back,” she calls as she hoists herself up and out the window through which Alec had come.
Her departure makes the air seem uncomfortably hot and compressing, and he feels like he’s back standing on the edge of a deep tank, being told that he’s going to be tested on how long he can hold his breath while being chained underwater. In short, not very assured.
“‘Just keep ’em busy,’” he repeats sarcastically. “Yeah, no sweat.”
Squaring his shoulders, he strides down the hallway. Command is far different than he remembered, and not just because there’s a pile of dismembered computers and mangled metal where the computer terminals used to be. All the people he’d come to know well are assembled stiffly on the ground, and though he’d only before seen one demon, he can instantly determine which transgenics drew the short straw.
“Aww,” he says in a voice full of false nonchalance, “somebody throw a party without me?”
Both Max and Meg’s heads snap towards the door as they hear Alec’s apparently unperturbed voice. Max can’t help but feel immense relief, even though he’s just one man facing a small army of demons. Her mind starts up again, thinking of possible ways this could go down in their favor. She knows Alec’s doing-or had done-the same thing, because getting out of jams is just what he does. Granted, he usually needs her to save him, but he more often than not at least is thinking of a plan.
Meg grabs Max’s upper arm tight enough to cut off circulation, and places the gun back to her head. They walk out the door and instantly attention is turned from Alec to them. Max sees equal relief in his face-albeit admirably concealed-and the smallest of smiles. “Hey, Maxie,” he says. She didn’t realize how much she’d missed his smartass tone until now, when it might actually rescue them all. “If you wanted to see me, all you had to do was ask. You didn’t have to orchestrate this whole circus.”
Max feels Meg getting annoyed, and hopes that she’s the kind of person-demon-who gets sloppy when frustrated, rather than trigger-happy. Meg narrows her eyes as she looks at Alec. “Where is Dean?”
“Oh. Yeah, him,” Alec says calmly, his voice deceptively casual. “He couldn’t make it. Previous engagement. You wouldn’t believe how popular a dead guy come back to life can be.”
“Shut up,” Meg growls. “Or I’ll put a bullet through her brain.”
Max sees the tiniest glimmer of anxiety tighten Alec’s stance, but he doesn’t react more than that. “No you won’t,” he says. “You don’t want Max, you don’t want any of the transgenics or transhumans. You want me, and you want Dean.” Meg stays silent, and Alec chuckles. “Oh come on, you thought I was that stupid? Your plan is ridiculous. I can see right through it.”
“Is that so?” Meg counters, raising her eyebrows.
Alec smirks. “Definitely,” he replies. “You have a stupid, petty personal vendetta against Dean because he sent you to Hell-that’s gotta sting a little. Then he went to Hell and still you couldn’t beat him. So you figure now that he can die again, you’ll kill him once and for all. And for good measure, you’ll kill the dude who shares his DNA. But…well, I guess you can save the bullet you’d hoped could be used on Sam.”
He doesn’t say it outright, but no one in the room is under pretense as to what he means. A somber atmosphere passes over everyone (excluding the demons), even though they didn’t know Sam. Some didn’t even know he existed, but each knows what family means, especially how much family means to Ordinaries. And the few who were aware of the Winchesters before Dean arrived know how much they in particular relied on each other.
Max closes her eyes for a couple moments, silently cursing everyone and everything from here to eternity. Although it does beg her the question as to how Dean took it. For that matter, what happened to him.
“One Winchester and one freak of nature to go, then,” Meg sneers. “Fabulous.”
Alec shakes his head. “Nah,” he objects. “I’d like to think I’m enough a pain in the ass to be considered a Winchester myself, eh, Maxie?”
Max shrugs. “With your ego, I’d say you’d fit right in.”
“Enough!” Meg snaps. “Where’s Dean?”
Alec throws up his hands. “Jesus, you demons are so fucking impatient,” he says. “Dean’s long gone. If I’m not mistaken, he’s about to pay our mutual buddy White a visit.” Meg’s eyes flare black, and her grip around the gun constricts. “Yeah, I know. Bummer, right? The way I see it, you got two options, bitch: You try and off Dean but leave me to exorcise every one of your minions here, or you stay and let Dean come to you.”
“You’re lying,” says Meg, her eyes still coal black.
“Nope,” Alec replies. “Sent your pal Ruby back to where she belongs with fifty words of Latin. It was oddly invigorating.”
Meg laughs, “Ruby’s no friend of mine.”
“Whatever,” Alec says. “Which one you gonna choose?”
Meg’s face twitches, and Alec tries to contain his distress at how creepy it is to see the pure wickedness on Kalinda’s otherwise innocent and pretty features. “Sit,” she commands.
“I prefer to stand, if you-”
In an instant, Meg moves the gun from Max’s head to point at Alec, and shoots. The bullet misses his head by a fraction of an inch, but no one knows the miss as anything but intentional. “I said sit.”
Alec promptly does as she said. “All righty, then,” he says. “Sitting it is.”
Meg proceeds to shove Max down onto the hard stone, and despite the fact that she’s now absent a direct hostage, the malice seeping through her every pore is all too evident.
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Max whispers to her second-in-command, sitting up gingerly.
Alec quirks a grin. “’Course I do,” he murmurs.
“Chance of success?”
“Twenty, thirty percent.”
Max groans. “Great.”
Trinity feels less and less sure about her plan as she walks further from Terminal City, which is somewhat remarkable, bearing that that she was never all that sure in the first place. The last time she’d had this much pressure put on her was…well, when she’d fucked with Alec’s head. The symmetry isn’t lost on her at the fact that she’s now going to fuck with Alec’s double’s head. If she’s completely honest, however, she thinks she’s going to hate the latter even more than the former, which is saying a hell of a lot.
Worse still, she’s never done what she’s about to do. She’d pulled things from people’s brains many times before, but she’s never tried to dredge them forth. Not implant, per se, but instead force memories. She’s not sure it’ll even work, let alone whether it’ll make Dean better or worse. And since she’s not really wired to be an optimist, she can’t help but think that if she makes even one mistake, she’s dooming them all.
When the long black car finally comes into view, she’s hit with a tidal wave of emotion, ranging from one end of the spectrum to the other. She swallows, steeling herself against the unexpected onslaught, and walks a few yards closer.
Dean is lying on the Impala’s hood, eyes staring up at the gray sky like he can find meaning from it. Denial is coming off him in torrents, undercut by longing, loss, abhorrence, and anguish. All of which she’d felt before, but never in such raw quantity. She’d known Dean would be a harder subject than those she’d had before, but she hadn’t counted on just quite how much harder.
“Dean,” she says, attempting to once again pull herself together. She knows the costs if she doesn’t.
Dean turns his head toward her, and then languidly sits up. “This is a nice surprise,” he says. (Even his voice is sown with refusal to accept reality, she painfully observes.) “Demons aren’t usually this attractive.”
“I’m not a demon,” Trinity says. “Everything Alec told you is the truth. You’re not in Hell anymore, Dean Winchester. Sam is dead, and my people and I are all in grave danger, courtesy of a demon you know very well. We need your help.”
“Oh, Christ,” Dean scoffs. “Not this shit again.”
Trinity really doesn’t have time or patience for the gentle approach she knows this kind of thing should take. She walks over to him and, grabbing his shirt collar, pulls him down off the roof of the car ungracefully and slams him against the door, his feet finding purchase on the debris-laden ground at the last moment.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “There’s no other way to do this. We need you. You’re our only hope.”
Dean frowns, but before he can say or do anything, Trinity places her hands on either side of his head, like she had Dix’s, and shuts her eyes. She feels Dean’s memories and thoughts-both repressed and free-bubbling to the surface like those had in so many others, but instead of copying them into her own knowledge, she focuses on amplifying them and shooting them back into Dean’s conscious. As they come forth in dizzyingly agonizing fervor, she forces herself not to drop the connection.
Cassette tapes, disparaging annoyance. A smarmy smile.
Childish pranks. Glue, a spoon, beer.
Getups. “We are so screwed.”
Bad, off-tune singing. Air tense with impending death.
A graveyard, a broken wrist, a promise of healing.
Laughter, from better times, from times before.
A body gray, dead. A kindred spirit alive, but in physicality only.
The body once more animated. Both animated. Sitting on a hood.
A graveled crossroads, a dilapidated bar.
A carefree driver. One perpetually worried and annoyed. Both at home.
“It’s my turn to drive.”
Tossed keys-a passing of the torch.
A desperate, grateful, loving hug.
Family. Brothers. Once upon a time.
Both Trinity and Dean come out of the link with fast and harsh breaths, reeling. Trinity would have swirled up more memories, but she simply couldn’t handle it. They were too powerful, too vigorous, too painful, even if she hadn’t magnified them. She blinks rapidly, trying to get her head back in the game.
She almost wishes she didn’t have to look at Dean. His hands are scraping against the side of the Impala, his nails digging into the paint, and there’s one sole tear falling down his cheek. She didn’t realize until just this moment that if the process was this intense for her, a transgenic, then it must have been unbearable for Dean, an Ordinary.
She puts her palms on his face, one on each side, but this time there’s no power emitted. She angles his head and he wearily drags his eyes over to hauntingly rest on hers.
“Dean,” she whispers. “Please.”
His gaze is clear, but dead. There’s no longer denial, simply depressed, morbid, I-beg-you-to-end-my-misery anguish. She knows vaguely that it’s necessary, that she has to do this, that to save the all, you must sacrifice the one, but she’ll be damned if she doesn’t regret what she’d just done.
“You’re our only hope,” she repeats.
“I can’t.” Dean’s words are so brokenly quiet that she almost doesn’t catch them. “I can’t. You can’t.”
Trinity closes her eyes and takes a deep breath before laboriously opening them again. “Dean, if you do this for me, for us, I swear to you I will do whatever you wish. Send you to a better place, let you walk away, wipe your mind, anything. I promise. Just please help.”
Dean’s hands ball into fists, and Trinity can damn near almost see him piece together just enough of himself to function. But he’s held together by old superglue, the kind that looks solid but can crumble at any moment, leaving that precious vase in hundreds of pieces once more.
“What do I need to do?” he asks, in the same near-silent voice as before.
She tells him, each syllable like a knife to her heart. After she’s finished, he gives her a tiny nod, and as if on autopilot, shuffles to the driver’s door and gets behind the wheel. She knows the only reason he’s willing (“willing” being a very generous term) to do this at all is because there’s the promise of salvation, of peace if he completes the task she asked of him.
Her own task far from over, she watches as the lights of the Impala disappear around the corner, and turns around, heading back towards Terminal City and hoping that when she gets there, she won’t find a room full of blood and death.
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